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On the soundtrack to an imagistic new film project, the darkwave duo’s limited palette verges on claustrophobia. Their winning formula hasn’t changed, but the music lacks drive. | On the soundtrack to an imagistic new film project, the darkwave duo’s limited palette verges on claustrophobia. Their winning formula hasn’t changed, but the music lacks drive. | Boy Harsher: The Runner (Original Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boy-harsher-the-runner-original-soundtrack/ | The Runner (Original Soundtrack) | Within contemporary post-punk’s revival of dark, austere synth, Boy Harsher stood out with a distinctly modern take on the genre. During the late 2010s, the North Hampton-based duo distilled its stripped-down brand of hypnotic darkwave across releases like Pain and Careful. Over the pandemic, the pair, who met while studying film at the Savannah College of Art and Design, directed a short film and wrote its soundtrack, both titled The Runner. But the neon-drenched project can’t quite make up its mind about being a music video, a meta-commentary, or a horror story; even if the music remains technically competent, there isn’t nearly enough material in either medium to stay afloat.
Boy Harsher has typically confined itself to a limited palette, often to striking effect. But the danger of that intense focus tilting into claustrophobia has never been more apparent than on The Runner. Whether diegetic or in isolation, the songs feel sterile and flat. Tracks like “The Ride Home” and “Escape” are frustratingly sedate and seemingly engineered to slip out of your attention, and the generic monotony of its lyrics doesn’t help: “Baby, we can escape,” “Maybe we can escape,” etc. Although infused with more energy, the single “Machina,” a freestyle-tinged collaboration with BOAN’s Mariana Saldaña, doesn’t prove its worth beyond a closely traced ’80s emulation. Still, there are moments that shine in their simplicity: The group’s collaboration with bedroom pop artist Lucy on “Autonomy” feels fresh and riveting, tinged with morning light as it rolls over the film’s credits. Opener “Tower” builds the mythos of its protagonist in a series of cool threats ( “Don’t you say my name/You don’t want to know about me”) before exploding into a grotesque, splenetic column of horror synth.
In sequences dressed up in the colors and set design of Julia Ducournau and David Cronenberg, the film’s titular protagonist, played by King Woman’s Kristina Esfandiari, alternately seduces and murders an odd series of characters on her path of destruction. The aspects of psychological horror play as scènes à faire, and the Runner’s sexual and violent diversions become more expected than transgressive. The film, however, does achieve some frisson when zeroing in on individual scenes of choreography. “Give Me a Reason,” for example, plays somewhat tame in isolation, but it erupts into life as a score: Hostile and hypnotic, it tensely saturates the movement of a love triangle in a carmine-drenched bar. Though these slower, more deliberate moments are rare, the interaction between robotic choreography and the mechanical score shines far brighter than an otherwise muted plane of background synth.
The duo began working on the project in the wake of vocalist Jae Matthews’ diagnosis with multiple sclerosis. Describing the cathartic experience of writing for the lead character, Matthews explained, “[She] needs to flee all these disastrous situations she herself has created; she’s the ultimate self-saboteur.” That desire for freedom is epitomized in both The Runner’s film and soundtrack. The soundtrack succeeds with taut moments of electronic beauty, but it just as quickly slips into a frustrating, self-defeating insularity. While the precise formula of Boy Harsher’s music hasn’t faltered, The Runner’s soundtrack lacks drive, or a deeper expansion of their sound: It feels more like the musical equivalent of an engine idling.
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. | 2022-01-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Nude Club | January 25, 2022 | 6.2 | 11961d5a-36f4-489d-9f21-fd1472f77c6e | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
milo is a sharp-tongued rapper whose wordplay rewards close listening. On his third and best LP, the Maine emcee carries the flag for the underground rap scene that birthed him. | milo is a sharp-tongued rapper whose wordplay rewards close listening. On his third and best LP, the Maine emcee carries the flag for the underground rap scene that birthed him. | milo: who told you to think??!!?!?!?! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/milo-who-told-you-to-think/ | who told you to think??!!?!?!?! | It’s easy to appreciate why the term “underground hip-hop” doesn’t get tossed around so much these days. Taking an oppositional stance toward the mainstream, the so-called underground artists of the 1990s and 2000s defined themselves by the qualities they found lacking in popular rap: independence, experimentation, political awareness, artistry over marketability. Today, that same ethos permeates hip-hop at even the highest levels of the pop charts. Kanye dabbles in industrial noise, Chance doesn’t need a label, and Beyoncé’s videos double as political statements. You could say that the underground won the battle, but that’s not how Portland, Maine, rapper milo sees it. “Why’s your favorite rapper always babbling about his brand again?” he asks on his third full-length, who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, adding, “This the last call for those real MCs/Your voice is needed.”
Bars like these might scan as little more than the grousing of a salty traditionalist, but milo is hardly an armchair scholar. On who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, he crafts richly layered rap songs using outmoded tools like sample-based beats, dense wordplay, and unapologetically nerdy references. He’s as earnest as his most confessional forbears—alt-rap sadboys like Atmosphere’s Slug and WHY?’s Yoni Wolf—though far less prone to navel-gazing. Where other rappers might bemoan their status as smart outsiders, milo flexes. “Spit it like Zadie Smith with a Jay-Z lisp/Or like J.Z. Smith, you could take your pick/The point is, my vocabulary pays my rent,” he raps on the aptly-titled “the young man has a point (nurture).”
Throughout who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, milo remains blissfully unconcerned with current rap trends, aiming instead for a sound that recalls underground rap’s high-water marks without feeling dated. He produced the bulk of the record himself under his Scallops Hotel alter ego, and the results demonstrate that he’s become nearly as good at beatmaking as he is at rapping. Tracks like “paging mr. bill nunn,” “rapper,” and “pablum // CELESKINGIII” crackle with the lived-in charm of classic Madlib instrumentals. “note to mrs” is a tone poem bathed in the gentle glow of morning light. “magician (suture)” evokes the loose, jazzy feel of the Roots, a touchstone (in fact, the title’s punctuation is meant as a nod to that band’s Do You Want More?!!!??!).
The rapping on the album is even more impressive. milo displays his mastery of a variety of flows, furiously stacking syllables one minute and lagging lazily behind the beat the next. Like many DOOM acolytes, he’s long employed a scattershot referentiality and here, he kicks it into overdrive; nods to Aristotle and Nabokov sit alongside references to Insane Clown Posse and Dungeons & Dragons. Almost every guest meets the high bar set by their host. Brooklyn’s ELUCID offers up plainspoken profundity (“I love wild things wildly/I love quiet things quietly”), underground stalwart Busdriver plays an unhinged foil to an exacting milo, and Milwaukee upstart Lorde Fredd33 steals the show on posse cut “yet another.”
With who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, milo both asserts his place within the lineage of underground hip-hop and argues for its continued relevance. He’s hardly alone in this endeavor: His Hellfyre Club compatriots (Open Mike Eagle, Busdriver, and Nocando) and kindred spirits like Chester Watson and Earl Sweatshirt have been making stuff like this for years. What sets his record apart is how forcefully milo makes his argument and how high he makes the stakes feel. He opens the album with a recording of James Baldwin discussing the poet’s role in society (“I want to suggest that the poets are, finally, the only people, who know the truth about us”) and claims that mantle for himself without even a hint of reservation. But he’s not just advocating on his own behalf: Like so many underground rappers of the past, milo sees himself as a part of a larger cultural movement: “Shocking moment as the pupil thought/Me and my niggas is a school of thought.”
CORRECTION: The original version of this story incorrectly quoted a lyric in “the young man has a point (nurture).” | 2017-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Ruby Yacht | August 10, 2017 | 7.5 | 119642a4-4420-40e5-8f36-bbdb56d4988d | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
The Philadelphia punk band couches its revolutionary anthems in winking medieval imagery, flirting with camp as they sharpen the guillotine’s blade. | The Philadelphia punk band couches its revolutionary anthems in winking medieval imagery, flirting with camp as they sharpen the guillotine’s blade. | Poison Ruïn: Härvest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/poison-ruin-harvest/ | Härvest | Rage and oppression are historical constants. Poison Ruïn’s Härvest marries feudal revolt with contemporary punk wrath, holding up a medieval mirror to the genre’s familiar symbols of disenfranchisement. The Philadelphia band trades the defiant cityscape of Bad Brains’ “Banned in D.C.” or the technological hellscape of the Germs’ “Media Blitz” for fields, labyrinths, and tombs, yeeting contemporary sounds like a Molotov cocktail through centuries past.
The record is bracing and incendiary; it’s also an escape. It promises transport, whether to a bygone time or a different emotional plane. Opener “Pinnacle of Ecstasy” enters as if on a fog, epic synth ceding to driving power chords as vocalist Mac Kennedy growls, “Rot, face down in the gutter/Covered in flies.” Before long, the guitars grow frenzied, the riffs dizzying, and the song’s protagonist, slithering in the shadows, has found ecstasy in their lowly station.
“Härvest,” the album’s highlight, follows a similar path. Building from its slow-burn cinematic keyboard opener, it segues into a propulsive punk anthem, part Legend of Zelda and part Ramones. Making an open call to revolt, Kennedy chants, “You sowed your seed/Despite the salt/Some glutton’s greed/You played your part,” adding ominously, “You play your part until we give the signal.”
Despite otherworldly embellishments, from Neverending Story-style interlude “Resurrection I” to the sword-sharpening sounds that open “Bastards Dance,” the album never crosses fully into the territory of camp. Poison Ruïn flirt knowingly with this line, winking occasionally from their seat next to the guillotine, but this record forgoes the cheese of adjacent knight- or wizard-core acts like Iced Earth or Grave Digger. Instead, Poison Ruïn employ symbols that point to contemporary parallels, real and meaningful disparities in wealth and class that only exist because we permit them. “Isn’t this our harvest?” Kennedy asks on the titular song. “Isn’t this our feast to share?/Wiser ones are asking themselves,/‘Who’s swinging the scythe?’”
At its most powerful, Härvest foments, whether the fruit of their harvest is class rage or despair. From the thinly veiled remove of a fantasy, the listener is impelled to reconsider their relationship to labor and agency, whether swinging a scythe or working hourly at a grocery store. The momentum slows on “Augur Die,” a serviceably breakneck song that could be the work of any hardcore band, but by “Bastards Dance,” we’re either wheeling around the pit with reckless abandon or hopping into the saddle with a lit torch.
The most effective protest songs juxtapose the extant with the possible, the unacceptable with the hopeful. Like a horseman’s boot to the face, Poison Ruïn’s album is a reminder of the violence we withstand and the violence we can mete out in service of something greater. Whether revolution starts in a rehearsal space or a pasture, Härvest attests that it’s delirious and hot-blooded, a wellspring of power rising from the gutter. | 2023-04-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Relapse | April 20, 2023 | 7.6 | 119be78d-f613-41ea-a4c7-cea7881c0818 | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
In the face of label woes, a gentrifying hometown, and Donald Trump, Philadelphia’s other Springsteen acolytes thrive inside the tension between hug-and-chug uplift and political fatigue. | In the face of label woes, a gentrifying hometown, and Donald Trump, Philadelphia’s other Springsteen acolytes thrive inside the tension between hug-and-chug uplift and political fatigue. | Restorations: LP5000 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/restorations-lp5000/ | LP5000 | When it’s time to retell the stories of the late 2010s and our multiplying sociopolitical problems, Philadelphia’s Restorations will not be our generation’s Creedence Clearwater Revival, the music filmmakers use now as countercultural shorthand. But LP5000, the sardonically titled follow-up to 2014’s LP3, does warrant a role in those inevitable scenes where people are doing what you are right now—looking at a music website on your phone and realizing anew there is no way to escape your waking news nightmare, only different ways to engage. “No, I don’t wanna hear that name again,” Jon Loudon sighs during “Melt,” as the dreamiest but bleariest Restorations song yet recreates the feeling of breaking a promise to yourself not to check Twitter the moment you wake up.
That name does go unsaid during LP5000, not that it makes much difference. “Glance at your phone and you mumble, ‘I hope he dies’/Yeah, I hope he dies, too,’” he sings at one point, a couple reaffirming their devotion to one another in a way that hopefully will feel dated at some point. This paralyzing weariness is the only major change since LP3, save a little more electronic chit-chat and a little less triple-guitar skywriting. Restorations still stand alongside Constantines and the Menzingers on a thorny branch of the Tree of Springsteen. It doesn’t take much to pierce this armor of red flannel and Born to Run vinyl, to release repressed feelings of masculine shame and creeping obsolescence that explain why these guys sound like they have to drink themselves to sleep every night.
The peaks of LP3 were pure wish fulfillment for workingman’s dread: “Imagine that focus in real life/Imagine going outside,” Loudon roared over Telecaster feedback on “Separate Songs,” a call to throw your laptop from a moving car. “Misprint” could make anyone cooped inside a compact stuck on the interstate feel like they were cruising down some bucolic back road instead. Those moments don’t ring false in 2018, but they do seem like emotional luxuries we can no longer afford. “Threw your back out just trying to stand up straight,” Loudon sings now during opener “St.” Regardless of how hard they thrash and throttle, Restorations land on the resilience to make it through this shit, one day at a time.
As with Jeff Rosenstock’s POST- and the World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s Always Foreign, LP5000 resonates through the contrast between hug-and-chug uplift and an encroaching sense of its futility in the face of constant outrage. Those recent albums are also uniformly depressing in the way they follow their bombastic, relatively celebratory predecessors, memories that hover overhead like the cloud of a Facebook “On This Day” post made before you had to deal with all of this.
To release LP3, Restorations jumped to rejuvenated punk stronghold SideOneDummy and were soon pegged as elder ambassadors of the United States’ new indie rock capital. But the label ditched its active bands to restructure under mysterious circumstances. LP5000’s first single, “The Red Door,” anxiously observes as Philly gentrifies into the “real” new Brooklyn. And though it’s produced by a guy who worked with the National, the War on Drugs, and Mr Twin Sister, its seven songs last only 24 minutes. By its mere existence, LP5000 suffers through the emotional and fiscal downsizing of the recent past.
The greatest trick of LP5000, then, is Restorations’ ability to sound cautiously anthemic. “Got a partner for starters and a kid on the way/Can’t be doing all this dumb shit no more,” Loudon snarls on “Nonbeliever.” He’d risk sounding smug if he were actually celebrating. And if you’re the sort who agrees gentrification is an unequivocal evil that you have limited power to control, you’ll identify with “The Red Door,” named for a telltale sign of displacement. When the song sounds ready to lift off or explode, Restorations only grit their teeth and vent. Real protest music might be more viscerally satisfying and important, but LP5000 plays its essential, relatable part.
The Great Awokening has created true folk heroes and left others with Twitter brain worms. Most of us have simply subjected ourselves to a pervasive baseline of bad news, worn like “a sodden and rotting wool sweater,” a foul, itchy reminder of our fucked-up present. Is the act of trying to keep your shit together the only way to stay sane or a true guarantee of insanity? LP5000 speaks with eloquence and empathy about that predicament. No, it doesn’t remove the sweater, but it reminds us that someone else is wearing one, too. | 2018-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | September 24, 2018 | 7.3 | 119ec9e0-5eb7-4a5c-a7e7-998607553094 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The Brooklyn songwriter and sound artist’s second album is a kind of spiritual accounting, a swirling blend of orchestral groans and human whispers that evokes subconscious drift. | The Brooklyn songwriter and sound artist’s second album is a kind of spiritual accounting, a swirling blend of orchestral groans and human whispers that evokes subconscious drift. | L’Rain: Fatigue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lrain-fatigue/ | Fatigue | On her piercing self-titled 2017 debut as L’Rain, Brooklyn artist Taja Cheek sifted through the aftermath of her mother’s death with roaming sensitivity. Intimate field recordings, tape loops, and fragmented harmonies resembled loose sketches, yet L’Rain’s scattered structure framed an astounding, up-close document of grief. Fatigue, Cheek’s second album, once again looks inward, but this time allows more light into the corners. It’s a graceful record whose wearied landscapes of synth, air horn, strings, and saxophone distill a suite of low moods—depression, regret, and fear—into resilience and hope.
“What have you done to change?” demands Buffalo alt-rock artist Quinton Brock on Fatigue’s blaring opener, “Fly, Die,” a question that weighed heavily as Cheek put this music together. The album’s nonlinear framework replicates the elliptical way the mind works through intense emotions, twisting in different formations until it fractures into a breakthrough. Some of these diffuse songs evolved out of voice memos Cheek made for herself or in collaboration with others, but while her music can be intentionally illegible, it’s never unapproachable. Fatigue’s swirling blend of orchestral groans and human whispers evoke a state of subconscious drift where self-growth is nurtured in real time. It’s a way of taking stock of the bruises of life.
Cheek and co-producer Andrew Lappin’s work is painterly and methodical, daubing vocal loops over clattering percussion, sweeping strings, and resonant synths to create a shapeshifting strain of experimental pop. On the shattering standout “Blame Me,” she sings in a nimble voice over fingerpicked guitar: “You were wasting away, my god/I’m making my way down south.” Jon Bap and Anna Wise’s background vocals form an armature of strength as Cheek’s words grow more woeful: “Fought my demons until you were old—maybe ’cause you love me/Thinking ’bout it lately: future poison-blooded little babies.” Wherever Cheek goes on Fatigue, the ghosts of regret and trauma follow closely behind, an emotional state that colors the album in foreboding shades even as she creates space to recover and improve.
Like L’Rain, Fatigue is marbled with personal recordings: Dishes being washed in the sink beneath a piano melody on “Need Be,” a voicemail from her mother buried in “Blame Me.” The clips imbue the music with fleeting traces of closeness and familiarity. Cheek approaches them from a distance, recontextualizing some of the most heartfelt or difficult moments of her life in song. The mercurial, six-minute highlight “Find It” begins downcast, with a metronomic synth loop and the repeated mantra, “Make a way out of no way.” Screams echo through the sluggish beat as coming through a wall; the dust settles on an organist and singer performing the gospel song “I Won’t Complain,” recorded at the funeral of a family friend. Cheek intones over it until the song crests in a rapturous, overwhelming finale, with no less than 13 musicians contributing to the commotion. It’s easily the most poignant song she has ever made, a deeply felt, Biblically minded portrait of forging a path out of darkness. Yet the journey has room for lightness and humor, too, like the “oops” that slips into the end of “Walk Through” or the wacky vocal affect of a former roommate on “Love Her.” On the brief “Black Clap” and the rhythmic, low-lit “Suck Teeth,” Cheek incorporates the percussive sounds of a handclap game she made up with multi-instrumentalist Ben Chapoteau-Katz, a way to pay tribute to the joyful sound of childhood hand games played by Black girls.
Cheek upends expectations in more direct pop and dance traditions, too. On “Two Face,” a roving piano line and stuttering samples melt into a soulful, psychedelic throb as she ruminates on a failed friendship. “I can’t build no new nothing no new life no new nothing for me,” she trills in a singsong cadence, the words bouncing over oscillated coos. The lyrics on the tense “Kill Self” are even more unforgiving: “Did you see me chew myself out?” she asks, voice rippling in a cascade over shuffling percussion. “Hear the gnawing?” At once the album’s darkest and most propulsive moment, “Kill Self” eventually assumes a seething dancefloor pulse, bending skillfully toward structure without abandoning Cheek’s wandering impulses.
Fatigue ends with the beatific “Take Two,” a spare reconfiguration of “Bat” from L’Rain. She repurposes the song in a similar way to her field recordings, as raw material to mold into an unfamiliar shape. Stripped bare of percussion and transformed into an airy, droning spiritual, Cheek’s voice unfurls in billowy, Auto-Tuned tones as she repeats the words, “I am not prepared for what is going to happen to me.” In her skyward voice, the sentiment is more life-affirming than terrifying, suggestive of infinite possibilities. There is no fixed road toward healing, Fatigue reassures us; there is only the way forward.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2021-06-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Mexican Summer | June 29, 2021 | 8.5 | 119f5c75-7aba-48c8-8e7f-c6e3c854aca7 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
After 30 years fronting the Roots, Black Thought has finally put out his first solo EP. It is rigorous but rarely hermetic, a small testament to his sustained excellence. | After 30 years fronting the Roots, Black Thought has finally put out his first solo EP. It is rigorous but rarely hermetic, a small testament to his sustained excellence. | Black Thought : Streams of Thought, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-thought-streams-of-thought-vol-1/ | Streams of Thought, Vol. 1 | Black Thought’s still-titanic 10-minute Funkmaster Flex freestyle from last December was both astonishing and affirming. It showed that the 46-year-old rapper is somehow still improving decades after his peers’ primes, which in hip-hop sounds almost as crazy as a professional athlete doing the same. Black Thought may seem divorced from the sense of desperation that manifests into these kinds of revelatory performances—he fronts the Roots, the house band of the “The Tonight Show,” and acts in an HBO prestige drama. On the other hand, he doesn’t need to be putting out freestyles to appease an audience he’s already won over in his 30-plus years of rhyming, proving that he’s still “got it.” It’s simply a highlight reel of Black Thought doing what he does.
Streams of Thought, Vol. 1 carries that freestyle’s impressionistic spirit with that knowing audience in mind. Though this is Black Thought’s first solo project (previous would-be debuts Masterpiece Theatre and Danger Mouse collab Dangerous Thoughts were shelved), the EP avoids any Herculean this-is-my-time statements in favor of weaponizing the quiet self-assuredness he’s earned in his decades as the Roots’ vocalist. Co-headliner and producer 9th Wonder mainly strings together a collection of soul loops and falls back, allowing Black Thought to throw down technically wrought, hookless verses. Rigorous but rarely hermetic, the album is a small testament to his sustained excellence.
At 17 minutes—including the two-year-old “Making a Murderer” with the Lox’s Styles P—Streams of Thought, Vol. 1 is a SparkNotes distillation of Black Thought’s abilities. His verses don’t give up easy mantras in the way some of his Philadelphian peers do; he thrills with internal rhymes and flow swaps that manage to fold years of experience and culture references into crisp narratives. You could argue that Things Fall Apart’s creative breakthrough was thanks to how the Roots finally matched the spontaneity of Black Thought’s prose.
No matter, Streams of Thought’s opener “Twofifteen” features this marginless narration in full force. The way he moves through flipping an idiom off his late grandfather’s wisdom when “burning man was blacks in Birmingham,” and a reference to Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls... carries a one-shot fluidity, like Alejandro Iñárritu remaking Do the Right Thing. Black Thought’s taste for classic literature reappears on “Dostoyevsky,” which takes his wanderlust to another extreme. He declares himself “Dostoyevsky meets Joe Pesci” before connecting the line to that “machete from the Serengeti, already,” then bending together the other syllables throughout the verse.
Perhaps Streams of Thought would’ve been better if it was just Black Thought rapping; although they acquit themselves well, Styles P and Rapsody feel like intermissions. Still, there’s an elder statesman ease trailing his voice that feels familial, and the two fellow rhymers indulge the low-stakes exercise. Black Thought leaves Rapsody enough breathing room on “Dostoyevsky” to throw in an adroit verse and the line “I ain't turn star boy in a weekend,” while on “Making a Murderer,” Styles P works himself out of the “We all got fucked but no pornos” clunker with a verse that carries the verve of someone willing to write until the pen runs dry. They both come across as game as an NBA player in a blacktop pickup match.
Streams of Thought’s closer “Thank You” suggests that all of Black Thought’s rhyming clinics are not just works of hunger, but also acts of gratitude. His continued relevance in a fickle industry, not to mention Tariq Trotter’s escape from the physical dangers of Philadelphia, is both a testament to his work ethic and divine favor. Over a sample of D’Angelo’s “The Charade,” he soulfully gives praise for his wife’s mercy, links lynched bodies to fleeing from cops (“Images of strange fruits hangin' from the trees/Laces on my gym shoes, skatin' from police”), and memorializes the “barbershop that used to be at 6th and Emily.” After Black Thought utters his last thank you, the project abruptly ends. | 2018-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Human Re Sources | June 6, 2018 | 7.5 | 119faeb1-6c22-462b-b691-c021c4d6211a | Brian Josephs | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-josephs/ | |
Recorded in a mountain village, the Russian ambient musician’s debut album molds field recordings and hushed vocals into a form that’s richly textured and occasionally unsettling. | Recorded in a mountain village, the Russian ambient musician’s debut album molds field recordings and hushed vocals into a form that’s richly textured and occasionally unsettling. | Perila: How Much Time It Is Between You and Me? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/perila-how-much-time-it-is-between-you-and-me/ | How Much Time It Is Between You and Me? | Ambient music has a reputation for being soothing. That only intensified during the pandemic, as many artists and listeners turned to the genre as a coping mechanism, using the music to ward off a looming sense of darkness and despair. Perila, however, has always reveled in darkness, and her debut album, How Much Time It Is Between You and Me?, is more unsettling than comforting.
A native of St. Petersburg, Russia, Perila (aka Aleksandra Zakharenko) relocated to Berlin six years ago, and she’s found a spiritual home in the community surrounding Huerco S.’ West Mineral Ltd., though she has yet to record for the label itself. Alongside like-minded artists such as Ulla, Exael and Special Guest DJ—all of whom she’s collaborated with—Perila has carved out a unique strain of ambient that’s miles away from the astral grooves of ’90s chillout rooms or the woozy stylings of today’s Balearic and new-age revivalists. Richly textured, uniquely visceral, and mildly unnerving, her work—which includes numerous self-released EPs, along with previous album-length efforts for labels like Sferic, Motion Ward, and Boomkat Editions—is streaked with a feeling that peril lurks around every corner. (Full disclosure: Perila has previously released a cassette on Paralaxe Editions, a label run by my wife, Dania Shihab.)
It’s not that Perila’s music is overtly scary. She’s not creating new-school horror soundtracks (or imitating the classic ones), but she does tap into a primal sense of danger. Like many of her releases, How Much Time has ties to nature—it was recorded last year in a mountain village in France—and though there are moments when the record captures the majesty of the outdoors, it also communicates the fear that can accompany being alone in the untamed wilderness. On album closer “Fallin Into Space,” she bathes in soft static, her gentle vocals and lulling melodies creating a picture of quiet serenity—an effect that’s amplified by quick flashes of birdsong—but the track is also punctuated by the intermittent creak of old wood, a sound that can seem absolutely sinister in a remote cabin in the middle of the night.
“Untilted” also has a creepy underbelly, and though its warbling brawn makes it one of the LP’s sturdier offerings, its incidental crackling and rustling evoke unseen vermin scuttling their way through darkness. These tendrils of dread and solitude are all over How Much Time, yet the album remains a distinctly intimate listen that often lavishes attention on the tiniest of details. “Time Date” is essentially a distortion-laced spoken-word piece accentuated with jittery bass notes, while the spacious “Vaxxine” contains little more than Zakharenko’s heavily reverbed voice, every tiny click and pop in her throat ringing out across the song’s soupy ether.
Perila does occasionally go a bit bigger. The blustering tones of “Air Like Velvet” build in intensity, suggesting a tear in the fabric of space-time opening up in the corner of your bedroom, while “You Disappear You Find Yourself Again” offsets its wispy tranquility with thick waves of droning bass. The immersive “Blanket” and “Cradle” have a definite floatation-tank vibe, but as Zakharenko fills them with fluttering, almost tactile bits of digital decay and sonic detritus, it once again becomes clear that conveying a sense of relaxation isn’t high on her list of priorities.
