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Prolific drone act follows last year’s What Happened with a zoned-out epic in the vein of ’70s space-rock giants Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel. | Prolific drone act follows last year’s What Happened with a zoned-out epic in the vein of ’70s space-rock giants Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel. | Emeralds: Does It Look Like I’m Here? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14275-does-it-look-like-im-here/ | Does It Look Like I’m Here? | Describing Emeralds’ music feels a little like capping that underwater oil spill must: How do you get your hands around this stuff? The Cleveland trio may favor methodical cadences in their music, but their releases come fast and furious. According to Discogs.com, they’ve put out around 40 releases in just four years, most of them CDRs and cassettes. There are variations of mood and intensity, and each major release has its own particular signature, owing in part to changes in gear and technique, and in part to being a band that improvises and records non-stop. Any given album feels like a snapshot of the band in time.
But Does It Look Like I’m Here? is the first Emeralds record you might be able to call “pretty.” Listeners accustomed to the multi-vectored force of last year’s What Happened, with its crush of competing swells, might initially be taken aback by the linear progressions here. Emeralds also finally seem to be playing actual notes, not just dialing in frequencies.
The songs are shorter—aside from one seven-minute jam and a 12-minute blur, everything is around three or four minutes long. That’s partly because they're dividing their music into smaller grids and speeding up the changes. On What Happened, tones rolled out in languid fashion. That’s still true here, but most of the album’s tracks are built around arpeggiated backbones, bubbling sequences in 8th-, 12th-, or 16th-note formations that focus the music’s energy in a directed stream.
If what set Emeralds apart before was the fact that they sounded unlike almost anything else, here you can hear distinct echoes of other artists, whether it’s the burbling synthesizer music of ’70s musicians like Edgar Froese and Klaus Schulze, or arpeggio-prone contemporaries like Oneohtrix Point Never, Jonas Reinhardt, or Gavin Russom. “Double Helix” finds a halfway ground between the gritty shuffle of early Kompakt and the Balearic drift of Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas. And “Now You See Me” is an honest-to-God waltz led by folky strummed guitar.
But there's something about Emeralds’ sound that really is theirs alone. (Timbrally, the band has never sounded richer—thanks in part to James Plotkin’s mastering job—and that’s especially true of the luscious heavyweight vinyl pressing, cut at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering.) The way they set loops against loops, with super-fast pinwheeling oscillations buzzing out of control on top, turns their tracks into perpetual motion machines, gathering incredible force as layers accrue. It’s a big part of the magic of this band, and what distinguishes even their most new age–flavored compositions: the overload of information, the spray of frequencies, the thrilling, viscous rush. | 2010-06-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-06-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Editions Mego | June 9, 2010 | 8.3 | 0f0ab26f-5e86-42e7-b82c-ac003cb33ed6 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Albany emo band takes a big swing with a concept album about the meaning of death, reimagining mall-emo, alt-rock, and pop-punk with a theatrical flourish that all works surprisingly well. | The Albany emo band takes a big swing with a concept album about the meaning of death, reimagining mall-emo, alt-rock, and pop-punk with a theatrical flourish that all works surprisingly well. | Prince Daddy & the Hyena: Prince Daddy & the Hyena | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prince-daddy-and-the-hyena-prince-daddy-and-the-hyena/ | Prince Daddy & the Hyena | In the span of three years, Albany emo band Prince Daddy & the Hyena went from writing songs about grilled cheese and weed to concept albums about the meaning of life (and also weed). And now, with another three years passing since 2019’s Cosmic Thrill Seekers, Kory Gregory’s next logical step is another massive leap—a concept album about the meaning of death. The narrative of Prince Daddy and the Hyena stars The Collector and The Passenger, two personifications of existential angst vying for Gregory’s soul; he also assumes you remember these characters from Cosmic Thrill Seekers. The plot is inspired equally by the band’s catastrophic van accident in 2018, Gregory’s month-long stay in a psychiatric hospital and, again, drugs. The only thing that’s missing is a libretto, either to keep track of the dialogue or use to roll a blunt.
But this time around, Gregory does not feel obligated to prime listeners with comparisons to The Monitor, American Idiot, or Welcome to the Black Parade. Reimagining mall-emo, alt-rock, and pop-punk with a theatrical flourish is just what Prince Daddy & the Hyena does now. If it lacks Cosmic Thrill Seekers’ shock value of seeing a couple of DIY pop-punk knuckleheads realizing their loopiest ambitions, Prince Daddy and the Hyena is even more impressive as proof of their dedication to craft, building on established strengths and wisely troubleshooting elsewhere. This is most apparent in the evolution of Gregory’s vocals, which in the past demanded either unshakeable devotion or instantaneous revulsion; even those with a tolerance for pop-punk tantrums would likely admit that Prince Daddy songs were catchy like rusty fish hooks, Gregory’s antagonistic register having as much in common with experimental noise as the Get Up Kids.
The lead single “Curly Q” imagines a heretofore inconceivable middle path—Gregory sings about his nephew the way he might sing to him, and it’s the most tender, overtly pretty Prince Daddy song to date. That is, at least until it swells into a lighter-waving finale, the first time Prince Daddy have exploded like a choreographed firework display rather than a bottle rocket set off in a cramped basement. If this approach happens to convince skeptics who steered clear because of the band name even before they ever heard a note, that doesn’t appear to be Prince Daddy’s primary focus. Rather, Gregory appears driven to develop an instrument versatile enough to keep pace with Prince Daddy’s ever-expanding sonic curiosity.
The album initially hints at an Abbey Road-style suite, a handful of brief songs conceived and resolved as completed experiments: Prince Daddy do Beach Boys, they do jangle-pop, they do strutting power-pop, they can still do a throwback rager to satisfy the fans who’ve kept the same P. Daddy hoodie since 2016. This appears to continue on “El Dorado”—Prince Daddy do Madchester—before the walloping chorus reorients the album to Prince Daddy’s true north, an upended mid-’90s hierarchy where Third Eye Blind, Veruca Salt, and Weezer are the most credible and influential bands of their era; yeah, there’s also some Radiohead in here, but it’s fittingly a couple of “Creep”-like chunks before the nine-minute “Black Mold” goes into Guitar Hero mode.
This on its own doesn’t distinguish any band on its own in 2022, particularly in a DIY diaspora oversaturated by alt-rock revivalism. But Gregory voice’s—both figurative and literal, even in a more palatable form—ensures that the album is always animated by an overwhelming emotional tumult rather than nostalgia. Gregory had been incapacitated by his obsession with mortality long before the pandemic forcibly made it a part of the daily discourse. Even the pithiest quotables—“Jesus Christ ate shit, now he thinks this life is his,” or, “Well I found my god, he’s as hollow as you figured”—serve as mile markers on his quests towards a spiritual epiphany that eludes Gregory every single time.
Yet for music that’s so rarely subtle, Gregory never sensationalizes; “I think I’ll send my own ass away to smooth out the wrinkles in my brain,” he shouts during “A Random Exercise in Impermanence (The Collector),” a typically self-deprecating way to describe being admitted to a mental health facility. Without any prior knowledge of the album’s backstory, it works just as well as a cry for freedom after another grueling, pointless day at the office—feel free to yell “enough, enough, I’ve had e-fucking-nough!” on the commute home. Or, to put it more bluntly, this music has zero chill—and why would it, when death doesn’t either? | 2022-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Pure Noise | April 26, 2022 | 7.6 | 0f10f675-0b9a-4408-8e26-14839e4bc793 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
At the age of 71, the British singer who helped define rock-star redemption shares gorgeous and vulnerable self-portraits, shaped by an ace backing band that sometimes includes Nick Cave. | At the age of 71, the British singer who helped define rock-star redemption shares gorgeous and vulnerable self-portraits, shaped by an ace backing band that sometimes includes Nick Cave. | Marianne Faithfull: Negative Capability | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marianne-faithfull-negative-capability/ | Negative Capability | Near the start of Marianne Faithfull’s 21st studio album, Negative Capability, the legendary singer beckons the audience toward her. “Gather ’round closely/Take in my words,” she seems to say above gentle acoustic guitar and sumptuous piano. Applying classic literature to song with her poet’s pen, this 11-track record illuminates her most personal fears and desires with an intimacy she’s never before offered. From teenage British pop star to half of a rock’n’roll power couple, from junkie tragedy to elder stateswoman, Faithfull reopens old wounds and offers poignant meditations on loneliness, love, death, and regret here. “Everything passes/Everything changes/There’s no way to stay the same,” she concedes on “No Moon in Paris.” There’s been little sense to this life of Faithfull’s, but it’s been one hell of a ride, as documented on these unapologetically vulnerable, contemplative songs. In centralizing universal trauma, Faithfull illuminates our interconnectedness.
Musicians all too familiar with these themes animate her stirring confessions. Nick Cave co-wrote “The Gypsy Faerie Queen,” and his piano strokes, rhythmic phrasing, and sonorous backing vocals anchor Faithfull’s cragged singing. Through the character Puck from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Faithfull describes a life lived in pursuit of a mystical faerie queen. Once a wandering force who healed the earth and its creatures, she’s now a wise and creaky figure who walks with a staff, an image that echoes Faithfull’s cover portrait here. Faithfull subverts the endless youth cliché, though, examining how silence and invisibility cloak even the most sovereign in their agedness, and how the muse endures even in a feeble form. “I only listen to her sing/But I never hear her talking anymore/Though once she did,” she sings of this spirit and, by extension, herself.
Veteran PJ Harvey collaborator Rob Ellis and Bad Seed Warren Ellis produced Negative Capability, shaping the living-room quality of these performances with help from a sterling crew of British songwriters and instrumentalists. Their acoustic guitar, organ, strings, and percussion feel so close, you’ll want to reach out and touch them. In the Bad Seeds, Warren Ellis adds a meditative water energy to Cave’s fire; that relationship extends here in the subtle tenderness he adds to Faithfull’s wishes and laments. On “Born to Live,” a tribute to her late friend, the actress Anita Pallenberg, his alto flute is a gorgeous bridge between despair and hope, mirroring the path of mourning. His signature viola ebbs and flows beneath “No Moon in Paris,” and it’s the graceful kite on which this re-imagining of her 1964 hit, “As Tears Go By,” flies.
That interpretation is one of three such covers here, and it’s a poignant full-circle reflection. There’s palpable truth in the 71-year-old Faithfull memorializing a lonely moment in a woman’s life, sitting alone watching children play, knowing those carefree days are numbered. It rang false when she was 17, at the edge of adulthood. She likewise tempers the ragged guitar and caterwauling tone of Bob Dylan during “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” with glacial chanting and symphonic accoutrements. Meanwhile, this version of “Witches’ Song,” recast from her 1979 comeback, Broken English, softens the original’s edges with warm viola and twinkling Rhodes. It becomes a familial standard, sung around a fire with loved ones. “Remember, death is far away, and life is sweet” feels less like an aspiration now, more a matter of course. Where much of the album is cloaked in these hushed tones, Faithfull’s anger is unmistakable for the blazing “They Come at Night,” an indictment of the international turmoil that produces terrorism. “Their sins come home to haunt us/From the wrong side of the gun,” she snarls.
Examining your life without fear of judgement by those less gnarled by wrong turns, self-doubt, and loneliness is a colossal task; doing so through the physical pains of advanced age, broken bones, botched surgeries, and nagging arthritis is rare. Faithfull channels her body and mind’s ache into an album that’s her best and most honest work since Broken English. With Negative Capability, she reinforces our links by exposing her own broken places. | 2018-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Panta Rei | November 19, 2018 | 8 | 0f10f9e1-4245-4387-8953-faef20ce34c6 | Erin Osmon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-osmon/ | |
On her disco-inspired new album, Ware sounds bolder, looser — and frankly, more fun — than she has in a near-decade. | On her disco-inspired new album, Ware sounds bolder, looser — and frankly, more fun — than she has in a near-decade. | Jessie Ware: What’s Your Pleasure? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jessie-ware-whats-your-pleasure/ | What’s Your Pleasure? | On her new album, Jessie Ware sounds like the host of the kind of party you heard about in ‘70s Manhattan—velvet banquettes and powdery surfaces, mink coats and cigarette holders, and club names that were enigmatic numbers, or—post-gay liberation and pre-AIDS—sincerely promised sanctuary, paradise. You can imagine Ware taking a scene newcomer under her wing, detailing the venue’s clandestine corners, advising which watered-down liquor to avoid—and anyway, don’t you deserve champagne?
Disco has been a shared obsession of late for both chart juggernauts and Ware’s own peers, but her reverence for the era may be the most literal, down to her flash-lit portrait on the album cover, the spitting image of Warhol’s iconic polaroid of Bianca Jagger. Here, Ware is a lycanthropic party girl, coming alive under the mirrorball with breathy flirtations over disco-funk and vibrant Hi-NRG, recreated deftly by chief producer James Ford. Her wonderland is, to quote Fran Leibowitz’s one-time description of Studio 54, made for “sex and dancing.” (Ware says as much of the record herself.)
Over the Italo disco daydream of a title track, Ware presents a dessert trolley of options for, ahem, “dancing sideways.” “Come on now push/Press/More/Less,” she sighs over neon-streaked synths.“Step Into My Life,” co-produced by Ford and Kindness, is a masterclass of orchestral funk, with Ware insisting “I don’t wanna talk, no conversation.” “Save A Kiss,” an outlier, extends the album’s palette to kinetic electropop, which Ware’s voice floods with romantic yearning.
In a recent interview, Ware described What’s Your Pleasure? as a celebration of her flourishing confidence. It has less of the soul-searching of Ware’s previous album Glasshouse, yet zooms in on a lighter facet of her personality, and is threaded with a camp sense of humor that reflects disco’s frivolity as well as the cheekiness that is all over Ware’s Table Manners podcast but has been largely missing from her recorded music. Her airy vocals feel like secrets whispered, confidences offered, recalling Diana Ross’s supple quiver over Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards’ beats and, in “Mirage (Don’t Stop),” coming close to Donna Summer’s orgasmic rapture. The strutting chorus of “Read My Lips” doubles down on the song’s oral innuendo with kissy sound effects, bringing to mind Anita Ward’s disco classic “Ring My Bell.” The rubberized bass jam “Ooh La La” is a riot of saucy ad libs and tooting car horns, and the frothy, Jellybean-esque “Soul Control” centers on the delightful frippery “We touch and it feels like: Woo!” It is a joy to hear Ware sounding so relaxed.
Disco music never liked to consider what happens when the music stops, but Ware allows a little of her signature psychodrama to creep into the nocturnal escapades she describes, and the flecks of ennui make the highs even higher. Over the darkly pulsing synths of “In Your Eyes,” Ware is racked with insecurities. “Would you follow me, with no guarantee?” she asks, before allowing herself a rare belting vocal. “Adore You,” produced by Metronomy’s Joseph Mount, commits what on paper might seem like a cardinal sin: it Auto-Tunes Ware’s pristine voice to a robotic murmur, the kind that could soundtrack a lonely android searching the cosmos. But her intonations (“Lean in...move slow”; “don’t go”) reshape the song’s mood with every syllable, in a nuance that makes the smallest shifts feel seismic.
The critic Douglas Crimp had a name—“boogie intimacy”—for the particular frisson you have while dancing with a stranger. “It’s usually limited to dancing together for a while before you each dissolve back into the crowd,” he wrote. That attitude seems to have galvanized Ware, too, on an album where she sounds bolder, looser — and frankly, more fun — than she has in a near-decade. “Last night we danced/And I thought you were saving my life,” she sings in “Mirage (Don’t Stop),” an evocation of communal movement as well as a mantra for the artistic rejuvenation that Ware finds in the groove. Her delivery is exquisite and carefree, suggesting an earned wisdom that a kiss is just a kiss, a touch is just a touch, and next Saturday night probably has more of both in store.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | PMR / Friends Keep Secrets / Interscope | June 29, 2020 | 8.3 | 0f1243f9-6813-4d20-a683-916e5b19650d | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5ef619d08813ffa92664e83d/1:1/w_800,h_800,c_limit/What%E2%80%99s%20Your%20Pleasure?_Jessie%20Ware.jpg |
Mutilator Defeated at Last is Thee Oh Sees' first LP to be recorded with the band’s post-hiatus touring lineup, and it sounds a bit different from the old version of the group. The fuzz and grime have been peeled back a little, leaving room for more density and detail. | Mutilator Defeated at Last is Thee Oh Sees' first LP to be recorded with the band’s post-hiatus touring lineup, and it sounds a bit different from the old version of the group. The fuzz and grime have been peeled back a little, leaving room for more density and detail. | Thee Oh Sees: Mutilator Defeated at Last | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20441-mutilator-defeated-at-last/ | Mutilator Defeated at Last | At times, Thee Oh Sees may have sounded scrappy and scuzzy on record, but by the time the San Francisco-based garage rock quartet released 2013's Floating Coffin—their seventh album, give or take—they had become one of the finest live acts around. On stage, they were just straight up better than their peers—faster, tighter, and weirder than the competition. And then they were gone. Sort of.
Later in 2013, singer/guitarist John Dwyer announced that the band would go on hiatus and would cease to perform live for the foreseeable future. Not long after that, though, he announced that a new Oh Sees album, Drop, would see release early the following year. It was all a little confusing, and when the band finally did rematerialize for some tour dates, drummer Mike Shoun, guitarist Petey Dammit, and singer/keyboardist Brigid Dawson were gone from the picture. Instead, Dwyer—who'd relocated to Los Angeles—was backed by bassist Timothy Hellman and drummer Nick Murray.
Arguably, Thee Oh Sees have always had a fluid membership, especially when it came to the band’s LPs, which Dwyer sometimes assembled entirely on his own (see 2011’s Castlemania). But when the guitarist stepped out from his bandmates, he tended to explore more tuneful territory, reserving the band’s heavier rock'n'roll output for the whole crew.
Mutilator Defeated at Last is Thee Oh Sees' first post-hiatus LP to be recorded using the band’s re-staffed touring lineup. It sounds different from the old version of the band, but not that different. In the past, Oh Sees records were made more or less live, the band bashing out the songs in single takes with no or minimal overdubs. Since reformatting the group, Dwyer has become a bit more interested in the studio. As with Drop, this extra polish and attention benefits Mutilator. There are tasteful psychedelic embellishments—synth wooshes, delay trails—and new instrumentation, like electric organ and acoustic guitar. The fuzz and grime have been peeled back a little, leaving room for more density and detail.
By the time Floating Coffin came out, the old version of Thee Oh Sees were at the peak of their ability on stage, but the records were starting to become slightly predictable. Each would contain a handful of fast rock songs, a few slow zone-outs, and one or two detours that broke character. In a way, swapping out his personnel has allowed Dwyer to change the band without altering that formula at all. Mutilator is distinctive in Thee Oh Sees' catalog because different musicians perform it—the drums are slightly swingier, there’s bass guitar rather than a Telecaster covering the low end. Everything else is pretty much the same as usual, down to the lyrics about death and decaying flesh.
Thee Oh Sees have one type of song that is consistently great. It’s the fast and heavy track that combines the creepy and ugly sensibility of the Cramps with krautrock's streamlined sense of repetition—"The Dream" or "No Spell", for instance. On any given Oh Sees record, these are the songs that count the most. And Mutilator delivers plenty of these songs. "Withered Hand", "Lupine Ossuary", and "Rogue Planet" each strikes that perfect balance of druggy alienation and soothing forward motion, of sublime rhythmic focus and freaked-out guitar violence. | 2015-05-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-05-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Castle Face | May 21, 2015 | 7.8 | 0f13feea-92fe-4d14-93b3-2b077997c9bc | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
Featuring Josh Homme on drums, this ZZ/Stones pastiche is proof that cock rock can seem innocent and ferocious at the same time, and that music doesn't have to be ironic to have a sense of humor. | Featuring Josh Homme on drums, this ZZ/Stones pastiche is proof that cock rock can seem innocent and ferocious at the same time, and that music doesn't have to be ironic to have a sense of humor. | Eagles of Death Metal: Death by Sexy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2904-death-by-sexy/ | Death by Sexy | Since hearing Queens of the Stone Age's "First It Giveth..." from Songs for the Deaf, I must confess that I've been secretly pining for them to pour more coy falsetto over their churning riffs. It's a sound that could easily sustain an entire record. While QOTSA's follow-up to Songs was consistent enough, it's becoming more apparent that ringleader Josh Homme is getting some of his best work done away from the weight of expectation, from the Desert Sessions to Eagles of Death Metal, whose first record was much more consistent and satisfying than most had expected. Now, EoDM return with Death by Sexy, further proving that this high-octane novelty has more than just joke appeal, and granting my QOTSA wishes in the process.
Singer Jesse "The Devil" Hughes (or Boots Electric, or whatever sassy moniker they've slapped on him today) is the perfect manifestation of QOSTA's lighter side, slipping between a manic Mick Jagger caricature and a Cramps-like amphetamine Elvis. For a record that revels in the clichés of rock, his attempts are terribly cute. Where Queens of the Stone Age have always explored the dark and dirty, the excess and the evil, the nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, and ecstasy, the Eagles of Death Metal crank up a cock-rock sound that's free of any danger or seriousness. This isn't subversion, this is good clean fun.
One would think innocence and cock-rock would be like fire and holy water, or that a record that just skims through familiar modes couldn't sustain itself for an entire album, but here, all bets are off. The cuddlification is kind of the appeal: Despite lyrics like "I touch you there because I know the spot," they rock "I Gotta Feeling (Just Nineteen)" with the absurdity it deserves-- sleazy, but in the same way as a Tijuana Bible comic. There are tracks a bit too campy to hold up for repeat listening, like "Shasta Beast" or the bizarre swamp lullaby "The Ballad of Queen Bee and Baby Duck", but mostly it's the camp that makes it work; they get away with "I Gotta Feeling", as well as the pregnant pauses on "Don't Speak (I Came to Make a Bang!)", the faux-Delta blues of "Bag O' Miracles", and, in "I Like to Move in the Night", being the umpteen-millionth band to quote "Brown Sugar". EoDM may nearly cross into Ween territory, but rather than roaming all over the stylistic map, they consistently stick to a rubbery ZZ/Stones pastiche.
The other main reason it works: Homme probably doesn't want the puppet master tag, but the drums are perfect. Totally ham-fisted but still incredibly intuitive and propulsive, they're the bedrock of this album's goofy appeal. Death by Sexy rubs out the line between novelty and earnestness, reminding us that music doesn't have to be ironic to have a sense of humor. | 2006-04-10T02:01:00.000-04:00 | 2006-04-10T02:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Downtown | April 10, 2006 | 7.3 | 0f1b2135-c21f-4bf9-9664-c44f144b9a7c | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
Following 2016’s breakout debut Cardinal, the New Jersey band Pinegrove have collected some of their best songs on a lovable new live album, with proceeds going to the Southern Poverty Law Center. | Following 2016’s breakout debut Cardinal, the New Jersey band Pinegrove have collected some of their best songs on a lovable new live album, with proceeds going to the Southern Poverty Law Center. | Pinegrove: Elsewhere | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22823-elsewhere/ | Elsewhere | It’s hard not to root for Pinegrove. Even before they raised more than $21,000 for Planned Parenthood and released Elsewhere—a lovable new live album whose proceeds are being donated to the Southern Poverty Law Center—the band seemed to be propelled entirely by positivity and goodwill. For a certain kind of listener, Pinegrove’s music will feel like a warm hug, cozy without being cloying, eliciting a rush of memories of drinking in furnished basements and driving aimlessly through quiet streets. Frontman Evan Stephens Hall’s voice is a strained, twangy yowl that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on ’90s alternative rock radio, and it’s a perfect vessel for communicating his vulnerable thoughts. “We were laughing and crying in awe at the size of the moon,” he recalls in one of the band’s most impassioned anthems. It’s a simple, near-precious thought that’s immediately elevated with a more sobering question: “Do you want to die?”
“Size of the Moon” is the penultimate track on Elsewhere, a 30-minute offering following a banner year of touring in support of their breakout debut, Cardinal. The eight songs on the collection are not reinventions: there’s no extended jamming, no gratuitous stage banter. But like the already-legendary video of Pinegrove’s AudioTree set last year, Elsewhere seems tailor-made for introducing new fans to the band. The recordings on *Elsewhere *are, in fact, a good deal more polished than the intentionally-messy Cardinal. Nandi Rose Plunkett, who also performs as Half Waif, glides through the album with a graceful shimmer, using her keyboard to fill in gaps that might have otherwise been accentuated with feedback squalls or background noise; it’s a crucial element in their toughening sound. On Elsewhere, all of Pinegrove’s songs feel bigger, tighter, and more controlled, without losing the edge that made them stand out in the first place.
More than anything, Elsewhere is a testament to just how good a live band Pinegrove has become. These are mostly flawless renditions of not-so-easy-to-replicate songs. Hall’s voice is weathered and raw, but it’s not careless: he knows exactly which lines to shout, which to whisper, which to leave out entirely and let the audience sing. The rest of the band is similarly proficient, evolving in subtle ways that build on on their various touchstones, from the American Football layered guitars in “Visiting” through rootsier territory in “Angelina” and “Aphasia.” In “Aphasia,” a lonesome slide guitar—a sound that hid in the background of Cardinal, suggesting its presence without asserting itself—comes to the forefront, highlighting the band’s ability to evolve into a modern, alt-country act.
In a closing rendition of “New Friends,” Hall’s voice even resembles a young Ryan Adams, before his days of breaking hearts, when he drank like a river. What the band does next will reveal where Elsewhere stands in their discography—a spirited appendix to a strong debut or a Wide Awake in America before a Joshua Tree. For now, it’s just another dose of good karma for a band who feels like an increasingly noble cause to support. | 2017-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | January 27, 2017 | 7.5 | 0f1ff865-0050-4976-b381-8af3a38309f3 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The Korean electronic duo’s music is a curious world of bright colors, aqueous burbles, and even one otherworldly pop song. | The Korean electronic duo’s music is a curious world of bright colors, aqueous burbles, and even one otherworldly pop song. | Salamanda: In Parallel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/salamanda-in-parallel/ | In Parallel | Salamanda’s colorful, luminous electronic music started as a fantasy. Korean producers Sala (aka Uman Therma) and Manda (aka Yetsuby) told Crack magazine in early 2022 that they hoped, through making songs, to retreat from the drudgery of modern life to the imaginary worlds they dreamed up when they were kids. It’s a feeling that their records over the last few years—playfully impressionistic, full of sunny synth melodies and an unrelenting spirit of curiosity—vividly evoke.
Their latest, In Parallel, is a vibrant expansion of these themes. The title of the first track, “Nostalgia,” might feel obvious for a duo whose music has mined the feeling so thoroughly. But it fits this foggy composition, which opens with the distant chatter of children playing, eventually fading into lapping synthesizer melodies and featherlight percussion. Its familiar, golden-hour emotionality makes for the sort of song that feels like a warm memory the first time you hear it.
Salamanda are most comfortable inhabiting this mode—In Parallel is bright and elaborate but unfolds at a contemplative pace. Their approach recalls the ornate records Jon Hassell was making toward the latter part of his career, or the intricate emotionality found on labels like West Mineral Ltd.; there is movement and momentum on In Parallel, but Salamanda always find space for stillness. Even on tracks that foreground percussion and rhythm, like the sleepwalking balearic murmurs of “Sun Tickles” or the aqueous burbles of “Purple Punch,” In Parallel’s movement is patient. It oozes slowly, shimmering like motor oil in rainwater.
On 2022’s Ashbalkum, the duo found a lot of power in the playful potential of the human voice, splashing wordless coos across the record. They use vocals in similarly abstract ways on In Parallel, including the gasping title track, which smears ghostly syllables across gently pooling electronics—underscoring the yearning that pulses beneath the record’s more abstract moments. But In Parallel’s most striking moment takes a different approach. While still oozy, otherworldly, and surreal in its own right, “Homemade Jam” pushes the limits of Salamanda’s sound by offering up what’s effectively a pop song. The lyrics are simple, little more than a nursery rhyme—“Make a jam/By myself”—but the track is sticky and sweet. There’s nothing else like it among In Parallel’s pensive pieces, but roughly hewn as it is, it’s genuinely memorable—part schoolyard chant, part radio hit beamed in from Candy Land.
Salamanda’s music is often broadly understood as ambient, but they’ve never been circumscribed by such borders. Peaceful moments abound in their catalog, but whenever things get too tranquil, a slithering rhythm or a surreal vocal melody stands ready to add a mischievous slipperiness. The freedom and genuine curiosity of their approach is what has made the group so exciting to follow across their recent productive years. Call them ambient if you must, but Salamanda aren’t drifting—they’re exploring, like wide-eyed wanderers turned loose on a brand new realm. | 2024-01-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Wisdom Teeth | January 9, 2024 | 7.1 | 0f275bfb-7f07-49d6-8220-63aa9ff99af2 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Stockholm Syndrome-- that peculiar condition in which a captive grows to love and respect his captor-- is real, and if ... | Stockholm Syndrome-- that peculiar condition in which a captive grows to love and respect his captor-- is real, and if ... | Oneida: Each One Teach One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5996-each-one-teach-one/ | Each One Teach One | Stockholm Syndrome-- that peculiar condition in which a captive grows to love and respect his captor-- is real, and if you're skeptical, you can experience it yourself with Oneida's Each One Teach One. A band with one the greatest, hokiest stage names in rock ties you up, stares you down, and works you over like Lennox Lewis pounding the heavy bag. After thirty minutes of tunneling, psychedelic 70s sludge (only the first of two discs), Oneida spits in your face, daring you to love them.
Each One Teach One goes right for the throat: the numbing, rusty buzz of "Sheets of Easter" is one of the least enticing ways I can imagine opening a record, yet somehow, after absorbing the full impact of this 14-minute onslaught, I realized I'd enjoyed myself. It's hard to recommend a relentlessly hypnotic slab of skull-crushing repetition, but "Sheets of Easter" is exactly the sort of ballsy move that makes so many love and respect Oneida. Churning guitars cycle a heart-stopping riff ad nauseam, but the effect is so mesmerizing, it's hard to fault the band for stealing a quarter-hour of my life away.
During "Antibiotics", the second and final track on disc one, Oneida sets the brain-blender from frappe to puree. It begins with a slick organ line courtesy of Fat Bobby, and seems to tout another sixteen minutes of intoxicating drone, but that catchy melody gives way, mutating in fractal order and deviating further and further from its set course. Guitars flare up, slightly off-cue, effects kick in unexpectedly, and the keyboard riff itself slithers into a different skin. From deep within the ever-changing swirl-- and just past the ten-minute mark-- an actual song emerges, but naturally, the shit hits the fan. What became solid for a moment soon collapses. There are no survivors.
The first disc is startlingly entertaining, given its repetitive nature, but its only real purpose is preparation-- an overblown effort to numb the listener's senses-- as without its tirades as contrast, disc two is terribly dull. Oneida has until now thrived on full-tilt sonic pandemonium, songs like "All Arounder", "Pure Light Invasion", and the hilarious, brilliant "Fat Bobby's Black Thumb", but somewhere between Anthem of the Moon and their latest, their signature aural riot has dispersed. Guitarist Papa Crazy and bassist Hanoi Jane have improved considerably, but that hurts more than it helps: they seem content to reproduce the pummeling assault of disc one, yet in their increased technical assurance, they lose the primal fury of old.
Disc two does hide a pair of choice cuts-- "Black Chamber" and "No Label"-- which benefit from Fat Bobby's swank organ and a killer bass roll. On the downside, they're stranded at the end of an otherwise monotonous set, and neither plays to the band's frantic strength. A handful of similarly decent tracks would have eliminated the need for a first disc of will-snapping indoctrination; Each One Teach One leads with a sucker-punch, and Oneida spend the rest of the album praying the superintendent breaks things up before everyone realizes they've forgotten how to fight. | 2003-01-16T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2003-01-16T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | January 16, 2003 | 6.5 | 0f2f55c4-d51a-4731-ac18-57b83ddb8467 | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
This handsomely appointed Deutsche Grammophon release of recordings by Bryce Dessner, guitarist for the National, and Jonny Greenwood, guitarist for Radiohead, is a sign of shifting cultural tides regarding orchestral works by rock stars. | This handsomely appointed Deutsche Grammophon release of recordings by Bryce Dessner, guitarist for the National, and Jonny Greenwood, guitarist for Radiohead, is a sign of shifting cultural tides regarding orchestral works by rock stars. | Jonny Greenwood / Bryce Dessner: St. Carolyn by the Sea / Suite From There Will Be Blood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19141-jonny-greenwood-bryce-dessner-st-carolyn-by-the-sea-suite-from-there-will-be-blood/ | St. Carolyn by the Sea / Suite From There Will Be Blood | Orchestral works by rock stars were once accorded the same level of basic dignity as Baby Mozart compilations or "Classical Relaxation" checkout counter CDs: They were the classical-music industry's green-mile walks, grist for the mill. This handsomely appointed Deutsche Grammophon release of recordings by Bryce Dessner, guitarist for the National, and Jonny Greenwood, guitarist for Radiohead, is one sign, among many, of shifting cultural tides. "Rock star" is an altogether more genteel occupation in this century than it was in the last—Dessner and Greenwood in particular enjoy a middlebrow cultural cachet somewhere between "TED Fellow" and "HBO show runner." And the classical music industry is relieved to have modern cultural ambassadors that won't make them feel foolish or craven.
Dessner and Greenwood have thus built up enviable composing careers for themselves. Their works are programmed by tony, first-class institutions, and positioned next to other contemporary composers, not consigned to the Friday-night concert that serves drinks. Greenwood has a head start on Dessner—his suite for There Will Be Blood, from 2007, enjoys a robust performance life and Popcorn Superhet Receiver, from which portions of this work were taken has been recorded already. Dessner, however, is catching up; last year, none other than the Kronos Quartet devoted a full album to his compositions. Now, whenever a prominent contemporary music festival is scheduled—such as this spring's Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, which also features Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche—Dessner and Greenwood are included.
It helps that their compositions do as much work as their names. Greenwood's There Will Be Blood suite is foreboding and inky-black, a work whose extended quotes of Penderecki and Ligeti do nothing to obscure the thumbprint of Greenwood's sensibility. The leaping, fiendish, cello line will forever be associated with Daniel Plainview, and the glinting blue eyes in Daniel Day-Lewis's soot-covered face as he proclaims his disgust for "these...people." The slow-fall-in-free-space glissandi that punctuate the "Henry Plainview" movement, the most obvious Ligeti touch, break open into plangent, lovely string writing, a push-pull between furtive remorse and throbbing evil keeps the piece from curdling.
Dessner's surprisingly mordant sensibility is a match for Greenwood's. On his "St. Carolyn By the Sea", moaning tremolos pass like a fever chill through the orchestra and show up in the guitars a few minutes later, goose flesh prickling the music's surface. There are guitars in the work, but they are twinkling and demure, and often feel like they are murmuring to quiet the upheaval of the shuddering beast that is the full orchestra. The work builds to a martial tattoo of an ending and cuts off, leaving its sharp outline visible in our minds.
Dessner's ear for string writing is particularly rich. The chords that move through the beginning of "Lachrimae" carry some Barber in their DNA, an impression that gets upset later when a cello bows out hoarse-voiced harmonics high up near the bridge. "Raphael", builds from wispy tendrils of sound into a super-saturated moment of full orchestral color, a blazing sunrise burning fog off of a river. The work stretches majestically over 17 minutes, maintaining a slow build that might feel familiar to the muscle-memories of post-rock fans. It is glacial, patiently ecstatic, and further evidence that Dessner's vision could support some large-scale works. Whoever wants to commission his first symphony would probably be rewarded with something fantastic. | 2014-03-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-03-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Deutsche Grammophon | March 21, 2014 | 7.8 | 0f2fb8ec-b13d-4b10-83a2-43b078f037d3 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Andrew Bird composed and performed the soundtrack to the independent film Norman. In addition to his tracks-- including 10 new instrumentals-- this collection includes Wolf Parade, Chad VanGaalen, and the Blow's Khaela Maricich. | Andrew Bird composed and performed the soundtrack to the independent film Norman. In addition to his tracks-- including 10 new instrumentals-- this collection includes Wolf Parade, Chad VanGaalen, and the Blow's Khaela Maricich. | Various Artists: Norman OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15943-norman-ost/ | Norman OST | It's been four years since Juno and seven since Garden State, which means we're due for another carefully soundtracked independent film celebrating young white folks' ability to find love despite crippling quirkiness. Right on schedule, here comes Norman, a 2010 festival-circuit selection rolling into theaters across the country with all the proper credentials: the square-peg protagonist (here, the titular Norman), the sweetly bumbling dalliance with an equally off-kilter would-be soulmate (Emily, "a girl who likes Monty Python"), the heavy-hanging bleakness of some unfortunately timed personal tragedy (the death and illness of Norman's parents).
Then, of course, there's the music, a soundtrack released a few weeks before the movie's super-limited national opening. But while the names on the tracklist read with the same indie-ish panache as those of Garden State and Juno, the two best-selling sophomore-year mix tapes in history, Norman takes a more focused approach. The film's score was composed and performed by Andrew Bird, a move that should shock no one faintly familiar with the classically trained multi-instrumentalist: Over the course of five solo albums, his swooping melodies and carefully built arrangements have all but pleaded to be overlaid on celluloid. Ten of his Norman tracks are original instrumental pieces that, even when taken out of their intended context (as we experienced them, unable to catch one of the movie's limited screenings before press time), fit nicely among his existing catalog.
"3:36" is perhaps the most readily-identifiable as a Bird song, its nervous, gnawing waves pocked with violin pizzicato and eerie whistling, his dual touchstones that he's almost always better off ditching. Here, though, they're used sparingly, maximizing their effect. When the dreadful pulse that opens first track "Scotch and Milk" repeats three tracks later on "Hospital", the ominous thrum glowers, grows heavy, then finally gives way to mournful violin pulls and plucks. That textural push-and-pull defines the score, Bird's strings caustic against the smooth, near-perpetual hum of the organ (or maybe it's a hurdy-gurdy, or deeply distorted violin loop-- whatever it is, its pitiless drone is so reminiscent of Wendy Carlos' analog-synth soundtrack to The Shining that Bird seems bound to one day score a horror flick). Here, if not for the gentle, almost mischievous lope of "The Kiss/Time and Space/Waterfall", the title of which tells its own little story, the tension would be nearly unbearable.
Bird has promised a new record out early next year, and if this collection can be considered any kind of preview, the arrangements will be darker, bolder, weirder-- but his songwriting, perhaps, more direct. On recent albums, especially 2009's Noble Beast, he has seemed nearly incapable of anything but lyrical abstruseness, throwing out mentions of aubergines and Cypriots like decoys, as if his cleverness would distract from his avoidance of grappling with anything more frighteningly real.
Instrumentally, while "Arcs and Coulombs", the first of Bird's three proper songs on Norman, holds tight to brushed drums and glockenspiel (his third- and fourth-most-often-deployed tricks), but its talk of candy-apple lips and "your serum in my veins" are new, their borderline corniness forgivable for their offering of proof that Bird is capable of feeling, or at least transmitting, such a pedestrian sentiment as romantic infatuation. It seems to be the most straightforward love song he's ever turned out, at least until "Night Sky" comes along a bit later: "What if we hadn't been born at the same time?/ What if you were 75 and I were nine?" he wonders, supported only by a feverishly stroked acoustic guitar carried over from the preceding track. Nary a whistle, a pluck, nor an obscure scientific metaphor-- just straight-up wonder at two people somehow managing to find each other amidst the whole mess of space and time. It's a new Andrew Bird, followed shortly by the old one: "Darkmatter", from 2007's Armchair Apocrypha, is the only Bird song not original to the soundtrack, but here it blazes in with a cinematic bravado that all but destroys its former self.
Contributions from three other artists are nestled among Bird's tracks. The Blow's Khaela Maricich lends the compilation its only female voice with "S.O.S.", a dreamy, heavy-lidded cry for help: "If you get a minute, would you come and look for me?" "You Are a Runner and I Am My Father's Son", the crunching, stilted opener of Wolf Parade's 2005 LP Apologies to the Queen Mary, is reworked here into a darkly pulsing near-dirge, its electric guitars pushed down, Spencer Krug's yawp subdued and accented with slinky percussion and accordion wheezes. And Chad VanGaalen's "Rabid Bits of Time" is carried over directly from his Soft Airplane, its mournful cello slub and lonely guitar fitting it in neatly among Bird's instrumentals, VanGaalen's ragged, exhausted bleating no doubt laid over some key moment onscreen, pushing the movie and soundtrack into its cathartic final third.
A soundtrack taken apart from its movie is a funny thing, especially one working in such familiar territory as Norman. It's not hard to imagine the scenes these songs must play over on screen: here's when he walks through the halls and the other kids stare, here's when he wonders how her hair smells, here's where he wonders about the vagaries of human existence and what's the point of it all, here's where they kiss, here's where they cry. Maybe it's that easy; maybe it's not. At the very least, it's beautiful. | 2011-10-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-10-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Mom+Pop | October 19, 2011 | 7.3 | 0f353f85-c561-41ae-b17c-5930c7ad8da3 | Rachael Maddux | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachael-maddux/ | null |
Continuing in the vein of 2007's BOSS, Magik Markers here channel their noisy leanings into simpler songs without sacrificing the band's fiery energy. | Continuing in the vein of 2007's BOSS, Magik Markers here channel their noisy leanings into simpler songs without sacrificing the band's fiery energy. | Magik Markers: Balf Quarry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13004-balf-quarry/ | Balf Quarry | If a band makes two records that move their sound in the same direction, is it fair to call the first a step forward and the second a retread? No, it's not. So please don't call Balf Quarry a repeat of BOSS, Magik Markers' excellent 2007 album*.* I understand the temptation-- like its predecessor, Balf Quarry channels this duo's noisy leanings into simpler songs without sacrificing the band's fiery energy. There are even some direct parallels-- the best song here, the chugging "Don't Talk in Your Sleep", bears echoes of BOSS' single "Taste", while the raging "Jerks" recalls BOSS' "Body Rot". And when heard in light of a 20-plus release discography (including at least seven since BOSS), Balf Quarry certainly sounds more like BOSS than anything else the band has done.
But it takes only a few listens to realize that this album is its own beast. Even with healthy doses of unruliness and a few far-off wanderings, this is Magik Markers' most coherent, self-contained effort to date. A friend called it "a road trip into the basement," and that pretty well captures the album's America-in-the-rear-view-mirror vibe. As the smoky grooves roll by, it's easy to picture singer/guitarist Elisa Ambrogio and drummer Pete Nolan camped out in a cellar, dreaming that their loose, swaying songs are treks down a hazy, endless highway.
"Smash out the glass of the dashboard clocks/ Drive straight into the West," Ambrogio sings in opener "Risperdal", a diary of a country where "America's past pays America's rent" and "High schoolers and Haggard know what I know." (At song's end, Ambrogio changes that line to "High schoolers and Hagerty"-- perhaps a nod to Neil Hagerty and Royal Trux, a band who could also sound like they were concocting alternate Easy Rider soundtracks from the comfort of dank underground dwellings).
Elsewhere, Ambrogio drops numerous references to road-drenched Americana. Her songs are littered with gamblers, lawmen, whiskey, and losing lottery tickets. This makes Balf Quarry something like a 1970s indie film shot through a modern-day lens, similar to the way Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny felt like a simultaneously faded and updated road-movie replica. So you probably need some penchant for American nostalgia and noisy stoner-rock to dig very far into Balf Quarry. But if you can hack it, there are pots of gold along the album's wayward avenues.
On "Psychosomatic", clipped guitar and cutting drums embolden Ambrogio's screed against thinking too hard ("If you start looking, do you know what you'll find?") Later, a crunchy electronic beat buttresses Ambrogio and Nolan's vocal duo on the love-song-ish "7/23". That's followed by the even more surprising "State Numbers", a ballad about the dangers of gambling featuring Nolan on piano and producer Scott Colburn on "wizard wind." "Luck never gives, it only lends," Ambrogio warns over the music's haunting tones.
Her most pointed rant, "The Lighter Side of...Hippies", is an indictment of something bigger: 60s idealism. "You had a revolution in your head/ Too bad you couldn't make it out of bed," she snarls, telling the boomers that "your heroes lied." In fact, here she wholly rejects the road fantasies that Balf Quarry had hinted at before: "No more forever young on the turnpike/ The sunshine visions were not what they seemed." But even Easy Rider itself ended with Peter Fonda deciding that "we blew it," and the dreams and disappointments Ambrogio sings about are often intertwined. Balf Quarry is the kind of record that can handle such rich, entertaining contradictions. | 2009-05-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-05-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Drag City | May 7, 2009 | 7.5 | 0f359f79-6d88-47af-bef8-702cfc60d096 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Plucking influences from 90s indie rock isn't new, but Cymbals Eat Guitars perfectly embody that casually ambitious slack-rock sound. Sometimes you just want the basics. | Plucking influences from 90s indie rock isn't new, but Cymbals Eat Guitars perfectly embody that casually ambitious slack-rock sound. Sometimes you just want the basics. | Cymbals Eat Guitars: Why There Are Mountains | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12826-why-there-are-mountains/ | Why There Are Mountains | Plenty of bands want to take you higher and even more are looking to get you down, but it's increasingly rare to find a record that sounds good with a AAA guidebook and a few hours to get to god knows where, as long as it's somewhere else. Despite the unabated use of adjectives like "sprawling" or "sweeping" or "epic," the indie road trip album has become something of a lost art, with bands mostly forgoing dense, pent-up instrumentation that slowly unfurls and releases-- you know, that lonesome crowded sound. You could blame it on so many bands being from autophobic NYC, or that the Pacific Northwest gods of indie are still going too strong to already be a primary influence, but neither would explain New York's Cymbals Eat Guitars' Why There Are Mountains. While there's plenty of geographical signifiers on their debut, it's almost topographic in its approach, without hooks and choruses so much as map-like layouts of mountains and sloping valleys.
Six-minute opener "...And the Hazy Sea" has Why They Are Mountains sounding like it could immediately implode, kicking off with the kind of cataclysmic blowout Built to Spill used to get to in a few minutes' less time. Occasionally adding reverbed guitar and electric piano to give an eye-of-the-storm calm, the band reaches about six different crescendos; it's less showy theatrics than Cymbals Eat Guitars just packing a lot of ideas into their songs. It's tough to consider structures this unpredictable to be templates, but upon hearing the subtle instrumental shifts of "Indiana" evolving from noise-rock interlude to a horn-led piano waltz, you locate a certain pretzel logic in these songs-within-songs. Yelpy and adenoidal, bombastic and yet unkempt, you could pretty much slap a sticker on this thing saying "RIYL: indie rock."
"Some Trees (Merritt Moon)" emerges from the feedback exhaust of "...And the Hazy Sea" into two minutes of tightly coiled post-punk dance and strangulated, sugary hooks. At first an environmentalist's lament of suburban sprawl, a much more sinister effect of deforestation is revealed-- "I was thankful for the mystery/ But by the time the girl had hanged herself/ I could have looked out my back window and watched her neck just snap." CEG are rarely as dark as they are on "Some Trees", but besides a sound engineer, the group also shares with Modest Mouse a tendency to turn supremely stoned observations into startling lucidity.
Why There Are Mountains gains as much impact from its quieter moments, especially "Share", which parlays queasy, whammy-bar shoegaze atmosphere into a defeated, yet regal procession of horns. As its followed by "What Dogs See", four minutes of echoing rubble and near spoken-word mumbles, it initially seems like a pokey bit of sequencing, but the song evolves into a prelude to the deceptively bouncy "Wind Phoenix", which turns personal devastation into a sing-along. The scattered lyrics could pass for a whimsical recollection of an Indiana youth spent watching Notre Dame football and listening to Sub Pop until you focus on the song's macabre laments.
What's most admirable about this sophisticated self-released debut is Cymbals Eat Guitars' willingness to think big with gestures that shouldn't fly in the hands of a young band, instrumentally or thematically. Occasionally, albeit rarely, it leads them astray, as in the closer "Like Blood Does", where the group dawdles a bit too long before reaching its arresting conclusion. But that's a minor quibble considering how Why There Are Mountains ends up being like any great result of wanderlust-- here, the journey is the end not the means; fortunately, that gives Why There Are Mountains astounding replay value. | 2009-03-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-03-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | March 16, 2009 | 8.3 | 0f38d51c-1400-4211-8d24-daf0fb63318c | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The driving force of Madonna’s debut remains its palpable physicality, born out of New York dance clubs, a new pop mandate to move your body in ways both public and private. | The driving force of Madonna’s debut remains its palpable physicality, born out of New York dance clubs, a new pop mandate to move your body in ways both public and private. | Madonna: Madonna | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madonna-madonna/ | Madonna | Today is Madonna Day in the Pitchfork Reviews section; in honor of her birthday, we reviewed four of her key records.
Sire Records founder Seymour Stein was lying in a hospital bed the first time he heard Madonna. It was 1982, and the man who’d signed the Ramones, Talking Heads, and the Pretenders had one of his usual heart infections. Listening to his Walkman, Stein perked up when he heard a bass-heavy demo of Madonna’s first single, “Everybody.” He called the DJ who’d given him the tape, Mark Kamins of New York’s anti-Studio 54 utopia Danceteria, and asked to meet Madonna, a Danceteria regular and waitress. Hours later, the 24-year-old dancer-turned-musician from Bay City, Mich. was in that hospital room, hoping Stein was well enough to draw up a contract.
Stein did sign her, and the following year put out Madonna, a cool and cohesive debut that helped resituate electronic dance-pop at Top 40’s apex with hits like “Holiday,” “Lucky Star,” and “Borderline.” But the suits at Warner Bros., which had acquired Sire a few years earlier, didn’t quite know what to do with the former punk who was writing and performing muscular R&B for the club. Their early inclination was to work her at black radio stations, favoring a cartoonish urban collage for the “Everybody” cover instead of Madonna’s already perfected thousand-yard stare. Listeners weren’t sure what to make of the singer cooing those pleading vocals on the rising dance hit, but it wouldn’t be long before Madonna did something about that too.
At Madonna’s convincing, the label let her shoot a chintzy performance video for “Everybody,” followed by a more polished video for her striking second single “Burning Up.” In it, she tugs at a thick chain looped around her neck and rolls around in the street while singing lines like, “I’m not the others, I’d do anything/I’m not the same, I have no shame,” her panting underscored by Hi-NRG beats and raunchy rock guitar solos. A man drives towards Madonna, but at the end, it’s her behind the wheel—the first great wink to her signature subversion of power through sex. Though her 1984 MTV Music Video Awards performance is now considered erotic lore on the level of Elvis’ censored hips, that writhing set to “Like a Virgin” would have had little context without the slow, sensual burn of Madonna throughout ’83 and ’84. It was a record that seemed quirky but innocuous enough based on the feel-good wiggle of its initial crossover hit, “Holiday,” but the driving force of Madonna remains its palpable physicality—a mandate to move your body, in ways both public and private.
Part of what gives Madonna such affecting rhythm is its use of electronic instruments that sounded like the future then and typify the ’80s sound now—instruments like the LinnDrum and the Oberheim OB-X synthesizer. Disco had brought dance music to pop’s forefront, where producers like Giorgio Moroder traded its saccharine strings for robotic instrumentation, but by the early ’80s, the genre had cooled off. People still danced to synthesizers, but their positioning was crucial—both within culture and musical compositions. The Human League and Soft Cell scored two of 1982’s biggest and most synthetic smashes, but back then the gulf between punk-derived new wave and bygone disco seemed wider than it ever really was. Disco and disco-adjacent stars like Donna Summer and Michael Jackson still were programming their hits, but the overall focus was back on a full-band sound. There’s no shortage of organic instruments on Madonna’s debut—“Borderline” wouldn’t be the same without the piano’s melodic underscoring, standout album cut “Physical Attraction” without its funky little guitar line—but the slinky digital grooves often take center stage. Through this, Madonna is able to achieve an almost aggressive twinkling that still feels fresh: the effervescent fizz at the start of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Cut to the Feeling” seems cribbed straight from “Lucky Star.”
