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Blog house may be increasingly used as an eye-rolling pejorative, but don't punish Cut Copy's hugely enjoyable In Ghost Colours, a fantastic summer pop record that feels light, confident, and unencumbered by the dictates of fashion. | Blog house may be increasingly used as an eye-rolling pejorative, but don't punish Cut Copy's hugely enjoyable In Ghost Colours, a fantastic summer pop record that feels light, confident, and unencumbered by the dictates of fashion. | Cut Copy: In Ghost Colours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11407-in-ghost-colours/ | In Ghost Colours | For better or worse, Cut Copy swim in the same pool as those electro, French touch, and new wave revivalists for whom fashion, irony, and self-consciousness represent swords to live and die by. In a scene as self-reflexive as this, backlashes are the order of the day, but even still, there are signs-- such as the increasing use of "blog house" as an eye-rolling pejorative, recent records by Calvin Harris, Does It Offend You Yeah?, and Ghostland Observatory, and the parallel rise of Balearic-feeling dance as a worthy substitute-- that this world might be slipping under the weight of its own ubiquity. Based on their patchy and rainbow-chasing 2004 debut, Bright Like Neon Love there was every reason to believe that a new Cut Copy record this late in the cycle would only accelerate the meltdown; after all, there are only so many ways to arrange and re-arrange vibrant art direction, moneyed aloofness, and the right kinds of sounds before the party heads to a new venue altogether.
As it turns out, we needn't have been so cynical-- not when Cut Copy aren't. If the pastichey Bright Like Neon Love felt more like an opportunistic patchwork quilt of other people's sounds and ideas, the hugely enjoyable In Ghost Colours feels light, confident, and unencumbered by the dictates of fashion. More than anything, though, it's a gloriously positive record, one whose cheerily strummed acoustic guitars, shimmering synths, sweeping choruses, and playful sonics maintain a delicate balance; where a lot of summer pop records like this often scream fun to the point of being oppressive (or at least annoyingly instructive), there's nothing remotely show-offy about In Ghost Colours. In fact, it's closer in spirit to the Avalanches' Since I Left You than it is to anything from the past few years. It's a hard record not to love.
In Ghost Colours was co-produced by DFA's Tim Goldsworthy, who deserves credit for simultaneously opening up the band's palette while relaxing their delivery. Sure, as you might expect, there are still blushes of French house and electro scattered liberally all over the show, but they're always deployed in ways that serve-- rather than overshadow-- the song. And while Cut Copy's principle and founding member Dan Whitford may come from a DJ background, the band-led songs come across every bit as muscular and as noteworthy as the dancefloor crossovers. To that end, this is one of the best bridges between electro and rock in a long time; the joins are so seamless that you don't even think of the songs on those terms.
From the first swirling synths and gleaming melodies of curtain raiser "Feel the Love", In Ghost Colours asserts itself as a hugely magnanimous record. Everything here sounds stadium-sized, loved-up, and breezily inclusive. There's the lead single "Lights & Music", an arena rock slow burner with a disco chorus; or the superb, helicoptering house of 2007 single "Hearts on Fire", which gets a welcome reprise; or the sunburst rock of "Unforgettable Season", which recalls Broken Social Scene in its ability to sound in full swoon from chord one; or the carefree "Strangers in the Wind", whose lazy verse and torpid guitar peels owe a little bit to Fleetwood Mac. Elsewhere, "So Haunted" and "Far Away" compete for standout track status, the former sandwiching verses of fuzzy guitar squall around one of the most gorgeous-sounding choruses of the year, the latter an effervescent bit of 80s synth fluff that holds up against the best of Human League and Erasure.
So yeah, you get the point: Pop lovers will find lots to love here, and if there's any justice, this record will keep them swooning through the summer. Regardless of what kind of audience it ultimately finds, though, In Ghost Colours earns its smiles with a combination of ingenuity and easiness that you don't often come by, and for that, even in April, it already feels like a triumph. | 2008-04-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-04-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope / Modular | April 14, 2008 | 8.8 | 10667af3-993f-44b5-9121-5aa92c8c79fc | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
In 1975, Willie Nelson changed the rules of country music. His lonesome, noir concept album about a wayward preacher was a big and beautiful dream made real by simple and spare music. | In 1975, Willie Nelson changed the rules of country music. His lonesome, noir concept album about a wayward preacher was a big and beautiful dream made real by simple and spare music. | Willie Nelson: Red Headed Stranger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/willie-nelson-red-headed-stranger/ | Red Headed Stranger | Red Headed Stranger, Willie Nelson’s 18th studio album, arrived in the world on May Day, 1975, to little fanfare. It would prove to be an ominous year. Two of Nelson’s fellow Texans and country music heroes, Bob Wills and Lefty Frizzell, would die. At the Country Music Awards, Charlie Rich would set fire to the slip of paper that announced John Denver as Entertainer of the Year. Denver topped mainstream country charts with his friendly ditty “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” which traded places with the lush, bright, radio-friendly productions of Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy,” and Linda Ronstadt’s “When Will I Be Loved.”
It was the year of Tonight’s the Night, Blood on the Tracks, Physical Graffiti, Metal Machine Music, Zuma, Horses, and Born to Run. And it was the year that Willie Nelson finally signed a record deal that allowed him “quote artistic control endquote” as he described it to Rolling Stone. In the span of about a week, summoning a core stable of musicians to a little studio in Garland, Texas, and for just $4,000, Nelson made an album that defied logic, transcended the industry-defined borders separating country from rock’n’roll, jazz, blues, and folk—and it became an artistic and commercial success. Red Headed Stranger remained on the Billboard charts for 120 weeks. It was as if he’d written himself a permission slip for the next four decades of his career. On first listen, one studio head wondered aloud whether it had been recorded in Nelson’s kitchen. It sounds like just Willie and his guitar, another remarked. Waylon Jennings, who was present for the initial listening session, leapt to his feet. “That’s what Willie is all about!” he reportedly hollered.
Nelson’s first four decades had been hard-earned. He was on his third marriage, father of four kids. He had washed dishes and sold encyclopedias door to door until he decided that it went against his beliefs to push them on people who couldn’t afford them and took a job peddling vacuum cleaners instead. He had done his share of time in a trailer park and he had seen his own house burn down. He had played honky-tonks across from Texas to Washington, and he’d worked as a radio disc jockey with the handle “Wee Willie Nelson.” One particularly despondent night, early in his Nashville days, Nelson walked outside Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge—the famous songwriter haunt where he warmed barstools alongside Kris Kristofferson, Hank Cochran, and Roger Miller. Nelson laid down on a snow-covered street and waited for a car to run him over.
The story is one Nelson tells frequently of his Nashville days. For more than 10 years, he made a name for himself recording well-received albums that failed to get the same acclaim as the No. 1 hits he wrote for others; he resisted record company producers and their suggestions of “different styles” while at the same time demanded better marketing for his records. Was it worth it working for nothing to fit someone else’s mold?
It’s those dark minutes, lying in the snow listening and half hoping for traffic, that were on his mind when he scribbled the first few lines of 1973’s Shotgun Willie, his first true outlaw country anthem, on the back of a “sanitary napkin” envelope in a hotel bathroom. “Mind farts,” his good friend Kristofferson bluntly offered. Nelson remained unvexed. “I thought of it more as clearing my throat,” Nelson said. That album contained what remain some of the most beloved songs in the canon of Willie—“Whiskey River,” “Slow Down Old World,” “Sad Songs and Waltzes”—and it set the stage for an album that would challenge an industry’s prejudicial notions, one that would earn Nelson overwhelming and long overdue respect not as a country artist but as an artist, period.
The song ”Red Headed Stranger,” written in the 1950s by Edith Lindeman Calisch and Carl Stutz, is the dark tale of a bereft cowboy, “wild in his sorrow, riding and hiding his pain,” who goes into a grief-stricken rage. It was a song Nelson used to play as a disk jockey on Fort Worth radio and it stayed in his head long after. In the spirit of fieldworker blues, gospel, country, and traditional Mexican songs that reverberated through the rows of Texas cotton Nelson picked as a child, it follows an ancient plot. It’s a murder ballad, a noir tune of damaged characters and fateful, human errors. When his own children were small, Nelson sang it to them as a lullaby.
On a long drive from Steamboat Springs, Colo. to Texas, the song got in his head again. As he sat behind the wheel, Nelson envisioned the Stranger’s song as part of a larger story, mapping out the narrative in chapters. In his telling, the Stranger of the song becomes a Preacher who discovers his wife in the arms of another man and kills them both (“And they died with their smiles on their faces”). Doomed to wander the countryside alone on his horse, he seeks a redemption that may never be realized. Nelson worked his old ballads into a roster of country standards that, he reckoned, would naturally inhabit the Preacher’s mind. Eddy Arnold’s “I Couldn’t Believe It Was True,” a brief, jaunty number, stands in for the moment when the Preacher discovers that his wife has forsaken him. In the next iteration of the recurring theme, “Time of the Preacher,” the recognition of loss sinks in: “And he cried like a baby/And he screamed like a panther.”
Deliberately spare arrangements echoed the Stranger’s existential loneliness. Relying mostly on guitar, piano, and drums, Nelson summoned a small crew of musicians in the studio—his sister, Bobbie Nelson, longtime drummer Paul English, Bucky Meadows, Mickey Raphael, Jody Payne. Little else was needed to evoke the sound of the Preacher’s violent ride, the relentless, loping, strumming gait: “Don’t fight him don’t spite him/Let’s wait till tomorrow/Maybe he’ll ride on again.” The horse in the studio was, of course, Trigger, the Martin guitar Nelson had customized in Nashville a few years earlier, Frankensteined with a pickup from his old Baldwin guitar and named after Roy Rogers’ television horse. Nelson heard Trigger “as a human sound, a sound close to my own voice.”
Musically, Nelson has always subverted plain, pure song with utter, starlit mystery. He had an uncanny ability to bend the listener’s perception of time. “I could put more emotion in my lyric if I phrased it in a more conversational, relaxed way,” he wrote in 1988. His vocal phrasings snake around the surfaces, altering its inflections, anticipating a beat or falling just behind it; his guitar appears to stretch and shorten the meter without ever breaking it.
As a single punched into a dusty jukebox, Fred Rose’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” is a beautifully realized if painful love song, the harmonies on the line “Only memories remain” landing with a little sting. Threaded into the Preacher’s story, it becomes the heart of the album. Like Nelson and Trigger lingering on certain phrasings, parsing missed chances and regrets, the Preacher and his black stallion haunt the canyons, retracing steps. He’s mindful that the love he lost is a place to which he can never return, but he can’t stop himself from trying to get back there.
Country music had always been one of the truest genres, gritty and realistic songs of broken hearts, the farm, the factory, the bottle. But until Red Headed Stranger, music critic Chet Flippo wrote in Texas Monthly, the genre had offered scant escapism and “almost no fantasy.” Nelson, for the first time, allowed country music to dream big and beautiful. Nelson converses with the genre’s roots but sends them into uncharted and previously forbidden territory, fusing his essential influences—the tragic brilliance of Hank Williams and the melodic expression of Django Reinhardt. His anti-heroic story has elements of Homeric myth, a moody, Sergio Leone sensibility, the devastating lyrical force of Cormac McCarthy, whose Border Trilogy Red Headed Stranger in many ways prefigures.
When he left Nashville for Austin in 1972, Nelson had gladly traded his jackets and ties for bandannas and jeans; he’d grown his own red hair long. And in casting himself as the title character of Red Headed Stranger, he had chosen for his story an essentially archaic thing, tough and worn and mythic; an incessant wanderer and broken spirit, at war with himself. The artist lying on the street in the snow.
You can have an appreciative listening of Red Headed Stranger as a clear, uncomplicated tale about manhood and morality and infidelity, about the characteristic lonesomeness of the cowboy drifter, about some bygone notion of Americana, as listeners and critics did in 1975, layering on desperado descriptions. It is possible in 2017, when interpretations still overwhelmingly shrink to the literal-minded, to return there too.
And yet that would be missing out on so much. Sure, by 1975, Nelson had weathered and been implicated in his own share of stormy relationships, allegedly standing on both sides of infidelity. But to dwell on a reading of Red Headed Stranger primarily as a tale of manhood and waywardness or as one entrenched in bygone notions of America feels dated, particularly if you are anywhere on the margins of that story. Women, empathetic listeners by nature and necessity, learn to be very good at imagining ourselves into narratives framed around the literal experiences of boys and men. And in Red Headed Stranger, the story that resonates loudest is not the most obvious one but a universal one, about what it means, in dark and thrilling ways, to follow your instincts when you have everything at stake and nothing to lose.
With Red Headed Stranger, arguably the biggest artistic gamble of his career, Nelson framed it as an album about creativity and risk, about bad decisions and lonesome paths, about learning to listen to instincts, and, moreover, about distinguishing instinct from impulse. If Shotgun Willie was Nelson’s newfound manifesto, Red Headed Stranger forged into mythic weirdness acknowledging that this is a kind of wandering that can never end. Such is the nature of the itinerant solitude and perpetual dissatisfaction of the artist—the life that the restless and relentlessly prolific Nelson chose for himself—on the road again.
As the album draws to a close, after searching in Denver dance halls and in strangers’ arms, the Preacher claims to have found some version of solace and maybe even love, if we can take him at his word. His declaration is followed by one of the album’s wordless instrumentals, quiet and beckoning as a campfire, as Mickey Raphael’s harmonica reverberates and fades out. The memory of the lyrics of the previous song linger like smoke: “I looked to the stars, tried all of the bars/And I've nearly gone up in smoke/Now my hand’s on the wheel/I’ve something that’s real/And I feel like I’m going home,” the Preacher-Stranger had just sung in “Hands on the Wheel.” It’s not clear, though, whether he’ll ever truly arrive, or if he’d let himself stay long. | 2017-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | November 19, 2017 | 9.3 | 1066b899-a1de-4129-ad27-c5954865f8b6 | Rebecca Bengal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca-bengal/ | |
On her most fully realized album to date, the prolific Chinese artist serves up an enthralling blend of dread and beauty that feels quintessentially her own. | On her most fully realized album to date, the prolific Chinese artist serves up an enthralling blend of dread and beauty that feels quintessentially her own. | Yikii: Crimson Poem | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yikii-crimson-poem/ | Crimson Poem | Since 2017, the prolific Chinese artist Yikii has been releasing albums that have become increasingly robust and difficult to pin down. Initial records like ❀ [no pain] and Gentle Nightmare were sketch-like, with curious dabbles into glitch, ambient, industrial pop, and various beat-driven ephemera. 2019’s Flower’s Grave, released on the inimitable Shanghai label Genome 6.66Mbp, proved a breakthrough: Yikii tastefully employed post-club collage aesthetics to create a gothic spectacle. Crimson Poem is her most fully-realized album since, and it serves up an enthralling blend of dread and beauty that feels quintessentially her own.
There are comparisons that can be made: the chilling, ethereal bliss of ’80s Japanese acts like Pale Cocoon, the electronic-pop madness of Hanayo’s Gift, the queasy compositions of Danse Noire labelmate bod. None feel exact, though, one reason being Crimson Poem’s use of microtonality. The string-laden opener, “-47 °C,” gives a taste for how it’s implemented to instill terror, but it’s not until “Noctambulist” that it becomes overwhelming. Crooked piano melodies and the faint sound of crying open the track, and then it all tumbles into a whirlwind of noise that arrives like a locust swarm. There’s simultaneous decorum in the strings, and this juxtaposition between stately and sour moods makes everything feel uneasy, like the music’s always on the precipice of being pleasant without ever reaching it.
Given that her compositional strategy involves engaging the listener with drawn out moments of suspense, it’s apt that Yikii cites horror video games like Fatal Frame as an influence. On the shapeshifting “Phantasmagoria!,” a series of brash synth stabs unexpectedly appears, and she forces you to feel the resulting anxiety, as if a monster’s started chasing you down an empty corridor. Even when the track moves into mellower territories, there’s a continual sense of uncertainty for what’ll come next, and this ambient, creeping anxiety keeps Crimson Poem exciting even in its repetitious moments. “Scavenger’s Daughter,” for example, is a ceaseless barrage of cycling electronics, but the periodic inclusion of an unrelenting beat ensures the threat of violence never dissipates.
Most crucial to Yikii’s music is her voice. Her simple melodies, child-like coos, and talk-singing are inspired by nursery rhymes, and her songs can sometimes feel like they’re being sung by a demon-possessed child. “Doll’s Synaesthesia” showcases that best, as music-box melodies bolster the song’s kindergarten-creepy aura. Like the sudden presence of a voice in a horror game, Yikii’s singing can immediately trigger panic. While the strings and piano on “Liminal Space” already sound ghastly on their own, hearing her reverberating vocals makes the track macabre, as if she’s an empty soul whimpering from the grave.
The problem with “dark” or “scary” music is that it’s often too content to begin and end with a haunted mood. More raucous styles, on the other hand, can rely too heavily on jump-scare tactics or feel soulless in their dependence on sound design. Yikii is the rare artist who can channel apprehension in a manner that isn’t gimmicky, mainly due to the variety of styles used. “Five Layers of Crimson Snow” mixes traditional instruments and synthesized vocals to create a beguiling digital eeriness. “Every day is a dull routine,” she explains, singing of a malaise familiar to anyone who’s ever walked this earth. She clarifies further: “Dead bodies and sadness everywhere.” Throughout Crimson Poem, Yikii activates your fight-or-flight response, reminding you that nothing is more human than having fear rattle your bones. On the carnivalesque “Disillusionment,” she sums up our collective experience with a wish: “I just want less pain/I’m afraid.”
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Danse Noire | October 11, 2021 | 7.7 | 1067a7d5-93ac-4190-8f53-ff92a83fff51 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
Sanctuary reissues all three studio albums from the influential UK shoegazers. | Sanctuary reissues all three studio albums from the influential UK shoegazers. | Slowdive: Just for a Day / Souvlaki / Pygmalion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11841-just-for-a-day-souvlaki-pygmalion/ | Just for a Day / Souvlaki / Pygmalion | Swooning, washed-out rock from over a decade ago: Why should these reissues matter? The obvious answer: because this band still sounds incredible. Listening back, it feels like Slowdive were both the first and last word on this particular form of guitar-pop dreaming. It's the same sense you can get from Galaxie 500, Mazzy Star, My Bloody Valentine, or the Cocteau Twins, four bands with whom Slowdive have plenty in common. The 1980s were full of earthy rock from punk's tail end, full of glittery pop and bouncy indie and spandexed anthems-- these people all pitched in to the reverse process of guitar music going slow, slurry, and stylish, going silent-cool, and staring off into space.
Loads of acts still work along these woozy, languorous lines, and loads of acts traced the lines out before these turn-of-the-90s groups came along. But each of those artists staked out a patch of territory that feels definitive, a sound complete enough that there's no point following down its path. (Who in the world would think he could squeeze more out of Mazzy Star's tricks than Mazzy Star already did?) No, revisiting these bands is a little like trading in some modern guitar-pop for a Beatles record: The first shot doesn't sound dated, or less sophisticated, and it doesn't necessarily seem "better," or more original, either. It's just a workable, fully-formed thing on its own, which might be why most of the acts that feel like Slowdive today-- say, Ladytron, Lali Puna, Broadcast, or M83-- are coming at that mood and atmosphere from very different directions.
A year ago, we were saying roughly the same thing about Catch the Breeze, a Slowdive compilation that was more Portable Summary than Best Of. Two discs, packed with long stretches from the band's three albums and most of the highlights from their singles and EPs-- this was a big enough chunk of their five-year career to make it easy to take a pass on the rest. Now comes the complete follow-through: remastered reissues of all three LPs, in full. The first two, Just for a Day and Souvlaki, come in the now-standard two-disc format, packaged with a lot of the same extras that already wound up on the compilation; the last, 1995's long out-of-print Pygmalion, comes back to life in its original form, which is probably the best and biggest news here. Yeah, yeah: Reissues, duplication, hard-earned money, blah blah blah. But in the long term, all those kids you see picking their noses everywhere will have two solid options for investigating this band-- the short way or the long one.
The gist of it: Frontman Neil Halstead has remained the same kind of songwriter throughout his career, from Slowdive's shoegazing to Mojave 3's dreamy "country" (someone did try to beat Mazzy Star!) to his solo folk; his songs are warm, uncomplicated, full of some strange weepy longing, and slowed down to a narcotic drawl. What's surprising is how many different ways he's found to present them. The best starting point is 1993's Souvlaki, already a bit of an Essential Slowdive in itself. Across this record, the band kicks up a swirl that matches Halstead's sleepwalking pop perfectly: Guitars stretch and swirl in slow-motion layers, and the vocals seem to be calling desperately out of them, even when they're just lazy chants. This stuff manages to be both pillowy-soft and passionately deep-- shades of the way My Bloody Valentine could blur heaviness into an out-of-focus lull, or the way Galaxie 500's drowsy strum could come out with a fist in the air.
A significant chunk of Souvlaki wound up on Catch the Breeze, but anyone hoping the remainder was forgettable is out of luck: Even as collaborator Brian Eno led this album off into a few dub-deep explorations, Halstead's pop songwriting hit a peak, and the album's tracks wound up good-as-"Alison" almost straight across. (Same goes for the cover of "Some Velvet Morning" on the bonus disc-- just Slowdive putting the swirl on someone else's dreamy, narcotic country songwriting.) It's a slightly different scenario for the band's first album, 1991's Just for a Day, which the anthology ignored in favor of the early singles and radio sessions that now stock its bonus disc. Not so surprising: It's a straight line from those singles and EPs to the sound of Souvlaki, whereas Just for a Day is more of a sweet-dream detour. It was in 1991 that the NME said Slowdive could "make Cocteau Twins resemble Mudhoney," and the fluffy sprawl of this record seems to be trying to prove them right. There's a lot less weight to it, and if anything in Slowdive's catalogue will seem dated, it's the overgroomed production on these songs. Still, there's something terrifically oceanic about it-- tracks start out softly floating and then whip themselves up into gorgeous, overbearing squalls.
Most important, though, is the reissue of Pygmalion, which should knock down the album's eBay asking price by a good fifty bucks. This is a detour of the best sort, and a Slowdive album in name only: With this record, Halstead pushed the rest of the band to the sidelines, dropped the notion of a "band" altogether, and recorded at least two tracks that I can't imagine being rivaled-- ambient pop dreams that have more in common with post-rock like Disco Inferno than shoegazers like Ride. Some of it is all woozy layers: spare touches of guitar, vocal phrases looping and phasing around one another, slow-rolling sampled drums. Some of it takes on the warmth and empty-room minimalism of the "folk" Halstead would go on to make. More than just "some" of it appears on Catch the Breeze-- five tracks out of nine, from an album that's not exactly consistent. But the sound here is so singular that's much better appreciated in album form, failures and all, and there's good no reason an album this fascinating shouldn't be in print.
The fluffy-sweet turn-of-the-90s record: That one is fans-only. The pop-rock record with the influential swoon: Anyone whose rock tastes run to the "dreamy" needs it, or at least needs "Alison" popping up on the mp3-player shuffle. The post-rock obscurity that's worth $12 just for "Blue Skied an' Clear": You won't find anything else quite like it. Swooning, washed-out rock from the 90s-- why should these reissues matter? I keep listening for reasons they wouldn't sound as good as they did a decade ago, and on at least two of these records, I'm not finding any at all. | 2005-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2005-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | November 28, 2005 | 7 | 106d5305-fe76-4ea8-a464-e6ea5bfe1474 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
In the past, Oneohtrix Point Never-- the main project of producer Daniel Lopatin, also of 1980s pop revivalists Ford & Lopatin-- had drones and moods and thematic movement that hinted at on-screen drama. The new OPN album is coming from somewhere else. | In the past, Oneohtrix Point Never-- the main project of producer Daniel Lopatin, also of 1980s pop revivalists Ford & Lopatin-- had drones and moods and thematic movement that hinted at on-screen drama. The new OPN album is coming from somewhere else. | Oneohtrix Point Never: Replica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16031-replica/ | Replica | Everyone who reads about music has a list of descriptors made meaningless by overuse. "Hazy" (rhymes with "lazy") is right up there for me, but another that makes me wince though I've used it myself dozens of times over the years is "cinematic." It's the term we reach for with instrumental music because movies are where we first learned about the emotional impact of abstract sound. If we'd have grown up in the silent era, we'd be leaning on different adjectives, but given our level of "moving image + instrumental music" saturation, "cinematic" is what comes to mind. Fair enough. In the past, the music of Oneohtrix Point Never-- the main project of the busy producer Daniel Lopatin, also of 1980s pop revivalists Ford & Lopatin-- fit this term. Albums like the Rifts collection and 2010's Returnal had drones and moods and thematic shifts that hinted at some kind of on-screen drama. And Lopatin has said that he's been influenced by film music and would love to work on movie scores. But the new OPN album, Replica, which also happens to be Lopatin's best work to date by far, is coming from somewhere else. This is music that exists independently, each track a tiny universe with its own cracked logic.
A few people have mentioned the Books to me in reference to this album, and the comparison holds water. It's not that Replica sounds anything like the Books-- though it uses tight loops of sampled voices, the voices exist to convey texture rather than language-- but Lopatin shares with them a fresh ear that creates an uncanny sense of wonder in the music. Also like the Books, Replica puts a premium on silence; just as important as all the odd, hard-to-place sounds is the space that frames it. And the combination of unusual textures and all the room, plus the way the music seems unbound to any particular era or aesthetic, makes the whole thing feel playful. The music is by turns dark, ethereal, frightening, and silly, but regardless, it carries in it a feeling of joy. There's a real sense of discovery here, or possibilities being probed, and that feeling is infectious. You can hear the person making it getting deep into what these sonic elements could mean, and he's bringing us down into this fantastic place with him.
Aside from the intricate production detail, what's most striking about Replica is how well-constructed these tracks are, which is especially impressive given the record's brevity (the first nine average less than four minutes each). Each has an arc and the music is constantly changing, but the tracks go into unexpected places. The opening "Andro" starts with a lonely, distant synth tone and fuzzy layers of robo-voices before becoming overtaken by noisy samples and, eventually, an explosion of percussion from what sounds like a a digital jungle. "Sleep Dealer" starts off like a pop version of a Steve Reich tape piece, zeroing in on percussive phonetic ticks and a loop of a human sigh, but it gradually resolves itself in an almost geometric way, as the relationship between the various samples snaps into focus just before the ending. The title track pulls us out of the machine by starting with a simple piano figure and then folding in bits of synth and finally a buzzing drone, becoming something alien and foreboding after starting so warm and melancholy. Lopatin doesn't just introduce sounds, add loops, and fade out; his pieces move, tripping from one place to somewhere far away over the course of just a few minutes.
A couple of tracks, like "Submersible" and "Remember", come closer to the pure synth drone work that marked earlier OPN material, but even these are full of weird surprises, like the distorted and warbly vocal loop at the tail end of "Remember" that manages to sound like a field recording of some ancient religious rite, even though it's probably something like a processed syllable taken from a life insurance advertisement. "Remember", like the album as a whole, feels peculiar and just out of reach, and it makes me realize how hard it is these days to find music imbued with genuine mystery. A huge part of the fun with this record is that these sonic miniatures are truly puzzling even as they remain accessible and highly musical; Replica is "experimental" music that also feels open, and somehow, despite coming out of two speakers like all my other records, it manages to feel participatory. I can feel myself filling in space and making connections as I listen.
Most film music is functional and is meant to reinforce images and amplify what's happening in the story. It is manipulative by design, serving to bend the affect of the viewer in accordance with the director's wishes. These 10 tracks are packed with detail and rich with feeling, but they are also, to a strange degree, devoid of manipulation. Even though they're uniformly stirring, they don't point you in any direction in particular, and you could see each listener creating his or her own meaning. Instead of pushing, they serve mostly to draw you closer and remind you of the power of sound as sound. Lopatin may have used samples from 1980s commercials to create many of these tracks, but Replica doesn't use nostalgia as an end in itself. This is music that digs deeper and burrows beneath the level of shared associations to discover the sparkling emotional potential of carefully arranged vibrations moving through the air. | 2011-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Mexican Summer / Software | November 11, 2011 | 8.8 | 10707a49-b1eb-4b4f-b78b-3565987e4b04 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Inspired by a series of window views, Japanese ambient pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura’s 1982 album Music for Nine Postcards has a disarming presence, cutting sweetly into the listener’s reality. | Inspired by a series of window views, Japanese ambient pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura’s 1982 album Music for Nine Postcards has a disarming presence, cutting sweetly into the listener’s reality. | Hiroshi Yoshimura: Music for Nine Postcards | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hiroshi-yoshimura-music-for-nine-postcards/ | Music for Nine Postcards | Sometime in the middle of composing the songs that would become 1982’s Music for Nine Postcards, the late Japanese ambient pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura visited the then-new Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in the Shinagawa ward of Tokyo. He was taken with its pristine architecture, with its view of the trees in its courtyard from the interior. Yoshimura imagined his nascent work in relationship to that space, and inquired about having the finished piece played there; the museum agreed. The titular nine postcards, nodding back to that view from the Hara Museum, refer to a series of window views. In the songs’ titles, and in the few translated texts surrounding the release, he links them to broadly drawn images of the natural world: clouds, rain, a tree’s shade.
Ambient music is often linked to a kind of psychic interiority, but Yoshimura—who overlapped with the post-Fluxus contemporary art scene of 1960s and 1970s Tokyo—made music responding to and designed to exist in physical places: for train stations, runway shows, and so on. In 1982, a version of Music for Nine Postcards was the first release in Satoshi Ashikawa’s Wave Notation series; Ashikawa and Yoshimura defined and advocated for what they termed “environmental music,” “music which by overlapping and shifting changes the character and the meaning of space, things, and people,” wrote Ashikawa. “Music,” he argues, “is not only meant to be something which exists alone.” Influenced by figures like Erik Satie and Brian Eno, this developing sound also progressed with a specificity and gentle sense of intent, responding to urban sonic overload (and, perhaps, to developing ideas about media: an awareness that culture doesn’t just reflect reality, but actively produces it).
Music for Nine Postcards, then, is an intervention conducted through near-stillness. Composed with a minimal setup including a Fender Rhodes piano, the songs collected here are built around simple melodies that Yoshimura modulates in small, affecting ways. In a 1999 text reprinted in this reissue’s liner notes, he likens his process to planting a “seed” as a means of seeking “a prime number.” There’s little texture in them beyond the keyboard’s warm finish: a phrase will move alongside a complementary droning tone, and perhaps a harmony will wander in, but Yoshimura’s pieces rarely build. Despite this lack of sonic density, however, they have a disarming presence, cutting sweetly into the listener’s reality.
The effect is multidimensional: melancholy, wistful, invigorating, consoling. In a sense, though these sounds are conversational in their way, Yoshimura leaves quite a bit of room for the listener’s mood and memories. The record’s effects are, like the nature iconography he invokes, delivered with broad, almost neutral strokes. But space—even, or especially, the crowded and overwhelming urban kind—is necessarily emotional. It is loaded with memory, or whatever abstract something floats in the air when humans have been feeling their way through a place—and he taps into this characteristic of our every-day beautifully. Yoshimura’s practice shines light onto corners of feeling that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Yoshimura and Ashikawa’s ideas about sound and space remain relevant, especially as public space becomes ever-more fraught with anxiety and the infrastructural and social fractures that result from austerity. The mediations proposed on this album are intimate in scale but effective and timeless, unadorned such that they maintain a universality. Yoshimura’s output extends far beyond what’s captured on this release, and a resurgence of interest—and the promise of further reissues—hopefully means more documentation around his work will be available in English. But these Postcards alone have a solidity, the kind of sounds you want to carry throughout your life. | 2017-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Empire of Signs | November 15, 2017 | 8.5 | 1070f1af-cce4-41c1-90d7-7df69ccd62f1 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | |
And so it's come to pass: the great wheel of revivalism spins, dredging up the next phase of music ... | And so it's come to pass: the great wheel of revivalism spins, dredging up the next phase of music ... | The Libertines: Up the Bracket | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4769-up-the-bracket/ | Up the Bracket | And so it's come to pass: the great wheel of revivalism spins, dredging up the next phase of music history to be paraded about-- it was only a matter of time before we came around to The Clash. But just as calling The Clash "punk" belittles how their sound had evolved by the movement's curtain call, it would be unfairly dismissive to brand The Libertines Clash knock-offs. You'd have to throw in a line or two about singer Pete Doherty sounding uncannily like an English Julian Casablancas to be more dismissive. British Strokes for British folks, as they say.
All cards on the table, though: Up the Bracket does emulate, thanks in no small part to production care of ex-Clash founder Mick Jones, but it never truly imitates. Like The Clash before them, The Libertines draw primarily from decades of rock tradition-- blues, dub, a healthy whiff of the English countryside, and a few gorgeous rock riffs straight from the brainstem of Chuck Berry-- and fuse them into an unruly and triumphant monster of an album. The band burns through a range of emotions with fearless abandon, and just when one track seems about to split into pieces, they pull it all together only to threaten glorious collapse again on the next song. From their plaintive anthems to fuck-all barnburners, this is some of the most fun I've had with a CD in ages. Rarely does a band approach such a wide array of attitudes with equal proficiency.
"Boys in the Band" traverses miles of territory in four short minutes; funk-fused riffs lend a dangerous swagger to Doherty's ultra-confident vocals before, curiously, the whole thing pulls a 180 into barbershop-style harmonies. It's not as crazy as it sounds, but it's twice as fun. Later, the band find themselves in the throes of a token heartfelt ballad-- even one that delivers unexpected quaintness and delicate folk sensibilities-- as old-time cymbal washes make such an obvious track better than it has any right to be. But before the glow fades, they take us right back to hook-laden rock with the title song, recalling The Clash's finest moments, complete with vocals lifted from Joe Strummer's back pocket.
There's an almost indescribable wealth of rock lurking on Up the Bracket, and rarely is it less than blissfully entertaining. In just thirty-odd minutes, The Libertines pretty much do it all. Call it calculated, call it derivative-- hell, there's so much to this album, you can call it just about anything you like and probably not be too far from the truth-- but if you don't hear it, you'll be the one missing out. | 2003-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2003-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | January 5, 2003 | 8.5 | 107104b4-b2d2-496a-b7b4-93e8ea4198c7 | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
Former "biggest band on the planet" continues its yeoman's work, making anonymously dependable riff-rock for those who want that sort of thing. | Former "biggest band on the planet" continues its yeoman's work, making anonymously dependable riff-rock for those who want that sort of thing. | Pearl Jam: Backspacer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13480-backspacer/ | Backspacer | If you're between the ages of, say, 25 and 35, chances are you either significantly overrate or underrate Pearl Jam. Either you carry a certain nostalgist's sentiment for one of your early rock touchstones (I fall into this camp), or you view them as the root of all that was overwrought and evil about mid-to-late-90s guitar music. Sure, everyone knows PJ sold eleven trillion albums between 1991 and '94, but still I imagine it's difficult for relative young'uns to reconcile how strong an opinion so many people in a specific demographic have about a group that hasn't been commercially or critically relevant for over a decade.
Backspacer, the group's ninth studio album, seems to suggest in its tossed-off 37 minutes that Pearl Jam have no greater concern and regard for what they do than the rest of the world can muster. Virtually the whole record settles into the same formula the band's been dutifully churning out since the dawn of the millennium-- lively but almost utterly hookless riff-driven hard rock. Lather, rinse, repeat. And when I say "riff-driven" I really mean "almost entirely riff-dependent," because musically the riffs themselves are typically the only things worth your attention.
PJ's long-dormant punk and hardcore proclivities (ugh, "Lukin") have been rising to the surface with greater regularity in recent years, and I'll admit in short bursts this bulldozing approach can be somewhat satisfying. The opening four songs kick-start and then keep up a certain pleasing level of propulsiveness, with the goofily fast-and-loose "Gonna See My Friend" (hey, is that an actual bassline I hear?) and Thin Lizzy-ish double entendres of "Johnny Guitar" being particularly listenable. Sooner or later, however, you remember these guys wouldn't know a melody if it bit them in the ass. What's worse, this chugging blitzkrieg negates the power of the band's greatest weapon, Eddie Vedder's voice, which can display its craggy richness and masculine grace only when the band isn't trying to break land-speed records. (I know some folks hate Ed's singing, but it mostly seems like they're reacting to the fact that his voice launched a thousand Nickelbacks, which is like hating "The Simpsons" because of "Family Guy" or "American Dad".)
The gentle "Just Breathe" might seem like the perfect opportunity for Vedder to finally dust off those resonant pipes, but instead he sings the tune with a distractingly country-ish catch in his voice, plus the tune is numbingly syrupy and the lyrics, after a promisingly pointed start ("I'm a lucky man to count on both hands the ones I love") devolve into tedium. The same hit-or-miss sensitivity marks "The End"-- Vedder inexplicably finds it necessary to remind us he's "just a human being" on one song and "just another human being" on the other-- but at least "The End" manages to land on the right side of affecting thanks to its painfully honest depiction of romantic dissolution ("This is not me/ You see/ Believe/ I'm better than this/ Don't leave"). Still, we have to rely on "Amongst the Waves" to deliver anything remotely resembling the soaring anthemics that used to be a PJ trademark (what I wouldn't give for a "Light Years" even). The back half of the album sure isn't inclined to help, largely abandoning even the modest steamrolling enjoyment of the record's initial jolt in favor of thoroughly forgettable mid-tempo dreck, save for "Supersonic", which nonetheless sounds like a band trying to be the Ramones minus the fun.
It's an extremely odd thing to say about a band that for three or four years was the biggest rock megalith on the planet, but nowadays Pearl Jam are the very definition of anonymously workmanlike, seemingly plugging along with their heads down from one colorlessly unimaginative album to the next. Once upon a time this was a group that was on top of the world and yet still took all kinds of bizarre chances, recording shit like lengthy tape experiments and songs about bugs-- often ridiculously self-indulgent, sure, yet always surprising. Now, paradoxically, with the spotlights long since extinguished, Pearl Jam seem content to do things by the book. | 2009-09-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-09-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope / Monkeywrench | September 22, 2009 | 4.6 | 1071f7a6-44b9-458c-922c-04ded1355372 | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
The San Francisco rapper and Dallas producer are still having a good time on their lush and laid-back fifth album together. | The San Francisco rapper and Dallas producer are still having a good time on their lush and laid-back fifth album together. | Larry June / Cardo: The Night Shift | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/larry-june-cardo-the-night-shift/ | The Night Shift | Larry June’s style couldn’t be more straightforward: Aspirational flex raps and checklisted wellness routines delivered with such serenity, it’s like he’s a walking valium pill. It’s an adaptable approach: Whether he’s gracing his trademark West Coast post-hyphy beats, dreamy disco-pop, or velour sample loops, he rarely sounds out of place. He’s able to flex this versatility with the hyper-malleable Texas producer Cardo, with whom he’s made five projects in the last four years. Unlike June’s work with production duo LNDN DRGS or the Alchemist, which tend to marinate in one sound for an entire project, his team-ups with Cardo boast more song-to-song variety. The Night Shift, their fifth album, maintains that spirit with warm and sultry beats to cruise to.
Cardo has produced stadium-ready megahits for Travis Scott and Drake, contemplative ballads for Kendrick Lamar, and frenetic beats for Pi’erre Bourne and Baby Keem, all of which are tied together by an enveloping sense of scale. The best Cardo beats are the epitome of surround sound, landing around you like a dome. On previous collaborations, Cardo gravitated towards the wavy rhythms of hyphy; The Night Shift more or less sticks to that script, with lush, swinging rhythms on tracks like “Chops on the Blade” and “Pop Out.” June’s mellow confidence normally keeps things from getting dull, but his boasts can sometimes go from charmingly basic to eye-rollingly cliche. Take the first verse of “Glasshouse Knockin’,” which sounds like it was penned during one of his many stock portfolio meetings: “My numbers is different, my hoes is brilliant/My snow Sicillian, I’m countin’ a million” he says, a scenario we’ve heard him describe hundreds of times before.
Cardo’s hyphy work is smooth—the distorted swing of ”GRGP” inspires Bay Area legend Too $hort and Detroit street rapper Peezy to get loose, and when Cardo pushes June offshore musically, things perk up. Early highlight “Ocean Cuisine” mixes a string sample and tinny hi-hats with a bouncing drum line as June plots to fill his garage with several different kinds of coupes. It’s peppy without knocking June out of his BPM comfort zone, and enough to give guest 2 Chainz room to run off with one of his most memorable features in a minute (“Told him it was chess, not checkers, like an A-cup”). “Love of Money” keeps up this momentum with jazzy saxophone and booming 808s that could soundtrack a night a a 5-star Michelin restaurant. The right beat will make even the most cliche Larry June bars sound first-time fresh.
Like his Bay Area forebears $hort and E-40 before him, June has built a legacy on dependable homegrown lifestyle raps. And while The Night Shift doesn’t contain anything too surprising, his music with Cardo remains among the most fluid and fun in his catalog. The pleasure in a body of work like The Night Shift comes from its configurations, the constant tinkering that can unearth new dimensions within a classic formula. | 2023-11-28T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-28T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | The Freeminded | November 28, 2023 | 7 | 10722cb9-5dbb-49bd-b183-0d6bed15d3e9 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Big Boi is known for his voracious, omnivorous listening habits and willingness to abandon his most successful musical formulas; on his second proper solo album, he teams up with artists like Phantogram, Wavves, and Little Dragon, and the result is a puzzling mess. | Big Boi is known for his voracious, omnivorous listening habits and willingness to abandon his most successful musical formulas; on his second proper solo album, he teams up with artists like Phantogram, Wavves, and Little Dragon, and the result is a puzzling mess. | Big Boi: Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17294-vicious-lies-and-dangerous-rumors/ | Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors | Big Boi is known for his voracious, omnivorous listening habits and willingness to abandon his most successful musical formulas. Since he's spent the last few years sharing festival stages with indie rock and electronic acts, it makes some sense that he might want to make a record influenced by indie rock and electronic music. So here on his second proper solo album, he's exchanged the deep, dirty funk of 2010's Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty and his half of OutKast's nearly decade-old double solo LP Speakerboxxx/The Love Below for collaborations with artists like Phantogram, Wavves, and Little Dragon.
Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors is on the one hand a genre-busting statement of artistic restlessness but it's also a mess. You can try looking at it from a few different angles: as an outgrowth of rap's artsy ambitions, a compilation of indietronic-rap fusion tied together by one voice, or even simply as the new Big Boi record. But each approach carries its own particular set of frustrations when confronted with the 17-track whole.
Some of its weakest moments are actually the ones with the most potential. Teaming up with A$AP Rocky and Phantogram on "Lines", for instance, makes good sense on paper. Rocky's among the most successful of the current crop of upstart boundary-pushing rappers and Phantogram (who contribute to three of the album's tracks) have demonstrated an ability to infuse traditional pop structures with a sonically adventurous spirit. But the finished product refuses to cohere into the quasi-ambient electro-pop-rap gestalt the line-up promises. The rappers' verses and Sarah Barthel's breathy, multi-tracked choruses basically stand politely next to each other without interacting in any meaningful way.
Other questionable team-ups fare much worse, like the lineup of Big Boi, pop-rapper B.o.B., and snotty surf-pop savant Nathan Williams of Wavves on "Shoes for Running". The terminally schlocky B.o.B. comes at this potentially challenging collaboration with the same staunchly middle of the road approach he takes to everything, while Williams yelps his way through a hook that would be embarrassingly twee even if it wasn't presented in the context of a rap record. Imagine a weak, more self-consciously indie-fied song from the Judgement Night soundtrack and you're getting there.
The album's saving grace is Big Boi. No matter what setting you place him in, he remains one of the most dextrous, technically capable, and thoroughly entertaining figures in hip-hop. He's still unapologetically lecherous, still styling all over less-smooth fools, still repping for the Dungeon Family and OutKast. (Although the latter trait is starting to seem cruel considering how many people are still holding out hope for a proper sequel to Stankonia and how much more unlikely that possibility seems with every passing year.) He's also still apparently unable to phone in a half-assed verse no matter the circumstances, so at least the flimsiest songs on Vicious Lies still has his performance holding them up, even if there's nothing else helping out.
A few tracks do live up to their potential, and to Big Boi's ambitious vision in general. "In the A" brings him together with T.I. and Ludacris over a noisy, chaotic funk beat dripping with wah-wah guitar, siren-like synths, and stripper-pole drums that's got enough of the familiar Big Boi energy to bring its differences into compelling focus. (T.I. and Luda both living up to their habit of delivering their strongest material in cameos on other artists' tracks helps as well.) And the deeply louche "Raspberries" upholds Big Boi's reputation for making sex music that sounds like it's being beamed in from several years into the future.
He also clicks with Swedish electro-pop group Little Dragon, who appear on three tracks. "Descending" is sweetly sad and atmospheric, with Big Boi and Little Dragon vocalist Yukimi Nagano trading verses over a delicate fingerpicked guitar and a reverb-laden minimalist bit of drum programming straight out of a Prince slow jam. But on "Higher Res" and "Thom Pettie"-- maybe the best cut on the album-- the group shows a surprising facility for producing the kind of booming, nasty beats that suit Big Boi the best. Out of the lengthy list of collaborators on the disappointing Vicious Lies, they're the only ones he should hit up the next time he goes in to record. | 2012-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Island Def Jam | December 10, 2012 | 6.1 | 1073b5a3-3434-4431-a3c6-1f8c22d81fe6 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
On Wildheart, Miguel makes good on all of his cross-genre dabbling of the past five years. The album soars with shiny guitar lines and sky-high vocals, while Miguel explores a sex-positive attitude that focuses on pleasure and partnership instead of one-sided pursuit. | On Wildheart, Miguel makes good on all of his cross-genre dabbling of the past five years. The album soars with shiny guitar lines and sky-high vocals, while Miguel explores a sex-positive attitude that focuses on pleasure and partnership instead of one-sided pursuit. | Miguel: Wildheart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20728-wildheart/ | Wildheart | As perhaps the last vestige of grown-folks carnality in mainstream music, modern R&B trades in the archetypes of masculinity; sweaty abs and dirty talk pushed by loverboys (Usher) and bad boys (Jodeci). Prince's flamboyance remains one of the biggest exceptions in the genre's long and storied history, and the years since his purple reign are dotted with lonely acolytes: In 2003, André 3000 took a shot at hip-hop's rancorous masculinity—with the help of a smoking pink gun—on his rap-&-B manifesto, The Love Below. Some might say the tension of conforming to one-dimensional manhood contributed to D'Angelo's post-Voodoo unspooling.
The current R&B landscape is painstakingly virile: From Jeremih to Trey Songz, Ty Dolla $ign to PARTYNEXTDOOR, men are singing about sex and love. But all of these supposed libertines are focused on the primacy of male pleasure, treating their sexual experiences with all the reverence of a bunch of wadded-up tissues. On Wildheart, his third full-length album, Miguel, the writhing, pompadoured soul singer, has a similar focus, but it's sex-positive instead of sex-obsessed, a crucial difference. Languorous and detailed, it transcends the genre's established narratives with a focus on pleasure and partnership instead of one-sided pursuit. If Frank Ocean is young soul's prismatic, consciousness-expanding Marvin Gaye, Miguel's the reliable Al Green. The first words on this album—"Don't ever sell yourself short... Trust your intuition... You know the plan, conjectures of society," from the reverb-y opener "A Beautiful Exit"—are a testament to how Miguel's grown from radio-baiting R&B archetype to a maker of high-concept, genre-splicing pop music.
Miguel has occupied a unique space in the awkward "alt-R&B" narrative of the last few years. Amidst the washed out presets and drum machines and drugged-out boasting of his peers, he was a guitar-toting outlier, more of a throwback to a sensual showboat like Ginuwine instead of a self-loathing narcissist like the Weeknd. The nag champa-tinged smokiness of earlier songs like "All I Want Is You", or the glowing synth arpeggios on "Adorn" and fuzzed out scales on "Gravity" expressed something more wholesome, hopeful, and musically psychedelic. (Even when he sang about drugs on "Do You…" it was all just a metaphor for love). On Wildheart, Miguel makes good on all of his cross-genre dabbling of the past five years, but unlike the track-based experiments that dotted his two prior LPs and five mixtapes, he extrapolates the heavy funk across an entire album.
Miguel has long cited Prince, Freddie Mercury, and James Brown as inspirations, and on Wildheart he works through these icons. The album soars with shiny guitar lines and sky-high vocals, which reflect the mythic possibilities of California and his hometown of L.A. Unlike All I Want Is You or Kaleidoscope Dream, W**ildheart is almost entirely self-produced save for a couple of assists, including Cashmere Cat and Benny Blanco on the Cali soul-riffing "…Goingtohell". So Miguel is writing for Miguel, and he knows that his voice, heady like good coffee, will soar over the crunchy bass guitar lines of "A Beautiful Exit" and the sultry, obsessive "FLESH".
When he wants to go digital, on "The Valley" and "Destinado a Morir (Enter.Lewd)", dilated, ragged synths and stretched-out strumming serve as a glowing bedrock over which he exhales explicit lyrics. The titular valley in the former refers to California's porn industry and he sets the scene like an R-rated kid's playground song: "lips, tits, clit, sit." It's the blood-red prelude to Wildheart's tender morning-after first single, "Coffee", and his writing is even raunchier than Kaleidoscope Dream's "Pussy Is Mine". The sequencing belies the real turn-on: Miguel knows where to find those hard-to-reach spots, and will bring you coffee in the morning, too.
Focusing on Wildheart's overt eroticism is one way of listening, but it's impossible to overlook just how seriously he's taking craft. Like, sure, Miguel's take on #surfbort, "Waves", might be a vivid metaphorical construct, but the silky stack of harmonies on the bridge is absolutely stunning—maybe the album's most dazzling moment. Lenny Kravitz, another soul-subverting California dreamer, creates an airless cocoon of lust and lush guitars on "Face the Sun". "What's Normal Anyway" has careful guitar ripples and a steady beat, sturdy footing for Miguel's backstory to all of the skirt-chasing: "Too proper for the black kids, too black for the Mexicans, what's normal anyway." And the quiet moments explode without veering into bombast; think about the simple chord changes and placid drum loop of the Smashing Pumpkins' "1979" with a wistful story about a California stricken of sunlight—and that's "Leaves".
On Wildheart, Miguel complicates his lothario backstory in a way that few of his peers have managed. A song like "What's Normal Anyway" speaks to multiple experiences of alienation, in both life and love. For Miguel, humanity is found between partners and between the sheets. And Wildheart's success might signal a shift in modern R&B, which is to say that perhaps we will finally move on from minimalism and petulant misogyny and sluggish synths to follow Miguel, along with Leon Bridges and Frank Ocean—the latter slated to return this summer—toward the next era of soul, one where sex is not an arbiter of masculinity but something that's simpatico with fun and feelings. | 2015-07-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-07-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA / Bystorm | July 1, 2015 | 8.9 | 1074a782-5bc1-4fad-b617-b51e4e5f469a | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | null |
Working with synthesizers and samplers from the 1990s, the Tokyo producer channels the uncannily ersatz sounds of vintage video-game music into a post-vaporwave take on deep house. | Working with synthesizers and samplers from the 1990s, the Tokyo producer channels the uncannily ersatz sounds of vintage video-game music into a post-vaporwave take on deep house. | Soshi Takeda: Floating Mountains | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soshi-takeda-floating-mountains/ | Floating Mountains | There’s something profound about the uncanny, half-rendered graphics of 1990s technology. The same way space-age art from the 1950s sought to capture the unattainable dream of travelling through the stars in small flying cars, the eerily smooth computer models of ’90s games like Myst carry an unmistakable sense of yearning—a reach for perfection that comes up almost laughably short, but in the process becomes beautiful in an entirely new way. Beyond those unfinished edges, the mind can run wild with the world-building possibilities in a way that it no longer can in an era in which every detail comes alive in Ultra HD resolution. Going back and listening to music or watching movies from that era, the technological seams are always so much more obvious than they were at the time, but the imperfections begin to take on their own alluring quality. That’s the space Tokyo producer Soshi Takeda’s music inhabits.
Takeda hasn’t released much until now—just a small string of wonky new-age singles and glistening elevator-funk releases, as well as a sublimely groovy tape last year that pulsed with a warm, analog glow. But Floating Mountains, his new release for 100% Silk, takes his sound in a different direction. Using only hardware and samplers from the ’90s, Takeda captures the era’s flat, crystalline sounds, sketching evocative landscapes out of their cold, digital sheen. Like a post-vaporwave take on deep house, Takeda’s production is still very much indebted to Larry Heard, albeit more Sceneries Not Songs than Ammnesia. His dance music feels meant for meditation more than actual dancing, a slowly enveloping mist of pulsing bass and synths that shimmer like crystals suspended in midair.
Throughout Floating Mountains, Takeda pulls off a trick where he immediately drops the listener into the thick of a deep trance, then gradually loosens up the rhythm until it becomes almost playful. The title track abruptly opens on peak time at the club, all dense chords and hypnotic hi-hats, before a snaky MIDI melody makes its way to the forefront and carries the track away to Balearic bliss. It’s the type of song you could accidentally leave playing on repeat for an hour without realizing, let alone caring. Takeda’s music naturally lends itself to this endlessly looping quality—“Ancient Fish” evokes turn-of-the-century video-game music, channeling the same plastic Pacific Island simulacrum as the Final Fantasy X soundtrack with its ominous steel drums and urgent, dungeon-ready congas.
The songs on Floating Mountains function best in dimly lit rooms where the imagination can summon images that aren’t really there. That’s particularly true on “Deep Breath,” included here as a digital bonus track after being featured earlier this year on the excellent 2nd Life Silk compilation. Cruising on a seemingly straightforward arpeggio that somehow becomes darker and more mysterious the longer the track goes on, Takeda delicately layers its loungey beat with the soft sound of rain sticks, light hand percussion, and, finally, a mesmerizing Ash Ra-worthy guitar bridge. It’s the deepest kind of head-nodder, the kind that slowly sneaks up on you until it becomes an almost spiritual experience. Floating Mountains is full of these moments; Takeda is forever finding new ways to pull back the curtain on his icy textures, revealing oceans and valleys of feeling. It’s magical in the way only the most artificial sounds can be.
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 | Electronic | 100% Silk | October 12, 2021 | 7.4 | 1075a8fb-1a75-4bee-914e-150ac4966bb8 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
The Atlanta rapper is a far better singer than he is a rapper, which is all too clear on his latest project. | The Atlanta rapper is a far better singer than he is a rapper, which is all too clear on his latest project. | Lil Yachty: Nuthin’ 2 Prove | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-yachty-nuthin-2-prove/ | Nuthin’ 2 Prove | Nuthin’ 2 Prove is why Lil Yachty should not be spitting bars. The best of his music avoids contemporary punchline-obsessed rap in favor of gummy, vibrant new-age euphonies—or at least it kind of does. Each of his releases since his 2016 debut Lil Boat has been conflicted with what makes Yachty pop, parading his lighthearted nursery rhyme raps, that, along with his crimson dreadlocks, have made him a favorite of teen hipsters. When he bellows and trills, regardless of what’s actually coming out of his mouth, the results are leagues better than when he tries to do his best rapper impression on songs.
Contrary to what the album’s name implies, he has a lot to prove lately. The streets aren’t checking for Lil Yachty like they were in 2016. There are rappers purporting to be cloned in factories and others using electrified brass knuckles to batter hotel television screens; having red dreads isn’t the definitive representation of risqué any more. Now, he’s just another slightly established rapper whose music needs to stick if he wants to be at the BET Awards next year. This uncertainty and desperation would mean that a title like Nuthin’ 2 Prove must be a play on words, to lull the listener into a false sense of relaxation while preparing to overload their senses. But the album’s opener, “Gimmie My Respect” doubles down on cruise-control Yachty. It’s a weird way to begin something absolutely necessary for his continued success.
The first half of Nuthin’ 2 Prove is obsessed with challenging his lyrical criticism with a surplus of leaden rhymes and weak deliveries. There’s no reason in the world Yachty should enter a song before the beat drops with empty, serious rhymes. Even next to Lil Baby and Juice WRLD, two melodic rappers who are able to successfully hide their weaknesses behind unique melodies, Yachty sounds drained of his energy. “SaintLaurentYSL” benefits from Lil Baby’s transfixing chorus before Yachty spits a verse in stop-motion that’ll piss off even the most tolerant of listeners wise to his ways. There’s no coincidence that the first half features guests on five of its eight songs. Yachty attempts to blend his stinkers with those of his guest features, with his own rhymes acting as filler in between. It leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
The silkiness of his robotic hum sounds more appealing than ever before, tempered by years in the industry to refine his more grating tendencies. And while his bars often fizzle out, his love-laced stanzas are well-crafted. “Worth It” is a nostalgic, soothing ploy for natural beauty, as he ends each line with a joyful cannonball that makes the next one splash with fresh energy. “Stoney” lives tranquilly at the bottom of an ocean, with Yachty’s voice seldom rising above a cat’s enthusiastic purr.