For those acquainted with Perila’s previous work, all of this will likely ring familiar. Despite being released by Smalltown Supersound—a larger label than any of those behind her other recordings, and one not necessarily known for ambient music—How Much Time is more of a continuation than a departure. Zakharenko’s musical vision remains intricate, ethereal, and just a little haunted. There’s beauty and bliss to be found, but anyone looking to nurse a fractured psyche ought to proceed with caution, as How Much Time probably won’t heal the soul—it’s likelier to gnaw at 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. | 2021-06-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | June 29, 2021 | 7.4 | 11a0ae4c-ed05-465e-989f-7222ed0b6196 | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/60d5f52746c357c48e83fe52/1:1/w_1178,h_1178,c_limit/Perila%20-%20How%20Much%20Time%20It%20Is%20Between%20You%20and%20Me |
Brand New's The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me blew up teen angst to literally biblical proportions, resonating like no emo band before or since to outcasts in Sunday school *and *high school. | Brand New's The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me blew up teen angst to literally biblical proportions, resonating like no emo band before or since to outcasts in Sunday school *and *high school. | Brand New: The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22626-the-devil-and-god-are-raging-inside-me/ | The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me | At the turn of the century, emo had finally gone pop, but hadn’t felt like music for popular kids. On Clear Channel playlists, “The Middle” and “Screaming Infidelities” were boyish, bashful contrast to the goateed bullies of nu-grunge and rap-metal and the New Rock Revival’s trouser-stuffing sexuality. But while Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional were extensions of the church basement and DIY house scenes that fostered Christie Front Drive, the Get Up Kids, and the Promise Ring, they would soon be overtaken by the likes of Brand New, Taking Back Sunday, and plenty of bands who were basically jocks in ringer T’s: they were loud, rude, and thought about little other than sex. The Long Island band’s 2001 debut Your Favorite Weapon helped establish the sound and the gender politics for a time when emo would draw in more fans of both sexes than ever before, but often cleared the room of people who expected punk rock to be a welcoming or progressive environment. To this day, “Emo Night” most likely means drunken 20-somethings yelling along with “Jude Law and a Semester Abroad.”
After the potent but obnoxious venting of Your Favorite Weapon, Brand New’s ambitions started to emerge two years later on Deja Entendu—they hired a guy who engineered Pixies records to produce it, wrote the acoustic weeper “The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot” to prove they’d heard the Smiths, and added a guitar solo on “Good to Know That if I Ever Need Attention All I Have to Do is Die” that veered so close to “Hotel California” it proved they’d probably never heard the Eagles. But frontman Jesse Lacey still inhabited a stunted, vindictive emotional viewpoint—even as he spent considerable time staring at an empty bottle, ruefully recounting the failure of copious sex and substances to provide him with any lasting happiness, he was just as quick to boast about a lifestyle that let him basically fuck and drink however much he wanted: “I wouldn’t stop if I could/Oh it hurts to be this good,” he admitted on “Okay I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don’t.” His flexing and his self-loathing were both forms of the same narcissism: In this way, he was almost proto-Drake.
Brand New jumped from Triple Crown to Interscope after Deja Entendu, and no one would’ve been surprised if major-label money and expectations would’ve caused Lacey to go even deeper into his vices. But based on the ensuing Fight Off Your Demons demos, Lacey was at least willing to make an effort to be the better man. “Brother’s Song” and “1996” were worldly and warm, allowing someone else’s story to be told for once. But this embryonic version of Brand New’s third album was leaked by overzealous fans (and sold back to them a decade later), causing a disillusioned and emotionally violated Lacey to retreat inward again. By the time The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me was completed, he may have realized that the world didn’t revolve around him—but he was now the dark center of the universe, a howling spiritual void.
Theology had always played an under-appreciated role in emo’s development. In fact, the golden era of emo was often praise music: witness the effect of Jeremy Enigk’s born-again Christianity on How It Feels to Be Something On, the exaltation of Mineral’s “Gloria,” or the existence of overtly denominational labels like Tooth & Nail. Even skeptics like David Bazan and Aaron Weiss could still quote scripture through their struggles. Besides, the mid-2000’s was a time when rock music of many stripes reasserted its faith: 2004 alone gave us Pedro the Lion’s Achilles Heel and mewithoutYou’s Catch for Us the Foxes, as well as the proudly Mormon Brandon Flowers, “Jesus Walks,” and Seven Swans. But while emo had previously been defined by passionate vocalists, desperately pleading to the heavens for salvation, Lacey was telling Jesus Christ not to bother— “I’m scared I’ll get scared and I swear I’ll try to nail you back up.”
It’s teen angst blown up to literally biblical proportions, resonating like no emo band before or since to outcasts in Sunday school and high school. But as sure as Brand New is an emo band, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me is not an emo record. It might actually be post-emo: “Was losing all my friends, was losing them to drinking and to driving,” Lacey mutters with unsettling resignation on the album’s first lyric. He sounds no more relieved to say in the next line, “Was losing all my friends, but I got ‘em back.” Whereas Lacey once took great pride in his ability to turn even the smallest slights into voluble LiveJournal status updates (“my tongue’s the only muscle in my body that works harder than my heart”), The Devil and God is often a dispassionate eulogy for that version of himself and his silly little feelings: “I used to be such a burning example,” “I used to care I was being careful,” “goodbye to love.”
To some degree, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me can be classified as soulless—albeit “soulless” as an aesthetically powerful narrative choice. Positive reviews of The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me likened Brand New to Radiohead and Modest Mouse—“Limousine (MS Rebridge)” is loosely modeled after “Exit Music (For a Film),” but Radiohead comparisons often serve as generic shorthand for “ambitious, brooding alternative rock.” The latter reference presumably referred to the band’s newfound affinity for whammy-bar harmonics and The Moon & Antarctica’s permafrost ambience, particularly on “Jesus.” In fact, the band had originally started working with Dennis Herring, who produced Modest Mouse’s Good News For People Who Love Bad News, an unexpected commercial success that put them in a position to share a co-headlining bill with Brand New this past year.
But Lacey is soulless in a way that recalls Thom Yorke on Kid A and Isaac Brock on The Moon & Antarctica—these are narrators who have lost something substantial, who have been separated from their physical being and seem to be staring down at a Sim-version of themselves. “I’m not here, this isn’t happening,” Yorke moaned, while Brock asked, “Does anybody know a way for a body to get away?” A seriously unnerving performance of “Jesus” on “Late Night with David Letterman” presents Lacey as a spiritual husk, and there are Easter egg references to the cover art of Deja Entendu as an avatar for his former self: “this bedwetting cosmonaut,” “space cadet, pull out.”
The Devil and God even sounds soulless. Despite being on Interscope’s dime, the band ran out of time and money while working with Herring and switched to “fifth member” Mike Sapone, responsible for the functional, nondescript mainstreamo sound of Your Favorite Weapon. And yet the same cold, clinical production is responsible for The Devil and God’s unusual and appropriate atmosphere. At no point does Lacey sound suicidal—in fact, he sounds resigned to living (“Do you feel condemned just being there?”).
While The Devil and God touches on Nirvana, Joy Division, and Elliott Smith, it doesn’t attempt to conjure those artists’ specific psychosomatic distresses, whether through dyspeptic churn, epileptic terror, or catatonic depression. Lacey begs for divine retribution, and some of the most bludgeoning dynamics you’ll hear on a modern rock record deliver it. The added percussion on “Millstone” conveys metal-on-bone trauma, while instrumental “Welcome to Bangkok” could pass for an interstitial from The Seer.
But The Devil and God is defined by its crippling “drops”—the chorus on “Sowing Season (Yeah)” plays on textbook Pixies-style explosiveness, but the full-band crashes on “Limousine,” “You Won’t Know,” and especially “Luca” are completely unexpected, the kind that cause convulsions at your desk or a swerve off the road. There isn’t a single warm or welcoming texture, just expanses of dulled existence and the brutal punishment Lacey so vehemently feels he deserves.
But what exactly has he done? On Deja Entendu’s shockingly callous “Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis” (Brand New’s own “Marvins Room”), Lacey coldly copped to his “desperate desires and unadmirable plans” but gave himself an out by presenting it all as a hypothetical (“if you let me have my way, I swear I’d tear you apart”). He wasn't the only guy in this realm passing off non-apologetic psychosexual reckoning as introspection at the time. This mode of songwriting often made for compelling gossip, but limited Brand New’s scope to things that actually happened to Jesse Lacey.
Freed from the constraints of autobiography, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me allows Brand New to inhabit far more frightening mindsets, both real and fictional; similar to Sufjan Stevens’ “John Wayne Gacy Jr.,” a murderer’s heinous actions become a philosophical exercise, daring the listener to really consider whether they can empathize and see their own worst impulses made real. “Luca” takes its name from Vito Corleone’s most barbaric consigliere, one who impregnated an Irish prostitute, murdered her, and then strongarmed the midwife into burning a child in a furnace. On “Limousine (MS Rebridge)” and “You Won’t Know,” Lacey invokes the appalling death of 7-year old Katie Flynn, killed by a man driving the wrong way down Meadowbrook Parkway in Long Island with a .28 BAC, hours after being a flower girl at her aunt’s wedding.
As alluded to in “Sowing Season,” too many of Lacey’s friends, and perhaps himself included, could have been Martin Heidgen, the man behind the wheel, and The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me hinges on the conclusion that the willingness to sin is equal to actual sin if you’re subject to judgment from an omnipotent being. Lacey’s verse from the perspective of Heidgen ends as a half-assed plea for mercy from an unsalvageable human being who knows exactly what he is: “I saw our sad messiah/He was bored and tired of my laments/Said, ‘I’d die for you one time but never again’,” Lacey sings, drawing the parallel between Heidgen’s earthly verdict and the one Lacey expects when he meets his maker.
The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me rarely admits to much, diametrically opposed to melodramatic oversharing and tabloid exploits of Fall Out Boy, Panic! At the Disco, and My Chemical Romance that defined emo in the MySpace era. This was all very risky in 2006, especially for a band making its major label debut. Though critically acclaimed, the less enthusiastic reviews balked at the portentous epics and wished for more of the scorched-sugar rush of Deja Entendu. It’s not unwarranted; underwritten lyrics occasionally cut against the sober sonics (“Life is a test and I get bad marks”), and there’s just enough radio-friendly spite to remind the listener of the sound Brand New had grown out of. “Not the Sun” strains to extrapolate sexual denial into hellish spiritual immolation, while the broadly political and triumphant “The Archers Bows Have Broken” is an awkward fit within the otherwise insular and defeatist The Devil and God, especially as it leads into the nihilistic despondence of closer “Handcuffs.”
Neither of those immediately accessible tracks were released as singles. Preliminary interviews were scarce and often with obscure, non-American publications (“in the States, you get misrepresented...the headline would end up being something stupid like ‘We hate My Chemical Romance,’” Lacey complained). Given a late-November release date unusual for non-marquee acts, The Devil and God peaked at #31 on Billboard, neither a flop nor a resounding success.
Ten years ago today, Brand New were supporting The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me on the road with Dashboard Confessional. Starting next week, they’ll be playing 15,000-cap arenas in the UK. The explanation isn’t simply, “they made The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me.” Its effect on Brand New itself feels difficult to quantify and certainly not immediate: while 2009’s Daisy debuted in the top ten, it fell out after six weeks with little impact, its reception amongst critics and Brand New fans decidedly mixed. Though it’s not Brand New’s worst album, it’s certainly the one the least number of Brand New fans would say is their best.
But their status as one of the most popular cult bands is more attributable to what they didn’t do after Daisy. Some of the presumed trolling behind Brand New’s current mythology might just be due to administrative errors or a desire to tie up loose ends before their maybe, maybe-not 2018 breakup: the liner notes for The Devil and God contained no lyrics, but an invitation to send one dollar for a booklet. Nine years later, fans were finally receiving them. And while their peers became overexposed or uninspired, Brand New’s continued insistence to let their fans speak for them created one of the loudest echo chambers going—“The Complete Guide to Brand New’s Comeback Album,” “Tunnelling Down the Brand New Wormhole,” “Brand New Came Up With a New Way to Mess With You Today,” “Brand New Just F*cking With Us at This Point,” this is all substantial Brand New LP5 reportage. By leaving his words and intentions open to interpretation, Lacey unwittingly shifted from a minor celebrity to a generational voice.
For the most part, Brand New played the role of a principled, popular rock act that felt very uncomfortable with their position as spokespeople. There hasn’t been one like this in a very, very long time. The marginalization of rock music in the 21st century actually benefits a band like Brand New, as it pushes together potentially incompatible subsets of listeners. These days, Brand New have enough clout to play shows with their heroes in Built to Spill and Modest Mouse, but in 2006, most of their attempts to place themselves within a counterculture lineage somehow went unnoticed: the cover art for the “Jesus” single is a blatant homage to Jesus Lizard’s Goat, the title of The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me is an obscure reference to Daniel Johnston. And when Brand New really tried to make their own answer to In Utero with Daisy, Lacey was namedropping Fugazi, Polvo and Archers of Loaf as formative influences.
But Vinnie Accardi, the guitarist who co-wrote most of Daisy, mentioned Stone Temple Pilots’ Core and Alice in Chains’ Jar of Flies as his touchstones. And Brand New’s ability to hit the cheap seats—the first two choruses on Devil and God are “yeah” and “whoa”—make their discomfort and recalcitrance with their heralded status compelling rather than a matter of fact. At a point where most rock acts are going out of their way to ingratiate themselves with their audience and reach across aisles, Lacey screams “I am not your friend, I’m not your lover, I’m not your family,” and it’s weirdly comforting to affirm him, with a blood-curdling YEAH. Brand New died for emo one time, but never again. | 2016-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope / Tiny Evil | December 4, 2016 | 8.5 | 11a772a0-e484-4882-8e22-5acd1e756942 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Canadian DJ, producer, and marine biologist bridges worlds on her debut album, weaving orcas’ songs and conservationist messages into deep-diving tracks aimed at inclusive dancefloors. | The Canadian DJ, producer, and marine biologist bridges worlds on her debut album, weaving orcas’ songs and conservationist messages into deep-diving tracks aimed at inclusive dancefloors. | Jayda G: Significant Changes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jayda-g-significant-changes/ | Significant Changes | Jayda Guy’s academic work and musical output have a common goal: Both are designed to make people to think about how they interact with their environments. The Canadian musician presented her master’s thesis about the effects of certain chemicals on an endangered West Coast orca species last year, and she recently started a talk series featuring young scientists. As Jayda G, she’s been responsible for some of the most rapturous disco house to come out of the “Canadian Riviera” scene, and she has captivated crowds worldwide with her uninhibited DJ style. Let other selectors squabble about sharing track IDs and unwarranted wheel-ups—she’d rather concentrate on providing the soundtrack for cathartic, electronic device-free boogieing.
Following a string of excellent EPs and singles on labels including 1080p, Geography Records, and her own JMG Recordings, Significant Changes is the Berlin-based producer’s debut album. Like much of Guy’s previous work, the nine tracks here draw on influences including Chicago house, soul, disco, and 1990s R&B, but her references to the natural world this time around are more overt. Recorded while she was finishing her studies, its bookending intro (“Unifying the Center (Abstract)”) and outro (“Conclusion”) read like parts of a scientific paper; it’s not surprising that there’s a sense of ecological urgency underpinning many of these songs.
In interviews, Guy has frequently expressed her desire to bridge her two passions, and one way she achieves this is by turning field recordings into unexpectedly poignant melodies. The instrumental centerpiece “Orca’s Reprise” is built around the marine mammals’ cries, but the producer smartly avoids new-age chintziness. “Missy Knows What’s Up” takes the concept one step further, sampling the ominous words of Canadian biologist Misty MacDuffee (“Why are these whales threatened and what are we going to do about it?”), and setting them to a thumping backbone.
It’s not all doom and gloom, however, and Guy expertly balances the record’s more somber offerings with a handful of four-on-the-floor, heat-seeking anthems. If you’ve seen her play at a festival or listened to one of her decade-hopping radio mixes, then you know that, as a DJ, she prioritizes songs that exude a certain timelessness, rather than trying to score cool points for obscurity. From War’s 1971 funk hit “Slippin’ Into Darkness” to TLC’s “Creep,” she’s constantly thinking about what will elicit the biggest head-bobbing, limb-pumping responses from her audiences. Frequent collaborator Alexa Dash appears on two euphoric tracks, “Sunshine in the Valley” and “Leave Room 2 Breathe,” and her soulful, husky croon perfectly complements Guy’s shuffling grooves, vintage drum-machine sounds, and, on the latter, roller-rink cowbell.
Yet on an album that’s full of human and animal voices alike, the most prominent one is her own. Guy’s arresting spoken-word vocals take center stage on “Stanley’s Get Down (No Parking on the DF)” and “Move to the Front (Disco Mix),” both of which address dancefloor etiquette over propulsive basslines and warm strings. “I see you with your phone looking at Instagram,” she playfully admonishes on the former, while the latter is a rousing call to arms to ladies “all the way in the back,” which sees the producer doing her best Body Break host impression. As if to remind listeners that it’s not so serious, she punctuates these instructions with gleeful whoops.
According to Guy, the album’s title has a twofold meaning. Not only was it the most-used phrase in her thesis, but it also refers to the personal and artistic changes she’s experienced in recent years, as she’s moved halfway across the world and played shows even further afield. Her ever-growing platform to reach people, she says, brings certain responsibilities, whether it’s reducing her carbon footprint or helping create more diverse and inclusive learning and dancing spaces. Like all the best teachers, she’s leading by example. | 2019-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | March 25, 2019 | 7.9 | 11a868fa-b960-4059-8ffd-3d8c01cc52cc | Max Mertens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-mertens/ | |
With its two-tone album cover, terse songwriting, and Albini-style, hands-off recording, *Ha, Ha, He. is Mourn's *period piece, conjuring the grave austerity of mid-'90s post-punk. | With its two-tone album cover, terse songwriting, and Albini-style, hands-off recording, *Ha, Ha, He. is Mourn's *period piece, conjuring the grave austerity of mid-'90s post-punk. | Mourn: Ha, Ha, He. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21872-ha-ha-he/ | Ha, Ha, He. | Try as they might, Mourn couldn’t help but show their age on their 2015 debut—prompted by classroom boredom, disdain for specific classmates and disdain for high school’s general social schematic, *Mourn *was clearly from the perspective of teenagers who really wish they weren’t. “They listen to music that doesn’t make you think about anything,” Carla Pérez Vas said of her peers, while she and Jazz Rodríguez Bueno gravitated to Sleater-Kinney, Sunny Day Real Estate, and PJ Harvey, thoughtful, strident acts who were in their prime before the duo were even born. Less than a year and a half later, Mourn’s age is a non-issue: they just sound like an indie rock band in 2016 that wishes it wasn’t.
The sonics are familiar, as is the trajectory. *Ha, Ha, He joins the recent ranks of Yuck’s Glow & Behold *and Eagulls’ Ullages**, sophomore albums from similarly promising indie rock bands that didn’t build on their canonical indie rock influences or look towards other genres for inspiration. They simply dug a little bit deeper in the crates and made slight peripheral shifts. Mourn has claimed Throwing Muses as a major touchstone here, and there’s an unspoken affinity for some of the more ungainly anti-heroes of the alt-rock gold rush: Shudder to Think, Chavez, the second Sunny Day Real Estate album. Compared to its more jangly, plug-and-play predecessor, *Ha, Ha, He. *is all jagged physicality, throwing sharpened elbows and quick jabs.
Mourn are adept intimidators: the pummeling opening instrumental “Flee” suggests that Janet Weiss is the focus of their Sleater-Kinney hero worship, while “Evil Dead” nimbly shifts from stuttering riffs to an unsettling chorus of wraithlike chants. They sound confident here, not necessarily trying to adapt to their status as a band that can play festivals so much as exhibit their growth as pure musicians. The songwriting has become just as terse and flinty and it’s effective when Mourn engage with challenging subject matter—“I Am a Chicken” reads like a victim of assault rationalizing after the fact (“Drag me to your cave, grab my feet, I won’t complain...sorry to disappoint you”) while “Irrational Friend” and “Gertrudis, Get Through This!” cynically view love as transactional, a lopsided negotiation at best. It’s all brutal stuff, more so because they’re delivered no differently than anything else than what surrounds it—all of this is just part of the human condition to Mourn.
But for the most part, the unrelenting, grim inscrutability provides little beyond surface tension. Its two-tone album cover, P.J. Harvey-evoking title and Albini-style, hands-off recording establishes *Ha, Ha, He. *as a period piece—conjuring the grave austerity of mid-'90s post-punk but none of the invention. Just about anything that’s novel—jazz chording, serrated yells, tart harmonies—fails to truly flourish within the drab, flat production. Despite the jagged riffs and soberly intoned lyrics, there are few hooks; “Nobody is exempt from the unexpected,” “Little brother, sleeping in a puddle/intricate puzzle surrounds you” are typical of the lyrics that get reiterated enough to assume sort kind of portentous meaning, but exactly what is unclear.
On their debut, Mourn sang in English rather than their native tongue, with the valid belief that they would taken more seriously outside of Spain. While they were saddled by clumsy lyrics, it felt necessary to grade early songs like “Your Brain Is Made of Candy” and “Boys Are Cunts” on a curve: even if they were juvenile, they felt personal, inspired by an teenage vindictiveness that feels timeless and relatable. “Storyteller” and “President Bullshit” make the same points about the overly self-conscious, and thus fraudulent, nature of personal interactions, but their generality seems to be more a result of Mourn’s purposeful withholding rather than any kind of language limitation.
It’s possible to view *Ha, Ha, He *more kindly as a reflection of its already troubled history—though it was finished in 2015, Mourn claimed it was being “held hostage” by their Spanish label that also doubled as their managers (unfortunately, teenagers getting taken advantage of by their labels is also timeless). Maybe all of this explains the dour, dutiful nature of *Ha, Ha, He, *but that's what Mourn was probably going for anyways. They never wanted to be too young to feel this damn old. | 2016-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | June 8, 2016 | 6 | 11a95b75-17e1-4ad6-ba61-aaa09f6b750e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
With this zippy, condensed, six-song EP, the rap jester seems to have once again found his creative spark. This is the best 2 Chainz has been in a long time and the most self-aware. | With this zippy, condensed, six-song EP, the rap jester seems to have once again found his creative spark. This is the best 2 Chainz has been in a long time and the most self-aware. | 2 Chainz: Felt Like Cappin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21541-2-chainz-felt-like-cappin/ | Felt Like Cappin | Much of Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz's appeal comes from the specific, witty economy of his language, his ability to string together zippy comic punchlines and elaborate boasts in quick succession. He is most effective making phrasing and imagery work for him in tandem (think quips like "Might valet park a Brinks truck" or "Got a pocket full of dead prez/ Attached to your girl like a .jpeg"). His recent releases have struggled to duplicate the formula, and he has fallen by the wayside as a result, all while a new crop of artists from his city pop up. Just as it seemed 2 Chainz might be swallowed up by the current, he returns to form with a surprise release, Felt Like Cappin, which is essentially a singles bundle.
At just about 20 minutes, Felt Like Cappin is a natural progression from 2014’s underrated FreeBase EP*,* with last year’s Trap-A-Velli Tre mixtape serving as more of a stopgap. Trap-A-Velli Tre had its moments, but it was way too drawn out and scattershot,with a few songs that were as weird as they were unnecessary. 2 Chainz cuts out the filler here, and is better for it: His trifle-heavy rap style works better in condensed space, and at six tracks that’s exactly what we've got. The brevity allows him to be the entertainer who captivated audiences with jokey, absurd runs of guest verses again. "I don't care about the tats on your faces/ Them bitches cost $15/ I don't care about the pills that you're taking/ Them bitches cost $15!" he raps on the title track, hamming it up with phrase-punctuating tonal shifts.
Too much 2 Chainz can be a bit like eating icing directly from a pastry bag: fun at first, then nauseating. This go around, his raps aren’t only funny, they’re balanced, and he peppers them in over a wide-ranging assortment of sounds from producers Cardo, Mike WiLL Made-It, Zaytoven, FKi, and Timbaland. On "This Me, Fuck It" (which also appeared on Timbaland’s King Stays King mixtape), he raps in compact bursts over one of Timbo’s signature, slithering flute loops, slinging zingers together. The TM88-produced "Not Invited" finds him wading through wailing synthesizers and organ flecks, reveling in his exclusivity. "I don’t have to front/ I park in the front with the trunk in the front," he raps, and it’s hard not to revel in his flair and flamboyance.
He tags on two clean versions of the likely singles at the end, as if to remove any doubt what demo he's appealing to: These are for radio rotation, for packing dancefloors. On "Back on the Bullshyt," he packs raps into a spiraling, woozy synth progression, and Wayne turns in one of his stronger performances of late. The one curveball is "Mindin My Business," a staggered, minimalist cut that showcases some of his most clear-eyed writing ("Resident Evil around these parts/ Peanut got killed in his front yard"). It teases at an ability to stray from his formula without drifting too far out of his lane. This is the best he's been in a long time and the most self-aware. For a while, it seemed like 2 Chainz’s hit making days were over. If nothing else, Felt Like Cappin proves he is still quite capable. | 2016-02-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 3, 2016 | 7.2 | 11a9b119-70bc-4e2a-a499-2099c6105372 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
In 1992, R.E.M. were the biggest, most important rock band in America. This reissue of their multi-platinum smash, 25 years later, highlights a brooding, transitional album that still resonates. | In 1992, R.E.M. were the biggest, most important rock band in America. This reissue of their multi-platinum smash, 25 years later, highlights a brooding, transitional album that still resonates. | R.E.M.: Automatic for the People | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rem-automatic-for-the-people/ | Automatic for the People | Over the course of the promo cycle for R.E.M.’s eighth album, Automatic for the People, Michael Stipe came out as a balding man. Not that anyone was surprised—as of 1991’s Out of Time, the singer’s famous cloak of curls had given way to a tidy short cut, and the videos for Automatic for the People’s singles had effectively become showcases for Stipe’s hat collection. By the time the clip for the album’s bittersweet final single, “Find the River,” surfaced in the fall of 1993, Stipe’s backwards baseball cap could no longer conceal his failing follicles.
While hair loss is common among men over 30, you don’t often see it happen to the lead singer of a major rock band at the height of its popularity. It must’ve been especially trying for Stipe, who not only used his long locks as a security blanket (“The hair helped a lot to hide who I was,” he would tell The Guardian in 2007), but also had to contend with spurious rumors that suggested his changing visage was a function of declining health. Yet for all the stress it may have caused him at the time, Stipe’s fading hairline was an effective advertisement for an austere but nakedly emotional album consumed by the anxiety of aging, the inevitability of death, the loss of innocence, and the impossibility of holding on to the past.
With the release of Automatic for the People, R.E.M. firmly entered their elder-statesmen phase, just as the next wave of alternative rock was cresting. R.E.M.’s career up to that point had represented the platonic ideal of a left-of-center rock band infiltrating the mainstream—a step-by-step process that saw the band turn bolder and its audience get bigger with each album, culminating in the multi-platinum, MTV-saturating success of Out of Time. Ironically, Automatic for the People arrived in a post-Nevermind world where all that careful groundwork was being razed by overzealous major labels desperately seeking the next Nirvana. At the same time, the amped-up, aggressive nature of grunge threatened to make R.E.M.’s increasingly refined, mandolin-plucked pop seem, well, out of time.
The knee-jerk response would’ve been to let Peter Buck pounce on the distortion pedal and reassert the band’s post-punk bona fides (a back-to-basics strategy they hinted at during the Out of Time press cycle), but R.E.M. wisely opted to step aside and let the flannel-clad kids have their moment. Rather than attempt to compete in a world where teen angst was all the rage, R.E.M. set about crafting a rueful response to the onset of middle age—and remind us that life goes on even after your slam-dancing days are over. (If Kurt Cobain had survived into middle age, he probably would’ve wound up making a record that sounded like this.) The video for the album’s haunting acoustic opener, “Drive,” gamely adopts Seattle-scene aesthetics—a never-ending mosh pit rendered in flickering black-and-white—like a Charles Peterson photograph come to life. But when Stipe crowd-surfs atop a sea of hands belonging to fans several years his junior, he’s not trying to ride a trend, but starkly illustrate just far from the alt-rock zeitgeist R.E.M. had drifted in the Year of Grunge. When he sings, “Hey kids, where are you?/Nobody tells you what to do,” it’s with a combination of awe and envy.