Madonna vaguely criticized her debut’s sonic palette while promoting its follow-up, 1984’s Like a Virgin, but its focus is part of what makes the album so memorable, so of a time and place. She would soon become known for ritual pop star metamorphosis, but with a clearly defined musical backdrop, Madonna was able to let shine her biggest asset: herself. The way Madonna’s early collaborators talk about her—even the ones who take issue with her, like Reggie Lucas, who wrote “Borderline” and “Physical Attraction” and produced the bulk of the album—often revolves around her decisiveness, her style, the undeniability of her star quality. Some of these songs, like the self-penned workout “Think of Me,” aren’t all that special, but Madonna telling a lover to appreciate before she vacates is so self-assured, the message carries over to the listener. And when the material’s even better, like on “Borderline,” the passionate performance takes it over the top.
Maybe the New York cool kids rolled their eyes at the Midwest transplant after she blew up, but she had effectively bottled their attitude and open-mindedness and sold it to the MTV generation (sleeve of bangles and crucifix earrings not included). Innocent as it may look now, compared to the banned bondage videos and butt-naked books that followed, Madonna was a sexy, forward-thinking record that took pop in a new direction. Its success showed that, with the right diva at the helm, music similar to disco could find a place in the white mainstream—a call to the dance floor answered by everyone from Kylie to Robyn to Gaga to Madonna herself. After venturing out into various genre experiments and film projects, when Madonna needs a hit, the longtime queen of the Dance Songs chart often returns to the club. This approach doesn’t always work, as her last three records have shown, but you can’t fault her for trying to get back to that place where heavenly bodies shine for a night. | 2017-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner Bros. | August 16, 2017 | 8.2 | 0f39e64a-ac6a-49a4-8187-8c72aece4444 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
On their debut collaboration, the acclaimed harpist and the Espers singer pull long songs and meditative moods taut by creating unexpected tangles. | On their debut collaboration, the acclaimed harpist and the Espers singer pull long songs and meditative moods taut by creating unexpected tangles. | Meg Baird / Mary Lattimore: Ghost Forests | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meg-baird-mary-lattimore-ghost-forests/ | Ghost Forests | Listen for the twangs. The little disruptions on Ghost Forests, the collaborative debut from Meg Baird of Espers and Heron Oblivion and the harpist Mary Lattimore, offer a key into its soul. On the surface, the album is gorgeous, soothing, delicate; you could soak in a bathtub while it plays. But beneath that placid surface, little explosions and rustlings abound. Electric guitar mutters cloud the arrangements, while Lattimore treats her harp strings like nerve endings, sometimes making you wince at their bright snap. The more time you spend with Ghost Forests, the more these unsettling touches come into focus. They give the album weight, so it doesn’t drift into the ether. This is ambient folk, shot through with ambient anxiety.
Lattimore has never let the harp’s reputation as a “celestial” instrument, the one played by the angels on your dentist’s wallpaper, get in her way. In her hands, the harp doesn’t float down from some numinous hereafter free from death, suffering, or finger calluses. Her percussive playing offers constant reminders that a harp player is wrestling with a collection of wood and strings the size of a compact car. Baird, meanwhile, strums her guitar hard. On “Damaged Sunset,” she hits the strings like someone driving nails into a porch deck. On “Between Two Worlds,” she adds bullfrog blurts of keyboard around a ringing drone. Such textures keep Ghost Forests mesmerizing, even taut, as these songs unfurl into eight minutes of single-chord pieces. Mind-wandering is inevitable, and often part of the point, in music this loose and expansive, but, during Ghost Forests, you somehow remain magnetized.
Ghost Forests is split between longer, mostly wordless explorations like “Between Two Worlds” and more songlike pieces like “In Cedars,” where Baird’s sighing vocals point the music toward dream-pop. On “Painter of Tygers,” little icicles of synth streak quietly in the background before the arrangement darkens into a cloud of distortion. It passes as quickly as it arrives, like watching a patch of rough weather move across the sky.
Years ago, Baird and Lattimore belonged to a loose and highly collaborative group of experimental and folk musicians around Philadelphia. But only after moving to California separately did they work together in a formal, dedicated sense. On Ghost Forests, you can feel their sensibilities probing each other’s, seeking counterintuitive ways to fit together. They are especially attuned to one other in the moments when the music verges on free improvisation, when the song structures dissolve so that the pair can range more widely and freely. The wordless stretches are so steely, so beguiling, that they almost overshadow the pieces with vocals. The sung moments are beautiful, particularly “In Cedars,” but it is a more conventional beauty, the beauty of Japanese water fountains sitting in corner spas.
The most obvious choices Lattimore and Baird make tend to fall the flattest: The six-track album ends with a long-flowing reworking of the traditional child ballad, “Fair Annie.” Like many such songs, the song has plenty of dark notes—a lord orders a woman who has borne him seven children to clean herself up and appear more like a “maiden” for his newly arriving wife. But Baird and Lattimore play it pretty straight. Their version is only nice, and all the little tensions the pair have been developing drain away during these eight minutes. The two are friends, and given the steady clip of their respective release schedules, it seems likely they will work together again. Maybe next time, they push past these edges, into the wilderness of twangs and blurts beckoning just beyond Ghost Forests. | 2018-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | Three Lobed | November 24, 2018 | 7.4 | 0f3a0d20-0351-45eb-ace9-5265be271094 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Featuring members of the recently disbanded Ought, the post-punk trio makes its debut with skeletal songs of modern anxiety and isolation. | Featuring members of the recently disbanded Ought, the post-punk trio makes its debut with skeletal songs of modern anxiety and isolation. | Cola: Deep in View | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cola-deep-in-view/ | Deep in View | The name Cola partly stands for “Cost of Living Adjustment,” an ironically dry source of inspiration for a rock band. But in the context of former Ought frontman Tim Darcy’s latest project, the economic term speaks to an artistic outlook as well. Joined by fellow ex-Ought bassist Ben Stidworthy and drummer Evan Cartwright (U.S. Girls, The Weather Station), the trio’s debut album addresses modern anxieties wrought by technology in a world on the brink, bringing their imagistic worldview to the present. Cola’s sleek sound fits in with the melodic side of contemporary post-punk, with sharper hooks and more succinct songwriting than the members’ past work. What remains is Darcy's charismatic spoken-sung drawl, picking up right where his last band left off.
Before announcing their split in 2021, Ought refined their approach to contemplative, cathartic art-rock across three albums. On the quartet’s emotionally raw 2014 debut, Darcy’s voice strained like a young David Byrne searching for something to believe in. By 2015’s Sun Coming Down, their songs grew longer and their lyrics more repetitive, with the snarled delivery of Mark E. Smith. Darcy tried out a Roy Orbison quiver on his 2017 solo album, and on Ought’s final LP, he was accompanied by a 70-person choir. No such embellishments appear on Deep in View, as the three musicians strip their songs to skeletal essentials.
In that sense, Cola has a few things in common with the Smile, the Radiohead side project featuring Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood. Both bands formed in the shadow of their members’ better known projects and emerged with a familiar, streamlined sound. “So Excited” was the first song that Darcy, Stidworthy, and Cartwright wrote together in late 2019, its choruses ringing with the disaffected catchiness of the Strokes. After the pandemic hit, their in-person recordings were replaced by file trading over Google Drive, though it’s impossible to tell the difference. Sandwiching the meat of the song between off-kilter instrumental passages, “Fulton Park” touches on feelings of disconnection. As its choruses fall apart, Darcy sings about being “pulled over for imitating landscapes,” an imaginary world he escaped to during his loneliest moments in lockdown.
Darcy’s lyrics have always been concerned with human connection, but these songs were written from a more reclusive perspective than Ought’s grandiose epics. “Mint” describes his solitary experiences making tea, dusting his record shelves, and pacing the halls. It feels like both a cry for help and an admission of self-sabotage when he sings “I’d call someone/I don’t call anyone.” On “Water Table” Darcy sounds just as alone, becoming one with technology while he stops worrying about going extinct. Cartwright’s caveman drum beat, without the use of cymbals, leaves a lot of space for the lyrics, as do his martial snare rolls on “Gossamer,” propelling one of the album’s most evocative lines: “I feel abrasions like a seawall feels the rain.”
It’s interesting to hear the multiple demos of “Degree,” which Cola have released alongside the album version. The twinkly guitar riffs that made it to the final cut are undeniably pleasant, but I found myself wishing they would have kept some of the droning organs, echoing drum machines, and sputtering breakbeats that appeared in earlier renditions. The uniformity of the album’s first nine songs becomes clear by the time they reach closer “Landers,” switching out their minimalist rock arrangement for moody pianos and soft drum brushes. Cola haven’t reinvented the wheel, but these subtle experiments suggest they still have boundaries to push. | 2022-05-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire Talk | May 31, 2022 | 7.3 | 0f409cec-d343-4dc3-8bf4-b17bfe3a1d6d | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
Pop singer Ari Leff advocates powerfully for being forthright about your feelings, but his album’s whopping 21-song tracklist is underwhelming and repetitive. | Pop singer Ari Leff advocates powerfully for being forthright about your feelings, but his album’s whopping 21-song tracklist is underwhelming and repetitive. | Lauv: ~how i’m feeling~ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lauv-how-im-feeling/ | ~how i’m feeling~ | Bebe Rexha is “Sad.” Olivia O’Brien wants to be “Sad Together.” Chelsea Cutler is “Sad Tonight.” All of Snakehips and Tinashe’s friends are wasted; all of Tate McRae’s friends are fake; all the kids Jeremy Zucker knows are depressed. The 25-year-old pop singer Lauv—who’s written for Charli XCX and toured with Ed Sheeran—is already well-versed in this very bummed, very online state of a generation. His debut album, ~how i’m feeling~, is a wholly sincere look at angst in the age of social media. “We’re never alone, but always depressed, yeah,” he laments on the closer “Modern Loneliness.”
Pop’s pivot to melancholy attests to a certain progress: People on the internet—teenagers especially—are more willing than ever to open up about mental health. Yet the language that’s meted out to talk about it, to really talk about it, is still so limited that what looks like relief often serves to slot our emotions into familiar and digestible templates. (“im like ~~~anxiettyyyy, and then never see a therapist,” a friend joked recently.) The conspicuous text-message stylization of ~how i’m feeling~ makes the tension clear. In contemporary lexicon, bracketing your message in tildes is a form of hedging, of preemptively undercutting the seriousness of what you’re about to say; all-lowercase lettering is another method of shrinking things down. But Lauv wants to cut out the posturing. “We live in a world where a lot of people are afraid of really expressing themselves,” he’s said. “I want you to hear my music and feel, ‘I can be honest and vulnerable with the people around me.’”
One obstacle to expressing yourself is working up the courage to do so; another is figuring out, on your own terms, who that self really is. As a public figure, Lauv advocates powerfully for being forthright about your feelings, but his album’s whopping 21-song tracklist is underwhelming and repetitive. Lauv calls it “diverse, emotional, and lit,” but ~how i’m feeling~ is mostly temperate, EDM-lite affairs jumbled with piano ballads and Sheeran-style nice-guy folk, plus one blatant bid for a Latin-pop hit (the Sofía Reyes-assisted “El Tejano”). Much of the emotional substance is laid out in the titles: feelings are hard (“Feelings”), I’m lonely as fuck (“fuck, i’m lonely”), I’m so tired of love songs (“i’m so tired”). These are Tumblr posts adapted as studio hits.
When Lauv leaps into a pained falsetto on ballads like “Julia” and “Sad Forever,” you feel the pang of his isolation. But his few moments of existential elegance are undermined by tonally mismatched production. “I wonder what it feels like to be more than I am,” he quavers on “Drugs & the Internet,” before a jarring drop turns the song into a schoolyard stomp. Elsewhere, serious themes are almost completely obscured by mild, Spotify-friendly vibes. “fuck, i’m lonely” features on the soundtrack of the teen-suicide drama 13 Reasons Why, but with its staticky, air-fried finger snaps and tropical ambiance, the Anne-Marie duet is more fit for a flirty island romp.
More often than not, Lauv’s attempts to be all-inclusive dilute his message. When he says “we’re never alone, but always depressed,” “depressed” could encompass everything from one-time alienation at a party to life-threatening imbalances in brain chemistry. “I’m lonely just like you,” he repeats on the moody, stadium-ready “Lonely Eyes.” The girl to whom Lauv confesses this fact is so curiously blank that she has few features apart from her “lonely eyes” and her proclivity for expensive vacations. Other characters are even more laughably one-dimensional: “Billy” is a juvenile redemption story about a misfit who grew up in poverty, then “woke up in a Tesla at 23.” (Billy is also the name of Lauv’s dog.)
On social media, as in pop music, it’s become increasingly fashionable to display one’s authentic, imperfect self. But the rush to “get real” hasn’t really removed the filter on our expression, only altered its tint. Likewise, the six “Little Lauvs” on the album cover, each wearing a different color of the rainbow, supposedly represent divergent facets of the artist’s personality, a bit like the dueling emotions of Pixar’s Inside Out. As with so much of ~how i’m feeling~, the concept seems simultaneously over- and under-developed: There may be six different versions of Lauv pulling the strings, but in the end, they all sound alike. | 2020-03-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | AWAL | March 11, 2020 | 5.1 | 0f44d09e-fb20-46dc-b5ac-0323242b0760 | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
Perfectly timed to herald modern rock radio's sea-change shift from grunge's roar to emo's wail, this double platinum release enjoys a 10th anniversary reissue with the addition of six B-sides. | Perfectly timed to herald modern rock radio's sea-change shift from grunge's roar to emo's wail, this double platinum release enjoys a 10th anniversary reissue with the addition of six B-sides. | Foo Fighters: The Colour and the Shape [10th Anniversary Special Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10473-the-colour-and-the-shape-10th-anniversary-special-edition/ | The Colour and the Shape [10th Anniversary Special Edition] | The Colour and the Shape was the Foo Fighters' second album, but it's the first to receive the commemorative 10th anniversary treatment. That's not to suggest the album is superior to Dave Grohl's 1995 Foos debut (it's not), but its double-platinum sales did mark the band's permanent transformation from humble hobby project into the grunge Wings: i.e., a band that could never claim the same cultural impact as its antecedent, but that can at least get played just as much on KROQ. And that was to be expected-- The Colour and the Shape's 1997 release was perfectly timed to herald modern rock radio's shift from grunge's roar to emo's wail.
More so than the Foo Fighters' debut-- a homemade, self-recorded collection of demos Grohl had accumulated while manning Nirvana's drum stool-- The Colour and the Shape presented a true picture of the kind of group Grohl wanted to be in, had he not been sidetracked by the job of drumming for the biggest American rock band of the early 1990s. But despite Grohl's dream-team assembly-- Pixies producer Gil Norton, Germs guitarist Pat Smear, Sunny Day Real Estate bassist Nate Mendel, and former Alanis Morrissette drummer Taylor Hawkins (who joined after the album's recording)-- that band would turn out to be much more formulaically mall-punk than the Foos' torn 'n' frayed debut suggested.
On that first album, Grohl displayed a remarkable deftness for balancing melody and menace-- even as the rocket-launcher riffs of "This Is a Call" and "I'll Stick Around" shot into the red, he never lost his cool. On The Colour and the Shape, the noise/pop relationship feels more forced, like Grohl's trying too hard to grind down his sweet tooth into a fang, dressing up virtually every song in a chrome-plated guitar gilding that boosts the volume and fidelity, but ultimately dulls the impact. Maybe he's overcompensating for being a softie at heart: the gentlest turns are either presented as brief teasers (the 84-second opener "Doll"), are appended with portentous, power-ballad choruses ("February Stars"), or are muted into a blur ("Walking After You", which reappeared in improved, revised form on The X-Files movie soundtrack). Or just contrast the first album's standout single "Big Me" with The Colour's "Up in Arms", two melodically similar songs in vastly different packaging: Where the former is content to coast as a simple, gentle jangle, the latter resorts to a soft/loud about-face that feels like nudge-wink schtick.
Listening to the album a decade later, it's clear the singles were singles for a reason: "Monkey Wrench" romps like a typical Grant Hart Hüsker Dü number but is given a massive kick by Grohl's climactic, hoarse-throated third verse, and "My Hero" strikes the uncharted middle ground between sensitive-guy vulnerability and Super Bowl pre-game show soundtrack. And then, of course, there's the song that's kept me from unloading this disc at the used-record store: "Everlong", one the most affecting, passionate rock songs of the 1990s-- Sonic Youth's "Teenage Riot" recast as Weezer's "Say It Ain't So". (And yet, not even this pensive ode to blossoming romance is immune from the Foos' jokester tendencies-- thanks to its horror-spoof video, every time I hear this song I picture Taylor Hawkins in a Goldilocks outfit.)
The six B-sides tacked onto this anniversary edition-- four of them covers-- would seemingly serve as little more than excuse for the Foos to goof off, but in effect they lend the '97 Foos more, well, color and shape. On the album proper, Grohl shrieks that he doesn't get "enough space," but the robo-punk redux of Vanity 6's "Drive Me Wild" and the dub-metal prowl through Gary Numan's "Down in the Park" give the Foos room to explore the outer edges of their pop-punk parameters. Even the song most susceptible to the vagaries of kitsch, Gerry Rafferty's smooth-rock standard "Baker Street", is played with a straight face, and proves an ideal complement to Grohl's voice (though it also proves you shouldn't send a guitar to do a sax's job). The final bonus cut is the caterwauling, feedback-screeched title track, which was left off the original tracklist yet provides the only real evidence on this whole album that one of the Foo Fighters used to be in The Germs.
Then again, this album was always about severing ties to the past, with Grohl's post-relationship purging ("I was always caged and now I'm freeeee!") doubling as a metaphor for his promotion from drummer to camera-ready frontman. At the time of The Colour and the Shape's release, many interpreted "My Hero" as a requiem for Kurt Cobain. But if there's a conversation going on between Grohl and his fallen friend here, it's in the arena-sized chorus of "Hey, Johnny Park", when he wonders, "Am I selling you out?" As the subsequent 10-year string of radio hits has shown, it's a question Grohl would never have to ask again. | 2007-08-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-08-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | August 1, 2007 | 5.8 | 0f46000e-1650-4956-85ee-d8c1adbc8ec8 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The subversive indie hip-hop outfit Dälek return from a hiatus with a revamped lineup and a newfound confidence and profundity. | The subversive indie hip-hop outfit Dälek return from a hiatus with a revamped lineup and a newfound confidence and profundity. | Dälek: Asphalt for Eden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21637-asphalt-for-eden/ | Asphalt for Eden | Given hip hop's longevity, global reach, and power as a paradigm-changing social force, it's still relatively rare when rap artists make a splash with a coherent, actionable left-wing message. Of course, Public Enemy and KRS-One gave audiences a new vocabulary for questioning the power structure, which the majority of hip-hop acts rail against in some form or another anyway. Today, we can point to several contemporary acts—The Coup, Immortal Technique, Killer Mike, etc.—whose rhetoric follows the same path, but none can claim to be as musically subversive as Dälek, an outfit that almost two decades ago fulfilled hip-hop's potential to exist in an alt/underground/experimental universe while staying true to its roots.
Dälek (a play on the word "dialect") parlayed atypical hip-hop inspirations—My Bloody Valentine, The Velvet Underground, etc.—into sumptuous billows of noise. Groundbreaking albums like 2002's From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots, 2005's Absence, 2007's Abandoned Language, and 2009's Gutter Tactics combined the brutalistic drive of industrial music, the density and grain of heavy guitar music, the painterly textures of ambient music, and the thumping backbeat groove of classic hip-hop. And while it makes sense that the band landed on Mike Patton's Ipecac label and on stages with the likes of the Melvins, Tool, and Godflesh, it bears repeating what an ongoing accomplishment it has been for Dälek to break down barriers while keeping both feet planted firmly in hip-hop.
On Asphalt for Eden, Dälek returns with a revamped lineup after going on hiatus in 2010 upon the departure of co-founding producer Oktopus (Alap Momin). That the new incarnation—frontman/bandleader MC Dälek (Will Brooks), longtime Dälek guitarist-turned-producer Mike Manteca, and DJ rEk (Rudy Chicata), the group's original DJ back in '95-'96—manages to craft yet another hybrid of hip-hop with outside elements isn't especially surprising. It isn't even necessarily all that surprising that Dälek 2.0 goes a long way towards reinventing its sound while still retaining its essence. But no matter how used to this group's agility we've become, it doesn't make the step forward it takes on this new material any less impressive.
Not unlike Gutter Tactics, the backbeat on Asphalt for Eden is far less monolithic and bass-heavy, often sounding like a beat filtered through a haze of static, hip-hop as a remnant of a civilization long expired several light years away. This time, though, Manteca and Brooks (who also produces) dial back the blast-furnace intensity of that familiar Dälek wall of sound and opt instead for more delicate layers that verge on minimalist ambient electronica. But make no mistake: nothing is actually missing here. In fact, the stripped-down composition of the music arguably gives it more power than Dälek's previous work. Manteca and Brooks weave together layers of sounds that they atomize into overlapping clouds of fine mist. And because they leave so much space in their arrangements, the new material reveals Dälek's ear for harmony in ways we might have felt but hadn't necessarily heard before, because the older albums packed such a strong punch in the gut.
As usual, Brooks addresses the encroaching forces of human control—big business, globalization, totalitarianism, post-colonial American hegemony, war, etc. This time, though, rather than make didactic statements, he focuses on the internal angst of the individual coming to terms with and trying to navigate an increasingly dehumanizing landscape. And in another fresh twist on previous work, the sounds on Asphalt for Eden have an almost playful tone that dithers between ominous and optimistic. An Aldous Huxley spoken-word sample over a spectral ambient throb on "Masked Laughter (Nothing's Left)," for example, recalls Orbital's plea to collective human awakening on their 2012 album Wonky.
Filled as it is with so many gorgeous colors, Asphalt for Eden could have underscored actor Rutger Hauer's iconic "Tears in rain" monologue at the end of Blade Runner. In fact, the music becomes all the more moving when it directly contrasts Brooks' chilling shards of imagery. The dulcet electronic ripples of "Masked Laughter," for example, conclude with a repeating loop of the word "terrorism." If there were a manga based on dystopian sweatshop-induced urban poverty and that, in turn, were turned into an anime film, you couldn't do better than Asphalt for Eden for a soundtrack.
Brooks spent five years away from Dälek fronting the comparatively traditional rap group iconAclass (and doing remixes for the likes of Black Heart Procession, Zombi, Palms, Broken Flowers, etc) but he takes a huge leap on his return to Dälek, which sounds not only revived here but permanently altered not unlike a friend who comes home after years abroad—or even from a traumatic experience like, say, prison. In other words, the profundity here comes across in the most restrained gestures.
Though Brooks opts for a more oblique lyrical approach on these new songs, the modern horrors that populate Dälek's previous albums are never too far off, and the foreboding sense of the world going to hell in a handbasket hovers over your shoulder the entire time. The song "Guaranteed Struggle," for example, contains a sample of Brooks delivering a disconnected verse fragment about "fuck[ing] around and watch[ing] the whole world crumblin'"*—*basically, the story of our lives for anyone who can afford to spend leisure time on music or entertainment in 2016. But the more ambiguous emotional notes in the album's sonic makeup at times parallel the more subtle blossoming of consciousness also unfolding on the world stage. Dälek took hip-hop into new stylistic realms before. This time, although Brooks and company may not have specifically intended as much, on Asphalt for Eden, hip hop ascends into the noosphere. | 2016-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Profound Lore | April 28, 2016 | 7.8 | 0f484cbd-01a6-4f41-951f-6908664146e8 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
With 2012’s colossal The Seer, Swans released a record that seemed designed to test the commitment of the band’s most ardent followers yet expanded their audience to an unprecedented degree. Michael Gira seems aware that anticipation for a new Swans album has never been greater, so he’s responded in the best way possible: by producing a record that is every bit The Seer’s equal. | With 2012’s colossal The Seer, Swans released a record that seemed designed to test the commitment of the band’s most ardent followers yet expanded their audience to an unprecedented degree. Michael Gira seems aware that anticipation for a new Swans album has never been greater, so he’s responded in the best way possible: by producing a record that is every bit The Seer’s equal. | Swans: To Be Kind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19326-swans-to-be-kind/ | To Be Kind | Swans were hardly the first 1980s underground-rock fixtures to resurface in the new millennium, and they’re not the only ones who've resisted the nostalgic trappings of reunion tours to make a respectable showing as a rebooted recording act. But they are the rare band of their vintage who seem less concerned with living up to or building upon a past legacy than establishing a completely different one. In retrospect, the 14 years that elapsed between 1996’s Soundtracks for the Blind and 2010’s My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky were less a break-up-induced hiatus than a gestation period. The bigger, brawnier Swans that Michael Gira has assembled in its wake (complete with a strapping, bare-chested gong-smasher named Thor) are beholden neither to the primordial, industrialized sludge of the band’s infamous ’80s catalogue nor the post-goth serenity of their ’90s work. Instead, they’ve perfected a new means of transforming grostequerie into grandeur and vice versa.
With 2012’s astonishingly colossal The Seer, Swans pulled off the unlikeliest of coups: A record that, over its six sides and two-hour-plus running time, was seemingly designed to test the commitment of the band’s most ardent followers yet, amazingly, expanded their audience to an unprecedented degree. (This summer, Swans are even playing the odd free festival date in outdoor public squares, which could conceivably earn them a few new fans in the grandparents-and-strollers demographic.) But while Swans have always been the last band to pander to audience expectations, Gira nonetheless seems aware that anticipation for a new Swans album has arguably never been greater. And so he’s responded in the best way possible: by producing a record that, in structure and scale, is every bit The Seer’s equal, yet possessed by a peculiar energy and spirit that proves all the more alluring in its dark majesty.
The relationship between the two albums can essentially be gauged by their respective album covers. Though there’s a similarity in composition, To Be Kind’s artwork trades *The Seer’*s dark shadows for a bright mustard tone, and the central feral-dog figure for cute baby faces (as rendered in a series of six by L.A. painter Bob Biggs), suggesting a more approachable ethos at play. But as any new parent can tell you, an infant is as volatile and destructive a creature as the wildest of field animals and, likewise, the John Congleton-produced To Be Kind boasts a more focused attack—with a preminum on taut, throbbing grooves and blackened blues—that initially tricks you into thinking it's more accessible than its predecessor. (Hey, there's even a song named in honour of Kirsten Dunst.) Yet it’s ultimately accessible in the same way a prison gate is accessible—getting in is relatively easy; getting out unscathed is an entirely different story. Upon hearing the introductory Cajun-funk strut of “A Little God in My Hands”, I initially worried that Swans were crossing over into the sort of campy, Southern-fried creepiness you’d hear on the soundtrack to an episode of "True Blood". But after that destabilizing blast of brass and synapse-frying synth beam appears out of nowhere at the 90 second mark, “A Little God in My Hands” carries on as if infected by a virus; it tries to keep its cool, but the once-sprightly rhythmic bounce is now ridden with a nervous tension, while the encroaching chorus of dead-eyed female voices transform the song into a mutant-zombie version of its former self. On To Be Kind, this is what constitutes a lead single.
Close observers of Swans will notice that seven of the 10 songs here were previewed in some form on last year’s limited-edition concert album/demos collection Not Here/Not Now (whose sales funded the new album’s production). But most have since been subjected to dramatic embellishment or rearrangement. Not Here/Not Now’s tense, acoustic-strummed closing sketch “Screen Shot” has been recast as To Be Kind’s louche, slow-boiling “Yoo Doo Right”-styled opener and, in the process, illuminates the great contradiction at the core of the 21st-century Swans sound: as their sonic vocabulary has grown more elaborate and texturally detailed, Gira’s sense of melody has turned all the more minimalist and mantric. Thirty years ago on the deadpan dirge, “Job”, Gira sang from the perspective of the world’s most bored axe murderer (“Cut off the arms/ Cut off the legs/ Cut off the head/ Get rid of the body”) as a metaphor for soul-destroying, day-to-day workplace drudgery; on “Screen Shot,” he more eagerly sings of a different sort of dismemberment (“No touch/ No loss/ No hands/ No sin”), of purging urges—and the body parts used to indulge them—as way to achieve a state of spiritual purity.
The ensuing songs on To Be Kind present variations on this theme—of unleashing an outsized sound to find an inner peace, and reclaiming one's innocence by way of insolence. But, of course, this being a Swans record, salvation never comes easy. When, amid the “Dirt”-covered funereal march of “I’m Just a Little Boy” Gira pleads, “I need loooooooooooove,” he’s answered by a Greek chorus of devious, derisive laughter. (Of all the terrible, humiliating experiences detailed in Swans songs over the years, that moment just might count as the cruelest.) And if the 34-minute centerpiece “Bring the Sun”/“Toussaint L’Ouverture” initially summons our planet’s primary life-source with all the trance-inducing elation and desperation of a remote-island pagan sect praying to their gods for a bountiful harvest, its more sinister second act—wherein Gira maniacally howls the name of the titular 18th-century Haitian revolutionary while drowning in a swamp of dub spewage—transforms the track into an after-hours seance gone wrong.
As it plays out, To Be Kind starts to resemble a cult procession unto itself, a mesmerizing spectacle of an omnipotent band whose sound continues to expand in scope and ranks swell in size. Much like The Seer, To Be Kind sees a formidable and evermore prominent coterie of female vocalists—from the insurgent Cold Specks to reigning freak-scene queen St. Vincent to avant-rock veteran Little Annie—falling under Swans’ sway. And rather than provide a calming counterpoint to Gira’s stentorian croon, their voices ultimately serve the album’s hypnotic force. From the teeth-gnashing ferocity of “Oxygen” to the calamitous, battering-rammed climax of “She Loves Us!”, To Be Kind adheres to a policy of transcendence by any means necessary, even if it means repeatedly bashing you in the face with a mallet until you’re seeing stars and colors.
On the hymn-like title-track closer, Gira solemnly repeats the words “to be kind” as both an aspirational self-help slogan and a tacit acknowledgement that, given all the diabolically orchestrated malevolence we’ve been subjected to over the preceding 112 minutes, he hasn’t always done the best job of heeding his own advice. But as the song violently erupts into one final, sustained surge of tectonic-plate-shifting discord, the moment proves to be as affirming as it is unsettling. “People always consider us to be very dour and depressing, but fuck that shit,” Gira told Pitchfork’s Brandon Stosuy in 2012. “The goal is ecstasy.” And what makes To Be Kind so compelling is how that goal seems both fully realized yet forever out of reach at the same time. | 2014-05-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute / Young God | May 12, 2014 | 9.2 | 0f4bd3f6-0f20-48a1-97fe-e87c06f4eee5 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
A player in Shabaka Hutchings’ Sons of Kemet and a key figure in London’s vital jazz scene, Cross brings new energy to the tuba, an instrument long neglected in jazz and hits offshoots. | A player in Shabaka Hutchings’ Sons of Kemet and a key figure in London’s vital jazz scene, Cross brings new energy to the tuba, an instrument long neglected in jazz and hits offshoots. | Theon Cross: Fyah | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/theon-cross-fyah/ | Fyah | At a certain point in a Sons of Kemet live show, saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings and his dueling drummers will drop out, leaving room for tuba player Theon Cross to step up and solo. It’s always a heady moment: Cross’ solo can veer from Dixieland to the room-rattling frequencies of modern bass music in the span of a single breath. Cross also makes plenty of detours through free jazz, dub, hip-hop, soca, grime, and other sounds from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Such versatility has made him a catalyst on the bustling London jazz scene for years now, and his low-end skills power some of its biggest breakout acts: Hutchings, drummer Moses Boyd, saxophonist Nubya Garcia, the Ezra Collective.
With Fyah, Cross steps out on his own as a leader, with Boyd and Garcia on board as a trio for most of the set. The album also features guest turns from Cross’ brother Nathaniel on trombone, Wayne Francis on tenor saxophone, and Artie Zaitz on electric guitar. Whether the band tackles boisterous uptempo beats or more languid meditations, Cross and his horn rumble through Fyah’s eight pieces like an underground train, connecting and deepening the sense of interplay between participants.
The trio crackles to life on “Activate,” where Cross’ prowess is by turns rhythmic and melodic, stomping and ratcheting up the rollicking song’s tension. His tuba grapples with Boyd and his tricky measures while also shadowing Garcia’s crystalline, high-flying lines, the three pushing and urging one another along throughout the Carnival-flavored stepper.
Cross can thrill even on songs with less frenetic tempos. “Letting Go” marries silky rare groove to foghorn frequencies, while for the bubbling movement of “The Offerings,” the trio slinks amid background party chatter, inconspicuous even as they’re cooking. “CIYA,” a soul-jazz tune with bedroom eyes, is the smoothest of the set, Zaitz’s liquid guitar lines harking back to steamy ballads like Curtis Mayfield’s “Give Me Your Love.”
“Panda Village” is a dancefloor filler along the lines of Boyd’s Four Tet and Floating Points-mixed single “Rye Lane Shuffle.” Blending the rough with the sleek, the tricky groove is mixed with synthesized woodwinds and vinyl backspins reminiscent of pirate radio. “Radiation” boasts a spittle-flecked tone that turns the ground to gelatin as Cross’ tuba drops a full fathom deeper than any dubstep wobble. The full ensemble number “Candace of Meroe” moves like a throwback to 1970s Afro-funk, full of Zaitz’s chicken-scratch guitar and Cross’ quicksilver thrum.
While the tuba was a staple of early-20th-century New Orleans jazz ensembles, it wound up neglected along with other Dixieland instrumentation like the banjo and cornet, losing its place in the music over the following decades. “People always underestimate the tuba,” Cross said recently. “People aren’t familiar with it.” But the unfamiliarity that comes from neglect also permits a greater freedom now. That element of surprise comes through on Fyah: Roving at will across other genres, Cross is able to wholly remake the horn in his own image. | 2019-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Gearbox | February 14, 2019 | 7.5 | 0f535217-4d60-41d2-a7f9-0883c5d9c69e | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Katie Crutchfield’s fourth album features sharp, gorgeous songwriting. The polished production and urgent performances ensure her fiery exorcisms about the end of a relationship are deeply felt. | Katie Crutchfield’s fourth album features sharp, gorgeous songwriting. The polished production and urgent performances ensure her fiery exorcisms about the end of a relationship are deeply felt. | Waxahatchee: Out in the Storm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/waxahatchee-out-in-the-storm/ | Out in the Storm | Through her work as Waxahatchee, Katie Crutchfield has become a master of blending introversion and extroversion, communicating emotional subtleties with music that sounds best shouted in unison by adoring crowds. Out in the Storm, her fourth album, feels like the culmination of that inverse relationship. Detailing the trajectory of an increasingly destructive long-term relationship, Crutchfield writes with first-person directness and an occasionally jarring self-reflexivity. “Everyone will hear me complain,” she sings near the beginning of the album, half-worry and half-demand. “Everyone will pity my pain.” Co-produced by John Agnello, Out in the Storm is also the most polished Waxahatchee record to date, coupling some of Crutchfield’s sharpest writing with her most powerful and distinctive work as a bandleader.
The last Waxahatchee album, 2015’s sweeping Ivy Tripp, was a meditation on in-between states. More than one song began with an elongation of the word “maybe,” as if to suggest that any of these thoughts could be retracted. Out in the Storm feels like a reckoning with those out-of-body experiences. In “8 Ball,” a twangy rocker that’s among the finest Crutchfield has ever written, she winds through a series of metaphors to assess the roles in a relationship. In its opening verse, she drawls out a sentence—“You let me take my own damn car to Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.”—with the kind of drawn-out hyper-specificity you employ for maximum impact in a fight. These are the stakes of Out in the Storm, an album whose peaks feel like climatic exchanges between people with a natural ability to hurt one another.
Out in the Storm is propelled by singular obsessions, a challenge that forces Crutchfield to find new ways of approaching the same situation. Often, she’s actively trying to escape herself. She recalls falling in love “through childish eyes” in the slow, haunting “Fade,” studying her own deterioration as she withers away in a dead-end relationship. In the shimmering “Sparks Fly,” she flees to Berlin and sees herself through her sister’s eyes: full of hope and charisma, “a live wire, electrified.” Halfway through the record, this seems like a happy ending, but its brief moment of escape—staying up all night, drinking, dreading your return home—reminds you that sparks flying can often lead to greater destruction.
Crutchfield’s road-tested band, who’ve settled into a lean, aerodynamic sound, complement the emotional extremes in her writing. In “Sparks Fly,” a pattering drumbeat recalls the negative space in Neil Young’s “Peace of Mind,” giving the song a weightless momentum. Elsewhere, the hazy atmosphere of Ivy Tripp is transported to the more earthbound material, with stately keyboards from her twin sister Allison Crutchfield in “Recite Remorse” and Katie Harkin’s smokey guitar riffs throughout “A Little More.” The band is equally adept at mirroring Crutchfield’s urgency, as in “Never Been Wrong,” a charging anthem with lyrics pinpointed on one character trait. “The margin’s gigantic, am I happy or manic,” Crutchfield asks desperately, before raging against the loneliness of knowing a person better than anyone else: “I will unravel when no one sees what I see.”
Crutchfield has a knack for addressing the way minor frustrations can snowball into deeper troubles over the course of a relationship, seamlessly zooming in and out to assess the damage. She explores how it can fuck up your sense of self, your sense of trust, even your sense of time. “You went back in time today, expecting me to do the same,” she sings in the vicious “No Question,” which culminates with a stark realization that she repeats like a mantra: “It never ends.” “Silver” glides with a breezy modern rock sheen, but its lyrics are haunted by visions of destruction. In hushed, layered harmonies, Crutchfield sings about transformation with a poetic dream logic, expressed through imagistic verse that takes inspiration from Robert Pollard’s songwriting in Guided by Voices.
Robert Pollard feels like a fitting analog to Crutchfield at this point in her career. Both artists seem to have a limitless well of side projects (and band names); both write at an unrelenting pace; and both successfully ditched their “lo-fi” signifiers through records that cleaned up their sound without sacrificing their characteristic sprawl. While lacking the close mic’d intimacy of her early work, Out in the Storm is equally immersive, with songs that play like fiery exorcisms. It proves that Crutchfield’s music can retain its honesty while aiming at larger audiences, gaining its power from the raw, relentless energy that’s always fueled her best songs. Without seeking easy answers, she’s able to find peace in the explosion. | 2017-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | Merge | July 13, 2017 | 8.2 | 0f539b00-db84-43e0-819d-bf446178bf27 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Sampling a worn vinyl copy of Debussy’s La Mer, the Chicago musician creates short, impressionistic pieces that fuse ambient, drone, and noise; they’re easy to get lost in. | Sampling a worn vinyl copy of Debussy’s La Mer, the Chicago musician creates short, impressionistic pieces that fuse ambient, drone, and noise; they’re easy to get lost in. | Forest Management: After Dark | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/forest-management-after-dark/ | After Dark | Though John Daniel’s music rarely sounds unfinished, you could call it a work in progress. Over the past eight years, the Ohio-born, Chicago-based artist has appeared on over 50 releases under the name Forest Management, creating ambient sounds and droning textures that constantly move forward. Daniel’s advancements sometimes take the form of big, dramatic arcs, but more often they come in small steps, carefully thought out and patiently executed.
There’s almost nothing but small steps on After Dark, a double album of short, focused pieces whose shifts are so subtle they can be hard to catch at first. No two tracks are very different from each other in the way they develop or even in the way they sound. Daniel avoids obvious, sweeping moves, instead offering simple loops whose evolutions require close attention. The cumulative effect can feel subconscious: you know you’ve gone somewhere by the end of a given track without being sure exactly how you got there.
The simplicity of After Dark is due in part to Daniel’s self-imposed limits. Every sound came from one source: a used vinyl copy of French composer Claude Debussy’s 1905 orchestral work La Mer (French for “The Sea”). Daniel recorded both sides on his computer—which caught both the music and the pops and hisses from the aging wax—then applied edits and effects to gradually carve out songs. Latching onto short figures that he could loop, Daniel crafted impressionistic pieces more about mood than structure. He explains, “I was drawn to how Debussy chose feeling over thinking in music—an almost avant-garde thought at the time.”
Daniel was also drawn to Debussy’s fascination with the sea. After Dark has a watery ebb and flow: Some tracks feel caught up in the waves of previous songs, while others undercut them and start new ripples in the process. Initial forays like the sandy opener “Seventh Time’s a Charm” and the oscillating “A Smell So Sweet” feature tactile sounds in sharp focus, but that clarity melts in the murkier pools of the howling, cavernous “Magnolia” and the dark drift of “Fake Rose and 24 Karat.” Later, “The Grand Lobby” evokes a church organ on the ocean’s floor, but it seems to return to a sunny surface in the busy, rhythmic “Walk Along Broadway.” As he navigates these movements, Daniel embeds each track with textures that are easy to get lost in.
In fact, tracing the patterns that run through After Dark sells Daniel’s work a bit short. Whatever shapes you might hear in the album’s sequencing, each track remains a self-contained statement, filled with complex layers and purposeful motion. On that scale, this is the most accomplished Forest Management album so far. Daniel has found a spot between ambient, drone, and noise to call his own, fusing the qualities of all three without diluting any of them. It still sounds like he’s on the move, probing for ideas, and on After Dark, his patient advancements add up to a big step forward. | 2019-12-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | American Dreams | December 30, 2019 | 7.7 | 0f54be3f-7d1a-44b9-84bc-22cd6e871727 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
In the last year, indie rock lifer Fred Thomas got married, quit his day job, and moved to Canada, but *Changer *isn’t about that. It’s about getting older and how the weight of expectations is a bitch. | In the last year, indie rock lifer Fred Thomas got married, quit his day job, and moved to Canada, but *Changer *isn’t about that. It’s about getting older and how the weight of expectations is a bitch. | Fred Thomas: Changer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22739-changer/ | Changer | Fred Thomas will never create his masterpiece, and it’s better that way. An indie-rock lifer with too many aliases to count, he has been creating imperfect, emotional music so consistently that any record that felt like a capstone on a particular phase of his career would ruin his whole appeal. This is messy music that bleeds from releases to release. Epiphanies shift and deepen with each record, aging in time with Thomas.
Changer, his latest release under his own name, is the result of a series of upheavals. In the last year, Thomas got married, quit his day job, and moved to Canada, but Changer isn’t really about that—not explicitly anyway. It’s about getting older and how the weight of expectations is a bitch. In the world that Thomas writes about, personal reckonings gradually morph into—it’s trite, but let’s just get it out there—genuine joy at the places that life can take us. If there’s any unifying theme, it’s rhetorical questions like, Am I becoming who I’m supposed to be? Am I doing it at the appropriate pace? And also: what’s the appropriate pace?
There’s no real answer here, and Thomas knows that. Instead, he finds comfort in his uncertainty. On “Misremembered” he half-sings in a blunt voice that sounds frustrated and warm at the same time, “When the controlled burn that you call your 20s is finally extinguished, you know you still need someplace to go.” It feels like a mission statement.
Albums about growing up and growing older tend to appeal to people in the same demographic as the songwriter. At their best, they can become iconic markers of age—records that tell us who we are by foregoing specificity in favor of surface emotion. A good pop song can tap into the half-lidded boredom of youth or the optimism of being 20 and ready for the future. Thomas, who writes songs as short stories, imperfect and without resolution, will likely never write music like this.
Instead, he rejects the comfort of being 30-plus by writing his way through specific memories of sloppy house shows and shitty scene encounters. On “Open Letter to Forever” he sings, “Like, I remember standing out in front of the Northern, after another 15-paid gig, getting harassed by Olympia street punks (the worst!) for looking like a hipster. I wanted to be like, ‘Man I’m probably a couple years younger than your father. And I’ve traded any chance at stability for this community of people who, like, know what Black Flag is or whatever.’” His lyrics are so strong that the actual music can sometimes feel like an afterthought. When is this guy going to write a book?
There are points, though, where the instrumentation does more than just bolster Thomas’ vivid writing. “Oval Beach” is a warm electronic instrumental that sounds like Boards of Canada making dream pop, and “Echolocation” layers crashing cymbals on top of a burbling loop that gives way to a wistful cascade of horns. Here, Thomas flexes a different writing muscle and emerges as a bandleader more than a master of autobiography.
But Thomas knows what he’s good at. Closing track “Mallwalkers” is a career-best track that grapples with the value of nostalgia while attacking cynicism head on. In it, Thomas is working at a cell phone kiosk at the mall, feeling disconnected from his friends, watching them “dance around, feeling weird about fucking each other” wondering “Do I even need to be here? And why does this hurt?” Soon, he’s identifying with the seniors that walk through the mall for exercise, while “dreaming of a simple suspended eternity, where you’re stoned in your basement, playing games, hanging out with your dogs.”
At the end of “Mallwalkers” he sings, “All the lonely lights on these frozen cars, every broken-wrist handstand in some best friend’s yard, and every ugly part of everything that people keep telling you you are...They aren’t yours. They’re just wrong.” Imagine hearing that exactly when you needed to. Thomas’ music is one long effort to reach across the void and connect. He’ll never reach everyone, but with every album he gets a little closer. | 2017-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | January 17, 2017 | 7.1 | 0f5936a5-f25e-4eb8-8eeb-79e86ac4150e | Sam Hockley-Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-hockley-smith/ | null |
Sleigh Bells' brash, hyperactive sophomore album is plenty loud. This time around, though, the duo emphasize the delicate elements of their sound in service of dynamic and ecstatic pop tunes. | Sleigh Bells' brash, hyperactive sophomore album is plenty loud. This time around, though, the duo emphasize the delicate elements of their sound in service of dynamic and ecstatic pop tunes. | Sleigh Bells: Reign of Terror | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16297-reign-of-terror/ | Reign of Terror | Sleigh Bells arrived fully formed with blunt rock riffs, crunk beats, and airy, feminine vocals. Their debut, Treats, may be the first record to fetishize the negative consequences of the Loudness War, with guitarist and producer Derek E. Miller pushing an already bombastic sound to absurd extremes by deliberately narrowing the music's dynamic range to the point of clipping even at moderate volumes. Treats owes its greatness to its simple, direct hooks, but the band's overly hot recordings were also thrilling in that they tapped into our positive associations with cranking stereos up to the maximum volume because we loved what we were hearing.
Sleigh Bells' second album, Reign of Terror, is plenty loud, but it doesn't rely on this volume trick. Instead, the duo emphasizes the delicate elements of their sound that mostly got crowded out in the midrange of Treats' speaker-melting din. Alexis Krauss, the former teen-pop singer turned punk-rock badass, is foregrounded throughout the record, and her roots in Clinton-era bubblegum are more fully integrated with Miller's heavy riffing. The beats are less indebted to hip-hop this time around and the guitar parts have gone full-on metal, alternating between elemental AC/DC-like hooks and late-80s harmonics.
Reign of Terror is a brash, hyperactive set of songs, but Miller and Krauss' synthesis of disparate strands is exceptionally graceful, with traditionally macho and girly sounds flowing together seamlessly in dynamic, often ecstatic pop tunes. They refine their take on girl-group pop and cheerleader chants on "Leader of the Pack" and "Crush", and set shoegazer swooning to machine-gun drum fills on "Born to Lose". More impressively, Krauss' melodies somersault over Miller's waves of alt-rock buzz guitar and colorful keyboards on "Comeback Kid", and they fully commit to the gentle, sentimental melodies of "End of the Line" without compromising their noisy aesthetic. "You Lost Me", one of three consecutive songs that lean hard on metal harmonics at the end of the set, is straight-up gorgeous, with layers of clean notes, slow-motion drones, and breathy coos building to a headbanging catharsis.
Sleigh Bells pull off this more sophisticated and nuanced approach without calling attention to their improved craft or maturity. They remain obsessed with overwhelming their audience with excitement and pleasure, and their heaviest moments on Reign of Terror eclipse those on Treats. "Demons", the record's fist-pumping centerpiece, is an adrenaline rush sustained over three minutes, with Krauss affecting her most sinister tone above an overpowering riff straight out of the (original) "Beavis and Butt-Head" series. Miller has mastered the big dumb riff, but his arrangements are full of subtle touches that embellish and reinforce the bludgeoning attack of his chords. All through Reign of Terror, he and Krauss hit upon an ideal balance of texture and simplicity, expanding on their basic formula without losing any of their direct, unfussy charm.
The band makes such incredibly physical music that the lyrics would seem to be beside the point, but it's notable that so many songs on both records are fixated on winning and losing. This isn't a surprise, really-- given the triumphant sound of this music, what else would you want to sing over it? Krauss often sings from the perspective of a supportive confidant, offering a sweet pep talk on "Comeback Kid", or empathizing with a friend's suicidal thoughts on "Born to Lose". She spends a good chunk of Reign of Terror dwelling on the aftermath of violence and tragedy, seeking out ways of coping, moving on, and thriving despite the chaos. Themes of suicide pop up throughout the album, climaxing with "You Lost Me", which seems to be at least partly inspired by a pair of Nevada teens who attempted suicide while listening to Judas Priest in 1985. (One survived and their parents famously sued the band.) Krauss avoids moralizing on the subject, opting instead to project understanding and concern. In a small way, her approach is refreshing and subversive-- this sort of aggressive, over-the-top rock is traditionally a vehicle for narcissism, but she invests this music with kind-hearted concern for others. | 2012-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Mom+Pop | February 20, 2012 | 8.2 | 0f59fdcd-8d9e-4ebb-a113-e80fa0dbfa1a | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
Wake Up You! specifically covers the short-lived but influential period of Nigerian rock in the country’s post-Civil War era (after 1970). | Wake Up You! specifically covers the short-lived but influential period of Nigerian rock in the country’s post-Civil War era (after 1970). | Various Artists: Wake Up You!: The Rise & Fall of Nigerian Rock 1972-1977 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21536-wake-up-you-the-rise-fall-of-nigerian-rock-1972-1977/ | Wake Up You!: The Rise & Fall of Nigerian Rock 1972-1977 | When the African vinyl-digging trend peaked five or six years ago, there was a rush, mostly among American and European collectors, to press and publish retrospective compilations. From the mid/late-‘00s onward, there was a feverish proliferation of digitized vinyl on mp3-sharing blogs, many of which featured music from West Africa. One of those blogs was the popular Comb and Razor, run by Uchenna Ikonne, who’s since become the main man behind a number of Nigeria-focused projects for labels like Soundway, Luaka Bop, and Now-Again. Since the early 2010s, what some have called the “Scramble for African Vinyl” has slowed down a bit, if in part because various collectors have rendered certain vinyl-rich areas comparatively “dry.” So it says something about Now-Again that they took the better part of a decade to properly license, credit, and release what is now Wake Up You!: The Rise and Fall of Nigerian Rock, 1972-1977.
Where other Nigerian vinyl compilations have focused on various permutations of rock, funk, soul, and disco, Wake Up You! specifically covers the short-lived but influential period of Nigerian rock in the country’s post-Civil War era (after 1970). On 34 tracks across two volumes and two accompanying books, the compilation documents some of the musical, socioeconomic, and political trends that shaped Nigerian Afrorock.
The majority of both Vol. 1 and *Vol. 2 *feature music from the height of Nigerian rock in the early ‘70s, before the scene started to decline. The decade saw Nigeria experiencing a petroleum-fueled post-war economic boom, which ushered in a renewed sense of optimism that proved a huge boon to the growth of the country’s music industry. And yet, as the government sought to rebuild the nation, leftover wartime trauma and unresolved tensions got swept under the rug. So it's very possible that the sense of discomfort and melancholy that had never really gotten addressed then ended up bubbling over into rock, particularly in the East, which had borne the brunt of the war as the former secessionist Republic of Biafra. The compilation reflects that reality, featuring mostly Eastern rock bands.