Even when love isn’t the focus, Yachty’s just better when he isn’t rapping at all. “Everything Good, Everything Right” is the platitudinous 2016-era Yachty that radiates enough solar energy to power the Lightyear One. Its carnivalesque atmosphere is mesmerizing because he can’t sing worth a damn, but his commitment to encapsulating an overly sweet experience with equally saccharine notes is just heartwarming. It’s a high point on an otherwise confused album that knows what it’s good at and what it’s not, and yet still chugs on anyway.
Nuthin’ 2 Prove is obsessed with the idea of respect as a measure of talent and he frontloads the album’s rap half with features from more capable rappers, hoping to siphon off some of their clout. This makes the atmosphere much more leaden than it needs to be like he’s banging a point into the listener’s head that isn’t quite understanding it. It’s a slog, but then you get something like “Next Up” which is a clever mix of melodic rap and straight-forward bars that is both fast and loose with a breezy air reminiscent of his past highlight “Minnesota.” It’s peak Yachty, perfectly in his element, sandwiched between blithe harmonies and light-hearted swag rap. He could have the world in his hands if he stayed there longer. | 2018-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Quality Control / Capitol / Motown | October 24, 2018 | 6.1 | 10764118-1bad-4c44-8f23-b8fe6bdb0b23 | Trey Alston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/trey-alston/ | |
Fleshing out its classic indie-rock sound with synths, Auto-Tune, and other hazy production touches, the North Carolina duo searches for dream-pop atmospheres in the muggy Florida landscape. | Fleshing out its classic indie-rock sound with synths, Auto-Tune, and other hazy production touches, the North Carolina duo searches for dream-pop atmospheres in the muggy Florida landscape. | It Looks Sad.: Sky Lake | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/it-looks-sad-sky-lake/ | Sky Lake | As long as rock has competed to be the predominant sound of youth culture, there have been artists in its ranks who want to expedite its concession speech. Adam Levine recently moaned about feeling ostracized from rock music while “all of the innovation and the incredible things happening in music are in hip-hop,” and Matty Healy has made the false genre binary a bedrock principle of the 1975’s album rollout, repeating the same things about rock’s obsolescence that you might’ve heard from Thom Yorke or even Billy Corgan in 1998. Even an indie-rock paragon like Dave Longstreth ended up singing the same tune once he started dabbling as an R&B hired gun. Though his claims about indie rock “miming a codified set of sounds” were predictably taken out of context, he wasn’t exactly wrong—even the most exciting guitar-based music tends to be the result of incremental sonic evolution that still honors past modes. There’s evidence of that process in It Looks Sad.’s Sky Lake, a low-key record from a modest North Carolina duo that immediately scans as modernist indie rock but would have been virtually inconceivable a decade ago.
Sky Lake isn’t a game changer, but a reflection of how the game has changed. Jimmy Turner and Alex Ruiz’s reference points cut off more or less in 2009—a year defined by the emergence of aqueous, sample-based beatmaking and the kind of mid-fi, beachfront guitar rock to which It Looks Sad. initially warranted comparison. These two tendencies often came together in a cocooning aesthetic accompanied by escapist signifiers—at once a retreat toward nostalgia and an expression of millennial malaise before anyone had a term for it. It was frequently dismissed as a fad, but the course for the next decade had been set. In particular, the trend that has clearly influenced It Looks Sad. during the four years that separate their first EP from their debut album is the convergence of vibey rap with vibe indie rock leading to (Sandy) Alex G’s muted appearance on Frank Ocean’s Endless, a kind of 2010s “Walk This Way.”
Turner views Auto-Tune as a go-to sonic tool similar to distortion or reverb, and he sings through all three effects on the opening “Shave.” It’s one of the numerous experiments in pure texture on Sky Lake that could pass for interludes, none longer than two minutes, yet there’s a sense that It Looks Sad. see them as the main point of the project. “Light” is a wisp of a song, barely 80 sounds of amorphous vocal processing, a melody trying to find its path through the amniotic production drip; it was also the album’s first single, drawing a clear break from “Kaiju,” their 2015 digital single, which hewed more towards strident, tuneful emo and unaccountably racked up over 6 million Spotify streams despite zero mainstream coverage and a tiny touring footprint.
While even the band’s own press release admits it’s trite to use “dreamy” to describe a dream-pop album, and the title admittedly does have a “dream-pop album generator” feel to it, Turner’s lyrics are rooted in reality. Sky Lake actually exists—it’s a small, woodsy enclave in Orlando where Turner grew up and an AirBnB can be had for about $40 a night. The album shares an engineer with Julien Baker’s Turn Out the Lights, but Calvin Lauber here provides the exact opposite of that record’s piercing clarity. The muggy, enveloping Florida heat hangs all over Sky Lake, giving it a tactile, earthy sense of place that’s rare in this mode of indie rock, bolstered by the off-kilter images that dot Turner’s somnolent vocals: palm readers, three-legged dogs, sand disappearing into the ocean, bike rides through blue-black evenings.
It Looks Sad. still occasionally broaden their range by treading too heavily on other bands’ turf. Play the mesmeric guitar instrumental of “Graves” to Zachary Cole Smith and it might take him a minute to determine whether it’s an outtake from Is the Is Are. As much as the presence of pure ambience and guitar-less vignettes situates It Looks Sad. in the current day, it also shows where their strengths lie. And their overall approach really isn’t that much different than it was on “Kaiju” or their 2014 Self-Titled EP. “Drool” evokes shoegaze sublimity grounded in the most mundane desires—“All I really wanna do is sit around and drool with you always/You watch TV, I fall asleep.” Meanwhile, “Everyday” and “Palme” are the kind of propulsive, plaintive, and hooky indie rock typical of Tiny Engines, only gilded by Auto-Tune vocal ripples, brittle drum chatter, synth countermelodies, and a generous application of Floridian humidity. While there isn’t always a clear who to Sky Lake, it’s a fully-developed where. | 2018-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | December 11, 2018 | 6.9 | 1078940c-3deb-4666-be67-345941aa029a | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
This new LP is the first in a six-album series from ambient artist James Leyland Kirby. It’s an extreme continuation of the concept—memory loss—that guided his 2011 masterpiece, An Empty Bliss... | This new LP is the first in a six-album series from ambient artist James Leyland Kirby. It’s an extreme continuation of the concept—memory loss—that guided his 2011 masterpiece, An Empty Bliss... | The Caretaker: Everywhere at the End of Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22470-everywhere-at-the-end-of-time/ | Everywhere at the End of Time | Ambient music has a habit of all running together, but on 2011’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, James Leyland Kirby devised a series of ways to stand out. He invoked the purgatorial ballroom of The Shining with his project’s name, the Caretaker; layered it with Alzheimer’s studies; and spun it through loopy, languid edits of Jazz Age 78s. The results were soothing to the ear, lucid to the imagination, and rich with historical feeling, all unified in a meditation on degradation, memory, and time. There was also an implied provocation in Kirby’s sweet, almost jaunty treatment of losing one’s mind. Ambient masterpieces like Empty Bliss often cause me to think, “I’d take six more albums of that.” But in the event, I’m not as sure.
Everywhere at the End of Time has been planned as a six-stage release. The first three will come out as downloads and LPs between now and next year, when they will also be compiled in a CD set; the last three follow the same pattern from March 2018 to 2019. The premise is that the Caretaker, one of Kirby’s long-running aliases, has been diagnosed with early onset dementia. The music will chart the patient’s decline, ending in the alter ego’s “death.” Memory, incarnated as resurfacing bits of music from throughout the Caretaker’s oeuvre, will progressively smear and recombine.
In short, it’s an extreme continuation of what Kirby did on Empty Bliss, his most popular release to date: lingering on the precipice where pleasant reverie slips into the abyss. As on that album, pitches laze, overtones huff and puff, lines elongate, surface noise crackles, and scratches slash out a rhythmic rain. But mainly, the loops just play, stuck somewhere between dreamlike and deathly, until suddenly, ominously, they stop. Roaring Twenties horns turn from saucy to sloe-eyed, poky and dopey, as if a heavily opiated combo kept losing its place in a Gershwin tune.
“Here we experience the first signs of memory loss,” Kirby writes in liner notes. “This stage is most like a beautiful daydream. The glory of old age and recollection. The last of the great days.” But we begin to hear more severe signs of breakdown around halfway through it. On “Slightly Bewildered,” the instrumentation becomes an almost toneless mooing, the loop wrapping around with a stagger. “Things That Are Beautiful and Transient” is inside-out, the melody an inner voice, its harmonic field the foreground. A winning gentleness pervades later tracks like “An Autumnal Equinox” and “The Loves of My Entire Life,” but by the end, even gentleness has taken on a desperate tinge, as though if the dancing stops, everyone dies.
It’s a testament to Kirby’s cunning composition that it sounds like he’s playing long stretches of the source material intact, when in fact, he is drastically altering tiny snippets and composing them into smeared but credible pieces. He mulches and reconstitutes an era, but he is not very interested in historical footnotes. He’ll talk a lot about process and concept, but you have to turn to Who Sampled to tell you that, say, the title track of Empty Bliss is derived from Layton and Johnstone’s 1929 recording of “The Wedding of the Painted Doll.” As Kirby goes all in on this coup de grâce, one can’t help but notice that he’s using other people’s music to channel the subjectivity of other people’s medical condition, and wonder where that gets us.
Empty Bliss rested on studies of Alzheimer’s patients and music, which seemed to keep a respectful distance from real, specific suffering. But there is something a little unseemly about Kirby “giving the project dementia” and reveling in it across hours of pleasurable music, especially after he announced it in such a confusing way that he had to clarify that he himself had not been diagnosed with dementia. If not exploitative, it’s at least an unduly romantic view of an illness. We like to dabble in madness through music, in the abstract. But an actual disease? Why should we want to experience dementia by proxy, aesthetically, or think we even can? I watched my grandmother succumb to it for a decade before she died, and it was very little like a “beautiful daydream.” In fact, there was nothing aesthetic about it. | 2016-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | History Always Favours the Winners | October 7, 2016 | 7.3 | 107f1c2f-41b0-4547-b07b-3225fb1c080a | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
This six-track EP from Peter O’Grady is moodier and more penumbral than anything he’s done before, with a much wider range of tempos and rhythm. | This six-track EP from Peter O’Grady is moodier and more penumbral than anything he’s done before, with a much wider range of tempos and rhythm. | Joy Orbison: 81b EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joy-orbison-81b-ep/ | 81b EP | Peter O’Grady has not had the career that most people might have expected from him in the nine years since he turned UK bass music on its ear with a tune called “Hyph Mngo.” Didn’t matter that nobody had any idea what the title meant or what its pitched-up vocal lick was supposed to be saying, if anything: Arriving just when the dubstep scene was getting stale, the song offered an escape route to greener pastures, and fans (plus legions of imitators) eagerly followed in its wake. “Hyph Mngo” exerted massive force on shaping the bass/techno/house hybrids that continue to dominate large swaths of underground dance music, but O’Grady—better known as Joy Orbison, and sometimes simply Joy O—has never made anything like it again.
Instead, he retreated into a world of progressively sterner, murkier beats, many of them released on his tiny labels Doldrums and Hinge Finger. He’s given us plenty of bangers—just see “Ellipsis” or virtually any of the tracks he’s made alongside Boddika for the SunkLo label—but it’s as though, having gone full Icarus on his debut single, he decided to strap on a lead apron and welder’s mask. There’s a heaviness, a sluggishness, to all his subsequent work: Even at their most powerful, his beats often have the feeling, familiar from nightmares, of trying to run but finding the limbs unwilling. And in the past couple of years, his productions have only gotten foggier, more abstracted, and less forthcoming as they’ve come swatting their way through a muggy haze.
It might be surprising to realize that in all this time, O’Grady has yet to release a proper long-player. (The lone entry under the “Albums” tab on Discogs is actually a sprawling DJ mix for the Tokyo streetwear label Cav Empt.) 81b, a six-track EP for his own Toss Portal label, makes for his fullest and most satisfying statement to date. It’s moodier and more penumbral than anything he’s done before, drums glinting like mica amid dark swirls of synth and static.
It’s more versatile, too, with a wider range of tempos and rhythms. Although three tracks lie comfortably within his fleet-footed broken-techno wheelhouse, “COYP” and the title track both fall back to 100 beats per minute. The latter’s a hypnotic, slow-motion house jam that sounds a little like some of Andy Stott’s slow-motion experiments of a few years ago, just flooded with color; the former relaxes into a springy, dembow-flavored groove without going overboard on overt dancehall references. In fact, it’s not very overt about anything: The track consists mainly of scratchy drums and charcoal bass shading, with some iridescent synth pads smeared across the surface. It’s a smart choice of tempo, allowing him to get the most out of his textures without worrying too much about whether or not people are dancing.
Like “Faint” and “Ellipsis,” tunes made instantly recognizable by their striking spoken-word vocal samples, the opening “SEED” uses a short but potent snippet as a calming center of gravity amid shuddering kick drums and needling bleeps. “You’re falling,” intones the voice, reinforcing the vertiginous feel of his lurching groove. It’s a fine track, particularly for the way he teases out the tension across its buildups, breakdowns, and one killer false ending, but it’s also the least surprising cut here. He’s better on “SIN PALTA” and “BELLY,” the tunes where he ventures the furthest afield from his previous work. Last year’s TOSS PORTALEP had a track called “98 Koln” in which, if you squinted, you could hear a callback to Cologne’s Kompakt label (cf. Dettinger, M:I:5) at the end of the 20th century; “BELLY” sounds similarly enamored of classic minimal techno, this time emulating the modular squelch and crystalline hi-hats of Ricardo Villalobos. In its wandering melody and long, undulating groove, it might as well be an homage to Villalobos’ 2004 masterpiece Thé Au Harem D'Archimède.
The most unusual cut of all is “TENNOV6TEEN,” a glowing miniature nestled at the heart of the record. It bubbles along at his habitual 132 beats per minute, but there are no drums, just nervous bass pulses and staccato synth counterpoints that rattle like pebbles in the tide. It’s at once plaintive and stoic: There’s a melancholy undercurrent to the melody but a stone-faced character to the way it just rolls on and on. It marks a major shift from both the ecstatic overdrive of “Hyph Mngo” and the screw-faced swagger of his peak-time anthems. In its refusal to do any of the things dance music is supposed to do, it might be the most true-to-form thing that Joy Orbison has released yet. | 2018-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hinge Finger | October 26, 2018 | 7.7 | 1083906b-7862-4a67-ad6c-c5d8f3bbe731 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On his relentless debut, Aleph, French producer and Yeezus collaborator Mike Levy proves to be the sort of transcendental figure who can fill festival EDM tents with drop enthusiasts while also appealing to listeners who consider themselves nuanced consumers of contemporary electronic music. | On his relentless debut, Aleph, French producer and Yeezus collaborator Mike Levy proves to be the sort of transcendental figure who can fill festival EDM tents with drop enthusiasts while also appealing to listeners who consider themselves nuanced consumers of contemporary electronic music. | Gesaffelstein: Aleph | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18747-gesaffelstein-aleph/ | Aleph | In order to realize his brutal musical vision with Yeezus, Kanye West enlisted a congregation’s worth of collaborators with a highly diversified range of skills: honeyed indie crooners, European EDM wunderkinds, luminary rock producers, M.I.A.’s former fiancé. Another helping hand was lent by Mike Levy, the French producer who records and performs as Gesaffelstein. He worked on the bruising, stadium-ready “Black Skinhead” and the raucous, emergency-lit “Send It Up” alongside label mate Brodinski and sonic grandfathers Daft Punk, among others.
A quick glimpse at Gesaffelstein’s professional mythology is all it takes to understand the heart of his appeal to West: a shared interest in art and fashion, a personal aesthetic possessed of palpable intensity and ripe with darkness and violence, and an eye towards intellectual concerns broader than music. (It’s captured neatly in his chosen moniker: Gesaffelstein is a portmanteau that combines the German word “gesamtkunstwerk,” meaning “universal artwork,” and Albert Einstein, an inspirational figure.) His debut album Aleph fuses those pre-existing aspirations to ideas about style that feel directly derived from his work with West, with its cover—a jewel case containing a gold disc, the case overlaid with complex patterns reminiscent of circuitry—serving as the most obvious hat tip.
It’s a testament to Levy’s talent, and to the strength of his sonic identity, that Aleph merits comparison to Yeezus in terms of its thematic consistency and coherence. From the ferocious spoken introduction that marks opener “Out of Line” (one of several appearances by Parisian vocalist Chloé Raunet) to the slowly rising sirens echoing throughout “Perfection”, this is an absolutely relentless record: there’s no sunlight to be had on Aleph. Levy specializes in two types of songs: fiery, raging bangers meant for the dank club at the end of the world, and meditative mood pieces that bubble and loom while you’re fighting through the next morning’s hangover. Thoughtful sequencing choices help to amplify the magnitude of the difference between the members of these phylums, and have the added benefit of lending Aleph a natural-seeming cycle of attack and release. When doom-soaked, muscular lead single “Pursuit” glides into the ominous, slowly shifting “Nameless”, it’s as if we’ve been given a well-earned breather after enduring the intense assault of the former.
It’s a trick Levy pulls multiple times without diluting its effect, made possible by the tonal differences between the album’s higher-octane tracks: “Send It Up” relative “Hellifornia” pairs a trunk-ratting hip-hop rhythm with a howling, DEFCON 1-level screech, while “Duel” earns its combative title by pitting a furious, hyper-kinetic beat against a friction-fried synth that refuses to let up. While the album’s dark, dance-ready techno cuts certainly demand their fair share of attention, Levy takes advantage of the album’s quieter moments and displays surprising levels of subtlety and restraint. With its eerie guitar melodies and digital choruses of the damned, the title track could slot neatly into a collection of outtakes from the Drive soundtrack; mid-album counterpart “Wall of Memories” fares even better, bulging and warping underneath a haunted piano line. By making room for both potential floor-filling wrecking balls and quieter, spookier moments on Aleph, Levy sets himself up as the sort of transcendental figure who can fill up festival EDM tents full of drop enthusiasts while simultaneously appealing to listeners who consider themselves more nuanced consumers of contemporary electronic material.
If Aleph has a weakness, it's the album's lack of concision. At around an hour, this is a lengthy, demanding record, and the relentless push that constitutes a major part of its excitement in small blocks renders it somewhat exhausting when ingested as a whole. While some of the strongest songs—the stomach-churning “Hate or Glory”, the piston-powered techno workout “Trans”—are tucked near its conclusion, it takes an effort to make it to the finish line. The importance of brevity is a lesson Levy didn't pickup after working on Yeezus, a similarly dark record that clocks in at a brisk 40 minutes. A distillation of the sounds and themes contained within Aleph into an equally slim package would render his next record truly fearsome. | 2013-11-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-11-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | The Vinyl Factory | November 8, 2013 | 7.8 | 10860e62-0ac1-422b-8f53-54004a00ce7e | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | null |
The Philly singer-songwriter’s third proper album is written and sung with painstaking care and offers an entry point to his sprawling and satisfying discography. | The Philly singer-songwriter’s third proper album is written and sung with painstaking care and offers an entry point to his sprawling and satisfying discography. | Greg Mendez: Greg Mendez | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/greg-mendez-greg-mendez/ | Greg Mendez | “Every time you say you wanna know me/I get anxious/cause I would probably tell you about some dumb shit,” Greg Mendez warbles at the beginning of “Maria,” a highlight from his subtly stunning self-titled album that subtly scrutinizes the whole “intimate singer-songwriter” enterprise. In short, what’s the distinction between indiscriminate confession and honest communication? He then puts this concern to the test by proceeding to tell us about the time he got arrested at a crack den.
Neither an introduction nor the bold redefinition assumed from a self-titled release, Greg Mendez’s third proper album is nonetheless framed as an entry point to his sprawling and satisfying discography. After 15 years kicking around Philadelphia’s DIY scene, he’s more of a peer of Alex G than progeny, though new listeners are likely to hear them drawing from similar wells. “Maria” could be mistaken for a bonus track on the Trick re-release—the kind of breathless, unspooling melody usually played out on a lead guitar rather than the human voice, the uneasy tension between easy listening ambience and abject squalor. Yet unlike the lowlife reportage on Alex G’s “Hope” or “County,” Mendez is both storyteller and subject here.
The nonchalance in his delivery cuts against the shock value, leaving space to interpret the intention behind each painstakingly chosen word. Notice the juxtaposition between the addict’s frantic desperation and the custodial, impersonal performance of cops who’ve seen far too much of this shit—“Krys and I came crashing through the window/But they were waiting.” Was this whole thing dumb shit because it was a stereotypical moment of intoxicated stupidity? “Earlier that day, we were both clean,” Mendez reveals and while sometimes, addiction can be cunning, baffling, and powerful, it’s more often a blunt instrument to the head—“Come back to me, because it’s easy.”
Though not exactly a concept record or a narrative, Greg Mendez is unified in its exploration of how addiction and relationships—platonic, familial, and romantic—can be subject to the same toxic power dynamics. “Here’s a photograph where it looks like I’m having a good time,” he sighs on “Best Behavior,” embodying a depression so total that a tossed-off punchline lands like a blow to the gut. (“But I’m not,” he adds.) Though Mendez is rarely backed by more than brushed drums, soft electric guitar, or a chintzy organ preset, “Best Behavior” is one of the few truly alone songs here, and the narrator sounds incapable of registering any joy, not even for someone listening to their favorite song or landing their big job. “I’m on my best behavior, do you like it?” he sings, dripping with both neediness and sarcasm, only willing to generate enough energy to desire company for their misery.
Mendez’s arrangements throughout are spare but sturdy, reflecting its narrators’ fate of spiraling towards oblivion while resigned to the likelihood that they’ll keep trudging on. The thwarted impulses of “Cop Caller” are underscored by a full-band coda that gets incrementally louder, wanting so badly to break the solemn mood by waking the neighbors. Even the one song that could be called “bouncy” or “jaunty” (“Goodbye/Trouble”) does so by compressing Elliott Smith’s career into a couple of minutes, combining the diaristic dejection of his own self-titled album with the harmonic sophistication that he saw as a way forward.
While only 23 minutes long, it’s quite literally a life’s work, as its final two songs both date back over a decade. Notice that the closer is titled “Hoping You’re Doing Okay”: “Pull your sleeves down though it is 93 degrees,” Mendez sighs in a crushing depiction of dopesickness. Mendez wrote this song in 2009 and in the time since, he has gotten clean, witnessed the coming and going of several generations of Philly indie rock, and made Greg Mendez while on worker’s comp after a concussion suffered on a construction job. What came of the inspiration of “Hoping You’re Doing Okay,” assuming that it wasn’t Mendez writing to himself?
The past half-century of “singer-songwriter” music can make ears numb to the signifiers of “intimacy” that emerge with even the most cursory listen here: real name on the album cover, no gimmicks. Whispery vocals cloaked in an indeterminate hum, like the music was recorded and uploaded to streaming by the very same iPhone. Songs with seemingly placeholder titles (“Maria,” “Sweetie,” “Friend”) that imply their subjects were sitting in the same room as Mendez. And perhaps it’s crass to suggest that Greg Mendez transcends these tropes because he’s been through some shit. Yet, I think back to that opening line from “Maria” and understand why Mendez admits to being so anxious about letting someone get to know him—in less than two minutes, he can express a lifetime’s worth of pain, regret, and resilience. | 2023-05-08T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-08T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Forged Artifacts / Devil Town Tapes | May 8, 2023 | 7.8 | 10926005-7508-4457-b518-ce6044bc60c9 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The Russian collective’s dance-pop protest mixtape arrives a decade after their guerrilla performances went viral across the globe. But its message is lackluster and belated, conforming to a shallow vision of feminist pop. | The Russian collective’s dance-pop protest mixtape arrives a decade after their guerrilla performances went viral across the globe. But its message is lackluster and belated, conforming to a shallow vision of feminist pop. | Pussy Riot: Matriarchy Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pussy-riot-matriarchy-now/ | Matriarchy Now | Pussy Riot emerged in Moscow in 2011, a year in which the riot grrrl movement and third wave feminism were transitioning into the fourth wave’s digitally focused discourse across the Western world. That year, while cities like Toronto, London, and New York held SlutWalks to reclaim the misogynistic slur and raise awareness about sexual violence, members of the Russian collective began protesting with punk songs. Pussy Riot climbed atop subway cars and took the stage next to a prison, screaming against upcoming parliamentary elections and advocating for incarcerated activists. These displays succeeded in starting conversations, talk being a tenet of early 2010s pop feminism. Both the SlutWalks and the guerilla performances reached varying levels of virality, though it’s questionable what they delivered beyond internet chatter. In a 2012 interview, Pussy Riot compared themselves to Bikini Kill. “What we have in common is impudence, politically loaded lyrics, the importance of feminist discourse and a non-standard female image,” they said. “Discourse” is the operative word here.
The limits of this kind of discourse, and contemporary feminist music more broadly, are apparent on MATRIARCHY NOW, Pussy Riot’s new mixtape. It arrives a decade after founding members Nadya Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were sentenced to two years in prison for performing in protest against the Russian Orthodox church’s support for Vladimir Putin. The mixtape doesn’t address the anniversary, aside from a line about turning “batons into tampons” and “prisons into clubs.” MATRIARCHY NOW doesn’t appear to address much of anything. It’s not just that the mixtape is a tepid act of defiance, it’s also a tepid pop album.
MATRIARCHY NOW feels about five years late. Songs bounce from sex positivity and equality to outdated feminine stereotypes and boss bitchery—topics the internet has drained of all their vitality. The mixtape is hyperpop-lite, with soft glitches and a giant eggplant emoji on the album cover. The release follows in the vein of last year’s Rage Remixes, in which the band recruited electronic artists like Boys Noize and HANA and shifted from punk to dance pop. The mixtape is a similar effort, a maneuver to make their message more accessible, but also a clear branding strategy.
The project begins with “Princess Charming,” a gender-flipped, fairy-tale subversion that includes a corny girlboss mantra: “Everything I start goes straight to IPO/Everywhere I go I become the CEO.” Lead single “Plastic” paints the perfect woman as a submissive doll over bumping bass and Auto-Tuned whispers, more Die Antwoord than riot grrrl. “Sugar Mommy” swirls around a wicked carnivalesque melody, dominatrix musings, and a Bernie Sanders name check. It’s not until “Hatefuck,” the penultimate track, that the mixtape starts to develop some depth. Deep bass and dubstep skitter and crash under erotic death threats: “Kinda would rather fuck your dad/Shove my panties in his mouth.” The emotional vacancy of the previous songs only further highlight this outburst of fury.
Tove Lo, the Swedish pop star and the mixtape’s executive producer, reveals herself as a curator who loves to, above all, play it safe. Features from left-of-center pop artists like iLoveMakonnen, Big Freedia, and Slayyyter carry the potential to imbue the tracklist with an experimental edge and some much-needed intensity, but instead, they’re juiced for their shticks: Freedia as the twerking cheerleader, Makonnen as the soft-spoken rapper.
Music was always secondary to Pussy Riot’s politics, until it led to coverage in the U.S. media. In 2013, some members even left the group because they found the idea of releasing music antithetical to the anti-capitalist ideals and “war on authoritarianism” that was once at the collective’s core. The new mixtape certainly doesn’t prioritize musical ingenuity, but seems preoccupied with Pussy Riot’s status as activist pop stars. There’s little that sets MATRIARCHY NOW apart from the current market of sex-positive, size-inclusive, pitched-up pop. These once-radical themes are now oversaturated, and the ideas are no longer subversive. When individual power supersedes collective justice, feminism is merely a feel-good anthem. Today’s pop feminism exists under a wide umbrella, from Lana Del Rey’s ultra-feminine vulnerability to Lizzo’s empowerment-themed Top 40 hits; from Charli XCX singing about cheating to Beyoncé sampling Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Pussy Riot just huddle up right beside everyone else.
In a recent interview about the mixtape, Tolokonnikova mentioned the importance of “magical thinking” and a “naive approach to life–to be able to fantasize about a better world because it’s something that unlocks your imagination and our collective imagination.” She continued, “Build a world where everyone’s free and there is no prisons, and money just fall from the tree and there is no police and celebrating your own power.” But the mentality of MATRIARCHY NOW doesn’t come across as progressive idealism or even escapism; its vision is blurry and out of touch. | 2022-08-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Neon Gold | August 15, 2022 | 5.3 | 1092b41e-92f0-4835-bdec-9d74a079920e | Julia Gray | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julia-gray/ | |
It’s no return to form, but the alt-rock band’s sixth album taps into a well of quarantine-bound inspiration for some of their most varied and carefree songs in over a decade. | It’s no return to form, but the alt-rock band’s sixth album taps into a well of quarantine-bound inspiration for some of their most varied and carefree songs in over a decade. | Silversun Pickups: Physical Thrills | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/silversun-pickups-physical-thrills/ | Physical Thrills | Ever since Silversun Pickups released Carnavas in 2006, its breakout single “Lazy Eye” has loomed over them like a dusty trophy. It vaulted the band to indie rock fame with massive opening gigs, coveted video game placements, and constant radio airplay. It’s a great song, no doubt—a sprawling alt-rock gem whose tense riffs and snarled lyrics were practically made for windows-down car rides with friends—but it shrouded the band in Smashing Pumpkins comparisons and, in the process, set the bar high for the rest of their career. Chasing a similar sound never resulted in an equal return; a pivot to mid-tempo pleasantries was boring at best. Now, more than 15 years later, Silversun Pickups may have found their next best evolution: a little bit of everything and no fucks to give.
When the pandemic hit, Silversun Pickups halted touring and guitarist Brian Aubert resumed full-time dad duties. As weeks turned into months, he began doodling song notes and recording demos, purging the melodies that accumulated in his head. He considered these creative exercises or maybe the beginnings of a musical—something far removed from the Silversun Pickups sound. But after tracking a handful with producer Butch Vig, Aubert showed them to bassist Nikki Monninger, drummer Christopher Guanlao, and keyboardist Joe Lester. Born in an environment free from pressure or expectations, the material would be reshaped in the hands of Silversun Pickups as a group, filtering pop hooks, horror-inspired sound effects, and self-described “dream shanties” through their brand of brooding alt-rock angst.
Physical Thrills presents Silversun Pickups as a band with a rejuvenated approach. At its peaks, the album channels the unfiltered enthusiasm and surplus energy of young adulthood into uptempo indie rock that flickers with unexpected embellishments. On standout “System Error,” Monninger tears through a burly bassline that’s rendered undeniably suave thanks to her effortless playing. Paired with Aubert’s sinister delivery and a warped, unsettling guitar slide in the bridge, the song maintains the unpredictable menace of a dog baring its teeth. The ample reverb and slow, romantic percussion of “We Won’t Come Out” lure you into a dream before snapping into a feverish breakdown, like Silversun Pickups’ take on Radiohead’s “We Suck Young Blood.” Arriving at these songs takes a while—the album’s tracklist feels bloated and most songs run a minute or two longer than necessary—but they serve as guideposts helping Physical Thrills’ adventurous paths to meet back in the middle.
Silversun Pickups have always excelled at tiny explosions: Aubert’s howl that ushers in those crashing guitars in “Lazy Eye,” the dueling guitar solos that blur into one in “Panic Switch,” or that twinkling riff cushioning the outro of “Three Seed.” While recent records stripped the color from the band’s potential fireworks, Physical Thrills lets them shine again, if only for a brief flash. Take the blown-out vocal harmonies that jolt into focus during opener “Stillness (Way Beyond)”; the 8-bit tone coating the guitar slides in “Empty Nest”; or the tropical drum break in “Hidden Moon” that lightens an otherwise heavy affair. While the album has its share of outright misses, like the sleepy unofficial suite of “Dream at Tempo 050,” “Dream at Tempo 310,” and “Dream at Tempo 150,” the bursts of passion sprinkled throughout make these letdowns more tolerable.
Regardless of when you last checked in on Silversun Pickups, Physical Thrills won’t sound like a return to form. No one song captures a sense of unbridled possibility quite like “Lazy Eye” did. That’s arguably for the best, though. Silversun Pickups tap into a well of quarantine-bound inspiration that results in some of their most varied and carefree songs in over a decade, even if the majority overstay their welcome. They’re trying something new while remaining indifferent towards its reception—a trope for good reason. The passionate debut that introduced this band to the world is long past. In its place, Silversun Pickups are finally offering music substantial enough to suit them in their modern-day iteration. | 2022-08-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | New Machine | August 22, 2022 | 6.3 | 109eaaa2-cfb2-4ed6-9bce-2cb078c086f0 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
In standard and extended editions, Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album races to fill the gap between her intimate songwriting and her increasingly outsized persona. It’s unruly, unedited, and even a little tortured. | In standard and extended editions, Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album races to fill the gap between her intimate songwriting and her increasingly outsized persona. It’s unruly, unedited, and even a little tortured. | Taylor Swift: The Tortured Poets Department / The Anthology | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-swift-the-tortured-poets-department-the-anthology/ | The Tortured Poets Department / The Anthology | Taylor Swift’s music was once much bigger than her. A born storyteller, she gathered up the emotional ephemera of her life and molded it into indelible songs about herself, but also about young women—about their sorrow, their desire, their wit and will. She was the girl next door with the platinum pen, her feelings worth hearing about not simply because they existed but because she turned them into art.
Those days are gone. Swift, pumped up to mythical proportions by discursive oxygen, is bigger than her body of work—no knock against her body of work. She is her own pantheon: a tragic hero and a vindicated villain; an inadvertent antitrust crusader and a one-woman stimulus package; an alleged climate criminal and fixer; The Person of the Year of the Girl. Over the past 13 months, she’s strapped on her spangled bodysuit and performed a Herculean feat three nights a week on the highest-grossing tour of all time, earning her vaunted billion-dollar valuation. Her musical achievements are remarkable. But nobody makes a billion dollars from music alone.
The Tortured Poets Department, Swift’s 11th studio album, senses that widening gap between Taylor Swift the artist and Taylor Swift the phenomenon, and wants to fill it with a firehose of material. The burden of expectation is substantial: This is Swift’s first body of new work since the end of a years-long relationship and a pair of high-profile, whirlwind romances—one of which, with the 1975’s Matty Healy, appears to have provided much of the inspiration here. Fans came to Tortured Poets seeking emotional catharsis, or at least the salacious details. Swift, it seems, wanted the comfort of familiarity. Returning to Jack Antonoff and the National’s Aaron Dessner, her primary songwriting and producing partners of the last several years, Swift picks up threads from Folk-more and Midnights without quite pulling anything loose.
Tortured Poets’ extended Anthology edition runs over two hours, and even in the abridged version, its sense of sprawl creeps down to the song level, where Swift’s writing is, at best, playfully unbridled and, at worst, conspicuously wanting for an editor. The winking title track—a joke about its subjects’ self-seriousness—makes fun of the performance of creative labor, which is funny, given the show that Swift is putting on herself. She piles the metaphors on thick, throws stuff at the wall even after something has stuck, picks up the things that didn’t stick and uses them anyway.
That’s why we end up in “Florida!!!” for no apparent reason; why the dirge “So Long, London” names five different causes of death; why “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” is allowed to work a schoolyard premise until it cracks. But unruliness also produces the wild wonder of “But Daddy I Love Him,” a spiritual descendent of “Love Story” where the protagonists are knocking down castle walls instead of stealing glances in the ballroom. Dessner’s propulsive string arrangement and Swift’s narrative marks keep the song moving even as it stretches towards six minutes, reaching flights of fantasy unlike anything else on this album. Swift is nimble here, heel-turning and cackling through the chorus (“I’m having his baby/No I’m not, but you should see your faces”).
Perhaps she’s after a sort of text painting—an effort to reflect the all-consuming, uncontainable nature of her sordid affair in the shape of the music itself. Perhaps she is playing with scale, drawing a contrast between a relationship’s brevity and its broad impact. “Fortnight,” a lethargic, druggy opener with an oozing Post Malone feature, sets up both the timeline and the stakes: “I love you/It’s ruining my life/I touched you for only a fortnight.” From there, Swift assembles, song by song, an exquisite corpse of a love interest, a “tattooed Golden Retriever” who smokes like a chimney and plays with guns and makes her feel like a kid again and could maybe, possibly, father kids of her own. He is alluring and unreliable. He has a terrible reputation. He is the conduit through which Swift returns to many of the themes that have defined her 2020s output: marriage and commitment; the currency of youth; the cruelty of public opinion.
There is a clear emphasis here on vulnerability; it’s an effort to rub some of the varnish off of Taylor Swift the commercial product and focus on Taylor Swift the tender, unlucky romantic with whom we fell in love so many years ago. No matter her stature, Swift can still reach the everywoman. She is versed in memespeak: “Down Bad” works because of the juxtaposition between its banal hook and its description of “cosmic love”; the corporate girlies will go feral for “I cry a lot but I am so productive” (“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”). I can even get on board with the outlaw machinations of “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” if mostly for the lyrical backflip of its chorus: “They shook their heads saying, ‘God help her’ when I told ’em he’s my man/But your good Lord didn’t need to lift a finger/I can fix him, no really I can.”
Swift would have us believe that this album represents an unprecedented level of access to her inner life—an exorcism of her true feelings about a relationship whose general outline is widely recognizable. “I’ve never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets,” she told an audience in Melbourne ahead of the release. Remember, though, that she has been using songs to litigate her private affairs with public figures since her breakup with Joe Jonas in 2008. What’s changed is not the intimate writing; it’s the appetite for the minutiae of Swift’s life, and the sheer quantity of material she’s feeding it with. Clues and keywords that might once have been left for the liner notes are littered throughout the lyrics. If you know, you know; if you don’t, please choose from any of the hundreds of explainers.
It’s not Swift’s fault that we’re so obsessed with her, but this album gives the impression that she can’t quite hear herself over the roar of the crowd. Tearjerkers like “So Long, London” and “loml” fall short when every lyric carries equal weight. There’s no hierarchy of tragic detail; these songs fail to distill an overarching emotional truth, tending to smother rather than sting. It would help if Swift were exploring new musical ideas, but she is largely retreading old territory—unsurprising, perhaps, given that the last three years of her life have been consumed by re-recording her old albums and touring her past selves. The new music is colored in familiar shades of Antonoff (sparse drum programming, twinkly synths) and Dessner (suppler, more strings). Songs sound like other songs—“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” like Midnights’ “Mastermind”; the intro of “So Long, London” like that of Folklore’s “My Tears Ricochet.” Her melodies feel staid, like they are made to fit the music, rather than the other way around.
Also familiar are Swift’s tortured ideas about her own public image. The morbidly sexy Antonoff joint “Guilty as Sin?” has her “drowning in the Blue Nile,” borrowing the backbeat of “The Downtown Lights,” and comparing herself to Jesus, crucified for her trysts. On “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”, the imagery is convoluted: Swift is both a defanged circus animal and a witch who “put narcotics into all of [her] songs.” The Swift of “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” is more fun but still creepy—a glittering zombie under stage lights, smiling as she rots away inside.
Swift the workhorse, Swift the beacon of capitalism, Swift on a never-ending conveyor belt between the stage and the studio. This is the Swift that brings us The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, maximally bloated with 15 (15!) additional songs. Those that stand out mostly do so for the wrong reasons: There’s the one that borrows its premise from Olivia Rodrigo, but executes it less skillfully; the one where Swift dwells on her resentment toward Kim Kardashian; the one with that weird lyric about racism in the 1830s. This data-dump release strategy is not at all unique to Swift; it’s a concession to the modern music economy, which incentivizes artists to batch as many songs as possible, in as many packages as possible, to juice streams and sales. I look back fondly on the more modest tactics of “Our Song,” the last track on Swift’s debut, where she literally sang “play it again” in the final chorus.
If Swift believes that output for its own sake is what she has to offer, she underestimates her gift. Listeners who believe that her every ounce of experience is inherently interesting—because she was the one to have it—misunderstand her as well. Taylor Swift doesn’t need a whole album to tell the story of a relationship; she only needs one song, sometimes even one line. She almost has it in Tortured Poets’ title track, with the tossed-off brilliance of “We’re modern idiots.” She’s nearly there with the vignette, which needs a bit more burnishing, about her man slipping a ring from her middle to her eager left ring finger at dinner. You can see what she’s chasing here: the moment in time that triggers a flash of feeling that lasts forever—the sort of thing people call Swiftian. We’ve been students of Swift’s poetry for years. The lesson of The Tortured Poets Department is not to push through the pain—it’s to take the time to process it. | 2024-04-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | null | April 22, 2024 | 6.6 | 109fb61f-f88f-4e13-a584-70bf4116320a | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Watching Movies With the Sound Off is a quantum leap in artistry from Mac Miller’s 2011 debut, Blue Slide Park. Featuring production from Flying Lotus, the Alchemist, Clams Casino, Pharrell Williams, and Earl Sweatshirt, and a rare Jay Electronica verse, it’s the wide-eyed kid brother of Blue Slide Park home from college extolling the virtues of meditation and salvia. | Watching Movies With the Sound Off is a quantum leap in artistry from Mac Miller’s 2011 debut, Blue Slide Park. Featuring production from Flying Lotus, the Alchemist, Clams Casino, Pharrell Williams, and Earl Sweatshirt, and a rare Jay Electronica verse, it’s the wide-eyed kid brother of Blue Slide Park home from college extolling the virtues of meditation and salvia. | Mac Miller: Watching Movies With the Sound Off | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18202-mac-miller-watching-movies-with-the-sound-off/ | Watching Movies With the Sound Off | Mac Miller skated into rap with all the bottomless happy-go-lucky charm of a best friend’s insouciant little brother. The documents of his early career are the works of a kid very much in love with hip-hop but frustratingly ill-equipped to translate his verve into compelling music. His songs didn’t feel lived in; their observations were as slight as their lyrics were clunky. Even so, Miller proved a hit on the underaged weekend warrior circuit, and despite a withering critical reception, his 2011 debut album, Blue Slide Park, became the first independent hip-hop album to top the Billboard charts in nearly 20 years.
Things got knotty for Mac just as quickly as he took off, though. Beset by detractors and disillusioned with his career path (and the ever-present “frat-rap” association), he turned to promethazine to cope during 2012’s rigorous Macadelic Tour. Miller also ran into threats of litigation from hip-hop producer Lord Finesse, who says his production was used without permission on a popular mixtape cut, and Donald Trump, who came calling after a 2011 single named after him racked up millions of views on YouTube. Miller kicked the promethazine habit, settled with Finesse out of court (although Trump still taunts him), and then summarily ditched his native Pittsburgh for Los Angeles, where he’s been palling around with members of Odd Future and Kendrick Lamar’s Top Dawg Entertainment collective ever since. Watching Movies With the Sound Off is steeped in the pathos of Mac’s bad year and the musical influence, both direct and indirect, of his new rap friends. It’s the wide-eyed kid brother of Blue Slide Park home from college extolling the virtues of meditation and salvia.
Watching Movies With the Sound Off reintroduces Mac Miller as a druggy philosopher on the mic and a left field talent behind the boards. Gone are the undercooked shaggy dog stories of Blue Slide Park and mixtapes like Best Day Ever. In their place we get a batch of songs that break the surface with snarling, self-deprecating wit (“I don’t act hard/Still read Babar” from opener “The Star Room”) and musings on mortality (“Probably be dead soon inhaling cigarette fumes” on “Avian”) and drugs (“That fetanyl, it numbs me/...Turns you into a junkie” on “Someone Like You”). There’s still a lemon here and there (“I spit the shit that leave a diaper brown” on the otherwise promising lead single “S.D.S.” and “Gees,” with its chorus of “Suck my dick before I slap you with it”), but the Mac Miller of Watching Movies, who feels comfortable trading verses with rap nerd favorites like Jay Electronica and Action Bronson, largely succeeds in distancing himself from the guy peddling kiddie-pool deep rhymes about drinking 40s in front of the police just two years prior.
Miller’s Doom-esque witticisms are dispensed here over production that matches Wiz Khalifa’s 2012 cloud rap gambit O.N.I.F.C. for sheer druggy majesty. Miller handles a good portion of it himself, turning in loping circus music on “Avian” and eerie descending mellotron melodies on the absurdly titled “Suplexes Inside of Complexes and Duplexes.” “Aquarium” stir fries Tune-Yards’ “Powa,” churning out a slow-building and hypnotic barn-burner replete with massive drums and tasteful strings. The rest of Watching Movies’ production is farmed out to blunted Cali hip-hop luminaries like Flying Lotus and the Alchemist as well as emerging production talents like Clams Casino and Odd Future’s Earl Sweatshirt. Lengthy passages of stately, ephemeral soundscapes give Watching Movies the feel of a quixotic vision quest with Miller playing the role of the wizened sherpa.
The hazy sprawl of Watching Movies also gives Mac a chance to dart outside the boundaries of hip-hop a little. He ditches rapping on a few cuts, exposing a singing voice in line with the Mark Everett school of coarse-throated, disembodied vocalisms on the oceanic Clams Casino assisted “Youforia” and Pharrell’s gossamer “Objects in the Mirror.” Both are lightweight love songs that make up for what they occasionally lack in lyrical profundity with an open armed earnestness. He one-ups both with “REMember,” a letter to a fallen friend full of heartsick what-if scenarios (“You had a girl, I kinda wish you knocked her up/So I could meet your son and talk you up”) and frank talk about the therapeutic power of crying. All three are instances of Miller imparting stories that dig deeper than the bedroom boasts and quests for weed that made up the bulk of his songwriting up to this point.
Watching Movies With the Sound Off is a quantum leap in artistry, but it’s not without faults; the album’s about three songs too long, and a couple of the tracks in the back end just plain run together. Also, while all of the guest spots here are welcome deviations from Miller’s adroit Stones Throw homage, they routinely punctuate how much room he’s got left to grow as a writer. It’s highlighted most poignantly on “Suplexes Inside of Complexes and Duplexes”, where Jay Electronica shows up unannounced to kick a nonsensical verse, his first in years, and blows the whole album sky high just recounting the story of The Wizard of Oz, and also in the spoken word interlude after “Red Dot Music,” which features breakout battle rap star Loaded Lux lampooning “Easy Mac with the cheesy raps,” ruthlessly snarling “Who the fuck is Mac Miller?” Watching Movies With the Sound Off begins to broach the subject, but the question still stands. | 2013-06-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-06-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Rostrum | June 24, 2013 | 7 | 10a3bcd3-be56-45a9-99be-e7e450565755 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | |
The agile singer-songwriter smoothly transitions from the effortlessness of his 2017 debut to a sophomore record rich with complexities. | The agile singer-songwriter smoothly transitions from the effortlessness of his 2017 debut to a sophomore record rich with complexities. | Knox Fortune: Stock Child Wonder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/knox-fortune-stock-child-wonder/ | Stock Child Wonder | There’s an opacity baked into the technicolor fever dreams of Knox Fortune’s solo work, euphoric washes of largely synthetic instrumentation—all of which begs to be played outdoors. His vocal inflection, usually multi-tracked in fuzzy layers, is at once ageless and genderless; his arrangements embrace industrialism (the featured instrument on “Strange Days,” the mesmeric standout from 2017’s Paradise, is a clattering spray can) as often as they hearken upon well-worn new wave acts. His music is so enveloping and bright that at times it leaves you waiting for the other shoe to drop—for the warm hooks to swerve offkey and for Fortune’s flower-child bliss to turn sour.
That moment never arrives on his sophomore effort Stock Child Wonder, a record so expansive that its high isn’t dulled by mood stabilizers. Fortune’s absorbing melodies are subtler than they first appear: he rarely employs the same verse structure twice, and he frequently places instrumental breaks where you expect a chorus to be. The drum-based tracks “Static” and “Shirtless” are embellished with double-time vocal passages; and the offbeat synth on “Sincerity” allows Fortune to play loose with the time signature. If Paradise’s seeming effortlessness was its most charming quality, Stock Child Wonder’s unassuming formal complexities are an even greater testament to Fortune’s strength as a songwriter.
Yet the melodies are only half the equation—as a producer, Fortune is equally devoted to presentation. The gauzy engineering, which might have been used as a crutch, instead provides leeway for his more eccentric impulses. “Shirtless” kicks off with a campfire guitar and closes with a delicate violin arrangement, whereas “Gemini” juxtaposes disco strings with Caribbean-sounding drums. The Elliott Skinner duet “Morning Light” is sequenced as the album’s centerpiece, a nearly six-minute percussion-less suite highlighted by an austere trumpet solo. Its sincerity isn’t entirely discordant, but it’s enough of an anomaly to seem slightly out of place on Stock Child Wonder, its ponderousness never revisited.
Fortune got in on the ground floor of Chicago’s 2010s rap renaissance, producing for Joey Purp and Vic Mensa (who bestowed Fortune with his stage name) and notching a Grammy for his work on Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book. Although Fortune’s solo records are more reminiscent of Beck than Do or Die, there are intuitive callbacks to Chance and the Social Experiment’s creative milestones and the frenzied idealism with which they stare down addiction and trauma. Given the overtly Christian tones of Chance’s subsequent music, Stock Child Wonder offers welcome reminders of the low-stakes innocence and exuberant spontaneity that made Acid Rap and Surf irresistible. On the energetic “Hideout,” Fortune sings, “We used to hide out in back of our house/Lay in the garden and cover our mouths.” It’s the same brand of first-person-plural snapshot found in Chance’s coming-of-age diaries and roller-rink reminiscences, but where Chance hinted at the despair lurking behind his drugs and faith, Fortune mostly eschews remorse: on “Come Over,” getting high and growing up are just things to do, preferably with a nice woman at your side.
Stock Child Wonder pulls from a broader sonic palette than Paradise, yet feels surefooted even at its most discursive. Its disparate threads are held together by Fortune himself, who, for all his restraint as a performer, is at once earnest and undramatic. While his unvarnished lyricism yields a few bricks (“I couldn’t run unless I ran with you,” he croons on “Morning Light”), his best writing bears a visual alacrity, which brings to mind Evan Dando’s moony nostalgia. “Shirtless” finds its narrator and a companion riding around aimlessly in a sticky-seated Volvo. The narrative doesn’t really go anywhere, which is beside the point; in the final verse, Fortune sets the scene: “My skin stuck to the leather, on the couch in your apartment/In a heatwave in October, back when phones were Motorolas.” Even the ostensible breakup songs, “Change Up” and “Sincerity,” are so unflaggingly optimistic as to feel aspirational. Fortune doesn’t radiate naivete so much as he does unflappability.
The final track, “Always,” a rapturous love song, breaks through Stock Child Wonder’s pleasant haze. The three-chord piano melody is the simplest on the album, and while its placement doesn’t undermine the rest of the record (as a finale, it recalls Mac Miller’s “Youforia,” the uncharacteristically ardent windup of Watching Movies with the Sound Off), it’s the only song that might accurately be labeled a ballad. Fortune stretches his vocal range, straddling countertenor and falsetto, and belts the swelling chorus. As a coda, it’s a tantalizing suggestion that he’s still only providing us with a glimpse.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Nice Work | November 12, 2020 | 7.3 | 10a50381-69b4-4f79-ba16-b097ed9bc696 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
The nominally bicoastal pop trio’s fourth album is musically complacent and emotionally lifeless. | The nominally bicoastal pop trio’s fourth album is musically complacent and emotionally lifeless. | LANY: gg bb xx | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lany-gg-bb-xx/ | gg bb xx | If you haven’t heard LANY’s music yet, you’ve heard a dozen variations of the same thing: syrupy synths and watered-down beats, electropop shuffles and lyrics culled from Instagram captions. This is the sound slumping across Spotify, playlist-friendly and palatable enough to put on shuffle; this is music that can never disappoint you, because you’ve been conditioned to expect nothing from it. Lauv, a reigning sadboi of streaming, sounds like this, all smeared vocals and finger snaps; so do, at times, Tove Styrke, who rasps quasi-confessional electropop, and Dixie D’Amelio, the TikTok star turned singer who cycles through market-tested genres. It’s the limp, flat soundtrack of Ubers and malls everywhere.
LANY stands for “Los Angeles New York,” but realistically, it means nothing—the group was desperate for an available four-letter word for “design and aesthetic purposes.” Their latest album chases that vague desire for a vibe. Every synth sounds like it’s swaddled in cotton batting, every drum pattern sounds like a shadow. LANY don’t pretend to cobble together some deeper meaning; the vacuum is the point. gg bb xx is their second album within a year, and even the title is just a random batch of letters: “I wanted a title that had no pretense, no preconceived notion,” one band member is quoted in the retail copy. “Whatever the song feels like to you, that’s what the title means.” Track after track, LANY ask us to invest in unconvincing emotion while outright denying that their music signifies anything at all.
You can assign the band some influences, if you’re feeling generous: the xx by way of OneRepublic, or an ultra-diluted strain of Glass Animals mixed with Ed Sheeran. But more acutely, this is the sound of infinite scroll. There is no introduction to who LANY are or claim to be, and for all the local name-checks they drag into their lyrics—L.A. freeways and Brooklyn rooftops, Monday night drinks and the Chateau Marmont—these are muddy songs with generic ideas about breakups and flirting. It’s tough to take LANY at their word when they swivel between irony and earnestness without committing to either. A beat drop underscores an exclamation of “Damn!” as they marvel at a woman who studied abroad in Japan. There are flecks of trop-house, an acoustic-adjacent ballad, and faintly propulsive pop tracks, but too many of these songs sound interchangeable.
The blandness might be more forgivable if these guys didn’t seem so insufferable. To hear LANY tell it, the world is against them because they’re too nice to women, too sensitive and long-suffering. Their incessant gripes are a feat of passive aggression: “Sorry I call again when you don’t pick up/And tell you you’re beautiful but probably too much,” they sing on “dna,” sounding astoundingly unselfconscious. “I stopped working late and I stopped getting high,” they moan on “never mind, let’s break up,” as if this were a great sacrifice. Their love songs can be equally grating, platitudes mashed into nonsensical turns of phrase. “People make rockets that go to the moon/People make mistakes too,” they yowl on “live it down,” with the earnestness of an elementary school choir. “You’re more Paris, Texas than Paris, France,” they coo on “get away,” which is, supposedly, a compliment.
LANY is less of a band, more of a Shutterstock image of what a band nowadays might be. Have you ever quickly needed a band for something, doesn’t really matter what they sound like as long as they play music? Try LANY. Their infatuations feel dubious, their sadness deeply petty. Their songs are translucent and transactional, absent of the basic ingredients that make music interesting. You can press skip the next time a LANY song shows up on your company-authored playlist of choice, but chances are good that the next track will sound just like it.
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. | 2021-09-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Interscope | September 8, 2021 | 4.1 | 10a5b221-4161-4839-9e71-53c7e36eeb40 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Beach House's newest album, Depression Cherry, might have the silliest, or at least the most inexplicable, title in their catalog, but in every other sense it’s another impeccably measured step forward. Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have grown so adept at spinning dreams that they can turn all the lights on the set and still dazzle us. | Beach House's newest album, Depression Cherry, might have the silliest, or at least the most inexplicable, title in their catalog, but in every other sense it’s another impeccably measured step forward. Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have grown so adept at spinning dreams that they can turn all the lights on the set and still dazzle us. | Beach House: Depression Cherry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20691-depression-cherry/ | Depression Cherry | If you view a band as a long-term artistic project, then Beach House have always been perfect. Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have done everything right: They’ve found the ideal balance of dim, lush tones; their sound progresses at a graceful, even clip; they leave just the right amount of time between albums. Even their name is perfect: Beach houses are rickety, inviting spaces that, by nature of their existence, live outside of time. If a beach house were to change noticeably—if that paperback you left there last May isn’t still sitting upside-down and open to the same page, gathering dust on the same shelf you left it—you'd be upset.
Part of the joy of yielding to their luxuriant music, then, comes from sensing the comfort of these solid borders framing it. Their music explores the sadness of pleasure, and the pleasure of sadness, and with each record they deepen this inquiry a little more. Their newest, Depression Cherry, might have the silliest, or at least the most inexplicable, title in their catalog (compare it with the euphonious clarity of Teen Dream, or Bloom, or Devotion), but in every other sense it’s another impeccably measured step forward. Their albums might be an ideal soundtrack for daydreaming, but Scally and Legrand seem remarkably clear-headed about their work.
The most noticeable changes they make here are adjustments to lighting and angles. They’ve stripped back the booming drums of Bloom and boosted the synth and guitars, giving a new physicality to ethereal sounds. On "Sparks", Scally’s vintage-organ keyboard patch is dissonant, mixed right up front, and a little uncomfortable, like a crick in the song’s neck. The slide guitars have a brittle edge, suggesting the involvement of actual human fingers. The backing vocals are mixed a few inches closer, so they sound less like a celestial choir than an earthbound crew of worried voices whispering secrets.