“Drive” doesn’t just establish Automatic for the People’s patient pace and nocturnal atmosphere (spun off from Out of Time’s hazy highlight “Country Feedback”); it sets its emotional tenor as well. This is an album fixated on the past, but its nostalgia is stripped of all sentimentality. “Drive” quotes both Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” and David Essex’s glam-era hit “Rock On,” but Stipe’s stern, menacing delivery seems to mock their calls for carefree kicks in a time of national turmoil. Automatic for the People came out a month before Bill Clinton won his first presidency, but it bears the weight and scars of what came before it: namely, 12 years of Republican neglect concerning AIDS, poverty, and the environment.
Automatic for the People contains only one explicitly political song—the Crazy Horse-cranked “Ignoreland,” the most seething, spiteful track R.E.M. ever produced. But the whole album feels as though it’s in recovery from, or preparing for, some great trauma: “Sweetness Follows” renders its funereal scene of family dysfunction with church-organ sounds clashing against dissonant drones; the gentle sea-shanty sway of “Try Not to Breathe” frames an ailing elderly person’s desperate pleas for a quick death. Even the album’s karaoke-ready sing-alongs cast dark shadows: The traffic-stopping soul ballad “Everybody Hurts” is either the most depressing song ever about trying to stay optimistic or the most sanguine song about coping with depression. And the luminous country-rock reverie “Man on the Moon” centers on a subtly subversive chorus line—“If you believe they put a man on the moon”—that effectively presents conspiracy theory as fact and truth as a matter of opinion, an unwittingly ominous harbinger of the info wars that would eventually be waged in U.S. politics.
“Man on the Moon” has since become the official theme song for the Andy Kaufman enigma-cultivation industry, but the late comedian is just one participant in a parade of icons that includes Mott the Hoople and 1960s wrestling star “Classy” Freddie Blassie; elsewhere on the record, we hear an elegy for 1950s screen heartthrob Montgomery Clift cross-wired with allusions to “Let’s Make a Deal” host Monty Hall (“Monty Got a Raw Deal”), and Dr. Seuss turns up in a spin on “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (i.e., “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight,” a tune that threatens to join “Stand” and “Shiny Happy People” in the R.E.M. silly-song sweepstakes, but manages to stay on just the right side of the charming/cloying divide). They’re the sort of references that, back in 1992, seemed as adorably antiquated as a “Dragon’s Lair” scene does on “Stranger Things” today—but rather than simply deploy old pop-cultural artifacts as a means to activate our pleasure centers, Stipe uses them as decayed, dust-covered totems to gauge the distance between an idealized idea of America and the turbulent reality that colored the album’s creation. That critical sensibility bleeds right into the cover art. The phrase “automatic for the people” is the satisfaction-guaranteed slogan posted at a popular diner in the band’s native Athens; it also speaks to the pressures of a band that had just sold 10 million albums and needed to serve up more hits. And that striking cover photo is actually a close-up of a star ornament found on an old motel in Miami, but, rendered in brutalist grey, it appears as fierce and fearsome as a medieval cudgel. The image bluntly reinforces the notion that while Automatic for the People isn’t a loud album, it’s certainly a heavy one.
Automatic for the People arrived a mere 18 months after Out of Time—a swift turnaround time for a sequel to a blockbuster album that still seemed ubiquitous well into 1992. But then the early 1990s were to R.E.M. what the late ‘60s were to the Beatles—a period where the band took a break from touring to immerse itself in the possibilities of the studio, breaking down traditional instrumental roles in the process. The star-lit lullaby “Nightswimming”—essentially a demo embellished by John Paul Jones’ wondrous string arrangements—features Stipe accompanied only by bassist Mike Mills on piano; “Everybody Hurts,” a song largely without traditional percussion, was crafted by drummer Bill Berry. Even as Stipe’s celebrity skyrocketed in the wake of “Losing My Religion” getting played nonstop on MTV, R.E.M. remained an intensely democratic unit, a quality that’s emphasized in the outtakes on this 25th-anniversary reissue. Many of them reveal that Stipe’s melodies and lyrics were often the final pieces of the puzzle to be set into place, as he hems and hums his way through otherwise structurally sound versions of “Find the River” (once known as “10K Minimal”) and “Ignoreland” (née “Howler Monkey”). They also reveal that the sessions for R.E.M.’s darkest album did yield moments of playful release, like the self-explanatory “Mike Pop’s Song” (which could’ve been the sunny flipside to Mills’ Out of Time standout “Texarkana”) and “Devil Rides Backwards” (a would-be companion to “Man on the Moon,” had Stipe ever finished writing its lyrics), not to mention an early draft of “Sweetness Follows” bearing the Gulf War-aftershocked title, “Cello Scud.”
But if the demos collection presents the fables of R.E.M.’s deconstruction, its concert-disc complement—capturing the only show they performed in support of Automatic for the People—is an essential document of their onstage chemistry. Recorded live at the 40 Watt Club mere days after Clinton’s victory, the band sounds eager to extend the celebratory mood by favoring Automatic’s more rousing songs (including a tough, hard-rockin’ twist on “Drive”), cool covers (the Troggs’ “Love Is All Around,” Iggy Pop’s “Funtime”), and beloved back-catalog standards (“Fall on Me,” “Radio Free Europe”). Top it off with choice stage banter about the indignities of using capos and humorous exchanges with Israelis, and you’ve got a pristine portrait of the original four-piece formation at its absolute prime, before the onset of middling reviews, health issues, and line-up changes. But if the 40 Watt Club set is a frozen-in-amber monument of peak-era R.E.M., it’s one that bears out the wearing effects of today’s political climate. At one point, Stipe informs the crowd that the show is being recorded for a Greenpeace benefit record—by a solar-powered mobile-truck studio. And in lieu of his normally deadpan speaking voice, you can hear an audible excitement over the prospect that America was on the brink of a major paradigm shift. Alas, that cautious optimism has curdled once again into despair a quarter-century later, when presidential elections are still being fought and won on coal-industry pandering and climate-change denial. The exchange provides a stark reminder of the chasm that exists between the world R.E.M. dreamed we’d inherit and the one we’re living in now.
For a band once so omnipotent and omnipresent that they inspired parody songs and comedian rants, R.E.M. occupy a peculiar place in 2017. Even before their official split in 2011, they had long ceased to be the headline-generating juggernaut that their benevolent rivals in U2 clearly relished becoming, yet they haven’t retained the outsider cachet that their one-time peers in the Smiths and the Cure still hold, and their vintage T-shirts have yet to become staples of student attire. But if Automatic for the People is the ultimate emblem of a distant era when R.E.M. were the biggest, most important rock band in America, it’s an album that—in surveying a fraught political landscape, the fragility of our mental health, and the fate of our planet—still speaks emphatically to our current condition. It’s just that the dark clouds it saw creeping in on the horizon have since erupted into a violent storm. | 2017-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Craft | November 14, 2017 | 9.3 | 11ad2f5d-a932-4d11-b38b-307aacf74429 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
"Community" star Donald Glover's fourth hip-hop collection-- the first with a commercial release-- is preposterously self-obsessed, but not the least bit self-aware. | "Community" star Donald Glover's fourth hip-hop collection-- the first with a commercial release-- is preposterously self-obsessed, but not the least bit self-aware. | Childish Gambino: Camp | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16074-camp/ | Camp | If you buy only one hip-hop album this year, I'm guessing it'll be Camp. The album maintains some of the overweening humor of Donald Glover's sitcom "Community", but Glover's exaggerated, cartoonish flow and overblown pop-rap production are enough to make Camp one of the most uniquely unlikable rap records of this year (and most others). What's worse is how he uses heavy topics like race, masculinity, relationships, street cred, and "real hip-hop" as props to construct a false outsider persona. On record, he paints himself as a misunderstood victim of cultural preconceptions who is obviously smarter and funnier than his primetime material suggests. Unfortunately, it's a position that holds up to absolutely no scrutiny whatsoever.
Glover's not doing himself any favors with a rap handle taken from the Wu-Tang Name Generator, but that'd be easy to overlook if Camp functioned as anything more than a series of similar one-note gags. On a song-by-song basis, he scripts a slightly off-brand, fictional version of Kanye West being played for laughs. We could talk about Glover's bloodlines all day, but Childish Gambino's paternity test traces straight back to "All Falls Down". "You See Me" reimagines "Niggas in Paris" as a meme cemetery, with Glover painfully leaning into herniated punchlines like, "She's an overachiever/ All she does is suck seed." (Or maybe "Asian girls everywhere... UCLA!" will eventually end up on a T-shirt.) The bottle-service electro of "Heartbeat" could have been the 10th-funniest song on 808s & Heartbreak-- somewhere between "The Coldest Winter" and "Love Lockdown"-- and it's actually trying for laughs. A few of Camp's tracks focus on more inspirational topics than "making up for the fucks I missed in high school," but they usually emulate "Jesus Walks", or when trying to be slightly more humble,"Get By". And any shred of relatability Glover establishes by reminiscing about sinkbaths with his cousin, or trying to fit into the white school his parents busted their asses to send him to, are cancelled out by R&B hooks so garish and impersonal they make Lupe Fiasco's Lasers sound dignified.
Supporters may rush to praise Glover as a "multi-talent" due to Camp's self-production, but his cratedigging begins with The College Dropout and ends with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, all of it Blingee'd up with assistance from "Community" composer Ludwig Goransson. Yes, that's a lot of Yeezy talk, but the most insidious aspect of Camp is how Glover operates from a *pre-*Kanye inferiority complex where he senses that any dismissal of his music stems from gangsta rap still being the predominant aesthetic version of hip-hop (never mind that the most commercially relevant guy who can be feasibly be called "gangsta rap" right now is Rick Ross, and even he's widely beloved on account of being an acknowledged pathological liar). This much is obvious from the tone-deaf "All of the Shine," and especially "Backpackers", a preemptive strike at his always-male, usually educated haters. Note how its title co-opts the one epithet more outdated than "hipster" in rap music circa 2011.
Glover isn't strictly a comedy rapper, but he flows like a comic actor: When he's trying to be playful, his voice hitches in a pubescent squeak, and when he "goes in," he's still delivering one room-clearing punchline after another with the earnestness of the most confused Rhymesayers guy ever. At the very least, Camp can serve as hashtag rap's tombstone, and I'll just present some choice quotes without comment so you can decide for yourself: "I made the beat and murdered it, Casey Anthony," "You can kiss my ass, Human Centipede," "I got a girl on my arm, dude show respect/ Something crazy and Asian, Virginia Tech."
Every attempt Glover makes to present himself as an inside operative confounding stereotypes about mainstream rap rings totally false. In "Fire Fly", he brags about the ease of scoring college gigs and college girls (while rhyming "LSU" with "molest you") and then complains: "No live shows because I can't find sponsors/ For the only black guy at a Sufjan concert." Bullshit. OK, look: I realize that there's a chance some kid will hear that line and feel validated, and you know, the last thing we need is an armchair cracker like myself relating contrary anecdotal evidence about the demographics at Sufjan Stevens' last concert. So let's just look at the facts: Jay-Z and Beyoncé could be seen at Grizzly Bear shows in 2009, Justin Vernon has a free pass to jump on any track he chooses, and producers spent the year sampling Beach House, the xx, and Tame Impala. How does Glover explain Drake? Is he "crazy or hood," or just a half-Jewish, former child actor from Toronto who's already sold 600,000 copies of Take Care while signed to Lil Wayne's record label? I mean, sub-major hip-hop isn't a post-cred, post-racial utopia by any means, but I can't think of another time when there were more options for listeners of just about any race or background seeking to identify with rappers on a non-allegorical level. I just have to assume Glover has completely ignored the success of Lil B, Main Attrakionz, Curren$y, Kendrick Lamar, Odd Future, Danny Brown, and especially Das Racist when he meekly moans, "Is there room in the game for a lame that rhymes/ And wears short shorts and tells jokes sometimes?" It's the perfect summation of Camp: preposterously self-obsessed, but not the least bit self-aware. Tell me that ain't insecure. | 2011-12-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-12-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Glassnote | December 2, 2011 | 1.6 | 11ad6f3d-06b9-4853-a55d-074d08e09535 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Portland-via-Providence duo the Body push the boundaries of metal in both the intensity of their live experience and their penchant for collaboration. They've worked with the Haxan Cloak, the Assembly of Light Choir, and many others, and on their latest team up with USBM stalwarts Krieg. | Portland-via-Providence duo the Body push the boundaries of metal in both the intensity of their live experience and their penchant for collaboration. They've worked with the Haxan Cloak, the Assembly of Light Choir, and many others, and on their latest team up with USBM stalwarts Krieg. | The Body / Krieg: The Body & Krieg | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21201-the-body-krieg/ | The Body & Krieg | Portland-via-Providence duo the Body advance metal in two vital, if not obviously complementary, ways. On their studio albums, they are rare arbiters of outside collaboration: They've brought in the likes of the Haxan Cloak, the Assembly of Light Choir, Robert Lowe of Lichens and Om, Braveyoung, and Thou to expand metal’s capacity for exploring terror and inflicting self-prescribed misery. As a live band, the Body forego experimentation and focus on how far amplification can raise them and test you. Chip King sands you down with both multiplying walls of low end and his voice, a hybrid of Xasthur's Scott Conner's ghostly wails and the bleeding highs of Silencer's Nattramn; drummer Lee Buford is the only drummer with enough force to give aim to King’s projectiles. Choirs, religious speaking in tongues samples, and other details get smothered in the pursuit of absolutely demolishing the audience.
The Body's latest collaboration is with USBM stalwarts Krieg, specifically their mastermind and sole consistent member Neill Jameson. For the Body, it's the closest meeting of their two sides. It's still not quite close to the heaviness of their live shows—when a medium that can capture that emerges, it'll be huge news—but it’s still a convincing document about how both groups see rawness beyond a production style or anti-aesthetic.
Jameson's main contribution to the project is his vocals, which complement and counter King's shrill howl. Where King’s voice can seep into the music like a poisoned wind, Jameson comes through assertively, providing a hardcore edge that is usually more apparent in the Body's live show. He also coaxes rawer work out of them, acting as a pivotal spiritual influence. "Fracture" is a house with some of King’s densest noise walls; the suffocation that comes with them playing a narrow dive bar-cum-morgue or DIY house with feeble breakers has never been so effectively bottled. King and Jameson act as an interrogation unit, switching off each other.
Like I Shall Die Here, the Body, along with Jameson, explore the relationship between metal and dark electronic music. Their cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Terrible Lie" on You, Whom I Have Always Hated has become one of their more heralded tracks, and here, they take on more perverted interpretations of the great electronic and metal clash of the '90s. They warp goth-metal on "Never Worth Your Name", taking what would be a gorgeous synth backbone for Anathema or Type O Negative and strips any and all lust. There’s some form of longing left, the only thing left to trace it back to its source material. There's also a deceptive warmth, something also present on their cover of Sinéad O'Connor's "Boys in Black Mopeds" from the Body’s 2008 tour CD-R. The closest thing to the Haxan Cloak’s touch on Die Here is "Carved Out and Caved In", where distant bells work to loosen the guitar into a noise morass. While this collaboration lacks some of the unity of D**ie Here, it still has enthralling experiments with electronics rarely seen in metal. And for both groups, there’s always the drive for unorthodox aggression. | 2015-11-24T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-11-24T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Metal | At a Loss | November 24, 2015 | 7.5 | 11b3e760-0010-48d5-af7a-8bf75883747c | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
Channeling new age spiritualism, the California synthesizer musician’s new album is a tender and warm-hearted offering, well-suited as an ointment for the dullness of life in isolation. | Channeling new age spiritualism, the California synthesizer musician’s new album is a tender and warm-hearted offering, well-suited as an ointment for the dullness of life in isolation. | Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: The Mosaic of Transformation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kaitlyn-aurelia-smith-the-mosaic-of-transformation/ | The Mosaic of Transformation | For 12 months’ access to an app called Calm—MSRP $69.99, with a lifetime option available for $399.99—your desktop and mobile screens will purportedly become a balm against the captive and infinite present. There are featurettes meant to help you sleep, reach peak performance, and breathe more thoughtfully. In “7 days of Soothing Pain,” communication teacher Oren Jay Sofer coaches you—tidily, hospitably, efficiently—how to cope with awful news. Stars like Matthew McConaughey and Laura Dern contribute audiobooks and self-affirmations. Composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith—an elegant practitioner of the Buchla modular synthesizer, classical pianist, Yogi, and warm, benevolent spirit whose music has always been very much like a rainbow mist radiating out of the goblet of Earth—premiered her new album on the app a few weeks ago.
There is something of a new age awakening afoot. A yearning for holistic spiritual nourishment now lives prominently inside advertising copy, news segments, retail operations, and Twitter dispatches from humanoid brands, each tapping into a collective longing for a return (or brief holiday) to something resembling even partial wholeness. I have seen Deepak Chopra on television every week for the past four weeks. Cooking and gardening websites, which are experiencing an unprecedented boom in web traffic, have passages on mindfulness alongside voguish recipes for very umami noodles or how-tos on watering your indoor plants. “Are you operating from a place of fear and scarcity?” asked the chief content officer of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop in a recent conversation with Entrepreneur magazine. “Take the time to articulate this for your business, yourself, the universe, and the divine.” The captive psyche—and following suit, the market—is arching hurriedly toward high Zen.
The conch shell of serenity has been blown with steady pressure across the past 40 years in the fringe universe of East-meets-West experimental music. American new age’s spiritual crucible is roughly rooted in northern California, and, like most monasteries, the genre works somewhat like a family. Based in the small town of Bolinas, Smith’s own sonic relationship and serendipitous friendship with Suzanne Ciani—“America’s first female synth hero”—nurtured her practice with the Buchla world of synthesizers. The massive, water buffalo-sized Buchla 200 series, and Smith’s preferred Magic Easel model—which both work by tweedling the envelope and expression of tones into limitless configurations—were created by Ciani’s one-time boss Don Buchla, the former NASA engineer and close peer to the Grateful Dead’s sound tech, Owsley “King of LSD” Stanley. Like any computer or mind-altering psychedelic, the instrument is meant to mess with the texture of space and time to create an intergalactically exotic experience.
Smith’s Buchla music routinely resembles a glowworm of paradise writhing along the other side of the cosmic lane. Her collaboration with Ciani, on an album titled Sunergy, recreates the sensation of watching serene clouds float in miniature. EARS, Smith’s enormous 2016 release, has inspired me more than twice to lie on the ground in a dark room and consider my purpose. Her albums regularly feature the melty blue sounds of an orca’s bubble and squeak, then give way to a foamy bloom of tones that communicate in a language spelled out of mandalas. One of her recent EPs, The Electronic Series Volume 1: Abstractions, contains beautiful Buchla effervescence alongside “a short comic about two friends—a plant and a human being—having an existential conversation.” Each forthcoming volume is “intended to nourish inquisitiveness.’”
The Mosaic of Transformation, like Smith’s last album, Tides: Music for Meditation and Yoga, is also made for nourishing purposes. Here, she softly bangs the synthesized gong of a generous strain of spiritualism usually reserved for the discourse of Reiki classes or mindfulness retreats. It veers inescapably toward a place that—while technically inspiring—is unintentionally part of a larger system blanketed as what we need right now. By working earnestly, affectionately, and overtly in kneading the tensions of fear, it points, gently, at the conflicts it tries to abate.
By kind design, or by dint of years of yoga practice, nearly all of Smith’s vocals are instructional, inclusive, and meant to be chanted. “Remembering” has eight words of lyrics: “Be kind to one another,” she hymns, as if through syrup. “We’re calming together.” She loops these words through the song’s entirety in a polyphonic canon, rounding and rotating phrases in slow, loping drifts. “The Steady Heart”—equally wreathing, equally peace-inducing—grows like sea lather during a tide. “I believe,” she begins. “I trust. Open up your heart.” Crescendos build, layer, and are serenely laid to rest.
As with all chants—religious, political, or like those at the end of a core flow class—their goal is to unify the chanter with a greater whole. Psalms like Smith’s are more than acceptable at face value as restorative, pure-of-heart acts of grace, yet your threshold for bearing this attitude of exceeding amiability may vary. Often, I found myself at odds with her messages, though they are plain and pure as sun. Feel warmth. Feel gratitude. Heal, she patiently asks.
The Mosaic of Transformation implicitly states that the endpoint of immersing yourself in its music—wherever or however you may get it—is to care for yourself, which, in turn, will make your world brighter, more palatable, easier to surmount. It is a tender, munificent offering from an artist who has operated in these modes her entire career. But the very idea of wellness has been made curious under present circumstances. Self-care is now less about getting oneself optimized in time for work and more about being able to breathe normally on a Wednesday afternoon. Smith acknowledges that the world is wondrous, and asks us to navigate it more joyously and effectively by centering ourselves and finding our peace. But in the absence of what was once a center—fatigue a global given, the ego constantly under duress, even the notion of work itself under siege—the music unintentionally traces the contours of our great, communal bruise.
Smith notes that the album was created alongside a practice of “improvisatory movement”—which is to say, this is a work honoring the body in motion. The final track and melodious adieu, “Expanding Electricity,” swans across 10 minutes of arpeggiated, sprawling Buchla burblings, each whorling, compressing, and flowering like a big ballet born out of the inspirational “bubble of joy” Smith cites as the genesis for this project. This image is especially intriguing at a time when the body’s movements are bounded by isolation, and the extent of our physical freedoms is limited to what we can practice at a safe distance, bubbled in anything but joy. A lyric ribbons through, asking the audience a compelling question: “How can I help to serve you so you can do what you do?”
What is it that we do now? The sort of work Smith has devoted her life to is certainly worthy, and it feels good to listen to this album as part of its express utility: to find ways to feel thankful for being alive. What’s impossible to untangle from the album is its relationship to the present, the notion that this is meant to be massaged like an ointment into the mournful, hollow dullness of life in isolation. Hope is not gone, but it often feels like it. An international existential crisis has opened and widened space comfortably, fortuitously, even miraculously, for Smith’s—and new age’s—sensibilities. What that crisis also does is reveal how it finds ways to swallow them.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Ghostly International | May 20, 2020 | 7.2 | 11b59c64-59c1-4467-b7ff-f2aa83381c0d | Mina Tavakoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mina-tavakoli/ | |
The Atlanta rapper’s latest album is monotonous, short on the quirks and out-of-body experiences of his better projects. | The Atlanta rapper’s latest album is monotonous, short on the quirks and out-of-body experiences of his better projects. | Gunna: DS4Ever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gunna-ds4/ | DS4Ever | Gunna likes to rap about fly shit, punched-up by spontaneous flow and melody switch-ups that seem minor the first time, until days later when they’re still on your mind. The Audemars Piguet watch and Fendi fur he boasts about on “Top Off” are memorable because he pivots from soulful wails to punchlines delivered like a freestyling R2-D2. The references to Versace boxers and Isabel Marant on “ARGENTINA” only matter because his flow zigs and zags like a car through an obstacle course.
But those small moments are an afterthought on Gunna’s latest album, DS4Ever. His breezy Atlanta sing-rap tracks—centered on foreign whips and more designer clothes than an episode of Real Housewives—have never sounded so dull. The record lacks the excitement of a project like last year’s Punk, by his closest collaborator Young Thug, who, instead of staying the course of his highest-selling album to date, So Much Fun, stripped down his sound to melancholy acoustics and dreary pianos. With DS4, Gunna is on autopilot.
This is not a plea for Gunna to blow up his sound—that’s not his style. But DS4 is monotonous, short on the quirks and out-of-body experiences of his better projects. If “alotta cake,” with its textbook Metro beat and Gunna’s mild singing, were to play on my Spotify account unexpectedly, I wouldn’t notice until it was over. The track “south to west” has a similar effect; his typically playful, rapid-fire delivery doesn’t sound as lively, and Gunna is way more interesting when he’s naming all his favorite luxury goods than when he’s just rapping about having lots of money to buy them.
Too many songs feel like items on a checklist. The mandatory back-and-forth with Lil Baby proves their chemistry hasn’t waned, but the formula to their joint tracks is due for an update. The Chris Brown collab “die alone” is predictably indistinguishable from the shit-ton of other Chris Brown-and-rapper collaborations that have radio DJs in a chokehold. There’ve been rumors that Gunna is dating Chlöe Bailey, so to capitalize on that, there’s a half-assed R&B duet.
The saving grace of DS4EVER is the all-star roster of producers who pop in and out. The Mike WiLL Made-It beat on “thought i was playing” could have lived on Dirty Sprite 2; it was made to soundtrack leaving the club as the sun rises. The 808s on Southside and Metro Boomin’s “poochie gown” pound like your heart after a triple espresso, punctuated by a Gunna diss of Freddie Gibbs that’s so bizarre it’s hilarious.
And as forced as Gunna’s new “pushin’ P” motto may be, the Wheezy instrumental it’s laid over is so ominous it’ll make the hairs stick up on the back of your neck. The middle section of the song, where Gunna raps gibberish for a moment, is the most fun he’s having on the entire album.
But fun shouldn’t feel like a rarity on a Gunna album. In the past, it sounded like he got a rush crooning about just how much plusher and more expensive his life is than ours. On DS4Ever, it feels like he’s doing it out of obligation.
Buy: Rough Trade
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Young Stoner Life / 300 Entertainment | January 13, 2022 | 5 | 11bb4244-95ce-4b29-a911-ffaa1db265f3 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Toronto quintet's colorful new album is all MIDI sheen and New Age cheese, the product of classy musicians working with the chintziest materials possible. | The Toronto quintet's colorful new album is all MIDI sheen and New Age cheese, the product of classy musicians working with the chintziest materials possible. | Bernice: Cruisin’ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bernice-cruisin/ | Cruisin’ | When did the cheesiest American sounds of the 1980s become the hippest Canadian music of the 2020s? When did smooth jazz become an underground concern? You might call it Kaputt-core: In the years since Destroyer’s landmark album—but especially during the past few years—a new wave of loosely connected Toronto indie musicians have experimented with and subverted the softest, smoothest styles of the Reagan era.
Saxophonist/composer Joseph Shabason, who played on Kaputt, has been at the forefront of this movement, toggling between New Age textures and clanging dissonance on his 2021 album The Fellowship and luxuriating in lite-jazz licks on last year’s supergroup project Fresh Pepper. Then there’s The Weather Station, who marshaled the whirling intensity of quiet storm on 2021’s Ignorance, and the Japanese composer Masahiro Takahashi, who melts the borders of ambient, exotica, and sighing smooth jazz on his recent album Humid Sun.
Several of those artists are associated with the vibrant Toronto label Telephone Explosion, which also became home to experimental pop group Bernice during the pandemic. (Notably, multiple members of Bernice play in Fresh Pepper.) So, it’s probably not a coincidence that Bernice’s fourth album, Cruisin’, flutters to life with an exuberant rush of crystalline synths and wordless ooohhs and ahhhs, as though the members of this eccentric quintet just returned from a yoga retreat in 1986.
The group’s last album, 2021’s Eau de Bonjourno, was steeped in supple grooves and off-kilter R&B murmurs. Cruisin’ is more colorful, a peculiar melange of artifice and sincerity. The gauzy, processed guitars summon Treasure-era Cocteau Twins; the joyfully hokey synth presets on friend-in-need crooner “Are You Breathing” and the Zen-like “No Effort to Exist” bring to mind the Yamaha DX7 reveries once favored by Beverly Glenn-Copeland, a prominent admirer of Bernice’s work. (Even more kitschy is the instrumental ditty “Little Miss Timmy,” which could be incidental music for a Game Boy Color game.) Yet the silky-smooth sweetness of Dann’s voice brings a human warmth to the compositions, whether she’s crooning sweet existential nothings about birds on “No Effort to Exist” or giving herself a goofy pep talk on the novelty-rap “I Am Brave,” one of several sub-minute fragments. On “Yoohoo,” she stretches out the titular phrase as if she’s delivering the world’s gentlest wolf howl.