Despite regional differences, there was a collective desire, especially among youth, to have some kind of contemporary music they could claim as their own that was “distinctly African." This was one of the reasons why James Brown’s soul music, with its pro-Black messaging and funky rhythms that meshed well with pre-existing West African musical traditions, had exploded in popularity during the region’s independence era. His influence continued into the next decade and beyond, as evidenced throughout Wake Up You! For instance, on *Vol. 1, *The Hygrades’ 1971 B-side “Keep on Moving" directly references "Cold Sweat" and has the cathartic screams to match. This desire for a homegrown music was also what helped make Fela’s self-branded Afrobeat so popular, which would soon eclipse Afrorock, even though the two weren’t initially that different. The stylistic similarities between the two are clear in their shared highlife percussion rhythms and off-kilter organ work. This can be heard across Vol. 1—on The Hygrades’ “In the Jungle (Instrumental),” The Funkees’ “Baby I Need You,” OFO the Black Company’s “Beautiful Daddy,” and many more.
On Vol. 1 opener “Never Never Let Me Down” (1973), the little-known Formulars Dance Band deliver a touching number filled with nostalgic doo-wop harmonies and lyrics steeped in heartache: “Just one thing you do not know, girl,” the lead singer croons. “And that is I need you/And one more thing you do not know, girl/And that is I love you.” By contrast, War-Head Constriction’s record "Graceful Bird" (1973) ramps up into a heavy metal track with long, snarling guitar solos and piles of distortion. According to Ikonne’s liner notes, War-Head Constriction also often played with a later iteration of the band Waves, whose psychedelic “Wake Up You” (featured on Vol. 2) b/w “Mother” (on Vol. 1) is the comp’s namesake. Vol. 1’s closing track, P.R.O.’s 1976 “Tell Me,” in turn references dub by way of delay effects, hinting at the fact that towards the end of the decade, a several schoolboy and college rock bands—including teen sensations Ofege—started shifting their heavy rock sound towards "dub and militant rockers-style reggae." But even then, with the exception of Afrobeat and with the advent of disco, the public wanted something smoother and glossier, and Nigerian rock slipped more or less into darkness (related: Funkees’ cover of War’s “Slipping into Darkness” on Vol. 2).
In that way, Vol. 1 comes to a logical close. The album itself is very loosely chronological, though it doesn’t follow the arc of the accompanying book, which is an important part of the compilation. V**ol. 1 sags a bit towards the middle of its 18 tracks, but it picks up again later on—perhaps not unlike the trajectory of Nigerian rock over the decades. Many of the narrative threads present on Vol. 1 are also those that run through Vol. 2, and certain bigger bands, such as The Hykkers, The Hygrades, and The Funkees, appear on both volumes. However, where Vol. 1 is generally more exuberant and brighter, Vol. 2 is more melancholy, reflecting some of the darker realities of the time.
Much of Vol. 2 expresses a desire for freedom and a resistance to the social and political dis-ease of post-war Nigeria. On “Life in Cannan,” Ceejebs lament the state of what could have been their promised land. Over nimble jazz keys and thick bass, lead vocalist Eyo “Crosbee” Hogan gathers his listeners around him, intoning, “Come around, people of this world/let’s get together and pray/Evil things are happening every day/Many rich are getting poor/The poor ones are dying away.” Echoing that sense of despair is The Identicals’ nearly-apocalyptic “Who Made the World,” on which they demand answers to questions they know they’ll never get, howling, “Who made the world? Who made the land? Who made the moon?” Even the love songs here ride on a sort of desperation bordering on futility: on opening number “Come Back,” band leader Theodore Nemy’s voice cracks time and time again as he begs for his “baby” to “come back.” An organ drones beneath him, sympathetic (figuratively and musically) to Nemy’s grievances.
Perhaps most clearly exemplifying the intersection of Afrorock and the politics of the time on *Vol. 2 *is the band Action 13, who appear on *Vol. 1 *as their later iteration, Aktion. On Vol. 2, their song “Set Me Free” could easily be interpreted as a protest against the band’s prison-like relationship to their then-patrons, the Nigerian military’s 13th Brigade. Many brigades of the time used bands to entertain their soldiers, boost morale, and reassure citizens, via music, that all was well. Initially, their patronage was helpful in providing a number of Eastern musicians with a living. But Action 13, like many other bands with brigade numbers affixed to their names, eventually grew frustrated, and many tried to break free to make a name for themselves independent of the military. These outside pressures, as well as labels’ jostling to sign artists with varying degrees of success, often augmented bands’ internal instabilities as well. There was a ton of back-and-forth between bands. For instance, on Vol. 2, we see Tony Grey, (former?) keyboardist of the Magnificent Zenians (Vol. 1) leading his own band, The Black 7; certain members of Afrorock pioneer Joni Haastrup’s Monomono appear here backing one Shadow Abraham; juju icon King Sunny Ade makes a surprise appearance producing The Believers’ “Life Will Move.” Trying to make sense of the bands’ relationships to each other, to regional trends, to labels, and to military involvement is like trying to make sense of a messy maze of crossed paths, dead-ends, and false starts.
But in that sense, Wake Up You!**: The Rise and Fall of Nigerian Rock, 1972-1977 does a thorough job of conveying the angst and mutability of Nigeria’s protean post-war period. This was music that helped people, young people especially, to sort through their own identities in the wake of war, even if it was to define what they weren't. On Vol. 1, in the chorus of their track “Scram Out,” from their 1977 album Be Nice To The People, young schoolboy rockers Question Mark sing, "I want to feel free, I want to feel happy!" Which at the end of the day, through all its ups and downs, was what the movement was about. | 2016-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | null | May 26, 2016 | 7.5 | 0f5c21e2-5a7f-4902-95ed-a718cf51747a | Minna Zhou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/minna-zhou/ | null |
The AACM composer pays tribute to the cultural history of a monumental work of public infrastructure in a set of elegiac pieces for trumpet and piano. | The AACM composer pays tribute to the cultural history of a monumental work of public infrastructure in a set of elegiac pieces for trumpet and piano. | Wadada Leo Smith / Amina Claudine Myers: Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wadada-leo-smith-amina-claudine-myers-central-parks-mosaics-of-reservoir-lake-paths-and-gardens/ | Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens | Central Park sits like a monster’s footprint in the middle of Manhattan, girdled with towers, lush and verdant but hard to mistake for the wilderness. Such an imposing work of infrastructure appeals to Wadada Leo Smith. The great AACM trumpeter and composer’s releases since 2012’s Ten Freedom Summers encompass an alternative map of America, lovingly sketching in its Great Lakes and National Parks while honoring its civil rights leaders, artistic geniuses, and the millions displaced and killed in its creation. Smith composed six of the seven pieces on Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens, and he’s joined by pianist and AACM cohort Amina Claudine Myers, who completed the sessions with no prior rehearsal. Smith describes Central Park as his favorite park in the world, but from the first minor-key piano notes on “Conservatory Gardens,” it’s clear that Mosaics is about more than bucolic landscapes.
The tone is stately and almost elegiac throughout, as if a grand, seismic, and vaguely frightening event is taking place on a glacial timescale. Myers broods in the lower octaves, providing the bedrock through which Smith’s horn cuts like a river through the landscape—or like a path through a garden, or like the park itself through Manhattan’s skyscraper canyons. It’s a delight when her hands dance freely into the higher registers, as in the last minute of her splendid solo piano piece “When Was,” but she and Smith largely proceed at a deliberate pace. It could work as ambient music if Smith’s sharp tone did not so thoroughly dominate the mix; its first appearance on “Conservatory Gardens” after more than a minute of insinuating piano intervals from Myers comes as an abrupt shock on an initial listen.
Mosaics is as interested in the park’s human history as its natural beauty. One of the longest and most beautiful pieces on the relatively short record is “Albert Ayler, a meditation in light,” in which the spirit of the late free-jazz icon apparently inspired the loosest and most convivial interplay between the two. “Imagine, a mosaic for John Lennon” is (thankfully) not a rendition of “Imagine” but an extension of the album’s air of twinkling mystery. The spot near Central Park where Lennon died is a popular site of pilgrimage for Beatles fans; the album’s somber tone suggests an awareness of the millions of lives and deaths that make up New York’s past, the sheer density of human history one can feel in every square inch of the city.
In its exploration of a relatively small part of NYC as a microcosm of its complexities, Smith and Myers’ album is spiritual kin to Loren Connors’ stunning solo guitar albums Hell’s Kitchen Park and 9th Avenue, which channeled the vanishing Irish-American history of the gentrifying Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Like those albums, Mosaics is short, just 36 minutes, more than a quarter of them occupied by “Conservatory Gardens.” But it doesn’t feel small, even when compared to Smith’s almost improbably ambitious epics like the four-and-a-half-hour Pulitzer nominee Ten Freedom Summers. Its borders seem to extend beyond its confines, as if there’s a theoretical piece for every meadow and lake in Central Park and this is just a small leakage from a vast parallel universe rendered through music. | 2024-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Red Hook | May 25, 2024 | 7.4 | 0f5ef29d-a981-41c7-a15b-3f320057f868 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
The L.A. rapper grapples with uncertainty and depression over warm, creamy, lo-fi beats. | The L.A. rapper grapples with uncertainty and depression over warm, creamy, lo-fi beats. | Maxo: LIL BIG MAN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maxo-lil-big-man/ | LIL BIG MAN | Like the title suggests, LIL BIG MAN is a coming-of-age story. Maxo is young enough to dream like a kid, but old enough to be aware he won’t be able to for long. One day, the L.A.-based rapper fantasizes about helping his family living comfortably and wearing a big-ass chain, the next he’s praying for the bare minimum: “23 hope I live to see 24.” As he reflects on the lessons that have helped him grow, he also pauses to feel the pressure of trying to leave his mark before his clock runs out.
The creamy vocal samples and muddy drums come from a team of lo-fi rap’s finest—lastnamedavid, Vik, Swarvy, and Roper Williams—and they make every verse seem like it takes place in a dream. Some might compare Maxo’s sound to the baritone Earl Sweatshirt or the abstract MIKE, but he resembles neither. His voice is soothing like watching a wide-open Steph Curry three-pointer on loop, and his lyrics are straightforward, leaving few lines up to interpretation.
Like anyone in their early 20s, Maxo is often wracked with fear. Few things weigh on him more than the prospect of wasting his remaining days—“My clock been ticking, I'm just tryna get myself right,” he asserts on “Time.” Even a warm Swarvy instrumental on “Strongside” doesn’t prevent Maxo from shrinking into his shell: “Covers on my head, guess I’m scared of the future,” he confesses.
But at his best, Maxo’s dread is balanced with a glimmer of hope, like on the EP standout “In My Penny’s.” His optimism, when it peeks through, is refreshing for how hard-earned it feels: “Even last place see the finish line,” he tells himself. On “Crown Heights” Maxo stares his depression in its face, accepting that he will live with it while balancing acceptance with positivity (“But I’m just countin’ my blessing, all that I have for you”).
Through LIL BIG MAN’s brief runtime, Maxo never finds the answer he’s looking for, but his search is winning on its own. Within 30 minutes, he hits upon a tangle of vivid feelings—uncertainty, anxiety, hope, depression, pain, love. “Maybe I be thinking too much, I don’t know,” he shrugs on “Crown Heights.” Above all, LIL BIG MAN captures this sensation: Nothing defines being 23 like knowing that you don’t know shit. | 2019-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | March 21, 2019 | 7.3 | 0f64d916-ee01-4fb6-8cb5-5b647d1da97c | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Following reissues of Mother Earth’s Plantasia and other cult classics, a new anthology of the Moog pioneer’s work revolves around his groundbreaking soundtrack to the 1969 moon landing. | Following reissues of Mother Earth’s Plantasia and other cult classics, a new anthology of the Moog pioneer’s work revolves around his groundbreaking soundtrack to the 1969 moon landing. | Mort Garson: Journey to the Moon and Beyond | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mort-garson-journey-to-the-moon-and-beyond/ | Journey to the Moon and Beyond | Before he was a paradigm-shifting synth pioneer, Mort Garson was a composer. Born in Canada to Russian Jewish refugees, Garson took up the piano at 11 and practiced obsessively during his teen years. He went on to study at Juilliard, and upon graduating, he began working as an arranger and session pianist. By the early 1960s—his career briefly interrupted by military service in World War II—he had worked with pop singers like Cliff Richard, Brenda Lee, and Bobby Darin. In 1963 he notched a No. 1 hit, composing and arranging “Our Day Will Come,” a languid, bossa-nova-inspired R&B single with a vibey Hammond organ solo snaking through the bridge. The song’s success sent him to Los Angeles, where Garson became a pop-music powerhouse. His music has been performed by a remarkable array of artists: the Sandpipers, James Brown, Mel Tormé, Cher.
A 1967 meeting with Robert Moog changed everything. Moog was demonstrating his newly designed modular synthesizer at L.A.’s Audio Engineering Society Convention. Garson, keen to get weirder with his arrangements, was immediately taken with the gargantuan electronic instrument and bought one of the first Moog systems ever made. Initially, he used it for sound design in jingles and television advertisements, but the deeper he got with the Moog, the more he realized its seemingly endless musical possibilities. He first integrated it into the full-band rock’n’roll arrangements of The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds, eventually abandoning all other instruments to compose solely with his synthesizer.
To synth nerds, Garson today is best known for his 1976 LP Mother’s Earth’s Plantasia, an album that was meant to nurture the growth of houseplants. Given away with every purchase at Melrose Avenue plant store Mother Earth, Plantasia became a psychedelic cult classic. Sacred Bones reissued the record in 2019, introducing Garson’s whimsical electronics to a whole new generation of listeners. In 2020, the label reissued more of Garson’s landmark ’70s output, including Black Mass, his foray into occult-informed electronics under the name Lucifer, and Music From Patch Cord Productions, an archival compilation that featured alternative takes of some Plantasia cuts. Sacred Bones continues its reissue campaign with the joyous Journey to the Moon and Beyond. The compilation plunges further into Garson’s enormous archive but emphasizes his mind-bending skill as a composer and arranger over his work as a synthesist.
That’s not to say the record is devoid of his signature bleeps and bloops—Journey is teeming with swollen sine-wave bass and filter growls. There are moments, like the twinkling waltz of “Love Is a Garden,” that share Plantasia’s sun-baked warmth. “Three TV IDs” has a bit of the acid-casualty paranoia found across Black Mass. But recordings that don’t prominently feature the Moog expand our understanding of the composer’s range, giving further context to Garson’s zany innovations.
“See the Cheetah” is a paisley-patterned mod jam recorded in 1967 by the Big Game Hunters, a band that may or may not have existed outside the studio. Though the two-minute tune has very minimal synth work, the winking playfulness of the arrangement feels like trademark Mort Garson. It’s the kind of bouncy, lite-jazz library psych that Trish Keenan and James Cargill would mine in Broadcast’s early material, full of splashy cymbals, overactive flute, and nonsense lyrics.
“Black Eye (Main Theme),” excerpted from the soundtrack Garson composed for the 1974 Blaxploitation flick of the same name, is more serious in tone. Garson takes a page from Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly playbook, combining funk bass and a constant clip-clop of woodblock percussion, punctuating the groove with a quarter-note snare. The guitar sounds thick and syrupy, as if he’s running it through the filter on his Moog before running it out to an amp. Once the baritone sax doubles the guitar line, the melody sounds like it’s melting, giving the entire composition a trippy glow.
The centerpiece is “Moon Journey,” a six-minute synthesizer symphony commissioned by CBS to soundtrack the 1969 moon landing. The piece goes through several movements, all of which make extensive use of the synthesizer’s noise circuit. It starts with detuned arpeggios and percussive filter envelopes, adds uneasy drones, then morphs into a carnival funhouse soundtrack kissed with the stuttering delay Garson would employ throughout the rest of his career. He doubles down on the wackiness, jumping into a section that sounds like the “Western shuffle” preset of an old drum machine that’s been thrown down a flight of stairs. Finally, it resolves into a major-key waltz, dissolving like late afternoon sunlight on a pond. It’s classic Garson, at once awe-inspiring, slightly menacing, and beautifully tranquil—all feelings probably shared by those who watched the Apollo 11 broadcast.
That mix of joy and apprehension confirms “Moon Journey” as the compilation’s emotional anchor: Mort Garson turned 45 on the day of the Moon landing, spending his birthday processing the fact that 650 million people were hearing his music accompany Neil Armstrong’s giant step for humankind. It’s a staggeringly complex work; early Moog synths were monophonic, meaning only one sound could be played at a time. Recording such a dense, layered composition was a painstaking process of tuning, overdubbing, and re-tuning, so creating such a complicated mosaic of sound—for such a historic event—was as much an undertaking as it was an honor.
Garson kept writing and recording every day until his death in 2008. His vault of recordings is reportedly massive; some of the pieces included here couldn’t be traced to a particular project or period of his career. Journey is a carefully curated sampling of Garson’s talents as a composer, arranger, synthesist, and sound designer. It adds to his mystique as a channeler of otherworldly frequencies, a grinning virtuoso tapping into the beyond one patch cable at a time. | 2023-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sacred Bones | July 22, 2023 | 7.2 | 0f689640-0287-4ace-b071-f5c1d9bc99ac | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
On his second solo album, fueled by unspecified personal misfortune, the former Sandwell District member finds emotional resonance in the interface between techno and post-punk. | On his second solo album, fueled by unspecified personal misfortune, the former Sandwell District member finds emotional resonance in the interface between techno and post-punk. | Silent Servant: Shadows of Death and Desire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/silent-servant-shadows-of-death-and-desire/ | Shadows of Death and Desire | Ever since Mudd Club DJ Johnny Dynell played Ian Dury, the Flying Lizards, and the Slits as a cheeky response to the 1970s’ anti-disco backlash—the guitar music still “had a basic beat, and the basic beat was disco”—dance music and post-punk have only become more comfortable bedfellows. Same goes for techno and other members of the drum-machine music family, from electronic body music to industrial. Such connections have been explored in recent years by crate-digging producers with a yen for abrasive electronics, including Minimal Wave founder Veronica Vasicka, Berlin’s Phase Fatale, Dominick Fernow as Vatican Shadow, and Los Angeles-based producer and graphic designer Juan Mendez, aka Silent Servant. On Shadows of Death and Desire, his second album for Fernow’s Hospital Productions, Mendez skillfully renders the inherent conflict between melodic emotion and cold, mechanical brutality.
A scene elder of sorts, Mendez was raised in 1980s Los Angeles on a well-rounded diet of the Smiths, DTLA warehouse parties, and KROQ. Slightly later in life, he imprinted upon Adrian Sherwood, German new wave, Belgian label R&S’ flagship compilation In Order to Dance, and hearing A Certain Ratio on a vaguely remembered New York City dancefloor. Since then, Mendez has synthesized a distinctive sound that can be found across his many projects. Most probably know him as a member of now-defunct but influential label and collective Sandwell District, featuring techno luminaries Regis, Function, and to a lesser extent James Ruskin and Peter Sutton. Mendez has put out moody and romantic synth music with ex-wife Camella Lobo as Tropic of Cancer and conducted bleak post-punk experiments with Regis as Sandra Electronics. In a nod to his day job as an art director, he has also defined one of the most striking visual aesthetics in techno, for both Sandwell and his retired imprint Jealous God.
Silent Servant’s debut full-length, Negative Fascination, arrived nearly a year after the dissolution of Sandwell District in 2011. “Stasis is death,” their final statement concluded—words to live by for Mendez. For his first LP he charted away from Sandwell District’s expansive, nuanced take on minimal techno, and Shadows of Death and Desire has an even more existential bent: Mendez somewhat cryptically announced that the release is “a product of a significant life change that wasn’t a benefit.” Yet, with seven tracks clocking in at just under half an hour, Mendez doesn’t waste any time dwelling on the past. Where Negative Fascination eased in listeners with a largely beatless, even cinematic introduction, its follow-up cultivates a sense of uneasy gloom from the get-go. Squealing feedback crystallizes into a queasy three-chord churn on album opener “Illusion,” giving way to the slicing kick and house-of-mirrors vocal delay on “Harm in Hand.”
The rest of Shadows of Death and Desire alternates between relentlessly dark propulsion and moments of ambient reprieve. “Damage” comes from the same clanking torture chamber as EBM pioneers Nitzer Ebb’s “Join in the Chant,” pulling taut nerves and tendons that are then allowed to relax as relatively calming—if still ominous—strings float through “Loss Response.” Then it’s off to the races again with the tensely sequenced “24 Hours,” given subtle texture with serrated six-string manipulation in the background. Shadows of Death and Desire ends by powering down through “Glass Veil” into “Optimistic Decay,” its closing track and something of a mission statement for Silent Servant’s vibe. Lobo makes an appearance as the album’s lone guest, adding a haunting aura with indiscernible vocals that recall her main collaboration with Mendez and offset the gnarled guitar squall. This particular back-and-forth between tracks toward the end of the record is especially reminiscent of the unpredictable eddies of calm and rage that could accompany the kind of life-altering event that Mendez has hinted at.
Such emotional resonance is where Silent Servant’s album excels. Where other post-punk-informed techno might value bone-dry wit or referential in-jokes, Mendez isn’t afraid to imbue his music with the kind of heaviness that has staying power, not unlike his childhood influences Robert Smith and Kevin Shields. If Silent Servant sets the bar for the intersection of dance and doom, Shadows of Death and Desire gives an even more promising indication of where it’s headed. | 2019-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hospital Productions | January 9, 2019 | 7.8 | 0f69517c-c1f7-4987-ba86-f62ec2d1f7a1 | Harley Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harley-brown/ | |
The Italian-born, London-based EBM auteur thaws out his industrial chill and embraces optimism, celebrating the fragility and strangeness of human experience with uncommon earnestness. | The Italian-born, London-based EBM auteur thaws out his industrial chill and embraces optimism, celebrating the fragility and strangeness of human experience with uncommon earnestness. | Not Waving : How to Leave Your Body | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/not-waving-how-to-leave-your-body/ | How to Leave Your Body | In 2017, Alessio Natalizia made an interesting claim about the brusque, intelligent dance music he was making as Not Waving: “We live in such a fucked-up world, so it’s important to make some optimistic music once in a while,” he said. “I think it’s our job as an artist to give options, to give possibilities, and a different way of doing things. And I think hope is one of those options.”
Fans could’ve been forgiven for thinking otherwise. Natalizia’s music at that point in time was imposing and brutalist, more reflective of a “fucked-up world” than any avenue out. The key song from Good Luck, the album he was then promoting, was a team-up with Québécoise nihilist Marie Davidson, whose own brand of coldwave doubles as anti-club manifesto. “Hope” seemed at best like a far-off prospect, at worst a cruel joke.
A few years and a few records later, the truth of Natalizia’s statement is coming into view. On How to Leave Your Body—roughly his 10th record, including collaborations with Romance and Mark Lanegan under his Dark Mark moniker—Natalizia triumphantly and effusively embraces optimism, thawing out his trademark industrial chill underneath a hard-earned sunrise. Less an EBM album than a showcase of the best textures contemporary experimental pop has to offer, How to Leave Your Body offers a counterweight to modern doomsaying, choosing instead to celebrate the fragility and strangeness of the human experience with uncommon earnestness.
One early highlight, and the song that most embodies the album’s ethos, is another collaboration with Davidson. “Hold On” acts as an inversion of 2017’s “Where Are We”: Where once Davidson decried the “sick world we live in,” now she hangs back, an omniscient narrator extolling the power and importance of friendship, or perhaps simply recalling fond memories. “Teenagers walk hand-in-hand, smiling in the daylight,” she says quietly, with none of her trademark smirk. “Someone rents a car and they drive; they laugh as they all jump in, getting closer and closer to each other.” Portentous piano chords and ravey synth stabs build as she speaks; the scene feels cinematic, a surprising turn toward narrative that foreshadows the album’s thoughtful, sanguine bent. As the song crests, Davidson breaks into a rare sung chorus: “Every now and then I feel a fire in my heart/I hold on to the feeling trying not to fall apart.”
The rest of the record is charged with this earnest, nostalgic warmth—even its song titles, including “You Are Always Younger Than the Future” and “My Best Is Good Enough,” look like a catalog of affirmations. “My Sway,” a collaboration with HTRK’s Jonnine, is lyric poetry as clattering, organic dembow, an appeal to a lover to see eye-to-eye that builds to a crescendo that, if not hopeful, is at least resolute and empowered in its finality: “It could only be this way/I see in a different light/Your morning, my night.” Natalizia even pulls Lanegan from under his perpetual dark cloud on “Last Time Leaving Home Part 2,” a meditation on grief underscored by droning, atonal strings. “Daylight is going, it is coming,” Lanegan repeats, a gentle mantra for recognizing the inevitability of death, but also of life.
If How to Leave Your Body were made up exclusively of metaphysical meditations it might have dragged, but Natalizia has always been a skilful craftsman of albums. Serene songs like “My Sway” and “Last Time Leaving Home Part 2” balance the slivers of industrial house and techno that arise elsewhere, while the stuttering synth grooves of “Define Normal” and the haunted echoes of Spivak collaboration “Never Ready” make the return to more subdued, pop-oriented tracks feel like a refreshing step out of the club into fresh air and sunlight. The whole of How to Leave Your Body feels like a step towards something brighter, kinder, better. It makes hope seem not just like a possibility, but something tangible, accessible—something so physical and so real that, if you wanted it, all you’d need to do was to reach out and grab it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ecstatic | May 27, 2021 | 7.5 | 0f6a8299-48cc-48ee-8a92-a5c224d0e576 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The rapper and visual artist’s debut compilation is an intimate opus of lo-fi sampledelia, a 50-song catalog of memories, half-thoughts, and moments of discovery. | The rapper and visual artist’s debut compilation is an intimate opus of lo-fi sampledelia, a 50-song catalog of memories, half-thoughts, and moments of discovery. | DORIS: Ultimate Love Songs Collection | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/doris-ultimate-love-songs-collection/ | Ultimate Love Songs Collection | At a June event commemorating Anysia Kym’s Truest, DORIS rasped breathily over his own floor-rumbling tracks: a curious spectacle, considering that his “floor-rumbling tracks” are woozy bedroom ballads, less Mike Dean than Dean Blunt. Take “Usher,” the airy one-off single he dropped via MIKE’s 10k label three years ago. A languid Enchantment loop longs for “Gloria, my Gloria” while DORIS dawdles through the mix, chirping about weed—listen closely and you can hear him choking on the smoke. It’s beautiful in an unpolished way, like early Ariel Pink or R. Stevie Moore sending heartfelt prayers through hissing mics. Now picture him onstage, swaddled in feedback, speaker rattles, and the bitcrush of his own cranked-up backing track, no longer whispering but screaming through songs that lend themselves to silent weeping. Raw passion permeates even his breeziest, most distant dreamscapes. “Real and straight up,” he said in a recent interview: “That’s what I want to be, 100 percent of the time.”
DORIS is Frank Dorrey, a Jersey-raised multi-hyphenate who first came to public attention as a visual artist whose uncanny portraits have adorned album sleeves and limited-edition skate decks. His few press appearances portray him as a cerebral recluse, happier to speak from a SoundCloud account than a soapbox. The statements he made from said SoundCloud account were surreal—fleeting fever dreams that rode the same psychedelic highs as his eerie, amorphous Picsart prints. He chose the name DORIS partly as an homage to Earl Sweatshirt: an artsy young introvert resonating with the mastermind behind I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside.
Dorrey is still somewhat shy, but he’s stepping out more often. (Pitchfork caught up with him earlier this year at the opening of a joint art exhibition with Brayan Ramales.) He’s also gotten far more comfortable in his own voice—comfortable enough to drop a sprawling 50-track opus without stumbling across the same idea twice. Last month, he independently released Ultimate Love Songs Collection, a glut of lo-fi demos largely ripped from his SoundCloud. It scans a lot like other ambitious hard drive clean-outs, à la Roaches 2012-2019 or Sent From My Telephone, but manages to remain intimate—and wildly fun—where the “longform idea dump” genre so runs aground. Ultimate Love Songs Collection doesn’t feel low-effort or self-aggrandizing—it shares the cathartic release of singing in the shower. “I’m just riding on the beat, I just like the way it sounds,” a giddy DORIS admits on “Baby reign,” audibly lost in the sauce. Unlike much of underground rap’s young vanguard, he isn’t cosplaying his influences so much as performing simple passions: his own company, the songs he’s stoked on, and the weed he’s smoking while trying to loop his favorite parts. Deep as it sits within his universe, the music is familiar enough to nestle comfortably within ours.
Here’s the scene: DORIS hunched over a laptop long after midnight, tangled in wires from a mic, a charger, a pair of headphones, and a Focusrite. The only light source is his screen, and if he doesn’t close all those YouTube-to-MP3 tabs, it might just go out. Ultimate Love Songs Collection has the drowsy fuck-it affect of a savant on his last sip of Celsius. Dorrey’s phlegmy whisper bridges the gap between Whole Lotta Red’s rage-rasp and The Unseen’s quirky up-pitch, like an imaginary friend with something stuck in their throat. His appetite for samples expands on the air of red-eyed curiosity, revisiting traces of soul music heard through parents’ crackly radios, alt-rock earworms playing from cracked iPhones, and young-adult angst drowned out by airy hypnagogic pop. One second, he’s chipmunk-squeaking over the Cardigans’ “Lovefool”; the next, he’s coughing out congested romance epics, regaling weed over melodies more famous for regaling girls from Ipanema. All the while, he’s endearingly candid, like a kid who got one of those T-Pain mics for Christmas—bedroom or studio, he just wants to say the first thing that comes to mind.
What makes Ultimate Love Songs Collection so rewarding, even relatable, is the way it wears this bare, ragtag enthusiasm on its sleeves—stripping away pretense so all that’s left is a snapshot of the moment DORIS decided he fucked with a certain song. Today’s underground hip-hop is less interested in consistency than radical, relentless knob-pushing: dialing up the echo, amplifying the distortion, kindling flames of anarchy and fetching gasoline. DORIS shares his contemporaries’ knack for frenzied creation, but he also doesn’t move like there’s anything especially shocking or marketable behind his madness. No occult poses, no indie sleaze revival, no punk aesthetic rehashed for a new generation: He just wants to wail his own love songs over the ones stuck in head. | 2024-08-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-08-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Janine | August 5, 2024 | 8.3 | 0f6cab18-c6a8-4e3b-b16b-eb4a9e2b3bcd | Samuel Hyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/samuel-hyland/ | |
The proudly suburban Ontario band’s first album uses styles as different as indie pop, shoegaze, and post-hardcore to dramatize frontman Brandon Williams’ journey from despair to rage to resilience. | The proudly suburban Ontario band’s first album uses styles as different as indie pop, shoegaze, and post-hardcore to dramatize frontman Brandon Williams’ journey from despair to rage to resilience. | Chastity: Death Lust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chastity-death-lust/ | Death Lust | Brandon Williams, the lead singer and songwriter of Chastity, hails from Whitby, Ontario, part of the chain of suburbs that extends out from the eastern edge of Toronto. Like many suburbs, it’s a mishmash of affluent commuter communities sprouting with McMansions and older housing developments populated by working-class folk employed at the regional power plants and factories that serve the big city. And like many suburbs, it’s the sort of place where lacking a car is tantamount to living under house arrest, and where recreation for bored teenagers inevitably leads to some degree of criminal activity. When you’re a young misfit in a cultural desert, the usual knee-jerk reaction is to get the fuck out of town as soon as you can scrounge up the rent and decamp to the nearest urban center. But Williams has never harbored the desire to live downtown—and that lack of interest in cities isn't just because they've become so expensive. His natural response to suburban life isn’t to escape it, but to improve it.
There is, of course, no shortage of music that explores the dissociative effects of the suburbs, and how the postwar shift toward sprawl and big-box strip malls can breed problems—isolation, depression, cultural homogeneity—as severe as the inner-city ills that suburbanites sought to escape. But few artists have made their suburban upbringings as central to their musical identity as Williams. It forms the backdrop of several videos he’s released over the past few years—vibrant, visceral documents of wayward youth skateboarding through empty streets, pool-hopping, and partaking in scheduled street fights for a crowd of bloodthirsty classmates. It’s also the impetus behind his DIY promotional efforts, which include hosting shows in an old barn on the outskirts of Whitby and donating the proceeds to local mental-health support agencies. And it’s the geographic analog for a debut album that feels at once both expansive and suffocating.
Chastity’s early singles and EPs showcased an artist with the versatility to work in dramatically different modes, from brittle bedroom indie pop to stormy shoegaze to raging post-hardcore. These are the sort of oppositional styles that, 20 years ago, would have relegated followers to different high-school cafeteria tables. But the beauty of Death Lust lies in how Williams makes them all sound like part of the same continuum of disaffection, and how he approaches each mode with a pop songwriter’s ear for concision. Chastity's debut full-length is a brief album, with 10 songs clocking in at 31 minutes total, but the terrain it covers is vast. This is a record that begins with an intimate string-swept ballad and ends with a throat-shredding, circle-pit sermon—and yet, like a frog swimming in an increasingly hot pot of water, you barely notice the slide between those two poles.
More than just a showcase for Chastity’s musical fluidity, Death Lust charts Williams’ emotional journey from despair to rage to resilience. Even the length and positioning of his song titles reinforce the theme: Flip over to the album's back cover, and you’ll find an aerial photograph of a subdivision, overlaid with the album’s tracklist to form a cross. At first glance, the layout seems to equate the suburbs to a graveyard. But after listening to record, the cross invites a medical interpretation, hovering above a place where disenfranchised kids are in desperate need of community support.
Mental health has always been a recurring theme in Williams’ music, and Death Lust presents an unflinching glimpse into the mind of someone so tormented by anxiety and loss that they can only feel pleasure in fantasizing about ending it all. On the quivering opener, “Come,” Williams isn’t just eulogizing a departed friend, he’s making plans to join them on the other side. And amid the dreamy jangle of “Heaven Hell Anywhere Else,” he imagines just how he’d do it: “What would it feel like to fall/From the school, 60 feet tall,” he sings in a heavenly sigh, letting the song’s crystalline chorus serve as the safety net that brings him gently back down to earth. “Anoxia,” however, offers no such salve, its adrenalized punk thrust expressing an even more unsparing death wish: “Bury me between the guilty and filthy/Then hang me from the tallest tree in Whitby.”
Williams isn’t simply wallowing in his pain, however; he approaches it like a boxer working an inside game, getting up close as a means to better analyze and attack it. For all its sorrowful subject matter, Death Lust is an often rousing rock record that answers Williams’ disarming admissions with muscular displays of fortitude. “Suffer” and “Scary” erupt into monstrous grungegaze grooves that suggest the Smashing Pumpkins if they’d signed to Dischord and spent the ’90s playing basement shows. And even when Williams’ hardcore roots start to show on the album’s second side, the gnashed-teeth aggression functions as an all-out assault on his demons. Closing track “Chains” is a queasy exercise in churning Albini-core that climaxes with Williams’ most ferocious performance, but also his most sanguine sentiment: “Don’t waste your pain on hate,” he barks in its cathartic chorus, “Start your life outside the chains!” It’s not exactly a declaration of victory—trauma is like that horror-movie villain who can be warded off for a spell but never stays dead. But on an album whose most tranquil songs often reveal Williams’ most upsetting confessions, it’s only fitting that he finally achieves a moment of inner peace through a scream. | 2018-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | July 14, 2018 | 8 | 0f7318af-3a5e-4747-b67f-128b01e7b184 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
There’s a lot of self happening on the ninth proper Bonnie "Prince" Billy album, a release that finds Will Oldham largely unaccompanied. The result is one of the most intense, spry, and catchy collections of a distinctive career. | There’s a lot of self happening on the ninth proper Bonnie "Prince" Billy album, a release that finds Will Oldham largely unaccompanied. The result is one of the most intense, spry, and catchy collections of a distinctive career. | Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Bonnie "Prince" Billy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18650-bonnie-prince-billy-bonnie-prince-billy/ | Bonnie "Prince" Billy | There’s a lot of self happening on the ninth proper Bonnie "Prince" Billy album. Will Oldham played everything himself, recorded it himself, released it himself, and even distributed it himself by hand to record stores. Most significantly, the music on Bonnie "Prince" Billy exudes an individual perspective—nearly every song is written in the first person, and Oldham’s spare acoustic guitar, breathy vocals, and close-up production form a contemplative inner monologue.
There’s one more bit of self about Bonnie “Prince” Billy that’s important: the fact that Oldham decided to make it self-titled. The last time he went that route was on 1994’s Palace Brothers (later re-titled Days in the Wake). That was also the last time he made a full-length album with, for the most part, just his voice and acoustic guitar. The result was one of the finest records in his oeuvre, a suite of intimate sketches studded with now-classics like “Pushkin” and “I Am A Cinematographer". He must’ve thought of that album while making this one*,* and when judged against its predecessor Bonnie "Prince" Billy measures up quite well.
That’s due partially to how perfectly the solo acoustic format fits Oldham’s melding of vocals and lyrics. He weaves them together so tightly that it’s hard to tell singer from song, and that’s clearest when it’s just him and a guitar. His voice shakes, stretches and cracks around notes, approaching rather than hitting them, and his words similarly skirt themes and flirt with meaning. Concrete ideas and images emerge, but nothing is ever so defined that a single interpretation is clear. Often my first impression of a song flips on subsequent listen, when one bent note or one turn of phrase that I didn’t notice before makes me rethink the rest. At best Oldham’s songs are powerfully ambiguous, and that’s true of all of them on Bonnie "Prince" Billy.
This time around, Oldham finds ambiguity in the elusive concept of the self—what it is, how it changes, how it will end. A few of these tunes are ostensibly about relationships, but even those center on the self and its struggle to connect. “I see you go on/ and I go too, but not with you,” Oldham sings in the album’s second song, “Lessons from Stony", his voice rising with caution. On the next tune, “Triumph of Will", he laments that he and his partner are “never lost together… We are two separate people/ We never will be one.” By song’s end the couple have willed their way to unity, but it’s a triumph that doesn’t last long.
From there, Oldham becomes increasingly pessimistic about love. “All our hearts are stained and every love is tainted,” he declares at one point, and later “there is no heaven for love, it simply dies.” He also becomes increasingly obsessed with mortality, both fascinated and terrified by death of the self. On “I Will Be Born Again” he sings the title repetitively as if trying to convince himself of the impossible. On the deceptively upbeat “This is My Cocktail” he admits fearing two things: “losing my mind, losing my body.” And by the time of “Ending it All (As I Do),” he sounds resigned: “the beginning of ending is already done.” Throughout these musings, his guitar winds around like a stream of consciousness, shifting between simple melodies and looser, less certain structures.
It may sound like Bonnie "Prince" Billy is an intense listen, but much of it is also spry and catchy, and some of it is pretty funny too. One song about a pig kept in a chest at the foot of a bed plays like a surrealist cartoon, and even when Oldham is staring at death, he stays wry and absurd, dropping humorous motifs throughout. A particularly amusing one is his persistent use of the word “fun,” which is held up as a kind of life-goal holy grail. But its attainment is always uncertain, which gives the album tension.
That uncertainty, and Oldham’s sense of the self as constant flux, also give Bonnie "Prince’"Billy a Zen feel—and, by the end, a meditative calm. Closer “Royal Quiet Deluxe” describes driving down a highway to escape a failed relationship, but also to meet something greater. “If we die many times, then let death come to me,” he sings spiritedly—and then suddenly switches into a upbeat epilogue. “This is the last song of its kind,” he croons as if he’s peacefully accepted his demise, or moved on to something new. It’s one of the most sublime moments in a musical career already full of them—and it ends with the album’s sunniest line: “Ain’t it the best?” Once you’ve taken this fascinating journey with Oldham, it’s hard not to agree. | 2013-10-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-10-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | self-released | October 17, 2013 | 7.8 | 0f78372e-6631-4981-a615-07a1f9cf402e | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The three improvisers conceived their new album while soundtracking a film for Louis Vuitton, but the results, far from being glamorous or overblown, are intimate and conversational. | The three improvisers conceived their new album while soundtracking a film for Louis Vuitton, but the results, far from being glamorous or overblown, are intimate and conversational. | Asma Maroof / Patrick Belaga / Tapiwa Svosve: The Sport of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/asma-maroof-patrick-belaga-tapiwa-svosve-the-sport-of-love/ | The Sport of Love | Peculiar Contrast, Perfect Light, the official film of the Louis Vuitton 2021 fall-winter men’s show, is a suitably opulent and bugged-out curio of high celebrity culture. Saul Williams emerges from a snowy wilderness reciting poetry to himself, Louis luggage in hand, before the Revenant-like vista morphs into a sleek room decked out in green marble and filled with models. Yasiin Bey shows up and starts rapping. The director is Wu Tsang of the Moved by the Motion collective, which also counts among its members the three artists behind The Sport of Love: cellist and pianist Patrick Belaga, saxophonist and flutist Tapiwa Svosve, and producer Asma Maroof. After contributing to the soundtrack to Tsang’s film, the three decided they had more in them: a score to an imaginary romantic film, which I’d love to see if it’s as batshit as Peculiar Contrast.
The Sport of Love, though, is something a little less elaborate than their Louis Vuitton commission: a record of three talented and well-connected musicians inhabiting a sound and style. Maroof, half of the great post-club duo Nguzunguzu, shepherded Belaga and Svosve’s improvisations into a digestible package of just over half an hour. It’s telling that she leaves a snippet of a voice saying “OK!” at the beginning of the sublime Svosve flute showcase “Delicate Distance Between Boulders,” as well as a relieved laugh at the end of “Sport.” On top of the album’s more superficial explorations of what love might sound and feel like, this is an album about the electricity between improvisers finding common ground; it feels more like a real-time conversation than a carefully crafted statement.
Svosve’s saxophone is usually the lead instrument, with Belaga’s cello holding down the low end. In tandem with the romantic themes of the album, it’s easy to dream up associations with the sax-slathered recesses of ’80s cheese—Blade Runner’s “Love Theme,” George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” countless late-night Skinemax themes—but the musicians only hint at that aesthetic without leaning into it the way Nguzunguzu did on their dreamy, R&B-heavy mashup album The Perfect Lullaby. The music is ramshackle and horizontal, rejecting vocals and drums entirely; I can’t recall anyone playing a chord. This is more in the ambient jazz tradition of Marion Brown’s collaborations with Harold Budd on The Pavilion of Dreams, the processed trumpet murmurs of Jon Hassell and Arve Henriksen, the heavy-lidded languidness of Pharoah Sanders’ performance on Promises: left-field players meeting easy listening halfway.
Unlike those artists’ best work, The Sport of Love is not particularly interested in spiriting the listener to another world. For all the effects on Svosve’s saxophone, neither the players nor producer Maroof do much to make their instruments sound like anything other than those instruments. The musicians mostly play long, sustained notes, and the most striking extended technique comes on 15-minute centerpiece “The Stranger,” when the grit at the bottom of Svosve’s tone nearly consumes the notes and leaves only a distant hum. That piece is the only one to feature any outside musicians, namely harpist Ayha Simone and percussionist Mathieu Edward, and by no coincidence the one that most approximates the sweep and voluptuousness of a great romance (Simone’s harp intro also recalls Nguzunguzu’s epic “The Boy Is Mine” flip on The Perfect Lullaby). The Sport of Love may be a score to an imaginary film, but the strongest image it evokes is simply of three musicians discovering how good they sound together. | 2023-06-02T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-02T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Jazz | Pan | June 2, 2023 | 6.8 | 0f78c6dd-1fd6-4c21-ac12-49f52b278a7c | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
The 21-year-old Kanye West acolyte and Future soundalike tries again to step out of his elders’ shadows on an EP that is unlikely to quiet his critics. | The 21-year-old Kanye West acolyte and Future soundalike tries again to step out of his elders’ shadows on an EP that is unlikely to quiet his critics. | Desiigner: L.O.D. EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/desiigner-lod-ep/ | L.O.D. EP | Desiigner’s schtick isn’t just thin—it’s transparent. His biggest hit, “Panda,” isn’t just two years old—it’s also eerily reminiscent of Future’s big hits. His rise wasn’t just meteoric—it was facilitated by Kanye West, a hip-hop visionary and babbling egomaniac whose popularity is currently at its nadir. Still only 21 years old, he’s got an official debut album languishing alongside Tha Carter V and Madvillainy 2 in rap purgatory. In the meantime, the Brooklyn rapper has released L.O.D. (or Life of Desiigner), an EP that is unlikely to quiet his many critics.
Desiigner’s ability to mimic Future’s throaty ululations is simultaneously his greatest gift and his most damning curse. Without that mumbly warble—which can connote pain, pleasure, or the particular pain of nihilistic pleasure-seeking—“Panda” would probably never have dug its claws into West’s malleable pate and ended up on The Life of Pablo. Not sampled so much as reproduced, the song largely escaped Kanye’s jittery, impulsive tinkering. But with West’s co-sign came increased scrutiny; Desiigner’s 2016 mixtape New English garnered lukewarm reviews, with journalists repeatedly calling out his similarities to Future.
To presume that Desiigner is purposely imitating Future would be unfair; his motives remain unknown. But, at the very least, through shared thematic interests as well as biological happenstance, Desiigner is making music that’s conspicuously similar to that of his Atlantan peer. Future does arch-trap-capitalist anthems, libidinous propositions, and tempestuous, sorrowful ballads. On L.O.D., Desiigner attempts the same to uninspiring results.
He checks off all of the basic rap boxes—his voice, his choruses, and his beat selections are fair to middling. It’s the discreet, revealing bits that are severely lacking. “Hood” opens with the intriguing Auto-Tuned salvo “I know niggas getting bodied in their own hood” but too quickly devolves into baffling lines like, “And I live my life right, like a motorcycle/And I don’t recycle/And I am a psycho.” Even “Tonka,” the most enjoyable song on L.O.D., suffers for its lassitude. Rather than inspiring greater intensity on the rapper’s part, the song’s wild, layered backing vocals clash with his listless delivery. Desiigner has a single gear, instrumental be damned.
There are a few moments on L.O.D. when he doesn’t sound like he’s imitating Future—but they neither depart much from his typical formula nor establish him as an artist with much verve or vision. Stripped of the mystique afforded by the Atlanta trap-rap mumble, “Priice Tag” and “LA to NY” are naked in their aimlessness. His repetitive lyrics might as well be a chalkboard gag from “The Simpsons.” Like Bart, Desiigner invests minimal energy in these stultifying exercises.
The rapper’s backstory makes listening to L.O.D. an especially disheartening experience. It feels like Desiigner—who once slept on his family’s carpeted floors in the Bed-Stuy projects, for lack of a bed, and was shot in the hip at 14—has been saddled with all the expectations of a Kanye West protégé without benefiting from any substantive guidance. West and his G.O.O.D. Music associates haven’t displayed much interest in mentoring this artist they plucked from relative obscurity as a teenager. Watching Desiigner get broken on the music industry’s wheel is maddening, because the failures of L.O.D. aren’t his alone—they’re side effects of a star-hungry system that’s unconcerned with the long-term effects of its machinations. | 2018-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam / G.O.O.D. Music | May 9, 2018 | 4.6 | 0f7c37eb-ad09-464d-b50e-ca71e3629000 | Torii MacAdams | https://pitchfork.com/staff/torii-macadams/ | |
Produced by Mo Troper, the full-length debut from Brenden Ramirez’s power pop project surges with quiet confidence and an open heart. | Produced by Mo Troper, the full-length debut from Brenden Ramirez’s power pop project surges with quiet confidence and an open heart. | Bory: Who’s a Good Boy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bory-whos-a-good-boy/ | Who’s a Good Boy | Brenden Ramirez is a power pop quick study. After playing in all manner of rock bands growing up, Ramirez studied jazz guitar at Willamette University, a pursuit that took him as far as Nepal, where he briefly taught at the Kathmandu Jazz Conservatory. His music degree had a focus on improvisation: the antithesis of power pop, a style that seeks to replicate the anarchic impact of the ’64 Beatles under strict lab conditions. But there are times on Who’s a Good Boy, Ramirez’s debut full-length as Bory, when he slips into power pop suddenly yet naturally, like a childhood friend appearing in a dream.
Some of that familiarity can be chalked up to Ramirez’s post-grad employment. Soon after moving to Portland in 2018, he joined the backing band of local power pop omnivore Mo Troper, who produced and played on Who’s a Good Boy. “I don’t think I even knew what power pop was until I met Mo,” Ramirez admitted to Willamette Week earlier this month, “which I think is a common occurrence for people who meet Mo.” That experience is evident from gems like the lead single “We Both Won,” a jangling post-breakup anthem that beams its arpeggiation like a forced smile. “North Douglas” is a plea to visit a partner’s childhood home, outfitted with dual guitars. The chorus peals like church bells, melodies and countermelodies folding into each other.
Just like another Troper-produced power pop record released this year, Diners’ Domino (to which Ramirez contributed additional guitar), there’s a naturalism to the lyrics that contrasts with the almost formalist arrangements. But where Domino felt like an internal monologue, Who’s a Good Boy has a second-person intimacy. Some tracks seem to open in the middle of an argument: “Don’t take this the wrong way.” “I’m sorry for being weird.” But Ramirez’s breathy tenor defuses tension. “To find the words in my head/It takes a while,” he confesses on the opening track, the dream-pop apologia “The Flake.” The desire to connect is palpable. His guitar yowls in parallel motion with his refrain; the production is so saturated, it laps at the speakers.
Despite the measured chime and judicious use of handclaps, this is at heart a prototypical PNW indie-pop effort. Warm but guarded, intricate and muted, reminiscent of the Shins and David Bazan and especially Elliott Smith. The blown-out instrumental break on “Five-Course Meal” is Smith through and through: the choirboy coos, peaking guitars and Mellotron wash could have appeared on anything after XO. There’s a jolt whenever you spot a familiar chord change, or recognize the melodic contour of a closing word. It feels less like homage and more like Bory’s vocabulary.
One track toward the end of the album suggests how that voice might be further developed. “Sidelined” is a sure-footed ballad with a sticky guitar motif. Like “North Douglas,” it’s torn between devotion and desire. “I know you want to be of use/But you’ve got nothing to prove,” Ramirez sings on the third verse. Then he casually breaks off a tender, probing guitar solo. When the chorus kicks in, you can practically hear a club singing along. For all of Bory’s self-deprecation, Who’s a Good Boy has a quiet confidence. Thematically, it’s concerned with being understood. Bory’s stylistic and emotional openness ensure that it is. | 2023-12-21T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-21T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Earth Libraries | December 21, 2023 | 7.3 | 0f7cd5ad-e637-4ce8-9517-9424e99567e6 | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
Drawn mostly from a palette of piano, guitar, and chopped vocal fragments, Ulla Straus’ new direction in ambient music represents a departure from her previous albums. It’s glitchy, but also human. | Drawn mostly from a palette of piano, guitar, and chopped vocal fragments, Ulla Straus’ new direction in ambient music represents a departure from her previous albums. It’s glitchy, but also human. | Ulla: foam | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ulla-foam/ | foam | There’s a point where ambient music stops being ambient—where the artist, rather than guiding you through your inner world, pulls you into theirs. On foam, her best album yet, the American musician Ulla Straus, who records simply as ulla, deftly slips across that line. In a way, she’s been moving in this direction since her first release. Floor, a 2017 cassette on Lillerne Tape Club, was two side-long cuts of pure ambience. Tumbling Towards a Wall, from 2020, was something new, all tactile textures and gurgling rhythms, a kind of fireside glitch that recalled Jan Jelinek’s Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records. Her last LP, last year’s Limitless Frame, moved further into the material world, with pianos and woodwinds drifting through its nighttime fog.
All of these records are excellent, but foam represents a breakthrough. The album draws mostly from a palette of piano, guitar, and chopped vocal samples. It’s glitchy, but also human. You picture hands on the piano keys, and a woman singing those sad notes—if not in the flesh then in a memory, or a dream.