These minor tweaks result in a sound that retains the band’s grand theatricality, but also lets you smell the grease paint a little more, feel the itch of the Victorian-era fabrics on your skin. When Legrand sings "Tender is the night for a broken heart/ Who will dry your eyes when it falls apart?" on the sweeping mid-album highlight "Space Song", it registers as exactly the sort of high-flown Romantic soliloquy she’s always preferred. But then a buzzing, dinky-sounding synthesizer burbles up into the track, wandering onstage like a comic foil. Like the old drum machines they prefer, touches like these give the music an air of innocence, evoking silent films, community theater productions, puppet shows. Legrand and Scally have grown so adept at spinning dreams that they can turn all the lights on the set and still dazzle us.
"Trance is a big part of our thing," Scally said in their recent Pitchfork interview. "We'll repeat a part for three hours while we wait for the next piece to fall into place." On Depression Cherry, you can almost hear these dawning moments as they happen, with a palpable click. The bone structures of these songs are closer to dance tracks—with builds, drops, peaks, and switch-ups—than the flourishes of traditional pop songwriting, and this frame allows Beach House to stretch out and telescope their songs without getting lost. On "PPP", Legrand alternates between a pinwheeling melody and a more open-ended, spoken-word performance, with Scally’s arpeggiated guitar stitching a visible, silvery thread through both.
Underpinning everything, as always, is the drone. Legrand’s finger almost never lets up on a chord’s root or fifth note in a Beach House song. You can see her live, doing this—she keeps one hand pressed on the keyboard at all times, grounding the song even as her vocal soars and Scally’s guitar glitters. On Depression Cherry’s opening track "Levitation", a lovely saturated D chord opens slowly out of a faint high-F# drone, which never disappears from the song’s edges. The omnipresence of these drones in their songs suggests that their fantasies have a fatalistic tint: The drone is always there, the hum of the air conditioner that’s too loud in your vacation condo, the fly that won’t stop buzzing. That buzzing note is as legible on Bloom’s "Irene" as it is on many of the songs here, and it’s why we feel our gut tugged to Earth and our skulls lifted skyward when Legrand’s voice reaches for her highest notes.
One of the first lines Legrand sings on the album, from "Levitation", is "There’s a place I want to take you." Isolated, it’s an emblematic Beach House lyric—a promise of transportation that leaves the destination unspecified. In fact, it doesn’t even promise arrival: she just wants to take you there. It is this melancholia, the exquisite ache of being nearly aloft, that Beach House has perfected. With every album, someone observes—rightly—that the band has never sounded exactly this full and soaring before. From their muted first two records, into their Sub Pop debut Teen Dream and then Bloom, Beach House always seem to be just leaving the ground as we catch them. It’s a trick of the light, and it speaks to the sadness that makes their music linger: Transporting experiences, they gently remind us, are always round-trip tickets back to everyday life. | 2015-08-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-08-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bella Union / Mistletone / Sub Pop | August 18, 2015 | 8.4 | 10a64d22-a0b4-441a-90c5-3c9b79445a5d | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Michael Gira reunites his epochal band, retaining its bleakness and melodrama but presenting it now via his love for apocalyptic country blues. | Michael Gira reunites his epochal band, retaining its bleakness and melodrama but presenting it now via his love for apocalyptic country blues. | Swans: My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14651-my-father-will-guide-me-up-a-rope-to-the-sky/ | My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky | Swans debuted in the early 1980s with the starkest and ugliest music imaginable: Nerve-shreddingly slow and plug-your-ears loud, somewhere between no wave and doom metal, with lyrics that viewed humanity as a sheep-like mass that deserved whatever horror came its way. Melody, nuance, and gentleness came later, but by then it was too late. Swans' rep as unrepentant industrial brutalists had stuck. Sure, it was unfair, but that's what happens when you introduce yourself with a sound that singular and abrasive.
Swans frontman/mastermind Michael Gira was notoriously unhappy about that rep. His early records made their point-- music can sometimes hurt, and sometimes that hurt is weirdly pleasurable-- and by the late 80s his interests lay elsewhere. Sure his lyrics remained oppressive, abject, and generally icky, but his bellowing and moaning became a mournful croon. Humanity and beauty kept leaking in, almost despite the band's best intentions. As the 90s went on, Swans albums became as much about exploring gorgeous (if disquieting) ambient texture as crushing heads. Gira's songs blossomed from skeletal rhythmic sketches into lush epics that predicted a lot of post-rock.
But Swans' music, whatever the period, was driven by a philosophy of no compromises. Gira wanted the freedom to change direction whenever he wished. Swans fans and critics refused to shut up about his earlier, more brutal records, as if Gira were Woody Allen raised on Marquis de Sade. So he did the only reasonable thing an intractable man could do: He killed the band in 1997, dumped its historical baggage, and tried to enjoy the freedom of no expectations in a new project, Angels of Light.
Perhaps 13 years was enough time to put Swans into perspective, though, because here's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. Its existence is surprising to say the least, especially considering Gira's sneering dismissal of the whole idea of bands reuniting. What's less surprising is that Gira's shifted musical directions yet again, though his voice and the inimitable end-times vibe make My Father instantly recognizable as a Swans album.
I understand why Swans' music, even the later and more melodic period, can be off-putting to those who prefer their music more humane and humorous. Gira can be a blackly funny fucker, but to truly enjoy Swans, it does help to have some affection for music that's, well, bleak. Really bleak. Theatrically bleak. Because however funny or lovely or melodramatically stirring he can be, there's always going to be a core of desolation to Gira's songwriting.
My Father reinforces that fact, but it does so with a stomping, swinging, snarling live-band urgency that sounds little like Swans' last album, 1996's Soundtracks for the Blind, which leaned heavily on the band's love for tape loops and ambient soundscapes. My Father is less about the Eno-esque sonic tapestries and more about Gira's love for apocalyptic country blues. The musicians sound go-for-the-throat savage after their long absence, as if Gira presented them with a batch of blackened lyrics and they couldn't wait to pound the songs into shape.
In other words, My Father grooves, and grooves hard. "Eden Prison" features one of Gira's most menacing performances in recent years, but really his snarling contempt is a bonus given the intensity the band brings to the galloping rhythm. Unlike the keyboard-driven Soundtracks material, which often had to be radically reconstructed for the band's final tour (as heard on 1998's posthumous live album, Swans are Dead), you can imagine the reconstituted Swans taking these new songs to the stage and kicking them out as-is.
Gira's new songs are obviously far more refined than band's bash-and-groan 80s material. (Just about every song ever written is more refined than something like 1984's "Raping a Slave".) There are still touches of the Soundtracks era and its atmospherics, though it's usually restricted to intros and outros. But this is the closest Gira's come in decades to the band's old immediacy, intensity, and brute force. "My Birth" is traditional hard rock filtered through Swans' drone-happy sensibility, the one to play for Queens of the Stone Age fans. And while "No Words/No Thoughts" opens the album with a moody wash of church bells, it immediately drops into the kind of swampy lurch that once made Swans heroes in the sludge metal community.
But if Gira got his Swans groove back, he also got his Swans bile back. This album is the antithesis of 2010's gooey let's-all-be-friends chillwave fun. The only way My Father would make sense on a beach is if nuclear winter had broken out. After all, there's a song here called "You Fucking People Make Me Sick", which sets a new standard for Gira's spit-in-your-eye venom. It is also sung, in part, by Gira's three-year-old daughter (she duets with Devendra Banhart) and opens with what sounds like a didgeridoo. That's Gira's kind of comedy. He always seems to having the most fun when he's at his most sardonic, and when he's at his most sardonic, he's also at his most memorable.
A lot of people have died in Swans songs over the years. (They've also been abused, degraded, violated, and made to wish they were dead.) On My Father, there's "Reeling the Liars In", a full-scale moral cleansing where E**very Liar on Earth, or at least as many as Gira can get his hands on, is loaded onto a pyre and set ablaze. It's the slightest song on the album, and the most vicious, and also the catchiest. I only mention it here at the end only to let new listeners know what they're in for when Gira's in a good mood. Longtime Swans fans are, I'm sure, already smiling. | 2010-09-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-09-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Young God | September 22, 2010 | 7.7 | 10a797c9-e283-433b-9ee9-214a295e922c | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The debut LP from this Copenhagen band arrives via the same label that introduced Iceage. But First Hate make bright pop music—yearning melodies, sparkling Euro trance keyboards, padding club beats. | The debut LP from this Copenhagen band arrives via the same label that introduced Iceage. But First Hate make bright pop music—yearning melodies, sparkling Euro trance keyboards, padding club beats. | First Hate: A Prayer for the Unemployed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23269-a-prayer-for-the-unemployed/ | A Prayer for the Unemployed | First Hate’s A Prayer for the Unemployed finds its way into the world on Escho, the Copenhagen independent label that first released—and whose owners continue to manage—Iceage. And while perhaps it’s a little unfair to hold up a debut album as emblematic of anything, it does seem to neatly encapsulate how the city’s underground scene has changed over the last half-decade. Back in 2011, Copenhagen was all angry young men making visceral punk and industrial music that spoke its intent through cryptic lyrics and heathen runes. But that period lasted for barely a blink of an eye. Before long, Iceage’s singer Elias-Bender Rønnenfelt was exploring plaintive synth music in Vår, and Hannes Norrvide had embarked on the long road to transforming his former solo project Lust for Youth from misanthropic noise into a sort of romantic Balearic boyband.
And now there is First Hate. A Prayer for the Unemployed finds Anton Falck Gansted and Joakim Nørgaard building bright, synthetic pop music from yearning melodies, sparkling Euro trance keyboards, and padding club beats. One obvious touchstone is the Pet Shop Boys, with whom First Hate share a taste for smartly observed vignettes of complicated love and metropolitan living (and you sense Neil Tennant might see an album title like A Prayer for the Unemployed and happily claim it as his own). But they still have the sense of a band who rehearse in Copenhagen’s graffiti-plastered practice space Mayhem, and part of the appeal of this record is in the tension it draws between DIY practice and pop sensibility, juxtaposing underground temperament with choruses that soar.
There are echoes throughout of the scene that spawned them. Gansted has a voice that’s a close ringer for Rønnenfelt’s—proud and surly and a little bit sensual, as if just roused from sleep. Songs like “Bullets of Dust” and “Supernumerary,” so pretty and urbane on the surface, seethe with undercurrents of lust, confusion, and teenage melodrama. Perhaps their defining moment so far is “The One,” a sashaying piano house track with notes of New Order’s “Temptation,” in which Gansted picks over a relationship that has lapsed into stares and silence. The early verses find him trapped in a cage of indecision. But as the song winds towards its climax on peals of harmonica, a female voice enters the frame: “If I’m not the right one/Tell me what you’re waiting for…” Suddenly the clouds part, and Gansted closes the song with a brief spoken word segment that is decisive and without mercy. “Life is not always about keeping your promises,” he intones. “Life is about following your heart.”
There is a recurrent caddishness to First Hate, the sense that these boys would break your heart and dash off without a moment’s hesitation. But alongside arrogance there is empathy, and the feeling that First Hate want their music to reach out and actually mean something to people. “Copenhagen MMXIV” is an immaculate ballad directed towards a heartbroken girl as she takes a nighttime passage through the city, drawing comfort from the lights of distant windows. Meanwhile, the title track brings to mind another, rather more high-profile Dane, MØ. A song about hope and self-care for a generation overlooked, its breathy synths and clarion-call melody lines recall one of Diplo’s more gently euphoric productions, and its chorus shuns any hint of cynicism or subversion as it pirouettes off towards the clouds.
Moments like this raise questions. Like: will First Hate end up a DIY pop band, or an actual pop band—and does anything, beyond a fanbase, really separate the two? A Prayer for the Unemployed doesn’t quite feel like the finished article. Slightly front-loaded, its boldest moments are dispatched early. Still, there is something potent in First Hate’s mix of innocence and ambition. Too savvy to be naïve, but too wide-eyed to feel fully mature, right now their youth is the source of their power. | 2017-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Escho | May 31, 2017 | 7.8 | 10a9e33b-6434-45ac-b03e-613926d7b214 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
St. Vincent’s sleek, streamlined production stands out from the rest of the band’s catalog, but all of the elements you first fell in love with are still here. | St. Vincent’s sleek, streamlined production stands out from the rest of the band’s catalog, but all of the elements you first fell in love with are still here. | Sleater-Kinney: The Center Won’t Hold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sleater-kinney-the-center-wont-hold/ | The Center Won’t Hold | The Center Won’t Hold, Sleater-Kinney’s ninth album, is about ambition, desire, and fear. Their alliance with St. Vincent has resulted in sleek, streamlined, capital-P Production that stands out from the unadorned directness of the rest of their catalog. But it is bold and loud in the same way we expect from Sleater-Kinney; the tight economies of their previous work are still present, just manifesting themselves differently. The lyrics, too, remain direct and immediate, yet elegant and precise. None of these are new descriptors for Sleater-Kinney. The three women who recorded this album are products of modern society, and they know the rules: Women aren’t allowed to age in public. They’re supposed to camouflage their bodies; they aren’t supposed to still want anything, whether intellectual, artistic, or carnal. All of those hungers are present on The Center Won’t Hold.
The title track opens the record, a statement of intent that segues from distorted industrial to electrical mayhem. The songs on The Center Won’t Hold are about the here and now and how Sleater-Kinney see themselves within it, so it is sad and sardonic, but not mournful. The daily conditions that torment us are described and shared, without conclusion: “Sell our rage, buy and trade/But we still cry for free every day,” sings Corin Tucker in “Can I Go On?” The quasi-robotic dirge “The Future Is Here” opens with, “I start my day on a tiny screen,” before keening: “Never have I felt so goddamned lost and alone.” It isn’t inspiring, but there is something intensely comforting in these public admissions.
The album is political the way the band’s very existence is political, with references both direct and oblique. “She stood up for us/When she testified,” from closer “Broken,” is a reference to Christine Blasey Ford. But it’s an earlier lyric that’s closer to bone: “I really can’t fall apart right now/I really can’t touch that place.” The high tension from the first note of “Bad Dance” feels like the danse macabre portrayed in the lyrics: “If the world is ending now/Then let’s dance,” Carrie Brownstein purrs, ending the hoedown with the line that best sums up the record’s pulsing undercurrent: “And if we’re all going down in flames/Then let’s scream the bloody scream/We’ve been rehearsing our whole lives.” Women who say these words share a solidarity.
There are also bonafide hits on this record, melodies that Velcro themselves to your brain. The aforementioned “The Future Is Here” bubbles seductively, na na na na na choruses and all. “Hurry on Home,” the first single, finds Brownstein channeling the vocal tone and affirmative attitude of the B-52’s’ Kate Pierson. With a silky chorus to smooth everything out, it’s a deliberately sexy foil to the opening track. “LOVE,” a breathless celebration of the band’s history—“Call the doctor, dig me out of this mess”—falls into the grand tradition of songs about being in a band, alongside the Who’s “Long Live Rock,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Travelin’ Band,” or the Ramones’ “Danny Says.” You can imagine the anarchist cheerleaders from the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video chanting, “We can be young/We can be old/As long as we have/Each other to hold.”
Even if tracks like “Can I Go On” or “RUINS” don’t manifest themselves as solidly as some of the others, they’re still interesting, well-constructed, complete thoughts. The Center Won’t Hold is a Sleater-Kinney record not only because their name is on the cover, but because all of the elements you first fell in love with are still here: brutal and unyielding lyrics, Tucker’s superhuman vocals, the solar flares that emit from Brownstein’s guitar, the way Janet Weiss’ authority shapes both the beats and the space between them. Weiss’ statement that she was leaving the band came just days after this album was formally announced; her departure is unfortunate, not just because it is the end of a chapter, but because we won’t get the chance to see the musicians who recorded these songs work them out in public.
The challenge of contextualizing The Center Won’t Hold is that there isn’t much to compare it to. There are no other all-women musical groups of Sleater-Kinney’s longevity, stature, and influence. It matters that there are women in their 40s and 50s singing about the radical topic of… being women in their 40s and 50s, because they have few peers in their realm. It’s impossible to talk about this album without invoking the enormous line that ends “LOVE”: “There’s nothing more frightening and nothin’ more obscene/Than a well-worn body demanding to be seen/Fuck!” It’s no accident that Sleater-Kinney deliver this message within a song that will make you want to pogo around the living room, or that Brownstein’s bare butt adorns the cover of the first single. The personal is political, always.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | August 20, 2019 | 7.9 | 10aab025-5e45-4ba3-8be9-9fa7600ab33a | Caryn Rose | https://pitchfork.com/staff/caryn-rose/ | |
On Be and Finding Forever, Common struck a winning, humanizing balance between moralism and hedonism, proving that the two needn't be mutually exclusive. On Universal Mind Control, he-- and the Neptunes-- split his personalities into what seem like two wildly different EPs. | On Be and Finding Forever, Common struck a winning, humanizing balance between moralism and hedonism, proving that the two needn't be mutually exclusive. On Universal Mind Control, he-- and the Neptunes-- split his personalities into what seem like two wildly different EPs. | Common: Universal Mind Control | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12508-universal-mind-control/ | Universal Mind Control | On a song called "Announcement" from his eighth LP, Universal Mind Control, Common raps, "I still love H.E.R., she be needin' the dick/ When it comes to hip-hop, it's just me and my bitch." He's referring to his 1994 song "I Used to Love H.E.R.", where he began to seriously define himself as a moralistic foil to the gangster rap phenomenon. The reference seems ironic on an album this vacuous and amoral.
Then again, the song has been ironic from the start. In conflating hip-hop's downfall with that of a loose woman, Common succumbed to a definitive moral hazard-- misogyny-- of the gangster rap he railed against. During the last faint reverberations of hip-hop's so-called golden age, this odd blend of puritanical defiance and doomed acquiescence wasn't unusual. Notice how, on A Tribe Called Quest's "Check the Rhime", Phife goes from "have all my hos in check" to "my aura's positive, I don't promote no junk" in three seconds flat.
Common emerged (as Common Sense) at the tail end of Afrocentric rap's heyday, which helped him escape obsolescence as his peers fell by the wayside. Treading the precarious line between positive maverick and mainstream star has defined him for his entire career. On Be and Finding Forever, with assistance from Kanye West, he struck a winning, humanizing balance between moralism and hedonism, proving that the two needn't be mutually exclusive. But on Universal Mind Control, his personalities split off into what seem like two wildly different EPs, one awful and one tepid.
The awful half is the first one, a bizarre concoction of featherweight electro, sex raps à la LL Cool J, "Sir Psycho Sexy"-era Red Hot Chili Peppers, party-starting clichés, and interminable A-A-A-A rhyme patterns that were fresh circa "Rapper's Delight". Putting aside the obvious laziness of Common's lyrics and the Neptunes' production, it seems more than anything like a profound failure of self-awareness. On the title track, Pharrell informs us that "This is that new shit and it don't feel the same," which Common contradicts with an almost satirically old-school "dang diggy dang da-dang da-dang dang."
"Punch Drunk Love (The Eye)" is just cynical, with its throwaway Kanye hook (gotta get him in the credits somehow) and buried Auto-Tuned singing by Pharrell. "Make My Day" benefits from a jovial Cee-Lo cameo and a spry jackhammer beat by Mr. DJ that a harder rapper would eat up, but Common needs warm, soulful beats to thrive, and he mostly sounds lost here. At least the inane lyrics ("Baby girl I'm a man/ And we can do this my way/ Take a ride on the highway/ And pretend that it's Friday... and it is!") gain some incidental surging effects from Mr. DJ's efforts. The ugly, blocky nadir "Sex 4 Suga" sounds like an Andy Samberg parody. Things settle down a little with "Announcement", but you know you've got a problem when a Pharrell verse actually livens up your song.
The tepid second half is oddly something of a relief. Common shows signs of life on "Gladiator", surging powerfully over noir strings and jittery piano, but comparing yourself to Nelson Mandela-- not to mention "a radical" who "don't fit the game"-- is a tough sell on this record. At least Common sounds comfortable amid the breezy chimes and canned platitudes. A perfunctory Obama shout-out on "Changes" finds Common taking a rare glimpse outside of himself, but it's too little, too late. Universal Mind Control is a painful misstep from a talented rapper who's decided to be as nasty as he wants to be-- which turns out to be much, much nastier than we'd like. | 2008-12-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2008-12-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Geffen | December 10, 2008 | 2.8 | 10acb27a-75af-4ac0-8f90-3d3b803db555 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The Southern rock band culls through its recent archives and compiles a dozen rarities on this odds'n'sods collection. | The Southern rock band culls through its recent archives and compiles a dozen rarities on this odds'n'sods collection. | Drive-By Truckers: The Fine Print (A Collection Of Oddities and Rarities 2003-2008) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13380-the-fine-print-a-collection-of-oddities-and-rarities-2003-2008/ | The Fine Print (A Collection Of Oddities and Rarities 2003-2008) | In March 1999, George Jones slammed his SUV into a bridge abutment, and Drive-By Truckers got a song out of it. Jones wasn't reeling from alcohol, nor was he being chased by an angry ex, nor did any of the hard-living country tropes play into the crash. Instead, he was simply talking on his cell phone to his daughter. He was in critical condition but recovered eventually. Which is fortunate, because a legend like Jones shouldn't go out that way. Part joking and part shaming, the Truckers' "George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues" acts as a biopic of sorts, framing a consideration of his life and legacy with details from the crash. "He almost stopped loving her today," Hood sings, before admonishing the legend: "Better leave that cell phone alone."
That song kicks off The Fine Print, a collection of "oddities and rarities" that closes out a particularly productive decade for Drive-By Truckers. They were bound to get around to this kind of release sooner or later: At any given time they've had three and sometimes four songwriters in the band at once, so the backlog of unused songs was sure to back up the drains and overflow into a catchall like this one. As a retrospective, The Fine Print is incomplete, covering only 2003 onward (save a recent version of a Pizza Deliverance song). There's no Rob Malone, who left the band following Southern Rock Opera; Shonna Tucker sings only a verse of their redundant cover of "Like a Rolling Stone"; but there are two new Jason Isbell tracks, which reminds you how naturally he fit into the group and how dynamically the band performed his songs. "When the Well Runs Dry" is a tense assessment of romantic and creative desiccation, and you can almost hear the mosquitoes buzzing around the languid "TVA", a shaggy dog story told by a backwoods lifer and interrupted by a simple, graceful guitar solo.
The Truckers don't skimp on the elements that have made them stand out among the southern-rock upstarts: These songs are populated with realistic characters in hard-luck situations, soundtracked with gnarly guitars and gritty vocals. "The Great Car Dealer War" and this version of "Goode's Field Road" (from Brighter Than Creation's Dark) are two more entries into Hood's Southern crime syndicate series. Recorded for The Dirty South, "The Great Car Dealer War" is told from the point of view of an arsonist who burns down car lots, and Hood balances the gravity of his testimony with bits of grim humor. Mike Cooley's "Uncle Frank" may not have quite as strong an impact, but this alternate version of an early song does include a grim coda not included in the original, which gives the song even higher stakes.
Their take on Tom Petty's "Rebels", recorded for "King of the Hill", fits so perfectly among the Truckers' original that I forgot it was a cover, and Hood updates Tom T. Hall's Vietnam-era "Mama Bake a Pie (Daddy Kill a Chicken)" to Iraq, fitting it nicely among the veteran songs on Brighter Than Creation's Dark. But the real story here is their version of "Play It All Night Long", which Warren Zevon wrote as a response to Lynyrd Skynyrd's response to Neil Young's "Southern Man". The Truckers wrote about Skynyrd and Young on 2001's Southern Rock Opera, so this cover acts as a sort of epilogue to that album. Plus, they fold in a few bars from "Ain't That Pretty at All" before throwing the song against a wall and beating it senseless with their guitars.
Unsurprisingly, the rarities on The Fine Print could make a good album, but the oddities are often distracting. Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", which they covered for Uncut magazine, is pretty much uncoverable, but the Truckers do as good a job as anyone else. The noir blues "Mrs. Claus' Kimono" is about unrest among the elves and reindeer, who plot to off Santa. Hood's conspiratorial tone sounds as out of place here as the song's cartoonish concept, but at least they can poke a little fun at themselves. More crucially, it adds another facet to The Fine Print, which recalls the Truckers' studio albums in its range of distinct tones and subjects: Filled with ups and downs, this collection of toss-offs and also-rans portrays the Truckers as a band that finds inspiration in the unlikeliest places. | 2009-08-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-08-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | New West | August 31, 2009 | 6.6 | 10acbe31-b88f-4c09-aad2-afc0e8a03129 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The fourth full-length from the hermetic UK electronic wizard is his most confident in ages, a fully-formed showcase for his singular ear and audacious production. | The fourth full-length from the hermetic UK electronic wizard is his most confident in ages, a fully-formed showcase for his singular ear and audacious production. | Zomby: Ultra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22322-ultra/ | Ultra | The lead single to Zomby’s first album in more than three years was not terribly auspicious. Sure, in the run-up to its release, the prospect sounded almost too good to be true: Zomby and Burial together at last—bass music’s two most notoriously hermetic producers emerging from their studio lairs bearing, one could only assume, fistfuls of charcoal and lightning. But their collaboration “Sweetz” sounded half-assed: desultory in spirit, scattered in form, and overlaid with an insistent vocal loop insisting, “Get me fucked up/Get me fucked up/Get me fucked up,” over and over, like the inner monologue of a user whose serotonin receptors have long since scabbed over. Heard on its own, it didn't sound like much. But “Sweetz” turns out to make a strange kind of sense in the context of the album. Its weird twists and turns draw you in; its lysergic extremes fuck you up. In its dead-eyed way, it comes alive.
Zomby has never played to expectations. From his early, squirrelly dubstep singles and the full-bore breakbeat hardcore of his debut album, 2008’s Where Were U in ’92?—an album that helped set up a broad wave of British rave revivalism from artists like Lone, Special Request, and even Jamie xx—he veered into unexpectedly sentimental territory with 2011’s expansive Dedication, his first album for 4AD. It was a promising turn of affairs, the famously cagey artist finally wearing his heart on his Balmain sleeve. But 2013’s With Love tested even his most stalwart fans’ patience. Its grim mood hung like a pall, and many of its 33 tracks felt like unfinished sketches; some of them, like “Digital Smoke” and “Entropy Sketch,” were merely variants of each other, separated by inelegant fadeouts.
But Ultra is the most self-assured Zomby record in ages, and a huge step forward from the slightly pro-forma DJ tools of last year’s Let's Jam!! EPs. Even at its darkest—which is to say, most of it—he sounds like he’s enjoying himself, from the triumphant fanfare of the opening “Reflection” to the regal tones of the closing “Thaw.” Sometimes, he’s in and out in two minutes, just to see what kind of sparks fly when one sound rubs up against another. Elsewhere, he lets loops tumble on as long as he likes. That strategy doesn’t always work: the cycling synths and voices of “Fly 2” abruptly drop in tempo some two-and-a-half minutes into the tune and then continue spinning away for three more minutes, slow and stuporous, like a battery-operated toy running low on charge. “Her,” on the other hand, is perfect—just a four-bar chord progression made of bright, gleaming synths and booming, Phil Collins-grade toms. It’s so hopeful it makes you a little nervous, because nothing in life works out as well as the utopia it promises.
Ultra is also Zomby’s most experimental record in ages. That might sound strange, given how many of his usual tropes come into play: video-game bleeps, laser blasts, gun-cock samples, and all the other accouterments of grime. But, particularly after the polished sonics of With Love, he’s letting himself get weird again. “Burst” may employ the same arcade chirps that he’s used forever, but the way the stuttering synth riff seems to slow down in mid-tumble is unusual, like grime turned gelatinous. “Quandary,” a co-production with Darkstar, pairs the pinging of tilting pinball machines with a bouncy lead that's almost Caribbean in feel. It’s a disorienting listening experience, especially the drums' mismatched, tangled reverb tails. You feel torn different ways at once—which, given the title, might be the point.
It’s not all so successful. The drab, bitcrushed “E.S.P.,” reminiscent of Actress’ desiccated atmospheres, feels longer than its three minutes; “Yeti,” an icy grime tune in the mold of Wiley’s “Eskimo” or “Igloo” is rather superfluous coming right after “Freeze,” another bright, brittle grime track that sounds absolutely fantastic. (Zomby presumably thought that placing such similar tunes together would be illuminating, and it is: He still hasn’t perfected the art of editing down his tracklists.) And some of his choices, like the gunshots and “Twin Peaks” monologue of “Reflection,” feel slightly uninspired for an artist whose public persona puts such a premium on audacity.
But those are minor quibbles, because when he's on, he’s on. The sparkling “Glass,” the sorrowful “I,” the rough-cut jungle of “S.D.Y.F.” (“So Dance You Fuckers”), a collaboration with The Trilogy Tapes’ Rezzett—all of it finds Zomby sounding refreshed and invigorated. On the closing “Thaw,” he even sets the drums aside, lavishing all his attention on an absolutely gorgeous set of chords played on an absolutely gorgeous set of synthesizer patches. You can hear his passion for fashion coming to the surface here: It resembles draping; it sounds expensive, and it suggests that he’s still got a few tricks up his sleeve. | 2016-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | September 6, 2016 | 7.9 | 10b5405e-d2c2-458e-a62d-29f2f0c44101 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
After 24 years, the electronic pop duo returns with a moving, handsome album that tells a sophisticated story about recapturing innocence. | After 24 years, the electronic pop duo returns with a moving, handsome album that tells a sophisticated story about recapturing innocence. | Everything But the Girl: Fuse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/everything-but-the-girl-fuse/ | Fuse | When Ben Watt was diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening autoimmune disease, he made two albums with his wife, Tracey Thorn, that wore the couple’s trauma on their sleeves: Amplified Heart arrived in 1994 and Walking Wounded two years later. The last album that Everything But the Girl wrote together was equally transparent, although it spoke to a different strain of dissociation. Temperamental, released in 1999, came after the unassuming British indie duo had balked at the fame sprung on them by Todd Terry’s remix of their 1994 track “Missing,” which went on to define the club-spiked sound of the late-’90s and led to them declining an invitation to open for a U2 stadium tour. Its pessimistic lyrics spoke of alienation not just from other people, but from any sense of the past or the future. “And you say, ‘Think of the old days,’” Thorn sang on “The Future of the Future (Stay Gold),” the swirling house collaboration with Deep Dish that closed the album. “‘We could have them back again’/Well I thought about the old days/They’ll go bad like they did then.”
The band called it quits and dedicated themselves to home life, raising three kids. Watt founded the dance label Buzzin’ Fly and released solo music; Thorn also made albums and wrote several brilliant books on her life in music and its inspirations. While they offered each other practical creative assistance, their core collaboration was over. Curiously, it returned during another period of alienation. After the pair lived through an extreme version of the pandemic that required them to stringently self-isolate owing to Watt’s illness, Thorn proposed a reboot of EBTG, worried that they might one day realize they had left it too late. Once she persuaded Watt, they approached the project so tentatively that they hesitated to call it EBTG, crediting the song files to TREN—Tracey and Ben. They announced the finished album in similarly low-key fashion: “Just thought you’d like to know that Ben and I have made a new Everything But the Girl album,” Thorn tweeted. “It’ll be out next spring.” She went out for dinner and returned to thousands of retweets.
Considering the circumstances of its creation, it’s not surprising that Fuse is an album that craves connection. It’s as fearful as Temperamental, but harbors none of its cynicism. “Kiss me while the world decays,” Thorn sings on the dubstep-haunted opener “Nothing Left to Lose,” and no other voice could brim so affectingly with anguish and urgency. A deep, desperate bond with someone else, she stresses on “Forever,” might be the only bulwark against the “cruelty” and “scheming” of our mendacious times. The warmth of her vocals and the relative chilliness of the glitchy, cavernous production suggest the scope of the distance they need to breach. But unlike the year-zero mentality of its predecessor, Watt and Thorn also urge maintaining ties to the past, drawing on nostalgic vignettes from their clubbing days at the blissfully ignorant end of the ’90s, as well as the wisdom afforded them by the subsequent decades.
EBTG has never been burdened by its history; they’re more inclined to ditch it from album to album, jumping between bossa nova and lite jazz to jangly indie, rousing ’60s orchestrations, soul, and drum’n’bass. But on Fuse, the duo pick up at least in the spirit of where they left off, keeping their connection to contemporary club culture alive. While the stories of Croydon boys, “girls and night-off waiters” on “No One Knows We’re Dancing” hark back to a Sunday daytime club that Watt ran in 1999, its wistful euphoria and sense of starry-eyed sanctuary dovetail with today’s dancefloors. The serrated “Nothing Left to Lose” evokes “Katy on a Mission” for a corporate London now hollowed of promise; “Caution to the Wind” is an anxious but devotional sad banger with a chorus that feels as if it’s existed forever (European listeners, however, may be distracted by a synth refrain that sounds annoyingly like the announcement chime in Paris train stations); “Forever” is a gamelan-dappled Balearic sunset, albeit one viewed with a giant lump in the throat.
Although the tone can get a little one-note, this personal and cultural lineage deepens the poignancy of Fuse, in which Thorn and Watt broadly consider what we lose and hold on to over the course of a lifetime. There are the clear griefs—“Lost,” a resting heartbeat of a song that flares with glass-rim glimmer, touches on the death of Thorn’s mother, and with her the dissolution of a worldview—but also more existential ones, often conveyed by messing with the fabric of Thorn’s fabled voice. Buried deep in the backdrop of that song, she becomes a barely audible processed burble, a shadow self urging: “Stop hiding after all these years/That front you put on isn’t fooling anyone.” She considers other ways one’s sense of self might be stolen: The alien “Interior Space” seems to touch on going through menopause—“And no I don’t bleed/And yes I am freed/But what is that worth?/Are we all about birth?”—and Thorn’s voice is pitched to sound distorted, desiccated, masculine even. On “When You Mess Up,” a gorgeous, spare piano devotional, a lavishly tender Thorn urges someone to stop giving themselves such a hard time but not to make light of their pain. Then, her voice becomes robotic as she sings, “In a world of micro-aggressions/Little human transgressions/Forgive yourself,” embodying, perhaps, how dehumanizing contemporary discourse can be.
As with EBTG’s original pivot, the appeal of dance music is the vast amount of space it leaves for Thorn’s voice, an instrument that’s only grown more magnetic with age. If everything is already in tatters, rather than second-guess yourself, she dares us to take a chance: the lovers in “Run a Red Light,” elbowing their way into the in-crowd by possibly nefarious means, seem high on hubris, but Thorn sings it with such seduction that you understand why they’re chancing it. “Time and Time Again” chronicles a woman finally leaving a cheating ex and taking her chance with a lover (though the somewhat drab melody undersells it).
The album ends with “Karaoke,” a contemplation by famous non-performer Thorn on what it means to sing, to take a risk at connection. It’s a glowing slow dance with herself, a call and response between an angelic chorus asking whether she sings to “heal the brokenhearted” or “get the party started,” and Thorn’s fulsome responses: “Oh you know I do … And I love that too.” Perhaps that’s what EBTG’s perspective has afforded them—to recognize how easily we can get in the way of life’s moments of innocence. Like Fuse, they’re rare. | 2023-04-21T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-21T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Buzzin’ Fly | April 21, 2023 | 7.7 | 10b7d61c-df8c-48e8-9efd-1dd0f0c9aa5f | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The debut LP from singer Perera Elsewhere has the kind of breathy, sighing tone that complements trip-hoppy electronic music—the kind you'd expect to hear in the background at a public place. But laid naked on Everlast, the effect is beguiling and spooky. | The debut LP from singer Perera Elsewhere has the kind of breathy, sighing tone that complements trip-hoppy electronic music—the kind you'd expect to hear in the background at a public place. But laid naked on Everlast, the effect is beguiling and spooky. | Perera Elsewhere: Everlast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18618-perera-elsewhere-everlast/ | Everlast | LA label Friends Of Friends continues its crusade into Berlin with another signing, this time singer-songwriter Perera Elsewhere. She's easily the label's most surprising addition yet, though her smoky atmospherics are of the mood music variety preferred by many of the crew. A member of downtempo trio Jahcoozi (alongside producers Robot Koch and Oren Gerlitz), you might otherwise recognize her sultry tones from Modeselektor's "Silikon," back when she went by given name Sasha Perera. But on Everlast, her solo debut, she mostly abandons the smooth electronica of her past in favour of a gothic atmosphere that actually kind of sounds like it was recorded in a frigid castle, her vocals echoing through chambers of cold stone.
Perera has the kind of breathy, sighing tone that complements well-groomed, trip-hoppy electronic music—the kind you'd expect to hear in the background at a public place, unobtrusive and pleasing to the ear. But laid naked on Everlast, there's a spooky and beguiling quality to it. The album opens with the bluesy strum of "Drunk Man", where her vocals are appropriately slurred so you can just barely make out the words. Her quiet voice is accompanied by steady drums and a distinctly wooden thump of a bassline—earthy sounds with sanguine accents that feel like a deliberate reaction to the perfect production of her other work. It's not very often you hear of an expat in Berlin who tries so hard to sound acoustic.
Not that the production is an afterthought; every element is touched with some level of reverb and so neatly placed that you'll wonder which are judiciously-chosen samples, and which were actually played by hand. Hard-panned multitracking and other stereo spectrum tricks makes the Gonjasufi duet "Giddy" captivating in spite of its stupor, and pitch-shifting on "Shady" lends it an ethereal feel underpinned by implacable noises that sound like guitar strings being melted and stretched like taffy. She even plays off a ghostly, masculine version of herself on "Carousel," whose simple chorus echoes the bare desperation of Neil Young's Ditch Trilogy—it's amazing the amount of emotional mileage she can get out of merely repeating and enunciating a single word, especially when she's doing it over guitar chords that drip with anguish.
Indeed, as thoughtful as the production on Everlast might be, it's simplicity that's key. Album highlight "Dreamt That Dream" isn't much more than a few mantra-like phrases stuck together and rolled off Perera's tongue almost carelessly, but it proves intoxicating in the album's walk-in freezer of an echo chamber. It works the same magic on the heavy-handed political didactic (and first single) "Bizarre". Her lyrics ("money's running everything/ the same ten families that run the show/ friends with the president and friends with the Pope") amount to high-school-level social commentary, but set against a distant synth whine and decisive acoustic guitar, it's like a 60s protest song dressed up in modern clothes.
Most of all, Perera Elsewhere’s debut is a defiantly quiet record in a scene of maximalism; compare it to the oversaturated landscapes of her labelmates Shlohmo or Groundislava, or the rhythmic attack of Salva, and she's an obvious outlier. But not that much of an outlier; Friends Of Friends has always had a knack for finding artists whose sense of pathos borders on maudlin but usually end up on the right side of the divide. The same goes for Everlast, where even the most earnest moments, like the baroque "Light Bulb" or the self-consciously trippy "Bongoloid", become captivating thanks to her unforgettable voice and cultivated ethereality. It’s a short but penetrating record of far-away, foggy reveries that’ll burrow its way into your consciousness until it haunts you, one breath after another. | 2013-12-02T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2013-12-02T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Friends of Friends | December 2, 2013 | 7.8 | 10ba5137-c1fe-4f9e-9c5a-4819d1c8db46 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
Now expanded in a deluxe edition, the Memphis rapper’s blues-inflected third album keeps a tight focus while alluding to the painful loss of mentor Young Dolph. | Now expanded in a deluxe edition, the Memphis rapper’s blues-inflected third album keeps a tight focus while alluding to the painful loss of mentor Young Dolph. | Key Glock: Glockoma 2 (Deluxe) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/key-glock-glockoma-2-deluxe/ | Glockoma 2 (Deluxe) | With the tragic death of Young Dolph in 2021, the Memphis rapper Key Glock lost not only a close artistic collaborator, but a beloved family member and the single-most influential figure in his career. But instead of constructing a hagiography to his mentor, he has paid tribute by carrying on, a consummate workaholic who tunes out pain by clocking in. This year’s Glockoma 2, now expanded in a deluxe edition, maintains the laser-sharp focus of his previous Southern hustle music while showing a deepening sense of maturity and resolve. As usual, there are no bonus guests or radio-baiting remixes, just straight-up bars.
Glock’s self-reliance is squarely in the tradition of Memphis rap, a scene that has often worked on its own terms. But Glock embodies his hometown not just in business philosophy but in production. While producer Bandplay sticks to a classic Memphis underground sound, all bass kicks and thick claps, he uses samples that add new flair to Glock’s established style. There’s a vintage warmth to Glockoma 2 that recalls the city’s history as a vibrant Mecca of rhythm and blues, from the glistening strings on “2 for 1” or the bluesy guitar of “From Nothing.” Glock is frequently at his most nimble on these throwback numbers, like the turntablist-inflected “In & Outta Town,” which Bandplay constructs from the foundation of a beeping alarm.
Across the album, Glock’s tight flow draws you inward, like he’s rapping in stealth mode. He isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but there’s a sly wit to his imaginative bars, like when he compares the drip on his neck and wrist to the Nile River on “Ratchet.” You get the sense that Glock is protecting his heart, but gloom and pain lurk around every corner: “Still hanging with the reapers/Hanging with the demons,” as he says on “Sucker Free,” the opener to the deluxe edition. He lets ghostly samples articulate what he himself cannot: On “No Hook,” a pitch-shifted voice repeats the refrain “I hear voices,” a menacing counterpoint to Glock’s usual swagger. On tracks like “Let’s Go” and “Lean Habits,” Glock is backed up by chopped-up choirs, while distorted vocal flips lend a cloudy flavor to “Work” and “Fuck Dat Shit” that evokes Clams Casino beats.
On their Dum and Dummer tapes, Glock and Dolph made for effortless tag team partners; the void of voices on Glockoma 2, save for Glock’s own, only magnifies how unique their chemistry was. But Glock is more than capable of standing on his own; as he puts it bluntly on the closing track, which outlines his continued indifference to co-signs, “Fuck the rap game, just pay myself for a feature.” For Glock, that independence is a principle he inherited from his mentor, who bucked the majors with his Paper Route Empire label. By continuing to put his ideals into action, Glock keeps Dolph’s legacy alive. | 2023-07-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Paper Route Empire | July 3, 2023 | 7 | 10bbc7dc-e30b-404e-8ad4-6388334db636 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Early in their career, Modest Mouse accomplished what may be the ultimate goal of any band: to forge a... | Early in their career, Modest Mouse accomplished what may be the ultimate goal of any band: to forge a... | Modest Mouse: Good News for People Who Love Bad News | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5363-good-news-for-people-who-love-bad-news/ | Good News for People Who Love Bad News | Early in their career, Modest Mouse accomplished what may be the ultimate goal of any band: to forge a unique and recognizable sound from the most basic elements of rock music. By the time they'd released their second album, The Lonesome Crowded West, the band was working with a distinct but manipulable set of characteristic traits-- Isaac Brock's throaty, lisping vocals, Eric Judy's rolling, fluid basslines, and the rigid, muscular drumming of Jeremiah Green. 2000's The Moon & Antarctica crafted these traits into an epic studio masterpiece-- an ambitious, affecting, moody album that built upon the band's musical strengths rather than obfuscating them. But in the wake of that record, the band's future seemed dubious. Under the pressure of following their defining LP, the band lost their drummer and regained original guitarist Dan Gallucci, a substantial lineup shift that seemed to constitute a threat to the very core of Modest Mouse's characteristic sound.
In the wake of all this uncertainty, it comes as no small relief that Good News for People Who Love Bad News is just the kind of Modest Mouse record we've come to expect from the band. As suggested by the familiar starburst pattern on the CD, now stained a pharmaceutical pink, Good News is less a product of the ambitious experimentation of The Moon & Antarctica than it is the young, violent Modest Mouse on anti-depressants. Opener "The World at Large" is classic Modest Mouse in composition-- Isaac Brock singing a melody of thirds over subtle chord changes and clean, delay-soaked electric guitar. But the overall tone of the song is disarmingly anesthetic: The jabbing guitars and insistent drumming of early Modest Mouse are ostensibly absent, replaced with subtle e-bowed guitars and distant "bop bop bop's." Certainly, "The World at Large" is more resigned in tone and content than any Modest Mouse song to date, but what makes it truly striking is that its resignation never seems fully convincing -- the frantic anxiety of early Modest Mouse still lurks just below the surface.
"The World at Large" is followed by the first single from Good News, the awe-inspiring "Float On". Like The Moon & Antarctica's "Paper Thin Walls", this song seems fundamentally different from almost everything Modest Mouse has released to date. In the past, even the band's upbeat songs have essentially been sped-up dirges, due in no small part to former drummer Jeremiah Green's restless, serpentine drum patterns. On "Float On", new drummer Benjamin Weikel more than pulls his weight, his simple but inventive playing affording the song an anthemic character never before realized by the band. This anthemic side of "Float On" reaches its apex in the song's fist-pumping finale, as numerous voices join in to sing/speak the chorus.
Like every other Modest Mouse full-length, Good News remains tremendously strong for its first five or six tracks. "Ocean Breathes Salty" is slightly darker than "Float On", but remains uncharacteristically upbeat. Here, Weikel's drumming proves particularly indispensable, his tight, regular playing adding extra emphasis to the song's powerful dynamics changes. Lyrically, as with most resignation-themed albums by philosophically minded bands, Good News concerns itself largely with death and the afterlife. At times, Brock's lyrics threaten to approach cliché, but "Ocean Breathes Salty" redeems itself with its strong vocal melodies and convincing delivery. "Bury Me With It", the record's most blistering, forceful track, is an energetic high point, putting Brock's signature sing-screaming to great use.
With "Dance Hall", however, Good News begins to slip. Along with "The Devil's Workday" and a few others, the song comes across as half-hearted Tom Waits pastiche, overlooking all of the band's strengths and ultimately undermining the album's cohesiveness. It's a shame that so many of the album's darker tracks, which could have provided a poignant emotional counterpart to the more resigned and optimistic tone of the record as a whole, come across as so overdetermined and musically lacking.
Fortunately, Good News bounces back fast with the laidback, literate "Bukowski". Here, as with "The World at Large", Brock steps out of his well-cultivated gas station savant pose to prove that, yes, he can read. Indeed, Good News is a much more lyrically casual and upfront album than any past Modest Mouse record, substituting more conversational and direct observations for Brock's usual wide-eyed, poetic revelations. Similarly, songs like "Bukowski" are much more musically unassuming, relying upon simple but well-structured banjo figures and rhythmic vocal patterns.
The latter part of Good News is host to some remarkable moments, as well. "Blame It on the Tetons" splits the difference between "Bukowski" and "The World at Large", offering one of the album's most memorable melodies. On "Black Cadillacs", Modest Mouse wind up sounding uncannily like The Clash, Brock's chorus of "we were done, done, done with all the fuck, fuck, fucking around" echoed by angular stabs of guitar, bass, and drums.
Yet, for all its transcendent moments, Good News ultimately fails to hold together all that well as an album. The middle sections of The Moon & Antarctica, often criticized for being aimless and overproduced, worked tremendously well towards reinforcing the desolate, paranoid tone of the record as a whole. Indeed, The Moon & Antarctica was an album where moment-to-moment action was often, and wisely, sacrificed for album-unifying ambience. On Good News, however, the lulls are simply lulls.
Still, it's remarkable that, after four long full-lengths, an album's worth of singles, and a couple of EPs, Modest Mouse are still finding ways to invigorate their sound while retaining a sense of definiteness and sincerity. While Good News is neither a unilateral return to the scruffier Modest Mouse of yore, or an even more experimental expansion of The Moon & Antarctica, it is host to more than its share of great-- and, perhaps more importantly, distinctively great-- moments. In spite of a substantial line-up change and the daunting spectre of their previous full-length, Modest Mouse have issued yet another record that uniquely explores what the band does best; being Modest Mouse. | 2004-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epic | April 5, 2004 | 7.9 | 10bf90d9-bfa1-4253-87fc-0cc649ca9274 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
On Fiona Apple's first album in seven years, her sharp songwriting and vivid imagery have lost none of their power. | On Fiona Apple's first album in seven years, her sharp songwriting and vivid imagery have lost none of their power. | Fiona Apple: The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16732-the-idler-wheel-is-wiser-than-the-driver-of-the-screw-and-whipping-cords-will-serve-you-more-than-ropes-will-ever-do/ | The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do | In March, a 12-year-old letter Fiona Apple once wrote to a young gay fan named Bill surfaced online. "A person who loves is a righteous person," read the supportive note, "and if someone has the ability and desire to show love to another-- to someone willing to receive it, then for goodness' sake, let them do it." The message was warm, thoughtful, sincere. But its presentation was just as important. It was written-out by hand, on lined paper. And there were Apple's pen marks-- a distinctive blend of print and cursive-- legible yet casual, perfect in its imperfections. The letter provided an instant reminder of the singer-songwriter's lasting appeal, why she can take six or seven years between albums and return to even-more-rabid followers. Unguarded honesty doesn't go out of style.
This is especially true in 2012, when major artists can get so caught up in "brand management" and web-based "social engagement" that the core of their art-- emotion, intelligence, meaningful connectivity-- is sometimes lost amidst bottomless scrolls. Being able to slice through the bullshit is arguably more coveted now than when Apple did just that during her ferocious acceptance speech at the 1997 VMAs. Another famed modern truth-teller and award-show crasher (and noted Fiona fan), Kanye West, has been able to harness technology, the media, and his own public projection by constantly negotiating with all things fresh and new. Apple doesn't really care about all that. In interviews from both 2000 and 2012, she claimed to not listen to any new music whatsoever, and when she recently sat down with Carrie Battan for a Pitchfork interview, she referred to Google as "this whole Google thing," like an overwhelmed grandmother. On her entirely acoustic fourth album, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, the 34-year-old makes herself heard with her voice, her words, her piano, and not much else.
This is the most distilled Fiona Apple album yet. While her celebrated previous work was marked by eclectic musical flourishes courtesy of producers including Jon Brion and Mike Elizondo, The Idler Wheel is fearlessly austere in comparison. She worked with touring drummer Charley Drayton on the album, and his touches are light and incisive. Speaking of the record's signature clattering percussion-- including thigh slaps, truck stomps, and "pillow," according to the credits-- Apple associated the homemade sounds with an increased freedom: "I just like that feeling of: 'I'm in charge, I can do whatever I want.'" And this musique concrète approach is not random. Every single waveform is pierced with purpose, from the muted heartbeat thumping through "Valentine" to the childlike plinks popping around the uncharacteristically optimistic "Anything We Want" to the chugging factory sounds that give "Jonathan" its uneasy rhythm. On the oddly life-affirming "Werewolf", a banjo shows up, plucks exactly four notes, and then dips out, never to return. "You made an island of me," she belts on that song, and The Idler Wheel's spareness does lend it an insular loneliness, one that's divorced from the outside world while also being intimately in-tune with its basic realities. As Fiona's self-drawn album cover suggests, the inner workings of her mind can be scary, ugly, and head-splinteringly vivid.
"Werewolf" also features the album's most jarring and powerful found-sound moment: just as the self-conscious ballad climaxes, the roar of children screaming on a playground enters, adding an uncanny mix of dread and wistfulness. The fact that Apple was inspired to insert the yells by a classic-movie battle scene that was running when she first played the song only adds to the sample's ambiguity as well as its spontaneity. Much of the album involves Apple's constant struggle between naivety and cynicism; on opener "Every Single Night", she sings, "I just wanna feel everything" and "every single night's a fight with my brain." The saga can turn into lacerating theater, as on "Regret", which, with its mechanical beat and ominous, monk-like ambience, could nearly pass for a track on Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral. The song also features the most brutal hook of Apple's career: "I ran out of white doves' feathers to soak up the hot piss that comes from your mouth every time you address me," she bellows, tearing her throat apart in the name of pure vengeance. And while she's undoubtedly one of our foremost talents at the art of the kiss-off, the blame for Apple's woes is a bit more spread out now. "How can I ask anyone to love me," she offers, "when all I do is beg to be left alone."
"Left Alone" is nothing short of a vocal masterclass. It has the singer going from the verses' rap-like cadence to the hook's curlicue jazz stylings to the operatic long notes of the bridge-- notes that slowly curdle underneath their own exasperated weariness. This makes sense considering Apple is a child of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and hip-hop, a songwriter who's spiking the Great American Songbook with today's mirror-upon-mirror confessionalism. She's able to convey more with a quick, original turn of phrase-- "my woes are granular," for one-- or an in-the-moment scrunch of the face than many pop stars are able to muster with 100-foot screens and volcano pyrotechnics.
It's an old-school approach, though it rises well above mere sepia Instagrams. Instead of being far-off and dreamy, her throwback moves are the opposite-- intrusive, corporeal. This is not background music. It demands attention. "Look at! Look at! Look at! Look at me!" she pleads on "Daredevil", a knowing admission of her self-destructive tendencies. But even after being thrown into the media spotlight at a young age, and having to deal with crippling doubt, Fiona Apple didn't go boom. She's still here, brave enough to indulge in raw emotion and smart enough to make those feelings carry. | 2012-06-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-06-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epic | June 18, 2012 | 9 | 10bfa1c2-0668-4550-9893-660328a48687 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The Chicago band grapples with impermanence and loss on their memorable indie rock debut. | The Chicago band grapples with impermanence and loss on their memorable indie rock debut. | Cusp: You Can Do It All | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cusp-you-can-do-it-all/ | You Can Do It All | For a while, any band with a Big Muff pedal and a tower of stacked Marshalls was stamped as a Dinosaur Jr. understudy, and some of them courted the comparison firsthand. But lately, the tides have shifted. A new generation of musicians are idolizing Steve Hartlett over J Mascis, naming Connecticut fuzz-rockers Ovlov as their inspiration for noisy rock with a melodic underbelly. “Ovlov is the band that made me want to BE a band,” Chicago group Cusp once tweeted; their live sets make that obvious.
On their debut full-length You Can Do It All, Cusp tap into the same attributes that make Ovlov so beloved: deafening riffs that turn into singalong earworms, weighty power chords that feel like thick wool, an opening lick that you never get tired of hearing. Singer Jen Bender and guitarist Gaelen Bates both share strumming duties while bassist Matt Manes anchors the deep end, resulting in lush, dizzying tracks like “Win” or “Limited Edition” that dip into the warm tones of shoegaze.
But You Can Do It All isn’t straightforward fuzz idolization. Cusp pull their indie rock in weirder directions, reveling in intentional subversion: minor-key solos instead of major-key niceties, bridges that opt for unconventional chord progressions. Bender puts a conversational twist on her pop vocals, as seen in the lilting, sugary vocal slides of “Dead Things Talk” and the punchy power-pop harmonies of “Inside Out.” You’d be forgiven for thinking Speedy Ortiz came on shuffle. Despite having moved to the Windy City only a year ago, Cusp are already a snug fit in Chicago’s music scene, resting between the unpredictable thrashing of Melkbelly and the nimble dexterity of Floatie, the local art freaks of their respective subgenres.
Though Cusp are the band at the house show that has you digging into your pockets to fish for earplugs, their most striking songs on You Can Do It All are unexpectedly quiet confessionals. The album grapples with impermanence and loss; Bender expresses her alienation through simple phrasing. On “You Can’t Do It All,” a wash of guitar and bass bleeds into white noise as she emphasizes the paralyzing feeling of having not accomplished enough: “You can do anything you want, but you can’t do it all,” she repeats numbly. On the album opener, Bender whispers “it will never be okay” during a midnight breakdown while viola and an electric guitar riff creep beneath her. Despite the song’s brevity, it highlights Bender’s skill at conveying the world’s coldness and unpredictability.
Ultimately, it’s the unassuming “It’s Not My Job” that steals the show. Bender addresses an old relationship, wishing to shield a loved one from all harm: “I thought of your parents looking to me/We’re all here to help you/We’re all on your team.” But as the song progresses, she works past the guilt of setting boundaries: “It’s someone’s job, but it’s not mine.” Her guitar rolls through dreamy keyboard notes while Terrin Munawet’s steady, minimalist drumming keeps her grounded. It’s this bittersweetness, this balance of discord and pleasantry, that makes You Can Do It All a memorable first impression. | 2023-05-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | May 15, 2023 | 7.3 | 10c07982-2673-4aea-bcc3-97a38eec54c3 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
The 40-song label compilation from Argentina’s AGVA Records is a prismatic and circuitous immersion into the sounds and aesthetics circulating across Latin America. | The 40-song label compilation from Argentina’s AGVA Records is a prismatic and circuitous immersion into the sounds and aesthetics circulating across Latin America. | Various Artists: ARENA02 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-arena02/ | ARENA02 | It would be too easy to approach ARENA002, the latest release from Argentina’s AGVA Records, as a primer on Latin American club music. Since 2015, the Buenos Aires netlabel has helped nurture a community of experimental producers and created a home for porteño club kids through their recurring party series and radio show. Their first compilation, a 12-track album released in 2016, introduced the world to some of their early dance floor machinations. But ARENA002 eclipses the ambition of its predecessor with 40 songs from producers, beatmakers, and vocalists from the landscape of Latin American club music, as well as a handful of international collaborators.