It’s the tension between this retro artificiality and the intimacy of Bernice’s songwriting that makes Cruisin’ a thrilling experiment. Several songs emerged from a writing retreat in 2021, where the band explored an epistolary mode, checking in on friends or community members through song. “Underneath My Toe” opens like an emoji-filled text message (“Hi! I miss you all the time!”), with Dann cooing words of affection to a dearly missed friend; the music vacillates between pitter-patter jazz-pop and lurching funk. Elsewhere, Dann’s writing runs the gamut from vast and existential musings (“Dog Needs Love,” the rare clunker) to hyperspecific odes (“Barbara, It’s Your Tree,” a lovely letter-in-song to a nonagenarian loved one). Even when you don’t know who she’s singing about, you can sense a glow of affection and curiosity.
Cruisin’ is what happens when classy musicians work with the chintziest materials possible, all MIDI sheen and New Age cheese. Thirty-five years ago, people made music that sounded like this because it was just what was popular and commercial. Today, Bernice and their Toronto peers are exploring that aesthetic because they have something new to say. | 2023-05-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Telephone Explosion | May 12, 2023 | 7.7 | 11bba03f-e285-431a-b2fb-eb67e50f5d05 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
The second, more adventurous album from the Texas soul singer bends toward the present while keeping the warmth of classic R&B in his melodies and songwriting. | The second, more adventurous album from the Texas soul singer bends toward the present while keeping the warmth of classic R&B in his melodies and songwriting. | Leon Bridges: Good Thing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leon-bridges-good-thing/ | Good Thing | Leon Bridges never set out to be a nostalgia act. Growing up in the ’90s, he was devoted to the R&B of Usher and Ginuwine and his earliest performances at open-mic nights in his native Fort Worth were of neo-soul songs sketched out over readymade beats. Though his debut album, 2015’s Coming Home, was a study of early ’60s soul music written at the altar of Sam Cooke, Bridges strives to be considered among his contemporaries as well as his forebears. He’s shared bills with One Direction expats, appeared on songs with Macklemore and ODESZA, and popped up in a music video with Portland rapper Aminé.
Perceived obligation pulled Bridges into the fold of traditional soul music, he’s said: As a young singer considering the profound legacy of black musicians like Cooke and his peers, Bridges felt compelled to pay them homage. If Coming Home was a remittance of dues, then, Bridges’ sophomore album, Good Thing, is a widening of horizons. His music remains broadly “retro” with a veil of analog fuzz built into the tracks, horn licks and references to the American South, and those buttery, laid-back vocal runs that drew a line from Bridges to his idol in the first place. But his temporal fixation has loosened, making room for a more elastic, eclectic approach to songwriting that feels perfectly contemporary.
This new adventurousness is most apparent in songs like “If It Feels Good (Then It Must Be)” and “You Don’t Know.” The former, a flirty, guitar-heavy funk number with a winsome opening line about being hotter than Texas, reveals its affinity for pop with plummy string synth and a bouncy four-count intro that tips its hat to Pharrell. Right on its heels, the equally upbeat “You Don’t Know” pairs Bridges’ dreamy falsetto with a boisterous disco track. These are the first entries in Bridges’ catalog that are, without question, meant for dancing, full of hints that he’s gunning for a spot in the same pop radio pantheon that he worshipped as a kid. In this pursuit, producer Ricky Reed—who in the past year has worked with Kesha, Maroon 5, and DNCE—is a worthy partner. It’s easy to point to Bridges’ major label credentials and call his crossover a commercial ploy, but with his upper-range theatrics and ineffable charisma, he makes a convincing pop vocalist.
The biggest payoffs on Good Thing aren’t born of its highest-energy moments, but of the tender touches in Bridges’ voice. Part of Coming Home’s charm was its leading man’s sweet, simple take on romance. Bridges wanted nothing more than to be a better man for his baby, to swim the Mississippi River to prove his love—heartwarming, if quaint-sounding, sentiments. On Good Thing, Bridges has kept his heart on his sleeve but updated his parlance to something a little less affected, a little more believable. On standout single “Beyond,” he gushes about seeing his partner’s face in the light of day, not just her body at night. On “Forgive You,” a stunning, sweeping offering of absolution, he captures the exquisitely affecting memory of sliding a pillow under his sleeping lover’s head. “Shy,” a lovely slow-burner, meets introversion with patience and compassion.
And notably, on this record, Bridges spares us the euphemisms when it comes to sex: “Sometimes I wonder what we’re holding on for/Then you climb on top of me and I remember,” he sings on “Mrs.” He remains the gentleman and doesn’t elaborate much further—but it’s clear that what he’s singing about here is real love, both the physical and the emotional of it, where before he was caught up in the idea of courtship. And while Bridges may still harbor old-school fantasies about wifing and child-rearing (“Will she have my kids/Will she be my wife?” he wonders aloud on “Beyond”), he’s speaking about them in language that feels like his own, instead of in words borrowed from generations past. That authenticity makes the difference between songs that are charming and songs that are genuinely moving. For Bridges, it’s the difference between being an act and being an artist. | 2018-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | LisaSawyer63 / Columbia | May 8, 2018 | 7.2 | 11bf89bf-b3c5-4bcc-91c3-499b13e3ff4a | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Franz Ferdinand and cult band Sparks have toyed with making a collaborative album for years. The result, FFS, is not a meeting of equals: It's a marquee-name band throwing their weight behind a cult act that clearly inspired them, and the cult act showing who's really in charge. | Franz Ferdinand and cult band Sparks have toyed with making a collaborative album for years. The result, FFS, is not a meeting of equals: It's a marquee-name band throwing their weight behind a cult act that clearly inspired them, and the cult act showing who's really in charge. | FFS: FFS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20665-ffs/ | FFS | Franz Ferdinand and Sparks initially floated the idea of working together in 2004, following the release of the former band's first album, which went platinum, and the latter band's 19th, which didn't chart. Sparks' Ron Mael responded by sending Franz Ferdinand a demo for a song called "Piss Off".
But Sparks are nothing if not ironists, and both bands are long-haulers, and at some point they finally got it together to make an album together, under a name you wouldn't guess would naturally occur to the sixty-something Mael brothers. Appropriately, the first public sign of their collaboration came when Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos joined Sparks for the latter's "When Do I Get to Sing 'My Way'" on stage a few months ago.
As much as FFS' members have been going on about how everyone made concessions to the partnership, in practice this is effectively a Sparks record with a particularly sharp, focused backing band. That's something they've needed for a long time, despite how much fun the Maels' unaccompanied "Two Hands, One Mouth" tour was. The central lyrical topic is Ron Mael's favorite subject, the gross stupidity of masculinity; the musical hooks are mostly Sparksian rather than Franzian. Every song is also, to one extent or another, a vocal duet between Russell Mael and Kapranos. The former's demi-operatic falsetto and pinpoint enunciation are the focal point of his band's arrangements, and the latter's crisp baritone has generally blended in with his group's sound, so their dynamic's not too even either.
"Even" isn't what's called for here, though, and they know it: the longest and most elaborate track is a suite called "Collaborations Don't Work". "Warhol didn't need to ask De Kooning 'bout art/ Frank Lloyd Wright always ate à la carte," Kapranos growls, before Russell Mael joins him with an ionospheric harmony: "Wish I'd been that smart". Indeed, FFS doesn't always work—the album's middle section keeps falling into the latter-day Sparks snare of hitting on some clever phrase ("the man without a tan," "the power couple's coming around") and repeating it until it's certain that everyone's gotten the point. And the chemistry between the two bands isn't so perfect that a second collaborative album would be preferable to whatever either of them has up its sleeve next.
When FFS does click, though, it's a little delight. That initial song Ron Mael contributed, "Piss Off", instantly earns its place on the next Sparks greatest-hits collection: it's a jaunty, lyrically withering rocker of the sort they used to crank out in the '70s. The airy, buzzing funk of "Call Girl" (hook: "why don't you call, girl") is the kind of thing Franz Ferdinand do exceptionally well, although lyrics like "I gave up blow and Adderall for you/ So I'd have dough and spend it all on you" have Sparks' fingerprints all over them. This is not a meeting of equals, and it doesn't have to be. It's a marquee-name band throwing their weight behind a cult act that clearly inspired them—and the cult act showing who's really in charge. | 2015-06-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-06-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | June 12, 2015 | 7.1 | 11c341ac-1ab9-43d9-9964-322a51cd6d3d | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
The former "new Radiohead" has their best moments-- most of them from their first two LPs-- packaged with other highlights, and the requisite new song. | The former "new Radiohead" has their best moments-- most of them from their first two LPs-- packaged with other highlights, and the requisite new song. | Doves: The Places Between: The Best of Doves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14107-the-places-between-the-best-of-doves/ | The Places Between: The Best of Doves | About a decade ago, the word "angular" was rarely heard outside of a geometry class, and this was what Mercury Prize nominations sounded like. Doves did enough anthemic rafter-reaching to honor predecessors like Oasis and the Verve. They were also studio-centric and tech-savvy enough to satisfy an OK Computer jones, while having enough British classicism for people not ready to follow Radiohead down the rabbit hole. And there were many of them, to the point where "new Radiohead" (ironically sounding like the old Radiohead) became one of the early new century's most briskly populated UK indie subgenres.
With the possible exception of Elbow, none were better than Doves. So as The Places Between collects the best of the Doves (fortunately, it's not fooling anyone going by "Greatest Hits"), what's striking is how little it bears to the current landscape of rock music on either side of the Atlantic. As Stuart Berman pointed out in his review of Kingdom of Dust, former opening acts like the Strokes and the Rapture both pointed the way for sounds and, more importantly, images that would ultimately make Doves seem stodgy and unsexy by comparison.
Debut Lost Souls remains an enduringly consistent piece of shadowy, orchestral rock, and it could've been well represented here by any of its tracks. Despite being posed as the darkness before The Last Broadcast's light, Lost Souls gets cherrypicked for its most emphatic numbers. "Catch the Sun" remains the strongest melody Jimi Goodwin has ever written, while the harmonica and guitar peals of the misty "Sea Song" exude a low-key ecstacy. Even the stately, string-led waltz "Man Who Told Everything" is included as a truncated "summer" version.
Still, "There Goes The Fear" might stand as their crowning achievement: seven minutes, none of them wasted, rushing forth with an undeniable freewheeling brio and a percussive outro that still stuns (unfortunately, companion piece "Words" and its mawkish U2-isms is included over the luminous ballad "Satellites"). The grand, sweeping gestures of "Caught By the River" would be the most fittingly majestic closer of Doves' career if it weren't for the song that succeeds it on Places Between, which ends where Doves began, the "what if Second Coming went right?" drum barrage "The Cedar Room".
Though Some Cities features what might be Doves' closest thing to a stateside hit (the Motown-bound "Black and White Town"), the record itself lacked the juice of its predecessors, coinciding with a time when Coldplay loomed large and Keane broke. Kingdom of Rust was solid as well, but at this point, Doves were simply a band easy to take for granted, or even ignore. "Andalucia", a new song included here, tends to affirm the reasons Doves eventually opened up for Coldplay instead of the other way around-- Doves' looser rock numbers don't have enough oomph to cover for Goodwin's questionable vocal range and the band's general lack of charisma.
As much as you want to view The Places Between as a triumphant document of Doves' potency, I can't help but feel a somewhat depressing sense of finality-- especially when the tracklist is so stacked toward their first two albums (nine out of the 14 previously available songs. In a weird way, it actually honors the latter two by picking far and away their best songs and reintroducing them. More likely, The Places Between is all about reintroducing Doves as a band to people who initially, wrongly wrote them off. | 2010-04-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-04-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | EMI | April 7, 2010 | 7.8 | 11c51b74-9158-43f4-bb23-ecd7c1015487 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Spearheaded by the Edge, this collection of stripped-down, re-imagined U2 songs is a frustrating missed opportunity. | Spearheaded by the Edge, this collection of stripped-down, re-imagined U2 songs is a frustrating missed opportunity. | U2: Songs of Surrender | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/u2-songs-of-surrender/ | Songs of Surrender | After 50 years as one of the biggest bands in the world, there’s something charming in the way that U2 keeps acting like they have something to prove. We all watched how actors, artists, and musicians handled the pandemic and its lockdown, whether it was Toyah Willcox and husband Robert Fripp staging elaborate dance numbers in their kitchen or St. Vincent drinking martinis and calling random fans live on Instagram. If you’re the Edge, apparently what you do is look at your band’s entire body of work and decide that it’s time to re-record it.
The result is Songs of Surrender, released on St. Patrick’s Day, in 16-track standard and 40-track deluxe versions with at least half a dozen different colored vinyl versions. Although this release is being marketed as a U2 record, it’s truly an Edge solo project that he invited Bono to sing on. Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton are on the cover and credited on each track, but it’s been made clear that Adam just recorded a bunch of basslines and left it to Edge to sort through and take what he wanted, while Larry’s participation mostly came via old tape scraps from previous sessions.
In the liner notes and in the press, Edge makes the point, repeatedly, that they recorded a lot of these songs when they were “very young men” and that Bono’s voice is much richer now, so why not re-evaluate them as men in their 60s, with a more refined vocal instrument? There’s also a general narrative voiced by multiple band members that the songs “weren’t finished” and here, now, he finally had the chance to finish them. (That these songs were somehow unfinished will be news to the millions of fans who have sung along to them at the top of their lungs, gotten them tattooed on their arms, or otherwise made them part of their lives for decades.)
Yes, it is true that 1980’s “Stories for Boys” was written when U2 themselves were boys. But that is a valuable perspective: The original is scattershot and impressionistic, more about feeling than precision. The Songs of Surrender version is stripped down to piano with the Edge on vocals, and the lyrics have perhaps more specificity than the original. That subversion, however, does not improve the song at all. In contrast, Pete Townshend wrote “My Generation” when he was 20, and the Who are still out there singing “Hope I die before I get old.”
Likewise, the exercise of switching “Bad”—the band’s 1984 song written about a friend’s struggles with drug abuse—from third person to first person disrespects the song’s original intent. What made that song—about watching friends go through literal life and death situations—one of U2’s best was how well it emotionally communicated the bleakness people felt, the loss and regret and sorrow that Bono manifested in the performance. Altering the lyrics now to put himself in the story doesn’t help it or clarify it or improve it, because he was already there. The fact that he still feels genuinely lucky despite all of the years that have passed doesn’t mean that he should rewrite “Bad.” It just means he should write some new songs.
These types of unnecessary alterations affect pretty much everything else on the record. None of these “re-imaginings” on Songs of Surrender fundamentally transform any of the 40 tracks. The great songs are still great, the re-written lines are interesting suggestions but in most cases, are no more than jarring distractions, and the less-than-great songs (some of which the band only released in the past decade, like “Every Breaking Wave” or “Invisible”) are still exactly what they were before this project.
Then there is the case of “Walk On,” an anthem from 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Upon release, the band dedicated it to Aung San Suu Kyi, who at the time was a political prisoner in Myanmar. Earlier this year, Bono spoke about being “let down” by her alleged human rights violations, and decided to give the song to someone else. On Songs of Surrender, they’ve taken the song back, retitled it “Walk On (Ukraine),” and rewritten it with references to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. (The song now opens with the line, “If the comic takes the stage and no one laughs.”) But “Walk On” was already an inspiring, uplifting anthem about hope and perseverance that exists independent of the association they gave it. They could have dedicated it to the people of Ukraine without changing one word of it.
The more delightful moments on the record start with the Edge’s stunning falsetto take on “Desire,” which turns it into a futuristic, Motown-tinged romp that wouldn’t have been out of place on Achtung Baby. “Dirty Day,” an underrated track from 1993’s Zooropa, subtracts the original’s electronics for cello and a Waits-ian vocal delivery that doesn’t update it so much as make it fit in better with the context of the record. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” cements its reputation as eternally unbreakable, “Until the End of the World” turns into a well-suited country gospel tune, and both “All I Want Is You” and “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” are still heartrending even in their refashioned states. Elsewhere, Bono gives some phenomenal performances, pushing his voice to its limits, like he does as he soars through “Beautiful Day” and “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own.”
But all of these highlights could have been manifested in a concert or other live performance and issued as a B-side or fan club single; nothing here is unforgettable or in danger of replacing its original. The arrangements are formulaic, regressing back to the stripped-down candlelit era of the original MTV’s Unplugged. At worst, Songs of Surrender is an overindulgence. At best, it’s a pleasant interlude. But it isn’t something that’s going to alter their legacy or the trajectory of their art in any direction, and U2 has always made it clear that we should expect more from them than that. | 2023-03-21T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-21T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Island / Interscope | March 21, 2023 | 5.7 | 11c589cd-9789-41c2-894e-37546b7df62b | Caryn Rose | https://pitchfork.com/staff/caryn-rose/ | |
The Toronto-based trio Metz have incorporated harmony into their heavy sound on their third full-length. They shift away from all-out abrasion, adding color to their eruptions. | The Toronto-based trio Metz have incorporated harmony into their heavy sound on their third full-length. They shift away from all-out abrasion, adding color to their eruptions. | Metz: Strange Peace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/metz-strange-peace/ | Strange Peace | Back in 1966, in a segment filmed for Dick Clark’s TV show “Where the Action Is,” the Who’s Pete Townshend equated volume with power, saying that the benefit of playing “fantastically loud” is that it gets people who would otherwise “turn a deaf ear” to pay attention. Fair enough, but what Townshend left out is that volume by itself doesn’t accomplish much other than make people numb. These days, sometimes less volume cuts through all the noise better. On their third full-length Strange Peace, Metz prove as much by dialing-down the jackhammer attack of their first two albums.
Which is not to say that the Toronto-based trio has ditched repetition as its primary mode of expression. But the main lyric on “Escalator Teeth” offers a clue that Metz are quite aware of pushing against their limits, as guitarist/singer Alex Edkins sings, “Machine-like repetition flows/Obscures my line of vision/And it takes hold/It goes on and on and on” before the song abruptly cuts off. It’s also apparent that the band sounded loud as fuck in the room where these tracks were recorded. In fact, most of the guitars, drums, and bass you hear on the album do break up a little, as if pushing past the maximum threshold the recording equipment would allow.
In 2012, on release of the band’s self-titled debut, guitarist/singer Alex Edkins said in an interview, “We try to take everything we do and make it redline.” The difference this time is that the album’s spacial ambience allows listeners some distance from the roar, which proves to be crucial. Ironically, this shift away from all-out abrasion comes in spite of the presence of Steve Albini. Of course, Metz have always worn their affinity for Albini’s work with the likes of the Jesus Lizard and his own band Big Black right on their sleeves. As it turns out, previous albums Metz and II were more faithful to Albini’s trademark cinema-verité production style without him.
Imagine the difference between a high-resolution photo print of an explosion versus being close enough to the explosion that you start coughing-up dust. Strange Peace, with its slicker mix and mastering finish, invites you to savor its details, unlike previous work. The change couldn’t have come at a better time, as Metz aren’t any less explosive than they were, but they’ve clearly added color to their eruptions. It would have been a mistake to smother the brilliance of those new colors with brute force.
On “Cellophane,” for instance, the band shows the utmost patience as it unveils its newfound affinity for melody in stages. At first, the song presents itself via the relentless repetition the band built its name on, a kind of fixation with pointed, blunt musical phrases. The jangle and thrum is ever so slightly sweetened, almost but not quite hummable—that is, until the song opens up unexpectedly onto an anthemic chorus. It is in this element of surprise, not volume, that Metz discover their true power as Strange Peace bounds from one mood to the next.
To be clear, Metz haven’t turned into a pop band. They’ve actually done the opposite, incorporating harmony without going soft. The fact that so few heavy bands have been able to pull that off attests to how difficult it is. With Strange Peace, Metz make it sound easy. | 2017-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | September 23, 2017 | 7.6 | 11cb1d1a-d375-42fd-806c-ef611b949d25 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | |
On their 13th album, the Japanese rock’n’rollers reaffirm what they do best: making the once-rebellious sounds of surf, rockabilly, and CBGB punk seem dangerous again. | On their 13th album, the Japanese rock’n’rollers reaffirm what they do best: making the once-rebellious sounds of surf, rockabilly, and CBGB punk seem dangerous again. | Guitar Wolf: LOVE&JETT | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/guitar-wolf-loveandjett/ | LOVE&JETT | There are garage-rock bands, and then there’s Tokyo terrors Guitar Wolf, whose sound couldn’t possibly be contained by a mere cinder-block carport. This band’s style of rock’n’roll demands more imposing prefixes, like “jet,” “hurricane,” and “Kawasaki ZII 750.” Much as 1960s British Invasion groups bastardized the blues and sold it back to American teens, Guitar Wolf have spent the past 30 years making once-rebellious Stateside sounds—surf, rockabilly, Nuggets, CBGB punk—seem dangerous again, forsaking retro purism for monomania. Your typical garage band might make your ears ring; this one kills zombies.
Barring the occasional fidelity upgrade and periodic willingness to jam out past the three-minute mark, Guitar Wolf albums are more or less interchangeable—their commitment to rusty-chainsaw rock’n’roll is so absolute, it can make the Ramones look like Radiohead. Each release subjects you to a blaze of in-the-red riffs, song titles that appear torn from a B-movie poster, and screamed Japanese verses that even a native speaker might be hard-pressed to decipher. But for all their wild abandon and biker-gang aggression, Guitar Wolf have always had a soft spot for the melodic charms of ’50s rock’n’roll. As the title of their 13th album suggests, this time they’ve added a little romance to their roar.
LOVE&JETT is being issued by Jack White’s Third Man, making it Guitar Wolf’s first release for a high-profile U.S. label since they were part of Matador’s run of Japanese signings in the mid-’90s. And with its skin-tight 10-song, 26-minute format, the album seems primed to engage a wider audience—the opening title track may come crashing in on a hardcore stomp, but frontman Seiji’s unabashedly tuneful vocal practically renders it power-pop. The band also take extra measures to ensure the language barrier is a non-issue: Everything you need to know about the ravenous “Sex Jaguar” is right there in the wild-cat growls. And while Guitar Wolf are no stranger to murderous covers of snotty garage-band staples, their jackhammered rendition of the Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’” retains the original’s congenial, soulful spirit despite the half-remembered lyrics.
But the most perceptible change on LOVE&JETT can be felt beneath its surface squall. This is the first Guitar Wolf album to feature new bassist Gotz, the third person to fill out the band’s bottom end since original member Billy died of a heart attack in 2005. Gotz brings a touch of polyrhythmic finesse to the band’s bull-headed assault, investing “Bowling in Takada-No-Baba” with a Motown-like swing and laying down a throbbing bassline to power the gritty hi-hat groove of “Australopithecus Spark” (the closest Guitar Wolf have ever come to disco). But though LOVE&JETT teases at new directions, it ultimately reaffirms what this band does best. The album climaxes with an updated version of the berserker 2002 rave-up “Fire Ball Red” (rebranded here as “Fireball Red Legend”), providing new fans with a crash course on an essential Guitar Wolf maxim: When you hear Seiji count in with a 1-2-3-4, it’s a warning to get the fuck out of the way. | 2019-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Third Man | May 13, 2019 | 7.4 | 11d3f890-f7a7-4305-855f-1188342b3ef0 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The Atlanta producer returns with a guest-filled album that builds on and creates a bigger version of the dark, hard-hitting production that has turned him into rap’s definitive producer. | The Atlanta producer returns with a guest-filled album that builds on and creates a bigger version of the dark, hard-hitting production that has turned him into rap’s definitive producer. | Metro Boomin: Not All Heroes Wear Capes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/metro-boomin-not-all-heroes-wear-capes/ | Not All Heroes Wear Capes | Fake retirements are hip-hop. Can an artist even be considered a rap icon if they have never bowed out of the game, and then come back months later with a new album? Metro Boomin, aware that it was time for this rite of passage, called it quits in April after remaining mostly silent since December’s Double or Nothing with Big Sean. But the rap world knew Metro would return, they just didn’t know how or when. Would it be on a new Future project? Would he hit the swerve button and release an album with a pop artist? Maybe a Perfect Timing 2, one could only hope? Instead, Metro dropped Not All Heroes Wear Capes, a high-profile guest-filled album that builds on and creates a bigger version of the dark, hard-hitting production that has turned Metro into rap’s definitive producer of the last five years.
Since 2013, when Metro established himself with 19 & Boomin, the St. Louis-bred producer flew through the beat-making ranks. From the jump, he impacted the genre with his, “Metro Boomin want some more, nigga” tag, all but making the producer tag a necessity. But where Metro really shined was an ability to elevate the artists he collaborated with—like so many of the beat-making legends. Metro’s beats would become the key in unleashing the creativity in some of rap’s greatest talents: He helped Future tap into his lean-drenched emotions on DS2, transformed Travis Scott into our Auto-Tune overlord on Days Before Rodeo, and managed to scratch one of the last great musical moments out of Kanye West on “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1.” Not All Heroes Wear Capes doesn’t just broaden Metro’s sound, it’s a showcase for artists relieved to be working with Metro again, because that’s when they are at their most creative.
Right now, there is no better case for Metro bringing the most out of an artist than 21 Savage. The East Atlanta rapper finds himself on three of the album’s tracks with the first “Don’t Come Out the House,” using a sinister half-whisper flow to reciprocate the horror score energy felt by Metro’s piano keys and the drums of Memphis’ Tay Keith. The track feels like a pump of adrenaline as the melody cuts out leaving only the rumbling bass of Tay Keith and 21’s villainous whisper. But 21 smartly doesn’t overuse the flow, returning to his standard creaky-voice when Metro’s keys kick back in. He then spits a hurtful bar that will crush the hearts of all of his denim-wearing supporters, “Levi jeans, low self-esteem, he on BlackPeopleMeet.”
Then, on “10 Freaky Girls,” Metro shows off how he refined his sampling skills during his hiatus, flipping an ’80s R&B song into a two-stepper spearheaded by 21. He manages to be both comedic and chilling, as his personality feels free, flexing his Ubereats account and using the song’s harmonica outro to speak about the pleasant experience he had when he ran into a guy he robbed from way back.
Metro extends his life-giving to guests throughout the album. “Up to Something” with Young Thug and Travis Scott is an instrumental that could fit into an older era of Metro, and Thug and Travis comfortably let their vocal quirks loose. On “Space Cadet,” Metro ushers Gunna into “The Twilight Zone” with a twinkling instrumental, and Gunna responds with one of the album’s bounciest hooks. The “Space Cadet” instrumental, like so much of the album’s production, feels cinematic but thankfully not far removed from his Atlanta-built sound.
Metro stumbles a bit when he deviates from that Atlanta sound. “Only You” is a desperate swing from Metro, aimed for the thriving Afrobeats and reggaeton markets, handcuffing WizKid and J Balvin to a beat. Metro remedies that slip up with “Borrowed Love,” a crossover attempt that creates a muddy dance track for the calming vocals of Swae Lee to levitate and WizKid to show why he has become the must-know name in Afrobeats.