The more important change here, though, happens under the hood. foam is subtle, delicate, and sometimes ethereal. But it also demands your attention. This is an artist not providing a canvas for your thoughts and feelings, but communicating her own, however abstractly. Unlike, say, the Going In series from the Bunker New York, foam is not something you zone out to—the peals of noise on the opener, “song,” signal that early on. This is, no doubt, music for contemplation. You might take it in while staring at the ceiling, into the middle distance, or out the rain-soaked window of a bus. But you wouldn’t ignore it, any more than you’d ignore someone who’s lowered their voice to tell you a secret.
foam has the glued-together feel of a collage, each juxtaposition imbued with meaning that even its creator might struggle to explain. Most tracks are fragmented, with staccato rhythms built from thin slivers of sound. Others come whole, played on one instrument, seemingly without a sample in sight. One is “marina,” a beautiful guitar piece that reveals Straus to be the rare electronic artist who could play unplugged.
For an electronic album, foam is brought to life by something surprising: the honesty and vulnerability of a singer-songwriter. This is nothing new for Straus—she said she made Limitless Frame “as a way to hug myself.” foam, soothing as it is in places, is not so pure a salve. The mood is one not of comfort, but of a delicate subject being carefully breached, a memory pondered, an invitation to, as My Bloody Valentine put it, “tiptoe down to the lonely places.” But the overall effect is not brooding, somber, or sad. It’s intimate, even romantic. It’s certainly the warmest record Straus has ever made.
Given Straus’s versatility as an artist, foam relies a little too heavily on its core aesthetic in places. Ghostly voices, splashes of piano, and glitchy artifacts are the defining features of most of these tracks, some of which sound like different versions of one another. The album’s detours are some of its best moments (for my money, “marina” is the best thing here). Still, she’s hit upon a beautiful mode of expression. Each of these fluttering bursts of sound seems to convey a tender, personal truth. Far from getting old, this musical language reaches perfection at the record’s conclusion: “foam angel,” a bittersweet piece that’s part ballad, part lullaby, part hymn. | 2022-11-29T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-29T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Electronic | 3XL | November 29, 2022 | 7.6 | 0f7cf777-a09a-46af-9c82-78b1cea1eb9d | Will Lynch | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-lynch/ | |
On Cut 4 Me, an ambitiously catchy collection featuring production from Bok Bok, Nguzunguzu, Girl Unit, Kingdom, Jam City, and others, the Los Angeles vocalist Kelela Mizanekristos gives dark dance music a more pop-friendly spin. | On Cut 4 Me, an ambitiously catchy collection featuring production from Bok Bok, Nguzunguzu, Girl Unit, Kingdom, Jam City, and others, the Los Angeles vocalist Kelela Mizanekristos gives dark dance music a more pop-friendly spin. | Kelela: Cut 4 Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18661-kelela-cut-4-me/ | Cut 4 Me | It used to take ages for underground sounds to find their way into mainstream pop music. Information moved more slowly, recordings took more time to produce, and there were layers of cultural gatekeepers to be navigated in the process, so subcultures that craved obscurity could usually find it. The internet and digital recording technology have changed that. Now, if your timing’s right, you can see a specific synth sound or drum programming technique make its way from some nobody producer’s SoundCloud page to pop radio in maybe a couple of months, but sometimes in just weeks.
The shadowy postdubstep underground bass music scene, for instance, is currently finding itself thrust into the spotlight by Kanye, Drake, and their legions of followers who've adopted increasingly dark-toned aesthetic identities informed by artists like SBTRKT and Arca. This scrutiny and appropriation will only intensify in the wake of Lorde’s Pure Heroine, which transmuted minimalist bass music that would've qualified as avant garde only a few months ago into chart gold. So what does a musical community with a preference for operating under the pop-cultural radar do when mainstream artists start knocking it off for parts? The smartest and most productive thing would be to launch its own competing, alternative product: And now it has, in the form of Kelela Mizanekristos.
Raised in the Maryland suburbs around D.C. on a diet of 1990s pop-R&B divas before relocating to the bustling L.A. bass scene, Kelela is attempting to do what dozens of top-tier singers, songwriters, and producers are also trying, which is to take the moody sounds of the sorts of electronic musicians orbiting club nights/labels/collectives like Night Slugs and Fade to Mind, and give them a more pop-friendly spin that will appeal to listeners who don’t normally go in for severely dark dance music.
Unlike other singers working at similar aims, Kelela is tight enough with the Fade to Mind/Night Slugs crews to collaborate with them directly, so her beats come straight from the source: Bok Bok, Nguzunguzu, Girl Unit, FtM founder Kingdom, and other affiliated artists who’ve helped define a booming, severely stripped-down sound pieced together from bits of techno, grime, R&B, drum & bass, and dubstep’s pre-neon days. It’s well-constructed launchpad that she’s acquired for herself, and she doesn’t waste it.
Cut 4 Me is an ambitiously catchy record as well as being an aesthetically ambitious one. Essential to this is Kelela’s decision to play against the beats' moodiness—that juxtaposition drives the album’s likability. The beat by NA for “Do It Again” is horror-movie creepy, with a hypnotic John Carpenter-like keyboard figure looping over booming haunted house drums, which she decided to use as the foundation for an slow-motion sex jam straight out of the Aaliyah playbook. The Nguzunguzu-produced “Enemy” is as twitchily abrasive as the most staunchly underground first-wave dubstep, so she tops it with a cotton-candy pop-R&B vocal that could have been lifted from a turn of the millennium Brandy B-side.
Kelela’s an unlikely diva for a scene that’s attracted more than its share of dance music purists who don’t go in for frippery like vocalists, but it works. She also needs to close some of the gap between her ambition and what her voice is capable of—it’s a perfectly good voice, but lacks much of the expressiveness and power that singers who don’t come by those things naturally need time to develop. But this kind of works, too. A full-blast diva would obliterate the subtlety that the beats rely on, and the spunky-newcomer charisma that her performance projects imparts crucial warmth to their icy sounds.
The voice can be worked on, though. The more important things that Cut 4 Me teaches us about Kelela are that she has the taste to pick out a fantasy all-star team of collaborators, the talent to make herself heard over their beats, and the intelligence to get it all together at the exact right moment. That’s all instinct, and that can’t be learned. If she wants pop stardom—if not the five-star kind like Rihanna, then at least the cultishly-adored kind like her former tourmate Solange—she couldn’t be in a better place. | 2013-10-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-10-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Fade to Mind | October 18, 2013 | 8.3 | 0f7fcea4-7d51-438b-a0bc-704738264f68 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Since their inception, Clutch have amassed a global reputation as the platonic ideal of stoner rock. Psychic Warfare marks a return to the bluesy, boozy rock of their early catalog, with more than enough wacky stories to go around. | Since their inception, Clutch have amassed a global reputation as the platonic ideal of stoner rock. Psychic Warfare marks a return to the bluesy, boozy rock of their early catalog, with more than enough wacky stories to go around. | Clutch: Psychic Warfare | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20979-psychic-warfare/ | Psychic Warfare | If Mastodon are kings of the sludge-rock world, then their past co-headliners Clutch are the jokers. Since their start in 1991, Clutch have amassed a global reputation as the platonic ideal of stoner rock, with frontman Neil Fallon regarded as one of rock’s most talented auteurs. Like Baroness and Lo-Pan, they’re not afraid to roll up their sleeves and crank out a filthy blues jam (1998’s The Elephant Riders more than gives the Black Keys a run for their money), but the band does so with a cartoonish flippancy that their peers lack, which in turn injects the genre with a much-needed sense of humor. “I have a great luxury that I'm a professional liar—that's what a storyteller is,” Fallon said in the album's press release, going on to add, "It's the one socially acceptable way to completely deceive people, and that's what they want.” Liars tell the best tales, for sure – and when they're packing guitars, all the better.
Where Brent Hinds and company purvey AP lit-inspired epics and extensive experimentations in genre, Fallon and his partners have but the boogie and the bellylaugh—and in the hands of this foursome, that’s more than enough. Clutch’s last record, 2013’s Earth Rocker, marked their biggest triumph to date: a playful, occasionally psychedelic LP that wasn’t afraid to go prog once in a while (it’s also one of the best driving albums in recent memory). Psychic Warfare, recorded in Texas and produced by Machine (who manned the boards for both Earth Rocker and 2004’s Blast Tyrant) isn’t as overachieving, instead marking a return to the bluesy, boozy rock of their early catalog.
After a nondescript intro, Psychic Warfare starts with one of the band’s strongest songs to date: “X Ray Visions”, an ode to conspiracy theories, drugs, sex, and horoscopes all rolled into one. Over the span of three-and-a-half minutes, Fallon manages to incorporate visits from Republican apparitions (tapping out a telegram in a motel room, he’s “quickly overtaken by the angry spirits of Ronald and Nancy Reagan”), a raucous refrain that renders quacky sci-fi concepts like “x ray visions” and “energy weapons” undeniably badass, and the best musical role-call since Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz” (when’s the last time you introduced yourself as “on the mic…SCORPIOOOOOOOO!”?). It’s a contender for one of the best hard rock songs to date, so it’s unfortunate that the rest of the album–except, perhaps, the “Highway Star”-cribbing “Firebirds!”–fails to capture that divine, batshit energy, despite Fallon’s tales of supernatural lust (“Sucker For The Witch”), cyclops’ revenge (“Behold the Colossus”), decapitated bodies and three-legged mules (“Decapitation Blues”).
Perhaps it’s the abundance of one-three-five chord progressions, or the scarcity of skyward solos (although “Noble Savage” is a shoe-in for Rock Band 4) – or maybe “X Ray Visions” is just a hell of an act to follow. Either way, Psychic Warfare settles into craggy cruise control by “Sucker For The Witch”: haggard verses festooned by Fallon’s goofy imagery and anchored by the no-bullshit percussion of drummer Jean-Paul Gaster and bassist Dan Maines, which in turn give way to stadium-ready choruses. Occasionally, they dip into Texan blues (“Our Lady of Electric Light”, “Son Of Virginia”) – a welcome bit of contrast that comes at the expense of lost momentum, with mid-album “Doom Saloon” being the worst offender.
Clutch work best when they keep the pulley of punchlines and pummeling riffs running at max speed, and as a result, Psychic Warfare proves a tad too meandering to eclipse Earth Rocker or Blast Tyrant. But guffaw, gawk, pump your fist you will—and in the self-important, super-serious world of heavy music, that’s worth more than you think. | 2015-10-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Weathermaker | October 12, 2015 | 6.9 | 0f80247d-d86c-458e-be18-cc76b73c1805 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Deerhoof follow their excellent The Runners Four with another turn away from hyper-complex pop and no wave, and toward accessible, foot-stomping rock. | Deerhoof follow their excellent The Runners Four with another turn away from hyper-complex pop and no wave, and toward accessible, foot-stomping rock. | Deerhoof: Friend Opportunity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9810-friend-opportunity/ | Friend Opportunity | There's a high you get from the classic 1970s "art-rock" of Yes, Genesis, or King Crimson-- and when it hits, there's nothing like it. I'm not talking about the way other music peaks, like a dance track where the beat kicks in and the crowd goes berzerk, or metal music that gets louder and louder until your skull caves, or gutbucket singers who can make your heart jump out of your chest. With art-rock, there's a lot of mumbo-jumbo and funny time signatures, and sometimes there's like 10 or 15 minutes of really boring shit (see: Yes, "Awaken"). But when the "good part" hits? Holy shit-- the band crescendos and the singer, smooth as silk but loud as God, rams Buddha down the throat of a giant silver dragon. If I sound like I'm growing a mullet, I've done my job.
Deerhoof, an indie band who have released plenty of discombobulated pop and no wave albums, have lately turned toward accessible, foot-stomping rock. It worked on The Runners Four, but it works better and quicker on their new album, Friend Opportunity. We've been using the term "inde prog" mostly to describe bands that quick-cut between ideas and construct mini-suites out of mini-songs. But on this record Deerhoof take everything that clique of indie bands has worked toward-- add the suddenly popular twee vocals-- and ride it like an h-bomb.
If it weren't for Satomi Matsuzaki's little-girl voice, this music would be demagoguery: concussive beats, stabbing horn fills, pounding drums, a guitar chord that lands like a 10-ton weight on a 20-ton trampoline. I've never been more aware of the attack of an electric piano. And while a new love of knob-twiddling and loop-peddling brings more tonal colors, they're here for percussion, not atmosphere.
I didn't even want to make out all the words, in case I'd screw up the Obi Wan-spanks-Zelda Hero's Journey I had in my head in tracks one through nine. Snatches of story-like lyrics-- the stage-setting of "The Perfect Me", the flashes of conflict, warnings that "It's a trap"-- imply a narrative arc, with a detour for a new character on "Cast Off Crown", drummer Greg Saunier's sole vocal performance and a mini-epic that crams introduction, exposition, and resolution into three minutes.
The rest of the vocals are held down again by the high, heavily-accented singing of Matsuzaki. And the more song-like Deerhoof's music gets, the more obviously she becomes a barrier to new fans. The bleep-bloop speak-singing of "Kidz are So Small" seems to be the dealbreaker-- like you shouldn't take anything so sweet and cute seriously. (Listen to that gristly bleep in the background: that's a fucking droid, dude.) But wait 'til you hear the climactic "Matchbook Seeks Maniac": Jesus, Matsuzaki is the homecoming queen from Saturn, complete with silver glitter makeup and hip-side death ray. She rides the album's peak in the main chorus-- "I would sell my soul to the devil/ If I could be the top of the world"-- and when she belts the title phrase? It makes me quail.
Only thing is, after that 24-minute binge we get the 12-minute hangover of "Look Away". Like a rambling, shapeless homage to Yes' "Sound Chaser", it's listenable and it has a great instrumental traffic jam at the midpoint, but on this record it's just an appendix. All of a sudden the band is back to silences and blank stares, sustained tones and reverbed guitars. They're "deconstructing pop," which means they're asking questions. But on Friend Opportunity, Deerhoof work best when they blast right to the answers. | 2007-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2007-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Kill Rock Stars | January 23, 2007 | 8.9 | 0f8382fb-034d-4de0-adbc-29f1ccb439ea | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
Radiohead's Thom Yorke joins forces with Nigel Godrich, Flea, Joey Waronker, and David Byrne percussionist Mauro Refosco (the band he used to bring his solo album The Eraser to life) for the project's first studio album. | Radiohead's Thom Yorke joins forces with Nigel Godrich, Flea, Joey Waronker, and David Byrne percussionist Mauro Refosco (the band he used to bring his solo album The Eraser to life) for the project's first studio album. | Atoms for Peace: AMOK | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17632-atoms-for-peace-amok/ | AMOK | The Eraser was Thom Yorke's attempt to liberate himself from the burden of being frontman for the most over-analyzed rock band in the world and explore more insular and austere forms of electronic production. Atoms for Peace is likewise his attempt to liberate himself from the burden of being Thom Yorke, shirking the added psychoanalytical interpretations that solo releases inevitably attract by receding into an all-star cast (complete with a name-- cribbed from a Dwight Eisenhower speech and subsequent program by way of an Eraser track-- that sounds like some one-off 1980s charity-single supergroup). From the similarly greyscale Stanley Donwood cover art on down, AMOK is essentially Yorke's follow-up to The Eraser, backed by the band that performed the album's songs during a handful of live dates over 2009-10: producer/multi-instrumentalist Nigel Godrich, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, David Byrne percussionist Mauro Refosco, and drummer Joey Waronker (a.k.a. the 21st-century Jim Keltner).
Actually, "performed" is a gross understatement—in the hands of Atoms for Peace, The Eraser's songs were utterly transformed from skeletal synth sketches into full-blooded, festival-rocking workouts that gave Yorke occasion to test out the dance moves he would later flash in the "Lotus Flower" video. So there's good reason to believe that vibrant energy would spill over to AMOK. The new record is certainly a more colourful, layered work than The Eraser, and suggests all those late-night, Fela Kuti-soundtracked benders Yorke's talked about in interviews were as much educational as they were recreational. But if the opening "Before Your Very Eyes" faithfully assumes the jittery cadence of 70s Afrobeat, it doesn't seem all that interested in acquiring the same force, preferring to skitter rather than swagger. And it sets the tentative tone for an album that's intricately assembled and rhythmically complex, but oddly inert. "I made my bed, I'm lying in it," Yorke sings early on, a fitting advertisement for the unpredictable artistic course he's charted throughout his career. But over the entirety of AMOK, you get the overwhelming sense that, this time, his sheets are tucked in too tight.
Surprisingly, what this thing really needs is more Flea. While some Radiohead fans may view the union of Yorke's fragile, world-weary croon with Flea's cock-in-a-sock showboating as pure sacrilege, Mr. Slappeh De Bass commendably spends much of AMOK reminding us what a tastefully melodic player he can be when he keeps his right thumb in check. The album's most invigorating moments come when he takes the lead, like on the hypno-funk throb of "Stuck Together Pieces" and the mid-song ramp-up on "Dropped", whose accelerated, slippery groove indicates that Kevin Shields isn't the only 90s alt-rock icon currently getting mileage from his old drum'n'bass records.
But Flea can't carry the rhythm section alone. AMOK was reportedly built through a process of Yorke and Godrich handing over their laptop demos to the rest of the band for their embellishment. But Waronker and Refosco seem more intent on studiously replicating every last click and cut than giving the songs extra width. Instead, AMOK subtly applies its intensity through textural density—like with the fuzzy synth oscillations on "Before Your Very Eyes" that threaten to vaporize Yorke's vocal, or the eerie post-apocalyptic drones that permeate the title track's dubstep strut. But in each case, they set you up for a climax that never comes, with the songs pulling back or fading out just as they seem ready to erupt into something more fierce. For all the rhythmic chicanery at play, AMOK feels strangely static and contained, giving a perpetual sense of jogging in place.
This wouldn't be such an issue if Yorke assumed a more commanding presence, but his diffident vocals here-- which favor the hushed, high-register end of his range-- suggest a desire to, if not disappear completely, at least dissolve into the clattering backdrops. For all the electronic abstraction heard on The Eraser and Radiohead's King of Limbs, Yorke's performances were for the most part assertive and forthright, making the songs more impactful than their brittle structures initially suggested. On AMOK, Yorke's lyrics tend to drift in and out of decipherability, his impressionistic protest songs hinging on appropriations of well-worn phrases ("the will is strong, but the flesh is weak") or withering mantras ("care less, I couldn't care less"). And the more intimate the songs get, the more distant he becomes: the synth-swaddled soul ballad "Ingenue" counts as AMOK's most humane, romantic turn, yet also its most inscrutable.
And that's ultimately the most frustrating thing about AMOK: the fact that you can hear the great potential in every song, and so easily imagine how the hand-clapped hook of "Judge, Jury, and Executioner," the percussive breakdown of "Unless," and the creeping exasperation of "Reverse Running" would absolutely pop with a more vigorous attack. No doubt, like The Eraser, these songs will go down a like a storm in a live setting. But, given the caliber of players Yorke has on hand this time around, it's disappointing that we still have to make that assumption. | 2013-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | XL | February 25, 2013 | 6.9 | 0f8915a1-331b-4acd-bff1-6bfad4996348 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Flava and Chuck. Ghostface and Raekwon. Andre and Big Boi. Eazy and Dre. Eminem and Dre. The history of hip-hop ... | Flava and Chuck. Ghostface and Raekwon. Andre and Big Boi. Eazy and Dre. Eminem and Dre. The history of hip-hop ... | Ultramagnetic MC's: Critical Beatdown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8383-critical-beatdown/ | Critical Beatdown | Flava and Chuck. Ghostface and Raekwon. Andre and Big Boi. Eazy and Dre. Eminem and Dre. The history of hip-hop is full of odd couples-- most often, the raving, paranoid madman and his wiser, more stern companion. Hell, even The Sugarhill Gang had Master Gee. Hot-buttered a pop da pop dibbie dibble, my ass. The Ultramagnetic MC's, however, were the first all-lunatic rap group, one that would straitjacket the way from Digital Underground to Company Flow. If they offered anything truly innovative, it wasn't so much in their brilliantly swift, stilted flow or crushing rhythmic density as it was in the establishment of this unique dynamic.
To claim that Critical Beatdown is the greatest hip-hop album of 1988 would take a lot of courage-- after all, it was the zenith of hip-hop's Golden Age, boasting classics from nearly every influential late-1980s rap group. And even if Ultramagnetic's Kool Keith and Ced Gee didn't possess the intricate rhythms of Rakim and Chuck D, or paint vivid ghettoscapes as well as KRS-One or Slick Rick, Critical Beatdown is still probably the hardest, fastest, craziest hip-hop album of that year.
Critical Beatdown's surging psychosis is primarily due to its producers. Ced Gee was one of the most respected, radical maestros of the era, devoting some of his energies to Boogie Down Productions' untouchable Criminal Minded. DJ Moe Love was more interested in using the turntable's sounds than its samples', helping transform DJing into turntablism. Never mind the chilling hisses and heckles or the charred slabs of swollen funk; Beatdown has as much screaming as the average punk or metal album. Those screams, of course, are ingrained in the very fabric of the beat, concealed and crippled amidst the relentlessly fuzzing bass. And like most great rap albums, many of them come from the patron saint of yelps, James Brown, and flurry and flux with such abstraction and chaos that they make the beats feel deceptively fast-paced.
Though many of these samples were standard-issue in the 1980s, they're arranged into patterns like split-second greatest-hits discs. "Ease Back" never sounds particularly innovative, but the bruising conflict between The Meters' "Look-Ka Py Py" and the JBs' "The Grunt" justified the existence of sampling in an era in which to some it was still oddly despised. On "Ego Trippin'", the beat is a mosaic of hacks and howls that sound as if they could suddenly disappear under the monstrous beat. On "Funky [Remix]", the stratifications of snares and basses bring out some gentle, foreign incantations rhythmically chirped by buried female voices. On the record's best track, "Ain't It Good to You", the frantic, proto-drum-n-bass beat breaks into inebriated static and a core that sounds like every sample on the album searing into one another.
Kool Keith and Ced Gee's lyrics often seem as if they're not really about anything at all: The opening track asks the listener to do the one thing it's impossible to do to music-- "Watch me now"-- and things don't get much more clear after that. For instance, Keith's first verse begins, "Uno dos not quarto/ Spanish girls, they call me Pancho/ When on the mic, innovating this patterning," and ends, "I'm in a movie scene/ Ears turn, and needles lean/ To cut scratches." On "Ease Back", he "relates it verbal/ Dissing a mouse and smacking any gerbil/ I bought a Saab, a 1990 Turbo." Keith could have wished for any future model, but he went for the Saab: Now that's lyrical ingenuity. (In a recent Mojo interview, Keith reported that the MC's "read a lot of Popular Mechanics"-- so perhaps that explains his predilection for sensible motoring.)
But despite Keith's reputation, Ced Gee is the source of the album's most insane, digitalk-quantum gibberish, spouting lines such as, "A certified rhyme that I use, confuse, clock the time to a point/ A metaphysical radius," or, "Using frequencies and data, I am approximate." Ced's rhymes are so "approximate," in fact, that they should be studied in seminars alongside general relativity. And despite his philosop-hop, he can still sound as tough as NWA, claiming, "I will melt anyone who even tries to feel an emotion." That anti-sentiment sentiment sounds odd until we find out Ced is a robot: "I'm like a merchandise, a customized item/ Computer rapper for ducks who wanna bite them."
In a year that's already seen too many needless hip-hop reissues (from Nas to Non Phixion), Critical Beatdown's six bonus tracks-- including many of the group's early singles-- are probably not worth seeking out unless you're a bit more ultramagnetic than the casual fan. Those tracks are sparser and slower, and they feature group raps, an unhealthy amount of beatboxing and kind-hearted disco synths. The original 12-inch of "Chorus Line"-- with its punctured vocals and melodramatic reverb-- still has the faint residue of hyper-lunacy, even though Tim Dog is on the mic. The classic "Travelling at the Speed of Thought [Hip House Club Mix]" is a frilled techno fiesta, and is the most mainstream thing Kool Keith has ever done. (And even then, it has a clarinet solo.) For the initiated, though, the reissue sounds slightly crisper than the original, and the extras are nice additions to a flawless album-- one that stands tall today as one of Golden Age's most ageless. | 2004-06-10T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2004-06-10T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal / Rap | Next Plateau | June 10, 2004 | 9.7 | 0f8a6dd3-ddcc-49dd-8576-995e4321b728 | Alex Lindhart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alex-lindhart/ | null |
Two friends—one a longtime Neil Young fan, one a relative newcomer—team up for a warm, unpretentious covers EP that serves as an unlikely primer. | Two friends—one a longtime Neil Young fan, one a relative newcomer—team up for a warm, unpretentious covers EP that serves as an unlikely primer. | Jeff Rosenstock / Laura Stevenson: Still Young EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-rosenstock-laura-stevenson-still-young-ep/ | Still Young EP | A covers album is a great way for musicians to answer their least favorite question: What are your influences? But Jeff Rosenstock and Laura Stevenson’s EP of Neil Young tunes is more concerned with how we introduce others to the music we love. Still Young reimagines four selections from Young’s six-decade career, blowing up some of his simplest songs to a size more suited to Rosenstock and Stevenson’s punk background. It’s a compact document of two friends sharing and reinterpreting music with total freedom—a warm, unpretentious record that serves as an unlikely Neil Young primer.
Rosenstock and Stevenson go way back: As teenagers, they palled around the same Long Island punk scene, and they’ve played in each other’s bands on-and-off for years, most notably the defunct group Bomb the Music Industry! Their individual histories with Young’s music have been less aligned. “I knew I was supposed to like Neil Young but a lot of the ‘standards’ admittedly are not for me,” Rosenstock says in the EP’s liner notes. Stevenson, meanwhile, says she’s heard Young’s music at home for as long as she can remember. Eventually, Rosenstock caved and asked Stevenson for a Neil Young starter pack. Apparently it did the trick: Still Young is seemingly the first in a series of cover EPs as a duo.
Given their lengthy friendship, it’s no surprise that Rosenstock and Stevenson are a great pair. Stevenson’s voice is light and clear—a perfect foil to Rosenstock’s crackling, conversational whine, itself a marked contrast from his customary shout. Their vocals on “Harvest Moon” are not unlike Young’s duet with Linda Ronstadt in the original. Rosenstock and Stevenson’s take on the song is fairly straightforward, though subtle snare replaces the barroom “broom sweeps” of Young’s original, and the addition of vibraphone and droning guitar give the familiar melody a little tooth. “Through My Sails” (taken from Zuma, Young’s 1975 LP with Crazy Horse), gets the most pared-back treatment, layering harmonies over a simple structure of acoustic guitar and bass.
Sandwiched in the middle of Still Young are two amplified interpretations that some may not immediately recognize as Neil Young songs. The 1970 piano ballad “After the Gold Rush” receives a glowing synth riff and multi-tracked vocals that resemble a late-’80s pop-punk Christmas carol. “Ambulance Blues,” from Young’s 1974 LP On the Beach is another maximalist take on an austere song, and it’s easily the EP’s best offering. Where Young’s original featured muted harmonica and fiddle, Rosenstock and Stevenson stack on drones, keys, and wailing guitar. There’s even a faint siren in the distance—a bit on-the-nose, but fitting for two New Yorkers who’ve surely heard thousands in their lives. Another pal, the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, appears near the end to deliver a terse, gravelly cameo: “There ain’t nothin’ like a friend who can tell ya you’re just pissin’ in the wind,” he drawls. Rosenstock and Stevenson may have recorded Still Young just for the hell of it, but they’ve managed to uncover the best possible outcome of imposing one’s musical tastes on loved ones. | 2019-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | December 10, 2019 | 7.5 | 0f8d87d6-1f27-4121-8263-1183dede9304 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
On his latest solo record, the singer-songwriter continues his quiet excavation of self and the tumultuous world around him, exploring how a supposedly ordinary life is often anything but. | On his latest solo record, the singer-songwriter continues his quiet excavation of self and the tumultuous world around him, exploring how a supposedly ordinary life is often anything but. | Bill Callahan: Gold Record | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-callahan-gold-record/ | Gold Record | A man goes to the driveway to try and start his car. The engine keeps turning over but it won’t catch. An older man runs out from across the street and tells the younger one that cranking it more will only make things worse. He invites the younger man in for a beer, which turns into dinner with the older man and his wife. Despite living across the street from each other, the two men had never met, the younger one being “the type of guy who sees a neighbor outside/And stays inside to hide.” After dinner, the older man’s wife shows the younger man a room to rest, which, judging by the pictures on the wall and the things arranged just so, belonged to the couple’s now-dead son. The young man peers through the blinds and remembers that his own children will be home soon. Where had he been going? We never find out. The young man falls asleep and wakes up in the dark to the older couple standing in the doorway. “Son, it’s OK,” they say. “It’s OK. Son. We’re OK. We’re OK.”
Like a lot of Bill Callahan songs, especially the ones he started writing around the time of his 2005 album A River Ain’t Too Much to Love under his old performing name, Smog, “The Mackenzies,” from Gold Record, handles concrete events with the texture and ambiguity of dreams. Callahan’s voice is low—lower every album, it feels like—and his arrangements, while thoughtful and quietly surprising, are almost always anchored by a lone acoustic guitar. Listen at a distance and you might just hear another man in chambray doing his earnest American thing. But listen closer—the funny asides, the way the narratives ramble and unfold like a new idea explored in real time—and you can hear someone exploring how a supposedly ordinary life is often anything but.
His last album, 2019’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, focused on marriage and parenthood. As the father of two boys under five, I’d never heard music that better captured the wonder and trials of domestic life from a man’s perspective—a comfort, especially, at a time when the culture was investigating what, exactly, made a good man in the first place. In the past, his characters’ attitudes toward women and children had been coyly misanthropic: They fantasized about kidnapping kids from the grocery store, made blowup dolls out of their ex-girlfriend’s clothes, and found their moral vocation in cunnilingus. One song, 1999’s “Let’s Move to the Country,” teased commitment, ending on the line, “Let’s start a… / Let’s have a…,” but left off the words—“family,” “baby”—the man couldn’t—or wouldn’t—say.
If Shepherd’s man was settling down, Gold Record imagines the sweet old codger he may one day become. He chauffeurs two newlyweds through the desert and feels stupid for giving them advice, even though they asked (“Pigeons”); he grumbles at the pop singer comforting his audience with hollow bromides (“Protest Song”) and reconciles himself to marriage with a woman who hates watching him eat but hates seeing him go hungry, too (“Breakfast”). Reality has borne down on him, but he remains available to wonder: for art (“Another Song,” “As I Wander”), for the babies “with eyes like honey-drunk bees,” for the ways “the moon can make a false love feel true” (“35”). And as though to close the existential loop opened 21 years earlier, he revisits “Let’s Move to the Country,” filling in the words—“family,” “baby”—he’d left off before. In 1999, the song played like the daydream of nervous young lovers getting ahead of themselves; on Gold Record, it plays like nostalgia: Remember when we had plans? Yeah. That was good.
For all its masculine cosplay, the heart of Gold Record is spontaneous, intuitive and feminine, a flock of little dreams loose in the Milky Way. You never sense him straining to make a point or steer the story. If anything, Callahan often seems like he’s following his songs instead of leading them, carefully and open to all paths, the way a birder follows the call from wherever it comes. (He is a meditator, no surprise.) Even ”Ry Cooder,” a tribute to the roots-rock musician and possibly the dumbest song Callahan has written in 27 years, is alive with punchlines, zig-zags, and little surprises a stricter sort of attention would miss. Like all supposedly simple men, Callahan makes a show of putting one foot steadily in front of the other. Then, suddenly, he leaps.
The advice to the newlyweds in “Pigeons,” by the way, is this:
When you are dating, you only see each other
And the rest of us can go to hell
But when you are married, you are married to the whole wide world
The rich, the poor
The sick and the well
The straights and gays
And the people that say, ‘We don’t use those terms these days.’
Callahan is in his mid-50s now, and has been making records for more than half his life. Listening to them in sequence, you can hear a songwriter moving slowly from skepticism and alienation toward gratitude and warmth. Like a lot of artists on Drag City—a label Callahan has now been on for almost 30 years, longer than any other artist on their roster—Callahan comes to his folk music from a place both post-punk and post-hippie, with the individualism and reticence of the former and the utopian intimacy of the latter. He is cranky, but generous, the kind of performer who brings you inside a secret, and who, even in jest, seems to treat his circumstances as a gift.
In a bit of poetic consonance, Callahan became a father just a few years before losing his mother to cancer: The child becomes the parent, the parent moves on to make room for the new child. “I didn’t ever feel like she was being honest or expressing her feelings my whole life,” he said in an interview with Pitchfork in 2019. “As she was getting older, I begged her: Show your children who you are, because we want to know before you die. She couldn’t do it.” It’s a stark quote, harsh and soft at the same time. But in its wholeness, there’s a truth. Gold Record captures both sides: The yen to collapse the spaces between people, and the acknowledgment that some spaces are too cold to cross.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | September 4, 2020 | 8 | 0f968a38-8bb9-4f80-a1ba-24ddc56f181d | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | |
Seth Haley's most closeup-friendly project is remastered and re-packaged alongside four new bonus tracks by venerable label Ghostly. | Seth Haley's most closeup-friendly project is remastered and re-packaged alongside four new bonus tracks by venerable label Ghostly. | Com Truise: Cyanide Sisters EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15085-cyanide-sisters-ep/ | Cyanide Sisters EP | The hardest-charging of synth obsessive Seth Haley's many projects, Com Truise debuted in June with a free download release of this very EP. Bolstered by a nascent fanbase from Haley's other concerns (the woodsy Boards of Canada revivalism of Sarin Sunday, the chewy instrumental hip-hop of Airliner, and SYSTM's frazzled electro), a retro-drenched series of mixes released under the Komputer Cast banner, and eventual remixes for fellow 80s flag-wavers Neon Indian and Twin Shadow, Truise built up a modest buzz, enough to be noticed by the folks at Ghostly. Remastered and re-packaged alongside four new bonus tracks, this reissue marks Haley's debut for the label, and immediately foregrounds him as one of the most interesting and promising producers to mine the weird intersection between 80s computer music nostalgia and proggy, electronic funk.
If we gave awards to musicians for art direction, Haley would be a lock for Best Newcomer. From the shock of red-orange and the Designers Republic-friendly flourishes that grace his official site through to his expertly refer- and rever-ential artwork sleeves, one might conclude that Haley's an aesthete, and certainly meticulous. This is relevant insofar as Com Truise's music also gives the impression of being immaculately designed. In the particular world of synthesizer music, everything is iterative, and a sound can always be pushed. This means that doubt is always around the corner, and finished tracks are frequently slowed by anxiety over whether they've been adjusted to paramount effect. Haley, you can tell, knows exactly what he's going for and exactly how to get it.
His detractors might argue that this is because he isn't working from his own vision at all. If there's a knock on Haley, it's that his music is too easily reducible to its influences, and that those influences are as decipherable as the source of his spoonerized pseudonym. It will, for example, be very difficult for anyone to write about this EP without mentioning Boards of Canada's Geogaddi, many of whose more uptempo, tremulous moments are echoed within, most notably on the pulsing synth swirls of tracks like "Tripyra" and "Sundriped". That there is generally a nostalgia angle being worked here probably also doesn't help.
And yet, as you move between the burned out shimmer of "Slow Peels" to the lurching, stutter-stepped prog of "BASF Ace", it scarcely feels like it matters; while a lot of Cyanide Sisters very patently tugs at the archetypes around electronic music and prog and nostalgia and the 80s, it does so with a muscle, gnarliness, and craft that makes it difficult to deny. In other moments, like the classical guitar sampling "Norkuy" and the vocal-led "Pyragony", Truise steps far enough out of character to suggest he's got plenty of other tricks up his sleeve. According to Ghostly, there's a proper full-length due later this year, so it won't be long before we have a better sense of Truise's path. Even if he just kept on mining this particular vein, though, he'd still be better than most. | 2011-02-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-02-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | February 9, 2011 | 8 | 0f9a90a3-df06-4f9c-8aec-dbe2338ae9c7 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
Following a full-on immersion into art-pop with last year's More, Alexis Georgopoulos' Arp project returns with an EP that strikes a more even balance between electronic instrumentals and vocal-led songs. | Following a full-on immersion into art-pop with last year's More, Alexis Georgopoulos' Arp project returns with an EP that strikes a more even balance between electronic instrumentals and vocal-led songs. | Arp: Pulsars e Quasars EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19789-arp-pulsars-e-quasars-ep/ | Pulsars e Quasars EP | Tussle's music frequently resembled electro-funk-as-astronaut ice cream: dehydrated, alkaline, functional but in an abstemious way. As Arp, ex-member Alexis Georgopoulos has retained his old group's basis in krautrock and modular synthesis but has taken it in freer directions, relaxing out of Tussle's parched technicality across a string of increasingly warm, woolly and hard to categorize records. As Arp's first two efforts form a symmetrical pair, so does new EP Pulsars e Quasars with last year's improbable More.
On the 2007 debut In Light, Arp drifted serenely among cold stars, turning to the ethereal side of Tussle's beat-driven German electronic idiom. Then, he touched down on some clement sunset shore with the grainy, glowing 2010 effort The Soft Wave, hooking into the neo-new-age trend of Oneohtrix Point Never and Emeralds with minimal arpeggio suites. (Seldom has a musician's alias been so on-the-nose as Arp's: It's like if Tim Hecker called himself "Drone" or Axel Willner went by "Loop.")
Having dispensed with the nocturnal and diurnal sides of that aesthetic, Arp made a startling but ultimately comprehensible lateral leap to another part of the '70s electronic pop continuum on More, an art-pop album in the style of early Brian Eno, but more raw-boned and tattered. More omnivorous, too, with sonic touchstones spanning Tin Pan Alley, Motown, '60s garage rock, and '70s glam, all polished to one brassy consistency and decoratively etched with analog electronics.
Following the impeccable abstraction of its predecessor, More's prominent adenoidal vocals and live instrumentation took some getting used to before you could even hear it as the same artist. But there was a sense of continuity in the hushed crackle of analog signals, sealing in the garish songs. If it had come first, Pulsars e Quasars, a more evenly balanced between electronic instrumentals and vocal-led songs, would have made for a less abrupt transition.
Pulsars feels looser and livelier than More, using a pickup band rather than solo multi-tracking. On the title track, a jaunty guitar line, phased slightly green and nauseous, supports a stuffy vocal. After starting simply, the guitars gain definition and start to churn, with waves of distortion like impalpable explosions in the background, toward a cheering cherry sunburst finish. "UHF1" similarly begins in a metronomic place before the guitar phases start swooshing and crumpling in the far corners, pumping in a chaotic energy that cues mutations into dance-rock and heroic noise; in both songs, the instrumental melody is stickier than the faintly droll vocal intoning.
Though the psych-pop songs stand out, the instrumental electronic side of Arp, which gets two fine showings here, is arguably preferable. On "Chromatiques II (Extended Mix)", an elegant decanter of delicate periodic tones gorgeously fills and drains with morning light. Its many voices grow freer and freer, like a starchy choir gradually easing into gospel expression. Meanwhile, "New Persuasion (Version by Le Révélateur)" is a precise and detailed krautrock voyage, with low arpeggios tensed as if about to strike, a lurking bass like footsteps coming up behind you and a synth melody that wafts out like silver smoke on the dark.
There are a couple of weak spots on this EP: "Suns" is attention-getting as a blown-out noise intro but is not a piece you'd return to on its own, and “On Returning”, built on a loop of thickly chugging electric guitar chords, presses onward like a huge, mindless drill. It's pretty boring and one-note, but if Georgopoulos' indulgent, decadent tendencies produce the occasional dud, it seems a small price to pay for the intrigue of looking forward to what he’s going to do next. | 2014-09-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-09-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mexican Summer | September 24, 2014 | 6.7 | 0fa5b421-140a-45e9-b43e-ef058f84b577 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The Black Keys combine with many of hip-hop's top stars-- Mos Def, Q-Tip, RZA, Raekwon-- on a surprisingly well thought-out record. | The Black Keys combine with many of hip-hop's top stars-- Mos Def, Q-Tip, RZA, Raekwon-- on a surprisingly well thought-out record. | BlakRoc: Blakroc | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13747-blakroc/ | Blakroc | You might think the remarkably similar and undeniably terrible Black Lips/GZA collaborations from earlier this year would have made everyone involved in the BlakRoc project-- Black Keys plus hip-hop artists, to be reductive-- re-think their decision. But by being so blatant about what it did wrong-- combining notoriously sloppy and notoriously methodical artists-- the Lips and GZA may have actually have provided an unintentional boost.
No such problem exists in BlakRoc-- the Black Keys recently toe-dipped into hip-hop by having Danger Mouse produce their last LP and their reverent, values-based approach to the blues nicely dovetails with the ethos of the MCs involved-- mostly guys who came up in NYC during the late and mid-1990s. And while this simpatico relationship ensures that BlakRoc allays all fears of being about as good as any previous rap-rock full-lengths, for better or worse, it ultimately serves as both the floor and the ceiling. If you're okay with "solid" being the main descriptor for a project boasting such well-known talent, BlakRoc won't be a disappointment.
In the track review for "Stay Off the Fuckin' Flowers", Tom Breihan described it as resembling Edan's "Beauty and the Beat, but with good rapping," which is pretty dead-on in two aspects. Raekwon is still in Gemstar-sharp Iron Chef mode here, in a performance worthy of comparison to deeper cuts from Cuban Linx... Pt. 2. Granted, it widely deviates from the typical subject matter on BlakRoc-- I suppose it's a testament to the respect given the Black Keys that most raps here work within the standard blues-rock tropes of hard times (most notably, "Hard Times") and no-good women ("Hope You're Happy", "Tellin' Me Things").
More importantly, in spite of the presence of tireless self-promoters like Damon Dash, Jim Jones, and RZA, they never go overboard and play up the masturbatory "look at us, we made a rap record with psychedelic rock guitars" angle like Edan and his ilk did, although the acknowledgment of the guys behind the boards make for the most awkward lyric on the whole thing-- "fuck the white ones, the Black Keys got so much soul."
But the Keys and Mos Def make the most of the stoned salutation "On the Vista", the sort of sing-rapping about the kind of "total control" one only feels in a hallucinatory state-- it wouldn't feel out of place on The Ecstatic, and most importantly, it could close the door on Mos relying on Fishbone as being some sort of apotheosis of rock music. Meanwhile, short-lived Dipset hook lady Nicole Wray (the one who made 1998's awesome "Make It Hot" as just plain Nicole) simmers admirably on the streetlamp-lit noir&B of "Why Can't I Forget Him".
And yet for all the brown-acid reverb, BlackRoc often comes off as a resolutely sober affair-- mutual respect leads to no on stepping on each other's toes or letting loose. I suppose the RZA's having fun, even if it rarely feels like anyone else is in on it-- he's strictly in quasi-erudite Bobby Digital mode here, where you actually prefer his nonsensical wordplay to moments when he's actually intelligible. Even if it never really syncs up, the attempt to match Zep-drum reverb to double-time Dirty South flows on "Coochie"-- which isn't available on digital versions of the record-- turns out to be the record's riskiest sonic experiment, but even that seems too restrained. Yes, a song called "Coochie" with Ol' Dirty Bastard and Ludacris is too restrained: Think about that for a second.
But even if the lame parts of BlakRoc are more noticeable than the enjoyable, what really sticks out is how easy this all feels--- not once does anything feel like awkward ambassadorship. For a project that spawned an accompanying tricked-out Camaro, it's a pleasantly modest album. And really, it's cool that a somewhat non-obvious choice like the Black Keys get to be involved with something like this. So, fine if BlakRoc's impact isn't always musical: At the very least, its optimistic approach feels pretty exciting when too many hip-hop fans are more willing to peel off self-satisfied jeremiads about the genre's demise. | 2009-12-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-12-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | BlakRoc | December 1, 2009 | 6.7 | 0fa9548a-ccc9-435c-a65c-07b9ed619f19 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The slowcore icons’ new album bears all the hallmarks of their classic records: plodding drums, skeletal basslines, and guitar work that sparkles in the darkness like dew on a cobweb. | The slowcore icons’ new album bears all the hallmarks of their classic records: plodding drums, skeletal basslines, and guitar work that sparkles in the darkness like dew on a cobweb. | Duster: Duster | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/duster-duster/ | Duster | For the better part of two decades, Duster’s small catalog was handed down like a myth. From one smoky dorm room to another, one road-worn Econoline van to the next, their records spread primarily through passionate word of mouth. Their insider status suited their songs, which they’ve since termed “experimental depressed music”—it’s never been the sort of stuff that naturally generates headlines. Nearly every word on those early records is sung in a grave whisper, so their followers responded in kind, keeping the music like a secret.
Listening back, the music that Clay Parton, Canaan Dove Amber, and Jason Albertini made together is diffuse, without much pretense or expectation. Even 2000’s Contemporary Movement, the last album of the band’s initial run and easily their most accessible, feels beautifully haphazard and exploratory. Like many of their labelmates on Up Records at the time—including Quasi, Built to Spill, and Modest Mouse—they found magic in a free-associative take on indie rock, playing their songs as if remembering them from dreams. And then they receded into the shadows for almost 20 years. The story, as it’s most often told, suggests that the band more or less vanished while their legend grew.
But during their ostensible hiatus, the members of Duster continued making music both together and separately. Albertini’s Helvetia carried on the slow, sad spirit of Duster’s best songs, often accompanied by Amber. Parton’s Static Cult label released some of those records, while Parton continued making similarly distraught solo music music as Eiafuawn. So while it’s tempting to view Duster’s recent activity—touring, a Numero Group box set, and now a new album—as a reemergence, the band sees it as a continuation. They just kind of spaced out for a little while.
True to their word, their new, self-titled album bears all the hallmarks of classic Duster records: plodding drums, skeletal basslines, and guitar work that sparkles in the darkness like dew on a cobweb. The songs hiss menacingly in the unpredictable way that their early tape recordings did, as if their four-track had begun to resent them for all the feedback and bummer vibes. They recorded this album live in Parton’s garage, which no doubt supplies some of the songs’ chilly precarity. Per Parton, the only difference now that they’re older is that they buy blank cassettes on eBay rather than “steal[ing] them from the drugstore.”
Even at their clearest, the lyrics on Duster’s older records tended to get clouded out by tape fuzz and static. And yet, you could always tell that, whatever they were singing about, things weren’t going well. Parton has described the overall tone as “purring distress,” a sensation that’s more legible on the new album. “I’m Lost” consists of the dreary refrain “Don’t you know I’m lost?” over an appropriately circuitous guitar riff that feels like getting caught in a thought loop. On “Summer War,” Duster sing explicitly of the apocalypse, of how the “end is coming to take us home.” One of the most surprising moments is “Go Back,” on which the band builds soaring melodies out of ultra-minimal guitar leads, feedback, and static as they sing about lost innocence and a fall from the garden. Like something the Jesus and Mary Chain might pray in a particularly dissociative state, it’s desperate, weightless, and impossibly sad.
In an interview with Vice last year, Parton explained that changing times have only underscored longstanding Duster philosophy. “We didn’t feel like we belonged in this world before,” he said. “And the world is only an even bleaker hellscape now.” Duster holds a mirror to that world, offering existentially troubled lyrics over droney, drawn-out instrumentals. It’s of a piece with the music they’ve always released, but there’s something hopeful in that. Even if you wake up one day 20 years from now and don’t recognize the hellish world around you, you can still press on the way you always have, with your friends at your side.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Muddguts | December 26, 2019 | 7.4 | 0fbac39b-9df5-4596-8056-1cbcef2bcceb | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
For a quarter-century, the Necks have developed a near-mythic status for building hour-long piano/drums/bass pieces that overflow with the tension of contrasts. Vertigo, their 18th album, often finds the trio at their finest, delighting in their instrumental ideas like they’re dancing. | For a quarter-century, the Necks have developed a near-mythic status for building hour-long piano/drums/bass pieces that overflow with the tension of contrasts. Vertigo, their 18th album, often finds the trio at their finest, delighting in their instrumental ideas like they’re dancing. | The Necks: Vertigo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21133-vertigo/ | Vertigo | The Necks have developed a near-mythic status. For a quarter century, they've been building hour-long piano/drums/bass pieces that overflow with the tension of contrasts—beauty versus bedlam, melody versus discord, momentum versus inertia. Live, the Sydney trio do it off the cuff, shaping tiny themes with familiar tools into improvised monoliths. Though the Necks draft more concrete plans for their records, they wield that same sense of wonder when they’re composing. At their best, the group’s albums sound meticulous but feel extemporaneous, like synchronized exhalations from a group whose chemistry suggests rock'n'roll’s best songwriting tandems. Made by just three musicians of ostensibly modest avant-garde-scene means, the Necks’ sets and records possess the same gripping power as a sitcom or documentary that might have cost millions of dollars and dozens of people to craft. The largely acoustic answer to New Zealand’s electric the Dead C, the Necks make miracles of efficiency and magnetism.
Vertigo is the Necks’ 18th album and second for the New York label Northern Spy, the group’s first stable American home. Like many of its predecessors, Vertigo runs as one uninterrupted track, with 44 minutes roughly split between two interwoven movements. It does, however, break from the past by increasing the role of roaring electric guitar (played by drummer Tony Buck) and wafting-and-hiccupping synthesizers and electronic accessories (played by pianist Chris Abrahams). These additions largely shape a drone that fluctuates throughout the album and serves as a springboard for the group’s convulsive repartee. The exact nature of the sustained tone changes: Vertigo begins, for instance, with the growl of Lloyd Swanton’s bowed bass and dense sheets of piano runs. Near the halfway point, though, it’s a high-pitched synthesizer purr, countered by a Wurlitzer organ whose every chord dissipates into space. Swanton emerges from the impasse with steady, resonant bass sweeps, briefly conjuring the spirit of Tony Conrad’s microtonal masterpieces. And just before track’s end, an organ, bass, and Buck’s scraped drums cohere into a gigantic sigh, so slow and resonant it suggests plate tectonics.
But these interlocking phases are only the undercarriage of Vertigo, the framework upon which the Necks’ usual, brilliant instrumental interplay moves. When Abrahams inlays beautifully ascending melodies inside Buck’s percussive din early on, the effect is magical. And when Buck divides Swanton’s long, bagpipe-like tones with a stuttering, trip-hop rhythm, you listen in anticipation, trying to foretell what might happen next, only to be surprised by the Naked City-style ruptures Buck soon bangs out. This is the Necks at their finest, playing group games of chutes and ladders and delighting in their instrumental ideas like they’re dancing.
But Vertigo does stumble slightly through its rather obvious series of arcs: An opening swell cedes to a comedown that sends the members out into space, only to reconvene a quarter-hour later. This back-and-forth motion defines much of Vertigo and, by record’s end, it gets a bit tedious. And, in part because of the underpinning drone around which the trio works, the Necks are busier and more restless here than in the past, sometimes moving as if trapped inside a pinball machine. The Necks typically make elliptical music, where restraint and suggestion power tension and momentum. Their last album, 2013’s Open, epitomized that. Vertigo, on the other hand, could do more with less—of, say, the tawdry horror-show electronics so prominent near the 12-minute mark or the shock-and-awe noise that populates the back half. The concept of working over and alongside a drone congests the Necks’ customary grace.