Rather than attempting to capture or “represent” all of the region’s talent in one release, ARENA002 is a prismatic and circuitous immersion into the sounds and aesthetics circulating across Latin America, resisting simple categorization. The compilation functions more like a celebration of the networks of exchange and affirmation that AGVA has built, embracing an unbounded sense of possibility and drawing on the collective memory of folkloric and popular sounds to remind us Latin American music is not bound to a single experience, aesthetic, or trajectory.
Parzubanil and Kotrina’s “Liquid” is a prime example of this desire to disrupt fixed narratives. The track is a percussive collage: it blends aquatic droplets, ribbit-like synth stabs, and baile funk moans, layering them over drum loops, horns, and jungle breaks. The result is a hauntological continuum: Parzubanil submerges echoes of Latin American percussive traditions underwater, decaying and transforming them for the dance floor.
Ozomatecuhtli’s “Teotihuacanos” announces itself as ancestral homage and is perhaps the most direct example of folkloric tribute on the compilation. Its title, a reference to the inhabitants of the Mesoamerican metropolis of the pre-Columbian era, almost immediately evokes a sense of communion: rain sticks and pan flutes slither in the distance, and tendrils of Mexican tribal folk percussion bloom into a spectral house bassline. It’s more than a portal into the past—it’s a reminder that Indigenous musical traditions are still woven into the present.
More than anything, the producers on ARENA002 relish the joy of the dance floor. “Cuchillo y Sal,” a standout track from Peruvian producer Orieta Chrem, is propelled by culinary ephemera; samples of sharpened knives, running sink water, and salt and pepper grinders mutate into dembow riddims, gabber-style kicks, and sinister grunts and roars. Elsewhere, SAPPHIR22’s “Brujonaso” opens with a brash dance floor command: “Rompete ha’ta bajo, que e’tamos llegando” (“Break it down low, we’re coming”). A gun cocks, a maniacal voice cackles, and SAPPHIR22 unleashes a torrent of drum loops and sirens into a rave reggaeton vortex, as pitched-down echoes of Hector El Father’s classic “Noche de Travesura” float over the production. Imagine the blood rave scene from Blade, but with more perreo.
ARENA002 succeeds as a massive club pack, rather than as a traditional compilation meant to be enjoyed from start to finish. The release focuses primarily on producers from South America rather than the Caribbean or Central America, so consider it a partial introduction to some of the region’s sounds. Some tracks, like YOTO’s “Zaramostra,” revel so deeply in experimentation that they renounce any sense of compositional structure; it’s the kind of material that demands to be experienced live, rather than through headphones.
Still, ARENA002 is an impressive offering. It asks us to embrace a radical, open relation to South America’s folkloric, popular, and left-field sounds—to take club music from the region seriously, to challenge the limitations that European and U.S. perspectives have imposed on experimental music from Latin America. ARENA002 raises a middle finger to convention and expectation, and instead embraces the promise and freedom of abstraction.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Agva | April 8, 2021 | 7.5 | 10c4161d-fef8-4f8c-be92-3d1a8ee5ca83 | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
Terrifying and thrilling in equal measure, the debut album from the Oklahoma City sludge-metal band is a vivid rendering of the towering piles of poison littering America’s psychic landscape. | Terrifying and thrilling in equal measure, the debut album from the Oklahoma City sludge-metal band is a vivid rendering of the towering piles of poison littering America’s psychic landscape. | Chat Pile: God’s Country | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chat-pile-gods-country/ | God’s Country | In World War I, fully half of America’s ammunition came from lead mined by the workers of Picher, Oklahoma. After generations of deindustrialization, Picher was abandoned in 2009, and despite a decades-long federal cleanup effort, it remains a ghost town strewn with mountains of toxic mine tailings—200-foot-high heaps of contaminated gravel known as chat piles. These poisoned mounds make a fitting metaphor for the Oklahoma City sludge-metal group. A gut-churning amalgam of molten guitars, pile-driving drums, and agonized howls, Chat Pile’s sound is as ugly as their inspiration—a terrifying embodiment of cancerous shit brought to the surface that should’ve been left buried deep below.
The quartet of singer Raygun Busch, guitarist Luther Manhole, bassist Stin, and drummer Captain Ron, Chat Pile have only been around since 2019, but they are inheritors of a musical lineage that goes back decades. On their first two EPs, the self-released This Dungeon Earth and Remove Your Skin Please, they did little to disguise their influences. The oily bass and guitar echoed the classic sludge of groups like Eyehategod, Karp, and Floor. The boomy blast of reverbed electronic drums flashed back to Big Black and Godflesh. Busch’s unhinged yowls immediately brought to mind the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow, while the mechanical brutality of the rhythm section evoked fellow former Amphetamine Reptile signees Helmet. At the margins, atonal spillover from arty groups like Unwound mingled with the lingering influence of drop-tuned nu-metal wizards Korn, obliterating hardcore’s conventional hierarchies of taste.
Chat Pile’s debut album makes no radical changes to that mixture; it just sounds bigger, uglier, and scarier. Once again handling production duties themselves, they’ve beefed up the music’s proportions, finding new depths in a mixdown that churns like a swollen river thickened with flood debris. Beginning with a halting progression of drum fills before exploding into Busch’s larynx-shredding shriek, the opening “Slaughterhouse” underscores just how forbidding their sound has gotten. The bass is tuned so low that its tones no longer register as actual notes—more like dark, gelatinous stains spreading across the low end. The guitar stabs and slashes, carving out dissonant yet hypnotic riffs that are catchy in spite of themselves. And the merciless snares and toms, driven home like a cattle pistol to the head, are the perfect complement to a song about abattoirs.
Despite the record’s imposing dimensions, Chat Pile pair heaviness with restraint. There are no solos and few double-time passages. Digging into their riffs with the tenacity of a dog worrying a bone, they stick to a methodical, mid-tempo pace—the determined gait of a contract killer on deadline. An innate sense of contrast amplifies the music’s force. Showing utmost respect for empty space, they know precisely when to pull back—to emphasize the cracked edge of Busch’s voice, or leave room for a silvery tendril of guitar—and when to flood the zone with pure, cleansing fire.
Even as an instrumental trio, Chat Pile would absolutely slay. But Busch tips them into true greatness. He’s got it all: presence, personality, and the storytelling abilities of a seasoned horror director. Start with his arresting voice, which might mimic the authoritative bark of a cop with a grudge or the withered mewl of a basement-dwelling troll, eliciting not just discomfort but something approaching physical disgust. When he screams, which is often, it’s not just figuratively blood-curdling, it sounds literally curdled, like little globs of matter were detaching from the walls of his throat, gumming up the vowels as they tumbled out. When he expresses vulnerability, he has a tremulous, sputtering tone somewhere between Bobcat Goldthwait and Barney Gumble on a three-day bender; it’s the sound of a man unraveling from inside.
While there are topical themes in their music—“Slaughterhouse” exposes the brutality of industrialized meat production, and “Why” is a desperate plea of sympathy for the unhoused—Chat Pile aren’t so much a political band as they are dystopian impressionists. “More than anything, we’re trying to capture the anxiety and fear of seeing the world fall apart,” says Stin. True to form, in song after song, Busch displays the awful magnetism of a street-corner ranter in a sandwich board. His subject matter can be chilling: In “Anywhere,” a gunshot rips through a moment of tranquility, leaving blood on the narrator’s face, brains on his shoes; in “Pamela,” a man seems to confess to drowning his son to get back at his wife. (At least, that’s one possible interpretation, in light of Remove Your Skin Please’s horrifying song about filicide, “Dallas Beltway.”) Seething like one of Henry Rollins’ angriest missives, “Tropical Beaches, Inc.” might be a businessman’s explosion of self-loathing. But the exact outlines of the songs’ narratives are rarely clear. Both captivated and repelled by Busch’s antiheroes, our sympathies drift uneasily across the rutted surface of the music, trying and failing to find a solid moral purchase.
What’s scariest is the path these songs travel as they devolve from garden-variety societal ills into a kind of free-associative chaos. “Wicked Puppet Dance” starts out like a cautionary tale about intravenous drugs, but by the second verse the paranoid narrator is meting out murder and arson, while the inscrutable chorus simply reels off a list of charged monosyllables, insistent as Nitzer Ebb and dripping with portent: “God’s/Eyes/Taste/Lips/Red/Phos/Death/Cum.” Likewise, “The Mask” begins as a short story told from the perspective of an armed robber, yet by the end, his howls are an inventory of “broken faces…/And jamming fingers/And goddamn dust in my eyes for the rest of my life,” a litany unintelligible to anyone not living in his own tortured mind. Even the closing “Grimace_Smoking_Weed.jpeg”—a nine-minute juggernaut about a guy so high he hallucinates the McDonald’s mascot in his bedroom—isn’t quite the lighthearted cannabis gag it might seem to be; deep down, it’s a harrowing existential nightmare, like a stoner-metal update of Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized,” toxic metals pooling at the bottom of his Pepsi.
Songwriting from the villain’s perspective is nothing new—see hardcore, see country, see narcocorridos. To Chat Pile’s credit, even their most unsettling songs never feel exploitative. As slippery as their songwriting can be, there is no doubting the band’s ethical compass. The question at the heart of “Why” (“Why do people have to live outside?”) is an unequivocal indictment of a system that relegates people to homelessness. The refrain of the dirge-like “Anywhere” (“It’s the sound of a fuckin’ gun/It’s the sound of your world collapsing”) ought to be looped at punishing volume outside NRA headquarters. Still, the question remains: Why would anyone want to listen to someone singing from the perspective of a child killer? Perhaps for the simplest of reasons: Because they are there. Chat Pile aren’t asking us to relate to these depraved characters, they are showing them to us because they are symptoms of a deeper rot. | 2022-07-29T00:04:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-29T00:04:00.000-04:00 | Rock | The Flenser | July 29, 2022 | 8.4 | 10c43290-caac-4c7e-b827-97f716eeb9d2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Much like his rhymes, Aesop Rock’s score for the action thriller Bushwick is packed with captivating detail; it’s an excellent fit for the film’s unrelenting intensity. | Much like his rhymes, Aesop Rock’s score for the action thriller Bushwick is packed with captivating detail; it’s an excellent fit for the film’s unrelenting intensity. | Aesop Rock: Bushwick (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aesop-rock-bushwick-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Bushwick (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Known for his gruff voice and labyrinthine rhymes, Aesop Rock is easy to listen to but hard to rap along with. He weaves dense, captivating songs that beg for engaged parsing. He’s never stopped experimenting with his voice, which means that his production has often been overshadowed by his lyrics and his delivery. But in late 2015 a pair of filmmakers saw something in Aesop Rock’s beat-making and tasked him with scoring the action thriller Bushwick. His skill set turns out to be an excellent fit for the rapid-fire intensity of their film.
Spanning just a few hours and several blocks of embattled Bushwick, the film imagines civil war breaking out in Brooklyn. Rather than dystopian world-building, the filmmakers invest mainly in the immediacy of unrelenting violence, stringing together a series of exhausting, hyperlocal tracking shots. The gunfire is addling and constant, and Aesop Rock’s score is appropriately tense. “Corner Store” casts the opening fly-over scene of an apparently normally bustling Bushwick in an anxious light, with a sinister synth buzzing over plunked keys. Many tracks precipitate or accommodate the bewildering sounds of inner-city combat: incessant helicopters, unexpected silences, explosions that sound sharp when nearby and dull when far away. As an accompaniment to the film, the score accomplishes its assigned mood-setting role and even assists some sporadic character development. The eerie calm of “Mashed Potatoes” cuts against the energy of a revelatory fight scene to underscore a protagonist’s unusual poise under fire. But the isolated score also demands attention. The tracks come alive on their own; they sound, if anything, even more unsettling when left with room for the imagination to flesh them out.
Aesop Rock’s Bushwick score reflects the movie’s pace, going from uneasy (“Mashed Potatoes”) to frenetic and confrontational (“Ogres” and “Sharks and Minnows”). “Raiders” is a propulsive anthem on the prowl—less ducking for cover than rallying for the attack. “New Yule” is more sinister but less sure of itself, with fidgety synths that frantically drill for open space. Here and elsewhere, the score’s short tracks often feature glitchy mood-building before a prettier theme soars from the mix.
Most tracks are built from vibrating synths and rattling percussion—clanking, artificial sounds that erupt sporadically and burn slowly. Lonely, modulating synth leads function as interludes, buzzing like a disquieting electrical hum. It all makes a strategic backdrop for the movie’s shaky combat scenes, but many of these sounds were already in Aesop Rock’s arsenal. A number of tracks sound like meandering, toned-down siblings of the beats he designed for himself on his last album, The Impossible Kid. Shorn of vocals or DJ scratching, they amount to a kind of gritty, industrial-sounding trip-hop.
There are a few moments in the movie when the score slips directly into the scene instead of lying over it. When the protagonist visits her stoned and oblivious sister, “Chesterfield” thumps muddily through the wall from the apartment next door; here, on its own, the song’s lead synthesizers twinkle over a crisply defined beat, with a world of detail opening up in the empty spaces. Just like the artist raps, Bushwick is both busy and precise, commanding full attention. That his production blends in so well with the film is an accomplishment. Better yet that it holds up so well on its own. As always, Aesop Rock’s music flourishes under scrutiny. | 2017-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Lakeshore | August 14, 2017 | 7.3 | 10ca3024-6dc1-4ed5-ae7a-7183aaead58e | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
The anonymous Brooklyn rapper’s third album is a little bolder and a little rawer, but it’s her versatility—across hip-hop, ballroom, house, and R&B—that keeps her sound fresh. | The anonymous Brooklyn rapper’s third album is a little bolder and a little rawer, but it’s her versatility—across hip-hop, ballroom, house, and R&B—that keeps her sound fresh. | Leikeli47: Shape Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leikeli47-shape-up/ | Shape Up | Leikeli47 may wear a mask, but she has a stronger sense of identity than many rappers who plaster their faces wherever they can find space. She’s a child of hip-hop and ballroom culture whose reference pool includes rap icons like JAY-Z and Lauryn Hill, and fashion icons like America’s Next Top Model coach J. Alexander; she lets her music speak for itself, but infuses it with just enough biographical detail to stand out. As a Black woman living in Brooklyn, Leikeli’s brand of anonymity grants her music a personal and communal confidence that extends across her three studio albums, all named after Black beauty treatments: 2017’s Wash & Set, 2018’s Acrylic, and her latest project, Shape Up.
Structurally, Shape Up isn’t far removed from the rhythm of Acrylic. Both albums revolve around pulsing beats that owe as much to ballroom and techno as they do hip-hop, and both eventually pivot to sultry ballads and love songs. The key difference between the two is the lack of a narrative throughline—unlike Acrylic, Shape Up has no skits or world-building exercises. Like any good sequel, the new album amplifies what worked before, streamlining an established formula without tampering too much. Leikeli’s braggadocio is slightly bolder, the intimacy of her stories slightly deeper. She opens the second verse of “Secret Service” with a raucous scene of her and some friends bumping JAY-Z songs while driving a van along the Potomac River, and you can feel the subwoofer rattling the chassis. Moments like these mark Shape Up as another peek behind her personal curtain, but it’s also a fiercely entertaining rap album in its own right.
Leikeli’s versatility goes a long way toward keeping her sound fresh. In her default mode, she mixes plucky punchline raps and gimme-what’s-mine boasts told with painterly detail. On “New Money,” she leads with a brutal shot at an ex (“My ex called me trying to talk again/But I don’t negotiate with terrorists”) and describes the Nike socks scrunched up in her Jimmy Choos before ending with a sweetly sung coda that recalls the opening melody of Beyoncé’s “Formation”: “I want every single quarter, penny, nickel, and dime/You ain’t gotta mail my check nigga; I’m outside.” “New Money” collapses all of her talents to dizzying effect, but they’re equally interesting when they manifest independently in the flows of the punchy autobiography that morphs into an action-packed stomp-out on “Zoom”; in details like the “assalaamu alaykom” that precedes a whirlwind romance with a partner on “LL Cool J” (short for “Ladies Love Cool Jewelry”); in the zig-zagging delivery of the ballroom scene she conjures on “Jay Walk.” Leikeli’s words are transportive, her sense of place amplifying the hectic production.
The scene-setting is just as captivating when she transitions away from pure rapping. Leikeli loves a jarring mid-album switch, almost as if she’s flicking your ear to ensure you’re paying attention. On Shape Up that’s a three-song stretch where she tells a failed love story over Temptations-style doo-wop (“Free to Love”), preaches pro-Black affirmations over a strobing house beat (“BITM”), and delivers a simmering R&B bedroom slow jam (“Baseball”). It’s a rollercoaster of tempo and mood changes, one that highlights the emotional and musical complexity of Black womanhood in blunter terms compared to the conceptual framework of Wash & Set and Acrylic. The candid romantic frustration and eventual clarity of “Free to Love,” in particular, give its story an equally personal and universal appeal.
Concept or no concept, Leikeli47 takes pride in using familiar elements of hip-hop, house, and R&B to continually remix her story. Her songs fuse stark confidence and raw vulnerability, unconcerned with how they scrape up against each other. Leikeli hasn’t strayed far from her musical comfort zone over the last five years, and Shape Up doesn’t attempt to fix what isn’t broken. But the control she exerts over her story ensures that every new album feels like an introduction. | 2022-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Hardcover / RCA | May 17, 2022 | 8 | 10cd701a-8998-49a7-843e-20c36fc4e9ee | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The Nigerian superstar’s latest LP can feel heavy under the weight of his personal reflection and Pan-African crusade. It is a load worth carrying. | The Nigerian superstar’s latest LP can feel heavy under the weight of his personal reflection and Pan-African crusade. It is a load worth carrying. | Burna Boy: Twice as Tall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/burna-boy-twice-as-tall/ | Twice as Tall | As a child, like many children, Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu was fascinated by superhero comics. He wanted to be his own superhero, so he named himself Burna Boy, a moniker that has followed him into a career as one of the defining musical acts of today’s African diaspora. Last November, after his fourth studio album African Giant permeated the summer from Abuja to Brooklyn, he sold out London’s Wembley Arena. Now, just a year after African Giant, Burna returns with Twice as Tall, and with it, a more resonant origin story—one that explains his ascent from 2018’s breakthrough single “Ye.” In an accompanying motion comic, the Yoruba deity Orunmila chooses Burna to embody his “secret flame.” With it, Burna is challenged to restore the gods’ faith in humanity. He meets these Black gods again, in 2020, his mission completed through his resounding success. “You make music passionately, like you are waging a war,” one tells him, proudly.
Twice as Tall is Burna’s battle cry. Compared to 2018’s jovial Outside and last year’s sunnily conscious African Giant, Twice as Tall can feel heavy under the weight of Burna’s personal reflection and Pan-African crusade. His newly moody Afro-fusion—a mix of afrobeat, reggae, dancehall, hip-hop, EDM, and more—amplifies his passion. Twice as Tall could’ve aimed to crystalize Burna’s position as a global Afropop star with easier, feel-good hits. Instead, he turns starkly inward, assuring himself of his power, and outward, reminding the world of its failures and its potential. It is a load worth carrying.
Burna Boy lost the 2020 Grammy for Best World Music Album to celebrated Beninese singer Angélique Kidjo, an idol and collaborator. Despite his reverence for her, the loss sickened him, as he recounts on album opener “Level Up.” As Burna—whose humility here is admirable—lists times that he’s felt small, he initiates the familiar, satisfying arc of the hero’s journey. Over Anderson .Paak’s menacing drums on “Alarm Clock,” Burna issues a warning in light Pidgin English: You’ll discover that I’m really unstoppable. The somber synths of “Way Too Big” sound like a hike up Mount Olympus. Twice as Tall is marked by Burna’s pride in his hustle, his confidence in his path, and his faith that he is favored by the divine. It’s littered with pleas to God, rebukes of the Devil, and prayers that his trek to victory will be uninterrupted. As the album ends, he and UK rapper and singer Stormzy offer a peaceful, self-assured balm with “Real Life,” before Burna settles into the might and limits of being merely human on “Bank on It.”
While Burna uses the album opener to meditate on his own capacity for greatness, he reveals grander ambitions than riches and relaxation, or even personal fulfillment. He’s on a mission to fold in all corners of the diaspora, bridging colonial ruptures to illuminate a common struggle. When the album was nearly complete, Burna enlisted Diddy as an executive producer, alongside himself and his mother, Bosede Ogulu. Diddy supplies his experience as an American music mogul and adds narration that neatly stitches tracks together. “We from the same tribe. It’s Black love,” he says at the top of “Alarm Clock.” On “Monsters You Made,” Burna rages about structural violence and the ways it breeds interpersonal harm, as well as protest. He pulls at the thread that connects all oppressive regimes, from the post-war Nigeria that radicalized his hero Fela Kuti to the modern United States. With a hook from Coldplay’s Chris Martin and bombastic production that evokes an Imagine Dragons single, the song smuggles one of Burna’s most radical political messages into a record that could top the modern rock charts.
The pensive tone of Twice as Tall may throw off fans of Burna’s more danceable tracks, but “Wonderful,” “Onyeka (Baby),” “Naughty by Nature,” and “Comma” offer reprieve from the album’s focus and fury, bringing the levity to an impressive mid-album stretch. Here, Burna indulges. Sure, “Onyeka” is inspired by Nigerian diva and activist Onyeka Onwenu, who hosted a striking BBC documentary about government corruption in Nigeria and was subsequently banned from seven of the country’s 36 states—but it’s really just a scampish love song. On “Naughty by Nature,” he enlists the titular rap trio, whose 1993 hit “Hip Hop Hooray” was the first song he learned word-for-word. “Comma” is the party anthem, akin to African Giant’s “Killin Dem,” and Burna has the time of his life making light of sticky situations and women’s cosmetic procedures.
In an archival interview featured in Alex Gibney’s documentary on Fela Kuti, the Afrobeat trailblazer says, “As far as Africa is concerned, music cannot be for enjoyment, music has to be for revolution.” Of course, Kuti’s music was widely enjoyed, but it was also complex and challenging. On his latest LP, Burna Boy leans into this aspect of the icon’s mythos. Twice as Tall advances Burna’s political vision, and is frankly less fun than the two recent projects that catapulted him to superstardom. But the world is less fun than it was a year ago, too. Society could use a hero, a godsend. Pairing rhythms that possess the hips with encouraging calls for Black unity and an infectious sense of self-reliance, Twice as Tall is Herculean.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | August 19, 2020 | 8 | 10ce351a-588c-41ee-bdb2-1d526876cd6f | Mankaprr Conteh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mankaprr-conteh/ | |
After years of waiting and mounting hype, Jay Electronica’s fantastic debut is a mystical, distinctive work that nearly lives up to all the lore surrounding the rapper. | After years of waiting and mounting hype, Jay Electronica’s fantastic debut is a mystical, distinctive work that nearly lives up to all the lore surrounding the rapper. | Jay Electronica: A Written Testimony | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jay-electronica-a-written-testimony/ | A Written Testimony | The myth of Jay Electronica has long outweighed the music—in part because there was so little of it. He’s been: touched by Erykah Badu juju; cozy with a Rothschild; a Nas ghostwriter. He got a thousand beats from J Dilla, was anointed by JAY-Z, and was the last man left standing after Kendrick Lamar put the rap world on notice during “Control.” He is a homeless drifter turned enigmatic spiritual guru who accepted a co-sign from notorious Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, met super-Christian Chance the Rapper halfway on Coloring Book’s “How Great,” and worshipped at Hindu and Buddhist temples in Nepal during personal pilgrimages. But he’s only officially put out one mixtape, two singles, and a handful of other songs since 2007, occasionally appearing out of thin air to guest on songs seemingly at random.
And so with time, the myth grew. What was real and what was fiction began to blur, and what was real mattered less than what was interesting. The ghostwriting claims were disputed, he has never released a song with an original Dilla beat, and many count him as a footnote left in Kendrick’s wake, but he did actually end up between two of the wealthiest families in England. The selection of songs Jay Electronica has released over his career has drawn from all of this, only he’s put out as many of them in 13 years as some prolific rappers put out in a few months. The wait for his debut album has been so long that it became more of an ancient prophecy than a movable release date.
But the album, A Written Testimony, has finally materialized. It is a mystical, distinctive work that nearly lives up to all the lore surrounding the rapper. First and foremost, it is a prayerful offering that expresses the many spiritual and communal virtues he has internalized. But it’s also a record about the scrutiny of an insatiable public, one that leans on higher powers amid self-doubt. In just under 40 minutes, Jay Electronica erects monuments to Allah, NOI founder Elijah Muhammad, and Roc Nation overseer JAY-Z, who is at his side for nearly the entire album serving as sergeant-at-arms. “From a hard place and a rock to the Roc Nation of Islam/I emerged on the wave that Tidal made to drop bombs,” he raps on “Ghost of Soulja Slim.” From this well of deep faith, he summons rap performances that seem to defy space-time.
Like Dr. Dre scrapped the expectation-bogged Detox for Compton, Jay Elec (mostly) starts fresh here. An album called Act II: Patients Of Nobility (The Turn) had been in the offing since 2010, but a sequel three presidential terms in the making carries too much baggage. After waiting more than a decade for an album that will likely never come, fans instead received a brand new album only a few months after its announcement, one made in “40 days and 40 nights”—a period of great biblical significance (Jesus fasted, Moses waited on Mount Sinai for God’s law, Elijah fled in the wilderness). With the exception of “Shiny Suit Theory,” these are new songs, or, at least, previously unreleased ones. Whether the raps are from scribbled verses stashed away in Moleskines since the late 2000s or produced during the 40-day period of inspiration, the album sounds current because Jay Electronica’s rapping is immediate and immutable.
A Written Testimony is largely defined by the space between every note and word. These beats have a subtle grandeur to them that suits the gravitas with which Jay Elec performs. He produced most of the album himself, but the Alchemist and No I.D. follow his lead with gorgeous, unadorned flips. The music of “A.P.I.D.T.A.” is so untouched that the sampled band, Khruangbin, is credited as the producer. The beats on “Ghost of Soulja Slim” and “Ezekiel’s Wheel” affix understated drum kits to fuzzy, lo-fi samples that sound culled directly from TCM standards. Even “The Blinding,” which is split between booming Swizz Beatz and AraabMuzik chant music and elegant Hit-Boy dinner party rap, finds its way onto this tapestry. The unobtrusive but marvelous production allows Jay Electronica to be heard with the greatest clarity; he enunciates each syllable as if etching it into stone. These are his 10 hotep commandments.
Rap is no stranger to Five-Percenter rhetoric. It has touched artists from Wu-Tang Clan to Common, but Jay Electronica is curiously the rapper closest to the Nation of Islam and also the most cagey about his ideology. Through the NOI, as a young man, he found black power and unity, self-sufficiency and self-improvement. The teachings are his backbone and he uses them to lock horns with the devil. On “The Neverending Story,” he turns his origin story into a fable in which religious conviction saved him from destitution and hopelessness. Whether you take his faith at face value, the way he raps about it is mathematical—creating this impressive symmetry out of his life where there seemingly wasn’t any before. He weighs each word carefully and weaves in his own arcane theology. He is focused, convincing, and on message, even if that message is taking Biggie from Rap Mecca to actual Mecca, as Jay Elec flips a line from “Juicy” into one of the Five Pillars: “Remember Rappin’ Duke? Duh-ha, duh-ha/You never thought we’d make it to Lā ilāha illā Allah.”
It’s tempting to frame Jay Elec strictly as a mystic trying to fully unlock his chakras—and it’s hard not to when he’s rapping about the return of the Annunaki, calculating azimuths, or dragging his cross to Nazareth while wearing his crown of thorns—but he balances his mysticism with the down-to-earth perceptiveness of someone who has wandered the globe seeking refuge from sin. For all the time he spends consulting the universe in search of absolute truth, he spends just as much lingering in the traumas of the human condition. “I spent many nights bent off Woodford/Clutchin’ the bowl, stuffin’ my nose/Some of the cons I suffered for prose,” he raps on “Universal Soldier.” He mourns Flint, ICE breaking up families, and mortars striking Palestinians. His poignant verse on “A.P.I.D.T.A.” wrestles with the unceasing pain of experiencing death, even when you find comfort in the existence of the hereafter. The grandiosity is his sales pitch, but the real selling point is the empathy within.
He is supported at nearly every turn by career-redefining performances from rap’s greatest careerist, his billionaire boss JAY-Z. Rappers tend to fall off the cliff at 50, not just losing touch with the culture but losing their grasp of swing, like an aging athlete succumbing to arthritic joints. Hov has been turning back the clock for a while now, but he does something far more impressive here than 4:44’s personal accounting: He contorts into whatever shape is required of him by his host. During his last real foray into tag-team rapping, 2011’s Watch the Throne, JAY-Z was a step slower than his protege Kanye, a disparity largely exposed by his own eagerness to dictate the pace. On A Written Testimony, the God MC seems to simply be ordaining another. JAY clearly loves rapping with Jay Elec. These circumstances give him the chance to set his competitiveness aside and become the conscious technician he always dreamed of being. “My ancestors took old food, made soul food/Jim Crow’s a troll too, he stole the soul music/That’s the blood that goes through me, so you assumin’/I could never sell my soul, they sold they soul to me,” he raps right out of the gate on “Ghost of Soulja Slim.” JAY-Z, who is pretty familiar with the movement, is reanimated by purpose here.
Together, the two Jays exchange epic pyramid raps, settling into a rhythm that would make Raekwon and Ghostface proud. On “Shiny Suit Theory,” JAY-Z raps, “In the world of no justice and black ladies on the back of buses/I’m the immaculate conception of rappers-slash-hustlers,” and that thread of divine providence as the key to overcoming black struggle continues here. JAY-Z and Jay Elec follow this train of thought from two different angles and meet in the middle: The Five-Percenter ideal that the black man is god and the idea that through Allah black people can be granted agency. This is where Jay Elec finds his strength. The dignity and earnestness through which he raps lend all his verses a certain authority. He isn’t asking for reverence, only for onlookers to heed his experience as a man who found religion and its power to transform. What you believe is up to you, Jay Electronica simply wants you to have a little faith.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2020-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Roc Nation | March 17, 2020 | 8.4 | 10d577f4-de2e-4f91-bbfe-5bbb9351e18c | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
On her second album, reluctant Gen Z ambassador Clairo turns back the clock, embracing classic touchstones of 1970s folk. | On her second album, reluctant Gen Z ambassador Clairo turns back the clock, embracing classic touchstones of 1970s folk. | Clairo: Sling | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/clairo-sling/ | Sling | “Pardon my emotions,” Clairo apologized on her 2019 debut Immunity, suppressing a pounding desire to shut off the TV and just kiss already, worried that her friend would be terribly inconvenienced by the news of her crush. The 22-year-old artist’s world was one of discretion and uncertainty, small utterances and their shadow meanings, shy nudges toward people you want so badly to touch. (As she once told Rookie, “Getting close to someone is a really sensitive thing.”) But on “Blouse,” the hushed lead single of Clairo’s second album, Sling, the little thrills of adolescence are gone. “Why do I tell you how I feel/When you’re just looking down the blouse?” she sings, the dewy sincerity she once radiated now hardened into bitterness. Here is another young woman whose trust has been abused by an older man, and who is so hungry to be validated that she’ll risk being sexualized again: “If touch could make them hear, then touch me now.”
It is brutal to realize, when you’re young, that the ogling curiosity with which older people regard you is not the same as respect, and getting attention does not mean having real agency. Since she stumbled into fame in 2017, and not entirely of her own volition, Clairo has been narrowly interpreted through the prism of her generation—keywords: viral, YouTube, bedroom pop, POLLEN, bisexuality—as an avatar for sensitive youths more comfortable online than outside, and who speak frankly about their feelings. On Sling, you sense her exhaustion with this framing: “‘She’s only 22,’” she quotes anonymous commentators on closer “Management,” a song about feeling depleted by her career. And so, shrugging off the pressure to embody the future, she instead turns back the clock, embracing the touchstones of the past. Sling is her ’70s singer-songwriter album, the work of an old soul raised on Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and the Carpenters. “Mitchell told me I should be just fine,” she foreshadowed on the last record; now she’s stepping up to the mantle.
If it took Taylor Swift until her eighth album to retreat to the woods and return with a muted, elegant folk collection, then Clairo is far ahead of the curve. Recorded in the mountains of upstate New York with Jack Antonoff, Sling features vocal harmonies that sound like gleaming sighs, bluesy electric guitar whines, and plenty of minor key piano. Nothing really resembles a “hit”; the only single, the aforementioned “Blouse,” sounds like Elliott Smith's “Say Yes” tucked away in a sleepy winter cabin. In place of the heady ambiguities of young love are themes that Clairo once believed were “too emotional or intense to unravel”: “Motherhood, sexualization, mental health, and a lot of my own mistakes and regrets,” as she wrote in a recent newsletter. You can read the album, like many artists’ second projects, as an attempt to prove seriousness and maturation, to illustrate depth beyond what initially made her famous. For Clairo, Sling was a necessity: “This record has changed everything for me, because I was fully going to quit music,” she told Rolling Stone.
Her songs are wordier than ever before, etched with proper nouns and specificities—her friend Claud, the Atlanta suburb of Dunwoody, the Syracuse intersection of Comstock and Waverly. The granular and incisive lyrics are further proof of her songwriting talent, but they can also be harder to penetrate. (From “Zinnias”: “Got a cold piece of information to bring to you, said ‘Sorry but I can’t stay here while we wait for June.’”) Clairo has always been an insular artist, attuned to the nuances of private thought. But her prior songs were low-voiced conversations with other people, or at least her imagination of them—“Sofia, know that you and I/Shouldn’t feel like a crime,” she sang—and their simplicity afforded them a kind of openness. Here, Clairo is often alone, picking at knottier and more specific anxieties. “I blocked out the month of February for support/At least I have this year I won’t be worrying anyone on tour/…I throw my drink into the faces of my demise,” she sings on the pastoral, lullaby-like “Just for Today.” By her own admittance, all but Sling’s single needs “constant context”; she seems content for some of this knowledge to be hers alone.
There are real risks here: that the music is so understated and tasteful it becomes a snooze, that in wisening up you lose the gleam in your eyes. The quietness and occasional opaqueness of Sling remind me of a recurring complaint about Clairo’s stage presence, that she’s too withdrawn and timid to reach her audience. “If she says anything meaningful between songs, only the first few rows can hear it,” said one Guardian review. The singing on Sling does little to dispel this image. In its weaker moments Clairo assumes a hoarse, feeble whisper or mumbles like she’s under the covers late at night—although her vocals can also be exceptionally pretty, swelling into pearlescent “oohs” and golden harmonies. Sling is, in many ways, a curiously timed record, one that aspires toward domesticity, temperateness, and slow living at a moment when many people are craving unruliness and spontaneity. “Rushing so I can beat the line,” she cries out on “Bambi,” in one of the album’s most poetic lines. “But what if all I want is conversation and time?”
There’s a lesson in Sling’s irregular structures, about how if the present doesn’t move you, you can wait a few moments for something new to arrive. Sometimes a song proceeds slowly, and then a breeze wafts in and hitches up the tempo, until it feels like sashaying down the street in tap shoes. In the midst of “Bambi” is a sauntering horn section so waltzing and pleasant that you feel like a stranger might appear to gallantly tip his hat to you. It is an album of gradual beauty, each successive listen revealing new ripples and hues. One of Sling’s most vibrant, glorious moments occurs on “Wade,” not too long after Clairo murmurs that decades of her life are wasting away. The song slows, as if to alleviate her worry: woodwinds flutter like bluebirds, everything swoons in relief. Sling may be an album concerned with time, fears of obsolescence instilled by a vampiric music industry. But it also finds exuberance in stillness, a kind of gentle unburdening.
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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. | 2021-07-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Fader Label / Republic | July 19, 2021 | 7.4 | 10d5d76b-342d-46b0-9017-47c30d8e354d | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
Moon King’s Daniel Benjamin moves from shoegaze to disco on his latest release, but his version of the genre sounds too flat and tinny to survive on the dance floor. | Moon King’s Daniel Benjamin moves from shoegaze to disco on his latest release, but his version of the genre sounds too flat and tinny to survive on the dance floor. | Moon King: Hamtramck ’16 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moon-king-hamtramck-16/ | Hamtramck ’16 | Shoegaze tends to take place in wide open spaces, but on his first album as Moon King, 2015’s Secret Life, Daniel Benjamin imagined what it might sound like in miniature. Songs like “Apocalypse” offered up the same skyward yearning heard among Slowdive and Ride, but toned down the eruptions of bass and reverb. Moon King’s latest genre exercise also takes place in a narrow channel, only this time Benjamin fixes his sights on classic disco.
Inspired by a recent move to Detroit, Hamtramck ’16 is an EP-length collection of experiments hewn close to the shadow of Giorgio Moroder—so close that the bassline of opener “Come Around” is taken directly from Moroder’s 1977 hit with Donna Summer, “I Feel Love.” Rather than use that riff as a springboard for a similar exploration of space and texture, Benjamin lets it loop flatly in the foreground. The vibe isn’t dance floor transcendence; with Benjamin’s nasal voice and flanged-out guitars, it’s more indie brooding hour, like Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Multi-Love dialed down a notch or two.
Like generations of disco before it, Hamtramck ’16 situates boundless, unrequited desire against a rock-solid four on the floor backbeat. The way Benjamin vocalizes that desire, though, tends to feel a little rote. “Darlin’, I’ve been thinkin about you for a while/But I’m dreaming alone,” he sings on “Jasmine,” a combination of words you can imagine sitting among the scraps of many lyric books before it. Other lines, like those on the record’s most fun and flexible track “In & Out,” can be hard to make out through the reverb wash applied to his voice, forcing a disconnect between singer and listener. That ambiguity can work fine in genres like shoegaze or for bands like Radiohead, where the focus is not by any means the lyrics, but it leaves a vacancy here in disco, which, like most dance genres, demands a certain intimacy, or at least an acknowledgement that the dancer is being spoken to.
Instead, it often feels like Benjamin is murmuring to himself. Hamtramck ’16 rings too flat and tinny to sound like it could survive on a dance floor with other people on it. The treble’s oddly overpowered in the mix, and the drum machines tend to loom and clatter over everything else. On closer “Ordinary Lover,” a loud piano riff enters about 15 seconds in and doesn’t leave or change until the song ends. That’s four solid minutes of the same three piano chords at the same level, no breaks, no variance. It’s exhausting enough that I don’t even have the gusto to complain about how the chorus of the song goes, “I don’t want no ordinary lover/I don’t want no ordinary love.”
Disco never died, and even LCD Soundsystem came back from the grave. But it needs more than a rippling analog bassline and a few pairs of boots and cats to really thrive. Throughout Hamtramck ’16, I'm hungry for a couplet as delightfully strange and biting as Anohni’s on Hercules and Love Affair’s “Time Will”: “I cannot hold a half a life/I cannot be a half a wife.” I want figures to recede into the distance and come back twice as strong. I want anything close to the way Donna Summer whispers “ooh, it’s so good” like a sacred incantation. At its best and fullest, disco moves and breathes and dances like a whole body. Hamtramck ’16 walks more like an aspirational skeleton. | 2017-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Arbutus | August 8, 2017 | 5.4 | 10d631b1-dfb7-4928-8e42-f82796d116b4 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
Having established himself as a ruthless wit and tireless scholar of rap, Edan makes the leap to "serious artist" on Beauty and the Beat, exhibiting an auteurism that places him level with his predecessors instead of prostrate before them. | Having established himself as a ruthless wit and tireless scholar of rap, Edan makes the leap to "serious artist" on Beauty and the Beat, exhibiting an auteurism that places him level with his predecessors instead of prostrate before them. | Edan: Beauty and the Beat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2682-beauty-and-the-beat/ | Beauty and the Beat | Edan is quite the character: With him, it's either "Sing it, shitface" or an exercise in hip-hop erudition, as heard on his Fast Rap mixtape. Which is why one never knows what to expect from his recorded output. His debut LP, Primitive Plus, mixed the retarded with the ingenious; it was an entertaining album in a backpacker era that was more often redundant than refreshing. So, when photos of the newly hirsute Edan emerged and rumors of a "rock" record made the rounds, it became easy to imagine a Derek/Biggie Smalls concept album replete with irony and wankery. This record is no joke. Having established himself as a ruthless wit and tireless scholar of rap, Edan makes the leap to "serious artist" on Beauty and the Beat, exhibiting an auteurism that places him level with his predecessors instead of prostrate before them.
On lead single "I See Colours", Edan declares, "Prince Paul already used this loop/ But I'ma keep it movin'/ And put you up on the scoop." The lyric is a synopsis of Edan's new outlook. Yes, it's been done before, but not like this. The song is his epiphany over a 60s jangle and mushrooming Moog effects. Like a master mathematician who suddenly sees the pattern in the formula, Edan commences his solution.
One more time before he blows your mind, Edan pays respects to the "true scientists". "Fumbling Over Words That Rhyme" is a timeline of the forgotten founders. True, many of the names he drops are familiar, but-- as many of the mentioned could tell you-- respect is the only restitution to them. Over a runaway break, Edan pays dues to the Fatback Band on up, providing a syllabus for future pupils.
The nightmarish diptych of "Murder Mystery" and "Torture Chamber"-- the latter featuring Percee P's lyrical conveyor belt over the churning bass-line from Pink Floyd's "On the Run"-- bleeds into "Making Planets", an organ dirge backing Edan's laidback braggadocio that changes gears into a Crazy Horse-ish Mr. Lif conspiracy theory. Each song transitions to the next through the ever-present Moog noodlings and shared elements, an effort at a hip-hop long-player and not simply a collection of singles.
"Rock and Roll" applies Black Sabbath, Velvet Underground, and Talking Heads to create a psychedelic ode to its titular genre, and "Science of the Two" is a tangled mass of Edan and Insight that rivals Run-DMC for seamless vocal interplay.
On the latter half of the album, "Beauty", "Smile", and "Promised Land" are three sample-packed masterpieces that compress the time between '68 and '88. Reversed drum loops, found sounds, droning feedback, Echoplexed vocals, syrupy strings, and truckloads of bubbling Moog intermingle with Edan's Kane-with-a-cold mic skills to astonishing effect.
The gravity of Edan's lyrics and voice on Beauty and the Beat is perhaps its most surprising element. He's gone from a brainiac prankster to the Borges of rap. Even his battle rhymes have a surrealist bent. He doesn't wear watches by Jacob. He "wears the Time Meridian as a wristband." He doesn't grace stages. He "does the show on a fireball." He doesn't wear his own clothing line. He "put a nameplate on a asteroid belt."
Edan satirizes the narcissism of hip-hop by being so out-there narcissistic that someone would basically have to say, "I'm the best MC times infinity" to compete. But it's more than just his otherworldly assertions. Nearly every bar is a saturated image of his subconscious put on display to ponder its meaning. Some of it may just be nonsense but most if it is resonant. His lyrical inventiveness and idiosyncratic metaphors place him in a category populated by few.
Edan is hip-hop, without a doubt. But he's the hip-hop that appeared in the suburbs in the late-80's and shared time with metal and indie rock, when MTV's weekend line-up was "Yo!MTVRaps", "120 Minutes", and "Headbangers Ball", with Public Enemy likely to find time on all three. Beauty and the Beat sounds like a record made by someone who once devoured the catalog and history of his favorite artists, traced their lineage as far back as he could, and has discovered his place in the genealogy. With that enlightenment, Edan is no longer an impersonation of his idols, but one of their peers. | 2005-04-18T01:00:05.000-04:00 | 2005-04-18T01:00:05.000-04:00 | Rap | Lewis | April 18, 2005 | 8.8 | 10d9a2e6-3bbb-4ddb-b3a3-9cc3b34b7e87 | Peter Macia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peter-macia/ | null |
This collaboration between Xiu Xiu and Italy's Larsen was pared down from lengthy jam sessions. | This collaboration between Xiu Xiu and Italy's Larsen was pared down from lengthy jam sessions. | XXL: Ciautistico! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8828-ciautistico/ | Ciautistico! | This loose, billowing collaboration between the American avant-pop band Xiu Xiu and Italian post-rockers Larsen has a familiar back story: It's the classic band-meets-band, band-pursues-band, band-gets-band narrative arc. Xiu Xiu and Larsen, each aware and vaguely admiring of the other, meet at a Jarboe show, exchange records, vow to stay in touch, and become so mutually enthralled that they actually follow through and record an album together. They meet up in Torino without much of a plan and immerse themselves in the studio with trad rock instruments plus a bunch of theremins and glockenspiels. They jam intensely around sketched-out song structures and sequence the most realized bits as an album, an ephemeral and fractured thing that mirrors its mode of creation.
As listeners, we're rightfully wary of such one-off collaborations-- they often produce thrilling results in rap, where oversized personalities slam into one another explosively, but in indie rock, they can lead to a sort of hazy obscurantism as each musician tiptoes around the other's style. The results are often more interesting than realized, the sort of exploratory blurs that the In the Fishtank series often produces, which are easy to praise and then quickly forget about. And XXL may well wind up as such an artifact, prized by collectors but inessential for the causal fan. Nevertheless, it's surprisingly cohesive and focused for such a spontaneous production, largely because each band tempers the other's excesses. Xiu Xiu's confessional overstatement is as distinctly American as Larsen's cerebral reserve is European, and on Ciautistico!, they meet in the middle to create a music that scans as either a more rational Xiu Xiu, as on the structurally balanced instrumental tracks uninterrupted by dramatic shards of dissonance, or more emotional Larsen, as on the tracks where Stewart's aching vocals imbue the silvery drones with a messy human presence.
As if striving to embody the impulses of both bands, Ciautistico! is both corporeal and weightless-- you feel the bodily plunk of each intoned string and chime, and the shimmering confusion of the resultant sound waves decaying and diffusing into one another. The tone is icy yet resonant, drops of water falling into a deep well. "Paw Paw Paw Paw Paw Paw" opens with a low three-note bass drone and watery synth washes, but instead of continuing down the path of abstraction, Larsen's insanely tight drummer and Stewart's timorous vocals bundle up the atmosphere into a gloomy pop song. This is immediately offset by the album's most daunting song, "Minnie Mouseistic", which plays like the sound effects for a radio drama-- discordant tones, gentle concussions, creaks and ratchets bloom in isolation on a field of silence. Certain moments are pure Xiu Xiu, like the svelte electro-throb of "Ciao Ciautistico" and the sparkling fountain of synths that closes "Birthday Song", but for the most part, Xiu Xiu and Larsen slip into a methodical mind-meld, shuffling melodies and countermelodies toward their logical conclusions. | 2005-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2005-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Important | October 17, 2005 | 7 | 10db93fb-475d-4c93-964d-9ce251082be1 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Portishead's 1994 debut is a masterwork of downbeat and desperation. They invented their own kind of virtuosity, one that encompassed musicianship, technology, and aura. | Portishead's 1994 debut is a masterwork of downbeat and desperation. They invented their own kind of virtuosity, one that encompassed musicianship, technology, and aura. | Portishead: Dummy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23079-dummy/ | Dummy | In the UK, a dummy isn’t just a mannequin or an idiot; it’s also what Americans would call a pacifier. Savor the irony in the title of Portishead’s debut album. The album may suggest coziness, sonic swaddling, the gentle soundtrack to a raver’s comedown—and in 1994, ravers were plenty familiar with pacifiers. But Dummy doesn’t coddle, it unsettles. It tastes not like warm milk but coppery and bitter, like blood. Despite its two-plus decades spent soundtracking makeout sessions, it cradles a terrible loneliness in its heart. Despite its reputation as dinner-party music, it is straight-up discomfort food: curl-up-and-die music, head-under-the-covers music. It’s dark, dank, and quintessentially Bristol, mingling a chilling harbor fog with the resin of a thousand spliffs left to burn down in a haze.
With the exception of two UK singles released shortly before the album, there was no advance warning of the wind blowing in from the West Country. Portishead weren’t a gigging band; they only began playing live after the album started selling the kind of numbers that no one, at least no one in the band, expected it to. They were barely a band at all, in the traditional sense of the word. Their core lineup consisted of Geoff Barrow, a 22-year-old hip-hop fan obsessed with turntable alchemy; Adrian Utley, a 37-year-old jazz guitarist looking for a way out of the 20th century; and Beth Gibbons, a 29-year-old singer who’d grown up on a farm and, prior to Portishead, had “probably done more singing in her bedroom than on stage,” Barrow reckoned. Yet there isn’t a sound or a syllable out of place on Dummy. For 50 minutes, the album sustains a single, all-enveloping mood; its tracklist is a 10-sided die where every roll comes up some variation of despair.
Today, Portishead are regarded with a certain inevitability—their sound so perfectly executed, so in tune with the tenor of its times—that belies the sheer weirdness of how it probably sounded when you first heard it. It’s true that Dummy carries echoes of many landmark albums of the preceding years: the wistful narcosis of Mazzy Star and Cocteau Twins, the skeletal hip-hop of Eric B. & Rakim, the ethereal torch songs of Julee Cruise. PJ Harvey flits through its margins; so do the Orb’s stoned swirl and Seefeel’s dubby undercurrents. By 1994, Dummy’s after-hours vibe was already familiar from dozens of albums meant primarily for horizontal consumption, such as the KLF’s Chill Out, though Barrow downplayed any link to that scene. “Ambient music has never particularly appealed to me: Push ‘Go’ on a synthesizer, make some noise, put some delay on it and put a couple of sheep noises on it,” he sniffed to Melody Maker in 1995, in a barely disguised dig at Chill Out’s wooly livestock samples.
As much as Portishead’s sound was part of electronic music’s widespread mellowing, the musicians themselves had little truck with the rave scene; their own roots were closer to the dub and breakbeat traditions that had long been cornerstones of multicultural Bristol. Dummy’s closest antecedent was Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, and not by coincidence: Barrow had worked as an errand boy and tape op in Bristol’s Coach House Studios while that record was being made.
But Dummy is too idiosyncratic to feel like a calculated response to its predecessors. Its obsessions are too specific, and too doggedly pursued: the spy-movie twang of the guitars, the ripple of the Hammond organs and Leslie cabinets—if anything, its vintage signifiers feel out of step with that era’s rush of pre-millennium tension. Bristol’s junglists were carving new routes to the future in every chopped-up breakbeat, while Portishead were drizzling on muted trumpet solos like so much curdled milk. Where most of the decade’s cutting-edge electronic music was zealous about its agenda, Dummy pledged allegiance only to a mood.
The broad outlines of Portishead’s music are not particularly hard to decipher. They like their tempos slow, their drums crisp, their keyboards velvety. Gibbons sings with a smoky intensity that’s evocative of Billie Holiday and Sandy Denny without stooping to imitation. In the midst of an all-pervasive gloom, key details—tremolo-soaked guitar licks, turntable scratches, an unexpected sample of jazz fusioners Weather Report—glisten like peacock feathers under a blacklight.
They favor sounds imprinted with a host of associations, many of them filmic. Utley’s riffs come straight from John Barry’s James Bond theme; the woozy sine waves of “Mysterons” echo sci-fi soundtracks like The Day the Earth Stood Still; and “Sour Times” loops an extended sample of Lalo Schifrin’s music for Mission: Impossible. Their cinematic inclinations are borne out in the fact that they made an actual short film, To Kill a Dead Man, before the album itself. The 10-minute, black-and-white film is not particularly consequential, but it is notable for the way it visually remixes many of the same influences that make the album feel so instantly familiar. Fortunately, they proved to be far more adept at translating those moods and devices into music.
Like film noir, with its fondness for Venetian blinds and ceiling fans, Dummy thrives on mixing light and dark, hard and soft, positive and negative space. In “Strangers,” clean-toned jazz guitar morphs into a nervous dial-tone buzz. The galumphing rhythm feels like a heavy burlap bag being dragged over railroad ties, but Gibbons’ voice—a home-recorded demo that made the final edit—is a slender thread pulled taut. The metallic rattle at the center of “Sour Times,” an extended Lalo Schifrin sample, might be an alarm clock bouncing across the surface of a trampoline. Expert diggers, they know a nugget when they find it: Flipping Eric Burdon and War’s “Magic Mountain,” they take a sample that De La Soul had put to jubilant use in “Potholes in My Lawn” and turn it seasick and queasy. Even more remarkable is how they treat Johnnie Ray’s “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” on “Biscuit,” slowing its refrain down to 16 RPM and turning a sticky-sweet wad of ’50s bubblegum into a druggy dirge.
Their sense of contrast is particularly noticeable in the album’s rhythms. Barrow’s lickety-split vinyl scratching helps counterbalance the uniformly sluggish tempos, but the real action is in their breakbeats. In “Mysterons,” the looped snare rolls sound like a steel trap snapping shut and being pried back open in quick succession. The “Sour Times” beat resembles James Brown’s iconic “Funky Drummer” break, but transposed for a planet with only half of Earth’s gravity. “Wandering Star” and “Numb,” on the other hand, push forward as though running underwater, every beat a struggle against an overwhelming force. Track after track, the album toggles between crisp steppers and deadweight friction, between ping-ponging ricochets and Sisyphus’ last stand.
This groove was their invention, and theirs alone. Unlike most of their peers, Portishead didn’t rely on the same hoary Ultimate Breaks and Beats bootlegs that fueled the majority of the era’s club tracks. Their music may sound like the work of a couple of obsessive vinyl connoisseurs, but the irony is that they made most of it themselves. Some musicians speak of soundtracks to imaginary films; they created an imaginary soundtrack to use as their source material. Assisted by the drummer Clive Deamer, Barrow and Utley would jam in the studio, creating their own approximations of the ’60s music that inspired them. Once they had their songs engineered on 24-track tape, they’d take the final product and feed it back into their samplers; some material they even pressed onto vinyl dubplates, to manipulate the way a hip-hop producer would cut up breakbeats. Not quite a band, hardly a strictly electronic project, they had to invent their own kind of virtuosity, one that encompassed musicianship, technology, and aura. “It’s the air around the thing,” Barrow told The Wire. “What we are trying to do is create this air, this atmosphere: It’s the stuff that’s in between the hi-hat and the snare that you can’t hear, but if it wasn’t there you would notice it, it would be wrong.”
This air was the medium through which Gibbons’ voice soared. Would Portishead have been one-tenth the band they turned out to be had Barrow and Utley contented themselves with instrumentals, or hired session singers to lend a soulful patina at freelance rates? Not on your life. Gibbons’ voice is the center of the music; she elevates the recordings from tracks to songs, from mere head-nodders to forlorn lullabies.
She follows the contours of her voice along its breathy edge, cutting sharply through the meat of a glissando, falling back on the catch in her throat. Despite her convincing air of sorrow, she’s a knowing, playful singer, capable of shifting emotional registers on a dime, cycling through moods—jazzy and coquettish, grimly resigned, wild with grief—like a housefly tracing squares in empty space. In “Wandering Star,” her tone sounds almost flirtatious, despite the overwhelming vastness of her subject matter: “Wandering stars/For whom it is reserved/The blackness, the darkness, forever.” In the closing “Glory Box,” on the other hand, she is as incendiary as Utley’s overdriven guitar riffs, and when she sings, “This is the beginning/Of forever and ever, oh,” her sigh feels like a hole torn in the fabric of the universe.
And her occasional obliqueness frequently gives way to the album's real emotional payoff: out-and-out dejection. Some lines stand out as clearly as dog-eared diary entries: “Give me a reason to love you/Give me a reason to be a woman”; “Nobody loves me, it’s true/Not like you do”; “How can it feel this wrong?” When her words are hazy, her diction tricky, it might as well be part of a grand and treacherous strategy, like a boxer’s footwork catching you off guard before the knockout punch lands.
Without a public persona to measure Gibbons’ performance against, her presence within the songs was, and remains, that much more formidable. Pop fans typically like to know who is singing to them and why, even if it's an invented character. But that central mystery only makes Dummy that much more compelling. Who is this lovelorn woman marching off to war on “Roads,” her broken pleas part sigh, part icicle? Who will she become on the far side of forever and ever—the promised land of “Glory Box,” an uncharted territory that she makes sound both liberating and terrifying? Dummy arrived at a moment when young people were craving soundtracks for the comedown—but what happens when you follow Portishead all the way down, as far as they want to take us? These questions keep you coming back, trying to puzzle out its intimidating balance between bleakness and blankness.