When rappers hear that Metro Boomin tag, it’s like they’re possessed. It’s why Not All Heroes Wear Capes doesn’t feel like the typical producer album, filled with mixtape leftovers and owed favors. This is Metro Boomin laying the groundwork for his next phase, which at times feels like it could be film scores. When you’ve done it all at 25 years old, some may lose the motivation, but Metro seems ready to keep going, continuing to define the new sound of hip-hop. | 2018-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Republic | November 7, 2018 | 7.7 | 11d583a7-2e02-44e9-9d85-236137ea42c0 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The veteran California band reconstructs some of its earliest material for an unusual sort of lost album that captures an ephemeral moment in punk history. | The veteran California band reconstructs some of its earliest material for an unusual sort of lost album that captures an ephemeral moment in punk history. | Descendents: 9th & Walnut | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/descendents-9th-and-walnut/ | 9th & Walnut | Tony Lombardo was in his 30s when he first met Frank Navetta and Bill Stevenson, two teenage outcasts playing punk rock in Navetta’s sister’s garage at 9th Street and Walnut Avenue in Long Beach, California. They played together for a few years, but by the time Stevenson insisted the nascent band hit the road and start expanding its profile, Lombardo had a job, a mortgage, and a fiancée. He took a pass on touring, and left the group soon after. He came to regret that decision, recently telling Rolling Stone that “it was the biggest mistake I ever made.”
9th & Walnut, the eighth studio album from the Descendents, represents a do-over of sorts for the now-76-year-old Lombardo, looking back at those early days in the garage with nostalgic fondness and more than a tinge of wistfulness. Its songs were written in the late 1970s, before singer Milo Aukerman joined the group, and recorded by his bandmates in the early aughts. During last year’s pandemic lockdown, Stevenson returned to the tracks and added Aukerman’s newly recorded vocals, thus marking a kind of reunion. The unusual process manages to capture an ephemeral formative moment in the history of one of the most influential bands in punk.
The lineup here represents the spiritual core of a band that’s long been in flux, pulled apart over the years by various obligations: Aukerman’s career in biochemistry, Stevenson’s work with Black Flag, Lombardo’s suburban dreams, and the late Navetta’s mental and physical health. By the time Aukerman joined the band in 1979, after the release of their first 7" (“Ride the Wild/It’s a Hectic World”), they had already begun to evolve. Many of the songs that appear on 9th & Walnut had been dropped from their live sets, and they wouldn’t be recorded until 2002, when drummer Stevenson assembled guitarist Navetta and bassist Lombardo to finally put them to tape. When Stevenson sent Aukerman the tracks from those 2002 sessions last year, Aukerman was hearing many of them for the first time.
Since the bulk of this material was tracked years after it was written, and after decades of experience, there’s a technical proficiency and polish that would have been unachievable for the kids in that garage. Still, the Descendents’ back catalog has always had a juvenile bent, and the songs on 9th & Walnut are especially unrefined—Navetta wrote some of them when he was just 14. “Baby Doncha Know” excoriates an older woman for not acting her age from a predictably misguided youthful POV; “Yore Disgusting” and “Grudge” are indignant rants against people he hates. But these recordings also reveal some of the secret sauce that made early Descendents records so transcendent—namely, Lombardo’s distinctive downstroke strumming, an aggressive style that pushed the basslines out front, adding both heft and nuance to seemingly simple compositions.
Most of the record wouldn’t rank among the band’s best work, but there are gems. “Nightage,” Lombardo’s ode to a downward romantic spiral, joins the cadre of classic Descendents “-age” songs, and sounds the most fully formed of any of the album’s 18 tracks. And it’s more than a little cool to hear Aukerman’s vocals on the two Descendents songs released before he joined the group (“Ride the Wild,” “It’s a Hectic World”). If nothing else, it demonstrates just how transformative his presence was in shaping the band’s sound.
As much as anything, 9th & Walnut is a historical fiction, a reinterpretation of the brief moment before Stevenson became the de facto bandleader and took on most of the songwriting responsibilities, before Navetta burned his gear and fled north to become a fisherman, before the bespectacled Aukerman was the literal and figurative face of the band, when Descendents made raw, bitter punk rock rooted in Navetta’s angst and Lombardo’s reverence for the ’60s. There’s a significant gap between the jangly new wave guitars on that first 7" and the taut, melodic hardcore roots of 1982’s Milo Goes to College, the record that would birth pop-punk. In context, it is slightly bizarre to hear aging punks perform the songs of their youth, music that would become foundational to scenes that produced the likes of Blink-182 and Weezer. But as the missing link that connects Descendents’ humble beginnings to their most iconic sounds, it’s essential.
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. | 2021-08-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Epitaph | August 6, 2021 | 7.1 | 11d89cd3-7b71-4826-b8ba-98f7296b44e5 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Erika M. Anderson scores the debut feature film by the actress, fashion designer, and socialite Tara Subkoff. Recording with long-time collaborator Leif Shackelford, Anderson again explores the boundary line between the real and the virtual, taking up vocals, strings, and electronics to soundtrack a sinister online realm unrolling its tendrils into our own. | Erika M. Anderson scores the debut feature film by the actress, fashion designer, and socialite Tara Subkoff. Recording with long-time collaborator Leif Shackelford, Anderson again explores the boundary line between the real and the virtual, taking up vocals, strings, and electronics to soundtrack a sinister online realm unrolling its tendrils into our own. | EMA: #HORROR OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21336-horror-ost/ | #HORROR OST | Horror has always been deeply embedded into Erika M. Anderson’s music—not the lurid B-movie scares of lurking bogeymen or masked slashers, but a trauma more rooted in the quotidian and everyday, of neuroses roaming in a fog of prescription medication and of self-inflicted scars hidden beneath long sleeves. First as part of Los Angeles group Gowns, and now in her solo incarnation as EMA, Anderson has pursued a raw, husky lo-fi music that feels intensely personal, the sort that you either feel and empathize with on a deep and profound level, or listen to uncomfortably, like an intruder. On #HORROR, though, we find Anderson not airing personal demons, but writing to commission, as she scores the debut feature film by the actress, fashion designer, and socialite Tara Subkoff.
As the hashtag implies, this is a calculatedly millennial take on the genre, a tale of pre-teen girls, inherited privilege, and cyberbullying that takes an inevitable dark twist. On paper, Anderson is a good fit for the subject matter—not just for the fraught emotions that crackle in her music, but for her digital nativity. While EMA’s early output was firmly rooted in a DIY punk idiom, Anderson’s work has increasingly expanded into virtual and connected spaces, from the song-portraits of technological malaise found on her 2014 LP T**he Future’s Void to her recent exhibition "I Wanna Destroy (Sacred Objects From Suburban Homes)" at New York's MoMA PS1 and London’s Barbican, which employed Oculus Rift virtual reality technology to memorialize or consecrate banal or defunct artefacts of consumer culture. Now on *#HORROR—*recorded with long-time collaborator Leif Shackelford—we find Anderson again working at the boundary line between the real and the virtual, taking up vocals, strings, and electronics to soundtrack a sinister online realm unrolling its tendrils into our own.
Certainly, Anderson and Shackelford have done their homework. These 18 tracks add up to an hour of music, gesturing out to horror score landmarks past and present. "Running Danger" and "Dr White in the House" channel the analogue synth work of John Carpenter, unfurling throbbing electronic tones around which Shackelford twines long, melancholy violin strokes. "Locust Strings" recalls the sinister orchestral clamor of György Ligeti—or, if you want a more contemporary antecedent, the wasp’s nest hum of strings Mica Levi wove throughout Under the Skin. And while many of the album’s tracks feel fleeting, working with shadowy atmospherics, one fully-fledged song emerges in the shape of "Amnesia Haze". Taking its cues from the soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, it’s a diaphanous synthpop confection of twinkling arpeggios and soft-strummed guitar that recalls Chromatics in its minor-key yearning and opiated pacing. "You were just a child," repeats Anderson, and the results are striking, if a touch more pristine than the raw angst with which EMA made her name.
#HORROR often feels like a slick thing, with few of the rough edges that have defined Anderson’s work. But the above zig-zag of reference points here perhaps gestures at the real reason #HORROR doesn’t entirely come off. It feels a little too surface and referential, lost amidst legacies. You might argue a horror film soundtrack can never be anything other than a genre exercise: the process, after all, comes with certain demands and strictures—the tension of suspense, the release of the scare. But such is the genre-skipping on show that it’s hard to grasp what dark truth about Subkoff’s film #HORROR is trying to express.
Perhaps we get closest on a handful of tracks that feel like they play off the aesthetics of the web itself: "Horror #2", with its coldly impassive choral voices and buzzing tones that evoke jagged waveforms; or "Harshmallow World", a twinkly fantasia of pizzicato strings and tolling bells recalling the sumptuous, exotic darkness of Italian maestros like Bruno Nicolai, but presented with a bright, hyperreal glaze. With John Carpenter off on tour and labels like Death Waltz and Waxwork Records resurrecting dusty old scores as luxury consumer products, the vintage horror soundtrack has never been more sung. But at times like this we need someone to advance the form, and #HORROR doesn’t quite have the strength of conviction. Next time, perhaps, more guts. | 2015-12-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-12-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | December 9, 2015 | 6.4 | 11d97092-13a9-4612-ac8a-0a4a02a4c549 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
The 17-minute EP is a fun but somewhat predictable placeholder until the West Coast gunslinger’s next proper project. | The 17-minute EP is a fun but somewhat predictable placeholder until the West Coast gunslinger’s next proper project. | G Perico: Guess What? EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/g-perico-guess-what-ep/ | Guess What? EP | ”Shit goin’ better than ever,” G Perico barks giddily on the a cappella intro before running down all the ways they are. It’s an oddly inelegant way for a G Perico project to begin, considering how his music typically speaks for itself. He’s usually a bristling, unflappable OG who answers to no one. Yet after a prolific 2017 that saw him release three stellar projects, including two solo records and the collaborative tape G-Worthy, Perico has kept a low profile this year, delivering a few guest verses and keeping mostly to himself. Guess What? is a fun update on how his year has been (spoiler: it’s been great) and a somewhat predictable placeholder until the West Coast gunslinger’s next proper project.
Across Guess What?’s 17 minutes, Perico covers his usual territory—Crippin, ladies, homies, life in Los Angeles—with the verve and color we’ve come to expect. “Bitch I’m a player, gangster, pimp, mack/Had a 40 squeezed on me and I lived through that!” he boasts on the infectious “Mo Power,” his nasally vocals nestling in between producer Dupri’s ominous, beehive synths. Perico’s elastic voice sounds good over pretty much anything, especially the Daz Dillinger-indebted instrumentals he’s so drawn to, and the songs on Guess What? are no exception. He switches flows with the nimbleness of a point guard weaving through traffic for a finger roll—he’s smooth, crafty, and full of humor. He interpolates Forrest Gump on “Mo Power”’s chorus (”Go for it, go for it, go!”) and on “Play Wit It” vows to “spoil my daughter and take the hate out my baby mama” while boasting about eating Japanese BBQ.
The first half of Guess What? covers familiar Perico sounds that were nonetheless more refined on last year’s All Blue or 2016’s Shit Don’t Stop. The tracks here pack the expected bounce, menace, and detail, but without the usual urgency or thematic coherence. Still, the album’s only real misfire is “How U Want It,” a strip club-ready free-for-all with a thundering, if nondescript, beat from Mike WiLL Made It-affiliate 30 Roc. It sounds nothing like Perico’s typical work, which is fine, except that it replaces his flair with a run-of-the-mill trap sound that brings out Perico’s laziest rhymes: “Slap it/smack it/shake it/down/drop it/lift it/throw it/round,” he commands. As the EP’s closer, it unfortunately feels like an attempt to set Perico up for a more traditional debut album, which raises the question of what a (presumably) major label project from Perico would even sound like.
An optimistic answer could be Guess What?’s “Play Wit It,” which features an instantly singable chorus from the buzzing LA MC Kalan.frfr. With the help of Kalan’s Auto-Tune’d hook, it adds a melodic softness to counterbalance Perico’s snarl while priming the song for Power 106. It’s a perfectly executed addition to Perico’s skillset, a contemporary tweak on a ’90s-indebted sound that, in less experienced hands, could become repetitive.
Guess What? plays like a collection of Perico B-sides, but works as a low-stakes refresher on one of LA’s best spitters and an occasional testing ground for new directions. Perico’s next big project, assuming it’s not another EP, will have to prove that he’s capable of transcending, or at least building upon, the regionalism that has defined his music until now. Until then, though, even if he’s starting to get bored, he’s more than capable of illuminating the stark dichotomies of his everyday life: “On my waist, baby, that’s another gun case” he raps on “Wit the Gangstas.” “Shoot first, you gon’ see another day.” | 2018-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | So Way Out | September 12, 2018 | 6.7 | 11df478c-873b-4046-955e-095a4372a562 | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
Rhino compiles an impressive collection of the oft-maligned and misunderstood genre of goth-rock, which includes selections from a wide variety of artists, among them Joy Division, the Cure, Bauhaus, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Misfits, Sisters of Mercy, Throbbing Gristle, Ministry, Mission UK, and Einstürzende Neubauten. | Rhino compiles an impressive collection of the oft-maligned and misunderstood genre of goth-rock, which includes selections from a wide variety of artists, among them Joy Division, the Cure, Bauhaus, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Misfits, Sisters of Mercy, Throbbing Gristle, Ministry, Mission UK, and Einstürzende Neubauten. | Various Artists: A Life Less Lived: The Gothic Box | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9814-a-life-less-lived-the-gothic-box/ | A Life Less Lived: The Gothic Box | There's not much to criticize about A Life Less Lived, apart from the obvious occupational hazards of memorializing a genre quite so gleefully ludicrous as goth-rock. Unfazed by the Misfits having beat them to the "our box set comes in a tiny coffin" trick, Rhino have wrapped this 3xCD/DVD set in something the average goth is more likely to have actually been inside-- lace-up faux leather-- and slipped in a 58-page book full of some pretty entertaining stuff: pictures, song-by-song notes, essays, some cheeky "How to Dance Goth" instructions, and quotes from musicians either reminiscing about the 1980s or complaining about being included because they were NOT GOTH dammit SHUT UP. (The Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie: "I was way too fat to be a fucking goth!") No one will get very far into this music without a pretty intuitive sense of that tone-- the mix of devotion and affectionate parody, the ability to laugh over something's absurdity and still be (ahem) dead serious about it.
Because no matter how many Florida teenagers thought they were actually vampires, the fact is that goth-- a form of dance music-- has always been more fun than scary. Case in point, maybe: Alien Sex Fiend's "Now I'm Feeling Zombified". Forget capes and corsets-- this little legend is nine minutes of chintzy, acidic squelching, motoring angrily along with a frontman who makes Marilyn Manson look like Tony Bennett. The wonder of the thing is that it's a treat no matter which way you come at it: On one level, it's grim, cathartic, and a blast for dancing; on another, it's just fun to sing along in ridiculous cretinous-monster voices. And oddly enough, it's that same appreciation of the ridiculous that can get you through some of the bands that took their drama seriously-- the stadium goth-rock bands scattered through these discs, bands whose punk-meets-glam drama finds its next of kin in... well, hair metal, another 1980s genre that's dated pretty strangely. (If you don't believe me-- or the Cult-- just watch the Mission (UK) video on the DVD, which looks and sounds like psychedelic bikers have taken over Def Leppard.) Even the worst of the music here tends to be fascinatingly novel: No matter how many preening goth-influenced bands make their way onto modern-day radio, this stuff feels a world away from us.
Why? Because while we all give "goth" credit as an abstract notion-- a quality and style that's become one of the main pillars of the rock world-- we tend not to think much about the bands that really codified it, and even less about how its musical influence has worked out. Twenty years later, the compilers of this set have actually done a terrific job of tracing those things, especially considering how vague and malleable the word "goth" has gotten over the years. And while no one's pretending the world hasn't seen a lot of goth bands with, in Bauhaus guitarist Daniel Ash's words, "too much makeup and no talent," the selections in this box wind up making a great case for two things: The damned high quality of a lot of forgotten first-wave goth, and the sheer verve, insanity, and creativity of some of its musicians.
They start with familiar classics from the bands who turned out to be goth's godfathers-- Joy Division, the Cure, Bauhaus, Siouxsie & the Banshees-- but the heart of the thing remains England's 1980s goth heyday, where the urge to dance comes out in grim, grinding, relentless music for the fake undead: Look to the Sisters of Mercy's steamroller "Temple of Love", or Tones on Tail's "Christian Says". They sprinkle in darker tracks from the pop bands who filled out goths' record collections: Echo & the Bunnymen, the Cocteau Twins, the Jesus & Mary Chain. They follow the aesthetic as it comes to North America (Christian Death), reunites with punk (the Misfits), meets up with electronic dance music (Skinny Puppy), and starts to become "industrial" (Ministry), and then they glance back at the acts who were the godfathers of that (Throbbing Gristle, Einstürzende Neubauten). They stop in on the kind of arty, spooky goth that was more likely to have women singing (Dead Can Dance, Miranda Sex Garden), and close off with a nice past-meets-future moment: Modern-day band AFI covering the Cure's "The Hanging Garden".
Within all that is a rich vein of terrific pop music, from bands whose more over-the-top impulses seem-- 20 years down the road-- less silly and more brilliantly daring. Between the steady, clanging beat and the dark energy they're working to summon, the best of them genuinely shred: See Red Lorry Yellow Lorry's "Walking on Your Hands", which channels Joy Division for people who wish they'd rocked steadier. It's just as striking to sort through how much these bands contributed to the sound of modern music, with their cavernous, trebly productions helping pioneer the whole use of hard, ugly sound-- every time you love a track for how happily brutal it is, some small credit is owed in goth's direction. (Some acts here take that to bold extremes; the most notable example comes from 1991: Daniel Ash's "Coming Down" is 12-bar blues, only tinny and echoing and with the most curdled vocal treatment possible.) There are also plenty of reminders of goth's other side, the atmospheric, psychedelic spook that descended from Joy Division and the Cure.
Spend enough time with this box, and it just might turn you into a closet goth. The timing is perfect, too, and not just because My Chemical Romance sell lots of records. Some songs have a nervy energy that reflects against today's dance-rock; some have a ludicrous screech that reflects against today's noise bands. And all of it-- the spooky atmospheres, metallic productions, keening voices, dark drama-- has more than a little in common with this site's favorite record of last year, the Knife's Silent Shout. Best of all, it's the rare box set a person can buy to sink into a world that-- unless you've been a serious goth all along-- feels alien and new: These acts have been stuck in the goth ghetto so long that you might be amazed how much they have in common with their better-remembered peers. | 2007-01-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-01-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | Rhino | January 24, 2007 | 8.4 | 11e1fb5f-4905-4fa4-a07d-cfa28a838908 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
The Ghanaian American singer’s dazzling second album is a confident and unconventional record that flows, saunters, and boasts its way to one of the best pop albums of the year. | The Ghanaian American singer’s dazzling second album is a confident and unconventional record that flows, saunters, and boasts its way to one of the best pop albums of the year. | Amaarae: Fountain Baby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amaarae-fountain-baby/ | Fountain Baby | Amaarae is sounding expensive these days. Not necessarily in a material sense, though there is mention of vintage Impalas, box-fresh Mowalolas, and copious Dior drip. Rather her voice is extra luxurious, her music lavish with instrumentation: violins and cellos, a Japanese koto, ethereal harps, West African dounoun and kora, steel pan drums, an authoritative horn section. It flows, it saunters, it boasts, connected by Amaarae’s sweet soprano, lilting to the gods. The fountain in question here is pussy, but it’s also so much more. It’s Fountain Baby, the fascinating tale of a woman who wants the world, but who is also wise enough to accept that serpents follow glory. Unlike many of her pop contemporaries, Amaarae has an innate sense of consequences; balling and boning is not an escapist lifestyle, nor an empty canvas on which to craft cliché party bops for buying apple-scented body wash at CVS. There are some stakes to being rich, sexy, and messy.
Before Amaarae reckons with the dark side of abundance, she’s simply out here having too much fun. On Fountain Baby’s single, “Co-Star,” she and executive producers KZ DidIt and Kyu Steed adorn the syncopated rhythm with crystalline synths and Amaarae’s playful needling about astrological signs, somewhere between a meme (“Them Libra bitches horrible”) and a sardonic document of her dating life. By the second song, the dreamy baile funk-inspired reverie “Angels in Tibet,” she’s singing, “I want to fuck a puddle” with an almost diaphanous euphoria, like she’s high on sex and nitrous, floating through the night.
Her themes of desire and fuckery are vivid and emotionally complex. Even her flex meditations generally avoid tropes: On “Reckless and Sweet,” she gently chronicles a lover who’s interested “’cause my money just too long/The thought of me spending gives you goosebumps,” a golddigger lullaby that self-indicts, too—the downside of love and money, it seems, is having too much of the latter. Women want to use her, though she seems to return the favor: “Fuck you and give you away,” she sings breathlessly on “Disguise,” “You know I just wanted to play.” It’s a heartbreak song disguised as pillow talk, synths simmering as submerged bass titters courtesy KZ, Kyu, Glaswegian producer S-Type, and Yves Tumor collaborator Yves Rothman.
Amaarae has always stated her intent to make futurist Afropop. Her itinerant upbringing—born in the Bronx, raised in Atlanta and Accra—informs her creative ambitions, as do some of the musical inspirations she’s namechecked in a press release: Missy, Janet, Britney, though their more outré jams are better touchstones for pop gems like “Sociopathic Dance Queen” and “Princess Going Digital.” “Counterfeit” opens with a live-instrumentation cover of Clipse’s “Wamp Wamp (What It Do),” a fire nod to one of Pharrell’s more genius productions (he gets a writing credit). Amaarae keeps within the Hell Hath No Fury rubric, too, rapping about printing money and riding around shining, though somewhere in the generational shift, communal joy seeped into Push and Malice’s characteristic nihilism: “Thirty bitches in the crib,” Amaarae raps, “And they all getting paid!” The track’s urgency dissipates a bit from the sing-songy chorus, but it doesn’t really matter: This shit’s going to smash TikTok’s cakes to smithereens.
Though she never acknowledges it outright, pending anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Ghana, which would ostensibly outlaw Amaarae’s music, looms in the background of her vision of sex and danger. On “Wasted Eyes,” a midtempo burner with a 13-piece orchestra and a percussive glock, she nearly whispers, “Hottie million with a milli on me/I wanna ménage with the blicky on me.” Flirting with sexual danger is one thing, but our gal is still clear-eyed, with a punchline designed to cut the trifling at the knees: “You love me with no honor.” On “Sociopathic Dance Queen,” a candy pop gem about a doomed hookup at a bad party, the “acid pussy” is just too dangerous. On “Sex, Violence, Suicide” a watery, stream-of-consciousness acoustic guitar lament for a toxic relationship, she zags into a raucous, snotty guitar punk, à la her first album’s “D*A*N*G*E*R*O*U*S.”
Whether she’s enjoying the complicated life of a baller or indulging in the fantasy of it, her cool ease is dreamy and comely; her frustrated desire transforms into beauty by the velvety way she sings it, even as she reflects on louche situationships and the pain of lovers with ulterior motives. By the final track, when she sings a distorted guitar anthem about how her girl works the pole and then comes home to god—and the god happens to be “Alimony Ama,” her own nickname—no one’s more aware of the irony than Amaarae herself, as she looks to a higher power for a sign she won’t heed. “Shawty say she love me like she love the lord,” she intones breathily. “When I’m in that pussy I’m above the law/If I had the world I still would end it all/A thousand and one reasons not to get involved.” No doubt she’ll do it anyway. | 2023-06-12T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-12T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | June 12, 2023 | 8.7 | 11e6d203-b0bc-413d-8b2c-28aafdfb4e08 | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
In a case of well-honed troubleshooting after the startlingly bland X&Y, Coldplay's fourth LP is a diluted version of U2's Achtung Baby or Radiohead's Kid A, the "experimental" mid-career maneuvers of their peers. Brian Eno produces. | In a case of well-honed troubleshooting after the startlingly bland X&Y, Coldplay's fourth LP is a diluted version of U2's Achtung Baby or Radiohead's Kid A, the "experimental" mid-career maneuvers of their peers. Brian Eno produces. | Coldplay: Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11621-viva-la-vida-or-death-and-all-his-friends/ | Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends | Earlier this year, Britons voted Coldplay as The Band Most Likely to Put You to Sleep. The poll, conducted by hotel chain Travelodge, had Chris Martin & Co. beating out aural Ambien including James Blunt and Norah Jones. Even for a band known to take solace in their overarching pleasantness, the drowsy coronation doubled as a harsh insult. After all, Coldplay is a rock band. A grandma-friendly, Radiohead-normalizing, disarmingly polite rock band led by a man who sounds like he's still yearning for puberty perhaps...but a rock band nonetheless. After proving their stadium bona fides with 2002's bristling A Rush of Blood to the Head, these wuss messiahs fattened up with X&Y, a startlingly bland affair that even forced eternally level-headed New York Times critic Jon Pareles to dub them "the most insufferable band of the decade." The Travelodge survey indicated this considerate foursome wasn't even keeping people awake long enough to piss them off anymore. So Coldplay did what any U2 acolytes worth a chiming guitar chord would do-- they went off to "rip it up and start again." But Viva isn't a complete overhaul á la Achtung Baby or Kid A; just as they dull the sharp corners of their legendary influences musically, Coldplay offer a diluted version of the "experimental" mid-career maneuver with their fourth LP. It's a case of well-honed troubleshooting that should keep the faithful conscious enough to appreciate its subtle improvements.
Ever self-deprecating, Martin offered his band's thesis to MTV a couple weeks ago: "We look at what other people are doing and try and steal all the good bits," he said. "We steal from so many different places that hopefully it becomes untraceable." That last bit is probably wishful thinking. For their "new direction" album, Coldplay hired the egghead responsible for more new direction albums than any other producer over the past 35 years, Brian Eno. The move isn't original, but it's smart. A self-described "sculptor" with a tendency to chip away rather than augment, Eno helps Coldplay reverse their bloat in favor of a slimmer sound; the anthems remain but they're no longer bogged down by incessant refrains and overdubs.
Thanks to a bubbling bit of exotic percussion that wouldn't sound out of place on Peter Gabriel's latter-day LPs, "Lost!" is transformed from Just Another Coldplay Song into a uniquely alluring smash and live staple for years to come. The Gabriel connection is also apparent on the spectacular, wide-eyed "Strawberry Swing", which floats light tribal drums above circular guitars and Martin's idyllic musings. Think "In Your Eyes": The Next Generation. More welcomed semi-surprises: Ballsy first single "Violet Hill" pulls off some honest-to-God Scary Monsters mutant funk while "Chinese Sleep Chant" is a shoegaze excursion as traceable as it is passable. Arcade Fire producer Markus Dravs' touch can be heard on the strung-out anthem "Viva la Vida", its "woah oh oh!" refrain already responsible for untold iPod sales. Apart from a few brief lulls into somnolent twinkle-pop, the music is purposeful, svelte, and modern. If only Martin could inject some pathos into his often-embarrassing universal scripture.
There's a thin line between lyrics that speak to everyone and lyrics that suck-up to everyone (see: Bono's steady devolution over the last couple decades). Even on Coldplay's best songs, Martin sometimes has trouble reconciling his inner hack with his better judgment. On Viva, he backs away from the wallowing self-pity that tanked X&Y, instead going for black-and-white extremes-- life and death, love and lust, dreams and reality-- with little regard for any shades of gray. His supposedly ominous headstone obsession on "Cemeteries of London" is about as creepy as a midday graveyard stroll. And "Lost!" is nearly done in by a cringeworthy verse featuring big fish and a small pond. But there are moments when Martin's band mates push his wide-open words toward more specific meaning. Blissful nostalgia permeates "Strawberry Swing" so thoroughly it's impossible to deny its "perfect day," and the hook to Viva's closer relishes its immortal rush: "I don’t want to follow death and all of his friends!" He may be a pointed critic of his own broadness-- as seen in his guest appearance on "Extras" and in countless humble interviews-- but Martin is still a hopeless sap. He's clearly aware of Thom Yorke's apocalyptic verve and Bono's most cunning reflexive confessionals, but thus far he's incapable of matching either one.