The Necks have always confounded easy taxonomy. Their piano-trio semblance has often shoehorned them into jazz circles, though their pronounced lack of swing and structure has infamously confounded critics in those circles. And though there seems to be a natural spot for the Necks in experimental spaces, their presentation—three middle-aged men playing expensive acoustic instruments, often in esteemed concert halls—can make them a strange fit for the underground crowd. Their love of extended pieces and clattering crescendos even suggests a place in post-rock, though their music is often too incidental and illusory for the templates that term implies. With its part-time, eerie John Carpenter glow and sudden noise-rock spasms, Vertigo only renders the Necks as more vexing and unidentifiable. Though the Necks occasionally slip into predictability across this session, Vertigo epitomizes their career-long unpredictability, or their ability to start at one point and arrive somewhere entirely unexpected. Vertigo is a minor Necks record, destined to stand forever in the shadow of the 2013 opus Open. But, after a quarter century, the trio’s explorations still sound as ecstatic as they do limitless. That, at least, is another minor miracle. | 2015-11-09T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2015-11-09T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Experimental | ReR / Northern Spy / Fish of Milk | November 9, 2015 | 7.7 | 0fbbe4da-d823-49f0-834a-1662f62cb96c | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
This new seven-disc Fall box set surveys every single and B-side the Mancunian institution has released since 1978. It provides a tidy, linear history of a notoriously unstable band. | This new seven-disc Fall box set surveys every single and B-side the Mancunian institution has released since 1978. It provides a tidy, linear history of a notoriously unstable band. | The Fall: The Fall - Singles 1978-2016 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-fall-the-fall-singles-1978-2016/ | The Fall - Singles 1978-2016 | The last thing the world needs is another Fall compilation. The sheer volume of music that Mark E. Smith (and whoever he’s barking orders at) has produced over the past four decades has resulted in so many anthologies and quickie collections that you could build a house out of the jewel cases. But Cherry Red’s new seven-disc Fall box set instantly crushes them all like Godzilla on Bambi. It’s a survey of every single and B-side the Mancunian institution has released since 1978, providing a tidy, linear history of a notoriously unstable band. As with everything about the Fall, however, even this simple strategy is actually a lot more complicated than it appears.
Back in 2006, The Guardian’s Dave Simpson attempted to track down every former member of the Fall, a list that could fill a small town’s phonebook. And there could likely be another compelling in-depth article written about the effort required to put this box set together. The Fall have released over 50 singles to date, and through almost as many labels, some of which are long-defunct. Singles 1978-2016 is the product of a nearly four-year, Indiana Jones-worthy quest, but with the religious artifacts replaced by an even more elusive, holier grail: proper publishing-rights paperwork. So the fact that this box set exists at all is a minor miracle. What’s even more remarkable is the fact that, while listening to these seven discs attentively in one sitting would require you to book a day off from your job, it rarely feels like work. Even after their fleeting late-’80s moment as a Top 40 threat had passed, and the quality of their albums became more of a crap shoot, the Fall remained an intriguingly unpredictable singles band, one whose cantankerous, chaotic reputation belies their economical songcraft and stylistic malleability.
Singles 1978-2016 emulates the segregated format of Beggars Banquet’s popular 1990 compilations 458489 A Sides and 458489 B Sides. The box set’s first three discs (which are also available as a separate package) chronologically chart the journey from debut single “Bingo-Master’s Break Out” to last year’s “Wise Ol’ Man,” with each disc loosely representing a distinct phase in their evolution: the minimalist garage-punk origins, the semi-pop era, and the post-millennial free-for-all. The other four discs plot a parallel, circuitous course through the B-sides. (It’s a testament to Smith’s uncommon industriousness that the tracklist here is dramatically different than the Fall’s other career-spanning, multi-disc box set of note, The Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004.) Separating the A-sides from B-sides makes a certain amount of sense, providing both an easy entry point into the band’s labyrinthine catalog and a scenic path for more committed listeners to go down. At the same time, with a band like the Fall, the distinction between A-sides and B-sides was often largely arbitrary—a B-side banger like 1981’s “Fantastic Life” could be just as rousing as any lead single from the same era; an A-side rumbler like 1986’s “Living Too Late” could be just as cold and imposing as any oddity tucked on the flipside.
From the get-go, the Fall were clearly unlike any other punk band. Sure, the surface sneer of gut-punching early singles like “It’s the New Thing” may have aligned Mark. E. Smith with other Johnny Rotten-come-latelys, but his overstuffed lyric sheets were loaded with contrarian critiques of a punk culture that had become just as conformist and close-minded as the establishment it railed against. The Fall are often classified as post-punk—a movement synonymous with anti-rock experimentation and futurist principles—but in their early years, they were more interested in putting a post-modernist spin on pre-punk sounds. They cultivated mutant strains of country (“Fiery Jack”), 1950s rockabilly (“Lie Dream of a Casino Soul,” which sounds like “Tequila” being subjected to electro-shock therapy), and 1960s garage (“Psycho Mafia,” a showcase for original keyboardist Una Baines’ eerily emotionless, ice-picked organ lines). And even as Smith’s lyrics turned increasingly cryptic, he still trafficked in relatable subjects—football, World War II, over-caffeination—that made him more at home with the factory workers at the local pub than the art-school students at the discotheque. But then, Smith had a peculiar gift for rendering everyday English urbanity as dystopian sci-fi. The clanging “I’m Into C.B.,” for example, begins as a cheeky fetishization of trucker culture, before revealing its narrator as a sad-sack, jobless shut-in who uses his radio for devious prankster purposes—an uncanny prophecy of 21st-century online-trolling.
The arrival of guitarist (and Smith’s future wife) Brix in 1983 didn’t so much change the Fall’s sound as embolden it. The haunted-house organ sounds of old were updated to bright synths, the drum-machine tinkering was beefed up into danceable beats, and Smith’s verbal spew was unleashed in more controlled, graceful arcs. And with Brix dropping shout-’em-out pop hooks like cherries on a mud sundae, the band enjoyed a steady six-record run on Beggars Banquet that yielded their most immediate, enduring songs. At the time, they were producing work of such high quality—and at such a high volume—that they could afford to relegate bop-along earworms like “C.R.E.E.P.” and “Oh! Brother” to non-album singles, while punting definitive tracks like “No Bulbs” to stopgap EPs.
Up to this point, the Fall’s B-sides form an alternate canon every bit as wonderful and frightening as their headlining tracks, yielding a wealth of alternate-universe indie-rock touchstones (“2nd Dark Age”), hypno-dirge rants (“Repetition”), and eerily prescient premonitions (from the ominous “Auto Tech Pilot”: “I really think this computer thing is getting out of hand!”). Starting in the ’90s, the bloated demands of the CD-single took hold, with remixes, live takes, alternate versions, and even Christmas songs starting to appear. They’re emblematic of an era when the Fall seemed to be settling comfortably into middle age, even after Brix departed (she later rejoined) and the band’s revolving door began to swing more vigorously. It was a decade spent embracing trends (see: the Madchester-grooved “Telephone Thing”); flirting with elegantly sung, string-sweetened middle-brow indie (“Popcorn Double Feature”); mashing up reggae standards (“Why Are People Grudgeful?”); quoting Paul Simon (“15 Ways”); and twisting to golden oldies (“F-‘Oldin’ Money”). The lager-sloshing 1999 single “Touch Sensitive” could even pass for a Fatboy Slim jam, a fact reinforced by its festival-ready remix.
But after this period of streamlined aesthetic stability, the Fall barreled into the new millennium oscillating violently between accessibility and inscrutability, as if the Y2K bug had bypassed our computers and lodged itself firmly in Mark E. Smith’s brain. On the one hand, the Fall’s later years have seen Smith re-embrace his raw, garage-punk roots, albeit with a more muscular menace. The 2004 single “Theme From Sparta F.C. #2” adheres to his tradition of soccer-stadium-worthy chants, but comes as vicious as a pack of marauding hooligans. “Reformation! (Uncut)” takes aim at the ex-bandmates who abandoned him mid-tour in 2006, wielding its sinister two-note bass riff like a pulse rifle. On the other hand, as his line-up has steadied over the past decade, Smith has been all-too-eager to disembowel his band’s sound—by 2013’s “The Remainderer” and “Amorator!,” the Fall had effectively become an improvisational ensemble, their songs serving as rusted spittoons for Smith’s increasingly slurred, phlegm-soaked invectives.
Strange as it is to say about a seven-disc, eight-hour box set, Singles 1978-2016 is not exactly a comprehensive overview of the Fall’s discography. By its very nature, it must exclude the band’s greatest front-to-back album, 1982’s Hex Enduction Hour, which yielded several certified classics (“Hip Priest,” “The Classical”) but no official singles. Likewise, it can’t include essential album cuts (from early rave-up “Industrial Estate” to 2005 bruiser “What About Us?”) that never made it onto seven-inch. But this is still a staggering monument all the same, an elaborately detailed portrait of a shambolic artist whose astonishing productivity, creative restlessness, and utter disdain for the niceties of civil society know no bounds. This is Mark E. Smith’s lawn, and we’re all invited to get the fuck off of it. | 2017-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Cherry Red | November 22, 2017 | 8.4 | 0fc07985-f4fe-4a10-9083-0dc84118153d | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The Oakland-based heavy music band returns with its first album in 6 years. Concise and crystal clear, it feels almost provocatively unadorned. | The Oakland-based heavy music band returns with its first album in 6 years. Concise and crystal clear, it feels almost provocatively unadorned. | Kowloon Walled City: Piecework | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kowloon-walled-city-piecework/ | Piecework | Heaviness isn’t measured in volume in Kowloon Walled City’s music. Some of the most crushing parts of Piecework, the Bay Area band’s fourth full-length, are moments of total silence. Tension and release are crucial parts of the doom metal and noise rock they draw from, but those dynamics are rarely executed this patiently—or powerfully. Throughout Piecework, tension is drawn with excruciating pauses that hang longer than you expect, and the release comes not as a booming crescendo but as a relieved exhale. It’s subtle work, and Kowloon Walled City are the rare loud band that asks you to lean in closely to hear everything they’re doing.
Minimalism has always been a weapon in Kowloon Walled City’s arsenal. They’ve never had much fat on their compositions, but on Piecework, even the connective tissue has been excised. The elements are the same as ever, all grinding against each: sparse guitars, rattling bass, bone-dry drums, and Scott Evans’ anxious howl. It’s not as though earlier Kowloon Walled City albums were lush, but even for a band this well-acquainted with negative space, Piecework feels almost provocatively unadorned.
The naked production of the album, which was engineered and mixed by Evans, ensures that every note hits with full force. In this corner of heavy music, the finer details of riffs are often swallowed in squalls of feedback and noise. Evans and co-guitarist Jon Howell seek clarity throughout Piecework’s concise 32 minutes. Their twisting interplay is fully audible even in the loudest moments. As “You Had a Plan” swells to its frantic finale, one guitar holds down the main riff while the other splashes an expressionistic solo atop it. Both guitar parts ring out, crystal clear, into the darkness.
As vividly defined as the instruments are, Evans takes a more impressionistic approach as a lyricist. “She chews the air silently/And through the haze, like a pulse, you sing,” he intones on “Splicing,” invoking one of the album’s many unnamed characters. There’s something tantalizing and just out of reach about Evans’ vignettes, a thrilling contrast to the concrete sound of the music. Even the relatively direct title track, which Evans has said was inspired by his grandmother’s decades-long career sewing shirt collars, defies easy analysis: “Stars shine through tin on plaster/Straight arms won’t stop the world.”
The lyrics were the final element to fall into place for Piecework, the result of a nasty bout of writer’s block that left Evans staring at a blank page for over a year. “Part of that was me wondering, does anyone even need to hear from me? Maybe we should call this. Nobody needs to hear another middle-aged white dude yelling,” Evans told Treble earlier this month. Whether through self-awareness or self-doubt, that neurosis led to the longest gestation period in Kowloon Walled City’s discography: Piecework comes six years after Grievances, a break twice as long as any previous interim between albums. The agony of that gap is palpable in the music. Evans and his bandmates sound wearied by the act of creation, like each riff and drum fill is being extracted at the cost of some of their vitality. But even when the music feels emotionally draining, it lurches forward, stumbling toward catharsis. The stars shine through.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Neurot | October 12, 2021 | 7.2 | 0fc30cf5-24cf-4c19-879b-b3a4671cfb74 | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
The Swedish producer Axel Willner's dark, exquisitely detailed fourth album as the Field is a moody work that perfectly balances sleekness and aggression. Cupid's Head is thick and dense, a miles-long oil slick that radiates ultraviolet hues. | The Swedish producer Axel Willner's dark, exquisitely detailed fourth album as the Field is a moody work that perfectly balances sleekness and aggression. Cupid's Head is thick and dense, a miles-long oil slick that radiates ultraviolet hues. | The Field: Cupid's Head | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18538-the-field-cupids-head/ | Cupid's Head | Everything changes, but Axel Willner stays the same. Since the Swedish producer's debut LP as the Field, 2007's techno-pop landmark From Here We Go Sublime, Willner has patiently augmented the project's sound with each successive release, adding subtle touches that are significant in scope and texture. He operates with a workmanlike consistency, putting out an album about every two years, each with nearly identical packaging—two lines of artfully scribbled text on a beige background. On his first three albums as the Field, this simple design reinforced the Field's overarching aesthetic congruency. Without even cracking the spine of Cupid's Head, his fourth, it's obvious change is afoot, and the visual shift feels significant. Compared to the glimmering, soft-hued soundscapes of 2011's Looping State of Mind, the new record is a moodier work, perfectly balancing sleekness and aggression.
Willner's recent solo performances have abandoned the body-moving tendencies of the Field's full-band shows, favoring drones and formlessness more associated with his Loops of Your Heart project. Cupid's Head is thick and dense, a miles-long oil slick that radiates ultraviolet hues, and it has some overlap with his other project. It also finds the Field occasionally coming full-circle, with qualities that recall Here We Go Sublime. Besides being Willner's strongest collection since that game-changing debut, Cupid's Head's six lengthy jams take cues from Sublime's centerpiece, "The Deal", an intimidating monolith of techno that swells and pulsates over its 10-minute running time. He's moved away from proper and his sense of scope is more epic than ever. Cupid's Head as a record just feels bigger, dwarfing his previous efforts.
In that sense, Cupid's Head brings to mind another texture-focused album from this year: Fuck Buttons' Slow Focus, which saw the Bristol noise duo reining in their noisy squall to focus on diamond-sharp textures and a greater attention towards small-scale detail. "20 Seconds of Affection", Cupid's Head's gauzy closer, kicks things off with a throttling torrent of digital synth slush before giving way to a mid-tempo churn that continually folds itself into three-dimensional shapes, as a wandering bassline lurks just beneath the surface, wobbling with unease. "Black Sea" also has a feeling of up-up-up propulsion—hissing drum machines, interlocking tones, a swirl of transistor-radio noise lapping at the track's feet—before dramatically changing shape in its back half, as menacing arpeggiated tones dominate. The Field project has typically projected easy warmth, a kind of synthesized benevolence, but the intensity of "Black Sea"'s closing minutes is the darkest, most straightforwardly sensual, and most evil-sounding music Willner's made.
Indeed, Cupid's Head is more intense than any other Field record. With the exception of the silvery guitar tones that open the album's epic opener, "They Won't See Me", these songs start at the top and stay there, eschewing patient build for pure relentlessness, a sonic persistence that obliterates everything around you in a comforting, head-clearing way.
There are many transcendent moments of bliss on Cupid's Head—"They Won't See Me"'s high-tension tonal axis, the squishy radiance of "A Guided Tour"—but "No. No…" is the album's greatest moment of awe, with an endlessly looped voices evocative of the Flamingos-warping abstraction of From Here We Go Sublime's title track. Each iteration of the title phrase gradually stretches it further into the void. Over a bed of stormy, amorphous rhythms and off-white static, the sampled voice changes shape—from high-pitched to low, staccato to elongated, specific to indefinable—until there's nothing left but a broken helicopter-blade beat and an unadorned vocal sample that vibrates with a menacing inflection. It's a wellspring of tension on an album that brims with paranoia.
The Field's discography is paradoxical. On the one hand, Cupid's Head demonstrates how much Willner's aesthetic has changed over the last six years. That those changes have been incremental, and that there are clear threads going back to his debut, highlight the singularity of what he does. The landscapes of dance and electronic music have shifted since the release of From Here We Go Sublime—minimal techno, as well as Willner's label home Kompakt, have become niché concerns—so the fact that he's still an innovator in an always-crowded field is a considerable feat. A few artists have taken bits and pieces of his style and applied them in their own way, but no one has been able to sound like Willner, who in turn continues to sound like no one except himself. Cupid's Head is a dark, exquisitely detailed album that rewards patience and further cements the Field's reputation as one of modern electronic music's most satisfying auteurs. | 2013-10-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-10-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | October 2, 2013 | 8.7 | 0fc94b64-d7c8-4cf1-88f4-423a03a3eddc | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
null | The reclusiveness and mystery surrounding Boards of Canada has never been of much interest to me. When music possesses such an uncomplicated immediacy, the story of how it was made and by whom is less crucial. The macro of Boards of Canada's music is so well ordered, so complete, that the stories of the constituent parts are incidental. I never much cared for Easter eggs anyway; with art like this I prefer to let my subconscious do the work of sorting things out. So I find this band's records easy to take at face value.
*Geogaddi* was three years ago, and | Boards of Canada: The Campfire Headphase | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/839-the-campfire-headphase/ | The Campfire Headphase | The reclusiveness and mystery surrounding Boards of Canada has never been of much interest to me. When music possesses such an uncomplicated immediacy, the story of how it was made and by whom is less crucial. The macro of Boards of Canada's music is so well ordered, so complete, that the stories of the constituent parts are incidental. I never much cared for Easter eggs anyway; with art like this I prefer to let my subconscious do the work of sorting things out. So I find this band's records easy to take at face value.
Geogaddi was three years ago, and since that time Boards re-issued Music Has the Right to Children as well as early records like Twosim. With that small flood of material on the market at the same time we were able to digest Boards' career output as a whole and it became clear how deeply committed they are to a core sound that was quite well formed from the get-go. As long as Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin are making music together they will always sound like Boards of Canada.
Geogaddi was a few shades darker than what came before, but the grim hints of violence that record suggested are nowhere to be found on The Campfire Headphase. Instead, the latest record offers perhaps the dreamiest vision of the band yet. The first time through Campfire, I found myself wondering whether Stephen Wilkinson of Bibio had been offered a guest spot. Bibio got a small blip of buzz last year for Fi, his beguiling album of queasy four-track experiments with processed guitar. On the record he was promoted as a "discovery" of Boards, and, after listening to The Campfire Headphase, it's clear why they were so taken with his sound. Boards use of guitar on tracks like "Chromakey Dreamcoat" and "Hey Saturday Sun" makes explicit something about the band's sound that was always just beneath the surface: the connection of the music to the pastoral tradition of British folk. That feeling of nature's green as gold, the stream of sunlight through fluttering leaves, the communion with the environment that always involves a confrontation with death. There's a reason people bring weed with them on camping trips.
Of course, this being Boards of Canada, the guitar is first a sound tool, the familiar timbre of which is loaded down with the weight of emotional memory. So it's bent, stretched, spun in with the thick swirl of sound (The Campfire Headphase is a anything but minimalist) to become another ingredient in the record's stew. It bugs me that most of the songs here with guitar use one very simple picked chord and basically bring the loop in and out in predictable fashion. Perhaps because of the instrument's familiarity it naturally draws attention to itself, and there's no getting around that there's not very much happening with the guitar on most of the tracks where it appears. It adds nice twist, sure, but nothing more.
In terms of mood, Campfire is a sluggish record, weary, pointed edges dulled as if by the march of time. Boards could previously be counted on to offer a display of crisp, forceful drum programming to jar you out of your narcotic haze ("Telephasic Workshop" and "Gyroscope"). The Campfire Headphase is all midrange, the mid-tempo shuffles putting the mind-boggling array of instrumental processing front and center. In the sound generation department, at least, they're still hitting. The best thing Campfire Headphase has going is its unnamable synthesizer sounds. As copied as their aesthetic has been, it's amazing that after all this time they're still flat-out better at coming up with cool noises than just about everybody. The pure exercises in texture, like the minute-long between-track interludes like "Ataronchronon" and "Constants Are Changing" are among the record's high points.
These blissed-out narcotic interludes don't come quite often enough, though, and in fact this feels like a step down from the last two albums. It would be very hard not to step down from the heights scaled by those records, but by subtly altering their approach and adding bits of guitar The Campfire Headphase never really seems to give it a go. The Campfire Headphase is a good album and it's almost, but not quite, a good Boards of Canada album. | 2005-10-16T02:01:40.000-04:00 | 2005-10-16T02:01:40.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | October 16, 2005 | 7.6 | 0fcb7886-26ee-4a63-a6fe-4635ef57d626 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Like 2012's Centipede Hz, Painting With is a bright, epileptically busy piece of music that crams every element of Animal Collective's sound into a landscape without depth or recess. It feels, more than anything, like a kind of construction project: Each sound meticulously built and only faintly familiar, each second crammed with doodads, as though the band was worried either they or their audience might get bored. | Like 2012's Centipede Hz, Painting With is a bright, epileptically busy piece of music that crams every element of Animal Collective's sound into a landscape without depth or recess. It feels, more than anything, like a kind of construction project: Each sound meticulously built and only faintly familiar, each second crammed with doodads, as though the band was worried either they or their audience might get bored. | Animal Collective: Painting With | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21333-painting-with/ | Painting With | Despite its futuristic sheen, Animal Collective's music has always evoked a primitive kind of purity. Early on they wore masks—a gesture that connected them not only to the lucid dreams of playtime but to traditions of shamanism and present-day Mardi Gras, where people hide their faces not to disguise their natures but reveal them. Their songs morphed and rambled and writhed with the liveness of kimchi or kombucha, less finished product than something that fermented and evolved as you listened. Onstage, they looked more like astronauts than musicians; on record, they sounded less like musicians than cavemen, or lost wolves howling for an impossible moon: Modern guys seeking a spiritual basement deep below the civilized self.
Like most seekers, they get made fun of a lot. It's actually hard to think of music whose bad reputation is more disproportionately out of balance with its good intentions than Animal Collective's without dipping into Christian radio or trip-hop. Whether the jokes—which are mostly about drum circles, jam bands and shakily understood allusions to "shrooms"—are onto something or just contaminated by the tellers' own personal fears is in the eye of the beholder; suffice it to say that I agree with Nietzsche when he said that it is man alone who suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
No doubt said jokers will be happy to hear that the band prepared for their new album, Painting With, by bringing baby pools into the studio and projecting dinosaurs on the wall. Like 2012's Centipede Hz, Painting With is a bright, epileptically busy piece of music that crams every element of the band's sound into a landscape without depth or recess. Instead of the aquatic lullabies of Merriweather Post Pavilion or the naturalism of Sung Tongs, we get something like a 1980s Frank Stella or one of Jeff Koons' balloon dogs: Rad, synthetic and ready to jump directly into your face.
Depth and hiddenness become metaphors here. Watching the rockets' red glare over Baghdad in April, 2003, I was ready for an album like Here Comes the Indian, whose nightmarish volatility reminded me that whatever evil men do starts in the heart; after the 2008 election I vibed unapologetically with the optimism of "My Girls," which sounded like Peter Pan taking the wheel and telling the Darling children everything was going to be all right.
Now, values and messages that once seemed implicit in the band's music—love, freedom, the general idea that modern life is an interesting but fucked-up endeavor from which something very dear has been lost—are stitched right into the sleeves of their windbreakers. "Where's the bridge that's gonna take me home?" goes the coda of Painting With's giddy opening song, "FloriDada." "The bridge that someone's fighting over / That bridge that someone's paying for / A bridge so old so let it go." Seconds earlier, they sample the "Wipe Out," just to make sure you know they come in peace and packed all the toys. Even the title "FloriDada," has the quality of a joke explained. Though it pains me to say it, there are times that Painting With feels less like Animal Collective than Animal Collective: the Ride.
In the absence of a less effable genius, there's always elbow grease. Painting With feels, more than anything, like a kind of construction project: Each sound meticulously built and only faintly familiar, each second crammed with doodads, as though the band was worried either they or their audience might get bored. The human voice, which in the past has given their music not just a so-called human element but a devotional, almost religious glow, has been reduced to a party trick, with Avey Tare and Panda Bear trading syllables like two anxious Globetrotters. The album's best songs—"Golden Gal," "Recycling"—aren't just highlights, they're breathers.
As someone who has no hangups about admitting that this band changed not only how I think about music but how I thought about life, it's easy to wonder if Painting With and Centipede Hz signal an ending, or at least a consequential lull. Fifteen years is longer than most bands last, let alone great ones. Part of Animal Collective's image—or my image of them, at least—entailed fantasy of three to four guys sacrificing themselves at the foot of their loop pedals to conjure some other, bigger, more powerful god. Now, they're parents living in different zip codes and riding the festival circuit. Panda Bear's solo albums are more interesting than they've ever been and Avey Tare has kept busy, but the time that they were a bellwether for the horizon of independent music seems in ebb. Old heads will tell you that the most exciting part of seeing them live was hearing songs months, sometimes years before they came out on record: I, for example, remember being in the basement of a sushi restaurant in Charlottesville, Virginia, watching Feels before anyone knew it existed, or wading through Webster Hall to a gorgeous, slowly dawning song they later called "Banshee Beat." The feeling of that moment is hard to describe, but it was something like standing in the light of a secret. Times change, life intervenes. Painting With was the first time the band jumped right into the studio. Work can be scheduled, magic can't.
Correction (2/16/16 2:04 p.m.): This review previously described hearing the album Sung Tongs at a concert in Charlottesville. The album in question is Feels. | 2016-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Domino | February 16, 2016 | 6.2 | 0fd379ff-462c-461f-bb07-77655492e45d | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The big personalities of both Quavo and Travis Scott are muted on their collaboration, one that feels lethargic even for a victory lap. | The big personalities of both Quavo and Travis Scott are muted on their collaboration, one that feels lethargic even for a victory lap. | Travis Scott / Quavo: Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/travis-scott-quavo-huncho-jack-jack-huncho/ | Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho | Last year’s palatable string of album-length collaborations from the South featured Future and Young Thug dropping Super Slimey as a welcome surprise following their cold war, while Offset, 21 Savage, and Metro Boomin’s Without Warning was a Halloween gorefest that transcended its gimmick. Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho—Travis Scott and Quavo’s much ballyhooed team-up—was slated to be just as formidable, if only because the duo’s working relationship goes back longer than most of their contemporaries.
Quavo has been appearing on Travis’ projects since his 2014 mixtape Days Before Rodeo. Their big payoff came on the Young Thug-featuring jewel “Pick Up the Phone,” with Travis returning the favor by hopping on Culture’s oddly majestic “Kelly Price.” The two highlights didn’t place the stars on equal footing, but using Travis’ gothic bent to ornament Quavo’s colorful presence was a solid formula. That dynamic, combined with the sheer momentum of their careers, gave some confidence in the possibilities of Huncho Jack, which was teased all throughout last year. But instead of being the trap-and-Auto-Tune “Auld Lang Syne” it ought to be by its December release, Huncho Jack is lethargic even for a victory lap. The potential is squandered on a 41-minute runthrough that rarely feels much more than extracurricular.
Quavo and Travis don’t carry themselves as pals who’ve been working together for years. Rather, they have about the same amount of chemistry as two strangers attempting to draw some pleasantries out of dead air. Quavo features work best when the surrounding cast and production mirror his natural effervescence. But here, he’s on autopilot, slowing himself down to match Travis’ staid presence, which creates some uncharacteristic clunkers; on “Eye 2 Eye,” Quavo chants, “Real nigga, I/We see eye to eye” with the clumsy precision of a samurai who hasn’t realized his sword is no longer sharp. Meanwhile, Travis too frequently settles for throwing echoes and ad-libs at Quavo, which is unfortunate because his “It’s lit” signature is an acquired taste at best. They pop up like nervous ticks to ruin possible hits on the slithering “Dubai Shit” and the rugged “Motorcycle Patches,” adding irritation with every appearance
Joint projects often work best when the collaborators complement each other in ways that accentuate their abilities. Without Warning was compelling because 21 Savage’s deadpan voice was a catapult for Offset’s acrobatics. On his albums, Travis covers his shortcomings by curating and cloaking himself in this kind of nocturnal sensibility, like a kid wearing a cape. But Huncho Jack’s star co-billing casts him as more of a frontman, where the spotlight continuously highlights his mediocre rhyming. That he’s shooting banalities like, “Jump out this bitch: pogo, yeah” and, “Take that bar, no 3G” with lackadaisical delivery also shows a plain lack of ambition.
Huncho Jack’s saving grace is often the supporting players. Offset and Quavo are joyously vain in their shared verse on “Dubai Shit,” and Takeoff provides some welcome relief on “Eye 2 Eye” (“Flip it like it’s Five Guys, I’m Tupac, get all eyes”). But like any Travis Scott album, it’s the sterling production that carries the project. The beats are as elegant as they are variegated, kicking off with Buddah Bless’ Otis Redding chop on “Modern Slavery” and veering into unexpected oceanic keys that add emotional depth to “Huncho Jack” and the crystalline “Saint Laurent Mask,” which both feature Mike Dean’s touch. In a fatal irony, Huncho Jack’s liveliness tends to come from everywhere except Quavo and Travis Scott. The protean energy that buoy their respective works are sadly absent. | 2018-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Quality Control / UMG | January 3, 2018 | 6.3 | 0fd501fc-0972-436d-a23e-9ccc33b238c6 | Brian Josephs | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-josephs/ | |
Her first album since 2012 is a reflective, characteristically elegant session, surveying the singer’s advancing years in calm repose. | Her first album since 2012 is a reflective, characteristically elegant session, surveying the singer’s advancing years in calm repose. | Françoise Hardy: Personne d’autre | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/francoise-hardy-personne-dautre/ | Personne d’autre | With her first album in six years, the characteristically elegant Personne d’autre, Françoise Hardy finds herself among the last surviving icons of a certain kind of French pop. Her tone of absent-minded infatuation is tangled up in Parisian iconography; her voice tells us about France in the way Marilyn Monroe’s walk tells us about America. Hardy, too, makes her talent seem effortless, though her longevity hasn’t come by chance. Rather than courting fame, she’s spent the last half-century collaborating sparingly and shunning lucrative indulgences like touring and the services of Serge Gainsbourg, whose dream of a full-length behind their 1968 collaboration “Comment te dire adieu” she declined to fulfill. What she won instead was license to write her own history.
To many Anglophones, that history is largely unrecognized, which is a shame. Across Hardy’s 30 or so albums are intermittent flashes of brilliance, defying the received wisdom of a steady post-’60s decline. Her spare, haunting 1971 LP, La Question, might be the first truly personal Françoise Hardy record; 1973’s Message Personnel contains baroque-pop triumphs like “L’amour en privé.” As recently as 1996, Hardy was resetting the bar with Le Danger, which casually invented adult-contemporary space rock—appropriate, given that she’d begun moonlighting in astrology literature—but landed with a commercial thud.
Personne d’autre (Nobody Else in English) is the latest in a string of minor releases that form an epilogue to the 74-year-old singer’s legacy. On these 12 mortality-facing songs, there are moments when her breath thins to a wisp, circulating through the tasteful tapestries of songs like “Le Large” (translated here as “Sail Away”) and the Michel Berger cover “Seras-tu là” (“Will You Be There”). When she sings to a lost loved one, on “You’re My Home,” that “I would fight every day/Just to show you I am strong,” the calm in her voice doesn’t conceal the weight of the effort.
Hardy survived a major health crisis after her last album, 2012’s L’Amour Fou, and on the new LP she surveys her advancing years in repose, without the macabre flourish of, say, Jacques Brel’s curtain call, Les Marquises. Written and recorded with Erick Benzi (once a composer for Céline Dion), it’s a reflective session in sound and subject. Their formula offers few surprises—a saccharine tribute to Hardy’s husband Jacques Dutronc, “Train Spécial,” ticks the armchair-nostalgia boxes—though Hardy occasionally finds a niche to make her own.
Take “Dors mon ange” (“Sleep, My Angel”), Hardy’s adaptation of a 2005 obscurity by Poets of the Fall, a broody Finnish clan given to overwrought, minor-key proclamations. Apparently deeming their lyrics insufficiently melodramatic (“Let your dreams flood in/Like waves of sweet fire,” goes the original chorus) this version adds another shroud of gloom. “She screams, “I’m so afraid,’” Hardy sings in French, as the song’s apparently suicidal subject, “‘The machine races out of control/And it’s going to hurt.’”
This blunt narrative ought to sound contrived, but Hardy’s gift for delicate phrasing is defiantly alluring. She conveys sympathy in every word, like a benevolent monarch surveying a faded empire, and sings in the plainspoken yet luminous way that she’s made iconic. It’s as if she’s saying, this is simply the way things are, and they’re quite beautiful enough. | 2018-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Parlophone | April 13, 2018 | 6.5 | 0fd5db94-d57c-486c-be95-3845435a8e97 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
On his solo debut, the California garage-rock multi-instrumentalist and Ty Segall collaborator concocts a collection of wistful, psychedelic pop that pits lush and layered arrangements against needle-pinning power chords. Like Segall, Cronin brings a young energy to classic rock sounds. | On his solo debut, the California garage-rock multi-instrumentalist and Ty Segall collaborator concocts a collection of wistful, psychedelic pop that pits lush and layered arrangements against needle-pinning power chords. Like Segall, Cronin brings a young energy to classic rock sounds. | Mikal Cronin: Mikal Cronin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15844-mikal-cronin/ | Mikal Cronin | Just out of college, Mikal Cronin already has a proven record at garage-rock bashing. As bassist and singer for the Moonhearts (formerly Charle & the Moonhearts), he spent his dorm-dwelling years releasing a sporadic string of fuzz-infused surf-rock tunes. More notably, he's the Waylon Jennings to Ty Segall's Buddy Holly-- a collaborator and sideman who sometimes fills the bass chair in the psych-rock upstart's live band. Friends since high school, they've released a split LP, Reverse Shark Attack, and a handful of singles. But it's Segall-- among the most prolific voices in the thoroughly prolific San Francisco garage scene-- who tends to get the top billing.
On his eponymous debut, Mikal Cronin proves he can hold his own. It's an album of wistful, psychedelic pop that pits lush and layered arrangements against needle-pinning power chords. Like Segall's latest, Goodbye Bread, Cronin's solo turn finds him dialing back his thrashier impulses in order to clear space for singer-songwriter-style introspection. But when the curtain of lysergic gristle is pulled aside, it turns out that they're not the same person, after all. Even when he goes all Neil Young, Segall still retains an affable beach-dude demeanor. Cronin turns out to be the more vulnerable voice-- Elliott Smith in throwback dress, minus the self-loathing. And, like Smith, he has an ear for arrangements.
Album opener "Is It Alright" pivots from Beach Boys-worthy harmonies to chugging chords to jangling acoustic guitars before, finally, spinning off into an outro that sounds like Jethro Tull gone hardcore punk. It's no so much that Cronin knows how to effectively layer instruments (though he does) or collage disparate ideas together (though he does), but that he knows how to use dynamics to his advantage. On "Gone" he works soft-to-loud changes, dropping the bridge down to a whisper before bounding back up for a final, climactic freak-out. At the end of "Again and Again", Cronin drops out the rhythm section, rebuilding the song over a gentle falsetto melody.
Cronin's music owes a heavy debt to 1960s pop, mostly T. Rex and the Beatles (the sax outro on "Apathy" is weirdly reminiscent of the Beatles "Hey Jude"), but his tunes aren't precious period reconstructions. They're delivered with the gritty, gnarly abandon of a Black Flag fan trying to come to terms with their parents' record collection. Like Segall, Cronin brings a young energy to classic rock sounds because, well, he's actually young.
In interviews, Cronin has explained that the bulk of the album was written during the twilight months of his college career, when he was lonely and stressed and taking refuge in his tape recorder. Not exactly as trying a set of circumstances as, say, Tupac recording "Me Against the World", but a sensitive time, for sure. It's a transition that marks the end of structured life and the onset of a long-postponed adulthood, when you're too young and too old at the same time. Cronin nails that mood perfectly, with songs that are frustrated and energetic but flagged with uncertainty and doubt. The songs kick hardest when those melancholy sentiments collide with his crunching, chugging psychedelic urges-- when the volume is blasting in both the amps and the emotions. | 2011-09-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-09-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Trouble in Mind | September 21, 2011 | 8.1 | 0fd661e8-c5f6-412d-a696-61bdf1b4079b | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
Thurston Moore’s new solo LP evokes the hippie leanings that were always at the heart of Sonic Youth. With some of his most joyous lyrics to date, Moore uses outer aggression to achieve inner bliss. | Thurston Moore’s new solo LP evokes the hippie leanings that were always at the heart of Sonic Youth. With some of his most joyous lyrics to date, Moore uses outer aggression to achieve inner bliss. | Thurston Moore: Rock n Roll Consciousness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23150-rock-n-roll-consciousness/ | Rock n Roll Consciousness | Though they personified the squall and squalor of 1980s Manhattan, Sonic Youth’s hearts always belonged to 1960s California. Starting with 1985’s Bad Moon Rising, Golden State roots both literal (see: Kim Gordon’s Los Angeles upbringing) and figurative (Lee Ranaldo’s Deadhead past) began to deeply entangle themselves in their knotty guitar gnarl. But where the Manson-inspired maelstrom of “Death Valley ’69” seemed to add another gallon of piss onto the grave of the hippie dream, the content and iconography of Sonic Youth’s subsequent work suggested they were secretly mourning it.
The inner-sleeve artwork for 1986’s EVOL found Thurston Moore posing like a flower child with a sitar, while a scrawled crucifix insignia—emblazoned with the words “Sonic Life”—evoked the DIY religiosity of West Coast free-love cults. And with 1987’s Sister, Sonic Youth produced the most Californian album in their canon, from the desecrated Disneyland photo on the cover to the specific geographic references, not to mention the song that proved to be the closest Gordon and Moore would ever get to their own “I Got You Babe.” After flirting with mainstream success in the early 1990s, Sonic Youth more or less carried themselves as a post-punk Grateful Dead, becoming a modern paragon of hippie-era artistic freedom but without the incense, hacky sacks, and wavy-arm dancing.
This summer marks the 30th anniversary of Sister, but in lieu of a big deluxe reissue campaign, Moore has surfaced with a solo record that similarly exhibits outer aggression as a means to achieve inner bliss. While Moore’s most recent work has seen him unleash his latent activist streak, Rock n Roll Consciousness uses its noisy guitar jams as battering rams to access more intimate, spiritual modes of expression. The title is no misnomer—on Rock n Roll Consciousness, Moore is consciously rocking, with the returning cast of guitarist James Sedwards, My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe, and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley further solidifying the groundwork they laid on 2014’s The Best Day. But that sturdy foundation gives Moore the confidence to let his head float evermore freely into the clouds, atop some of the most joyous, optimistic lyrics he’s ever sung.
Rock n Roll Consciousness is an album about love—if not an album of love songs per se. Moore isn’t singing to his girlfriend here—he’s addressing mythical goddesses and the mystique of big cities at night and the changing of the seasons. Like The Best Day, the new record features lyrical contributions from London poet Radio Radieux, whose cosmic vocabulary—with its references to “the prophetess,” “peyote walkers,” “magic drums,” and “vibration love”—allows Moore to mine the ecstatic without losing his ageless, dead-cool drawl.
But if the album’s lyrics project a certain youthful idealism, musically, Moore and co. proudly dig their worn-out Converse heels into an indie-is-the-new-dad-rock ethos that trades in Sonic Youth’s abstract extremes for a tougher, more propulsive thrust. It’s more meat-and-potatoes, sure, but it’s really choice grass-fed beef with yam flan. “Exalted” unfurls like the Feelies playing at 16 rpm, before Sedwards starts channeling J Mascis channeling Eddie Hazel on what sounds like a meditative rendition of Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane.” This melancholic reverie is rudely interrupted by a doom-metal drone that hits like a flaming gong crash, blazing the trail for Moore’s star-struck vocal to finally come in just before the eight-minute mark. “Aphrodite,” meanwhile, feels like an entire song spun out of the staccato, pin-pricked climax to “Marquee Moon,” until Googe’s hypnotic bass breakdown goads Moore and Sedwards to engage in some wah-wah warfare.
Where The Best Day proffered a somewhat uneven mix of extended odysseys and rough-hewn sketches, Rock n Roll Consciousness is much more cohesive and smoothly sequenced. Its five tracks (averaging eight minutes a piece) feel like carefully plotted epics rather than improvised excursions; the revved-up 10-minute thriller “Turn On,” in particular, is packed with hairpin twists and turns. But Moore can also reach euphoric peaks through a more direct route. “Cusp”—a cloud-parting ode to the coming of spring—is six-and-a-half sustained minutes of shimmering jangle and steady, shuffling rhythm. The song is simultaneously frantic and soothing; like a jogging-on-the-spot exercise, the surroundings may not change, but by the end, your heart is pounding and you feel light-headed. It’s the moment where this album’s core philosophies achieve their purest physical manifestation. As Moore would attest, rock’n’roll—like love itself—should instill a higher state of consciousness, while at the same time make you feel like you’re losing it. | 2017-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Caroline | April 28, 2017 | 7.7 | 0fd6dcfe-e6e4-4aa7-8da5-7895d8f1d148 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
A song-by-song "reimagining" of Black Flag's Damaged, the excellent new album by Dirty Projectors is, more importantly, the work of a band that is restructuring rock on a compositional level rather than a sonic one. | A song-by-song "reimagining" of Black Flag's Damaged, the excellent new album by Dirty Projectors is, more importantly, the work of a band that is restructuring rock on a compositional level rather than a sonic one. | Dirty Projectors: Rise Above | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10577-rise-above/ | Rise Above | Dave Longstreth, like a lot of visionaries, is so full of bright ideas he can barely keep his shit together. Part of the problem is that he's indiscriminate about what he eats: Gustav Mahler, reggaetón, Malian guitar music, Cole Porter, band members. He's helmed a different roster of musicians for each Dirty Projectors album, and each album has had its own agenda. "Jolly Jolly Jolly Ego", from 2005's The Getty Address, plays like a parade of his fetishes: dissonant folk, looped bassoons, a rhythm track sounding like it was lifted from an R. Kelly record, and Longstreth in the middle, throttling his poor falsetto with vibrations violent enough to knock a drinking glass off a table.
After five or so years of cherrypicking from large groups of musicians, he's streamlined to a rock quartet, and they actually seem to matter to him in ways he can't shake: touring guitarist Amber Coffman and drummer Brian McOmber play on Rise Above; bassist and vocalist Angel Deradoorian hadn't joined yet, but has since been filling the parts played here by Nat Baldwin and Susanna Waiche. Hearing the band rip through material from last year's New Attitude EP on a recent Daytrotter session was like watching the glass slipper slide on.
While Longstreth's initial albums were mostly string-backed folk, he's now given himself up to rhythm-- in his words, his compositions have become more "horizontal" than "vertical." The horizontal's great for dancing-- an opportunity that arises a few times here-- but verticality is still the source of the songs' tensions. Coffman and Waiche's coos stack harmonies with Longstreth's bleat like little car wrecks, and even though the guitars move like a West African dance band or math rock, the songs seem propelled by the constant resolutions of notes rather than the beats themselves.
Then again, it's the combo-- a synthesis of heavy rhythms with an addiction to delicacy and ornament-- that makes Longstreth an innovative, paradoxical writer. "Spray Paint (The Walls)" is half-Soundgarden, half-Outkast. Some of this record sounds like Phish and some of it sounds like the Police. There's a verse in Esperanto. When Longstreth strides into the singer-songwriter spotlight, he's so determined to express himself he forgets the idea is to share, instead employing melisma that's so brutal it's almost embarrassing. And he sounds like he's having fun! And that's scary. Rise Above is serious, somewhat inhuman stuff, which is possibly why the band never smiles onstage: Longstreth, wide-eyed and focused, hair like wild grass; Deradoorian and Coffman looking eerily cornfed, as blank as backup singers in Mullholland Drive, their hands responsible for a completely different set of rhythms than their voices; McOmber a pair of arms occasionally rising above the wall.
But newfound focus from the band brings newfound exhaustion for listeners. For all his supposed messiness, Longstreth is actually really brittle and anal-retentive. That the album has a concept-- a song-by-song "reimagining" of Black Flag's Damaged-- scarcely matters to the listener, although it seems good for Longstreth: It gives the illusion of an anchor. He recently told me that it was his attempt at making a "New York album: angular, austere, obsessed with authenticity, like New York bands supposedly are." The assumptions seem off, but he probably hit the mark. They're consumed with cultural appropriation and aesthetic polyamory-- a post-pop-art idea of authenticity. Rise Above is so concerned about its polyrhythmic arrangements and precision that it can be suffocating on full listens. And though Longstreth tries to find color and protest in a bunch of songs about hating everyone's face and wanting to die, it's almost an afterthought-- unsurprisingly, the album's most bracing moment comes during the break in "Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie", when Coffman and Waiche volley oh's and ah's without an English word in sight.
Rise Above will drop plenty of jaws, and, like Deerhoof, Dirty Projectors are restructuring rock on a compositional level rather than a sonic one. To murder a cliché, whatever unfurls from Longstreth's brain next isn't anyone's guess-- Rise Above, for all its fastidiousness and minor drawbacks, finally displays the perfect counterargument to the portrait of him as another nutso college dropout: It displays a pattern. | 2007-09-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-09-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | September 7, 2007 | 8.1 | 0fd6ecbf-dffe-4ddc-906b-5dda2684c456 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
*Ruminations *is a record like none other in Conor Oberst’s catalog, stunning for how utterly alone he sounds. | *Ruminations *is a record like none other in Conor Oberst’s catalog, stunning for how utterly alone he sounds. | Conor Oberst: Ruminations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22488-ruminations/ | Ruminations | Conor Oberst’s music has never sounded lonely. Yes, he’s done catatonically despondent, inconsolable, dejected, maniacal—it's a lot to handle, and yet he’s always been surrounded by friends both local and legendary who believe in his vision, underscoring his status as one of the 21st century’s most mercurial and charismatic songwriters. Arriving almost a month after a comprehensive Bright Eyes boxed set that feels like a headstone for the band, Ruminations is a record like none other in Oberst’s catalog—stunning for how utterly alone he sounds. This is obvious in a technical sense, as there are no goddamn timpani rolls, no boys to keep strummin’ those guitars, just Oberst on harmonica, acoustic and piano with ten songs written during an Omaha winter and recorded in 48 hours. Plenty of folk artists make records like that. But there’s also a loneliness in Ruminations that’s far rare and disturbing—the loneliness one feels after taking stock and wondering if they have a friend left in the world.
“When it came time to stand with him, you scattered with the rats,” Oberst spits on “You All Loved Him Once,” a song whose title alone would create an uncomfortable subtext on any of his albums. Most fans assume any Oberst lyric written in the first person has to be about Conor Oberst and he’s acknowledged the “weird betrayal” they express when he fails to meet their expectations. Such was the case on 2014’s Upside Down Mountain, one of his more mildly received LPs. But many wouldn’t even acknowledge its existence to begin with—in late 2013, an anonymous post in XOJane’s comments section metastasized into a serious rape allegation against Oberst that was exposed as a fabrication; but only after a libel suit that quantified the damage to his career and reputation at $1 million (which would have been donated to charity). Oberst had the complaint dismissed after his accuser recanted and apologized, even though his name couldn't truly be cleared; the rash of articles that presumed his guilt are still easy to find and treat his innocence like a minor factual clarification.
Oberst does not address this situation directly on Ruminations. He comes close on its opener, imagining himself back in Omaha, sweating through his suit in a courtroom: “It’s a bad dream, I have it seven times a week/No, it’s not me/But I’m the one who has to die.” The title of this song is “Tachycardia,” which hints at the personal issues Oberst does directly address going forward, mostly the medical and mental maladies that popped up after he moved back to Omaha with his wife—Oberst talks about his blood pressure, therapy, “alkaline produce,” suicidal ideation and a cerebral cyst that sunk his tour behind Desaparecidos’ flamethrowing agit-punk reunion LP Payola.
Ruminations is Oberst’s most emotionally legible work since Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, also defined by its similarly cloistered worldview and sonic cohesion. Juxtaposed with the stately, worldly and universally beloved I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, Digital Ash felt like an “everything must go” clearance of songwriting tropes that sustained Bright Eyes up to 2005 and hadn’t returned since—drugs, casual sex, familial disappointment, mistrust of religion. These all come back in very startling ways on Ruminations, but more importantly, there’s the return of that quaver; the unsteady, hypothermic warble that made him a generational icon during his heyday and had all but disappeared on his more recent recordings.
Whereas it was once a very powerful affectation, Oberst sounds genuinely unsettled now—enough so that longtime engineer Mike Mogis told Vulture he was “a little worried” when he heard the demos, and on “Counting Sheep,” Oberst mentions the death of two children before intoning, “I hope it was slow, hope it was painful.” The names are redacted and it’s more disturbing for shifting the focus to the why of Oberst’s lyric rather than the who. Before “Counting Sheep” even gets to that point, it’s already an uncomfortably realistic document of insomnia, Oberst playing its stumbling chords with all thumbs, “gun in my mouth, trying to sleep/everything ends, everything has to.”
Because Mogis is involved, Ruminations isn’t lo-fi by any means, but it’s raw. There isn’t a delicately played note here and Oberst’s performance lends a palpable urgency to Ruminations that had been missing from his most recent work, perhaps at the expense of ambition. Ruminations at least makes good on its promise, trying to find connections between Oberst’s latter-day obsession with escaping the mythical construct of Conor Oberst and his prior obsession with living that construct.
“I don’t want to feel stuck baby, I just want to get drunk before noon,” Oberst casually announces on “Barbary Coast (Later)”; he also imagines himself as Paul Gauguin and John Muir, only to realize he’s not a painter or the outdoorsy type. He's still Conor Oberst, and throughout Ruminations, day-drunk surrealism is punctured by what he's best at: lacerating assessments of himself. They’re some of the most brutal he’s allowed himself in a decade: “Something dies when a star is born/I spread my anger like Agent Orange/I was indiscriminate,” Oberst sings on “Next of Kin,” preceded by a devastating portrait of a widower and the man who had to deliver the bad news. And yet, for all of the individual potency of the verses in “Next of Kin,” like much of Ruminations, the loose conceptual bundling doesn’t allow it the same knee-buckling thrust of similarly composed narratives like “Nothing Gets Crossed Out” or “Waste of Paint.”
“You All Loved Him Once” almost gets there. A song before it, Oberst admits, “I met Lou Reed and Patti Smith/It didn’t make me feel different,” and he spends six verses probing the inevitable disillusion and futility of hero worship. Unless you assume Conor Oberst affords himself the same grandiose self-belief as Kanye West, it seems that half of “You All Loved Him Once” at most, could be considered autobiographical. Some of it is almost certainly about Bernie Sanders or Barack Obama, or even just a friend who’s gotten too successful. But towards the end, some lines ring just too painfully true: “The more and more was put on him, he tried his best to take it on...you all loved him once/now he is gone”, he sings, and rather than making Oberst sound entitled, he comes off as someone legitimately disillusioned after an unimaginably awful public ordeal. But in the very next song, he’s gone off to an Irish pub in the East Village, trying to find a friend who’ll drink with him until they get kicked out. He's still Conor Oberst, after all. | 2016-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | October 12, 2016 | 7.5 | 0fd7d710-1000-4031-b256-10adca402cb0 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Three years on from In Ghost Colours, Cut Copy return with a powerful new album that's less about anthems and more about movements and transitions. | Three years on from In Ghost Colours, Cut Copy return with a powerful new album that's less about anthems and more about movements and transitions. | Cut Copy: Zonoscope | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15055-zonoscope/ | Zonoscope | Cut Copy are Australian, and it's summer in Australia right now. So if it feels a little weird listening to an album of euphoric, starry-eyed dance-rock on earbuds while you're scraping snow-grit off your windshield, keep in mind: Somewhere in the world, someone is probably road-tripping to a swimming hole with this album playing, or eating a popsicle, or playing catch with their dogs while it blasts out of a car stereo or nearby boombox. By the time summer arrives for those of us in the northern hemisphere, we'll know these songs by heart and be able to sing along loudly.
Back when this group released 2004's Bright Like Neon Love, the idea of backing dazed, introverted indie pop with a utopian house thump was still relatively novel. And though that sound has since inspired legions of followers and copycats, still no one does it quite like Cut Copy themselves. 2008's steamrolling In Ghost Colours was an album of anthems; tracks like "Hearts on Fire" and "Lights and Music" were transcendent pop that stuck in heads for days. But Zonoscope is something different. It's an album-album that puts serious work into movements and transitions, and it works best when you hear it all in one chunk. That doesn't mean it's Cut Copy's OK Computer; it just means that the group has put more work into building a vast, rolling landscape rather than a series of peaks.