It’s possible to hear in Dummy a collection of gratifyingly sad-but-sexy gestures, and plenty of Portishead’s followers—Lamb, Morcheeba, Olive, Alpha, Mono, Hooverphonic, Sneaker Pimps, and dozens of other acts forever lost to the cut-out bin of history—did just that. Whole retail empires flourished and collapsed while Portishead and their ilk were piped through the in-store speakers. Is Dummy stylish? Of course it is; you don’t evoke ’60s spy flicks without some deep-seated feelings about aesthetics, panache, the proper cut of a suit. But style, stylishness, is only the beginning. None of Portishead’s imitators understood that it’s not the blue notes or the mood lighting that make it tick—it’s the pockets of emptiness inside. Like Barrow once said, it’s the air. | 2017-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Go!Beat | April 23, 2017 | 9.5 | 10de4e35-97ab-488b-94fd-1cacd52793b6 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Redemption concludes Dawn Richard's trilogy. If Goldenheart was aggressive and Blackheart depressive, Redemption is reflective, an unusual headspace for a dance floor album to inhabit. | Redemption concludes Dawn Richard's trilogy. If Goldenheart was aggressive and Blackheart depressive, Redemption is reflective, an unusual headspace for a dance floor album to inhabit. | Dawn Richard: Redemption | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22648-redemption/ | Redemption | At first blush, Redemption, the new Dawn Richard record, feels like a victory lap. The conclusion to a trilogy of albums, Redemption signifies the end of a project that felt, at one point, as if its completion were uncertain, between shifting collaborators and Richard's brief 2014 reunion with the girl group Danity Kane. Redemption's opening tracks also seem to confirm that it's intended as the inverse to its predecessor, 2015's Blackheart, the sound of which was thick and full of dissonance; Redemption initially feels weightless. As it progresses, though, it reveals a depth that's both distinct from its predecessors and draws on them both.
Richard's 2013 album, Goldenheart, seemed to describe a disintegrating relationship that had ascended into myth; Richard positioned herself as if she were engaged in battle with her own emotions, and through metaphor her emotions had swollen into literal giants. “Faced the beast with my bare hands/Tried to break me down with all his strength,” she sang in “Goliath.” Blackheart was more slippery, a vortex of introspection in which Richard’s grasp of metaphor seemed to deliberately loosen, so that mythical figures like Calypso and the Titans coexisted with the thrum of amphetamines and the slur of depression.
If Goldenheart is aggressive and Blackheart is depressive, Redemption is reflective. This is a curious position from which to record a dance record; the dance floor is rarely characterized as a reflective space. More often it is utopian, escapist, a portal to an alternate reality. In the first proper song, “Love Under Lights,” Richard paints her own dance floor vision. She encounters a woman in a Led Zeppelin shirt, and they start to talk about music. “She said she fucking with Drake/I said King Kendrick,” Richard sings as the synthetic pulses behind her ripple and gleam. “I guess we’re kindred spirits.” Richard conceives of the dance floor as a place of protest (“Black Crimes”), of contemplation (“Voices”), of engagement (“Vines”), all of which are components of desire, whether for another person or another life. The drums behind her shatter and reorganize themselves into new rhythms throughout the album , as if they’re building and disassembling digital chandeliers.
The production on Redemption is distinct from the glassy backdrops her former collaborator and manager Druski provided on Goldenheart, and it's a deliberate move away from Blackheart's production, which felt like being sucked into a whirlpool. *Blackheart’*s primary producer, Noisecastle III, appears twice on Redemption, on “Black Crimes” and “LA,” but his more collagist aesthetic blends seamlessly with the sound world that Machinedrum and Richard build, an incandescent fusion of the organic and the synthetic, the electronic and the acoustic.
The notes that open “Voices,” while digitally manipulated and multiplied, sound like they've been issued from a bass clarinet. The bass tones that break through the surface of “Renegades” are oddly reminiscent of a tuba. “LA” is a parallel ode to Louisiana, where Richard was born, and Los Angeles, where Richard lives now; it mutates from a stuttered, ultramodern gleam into a spiraling guitar solo that sounds imported from a ’70s jazz fusion album. Then the melody shifts again, this time performed by a polyphonic brass band arranged by Trombone Shorty to resemble a New Orleans second line parade.
The integrity of Richard's voice provides the through line, which is often caught in ghostly tangles of itself or locking into prismatic harmonies, similar to how Prince or D’Angelo treated their voices. On the interludes, which are often as fully formed as the actual songs, Richard isolates and distorts her voice until it seems to separate into kilobytes. “Hey Nikki” is the closest the album comes to settling into an R&B tradition: It's an inversion of Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” considering the character through a different lens; instead of viewing her as an object of desire, it isolates her agency, and the song generates its desire from the aura of that agency. (Blackheart did the same thing with the titular character of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”) Richard’s voice floats above the music in the verses, but doubles, deepens, and fights through a menacing haze in the chorus: “Hey Nikki/Don't you wanna come and get with me?”
After “Hey Nikki” the album descends into a more introspective space. “Sands” describes a past relationship; In “The Louvre” she elevates someone into “a work of art” as a way of letting them go, and then the record itself lets go of its own instrumentation as it segues the outro, “Valhalla.” Richard, her voice heavily processed, finally glimpses her utopia; it is one “where rebels are the majority/And my color isn't a minority.” The tone is one of arrival after a long struggle, but there are hints, too, that this maybe a fantasy: “Escape,” she sings, and it feels as if her promised land was a mirage, forever shimmering just out of reach. | 2016-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | 2 B Real / Our Dawn | November 26, 2016 | 8 | 10df90ab-fc05-4d84-b774-1996afa4a900 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
Clocking in at 76 minutes, The Colour in Anything is James Blake’s wonderfully messy dive into maximalism. | Clocking in at 76 minutes, The Colour in Anything is James Blake’s wonderfully messy dive into maximalism. | James Blake: The Colour in Anything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21906-the-colour-in-anything/ | The Colour in Anything | It’s not James Blake’s fault that* The Colour in Anything* came out in the middle of a rainy week. Or it might be; the circumstances seem almost planned. Maybe the team plotting the surprise release of this album was watching storm fronts, waiting for ideal new-James-Blake-album conditions. On first impressions alone, they succeeded wildly: When bed sheets are in disarray, when grey light seeps into wet windows, and the sky is an interminable reminder that there is always a chance of showers, his particular brand of impressionistic melancholy is hard to resist. Stay in bed or descend out into the streets, it doesn't matter, his music finds a way to summon personal rain clouds that follow you wherever you go.
In keeping with his last two albums, The Colour in Anything is a hard, frank, and unsparing listen. But if you listen closer, you will notice some tonal shifts in the fog. For one, Blake shed the monomania of his past work, allowing other voices and sounds to creep in. He’s noted in interviews that *The Colour in Anything *is meant to represent a sea-change, personally, musically, and geographically. The disposition of this record is suppose to reflect its milieus: Southern California, friendship, and new love. Seven of its 17 tracks were co-produced by Rick Rubin. Much of the album was also mixed and mastered at Rubin’s Shangri-La studios in Malibu. Frank Ocean and Justin Vernon appear throughout, lending writing and production help. There’s also Connan Mockasin, who appears, bass in hand, for a song. James has stepped out of his London bedroom and invited collaboration at an unprecedented level. Clocking in at 76 minutes, The Colour in Anything is Blake’s wonderfully messy dive into maximalism.
All that said, in the best way possible, in no way shape or form is *The Colour in Anything *a rapid departure or reversal of what Blake does well. He still paints in deep blues and greys. His production is still unparalleled, spacious, and impossibly textured. His voice is still chilly and metallic, but maintains all its choir boy charm. His music is still towering and menacingly sad. He sings almost exclusively about lost love (“While you were away, I started loving you”), miscommunication (“I’m sorry I don’t know how you feel”), miasma (“I hope my life is no sign of the times”), and defeat (“I want it to be over”). It can be brutal to hear the microscopic variations of themes hammered over and over again, making the album’s pace something between apocalyptic and glacial. Each listen is draining in its way, and when it's over it feels like decades have passed. It can be so self-indulgent and extravagantly sad that it comes close to ruin porn. But it’s worth it. And there are positive messages to eke out of the experience, vitally important ones; that it's all right to be hurt, or alone, that heartbreak helps fuel the flow of life.
As contemporary electronic music moves towards more caustic, crunchy, and self-referential tropes, Blake's music is almost resolutely old fashioned. It deploys auto-tune, expressive (bordering on Platonic) percussion, minimalist pianos, and throwback sub-bass warble and womps. He distills his influences of R&B, gospel, and the wide patina of British dance music in such strange and ineffable concoctions that it makes it difficult to not rewind certain chunks of drum breakdowns and airy synths continually. The melancholic funk of “I Hope My Life (1-800 Mix)” or the dive bomb synth swoops of “Radio Silence” show Blake’s ability to orchestrate moments that mimic the stark romantic bombast of a Caspar David Friedrich painting.
Yet ironically Blake’s own grasp of lyric writing is still immature. He is never clever, catchy, or subtle. If anything he can even be comically melodramatic (“Where is my beautiful life?”) or annoyingly whiny (“I can’t believe that you don’t want to see me”). It makes it so that you wish he would just hum and slur his words into indistinct hunks of emotion. There are also several missteps in how his voice is treated throughout the record. A high pitched vocal processing in “My Willing Heart” is nearly unlistenable. Guest Bon Iver's “hooooo” at the start of “I Need a Forest Fire” is laughable in its wimpy approximation of bravado.
But these flubs are all forgivable. For the most part his singing can be vertiginous, isolating, and induce rapture when stretched into vast choruses. And when he’s alone at the piano, turning off the electronics, Blake approaches the sublime. He may never be able to reproduce the discomfiting beauty of his cover of “A Case of You” but he can still yoke tears from dry eyes in vulnerable songs like “F.O.R.E.V.E.R.” or the album’s title track. In closer "Meet You in the Maze," arguably the album's best song, he abandons instruments all together and sings in a multitudinous acapella that washes away the harrowing experience of the last hour in a rush of catharsis. It’s the closest the album comes to an anthem, and it’s heartwarmingly about self-care, discovery, and acceptance. After the probing self-consciousness that preceded it, these five minutes of fragility feel healing. “It's me who makes the peace in me...Music can't be everything," he sings, a moment of pained honesty showing that amidst the grand big-budget drapery of this album, its goals are actually quite modest. At the end of the day Blake just wants to prioritize happiness and self-knowledge above all else. It’s a thoroughly unhip statement that makes you believe smiling, even if it hurts, is the coolest possible thing in the world you can do. | 2016-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | May 10, 2016 | 8.2 | 10e60215-9ea3-4793-b64f-3aa24e51af62 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
On her seventh LP, the Canadian country singer spins a wild, Spaghetti Western-style yarn about heartbreak, revenge, and redemption. | On her seventh LP, the Canadian country singer spins a wild, Spaghetti Western-style yarn about heartbreak, revenge, and redemption. | Lindi Ortega: Liberty | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lindi-ortega-liberty/ | Liberty | Liberty could be a person. Or maybe it’s a place, or a horse. Whoever or whatever the name signifies, it’s the animating concept behind Canadian country singer Lindi Ortega’s seventh full-length—a narrative record that spins a wild yarn, not unlike Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger or Kenny Rogers’ Gideon. Ortega follows her unnamed protagonist through the open deserts of the American West as she rides a wild palomino from heartbreak to revenge and ultimately to redemption. It’s tempting to read this story of escape as autobiographical, especially given the way Ortega has elsewhere connected her onstage “country gothic noir” persona to her real-life body dysmorphia. But Liberty is about more than retelling personal war stories. In its twangy guitar, galloping drums, sun-baked palette, and high-plains drama, it’s a nuanced and often irreverent spin on Spaghetti Western films and their soundtracks. She’s celebrating her artistic freedom by showing us how an old pop-culture tradition can be made new and vibrant.
Naturally, Ennio Morricone looms large. The overtures that preface each of Liberty’s three acts practically quote the man who gave us the soundtracks to The Good, the Bad & the Ugly and most of The Hateful Eight. Working with producer Skylar Wilson (Justin Townes Earle, Caitlin Rose), a small team of songwriters including John Paul White, and the Nashville guitar duo Steelism, Ortega emphasizes mood as much as story, as though the desert were a state of mind rather than a place. Night is always falling on these songs, bringing it with the menace of the unseen but also the promise of a brighter morning. “Don’t come any closer to my heart, if you’re afraid of the dark,” she sings on the first full song, offering a wicked wink to the Technicolor arrangement.
As that wonderfully over-the-top line makes clear, neither Ortega nor any of her collaborators is afraid to veer toward Old West kitsch in these songs, whether it’s the Hazlewood-level reverb on her vocals or the chimes-and-whistling theme on “Afraid of the Dark.” That sense of dress-up may be the album’s most endearing quality, underscoring the playfulness of the music and storytelling. “You Ain’t Foolin’ Me” crackles with crunchy power chords, which bring to mind Young Guns rather than Once Upon a Time in the West. And “Pablo” interrupts its ode to an unusually gifted guitarist with a surf-rock guitar solo. Historical or musical accuracy, thank goodness, isn’t really a concern.
As Liberty proceeds to its final act, the mood grows graver, the music more straightforward and streamlined but no less inventive. “In the Clear” is a quiet ode to calm and security, and Ortega gives an understated performance to underscore those virtues: “There ain’t no hurricanes or tornadoes here.” She closes out Liberty with a song of gratitude, covering “Gracias a la Vida” by the Chilean folklorist and composer Violeta Parra. The title means “Thanks to Life” or “Here’s to Life,” depending on who’s doing the translating, and it’s been covered countless times over the last 50 years, most famously by Mercedes Sosa and Joan Baez. Ortega puts her own stamp on this standard by underplaying it. Accompanied only by a simple guitar strum and a distant trumpet, she makes the song sound like a small, private prayer as she rides off into the sunset. She may not be the protagonist in her story, but she still sounds like the hero. | 2018-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Shadowbox Music | April 3, 2018 | 7.4 | 10ee98f7-8e75-4909-9b6e-962b7c165d3d | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The Nashville trio Yautja are a prog-minded band that combines grindcore and Amphetamine Reptile-era noise with the artier shades of hardcore and death metal. Their Songs Of Lament EP, a sort of companion to last year's Songs of Descent LP, plays like an extended suite. | The Nashville trio Yautja are a prog-minded band that combines grindcore and Amphetamine Reptile-era noise with the artier shades of hardcore and death metal. Their Songs Of Lament EP, a sort of companion to last year's Songs of Descent LP, plays like an extended suite. | Yautja: Songs of Lament EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21151-songs-of-lament-ep/ | Songs of Lament EP | Technical progress is vital to metal's character. Metal bands have always pushed themselves to be faster, heavier, more challenging, and more musically dextrous than their predecessors. That said, it's still rare when an act genuinely succeeds at altering the meta-structure of the form. Anytime a Meshuggah or Dillinger Escape Plan comes along, you can bet dime-a-dozen imitators will cheapen the impact of their innovations. To make matters worse, today we're swarmed by retro-obsessed bands hell-bent on recreating the vibe and tone of, well, name any year and heavy metal subgenre. Not to mention that rampant sectarianism fosters a mentality where superficial differences between camps become paramount and crossing barriers becomes a transgression.
Every now and again, though, a band comes along that sidesteps these conventions. With their debut album, last year's Songs of Descent, Nashville trio Yautja (named after the extraterrestrial creature from the Predator film series) reminds us that what we think of as metal today can be as boundless and mutable as the range that jazz had encompassed by 1970. A prog-minded act that combines grindcore and Amphetamine Reptile-era noise with the artier shades of hardcore and death metal, Yautja doesn't just stack hairpin turn after hairpin turn—an approach that was tired by technical death metal's mid-'90s peak. Instead, bassist Kayhan Vaziri, guitarist Shibby Poole, and drummer Tyler Coburn create a highly malleable, mercury-like alloy that changes shape with liquid ease yet retains the solidity of its structure. (The way their music moves, it might've been more fitting for these guys to name themselves after the villian in Terminator 2.)
As its title suggests, the new EP Songs of Lament was crafted as a companion piece to the full-length, but there are some key distinctions. For starters, Lament leans closer to a grimier, more punkish production aesthetic. Meanwhile, because Yautja came out of the gate with a flair for tempo changes, the lean toward slower sections this time around doesn't seem drastic. With Songs of Lament, Yautja once again shows that, like the art of the fastball, sheer speed is most effective when a band can mix up its delivery and hit you from unexpected angles.
Case in point: Songs of Lament closes with the nine minute-plus "Crumbling", which climaxes in a sludge/doom buildup where Poole and Vaziri churn out an ominous riff at a crawling tempo. When Coburn suddenly explodes into a flurry of fills, followed by a blast beat and a jazzy double-time figure on the ride cymbal, the song feels like it's taking off even as it trudges through muck. That one passage speaks volumes about Yautja's mindfulness when it comes pacing. In fact, one marked contrast between Lament and its predecessor is that the EP plays like an extended suite of music. As for subject matter, all three of Yautja's members write lyrics and supply vocals, with Vaziri doing the lion's share of the barking. And while the cutting lyrical content does linger at the irate end of the emotional spectrum, Yautja's nonpartisan musical approach lends the words a more sophisticated hue by default.
Understandably, Songs of Lament doesn't accomplish as much as its full-length companion does in terms of furthering metal's evolution. Moreover, the new material is rendered somewhat two-dimensional by a mix that sounds flatter in comparison to Songs of Descent's full-fidelity production. Still, the new songs certainly show what this band is capable of when it makes subtle tweaks in its approach to structure. Indeed, Songs of Lament extends the pleasures of the debut while whetting the appetite for what new wrinkles Yautja might have in store the next time around. | 2015-10-27T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-27T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal | Forcefield | October 27, 2015 | 7 | 10f0e4ee-6af4-4539-b71d-b16c91830682 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The second album from the Australian trio hums with rage and retribution, executed with biting specificity and vast emotional range by singer Georgia Maq. | The second album from the Australian trio hums with rage and retribution, executed with biting specificity and vast emotional range by singer Georgia Maq. | Camp Cope: How to Socialise & Make Friends | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/camp-cope-how-to-socialise-and-make-friends/ | How to Socialise & Make Friends | The Melbourne punk trio Camp Cope are not impressed with the so-called Indie Rock Asshole. Sure, he’s outwardly progressive and affable, his music is usually quite good, and it can be easy to mistake his condescension for genuine concern. They're not buying it. Camp Cope might have titled their sophomore album How to Socialise & Make Friends, but they refuse to mince words on “The Opener,” which, yes, opens the album but is more accurately about an opening band, the supporting act—a metaphor for what is often deemed a woman’s station in life. Singer and guitarist Georgia Maq offers a relentless, chorus-less takedown of this subset of wanker while Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich plucks a bassline that’s the aural equivalent of an eye roll, and drummer Sarah Thompson props it all up with steady, stoic drumming.
Maq doesn’t let up in the title track that immediately follows, ably folding the personal and political into an intricate origami crane of misogyny until finally coming to the realization that this shit is paper and can be crumpled up and thrown into the fire. It is here where we learn that the origin (and sarcasm) of the title is some guy’s self-help book collection. As Maq zigzags between empathy and anger, we also get a sense of the album’s overall sentiment: Camp Cope will not make themselves small to help others in their hometown’s tight-knit punk community like self-help dude (or dudes in general, really) feel more comfortable. The opening trilogy of songs ends with “The Face of God,” which details a sexual assault by a fellow musician and the subsequent doubt, both self-inflicted and external, since the abuser didn’t seem like “that kind of guy.”
Camp Cope wrote How to Socialise before the #MeToo movement really took off. But reckonings don’t just fall out of the sky, and not since the alt-rock boom of the ’90s has music felt more ripe for a revolution. Camp Cope’s windswept punk feels both retro and right now, like Courtney Barnett covering Tigers Jaw covering Ani DiFranco. Their sound is jangly but unpolished, folky but not crunchy. Maq’s voice, decorated with Australian diphthongs, ably meanders from shouty to soft, conjuring an inexplicable mashup of Joe Strummer and Joni Mitchell. It’s an instrument she’s been honing since her similarly prescient, self-titled, Australian Music Prize-shortlisted 2016 debut.
How to Socialise’s center drags just a little with generalities like, “I really hope you’re happy where you are now” in the album’s six minute centerpiece, “Anna,” which segues into a similarly slightly vague “Sagan-Indiana.” A near-constant state of catharsis in “Animal & Real” has a numbing effect, like outrage fatigue for the ears. Of course, these are minor missteps among lyrics that are otherwise brilliantly concrete, and songs whose emotional range is vast.
Such is how you could describe the closer, “I’ve Got You,” a poignant song recounting the death of Maq’s father. With just her powerful voice and an acoustic guitar, she narrates a slideshow of disparate memories—a childhood injury involving broken glass, news of police violence, and small indignities like being asked to pay extra for a hospital room with a view. It’s the literal death of the patriarchy. But it’s also a sage acknowledgment that people are complicated—full of broken parts and beautiful parts—even Indie Rock Assholes. | 2018-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | March 7, 2018 | 7.8 | 10f75dee-2528-4b8a-9bac-7fdbdc838c4b | Melissa Giannini | https://pitchfork.com/staff/melissa-giannini/ | |
Maya Bon’s diaristic bedroom rock charts attraction, loneliness, neuroses, and late capitalism in winsome, pointillist detail. | Maya Bon’s diaristic bedroom rock charts attraction, loneliness, neuroses, and late capitalism in winsome, pointillist detail. | Babehoven: Demonstrating Visible Differences of Height EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/babehoven-demonstrating-visible-differences-of-height-ep/ | Demonstrating Visible Differences of Height EP | Babehoven, the Philadelphia-via-Los Angeles band helmed by Maya Bon, saturates the listener in particulars. Her latest release, Demonstrating Visible Differences of Height, is a diaristic EP that charts attraction, loneliness, neuroses, and late capitalism in winsome, pointillist detail. Its appeal stems from highly personal textures, references, and ephemera—a view as intimate and up-close as a goldfish’s, and equally as frustrated by glass walls.
These five songs get their emotional traction from Bon’s ambivalent, deadpan delivery, set against syrupy electric guitar and drums as slack as a morning-after fugue. On album standout “Asshole,” she sings, “If I always dick around, in the morning will I be an asshole?/While I’m laying on the ground/In the morning I wanna see your asshole.” Though the peculiar mix of self-loathing and lust feels very au courant, the backing instrumentation could’ve been a Slanted & Enchanted demo track. The song toggles between this central question and sensory bits and pieces: missing socks, chilly air conditioning, an exhortation to “Keep them coming, I can’t feel anything anyway.” As any noon-riser knows, there’s no separating the visible detritus from the feeling that you, too, might be lost and made partly of garbage.
Where “Asshole” languishes, “Confident and Kind” hums along, the sort of ambling meditation that might soundtrack an episode of “Gilmore Girls.” “I’m wearing shorts for the very first time in my life, feeling confident and cute, confident and kind,” Bon sings unconvincingly, a half-hearted pep talk. Behind her, acoustic guitar strums like a nodding friend as she narrates the discovery of a pollen allergy, ensuing sickness, and a $500 salon visit she describes as “a narcissistic treat as the world is depleted.” In the course of a day, she covers climate guilt, the body’s treachery, and gender troubles, singing, “Having short hair as a femme in 2019/Feels like I don’t know my body/Feel like I am just nobody/Unless I have some silky soft hair.” The body is a cage; “Confident and Kind” describes the feeling of realizing its dimensions.
There’s an urgency to Demonstrating Visible Differences of Height that’s belied by its mellow tempos, yet evident in the way Bon’s voice occasionally becomes fevered, panic setting in. The generality that unites the EP’s many specificities—the hair treatments, the Tuesdays, the self-doubt—is the recognition of our own limitations. Some walls close in from the outside, and some we build for ourselves, but confinement is confinement. Discouraged but not defeated, Babehoven soundtrack the feeling. | 2020-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | February 20, 2020 | 7.2 | 10f8b220-300e-4cbf-b8c8-64516b9c925c | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
Red stands as one of classic rock’s heaviest albums and also one of its most meticulous. With its dark, meditative sheen, it laid the groundwork for Robert Fripp’s more atmospheric work to come. | Red stands as one of classic rock’s heaviest albums and also one of its most meticulous. With its dark, meditative sheen, it laid the groundwork for Robert Fripp’s more atmospheric work to come. | King Crimson: Red | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-crimson-red/ | Red | Robert Fripp composed a list of reasons why he needed to end King Crimson. “The first,” he told Melody Maker in 1974, “Is that it represents a change in the world.” Fripp, then 28-years-old, felt that King Crimson—the progressive rock group he founded six years earlier—had become antiquated, representative of a different time. Furthermore, the band was dissolving before his eyes. On tour from October 1973 through the following summer, Fripp had observed growing tension among the quartet, now settled into their strongest lineup and on track to achieve their greatest commercial reception to date. “Situations are developing to an extreme,” he wrote in his fastidiously maintained tour diaries from this period, “Wonder how much I should take.”
The tour culminated with Fripp’s decision to end the band and focus on self-preservation. The work that immediately followed—his ambient, experimental collaborations with Brian Eno; his seminal guitar accompaniment on David Bowie’s “Heroes”—was more serene, more cerebral. He lived in solitude. He studied Gurdjieff. This was how the future looked to him. Crimson—with their drum solos and multi-part epics, their Mellotrons and tales of purple pipers—had become what he called a “dinosaur” band. “The old world is, in fact, dead,” he explained, “What we’re seeing now is, if you like, the death throes.”
While it would serve as the band’s final statement of the decade, Red, released in the autumn of 1974, does not sound like a eulogy. It’s vicious and vital, bristling with energy and new ground to cover. It stands as one of classic rock’s heaviest, most meticulous albums. It was equally influential for Kurt Cobain and Trey Anastasio; as seminal for metal as it was for math rock; equally beloved by scholars and stoners. With a dark, meditative sheen, it also lays the groundwork for Fripp’s more atmospheric work to come: music that influenced an entire field of artists diametrically opposed to everything he helped popularize in progressive rock.
Of course, King Crimson were progressive rock by definition: They helped codify the genre with their debut, 1969’s In the Court of the Crimson King. But half-a-decade later, with its British folk haze and whimsical orchestration, that album felt like, and was, the work of a completely different group. Within a year of forming, Crimson’s entire lineup shifted around Fripp—a tradition that mostly continued with each new release. This resulted in a discography that can feel more like a series of collaborative experiments than new progressions from a recognizable rock band.
Fripp has repeatedly referred to Crimson not as a singular creative entity but rather as “a way of doing things.” This particular way of doing things, however, seems to be modeled entirely after Fripp’s own mind: fueled by intellect, anxiety, and restless momentum. During the ’70s, he led the band through its myriad incarnations, from the absurd, meandering Lizard to the psychedelic and electrified Larks’ Tongues in Aspic. He never lingered too long on one particular sound or grew too comfortable with his company. Drummer Bill Bruford once described him as being “one part Joseph Stalin, one part Mahatma Gandhi, and one part the Marquis de Sade.”
As singular as they were, for most of the decade, and to most of the world, King Crimson was just one band in a grander cultural phenomenon. Progressive rock was a whirlwind of cascading notes, dizzying time signatures, heady concepts, and elaborate outfits. Crimson played into nearly all of those stereotypes at various stages, but Fripp somehow remained skeptical. Once described as “the world’s most rational rock star,” he always seemed averse to trends, too self-motivated to crossover. But when Red arrived, the genre had never been closer to a breakthrough in America, thanks to works by bands like Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull. But while these groups were gaining traction overseas by incorporating bigger hooks, cleaner stories, and brighter colors, Fripp was directing Crimson toward their darkest sounds yet.
Red is a record about fear. Its five songs are fiery and anxious, visceral and bold. The whole band (Fripp, bassist/vocalist John Wetton, and drummer Bill Bruford) were growing weary of one another, but they remained deeply attuned to their emotional climate. In “One More Red Nightmare,” a crashing airplane is a metaphor for entrapment, as Bruford rides against a busted-up cymbal he found in a trash can. It sounds like an accident, like scrap metal colliding in the sky. “Fallen Angel,” a ballad that’s alternately sweet and threatening, makes direct reference to gang violence in New York. It’s the first King Crimson lyric that could be called topical.
Red was the first Crimson album to retain the compact, five-song structure of Crimson King and the only to match its impact or influence. Both albums flow cinematically from rock epics to imagistic ballads, with heady mood pieces in between. Both feel like windows into new, sometimes frightening worlds. Both feature prominent contributions from multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald, who co-wrote all the songs on the band’s debut and appears as a guest on Red. Still, Red is no retread. In fact, the only part of the album that sonically recalls Crimson’s early days arrives in its final three minutes: a disorienting, jazzy coda that sounds like their previous six albums played in fast-forward.
The grand idea for Red was conceived during the band’s 1973-74 tour, which also saw the release of the half-live, half-studio album Starless and Bible Black (a phrase the band borrowed from Dylan Thomas). The rougher sound on Red came from the improvised performances they had begun to slip into their live sets, between the avant-garde blues-rock hybrids from Starless. Fripp had taken to calling these improvised pieces “blows”—a term that, somewhat ironically, implies a sense of breezy inevitability (maybe “improv” was too academic; “jam,” too American). As Crimson disintegrated on the road—with Fripp eventually eating meals separately from his bandmates—they knitted that distance into their live dynamic. Their “blows” begin in tentative, ominous movement before transitioning into lumbering grooves. Most feature hair-raising performances from violinist David Cross, who uses his instrument to make as much noise as possible, like a child crying for help. (By the end of the tour, before the recording of Red, he was out of the band.)
”Providence,” an improvised piece recorded live at their ’74 tour stop in the city of the same name, appears as the penultimate track on Red. Sequenced between the screaming “One More Red Nightmare” and the closing “Starless,” the song might seem like a quiet reprieve, but it builds to its own creeping intensity, like the scene in a horror movie when the protagonist finds a place to hide that turns out to be a trap. The performance is led by Cross’ violin, chased by Wetton’s distorted bass. When the whole band comes crashing in, it feels violent, even fatal. This was Crimson going off-script, no longer following the letter of the prog law but letting their instincts and their emotions run the show.
If “Providence” was the tortured sound of Crimson falling apart, the title track is their holy union. “Red” is effervescent, crushing, endlessly ascending. The song defines what Bruford calls the band’s “thick, intelligent Metal kind of sound,” making prominent use of the tritone, a Crimson melodic signature that signals dissonance, something lurking in the background (think: the “Twilight Zone” theme). The band had played at being sinister before, but “Red” was the first time that Crimson themselves sounded like something to be scared of. It’s a constant climax, a frightening rush of adrenaline.
“Red” is one of the band’s only ’70s songs to survive into the next incarnation of Crimson, which reunited Fripp and Bruford along with guitarist/vocalist Adrian Belew and bassist Tony Levin. Wetton—who, for casual listeners, might sound like he’s leading the charge on Red, as Crimson bluesiest, ballsiest frontman—would go on to find success in a different arena, fronting the pop supergroup Asia and singing their hit single “Heat of the Moment.” “I always found a certain frustration playing with Crimson,” he admitted in Dave Weigel’s The Show That Never Ends, “I was never really interested in jazz.” Despite his trepidation toward their material, his final appearance with the band was a revelation for the whole group.
“Starless,” the closing track on Red, was the swan song for Crimson’s ‘70s era and the finest song the group would ever record. In live versions, its central motif—a sad, hummable refrain—was performed by Cross on violin. On record, Fripp plays it on guitar, soaring with the same weightless sheet metal bend he later brought to “Heroes.” Wetton’s lyrics, meanwhile, are crushing in an imagistic way, delivered solemnly, like the national anthem for an imagined country. During its climactic breakdown, as Wetton’s bass buzzes with Geezer Butler levels of menace, Fripp plays a series of unison notes paired on two strings, climbing up the fretboard until the tension can no longer hold. Then, the band blasts off into a rapturous finale, in 13/8 time no less.
There are a lot of ways to hear Fripp’s solo during the breakdown in “Starless.” Sometimes it sounds like a mockery of the tedious gymnastics that had come to define prog rock. 1974 was, after all, the year that Yes toured their 80-minute slog Tales From Topographic Oceans in its entirety, giving naysayers an 80-minute excuse to abandon the genre altogether. It was also the year that Genesis released The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway—their final album with frontman Peter Gabriel—taking their sound to theatrical, conceptual extremes. “Starless,” in its way, was Crimson’s own self-immolation. With his solo, Fripp suggests stasis, a growing nausea, an explosion of monotony, as the band swarms around him like vultures. Bruford taps on bells and scratches cymbal heads as Wetton’s bass increases in volume and agitation. All the while Fripp sits on his stool, riding forward, one note at a time. You don’t know how much more he can take. Then, he finds a way out. | 2017-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Island | September 10, 2017 | 9 | 10f8ea1b-f758-4005-ba3f-826790b4163f | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Brooklyn dance-pop duo Holy Ghost!'s second album, Dynamics, pulls at all the strings its title implies. The bright disco/house tendencies and deep emotional highs of their earlier work are offset here with an introspective melancholy. | The Brooklyn dance-pop duo Holy Ghost!'s second album, Dynamics, pulls at all the strings its title implies. The bright disco/house tendencies and deep emotional highs of their earlier work are offset here with an introspective melancholy. | Holy Ghost!: Dynamics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18498-holy-ghost-dynamics/ | Dynamics | As the progenitors of last decade's indie-dance boom hit their “Now what?” years, the definition for musical maturation stands to get a bit confused. Music that nods to a previous generation's styles also faces the pitfall of knowing how those styles ossified when their listenership aged-- a combination of more self-awareness and more conscious grabs for half-comfortable adaptation-- and artists are trying even more stringently to avoid it. Holy Ghost! appeared on the scene near the end of the DFA-dominated indie-house movement's first peak, and managed to capture their stake in that scene with a couple fantastic releases (2007's “Hold On”; 2010's “Static on the Wire” EP) and an ensuing album that, though slightly uneven, pointed towards a promising future. Too bad that future was contingent on the party going on forever-- nowadays listeners who cut their teeth on that sometimes overamped mid-00s heyday would sooner prop up their feet than get up and move them.
Naturally, Holy Ghost!'s second album, Dynamics, addresses that condition by pulling at all the strings its title implies. Their brightest disco/house tendencies, and the deep emotional highs that came with them, are heavily offset with an introspective melancholy or ruminative ambivalence that asks instead of urges. Holy Ghost! put their heart deep in their grooves, where it could be drawn out after repeated listens; feelings that came across as insinuations at first gradually moved inescapably to the forefront. The songs here, meanwhile, lay it all out in detail from the start: late-night phone calls that feel like cheap stage productions in an attempt to scramble back to reconciliation (“Okay”), the summer-haze energy drain that keeps aspirations from going anywhere until anxiety sets in (“Dumb Disco Ideas”), the Bloomberg-era NYC party grind that's turned the Manhattan/outer borough clubhopper circuit into a two-way route (“Bridge and Tunnel”). This is a record that sounds like it's meant to express little more than what a drag it is to try and maintain that youthful energy in the danceclub world-- including from the music-wonk side, if “Dance a Little Closer” is any indication (“And there'll be no big changes/ there'll be no asinine punchlines/ OK, one's fine”).
The obviousness of the lyrics isn't a huge problem. Cheap words sound like a million bucks with enough vision behind them, but Holy Ghost!'s unfocused attention is so divided between a bunch of new musical ideas that getting something to click on all fronts is a rare occurrence. As singles-and-filler as Holy Ghost! seemed, it did all fit together, one or two tricks done appealingly rather than half a dozen that scatter across a wide-grouped target. Emerging out of the old Brooklynite neo-disco wheelhouse of six years ago into something transitional shouldn't have to mean Zeliging one's way through Aspartame Fleetwood Mac (“I Wanna Be Your Hand”), a strip-mall suburb of Phoenix (“Changing of the Guard”), or the overblown beach-cruiser bombast of late 80s AOR-pop ballads (“It Must Be the Weather”).
So after throwing every kind of stylistic detour into the year-and-a-half recording process that eventually gave us Dynamics, it's the stay-the-course dancefloor material that proves the most rewarding. It's definitely not as of a type as their previous synthpop-skewing material was-- “Bridge and Tunnel” is big-budget Italo a'la Kano, the intricate armada of synthesizers on “Cheap Shots” draws a clear line from mid-80s Manchester electro back through the Berlin School of progressive electronics, and “Dance a Little Closer” and “Dumb Disco Ideas” are ür-DFA in IMAX. Nick Millhiser and Alex Frankel can still crank out the heavy jams if they want to, and while half of the album feels overstuffed and overproduced, that hugeness does them a favor when it's applied to the pure dance cuts. Frankel's voice is still distinct, too-- clipped, sawed-off, and cool without being lifelessly aloof. (It helps when you can bring in Nancy Whang to push up the oomph on nearly half the tracks.) Unfortunately it's still too scattershot, proof that too many ideas can be even more of a detriment than not enough. That latter scenario held back their early work a little, but that's excusable; their first singles and the album that followed were the work of a band that was trying to figure out who they were. It's just a bit of a letdown to hear them, more than five years into their career, not having entirely answered that question. | 2013-09-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-09-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | DFA | September 18, 2013 | 6.3 | 10fad956-fa28-483a-b0dd-a2e14473c8bc | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The debut EP by Brazilian producer Superfície uses morphing club sounds to soundtrack a politically-charged sci-fi narrative of his country’s past, present, and future. | The debut EP by Brazilian producer Superfície uses morphing club sounds to soundtrack a politically-charged sci-fi narrative of his country’s past, present, and future. | Superfície: Hélices EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22747-helices-ep/ | Hélices EP | When traditional measures to fight the mosquito-borne Zika virus in Brazil proved unsuccessful, the country eventually turned to bioengineered mosquitos in order to crowd out the fatal virus’ rapidly spawning host lineage. The debut EP from Brazilian producer Superfície prominently features descendants of these cyborgian arthropods: its artwork depicts a digitally-rendered mosquito, and their buzzing sound effects appear directly on three of the four tracks. On Hélices, the producer weaves a fantastic science-fiction narrative that intertwines digital entomology with Afro-Brazilian baile funk rhythms.
In the process, Superfície draws inspiration from his native country, particularly the history of the indigenous Guaraní people, who the government of Brazil didn’t formally recognize as human beings until 1988. (And leaders say their genocide continues, along with their struggles against land dispossession and horrible youth suicide rates.) With that, Superfície also takes on technologized visions of the future and capitalism’s thirst for ecological devastation in the global south. The role of technology is decidedly ambivalent on Helíces, which simultaneously valorizes the potentialities of tech for resistance and highlights the ways it will reproduce existing relationships of domination.
While it’s impossible to grasp the whole backstory by just listening to this instrumental release, the EP’s compositional approach conveys a similar form of technological entanglement. This is evident in its approach to the baile funk rhythm, which, like most diasporic rhythms, has gone through multiple gene mutations in its lifetime. Here, it’s re-engineered through a process of syncopation that splices together its past, present, and imagined future. Initially inspired by Miami bass and freestyle records, the baile funk beat has melded at various points with Rocky horn samples, beatboxing, and a Diplo cooptation; these days, it finds itself commandeered by frolicking teen-boys like MC Pikachu and MC Brinquedo.
Hélices jams on the baile funk rhythm like a contagious, viral riff, stringing and restringing it through zones of pleasure and dread. “Febre Do Vale” subjects a slow march to this microbe-morphing approach, while “Dengue Drums” transmutes it into a kind of ecstatic restlessness. A fluid sound design, in-between musical phrasing and spurts of noise, glues it all together.
Like the swarming bioengineered insects let loose throughout Brazil, the baile funk rhythm moves through the world guided by these processes of emergence and network-oriented models of distribution. On the EP, it infects and is reciprocally infected by sounds from a disparate range of sources, enmeshed with ambient music motifs, samples of traditional percussion instruments, and a motif of Guaraní music on the track “Cerol.” The earworming, precise sound-forms on this release thus convey feelings of dispersion. The producer references another mosquito-borne illness on “Dengue Drums,” a track characterized by a gliding sense of polyrhythmic uncoiling. The EP’s accompanying remixes by Venezuelan-American producer umurmurum and Club Chai co-founder foozool further extend the contagion of the sounds at hand, reframing them in more straightforwardly dancefloor-friendly and eerily droning contexts, respectively.
In his theoretical writings, the Afrofuturist critic Kodwo Eshun has praised Black diasporic musics that use sonic technologies to break with the past and synthesize new ways of thinking about and feeling the future. We can see Superfície making related moves here. It’s unclear what kind of future the EP fights for exactly, but its urgency rages. | 2017-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Salviatek | January 10, 2017 | 7.6 | 1105c622-c8ae-4b58-a676-5e91317435b3 | Alexander Iadarola | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alexander-iadarola/ | null |
The immersive and warm-hearted comp from the Swedish label is filled with pop oddities and floor-filling house tracks from both big names and newcomers. | The immersive and warm-hearted comp from the Swedish label is filled with pop oddities and floor-filling house tracks from both big names and newcomers. | Various Artists: Studio Barnhus Volym 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-studio-barnhus-volym-1/ | Studio Barnhus Volym 1 | Eight years ago, Stockholm’s Studio Barnhus label got its start with Good Children Make Bad Grown Ups, a showcase for founders Axel Boman, Petter Nordkvist (aka Pedrodollar), and Kornél Kovács. The four-track sampler triangulated the nascent label’s sound at the intersection of deep house, impish disco, and 1960s pop, and as Studio Barnhus has grown up, the crew has retained its childlike spirit. Across the next 60-odd releases, the imprint has struck a careful balancing act between floor-filling hedonism and misty-eyed sentimentalism, offset by a subtle sense of humor. On Studio Barnhus Volym 1, the label’s first long-playing compilation, the Swedes continue to explore their affable aesthetic, and they’ve never made better company.
Studio Barnhus’ releases generally target club audiences—all three founders are DJs—but Volym 1 is often content to stray far from the dancefloor. The opening “Night Fantastic,” from Man Tear is a woozy pastiche of 1980s synth-pop that takes giddy pleasure in clever sound effects and cheekily portentous lyrics. Paradise Alley opt for toe-scuffing vibes on the downcast “What Road,” another sidelong take on synth pop. Whispers Beirut finally make the leap from SoundCloud to a more legitimate theater with “The Champion,” a slow, pneumatic take on their whimsical signature sound.
Recent signee Bella Boo’s “boyboy” drizzles bluesy sweet nothings over elliptical scrapes and squelches, suggesting Matthew Herbert remixing St Germain; in-house heartthrob Baba Stiltz doubles down on the blues conceit in a gravelly romantic plea that vacillates between sincerity and tomfoolery. And Pedrodollar’s bittersweet “Reality World” comes off like a sun-warped cassette, out-of-tune guitars glinting warm against a drunken synth solo. (Studio Barnhus’ sense of humor comes into play here with a single spoken word—“Orange”—that’s almost certainly a reference to Boards of Canada’s own habit of infusing their music with synesthetic cues.)
It’s easy to spot the influence of both Pampa and Kompakt on the Barnhus sound, so it’s fitting that figures from both labels turn up on Volym 1. Pampa papa DJ Koze delivers “Hawaiian Souldier,” a sticky-sweet tone poem that melts guitar strings into a puddle of ice cream, while Superpitcher bounces back from his sprawling The Golden Ravedays with one of the gentlest, most affecting songs he’s given us in years: His “La La Land” crystallizes the compilation’s easy-listening undercurrents in home-organ drums and a wordless, na-na-na chorus that sounds like it’s straight out of a ’70s Christmas special.
John Talabot, who DJs and records with Boman as Talaboman, also turns up with a crackerjack tune—“The Change,” a punchy house bubbler with detuned synth accents that trigger flashbacks of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92—but for the most part Volym 1 doesn’t rely on big names to make its case; some of its best work comes from newcomers. Atlanta’s Qaadir Howard—the YouTuber who popularized the phrase “No Tea, No Shade”—delivers a UK-flavored soulful house tune with a breakbeat undercurrent. Off the Meds, a Stockholm group fronted by the South African MC Kamohelo Khoaripe, drop a low-key hip-hop track fueled by acoustic bass and Ethio-jazz piano. And Sofia Kourtesis turns in another easy-listening house gem that cushions crisp hi-hats in airy vocal samples; along with Kovács’ much heavier house anthem “On Roofs,” it’s one of the album’s dancefloor highlights.
There was a fourth name credited on Barnhus 001, one only heard from one other time since then: Gino Bomino, whose fleeting appearance serves as a reminder of the label’s fondness for a well-played mystery. There are no secrets on Volym 1, exactly, but there is one major surprise: the comp’s absolute standout, Adrian Lux’s “Teenage Crime (Axel Boman Dub),” which first appeared in radically different form, in 2010, on Axtone—a label run by Axwell, of the Swedish House Mafia. The original version was a kind of winsome trance-pop, while the Axwell remix—not nearly as offensive as some of SHM’s later work, admittedly—added some main-stage oomph. There’s no mistaking the source of Boman’s edit, but the way he slows the tempo, dubs out the voice, and swaps in a weak-in-the-knees bounce laced with silvery acid streamers makes for an unexpectedly moving dancefloor moment. The Studio Barnhus crew has never been above indulging a pop sweet tooth, especially when it comes to sampling their Swedish brethren, but being able to hear the honey in a song many underground heads might automatically have written off as cheese speaks to the open-mindedness—and the warm-heartedness—that lies behind Studio Barnhus’ irrepressible charm. | 2018-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Studio Barnhus | September 1, 2018 | 7.7 | 1106ac14-66c9-4393-8c83-62e04f378df8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Detroit rapper’s world is bleak and flashy in equal measure. On the followup to 2021’s Unfuckwitable, he’s getting better at balancing his opposing tendencies. | The Detroit rapper’s world is bleak and flashy in equal measure. On the followup to 2021’s Unfuckwitable, he’s getting better at balancing his opposing tendencies. | Babyface Ray: FACE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/babyface-ray-face/ | FACE | The opening song on Babyface Ray’s FACE starts out traditionally but ends with a curveball. The first half of “My Thoughts 3 / Pops’ Prayer” is a continuation of the song series the Detroit rapper has been producing since his 2017 mixtape Trillest—a combination of life advice, flashy status updates, and bittersweet memories of life in the streets, delivered in his trademark slur of a voice. What makes this iteration different is the prayer from Ray’s father that closes the song. The music stops and his billowing voice offers a plea for protection against malevolent forces: “I come asking Your choice blessings on my baby boy Ray… That you might wrap him up with Your love, Your grace, and Your mercy/Giving him protection, prosperity, and peace in a dark and dying world.” It’s an isolated moment within Ray’s catalog of steely Detroit street rap, but it looms over the entirety of FACE: Every designer-clothes flex and moment spent reveling could be his last.
Ray’s father’s opening prayer also complements FACE’s epic scope, and not just in surface-level references (“I know heaven real, man/I done been to hell and back,” he says on the excellent single “Sincerely Face”). He’s been in the game for over a decade, and after the mainstream breakthrough of his 2021 EP Unfuckwitable, Ray is ready to show his growing range. At 20 tracks and nearly an hour in length, FACE often scans as The Essential Babyface Ray, a variety pack of beats from different subsets of hip-hop from Michigan and beyond. But unlike Unfuckwitable, most of Ray’s experiments here feel natural, and he’s given himself more time to spend in the comfort zone that endeared him to fans on earlier projects like 2019’s MIA Season 2. The balance between his street-rap origins and more conventional fare still isn’t perfect, but Ray is closer to finding his sense of equilibrium.
The same mismatch between beats that plagued Unfuckwitable lingers slightly here as well. That’s ironic, considering that Ray’s writing has a sharp sense of symmetry. He likes to stack good and bad thoughts one after the other in his verses, revealing an intimacy to his words that’s at odds with his tough-guy persona. At the end of his verse on “Overtime,” within four short bars, he darts from protecting his nephew on the cold streets of Detroit to touring the world and wearing clothes from the Japanese streetwear brand Human Made. He moves similarly through mid-album highlight “Me, Wife & Kids,” stuffing money into a blue Goyard bag while questioning what’s really driving his ambition (“Could be the paper or the percs, I been fucking itching”). Moods shift on a dime, from celebratory to paranoid to reflective—especially on songs like the heartfelt closer “Motown Music”—with Ray’s flat affect linking his non-sequiturs together like zip ties on a designer sneaker.
Ray’s world is bleak and flashy in equal measure, and an all-star team of guests and producers steps up to further flesh it out. FACE features more Michigan names in the credits than last time, and every feature from the Great Lake State plays to Ray’s strengths. He reunites with Icewear Vezzo on “6 Mile Show,” passing the baton like a hot potato over 808 Mafia and Southside’s wailing sirens. Producer Pooh Beatz decorates “Me, Wife & Kids” with a deep low end and whirring synths, creating a menacing swing for Ray to demolish. Flint mainstay Carlo teams up with Swedish producer and Sad Boy member Yung Gud on the standout track “Overtime,” the drums and piano meshing with the spacey instrumental underlay to create a vibe that’s weird and enticing.
“Overtime” is far and away the strangest song on FACE, but it isn’t the only moment where Ray navigates relatively new territory. Atlanta producer DJ Esco’s four placements mostly match the nervy energy of Ray’s best beat choices—“Tunnel Vision” and “Motown Music,” in particular, manage to be expansive without overwhelming Ray’s voice. Some of the album’s stabs at more mainstream-friendly production barely register. 808 Mafia and Southside’s menacing beat on the first half of “6 Mile Show” is undercut by an unnecessary ATL Jacob beat change that ruins the song’s atmosphere. “Blood, Sweat, & Tears” is more indistinct, and boring, than its twin verses from Ray and guest G Herbo deserved. A serviceable but completely unrelated Pusha T guest verse and Wiz Khalifa’s one-man weed nostalgia act waste the interesting beats and otherwise good verses on “Dancing With the Devil” and “Kush & Codeine,” respectively. These moments distract from Ray’s presence and feel less like songs than naked grabs at specific markets.
Thankfully, the handful of stumbles have little to do with Ray or his raps. Beneath his cold resolve, he shows a yearning to move to the next level of stardom, and the mix of regional styles never dilutes the essence of what makes Ray’s music great. FACE’s variety and grit put the album in conversation with his father’s prayer from the beginning: Ray is on the right track, and his legacy is slowly beginning to take shape.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-02-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Wavy Gang / Empire | February 1, 2022 | 7.1 | 110c9bb4-2f53-4d1d-8914-1b95f81e4691 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
They came on the scene with online novelty hit "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell", but there's a lot more to this New York rap outfit on their new mixtape. | They came on the scene with online novelty hit "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell", but there's a lot more to this New York rap outfit on their new mixtape. | Das Racist: Sit Down, Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14662-sit-down-man/ | Sit Down, Man | "These zooted brown weirdos is wildin' but they can really rap/ Saw the cover of the tape, figured it's pretty wack/ Later on eventually admitted that it's pretty crack." That's one of the most pedestrian lyrics on the dense, witty, complex Sit Down, Man but it's a good summary of the 180-degree turn Das Racist have pulled in 2010. Sure, plenty of people liked "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell", but when you lead with a presumed novelty song, the bar for your career tends to be set pretty low. But the trio followed that with the slept-on Shut Up, Dude mixtape and all of a sudden lowbrow humor gives way to subversive social commentary and a culturally literate wit that was too hilarious to immediately draw attention to how really fucking smart it was.
Judging by *Sit Down, Man'*s impressive production roster, a lot of fellow artists embraced the Shut Up mixtape. The sheer variety and quality of those producers aren't just important co-signs, however; they provide a context for Das Racist to bring their best. It also opens them up to the fruits of collaboration and, over 80 minutes, diversifies their sound. Despite the range of collaborators, Das Racist never have to break character, whether going abstract and abrasive with El-P, bareknuckle street brawling with Roc Marciano, counting major label young money with Boi-1da, or canoodling to Teengirl Fantasy's wobbly R&B.
The stars of the show though are clearly MCs Kool A.D. and Heems, who here blow their previous work out of the water. Heems told The Village Voice he chooses beats "so Talib Kweli fans wouldn't like it," but while Das Racist go great lengths to separate themselves from the pejorative connotations of "lyrical hip-hop," the main draw are the lyrics. Das Racist turn rap into Calvinball, making and breaking the ground rules with no warning whatsoever: One moment, they'll be calling Mobb Deep's Prodigy "more Picasso than Schnabel," and the next they'll be doing cold-rock-a-party Q&A-- "you puff herb?" "Dog, I smoke weed too!" Or, in what I guess could be a one-line summary of Das Racist's mindset: "I'm counting Jacksons with black friends/ I'm counting tens in Benzes with white friends/ Wonderin' if suicide's a largely white trend/ Google it later and confirm that, aight then."
There's precedent in the hyper-referential raps of Beastie Boys and MF Doom as well as the abstract-gone-mainstream wordplay of Dipset and Lil Wayne, but Das Racist are a singular act. Google and Wikipedia get several shoutouts, and it makes sense since everything under the sun is fair game for these guys, but they never rhyme for the sake of riddlin'. The lyrics themselves have an orderly and logical nature about them, pop culture crosswords that draw connections between completely unrelated objects. Listening to their music doesn't require deep cultural or musical knowledge to enjoy it-- it's pretty damn enjoyable purely as pop-- but you'll get more of a charge from it the more often you decode it. In that sense, Das Racist's music feels closer to Girl Talk's than any other current rapper.
Das Racist could stand accused of sinking into trivia as a means of obscuring a certain sort of modern emptiness, but in between all the proper nouns are some disarmingly humane moments. The Brooklyn group Keepaway lends "Amazing" a sparkly, champagne-spilling luxury as Heems gives a tender, relatable treatise on the effects of soft substance abuse. Though he notes that fan interaction tends to be way friendlier when you rap about weed, he reminisces about a youth of "Yo! MTV Raps" cards and Nautica sweatshirts and realizes "we used to play basketball, then we started drinking." Meanwhile, on the Diplo-produced "You Can Sell Anything", A.D. bemusedly imagines a record exec thinking, "maybe we can cake off the weirdos," while Heems kicks a bravely honest and timely verse where he "celebrate[s] the fact I moved back into my mom's basement," seeing the bright side of having no rent and the freedom to "sell old books for new ones," do shows, and hang with guys like Diplo.
And yet, although the upgrade in production and increased confidence in their lyrics are certainly a big part of Sit Down, Man, the most important growth for Das Racist is that they're learning how to write songs instead of just rap for four minutes at a time. Most people who've enjoyed Das Racist to this point probably wouldn't mind if they stuck with the latter, but for people who don't share their encyclopedic knowledge of turn-of-the-century mainstream rap, the sheer density of that would understandably be exhausting. Sit Down, Man works every bit as well in a house party as it does for a solitary geek-out session: the coked-out couture-rap of "Fashion Party" shows surprisingly easy chemistry with indie mystics Chairlift and should be appreciated by anyone who's ever felt odd at a gallery event but enjoyed the free booze. And while there's plenty of recognizable interpolations (Jay-Z's "Run This Town", "Days of Our Lives", the Very Best's "Julia", "We Are Family", "People Are Strange", "Addams Groove"), perhaps the best is where they feed Enigma a couple of Irish car bombs and turn "Return to Innocence" into a drunken singalong.
Some may still resist embracing Das Racist, but I imagine it's not so much a matter of race or privilege, though they do have a lot of fun playing with those two issues. It's more reflected in their hook from "hahahaha jk?"-- "we're not joking, just joking, we are joking, just joking, we're not joking." It's always difficult to convince someone that a rapper's the real deal with "they're really funny" as the selling point, since it gives the impression that neither you nor the artist appreciates the daunting cultural import of hip-hop. It's the same reason a lot of us would reserve a circle of hell for "comedy rappers," who figure that the mere medium of rapping is funny and let that do the heavy lifting. That's not how Das Racist roll: They kid because they are deeply and madly in love with hip-hop, and Sit Down, Man is an infinitely entertaining result of extreme reverence toward rap and irreverence toward everything else, themselves included. | 2010-09-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-09-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | null | September 23, 2010 | 8.7 | 110cde37-b664-4230-b15b-a634f429be0b | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
While the band’s new live-in-studio album doesn’t radically reinvent any songs, trimming some of their more frivolous elements grants new clarity and focus. | While the band’s new live-in-studio album doesn’t radically reinvent any songs, trimming some of their more frivolous elements grants new clarity and focus. | Dirty Projectors: Sing the Melody | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dirty-projectors-sing-the-melody/ | Sing the Melody | Dave Longstreth and his Dirty Projectors are best known as purveyors of fussy, technically demanding art-pop: songs that leap between genres and time signatures, riffs and vocal arrangements that slice and pirouette around each other, verses in which “unimpressed” and “Archimedes Palimpsest” are rhymed with a wink and a grin. It’s amusing, then, that the Projectors are at their friendliest and most engaging when they strip Longstreth’s compositions down, tapping into the loose, raw energy that comes with playing live or working fast.