"Lights will guide you home/ And ignite your bones/ And I will try to fix you," sang Martin on X&Y's "Fix You", a gag-inducing bit of motivational flotsam that came off like self-parody. Viva offers a more believable fix to the current Coldplay dilemma, i.e., how does a pop band with artful aspirations please everyone while satisfying themselves at the same time? Because while they ape their forebears without mercy, there's no mistaking a Coldplay song from a U2 or Radiohead song. The new album expands their individuality in tiny, effective ways while maintaining their world-beating gifts. The record's violent, revolution-themed artwork is misleading. Viva is more like a bloodless coup-- shrewd and inconspicuous in its progressive impulses. | 2008-06-16T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-06-16T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | June 16, 2008 | 6.9 | 11f0b395-7d23-4fec-8a42-ac980eb9d0aa | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The New York and Seoul-based Kathy Yaeji Lee is one of the most fascinating vocalists to appear in house music of late. Her languid debut EP is full of elliptical earworms. | The New York and Seoul-based Kathy Yaeji Lee is one of the most fascinating vocalists to appear in house music of late. Her languid debut EP is full of elliptical earworms. | Yaeji: Yaeji EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23022-yaeji-ep/ | Yaeji EP | When you think of house vocalists, you might recall the larger-than-life pipes and jaunty delivery of ’90s-era singers—like Barbara Tucker, Kathy Sledge, or Meli’sa Morgan—who channel the genre’s primordial disco and R&B roots. In recent years, Disclosure and their coterie of singers have mimicked those booming pop-house styles. But a wave of underground house singers are doing something different—something whispered, sleepy, and sparse. Galcher Lustwerk pioneered a new way forward for house vocalists, an unadorned simplicity.
Enter Kathy Yaeji Lee, the 23-year-old New York and Seoul-based DJ behind the electronic project Yaeji—one of the most fascinating vocalists to appear in house music of late. Musically, she shares in the foggy and dazed deep house of Galcher, DJ Richard, or Florian Kupfer. But unlike her forebears, she presents a singing voice that doesn’t have any immediate comparisons. She is equally lackadaisical, but the pure quality of her voice is a true curiosity. On her self-titled EP, Lee displays all the modalities her voice has to offer.
Across Yaeji’s five tracks, Lee’s voice is at once present and just barely there. Singing in Korean and English, she sounds both smoky and bubbly—languid in mood, but fast-paced in her inflection. She shifts between a relaxed whisper and endearing spoken word, maintaining a melancholy register throughout. Her voice slinks and slithers across the relatively barebone beats she made alongside GODMODE’s Nick Sylvester (a former Pitchfork contributor). Hiding in plain sight are evocative, often personal or political lyrics that give Lee’s songs an unexpected emotional texture.
Opener “Noonside” is about waiting in line at border patrol, and “New York 93” reflects on her childhood memories of the city. On both, she’s aided by a very minimal set of tools: There’s often just a slippery synth line, quiet drums, and then slight but ominous vocal processing. The messages are not necessarily clear on a first listen; as Lee quickly repeats her phrases, it’s hard to grab onto her words. The effect, though, is undeniably catchy. She hammers away at elliptical, enigmatic phrases until they are lodged in your brain. But then again, some of her songs only gain extra weight once you’ve gleaned a lyric sheet; whatever feeling of seriousness they are supposed to connote can be lost in the shuffle.
Alongside these private songs, Lee shows a knack for writing both silly and more straightforward dance music. On the album’s highlight, “Guap”—a cover of a song by Australian house producer Mall Grab—Lee sings about counting cash in her “German whip” and a long night of clubbing with a deadpan monotone. It’s hard to know if she’s joking or serious, and it might not even matter, because “Guap” is an earworm through and through. This same quality carries towards the album’s closer “Full of It,” which is moody, effective house music. Standing at little under 20 minutes, this EP finds Lee flitting between more emotional pop and by-the-book dance music, not necessarily choosing one or the other. Yaeji feels like a sampler of what Lee can do, or a brief sketch of who she might become. | 2017-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Godmode | March 30, 2017 | 7.1 | 11f8ab34-352b-4d71-a05b-f0ce1359addb | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
These synth-pop goofs attempt to translate the fun of their intoxicating stage show into their debut record, but they mostly make effortlessness seem insincere. | These synth-pop goofs attempt to translate the fun of their intoxicating stage show into their debut record, but they mostly make effortlessness seem insincere. | Grapetooth: Grapetooth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grapetooth-grapetooth/ | Grapetooth | No other band on the planet may be having more fun right now than Grapetooth, the duo of Twin Peaks guitarist Clay Frankel and producer Chris Bailoni, or Home-Sick. During the last year, the Chicago synth-pop goofs have waved katanas out of convertibles, misused a moped, and played sold-out shows that often resemble stampedes and sometimes involve haircuts. But you know what’s not so fun? Scrapping a bad song idea, making a good song even better, or questioning what songs are strong enough for a livewire concert but may not work so well on an album. Grapetooth’s ostensible reluctance to do just that means that their self-titled debut for Polyvinyl is actually not so fun to hear.
In Twin Peaks, Frankel helps push rowdy rock into overdrive, even one-upping his bandmates’ unhinged energy. In Grapetooth, his slightly sawtoothed voice scuffs and scrapes the warped but smooth synthesizer bop of Bailoni, who sings some here, too. Synth-and-mic duos have been using small setups to convey big feelings for years, of course, from their proclaimed inspirators Suicide to the epiphany sculptors of Majical Cloudz. But Grapetooth—the band’s term for someone who drinks a lot of wine—are the Two-Buck Chuck version of the more sophisticated stuff. They trade in cheap fun, not deep reflection. They try on ill-fitting vocal styles like wacky hats, as when they drawl together on the kazoo’d-up campfire closer “Together” or try to steal back Len’s sunshine on “Trouble.” Grapetooth’s low-effort operation is part and parcel of their overall charm, but effortlessness doesn’t have to mean insincerity. During these 10 tracks, those feelings often seem inseparable.
When Grapetooth fully inhabit their happy-drunk energy to sell a gigantic proclamation like, “They will come for us one day/I will fight them off for you,” as they do during “Violent,” it works, because it seems to come with a Future Islands-sized sense of conviction. With its cascading synths and stacked harmonies, the music here is better built than the Cheez Whiz construction of “Trouble” or the lazy Depeche Mode imitation “Death.” They start promisingly with their sweetest groove on “Hangover Sq.,” shaping a Smiths-like foundation with a high bassline and breezy hi-hats. They even ditch their two-man method, adding a rhythm section. But they barely bother writing lyrics, instead singing the words to “Why So Pale and Wan Fond Lover?” by the 17th-century English poet John Suckling and adding a ridiculous kicker about going “down to hangover square.” They keep their words brief, as if trying to hide the fact that they’re short on compelling ideas and honest effort.
Grapetooth are masters of their own wine-fueled zone—a place where all that matters is polishing off a cheap bottle or two, turning down the lights, firing up the keyboards, hitting ‘Record,’ and going for broke on the first melody and words that happen. Join them in person, and Grapetooth the band will take you to that space and time. But as an album, Grapetooth feels like pressing ‘Play’ on those same recordings the morning after and realizing that maybe it all wasn’t quite as fun as you thought last night. | 2018-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | November 21, 2018 | 5.9 | 11f93ae2-00d9-43ff-93cd-3c83ebf1659a | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Whine of the Mystic is a necessarily dense title for a band like Nap Eyes. This is a drinker’s album, for the kind of drinker who does so alone, publicly, poring over popular 11th-century tomes. | Whine of the Mystic is a necessarily dense title for a band like Nap Eyes. This is a drinker’s album, for the kind of drinker who does so alone, publicly, poring over popular 11th-century tomes. | Nap Eyes: Whine of the Mystic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20718-whine-of-the-mystic/ | Whine of the Mystic | Nigel Chapman is not the first guy to play on the rich homophony between "wine" and "whine"— both can help people loosen up a bit, but they’re also physically intolerable in excess. In all likelihood, Chapman is the first guy to use it in the context of an Omar Khayyam text. Whine of the Mystic is a necessarily dense title for a band like Nap Eyes, its multitudes containing additional multitudes. This is a drinker’s album, for the kind of drinker who does so alone, publicly, poring over popular 11th-century tomes. And like most other musicians you’d associate with this pastime, Chapman speak-sings dense lyrics in a nasal, weary bray tinted with sarcasm—the content portrays him as a wise man, the delivery as one someone who isn't 100% trustworthy.
It’s no surprise then that Chapman, ruminative dude he is, has thought through this image of himself and what it says about him and what he wants it to say about him. While Nap Eyes works up a Kiwi-rock rollick on "No Man Needs to Care", Chapman struggles to get to the revelation contained in the title—"Well, I was reading in my book/ Just so that everyone would come take a look/ Nobody even dares." Chapman doesn’t seek companionship at the moment, it’s the noticing that gives him pleasure. Meanwhile, on "Delirium and Persecution Paranoia" he analyzes the meaning behind every gesture—"What am I trying to say by way of/ Eat with my door in a closed position?/ What am I trying to say to you/ When I sleep with my door in ajar position?"
Still, Whine of the Mystic is musically plainspoken and direct. There’s enough rhythmic jangle and lead twang to have it scan as "rootsy" or "folksy" even though Nap Eyes don’t actually appear to be a folk or roots band. Perhaps they are if you consider the G0-Betweens or the Velvet Underground as their respective nation’s folk music. Whine of the Mystic was recorded live with no overdubs, and they sound limber enough to let loose, but capable of keeping it together. As untraceable feedback leeches through the mix, Seamus Dalton’s constant kick drum stays just enough within the grid during "Dark Creedence", while "Delirium and Persecution Paranoia" and "No Fear of Hellfire" emulate Chapman’s mental cycling by vamping out for over seven minutes; they're all highlights and all come off like impromptu, extended live versions of songs originally planned to clock in at half their length.
Chapman’s a biochemical researcher by trade, a career that presumably requires so much focus and passion that there’s no off-switch. The same could be said for being a musician, so naturally songs about Nap Eyes ("Night of the First Show") mingle with ones that incorporate Chapman’s day job. "Make Something" could certainly be about the drudgery that accompanies both—"By and large, my only success comes from the things I do begrudgingly." It also has him complaining of, "One sickness of brain protein aggregation/ One of upregulated oncogene"—rifle through your old biochem notes and Chapman’s referencing the growth of cancer cells to explain a hangover or heartbreak. Granted, the vocabulary interrupts the flow of the music like tiny cork pieces in your wine glass, but they’re necessary for Chapman to establish his personal P.O.V. within music that deals in very familiar tones and ideas—at any given point, he could be mistaken for Dan Bejar, Adam Granduciel, Cass McCombs, and of course, Dylan or Van Morrison.
It won’t be long before we find out the degree to which Nap Eyes developed their own voice—Whine of the Mystic was a short-run 2014 release in their native Halifax, reissued by Paradise of Bachelors in anticipation of an LP due next year. For the time being, Chapman is more inclined to question his own inner monlogue. On "Dark Creedence", he finds himself at mass on Christmas Eve, drinking sacramental wine even though he can’t understand the reasoning behind it. At least until he recognizes how the ritual parallels with his voluntary usage of wine as a spiritual guide and mental lubricant rather than a blotter. He sighs, "Just get my drinking under control/ And I will live again," but note he doesn’t plan on quitting, just finding the right balance. | 2015-07-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-07-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Paradise of Bachelors | July 14, 2015 | 7 | 11fd0520-c240-4083-91b4-beb0fa8af693 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The often inscrutable Friedberger siblings make a welcome comeback on this, their most accessible record in years. | The often inscrutable Friedberger siblings make a welcome comeback on this, their most accessible record in years. | The Fiery Furnaces: I'm Going Away | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13220-im-going-away/ | I'm Going Away | The Fiery Furnaces have a well-deserved reputation for being difficult and willfully perverse both in concert and on record, so it may be easy to forget that the band started off fairly simple. Gallowsbird's Bark, their first and (to my mind, finest) album, is a free-wheeling blues-rock romp ideally suited to drunken sing-alongs in rowdy bars, albeit the old-timey kind that primarily exist in the fanciful imaginations of Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger. This sort of low-key, lowbrow tunefulness has always been a central component of the Friedbergers' aesthetic, even when they're off on proggy rock opera tangents, splicing their live shows into deliberately jarring sound collages, or roping their grandmother in to sing her own surreal, heavily fictionalized biography. After a half decade of booby-trapping many of their most charming melodies, the Furnaces have come full circle with I'm Going Away, a set of clean, straightforward tunes that, like those on Gallowbird's, would sound terrific playing on a pub jukebox.
Cultish fans may find themselves disappointed by how well-behaved the band sounds on I'm Going Away, but anyone who has been paying attention each step of the way would note this is not a sudden departure or artistic retreat-- it's part of a steady progression. Matthew Friedberger may have jettisoned his impulse to overstuff his compositions with unnecessary leads, but his melodic sensibility remains intact and boldened by streamlined arrangements emphasizing acoustic piano and the crisp, groovy percussion of drummer Robert D'Amico. The difference in this album isn't simply a matter of scaling back and dialing down eccentricities, but in the way the quartet embraces their rhythmic strengths, and subtly integrate elements from old school R&B in tracks like "The End Is Near", "Drive to Dallas", and "Keep Me in Dark" without resorting to pastiche or going against the grain of their established style. Compared to the weirder tracks on Widow City or Bitter Tea, these songs may sound relatively "normal," but there's no confusing this music with anyone else-- the tunes follow familiar Friedbergian patterns, and Eleanor's vocal cadences are as distinct and unmistakable as anyone in contemporary pop this side of Snoop Dogg and Lil' Wayne.
As on Gallowsbird's Bark, Eleanor Friedberger is the primary author of the lyrics on I'm Going Away, and the contrast with her brother's words on their four previous efforts is immediately noticeable. Though both siblings have a taste for packing their verses with tongue-twisters and obscure references, Eleanor's lyrics are far more emotionally direct, revealing, and confrontational. Whereas Matthew's songs lean heavily on skewed fictional narratives that are brilliantly crafted yet emotionally unengaging, the lyrics here are mostly autobiographical first-person accounts of romantic dissolution. Eleanor's words cut deep, but only to a point-- there is sorrow and regret, for sure, but there is also a slight aloofness, implying a character willing to speak her mind but not quite let her guard down.
In some cases, this comes off like a Dylan-esque pose, particularly on the Highway 61 Revisited-ish "Cut the Cake", but for the most part, the reserved approach to personal revelation is entirely appropriate. This isn't "confessional" music, at least not in the way that we often understand that mode of songwriting to be about venting pain and anxiety. This is more about reflection on the past, or even a reconfiguration of memory to make sense of the present tense. This is certainly the case for "Lost at Sea", a gorgeous ballad near the end of the sequence that finds Eleanor struggling to understand her reasons for ending a relationship. It's easily one of the Friedbergers' best compositions to date, but also one of the most atypical, as its majestic piano parts recall Elton John's work in the early 70s, and Eleanor's lyrics have an unadorned candor generally lacking in their older work. After six years of songs about everything from cell phone salesmen in the Middle East to being kidnapped by sinister Mormons, there is something refreshing in hearing her sing something as relatable and unpretentious as "Baby I'm... maybe I'm not me."
Not every song is so nakedly emotional. A solid third of I'm Going Away sticks to the band's thematic comfort zone, i.e., romanticizing seemingly lost cultural moments from the not-too-distant past. The record starts with the title track, a traditional number arranged by the duo to sound convincingly like one of their originals, and it bows out with "Take Me Round Again", a rollicking chorus in rounds that name checks popular songs from the early 20th century, including "When a Fellow's on the Level With a Girl That's on the Square", "The Merry Widow Waltz", and "See Saw Margery Daw". Like most of the duo's body of work, the latter practically demands annotation, and it certainly gains something from a bit of research. Ultimately, it's unnecessary-- the pleasures of "Take Me Round Again", like the rest of I'm Going Away, are immediate and unforced. The Fiery Furnaces will always be arty and precious, but they definitely know their way around a good tune. Have a drink and sing along. | 2009-07-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-07-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Thrill Jockey | July 22, 2009 | 7.8 | 11fe9a18-d323-47bb-b497-31a1c28df3cd | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
Like it says on the tin: This 3xCD box collects the best of the Bad Seeds' non-LP work. | Like it says on the tin: This 3xCD box collects the best of the Bad Seeds' non-LP work. | Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: B-Sides and Rarities | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1372-b-sides-and-rarities/ | B-Sides and Rarities | Most rarities compilations are chockablock with inferior alternate takes, half-assed covers, one-off soundtrack contributions, dead-end experiments, and tracks that were left off proper albums for good reason. Compiled by Bad Seed Mick Harvey, B-Sides and Rarities contains all of those things from every dark corner of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' 20-plus year career, but it still proves a better retrospective than the equally matter-of-factly titled The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
This discrepancy might be surprising, but coming from the Aussie boogeyman and his henchmen, it seems perfectly fitting, perhaps even inevitable. Since his days with the Birthday Party, Cave has nurtured an almost academic obsession with the underbelly of society and the basest of human urges, populating his songs with murderers, rapists, and rogues doing their God-appointed jobs and arguing moral issues as justification. So it's wholly appropriate that the underbelly of Cave's own career should itself be so fascinating.
Those characters stake their claim to the first two disks, especially the tracks culled from the eras of The First Born Is Dead and Murder Ballads. "Scum" is a kiss-off to a "fuckin' traitor, chronic masturbator, shitlicker, user, self-abuser" who apparently had the temerity to give Cave a bad review. Cave revives the beauty-inspired killer of "Where the Wild Roses Grow", with Bad Seed Blixa Bargeld singing Kylie Minogue's part, and there are four installments of the ultraviolent "O'Malley's Bar". But the best murder ballad (even if it is a stretch to consider it as such) is "(I'll Love You) Till the End of the World" from the 1991 Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World. Cave's not a lunatic on a killing spree; he's a lovelorn bombmaker, and he caps this cinematic story of devotion with a spirited sing-along.
As a writer and especially as a vocalist, Cave understands and appreciates the power of overstatement, and these seldom-heard rarities strike a resonant chord because they make no virtue of subtlety. Singing like he's Jesse Garon Presley, Cave writes the messages of "God's Hotel" and "Jack the Ripper" in all caps, bolded, underlined...in blood. As a result, the violence of his songs-- physical, moral, and emotional-- is all the more grotesque and haunting, and the three-disk format of B-Sides and Rarities gives him an enormous canvas for his scrawled screeds.
It would be negligent, if not outright criminal, not to mention the Bad Seeds, who could very well be the focus of B-Sides and Rarities. Over the years they have proved themselves a remarkable and reliable backing band-- perhaps one of the best in rock history-- possessed of a dynamic range and intuitive sophistication without which Cave could not possibly achieve his lofty ambitions. The diversity of styles and moods they master over the course of these three disks is truly impressive, from the Sun Studio minimalism of the first three tracks to the lurching menace of "Black Betty" and "King Kong Kitchee Kitchee Ki-Mi-O", from the sinister soundtrack flourishes of "Cocks and Asses" and "Red Right Hand (Scream 3 version)" to the gentle restraint of Boatman's Call-era tracks like "Black Hair (Band Version)". In culling material for this compilation, Harvey consciously excluded any of Cave's solo work from the tracklist (only one song, the baroque "Time Jesum Traseuntum Et Non Riverentum" from the X-Files compilation, does not feature the Bad Seeds, although it does feature sometime Bad Seed Warren Ellis' band the Dirty Three). As a result, B-Sides and Rarities is as much the band's show as it is Cave's, which may be the key to this collection's dark sense of adventure. | 2005-03-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2005-03-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Mute | March 21, 2005 | 7.8 | 12060f8b-4016-4a36-b281-2e46bc5f0fdf | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The New York rapper’s third studio album is an unbothered mission statement that displays his gifts as a bar-for-bar rapper and thrilling genre collagist. | The New York rapper’s third studio album is an unbothered mission statement that displays his gifts as a bar-for-bar rapper and thrilling genre collagist. | Cakes da Killa: Black Sheep | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cakes-da-killa-black-sheep/ | Black Sheep | Three months after Beyoncé’s Renaissance—and the ensuing conversations about dance music’s mainstream resurgence and its origins in queer, Black spaces—Cakes da Killa released his second album, Svengali. For a technically masterful rapper who has long been celebrated for, and pigeonholed by, his queer, Black identity, it was almost too easy to frame that album’s release as a reaction to the current moment. At the time, Cakes, who was revered for his fusion of ballroom and house influences way before those terms became familiar to the rest of the world, released his most personal and subdued album to date, his trademark made-for-the-catwalk bangers sizzling into more mellow, jazz-influenced musings. But Svengali wasn’t a middle finger to widespread co-optation of his sound; it was simply the album Cakes wanted to, and had to, make. It’s the eternal bind of any trailblazer: You’re either going against the grain or you’re overlooked when your style finally goes big. Lost in this discourse, though, was the simple fact that Cakes da Killa is a really fucking good rapper.
Black Sheep, Cakes’ third studio album, acknowledges that lonely position of belonging to no single tribe: too queer for hetero bar-for-bar New York rappers, too much of a rapper for mainstream queer pop. But the album is a confident compendium of breathless performances, bombastic personality, and thrilling genre collages. It is more akin to a victory lap, an unbothered mission statement from someone who knows what he deserves, and who’s going to laugh in your face as he tells you.
Born in New Jersey but long claiming New York, Cakes raps with an unmistakable prolonged drawl on his vowels and spits with the confrontational sensibility of early Lil’ Kim. On Black Sheep, he’s wearing those influences clearer than ever, interpolating Wu-Tang Clan and name-dropping Kangols and Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones, Part II” on closer “Ain’t Shit Sweet.” He channels 1995 hits by LL Cool J and Foxy Brown on standout single “Do Dat Baby,” which features a resplendent Dawn Richard cameo. What separates Cakes from his forebears is, inevitably, who he’s rapping for. “Bump in the cut no K for me/Know a couple they/thems wanna bang my beat,” he opens on “Mind Reader,” a dexterous, soulful cut that is as indebted to Crystal Waters as it is to Remy Ma. The rapping is hard enough for any Hot 97 freestyle: punchlines served one after the other like haymakers; a flow that goes from a speedy whisper to a syncopated bellow in a matter of seconds; and snarling boasts that, even at their most playful, are delivered with ferocious determination and a veteran’s ear for internal rhyme schemes. Who else but Cakes could rap “Shoot your shot while I sip my Riesling/Time to show the girls how to eat in every season”? Who else would admit he’s “too grown to be crushing on a thug” before allowing that he still might let the man top him?
On “It’s a Luv Thang,” Cakes sounds as comfortable over jazz hi-hats as he does over a samba rhythm thick with Pino Palladino-like bass on “FourPlay.” Longtime collaborator Sam Katz, who produced the entire record, is a wizard of unpredictability and versatility, imbuing even the most straightforward house/rap fusions with unexpected clangs and packed-club heat. Nowhere is this clearer than on “Cakewalk,” which begins with a Honey Dijon-like vocal chop, descends into an early 2010s concoction of 808s and irreverent noise, and moves finally into a pensive spoken word interlude, all within the song’s first minute.
If Svengali wore its message on its sleeve, Black Sheep is a statement by example: a sweaty, aesthetically attuned collection of back-to-basics bangers that finds its creator squarely in his comfort zone. Cakes has never sounded happier, which isn’t in spite of his years of in-betweenness, but because of it; this is a long-gestating embrace of that very liminality. Black Sheep is a thesis on standing apart from the crowd, but it’s far from a treatise on isolation. It’s a beckoning toward freedom by way of strutting and self-celebration, delivered by a musician who sounds at peace with his place. | 2024-03-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Young Art | March 25, 2024 | 7.5 | 120a2476-b687-4f04-a142-3710a98749d0 | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
A consolidation of the band's considerable strengths, much of the new SY album seems fixated on death, loss, and what little can be known about either. | A consolidation of the band's considerable strengths, much of the new SY album seems fixated on death, loss, and what little can be known about either. | Sonic Youth: The Eternal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13153-the-eternal/ | The Eternal | The Eternal, Sonic Youth's 16th album, has nothing to hide. Its strengths and weaknesses are all upfront-- in fact they're pretty well encapsulated in the first two tracks. Opener "Sacred Trickster" is a quick, adrenalized rocker in the vein of 2006's similarly straightforward Rather Ripped. Slamming to a stop after a tight two minutes, the band then tears into "Anti-Orgasm", exploding into biting noise halfway through before the song eventually drifts into beatific, instrumental wandering. It's a familiar move that Sonic Youth have deployed to strong effect many times (try "Pacific Coast Highway" on 1987's Sister or "Rain on Tin" on 2002's "Murray Street for starters). But here it seems to come too soon-- an auto-pilot turn that rings a bit off-key.
The rest of The Eternal runs through similar cycles of ebb and flow. And while the flow outweighs the ebb, it doesn't always defeat it. Many of the band's signature styles are well-timed: the concise blasts from guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo during the bridge of "Calming the Snake", the slow-building denouement of "Walkin Blue", the acoustic flourishes that give closer "Massage the History" a chilly mood. But sometimes the go-to moves feel forced-- take Moore's stiff rant on "Thunderclap (For Bobby Pyn)", or the dead-end bridge of "Leaky Lifeboat (For Gregory Corso)". The best Sonic Youth albums cohere enough to withstand missteps--sometimes even make virtues out of them-- but here the stutter-steps stick out a bit, putting The Eternal on a middle rung of Sonic Youth's discographical ladder.
Which still means it's pretty damn good. There's no denying the vitality of songs like "Antenna", a Moore sing-the-guitar-line classic akin to A Thousand Leaves' "Sunday" or Murray Street's "The Empty Page". "Radios play nothing when she's far away/ TV antenna rusts and gone to waste," Moore contemplates, his voice decaying along with his chiming strings. Just as good are two Ranaldo songs, the aforementioned "Walkin Blue"-- a swaying rocker with Beat poet-influenced couplets-- and "What We Know", sort of an elongated update on Rather Ripped's "Rats". "Heaven's not about your reputation," he sings, musing about "stepping across the great divide." Like much of The Eternal, "What We Know" seems fixated on death, loss, and what little can be known about either.
High points like that might hit harder without some surrounding lags, like the ZZ-Top-on-downers "Poison Arrow", or the weary yeah-yeah's of "Thunderclap (for Bobby Pyn)"-- especially since each of those tunes is followed by a similar, much better track. The chugging guitars of "Malibu Gas Station" trump "Poison Arrow" with sped-up, Television-like twin-guitar, while the wiry energy of "No Way", with its Ramones-ish chorus ("I'm not talking to you no more," chants Moore), echoes classic punk better than "Thunderclap".
But then it's easy to nitpick with a group that has been this good for this long and always offers a lot to comb through and dissect. Besides, The Eternal could turn out to be a grower. It certainly has happened before with Sonic Youth, whose unique place in rock history-- as a kind of living glue between late-70s post-punk and 90s alternative, 80s DIY indie and 00s net-age, tight pop and improvised noise, hard punk and hippie jams, etc.-- is secure, no matter what time reveals about individual albums. At the very least, some excellent songs lurk among these 12 tracks, and there's enough potential for debate about which are which to make The Eternal worthy of Sonic Youth's singular canon. | 2009-06-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-06-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | June 8, 2009 | 6.8 | 120d77ad-72b8-4832-8a76-75f7797f2ff8 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Bay Area vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Ephemeral Domignostika puts out solo material as Mastery. With Valis, he's crafted one of the more challenging black metal albums in recent memory. | Bay Area vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Ephemeral Domignostika puts out solo material as Mastery. With Valis, he's crafted one of the more challenging black metal albums in recent memory. | Mastery: Valis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20272-valis/ | Valis | Among many other projects, Bay Area vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Ephemeral Domignostika puts out solo material as Mastery, including splits with Skullflower and Palace of Worms as well as a 2011 demo compilation Barbaric Usurpation of the Hypereonic Black Metal Throne. These early releases suggested a budding technical brilliance and a desire to take black metal as far as it could go, but none were adequate preparation for Mastery’s first full-length. Valis is an exercise in hyperactive neuron overload, one of the more challenging black metal albums in recent memory.