Zonoscope opens with a blast of woozy ecstasy in the form of "Need You Now", the sort of track where you don't even realize how much tension the group has built up until they release it, and ends with "Sun God", a marathon 15-minute groove that slowly morphs into a tranced-out Giorgio Moroder thud. In between those two tracks, Cut Copy build a long-form piece of work that moves between genres and ideas and moods without ever sacrificing its dancefloor momentum.
"Take Me Over" works in a bouncy hook from Fleetwood Mac's mid-80s party-staple "Everywhere" and gives a sly nod to their countrymen Men at Work, turning down-moments into playful exercises in irresistible cheeseball melody. "Where I'm Going" is a twinkly, faraway sigh of a song that could pass for Washed Out if it wasn't for the titanic Gary Glitter drum-stomp powering it. And "Pharaohs & Pyramids" may be the greatest thing here; it uses the band's melodic gifts and the sense of yearning in frontman Dan Whitford's voice and applies them to a classic Chicago house anthem, deploying its keyboard blips, synth-strings, and programmed cowbells at the exact right moments, building into a climactic cresting swoop.
Compared to the last two albums, Zonoscope has precious little guitar crunch, which makes it hard to even call Cut Copy a dance-rock band anymore. And that's for the best-- not just because that combination seems like a less thrilling prospect in 2011 than perhaps it once did, but also because Cut Copy have the architecture of dance music down perfectly and the confidence to execute the genre's moves with absolute precision. Even in the dead of winter, Zonoscope does its job beautifully. Imagine how it'll sound when you don't have to layer up to go outside. | 2011-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Modular | February 7, 2011 | 8.6 | 0fdee6b6-dc6b-49b8-9016-551d6ef1cc9c | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Eclectic UK band locates an emotional center amidst their mathematically arranged dance punk elements. | Eclectic UK band locates an emotional center amidst their mathematically arranged dance punk elements. | Foals: Total Life Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14269-total-life-forever/ | Total Life Forever | Within the first seconds of Total Life Forever opener "Blue Blood", it becomes clear that Foals have taken a leap. Front and center, between tick-tocking guitars, frontman Yannis Philippakis begins to sing. When Foals' debut, Antidotes, sent the UK press into hyperbolic fits three years ago, Philippakis boasted what Pitchfork's Tom Ewing perfectly described as a "blank bark"-- one faceless particle amidst many mathematically arranged dance-punk elements. Philippakis was often indecipherable in a way that encapsulated those problems Foals' music suffered from as a whole: Their songs were fussy, calculating, and impenetrable, despite a ton of hooks. They could knock you down and they could make you glitch out, but finding an emotional connection was a challenge. In Total Life Forever, the Oxford quintet have not only opened up themselves and their sound, they've done so without abandoning the path that put them on the tips of tongues from the beginning.
They started by turning their songs inside out. Each of Antidotes' tracks was vacuum-sealed and tightly-packed, little space to be enjoyed between every pinballing polyrhythm and guitar figure. Though Foals were wise to add layers of horns and other muscles to the mix, it was difficult to feel as though there was any place to hang out within the song as a listener. At every turn, Total Life Forever is inviting. Much more alive than earlier efforts, it's an album with a complexion that constantly changes with time. When Philippakis' voice is first introduced in "Blue Blood", it's done with cavernous levels of reverb, his thin, delicate falsetto distant and sweet enough to recall My Morning Jacket's Jim James. The rest of the band quickly begin to do its thing with fewer rules: There's a much looser, much funkier feeling at work here, the poppy skronk of "Miami" or Chili Peppered licks of the titular track two early examples at work.
The album's second half doesn't fare so well, drowning at times in aqueous atmospherics. Single "This Orient" begins with some fizzy vocal textures and snare cracks only to morph into leftover Bloc Party. "Alabaster" doesn't boast any of the energy one could find in "After Glow" and closer "What Remains", both of which make devastating use of their song structures. But those missteps sound simply like growing pains. Without doubt, the record's finest moment is sprawling early blog hit "Spanish Sahara". Foals' music has frequently felt monumental in scope, often at the expense of the listener. But the way this one song in particular blooms, from its first traces of guitar melody to tear-jerking coda six minutes later, garners more goosebumps with every listen. It sounds exactly like what they set out to accomplish, done fluidly and organically. And in there, from the first few seconds to the very last, is a clear pulse. It's not difficult to find. | 2010-05-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-05-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop / Warner Bros. / Transgressive | May 20, 2010 | 7.6 | 0fdf396f-c702-47e7-a0d0-2422279f37b4 | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
Though the fourth and best album by the New York black metal re-constructors Krallice is the band's shortest to date, it is also their most relentless and unforgiving. It's a daunting, rewarding hour that calls for complete immersion. | Though the fourth and best album by the New York black metal re-constructors Krallice is the band's shortest to date, it is also their most relentless and unforgiving. It's a daunting, rewarding hour that calls for complete immersion. | Krallice: Years Past Matter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17100-years-past-matter/ | Years Past Matter | Don't be surprised if, at least at first, the latest and best album by New York black metal re-constructers Krallice sounds like a blur. Though Years Past Matter is the band's shortest record to date, it is also their most relentless and unforgiving, comprising six tracks of impossibly choreographed and dense four-part motion. In light of their propensity for 10-plus-minute spans, Krallice have previously experimented with ways to ease ingestion of these monstrosities, employing an antiphonal, long-short-long tracklist for 2009's Dimensional Bleedthrough and both starting and ending 2011's otherwise monolithic Diotima with relatively brief pieces. But for the most part, Years Past Matter starts, lashes ahead for a dozen minutes at a time, and then, after a 16-minute closer that might be Krallice's most demanding and glorious piece of music yet, ends. Sure, there are a few relative breaks in the roil, like the two minutes of guitar haze that lead out of "IIIIIIII" or the doom-suggestive interlude before the album's triumphant close. But for the most part, Years Past Matter is arrogant and unapologetic-- a daunting, rewarding hour that calls for complete immersion.
In recent years, when it's come to bending black metal, plenty of acts have focused on the auxiliary instrumentation, whether that's the keyboard layers they add to the pieces, the digital beats that supplant or subsidize their drums, or the extra electronics and textures that might subdivide their songs. But Krallice are, at least in terms of personnel, a traditional four-piece, with two guitarists (Mick Barr and Colin Marston), a bassist (Nicholas McMaster), a drummer (Lev Weinstein), and two vocalists (Barr and McMaster) who approach their screams with equal gusto but very different tones. What separates Krallice, though, is their audacity and exactitude, meaning that they generally not only trot past the 10-minute mark but also do so with songs where every bit seems rigorously composed, where nothing seems arbitrary or extraneous.
They've never sounded as comprehensive and confident as they do on Years Past Matter. Album opener "IIIIIII", for instance, moves in fits and starts, droning, then roaring, then washing out, then galloping ahead-- all in about the first 80 seconds. The four members are synced so well and completely; McMaster's bass doesn't sit still waiting for the guitars or drums to chance, and the guitars act more like complements than competitors. Listening to Years Past Matter is almost like listening to the Flaming Lips' Zaireeka, where all four discs (or members, as it were) are meant to be heard at once, though it can be just as fascinating to try and isolate just one sound. If every band is supposed to write around its weakest link, by this point, it's probably best to quit calling Krallice a band. They show no such weakness.
Four albums in, what might now be most impressive about Krallice is how selflessly the quartet seems to write and render these songs. If you're just glancing at the track lengths, you might anticipate protratced solos or, at the very least, spotlights and showcases for Barr and Marston, two of the best guitarists working right now. But even when they're furthest out in front-- as on the back half of "IIIIIIIII", with their guitars in flinty dialogue and occasionally in dead-ahead harmony-- McMaster and Weinstein aren't sitting passively, waiting for their turn to come. They push and pull at the rhythm, as though to force the guitars one way or the other; in fact, one of the best guitar passages here, about seven minutes into "IIIIIIIII", stems from the sort of roller coaster Weinstein and McMaster create and the way Barr and Marston are able to dip down with it and zip back toward the crest without distraction.
All of those assets-- the complexity and precision, the density and cooperation, the rigor and the delivery-- coalesce perfectly during "IIIIIIIIIIII", a 16-minute epic that finds Krallice pushing past the limitations of anything they've ever done. Aside from a short section near the beginning, this closer is largely instrumental, built on a short, flicking riff that Marston and Barr stretch, contract, and subsequently spin into the strangest shapes. Led by Weinstein's versatility, the song's pieces seem to form a cycle of interconnected circles, where each section capitalizes on repetition and variation before shifting seamlessly into the next one. Krallice have never sounded so ecstatic before, so perfectly delirious with the strength of their own designs. Like all of Years Past Matter, its finale is great on first listen and increasingly tremendous on repeat. It's strange to admit it, but when this 16-minute beast snaps shut, I generally just play it again, giving the blur one more chance to blossom into clarity. | 2012-08-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-08-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | self-released | August 28, 2012 | 8.2 | 0fe24f2e-27fd-4a8e-8a08-4ad855c8edec | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The debut from grime’s rising star is a mixed bag but still peppered with hits, inviting elements of dancehall, pop, trap, and garage to the same house party. | The debut from grime’s rising star is a mixed bag but still peppered with hits, inviting elements of dancehall, pop, trap, and garage to the same house party. | AJ Tracey: AJ Tracey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aj-tracey-aj-tracey/ | AJ Tracey | Let us remember London in the early 2000s, a special place and time, when the city’s pirate radio stations blasted out street tunes that seemed to form a forcefield around the tower blocks, protecting them from the horrors of Loaded magazine, post-Britpop indie, and New Labour. Out of the underground swaggered Craig David and Ms. Dynamite, genuine 21st-century British superstars whose debut albums shunned the UK garage sounds they’d built their reputation on and looked instead to contemporary American soul. Cut to a decade-and-a-half later and Skepta, a right honorable lord of grime, mixed local street sounds with transatlantic influences on his 2016 album Konichiwa. Like Ms. Dynamite, he was rewarded with a Mercury Music Prize. This is the way things have been done.
So what now of AJ Tracey? Straight out of West London, the 24-year-old has spent the last few years assembling a large youth following, championing Jeremy Corbyn in a volatile political era, and asserting his position as the next big-ticket British rapper with punchy quotables over battering grime beats. As is tradition, Tracey’s self-titled debut album is a veritable smorgasbord of local and international sounds, inviting elements of dancehall, pop, trap, and garage to the same house party. It’s also one of the most strangely sequenced albums of recent memory. Not only does Tracey opt to bookend it with relatively low-key tracks—“Plan B” features a mild synth flutter and muted flows, while “Wifey Riddim 3” is a harmless summer holiday pop song about girls—he takes the odd decision to line-up all the bangers next to each other over the record’s second half.
This, unsurprisingly, is AJ Tracey’s best section. A song called “Horror Flick” is always going to be easy pickings for a rapper with a flow that could tear down a tenement block. In this movie, Tracey is no transparent apparition, spitting instead with monstrous presence. His themes through this portion of the album rarely expand beyond cash, success, and throwing threats at unspecified enemies. Still, hearing him in full force over the murky keys and rat-tat-tat hi-hats of “Doing It,” and the steady pummeling drum machines of the Giggs-assisted “Nothing But Net” is enough to make you wish he had just cut 10 grime hits and called it a day.
It’s through the opening half that things are much stickier. There are highlights: “Necklace” sees Tracey team up with rising New York rapper Jay Critch over a beat that works acoustic guitar plucks into a melodic Auto-Tune-drenched number. On the other end of the spectrum, the generic dancehall of “Butterflies” and Young Thug pastiche “Psych Out!” minimize Tracey’s strengths by calibrating his voice into a half-tuneful croon. “Jackpot” places him in a Las Vegas casino but there’s little in the way of compelling detail from the man who once gloriously touted his touring scheduled with brags about playing Belgium twice and flying to Bordeaux “for a slice of the cheese.”
The best surprise is “Ladbroke Groove,” a tribute to Tracey’s home street that simultaneously pays homage to the classic garage sounds he grew up on. Strutting into two-step heaven, Tracey ensures the album links the UK urban music’s past and present. Which of the mixed bag of styles deployed on AJ Tracey will be further investigated in the future remains a mystery. What is clear is that he has talent and star power for days—talents that could have been better showcased here. | 2019-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 11, 2019 | 6.8 | 0fe4bb7e-215b-49df-aa23-d928493bf89a | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Inspired by the cosmos, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner addresses life on Earth. Her voice shines over melancholic arrangements, evoking Pacific Northwest indie rock as much as shoegaze. | Inspired by the cosmos, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner addresses life on Earth. Her voice shines over melancholic arrangements, evoking Pacific Northwest indie rock as much as shoegaze. | Japanese Breakfast: Soft Sounds From Another Planet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/japanese-breakfast-soft-sounds-from-another-planet/ | Soft Sounds From Another Planet | Michelle Zauner’s first album as Japanese Breakfast, 2016’s Psychopomp, was a meditation on grief in the wake of her mother’s death from cancer, as well as a raw portrayal of sexuality and heartache. That these subjects could coexist in the same space isn’t unusual (death and sex often mix, especially at the edge of human experience), but Zauner’s gift for connecting specific details to simple metaphor was uniquely affecting. “The dog’s confused/She just paces ‘round all day/She’s sniffing at your empty room,” she sang on “In Heaven.” Then, on “Jane Cum”: “Soulless animal keep feeding on my meat/All my tiny bones between your teeth.”
While Psychopomp focused on the most intimate human experiences, her new album, Soft Sounds From Another Planet, uses big guitars and melancholic arrangements to address life on Earth, but it calls upon the cosmos for its perspective. Zauner has said that Soft Sounds... began as a concept album—“a science fiction musical”—but the idea never panned out. Still, there’s a sheen to the project that suggests the initial inspiration made it into the album’s production (there are wordless, atmospheric interludes), as well as numerous references to other worlds.
“Machinist,” the first single, is the biggest leap forward in terms of sound and one of the album’s best songs. The song begins with the voice of a woman speaking to a computer: “Was it always this way and I just couldn’t see it?,” she asks, falling for her digital lover. Then, in a whirl of keyboards and Auto-Tune, the track explodes as a kind of new age disco anthem. “I just wanted it all,” she sings.
On the title track, Zauner looks to the heavens for help with a self-destructive partner. “I wish I could keep you from abusing yourself for no reason at all,” she sings. Though Zauner searches to other worlds for help, the only answer she gets is reverb. (I'm reminded of a Calvin & Hobbes strips when Calvin screams to the abyss.) On “Boyish,” an old song repurposed from her days in the rock band Little Big League, Zauner brings things back down to earth. “I can’t get you off my mind, I can’t get you off in general,” goes the instantly iconic chorus, now backed by a melody that would make Roy Orbison grin. The sentiment encapsulates Zauner’s sensibilities: uncomfortably personal, unpretentiously profound.
Nowhere has Zauner’s approach ever been clearer than when the band opened for the newly-reunited Slowdive earlier this year. It was a pairing that at once justified early comparisons between Japanese Breakfast and shoegaze greats, but also inadvertently highlighted the differences between the two groups. Where Slowdive set their vocals back in the mix, their voices just another thread in a tapestry of sound, that is not Zauner’s way. Instead, Zauner and co-producer Craig Hendrix make sure the words are never lost in the mix, but rather driving it. As much as shoegaze and C86 bands, Zauner’s music evokes the Pacific Northwest indie rock that Zauner grew up with in Oregon before moving to Philly; “Road Head” rings with the strip-mall mythologizing of Built to Spill’s “Car,” and there’s a hint of Modest Mouse’s “Sleepwalking” on torch songs like “Boyish.”
As with Psychopomp, the album’s most powerful moments come when Zauner examines seeming contradictions that actually aren’t or shouldn’t be. The opening track, “Diving Woman,” flirts with domesticity as a way to normalize her life. “I want to be a woman of regimen,” she sings, “A bride in her home state/A diving woman of Jeju-do.” Jeju is an island in Zauner’s native South Korea with a traditionally matriarchal society, where female free divers were the breadwinners and heads of household. Here, Zauner has reimagined an age-old trope on her own terms. For the album, she told Out, “I create my own experiences and communities that are largely rooted with queer people, women, non-binary people, all different races.”
With “The Body Is a Blade,” Zauner’s fascination with duality comes across most pointedly. “The body is a blade that moves while your brain is writhing/Knuckled under pain, you mourn but your blood is flowing,” she sings. Though Zauner is still grieving, her body has its own ideas. And even as Japanese Breakfast turn to the stars, Zauner’s best moments are rooted in the here and now. | 2017-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | July 18, 2017 | 8 | 0fe67344-506e-4738-9bed-4c30f731f2ff | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | null |
Third album from the meticulous French band finds its members loosening their ties, unbuttoning their cuffs, and coming across as the soft-rock Strokes. | Third album from the meticulous French band finds its members loosening their ties, unbuttoning their cuffs, and coming across as the soft-rock Strokes. | Phoenix: It's Never Been Like That | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9030-its-never-been-like-that/ | It's Never Been Like That | Maybe it's the French heritage, or their collaborations with new-age dabblers Air, but Phoenix has proven itself a band in touch enough with its feminine side to embrace the dulcet tones and oxymoronic world of soft rock. With production as crisp as a Frito and singer Thomas Mars' mercury croon, the group has assembled two brilliant singles ("If I Ever Feel Better" and "Everything Is Everything") that could slot into the playlists of hipsters and receptionists alike. Yet Phoenix haven't quite been able to stretch their minty-fresh sound over the length of an album, with too much of both Alphabetical and United floating off into the atmosphere.
The approach of It's Never Been Like That reflects an awareness of this shortcoming, as the band seeks a more consistent sound through mimicking the sloppier styles of those uncouth Americans-- in particular the Strokes. Loosening their ties and unbuttoning their cuffs, Phoenix put on their best slouch, slathering the album with messy, naturalistic guitar playing completely at odds with their usual robotic aesthetic. This earnest attempt at a costume change fails...but at the same time creates the uncomfortable dynamic that makes it Phoenix's best album.
For all the effort made to un-slick their sound, Phoenix just can't keep their OCD meticulousness at bay, utilizing all that slapdash guitar as a cued sonic preset no different from familiar tools like the string-synth and disco-bass. Maybe that modular usage sounds like a bad thing, but instead the interplay between lazy strumming and everything-in-its-right-place arrangements effectively rewrites the history of the garage-rock revival, drawing a line between "Last Nite" and Tom Petty and erasing the denial that "Maps" was the biggest song that scene's brief heyday produced. The tools in "Consolation Prizes" and "Second to None" may be the same, but replacing studied ennui with a breezy joie de vivre prevents the pop essence from being overly diluted by rumpled poses.
Here the band improves on its usual success rate by depositing not one, but two showstopper tracks. "Long Distance Call" embodies the disconnect between shamble and sheen better than anything else on the album, with the band alternately stomping the gas and the brake to lurch between their easy-listening older material and the happily polluted new image. "Courtesy Laughs" highlights the record's second half with a simple chord progression made transcendent by its metronome rhythm. Both tracks still could have remained middle-quartile indie pop without the carefully calibrated cool of Mars' vocals, operating at conversation-level volume and casually, smoothly hitting his marks without protracted strain even when enthusiastically incanting the album's title.
At under 40 minutes long, It's Never Been Like That is pretty much a sprint, though even at this short distance the band starts to sound a bit dehydrated on both five-minute instrumental "North" and the over-long "Sometimes in a Fall". But through most of the record, Phoenix marks out their territory in the sparsely-attended arena of new soft-rock and demonstrating the genre's compatibility with indie tropes. Dentists sick of REO Speedwagon ballads send their sincere thanks. | 2006-05-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-05-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Astralwerks | May 24, 2006 | 8 | 0fea31ac-5f16-45ca-b586-5f1780fc0d2c | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
The second album from the OVO R&B duo wades into the thick fog of heartbreak but stays grounded by the delicate and powerful voice of Daniel Daley and the shadowy, cinematic beats of Ninteen85. | The second album from the OVO R&B duo wades into the thick fog of heartbreak but stays grounded by the delicate and powerful voice of Daniel Daley and the shadowy, cinematic beats of Ninteen85. | dvsn: Morning After | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dvsn-morning-after/ | Morning After | For dvsn, the duo of singer Daniel Daley and producer Nineteen85 signed to Drake’s OVO label, dark clouds started to form near the end of their excellent debut on a song called “Hallucinations.” On an album steeped in the glow of new love, the track found Daley wrestling with intense heartbreak: “Tryna rewind till we’re back where we started … seeing you when you aren’t there.” Then there was “Another One,” which spoke more directly: “Never did I think I’d lose your love,” Daley concedes. “The hell was I thinking of?”
Morning After is a heartbreak record that extends that narrative, yet the album feels murkier than its predecessor and colder to the ear. It depicts a period of ambiguity, that on-again/off-again cycle of hooking up and breaking up, where it’s better to move on but the passion is too intense. Daley examines the ups and downs of a failed romance, lamenting his own faults and shortcomings along the way, while looking for some sort of resolution—not just with the woman, but with himself. It’s unclear if he ever finds it.
Daley is blessed with one of those rich tenor and falsetto voices that is built to convey pain and torment. It’s sturdy enough to channel classic R&B vibes of, say, Lenny Williams, but has the right production touches on it to feel right at home in the present. On “Nuh Time / Tek Time” in particular, he boils over in a rare bout of frustration. “You make it hard to trust you,” he quips. “Right now you talking crazy/First marriage, then babies?/Then text me, you hate me?!” The coiled drama of his voice and the production creates a love story for the Instagram age, a gut-wrenching tale in the era of swipe left and double-tap validation. Somehow, he captures the essence of R&B pillars like Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite (the singer’s 1999 cut “Fortunate” is sampled for “P.O.V.”) and Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, splitting the difference between them without leaning too heavily on either one.
While the dvsn brand is mostly associated with the silver-throated Daley, Nineteen85 is equally vital to the group’s overall effect. He mixes pop, modern bounce, and hip-hop, to create sparse beats that could work just as well beneath their label boss’ jilted bleeding heart rhymes. Yet on Morning After, the music feels shadowy and cinematic, unfolding in a fog of downtempo electro-soul. As it plays, you can almost see Daley’s story unfold like a melodrama. “We know music opens the door to the unknown,” they said. “Your mind automatically starts to fill in the blanks and create what you would want to see while listening to our music.”
To that end, Morning After challenges listeners to assemble their own puzzle, pull fragments from it, and draw their own conclusions. Trust, aloneness, insecurity, hundreds of nights worth of feelings: dvsn puts them all in the air for you to grab at any moment. There’s an air of mystery surrounding the group, which can make it tough to get a bead on exactly what they’re aiming for. Yet in an era where one’s personality takes precedence over the music they create, there’s something refreshing about art being presented without frills. For dvsn, this only adds to the intrigue, drawing you into the music even if the intended recipient is unclear. Though the overall story behind Morning After is vastly relatable, it feels a bit too cryptic in certain spots, and songs like “Don’t Choose” and “You Do” meander without adding much to the arc. But even the down moments add to the album’s meditative vibe—the isolation is palpable and the despair is too real. In dvsn’s world, old flames burn slow. | 2017-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | OVO Sound / Warner Bros. | October 18, 2017 | 7.6 | 0fee126c-b389-4e78-9dfc-4d27c5eaddff | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | |
The Australian bedroom-pop artist’s third album demonstrates that her attention to how her songs start, end, and connect has never been keener or better controlled. | The Australian bedroom-pop artist’s third album demonstrates that her attention to how her songs start, end, and connect has never been keener or better controlled. | Katie Dey: solipsisters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katie-dey-solipsisters/ | solipsisters | The internet can be a lonely place, but Katie Dey treats it like a one-way transmitter to other people feeling trapped in their homes, heads, or bodies. On her debut asdfasdf, the Melbourne songwriter shot her fragmented voice out of her isolated world and right into your own. Her heavily pitch-shifted coo on songs like “don’t be scared” and “fear o the dark” made the words difficult to understand, but the ineffability of the feelings was clear. If her vocals sometimes sounded more electrical than human, they also reminded you that, hey, brains run on electricity. On the new solipsisters, Dey moves closer to the mic than ever before, revealing the powerful lyricist hidden in plain sight.
For all the scrambled sonics running through her music, Dey has proven a knack for careful pacing. Asdfasdf kicked in like a generator, building to an energetic peak on “Unkillable,” while 2016’s Flood Network staggered its songs with short interludes running from “(f1)” to “(f8).” solipsisters pushes off gently with “waves,” pairing crashing water and crumbling, distorted pulses that flow seamlessly into the title track. “solipsisting” builds with warm drums that swoop and crack in the air, and rather than ending after its ascendent climax, it simply floats in the immaculate atmosphere. Dey’s voice slides into textural fog, where acoustic guitars and synths tie loose knots that recall Feels-era Animal Collective, whose songs seemed to curiously wander past their logical conclusions. Dey’s attention to how her songs start, end, and connect has never been keener or better controlled.
As seamlessly as “solipsisting” sneaks into view, “stuck” snaps to attention with crisp piano lines and pristine drums. “I was born inside this body and I’m stuck there/I’m a storm inside a rotting false construction,” Dey sings with surprising clarity. Her words, shared in a lyric sheet for the first time, nestle their sharp edges inside candy-coated sounds and unexpected details. “stuck” amplifies her strengths without losing the homespun intimacy that made her work so special, like when she punctuates a soaring chorus with a soft, throat-clearing cough.
solipsisters’ suite-like uniformity and more balanced mix are a departure from the chaotic highs and lows of Dey’s early work, allowing the songs to support and play off one another. Repeated references to shells and waves ripple from the stunning centerpiece, “shell,” where Dey opens a reflection on her own voice with the line, “My soul sings in higher octaves than my larynx will allow.” In a recent interview, she explained that her virtuosic pitch-shifting was not only an artistic decision, but “a way of relieving dysphoria and making my own music more palatable for me to listen to so that it didn't upset me—like putting an Instagram filter on your face.” Over flourishes of drums and glowing synths, she finds melody and poetry in knotty phrases like, “Morphing esophageal practices hardening the lumps up in my throat/My heart throbs in impossible rhythms my head could never erode.” It’s transcendent enough to illuminate even the album’s darkest passages.
In that same interview, Dey explained of solipsisters: “There’s a lot of ‘you’ and ‘me’ and ‘we,’ but it’s really all just about me, because I was so totally alone while I was writing these songs. You end up talking to yourself a lot if you’re isolated.” The album’s depictions of disconnection and depression are not easy to hear, even when surrounded by sounds that are, but in writing so passionately and honestly, Dey has initiated a powerful act of communion. If she’s reached you, she’s already made you feel less alone. | 2019-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Run for Cover | June 5, 2019 | 7.9 | 0fefb738-09a8-420b-b591-26b2008cc37b | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
The long-awaited follow-up to 2002's Fantastic Damage is more textured and melodic than its predecessor, but El-P's production is still amongst the most jarring in hip-hop and here the Def Jux rapper's themes and shading remain pitched to black, haunted by the prospect of a dystopian near-future. | The long-awaited follow-up to 2002's Fantastic Damage is more textured and melodic than its predecessor, but El-P's production is still amongst the most jarring in hip-hop and here the Def Jux rapper's themes and shading remain pitched to black, haunted by the prospect of a dystopian near-future. | El-P: I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10006-ill-sleep-when-youre-dead/ | I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead | Fantastic Damage, El-P's solo debut, was one of the first great albums released in post-9/11 America. It was tense and paranoid, and El-P seemed to be peering over his shoulder at the gathering storm. The album's production, blending waves of cacophony over broken rhythms, was similarly bleak. And while Fan Dam didn't anticipate everything-- who, aside from perhaps Donald Rumsfeld, could've foreseen the sanctification of torture as a tool of "freedom"-- it did give form to our own feelings of dread and helplessness.
Though I'll Sleep When You're Dead is (slightly) more textured and melodic than its predecessor, El-P's production is still amongst the most jarring in hip-hop, and his themes and shading remain pitched to black, haunted by the prospect of a dystopian near-future: Cigarettes are extinguished on wet palms, prisoners are raped before execution, and El-P-- our crazed, sometimes indecipherable narrator-- sticks his head out of a hoopde, screaming "freedom is mine." In this world, as in ours, we're coasting in the fast lane "with doom and disease." Like El-Producto says, "The whole design got my mind crying."
"Tasmanian Pain Coaster", the album's first track, kicks off with a sample from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. "Do you think that if you were falling in space that you would slow down after a while or go faster and faster?" the first voice (Moira Kelley's Donna Hayward) asks. "Faster and faster," heroine Laura Palmer replies. "For a long time, you wouldn't feel anything. And you'd burst into fire, forever."
El-P spends 13 tracks exploring the freefalling fatalism of that quote. America is ablaze and El-P is fucked up from the floor up: "Why should I be sober when God is so clearly dusted out his mind?" the rapper asks on "Smithereens". The reply never comes, and he stumbles along like Rory Cochrane, too dazed to be angry or to put all the pieces together. On "Drive", he talks of a kid who "fuel injected a speed ball," before later admitting with a wink "my triple-A card has one too many initials."
The album works best at these moments, when it's sneering into the abyss and spitting out gallows humor. "I stood up for the God's of ore mining/ In a military humvee with no bullet-proof siding," El-P raps on "Drive". Afterwards, a distant voice chimes in, "sorry about that, guys" as robotic backing vocals emerge from a miasma of corrosive, clunky rhythms to provide a mocking refrain of sorts. Elsewhere, lead-single "Smithereens" begins with a snippet of what could be a sunny, Bob Dorough track, before a voice interjects, "Bring me the dramatic intro machine," and squishy horror synths introduce one of El-P's most caustic songs to date.
But perhaps the most explicit instance of the album's dark humor comes at the end of "Habeas Corpses", which imagines El-P and guest rapper Cage as workers aboard a futuristic prison ship. Their task is to "facilitate the end" for the incarcerated. (From the gunshots sprinkled throughout, it's easy to imagine what that would entail.) "It's almost romantic," Cage comments, but El-P doesn't share the enthusiasm. He's fallen in love with prisoner #247681Z, and his job is suddenly full of contradiction and nuance. He tries to escape, but of course escape is illusionary and temporary.
"Habeas Corpus" is similar in spirit to Fantastic Damage's "Stepfather Factory", and provides a makeshift metaphor for our own country's desire for vindication and liberation. But, as the song fades, El-P is unwilling to cop to his own seriousness, and the track fades with him and Cage laughing off the drama they've just conjured.
The jaded pose is a good look for El, and when the album tries to emote, such as on "The Overly Dramatic Truth", it falls flat on its face. The song is full of cringe-worthy lines such as "you deserve the ignorance and bliss that I wish I still had," and is too emo for its own good. But when El-P sticks to what he knows-- chronicling the grime -I'll Sleep When You're Dead is every bit as good as its predecessor. It's a scary, difficult album, but one well suited for our times. | 2007-03-16T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-03-16T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Definitive Jux | March 16, 2007 | 8 | 0ff21d2d-099a-48a5-a2d4-2258c9d7d818 | Pitchfork | null |
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With the assistance of fellow Chicagoans Chance the Rapper, Saba, and Kweku Collins, R&B artist Jamila Woods makes vital, resonant protest music that sounds like a children’s playground. | With the assistance of fellow Chicagoans Chance the Rapper, Saba, and Kweku Collins, R&B artist Jamila Woods makes vital, resonant protest music that sounds like a children’s playground. | Jamila Woods: HEAVN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22156-heavn/ | HEAVN | It’s hard to tell if Jamila Woods’ solo debut HEAVN could have (or would have) been made without the renewed scrutiny of America’s deeply entrenched racism that has crystallized in the aftermath of the August 2014 killing of Mike Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. As part of M&O—a duo formed with fellow Chicagoan Owen Hill—Woods released two full-length projects before the phrase “black lives matter” became a national argument, a hash tag, or a movement. The group’s pair of self-released albums—The Joy (2012) and Almost Us (2014)—were softly adventurous mixes of acoustic soul, alternative pop, and folksy hip-hop that gamboled around the subjects of love, art, the art of love, and the love of art. A sample hook, from Chance the Rapper went: “Love won’t you fall asleep in my arms/While I read you these poems/That I wrote you so long ago.”
M&O showcased many things: smart production, masterful arrangements, a willingness to follow melody and tune above and beyond genre or format. The music was all soft and tender, songs of unity with no anger; the type of songs that would feel like escapism at a time when the rhetoric churned from the mini-complexes of presidential candidates, pop stars, and social media micro celebrities alike was ever-sharpening and often unforgiving. But Woods—who in addition to being a vocalist serves as Associate Artistic Director of the non-profit youth organization Young Chicago Authors—has emerged as a proponent of social justice; the kind of voice that doesn’t stay silent or shy away from the troubles of the world. And, on HEAVN she delves deep into the calamity of now and emerges with songs of freedom and meaning.
As with her previous work, Woods utilizes what’s functional—clapping games, lullabies, Paula Cole, headlines, statistics—to make music that defies categorization but not meaning. The result is unmistakable: HEAVN is protest music that sounds like a children’s playground. Every song here is resilient and steadfast without being angry and militant; almost each tune is a jingle. Produced largely by a coterie of ascendant Chicago stars—Peter Cottontale, oddCouple, Kweku Collins, Saba, and more—the tracks come off as if they’ve been cooked at a high temperature until all of the indignation has evaporated, leaving behind only hope and a rising strong vulnerability.
On “Blk Girl Soldier,” Woods champions freedom fighters, feminists, and writers as being “déjà vu of Tubman,” noting that even a young black girl “scares the government.” There are piercing claims and lamentations—“We go missing by the hundreds;” “They want us in kitchen/Kill our sons with lynchings/We get loud about it/Oh, now we’re the bitches;” “Look at what they did to my sister/Last century, last week/They make her hate her own skin, treat her like a sin”—all presented without rancor or rage. The most defiant thing about the song is Woods’ defiance of the baser emotions during such audacious level-headed truth-speaking. The theme is one of defense in the face of oppression, not vengeance. It’s a “Black Lives Matter (Too)” treatise, not an “(Only) Black Lives Matter” one.
The messages are made easier by Wood’s phrasing and voice—she’s light on the heavy points, her vocals sweet even when delivering bitter truths. She presents herself as an introvert who’d wistfully “rather spend my days alone on my pillow” as opposed to someone railing against the injustice of the world. On “LSD” she’s dedicated to her hometown in the face of inequity and coldness: “I will never leave you,” she sings. “I’m everything you made me/Even when you break me down.” Chance the Rapper’s characteristically dense verse—with shots at Spike Lee, observations of violence, and notes of gentrification— accounted for, it’s all of the sentiments of Kanye West’s “Homecoming,” but with less bombast and self-mythology.
Even when she’s singing about the personal and seemingly romantic, Wood’s experience still seems to presented through the filter of her place in larger society. On “Lonely Lonely” she may be talking to a potential lover when she sings, “Don’t take from me my quiet/Don’t take from me my tears/Don’t take from me me trials/Don’t take from me my fears”—but she embodies her full self as a woman in a world that wants its women to remain silent and its Blacks complacent as to never address the realities of patriarchy and white supremacy. On the title track, she’s ready to for undying love, but links it her ancestors lost to the Middle Passage: “They’re dancing in the deepest ocean/See? Not even death could stop them.”
Filled with personal memories, affirmations of self, and gazes of society’s racial strife, HEAVN is a singular mix of clear-eyed optimism and Black girl magic. On the opener, “Bubbles,” Woods sings of shyness, hesitation, and self-care, noting “how many different oils we know/to turn our skins from brown to gold”—making it metaphor about both beauty and protection. This rumination on isolation, journey, and transformation—which pops up throughout the album—comes full circle on the closer, “Way Up” where she sings, “I’m an alien from inner space” as a declaration that simultaneously reads as individual and universal. “Just ’cause I’m born here/Don't mean I’m from here,” she asserts because she knows that HEAVN is about a climate in which she doesn’t belong. It’s a climate in which none of us belong, but it’s also the only one that could produce an album filled with this particular tenor of hope in the face of despair. | 2016-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Closed Sessions | July 21, 2016 | 8.4 | 0ff29997-4899-45d9-ba3d-4a8dc6dfbb20 | kris ex | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kris-ex/ | null |
After successful tours with Dan Deacon and Girl Talk, White Williams issues a debut album layered with impeccable influences-- including Roxy Music, Beck, and T. Rex-- and a sense of calculated disaffection. | After successful tours with Dan Deacon and Girl Talk, White Williams issues a debut album layered with impeccable influences-- including Roxy Music, Beck, and T. Rex-- and a sense of calculated disaffection. | White Williams: Smoke | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10754-smoke/ | Smoke | Getting the full picture of Joe Williams' debut LP Smoke means making your way past the horrifically gaudy cover image to the production credits inside. There, after Williams' own writer/composer/engineer listing, is the name of the cover model, followed by credits for hair, makeup, "hookah prop design," and of course, "art." Williams, it is made clear, rolls as thick as the exhalant that gives his debut its name.
That aesthetic emphasis has landed Williams an opening gig for the recent electro-populist double-bill of Girl Talk and Dan Deacon. But while his tourmates get sweaty with the crowd as they tap away at their electronics, Williams keeps a cool distance. His songs are thin and languorous, with impeccable influences and the sort of calculated disaffection that comes from an MFA in design and a good weed connection. His attitude and vocal timbre have earned him comparisons to Beck, and that's more than fair: As glassy, nonchalant dance music, Smoke could be Midnite Vultures Redux: Something for the Blunted.
Mostly, though, Williams is a groove-obssesser working through his influences, and doing it with enough restraint and creativity to work them into his songs, leaving the showiness to his cover models. Smoke’s signposts form a coherent musical worldview: "In the Club" is T. Rex's "The Motivator" at 16 rpm, "Going Down" and "Route to Palm" work in the 1970s West African guitar colorations that Dirty Projectors, Vampire Weekend, and Islands have been exploring lately, "New Violence" hurtles forward with a motorik bassline, and opener "Headlines" plays like a bubblegum version of Brian Eno's "Baby's on Fire". Even the umpteenth barely-augmented cover of "I Want Candy" feels like a distillation of the record's love for veneers.
Smoke's fondness of surfaces doesn't stop at the level of rhythmic appropriation, though; Williams takes an observational approach to lyricism that recalls early Roxy Music's tongue-in-cheek take on the glamourous life. In "Headlines", he crafts a series of slow motion scenester dioramas like "Climb all you can/ It's a killer stake/ We'll hang from the branches/ While the mayor dances/ In the headlines." "In the Club" tightens its focus, observing, "Trashy dancing baby got inside for free/ She's got the basement wrist/ She do the snow-blow twist." Like his predecessors, Williams doesn't distinguish much between style and peril; the middle of Smoke features "New Violence", "Going Down", and "Danger", which view impending menace as a necessity for sophistication.
Williams' ostensible depthlessness, like that of his forebears, is itself only a façade, and Smoke offers plenty to discover across repeated listens-- particularly the way in which he tweaks his own voice, melting and reshaping it like the models' Technicolor "tears" on the album cover. This tendency toward sonic self-mutilation underscores the most appealing aspect of Williams' persona: Underneath the mannerisms is a shy kid, too timid to force his will on his audience in the manner of his tour mates, content to watch and comment from the margins. Appropriately, then, a streak of dark nostalgia murmurs just beneath the glitzy exterior of "The Shadow". Williams remembers "driving toward collisions in our heads," "burning buildings and the rivals that we had," and "wailing widows and the moments that we bled," and in the process giving some context to that hard-to-forget cover image: fashionable high culture as a sad, grotesque fantasy. | 2007-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2007-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino / Tigerbeat6 | November 1, 2007 | 8.3 | 0ff66d30-7372-4efd-91ab-3f05fded2e30 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
null | Here's an album that begs for vinyl, although not for the reason you might think. Certainly, My Morning Jacket's worn-in rock 'n' roll-- its starchy guitar riffs and Jim James' other-end-of-a-long-tunnel vocals-- seems tailor-made for the intimate crackle of a dusty turntable. But the concisely titled *Z*, the band's fourth full-length, needs to be flipped over: It has two distinct sides. Granted, most albums still rely on the two-sided format the same way most movies still rely on the three-act plot, adhering to it almost subconsciously. But I'm not entirely sure My Morning Jacket intended such a dramatic difference between | My Morning Jacket: Z | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16943-z/ | Z | Here's an album that begs for vinyl, although not for the reason you might think. Certainly, My Morning Jacket's worn-in rock 'n' roll-- its starchy guitar riffs and Jim James' other-end-of-a-long-tunnel vocals-- seems tailor-made for the intimate crackle of a dusty turntable. But the concisely titled Z, the band's fourth full-length, needs to be flipped over: It has two distinct sides. Granted, most albums still rely on the two-sided format the same way most movies still rely on the three-act plot, adhering to it almost subconsciously. But I'm not entirely sure My Morning Jacket intended such a dramatic difference between these two half Zs.
As Side One begins, the presence of producer John Leckie (of Radiohead, Stone Roses, and, er, Kula Shaker fame) is immediately evident. "Wordless Chorus" launches Z with a hardscrabble sound that recalls their earlier material, suggesting that the brighter production and looser, jambandier approach of It Still Moveswas a slight detour. There are more keyboards on these songs, courtesy of new member Bo Koster, and more confident experimentation-- a little reggae, a little r&b, even a little ambient. Defiantly flaunting their rural eccentricities, My Morning Jacket once again recall the earliest of early R.E.M., before you could understand Stipe's mumbling, back when the Georgia foursome defined themselves by claiming a birthright to kudzu-covered mythology. It's not really My Morning Jacket's sound that suggests this comparison, but their willingness to let the music retain its mystery despite the risk of seeming obscure or evasive.
So Z abandons the Skynyrdisms of It Still Moves, but that album's lessons remain intact: Compared to those on previous albums, these tracks have more guitar crunch and tighter song structures. Even single "Off the Record", with its driving reggae rhythms and James' lively performance, foregoes a dueling-guitar climax in favor of an unraveling outro that sounds like Air noir. "Wordless Chorus" hinges on just what its title suggests: Jim James singing aaahs and ohhhs between verses as the band rocks around him. It's as if the entire album, not just this song, could be stripped of literal meaning, as if everything My Morning Jacket needs to say can be communicated exclusively through sound. And it works, especially at the end of "Wordless Chorus", when James breaks into a rapturous r&b yowl that recalls the Passion of the Prince.
But My Morning Jacket does have something to say. Zis a spiritual album-- or at least Side One is-- with references to religion and a few barely veiled allusions to Jesus Christ himself. "Religion should appeal to the hearts of the young," James sings on "Gideon", and guess who the bouncy "What a Wonderful Man" is about. Here's a hint: "He was leading us through the dark/ He was saying that love goes on." Even that title itself suggests an omega to some unknown alpha-- sex or death or both. These hints at larger meanings infuse the songs with a weird sense of questing adventure, as if the band is revealing its secrets only to present even more riddles.
Side Two, however, loses much of the strange steam that fuels Side One, struggling to find its momentum and bringing the album back to reality with pedestrian problems like pacing. Following "Off the Record", "Into the Woods" breaks that spell, making everything that comes after it sound a little pale and less immediate. A dark-carnival organ sets the sideshow stage for James to sing about burning kittens and babies in blenders, and the overly literal production inserts a me-oww and a wahhh into the mix, Spike Jones-style. It sounds markedly better when the band comes in halfway through, but the song still dawdles to a conclusion. As if to apologize for "Into the Woods", "Anytime" is straightforward rock, enlivened by a pogoing guitar riff and James singing himself ragged. Disregarding its low-lying bass and piano lines, "Lay Low" rises to a blandly grandstanding jam as if on autopilot, but "Knot Comes Loose" ambles along on Koster's fluttering piano rhythms.
Fortunately, Z ends with the intense, simmering "Dondante". Backed only by a casually insistent rhythm section and a barely-there guitar, James sings as if in ecstasy, before the song explodes unexpectedly into a big, desperate chorus that sounds quintessentially My Morning Jacket. Then the song simply fades out-- but extremely slowly-- into several seconds of still silence. I like to think that the vinyl edition would loop that silence like Sgt. Pepper's, posing an answer to the album's question: What comes after Z? | 2005-10-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2005-10-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO / Red | October 6, 2005 | 7.6 | 0ff81597-1be2-45cb-ae4c-8c76b5e7d6d2 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
This is an album by the Black Keys called “Let’s Rock.” That's what it does. | This is an album by the Black Keys called “Let’s Rock.” That's what it does. | The Black Keys: “Let’s Rock” | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-black-keys-lets-rock/ | “Let’s Rock” | When the Black Keys look back, they won’t have regrets about striking while the iron was hot. After the mammoth success of their sixth album Brothers, which polished the band’s raw blues-rock enough for the radio, the duo raced out two more albums, including 2011’s even slicker El Camino. They headlined arenas and festivals, touring ceaselessly while licensing their music to seemingly any brand interested—which, for a time, felt like all of them. They were ubiquitous, and their sound became so permanently embedded in the airwaves that casual listeners may not have noticed they’ve been gone.
The duo’s new “Let’s Rock” follows their last effort Turn Blue by five years, the longest gap of their career. As the band tells it, they burned out, though during their time off Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney both continued making music at their typically relentless clip, just not with each other. Carney produced records for Michelle Branch, Tobias Jesso Jr., Wild Belle, and others, while Auerbach helmed records by the Pretenders and Cage the Elephant and dropped a leisurely solo album.
For some bands, that time apart might have yielded an epiphany that reshaped their approach. But the Black Keys have never much valued change. They’re focused, workmanlike, and committed to what works. As a result, “Let’s Rock” plays exactly like the record they might have rushed out right after Turn Blue.
This time, they are working without Danger Mouse, the producer whose modern/retro fusion helped prime the band for their crossover. His fingerprints in particular were all over the psychedelic hodgepodge of Turn Blue and its kitchen-sink strings and keyboards. “Let’s Rock,” in turn, opts for a streamlined approach: just Auerbach, Carney, a pair of backing vocalists (Ashley Wilcoxson and Leisa Hans) and as many overdubs as it takes to get the job done.
In truth, Danger Mouse’s window dressings neither added nor detracted all that much from the band’s sound. His absence leaves more room for riffs, and “Let’s Rock” doesn’t skimp on them. “Shine a Little Light” kicks off with a torrent of brawling guitars, the embodiment of those old speaker ads with the guy in a chair blowing away his living room. “Lo/Hi,” about reckless thrills and brutal comedowns, is even more undeniable, pure leather-jacketed swagger.
Most of “Let’s Rock” hits its mark, but sometimes the band cribs so overtly from their influences that it feels like cheating off of a test. The guitars on “Walk Across the Water” ape the suave glide of T. Rex’s “Jeepster," while “Sit Around and Miss You” lifts its lick so shamelessly from Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You” that it’s hard to hear it without picturing Michael Madsen slicing off a dude’s ear. Elsewhere the influences are subtler—shades of Steely Dan in the amplified soft-rock of “Breaking Down,” a hint of the Isley Brothers in the nimble lick of “Tell Me Lies.”
If none of those reference points are especially hip, that seems to be by design. “Let’s Rock” feels like a deliberate retreat from the limelight, where the Black Keys were always an odd fit anyway. Ambitious? No. Effective? Swish. Just as the album art for Brothers, with its matter-of-fact text, downplayed expectations, “Let’s Rock” is upfront about its meat-and-potatoes aspirations. This is an album by the Black Keys called “Let’s Rock.” It does.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Easy Eye Sound | July 2, 2019 | 7 | 0fff4b92-8c81-48dc-a3ba-c45ec874f911 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On this impressive record, the UK producer's haunted sound evokes faded memories, ghostly auras, and dream states but also remains grounded and forceful. | On this impressive record, the UK producer's haunted sound evokes faded memories, ghostly auras, and dream states but also remains grounded and forceful. | Forest Swords: Dagger Paths | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14397-dagger-paths/ | Dagger Paths | If there's any space left between micro-genres like witch house/drag, hauntology, hypnagogic pop/chillwave, and drone-step, Matthew Barnes has found it. Forest Swords, the UK producer's one-man project, conjures many ideas associated with those tags-- faded memories, ghostly auras, dream states. His music sometimes feels built from allusions and reference points, but the connections to sources are so elusive that Dagger Paths sounds singular first and evocative of something else second.
For me, that "something else" is often another artist who has snuck into a stylistic crevice, Mark Nelson, the Labradford member who works solo as Pan American. Like Nelson, Barnes is adept at picking simple rhythms and sounds, repeating them at a pace both languid and insistent, and folding in texture and volume until each piece becomes sneakily dense. Both also prefer wiry, reverb-heavy guitars, which charge their songs like lightning inside a cloud. But where Pan American can sometimes softly float away, Forest Swords is rarely hazy or indistinct. Most of Barnes' sounds are clear-- take opener "Miarches" whose echoes are big and bold, less like drifting fog than brisk wind.
That boldness comes partially from Barnes' interest in techno, hip-hop, and R&B. Those influences give him a strong sense of beat and a knack for forceful bass lines. The R&B strain in particular lurks in the background of everything here-- but in case you miss it among the reflecting guitars and rumbling beats, Barnes makes it explicit in an abstract take on Aaliyah's "If Your Girl Only Knew". Prioritizing bass over beat, letting every sound decay and dissolve, Barnes crafts a dying echo of the original, as if he hoped to erase it from his memory *Eternal Sunshine-*style.
What sticks in my mind after listening to Dagger Paths is its visual nature. When I get wrapped up in one of Barnes' tracks, I picture shadowy figures, found filmstrips, or TV movies fuzzed by tape wear. Barnes' videos are actually clearer and simpler than that (though "The Light" is almost exactly what I imagined), but they all use old footage to reflect the music's sense of dislocation. But it would be wrong to peg Barnes to one set of images or sounds-- my guess is he can do a lot more, and his new single, "Rattling Cage", has a dubby, Sun Araw vibe. As long as he keeps making music this blurrily evocative and vividly pictorial, any direction he takes will be the right one. | 2010-06-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-06-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Olde English Spelling Bee | June 24, 2010 | 7.9 | 10159d9e-de55-4ef6-8f22-e44dced7f9c9 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
On an album whose title translates as “Consistent Fantasy Is Reality,” the Turkish singer pursues distant dreams of freedom in a fusion of contemporary rock and Turkish folk. | On an album whose title translates as “Consistent Fantasy Is Reality,” the Turkish singer pursues distant dreams of freedom in a fusion of contemporary rock and Turkish folk. | Gaye Su Akyol: İstikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gaye-su-akyol-istikrarli-hayal-hakikattir/ | İstikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir | “Consistent fantasy is reality/There is death and this is a dream/Let my woes pour into yours/Hey shake it, life is rock ‘n’ roll.” So purrs the Turkish singer Gaye Su Akyol on the title track of her latest album, her voice honeyed and weary. Nurturing rock ‘n’ roll fantasies in her home country is a fraught proposition; the Eurasian nation dominates headlines more for its geopolitical standing and dismal human-rights record than its rock output, which makes Su Akyol’s music feel all the more vital. Over the past four years, she has positioned herself as one of the scene’s luminaries, alongside acts like Ayyuka and Büyük Ev Ablukada. Her visually arresting presence elicits comparison to Björk, and her approach lies in melding her home’s musical heritage to a wide array of rock stylings.
Her third album in five years, İstikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir crackles with a live energy that stems from the 18 months of touring following its predecessor, 2016’s Hologram Ĭmparatorluğu. Producing the album with longtime guitarist Ali Güçlü Şimşek, Su Akyol is in firm command of her powers, adding a few more electronic textures to push to new heights. The opening title track begins with the kind of vintage squelching electronics that led Andy Votel, the Gaslamp Killer and, most famously, J Dilla to plunder similarly sumptuous Turkish grooves. It then bursts into a percussion-heavy stomp full of synth blats and heavily phased guitar that serve as opulent backdrop for the singer. Her voice is a mesmerizing thing, deep and plummy enough to shake trees and stir hearts.