If 2009’s towering Bitte Orca remains the band’s masterpiece, follow-up Swing Lo Magellan is their easiest album to love, in large part because its quirks—the shaggy handclaps on “Dance for You,” the giggled backing vocals on “Unto Caesar”—puncture the illusion of perfection. You’re compelled to remember that humans had to come together in a room to make this music, which in turn makes their virtuosity all the more thrilling.
That’s the appeal of Sing the Melody, a new live-in-studio album released unceremoniously last week as part of Domino’s Documents series. Last November, near the tail end of months spent touring, the Projectors went into Manhattan’s Power Station to play highlights from their gleeful full-band comeback Lamp Lit Prose and a few gems from their back catalog. None of these songs are radically reinvented, but at a minimum they’re rendered with an impressive urgency. “That’s a Lifestyle” is a good example: It may have already been the most electric, familiar cut on Lamp Lit Prose, but it’s enlivened here by sharper, earthier harmonies from the trio of Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, and Kristin Slipp.
Other songs benefit from addition by subtraction; trimming their more frivolous elements for a live lineup has granted them new clarity and focus. Opener “Right Now” loses a programmed beat, piano part, and vocal manipulation, and its skronking horns are replaced with crisp chords. The final product is a pure and galvanizing call to action, one that would’ve fit in nicely alongside the more reflective material on Swing Lo Magellan. It isn’t the only song to find a more natural home within the Projectors’ larger discography here: Longstreth & co. rip up the floorboards of the bubbly Off the Wall homage “I Feel Energy,” revealing the sort of riffs and cool, clean space heard all the way back on Rise Above.
Most of Sing the Melody’s second half is devoted to older oddities, including a rendition of Dirty Projectors highlight “Cool Your Heart” that’s remarkably faithful to the glitchy, cluttered studio version. Tenured fans who remember how weird and thrilling it felt to see Longstreth pop up with a writing credit on a hit for Kanye West, Rihanna, and Paul McCartney will surely enjoy hearing him repatriate the bridge of “FourFiveSeconds,” and the 2009 David Byrne collaboration “Knotty Pine” retains its punchy, brainy energy. Where the cuts on the album’s first half threaten the supremacy of their “official” counterparts, these ones are enjoyable but ultimately inessential.
“Enjoyable but ultimately inessential” doubles as a frank assessment of Dirty Projectors’ current place in the world around them. The band has felt at odds with the prevailing mood in recent years, for reasons both musical—even after tasting major pop success, Longstreth has continued to let his freak flag fly—and cultural; this isn’t the most hospitable climate, in relative terms, for exacting auteurs. Sing the Melody makes a good argument for the Projectors’ continued relevance by shifting the emphasis from Longstreth’s creative leadership to the band’s power as a collective. In that way, it recalls Bon Iver’s i,i, another album that crackles with interpersonal energy. Both releases encourage you to think of the men at their center as reliant on the communities that bring their ideas to life. | 2019-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | December 20, 2019 | 7.1 | 110e0c5f-301d-44f6-86d4-28e1f0521622 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
The band’s new LP is a rosily optimistic record that showcases Bethany Cosentino’s expanding range as a vocalist and songwriter. | The band’s new LP is a rosily optimistic record that showcases Bethany Cosentino’s expanding range as a vocalist and songwriter. | Best Coast: Always Tomorrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/best-coast-always-tomorrow/ | Always Tomorrow | The Best Coast narrative was simple—cats, California, crushes, weed, all sung over sun-drenched guitars. But a closer read of the band’s output can be disconcerting: “Look to the future, nothing’s there,” Bethany Cosentino sang over tambourine hits on 2012’s The Only Place. On her 2015 follow-up California Nights, her tone was similarly ebullient as she sang, “I have no reason to be sad/But I find a way/Almost every day.” The song was titled “When Will I Change.” Fuzz pedals and spacious vocal reverb cast a warm sepia tone, but on their own, some of her words sooner evoked dead-end depression than playful slacktivism. Cosentino’s work met plenty of criticism, much of it openly sexist, but the troubling emotional undercurrents were dismissed as growing pains, if they were mentioned at all. Sameness, both sonically and lyrically, was treated as an artistic block, rather than a psychological one.
Always Tomorrow—Best Coast’s first LP in five years, setting aside their 2018 children’s album—is a dispatch from a better place. In that span of time, Cosentino made a number of moves toward personal growth. She’s become one of the most prominent figures to speak out about sexual misconduct in the music industry, finding a new way of using her voice and platform to inspire change. And crucially, she began to pursue sobriety. She took inspiration in part from Jennifer Clavin of Bleached, another SoCal band that turned a new leaf after years of hard partying.
The idea of public sobriety is relatively new; only a decade ago, stints in rehab and admissions of struggles with substance abuse might, at best, warrant a mawkish tour of the talk show circuit. But in the era of confessional media, musicians like Cosentino, Clavin, and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, as well as higher-profile celebrities like Ben Affleck and Courtney Love, are speaking openly about getting clean. With the newfound visibility comes a breadth of approaches to creating art while sober. For Crutchfield, sobriety has meant a return “to my roots, musically,” a pared-back, folk-inspired approach to songwriting that feels like a refresh. Bleached’s post-sobriety album Don’t You Think You’ve Had Enough took a more direct approach, while still keeping sobriety itself at arm’s length.
Cosentino’s preferred songwriting mode is more explicit. “Took away substances, that’s the only change I see,” she sings on “Rollercoaster.” “Different Light” makes no direct reference to drugs or alcohol, but emphatically encourages its subject to embark on a similar journey. “Who am I to judge if you still see things in a different light?” she sings, her lack of judgement slightly unconvincing. Even when ruminating on anxiety, she holds fast to a positive outlook: “Finally I’ve seen the light/Finally I’m the master of my own mind,” she sings on “Master of My Own Mind.”
It’s not a surprise to hear direct inspiration from Cosentino’s personal life—she’s never been one to take poetic license when it’s just as easy to say, “I’m crying.” Where previous records translated that candidness into empathy, here her singular focus comes across as self-satisfied. It’s not that sobriety itself is boring or smug; it’s that Cosentino has seemingly started at the finish line. “I guess this is what they mean when they say, ‘people can change,’” she sings on “For the First Time.” She is even more straightforward on “Everything Has Changed,” recounting old insecurities and bad habits before belting the chorus’ affirmation: “Everything has changed, and I like it this way.” If it sounds like a motivational after-school special, it might be because Cosentino wrote the lyrics a year prior to kicking substances, imagining an ideal world before she began to occupy it. That’s a testament to the power of self-actualization—but it can also scan as superficial, treating sobriety as a silver bullet.
While the songwriting can be simplistic, Always Tomorrow also showcases Cosentino’s expanding range as a vocalist and songwriter. There’s a chiming richness to her voice; bright, and clean, it cuts above the thick reverb of the instrumentation without turning to syrup. Working with producers Carlos de la Garza and Justin Meldal-Johnsen, who’ve elevated powerhouse vocalists for bands like Paramore, Charly Bliss, and Cherry Glazerr, Cosentino uses her voice to set the moods to match the album’s more adventurous compositional modes. There’s a clear effort to differentiate Best Coast’s songs from their presumed mold of surf rock and hazy power-pop. Small flourishes, like the synths that introduce “Seeing Red” or the soaring chords on “Used to Be,” help to break away from uniformity. On “True,” an uncharacteristically slow and twangy love song, her elongated vowels exude a lonesome sweetness that recalls Roy Orbison. As easy as it might be to discard Cosentino’s platitudes about personal growth, it’s tough to ignore the obvious strides she’s made as a vocalist.
Best Coast spent years chasing highs and documenting the lows with impressive, if often prosaic, frankness. And though they’ve finally found the optimism to match their sun-washed disposition, it’s Cosentino’s musicianship and knack for melody that prevents these songs from turning to fluff. Still, the record often slips into performative positivity; worthy ideas about overcoming challenges are subsumed by her rosy outlook. Despite the sheen of self-reflection, Always Tomorrow feels designed to convince everyone else as much as herself.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Concord | February 22, 2020 | 6.5 | 110e33b9-9fc2-44c2-a2f3-b4cfa65115e6 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The pairing of Scott Walker and Sunn O))) is real, and yes, it is a touch ridiculous. Their collaborative LP Soused feels more like an event and an experience than a vital, persevering record for either party involved. It’s good and, at times, completely absorbing, especially when Walker and the amplifiers seem to be fighting on the same side of a great battle. | The pairing of Scott Walker and Sunn O))) is real, and yes, it is a touch ridiculous. Their collaborative LP Soused feels more like an event and an experience than a vital, persevering record for either party involved. It’s good and, at times, completely absorbing, especially when Walker and the amplifiers seem to be fighting on the same side of a great battle. | Scott Walker + Sunn O))): Soused | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19946-sunn-o-scott-walker-soused/ | Soused | You won’t need to pinch yourself awake: As if to ensure listeners that Soused isn’t some fantastic nightmare or haunted daydream, Scott Walker and Sunn O))) begin their five-track, 50-minute collaboration with a brief series of exclamation marks. Walker’s voice sweeps in with extreme operatic gusto, delivering a set of simple, sliding phrases over sparkling synthesizers. Dual classic rock riffs trail those hails, like “Paradise City” abutting a scrap of “Heartbreaker”. And as it all fades toward silence, Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley shatter the creeping calm with their expected amplifier army. To emphasize the madness, the sound of an American bullwhip slaps at the back of the din. Yes, Scott O))) is real, and yes, it is a touch ridiculous.
In the wake of Lulu, the intriguing but errant byproduct of a more famous elder leading a more famous metal act, such a partnership felt like a joke someone might have made on a message board in 2011. Gabriel and Mastodon? Jagger and Down? Walker and Sunn O)))? Sure, line them up, but don’t assume that they will all net Lulu’s Warner Brothers deal. At least there was stylistic precedent for this hypothetical pairing. Though Walker was once a pop star, his work later in life has been experimentally ambitious, adding webs of dissonance to song cycles that explored discontent in dozens of guises. Even now, his 1995 LP, Tilt, seems diabolically heavy and jarring, employing unease as compositional exigency. Released only seven months apart, his 2006 album, The Drift, and Sunn O)))’s Black One, feel now like complementary surveys of the same seismic divide. Walker originally wrote “Lullaby,” Soused’s jarring and arching climax, in 1999. His music doesn’t fear the dark.
As legend has it, Sunn O))) approached Walker a half-decade ago with a blind call for collaboration. He’d never heard them, but they hoped he’d pen something to sing for “Alice”, the orchestra-gilded finale of their 2009 LP, Monoliths & Dimensions. He didn’t, but he did become a convert to the band’s maximum-volume, minimum-movement metal. He began writing new material with Anderson, O’Malley and, it seems, both their instrumental and thematic tones in mind. Together, they recorded those pieces earlier this year in London, with several of Walker’s more customary contributors adding drums, horns, keyboards and electronics.
Soused is billed to “Scott Walker + Sunn O))),” an ostensible meeting of equals. On T-shirts, the project is even playfully dubbed Scott O))), written in the same lower-cased, bold-faced font that the electronics company and drone duo have long used. And as is his wont, O’Malley designed the packaging for Soused, an austere grayscale colossus guided by a system of holistic organization.
But the music itself never tries to sell the conspiracy of equal and reciprocal collaboration. Sure, Sunn O))) made the first move here, but any real work required Walker’s acceptance and effort. This is, then, a Scott Walker album, where Sunn O)))—Anderson, O’Malley and longtime multi-instrumentalist and collaborator TOS Nieuwenhuizen—serve as a very large, potent instrument within Walker’s band, or maybe a set of them, like a rack of guitars pulled from a closet. During “Brando”, they follow him, saturating the background but almost always ceding the spotlight. When he sings “A beating would do me a world of good,” Anderson and O’Malley bend inside his shadow, taking the riff’s next step down.
Anderson and O’Malley even flash back to their high-school days in Thorr’s Hammer, or their subsequent separate bands, for “Fetish”, the album’s singular and brilliant flashpoint. Just before the song’s halfway point, they’ve traced Walker’s voice only with ominous noise and tracked him with mid-range melodies. “He imagines he feels it, tugging and clinching, hears it rustling and rising,” Walker yells, pausing suddenly as if to summon help. Sunn O))) answers, matching the beat of drummer Ian Thomas with loaded guitar and low-lying bass, like they’re an insurgent young doom band again, racing toward a crossover crescendo. Later in the track, they sprawl out beneath him, their amps and instruments harmonizing obediently alongside screeching trumpet, stuttering drums and stabbing static. They are, perhaps for the first time, part of a force greater than their own.
Sunn O)))’s career has been defined by their search for ways to augment their riffs, to make them bigger than simply big; but after 15 years and a half-dozen full-lengths, they’ve yet to take the routes through which Walker pulls them here. The only prototypically Sunn O))) moment arrives during the back half of “Bull,” when they cycle a slow set of notes across occasional percussion and over scrambled field recordings. But it’s mostly a mid-record volume respite, a break in the command of Walker’s stentorian elegance.
Soused documents depravity and wanton desire, or needing something—pain or the absence of it, protection or the illusion of it, privacy or the desecration of it—so bad it’s ripping your worldview into pieces. Walker empties volumes of data into those ideas, pinballing between 17th century painting debates, New Testament infanticide and Iroquois lullabies within the course of the shape-shifting “Herod 2014”. In less than a minute of “Bull”, he moves from a string of screamed Latin imprecations to a recited text message, reprinted in the liner notes as an iChat bubble. During “Brando”, he details successive episodes in which the named actor was beaten, shouting the elliptical list with an urgency that gives the sadomasochism a private power.
Though Walker was once a sort of balladeer icon, his lyrics trend toward the obtuse and ponderous. The words on Soused don’t forsake those qualities, necessarily, but there is a certain relatability and readability here, as if this return to rock ’n’ roll has pulled him back toward earth. Despite the macabre battle between the innocent and the hunter of “Herod 2014,” Walker delights in the language, using alliteration and end-rhyme to fashion what could pass for old-fashioned folklore. “The deer fly, the sand fly, the tsetse can’t find them,” he offers, his voice cold but comforting, like that of a wolf in disguise. “The goon from the Stasi
is left far behind them.
Their delicate derma
won’t witness a ray.” In this new relationship, Walker seems to have rediscovered a sometimes-hidden element of his own work—its playfulness and its perversity, the coexistence of the smile and the frown.
Is it selfish, then, to hope that this might be only the start, the unlikely origin of a partnership that extends beyond a one-off album? Walker is, of course, infamously reluctant to talk about his future in making music, and he can be rather chelonian with his output; much the same applies for Sunn O))), at its core a duo of dudes involved in a dozen other things. That’s one reason Soused feels more like an event and an experience than a vital, persevering record for either party. It’s good and, at times, completely absorbing, especially when Walker and the amplifiers seem to be fighting on the same side of a great battle. Soused is compelling, almost inherently so, but it’s not a classic. What if they gave this time to be more than a mere oddity, so as to feel no rush to launch from the gates and exclaim that this is, in fact, real? We’ll probably never find out, but we never thought we’d hear Scott O))), anyway. | 2014-10-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-10-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | 4AD | October 22, 2014 | 7.4 | 11109f65-1fdd-4791-9fdf-43e3b01fd05a | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Borrowing from disco, electro-soul, boogie, and 1980s R&B, vibe commissioner Calvin Harris’ second volume of frictionless summer jams has the staying power of vape smoke at Coachella. | Borrowing from disco, electro-soul, boogie, and 1980s R&B, vibe commissioner Calvin Harris’ second volume of frictionless summer jams has the staying power of vape smoke at Coachella. | Calvin Harris: Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/calvin-harris-funk-wav-bounces-vol-2/ | Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 2 | In the five years between Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 and its sequel, Calvin Harris, once a vegan, began eating liver and bone marrow. “I lost the fuck-you juice for a couple years,” he said in a recent interview. “It all came rushing back as soon as I had those bones and got those amazing fats in my body.” Of his new album Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 2, he added: “This is the product of that.”
Since 2017, Harris has had UK top 10 hits with Rag’n’Bone Man and Tom Grennan, remixed SZA and Halsey, and starred in a Vegas residency reportedly worth some $1.3 million per night. In 2020 he started a side project under the alias Love Regenerator, which spans ravey techno to this year’s “Lonely,” an irresistible ’90s piano house homage led by a gorgeous vocal from Sananda Maitreya, aka Terence Trent D’Arby. It would be the best track on Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 2, had it been included.
The throwback funk sound that Harris mines on Vol. 2 is all over the charts recently, with fresh perspectives from Beyoncé and Steve Lacy, as well as faithful era-reviving from Silk Sonic and Lizzo. Unfortunately no amount of beef offal can bring Harris to the level of his peers. When he borrows from disco, electro-soul, boogie, and ’80s R&B, the music is so wispy and unobtrusive it has the staying power of vape smoke at Coachella.
In the early ’10s, Harris productions like “We Found Love” and “Bounce” brightened the sound of radio pop. Here, he dulls it. Synths glide frictionlessly; vivid colors become pastel-toned playlist fodder. Lead single “Potion,” the weakest of Dua Lipa’s underwhelming post-Future Nostalgia singles, underserves her and Young Thug on a beat that feels like a yacht rock keyboard preset; Pharrell’s cloying ode to friendship on “Day One” has the complexity of a unicorn pool float. Harris cribs DNCE’s profoundly irritating disco pastiche “Cake by the Ocean” for a 6LACK and Donae’o collaboration called, ahem, “Nothing More to Say.”
“Lean on Me,” led by Swae Lee, shoots for the swooniness of “Sunflower” but lands at bland bedroom pop. The “Uptown Funk” type beat of “Stay With Me” would have felt dated a half-decade ago and despite the best efforts of co-features from Pharrell and Justin Timberlake, the song is just about saved by a seductive Halsey hook. “Hey, it’s a mess out there,” they sing, our hero swooping in to save the day.
Many of Vol. 2’s collaborations are thrilling to consider in the abstract. You can imagine a fabulously fun summer anthem with Harris and Latto, but her silky verse on the meandering “Live My Best Life” is cut short for a hook from Snoop Dogg, whose Bootsy Collins thing was better back when he was Snoopzilla. Harris once elevated his collaborators; many of them still shine despite insipid production. Busta Rhymes comes on “Ready or Not” mad as hell, flipping between double-time raps and flamboyant ad-libs; Stefflon Don’s lilting hook on “Woman of the Year” radiates blithe charisma. And a lovesick Charlie Puth is amusingly dogwalked by dancehall star Shenseea on the boogie-inspired “Obsessed,” his romantic entreaties countered by her brilliantly unbothered verse.
Harris’ best songs were works of high-voltage audacity, with brazen EDM donks that demanded you surrender to heedless joy, but could be oddly emotional too. In place of his previous music’s vision, Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 2 simply demonstrates competence. Harris may say that this album is powered by fuck-you juice; it is as threatening as an Erewhon smoothie. | 2022-08-10T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-10T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Columbia | August 10, 2022 | 5.2 | 1111a93f-0fda-4667-8c7e-bf50e40c24e4 | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | |
Quick-hit satisfaction is what makes the Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz a sought-after artist for guest verses, the medium in which he has carried out a world-conquering campaign over the past two years. His new B.O.A.T.S. II can be clumsy but the low stakes also yield some surprises. | Quick-hit satisfaction is what makes the Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz a sought-after artist for guest verses, the medium in which he has carried out a world-conquering campaign over the past two years. His new B.O.A.T.S. II can be clumsy but the low stakes also yield some surprises. | 2 Chainz: B.O.A.T.S II: Me Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18562-2-chainz-boats-ii-me-time/ | B.O.A.T.S II: Me Time | Quick-hit satisfaction is what makes Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz such a sought-after artist for guest verses, the medium in which he truly shines and in which he has carried out a world-conquering campaign over the past two years. For rap fans and casual radio listeners alike, the deeply accented “Tru!” ad lib or the equally joyous “2 Chaiiiinz” have taken on a Pavlovian quality, signalling the immediate thrill of 16 bars of pure absurdity and dirty jokes. Even when the punchlines don't land quite right, it's impossible to turn away. There's a certain exuberant commitment to the delivery, and that voice, which sounds pinched yet fully possessed. Listening to 2 Chainz is a compulsive act.
Leading up to the release of the first 2 Chainz album, Based on a T.R.U. Story, these qualities seemed like telling indicators of a new rap superstar on the rise. Accordingly, that album was an event, the product of the rapper formerly known as Tity Boi’s unlikely decade-plus career finally coming together in one release. In contrast, the follow-up, B.O.A.T.S. II: Me Time, arrived with almost no buzz, each of its promotional singles seeming to generate less excitement than the one before.
Yet B.O.A.T.S. II in many ways gets closer to the essential 2 Chainz appeal, perhaps unsurprisingly for an album focused on “me time.” It trades in the attempts at being a blockbuster project for a laundry list of "whoa, cool" moments, which begin in earnest as soon as 2 Chainz shouts out his stove by yelling "what up stove!" on opener "Forks". There's something refreshingly traditional about what a non-event the album is. It's as if 2 Chainz decided that his approach to 90s nostalgia would be not to make an album that sounded like that decade but rather one that applied the high-budget, slapped-together vibe of a minor Bad Boy-era release to the sounds of modern Atlanta. There's even a verse from Ma$e, and it's fantastic.
Much of the album's first half is what has become formulaic 2 Chainz at this point: Massive, booming beat, shouted short phrase for a hook, and non sequitur punchlines that sound like he's reading a list of one-liners out of a notebook. At its best, as on "Where You Been", this approach yields disjointed brilliance like "If you wrote an autobiography you'd have to sue yourself/ Your lyin' ass/ Codeine in my wine glass." 2 Chainz going at full tilt-- purposefully butchering the pronunciation of clothing brand Comme Des Garcons, for instance-- finds himself a riot and forces us to agree. At the same time, his approach can veer toward the latter-day Lil Wayne tendency to rattle off punchlines like Mad Libs.
Also like Wayne, who drops by for a lively verse within Drake's verse on fun, douchey highlight "I Do It", 2 Chainz's bars can skirt the border between WTF and tasteless. On the grandiose, cinematic "U Da Realest", for instance, he delivers a heartfelt series of RIPs before undercutting them with the line "I died in her cervix." There are two pretty terrible songs that are both about uploading sex tapes to the Internet, the better of which, “Netflix”, is partly redeemed by Fergie, of all people, stopping by to rap. Elsewhere, the loose approach yields duds like 90-second cocaine measurement tutorial "36", which is exactly the half-baked fragment its runtime promises it will be, and a misplaced spoken word intro on "Black Unicorn".
B.O.A.T.S. II can be clumsy, but the low stakes also yield some great surprises in the album's second half. The plinking synths and rumbling guitars of Wonder Arillo's beat on "Extra" push 2 Chainz into a fantastically deliberate half-time flow until current Atlanta wunderkind Rich Homie Quan swoops in for a thrilling half-sung verse. "Mainstream Ratchet" takes full advantage of DJ Montay and Big Korey beat with dubstep-grade amounts of low end, while "So We Can Live" matches T-Pain to a boom-bap beat complete with record scratches, to great effect. It's here, where 2 Chainz furthers the throwback East Coast vibe with a rare stab at storytelling, and on "Outroduction", which offers an unusually clear-eyed look at the rapper's career arc, that the reason 2 Chainz is so fun to listen to becomes most apparent.
On "Outroduction," he shares an anecdote that starts off wistful about a partner in jail calling to wish a Happy New Year. Then 2 Chainz gets the audible equivalent of a glint in his eye and shouts out-- not rhyming, just thrilled at the absurdity of it all-- "I had to tell him: nigga it's March!" B.O.A.T.S. II is an album that feels happy just to exist, a rejection of the modern idea that album releases are serious events and all the tracks that sound like they were fun to make get relegated to bonus cuts or mixtapes. The belief in the album as an entertaining product is similarly captured by the decision to include a cookbook of 2 Chainz's favorite tour recipes with the deluxe edition. 2 Chainz entertains us because he understands the wackiness of what he's doing, and he performs with a wink. He's a unique form of the American dream: The tru story of the guy who worked hard and, after a long career that could leave anyone jaded, emerged successful and seemingly less jaded than ever. | 2013-09-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-09-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | September 18, 2013 | 6.2 | 11158716-cb78-4bc7-9df4-f433b722ce6f | Kyle Kramer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kyle-kramer/ | null |
Focusing on songs recorded and released between 1957 and 1982, this follow-up to the revelatory Fire in My Bones box is a deeply compelling document of the range and power of gospel music. | Focusing on songs recorded and released between 1957 and 1982, this follow-up to the revelatory Fire in My Bones box is a deeply compelling document of the range and power of gospel music. | Various Artists: This May Be My Last Time Singing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15861-this-may-be-my-last-time-singing/ | This May Be My Last Time Singing | In 2009, YETI publisher (and Pitchfork contributor) Mike McGonigal assembled a compilation of "raw, rare, and otherworldly African-American gospel" that showcased his penchant for wild, devil-fearing church songs. As far as gospel collections go, Fire in My Bones felt revelatory, crucial: those three discs of evangelical missives reconfigured religious music as unpredictable, sonically challenging material. McGongial's next project, This May Be My Last Time Singing, focuses specifically on gospel songs recorded and released between 1957 and 1982. Like its predecessor, it's a deeply compelling document of the various ways human beings talk to God.
There's urgency to all good art, but gospel music, in particular, is fueled by desperation: Transmit your message of gratitude to Heaven before you lose the chance entirely (and end up somewhere else). The mission is massive, but in many cases, the material legacy is humble; at least a third of the songs included on This May Be My Last Time Singing were self-released and pressed, in small batches, onto 7", 45-rpm discs, a process paid for by church congregations or the singers themselves. Decades later, McGonigal tugged those little records out of cardboard boxes and milk crates, trawling record shops (this might be the only compilation in recent memory that thanks at least a dozen), online auctions, and flea markets for lost prayers. That these songs were released commercially (even if they sold only a few dozen copies for local or vanity labels) feels paramount to any real understanding of the performers' intent-- these aren't field recordings. They're solicitations: holler along, fall to your knees, pray with me. Believe.
McGonigal's finds are spread across three discs, each loosely organized around a state of faith ("The Devil's Trying to Steal My Joy", "Perfect Like the Angels", and "All Wrap Up in One"), and while they range dramatically in style-- from funk to rhythm and blues to drum machine psychedelia-- they're linked by an industriousness that feels unique to the genre. No matter how rowdy these tracks get, their creators are still doing selfless work.
This May Be My Last Time Singing focuses specifically on post-war gospel, but most of it feels oddly timeless. Rev. J.W. Neely and Family's "Don't Let Nobody Turn You Around" was self-released in 1980 but sounds divorced from the era altogether; it's disorienting to consider that this rendition was born into the same pop landscape as Pink Floyd and Blondie. An a cappella, handclap-heavy ode to solidarity in the face of temptation-- "Don't you let nobody turn you around/ You just keep on together," Neely and family shout, their voices warm-- it's encouraging, never threatening. Same goes for the Exciting Traveling Four's "O Lord I Have No Friend", which was released by the National Recording Label in 1982. Save a wonky electric organ intro (which sounds as if it were being piped up from the deep end of a swimming pool), "O Lord I Have No Friend" is quaint and earnest in a way that defies its age. You can practically see the matching bow ties, the four faces crowded around a single mic.
The collection's longest track, the seven-and-a-half minute "He Walks With Me (Parts 1 and 2)", is also its most exhilarating. Calvin Leavy, a singer and guitarist from Arkansas, scored a modest hit in 1970 with "Cummins Prison Farm", a scrappy electric blues that decried conditions at Cummins Prison, the Arkansas penitentiary infamous for its abuse (torture and inmate rape were common, and in 1968, three skeletons, one decapitated, one with a crushed skull, and a third with both legs broken back were discovered in shallow graves on the prison grounds). In 1976, Leavy-- who, in a particularly cruel twist, would be shipped off to Cummins himself for drug charges in 1992-- recorded "He Walks With Me (Parts 1 and 2)" with the Cummins Prison Farm Singers for the aptly named Messenger Records. The song contains a bogus fade out three and a half minutes in, but Leavy's really just warming up, his raspy voice growing higher, wilder. The music-- loose, rudimentary rock-- gently revs back up, providing a steady, rhythmic canvas for Leavy to scribble all over. His message is determined, redemptive: we are not alone, not ever. By the time the track actually fades out, it feels like there's a full army of believers crammed into the room.
Plenty of new, privately sourced anthologies have inadvertently positioned the record collector as curator, savior, interpreter. But unlike many maniacal stockpilers of vinyl and shellac, McGonigal doesn't fetishize these songs as hard-sought rarities. This May Be My Last Time Singing contains plenty of oddball finds, but, as McGonigal explains, these are just the tracks he loves the most-- which is exactly what renders him such a reliable guide. As his brief liner notes state, "these are the songs I'm most obsessed with, that if you dropped by my house I'd say 'You have to hear this.'"
Which, as any music fan knows, is the very best way to hear anything. | 2011-09-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-09-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Tompkins Square | September 29, 2011 | 8.4 | 1116d5cf-794e-45e8-a949-ec654503aec0 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
Lo-fi and languid, these 4-track demos for 2020’s Sundowner offer an illuminating window into the songwriter’s creative process. | Lo-fi and languid, these 4-track demos for 2020’s Sundowner offer an illuminating window into the songwriter’s creative process. | Kevin Morby: A Night at the Little Los Angeles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-morby-a-night-at-the-little-los-angeles/ | A Night at the Little Los Angeles | A Night at the Little Los Angeles is more than a series of sketches. This collection of 4-track demos recorded at Kevin Morby’s home in Kansas City offers a warm, fulsome window into the genesis of the music he would later sculpt with producer Brad Cook on 2020’s Sundowner. These aren’t dregs from the cutting room floor but rather distillations, 10 pared-back recordings that often outshine the later iterations. It’s a well-suited format for such inward-facing folk music, twilight ballads that focus on loss and longing.
Morby isn’t the first troubadour to escape the city and dig up roots, abandoning the metropolises that colored past releases like 2013’s Harlem River (New York) and 2016’s Singing Saw (Los Angeles) in favor of a Midwestern home with a hot tub and garden. An easy comparison is Bob Dylan and the Band’s classic The Basement Tapes, recorded in Saugerties, New York, and released at a similar remove after years on the road. But where their retreat felt like a rollicking group hang, Little Los Angeles is a largely solo affair, spartan in sound and provenance. Still, both records share a melancholy evocation of geography (Dylan’s “Goin’ to Acapulco,” Morby’s “U.S. Mail”), and they demonstrate the pleasure in the artistic process, as close as you can get to being in the room when the lightbulb goes off.
Lo-fi and languid, Little Los Angeles feels like being taken into someone’s confidence, although that intimacy works best when considered alongside the fuller renditions on Sundowner. This album forgoes any noodling or experiments and gets straight to the essence, so that several songs feel more arresting than their polished, studio counterparts. The meandering guitar on opener “Campfire” is warm and beckoning, and Morby’s unadorned vocals have never sounded so winsome. “Don’t Underestimate the Midwest American Sun” is another standout, with its peripatetic piano keys and unexpected shifts: The lyrics transition from a pleading tone to a more defiant one, like we are alongside Morby, mustering our conviction in real time. The album version, which was accompanied by a drum machine, anticipated the build, whereas the Little Los Angeles version maintains the illusion of spontaneity, recalling the moments of tension-and-release that he and his collaborators build so well onstage.
This release invites us closer to Morby’s performances, trading spacious production for the immediacy of creation, so that we can almost hear him putting pen to paper. Perfection is hardly the goal, but there are moments that drag no matter how interested you are in the craft. “Sundowner” feels lethargic without the honeyed thrum of bass and melodic trills, and “Brother, Sister” is corny by nature, trying desperately to evoke the mood of a Morricone Western. Still, no matter the disruptions, the hissing tape and abrupt cut-offs, Little Los Angeles illuminates the same pursuit that Morby sought on more fleshed-out albums like 2017’s City Music and 2019’s Oh My God: These are postcards that magnify the ephemeral, loving transmissions from a particular place and time.
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. | 2021-10-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | October 15, 2021 | 7 | 1117b75d-08eb-4328-9bb5-11f6b398017e | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
With chirping guitars and prismatic synths, the Baltimore band’s mellow, filigreed psych-pop has a beguiling appeal. | With chirping guitars and prismatic synths, the Baltimore band’s mellow, filigreed psych-pop has a beguiling appeal. | Tomato Flower: Gold Arc EP / Construction EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tomato-flower-gold-arc-ep-construction-ep/ | Gold Arc EP / Construction EP | On “Red Machine,” the opening track from Baltimore-via-Atlanta psych-pop band Tomato Flower’s debut EP, Gold Arc, vocalist Austyn Wohlers paints a vibrant but vague scene. “Red machine/Red all across the world/Red arena/Red the provincial girl,” she sings in her Laetitia-Sadier-meets-Greta-Kline voice, and it could mean just about anything. But Wohlers’ steady, comforting delivery and the band’s sun-dappled guitars and synths—a sound only a few steps off from soon-to-be tourmates Animal Collective—produce a sense of wonder that erases any questions.
“Red Machine” is a prime example of what Tomato Flower does well. Gold Arc, released in February 2022, and Construction, its August 2022 companion, are most effective when the music is catchy enough to make up for head-scratching lyrics. Wohlers takes a more direct approach on Construction’s “Blue” as she recites a financial wishlist: money, vacations, stocks, dividends. She gives each item a whole line in the stanza, leaving ample space for her requests to sink in as chirping guitars and prismatic synths present a contrasting bliss. It’s as specific and memorable as Tomato Flower get on these EPs.
When the melodies are strong, what they’re saying matters less than how they’re saying it. On Construction’s “Aparecida,” whistling synths and nonchalant guitars back vocalist Jamison Murphy’s full-throated but gentle performance. Though tuneful, it lacks lucid, memorable lyrics: “In dreams, I saw/But does it change a thing for me/This visitation?” It’s not the only time the strength of the music allows Tomato Flower to get away with lyrics that seem only partially thought out. Gold Arc’s “Shying” showcases guitar arpeggios and overdriven riffage that make for a strong EP closer even as the band’s imagery—“Oh, rectify me/No one’s ever gonna find you/In my pocket”—doesn’t reveal much.
Construction and Gold Arc falter when Tomato Flower hold back both lyrically and musically. “Take me to that place, the other side/Take me to where they are glorified,” Wohlers sings on the slow, arid Construction cut “Fancy.” She seems to be describing some fading paradise and a magical ascent to heaven—yet the vocal performances, guitar lines, and synths sound exhausting, not inspiring. Of the two EPs, Construction is more lyrically direct and musically sharp; had the band opted to replace “Fancy” with highlights from Gold Arc, the combined record might have better hit the mark. At their catchiest, Tomato Flower strike a fusion of twee pop and psychedelia that invites you into their inexplicably beguiling world, even if they’re still in the process of building it. | 2022-08-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | August 11, 2022 | 6.4 | 111a6765-e4e8-453d-9f2f-e40b0030fa0b | Max Freedman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-freedman/ | |
Though Japanese names in Pitchfork pages most often point to experimental Powerbook artists or psych-rock freakouts, Shugo Tokumaru offers a wonderfully structured indie pop record, dense and infinitely considered: No note seems unnecessary, and everything is in its right place. | Though Japanese names in Pitchfork pages most often point to experimental Powerbook artists or psych-rock freakouts, Shugo Tokumaru offers a wonderfully structured indie pop record, dense and infinitely considered: No note seems unnecessary, and everything is in its right place. | Shugo Tokumaru: Night Piece | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8270-night-piece/ | Night Piece | There's not much information available about Shugo Tokumaru. Music Related, the small Japan-via-NYC label responsible for the release, says Shugo is from Tokyo and in his twenties and, perhaps inadvertently, suggests that the Beach Boys are his only influence. If anything, the two artists do share an affinity for bright, beautiful melodies: Shugo's hushed tenor and sparse acoustic guitar arrangements will also remind American indie-pop audiences of Sufjan Stevens, and the songs' unintrusive electronic embellishments recall Nobukazu Takemura and recent Fly Records releases from OMB and Tatsuya Yamada.
Beyond that, there's not much of a gimmick to the songs on his debut album, Night Piece. Shugo doesn't seem to fit into the glut of bedroom IDMers and their sound-alike electro-acoustic alchemy, and in addition to an obvious geographical contradiction, Shugo is just way too melodic for the stateside free-folk scene. Really, Night Piece is "just" a pop album, short but dense and infinitely considered: No note seems unnecessary, and everything is in its right place.
Fittingly, Night Piece starts at dusk. A million crickets drown out the night of "Such a Color" with sex-charged bug-buzz, when a sheepish Shugo begins to pluck out an equally fragile melody. The melody bursts. Shugo strums in resignation, and turns to a distant accordion for last-ditch support. The song congeals unexpectedly but beautifully, and Shugo quickly reclaims the melody for his voice, buttressing it with stringed confidence and, by the song's outro, a little bit of bravado.
Other songs on Night Piece bear the same high degree of craftsmanship, but as the album presses on, we learn that Shugo has aspirations much larger than a string of catchy ditties. Through his prudent use of electronics, he begins to develop a strikingly unified worldview that Night Piece ultimately wills upon its listener. On "Light Chair", Shugo's guitar plucking stomps to a contrasting, docile woodblock melody before losing itself in winding arpeggios. "Lantern on the Water" shimmers as broad cello strokes are fed through a lo-fi sampler and percussive bell sounds try their best to harness the spectacle's majesty with an incidental beat.
Shugo's sense of humor rears its head midway through Night Piece: The songs, which at times border on pastiche, somehow never undermine the album's cohesion. Taken together, these highly stylized compositions form something of a dream sequence: "Sleet" throws us into an 8-bit Dragon Warrior village, while the goofy "The Mop" drags our sudden spurs through the golden dust of the American West. Then, a chase scene: "Paparazzi" is Shugo's virtuosic take on the theme from "The Benny Hill Show", a cartoonish one-man mummer's parade that doesn't strut so much as run for its life, with an unexpected hammock-swaying break here and there between the ensuing fretted mischief.
After covering so much musical terrain in only 23 minutes, Shugo finishes slowly and quietly with his unadorned lullaby, "A Kite of Night". The song doesn't take part in the world of Night Piece so much as consider it in retrospect-- it's the least evocative track on the album, but its most tender for that very reason. From its nakedness we realize just how rich a world Shugo has designed with Night Piece, and just how subtle his musical gestures are. So Night Piece is "just" pop music, but it manages to point well beyond itself, and regardless of who didn't influence it or what scenes it doesn't fit into, albums like this are always relevant, and always welcome. | 2004-09-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-09-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Music Related | September 22, 2004 | 8.6 | 111b7593-5e4e-4dec-9788-a9cd23d4409f | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
Rick Ross' most intriguing protégé is young Philadelphia street rapper Meek Mill. Coming after the relative success of singles "Tupac Back" and "Ima Boss", Dreamchasers is easily the biggest solo release of his promising career. | Rick Ross' most intriguing protégé is young Philadelphia street rapper Meek Mill. Coming after the relative success of singles "Tupac Back" and "Ima Boss", Dreamchasers is easily the biggest solo release of his promising career. | Meek Mill: Dreamchasers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15977-dreamchasers/ | Dreamchasers | Here's the biggest surprise in rap this year: Its preeminent tastemaker is Rick Ross. Imagine that being true in 2009, when, after being outed as an ex-corrections officer, Ross got roped into a childish feud with 50 Cent, who rediscovered his ability to ruffle the feathers of his overly serious peers, while blogs and commenters gleefully cackled along. That Ross emerged from the embarrassing fracas to become one of the few larger-than-life stars in the game was shocking enough, but now his stamp of approval alone is enough to make, or salvage, careers. Wale, who was left for dead by the major label system following his disastrous first album, was scooped up by Ross after a rather pedestrian appearance on Waka Flocka Flame's smash hit "No Hands" and is now poised to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of his upcoming album. But Ross' most intriguing protégé is the young (though by no means rookie) Philadelphia street rapper Meek Mill, a fact not lost on Ross, who saw fit to include himself on both of Meek's radio singles from this year.
Being from Philly, it's easy to see the lineage of ex-Roc-A-Fella underlings State Property in Meek's excitable, eager shout. But we're a long way from 2002, and there's a distinctly Southern bent to his rapping that has helped him rise to prominence during the reign of Lex Luger. Meek still carries an air of detached cool that is no doubt filtered down from Jay-Z, but the rapper that he often resembles is the currently imprisoned Lil' Boosie. Though his music isn't as emotionally raw as Boosie's, both rappers engage the listener on a purely visceral level, primarily through deliveries that seem on the verge of careening off the rails. The ability to connect in this manner is something that can't be taught, or even really developed. An untold number of rappers have tried to get over on energy and the sheer force of their charisma alone, but certain guys-- DMX, Waka, Boosie-- have an innate ability to connect with their audiences in a way that can leave non-believers, especially ones who privilege lyricism, baffled. Sometimes pro scouts will watch an athlete and say that the player has "it"-- well, Meek Mill, at least in this regard, has "it."
Dreamchasers -- coming after the relative success of singles "Tupac Back" and "Ima Boss", and with DJ Drama on foghorn duties-- is easily the biggest solo release of Meek's career, and it ends up serving a dual purpose. On the one hand, it easily showcases how deep his talent runs and how versatile an artist he can be. On the other, it functions as a blueprint for exactly what kind of rap music he should and should not be focused on making as his career moves forward. Let's start with the disappointing stuff. The tape is littered with beats either produced by Lex Luger or by people copying Lex Luger, and while that sound is now minted and unavoidable, Meek Mill isn't a rapper that needs to be working off the template. "Ima Boss", which is also included on the tape, is evidence enough that Meek can bark his way onto the radio without having to fall back on Luger's lurching productions.
Meek doesn't sound bad on those songs, per say, but the highlights of the tape prove just how unnecessary the generics are. For someone who doesn't try and dazzle with his lyrics, he possesses an exceptional eye for telling stories on both a macro and micro level. "Middle of Da Summer", for instance, finds Meek using the season as a frame for sketching a portrait of how his city revolved around him as he grew into a life of crime. "Tony Story" is not only one of the most vivid story raps in recent memory, but its plot and development are so engrossing on a cinematic level that it should give David Simon pause. And then there's the title track, with a beat straight out of the Clams Casino school of "soulful" and featuring a particularly devastating guest shot from Beanie Sigel, which transcends the trappings of rote inspirational ploys via Meek's sober and realistic rendering of the life of a struggling rapper.
Meek is being groomed for rap stardom, and the genre would be better off if he were able to get there. But while his proximity to Rick Ross has accelerated his career and will continue to open doors for his art, it's important for him to remember that he's not Ross and doesn't need to be. There are plenty of mid-tier rappers willing to merely ride out Lex Luger's wave, but Meek has enough dimensions to be in it for the long haul. | 2011-10-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-10-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | null | October 27, 2011 | 7.4 | 1122e13e-fbf0-4002-90ac-ba22d1037219 | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
The West Virginia native found fame on YouTube, but she descends from a long tradition of American roots music. Though assisted by Nashville greats, her debut retains her essential wildness. | The West Virginia native found fame on YouTube, but she descends from a long tradition of American roots music. Though assisted by Nashville greats, her debut retains her essential wildness. | Sierra Ferrell: Long Time Coming | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sierra-ferrell-long-time-coming/ | Long Time Coming | The rambling hobo is a central figure in American folk iconography. Jimmie Rodgers left home at 13 to ride the rails and create his Singing Brakeman persona. Woody Guthrie toured Dust Bowl migrant camps, honing his plainspoken folk music and trenchant socialist politics. Bob Dylan canonized Guthrie with his “Song to Woody” and helped mythologize the traveling folkie with songs like “I Am a Lonesome Hobo.” The broad strokes of Sierra Ferrell’s story place her in the same lineage, with a distinctly modern twist: She got her break by going viral on YouTube.
Ferrell left her West Virginia trailer in her early twenties, after a performance by a troupe of itinerant musicians blew her mind. She hit the busking circuit, performing old standards and her own songs on the streets of New Orleans and Seattle, singing in boxcars and truck stops along the way. In 2017, the Americana tastemaker channel GemsOnVHS started posting videos of Ferrell playing some of her originals, and before long, they were racking up millions of views. The lifestyle that tied her to a century-old folk tradition had suddenly made her famous on the internet. Two of the songs that blew up on YouTube, “In Dreams” and “Jeremiah,” help form the backbone of Long Time Coming, Ferrell’s stunning studio debut. The album versions pay homage to the glittering, big-budget country music of the ’70s, but they retain the essential wildness of Ferrell’s pre-Nashville years.
The most striking element of Long Time Coming is the one that made Ferrell go viral in the first place—her voice. In those YouTube videos, a septum-pierced, face-tatted, cowboy-hatted Ferrell opens her mouth, and a sonorous, stuck-out-of-time drawl comes tumbling out. The contrast may have been the initial hook, but it was that voice that gave the songs their staying power. Ferrell’s singing has clear antecedents—Loretta Lynn’s holler-raised twang, Dolly Parton’s effortless melodiousness, Bessie Smith’s confident rasp—but her nods to those legends always feel heartfelt, never academic. Already, she’s learned to sound only like herself.
Like her classic country forebears, Ferrell’s lyrics weave tales of love found and lost, bonds formed and broken. Even while exploring such well-trodden territory, her honesty shines through. “Whispering Waltz” sees Ferrell betrayed by a lover who talks about another woman in his sleep. She’s heartbroken, until the song’s refrain grants her a hard-won acceptance of the situation: “Now you don’t have to whisper/I know.” The album’s most powerful moments come when Ferrell, now more than a decade removed from her departure from West Virginia, feels the tug of home on her heart. In “West Virginia Waltz,” she returns to her birthplace after years away to try to rekindle a former flame, only to learn that he’s died. “Made Like That” feels more directly autobiographical, with Ferrell apologizing to her mother before tweaking John Denver’s famous lyric about her home state: “West Virginia, country roads/West Virginia, all I know/West Virginia, I’m leaving you today.”
Long Time Coming dips into a range of 20th century musical traditions to help flesh out Ferrell’s songs. “The Sea” sounds like it could be pouring out of a smoky New Orleans jazz club during Prohibition. “Jeremiah” and “Bells of Every Chapel” are agile bluegrass workouts, while “Far Away Across the Sea” and “Why’d Ya Do It” add calypso accents to their sultry acoustic blues. That versatility is thanks in part to the murderer’s row of Nashville session musicians who flank Ferrell on the album. It’s still her show, but the presence of veteran players like Jerry Douglas (Alison Krauss and Union Station) and Dennis Crouch (Johnny Cash) help her material reach its full potential. For someone whose career started in railroad cars and alleyways, the luxuries of a Nashville studio sound great on her.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Rounder | August 23, 2021 | 7.6 | 112362b2-5219-4d00-ac77-84ff0eee2a43 | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
With their latest full-length, and a minor name change, John Dwyer’s garage-punk band continues to travel further toward rock’s outer limits. | With their latest full-length, and a minor name change, John Dwyer’s garage-punk band continues to travel further toward rock’s outer limits. | Oh Sees: Orc | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oh-sees-orc/ | Orc | This year, John Dwyer is celebrating 20 years of Thee Oh Sees by going back to the project’s roots—albeit not in any musical sense. Rather, Dwyer has revived his bygone tradition of randomly tweaking the group’s name on a whim. For their 19th full-length album, the band formerly known as Thee Oh Sees (and The Oh Sees and OCS and Orinoka Crash Suite and Orange County Sound) are now just plain ol’ Oh Sees, a move that doesn’t so much herald a new phase as retroactively rebrand the one they’ve been establishing for the past two years. When Dwyer dissolved the long-running Petey Dammit/Brigid Dawson/Mike Shoun iteration of the band in 2013, he seemed to pick up right where he left off. But on a recent string of releases with a double-drummer formation, Dwyer and co. have gradually drifted further and further away from Thee Oh Sees’ garage-punk and psych-pop tent poles into more ephemeral spaces.
With Orc, the band consolidate the strengths of their joint 2016 releases, A Weird Exits and An Odd Entrances, streamlining their grab-bag experimentation into a more fluid flow and quasi-conceptual framework (well, at least as much as we can assume its fantastical references to castles, warriors, and beasts are somehow connected). Here, the shred-ready opener “The Static God” isn’t just another case of Oh Sees doing their motorik-maniac act, but rather a last-blast rocket ride to parts unknown, its stratosphere-breaching velocity eventually cooled by a cloud-parting organ drone that hints at the more patiently paced music to come.
The song also sees Dwyer adopt a campier, glam-kissed vocal tone. Throughout the record, he sounds as eager to mess around with his singing as the music: the glorious, steamrolling sludge of “Animated Violence” is the closest Oh Sees have ever gotten to metal, with Dwyer dropping comically Gene Simmons-esque growls in between gleaming Thin Lizzy arpeggios. But there is perhaps no better gauge of Oh Sees’ recent evolution than the mid-album colossus “Keys to the Castle.” From the outset, it follows the familiar Oh Sees battle plan of pitting a propulsive rhythm and mischievous melody against shocks of guitar fuzz that double as de facto choruses. Then, two minutes in, it dissolves into a mesmerizing extended coda of cloudy organ tones and snake-charming strings that gradually lull the song to a blissful rest past the eight-minute mark.
In fact, “Keys to the Castle” is such an entrancing set piece that it effectively casts a hazy-headed spell over the rest of the album. At 50 minutes, Orc is a good 15 minutes longer than the average Oh Sees record. And in the album’s second act, you can start to feel the extra weight, particularly when they slip into the drowsy, slow-motion prog of “Cadaver Dog” and “Drowned Beast.” Both boast the sort of madcap, theatrically rendered narratives that Dwyer’s protégés in King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are currently executing with more delirious energy.
But Orc also blows open some intriguing new paths forward: “Cooling Tower” recasts Can’s “Mushroom” as some bizarre-world children’s TV show theme, its doomy groove brightened by sundazed Stereolab-style hums, while “Paranoise” is a jittery Afrobeat jam further destabilized by buzzing synth frequencies and Dwyer’s spookily hiccupped vocals. And with the closing instrumental “Raw Optics,” Oh Sees prove that aforementioned Afro-funk excursion is no random one-off experiment, but a reliable rhythmic foundation that can fuse seamlessly with their signature garage-psych sound. By the time Orc winds down with the most chilled dueling drum solo ever, Oh Sees’ random name change starts to make more sense—as this band continues to travel further toward rock’s outer limits, definite articles just seem like unnecessary baggage. | 2017-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Castle Face | August 23, 2017 | 7.4 | 1123e7e6-23d0-4016-8909-39ba9974c6c9 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The likable Detroit rapper's debut on Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Music features West, The-Dream, Lupe Fiasco, Wiz Khalifa, Pusha T, and more. | The likable Detroit rapper's debut on Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Music features West, The-Dream, Lupe Fiasco, Wiz Khalifa, Pusha T, and more. | Big Sean: Finally Famous | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15605-finally-famous/ | Finally Famous | Rapping about the pressures of being famous is pretty popular right now. Kanye West and Drake, in their best moments, can make that weight feel like something that could apply to our jobs and relationships, and Big Sean's debut album on West's G.O.O.D. Music imprint takes a similar approach. The idea seems to be that with a deal and a record in stores, the Detroit MC has earned the right to complain with the best of them.
While Finally Famous isn't especially nuanced, Sean is an often extremely entertaining rapper. He's able to fit his elastic, smooth voice in the cracks of No I.D.'s lush soul samples just as easily as he slides right over heavier, more radio-friendly tracks like "Marvin & Chardonnay", which features a verse from West. Sean often runs circles around beats, speeding up his voice so that his words cram into a pileup in the end. His appeal is more in the way he plays with language than in his lyrics, which go so far as to make an unfortunate "Family Guy" reference.
On individual tracks, Sean's style works well. Even the blandest lyrics are worth a rewind based purely on delivery and enthusiasm. Who knew that "Fuck, I hate to say I told you so/ So buying rounds is my way of saying I told you hos" could sound so believably triumphant? But it's when the guests show up-- a high-profile list including not only West, but also The-Dream, Lupe Fiasco, Pharrell, John Legend, Wiz Khalifa, and Chris Brown-- Sean appears out of place on his own album. Clipse's Pusha T has a particularly strong verse on deluxe-edition album closer "100 Keys", while Sean sounds helium-light by comparison.
Ultimately, Sean's a likable character. Still, a line on "100 Keys" encapsulates his faults: "Keys open doors, but bricks open windows," he raps, recalling Clipse's "Keys Open Doors" except lacking their sharp wit and heavy delivery. We can only hope that for album two, Sean will step out from the herculean shadows of the artists he surrounds himself with and learn the art of subtlety. | 2011-07-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-07-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam / G.O.O.D. Music | July 6, 2011 | 6.1 | 11293a90-714f-4675-b7c0-699cc69ab4b7 | Sam Hockley-Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-hockley-smith/ | null |
On his wounded fifth album, Mac Miller sings deftly about heartbreak and his mental state, capturing his resignation without turning sadness into a performative spectacle. | On his wounded fifth album, Mac Miller sings deftly about heartbreak and his mental state, capturing his resignation without turning sadness into a performative spectacle. | Mac Miller: Swimming | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mac-miller-swimming/ | Swimming | When Ariana Grande left Mac Miller this spring, he lost a relationship, a collaborator, and muse. Miller’s 2016 effort The Divine Feminine was recorded closely with Grande and doubled as a love letter to the woman he’d hitched his star to. He’s gone from “you and me against the world” to just “me against the world,” and as much as he tries to convince himself that’s almost as good on his warm but wounded fifth album, Swimming, he knows it’s not.
At its lightest, Swimming plays a little like Mac Miller’s own Forgetting Sarah Marshall, an amiable account of involuntary bachelorhood. “I know I probably need to do better, fuck whoever, keep my shit together,” he ambles over an aloof beat on “Smaller Worlds.” On “What’s the Use,” he shrugs off his foibles over some buoyant roller-disco, accompanied by low-key vocal assists from Snoop Dogg and Thundercat. Miller’s flow is limber and self-deprecating; he tries any pattern of singing or rapping that might lift his spirits for a few seconds. He’s doing his best to find the humor in a situation that isn’t really funny, as his arrest for a DUI and hit and run this May made all too clear.
Miller has long been open about his struggles with addiction, which Grande cited in her decision to end what she called a “toxic relationship.” But those looking for any dirt-dishing or ax-grinding on Swimming will be disappointed. “Everybody want a headline, I don’t got nothin’ to say,” he rapped on “Programs,” a loose track from May with more of a chip on its shoulder than any that made the album. Even at Swimming’s bleakest—“Self Care/Oblivion,” a dispiriting account of his pain-numbing regime, or “Hurt Feelings,” which shines some light on his mental state during that DUI—Miller resists the suggestion that anybody in particular is to blame for him bottoming out. The furthest he’ll go is acknowledging life was a lot easier with Grande than without her. “She put me back together when I was out of order,” he admits on “Perfecto.”
This sort of heartsick longing is not exactly something new—in 2018, you can’t toss a stone without it landing in some chart-topping sad rapper’s styrofoam cup. But Miller explores his headspace with considerably more focus than Drake, Future, or Post Malone, artists who sometimes cut emotional corners in their rush to the next banger. An album with nothing but time on its hands and an understanding that healing is a slow, tedious process, Swimming is most engaging when it details the simple things Miller tells himself to keep his spirits up. “Every day I wake up and breathe/I don’t have it all but that’s all right with me,” he sighs on “2009,” even though he only sounds half-convinced.
He’s come a long way since his overbearing kid brother act of his early Blue Slide Park days. Where he used to mug over his music relentlessly, on Swimming he mostly lets the beats breathe, clearing ample space for the record’s peaceful orchestral swells and blushing keyboards. He’s also singing more than ever, and he sounds better than ever doing it. Modest as it is, his voice is expressive in ways his plainspoken prose could never be, capturing his resignation without turning sadness into a performative spectacle.