This is the first time Ephemeral Domignostika’s vision has been so clear; the memorable riffs are here, but he pushes them all to their breaking point. He plays with the velocity of Orthrelm's Mick Barr and the inventiveness of Gridlink’s Takafumi Matsubara. To call this music "dense" would be an understatement, as he piles on the skronky twists and synapse-melting tapping, pausing only for a couple of ambient interludes ("A.S.H.V.E.S.S.E.L." and "I.L.K.S.E.E.K.E.R.") and moments where the electrified spasms give way to acoustic strumming ("V.A.L.I.S.V.E.S.S.E.L.") while frantic drums and scowls continue. Mastery is polarizing, but unlike Ephemeral Domignostika’s one-man-band project Pandiscordian Necrogenesis, the music is much more than a cheap spectacle.
Because for all of Valis' chaotic energy, Ephemeral Domignostika remains a keen tactician, with each improvised freakout compressed, cut up into dizzying pieces, and put in place. It sounds like it was created in one take, with no edits, which would be impossible. But the knowledge that he composed the album from jams, integrating the best of improvisational spontaneity and metal’s tradition of rigid composition, and in the process making sense of his own madness, is just as staggering.
There are sections where a righteous black thrash riff will come in, something that demands only your most vigorous headbanging and your fists raised as high as you can raise them—the opening pummel of "V.A.L.I.S.V.E.S.S.E.L.", which he also revisits in "S.T.A.R.S.E.E.K.E.R."—but just as soon as these come to fruition, Ephemeral Domignostika will break it down and switch to another sequence equally as turbulent but even less comprehensible. While Mastery never abandons black metal, his ability to nod to catchy riffs while also surgically dismembering them is what elevates him above would-be avant-metallists.
Valis appears just as one-time Bay Area compatriot Leviathan is gaining attention—and in some eyes, redeeming himself—for his latest, and most accomplished, record, Scar Sighted. Both are triumphs of singular visions, the ethos of one-man black metal fully realized. While Scar Sighted is an examination of a troubled self, Valis is a warning to let you know just what Ephemeral Domignostika is capable of and how far he’s willing to scramble his mind for his music. It’s not an album for the stubborn traditionalists, nor is it for the newcomers who preach open-mindedness but are too timid to really engage with the art. | 2015-03-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-03-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Metal | The Flenser | March 5, 2015 | 8 | 120e2187-0131-4e1d-a455-20a44dff6aa0 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
The Massachusetts-raised singer-songwriter’s second album exudes a quiet intensity, slipping between gentle indie rock and barely-there folk songs with bottomless vulnerability. | The Massachusetts-raised singer-songwriter’s second album exudes a quiet intensity, slipping between gentle indie rock and barely-there folk songs with bottomless vulnerability. | Haux: Blue Angeles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/haux-blue-angeles/ | Blue Angeles | There’s no two ways about it: At times, Haux sounds a lot like Bon Iver. The similarity goes deeper than their shared approach to granularly detailed electronic pop, falsetto vocals, and sunken guitars; you might find yourself double-checking Spotify, wondering if somewhere, Justin Vernon’s broken angel wings are twitching. To Vern out this hard and then call a song “Hazel” almost begs for the association. Nevertheless, on Blue Angeles, as on his 2020 debut LP, Woodson Black has an otherworldly way of making an ordinary song his own.
That first album, Violence in a Quiet Mind, is remarkable for its unshelled vulnerability. It’s music you hover over, cupping your hands around it like a candle flame you have to shield from the wind. Isolation and depression are its themes; it leaves a pale scar on Blue Angeles in the barely-there folk of “Bella Blue.” But the new LP is cast as an escape from Los Angeles on the Appalachian Trail, breathing with more fresh air, natural light, and inertial energy than its superbly introverted predecessor. It’s this diurnal energy that draws out some glaring comparisons, but Black’s own fingerprints are all over them.
Blue Angeles is an album of indie rock and folk songs done up in pop, with deliriously driving basslines, precise pauses and drops, and deep DAW dives that dredge up strange volumes and curves in heartfelt, straightforward melodies. The production zings with hyperreal shudders and swooshes; stray syllables are tweezed off and blasted with freezing ethers, then left to shiver in digital limbos. The songs wax in emotion by waning in intensity, as Black’s flute-like voice slips down long, cool, fluid corridors.
Outside of well-turned but more commonplace fare like “Hazel,” “Carte Blanche,” and “Claire De Lune,” things get weirder and more interesting; a certain Old Hollywood glamour keeps casting a shadow through all the partly sunny weather. “Cover Girl” revels in raw earnestness and plush staging, sampling a classic Rita Hayworth film noir in an eerie lullaby adorned with iridescent harps. It sounds like Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” crossed with the Smashing Pumpkins deep cut “Cupid de Locke.” “Blood Moon” might have been at home on the first album, which resonated with the smallest, most cowering songs of Xiu Xiu, where the singing sounds like a weeping cartoon mouse. “Waves” is a convincing throwback to early James Blake, all loosened virtual drumheads and sewing-machine percussion, even though there’s a questionable Post Malone-y part stashed a little sneakily at the end.
Blue Angeles is seamlessly designed, except when it pointedly chooses not to be; across the record, there is a tendency to paste up flawless fantasies and then rip them down. When things start to feel too perfect, too professional, too cinematic, a plain acoustic guitar will shred the patina, or perhaps a brief recording of a roller coaster will zoom through a solemn anthem. On one song, a friend named Crow gives a homily about the earth; on another, he improvises on the harmonica. It resembles a light afternoon nap, when the world starts to filter into dreams. If the tentative daybreak of this album is slightly less unique than the prior record’s bottomless night, it’s just as casually gorgeous and finely shaded. | 2024-03-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Ultra | March 21, 2024 | 7.5 | 121364eb-fff1-4a84-b7f4-0dd7b3615181 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
For their third album, Sleigh Bells have made a few tweaks to their formula. On Bitter Rivals, Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss have embraced more varied instrumentation and they've become more creatively democratic, with Krauss writing most of the melodies. | For their third album, Sleigh Bells have made a few tweaks to their formula. On Bitter Rivals, Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss have embraced more varied instrumentation and they've become more creatively democratic, with Krauss writing most of the melodies. | Sleigh Bells: Bitter Rivals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18594-sleigh-bells-bitter-rivals/ | Bitter Rivals | A decade ago, Derek Miller was playing guitar in a hardcore band while Alexis Krauss was singing in a teen-pop group, and they came together in Brooklyn in 2009 with the provocative idea that these two genres have more in common than conventional wisdom suggests. Sleigh Bells' spectacular 2010 debut album, Treats, was like Jock Jams for Hell's Angels; Miller's riffs went off like illegal bottle rockets, and Krauss lilted, roared, and chanted ("Did you do your best today?") with the cataclysmic cool of a cheerleader who's just hijacked a monster truck. Like all records that don’t quite sound like anything before, you either loved it or hated it, but you couldn’t ignore it.
Finding damaged beauty in distortion and compression, Treats sounded magnificently charred, like it had been recorded on the only console to survive Armageddon. After its success, Sleigh Bells got the opportunity to make the transition to hi-fi, and there was reason to worry that squeaky-clean production might extinguish what made them original in the first place. But their 2012 sophomore album Reign of Terror did "pulverizingly loud" in a different, though equally distinct way: It had the cavernous and slightly haunting atmosphere of a collection of songs recorded in an empty stadium. One of its best tracks was called "Crush"—a title that compacted all of Sleigh Bells' tensions and contradictions into a single syllable. "I got a crush on you," Krauss cooed, but in the very same breath she flashed a switchblade, "I gotta crush you now."
For their third album, Bitter Rivals, Sleigh Bells have made a few more tweaks to the formula. They've embraced more varied instrumentation—see: the lightning-strike synths on "Sing Like A Wire"; the menacingly strummed acoustic guitar that opens "Bitter Rivals"—and added a drummer to their live show. But most notably, they've become more creatively democratic. Miller handled the lyrics, music, and production on the previous records, but on Bitter Rivals Krauss wrote most of the melodies. The material she's composed for herself does allow her to show more range—Bitter Rivals features both Krauss's most tuneful and aggressive vocals yet, sometimes within the same song—but overall it is the work of a band enduring some growing pains. The good news is that Sleigh Bells have new ideas, but the often-undercooked Bitter Rivals shows they haven't yet found effective ways to execute many of them.
And it doesn't take long for this to become apparent. Opening track and lead-off single "Bitter Rivals" starts off with a misleadingly minimalist, showdown-at-high-noon vibe, but it soon becomes a cluttered and unrelenting mess of chunky power chords, high-voltage synthesizers, and near-Karmin-grade rapping—all heaped on top of each other with little rhyme or reason. The same goes for the puzzlingly stilted "Sing Like a Wire", which feels so disjointed it's like the verse, bridge, and chorus were dragged-and-dropped from three different songs. The hook hits like an earthquake, but there's no build; the drop appears so suddenly that it doesn't quite feel earned.
Compare these songs to the sleek, expertly controlled chaos of Treats, and you get the impression Krauss and Miller are still getting the hang of how to write effectively together. They've also lost a bit of the spark that once made their production so thrilling. Sleigh Bells usually have a knack for turning sounds just on the edge of punishing into something deeply, viscerally pleasurable (on the first couple listens Treats seemed like the sort of thing that might permanently damage your hearing), but Bitter Rivals contains a few of the only Sleigh Bells songs that can rightfully be dismissed as "grating." The worst offender here is the hellish chorus of "Minnie", which takes what are already Krauss's most uncomfortably piercing backing vocals and, cruelly, pitches them up. I'm pretty sure there are frequencies in this song that only dogs can hear.
The slower, less insistent songs on Bitter Rivals fare better. The R&B-inflected "Young Legends" showcases the album's strongest melody, but it's unfortunate that the song's hesitant and ill-fitting production (at least half of Krauss's vocals come through sputtered and muffled like walkie-talkie transmissions) holds it back from fully blooming. The mid-tempo "Tiger Kit" is a more effective display of restraint; its do-or-die urgency ("You're gonna jump from that cathedral/ In front of all of these people") is subtly kindled by synth hits that fire on cue but duck out before they overwhelm the arrangement. One of the album's brightest spots, though, is also its quietest: the airy ballad "To Hell With You" shows off Krauss's vocals with minimal effects, and its lyrics slyly toy with the expectations set by its brazen title. Like "Crush", it's partially a kiss-off, but the undertones are unexpectedly sweet: "I'll go to hell with you/ Here's the proof." It's a rare and welcome moment of pause on a record that often feels cramped, rushed, and cluttered. Much has been made of the fact that it was mixed by Andrew Dawson, who also worked on Yeezus, but what this record really could have used is a reducer.
In 2013, it’s no longer enough to simply be loud. To command attention in a world that's already blaring with distractions, interruptions, and no shortage of airhorns, a record needs to be loud in a creative, compelling, and previously unexplored way. Sleigh Bells have proven that they know this better than almost anybody making music right now, and that's why Bitter Rivals feels like an exceptionally unfortunate misstep. It isn't enough of a disaster to put a dent in their solid fanbase, but it doesn't have the spark of the stuff that built it up in the first place. Treats had the wildly aerodynamic dips of an elegantly constructed roller coaster—think of that rolling riff that careens through "A/B Machines", or the surprise ending of "Infinity Guitars" when a song that goes up to 11 reveals, only in the last 40 seconds, that it actually goes up to 12. Bitter Rivals too often feels like a cheap thrill ride, firing on all cylinders but without any grand design. | 2013-10-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-10-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mom+Pop | October 8, 2013 | 5.9 | 1213f427-4f02-43b0-aaac-fa4e75d2df5c | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the original soundtrack to the Coen brothers’ 2000 film, one that primed a generation for a modern folk revival. | 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 original soundtrack to the Coen brothers’ 2000 film, one that primed a generation for a modern folk revival. | Various Artists: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Original Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-o-brother-where-art-thou-original-soundtrack/ | O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Original Soundtrack) | In February 2002, as Americans were still recovering from the aftermath of 9/11, the Grammys insisted the show must go on. The contenders for Album of the Year were a varied bunch that included Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft, India.Arie’s Acoustic Soul, and U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. The final two candidates stood as especially intriguing foils, each presenting a unique perspective on life in the American South: OutKast’s celebrated fourth album Stankonia, and the soundtrack to Joel and Ethan Coen’s unexpected hit adventure-comedy, O Brother, Where Art Thou?
By the arrival of the new millennium, the Minnesota-born filmmakers had sealed their reputations as high-minded auteurs on the consecutive successes of Fargo and The Big Lebowski. With O Brother, Where Art Thou?, released in December of 2000, they knitted the lurking everyman terror of the former with the absurd and twisting humor of the latter, approximating the arc of Homer’s epic, the Odyssey. The rural Depression-era Mississippi setting of the film was accompanied by a diegetic slate of gospel, bluegrass, pre-war blues, and string-band music, and its soundtrack became an improbable but massive hit, selling more than eight million copies and snagging the Album of the Year.
It’s no real surprise that the Recording Academy, never the vanguard of taste or talent, favored an album that spoke to white Americans’ nostalgic follies over one by two Black men from Atlanta daring to turn a critical eye toward the future. But the win was a watershed moment for an album that would define a significant part of the music-industry landscape of the next two decades. Beyond the immediate impact of the soundtrack—minting major careers for some and giving a late-in-life boost to others—O Brother, Where Art Thou? primed a generation for a modern folk revival, establishing a new Americana industrial complex along the way.
The Coen brothers took the old saws of folk songs—death, sex, disaster, the highwire act between piety and damnation—and peppered them into their own folkloric adaptation. In press cycles around the film, the Coens spoke about how the music shaped the narrative and the overall tone of the movie. Though the film’s main protagonists are not musicians by trade, music is the backbone of their story and the vehicle for their salvation. And ultimately, the crux of O Brother, Where Art Thou? follows another theme in folk: the homecoming.
On the lam from a chain gang and in search of a vast fortune, three men—played by George Clooney, Tim Blake Nelson, and John Turturro—pull a short grift cutting a record at a radio station, accompanied by a Black guitarist they picked up at a rural crossroads. Their recording of the well-worn folk number “Man of Constant Sorrow” explodes as a local hit, but their hand-to-mouth pursuit of a treasure keeps them out of the loop of their much more concrete commercial popularity.
The Coens cast Clooney as ringleader Ulysses Everett McGill, a speedy talker and phony barrister who thinks just fast enough to keep leaping from one frying pan into increasingly hotter fires. Dragged along for the ride are Turturro’s Pete and Nelson’s Delmar, alternately cynical and dim-wittedly optimistic fellow cons. The film’s centerpiece is Clooney’s nervy, bug-eyed performance of “Man of Constant Sorrow,” with Turturro and Nelson hamming it up as backup vocalists. The Coens had a mind to let Clooney sing it himself, but they found that unlike his aunt Rosemary, Clooney couldn’t carry a tune. Instead, producer T Bone Burnett called in the ringer Dan Tyminski, a guitarist and vocalist who had established himself as a formidable talent with bluegrass singer Alison Krauss and the all-star group Union Station.
Burnett had summoned Krauss, Tyminski, and their Union Station bandmates from the deep pool of bluegrass talent concentrated around Nashville at the time. By the end of the ‘90s, the country charts were dominated by high-gloss stars who packed arenas with heavy pop-crossover appeal: Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw, Shania Twain. But the music of O Brother, Where Art Thou? forewent bombastic pyrotechnics and headset mics. Instead, the Coens wanted to ensure that the film’s music was period appropriate, if not dating back to the Depression itself. They dove headfirst into their own research of folklorists’ field recordings and other long-neglected tunes. Burnett applied his expertise, drawing from his own deep well of historical understanding and recruiting the sharp singer-songwriter Gillian Welch as associate producer. His commitment to authenticity was so great that he arranged ribbon microphones by the Decca tree method of the 1930s and ’40s to more faithfully capture a vintage feeling. The production even hired a forensic musicologist, Sandy Wilbur, to determine whether “traditional” songs like “I’ll Fly Away” and “O Death” were, in fact, traditional (no and yes, respectively).
The results of the production’s many pains are, at times, stunning. Krauss takes the lead alongside the First Baptist Church Choir of White House, Tennessee on “Down to the River to Pray,” a gospel hymn that swells in a plea for communion. She joins Welch and Emmylou Harris, ever the nimble and generous collaborator, on the siren song “Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby.” Welch and Burnett had expanded the lullaby from a recording of Sidney Lee Carter by folklorist Alan Lomax. It drips with suggestion without once approaching a naughty word, proving how well-aligned vocal harmonies can overpower a song with subtext to knee-knocking ends.
The music of O Brother, Where Art Thou? roots the story in reality even as the story romps around in fiction, down to how Black artists fit—and are subsequently diminished—within the narrative. The origin of the story’s crossroads guitarist, Tommy Johnson, mirrors that of the real-life bluesman Robert Johnson, who, apocryphally, sold his soul to the devil in exchange for an inimitable guitar talent. Played by New Orleans blues guitarist Chris Thomas King, Tommy is essential to the crew’s survival: his lead on the radio station rescues them in the short and long term. King’s performance of Skip James’ “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” is a balm in one of the film’s rare moments of quiet, but the movie otherwise rarely allows him to speak about his own view of the world.
Beyond its role as the story’s emotional engine, music is essential to the central fiction in O Brother’s climax. The Soggy Bottom Boys’ schemes collide and come unspooled at a political fundraiser, where a bigoted gubernatorial candidate takes umbrage at the band being “integrated.” Outraged at the disruption to their good time, the townsfolk ride him out on a rail, cheering on the lovable scamps of the interracial ensemble. The film’s biggest improbability isn’t in a brush with a bank robber, a one-eyed Bible-selling Klansman, or a fortuitously timed flood, but in the notion that one good-enough song could move a room full of white people to collectively disavow racism and punish the offending party with passionate haste.
The rapid success of the soundtrack led to some career-changing quirks for almost all of its personnel. It created a surprising windfall for James Carter, whom Lomax had recorded singing “Po’ Lazarus” while Carter was imprisoned at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in 1959. The Coens used the recording in O Brother’s opening credits, and as the soundtrack began to boom, Burnett worked with an investigative reporter and Lomax-affiliated licensing personnel to track Carter down and give him the check he’d earned. Carter got a $20,000 lump sum and a trip to the Grammys with his family, who continued to receive the royalties that arrived after his death in late 2003.
The soundtrack also turned a spotlight back toward Ralph Stanley, who’d been a preeminent figure in bluegrass with his brother Carter. Ralph Stanley’s unaccompanied vocal performance of the ballad “O Death” scores one of O Brother’s most chilling scenes, and though Carter Stanley died in 1966, Ralph continued performing the song as a setlist centerpiece until his own earthly departure in 2016. Welch, Tyminski, and members of Union Station all enjoyed on-screen cameos, as did members of the Fairfield Four, who sing the haunting “Lonesome Valley” as Everett, Pete, Delmar, and Tommy seem to face certain doom. A concert film released in 2001, Down from the Mountain, helped put names and faces to the soundtrack’s not-quite-celebrity players as well as family-band contributors like the Whites and the Cox Family.
All of a sudden, people who thought they didn’t like “folk music” found themselves enjoying it. The old songs pressed on the reminiscences of some of its audience while acting as a new portal to the past for others. Maybe some had heard the tunes in church as children; others perhaps discovered that Deliverance and Hee Haw did not paint a complete picture of the banjo. Aligned with the upper-middle-class appeal of the Coens’ endorsement, the soundtrack wooed listeners who might’ve previously written off the genre as the stuff of uneducated hicks. Regardless, it’s hard to build any argument against the warm encouragement of “Keep on the Sunny Side” or the teetering charm of “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” The songs have stuck around because they’re good.
More long-term, the door had opened for a roster of powerhouse modern players. Already a highly respected presence in the bluegrass and country worlds, Krauss earned her laurels as an outright star, returning to work with Burnett on the soundtrack to Cold Mountain and a 2007 album with Robert Plant. She has 27 Grammys, the most held by any woman or singer—Quincy Jones is the only American with more, having 28. Welch released her lodestar Time (The Revelator) in 2001, which reeled with prescient weariness and an empathetic eye for lonely outcasts. Barely out of their teens, Nickel Creek had already proven themselves a prodigious set with their self-titled record in 2000. Krauss produced their next record, 2002’s This Side, which won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. The affable trio of siblings Sara and Sean Watkins with Chris Thile made Nickel Creek an appealing crossover among boomers keeping up with the kids, Gen Xers who’d heard about their Pavement cover, and millennials connecting with modern folk idioms on their own terms.
The Nashville-based string band Old Crow Medicine Show were also well-primed to ride the wave, having wrapped themselves in an enviable mythology at their outset. Their big break came after the daughter of Doc Watson—the blind grace èminence of Appalachian acoustic guitar whose playing shaped the understanding of the instrument’s melodic capabilities—heard the band busking on a corner in Boone, North Carolina. The group punched up some Bob Dylan scraps into “Wagon Wheel,” which made it to their 2004 self-titled album and became a potent regional favorite for its marriage of barroom bluster and homesick sentimentality. Old Crow had been playing “Wagon Wheel” for a decade by the time Darius Rucker, of South Carolina’s Hootie and the Blowfish, made a No. 1 hit out of it with Lady A (then still operating under their Antebellum auspices) in 2013.
Elsewhere in North Carolina, two hot-blooded young men sharing the Avett surname had begun trading their grunge-inspired electric guitar licks for emotive acoustic yawps. They went from a string of raw, searching records (2004’s Mignonette, 2006’s Four Thieves Gone, 2007’s Emotionalism) to working with Rick Rubin by the end of the decade. The Carolina Chocolate Drops coalesced in 2005, arriving as a necessary corrective and testimony to the presence of Black Americans in the history of country, bluegrass, blues, and more. Mumford & Sons, from the other side of the Atlantic, eventually hitched a ride with purported English charm.
Since O Brother, the Coens have returned to nearby wells, but none have bottled lightning like O Brother. Inside Llewyn Davis felt like a genealogical successor as it followed a young musician struggling to catch a break in the Greenwich Village folk-revival scene of the early 1960s. Burnett’s soundtrack likewise felt like O Brother’s spiritual offspring, with actor Oscar Isaac singing his own parts alongside old-guard favorites (Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk) and members of the younger set who’d been hoisted up by the previous wave (Marcus Mumford and the Punch Brothers—a group led by Chris Thile, by then also a MacArthur “genius” grant winner). Tim Blake Nelson reunited with the Coens as the titular sharpshooter in 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs opposite a cowboy played by former Old Crow Medicine Show fiddler (and co-founder) Willie Watson. They conclude their vignette singing a duet written by Welch and David Rawlings, which was nominated for a Best Original Song Academy Award.
Keeping with Coen tradition, the dynamic emotional heft of O Brother, Where Art Thou? comes from ordinary people going to great lengths and battling unrepentant chaos just to get home. The story’s flawed heroes are good folks messily trying to make a better way for themselves in this life or the next—a spirit underlined with a soundtrack that spoke exclusively to the same sentiments. The film laundered the reputation of “hillbilly music” to more widespread appeal, signaling to the music industry an appetite for twangy tunes packaged with aw-shucks humility. It broadened the platform available to generational talents like Welch, Thile, and plenty of their peers, while inadvertently securing a slot for “Wagon Wheel” on the setlist of countless dive-bar bands across the country.
The impact of O Brother, Where Art Thou? coincided with a cultural moment that left millions of Americans reaching for reassurances about their values. The music spoke to ideas of gentle, earnest goodness, which seemed an increasingly difficult comfort to come by. In subsequent years, boundaries between bluegrass, country, alt-country, blues, Southern rock, old-time, and folk music have been dissolved and re-negotiated under the umbrella of “Americana,” which has itself become a convenient marketing label for just about anything else. But fortunately for folk songs, the good ones have a way of enduring because they speak to moments in ways that Mason jar glassware and Anthropologie prairie dresses never could. They tell the truth about the trying weariness, the sorrowful lows, and the preposterous delight of staying alive.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Mercury | November 8, 2020 | 8.3 | 1214f62c-70b9-42fb-ab70-4f17b29f6189 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
The UK psych-rockers’ pan-genre approach benefits from a little extra curation and fun. As versatile as they are, their stylistic detours eventually feel like overkill. | The UK psych-rockers’ pan-genre approach benefits from a little extra curation and fun. As versatile as they are, their stylistic detours eventually feel like overkill. | Django Django: Glowing in the Dark | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/django-django-glowing-in-the-dark/ | Glowing in the Dark | When London-based four-piece Django Django began peeking out of their bedroom studio, around the dawn of the last decade, synth-toting psych-rockers were already climbing festival lineup posters from Brooklyn to Perth. But nobody else had a chopped-up robot vocal hook that could split the difference between the Mercury Prize shortlist and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, like their self-titled debut album and its wonky standout, “Default.” The next two albums, 2015’s Born Under Saturn and 2018’s Marble Skies, kept dabbling across styles—from surf-rock to dancehall—but never matched that early sensation of nerdish epiphany.
Turning into the home stretch of Django Django’s fourth album, Glowing in the Dark, a realistic-sounding doorbell rings (sorry, dogs!), an unidentified speaking voice that singer and guitarist Vincent Neff compares to comedian Martin Short’s gushes a quick greeting, and an indie-dance exorcism is underway. “Kick the Devil Out,” which combines Primal Scream’s gospel-powered backing vocals and the Rapture’s cowbells with the good-riddance schadenfreude of “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” illuminates why Django Django’s latest feels like a refreshing return to form. Though it ranges through drummer and producer David Maclean’s record collection as widely as ever, Glowing in the Dark homes in on the group’s most memorable set of songs to date—and it sounds like a little extra time curating has helped them loosen up and have fun, too. “One thing that we were really conscious of going into this album was to try to be a bit more playful with the songs and not get too bogged down with details,” bassist Jimmy Dixon has acknowledged.
Django Django finished Glowing in the Dark before the coronavirus hit, and some of the best tracks seem like attempts to transcend social problems that predated the pandemic and will almost certainly outlast it. “The world [was] a bit of a mess even before the lockdowns,” Maclean told a recent interviewer, singling out climate change and globalization. Opener and first single “Spirals” is a psych-rock anthem whose high-flying synths are almost intoxicating enough to sell what the feathery vocal harmonies are saying about “crossing the line that divides us.” The title track, appropriately flickering electro-pop à la recent remixers Hot Chip, harks back to “Default” with a stuttering cyborg vocal hook so catchy I’m willing to overlook the distinct possibility that it’s about the light of a smartphone. Less striking but still tough to hate is the strutting “Headrush,” a punk-charged rebuke toward some creep who says that “might is right.” That guy sucks!
Versatile though Django Django may be, their stylistic detours eventually feel like overkill. The bilingual rockabilly-goes-samba of “Got Me Worried” whisks by quickly enough to act as a palate cleanser, and cosmic synth interlude “The Ark” feels true to the band’s DIY sci-fi spirit. “Night of the Buffalo,” a clumsy show of solidarity with Native American tribes, picks up an extended violin outro that’s nice for what it is, but feels like a moment of self-indulgence. And the homespun folk of “The World Will Turn,” while not at all unpleasant, mainly reminds me of how Welsh pan-genre forebears Super Furry Animals did something similar with “Fire in My Heart,” from 1999’s Guerilla—right around the time they were warning that “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck” umpteen times over a Steely Dan sample.