Earmarks of Su Akyol’s previous albums remain present. There are folk instruments like the oud, bağlama, and cümbüş that situate acoustic songs like “Bağrımızda Taş” and “Boşluk Ve Sonsuzluk” in Turkey’s past. Şimşek’s whizz-bang Dick Dale shredding on rollicking numbers like “Laziko” beams in like surf music from a distant star. Against the synth bass on the slinky “Bir Yaralı Kuştum,” his double-time picking and wah pedal work deepen the song’s pliant groove. But then there’s the flare of flamenco that gives a dramatic kick to “Şahmeran.”
Even when the album slows things down to a crawl, Su Akyol and band cast a spell. A syrupy and dubbed-out drum machine kick on the brooding and sluggish “Gölgenle Bir Başıma” gives it all the dread of a Massive Attack production. The song (which translates as “All Alone With Your Shadow”) paints a portrait of drought, heartbreak, and grief in poetic lyrics poetic that elude facile understanding.
Su Akyol’s previous album translated as “Hologram Empire,” and İstikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir offers another such surreal edict: “Consistent Fantasy Is Reality.” Working in a country where the oppression of free expression is standard operating procedure, Su Akyol’s music seems like a post-1984 coping mechanism, where only in fantasy can freedom be truly felt. Or, as her artist statement puts it: “We need to create a counter reality in order to challenge organized evil and the horrible reality it creates, and the strongest option here is ‘consistent dreaming.’” The album deploys cagey metaphors to mask greater critiques, but a powerful line from “Halimiz İtten Beter” shifts from the language of hope and dreams and instead gives voice to those too-real moments of desolation: “I gave up on existence and held on to absence.” | 2018-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Global | Glitterbeat | November 13, 2018 | 7.7 | 10187c62-0903-4a8d-9067-0b4105dfa498 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Full of chaotic beats and cringe-worthy lyrics, the debut studio album from Jaden Smith is a paranoid fantasy that mixes new age thinking with apocalyptic rhetoric. | Full of chaotic beats and cringe-worthy lyrics, the debut studio album from Jaden Smith is a paranoid fantasy that mixes new age thinking with apocalyptic rhetoric. | Jaden Smith: SYRE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jaden-smith-syre/ | SYRE | Jaden Smith once said he thought it was an honor to be called “crazy.” It was his way of explaining the pseudo-philosophical babble spewing from his Twitter feed—a mix of stoned thoughts and even more stoned thoughts. Of Hollywood’s millennial generation of stars, he is among the funniest and most vexing. He’s a film and television actor, fashion designer, water-bottle company entrepreneur, and rapper whose pantheon of icons includes Kanye West and Silicon Valley tech-billionaire Elon Musk. In his music and his life, he’s a prankster and exhbitionist—showing up to public events in a Batman costume, or offering bits and pieces of his recently-shorn dreads as gifts on a talk show.
For as long as Smith has been a public figure, he has played up the thin, almost invisible line between being a hoax and being completely serious—he tries to be as transgressive and misunderstood as a Duchamp or John Waters. Still, Smith earnestly wants his art to be given the credit he thinks it deserves because he really does consider it revolutionary. He calls SYRE, his debut studio album, a “love letter to the world.” The 19-year old says this record is “very honest,” a Rosetta Stone that only people from the future may understand.
All of the sophistic ideas, musings, and pretensions that Smith has trafficked in are present, quite loudly, on SYRE. From its opening moment, he’s talking about the biblical story of creation, referencing the myth of Icarus, calling out crooked cops selling “crap,” and drowning his sorrows at the club. The opener, “B,” is part-one of the four-part song “BLUE.” On it, his sister Willow recites a sermon about the creation of man and the powers of Nyquil. Xylophone plinks meet church choruses, exploding electric guitars, and finally colossal bass drums, as Smith barrels into the track showing up haters and trying to get back with his girl. It’s incredible: it sounds like he’s trying too hard while at the same time not trying hard enough
A minute later, on “L,” he raps, almost too hilarious to be believed: “Girl I’m Martin Luther, Martin Luther King/Life is hard, I’m Kamasutra-ing.” On “U,” he somehow tops himself, delivering the second most cringe-worthy line of the year: “Man I’m artichokin’/I can’t breathe, that’s the art of chokin’.” The most cringe-worthy line of the year, appearing a few songs later on “Hope,” is actually shocking—Jaden endorses 9/11 trutherism: “Look, Fahrenheit 451/Building seven wasn’t hit and there’s more shit to come/The Pentagon is on a run.” It’s legitimately upsetting and speaks volumes to how careless Smith is on this album.
It would be generous to call this kind of songcraft scatterbrained. Smith refuses to stand still, shifting from sound to sound and thought to thought restlessly: Trap, stadium rock, John Mayer-like acoustic guitar licks, and sputtering noise can all appear in the frame of a single song. He cites Frank Ocean’s Blonde and West’s The Life of Pablo as primary influences here, which says more about his misplaced ambition that the actual sonics and content of the album. The beats are mostly helmed by Norwegian rapper Lido as well as members from Jaden’s MSFTsrep collective, which, in Smith’s own words, is “dedicated to supporting and waking up the population of planet earth.” The crisp sound of the production is the album’s one saving grace. It sounds top-shelf, as well it should since this album was three years in the making. While there are some musical highlights—like the 8-bit ambience of the Ricky Eat Acid-produced title-track—the album is constantly in pursuit of a voice it never finds.
Which highlight Smith’s writing, some of the worst in rap this year. His lyrics are crass and half-baked and insulting to one’s intelligence. He bungles his way through a world of luxury hotels (“I’m at the SOHO House/If you wanna come through”), conspiracy theories (“The Illuminati’s real, that’s the deal”), and uneducated wokeness in a way that is so artless, it becomes its own hollow kind of performance art. To spend an hour in Smith’s world is to be subject to a paranoid fantasy that mixes new age thinking with apocalyptic rhetoric. If you’re into this kind of thing, you might be better off drinking a cold pressed juice and watching a marathon of “Ancient Aliens.” It will be better for you than SYRE ever could be. | 2017-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Roc Nation / MSFTS MUSIC | November 21, 2017 | 5.1 | 10192d19-7d18-4920-9839-6afb8b80d15d | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
The Atlanta rapper tries to testify to the emotional burdens of the YSL case while staying lighthearted, resulting in an album that both lacks depth and is too absorbed in real-life drama. | The Atlanta rapper tries to testify to the emotional burdens of the YSL case while staying lighthearted, resulting in an album that both lacks depth and is too absorbed in real-life drama. | Gunna: a Gift & a Curse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gunna-a-gift-and-a-curse/ | a Gift & a Curse | On his last album DS4Ever, Gunna’s main concerns were what fast car to drive and pair of designer jeans to throw on. Now, he’s got the weight of YSL’s RICO case on his shoulders. Since he was released from jail in December, the generally tiresome social media conversation—driven by salacious Instagram and YouTube rags, plus a few rappers looking for attention—has focused on whether he “snitched.” But Gunna’s priority isn’t really responding to internet jokes. Instead, on his new album a Gift & a Curse, he’s trying to describe the emotional strain of a case that has torn apart brotherhoods and changed his outlook on life. He’s also attempting to keep the fun and lighthearted spirit of his prior music. The result is an album that is too vague to have much depth and too absorbed in real-life drama to have the feel-good vibes he wants to preserve.
Lead single “Bread & Butter” sets the tone, balancing anger at friends who have turned their back on him with wistfulness for the old days when none of this was on his mind. It’s the kind of confessional, melodic pain rap that is popular in the Deep South, but the AutoTune-heavy singing is too monotone and polished for it to be effective; listen to how a crooner like Tampa’s T9ine lilts to make up for not having a big voice. Gunna could also attempt lyrical vulnerability, emulating the blunt poetics of an artist like Jacksonville’s Lil Poppa. But he is mostly still caught up trying to puff out his chest.
I get it. He rose to the top of the Atlanta hip-hop ranks by being cool; it’s hard to dig in when he’s never really had to. Still, it’s frustrating when you can tell that he’s not being entirely real with you. Such is the case on the overly guarded and painfully slow “Paybach,” where he alludes to friends accusing him of betraying Young Thug by taking the Alford plea: “Switching on my brother are you serious?” he coos. I can assume that he’s wounded and confused by that accusation—but I have to assume, because instead of letting us in, he follows up with the flex “Nigga ain’t gon’ touch me and that’s period.” Similarly, “Idk Nomore” avoids all feelings with threats and hollow platitudes. At one point he sings, “Wanna know how Wunna feel? then listen to my music”—as if that isn’t what we are doing.
He’s better off on songs like “Fukumean,” where he goes back-to-the-basics—smoking good weed, thinking about boobs—deploying the explosive, run-on flow he nailed down around Drip Harder. Or on “Ca$h $hit,” where he continues to be nondescript emotionally but exhibits some imagination in the countless ways he describes getting fits off: “I drip like sweat in the sauna” and “Pop out, when I drip it’s a puddle.” The breezy beat of “Ca$h $hit,” with its low-key woodwinds whirling in the background, is one of the rare instrumentals that has any life to it. Notably, both of these songs come in the middle of the 15-track album, smashed in between lots of seriousness. They’ll be solid singles, but here, they really tear you from the moment.
Gunna is yet another rap star struggling with the expectation that if you hit a low point, you have to be prepared to let it all out by the next annual release date. Of all the tracks on a Gift & a Curse, “Rodeo Dr” feels truest to where he’s at right now. The beat is brisk, the flows switch, and luxury goods are still in sight but he airs some frustration: “Fuck this shit, you know I’m still doing it for Jeff and Lil Keed,” he raps, and that “Fuck this shit” is more moving than any part where being moving is the point. Clearly, Gunna isn’t ready or willing to fully pull at his emotions. I’d rather hear the album he wants to make over the one he feels like he’s supposed to. Maybe now that he’s gotten a Gift & a Curse out of the way, he’ll feel free. | 2023-06-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Young Stoner Life / 300 Entertainment | June 22, 2023 | 5.9 | 101b045f-7c7a-4a1f-89f0-6701e2f432f2 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The latest detail-heavy record from this folk-rock group examines the dark side of American spectacle. | The latest detail-heavy record from this folk-rock group examines the dark side of American spectacle. | The Felice Brothers: Celebration, Florida | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15401-celebration-florida/ | Celebration, Florida | In November 2010, the body of a man was found in his home in Celebration, Florida. He had been strangled and beaten with an axe. It was the town's first homicide in its 15-year history, and while the culprit was soon apprehended, the incident was a shock to many of the municipality's 10,000 residents. This kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen in Celebration, which had been founded by Disney specifically to be a crime-free, family-friendly throwback to a way of life that's more imagined than actual. It's unclear whether the Felice Brothers knew of that that crime when they named their fourth album Celebration, Florida, but certainly that dark spot on the town's sunny exterior adds a bit of sensationalism to these songs, which examine the dark side of American spectacle.
As with the album title, this Woodstock band chooses its proper nouns carefully, painting a glaring portrait of America full of Wonder Bread warehouses, used '96 Honda Civics, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and televisions turned to Fox 5 News. It's ersatz culture defined by its detritus, and it recalls the odd cityscapes of East River Pipe. The Felice Brothers lack F.M. Cornog's sense of wonder, which depicts even the most banal details as the stuff of science fiction. Nothing on Celebration is quite so transformative, but there are imaginative stories in these songs, populated with real characters checking the sticker price, lying to the desk clerk, and arguing with the TV.
The Felice Brothers try to reflect this American jumble in their music, which draws from 60s folk rock (their Woodstock is more The Basement Tapes than Woodstock) and general roots traditions without being specific enough to belong to any particular short-lived revival. They're tinkerers, reimagining Americana as something in flux, steeped in history yet absorbing new ideas. "Ponzi" bursts into a chaotic rumble of programmed beats and industrial stutter, linking Wall Street to the introverted grotesquerie of Nine Inch Nails rat [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| her than the self-conscious luster of hip-hop. Conceptually, it's an intriguing idea. Musically, it ruins one of the better tunes on Celebration, a tense, jerky groove that's more intriguing when it threatens to explode than when it actually explodes.
Therein lies the central complaint: The Felice Brothers may be a bit overeager in their experimenting. Perhaps unleashed by the sprawl of the album's theme, they indulge seemingly every whim, from the Auto-Tuned vocals and low-rider high-hat ride on "Honda Civic" to the bustling horns and accordion solo on the very same song. Celebration is not only a busy album, but a showy one as well: The songs morph and shift so often that they sound like several songs all at once, which tends to dilute their momentum. "Oliver Stone" fades in and out as through carried on a weak signal, until the band turns the dial from one station to the next. Opener "Fire at the Pageant", with its raucous shout-along chorus, can't convey that sense of urgency and pandemonium when it keeps stopping to consider itself in the mirror. Celebration, Florida doesn't simply reflect the hubbub of America as the Felice Brothers see it. The album becomes a part of the spectacle, which is surely not what the band intended. | 2011-05-10T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-05-10T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | May 10, 2011 | 5.7 | 101c0e75-fb8f-4dc2-acd9-c5588c5fe5fc | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Nonesuch offers an expanded reissue of this 1981 near-masterpiece, a record that's both a milestone of sampled music and a peace summit in the continual West-meets-rest struggle. | Nonesuch offers an expanded reissue of this 1981 near-masterpiece, a record that's both a milestone of sampled music and a peace summit in the continual West-meets-rest struggle. | David Byrne / Brian Eno: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1064-my-life-in-the-bush-of-ghosts/ | My Life in the Bush of Ghosts | As David Byrne describes in his liner notes, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts placed its bets on serendipity: "It is assumed that I write lyrics (and the accompanying music) for songs because I have something I need to 'express.'," he writes. "I find that more often, on the contrary, it is the music and the lyric that trigger the emotion within me rather than the other way around." Maybe because it's so obviously the product of trial-and-error experimentation, Bush of Ghosts sounded like a quirky side project on its release in 1981; heck, it didn't even have any "songs." But today, Nonesuch has repackaged it as a near-masterpiece, a milestone of sampled music, and a peace summit in the continual West-meets-rest struggle. So we're supposed to see Bush of Ghosts as a tick on the timeline of important transgressive records.
It mostly holds up to that scrutiny. An album that's built on serendipity-- on Brian Eno fooling around with a new type of drum machine, on syncing the hook in a tape loop to a chorus, on finding the right horrors on the radio-- can't score 100%. But even if you cut it some slack, crucial parts of the album don't sound as intriguing today as they once did-- namely, all of the voices.
The sampled speech from various, mainly religious, sources ties the album into a long and prestigious history of artists who used found sound, which David Toop capably outlines in the liner notes. It's still the secret sauce that provokes a reaction from the listener. But what reaction you have lies outside of Byrne's, Eno's, or your control. On the first half, where the voices are least chopped up, it's difficult to divorce them from their origins. A couple of tracks read as satire-- "America Is Waiting" sounds like Negativland with a way better rhythm section-- and others as kitsch. "Help Me Somebody" pulls a neat trick by turning a preacher into an r&b; singer, but the exorcist on "The Jezebel Spirit" doesn't raise as many hairs on the back of my neck now that taping a crazy evangelist has become the art music equivalent of broadcasting crank phone calls. We can't just hear them for their sound or cadences without digging into the meanings, and not everyone will find the meanings profound.
On the other hand, the rhythm tracks still kick ass 10 ways to Sunday, thanks both to the fly-by apperances of Bill Laswell, Chris Frantz, Prairie Prince, and a half dozen others, and to the inspired messing about of Eno and Byrne as they turned boxes and food tins into percussion. Tape loops are funkier than laptops, and the modern ear is so aware of the digital "noodging" of a sample to a beat that the refreshingly knocked-together arrangements of Bush of Ghosts are a vast improvement. At one stage of the project, they dreamed about documenting the music of a fake foreign culture. They largely pulled it off, and you can tell a lot about this far-off place from its music: It's a futuristic yet tribal town made of resonant sheets of metal and amplified plastic containers, that the populace has to bang constantly in perfect time to make the traffic move, and the stoves heat up, and the lights flicker on at night, and to coax mismatched couples into making love and breeding new percussionists.
The seven bonus tracks will provoke more arguments than they settle. The setlist of Bush of Ghosts has changed several times over the years, and the diehard fans will still have to swap left-out cuts that aren't resurrected here; most famously, "Qu'ran", an apparently sacreligious recording of Koran verses set to music, doesn't get anywhere near this reissue. The songs that are here include a few that sound almost finished, including "Pitch to Voltage", and others that would fit almost as well as anything in the second half of the disc. The last cut, "Solo Guitar with Tin Foil", features someone, presumably Byrne, playing a haunting tune on a guitar with an impossibly clean tone-- a fitting end to an album that, for all its transcontinental fingerprints, sounds strikingly free of impurities.
Though Bush of Ghosts was a link in the chain between Steve Reich and the Bomb Squad, I'm not convinced that this talking point helps us enjoy the album. However, Nonesuch made an interesting move that could help Bush of Ghosts make history all over again: they launched a "remix" website, at www.bush-of-ghosts.com, where any of us can download multitracked versions of two songs, load them up in the editor of our choice, and under a Creative Commons license, do whatever we want with them.
As I write this, the site hasn't launched, and even if it were up, I can't tell how lively its community will be, how edgy the remixers can get, and how many rules will pen them in. Nonesuch copped out by posting only part of the album, instead of every piece of tape they owned, and I suspect that the bush-of-ghosts.com site may just be a corporate sandbox for wannabe remixers. But I could be wrong; I haven't tried to submit my mash-up of "Qu'ran" and Denmark's National Anthem yet. What matters is that they started the site and released these tracks, and by doing so, they put a stake in the ground-- not the first one, but an important one-- for Creative Commons licensing, Web 2.0 album releases ("this is an album where you participate!"), and the culture of remixing.
And by handing over their multitracks, Byrne and Eno also make a powerful acknowledgement of their own helplessness. It is a basic but real fact of our time that sampling can work both ways. In the 80s, you could fairly make an argument that Byrne and Eno were the Western white men appropriating all kinds of Others, be they domestic and primitive, or foreign and exotic. Now the world can return the favor: Anyone can rip this work apart and use it any way they please, and you can bet that if some kid in the Third World sends a killer remix to the right blogger, it'll travel faster and farther than this carefully curated reissue. Byrne and Eno counted on a certain amount of serendipity in their studio; today, they can witness the serendipity of what happens to their killer rhythm tracks-- the ones they released, and all the others that people will use anyway. And the strongest message they could send is not only that they've relinquished control, but that they admit they already lost it-- whether they like it or not. | 2006-03-23T01:01:59.000-05:00 | 2006-03-23T01:01:59.000-05:00 | Rock / Electronic | Sire | March 23, 2006 | 8.5 | 101c4b91-3ec7-458a-b345-bda4554aab97 | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
For his first release in four years, the Strokesiest of the Strokes dials his songs back to basics. Running a mere five songs and 15 minutes, this EP is a fat-free effort that favors tight, snappy, emotionally direct songcraft | For his first release in four years, the Strokesiest of the Strokes dials his songs back to basics. Running a mere five songs and 15 minutes, this EP is a fat-free effort that favors tight, snappy, emotionally direct songcraft | Albert Hammond Jr.: AHJ EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18600-albert-hammond-jr-ahj-ep/ | AHJ EP | Albert Hammond Jr. is not the most popular Stroke, nor the most rock-star-stylish, nor the one who attracts an inordinate amount of popular comedic actresses, nor even the quiet one. But he is nonetheless the Strokesiest of the Strokes—if you were to ever dress up as a Stroke for Halloween, you’d be copping Hammond’s one-size-too-small thrift-store sports jacket, skinny tie, Chuck Taylors, and hair photoshopped off of Billy Ficca's head on the first Television album cover. Accordingly, out of all the extracurricular projects the Strokes have pursued over the years, Hammond’s solo releases have hewed most closely to the band’s bleary-eyed, tousled charm and classicist tendencies.
However, in the five years since Hammond’s last album, the Strokes have moved further and further away from that signature scrappy sound, expanding their sonic vocabulary with notoriously mixed results. Perhaps not coincidentally, Hammond’s new EP sticks to the narrowest of L.E.S. lanes. Where 2006’s Yours to Keep and 2008’s ¿Cómo te Llama? presented homespun interpretations of Hammond’s most iconic inspirations (John Lennon, the Beach Boys, Bob Marley), on AHJ he mines a more easily attainable influence: his own band circa 10 years ago.
Hammond has recently come clean about the various hard-drug habits that plagued him throughout the Strokes’ ascent, which he finally kicked shortly after the release of ¿Cómo Te Llama?. As such, there’s a sense that Hammond is forcefully hitting the reset button here, stripping his songs back down to the basics, and regaining his confidence by playing within his comfort zone. (He handles all the instrumental parts on the record, save for drums.) Running a mere five songs and 15 minutes, AHJ is a wholly fat-free effort that favors tight, snappy, emotionally direct songcraft over the genre experiments and instrumental excursions of ¿Cómo Te Llama? that suggested Hammond was headed down a more ponderous path.
Hammond may not be as casually charismatic as Julian Casablancas, and his songs can be modest and unassuming to a fault—the gently loping "St. Justice" is not so much an opening salvo as a warm-up exercise to check the levels of each instrument. But he brings a convincing poignancy and urgency when required. “Strange Tidings” recalls the dream-pop drive of “Hard to Explain”, yet lines like “If I’m guilty/ It’ll show” and “control is so hard to find” provide sobering reminders of a time when Hammond had to wear long sleeves even on the hottest summer days. But while oblique references to Hammond’s darkest hours abound on AHJ (“Cooker Ship” conjures images of burnt spoons and bottoming-out in the sort of fantastical terms his hero-turned-buddy Bob Pollard would appreciate), the energy here is one of spirited, defiant revitalization. And in the amazingly compact “Rude Customer”, Hammond turns in a song that would’ve been the hands-down highlight on any of the past three Strokes albums. If you're precisely the sort of disenchanted old-school Strokes fan who would respond to that with, "Well, that's not saying much," then the lean econo-pop of AHJ will feel all the more like a gift. | 2013-10-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-10-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Cult | October 9, 2013 | 6.8 | 101e6873-524c-49f9-8ac7-f822aa9e644d | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Abel Tesfaye finally delivers on his long-running vision, leveraging a self-loathing villain into an irresistible, cinematic narrative with his most satisfying collision of new wave, dream pop, and R&B. | Abel Tesfaye finally delivers on his long-running vision, leveraging a self-loathing villain into an irresistible, cinematic narrative with his most satisfying collision of new wave, dream pop, and R&B. | The Weeknd: After Hours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-weeknd-after-hours/ | After Hours | The Weeknd’s latest short film opens with the Toronto singer grinning maniacally onstage. He’s just finished a performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and blood crawls down the side of his bandaged nose, threatening to drip onto his suit. As the audience cheers, Abel Tesfaye walks backstage, his artificial smile intact, until he reaches a hallway where it fades into a frigid stare.
The character he plays is an exaggerated riff on the solipsistic-hedonist persona Tesfaye has been tunneling into since his 2011 mixtape trilogy, where he first introduced listeners to his brand of brooding nihilism. In 2020, he continues to revel in high drama; After Hours dives deep into the textures of pleasure, despair, and how we consciously distance ourselves from our interiors.
After years of attempting to bring the spectral tones of his early mixtapes to a mainstream pop format, Tesfaye finally unites his two worlds. His major-label debut Kiss Land was a languid disappointment, and Beauty Behind the Madness failed to live up to the promise made by the Trilogy tapes. After Hours delivers on the most compelling aspects of Tesfaye’s vision; leveraging a self-loathing villain into an irresistible, cinematic narrative with his most satisfying collision of new wave, dream pop, and R&B.
Even if he is singing about the same things—bacchanalian excess, loneliness as rapture, using women to rehabilitate his poor little life—the fresh vocals and production flourishes do the trick. On “Too Late,” his longtime producer Illangelo (alongside Lizzo producer Ricky Reed and DaHeala) mutate UK garage’s syncopated kicks and pitch-shifted echoes, drawing on the spirit of My Dear Melancholy,’s “Wasted Times.” “Hardest to Love” couples a sharp jungle break with Tesfaye’s longing whispers about remorse and a troubled partnership. Oneohtrix Point Never and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker also lend production on “Repeat After Me (Interlude)” a collage of psychedelic wooshes and Vocoder dubs, while the ghostly eulogy “Until I Bleed Out” uses liturgical synth arpeggios reminiscent of “Boring Angel” from OPN’s R Plus Seven.
There’s always been a cinematic flair to Tesfaye’s music, as if he’s been chasing after his own Purple Rain moment—for now, he’ll have to settle for a cameo in the Safdie Brothers’ 2019 thriller Uncut Gems. He draws on synth-pop nostalgia to mirror the tragic glitz of ’80s Hollywood: “In Your Eyes” includes an arena-sized cheeseball sax solo, while the plinking synths and slick hand-claps of “Save Your Tears” evoke a long-lost Wham! track. Tesfaye can lean a little too hard on these Reagan-era signifiers, but his bleeding-heart melodies and donating an unforgettable hook to the synth player on “Blinding Lights” remind us why we keep listening in the first place.
Like any good villain, Tesfaye is aware of the character he plays, dropping tongue-in-cheek one-liners like “Futuristic sex, give her Philip K. Dick” on “Snowchild.” Meanwhile, “Faith” cranks the gloomy dial up to 11, summoning a death drive reminiscent of the double-decker bus from The Smiths’ “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.” “But if I OD, I want you to OD right beside me,” he sings. “I want you to follow right behind me.”
Despite all these textbook Weekndisms, Tesfaye wants us to know he’s struggling to reconcile the sinner he once was with the man he’s trying to become. He may not be the dysfunctional addict of the Trilogy years, but he’s also not willing to be the partner a woman might need him to be. What more can you expect out of pop music’s antihero? There is not a single song on the album that colors outside the lines he established nine years ago, but his narrow focus has paid off: He’s finally found harmony between the enigmatic noir-pop that broke him to the blogs and the arena-worthy ambition that launched him into the mainstream. It’s hard to tell where the universe of listeners fixated on filling spiritual voids through sex, drugs, and romance ends and the universe of the Weeknd’s tortured, empty melancholy and drunken, devastating love begins. That’s the beautiful blur of After Hours.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | XO / Republic | March 24, 2020 | 7.9 | 102214e9-4d56-4f1b-8bb9-313c458dc73e | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
Vanishing Point is the first Mudhoney album in five years, and Steve Turner's erratic soloing, Dan Peters' hyperactive drum fills, and Mark Arm's righteous middle-aged rancor are so defiantly Mudhoney-sounding that they justify the price of admission. | Vanishing Point is the first Mudhoney album in five years, and Steve Turner's erratic soloing, Dan Peters' hyperactive drum fills, and Mark Arm's righteous middle-aged rancor are so defiantly Mudhoney-sounding that they justify the price of admission. | Mudhoney: Vanishing Point | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17833-mudhoney-vanishing-point/ | Vanishing Point | Outside of a brief period in the early 1990s, Mudhoney has never been fashionable. And this has been entirely by design-- except for the early 90s part, which the band probably would have rather avoided. When Mudhoney was given a plum spot next to Pearl Jam and Soundgarden on the Singles soundtrack-- the Saturday Night Fever of alt-rock-- it dropped a stinkbomb inside Seattle’s coronation as rock’s “it” city: “Overblown” opened with Mark Arm famously snarling, “Everybody loves us/ Everybody loves our town / That's why I'm thinkin' lately/ Time for leavin' is now.” On the new Vanishing Point, Arm is still playing the cranky contrarian, only now he has two extra decades of pent-up pissiness to vent at wannabe ballers. “You’ve always been the critics’ darling,” Arm bellows at some unfortunate unnamed band-of-the-month on the caustic rant “Chardonnay”. “Get the fuck out of my backstage!”
Arriving at a time when the indie vanguard has about as much to do with punk as Glitter has to do with Apocalypse Now, Vanishing Point is both an anachronism and, if you’re on Mudhoney’s wavelength, a hilarious bulwark against everything that’s annoyingly ephemeral about contemporary underground culture. It sounds like the last stand of Generation X: Vanishing Point is a righteous rallying cry in favor of cynicism, irony, anti-mainstream posturing, and all of those other antiquated concepts that have been deconstructed and discredited in these new, pop-obsessed times. How refreshing that after all the countless trends that once threatened to wipe out bands of their ilk, Mudhoney is still here and not giving a fuck. “I don’t care if you think I’m a prick,” Arm leers gamely over the transgressive garage-rock thump of “I Don’t Remember You”. “It’s clear to me you’re the same piece of shit.”
Like all born-and-bred bastards, Arm has actually gotten funnier and more charming with age. Perhaps that’s because the 51-year old’s barbs are now as benign as the typical complaints of any out-of-touch middle-aged guy. His “piece of shit” riff on “I Don’t Remember You” is inspired by running into a pushy dude from back in the day who slaps his back too hard at the grocery store. On the smart-ass “What to Do With the Neutral”, he mocks anyone who insists he should have a positive attitude; on “Sing this Song of Joy”, he slips into a full-on taunt: “I sing this song of joy/ For all the girls and boys/ Dancing on your grave.” Mark Arm’s primary influence is no longer Iggy Pop, it’s Larry David.
Vanishing Point is the first Mudhoney record in five years, the longest-ever gap between LPs for the band. Given where Mudhoney is at in its career-- still able to tour around the world, but hardly a big moneymaking proposition-- there’s no guarantee there will be another album. So, it’s nice to hear these guys playing about as well as they ever have on record: The tangle of Steve Turner’s erratic soloing and Dan Peters’ hyperactive drum fills on opener “Slipping Away” are so defiantly Mudhoney-sounding that it single-handedly justifies the price of admission. The difference between Mudhoney in 2013 and the Mudhoney of old is that what once seemed highly flammable is now reassuring. Mudhoney projects tradition and endurance, not danger; the band’s appeal these days is rooted in not spontaneously combusting, so that it can still exist when most of Mudhoney’s contemporaries are extinct.
Not that Mudhoney is resigned to being a museum piece. On “I Like It Small”, Arm is back in “Overblown” mode, going on about the superiority of GG Allin, “intimate settings,” “dingy basements,” and (most important of all) “no expectations” over whatever the opposite of those things are. At the start of the song, Arm sounds alone, buried in the kicked-up smoke of screaming guitars and pounding drums. But by the end, a chorus of people has joined him-- he’s a voice in the wilderness with the backing of a no-longer-marginalized army. What else is new? | 2013-04-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-04-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | April 3, 2013 | 7.4 | 1023004d-a65b-4b75-a9e3-565c57e33c78 | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
Drawing on samples of nature and science recordings, the experimental duo crafts a motley, riotous album from the Folkways Records archive. | Drawing on samples of nature and science recordings, the experimental duo crafts a motley, riotous album from the Folkways Records archive. | Matmos: Return to Archive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matmos-return-to-archive/ | Return to Archive | When Moses Asch founded Folkways Records in 1948, he set out to create a repository of all the sounds of the world—folk music and protest music and indigenous music and jazz, but also sounds of the office, of the junkyard, of the bottle-nose dolphin. “I decided that I would become like an encyclopedia,” he declared. “You don’t eliminate ‘A’ because nobody buys ‘A,’ but keep ‘B’ because ‘B’ is popular.” Asch promised that not a single title would go out of print, an offer that attracted educators, scientists, and activists who prized longevity above mass appeal. The result is one of the most remarkable audio archives ever created: Across 40 years, Asch released nearly 2,200 albums, an average of one per week. After his death in 1986, the Smithsonian Institution acquired the Folkways archive and stored it in a climate-controlled fireproof vault. Any title can now be replicated on demand by a CD-producing “Moe-bot,” an ultra-modern solution that realizes Asch’s promise beyond his wildest imaginings.
To celebrate Folkways’ 75th anniversary, the Smithsonian invited Baltimore sound-wranglers Matmos to record an original album that would sample this vast catalog. Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt, a duo as likely to find inspiration in a Whirlpool washing machine as in the work of Polish composer Bogusław Schaeffer, were especially drawn to records from the 1950s and ’60s, the era when portable equipment first made it easy to record everything from toads to time clocks. Matmos came back with a counteroffer: The album would feature no original music, only samples; and those samples would come exclusively from these early nature and science recordings. Return to Archive is the motley, riotous result, a suitably retrofuturistic collage incorporating over two dozen records ranging from Sounds of Animals to Sounds of Medicine, International Morse Code to End the Cigarette Habit Through Self Hypnosis.
Daniel and Schmidt let the archive guide them. Some sounds play nicely together, as in the dozens of snippets on opener “Good Morning Electronics,” finely diced and snapped to an eighth-note grid to create a whirlwind tour of jungles, laboratories, and sci-fi worlds. Others, like the mud-dauber wasp in its eponymous track, demand space to themselves. Matmos work up an entire band from the buzz of the insect’s flight, sculpting bass, percussion, and distorted electronics through careful sampling, processing, and sequencing. It’s an impressive performance even if it lacks the novelty of the group’s previous tracks crafted from crayfish synapses and cow uteri.
Matmos best portray the social milieu of the early Folkways era when they wryly juxtapose its rosy self-help rhetoric with the smothering lifestyle of 1950s suburban America. On “Lend Me Your Ears,” the Shakespearean phrase is sung by a 12-year-old boy and an adult woman, both subjects of Alfred Wolfsohn’s experiments in extending the range of the human voice on the Vox Humana LP. As their voices strain against their physical limits, a barrage of mundane sounds interrupt their performances—a ringing telephone, a melody of doorbells, and most ominously, from Sounds of Medicine: “Sounds of the Bowels–A Normal Hungry Man Smoking a Cigarette Before Dinner.”
Instead of cleaning up the samples, which hiss and pop with surface noise, Matmos lean into the abrasiveness by inviting noise musicians to manipulate the vinyl itself. Daniel and Schmidt mailed their own copy of Speech After the Removal of the Larynx to the noise artist and instrument inventor Evicshen, who made resin duplicates of the LP that skip and repeat. Her turntablist performance serves as the foundation for “Why,” a mad mashup of frog croaks and infants’ speech that hurtles forward with a gritty techno beat. Aaron Dilloway transfigured his copy of Sounds of the Junkyard by recording portions onto quarter-inch tape and creating the rhythmic industrial loops in the chaotic climax of closer “Going to Sleep.” These moments of excess charge Matmos’ surgically sliced and quantized samples with thrilling unpredictability. Like John Oswald’s pillaging of the Elektra roster on Rubáiyát Plunderphonics or Madlib’s remix of the Blue Note discography on Shades of Blue, Return to Archive works because of an affinity between artist and subject: Like Asch, Matmos are building their own endless encyclopedia, one that both documents and playfully remakes the world around them. | 2023-11-09T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-09T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Smithsonian Folkways | November 9, 2023 | 7.4 | 1023417b-cca6-42bf-bc9a-e2f9401800bc | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
Remix album greatly improves on last year's disappointing Any Minute Now. | Remix album greatly improves on last year's disappointing Any Minute Now. | Soulwax: Nite Versions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7840-nite-versions/ | Nite Versions | Not the biggest fan of remix albums, I can do redemption. Any Minute Now got good enough marks but damn did it bomb big for me, especially since its cranky leadoff single "NY Excuse" was in arm's reach of "Yeah" in 2004's punkfunk marathon. Soon word of Duran Duran-repping "Nite Versions" of AMN tracks fluttered about-- self-done electro retakes fitted for the floor but still uncompromisingly rock-- and a few popped up on that punch-drunk Radio 1 broadcast mix the 2manyDJs brothers did for the BBC back in January. When the NV'd "Krack" slowed down summer jams to slurry, breaking up the BPMs like "Jamrock" did in hip-hop sets, I had a feeling: A whole album of this shit and we'd have a cruder, crunchier Homework.
Figures, Soulwax lead off NV with a cover of Daft Punk's "Teachers", names changed for a who's who of dance-rock forefathers (which to my chagrin, includes the goddamn the Who). In the vein of "AC/DC aren't a metal band, they're a dance band," "Miserable Girls" grinds hard enough to get on one of those X-Games comps, seering guitar lead and convicted vox trapped interminably in echo. Still these are tracks before new-wave anthems, breakdowns before makeup, with emphasis on the vertical and the power of repetition. Even the vocal hooks are kept to snippets: "It's not you, it's the e talking," or "compute it!" or once is enough, "James Brown is dead."
Like for Munk or LCD Soundsystem, the authority (or something) of live sound plays a part in the NV lure, but Soulwax never overstate. When the comicbookishly dark holds on "Slowdance" give out for the bridge, those sixteenths on the high hat effect a lot on their own; "I Love Techno" benefits from heavy-handed drum pounds that hold back the song's twitter and Blondie bassline; the legendary "NY Lipps" mash between "NY Excuse" and "Funky Town" speaks for itself. These are simple tracks, sure, confident enough to lay their soundmakers bare (and vice versa), but such staunch anti-pussyfooting/anti-mysticism makes Soulwax a bit more democratic, palpable too. They play what's humanly possible for a quartet, and in fact, rumor has it they may even be playing these nite versions live in Philadelphia at the NYE Making Time party. And if they play NVs track-for-track, as they're peerlessly mixed on the CD, those minor strings that course teary-eyed closer "Another Excuse" won't drop the ball. | 2005-12-15T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2005-12-15T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | PIAS | December 15, 2005 | 8.2 | 1024a8a3-d205-4986-8e9f-449bb6645386 | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
Captured in Chicago in March 2023, the singer-songwriter and his band achieve a sort of dream state, finding otherworldly new forms for familiar songs about rebirth and revelation. | Captured in Chicago in March 2023, the singer-songwriter and his band achieve a sort of dream state, finding otherworldly new forms for familiar songs about rebirth and revelation. | Bill Callahan: Resuscitate! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-callahan-resuscitate/ | Resuscitate! | One of the words that Bill Callahan uses most frequently on Resuscitate!, a live album recorded in March 2023, is “dreams.” We’re coming in and out of them on “First Bird.” They’re places of transmogrification, danger, and in fact the ultimate reality on “Coyotes.” “Dream, baby, dream,” Callahan seems to ad lib on “Natural Information,” a song about pushing his infant daughter down the street, now reinforced with the greatest lesson this wised-up dad could ever teach her. It’s 11 years since Callahan released his 15th album, Dream River, a record he intended to be the last thing the listener heard at night, guiding them tenderly to their sleep state. Since then, marriage, fatherhood, and a new embrace of expansive thinking have taken the 58-year-old songwriter to a whole other metaphysical plane. I often think of beautiful coincidences as being like an eclipse—two celestial bodies lining up for just a second that you’re lucky enough to catch—and Callahan has become a stargazer for those moments in his writing, especially as he observes the habits of his young family; his melodies, too, have become more open, transcendent, reaching for something beyond.
That night at Chicago’s Thalia Hall, Callahan and his band attained a sort of dream state, sounding generative and otherworldly. “The date was mid-point in the tour,” Callahan writes in the accompanying notes, “so I knew we’d be as hot as we were going to get. Not too green, not too brown.” (He also notes that he tries to work only with venues, such as Thalia Hall, outside the Live Nation/Ticketmaster nexus, and maybe that freedom wriggles in.) In opening song “First Bird” alone, Callahan, guitarist Matt Kinsey, tenor sax player Dustin Laurenzi, and drummer Jim White voyage further than most bands ever do in a whole set. It starts off sounding like a mysterious night on the plains, full of skittish life forms, prowling bass, flashes of woodwind. As Callahan grows more fervent, the instruments vibrate with anticipation, and then come to tumble in and out of sync with their leader’s mercurial, deeply felt phrasing. It peaks with Callahan cawing “Tall! Tall! Tall!,” as if he were that titular first bird; after six minutes, the squalling guitar propels a full-band tumbledown climax. Even though parts of this ensemble have been playing together for a long time—and any group with White as its center has magic on its side—the telepathy between them is astonishing.
I saw Callahan in London at the outset of this run, in November 2022, and as a veteran fan, it was perhaps my least favorite show of his that I’ve seen. The setlist dwelled largely on his post-pandemic records, as this night in Chicago did, with scant exceptions. I love YTI⅃AƎЯ and Gold Record as much as the next person who loves joy, but why forsake your sweet Smog children! The playing was so digressive—the version of “Coyotes” on Resuscitate! lasts nearly 13 minutes, and many others run to around seven minutes—that I rued what felt like indulgence standing in the way of the old classics.
Yet it doesn’t feel that way on this album, and not simply because Callahan has trimmed the 15-song setlist at Thalia Hall that night to a tidier 10. The quality of the recording captures the glorious tumult in the band’s interplay, making it visceral and elemental: how Laurenzi’s sax shifts from arid to buttery on “Coyotes”; how the rhythm section is held back on “Drover,” as if by the song’s shepherd, then allowed to burst free. In Callahan’s notes, he described Chicago as “America’s heart,” and you can hear this band connecting its ’90s post-rock scene and contemporary jazz tendrils in their playing: “Naked Souls,” a lament about people grown dead inside, becomes a kind of spiritual, Callahan backed by the deep vocals of Pascal Kerong’A, and Natural Information Society’s Joshua Abrams and Lisa Alvarado join for “Natural Information” (surely named in tribute to their verdant jazz group), a puckish incantation that melts into a happy drone and softly nudging horns.
Something else that keeps any potential sprawl in check is the sense that Callahan has had an awakening he fervently needs to transmit, as the name of this record suggests. He has a standup’s sense of timing, and with the combination of a knowing pause and his wise, wry voice, it’s not hard for him to get a laugh out of a little aside like “if I believed in souls—and such—and judgment day” on “Keep Some Steady Friends Around” (the only Smog/pre-2011 song played). On the waltzing “Pigeons,” in which he plays a chauffeur extolling the merits of marriage, he savors and deepens every syllable of “plenipotentiary,” almost as if he’s a little bashful at his enthusiasm, or maybe just doing his best Sam Elliott impression. But often his pauses seem less like someone priming for a laugh than a receiver waiting for the feeling to strike him: “Dreams are thoughts in lo-tus!” he exclaims on “First Bird,” as if the image has just blossomed in his mind’s eye.
Most revivifying are the moments where this man, usually still as a lake, becomes roiled by feeling: “I’m your loverloverloverloverloverloverloverloverloverlover man!” he exalts on “Coyotes,” breathless with ecstasy. On the recorded version of “Partition,” his instruction to “Microdose!/Change your clothes!/Do what you got to do/To see the picture” is a vivid suggestion. But here, it sounds like a racing insurrection against stasis: Callahan at his most cataclysmic, Kinsey stabbing at his fretboard, the band in a sort of junkyard tailspin that even encompasses a brief broken funk interlude. Like all the wildest dreams, you sense they couldn’t recreate this glorious mess if they tried—but its suggestion to venture beyond knowledge, and to trust what you find there, is eye-opening. | 2024-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | August 3, 2024 | 7.8 | 1025bcc1-60a5-44e0-b6b4-614b9a5d3090 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The 28-minute EP continues Fetty Wap’s steady decline from promising trap balladeer to one-dimensional chant rapper. | The 28-minute EP continues Fetty Wap’s steady decline from promising trap balladeer to one-dimensional chant rapper. | Fetty Wap: Bruce Wayne | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fetty-wap-bruce-wayne/ | Bruce Wayne | Fetty Wap broke through doing pop rap things only Eminem and Lil Wayne had done, but now he only ever makes headlines when trading barbs with mayoral candidates in his hometown, or when drag racing his Mercedes CLS AMG drunk on a suspended license, or when people are facetiously petitioning to have him perform “Trap Queen” at Nancy Reagan’s funeral. His new mixtape, Bruce Wayne, is an attempt to change the narrative.
In the intro, scanning a radio dial produces nothing but his biggest songs, before segueing into Wayne’s “So Different”—the implication being he’s still making hits. The tape, named after Batman’s absurdly rich business-inheriting alter ego, aims to draw a flimsy parallel between Fetty and a billionaire crime-fighting superhero: Like Wayne, he suggests, he uses his power and status to give back to his community. (It’s worth noting that Wayne also poses as a superficial playboy as a cover for his late-night heroics.)
“I am Bruce Wayne, I’ve done a lot for people,” Fetty told Complex. “It’s not about bragging, but inspiring people to always give back.” The mixtape, released on his birthday and dedicated to his late grandparents Bishop Willie Lee Maxwell and James Eugene Hagans, is often exactly the opposite of what he claims—full of empty swag raps like, “A million in my bank, hunnid in my jeans, baby/I don’t mean to brag but they know it’s me, baby,” on a song literally called “Westin”—but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Its real problems are twofold and compounding: Fetty is an often lazy writer-performer who has lost command of his once stirring voice.
Though “Trap Queen” approached romance from an exciting new angle, turning an unlikely setting into the perfect space for an outpouring of affection, Fetty has never been much of a songwriter. His Pyrex sonnets and lullabies relied almost entirely on his wailing croons to convey tenderness and devotion. In the mixtapes and EPs released since 2016, he’s struggled to find the same mastery that made songs like “My Way” and “679” so potent, dipping more into barefaced raps and singing with far less zeal. Bruce Wayne continues Fetty’s steady decline from promising trap balladeer to one-dimensional chant rapper. His themes are largely the same but executed more poorly. Most of these songs have one meandering verse that goes nowhere. The hooks are way less catchy, and too often he’s prone to saying the most basic thing. Even his Batman angle is somewhat simple-minded and ineffective: “Let a nigga know, is it beef, is it beef?/Somethin’ in the air, Batman in the streets/Jordan 14s, Batman on my feet/Bitch I’m Bruce Wayne, stock’s up, come and see,” he raps on the title track. Contrary to what he claims, the market says otherwise.
In Fetty’s best moments, which, coincidentally, were also his biggest successes, he was a real ham. He sang like he was proposing in a crowded restaurant, performing not just for his lover but anyone watching. Bruce Wayne is far more muted and understated, especially on “So Different,” which slaps the “Hotline Bling” drums onto moodier synths as Fetty murmurs half-assed come-ons like “He a worker, I’ma boss now/You should know the difference.” But there are some flashes of those same garish tendencies that once made him trap’s Sisqo. The verse on “What We Do” explodes into howling, using its moaned pleas to coax a girlfriend into a threesome. “I love your face, your eyes, your style/Baby, if you with a vacay pick an island,” he warbles on “Look at Me.” There are moments where his subdued manner works, too, like the gleaming “Star Struck” or the closer “Hit Some Corners.” But for most of Bruce Wayne’s 28 minutes, there’s nothing really worth relishing. Where Fetty’s histrionic performances once demanded attention, these largely bore.
Stranger things have happened, but it’s hard to see a path back to ubiquity for Fetty Wap. It took a collab with both 6ix9ine and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie for him to even sniff the Top 40 for the first time in two years. Time has revealed him to be a flash in the pan; though more than the “one-hit wonder” he is sometimes made out to be, he burned himself out quickly and he has already maximized the utility of his only weapon. Across Bruce Wayne, on inert R&B tunes like “All for You” and “Wavy,” he tinkers with new interpretations of his old songs trying, to find something that works. His commitment is admirable, but simply listening to the tape is an act of charity. | 2018-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 300 Entertainment / RGF | June 13, 2018 | 5.4 | 102c3dbb-30e1-4d3f-8d44-b1e0eeab2e24 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The multi-instrumentalist and composer’s concept album about Black existence cites everything while saying nothing. The record collapses under its own inertia. | The multi-instrumentalist and composer’s concept album about Black existence cites everything while saying nothing. The record collapses under its own inertia. | Adrian Younge: The American Negro | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adrian-younge-the-american-negro/ | The American Negro | The cover of The American Negro recreates a lynching postcard, perverse mementos that 19th and 20th century white Americans would pass around like trading cards. Some postcards would center the victims, gawking at their violated bodies with lurid satisfaction. Others would emphasize the crowd of onlookers, inviting the viewer, presumed to be white, to participate in the day’s activity. Adrian Younge gestures at this grim history and its continuation into the present—the date on the postcard is crossed out—but no moment on The American Negro ever brings these charged subjects to life.
Paired with a podcast series and a short film, The American Negro is intended as a big picture look at Black oppression and resilience. In theory, Younge should be suited to unearth the past. His well-documented reverence for bygone days is built into his love of analog and tape, and his music often goes to painstaking detail to recreate the textures of the classic soul records he cherishes. At first glance, that’s what’s happening here. Younge positions this album as message music in the vein of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, and Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly. Appropriately, he rolls out an orchestra, a Fender Rhodes piano, a Hammond B3 organ, harpsichord, glockenspiel, wah pedal—you can practically smell the mothballs and afro sheen. But there’s no vision driving all this period porn. Younge is a student of history, but never its vessel.
Younge structures the album as an audio odyssey, pinging between free verse and the luxe, throwback soundscapes that are his calling card. Despite its outward elegance, though, the record is clumsy and inert. Younge, who wrote and performs all the spoken word pieces and is the album’s primary composer, has no presence as an orator. His awkward and stilted verses, written as rebukes to white supremacy, are tedious and unmoving. Though he frequently uses terms like “we,” “I,” and “you,” he’s often detached from his own message, his words broadcast from a sterile nowhere. “Have we learned anything?/Do we know who we are and where we belong?/Does our skin reasonably elicit fear and negative judgment?” he asks on “Revisionist History.” He sounds like a Russian Twitter bot raised on a strict diet of Hidden Colors quotes and Nas’ “Ultra Black.”
Even if his performances were more inspired, he’d still be hamstrung by his clunky lyrics. On “Intransigence of the Blind,” he contorts “We all come from Africa,” the stock phrase of people who think racism can be sloganeered out of existence, into a goofier shape. “I am the descendant of the chattel/And I am your brother/We are descendants of the Motherland/As every human shares the same African mother/Mitochondrially,” he says, sounding like Brother Sambuca. Elsewhere, on “Jim Crow’s Dance,” he tortures a metaphor until it breaks: “They argue that we should look at the stats/To better understand our circumstances/But statistics are records, and you can’t really listen to records that are cracked/Because the music skips.” It’s genuinely shocking that the line isn’t followed by finger snaps.
Younge is clearly writing from a place of real indignation, but his hamfisted diatribes are so lifeless and incoherent the record collapses under the inertia. He constantly invokes the past without engaging with it, naming multiple songs after victims of racist violence (“Margaret Garner,” “James Mincey Jr.”) and referencing Jim Crow, the TransAtlantic slave trade, and police brutality. There’s no narrative or thematic links to his time traveling other than “Black people were there.” Younge speeds through Black history like a bullet train, texture and detail and context stretching into a blur.
This lack of focus undermines the beauty of Younge’s arrangements. The record traffics in grandeur and importance without tethering them to perspective, curiosity, or imagination. No people or passions grace his elaborate stages, giving The American Negro a vacant, bloodless feel. The American Negro is a concept album without an essence, agitprop that doesn’t know what it’s agitating for, citing everything and saying nothing.
I often wondered where Younge sees himself in all this history. He’s pictured on the cover, hanging; he’s credited with playing over 20 instruments and conducting the orchestra; he even slips into the first person occasionally. But what does this music authorize him to say and be that the institutions of this country don’t? What about these compositions embodies his contradictions and convictions? Did making these songs clarify his experiences as “an American negro,” or further obscure them? These questions are rhetorical, but I’m awestruck by how ill-equipped this record leaves me to answer them.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Jazz is Dead | March 5, 2021 | 4 | 103163a4-431c-4e85-b50c-2ca3b37ef08d | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The Chicago singer and multi-instrumentalist leaps fearlessly between voices and sounds. His constant dissatisfaction leaves no question that his true colors are loud and clashing. | The Chicago singer and multi-instrumentalist leaps fearlessly between voices and sounds. His constant dissatisfaction leaves no question that his true colors are loud and clashing. | NNAMDÏ: BRAT | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nnamdi-brat/ | BRAT | The first thing to know about the music of NNAMDÏ is that he has a million vehicles for it. The multi-instrumentalist, singer, and rapper born (and formerly known as) Nnamdi Ogbonnaya jumps at every opportunity. He’s a label head. He’s a gifted instrumental polyglot. He’s stylistically ravenous: two of his many side gigs include drumming in mind-warping time signatures for an instrumental math-rock band and playing bass and singing backup in another known for plainspoken poignancy and extremely simple parts. His holistic hustle has earned him widespread admiration among DIY peers in Chicago; when Melkbelly got a call to open for Foo Fighters at Wrigley Field, their singer wore a NNAMDÏ T-shirt.