As always, Miller remains a step behind the prestige artists he emulates—Chance the Rapper, Anderson.Paak, and, increasingly, Frank Ocean, whose nonchalant songcraft looms large here. Swimming is less virtuosic than those artists’ recent works, but no less heartfelt, and the album’s wistful soul and warm funk fits Miller like his oldest, coziest hoodie. He may be unable to escape his own head, as he laments on the opener “Come Back to Earth,” but he’s decided to make himself as comfortable as possible while he’s trapped there. | 2018-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. | August 3, 2018 | 7.5 | 1132a308-d8dc-4f21-93c6-55699d62b206 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
After the long-awaited, triumphant official release of Smile, the former Beach Boy returns-- along with co-writers Scott Bennett and Van Dyke Parks-- creating an amazing portrait of L.A. and his own place within it. | After the long-awaited, triumphant official release of Smile, the former Beach Boy returns-- along with co-writers Scott Bennett and Van Dyke Parks-- creating an amazing portrait of L.A. and his own place within it. | Brian Wilson: That Lucky Old Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12155-that-lucky-old-sun/ | That Lucky Old Sun | In 2004, Brian Wilson finally climbed one of the biggest artistic mountains of his life, recording and releasing a complete version of Smile, which since 1966 had been perhaps the most legendary unfinished album ever. It was a triumph that returned Wilson to the spotlight, crowning an extremely spotty solo career with a true jewel. In fact, Wilson had already released the now nearly forgotten Gettin' in Over My Head earlier in 2004, to virtually no fanfare. Smile, though, was different. We knew it was brilliant before we even heard it, and though I still prefer my own bootleg of the original 60s recordings, it was something of a relief to hear Wilson finally purge the project that derailed him so long ago.
If Smile finally cleared out Wilson's closet, That Lucky Old Sun neatly closes the circle he began drawing in 1961 with the single "Surfin'", returning him to an idealized Southern California after Smile brought him across the country and through its history. Musically and lyrically, That Lucky Old Sun is as cohesive as its predecessor, though more modest in scale and ambition. Wilson and co-writers Scott Bennett and Van Dyke Parks have created an amazing portrait of L.A. and Wilson's place within it, blending nostalgia with hope for the future and honest biographical detail. The title track is an appropriately chosen oldie, written in 1949 by Beasley Smith and Haven Gillespie with lyrics that contrast the toil of life with the easy indifference of nature to our travails. In the past, it's been a hit for Frankie Laine, Louis Armstrong, and Frank Sinatra, but here, Wilson uses it as a musical thread to tie his album together, reprising it three times after opening the album with it.
Also aiding the album's suite-like feel are four spoken interludes written by Parks that paint images of L.A. life with the writer's characteristic sense of wordplay and rhythm. From a listening standpoint, these are the low points of the album, as Wilson's narration isn't very compelling, especially when he's asked to wield a series of Spanish phrases after "Mexican Girl". The narratives do, however, flesh out the album's geographical portrait. The lyrics to the songs themselves are often just as vivid, such as the opening verse of "Morning Beat", which borrows its rhythmic feel from the Beach Boys' early singles. "The sun burns a hole through the 6 a.m. haze/ Turns up the volume and shows off its rays/ Another Dodger blue sky is crowning L.A." perfectly captures a sunny day in the city Wilson still loves. References to star-studded concrete, the Capitol Building, the Hollywood Bowl, the Hollywood Hills, and even smog are sprinkled throughout the album and complete the picture.
Wilson's backing band, largely similar to the crew that worked on Smile and he has been touring with, is versatile, handling both old-school rock'n'roll and big, pretty ballads with ease. Members even do their best to approximate the harmonies of the Beach Boys when necessary-- especially since, with Wilson's falsetto gone, it's up to his mates to hit the high notes. Though it's just as orchestrated and complex as some of Wilson's classic work, the record doesn't capture that sparkling, big-room sound; as a result, it can occasionally feel a little hermetically sealed, especially with the way the background vocals are mixed and compressed.
As interesting as the portrait of Southern California the album paints can be, it's the self-portrait Wilson embeds in his wider narrative that carries the majority of the album's emotional weight. "Forever She'll Be My Surfer Girl" is clear self-referential nostalgia, but he digs deeper elsewhere. "I am a diver, a long line survivor," he sings on "Live Let Live", a line knowingly provided by Parks. "Oxygen to the Brain" and "Midnight's Another Day" are direct attempts to put Wilson's past mental and substance troubles to bed. "I laid around this old place/ I hardly ever washed my face," he signs on the former, following it up on the latter with, "Swept away in a brainstorm/ Chapters missing, pages torn."
Wilson washes his hands of those missing pages on two celebratory numbers, "California Role", which uses its title's nearly unforgivable pun to actual good effect. But it's "Going Home" that most firmly validates his renewed artistic currency: "At 25 I turned out the light/ Couldn't handle the glare in my tired eyes/ But now I'm back." And he is, with his finest non-Smile album since the golden age of the Beach Boys. Lucky us. | 2008-09-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-09-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | September 3, 2008 | 7.8 | 1132e7c5-804d-4674-b5b1-469059a3230f | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
On the follow-up to 2018’s Skulls Example, the Portland group delivers pointed late-capitalist critiques, using coarser melodies and more vivid lyrics to express gnawing existential anxiety. | On the follow-up to 2018’s Skulls Example, the Portland group delivers pointed late-capitalist critiques, using coarser melodies and more vivid lyrics to express gnawing existential anxiety. | Dear Nora: human futures | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dear-nora-human-futures/ | human futures | When Portland, Oregon’s Dear Nora reissued their second album, 2004’s Mountain Rock, in 2017, they went from being an obscure regional band to indie-folk cult heroes. The group’s frontperson, Katy Davidson, sang about searching for place and meaning in a crumbling world; the hollow guitars and wistful vocals sounded as if they were recorded deep in a cave. The reissue’s success galvanized Davidson to revive the group after an almost decade-long hiatus. In 2018 they released Skulls Example, a haunting follow-up to Mountain Rock. Like its predecessor, Skulls Example was minimal and moving, Davidson’s lyrics juxtaposing snapshots of the natural world—full moons, heat waves, birds sailing through the sky—with a looming sense of techno-deterministic dread. They documented without comment, noticing how each car they passed on a road trip brandished a GPS display, or how even small-town bars now boasted walls of flat-screen TVs. On Dear Nora’s latest album, human futures, Davidson delivers their late-capitalist critiques more pointedly, using coarser melodies and more vivid lyrics to express gnawing existential anxiety.
In an essay written in advance of human futures, Davidson called the new album the “culmination” of Dear Nora’s work so far. Thematically, they continue to contrast sublime naturalism with the mundane horrors of modern life: a purple beetle buzzing beside a bolo-tie-wearing content-mongerer; a narrator walking through mountainous fog while shaking off a dream of Lady Gaga; a speaker unable to admire the moon’s reflection on the water because they’re contemplating the death of democracy. But human futures is more than a series of off-kilter still lifes—it’s a record about gratitude, about small pleasures, about mourning humanity’s expanding disassociation from, and active destruction of, the Earth. Davidson swerves between awe and terror, attempting to soak in what’s left of the natural world before it’s gone.
So who’s to blame for this mess? Davidson has some ideas, taking aim at several contemptible archetypes. On “scrolls of doom,” they inhabit a persona who “makes billions in seconds flat” and wears a big honking cowboy hat, the sort of person who believes their money can be used to colonize other planets. There’s no reprieve from this claustrophobic ego; the only time the narrator connects with the outside world is when they give an almost erotic description of plastic stretching infinitely into the horizon. Similarly, on “airbnb cowboy”—which scans as a sort of spiritual cousin to Kim Gordon’s electrifying noise-rock anthem “Air BnB”—Davidson inhabits the voice of a post-truth, Joe Rogan-listening real-estate enthusiast who’s “got nothing to say… so content in every way.” Satiric and shrewd, these songs constitute the most overt political statements in Dear Nora’s oeuvre.
Even when Davidson attends to autobiography, human futures’ melodies and textures remain stolid and occasionally harsh, with a curtness rarely heard in their earlier recordings. The writing on “flowers fading” is understated yet memorable, but the grating synth lead and plain vocal cadence scrub away some of the emotional intrigue that undergirds Davidson’s prose. “sinaloan restaurant” similarly struggles to attach compelling melodies to otherwise poignant lines like, “My dad died many times years ago/Now on the table, staring at the light/I move from grief to joy.” It’s clear that Davidson wanted to experiment with different styles and sounds on human futures, to make a project unbound from any prior constraints or expectations. While it’s gratifying to listen to Dear Nora enter more adventurous territory, the band never fully finds their sonic footing here, too often putting concept before melody.
human futures blooms brightest when the band offers a modern take on its vintage sound. On the title track, Davidson soars over smog-laden cities and overstuffed landfills, placid as they recount the demise of humanity. “When the memories get blurry/We trade human futures in our portfolios,” they sing. Even the memory of shimmering rivers, colorful autumns, and California rain is not enough to soothe them—how could it, when these gifts will soon vanish from our lives altogether? It’s a helpless, agonizing fact that feels too big to think about—so don’t think, Davidson seems to be saying, just walk with me and treasure what remains. | 2022-11-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-11-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Orindal | November 4, 2022 | 6.9 | 11363317-31d2-42a3-8ebf-f054d9af72f1 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
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 the Philadelphia rapper’s 1999 debut, a dramatic and gritty album that brought a new kind of cred to Roc-A-Fella Records. | 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 the Philadelphia rapper’s 1999 debut, a dramatic and gritty album that brought a new kind of cred to Roc-A-Fella Records. | Beanie Sigel: The Truth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beanie-sigel-the-truth/ | The Truth | In 1998, Jay-Z had finally accomplished his mission. With “Hard Knock Life,” he’d blown up on the pop charts, taking his Roc-A-Fella business venture into the big leagues and escaping street life for good. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help but feel he’d lost something on the way. He’d donned the shiny suit and mugged into the camera like Ma$e. He’d slowed his flow and sampled a Broadway musical. These compromises nagged at him, and as he sought ways to balance his karmic ledger, the exploding Philadelphia rap scene called to him.
Across North and South Philly neighborhoods, two dozen or so rappers were defining a fierce local style: halting but high-velocity, herky-jerk but smooth, slick but hard. They didn’t race in front of the beat or ride the snare—they dug in and found a pocket, punching hard alongside the track’s low end. They were influenced by New York rappers like Ma$e and the Lox, but they added their own pugnacious spin: Their signature trick was to circle around the same syllable, often the same word, from line to line, like they were softening up a boxer with jabs—“Cats thinking I’m sweet, I ain’t been killin’ in a while/I heard a lot of cats rhyme, I ain’t feel one in a while,” taunted a rapper named Spade on a 1999 song called “I Love Being a Gangsta.” And then, just when you thought they were sputtering, they would switch every word in the rhyme scheme, delivering a clean uppercut. It was a fitting style for a town where it was often said that everyone either boxed, rapped, or both.
If you asked a hardcore Philly rap fan who the avatars of that style were around ’97, they would have pointed to Major Figgas. Formed by first cousins Gillie da Kid and Wallo along with a local named Bump J (unrelated to the Chicago rapper of the same name), they eventually expanded to seven members, including Dutch, Spade, and future Clipse affiliate Ab-Liva. Major Figgas shut down the local Power 99 station with every new freestyle. They were the spirit of the city, heavily favored to finally put Philly on the board.
So when Jay-Z swooped into Philadelphia, he came looking for Major Figgas, haunting neighborhoods and studios. They were, to him, a symbol of all he’d leveraged away. But Jay didn’t leave Philadelphia with Major Figgas. Instead, he signed a roughneck kid, someone nobody had ever heard of before, who had never recorded a demo in his life.
Dwight Grant was not one of the people jostling at the forefront of Philly’s exploding rap scene. He was not a member of Major Figgas. He wasn’t in Philly’s Most Wanted, the group being groomed by Pharrell as Philly’s answer to the Clipse. As far as anyone knew, Dwight Grant was working all-night shifts at a crack spot near the corner of 21st and Sigel Street, writing raps alone while listening to Ron G tapes.
Since being a rapper carried zero status in his neighborhood, he kept his creative pursuits under the radar, battling neighborhood friends and practicing his freestyles over full album tracks with the bass turned up to drown out the other rappers’ vocals. He went by the name “Beanie Sigel”; the name was simultaneously a reference to the nickname his grandmother gave him (“Beanie”), the street he lived on (Sigel Street), and a tip of the hat to the famous gangster Bugsy Siegel.
So when Boo Bonic, one half of Philly’s Most Wanted, offered to let Beanie tag along for his next meeting in New York, Beanie shrugged. He did, after all, have a dog fight to bet on that day. Besides, he was more of a Biggie fan and Jay was his little brother’s favorite rapper. He didn’t even want to go, but when he stepped outside his place that day, he found Mr. Man—the other half of Philly’s Most Wanted—waiting for him. Dismayed, he got in the car.
Jay first noticed Beanie hanging around in back at Baseline. He was recording the Vol 2...Hard Knock Life album track “A Week Ago” with Too $hort. Everyone else in the room was exultant, drunk on proximity to power, but Beanie was fidgeting, looking wary and unimpressed. After the rappers had freestyled, someone encouraged Beanie to go up.
”He kicked about a five-minute rhyme straight, no breaths, nothing,” Jay marveled later on the Hard Knock Life Tour documentary, remembering the first time he heard Beanie rap. He leaned over to the man who called himself Beanie’s “manager” at the time: “Promise me you’ll let me have him.”
But even more importantly, it was clear Beanie had something that maybe no one else in his scene had—a vision. There was a sternness to him, a weight to his presence that went beyond his burly frame. He had a Biggie flow, with Scarface gravitas. Sigel was everything Jay-Z was looking for at that time. Immediately, Jay added Beanie to the Vol. 2...Hard Knock Life posse cut “Reservoir Dogs.” Within a week, Beanie Sigel—an outsider with no demo tape, no local following, and no aspirations as a rapper—became the heir presumptive to the Roc.
After that, Jay seemed to bring Beanie with him wherever he went. Almost immediately, you could hear hints of Beanie’s hard-bitten style surface in Jay’s raps: “Chill with the crew/Real with the crew/4 million sold, look, still with the crew,” he spat on “More Money, More Cash, More Hoes.” And Jay brought Beanie along for the Hard Knock Life Tour, where he came out and freestyled a capella to 18,000 people who might have mistaken him for Jay’s bodyguard. It was Beanie’s first tour.
For Beanie, the disorientation was total. “My life changed overnight, dog,” he said to a camera in 2000 with the dazed look of someone whose life was flashing before his eyes. In a way, it was: When he was in elementary school, he briefly formed a “rap group” called Crash Crew with a friend named Tariq Trotter. Now that his former classmate went by the name Black Thought, Beanie wound up scoring a scene-stealing verse on the best Roots album of all time, Things Fall Apart, all because Big Pun double-parked. All rappers bragged about coming from nothing, but perhaps no one had come so far, so quickly, and from so little as Beanie Sigel. His swift come-up instantly became a cornerstone of his legend: “Met Jay, dropped on an album in a week/Without Unsigned Hype or Battle of the Beats,” he boasted.
An experience like that would make anyone a believer, and Beanie Sigel was Roc-A-Fella’s first true convert. Quickly, he brought as many Philly rappers into the Roc-A-Fella stable as he could: He and Freeway had made a pact when they met at a battle one night to help the other, so Free came first, quickly followed by more: Oschino, Omillio Sparks, the Young Gunz duo of Young Chris and Neef Buck. Suddenly, Roc-A-Fella had its very own version of Major Figgas, called State Property, under its own roof. Jay may have been the mind behind the Roc, but Beanie rapidly established himself as its heart and soul. Whereas before it had been some combination of vanity label and tax shelter, in Beanie’s eyes it was Motown in the ’60s, Philadelphia International in the ’70s.
Appropriately, his albums would help define a house sound for the emergent label that drew heavily on plush soul samples, relics from previous eras of Black American excellence. Beanie started combing through beat CDs to build what would become his debut album, The Truth. From the beginning, he had a special ear for darkness, drama, and grit. The production credits for the first three tracks belong to Kanye West, Just Blaze, and Bink!, respectively—each producer’s first placement on a Roc-A-Fella album. If you had to pick the three pillars for the next half-decade of East Coast rap, it would be difficult to come up with a more definitive list.
But none of that would’ve mattered, none of it would have gelled, if it weren’t for Beanie’s vision and tenacity. By the time he rescued the chopped organ loop of Graham Nash’s “Chicago” from one of Kanye’s beat CDs, multiple rappers had passed on it. But Beanie heard something in it—a spirit of struggle, a hint of desperation—and he breathed fire into it. Over what became “The Truth,” Sigel rapped in lines that neatly matched the structure of a logic proof with the hypnotic repetition of a sermon. “You got to see what I’ve seen, look where I’ve looked/To touch what I’ve reached, to take what I took/You’ve got to go where I’ve gone, walk where I’ve walked/To get where I’m at, to speak what I talk,” he said, sounding completely unburdened by the need to prove any of it.
This composure is rare in any artist—for a brand-new rapper who’s just signed a major label deal, it’s unheard of. He didn’t sound young, hungry, or eager. He sounded calm, somehow certain of our attention, almost patient. This preternatural self-assurance must have been how Beanie Sigel managed to entice Houston legend Scarface, not a rapper known for generosity with his guest spots, to not only appear next to a rookie but to share equal billing. On “Mack and Brad,” Face and Beans go back and forth, the legend and the upstart engaging in a friendly competition reminiscent of Biggie and Method Man on Ready to Die’s “The What.”
The only weak moments on The Truth are the ones where you can hear Beanie Sigel being marketed. “Mac Man” flips tinny Pac-Man sound effects while Beanie strings together a series of lame video-game puns (”I stay going to war with the Latin King Koopa”). You can imagine why somebody thought the track was a good idea—if Beanie had ghost-written it for Bleek, Jay’s hype man might have finally scored a modest hit—but it’s all wrong for Beanie. “Playa” is a rewrite of “Can I Get A…”, with Jay’s then-protégé Amil. Beanie finessed the verses, but the song drowned under a brain-dead chorus that made no sense for anyone involved.
Worst of all was “Anything,” a Jay-Z solo track without Beans that got tacked onto the end of The Truth. It was a bald attempt at Xerox-ing the success of “Hard Knock Life,” right down to the annoying sample of a chirpy kid from a musical on the hook—in this case, Oliver! And it was an early example of what Hova’s complicated version of “artist support” looked like. The inclusion of “Anything” on The Truth was both a dramatic endorsement from the boss and an implicit admission that he didn’t think Beanie Sigel could succeed without his direct intervention.
On one level, of course, Jay was correct: Beanie Sigel was not an easy artist to mass-market. His lyrics were maybe the most violent of anyone on the Roc-A-Fella roster, but he never granted his listeners the luxury of action-movie escapism, lingering with unsettling specificity on the bodily consequences of gunplay like someone processing real-time trauma. In one song, he promised to give one rival “flashbacks to that cold-ass table and them holes I gave you.” On another, he offered another potential challenger a chilling warning: “You’ll never put shorts on.”
Likewise, there had been hundreds of rap songs about prison before The Truth’s “What Ya Life Like,” but only Beanie saw fit to mention “hearing grown men moan at night” or invoking a “push rod toilet sword.” Over a foreboding film-score orchestral loop, Beanie shouted the hook, “My life is real! Everything signed and sealed!” like someone terrified over what they’d lived and seen. To call it “harrowing” would be to miss the point: It was a gauntlet-throw, a dare to other rappers to dig as deeply and go as dark as he did.
A guy like this could never notch a true radio hit. Yes, he could rap the words “champagne” and “VIP,” but they usually turned to ash in his mouth. When it was time for Beanie’s verse on a club record, you never felt that he shared his comrades’ flossy sense of good fortune for a second. If he showed up “all high in VIP,” he sounded like he always did: bruised, angry, wary, watchful. Everyone else was here for a good time; Beanie was here for a bad one.
In the parlance of A&Rs and record executives, Beanie Sigel only made album tracks. These were the songs that cost money, not the ones that generated it. But they were also the sorts of songs that won lifelong converts instead of curious fans, and Beanie made some of the most powerful album tracks in rap history. When he met with label heads Dame Dash and Lyor Cohen to discuss promotion for The Truth, Beanie argued passionately that the first single should be a song called “Die,” a representative stretch of which goes: “Die cause I hesitated to spray that man/Die cause I hesitated to pay that man/Die cause my man passed me an empty tool/Die cause I panicked, I couldn’t keep my cool...Die cuz a nigga was trying to get a name/Or die cause it was just my time to feel the flames.”
Cohen, perhaps not seeing the Hot 97 opportunities unfurling before him, berated Beanie in a typically aggressive CEO fashion. “I’m not telling you to be MC Hammer,” Beanie recalled Cohen saying. “Shit, I don’t know if you can even spell hammer.” Ignorant of Cohen’s position at the company and unaccustomed to being spoken to in this manner, Beanie Sigel pulled out a gun in a Def Jam conference room.
Stories like the Lyor confrontation did nothing to endear him to the higher-ups, and The Truth wound up selling around 155,000 copies in its first week—respectable numbers that would nevertheless render Beanie Sigel little more than a tax write-off in the era of platinum first-week sales. “Beans, I ain’t tryin to change you, just give you some game/To transition from the streets to the fame,” Jay-Z rapped on “Blueprint (Momma Loves Me).” It was classic Jay, mingling infuriating condescension with genuine concern. Jay and Beanie were temperamental opposites, destined to clash—cold versus hot blood, calculation versus bluster, indirection versus full-frontal assault. But they shared one thing in common: Both began as street kids who were ambivalent about having a rap career while secretly yearning to be the best.
Their influence on one another was mutual and profound. Listen to how Jay-Z circles syllables and switches emphases on 2000’s “Squeeze First”—a top-flight Jay solo track, as imperious and masterful as he’s ever sounded: You can nearly close your eyes and hear Beanie Sigel’s voice in his place. Others certainly did: When Nas levied a series of kill shots at Jay-Z on 2001’s “Ether,” he knew how to hit him where it hurt. “Compared to Beans, you wack,” he taunted.
For Beanie, Jay-Z was the man who made dreams come true. The Philly scene he arose from mostly imploded in his wake, at least as far as national press was concerned. Major Figgas never signed a major label deal, and Philly’s Most Wanted only eked out two albums. The brutal winnowing process of a regional scene down to a few national mascots was over. Somehow, Beanie Sigel had stayed standing. As dark as things got for Beans—he would go on to serve non-consecutive prison sentences for federal weapons charges and tax evasion—he always knew he had survived where others hadn’t been so lucky. Young Chris’ cousin was killed by a member of Major Figgas, and the beef between State Property and Major Figgas claimed the life of another promising Philly up-and-comer, Lil Rucie, whose body was rumored to have been found dead in a burned-out car.
Beanie Sigel, by contrast, got to be a hero. Meek Mill would go on to cite him as the artist who made him “love rap,” and his influence lives on wherever a tough-talking rapper decides to get dark. In 2021, Sigel appeared on N.O.R.E.’s Drink Champs, reflecting on the brutal ups and downs of a career that had left him alive, but undeniably scarred. “I’m the perfect example of when keeping it real goes wrong,” he said, his voice a permanent whisper after post-car accident surgery removed a piece of his lung. “But to me, it was real.” | 2023-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Roc-A-Fella | May 7, 2023 | 7.8 | 1137e909-5014-4300-920d-9af44d1f6644 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Skillfully switching between forward momentum and deep reflection, the Berlin electronic musician’s latest album proves her to be a master storyteller. | Skillfully switching between forward momentum and deep reflection, the Berlin electronic musician’s latest album proves her to be a master storyteller. | Ziúr: ATØ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ziur-ato/ | ATØ | For several days, I have woken up with Ziúr’s voice in my head: “Now that I’m invisible/I’ll come for you harder.” The Berlin electronic artist delivers the line through a pitched-up cyborg smile on “I Vanish,” from her new album ATØ, extending the syllables the way a child might: in-vis-sib-ble. The approach is deliberate, a way to underline the underestimation—the erasure, even—to which the song’s protagonist has been subjected. The brushed-cotton tones of the lead melody echo the careful placement of Ziúr’s words, paving the way for an extremely effective earworm.
It’s by no means the only one on ATØ. For slow jam “All Lessons Unlearned,” Ziúr teams up with pop veteran Samantha Urbani, who vocally figure skates through an icy landscape of marimba and what sounds like a murmuring chorus of awed infants. “Don’t let go/I won’t do,” urges Urbani over and over, breathily stressing the bond that exists even when life separates you from a loved one. The album’s only other collaboration also yields a sticky couplet. On self-preservation anthem “F.O.E.,” which stands for “Friendship Over Ego,” New Jersey rapper Ash B calls time on an unworthy companion: “’Cause I’m picking me over us/’Cause you have broken my trust.” For extra punch, Ziúr mirrors the rasp of Ash B’s delivery in the crackle and crunch of the track’s breaking-point production.
Guest features have become the norm on producer albums in recent years, but Ziúr breaks the mold by centering her own vocals. While her discography of club-inspired releases stretches back only a handful of years, her musical sensibility has clearly been shaped by her time fronting punk bands as a teenager. “Back when I was a singer/performer,” she said in a 2018 interview, “I ran into the audience, rolled on the floor.” On ATØ, Ziúr channels that performative energy into using her voice in wildly different ways, creating a series of vivid vignettes in the process. On the seductive “Life Sick,” she is swathed in post-punk melodrama, a singer hanging off a mic stand, head bent towards the crowd. Opener “ATØ” frames her as a shadowy figure in a forest setting, issuing life lessons through a veil of mist. And while the exquisite “Laniakea” doesn’t directly feature Ziúr’s voice, the humor and pace with which she handles the lead synth is reminiscent of her intonation on “I Vanish.”
For the most part, the instrumentals are as strong as the vocal tracks, if not stronger. I can’t hear “It’s Complicated” without wanting to trace the shape of every drumbeat and marimba note with my fingers and limbs. It is deserving of many a dance routine video tribute. “Unclaim” is another highlight: A masterpiece of textural dialogue, it opens with plucked strings, makes space for digital severity, and somehow finds a way to bring the two together in a way that negates neither. If I was splitting hairs, the dancefloor-focused “Catch Me Never” and “Fancy Handbag, Broken Zipper” could both have done with some trimming for this album context. The repetition of their patterns feels somewhat stagnant compared with the expressiveness of the songwriting elsewhere.
They’re minor complaints, however, and do very little to dent the achievement of ATØ as a whole. Skillfully switching between forward momentum and deep reflection, its 11 tracks prove Ziúr to be a master storyteller. The album title, it turns out, is an artistic abbreviation of The Alliance to Take Over the World; the record, she says, was made for “people who fight for their existence, every day.” “This Record is not here to please,” she continues in the album notes, “but to disrupt & to connect us in Solidarity.” While that is a noble pursuit, ATØ requires no preamble; the album’s innovative use of space and voice, its formidable sound design, and visionary narratives are their own best advocate. Underestimate Ziúr at your peril.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu / Objects Limited | November 19, 2019 | 8 | 1137fa91-7489-462a-baf1-80784898736e | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | |
West London band's faux family business actually sounds like a business, one supplying value-added products at discount prices. | West London band's faux family business actually sounds like a business, one supplying value-added products at discount prices. | Mumford & Sons: Sigh No More | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13906-sigh-no-more/ | Sigh No More | That band name derives from singer/guitarist Marcus Mumford, but the band members aren't actually his sons. Rather, it's a play at quaint family businesses run by real people in real small towns, trades passed down through generations: both independent (yes, as in indie) and commercial. It's a shallow cry of authenticity, but this West London quartet really does sound more like a business than a band, supplying value-added products at discount prices. Their debut, Sigh No More, is stocked with group harmonies straight from the Fleet Foxes warehouse, exaggerated earnestness on consignment from the Avett Brothers, some of the same rock "real"-ness that built the Kings of Leon brand, second-hand drama from that run on Keane a few years ago, and some insistent Gomez rusticisms gathering dust in the back room. It's not spot-the-influence if they're pushing them on you with a salesman's insistence.
Mumford & Sons take an emporium approach, with an inventory that's broad but never deep. By spreading their attention around so many different trends, they aim to do many things adequately-- perhaps to distract you from an inability to do any one thing especially well. They love big moments and acoustic instruments, so you might call what they do hoedown pop, although that might be giving them too much credit: Every hoedown on Sigh No More-- every rush of instruments in rhythmic and melodic lockstep-- conveys the same sense of hollow, self-aggrandizing drama. And they pull that shit on every track.
Among the predictable crescendos, there are some unexpected textures, mostly courtesy of some guy calling himself Country Winston playing banjo and dobro. And they contain hints of Celtic melodies in songs like "Roll Away Your Stone" and "Thistle & Weeds", like they might be trying to update Fairport Convention and Pentangle. But none of these ideas is fully developed or explored, the gestures fleeting at best.
For music that ostensibly prizes the appearance of honesty and confession, Sigh No More sounds surprisingly anonymous, giving a sense of the band as engaged music listeners but not as real people. Mumford paints himself a sensitive guy put upon by insensitive lovers: "Tell me now where was my fault in loving you with my whole heart," he whines on "White Blank Page", as the music swells and ebbs to exonerate him of any misdeed or misunderstanding. Worse is "Little Lion Man", which is already a hit in Britain but sounds overly self-absorbed in its insistent mea culpas, as if admitting wrongdoing is a noble gesture: "I really fucked it up this time, didn't I, my dear?"
When Mumford & Sons stray from their tales of romantic martyrdom, the results are actually worse. Late in the album, "Dust Bowl Dance" kicks up some American Gothic ambience with what sounds like the least believable stab at a murder ballad ever set to record. "I'll go out back and I'll get my gun," Mumford sings, like a man who had never handled a firearm in his life. "I said, 'You haven't met me, I am the only son.'" When the Sons' electric guitars finally kick in, the song descends from ill-advised to downright embarrassing. Live, it's probably their closer, but "Dust Bowl Dance" hints that Mumford & Sons are in the costume business. They're playing dress-up in threadbare clothes. | 2010-02-19T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2010-02-19T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Glassnote | February 19, 2010 | 2.1 | 11435d2a-68c2-46e4-86bd-b1b84a17e507 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
A mold used in casting needs to be the precise spatial opposite of the desired object. If you want a ... | A mold used in casting needs to be the precise spatial opposite of the desired object. If you want a ... | Jan Jelinek: Loop-finding-jazz-records | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4234-loop-finding-jazz-records/ | Loop-finding-jazz-records | A mold used in casting needs to be the precise spatial opposite of the desired object. If you want a piece of iron that looks like a human foot, you need a mold with empty space shaped like a human foot. It's obvious-- as the material is cast, matter becomes space and space becomes matter. This image comes to mind as I listen to Jan Jelinek's Loop-finding-jazz-records; this album is like hearing the mold used to cast proper pop. It's a perfect inversion of conventional music, a sonic negative. Everything that would typically be foreground is moved back or pushed off the screen altogether, and the flecks of sonic debris that would normally be covered by other sounds are left to carry the melody and rhythm.
These thoughts came to me the first time I heard "Do Dekor," which I would swear is the negative image used to imprint the "AFX Fast Mix" of Seefeel's "Time to Find Me." The rhythm is just as relentless (and nearly identical, beat-wise), but Jelinek's percussion of choice is not drums or even a drum machine, but tiny rips of static pasted into place. Taking the same idea even further is "Them, Their" which uses a single microscopic click as a substitute for a snare drum, as the full bass outlines a funky rhythm a half tick from hip-hop, and dreamy out-of-tune keyboards seem lifted from some distant memory. It's so computerized it hurts. And yes, it's fucking gorgeous.
The title here is meaningless, a joke coming from a guy who named a track on one of his records (under his Farben alias) "Live at the Hollywood Bowl." Some of the noises here may well have been sourced from jazz records, but you'd never know it. Besides, the palette here is similar to Jelinek's last album as Gramm, even though the goals are quite different. Gramm's personal_rock (which you should definitely check out if this record interests you) was more intent on exploring Jelinek's microsound ideas in the context of 4/4 dance rhythms-- something Loop-finding-jazz-records only touches on with "Rock in the Video Age" and "Tendency." With these tracks, Jelinek works territory similar to Wolfgang Voight's Gas project, anchoring his amorphous textures with the familiar house groove. The bulk of Loop-finding-jazz-records is given over to a more idiosyncratic pulse, which sheds more light on what Jelinek is doing with his peculiar mixing ideas.
That Jelinek would create his deep anti-pop for Stefan Betke's ~scape label makes sense, as Pole is definitely the most apparent reference point. Though his ideas are similar to a degree, Jelinek has far surpassed Betke in terms of expressiveness. Among the current spate of glitch artists, Germany's Jelinek designs his tracks with an ear for emotion. Part of this comes from the textures he chooses, which veer toward the liquid and organic, and part of it has to do with the manner in which Jelinek operates. The natural inclination with music this minute and detailed is to pay very close attention to the individual sounds, and a palpable intimacy emerges from the listener's proximity. Call me what you will, but I find this album to be incredibly sensual. It's like lying naked in a bed of freshly washed flannel sheets, rolling back and forth, feeling massaged by every strand of cotton. This is the real digital love, baby. | 2001-02-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2001-02-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | ~scape | February 6, 2001 | 9.3 | 11438d21-52a9-4c96-ae00-c524e3686dee | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
After the apocalyptic overtones of their 2021 breakthrough album, the Vietnamese experimental music collective finds hope in the fusion of rave music and eco-futurism. | After the apocalyptic overtones of their 2021 breakthrough album, the Vietnamese experimental music collective finds hope in the fusion of rave music and eco-futurism. | Rắn Cạp Đuôi: *1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ran-cap-duoi-1/ | *1 | When Boiler Room touched down in Ho Chi Minh City last year, genre-agnostic promoters Nhạc Gãy tapped experimental music collective Rắn Cạp Đuôi to warm up the club with three drummers and a blanket of guitar fuzz. After their initial ruckus, Rắn Cạp Đuôi debuted unreleased material that would become their latest album, *1, club-testing four tracks (“Bloody,” “What Cherubs,” “Pressure,” and “Straws”) that ended up on the final release. Now *1 arrives courtesy of Gãy’s associated label, combining the electronic jetsam of Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế (meaning “sleeping through the apocalypse”) with rave-inspired optimism. *1 features the same mode of rapid-fire digital collage as Rắn Cạp Đuôi’s breakthrough, but this time, instead of hitting snooze on the end of the world, they dance towards its salvation and provide a dewy glimpse of what might lie on the other side.
“Bloody” has both dance and dew. The first half, all blistering breaks and distorted kicks, propels us to the second, a drumless interpolation of Baroque harmonies that dissolves into a tranquil, watery abyss. An earlier version of “Bloody” served as the soundtrack for SỐNG VỚI LŨ, a 2021 short film by Gãy in response to art platform CIRCA’s question: “Where do we go from now?” The title of Gãy’s film translates to “living with flood,” an acknowledgement that Southeast Asian countries are already facing the brunt of the impending climate apocalypse. The early version includes howling by Ngo Phuong Linh accompanying a frenetic montage of rave footage and videos depicting Vietnam’s increasingly vicious monsoon season.
The album’s maximalism recalls the cybernatural sonics of eco grime and Martine Tucker’s insect electronica. While there are quantized rhythms in most of these tracks, the songs’ stochastic textures mirror the seeming randomness of ecological field recordings. “What Cherubs” opens with an angelic chorus interspersed with birdsong that sounds almost digitally generated, pausing for a bit of guitar tuning that ushers in the drop. “Nhộng Tằm” (which translates to “silkworm pupae,” a popular street food in Vietnam, Korea, and other countries in Asia) presents a palimpsest of sounds that blur together, a presentation of the sample folder as a digital biome. A byproduct of the silk industry repurposed for nutrition in the face of poverty, the silkworm pupa might be the perfect biofuturist metaphor for the entanglement of humans, technology, and nature.
These themes come to a blissful head on “Pressure,” the album’s standout track. After a short bout of scene-setting whirrs and strings comes an absolutely stunning segment of what I can only call shoegaze breakcore, a revelation of a melody emanating through the din of glitch and drums. The breaks give way to layers of kèn bầu drone; not the funereal kèn bầu that marked their last record, but a celebratory use of the instrument that marks a new beginning. As with all beginnings, there are some rough patches—the dark underbelly of “Pressure” rears its head in its outro, and an anguished scream punctuates the eco-futuristic ambience of the next track, “Mang Theo Tôi Nữa.” But the closing “Bugs Life” reprises the transcendence of “Pressure,” breaks and all, carrying that optimism forward with narration from Vũ Hà Anh that prefigures an astrally projecting trance melody. The cool pessimism of Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế turns to light, and the only way to go from here is up. | 2023-04-24T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-24T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Nhạc Gãy | April 24, 2023 | 8 | 114632be-b313-40a9-95e8-8cfa51e57b03 | James Gui | https://pitchfork.com/staff/james-gui/ | |
The ambient noise artist Jefre Cantu-Ledesma moves towards shoegaze on his beautiful new record, which engenders a feeling of pure optimism. | The ambient noise artist Jefre Cantu-Ledesma moves towards shoegaze on his beautiful new record, which engenders a feeling of pure optimism. | Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: On the Echoing Green | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jefre-cantu-ledesma-on-the-echoing-green/ | On the Echoing Green | Like a lot of ambient music concerned with repetition and decay, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s work tends to dilate time. A four-minute track from his extensive catalog, built primarily out of guitars, synthesizers, and tape machines over the past decade and a half, can unspool like a staggered half-hour movement. Recent releases like 2014’s Songs of Forgiveness focused on the erosion of repeated musical phrases—a technique William Basinski pushed to its extreme with the seminal Disintegration Loops. On his new album On the Echoing Green, though, Cantu-Ledesma edges confidently into constructing songs, not just atmospheres.
Perched on the seam between ambient and rock music better known as shoegaze, Echoing Green engenders a pure optimism. Much of Cantu-Ledesma’s work until now could feel as though it drifted in from an impossible, treacherous distance, or as though it were calling to something across that same length. But with its warm basslines, tuneful guitar riffs, and (on “A Song of Summer” and “Tenderness”) prominent vocals from Argentinian singer Sobrenadar, Echoing Green centers itself in the immediate.
Abrasive elements still hover around the edges of the album, and its placidity can often seem as though it’s on the verge of collapse. Lumbering opener “In A Copse” pitches down a piano riff to an ominous register, while “Vulgar Latin” wreathes Evan Caminiti’s guitar playing in static. The 88-second interlude “Autumn” contrasts industrial noise with thin, trebly guitar chords that sound something like Mac DeMarco noodling around the fretboard while trapped in a rusted shipping container that’s sinking off the coast of the Antarctic. The hypnagogic closer “Door to Night,” meanwhile, strangles contextless vocal syllables through meshes of noise and scattered drum beats before a single note calms the scene.
Feedback strains against the euphonious chord progressions of “The Faun,” which starts to decompose compositionally by the four-minute mark. Static whizzes over the mix as the guitars gradually fade from earshot, as though Cantu-Ledesma grew weary in his attempt to keep his regular chaos at bay. Even the most openly beautiful track, “A Song of Summer,” holds details that threaten to destabilize the arrangement. Over Cantu-Ledesma’s thickly padded guitars, synth figures pinwheel just slightly off the beat, inducing a sense of vertigo amid the dazzle.
This duality of lush, sensual guitar music and entropic noise resonates with the album’s implied textual theme. Its title derives from the William Blake poem “The Ecchoing Green,” which depicts a group of children playing in the park as elderly people watch them, recalling their own youth. The sun sets by the end of the poem and the children go home to sleep, a microcosmic premonition of the end of youth and life. Blake gives an impression of time folding in on itself; the elders watching the children are children on the same green in a different time, and the children are already the elders watching themselves play. The degradation that fringes Echoing Green’s sweet and nearly innocent melodies captures that same collapse of temporality. In a sense, everything mortal is already dead.
It’s likely no coincidence that Echoing Green is Cantu-Ledesma’s first album to come out since he became a father. When he began recording it, “I had just started to feel settled in New York, and my partner and I knew we were pregnant and going to have a baby,” he told Bandcamp. “So there’s no way that that’s not somehow a part of it.” Transitioning into parenthood—bringing another person into a world, a being inclined to fragility and suffering—might be the purest expression of anxiety-tinged optimism. The debris keeps rattling, but the light still pours through. | 2017-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Mexican Summer | June 27, 2017 | 7.7 | 1147bf06-acad-4473-a14d-e52f3343d9e3 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
Somewhere Else isn't quite a departure from Sally Shapiro's last two albums, but in among the sequencers and identikit drums are instruments from a more muted palette: flute, saxophone, and beats that skitter rather than shimmer. | Somewhere Else isn't quite a departure from Sally Shapiro's last two albums, but in among the sequencers and identikit drums are instruments from a more muted palette: flute, saxophone, and beats that skitter rather than shimmer. | Sally Shapiro: Somewhere Else | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17648-sally-shapiro-somewhere-else/ | Somewhere Else | While it's tempting to connect Sally Shapiro's reticent persona to her fragile, vanishing music-- supposedly she’s too shy to perform on stage or let producer Johan Agebjörn join her in the studio-- it's a red herring; some of music's most extroverted voices belong to reclusive singers, and her albums from Disco Romance on down are just as easily explained as the product of a ghost-girl persona as that of a Giorgio Moroder fan getting really into Tigermilk one night.
Somewhere Else isn't quite a departure from Sally Shapiro's last two albums, but in among the sequencers and identikit drums are instruments from a more muted palette: flute, saxophone, and beats that skitter rather than shimmer. The evolution was probably inevitable. The influence of Belle and Sebastian has long been palpable on Shapiro's work, and plying feathery vocals over disco is a gimmick that can't work forever; she and Agebjörn have often cited Italo divas Katy Gray and Valerie Dore as inspirations, but theirs is a genre is full of one-hit wonders. Gray, for instance, only had the one song. By Shapiro's second album, 2009's My Guilty Pleasure, people were calling Shapiro's formula samey; something had to give.
There's enough here that sounds of a piece with her last two records. The effervescent "All My Life" and "If it Doesn't Rain" soar like lost Disco Romance tracks, and the title of "This City's Local Italo Disco DJ Has a Crush on Me" certainly fits. Those songs were done solo-- much of Somewhere Else is farmed out to outside producers, another new development. They're either artists reprising their roles from Agebjörn's solo-ish album Casablanca Nights (which had enough Sally Shapiro tracks that it was basically Disco Romance 2.5), or pretty good outside bets, like the Drive soundtrack-boosted Electric Youth.
As on Casablanca Nights, the returns vary. Lead track "I Dream with an Angel Tonight" seems like Shapiro's normal fare-- boy meets girl, girl comes to love boy, boy was never meant for girl, who realizes this on the dancefloor-- until the track concludes in the musical equivalent of a sigh. At least the quiet-breakup track "Sundown" brings a foregrounded sax solo out of nowhere, which eventually comes to mimic Shapiro's voice, a neat trick. "What Can I Do", meanwhile, is your common or garden twee pop song. If you heard it in isolation, you'd never guess its singer once put out an album called Disco Romance.
Le Prix collaboration "Architectured Love" is fittingly titled, chilly and gorgeous as an ice palace. The New Wave-y "Don't Be Afraid" first appeared on French producer Anoraak's solo debut Wherever the Sun Sets, and has barely been changed here-- though it's charming enough that the cross-promotion can be forgiven. That's not the case with Electric Youth's "Starman", a passable-enough bit of hero worship that turns out not to have a hook. It's not terrible, just uninspired, and only goes to show that the disco romance formula is both harder to pull off and more singular than you'd think. | 2013-03-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-03-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Paper Bag | March 1, 2013 | 6.9 | 114957bf-e8d9-494d-9986-b77350a1bbb0 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
Recorded in Nashville, the spare set of songs taken from his last three solo albums is a minor but revealing statement from the graceful singer-songwriter. | Recorded in Nashville, the spare set of songs taken from his last three solo albums is a minor but revealing statement from the graceful singer-songwriter. | Bill Callahan: Live at Third Man Records | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-callahan-live-at-third-man-records/ | Live at Third Man Records | The five years since Bill Callahan put out Dream River have marked his longest hiatus yet in a career defined by momentum and steady changes—the deepening of his voice, the magnificent refinement of his writing. His few recent transmissions have all spoken to the same tranquil state of mind. There was a curio of dub remixes, a paperback book of collected lyrics, a slow and smoky contribution to a Grateful Dead tribute album. A few months after the release of Dream River, a newly affianced Callahan revealed to Pitchfork, “I love life more than I ever have, and I’m comfortable.” Soon after, he became a father. In the 52-year-old songwriter’s own words, when things are beautiful, just keep on.
Callahan’s latest release, a live set recorded at Jack White’s Third Man Records in Nashville in the fall of 2017, doesn’t quite signal a return to action. Its six songs are all selected from his last three solo albums, a trilogy of releases between 2009 and 2013 with an emotional resonance that seems to grow with every year. Coming from an artist whose body of work feels almost sociopathically well-considered (“There [are] no extra songs—I’m not an amateur,” he once said of his writing process, which, for at least one album, involved a literal quill and ink), Live at Third Man does have a slightly off-brand feel to it. Compared to his first live album, 2010’s immersive Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, his installment in Third Man’s ongoing series can’t help but feel like a minor statement.
That being said, the opportunity to revisit Callahan’s music in different settings and under different circumstances is part of his appeal. Any song or lyric, or even just the utterance of a word, can hit you differently with any listen. Without new music to highlight, Callahan’s recent shows have explored the depth of his songbook, binding disparate pieces together and allowing him to find new authority as a storyteller. Since 2013, I’ve seen him play three times, each atmospherically distinct but equally satisfying: once with a band, once solo acoustic, and once accompanied by guitarist Matt Kinsey. The latter incarnation is the one documented on this album.
Kinsey’s playing can be just as beautiful and plaintive or as jarring as Callahan’s lyrics. He builds a psychedelic helicopter squall during the climax of “Spring,” then plucks atmospheric trills through the transitions in “Jim Cain.” There’s an improvisatory flow to their performance, evident as they let the dramatic pause in “Drover” linger just long enough so the final refrain can ring with well-earned victory. “Tonight we’re gonna test out some old material,” Callahan tells the audience early in the show. It’s a joke, but not really.
If Live at Third Man feels uniquely revealing coming from Callahan, it’s down to the way the music sounds somewhat out of control—a night captured at random, for better or worse, for posterity. With the arrangements stripped bare, you notice inflections you haven’t heard before on his records: a phlegmy growl in “Ride My Arrow,” the desperate tug in his throat as he mimics a pleading audience in “Riding for the Feeling.” Just over eight minutes into a ten-minute take on “One Fine Morning,” his granite voice fails completely, breaking into a squeak as he sings the word “part,” in, “Yes, I am a part of the road—the hardest part.” Like all his most memorable moments, it sounds like an accident, just inches away from a punchline. And somehow, it feels just right. | 2018-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Third Man | December 6, 2018 | 7.4 | 114d985c-8628-43a5-9de2-79af1a12bcb1 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
On their seventh full-length (and Sub Pop debut), Sleater-Kinney hook up with producer Dave Fridmann to fully realize the sound they've been inching towards on their past two albums. The result is their most streamlined and confident album yet, resurrecting the righteous fury of their first great albums (Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out) in the name of classic rock titans like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Jimi Hendrix. | On their seventh full-length (and Sub Pop debut), Sleater-Kinney hook up with producer Dave Fridmann to fully realize the sound they've been inching towards on their past two albums. The result is their most streamlined and confident album yet, resurrecting the righteous fury of their first great albums (Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out) in the name of classic rock titans like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Jimi Hendrix. | Sleater-Kinney: The Woods | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7240-the-woods/ | The Woods | By now you probably don't need to be told the particulars of Sleater-Kinney's new album, The Woods: about how they signed with Sub Pop, making it their first album since 1995's Call the Doctor not released by Kill Rock Stars; about how they hired Dave Fridmann to produce and recorded it in rural New York instead of Washington State; about how they wanted a heavier sound that mines classic rock like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Jimi Hendrix for inspiration; about how one song is more than 11 minutes in length.
So it should come as no surprise that The Woods marks a significant transformation for the band-- one they first hinted at on 2000's All Hands on the Bad One, and crept closer toward on 2002's One Beat. Nor should anyone be shocked that, despite the new song structures, guitar solos, and drum fills, Brownstein's guitar still roars wildly, Weiss's drums still thunder, and Tucker still wails with a primal urgency that is one of the most compelling sounds in rock music today. What hasn't necessarily been made explicitly clear is that, even in the face of its cock-rock trappings, The Woods most closely recalls the righteous fury of their first great albums, Call the Doctor (1995) and Dig Me Out (1996).
The brash economy of punk, for Sleater-Kinney at least, has always been just a short step away from the lumbering behemoth of hard rock. "The Fox", however, seems to say otherwise. Opening the album, this piece of Aesop rock is about a fox and a duck, and I think it just might be allegorical. But it's loud and it thrashes and Tucker shouts to be heard over the din. It's ferociously uninviting, but it works both as a context-providing preface to the nine songs that follow and as a deterrent for weak-eared listeners. Those who make it to "Wilderness" will have passed a test of sorts.
"Wilderness" and most of "What's Mine Is Yours" sound like prime Sleater-Kinney, as does much of the rest of The Woods. Fridmann's presence is far from disruptive; you can hardly hear him in the mix, except for a little sludge in the low end-- a nice substitution for a bass player. Instead of weighing them down with single-mic'd Flaming Lips drums or Delgados density, he simply steps out of the way and allows them to sound larger, louder, and looser.
Turning their crosshairs away from the overt political issues of One Beat, Sleater-Kinney's amplification here sounds like a reaction to the current wave of backwards-looking boys-club bands that idolize post-punk dramatists like Joy Division and the Cure and abstractors like Gang of Four and Wire. (And anyway, weren't the women of Elastica working this same nostalgia, like, 10 years ago?) On "Entertain"-- the first single, no less-- Brownstein chides the eyeliner brigade righteously: "You come around looking 1984/ You're such a bore, 1984/ Nostalgia, you're using it like a whore/ It's better than before."
But Sleater-Kinney are looking backwards too, albeit to a different time in rock history and to different styles, as well as with a greater open-mindedness and self-awareness. Many of the hard-rock trappings of The Woods sound self-conscious: Leading into the album-closing "Night Light", the 11-minute guitar solo on "Let's Call It Love" is just that-- an 11-Minute Guitar Solo. The badass breakdown on "What's Mine Is Yours" is just that-- a Badass Breakdown. But the point of "Let's Call It Love" is the equation of music and sex as Brownstein sings, "I've got a long time for love" and then proves it with her guitar. And the point of "What's Mine Is Yours" is, as the lyrics reveal, not the breakdown but the recovery: As Brownstein's guitar squawks boisterously and arrhythmically, Tucker stitches it together with a low Led Zep riff and Weiss wraps it up with a big drum beat, all three of them literally creating music from chaos.
In other words, this hard-rock transformation sounds like an extension of all the meta songs they've been writing since before "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone"-- rock-about-rock songs that chronicle their experience as an all-woman band and that deploy that self-reflexivity as a weapon against industry double standards and general ignorance. In the past, this self-awareness often resulted in songs that sounded closed-off, each with its own extremely precise meaning that related but didn't always connect to other songs around it. The Woods, on the other hand, is their most album-like album since The Hot Rock, each song building on the previous and leading to the next. With its artificially sweetened melody, "Modern Girl", for instance, almost sounds saccharine ("My whole life is like a picture of a sunny day"), but coming after "Jumpers", a song so empathetic it considers suicide a viable act of defiance, "Modern Girl" takes on deeper meanings. The pair are two sides of the same woman, the ultimate predicament: To survive these days, you have to be either suicidal or superficial. Sleater-Kinney, meanwhile, get by simply sounding fucking supersonic. | 2005-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2005-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | May 24, 2005 | 9 | 11530e0a-de71-4560-8e4f-00a76708204d | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Burial returns with his first new solo work since 2007; it walks the emotional terrain as his past work yet subtly pushes his sound in new directions. | Burial returns with his first new solo work since 2007; it walks the emotional terrain as his past work yet subtly pushes his sound in new directions. | Burial: Street Halo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15293-street-halo/ | Street Halo | Burial puts out music seldom enough that when he does, it's an event. It's a scarcity thing: Instead of flooding the market with music, he keeps fans wanting, and he and the labels he works with know how to capitalize on that desire. A limited, vinyl-only collaboration with Thom Yorke and Four Tet, on the latter's Text Records, was released with only a week's advance notice and sold out in no time. With the exception of the limited, vinyl-only pressing, Hyperdub followed a similar strategy for this release, Burial's first new solo material since 2007, and label boss Kode9 helped build the anticipation by premiering tracks on Benji B's BBC radio show.
Not many electronic producers can command that type of hype. Fortunately, Burial hasn't disappointed us. Anyone who feared that he might have moved on to a new sound-- perhaps, like James Blake, embracing pop songwriting-- can breathe a sigh of relief: This is the same melancholic Burial we've known and loved from the beginning. But listeners who wondered if the formula might be wearing thin, diluting itself amidst all the rainy pitter-patter and tear-stained chords, can also breathe easy. While sticking to the emotional terrain he's known for, Burial also subtly pushes his sound in new directions.
"Street Halo" is the closest Burial has come yet to the straighter cadence of house and techno, with shuffling hi-hats and a crunchy handclap/fingersnap sound accentuating the 4/4 pulse; the middling tempo backs off dubstep's quick snap and eases into a relaxed, rolling house groove. The backbeat bassline even recalls, however unconsciously, Ricardo Villalobos' "Dexter", which isn't necessarily as absurd as it sounds: Both artists have a thing for accidental syncopations and splintering percussion. As always, Burial's beats are oblique, with a hazy percussive clatter lurking behind crisp, timekeeping accents. And again, he has made mournful, a cappella vocals the melodic focus of the track, and everything is suffused in a suggestive layer of static and grit. But he's a masterful arranger, frequently switching up elements-- focusing one minute on a blunt, rave-inspired bassline, and the next on supersaturated vocal harmonies that sound like overdriven Cocteau Twins. The track follows a counterintuitive logic, abandoning the predictable structure of breakdowns and buildups in favor of twists and turns you don't see coming, including a fake fade-out at the end.
The second track, "NYC", is even better. It's got all the yearning you could want from Burial, thanks to its keening vocal lead and stately synthesizer pads. Taking his virtual razor to a long strip of female vocals, he seems to have cut and pitch-shifted it in such a way that it hangs in the balance between meaning and pure sound, with slippery nonsense syllables giving way to clearer phrases ("...when I'm around") loaded with ambiguous emotion. Rhythmically, Burial takes up the staggered cadences of UK garage, long a favorite of his, but he slows the tempo to around 115 bpm. It's a brilliant move, giving garage's whipcrack syncopations an additional spring in their step; when combined with those floating keyboards and vocals, the groove feels almost deliriously buoyant. (As a visual analogy, I'm reminded of the underwater acrobatics in the video for Portishead's "Only You", which turns out to make a superb visual accompaniment to Burial's screwed kinetics.) It's strange to think that so few producers have explored grooves like this at similar tempos; in Burial's hands, it's a perfect merger of the pensive and the sensual.
"Stolen Dog" is also based upon a mid-tempo house groove, but the rhythm is less urgent than on the other two tracks, its elements restricted to a thumping kick drum, faint hi-hat tick, and faint, syncopated rimshots signaling the distant ghost of 2-step garage. There's a sing-song feel to the lilting synthesizer melody and the layered vocals over the top; it feels almost like a lullaby, with soothing chord changes doing their best to keep the darkness at bay, as dissonant bursts and ghostly clatter loom in the background. It might be the least essential of the three tracks here, but it's every bit as carefully thought out. Somehow, despite a sound bank that has long since become familiar, Burial keeps finding new ideas to animate his worn, mournful samples. | 2011-04-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-04-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | April 7, 2011 | 8 | 115486b9-e836-40a1-84a7-fb24e7c3e9aa | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Kevin Devine and Manchester Orchestra’s Andy Hull used to record collaborations that sounded like reworkings of their respective catalogs, but they’ve finally articulated what this band is about. | Kevin Devine and Manchester Orchestra’s Andy Hull used to record collaborations that sounded like reworkings of their respective catalogs, but they’ve finally articulated what this band is about. | Bad Books: III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bad-books-iii/ | III | Both Kevin Devine, the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter, and Andy Hull, frontman of Atlanta band Manchester Orchestra and sole member of Right Away, Great Captain!, have been around longer, sold more records, and played bigger venues than their collaborative side project, Bad Books. In 2010, the longtime friends (and the rest of Manchester Orchestra) partnered up to workshop one another’s ideas under a new moniker. Instead, they wound up writing material that sounded like reworkings of their respective catalogs: alt-leaning indie folk, deceptively mopey rock, and heartstring-tugging acoustic songs. After a seven-year break, Bad Books return with III, the album that finally articulates who, and what, this band is about.