The second thing to know about the music of NNAMDÏ is that he sings with the patternless precision of a Whac-A-Mole champion. He bounds deliriously between voices and phrasing styles, up and down his vocal register, as if alter egos are fighting over the controls. It’s a universal accelerant: It conveys both a sort of invincibility when he sounds ecstatic and of unraveling when he sounds tortured. On BRAT, the latest of several albums released under variations of his own name, his internal deliberations grapple over ego, selfishness, and the gift or indulgence of a life devoted to art. “I’m a big brat/I can’t pick a side,” he sings, with an audible grin.
Hearing all of this materialize into NNAMDÏ’s most ambitious album is exciting, but not always fun. The moments when he sounds invincible give way to equally intense self-doubts, and his songs overflow with confessional lyrics. “Bullseye” lands the album’s first instant hook, a short blast of Vitamin D that exists on an astral plane inhabited by Tierra Whack and maybe no one else. But as quickly as it hits, it withdraws on “Everyone I Loved,” where NNAMDÏ laments drifting apart from his family, who are “all having trouble understanding why I chose this route.” (The son of Nigerian immigrants, including a double PhD holder, NNAMDÏ earned a degree in electrical engineering and has discussed in interviews how his restless ambition is connected to his upbringing.) “Everything I loved now turns me off,” he sings in an Earth, Wind & Fire falsetto, up until that last word, which he drops with a spiritless thud.
BRAT opens acoustically, closes thunderously, and along the way squirms across ground-scraping beats, twinkling guitars, and most sounds in between. It’s sure to divide listeners who tend towards maximalism from those who don’t, and it certainly provokes questions about what gets lost in genre fusion. But NNAMDÏ’s constant dissatisfaction with any one sound leaves no question that his true colors are loud and clashing, and he’s not afraid to admit to uncertainty. This is what’s powerful about the final two tracks of BRAT, where a longer arc starts to take form. On “It’s OK” and “Salut,” he stands still, straightens his spine, and lets out an overdue exhale. “There’s no need to pretend you’re OK if you’re not,” he concludes, finally sounding satisfied.
NNAMDÏ is a clear natural talent, and also a malfunctioning fountain of ideas spraying in every direction. In saying a million things, BRAT doesn’t quite say any one bold thing. Most of NNAMDÏ’s recorded work has sounded like this—occasionally overwhelming and alienating—but sooner or later, he’s likely to focus all of these ideas into a tighter-tuned vision and construct a masterpiece. The singular voice, the personal rawness, and the sheer skill for craft are all there on BRAT, ready to snap together. | 2020-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rap | Sooper | April 9, 2020 | 7.3 | 1038569f-01ee-4c9b-bfea-db9781040f87 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
The British grime producer follows last year’s tender ode to fatherhood with a stark EP that attempts to come to terms with his father’s MS that is as inventive as it is vulnerable. | The British grime producer follows last year’s tender ode to fatherhood with a stark EP that attempts to come to terms with his father’s MS that is as inventive as it is vulnerable. | Mr. Mitch: Primary Progressive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mr-mitch-primary-progressive/ | Primary Progressive | After listening to Mr. Mitch’s last album, Devout, a sweetly stirring homage to fatherhood, I wanted him to adopt me. But the Primary Progressive EP makes me wonder if I should adopt him—or at least let him sleep on my sofa—so sharp is the emotional drop between the two records. Primary Progressive is as heart-wrenchingly sad as Devout was joyful, a record that takes the gurgling domestic contentment of the grime-adjacent producer’s last album and pulls the rug sharply from beneath it. And with good reason: Primary Progressive addresses Mitch’s father’s battle with primary progressive multiple sclerosis, a form of the illness that Mitch calls “essentially the worst kind you can get.”
Miles Mitchell has long been one of the most idiosyncratic producers on the grime scene, producing cotton-candy “Peace Edits” while his contemporaries were pumping out irascible “war dubs” and bringing ambient elegance to grime on his brilliant 2014 album Parallel Memories. On Primary Progressive he continues to strike out on his singular path, addressing the raw despair and grinding powerlessness that accompany a debilitating disease that has no clear cause and no known cure.
Of the five tracks on this largely instrumental EP only one, “Show Me,” directly addresses his father’s disease. But a heavy sadness hangs over all the songs, seeping into the instrumental cracks like rain in a cold afternoon storm. “Settle” employs a sped-up vocal loop à la Burial, its isolation and repetition driving home the mournful message over a cushion of synths. Opener “Restart” is even more minimal, consisting of little more than minor synth chords and a rueful keyboard line that brings to mind Daft Punk’s “Something About Us” evaporating off into space.
While Primary Progressive’s subject matter might be new, the new-age synths and digital gloss aren’t far removed from Parallel Memories’ lush soundscapes. The big difference here is that Mitch has brought the drums back, giving them the kind of front-line role they haven’t enjoyed in his work since 2013’s “Viking.” “Restart” and “Show Me” borrow the 4/4 pulse of house, slowing its skip down to a stately stroll, while “Closure” and “Settle” could just about work on a slightly emotional dancefloor. The latter’s drums are particularly pronounced, the rhythm’s fierce house/dancehall snap suggesting defiance in the face of a terrible disease. The EP’s shift into post-genre UK bass is best exemplified by “Phantom Dance,” whose stuttering beat sits somewhere in between dembow strut and IDM scuttle, allied to a synth melody that suggests Selected Ambient Works Volume IIs and the Arab tone system. Clearly, we are no longer in grime territory.
“Show Me” is the obvious standout. Over a circular synth motif and descending bassline, Mitch quietly bares his soul, his caramel-soft vocal cradled in a subtle layer of Auto-Tune. It’s the intimacy of the song that gets me, as if Mitch were reciting a quiet prayer rather than singing for public consumption. At one point his voice even appears to crack, a sign that all the digital vocal trickery in the world can’t hold back the force of pure emotion.
This bravery is part of what makes Mr. Mitch such a special producer. It was brave to make peace when other producers were waging war; brave to devote an album to fatherhood; brave to make an EP about MS. Primary Progressive is a bold step forward. | 2018-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Gobstopper | November 1, 2018 | 7.7 | 10393e72-f53a-4007-bd87-ab3353e6bac5 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Man, I hate when an album doesn't match up to the review I had planned for it. Months ago ... | Man, I hate when an album doesn't match up to the review I had planned for it. Months ago ... | Pedro the Lion: Achilles Heel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6216-achilles-heel/ | Achilles Heel | Man, I hate when an album doesn't match up to the review I had planned for it. Months ago, I'd artfully conceived a righteous corrective of all the bum raps David Bazan has received over the years, both from this esteemed institution and others. Valiantly, I'd position myself between the mournful singer/songwriter and the sharp arrows of our vicious kind, praising him as one of the finest modern practitioners of the lost concept album arts, while simultaneously mocking the IndieWorld reflex to immediately disparage anyone who dares discuss something so bourgeois as religion. Oh, the gleeful self-satisfaction that would be had!
Then I heard the album. No glee.
For starters, Achilles Heel finds Bazan taking a respite from the song cycles that have graced his last two fine efforts, Winners Never Quit and Control. And while the Lion certainly has a right to an intermission from his musical Decalogue, losing the narrative push sucks the heart out of these songs, leaving a mope-rock shell that's less than filling. Only the murder-tale of "Discretion" harks back to his previous style-- a short-story remnant of Bazan's minstrel talent, its bright light is obstructed by heavy-handed stand-alone songs about unhappiness in a socialist utopia, state infidelity, and bands dying in tour vans.
And then, there's the Jesus. While Sufjan Stevens has done wonders for hypnotizing indie folk into singing along with Sunday School lesson plans, Bazan continues to be the face on the scene dartboard for people's transposed aggression against the likes of Jerry Falwell. With hands pressed firmly over ears at the mere mention of the J or G words, most of these non-conformist conformists miss the context of Pedro's deity name-dropping, which is often as critical of organized religion (and better informed) as any of the Lion-haters claim to be. To his credit, Bazan never sounds like the kind of Christian robotically following clerical orders, but like a man looking for something, anything in which to find solace from an oppressively bleak world.
Unfortunately, Achilles Heel does little to explain those subtleties behind its Daniel-in-the-Lion's-Den cover art. While Bazan nastily skewers the kind of bible-beater he's not in "Foregone Conclusions" ("You were too busy steering the conversation toward the Lord/ To hear the voice of the spirit begging you to shut the fuh-uck up"), he turns in an unbelievably limp defense of faith just one track later. "The Fleecing" appears to be a form of response to his hipster detractors, but crumples under vague answers and a flimsy sheep metaphor, ultimately coming off as preachy as people blindly expect Bazan to be.
Whether it's the lack of plot, insight, or collaborators, Achilles Heel also finds Bazan's music stuck in a room with no exits, with one loping distortion-pedal crawler after another. Save "Discretion", gone are the thunderstorm drums that underscored the pathos of Control, sunk in the mix are the keyboard counter-melodies that have brightened past efforts, and what's left is Bazan wailing the rules to Rock Paper Scissors in "Arizona". "Keep Swinging" half-successfully attempts an evolution of his approach with its cutely awkward bass groove and jarring harmonies, but it's mired in formless fuzz and distortion. The surprising falsetto of the green-with-envy "Bands with Managers" and the deceptively peppy "Transcontinental" could make the A-team of the Pedro catalog, but it's telling that the latter track's "1, 2, 3, 4" drumstick-clack intro could lead into any track on the album.
With Achilles Heel so topographically uniform, it's tempting to declare the well dry for Bazan's sound, particularly considering how closely he veers to self-parody within this album's boundaries. But after a quick refresher with his last two albums to remember why I wanted to defend his work in the first place, I'm willing to give David the benefit of the doubt, labeling Achilles a stumble rather than a death knell. With concept albums coming back into style like neon clothing, it shouldn't be hard for Pedro the Lion to revert to reminding us in ten thematically related songs or less how ugly mankind can be. Then maybe I can use that review I've got stored up for him. | 2004-05-23T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2004-05-23T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Jade Tree | May 23, 2004 | 4.7 | 103bef26-dc6c-4718-8d91-2fa15ab039e1 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Mogwai's eighth album outside their soundtrack and remix work has been framed in terms of its increased use of electronics. The instrumentation has indeed shifted, but Rave Tapes digs hard into a place they've consistently circled back to throughout their career. | Mogwai's eighth album outside their soundtrack and remix work has been framed in terms of its increased use of electronics. The instrumentation has indeed shifted, but Rave Tapes digs hard into a place they've consistently circled back to throughout their career. | Mogwai: Rave Tapes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18896-mogwai-rave-tapes/ | Rave Tapes | Mogwai operate in a small space, where change decelerates into their music in lightly perceptible ways. Rave Tapes, the band's eighth album outside of their soundtrack and remix work, has been built up for its increased use of electronics, with a debt partially owed to the vintage synth scores that have held a sustained (and seemingly ever-increasing) influence over a huge swathe of underground artists. The first song to be released from the album, "Remurdered", certainly hinted that analog sounds would form a more rigorous backbone to their music than before, although they've been dabbling in this area since Rock Action in 2001. In truth, "Remurdered" is something of a red herring. If that song feels like a fuller manifestation of ideas that have taken over a decade for Mogwai to reach, Rave Tapes mostly tells a different story—one that digs harder into a place they've consistently circled back to throughout their career.
This is the second Mogwai album in less than a year, following their creepy 2013 soundtrack to the French TV show Les Revenants. That album is among the most introspective work they've ever recorded—no mean feat for a band so inward facing—and it's a tone they've only modestly advanced on for Rave Tapes. It's not hard to pull all the elements together and theorize at how they arrived at the humorous title for the record, which reads as a direct inverse to the morose worldview of the album and a poke at anyone thinking they’ve "gone electronic." Still, that's hard to square with a track like "Master Card", where the circular guitar motions they so often make remain front and center, and the analog sounds skirting across the surface only serve to keep familiar dynamics intact. The past hangs heavy on the shoulders of these guys, seemingly always keeping them in check even when you think they've reached a point of separation with it.
It's been 17 years since Mogwai’s debut, Young Team. That album emerged with stories of the band members taking on assumed identities and shaving their heads before entering the studio—a totemic representation of their full-blooded commitment to the cause, analogous to going into battle. It isn't hard to figure out who the major influences were on the band back then, but Mogwai had a combative feel that many of their peers shied away from. They had the air of a band that you committed to, that you argued over. There's been a natural fade away from that youthful starting point, as well there should be—it's not really befitting for a group of dads in their late 30s to enter a recording studio like they’re going to bootcamp. But still, there are elements left behind that could benefit from being intact on Rave Tapes, such as the astonishing ebb and flow of "Mogwai Fear Satan", or even odd impulses like getting Roky Erickson to guest on a track. Instead, it's hard to see what this offers that we don't already have.
Rave Tapes is the work of an oddly conservative band, turning away from the openness they once embraced. At some point Mogwai got less interested in testing the boundaries of their music, instead settling for being comfortable working within them. The bass-y keyboard grind that emerges at times is a new appendage, but the material it's dressed up in strains under the weight of familiarity, ultimately resembling an exercise in Mogwai box-ticking. So here comes the Codeine-lite vocal piece ("Blues Hour"), here comes the one with the vocoder ("The Lord is Out of Control"), here comes the one with the funny title ("Simon Ferocious"), here comes the one with the sampled spoken word dialogue ("Repelish"). It's hard to shake the feeling that this is a band trapped in their own creation, occasionally looking for somewhere else to go but unable or unwilling to fully get there.
Most groups don't leave behind the core signifiers that bring them attention in the first place, so Mogwai are far from an isolated case when it comes to looping back on themselves. In many ways they're victims of their earlier snottiness and ambition. The screaming guitars of "Like Herod", the sheer beauty of "Helicon 2", the bratty spat with Blur, the punk nihilism of calling an album Come On Die Young—they don't need to return to such things, but it does make the level of complacency they're operating at now such a baffling and frustrating end game to it all. At this point it feels like there isn't anywhere else they can go with this music, so infinitesimally small are the strides taken toward a better place. Mogwai have worked heavily in the visual realm in the last year, on Les Revenants and a live performance of their Zidane soundtrack. Maybe the cliché about instrumental bands creating "soundtracks for films that don't exist" has a grain of truth for them after all. Here, Mogwai’s cautionary approach all but drowns out the faint echoes of the once brave band struggling to get out from within. | 2014-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | January 20, 2014 | 6 | 103d1885-0d4b-4e6d-b776-27cec12e8265 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
On his self-titled Merge debut, the Bright Eyes star is focused on making escapes-- moving on, moving over, breaking out, hitting the streets, leaving it all behind, don't look back. | On his self-titled Merge debut, the Bright Eyes star is focused on making escapes-- moving on, moving over, breaking out, hitting the streets, leaving it all behind, don't look back. | Conor Oberst: Conor Oberst | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12060-conor-oberst/ | Conor Oberst | Both as a prodigy addled with "new Dylan" acclaim and an emo icon with a bratty attitude and nose-grazing bangs, Conor Oberst has been a squirrelly performer, whipping between genres and moods. Still, whether it's Desaparecidos' frantic punk-rock or Bright Eyes' folksy mewling, Oberst infuses most everything he touches with an awkward, frantic desperation; as a vocalist he sounds perennially uncomfortable, muscles tight and prepped to sprint away from the microphone. On his self-titled Merge debut, Oberst is focused on making escapes-- moving on, moving over, breaking out, hitting the streets, leaving it all behind, don't look back. "There's nothing that the road cannot heal," Oberst vows in the Tom Petty-esque "Moab", and he's never sounded more convinced: Conor Oberst figures escapism as its own kind of religion, a workable belief system for kids that can't sit still.
The notion of the road-as-savior isn't new-- for one, see decades of country music, from "Lost Highway" on-- and Oberst again embraces high, lonesome twang as his medium of choice, packing this record with the loose country rock that's ruled much of Bright Eyes' recent catalogue. The pervasive gripe about alt-country is that it's too gracious, too polite and predictable, and Oberst occasionally succumbs to Hank Williams-raising cowboy tropes ["Help me get my boots on, help me get my boots back on!" he yelps in "I Don't Want to Die (In the Hospital)"], but mostly, the genre suits his craggy vocals-- and his seemingly infinite supply of wistfulness.
Like anyone on the hunt for meaning, Oberst is compelled by mystical or metaphysical enclaves (see Bright Eyes' 2007 LP Cassadaga, named after a spiritualist compound in Florida populated, mostly, by psychics), and he opted to record Conor Oberst in the Mexican city of Tepoztlán (the name of his new backing band, the Mystic Valley Band, was inspired by the city-- where, legend says, the Aztec feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl was born). It's not surprising that Oberst ditched the U.S. to make a record about flight, but even from Mexico, he manages to skewer American soullessness: Oberst has always had a knack for spitting out tiny, dismal nuggets-- "There are pink flamingoes living in the mall," he sighs in "Lenders in the Temple"-- that successfully (and succinctly) suggest a kind of cultural and moral apocalypse. Since his days as a spastic, barking teenager, Oberst has traded in a lot of his post-adolescent trembling for a calmer, less unbridled melancholy, but Conor Oberst is still packed with disheartening realities, and Oberst refuses to temper his pessimism, even when it starts to feel heavy and contrived, more like a narrative tic than anything else.
Opener "Cape Canaveral", with its acoustic strums and barely-there percussion, is a lovely, quasi-nostalgic meditation of the 1969 moon mission (the "red rocket blaze over Cape Canaveral"-- an epic escape if there ever was one). The song ultimately transforms into an ode to movement-as-salvation, setting the scene for the eleven tracks which follow. "Hey, hey, hey mother interstate,/ can you deliver me from evil,/ make me honest make me wedding cake?" he wonders. "Atone, I will atone."
"Sausalito" is a rollicking daydream about camping out on a houseboat in California; "NYC - Gone, Gone" is a stomping, distorted burst about leaving New York for Mexico. "Gone, gone from New York City,/ where you gonna go with a head that empty?" Oberst demands. "Milk Thistle", which closes the album, is a grim acoustic song about dying (Oberst never mentions alcohol explicitly, but milk thistle, a purported hangover cure, is often employed, holistically, to treat liver disease-- so it doesn't seem unreasonable to read "Milk Thistle" as a song about suicide-via-whiskey). "Milk thistle, milk thistle, let me down slow," he trembles. "If I go to heaven I'll be bored as hell." It feels like a fitting, if morbid, way to end a record about escaping life-- about escaping everything. | 2008-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 4, 2008 | 7.3 | 103ec08b-ad27-4260-b65f-01ec5f39fc86 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
The sharp new LP from the Boston rockers avoids expectation without losing their asymmetrical songwriting style. It feels, in some sense, like their first true album. | The sharp new LP from the Boston rockers avoids expectation without losing their asymmetrical songwriting style. It feels, in some sense, like their first true album. | Pile: A Hairshirt of Purpose | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23053-a-hairshirt-of-purpose/ | A Hairshirt of Purpose | It’s impossible to talk about Pile without talking about their fans. With every album, the Boston rock band’s ascent continues by word of mouth. And yet, Pile reside in a state of relative self-sabotage, as if to punish themselves for all of the adulation. The energy of their recorded material pales in comparison to that of their live shows, where their cult inducts new followers effortlessly. For frontman Rick Maguire, it’s an endless cycle: create explosive songs, win listeners over at shows, watch the fanbase swell, feel unworthy of their praise, and write new songs to out-do what he feels didn’t warrant attention to begin with. In ways, that’s Pile’s weakness: being too good live.
Dig through the band’s discography and their formula becomes clear. Pile stuffs records with hits rather than big-picture concepts. It’s what preserves their material’s immediacy, but it’s also what makes them a band of songs, not a band of LPs. Here, for the first time, Pile offer exactly that: a proper album. A Hairshirt of Purpose orders songs with reason, progresses a narrative across 13 tracks, segues with efficiency, and bookends the record with a proper introduction and ending. Once again, Pile aim to surpass themselves with a formula that eschews expectation without losing their asymmetrical songwriting.
On Hairshirt, Pile are done with deconstructing songs for the sake of it. Tracks like “Hissing for Peace” and “Hairshirt” snarl with spinning agitation, but where they might have included serrated epilogues a few years back, Pile now let them sprint sharply. A guitar solo brews within Maguire during “Milkshake,” but he restrains the urge to reprise the drama of Dripping hit “Prom Song.” The band replaces their trademark, collapsing resolution with slower melodies that, true to reflective lyrical themes of self-growth, trudge alongside cinematic strings and organs. The violins of “Dogs” bolster its emotional swell, while the whistling on “I Don’t Want to Do This Anymore” underscores its self-aware cheekiness. Pile tries their hand at musical themes—like the nervous drumroll that intros three different songs—and the results are impressively cohesive.
Hairshirt spends its time burrowing in the joys of solitude and then cowering from them. Given that Maguire’s vocals sit in the forefront, he masks insecurities behind metaphors for the sake of anonymity, as in the relationship imbalance of “Rope’s Length” or with the internet trolls on “No Bone.” But on “Hissing for Peace”—with its ostensible themes of confidence and shame—it becomes clear Maguire’s self-punishing thought-processes could have turned him manic long ago. (“The spine’s just a snake/That’s ashamed of itself,” he sings, “While leading a meditation on poor posture.”) Maguire delivers recurring mid-song guilt-trips. Occasionally, he deflects onto others; worms become metaphors for politicians unstitching the country’s progress. For all that disgust, though, the record sounds calm. There’s no throat-scratching yelps, save for the holler on “Texas,” and even that requires several plays to expose its enmity.
In the past, a stereotypical Pile song would burst with a mix of feral percussion and strangely coquettish thrashing. Right as the final tracks of A Hairshirt of Purpose threaten to bleed together, the band returns to form with the closer “Fingers.” It’s the only shoehorned Hairshirt hit that utilizes the familiar Pile formula. Even then, it flashes new tricks. Maguire wrote a song that captures the band’s live appeal flawlessly, but by placing it at the end, he highlights their songwriting evolution at large. Pile could have remained in their amorphous realm of rock, but they needed to grow up. Here, as musicians, they did. | 2017-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | March 31, 2017 | 7.7 | 1040a21e-68ba-4cc9-95f0-8f9a3ad03d89 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | null |
Following her brash and confounding debut, the singer-producer slows everything down, recreating the sparse magnetism of her live show. | Following her brash and confounding debut, the singer-producer slows everything down, recreating the sparse magnetism of her live show. | Lafawndah: The Fifth Season | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lafawndah-the-fifth-season/ | The Fifth Season | Lafawndah’s debut LP Ancestor Boy announced her on a wider stage as someone willing to take risks and run with them. A brash mix of experimental dance and globally minded pop, the album was as exciting as it was confounding. In that same spirit, The Fifth Season, her first release of original material since then, is another sharp left turn.
She’s lost none of her experimentalism, but this time, she’s channeling it into a more live-feeling body of work. The Fifth Season is minimalist, full of space and light, like a development of her 2018 EP, Le Renard Bleu, with the Japanese composer Midori Takada, and their one-off performance of their piece “Ceremonial Blue” at London’s Barbican Hall. Album closer “Le Malentendu” is a rare example of Lafawndah sharing vocal duties, this time with French rapper Lala &ce. Rather than cluttering the mix, the contrast between the two vocal timbres—Lafawndah light and airy, &ce rich and grounded—opens the track up further, allowing Lafawndah to feel her own limits. It’s a welcome reminder of the sparse magnetism of her live shows, a touchstone in a time of distant connection.
With The Fifth Season, she slows everything down, stripping back the harsh, abstract instrumental productions of Ancestor Boy, affording her the time and space to explore other genres. “You, at the End” is built around a horn motif that subtly grows and adapts while anchoring the track, taking it in a jazzier direction. “The Stillness” is anything but still; it’s a slowly expanding web of drones and polyrhythms, carefully coordinated and vibrating with anxious energy, the feeling that anything could happen.
In all of her work, Lafawndah has centered her voice as an instrument. On The Fifth Season, however, she treats it with the same gravity, care, and potential for variability as a violin. On opener “Old Prayer,” she goes from a quiet plaintive lament to a cry that reverberates, giving the impression that the higher powers she invokes are sung into being through her. Her voice on “L’Imposteur” is layered with a Vocoder-like effect that’s an uncanny mimic of Lafawndah’s own occasional and subtle vibrato; with it, she dresses up as herself, trying on different aspects of her own personality to see which fits. On album single “Don’t Despair,” she sings as close as she can to a whisper without losing her stringent sense of melody, delivering a discordant message of tentative hope.
The Fifth Season is imbued with the tension and power of a live instrumental performance, at once intriguing and nerve-wracking. Throughout the album, Lafawndah embodies a purposeful fluidity of genre and role that makes her difficult to pin down, someone completely comfortable walking in their path no matter how it might appear to an outside observer. With this latest release, she complicates the labels of “dance music artist,” “composer,” and “performer” by synthesizing them, embodying all three at once and allowing herself to get lost in the boundless possibilities of each.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Latency | September 15, 2020 | 7.4 | 10414754-cfc6-4929-b5e6-7995f5da05b4 | Jemima Skala | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jemima-skala/ | |
If the jazz and experimental drummer’s work in other bands often suggests an irrepressible mania, the goal with this trio seems to be delicate chaos. | If the jazz and experimental drummer’s work in other bands often suggests an irrepressible mania, the goal with this trio seems to be delicate chaos. | Tyshawn Sorey: Verisimilitude | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tyshawn-sorey-verisimilitude/ | Verisimilitude | Tyshawn Sorey is one of contemporary music’s most adroit thrashers. To hear him in an ensemble led by saxophonist Steve Lehman or pianist Vijay Iyer is to enter a mind-altering rhythmic chamber. The tempo of a song may start out at a swinging pace. Then you hear a pivot that sounds like a reference to a Dilla motif. Next, it’s being spun through the wringer of free jazz. It’s easy to understand why lots of elite musicians like to have this guy in a band or why Questlove calls Sorey one of his “drumming heroes.”
As a composer, Sorey is no less bold. But his adventurism has adopted a different profile on his most recent albums for the Pi label. The Inner Spectrum of Variables, a double-disc set from 2016, used an unconventional string quartet to fill out some of Sorey’s contemporary classical designs. On 2014’s Alloy—a trio recording with pianist Corey Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini—the finale was a half-hour composition titled “A Love Song.” Over its first half, the way Smythe meditated over some of Sorey’s modes encouraged you to forget the piece’s claim to jazz-born tenderness. This hint of misdirection allowed the gradual entry of Tordini and Sorey himself to sound all the more ravishing.
Verisimilitude is this trio’s follow-up to Alloy. While it can fit on a single CD, it has an epic scale that follows from the wide-ranging air of Inner Spectrum. And though it never strays from its languid style, the brief opening track “Cascade in Slow Motion” reveals how Sorey can put his compositional materials under pressure. At first, Smythe’s piano picks over the scalar melody, while Sorey accompanies, quietly. Gradually, the drummer puts some more tumult into the ensemble’s texture. Still, it’s the softest kind of full-boil imaginable. If his work in other bands often suggests an irrepressible mania, the goal here seems to be delicate chaos.
Most of the following track, “Flowers for Prashant,” is similarly pensive—until a figure that sounds descended from Middle Eastern music sweeps into frame in the final minutes along with airy wisps of electronic processing. The third movement, “Obsidian,” flows without interruption from this same digital environment. That vibe is interrupted only when Smythe moves over to produce stark, plinking lines from a toy piano. (John Cage liked the instrument, too, but the use of it in a trio format presents new expressive possibilities.)
By the time of the centerpiece, the half-hour long “Algid November,” Sorey’s group makes the most of its deep experience together. Smythe knows how to uncork a fiery line of pianism—bringing a spare section to an unceremonious end—at just the right moment. Throughout, the use of electronics is so restrained that it can be easy to miss. But a gorgeous new melody in the tenth minute refreshes the listener’s patience, with its assurance that not every change in the music is going to be about such fine-grain distinctions. Even as the group recoils from seeming overbearing or obvious, its use of textural opposites—like sustain and dryness—creates a powerful narrative. That all the variety here comes from the work of three players is a marvel. It’s almost frightening to imagine what Sorey could conceive, with a full orchestra at his disposal. The right experimental music impresario should give him the chance. | 2017-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Pi | August 15, 2017 | 7.6 | 10485d59-c9a9-462c-90af-5f312c717c1a | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Janet Jackson’s 2004 album, a lush and preeminently sex-positive album that deserves a reappraisal. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Janet Jackson’s 2004 album, a lush and preeminently sex-positive album that deserves a reappraisal. | Janet Jackson: Damita Jo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/janet-jackson-damita-jo/ | Damita Jo | Don’t let that Cheshire cat smile Janet Jackson wears on the cover fool you—this album is something of a tragedy. Damita Jo carries with it inadvertent weight, like a banal conversation with a loved one just a few hours before a fatal accident. What was intended as a long-form expression of nascent love became, in the eyes of many, something repugnant and shameful—a demonstration of Janet Jackson going even further after going too far.
Because it was released in the wake of the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show—that which spawned Nipplegate—Damita Jo was inevitably associated with a debacle that found a single, metallic, sun-clad boob eclipsing a universally adored artist’s entire body of work, a catalog so astonishingly consistent at its commercial peak that Jackson’s greatest hits has a greatest hits. Overnight, Janet went from “the normal one” to yet another wacko Jackson.
But Damita Jo wasn’t a mere casualty of circumstance. It was a response to the uproar. Humid with shameless sexuality, it pointedly doubled down on the sensuality that for a decade had been pervading Jackson’s artistry (including that Super Bowl performance). Jackson could have reined in this extended meditation on the joy of sex—an “MTV News” report that ran mid-January 2004 suggested that she still had weeks of work left on the album after the Super Bowl. Instead, Jackson completed her vision. “There were people who wanted me to take certain songs off the album ’cause they thought it would pose a problem, but that would be changing who I am,” Jackson said on “Good Morning America” on March 31, 2004, the day after Damita Jo’s release. “And I’ll never do that for anyone.”
Jackson might as well have been attempting to fight a fire by singing it a lullaby. Virtually every interview she sat through during the Damita Jo press cycle touched on the Super Bowl, to Jackson’s visible discomfort. Worse yet, it was clear that it was open season on her body: Jay Leno solicited a kiss on air (“That was great…you’re very good at that,” he said after the peck), UK chat-show host Jonathan Ross noted, “What a pretty face you’ve got,” and David Letterman grilled the usually unflappable Jackson enough to exasperate her. “Can we talk about something else ’cause I don’t want to focus on my breast?” she asked after about 10 minutes worth of Super Bowl questions.
In recent years, Jackson’s career has undergone a general critical reassessment thanks in no small part to Black Twitter and the objectively galling decision to have Justin Timberlake perform at the 2018 Super Bowl. Largely ignored by listeners and received tepidly by critics, Damita Jo is something of a stain on Jackson’s recording legacy, the first in a series of commercial disappointments that quantified how the mighty had fallen.
Yet Damita Jo deserves our attention and, yes, justice, not just as a reparative formality but because its specific depiction of sexuality in a mainstream forum—a superstar’s major-label, highly anticipated album—is extraordinary.
Damita Jo was an exploration of the crucial role that sex plays in a new relationship—a basic truth that is generally glossed over in mainstream pop culture’s sanitized portraits of young love. Art that does examine the simple fact that new couples tend to fuck a lot—like Nagisa Ôshima’s 1976 film In the Realm of the Senses, or Gaspar Noé’s Love from 2015—often finds a legacy of notoriety. Damita Jo was inspired by Jackson’s relationship with producer Jermaine Dupri, whom she had been dating for about a year and a half when the album was finally released.
“It’s an album about love,” Jackson told Ryan Seacrest, and that was a line she’d repeat a few times during that press cycle. You could interpret this as spin for daytime television, or take her at her word: Damita Jo’s thematic foundation of love necessitated frank discussions of sex. Focusing on love didn’t whitewash the sex; it contextualized it. You could further, as many critics did, suspect that Jackson was being provocative for the sake of selling records, or you could trust her as an artist who had long earned that trust. “A lot of people know that sex sells, and I think they use that. For me, it’s something that’s true to me—my friends will tell you that sex is truly a big part of my life,” she told Blender.
Jackson’s matter-of-fact presentation of sex made her quite radical in the face of America’s inborn puritanism. The sex that Jackson had written and sung about, particularly on Damita Jo and its 2001 predecessor, All for You (Jackson’s swinging single album, recorded in the wake of her split from her husband of nine years, Rene Elizondo Jr.) was presented as free of consequences. These were fantasies on top of fantasies, a meta-utopia in which a woman and superstar could express herself so explicitly and remain unscathed by the shame. That Jackson chose mostly mid-tempo R&B of the liminal, undistinguished mid-aughts variety to deliver Damita Jo’s subtle treatise surely wouldn’t convince naysayers who rolled their eyes at yet more baby-making music in a genre full of it from an artist who’d been inviting us to her bed regularly for over a decade.
Sex, Jackson reminds us at the offset of Damita Jo, is as crucial to our conception of her existence as entertaining. “I do movies, I do dance, I do music/I love doin’ my man,” she sings in the title track, whose propulsive hook is heralded by an ascending horn figure, recalling some cheery ’70s sitcom theme song. On Damita Jo, sex is alternately found in a club’s dank corners and is so dressed up in euphemism as to sound like something out of old Hollywood. On “I Want You,” a Kanye West co-production, she coos, “Have your way with me,” over a sample of B.T. Express’s “Close To You” that’s pitched up so that its strings take on the frantic emotional timbre of a Douglas Sirk movie.
Damita Jo further explores the theme of Jackson’s criminally slept on 1996 slow jam “Twenty Foreplay,” that of insatiable horniness. (“Yes, I need it/Twenty-four hours a day,” she cooed on that track.) It is an any time/any place ethos as a lifestyle. On the go-go inflected stroll of “Spending Time With You,” Jackson sings of wanting to “Use all our energy/Under the moonlight making love.” On the album’s first single, “Just a Little While,” which combines frenetic breaks, elements of ’80s new wave guitars, and keyboards almost certainly inspired by Prince’s “Dirty Mind,” she frets about burning her lover out and resolves that lest her unyielding sex drive be a distraction, “Maybe I’ll just lay around/Play by myself.”
Pleasure is Jackson’s principle here. Her songs say little of the object of her desire; these odes are to love itself. They center Jackson and bespeak a passion for passion, sex for sex’s sake. This is never more apparent than in the oral suite of “Warmth” and “Moist,” the former of which rhapsodizes giving a blowjob in a parked car and finds Jackson singing with…something in her mouth that’s clearly supposed to be and very well might have been a penis. (When I interviewed her in 2009 during a Discipline junket, she was happy to uphold the song’s mythos, telling me, “There was something in my mouth” during the recording of the track.) “Warmth” is more a sound sculpture than a song, the murmurs and moans as crucial as its faint hook. “Now it’s my turn,” she says at the conclusion of “Warmth,” which flows into “Moist,” a song about receiving oral sex.
Combined, they constitute “active” and “passive” roles in such configurations and underscore the sense of versatility that pervades open-minded sex regardless of gender. Jackson, she’ll have you know, identifies as a bottom—she reportedly told the sea of gay men that watched her headline the Dance on the Pier at the end of New York’s Pride festivities in June 2004. But her lyrics make it clear that Jackson is more specifically a power bottom (the premise of her smash “All for You”—which finds her demanding, “Tell me I’m the only one” moments after admiring a stranger’s package—totally gives her away).
Damita Jo is not just rare for being a piece of mainstream erotica authored by a black woman—it’s also mainstream erotica that isn’t mired in darkness or shame. At its most explicit, Jackson’s dank 1997 masterpiece The Velvet Rope threw us in the dungeon for some bondage play. Damita Jo, in contrast, is largely upbeat if not precisely uptempo. One of her most unwaveringly R&B-oriented collections (again heavily assisted by the production/writing team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis), Damita Jo’s tone is bright and breezy. Multiple songs conjure island imagery, and yes, those islands are where people fuck.
That aforementioned smile that graces the cover is reminiscent of the impossibly pneumatic men that Tom of Finland drew in all sorts of carnal configurations, who loved every second of the sex they had with each other. Talk about gleeful, powerful bottoms. In an interview with famed biographer David Ritz in Upscale, Jackson took issue with the suggestion that she had a sexual obsession. “Obsession feels like a judgmental term to me, and when it comes to sex, I try to throw judgments out the window,” she said.
But a lack of shame from within does not inoculate the shame that comes from without. While Damita Jo had its share of enthusiastic reviews (notably, Ann Powers’ four-star write-up in Blender), it seemed to bore and baffle many critics, most of them men. For Rolling Stone, Neil Strauss wrote that Damita Jo “smacks of trying too hard,” while David Segal at The Washington Post said the album “has about it a hint of desperation.” For Entertainment Weekly, David Browne said that Jackson “works so hard at being sexy and provocative that she’s rarely either.” Even Alexis Petridis’ otherwise gushing review for The Guardian (“the results are astonishing”) took issue with the album’s “lyrical monomania,” in which “she puns wearingly on phrases like ‘doing it’ and ‘coming,’ like a demented 14-year-old boy.”
While it’s clear today that Damita Jo didn’t have a sex problem, it did have a specificity one. A terrific track like “R&B Junkie” doesn’t have very much to say—it’s a hazy salute to old school R&B in which Jackson references dances like the wop, the cabbage patch, the electric slide, Vaughan Mason & Crew’s “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll”…and not much else. (However inept it is at telling, though, certainly basing a song around a sample of Evelyn “Champagne” King’s glistening boogie classic “I’m in Love” is a way of showing the degree to which Jackson was an R&B junkie.)
Accompanying all the dirty discourse was Damita Jo’s stated theme of presenting sides of Jackson she’d never showed off in public—namely the no-fucks-giving Damita Jo (her middle name) and all-fucks-taking Strawberry. But these characters were lightly sketched, at best. Sure, a Janet Jackson album had never been this sexually saturated, but anyone paying attention knew she’d been DTF for over a decade by that point. And no one would think to cross her after she spat, “No my first name ain’t Baby/It’s Janet/Miss Jackson if you’re nasty,” way back in 1986. So how did Damita Jo enhance our understanding of Janet Jackson? Pointedly, it didn’t.
In fact, these “characters,” which the album more or less abandons explicitly five tracks in, elicit more questions than answers. The album contains a leitmotif of Jackson telling what she’s not telling: “There’s another side/That I don’t hide/But might never show,” she sings in the title track. You could feel duped walking away from this album, advertised as a confessional, knowing about as much about Jackson as you went in. But for an entertainer who kept her nine-year marriage a secret until it was ending (going as far as lying to Oprah about it during The Velvet Rope promo), being hawkish about her own narrative is its own sort of expression. The masks and characters she adopts don’t illuminate different sides of her, rather, they protect something she refuses to disown.
All is redeemed by her winsome delivery, though. Jackson doesn’t have a technically great voice, but she is a great singer (as such, Christina Aguilera is her precise inverse). She wraps her throat around her songs with gusto, performing with conviction and, within an evidently limited range, works with a seemingly infinite palette of soft: giggles, moans, whispers, mews, tweets. She has a nimble sense of rhythm that makes vocal pitter-patter around her beats. She doesn’t have pipes that will blow the ceiling off a church, but she’s such a deft performer and because she, Jam, and Lewis knew exactly what to do to enhance her limitations, propping up her main vocal in pillows and pillows of harmonies (see the luscious “Truly”). Nothing about her voice aesthetically suggests power, but what is it if not almighty power to be able to transcend notions of traditional proficiency?
None of Damito Jo’s singles went Top 40 in the U.S, but the lack of hits means that the album plays today as a single statement without the distraction of external cultural attachments to its songs. (It’s also a reminder that pop culture has no obligation to fairness if songs as sublime as “Truly” and “Island Life” should exist in neglect.) That Jackson’s commercial downturn happened to coincide with an album in which she was adamant about her status as a regular person who does regular-person things like fucking feels like some kind of thematic kismet. Damita Jo’s explicitly rendered humanity—in its intent and its performances—ultimately sells the sexual content of the album as part of a real human’s functions and desires, as opposed to a crass marketing angle. Between songs, on her trademark interludes, Jackson babbles about her love of humidity, Anguilla, dusk, and music, aware that life is in the details that outsiders might find extraneous. The glory and the tragedy of mortality spread across Damita Jo like the smile on Jackson’s face. Here I am, she was saying, naked as the day I was born, take it or leave it. Most people left it. That was their loss. | 2019-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Virgin | March 31, 2019 | 7.8 | 104d5b38-a56b-4f3d-bd86-8c24d39cc078 | Rich Juzwiak | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rich-juzwiak/ | |
On this fire-breathing flipside to 2006's stately Body Riddle, the Warp producer issues a visceral take on the art of modern beatmaking. | On this fire-breathing flipside to 2006's stately Body Riddle, the Warp producer issues a visceral take on the art of modern beatmaking. | Clark: Turning Dragon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11240-turning-dragon/ | Turning Dragon | In a recent interview, electronic music producer Chris Clark admitted he's "a bit of a perfectionist" when it comes to producing his beyond-intricate instrumentals. This is an understatement. Considering the Warp disciple's flair for pinpoint micro-rhythms, Clark's compositions come across like the inner whirlings of a beautifully disturbed mind. His beats rev up only to exhale into cleansing waves of static; each synthetic echo is draped with an echo of its own; oscillating fragments drift in and out of songs like unsettling half dreams-- this is imposing music. And without Clark's penchant for bruising emotion, it would be as useless as a stack of crashed, clicking hard drives. The human logic within his wave forms is convoluted but nonetheless present; Chris Clark is the guy with the bomb-rubble room-- a leaning pile of CDs here, gear head mags there, questionably clean clothes everywhere-- in which everything is oddly in its right place.
Across his first three albums, Clark utilized his talents with steely machines and warmer acoustic instruments-- including pianos and drums-- to assemble increasingly fluid tapestries, culminating with 2006's masterful Body Riddle. That album-- which attempted to answer the body's queries from the inside out-- assured its longevity with an all-encompassing attention to detail: Two years later, fresh folds continue to reveal themselves. Turning Dragon takes a detour from Clark's ultimate goal of meshing man and machine into one seamless, clattering bundle. Consisting of material tailored during frenetic live gigs and pegged as a counterpart to Body Riddle rather than a proper follow-up, Dragon finds the robots taking the upper hand. Clark's OCD tendencies are still apparent, but they're conveyed in a markedly brasher manner-- snares snarl, samples fire off semi-automatically, and the compression gets bumped up to Justice levels. It's the fire-breathing flipside to Riddle's contemplative stateliness.
And it's liberating to hear this sonic manicurist doing his best to freak out. Clark wastes no time in addressing his newly hedonistic agenda with the appropriately titled "New Year Storm". Ostensibly, this is his take on straight-up techno, but the near-industrial 4/4 pummels more than it pulses as it attempts to push through the producer's constant barrage of air-raid assaults-- this is what Trent Reznor wants to sound like in 2008. Galvanizing beasts "Volcan Veins" and "Truncation Horn" both employ micro-sampling to punctuate their soaring-BPM onslaughts; in the midst of these recklessly caffeinated raves, Missy Elliott and INXS are nothing but scattershot pawns in Clark's twisted game.
After the record's initial manic three-track bum rush, things settle into a slightly less leg-cracking groove. "For Wolves Crew" is the requisite Chris Clark album-within-a-song stunner: Before the seven-minute epic is through, we've heard the sound of a wood plank falling down metal stairs, a remixed alien transmission, and even some sped-up grime backed by a soothing, circular synth line. The whole disc sometimes risks becoming a tiresome test of modern beatmaking at its noisiest, but Clark is wise to include small-yet-essential breathers into the mix-- "Hot May Slides" acts as a side B sigh before "Beg" and "Penultimate Persian" close this scarily accomplished excursion with genre-melting finesse.
So while Dragon may be billed as a visceral antidote to Clark's impossibly complex Erector Set productions, it still has all the markings of a confessed perfectionist. Yet, as Clark himself said last year, "To make complex music with machines is actually pretty easy-- it's the mastering of technology rather than the mastering of music." While Dragon lacks some of the pathos of Clark's richest work, he's still much more than a mere button-pusher chasing the next plug-in. The struggle between his superhuman technical acumen and his desire to access nothing less than the secrets of the human condition continues to play out here, albeit on a more brazen plane. He's the ideal type of musical perfectionist-- one who realizes flawlessness is unattainable, but strives for it headlong all the same. | 2008-03-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-03-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | March 6, 2008 | 8.2 | 1053a958-98db-4d91-a489-0bf0610da920 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
With a group behind him that recalls the electronic jazz splatter of ’90s New York, Dave Harrington’s guitar work becomes a psychedelic, soft-hued quest for transcendence. | With a group behind him that recalls the electronic jazz splatter of ’90s New York, Dave Harrington’s guitar work becomes a psychedelic, soft-hued quest for transcendence. | Dave Harrington: Pure Imagination, No Country | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dave-harrington-pure-imagination-no-country/ | Pure Imagination, No Country | Dave Harrington gives himself some context, which is one of the main challenges of the modern guitar soloist. As one half of the electro-jam duo Darkside, Harrington threaded his glimmering instrumental lines through Nicolas Jaar’s downtempo deconstructions. Their 2013 debut Psychic used this formula to ground their compositions and break through to an audience of head dancers in the international language of minimalist space-funk. After one full-length, the duo put the project on hold and Harrington soon hit a different kind of club scene, gigging relentlessly around New York with a variety of configurations and finding an audience amid the local jam cognoscenti.
On Pure Imagination, No Country, recorded with the Dave Harrington Group, the approach owes more to the ’90s electronic jazz splatter of downtown Manhattan clubs like the Knitting Factory than the beats of the trans-national dance floor. The problem of context is still mostly solved, Harrington’s traditional six-string electric guitar is set against the void of anything-is-possible electronics. The sometimes jazz-like project, then, becomes a quest for the transcendently new and comes back with convincing results.
Pure Imagination surfs the tension between Harrington’s lyricism and a psychedelic sense of structure, unafraid to abandon form. Alternating atmospheres (“Dreams Field”) with the occasional freak-beat (“Then I Woke Up”), the pay-offs come when Harrington plays at his most deeply linear. “Belgrade Fever” superficially resembles Darkside with its tightly coiled guitar lines, but it soon cracks open into a long and moody solo, where Harrington shows off his solution to that second main challenge of the modern improvising guitarist: voice.
Throughout the album, Harrington adeptly switches into a mode where his notes cluster like the blooms of small alien flowers. He can sometimes recall Bill Frisell, though Harrington is more likely to dissolve into abstraction. Pure Imagination might even be divided into the too-easy categories of inside and outside, each setting up the other in constant rotation. While credited to the Dave Harrington Group, the music might be one musician or many, a sense of changing scale that only sometimes resolves into anything as obvious as an actual band. When it does, the results are often fantastically strange. "Neoarctic Organs" is the type of song one might find the house trio playing in an otherworldly underground grotto, with Harrington’s band-leading guitar squiggling in colors.
The speed at which the album moves through different voices and approaches also recalls the ’90s jazz scene. Even at its most chill, it rarely settles into one mood for more than a song. At least structurally, the 11-minute “Patch One” comes closest to bridging Harrington’s disciplines, a long and swelling drift with Harrington’s glacial guitar buried in the hum, finally bursting into the light during a bliss-skronk denouement.
The opposing modes of the album are neatly illustrated by its final two pieces. "No Country" is a float through no-time, occasional rhythms pulsing in the distance like a far-off station. And then Harrington gets about as far in as possible with the album’s conclusion: a mostly straightforward instrumental cover of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley’s “Pure Imagination,” written for the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Graced with Harrington’s pedal steel, the forces of the void push at the edges of melody and Harrington’s guitar keeps the emptiness at bay.
It breaks open into pedal-steel stardust that might be extended to the horizon by a remix, live improvisation, or loop function. On an album from the post-jazz future, it’s a nostalgic postcard from the far-off past, a universe of melody and form. It is the final destination, a moment of being on the other side of the proverbial stargate—a conclusion to make a listener start all over, to see if this is where it was pointing all along. | 2019-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Jazz | Yeggs | February 5, 2019 | 7.7 | 1059faa6-eae0-4d70-9e41-4968c2d0763c | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | |
Stephen Wilkinson's Bibio project continues to surprise, pushing further out of his comfort zone and venturing boldly into new territory. | Stephen Wilkinson's Bibio project continues to surprise, pushing further out of his comfort zone and venturing boldly into new territory. | Bibio: Mind Bokeh | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15279-mind-bokeh/ | Mind Bokeh | After five full-lengths and a few EPs, Stephen Wilkinson's Bibio project continues to surprise. His first three albums combined tape-distressed versions of British folk with warbly ambient interludes, and he gradually added vocals that hinted at proper songs. During this stretch, he seemed like someone who wanted to completely master one idiom before he could muster the courage to move on to another. But on his 2009 album, Ambivalence Avenue, Wilkinson moved outside of his comfort zone. His ear for mood and texture was still there, but suddenly his vocals were up front and he was tossing in hip-hop breaks and dense samples to craft a weirdly bent style of electro-pop. It was an exhilarating record. You could feel an artist stepping outside of himself and venturing boldly into new territory, and the sense of adventure was contagious.
Mind Bokeh is no less daring than Ambivalence Avenue, and it covers just as much ground, but here you can feel Wilkinson bumping up against his limitations. His talent for production is fully intact, but some odd choices sabotage the record. Instrumental sections like the title cut and the closing "St. Christopher" show a sound technician firmly in command of his material, folding twinkly keyboards, crackly loops, and gently insistent beats into tracks that are evocative and detailed enough to reveal more with repeated listens. Wilkinson's terrific understanding of sound is undiminished, and he still moves easily between genres and gets most of the key details right. But the further he explores recognizable song forms, the more often the album stumbles.
In the case of "Take Off Your Shirt", that stumble becomes a full-on face plant. Wilkinson's exploratory spirit is a wonderful thing, but glammy power pop in the vein of Phoenix is something he should absolutely, positively leave to someone else. With its blocky guitar riff and canned beat, "Shirt" is stiff and downright unlikable. Fortunately, it doesn't get any worse, but there are still too many ho-hum moments that feel weirdly off. The six-minute "Pretentious" brings the flow of the album to a halt only two tracks in, with a woozy synth-driven lope that's a bit too close to anonymous chillwave and is not redeemed by the tacked-on vocals. Along the same lines but better is "Light Seep". Here, the repurposed AM radio pop of Ariel Pink would seem to be an influence, as Wilkinson mixes a funky wah-wah guitar with percussion that sounds like a Wurlitzer preset. To my ears, it sounds like a so-so take on something Keyboard Money Mark was doing in the late 90s, but "Seep" is at least listenable and a good example of Wilkinson's eclecticism working for him.
On the plus side, "Wake Up!" is very much a continuation of the best of Ambivalence Avenue, with its surging Dilla-fied samples grafted to a vocal performance that finds Wilkinson filled with yearning, sounding almost desperate. And "K Is for Kelson" is a convincing slice of bouncy indie pop that sounds like it's being sung by a robot on holiday in the tropics. These songs are short and sweet, making their point and getting out, which works to their advantage. But on the lengthier tracks, Mind Bokeh seems to hover in an unsteady place between pop song form and soundscapes, and the flaws-- repetitive melodies that don't quite gel, the voice just a bit too high in the mix-- become more evident. There is enjoyable music here, and I've no doubt that the Bibio project has plenty of life on it. But now that Wilkinson has spent a few years trying new things, a little focus might do him some good. | 2011-04-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-04-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | April 1, 2011 | 6.9 | 1061d815-06ff-41f2-b1e4-71c3fa098856 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
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