Created during scattered sessions over the past two years, III fills the gaps left open by 2010’s self-titled debut and its 2012 follow-up, II. The first album grappled with religious ideology and deep-seated regrets; the latter explored fictional stories through self-reflective characters. Both zigzagged abruptly, swerving from peppy alt-rock to barren ballad without much regard for flow. Devine and Hull wrote catchy songs independently, but—perhaps as a symptom of the distance between them—their collaboration struggled to find a singular focus. (Even they admitted as much.) Now they’re on the same page.
Shedding the keyboardist, bassist, and drummer of their previous incarnation, Devine, Hull, and Manchester Orchestra member Robert McDowell use a few acoustic guitars, a bare piano, and the occasional keyboard to set their scenes. Recording with just three members results in intimate, hushed storytelling reminiscent of Devine and Hull’s early days sharing the stage—so honed in and aware of the other’s movements that onlookers fell silent, entranced. The stripped-back approach allows “UFO,” a song about suicidal ideation, to swell with layered vocal harmonies just as the lyrics turn confessional. By comparison, the emotional nine-minute closer “Army” sounds like an explosion, slowly building the acoustic instruments to a breaking point, when the protagonist, a soldier, takes his own life.
Within a comforting, relaxed musical space, Bad Books reach beyond B-side material, using this platform to wrestle with previously untouched topics. Devine and Hull, both new fathers, wax poetic on the joys and anxieties of raising a child. Hull’s haunted whispers tell a horror story on “Neighborhood,” a graphic condemnation of homophobic violence. Meanwhile, Devine’s songs—“Myths Made Plain” and “I Love You, I’m Sorry, Please Help Me, Thank You”—are consumed by political inequality, parental failure, and a blurred sense of self. These aren’t road-trip singalongs the way “Forest Whitaker” and “The After Party” were. They’re confidential poems descended from one-on-one conversation—a natural approach, given that Devine and Hull regularly speak on the phone. There’s a refreshing candor to III, especially when it comes to the heaviest subject matter. Bad Books are getting honest, even if the truth—“I’m a seven-page laundry list of sinful deeds I swore were not me”—is unflattering.
At the end of “Wheel Well,” there’s a lull where the music subsides and Devine’s voice floats in like a raft: “No one’s alone/Or it’s the one thing we are.” Solitude suits Bad Books; it’s what allowed Devine and Hull to become comfortable starting from scratch. Without the hooks of their previous albums, never mind those of their better-known bands, the songs on III take a while to sink in. In return for the slow approach, Bad Books offer a serious body of work that can stand on its own, a testament to the friendship that brought them together in the first place. | 2019-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | June 22, 2019 | 7.4 | 1158af17-5be6-43fb-a867-e7b30be5704b | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s operatic vocals and a string ensemble help the Canadian trio evoke the rush of new love, though some experiments go awry. | Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s operatic vocals and a string ensemble help the Canadian trio evoke the rush of new love, though some experiments go awry. | Braids: Euphoric Recall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/braids-euphoric-recall/ | Euphoric Recall | You’ll be tempted to turn off Euphoric Recall halfway through the first song. The fifth studio album by Montreal pop experimentalists Braids begins with an inauspicious flashback to Shadow Offering lowlight “Snow Angel”—the same goofy rap cadence, the same stale #ResistanceTwitter platitudes. Raphaelle Standell-Preston actually utters the words “orange man,” leaving you barely any time to recover before rhyming “Dems and Hollywood stars” with “suckin’ blood and pluckin’ newborns: kid farms.” Wait out these insufferable opening minutes, though, and the strings rise up, the drums come in, and Standell-Preston’s voice spills from stilted talk-rap into her trademark operatic float. It is, in music, that moment when you set your phone on the nightstand, screen down, and turn to your partner in bed. It’s just lovely.
And so, for the most part, is the rest of Euphoric Recall. Standell-Preston recorded this album in the throes of new love, which explains why the lyrical content is about as substantial as angel food cake. One song likens a lover to “a little perfect Golden Retriever” with “pretty star eyes.” The grit and gloom of Shadow Offering is nowhere, except those first ugly minutes. Everywhere else, the band is in fine, focused form, buttressing their synths with a string ensemble. In critical moments, the cello leaps in, low, to lend some heft to the album’s featherlight, honeymoon feel.
Standell-Preston’s meditative delivery grounds these songs, even in the electric crackle of new relationship energy. She repeats certain words and phrases, rolling them around in her mouth to refine them: sweet-ness, sweet-ness; cake, cake, cake. The album’s most mature and fully realized song, the late-night dream-pop ballad “Lucky Star,” rests on the repetition of, “I miss you all the time/Even with you.” Standell-Preston sings like someone who’s unafraid to look stupid by saying “I love you” too soon: She hasn’t been in it long, but she is all in.
Braids have long been charged, not inaccurately, with mimicry of influences like Animal Collective. (Second track “Apple” is, in particular, the best Feels outtake this decade.) What Braids have that their peers don’t is Standell-Preston’s capacious, athletic voice. The joy of listening through their discography is hearing just how much her delivery has matured. She knows more now about how to wield a musical phrase, when to ascend from an alto valley and hold onto a high note.
Euphoric Recall falters when the band forgets that her voice is the main event. That QAnon-baiting rap isn’t the only offender. “Evolution,” all canned beats and programmatic ringtone flourishes, sounds like a bad remix of a better song. It begs for a heavier, sweatier backing track, something worthier of the lyrics’ pulsing anxiety. The instrumental of “Millennia,” likewise, is such a poor match for the vocal track that at times the pairing sounds accidental. The inept aping of Age of Adz that opens “Left/Right” is another unwelcome distraction. When the sound-collage chaos gives way, minor-key piano makes a far better fit for the song’s carnal, animalistic imagery. The closing title track, however, rights these wrongs: a highlight that consolidates all of Standell-Preston’s best and most surprising phrases—the yelps, the coos, the octave leaps. Over a decade into their career, Braids may still be searching for a distinct identity. But what Euphoric Recall makes clear is that Standell-Preston knows her voice better than ever before. | 2023-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Secret City | May 3, 2023 | 6.5 | 1159adb3-0460-4cbc-b212-23296d53d2fb | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Sophomore album from this Brooklyn-via-Tennessee singer-songwriter improves on her debut with classical songwriting and a confident, ethereal delivery. | Sophomore album from this Brooklyn-via-Tennessee singer-songwriter improves on her debut with classical songwriting and a confident, ethereal delivery. | Sharon Van Etten: Epic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14690-epic/ | Epic | This past April, Bon Iver's Justin Vernon stood alone on stage at Memorial Hall in Cincinnati and played a song entitled "Love More". It was not a new Bon Iver tune but a cover culled from the songbook of Brooklyn's Sharon Van Etten. The way Vernon wandered through the slow, often overwhelming beauty of that song, one walked away from it feeling as if he needed to hear more from and about Van Etten. It's a song that seizes you.
Van Etten came to Brooklyn by way of Murfreesboro, Tenn., and her parents' basement in New Jersey. Her first album, the self-released Because I Was In Love, was a tuneful set of simple, spare, acoustic-based travails. It wasn't remarkable, but at its heart was a voice that begged to be uncovered: an instrument as chilling as it was opaque, as wounded as the title of the record seemed to suggest. Epic, her first wide release, feels like the unveiling of her full talents. Classic songwriting with an ethereal delivery is central to her appeal, but it's her sense of confidence that really sells it, as the first lines of opener "A Crime" attest: "To say the things I want to say to you would be a crime/ To admit I'm still in love with you after all this time/ I'd rather let you touch my arm until you die." On paper, those words might read a bit like coffee-shop fodder. But the cool grace with which Van Etten belts every line, and the dangerous force with which she strums every first count, make for an explosive sound that didn't seem possible from her earlier. She sounds as though she's arrived.
From there, Van Etten doesn't loosen her grip. As Epic progresses, her vocals couple with an array of sonics and styles (see: the pedal-steel country saunter of "Save Yourself", the electric punch of "Peace Sign"), though it's the slower, more atmospheric numbers that remain the album's most arresting. "DsharpG" is one gorgeous, six-minute crescendo, Van Etten's voice haloed by Mellotron and kick drum. Lyrically, she explores relationships from a number of vantage points, and Epic was recorded so intimately that Van Etten sounds as close as she does gutted. It all comes together on the hopeful tones of "Love More", as her voice pirouettes and heaves over a story of learning to love again in spite of pain: "Tied to my bed, I was younger then, I had nothing to spend," she sighs. "But time on you, it made me love, it made me love, it made me love more." And so the titular mantra unfolds. It's one of the more emotionally draining songs I can remember hearing, and yet as soon as it's over, it turns out I want to listen again. | 2010-10-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-10-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Ba Da Bing | October 7, 2010 | 7.8 | 116a9b1d-b1de-499f-9911-72d604dc1950 | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
This Sacred Bones LP is Margaret Chardiet's most high-profile Pharmakon release to date, following a series of hard-to-find CD-Rs and cassettes. It takes cues from Throbbing Gristle, Swans, and Whitehouse among others, and proves a bodily, antagonistic listen. | This Sacred Bones LP is Margaret Chardiet's most high-profile Pharmakon release to date, following a series of hard-to-find CD-Rs and cassettes. It takes cues from Throbbing Gristle, Swans, and Whitehouse among others, and proves a bodily, antagonistic listen. | Pharmakon: Abandon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18009-pharmakon-abandon/ | Abandon | It starts with a scream. Not just any scream, but one that sounds like it's shredding all the muscle tissue in the vocal cords of Margaret Chardiet, the 22-year-old New Yorker who records as Pharmakon. It's more a warning than an introduction, a line drawn in the sand that forces you to either cross and face the consequences or turn away and go about your pleasant day. Chardiet outlined her backstory in a recent Rising feature; the daughter of punk parents, highly active on the DIY scene in New York, uninterested in cultivating any kind of online presence. She says Abandon is about "fiercely holding on to what's true and unapologetically abandoning what's not." Getting to the heart of Chardiet's truth is an ugly process, full of pain and suffering and confrontation spilling outward, forming an unwavering commitment to her art that's both commendable and distressing at the same time.
This release for Sacred Bones is the most high-profile Pharmakon output to date, following a series of hard-to-find CD-Rs and cassettes. The music hovers around the noise and power electronics genres, taking cues from Throbbing Gristle, various phases of Swans, and Whitehouse among others. Like those bands, Chardiet isn't interested in music as a passive listening experience. Instead, Abandon is a brick hurtling through the windshield of a moving car, a purposefully antagonistic act that forces you to fully focus on the moment. Pharmakon's most frightening moments rarely involve a complete noise blackout. This is a carefully worked set of lethargically paced songs, sometimes passing from a chilly machine hum to dull thuds of metallic percussion ("Ache"), sometimes taking pitch-shifted vocal passages and layering them over drones that sound like bombs tumbling out of the sky ("Crawling on Bruised Knees").
There’s a thread of body horror loosely strung through Chardiet's work. A prior release included a track named "Mound of Flesh, Cavern of Fluids"; this record depicts Chardiet covered in maggots on the cover and includes "Crawling on Bruised Knees"; one of her older tracks, "Xia Xinfeng", is named after a woman who literally kissed her lover to death by passing him a capsule of rat poison when their lips met. Similarly, the music carries a strong sense of disease and decay, of things nearing a point of total breakdown. The fascination with bodily atrophy makes sense here, anchored to work so physically draining for both listener and performer. Abandon isn't at all about creating distance or putting up boundaries. Chardiet often forces audience members to look her directly in the eyes during live shows, sucking participants down into her despair in an unnervingly direct manner.
The arc Abandon takes feels deliberately mapped out, heading from an overpowering form of aggression at the start and gradually sinking into more studied material later on. "Pitted" borrows some of the clarity Swans found circa Children of God, where noise started to feel like a dead end and tracks like "New Mind" represented a solemn trudge out of the mire. Chardiet's vocal bears a similar authoritarian tone to the one Michael Gira possesses; when she sings, you shut up and listen. It's helped by the fact that her multi-octave voice can rise and plummet so effectively, something driven home by "Pitted", where no amount of harsh electronics can compete with the full-tilt power of her vocal. It's the one slip of the mask here, the one moment where a form of deathlike beauty is stirred into the swill, momentarily hinting at a place somewhere outside of Pharmakon's defiant battle mode.
In a recent Wire interview with Wolf Eyes, the band's John Olson discussed the gradual cessation of musicians working in all-out noise, resulting in more meditative electronic artists such as Oneohtrix Point Never and Emeralds. Olson likened the move to a shift from external to internal impulses, a retreat from the outright purge of Wolf Eyes into something more inward-looking. Chardiet's work as Pharmakon spills all its guts out onto the floor and leaves them hanging for close inspection, but this isn't entirely a return to external outpouring. As noted in the aforementioned interview, there are times in the Pharmakon live show where she's "disappearing into her own head." Those moments are apparent here, too, making it feel like Chardiet oscillates between being lost to the world and thoroughly bruised by it. Getting forcibly pinned down in her personal cycle of attack and retreat is a dark, visceral, utterly compelling thrill. | 2013-05-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-05-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | May 16, 2013 | 8 | 116e20d9-2e47-4982-afbf-632f9456973c | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Emerging as a pop star from Nigeria’s Afrobeats scene, WizKid’s stateside debut is a potent crossover album that blends pop, R&B, dancehall and features Drake, Trey Songz, Ty Dolla $ign and more. | Emerging as a pop star from Nigeria’s Afrobeats scene, WizKid’s stateside debut is a potent crossover album that blends pop, R&B, dancehall and features Drake, Trey Songz, Ty Dolla $ign and more. | Wizkid: Sounds from the Other Side | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wizkid-sounds-from-the-other-side/ | Sounds from the Other Side | Nigerian pop star WizKid planted his flag firmly in North American soil after guesting on Drake’s UK funky-celebration “One Dance.” With Drake, communion is often interpreted as wave-riding—or, more unflatteringly, cultural appropriation—but this wasn’t his own discovery. He was paired with WizKid by grime impresario Skepta, when they both hopped on a remix of WizKid’s 2014 “Ojuelegba.” This collaboration wasn’t about Drake looking for another trend to engage with, it was about WizKid’s globalist, genre-hopping vision. That point of view hits with precision on WizKid’s stateside debut Sounds From the Other Side, a world party blending pop, R&B, dancehall, and Afrobeats, a descendant of the West African funk genre Afrobeat (no S) popularized by Fela Kuti.
This fusion has caused some derision. Fellow Nigerian pop star Davido, who is also experiencing some crossover success, lambasted Sounds From the Other Side for being “pon pon,” or leaning too heavily on music styles outside of Afrobeats to appeal to an international audience. But pop’s global harmony—or, hegemony, depending on how you look at it—means learning how to blend and, look, even Davido is making tracks with Rae Sremmurd and Young Thug.
There are traces of pure Africa on Sounds From the Other Side, however. WizKid cites “Sexy” as a track indebted to his home continent, but he is happy to build a castle in other genre’s sandboxes. The guest roster alone is a veritable fête of R&B-bro feature go-tos. Trey Songz glides on downcast closer “Gbese,” a track about finding a girl so irresistible, you’re willing to go broke just to dance with her. (“Gbese” translates to “debt” in Yoruba). Fellow studio rat Ty Dolla $ign hops on two songs—“Dirty Wine,” a DJ Mustard-produced dancehall ode a little bit too impotent for the neck-breaking dutty wine it pays tribute to, as well as “One For Me,” an Afrobeats track that tinkers heavily with contemporary R&B, down to an SWV-interpolating hook.
Their ability to occupy different genres together had already been proven on dancehall upstart Kranium’s overlooked song of the summer contender “Can’t Believe,” but WizKid and Ty on Other Side is indicative of how fun and exploratory they are together. It is a pleasure that’s laid out across the record, whether it’s on Drake collaboration “Come Closer,” the UK funky-adjacent “All For Love” featuring South African R&B vet Bucie, and with Major Lazer on the sunny “Naughty Ride.” Even when Chris Brown, unfortunately, shows up, there is the sound of joy at the album’s core. Brown may invoke bile from music listeners, but his indestructible pop acumen precedes him. He is malleable and fits in anywhere. As with the other guests on the release, WizKid’s is a world where everyone shines.
On his own, this world is even stronger. Tracks like single “Daddy Yo” and the romantic gestures “Picture Perfect” and “Nobody” shed some of the fusion pop trappings for more Afrobeats-centric production. Percussion is paramount, but as opposed to 808s or trap beats, he nods to Yoruba and Afro-Latin rhythms, keeping it firmly grounded in WizKid’s roots. It is a party that should act as a door-opener for further global authenticity in pop so people like Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee go to No. 1 for “Despacito” on their own, not with the help of Justin Bieber. The Biebz helping to achieve the first Latin pop hit since the “Macarena” in 1996 is a small penance for his dembow-siphoning “Sorry” generating the misnomer tropical house. But it also signals that there is an interest on American radio for diaspora pop in Rihanna’s “Work,” and the continuing crossover success of Popcaan. WizKid is primed to carry Afrobeats to great heights. | 2017-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Starboy / RCA | August 1, 2017 | 7.4 | 117152ed-417a-4549-b7a1-d097a0b0b417 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | null |
Sade’s fifth album trades the band’s signature luxuriance for a sparser, knottier sound. They turn up the natural sensuality of a winding breeze and a low, gibbous moon. | Sade’s fifth album trades the band’s signature luxuriance for a sparser, knottier sound. They turn up the natural sensuality of a winding breeze and a low, gibbous moon. | Sade: Lovers Rock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sade-lovers-rock/ | Lovers Rock | Even on Sade’s official website, you have to dig around to properly see the woman herself. The lead image presents Sade Adu on stage and in silhouette, shot from somewhere below. The bright, disembodied heads of her bandmates—Stuart Matthewman, Andrew Hale, and Paul Denman—float behind her, a rich supporting cast. More light lands on the bodypack hanging at Adu’s hip than on her face itself. And what a face it is; for the first half of the band’s nearly 40-year career, the dancing, almond eyes and wide, perpetually rouged mouth of its frontwoman marshaled multi-platinum after multi-platinum album. By 2010, though, Adu had famously turned away; for the cover of Soldier of Love, Sade’s most recent release, she offered the camera her back.
But that retreat had begun in earnest on Lovers Rock, a decade earlier. The band’s fifth album was the first whose cover didn’t spotlight Adu’s full face. Instead, it’s her side profile, eyes looking down and away, that form its impression. Its 11 tracks share that understated energy, trading Sade’s signature luxuriance for a sparser, knottier sound, landing beautifully between the pastiched, jazzy pop of fellow ’80s UK breakouts like the Style Council and Everything But the Girl and the growing neo-soul bloc giving an edge to R&B in the late ’90s. Across Lovers Rock, Adu’s vocals, thick and low as always, recede into a breezy landscape of acoustic guitar, reggae bass, and simple percussion. “It’s less about the surface and more about the roots,” she said at the time.
Of course, the roots had always been there, in the form of Adu’s unusual melodies, razor-sharp lyrics, and the band’s lush grooves. But on Lovers Rock, Sade gives them space, wisely surrendering Matthewman’s velveteen saxophone, the signature instrumentation that threatened to calcify them as a relic of the ’80s easy listening cohort. Instead of the sumptuous boudoir Sade had unintentionally helped turn into a cliche with the ubiquity of songs like “Smooth Operator” and “Your Love Is King,” they turn up the natural sensuality of a winding breeze and a low, gibbous moon. Adu’s instinct for sexiness carries across Lovers Rock, this time her lower register hinting at the kind of intimacy that comes from gentle restraint and sustained eye contact.
Sade’s prolonged hiatuses now function as a social contract between the band and its fans, the gap steadily growing between each album. But the eight years between Love Deluxe and Lovers Rock was unusually long, even for the market demands of the pre-streaming era. In Sade’s case, the ’90s equivalent of “drop the album” memes manifested as gossip: that Adu had deep psychological or addiction issues, that only something dark and catastrophic could explain a desire for privacy. The rumors were so persistent, and so vague, that even in 2020, YouTubers can draw in hundreds of thousands of views to videos promising to explain Adu’s sabbaticals. In fact, Adu says, she was simply living, collecting personal life experiences to use as the source material for Lovers Rock. Slivers of those years are evident across the album: in the electricity of new love on “Flow,” the transformative joy of motherhood on “The Sweetest Gift,” and the torturous anticipation of heartbreak on “Somebody Already Broke My Heart.”
The abandoned literary ambitions of Adu’s youth found a home in her songwriting, which eschews conventions such as rhyme and verse-chorus-verse structure and yet manages to translate and illuminate swathes of the human emotional landscape. In her hands, love is an outstretched hand: “When you’re on my outside baby, and you can’t get in, I will show you, you’re so much better than you know,” she promises on lead single “By Your Side.” Despair is almost noble, as on “King of Sorrow,” and pain is an accomplishment. “It’s down a rugged road you’ve come/Though you had every reason, you didn’t come undone,” she sings on “It’s Only Love That Gets You Through,” summing up the Capicornesque nurturing and Earth mother-sagacity that exemplifies Adu in the public’s imagination.
As Sade had done before, like on the famine-referencing “Pearls” and the racial story of “Tar Baby,” Lovers Rock further expands the conventional understanding of love in pop music. Adu places social, humanist love right alongside romantic and interpersonal love. “Slave Song” and “Immigrant” are among the most moving of the band’s oeuvre: “Teach my beloved children, who have been enslaved, to reach for the light continually,” Adu prays on the former. “Isn’t it just enough how hard it is to live? Isn’t it hard enough just to make it through a day,” she begs on the latter.
The cultural influence of Caribbean Britishness had long shaped Sade, but here it’s literalized. The album’s title and the sounds throughout point to the specific style of romantic reggae that shaped much of London youth culture in the 1970s. Lovers Rock was also, for Adu, who was then approaching middle age, a full circle meaning: She was spiritually indebted to the genre, as her career in music had accidentally been kickstarted by a chance run-in at a lovers rock concert. And the relationship that underscored much of it had led her to spend years in Jamaica during that sabbatical. I’ve always been compelled by the absence of a possessive in a noun (Lovers) that often requires it.
The album stood out all the more in 2000, as pop became a shiny, slick vision of some imagined, tech-mitigated Jetsons-style future. Unlike other ’80s acts desperately seeking reinvention in the trends of the day, Sade avoided obvious dialogue with the charts. There are nods to hip-hop in the drums on “Flow” and digital experimenting in the synths on “By Your Side,” but for the most part, the band opted out. And yet Lovers Rock proved to be predictive. Echos of its style, the kind of mellow, vibey pop that could very well be described as Sade-core, have been palpable throughout the past decade, from the rhythmic R&B of Jessie Ware and Rhye to an entire generation of rappers. Among the most obviously indebted to Sade is Drake, whose grotesque registry of commemorative tattoos includes two of Adu’s face. The “dark, sexy” sound he introduced early in his career are direct reflections of the band’s influence. “I’ll call them ‘Sade moments,’ where you hear it, it hits you, and you feel something,” he told MTV in 2010.
Though Adu never quite had a punk phase, she told the writer Michael A. Gonzales in 1992 that her proximity to the community and its ethos encouraged her to seek out an alternate career model and a non-traditional rubric for success. She landed on one that has been driven by artistic intuition and creative whims, not financial motivators. It helped that her model included negotiating an unusually large royalty share of what would be tens of millions of albums sold and the accompanying freedom to pursue a self-directed career, long and unhurried.
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. | 2020-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | October 9, 2020 | 8.7 | 11774a2c-5aab-46f6-b317-e10316932077 | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
The Ontario musician slings revolutionary sentiments and blood lust for authority over bittersweet alt-rock. | The Ontario musician slings revolutionary sentiments and blood lust for authority over bittersweet alt-rock. | Chastity: Home Made Satan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chastity-home-made-satan/ | Home Made Satan | A Chastity lyrics bot would get banned from Twitter in about 15 minutes. “If you want to show the world love, kill a cop,” Brandon Williams smirks on “I Still Feel the Same,” pausing in the middle of that thought for just a moment so it sorta sounds like a joke. You know, he’s just kidding...unless you’re gonna do it. Cops are at the top of Williams’ very explicit and lengthy hit list on Home Made Satan, along with the military, Andrew Scheer, Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump, the Christian right, #notallmen apologists, the Ku Klux Klan, and bankers. Oh, and there’s a “special place in hell” for his conservative-voting parents. If Chastity sounded like metal or made hip-hop, Home Made Satan might be under government investigation. But he comes off as something a lot more unnerving to right-wingers: a violent radical hiding in plain sight, posing as a suburban centrist.
“You call me commie like it’s a bad thing,” Williams shouts over music that recalls a cash-flush period of alt-rock that wasn’t opposed to much of anything—the gains of Kurt Cobain’s pyrrhic revolution sustained by Dave Grohl’s pragmatic centrism. The guitars are technically distorted, but they feel as clean and gleaming as a beam of pure sunlight off stainless steel. Even when Williams is shouting, his voice projects upward like he’s in a reclined position, not yelling at you. Though a loud, androgenic form of pop, it’s pop all the same, and on 2018’s Death Lust he sounded a bit spooked by his proximity to it, hinting at big hooks and roaring crowds just off screen. In most cases, it would be a slight to liken anything to Foo Fighters ca. There Is Nothing Left to Lose, but in the case of lead single “Sun Poisoning,” it’s Chastity fulfilling its potential.
But while Williams embraces a violent populism in opposition to the “austerity in my country,” Chastity tends to lack the follow-through or commitment for decisive actions. “Sun Poisoning” has the windup of an alt-rock smash but not the delivery, squandering its biggest chorus on the album’s most inscrutable lyric (“Can’t you see how easily my teeth bleed?”). Conversely, “The Girls I Know Don’t Think So” and “Anxiety” can’t quite land a melody to equal the punch of their concepts. Home Made Satan is an even leaner record than the half-hour Death Lust—10 songs clocking in at 27 minutes—but discards hooks instead of bridges, verses, and other superfluous appendages of longer songs. “Spirit Meet Up” is a welcome blast of aggro post-hardcore amidst the otherwise-staid tempos, before swerving into a wheel-spinning grunge riff; “Bliss” mirrors Williams’ fruitless search for anything greater than a momentary joy.
The songs that hit the most squarely are the ones where Williams is alone, turning his hatred inward when there’s no easy target where it can be directed. “I stay home/I make sure I’m not going to hell/I hear their pleasure, I wish them well,” Williams sighs on “Last Year’s Lust,” not wanting to die but not really stoked on living.
Home Made Satan arrives quickly on the heels of the well-received Death Lust, which countered its suicidal ideation with visions of suburban uprising (“Sadness is the danger of being young/Dreaming of the days still to come”). It’s reasonable to expect Home Made Satan to be the follow-through, the leveling up, but it holds no such interest in rebuilding. “You wave a burning flag, I still feel the same,” Williams sweetly sings towards the album’s end. Perhaps Chastity is interrogating the utility of indie rock as revolutionary art, or just the realism of revolution itself after the past decade of wearying in-fighting and fleeting gains. Either way, he sounds less like a dissident and more like someone sitting this one out. | 2019-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dine Alone / Captured Tracks | September 20, 2019 | 6.4 | 11787b10-0bc0-405b-99f9-b76b46b673aa | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Thanks to a performance on "Late Show With David Letterman" that went viral, Future Islands are now ready for their close-up. Their fourth album does not disappoint. This is pop music distilled, something Future Islands have been working at since their earliest lo-fi electro-punk records. | Thanks to a performance on "Late Show With David Letterman" that went viral, Future Islands are now ready for their close-up. Their fourth album does not disappoint. This is pop music distilled, something Future Islands have been working at since their earliest lo-fi electro-punk records. | Future Islands: Singles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19124-future-islands-singles/ | Singles | Future Islands frontman Samuel T. Herring has an energy, a physical aura, that moves along a single line. On one end is a hangdog character with tucked-in shirt and pleated khakis and on the other is an ursine man-monster wresting primordial sounds from his heart. Until recently, we could find Herring only in the small clubs where Future Islands relentlessly toured. With Herring as ringleader, these shows got pretty rowdy for a three-piece synth pop band. Everyone would push around to his metal vocals of “Tin Man” and sway along to “Inch of Dust” — their former marquee song from 2010’s In Evening Air — all while Herring waved his arms like a man conducting a symphony of giants.
When Future Islands recently performed their new marquee song on “Letterman”, the stunning “Seasons (Waiting On You)”, the secret was out: Here’s this guy, this dude with a tucked-in shirt, khakis, and a receding hairline bobbing and weaving, grinding gears in his throat, giving a “fuck yeah” gesture before a perfect pop modulation takes him to the chorus. He had that kind of uninhibited spirit the internet loves to protect and preserve. If he had a more garrulous social media brand, no doubt he could take this moment and amass an army of fans, the hashtag Herring Task Force, retweeting Vines of people wearing tucked-in shirts and khakis doing “The Herring”.
The landmark performance was far and away the most viewed musical segment on “Late Show With David Letterman” and it was certainly the most surprising moment of Future Islands’ career. And now, following the storied live shows, the memes, and their move from Thrill Jockey to 4AD comes their fourth and possibly best album, Singles. These songs finally invite us to participate in Herring’s world, one shaped by geological heartbreak events and their epochal reflection periods, told with nothing more than the simple truth. It’s pop music distilled, something Future Islands have been working at since their earliest lo-fi electro-punk recordings.
Singles is a great balance of pop and melodrama. It’s built around the sturdy new wave beat, almost always four on the floor, giving Herring a comfortable frame in which to sing. Its themes are also symmetrical, as Herring plays with antithesis like an eager English student: day and night, sun and moon, summer and winter, man and woman. His words are the sort of thing that would tumble out of your mouth if you were told to write a love poem right now in eight seconds. “She looks like the moon/ So close and yet so far” or “My sun every morning/ My star of the evening” are just two couplets that look goopy on the page but sound so impulsively romantic when he sings them. Which is to say that the setting for these songs is nothing fancy, but if they were any busier than cool nights in the tall grass with the moon hanging just so, it would ruin the music’s delicate relationship with Herring.
Herring’s presence draws from Wham City’s theatrical charm, but Future Islands also work on a much grander scale. From their debut up to 2011’s On The Water, bassist William Cashion was the group’s Peter Hook, as he offered distinctive lines with an actual personality behind it. But on Singles, Cashion and the band nod toward the stadium-ready anthems of early U2. The moody synth drones have been replaced with ergonomic melody and the band has tightened up accordingly. On songs like “Spirit” and the parting words of “A Dream Of You And Me”, when Herring’s passionate delivery carries him into those heavenly choruses, you can all but see the flood lights flash in the arena when he gets there. He sings with his eyes open, still searching, still trying to reconcile love, and still a little pissed off.
The album isn’t as taut as it could be in the back half—“Like the Moon”, for example, is a predictable and rather long four-and-a-half minutes. But Future Islands compensate for the occasional dull patch. Just after “Like the Moon” comes the album’s highpoint, the post-mortem ballad “Fall From Grace”. It could be a Beach House song with its below-freezing tempo and a spotlight on Cashion’s guitars, but then Herring gets to thinking about one of those heartbreak events and it all comes rushing back above this overdriven baritone guitar. He unknots all the emotion that has only bubbled up until now and asks one last question about their love and basically Hulks out: “was it ALL INSIDE OF ME?” The moment is arresting, and in the context of the sometimes mushy poetry of the album, these four words are blinding and absolutely unforgettable.
If this all seems a bit much, well, it is. That’s the point of Future Islands, to invite this impulsive and unfettered behavior into the lives of listeners, both at home and at their shows. Singles is risky, but the strength of the songwriting carries it over. It reminds me of that video from Sasquatch 2009 of the shirtless guy dancing to Santigold, which has since gone mega viral. Herring acts on impulse—at no point does he sound calculated or clever—offering an open invitation to the uninhibited, to the goofy, and the sentimental. | 2014-03-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-03-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | March 25, 2014 | 8 | 1178b742-5880-454d-9907-4f234acd56f0 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
Rivers Cuomo pays tribute to his hermit orchestral-pop heroes, name-checking Harry Nilsson, Serge Gainsbourg, and Pet Sounds. But of course, it's all Weezer in the end. | Rivers Cuomo pays tribute to his hermit orchestral-pop heroes, name-checking Harry Nilsson, Serge Gainsbourg, and Pet Sounds. But of course, it's all Weezer in the end. | Weezer: OK Human | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/weezer-ok-human/ | OK Human | Weezer were supposed to cosplay 2020 in the image of Rivers Cuomo’s pop-metal idols Van Halen: after forays into lounge-pop, Jay-Z homage, trap production, and Toto covers, the self-explanatory Van Weezer promised “back to big guitars,” an album-length prologue for barnstorming baseball stadiums with fellow Monsters of KROQ Fall Out Boy and Green Day; the yearlong delay of both tour and album suggests that they’re a package deal, and that if Hella Mega Tour has to once again reschedule its optimistic July kickoff in America, there might not be a point in dropping Van Weezer either. In the meantime, here’s OK Human: crafted in the image of Cuomo’s orchestral-pop hermit heroes, announced and released within the span of two weeks, an album that owes its lyrical content and entire existence to pandemic living. But no matter how many obvious differences exist between OK Human and Van Weezer, it’s really just splitting hairs—it all ends up being inevitably and unmistakably Weezer.
Mind you, OK Human is not the “Weezer” that still exists as a reference point for any new alt-rock act toying with fuzz pedals and self-deprecation. This time, Cuomo entrusts a 38-piece orchestra with fleshing out a collection of demos, showing all-in commitment to a new bit after years of mimeographing his own sound. Cuomo references Serge Gainsbourg, Francoise Hardy, Harry Nilsson, and, of course, Pet Sounds as sonic ideals, though he never quite convincingly taps into a spiritual connection with those artists. More telling is Weezer’s choice of collaborators—Jake Sinclair and Rob Mathes, the producer/arranger tag-team best known for their work with Panic! At the Disco, a band that, like Weezer, recognizes the value of cringe virality. But though “Numbers” or “Playing My Piano” show that Cuomo is surprisingly well-suited to candelabra-lit balladry, there’s just as much material here that uses strings and horns to replicate their stock power chords and vocal-doubling guitar solos.
It turns out that it doesn’t really matter if Cuomo is writing for synthesizer, guitar, harpsichord, string section—through sheer endurance, Weezer transcends sound. “Weezer” is a perspective of the world that belongs exclusively to Rivers Cuomo; a pop-culture obsessive with an extremely limited capacity to take on new information; a man with an insatiable creative streak that requires almost no artistic spark. Give a play-by-play of “Grapes of Wrath” and there’s no question as to its author: the chorus pump-fakes the melody of “Electric Avenue” and immediately reveals itself as product placement for the Audible app. In the lyrics, Cuomo confounds a perfectly relatable impulse—coping with the crushing mundanity of lockdown by escaping into literature—with a reading syllabus of Catch-22, 1984, Moby Dick, and Lord of the Rings that most have grudgingly checked off before high school graduation. As always, it feels like he’s trolling us. Yet, there’s more than 25 years of Weezer music like this, outlining a squareness so pure that it’s virtually avant-garde, so how can anyone doubt that he means every word of it?
And so judging OK Human on subjective ideas of “quality” feels about as futile as it would for a cleaning product; the only question is whether it gets the job done, and after hearing “Aloo Gobi” or “Grapes of Wrath” once, I anticipate that in 2041, I’ll either hear them in a Ralphs or rattling around my brain whether I want them to or not. OK Human is Cuomo’s ideal of pop as a craftsman’s pursuit, songs that aspire to the universality and utility of jingles. And yet, Weezer songs most often feel like self-driving cars on cruise control until Cuomo decides to steer the thing off a cliff—throwing in an ill-considered rap cadence, a reference to BLACKPINK or the Morton Salt girl that immediately questions whether Cuomo is writing for anyone other than himself. It’s the Hollywood adage of “one for them, one for me” playing out on a second-by-second basis.
Yet even as he writes about dodging Zoom interviews and what he ate for dinner, it still feels as impersonal as water-cooler small talk; both effortless and try-hard at the same time. “Numbers” or “Screens” or “Aloo Gobi” or “Here Comes the Rain” say nothing novel about living in 2021 (i.e., social media is an endless, no-win competition; we spend even more time on our phones; even enjoyable routines can become exhausting) aside from confirming that Rivers Cuomo still lives amongst the rest of us. The common threads celebrities try to establish with civilians have proven to be pretty flimsy throughout the past year, but they’re enough to give OK Human an emotional binding missing from nearly every album they’ve made in the past 20 years. Even if “an orchestral COVID album” makes OK Human the most gimmicky Weezer album (of original songs) twice over, it gets across why Cuomo keeps the brand going. “Playing My Piano” finds Cuomo at his most quarantined, staring at the keys to the point where his wife, children cease to exist, or, true to form, “Kim Jong-Un could blow up my city, I’d never know.” Cringe in second-hand embarrassment or hear it as a clumsy, endearing part of him fumbling through the only means of communicating with the outside world. Either way, that’s Weezer for you.
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. | 2021-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Atlantic | February 1, 2021 | 5.8 | 117bfc45-a0e7-4382-9725-ed8ca9cc4026 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Third full-length from these garage-blues tag-teamers exhibits a newfound confidence that results in their first truly ambitious and carefully planned release. | Third full-length from these garage-blues tag-teamers exhibits a newfound confidence that results in their first truly ambitious and carefully planned release. | The Black Keys: Rubber Factory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/767-rubber-factory/ | Rubber Factory | Now that The Black Keys have solidified themselves as ranking contenders in the garage-blues tag-team division (a recognized and surprisingly competitive weight class), they've got a whole field of challengers to fend off. I'm thinking primarily of me, the critic, looking to measure their latest effort against its vaunted predecessors, counting the faults, tallying the improvements, making a decision. But the band has garnered a sizable fanbase indifferent to prior allegiances-- mud-caked Bonnaroo jam fans, NPR-driven blues boosters, and fist-pumping hard rock loyalists have all been trampled under The Black Keys' roots-chewing corduroy stomp. So really, it makes little difference what I have to say; most of you have already decided these guys are the real deal. Those who haven't, however, can rest assured that, in judging The Black Keys' budding discography, Rubber Factory beats their previous two by TKO.
That's because it picks up right where Thickfreakness left off-- outside the bar in the gravel parking lot, swinging aggressively with Dan Auerbach's ferocious six-string and Patrick Carney's cymbal-and-snare seizures-- and brings the noise one step further. There's more of an album feel to Rubber Factory, a conscious song-by-song progression rather than the visceral, overwhelming vibe that forged their debut, The Big Come Up, into a seething wrecking ball. When Auerbach settles down with a lap steel on "The Lengths", it's no mere diversion-- there's true conviction behind his country blues balladry. In its rosy tenderness, "The Lengths" is the biggest departure from the band's studied template. Auerbach sings, "Please yourself/ You don't have to be afraid," and it seems obvious he's convincing himself that he and Carney have carved out a niche deep enough they can break out of it with confidence to deliver something totally unexpected and achingly sweet.
"The Lengths" isn't the album's only curveball-- The Kinks cover "Act Nice and Gentle" finds The Black Keys tuning into the FM side of the dial. Where Ray Davies' original is twangy, sugary pop, The Black Keys give it a honky-tonk swing, as Auerback plies the slide and Carney's fireworks fade to a gentle sizzle. "Grown So Ugly" is a tragic prison blues penned by Robert Pete Williams and covered in the 1970s by Captain Beefheart. Auerbach tears into the standard with typical grit, but halfway through, pulls back into a short-lived vocal break that merits his position in the Fat Possum pantheon.
Those three tunes stand out as impressive tangents that skillfully mediate the rest of the album's oldtime Black Keys thunder. Songs like "Stack Shot Billy" and "Girl Is on My Mind" show the memorable songwriting that made Thickfreakness a standout. "When the Lights Go Out" opens Rubber Factory with a Bonham-esque bass pulse and an ominously pealing guitar, while closer "Till I Get My Way" lays one line of primitive Auerbach distortion over another more genteel melody until the two eventually swim together beneath Carney's splashy cymbal work.
And then there's "10 A.M. Automatic", Rubber Factory's first single and easily one of the most radio-ready indie anthems of the year, next to Modest Mouse's "Float On". It's the song most likely to show up in a Guy Ritchie flick next summer, a cool-as-fuck, hormone-laced dose of rock 'n' roll ecstasy. Here, Auerbach's voice attains that archetypal blues fever that induced the birth of rock 50 years ago; melody and rhythm mesh into a primal force that's raw and pure.
The Black Keys have consistently sought to keep their distance from modern blues, calling themselves a rock band above anything else. But we all know the blues resides at the core of rock 'n' roll. Rubber Factory sways back and forth almost imperceptibly between the two idioms, revitalizing the essence of both. | 2004-09-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-09-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | September 9, 2004 | 8.3 | 117ecb72-d319-493b-8c4b-a5408e5935f8 | Jonathan Zwickel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-zwickel/ | null |
Quan’s official debut is a triumph of willpower and talent, a detail-oriented collection with immaculate production that rightfully reestablishes his place in rap. | Quan’s official debut is a triumph of willpower and talent, a detail-oriented collection with immaculate production that rightfully reestablishes his place in rap. | Rich Homie Quan: Rich as in Spirit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rich-homie-quan-rich-as-in-spirit/ | Rich as in Spirit | Breaking his promise, Rich Homie Quan actually did stop going in. After the stunning success of 2014’s Rich Gang: Tha Tour Part 1 with Young Thug and Birdman, he released three tapes that ranged from pedestrian to decent in 2015, had a somewhat public falling out with Thug, and was embroiled in a rape-lyric controversy. He vanished from the public eye until, in 2016, he flubbed Biggie lyrics at the “VH1 Hip Hop Honors,” prompting outrage and overreaction. After a streak of missteps, it seemed as though Quan had been written off by most as a rising star gone bust.
But the Atlanta rapper’s 2017 mixtape, Back to the Basics, hit the reset button and zeroed in on that triumphant but never quite comfortable voice that made him so captivating in the first place. Now with his official debut album, Rich as in Spirit, he’s trying to reassess his whole story. As the title suggests, Quan reasons that true triumph stems from character and willpower, and that same indomitable spirit has sustained him through tough times. His honeyed voice and tortured soul recalls the crossroads moments when he decided he wouldn’t accept mediocrity, recognizing the mistakes he’s made and finding some answers of his own in the process.
Many lyrics juxtapose hardships from a troubled upbringing with his celebrity life. On “34,” which traces the sources of his desires: “Might buy that Maybach, I grew up without no curtains/And when I get it, I’ma keep my windows rolled up on purpose.” Even after all he’s achieved and overcome, though, he realizes there’s no way for him to really fill the void. “I done bought everything that I ever wanted, but it’s still empty spaces,” he raps on “Think About It.” These songs are so open, nearly transparent, as Quan shares memories from all the instances that nearly broke him and chronicles how he keeps managing to put himself back together again.
As on Back to the Basics, Quan returns to the natural inclinations that made him an emerging rap star and continue to make him special: gut-wrenching, detail-oriented storytelling, slippery flows, and glossy melodies. He’s just a tad sharper here; his presentation is crisper. Whether he’s recounting how watching his mom work two jobs led him to robbery or reliving the double life he led in high school, he is constantly leading the listener into the moment with careful scene-setting. Just as keen as his retentive narration is his knack for catchy tunes. “Reflecting” is pleasantly bouncy, and “Achieving” shows off some of Quan’s most polished and soothing vocals to date. Throughout the album, he lays earworms into an incredibly sensuous collection of beats.
The unsung heroes of Rich as in Spirit are Nard & B, the production duo behind Migos’ “T-Shirt” and several of Future’s greatest mixtape deep cuts. Their beats strobe as if just out of focus, woozy and disorienting. On “Understood,” the synths whirr as if approaching from a distance, oscillating like beams from a lighthouse. The ringing chimes on “No No No” echo into programmed beeps before the whole thing dissolves into one washed-out tone. As Quan writes about being a writer on “The Author,” his raps ripple across the surface of aqua synths, each note spreading along the edges of a throbbing 808 bass. Each song brings out his best.
Alongside 30 Roc and Cassius Jay, Nard & B help set the mood for one of rap’s most impassioned crooners. Quan’s tottering and at times strained vocals seep into the grooves of each production. He is an important link in an Auto-Tune rap lineage that continues to produce stars but he’s often left out of the conversation, a fact he acknowledges often on Rich as in Spirit. The album, in part, is an attempt to claim his place in that legacy. “I put a lot these niggas on and I still ain’t got my credit/But I ain’t mad though, ’cause I could’ve been mad broke,” he raps. As he reexamines the turbulent history that led him here, he reestablishes his place in rap. | 2018-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Motown | March 21, 2018 | 7.7 | 117f4986-6c14-480d-b7dd-6cf38c85e51e | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The third record from the UK trio wrangles their elastic, post-punk spirit into an urgency that feels bonded to the present. It makes for songs that are as mesmerizing as they are exhilarating. | The third record from the UK trio wrangles their elastic, post-punk spirit into an urgency that feels bonded to the present. It makes for songs that are as mesmerizing as they are exhilarating. | Shopping: The Official Body | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shopping-the-official-body/ | The Official Body | Shopping’s whole thing could not be more antithetical to their name. And yet, since their formation in 2012, the English post-punk trio have adamantly refuted claims that their music intentionally broadcasts a political dogma. Any commentary, they insisted, was simply a reflection of what was on their minds, not an attempt at proselytizing. “We are slaves to the system, so we have to write our frustrations down when we make this music,” drummer Andrew Milk explained to Stereogum in 2015. “[It] was never the intention to be political; we explicitly just wanted to make people dance.”
But three years later, the stakes are higher, and Shopping have wrangled their elastic spirit into an urgency that feels bonded to our present, catastrophic atmosphere. On their third record, The Official Body, they dig deeper into the identity politics, power complexes, and content criticism that defined 2013’s Consumer Complaints and 2015’s Why Choose. But like their subtle politicism, Shopping continue to resist evangelizing screeds. Instead, their critical messages occur as blunt, brief repetitions woven into the greater musical texture. On opener “The Hype,” guitarist Rachel Aggs and Milk engage in a bellowed round-robin dialogue about subliminal media brainwashing over a jagged guitar riff. “Don’t believe! Ask questions,” bassist Billy Easter chimes in. Without ever skirting close to what New York Magazine’s Molly Fischer recently coined as “entertainment-as-think-piece,” “The Hype” accomplishes its appeal for autonomy by gently nudging rather than aggressively prodding.
Whereas Shopping have previously relied on a strict three-piece arsenal—along with the production work of Orange Juice’s Edwyn Collins—the band have fleshed out their interwoven rhythms with synth bass and drum pads. The geologic levels of synth and bass in tracks like “Wild Child” and “Discover” make Shopping’s previous efforts sound downright minimalist in comparison. While not being as light-footed as one of Aggs’ other projects, the indie-pop duo Sacred Paws, The Official Body creates upbeat, transformative moments that strike a balance between a call to action and the thrill of a humid mosh pit.
Shopping excel when their music sweeps the listener away into a tangle of tempos. Milk’s driving drumbeats, Easter’s swaying bass, and Aggs’ tap-dancing guitar form a tighter sound than ever, a mesmerizing spider web that collapses when a sharp lyric pierces through: “This is such a simple thing/You don’t like me/I don’t look like you,” Aggs poses on “My Dad’s a Dancer” before emitting an unexpectedly joyous, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha,” à la the Julie Ruin. Rather than underselling or distracting from Aggs’ sincere quandary, the outburst intensifies how often she has considered her role as the other. It’s a heartbreaking moment conveyed with inspiring levity.
Aggs’ guitar often acts as a pressure valve, inflating the sonic bubble until it's about to burst. On “Asking for a Friend,” her needling sounds so tight it could shatter. “Where will I go to find some peace,” she pleads as her fingers run a marathon on the frets. “Suddenly Gone,” a meditation on being a queer artist of color, finds its strength in interplay between its subtle lyrics and acute instrumental punctuations. On “Shave Your Head,” Milk wanders through a world consumed by Groupthink, identical haircuts, and interchangeable faces. “I can’t I can’t I can’t tell you apart,” Milk babbles as Aggs swings in to urge independence. “Break through/Feel frustrated,” she exclaims while playing an appropriately tricky melody. “Overtime,” a track about a personal crossroads and indecision, breaks into a jittery fever dream at its conclusion. “I think I finally found a way out,” Aggs proclaims, kicking through the turmoil with hope and wonder.
Shopping are not reinventing the wheel and they do not need to—the halls of post-punk are already too full of guitars that are angular. The trio is so refreshing and exhilarating because of the space they elbow-out for themselves and the vibrant spirit they pump into the exhausted genre, proving that simply adding some cavernous echo to a track isn’t enough. There’s no proper formula of funky riffs + danceability + fearless ethos that makes a hit. Shopping know that to invert tradition, you’ve gotta have some fun too. | 2018-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | FatCat | January 19, 2018 | 8.1 | 1190477f-d46e-441c-b9e8-9d5178c8dd85 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Laurel Sprengelmeyer's Cult Following is a flowing record with guests including Sufjan Stevens, Sharon Van Etten, the National’s Dessner brothers, and TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone. | Laurel Sprengelmeyer's Cult Following is a flowing record with guests including Sufjan Stevens, Sharon Van Etten, the National’s Dessner brothers, and TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone. | Little Scream: Cult Following | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21861-cult-following/ | Cult Following | The first single from Little Scream’s second album recasts Laurel Sprengelmeyer as a Bee Gees-indebted art-popper on the grind. The Iowa-born, Montreal-dwelling artist sings in a high, breathy register about fooled hearts and the gift of dance, the flirtatious atmosphere stoked by cheeky guitar and a synth that stutters and slides like a broken zipper. Her 2011 debut, The Golden Record, featured a fair range of guitar-oriented styles—choral post-punk, desert ballads, Horses-indebted spirituals—but nothing as pure pop as this.
Rather than a reinvention, though, “Love As a Weapon” is another string to Sprengelmeyer’s considerable bow, and on Cult Following, the wealth of styles—tarnished guitar, midnight-hued synths, Eno-indebted balladry—are all pointed in the same direction. To make clear that the record is offering up an alternate reality, the opening interlude is called “Welcome to the Brain,” a spooky riff on the drone of an ensemble tuning up. One song flows into the next, and there are three more interludes across the album’s dozen tracks. Sprengelmeyer brings a similar sense of destination to her individual songs, which rarely end where they started.
On The Golden Record, she tilted towards great booming crescendos. Here, she makes agile and surprising shifts between joy, chaos, and vulnerability in the space of a single track. The centerpiece is “Evan,” a song bookended with its own interludes—an ebullient introduction and a haunted outro—which in turn encompasses all her strengths. It starts out as a gentle lullaby, her voice shoring up the melody until it accrues enough chutzpah to turn into a kind of gospel country song. Then thunder strikes, piercing strings swirl, and her vocal refrain takes on a frenzied intensity. Better still is its dark aftermath, “The Kissing,” where Sprengelmeyer’s soft guitar finds its stakes in clangs of staticky fury, a yowling, borderline-prog solo, followed by a choir’s medicated coos, which linger like fallout.
Cult Following is beautifully orchestrated, and one of the rare records where the lavish arrangements feel fully in service of the songs, rather than like stage decoration. (You could sell the record on its guests—Sufjan Stevens, Sharon Van Etten, the National’s Dessner brothers, TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone, cult Canadian singer Mary Margaret O’Hara—except you can hardly pick them out; they lend their skills rather than personalities.) Sprengelmeyer co-produced with Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, and they make subtle use of panning and scale to swirl the listener right into the world they’ve created, which hits hard without sacrificing on elegance.
In one of the record’s most moving moments, Sprengelmeyer adopts a girlish, scared voice to countenance the possibility of redemption, and of reconciling hurt: “If there are memories I wanna burn/What happens to the ones that I like to keep?” she sings, evoking Bat for Lashes at her most forlorn. “What if my best memories are dreams? Do I get to keep these? Please?” She ends the charade on “Silent Moon,” an eerie, tremulous lament, like Morricone or Angelo Badalamenti arranging for Karen Dalton: “What I loved in you was just projection/A kind rendering of imperfection,” Sprengelmeyer admits, sadly. “Once I saw what was true/There was not much left of you/I’m afraid.”
The record is fluid, but front-loaded. After “The Kissing,” an eerie, dreamy mood sets in, and the intensity wavers. But while Sprengelmeyer sacrifices the impact of her second record by stacking uncompromising pop songs at the front and dreamier musings towards the back, her story is tantalizingly non-linear and elliptical. Cult Following is a captivating enquiry into the unrelatability of desire, but the conclusiveness of the hurt it can wreak. When it hits, there’s nothing like it. | 2016-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Merge | May 10, 2016 | 7.5 | 1190d018-4058-487f-8cee-c8716f1905fe | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The German producer Florian Kupfer comes from the lo-fi end of the techno spectrum. His music, which has industrial leanings, is unvarnished and thick with distortion, and this new EP is probably the heaviest, most brain-bending thing he's done yet. | The German producer Florian Kupfer comes from the lo-fi end of the techno spectrum. His music, which has industrial leanings, is unvarnished and thick with distortion, and this new EP is probably the heaviest, most brain-bending thing he's done yet. | Florian Kupfer: Explora EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20860-explora-ep/ | Explora EP | The German producer Florian Kupfer comes from the lo-fi end of the techno spectrum. His music is unvarnished and thick with distortion; most tracks feature a single drum machine and a synthesizer or two, and they swim in line noise and tape compression. But that gritty affect is a means, not an end. He can be bruising, as on the recent "Discotag", where he flips vintage rap samples and petulant bass buzz into a contemporary take on hip-house, and tender, as on last year's "Feelin", with its melancholy hook, "I can't stop this feeling." He can be eerie: "Bridge", from a recent WT Records release, pairs wind chimes with a thudding kick drum in a way that suggests a record left skipping its run-out groove long after all the people have gone home. And he can be unrelenting: On last year's "Head", the steady rattle of a fire-alarm bell rings for minutes at a time—mixed, to deliriously dissonant effect, with the whine of rubbed wineglass rims.
Until now, Kupfer has recorded mostly for labels like L.I.E.S., Rush Hour's No 'Label' offshoot, and Willie Burns' WT Records—a small circle of likeminded peers who share his suspicion of the shinier, happier aspects of mainstream dance music. His Explora EP appears on Technicolour, the house- and techno-oriented singles label under electronic heavyweight Ninja Tune, but he keeps his cards as close to his chest as ever. In fact, it's probably the heaviest, most brain-bending thing he's done yet.
"Explora (Slave)" sets the record's abject tone with an invitation that quickly turns menacing. "Explore your fantasy," coos a sensual voice, but it dissolves into a cyborg's growl; tri-tone synth stabs drip like the stalactites of a sex dungeon. It's slow to get going: two-and-a-half minutes pass before the beat drops in earnest, and once it does, all that introductory tension is channeled into shuddering machine rhythms and scissor-handed hi-hats. Flecked with acid and analog to the bone, it's reminiscent of Bam Bam's "Where's Your Child", Phuture's "Your Only Friend", and other '80s Chicago house cuts where pitched-down voices and bad vibes ruled the dancefloor. But its sleazy, sinister energies are a walk in the park compared to the beaten-down resignation of the next track, "Headpiece". This one shuffles along at a dirge-like 57 beats per minute, and its listless drum track might as well be a screen door swinging on its hinges in heavy weather. The opening notes, bulbous and blown out, sound a little bit like the electric bass melody of Swans' "In My Garden"—surely a coincidence, but the comparison feels appropriate, if only because industrial music's blasted affect plays such a key role in Kupfer's music; he's as much a student of Wax Trax as he is of Trax. The real magic is in the way it builds over the course of its long, exhausted haul, distortion and dub delay and the EQs all flickering unsteadily, soaking up the unmistakable energy of the live-in-one-take jam.
"Brute Force" is the slightest of the EP's four tracks, to the extent that it sounds a little bit tossed off; it's a monotone eighth-note synth chug set against muted kicks and a ragged open hi-hat. (It does sound a little bit like Barnt's ultra-stripped-back jams, but it lacks their gonzo energy, having neither dynamics nor development.) But he makes up for it with "Shpel", the EP's final cut. It's the record's most bare-bones track, but also its most engrossing. Here's where he really gives into his industrial leanings, wreathing sumptuous wooden thumps in pitched-down shrieks and gravelly voices slowed to the point of unintelligibility. This one goes on for nearly 12 minutes, and while nothing ever really happens, it doesn't need to; for fans of atmospheric dread, its whiff of freezer burn is plenty exquisite. This one isn't even obviously analog in nature; any number of techniques might be responsible for its resonant central tone. But the track takes away an important lesson from Kupfer's lo-fi studies: sometimes, learning to do without is the best way to find your focus. | 2015-07-30T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2015-07-30T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Electronic | Technicolour | July 30, 2015 | 6.5 | 1195e7b1-0223-42d8-a579-f5f338c1239a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
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