Django Django would never do this; even at their most generous and direct, they’re still pretty damn polite, mad scientists who can never fully doff the lab coats. This drab reserve is most evident in contrast with labelmate Charlotte Gainsbourg, who infuses smoky charisma into “Waking Up,” a highlight that otherwise might’ve been merely the latest in a long list of songs about life on the road. Maclean, a DJ and sometime house producer who spent much of his youth trying to make hip-hop beats, recently said, “I’d love to do a whole album of collaborations, a bit like Gorillaz do.” It will be a shame if life on the road doesn’t return in time for Django Django to perform Glowing in the Dark on sunny festival stages, perhaps alongside woolly successors like King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. But it’s no shot to say that their real strength might lie in playing backup to someone more singular or subtle, so they’re not constantly serving the whole buffet just because they can.
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. | 2021-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Because | February 15, 2021 | 7.1 | 12191ee0-4c99-4dcc-a635-c2bdded5261f | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
After the grotty, pissed-off Monomania and Bradford Cox's catastrophic car accident comes Deerhunter's most content, warm and plainspoken work to date. While the band's written many indelible songs, Fading Frontier may have their first that could conceivably blend into real-deal classic rock radio. | After the grotty, pissed-off Monomania and Bradford Cox's catastrophic car accident comes Deerhunter's most content, warm and plainspoken work to date. While the band's written many indelible songs, Fading Frontier may have their first that could conceivably blend into real-deal classic rock radio. | Deerhunter: Fading Frontier | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21039-fading-frontier/ | Fading Frontier | A Deerhunter album rollout usually coincides with some pithy and provocative statements from Bradford Cox on pop culture. He sort of obliged on Fading Frontier, calling most modern pop music "totally unredeemable" in an interview. But other than that, he seemed serene: "Fifteen years I spent proving myself," he mused in that same piece. "The only reason for me to make a record now is to make the record." Accordingly, after the grotty, pissed-off Monomania and Cox's catastrophic car accident comes Deerhunter's most content, warm and plainspoken work to date.
Cox drew an "influence map" for this record, one which included R.E.M., Tom Petty, and INXS. All of these names together clarify something about Cox's intentions: These are amongst the most agreeable rock artists to ever become stars, and Fading Frontier sounds like Deerhunter attempting to create songs that are equally enjoyable in an objective way as "Free Fallin'" or "Need You Tonight" or "The One I Love"—ones where if you hear them in a restaurant or car or house party, no one will ever ask you to turn them off. While Deerhunter's created a number of indelible songs over their career, Fading Frontier may have their first that could conceivably blend into real-deal classic rock radio.
Deerhunter reunite with Halcyon Digest producer Ben H. Allen, who forgoes his trademark aquatic ambience and booming low-end to approximate the embossed sound of Jeff Lynne or Scott Litt on "Breaker" and "Living My Life". Even compared to the contemporary indie rock elite working with late-'80s pop-rock at the moment, Fading Frontier sounds happily centrist. Opener "All the Same" shares a title with a Real Estate song, as well as their chiming, interlocked guitars and chipper melodic resolutions. The waltz-timed number with tinny drum machine and slide guitar also happens to share a title with Beach House ("Take Care"). These are crisp and professional recordings, midtempo strides with cleanly strummed open chords, broad harmonies and hooks, unbeholden to any particular subgenre or time period. Meanwhile, the harpsichord and high-capoed guitars of "Duplex Planet" and "Carrion" show a clearheaded psychedelic side of Deerhunter that's more Paisley Underground than Velvet Underground.
Cox has called Fading Frontier his "domestic" record, but you shouldn't expect a facade of contentment: "All the Same" finds Cox turning his attention to a friend's father, who "changed his sex and had no more" out of boredom and loses his wife, kids and will to live as a result. Meanwhile, the foggy ambience of "Take Care" parts to reveal Cox singing about burnt dry ice and rotting corpses. The title is not a tender promise, it's a sarcastic, suicidal salutation. Even if Cox hadn't spent much of the past year in recovery, Fading Frontier would likely still obsess over mortality; this is a Deerhunter record, after all, and so we end up with sturdy, industrious pop-rock songs about creeping death, survival and revival. Cox has urged us not to confuse "I" with me," but has spent a significant portion of his life in and out of hospitals, and both "Snakeskin" and "Duplex Planet" feel inspired by his convalescence." I don't ever want to go back again to the old folks' home," he sighs on the latter, and it feels like an echo of the riddle he posed on Halcyon Digest's "Basement Scene,'" where he claimed, "I don't want to get old" and "I want to get old".
Perhaps he did mean both. Note the play on words of the closer "Carrion", or hell, the double meaning of "remains". If it doesn't initially seem like there's as much at stake as there was on Halcyon Digest or the singleminded commitment of Monomania, Fading Frontier is Cox reckoning with the dissonance of being relatively young man of 33 with a band who's already in legacy-building phase*.* But the tough talk on "Snakeskin" comes from someone whose mere physicality is considered a major health risk and confrontational by default ("I was born already nailed to the cross"). If there isn't a Deerhunter sound, there's a Deerhunter perspective that runs through their work, best summed up in "All the Same"—"take your handicaps/ Channel them and feed them back/ Until they become your strengths." The weird era continues. | 2015-10-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | October 12, 2015 | 8.4 | 1225423f-b5aa-4b7e-9c61-72f681dfdf7d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Ramallah-based electronic musician’s fifth album uses sampling and noise as tactics for disrupting official narratives and defending Palestinian historical memory. | The Ramallah-based electronic musician’s fifth album uses sampling and noise as tactics for disrupting official narratives and defending Palestinian historical memory. | Muqata’a: Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/muqataa-kamil-manqus/ | Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص | The Palestinian DJ Muqata’a’s alias has various translations: “boycott,” “interference,” “disruption.” He also uses his music as a form of political and cultural disruption. As a former member of the collective Ramallah Underground, Muqata’a has been fiercely critical of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. In his solo productions, Muqata’a has found a more artful form of protest, adapting sampling as a way of pushing back against the erasure of Palestinian culture. Muqata’a told The Guardian, “When your heritage is being attacked by the state, you have to find ways of being remembered.” In his productions, sampling becomes a political act of preservation; he takes snippets of classical Arabic music and local field recordings and renders them small but purposeful interruptions.
Where Muqata’a’s previous albums, particularly 2018’s Inkanakuntu, tended toward more traditional hip-hop and trip-hop, Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص, his fifth studio album, leans closer to experimental noise. “Kamil Manqus” translates as “whole imperfect” or “perfect imperfect.” The idea of the glitch is central to the album. Shouts on the street become twisted so that it’s unclear whether they’re expressions of pleasure or pain; snatches of an ascending scale emerge through eerie feedback, like a radio that can’t quite find the right frequency. Referencing his patchworked sampling style, Muqata’a has said, “When our land is being taken away, our culture is muted. So it’s a way to try and disrupt that—being a glitch in the system is very important.” To extend Legacy Russell’s theory of glitch feminism, the glitch in Muqata’a’s productions becomes a powerful means of resisting oppressive narratives that have been imposed upon Palestine.
The glitches on Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص vary from the mechanical bleeps of musical hardware to manipulations of short sung samples; every time a glitch appears, the melodic elements shift and change, making the essence of each track difficult to hold onto. “Shay’an Fa Shay’an شَیئاً فشَیئاً” is twitchy and nervous; its central motif morphs rhythmically as it’s interrupted by shouts and spoken fragments. The clicking, compressed beat of “Ma Wara' مَا وَراء” comes clattering through looped samples before a cavernous bass pushes to the fore, like an old man snoring himself awake to resume a half-forgotten conversation. The album hovers unsteadily between anxiety and defiance, balancing the desire to flee and to fight. It holds discomfort at its core, seeking to explore that unease rather than resolve it.
This discomfort extends to the album’s rhythmic inconsistencies; the moments where a discernible beat pattern breaks through are few and far between. The woozy “Bilharf Alwahad بالحَرف الواحَد” is given new shape several times, swaying between a clattering jungle and drunken techno. A careening breakbeat spins past on “Dirasat ’Ulya دِراسات عُلیا,” excitedly offering a tentative structure to the feedback and fuzz before snatching it away again at a moment’s notice. “Tanqeeb تَنقیب” opens on a nervous clicking of hi-hats before breaking into a fuzzy, forcefully rocking rhythm. This constant rhythmic shifting is deliberately destabilizing, and it’s from this agitation that the album derives so much of its intrigue. Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص suggests that disquiet can be a productive power, a revolutionary force—at the very least, a strategy so as not to be forgotten.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hundebiss | February 9, 2021 | 6.9 | 1225ce56-cd44-4caf-b00e-040fd903e912 | Jemima Skala | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jemima-skala/ | |
On their new collaborative 7-song mixtape, Lil Uzi Vert and Gucci Mane have a Who Framed Roger Rabbit dynamic, where Uzi is the elastic Roger and Gucci the human detective Eddie Valiant. | On their new collaborative 7-song mixtape, Lil Uzi Vert and Gucci Mane have a Who Framed Roger Rabbit dynamic, where Uzi is the elastic Roger and Gucci the human detective Eddie Valiant. | Gucci Mane / Lil Uzi Vert: 1017 vs. the World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22672-1017-vs-the-world/ | 1017 vs. the World | On his recent Hot 97 appearance with Funk Flex, Gucci Mane noted his immense desire to work with new artists that had risen during his time in prison. He name-dropped Lil Yachty, Dae Dae, 21 Savage, and, of course, the partner he collaborated on this new mixtape, 1017 vs. the World, with: Lil Uzi Vert. “Anybody who hot, and the kids say he hot, I think it’s hot” Gucci told Flex. This kind of talk would fit in nicely at any music label boardroom, but because it comes from Gucci Mane, a street-rap elder statesman with a proven track record of promoting and influencing new rappers—particularly in Atlanta—you trust that it comes from a good place. Gucci has been making good on his promise and, with the fourth project of his to be released in 2016, 1017 vs. the World brings Gucci’s slower tempo and aggressive style together with Lil Uzi Vert’s anime-tinged eccentricity and goofiness.
Beyond Gucci’s desire to connect with a younger audience and make music with a young upstart, there’s not much of a meeting point between these two. Uzi is so elastic and cartoonish that it makes the already-traditional trap style of Gucci feel even older by comparison. The tape is certainly not bad, but the chemistry of collaboration is absent: The songs that work best for Gucci’s mellow, bass-heavy nonchalance don’t work as well as for Uzi because he sounds reined in, and the songs where Uzi bounces off the walls in his Nicktoons rockstar manner get bogged down by Gucci. They have a Who Framed Roger Rabbit dynamic, where Uzi is the elastic Roger and Gucci the plodding Eddie Valiant.
There is something intriguing about the sound of Gucci's voice on Honorable C Note’s candy-colored beats, like the opening “Changed My Phone”; it doesn’t fully work, but you can feel him trying to work with a sound outside of his own. Gucci shines most when the sound is on his terms, such as in the Mannie Fresh-produced “Blonde Brigitte”; a heavy, sluggish record where Gucci can rap with adoration about “a black girl with blonde hair, green lipstick she look like a rainbow.” Uzi’s spastic irreverence, meanwhile, is better-served on the video game soundtrack production of “Today!!”
The roster of producers on this brief tape is eclectic, but they can’t bridge the generation chasm. Since returning from prison, Gucci has sounded hearteningly strong if rarely inspired, and the implied madness that sparked much of his best material, from 2008 to 2010, has dissipated. It might have served him next to Uzi's playfulness and flippant disregard of masculinity, his “diamonds on my choker” and “I was watching Food Network and learned how to make the cake.” Uzi isn’t that far removed from Future or Young Thug, both frequent Gucci collaborators, but the difference between Uzi and Thug is that Thug came up under Gucci's tutelage. Thug is still a student, whereas Uzi has no connection to his elder, and it’s evident. | 2016-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 1017 Brick Squad | December 7, 2016 | 6.8 | 12312f10-2c30-4c6e-a263-afb328ef40a1 | Israel Daramola | https://pitchfork.com/staff/israel-daramola/ | null |
The offbeat New York trio’s wicked sense of humor shines on an album of punchy, peculiar songs that register as pleasant and uncomfortable at once. | The offbeat New York trio’s wicked sense of humor shines on an album of punchy, peculiar songs that register as pleasant and uncomfortable at once. | Palberta: Roach Goin’ Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/palberta-roach-goin-down/ | Roach Goin’ Down | Time is rarely wasted on a Palberta record. The New York trio favors jagged, punchy, peculiar songs that make their points in a minute or two but, perhaps paradoxically, work best when absorbed a few dozen at a time. The effect is something like binge-watching a cult TV show: Palberta’s stylistic conceits seem awkward and foreign at first, but over time their odd logic starts to make total sense. Soon enough, it’s hard to remember what life was like without them.
Following a handful of early EPs and singles, the band’s second full-length, 2016’s Bye Bye Berta, sharpened their anarchic vision. Palberta leap another level on the hyper-charged Roach Goin’ Down, an album whose addictiveness reveals another paradox: multi-instrumentalists Lily Konigsberg, Anina Ivry-Block, and Nina Ryser craft a sound that is simultaneously pleasant and uncomfortable. The trio’s rushing energy, danceable staccatos, and sunny singing are as cozy as a basement full of friends listening to records together. But every track subverts musical conventions, too; there are skewed rhythms, off-key vocals, detuned guitar parts. This is music that pokes as it soothes. You can swing and smile to Roach Goin’ Down, but Palberta are not about to let you settle in.
That central dichotomy gives the trio the freedom to get minimal without getting staid. Many compositions have just a couple of parts and a few lines of lyrics. One obvious candidate for Palberta ur-song is “Palberta,” which opens with the trio yelling “We’re Palberta!” before ripping out a minute-long rickety groove that falls somewhere between ESG and Captain Beefheart. Even more representative of their style is “Sound of the Beat,” whose entire lyric is, “Hey! That’s the sound of the beat/I can hear it now! That’s the sound of the beat!” It’s a simple template for a chant-along dance number, and the music is sure to get hips moving. But the group’s stretched singing and discordant guitars make the song unnerving in a way that’s weirdly infectious.
That effect is enhanced by Palberta’s pervasive sense of humor. It’s present in their unfettered playfulness, with all three members switching instruments from song to song. When they sing together, you can imagine that they’re beaming at one other. The music sounds like it was fun to make, too—during “Ziddy,” the three musicians actually crack themselves up—in large part because the band takes so many chances and eschews perfection in favor of enthusiasm.
But there’s also humor of a more wicked stripe on Roach Goin’ Down. Often, Palberta’s sparse words feels parodic, poking fun at self-serious punk and rock clichés by turning mundanities into goofy anthems; the lyrics to “Cherry Baby” are just the title repeated over and over again. “Rich Boy” is a literal parody song: Palberta skewer the Hall and Oates hit “Rich Girl,” switching the chorus from “You’re a rich girl, and you’ve gone too far” to “She’s a rich boy, and she’s gonna go out,” thereby flipping the lazy contempt of the original (which was, in fact, inspired by a boy, but Daryl Hall was too scared to openly criticize a male). The track recalls the trio’s smashing of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” on Bye Bye Berta, but this deconstruction has even sharper teeth.
It’s that sharpness that makes Roach Goin’ Down a new peak for Palberta. The album achieves consistent conceptual acuity without losing the band’s shambling edges or tightrope daring. A lot of self-made indie bands from the past four decades have struck this balance, but the trio’s talent for packing a nuclear punch into a few chords, some rhythmic twists, and a pithy spit of words bears the strongest spiritual resemblance to Minutemen. That’s heady company for a band that isn’t even five years old, but Palberta’s quickly honed prowess and growing mastery of their own slanted vision suggests even higher peaks to come. | 2018-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Wharf Cat | June 12, 2018 | 7.8 | 1238260d-8093-4946-a4e0-e830af7473c8 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
In the wake of longtime Bad Seeds member Blixa Bargeld's departure, Nick Cave issues this double album-- its halves ostensibly split between quiet and more chaotic material-- on which he further explores human nature's dichotomous penchants for piety and depravity. | In the wake of longtime Bad Seeds member Blixa Bargeld's departure, Nick Cave issues this double album-- its halves ostensibly split between quiet and more chaotic material-- on which he further explores human nature's dichotomous penchants for piety and depravity. | Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11700-abattoir-bluesthe-lyre-of-orpheus/ | Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus | Nick Cave has made a long and bountiful career of cataloging mankind's depravities, and how greatly these deeds contrast with our declared pious objectives. But moderation has never been Cave's strength, so when he opens fire with the immoderate double barrels of Abattoir Blues and The Lyre of Orpheus, it appears that he intends to fight audacity with audacity.
For the occasion, Saint Nick has again donned his Boatman's Call preacher darks. You can almost taste the brimstone puffing from his nostrils on Abattoir Blues's opener "Get Ready for Love", which-- in its full-throated gospel-punk regalia-- sounds like it could be the most raucous Blues Explosion track ever. This unruly blast sets the stage for The Bad Seeds' most varied and dynamic collection in years, an ironic fact considering that this is their first album since the departure of designated avant guardian Blixa Bargeld.
I'm not sure when it was decided that double albums now require two titles (is this Outkast's fault?) but the record imprecisely splits its quiet half (Orpheus) from the disorderly half (Abattoir), with only a couple of strays crossing the border in each direction. Compared to previous Nick Cave efforts, its most prominent new feature is the risky inclusion of a backing gospel choir on several numbers, a maneuver so hackneyed that even U2 has largely abandoned it. But on tracks such as "Hiding All Away" the extra voices manage to dovetail nicely with The Bad Seeds' more theatrical, over-the-top tendencies-- only the most devoutly secular will find cause to object.
Throughout his career, Cave has avoided overt political and social commentary, and on the surface, that remains the case here, with the bulk of Abattoir/Orpheus ostensibly consisting of love songs directed to God, nature, or some other nameless "she" or "babe." But it'd be pretty difficult not to notice the panicked, apocalyptic subtext that veins through tracks like "Cannibal's Hymn" or "Messiah Ward". "Do you feel what I feel, dear?/ Mass extinction, darling, hypocrisy/ These things are not good for me," Cave sings on "Abattoir Blues", a song which attempts to inject some humor into Armageddon. "The sky is on fire, the dead are heaped across the land/ I went to bed last night and my moral code got jammed/ I woke up this morning with a Frappucino in my hand."
Elsewhere, Cave struggles to decide whether the arts should be merely an entertaining distraction for an audience or if the artist has a responsibility to direct our focus on society's ills. On "Nature Boy", the singer gets advice from his father after watching a gory news report: "Don't look away now.../ In the end it is beauty/ That is going to save the world." And on the writer's block lament "There She Goes, My Beautiful World", he notes the link between creativity and the ability to endure and stand witness to hardship. "John Wilmot, penned his poetry riddled with the pox.../ St. John of the Cross did his best stuff imprisoned in a box/ And Johnny Thunders was half alive when he wrote 'Chinese Rocks'."
But Cave also creates escapist music, singing extensively of linden trees and cornflowers, red-breasted robins, and gamboling lambs. And it sure seems as though he slams the door on the notion of art saving the world on The Lyre of Orpheus's title track. In Cave's sardonic, tedious rewrite of the Greek myth, the music created by Orpheus' instrument spreads across the Earth like a murderous pestilence until God gets pissed and throws him down into hell where Eurydice threatens to shove the lyre up Orpheus' "orifice." (Unfortunately, this song sounds no better than it looks on paper.)
It would be foolish, however, to think that you could get through a Nick Cave project this ambitious without a few clunkers. At least here Cave's missteps occur when his reach exceeds his grasp, and the songs that fail manage to do so dramatically rather than boringly. If you're able to hunker down and dodge the occasional duds, you're rewarded at the finish line with "O Children", a straight-faced, full chorus number that somehow overcomes every inspirational music cliche (including a lyrical references to "Amazing Grace") to become genuinely beautiful and stirring. It may even leave you with a brief but powerful feeling that piety may yet someday overcome depravity. | 2004-10-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-10-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | October 5, 2004 | 7.8 | 123d0add-e998-4076-a86d-344943dfe512 | Matthew Murphy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-murphy/ | null |
Eight years after “Huzzah,” the Brooklyn rapper is back on his own label, back on his own terms, and just as defiant and provocative as ever. | Eight years after “Huzzah,” the Brooklyn rapper is back on his own label, back on his own terms, and just as defiant and provocative as ever. | Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire: Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mr-muthafuckin-exquire-mr-muthafuckin-exquire/ | Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire | “Huzzah!” This was the triumphant cry Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire rode to viral success in 2011. The Brooklyn-raised rapper broke through with an outlandish attitude and fluid flow, bragging about downing half a gallon of budget vodka over an eerily funky beat sourced from underground gore master Necro. A remix to “Huzzah!” roped in Das Racist, Despot, Danny Brown, and El-P, boosting eXquire’s profile even further. He signed to Universal records. The major label platform didn’t work out for the uncompromisingly creative rapper—pretty much to no one’s surprise. As he rhymed after leaving the label, “When I came, niggas said I was just 40s and orgies/Took all the deep shit I rhymed about and ignored it... My stupid ass sold his soul and didn't even get the fame—I ain't even fuck Rihanna.” Eight years later, eXquire finds himself back where he started, self-releasing music entirely on his own terms via his Chocolate Rabbit enterprise. The move feels full circle, like the welcome reclaiming of his soul.
eXquire's self-titled album starts in fiery fashion with “FCK Boy!” Over a lo-fi track that sounds like a no-budget Italian horror movie blasting from a dying television, eXquire gets right to the rabble-rousing: “R. Kelly can rot in hell, but his music too good to mute/Oops!/Telling me no more ‘Ignition’ while I'm dancing/But then I'm ‘posed to stand for the fucking national anthem?" Next, he’s alluding to reparations and a "Gucci fabric noose” and adding, "Fuck Prada, Burberry, fuck Louis Vuitton too/They ain’t do nothing racist but that's just in case they do.”
The tirade is eXquire in capsule form, erudite and profane, delivering pop culture and politics in a spellbinding, seamless flow. As much as he channels no-fucks-given icons of bygone eras like Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Eazy-E, and Willie D—and Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire gleefully hits Efil4zaggin levels of expletives—his lyrics have always offered savvy political commentary and catharsis for those prepared to hear it. On the slinky piano of “Nosediiive,” eXquire namechecks Abbie Hoffman and updates his philosophies for a world of surveillance capitalism, where corporations are “pulling our privacy from under our feet.” “SpankBang favorites and Amazon wish lists/Algorithm trigger words, they put me on their hit list,” he raps.
Balancing the politics are eXquire’s reflections on self-doubt and depression. On “RumbleFish,” over a hazy funk beat by long-time foil CONSTROBUZ, eXquire flashes back to being a 12-year-old kid in the projects, retreating behind comic book fantasies and watching his mom in a physically abusive relationship with a man who’d go on to kill his next girlfriend. Despite the heavy subject matter, eXquire’s sing-song flow and the track’s nostalgic glow make it redolent of Slick Rick’s “Hey Young World”—it’s genuinely tender and moving. Naturally, eXquire follows it with the unapologetically coarse “I Love Hoes,” which expresses exactly what its title promises. But that’s always been the real draw with eXquire: He’s a complicated and multi-faceted artist who defies pigeonholing. He conveys this sentiment on the hook to "RumbleFish" in pleading terms, where he repeats, “Don't box me in, don't box me in.” It might not be as catchy as “Huzzah,” but it feels twice as heartfelt. | 2019-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Chocolate Rabbit | July 11, 2019 | 7.8 | 123fea3e-ee22-4ffa-919b-e5e7d95c7a43 | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
The influence of Big Star and Deep Purple looms large over the first collaborative album by Fugazi's Brendan Canty and singer-songwriter/remixer Rich Morel, who met as members of Bob Mould's touring band. | The influence of Big Star and Deep Purple looms large over the first collaborative album by Fugazi's Brendan Canty and singer-songwriter/remixer Rich Morel, who met as members of Bob Mould's touring band. | Deathfix: Deathfix | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17809-deathfix-deathfix/ | Deathfix | Brendan Canty played drums in Fugazi; Rich Morel's a singer-songwriter with a side-hustle remixing Nelly Furtado songs for the club. The two met when they both joined Bob Mould's touring band (Morel and the ex-Hüsker host a monthly DJ night in D.C.). The stylistic gap between a post-punk legend like Canty and a song-and-dance man like Morel might seem a bridge too far, but Canty and Morel's pedigrees, impressive as they are, don't really loom all that large on Deathfix, their new band's self-titled debut. Canty and Morel bonded over a love of shaggy 1970s rock, and there's plenty of Big Star and Deep Purple's influence to be found on Deathfix, cut with swampy grunge, post-rock, and a touch of funk. So many new bands from established artists hinge on the tension between the two styles, but there's not much tension of any kind to be found on the surprisingly loose-limbed Deathfix. Unmoored from expectation, uninterested in rehashing past glories, Canty and Morel make for the basement, looking to make a racket all their own.
Opener "Better Than Bad" practically swings an arm out the window and asks if you need a lift. The glam-spangled, sweet-as-Raspberries power-popper seems to be at least 90% hook, its ribbony lead guitars driving the song's melody off into the night. "Low Lying Dreams" introduces the first of several unseemly characters, as Morel's Mark Lanegan-worthy leer gives way to a sweeping eastern-tinged crescendo. Faraquet's Devin Ocampo and Medications' Mark Cisneros joined Canty and Morel in the studio, fleshing out their demos with bits of their own, and the results are remarkably fluid, never showboaty, perpetually locked-in.
Most of Deathfix's lyrics concern themselves with the down-and-out. Characters sidestep sobriety, idolize wantonly, die in depressing fashions. Take "Hospital", which flits between the mania of a fever-dream ("the patients are turning red") to a young girl, a do-not-resuscitate order, and a patient's bed with a regrettably high turnover. Morel and Canty won't paint you a portrait, exactly, but there's enough detail in these thumbnail sketches to suggest a very real (and very troubled) cast of characters hanging in the shadows of these songs. Until "Dali's House", that is.
"Dali's House" is a goof; that's the only explanation. Riding a stock funk groove with a distinct jam band lean to it, "Dali's" finds our speak-singing narrator wishing he himself could house a loose gathering of cool kids from the annals of history: Jane Birkin, Muhammed Ali, Mr. Dali himself. If some guy wryly intoning a who's who over a locked groove sounds a little familiar, that's because it's supposed to: "I wish I was James Murphy's house," Morel notes, "because you can steal ideas, and Daft Punk's always playing there." It's kind of a rimshot in search of a punchline, but there's just a hint of acid in the delivery that makes it awfully hard to conclusively figure for a burn or a tongue-in-cheek tribute. Considering how quickly the song devolves into silliness-- "I wish I was the guy from House's house"-- we'll go with the latter. But while the first DJ to fake-out an LCD-expectant crowd with "Dali's House" is a hero in waiting, essentially it's just one of those jokes that gets less funny every time you hear it.
Deathfix quickly recovers with "Playboy", which charts a surprisingly nimble path between tricky jazz rock chords and starry-eyed, lighter-flicking balladry. But the snarl of its guitars can't keep the slow-burning "Mind Control" from getting a bit bogged down in its own murk. There's no shortage of dynamism in Deathfix's arrangements, a lot of little parts sliding past the periphery. But the strange paths some of these songs travel to get to their eventual crescendos occasionally gets them stuck in one place, or one mood, for too long. Penultimate track "Mind Control" gradually builds to a window-shaking post-rock climax, but it takes eight minutes and a false ending to get there. Deathfix gets its expansive, laid-back feel from the relaxed conditions under which it came together, but that's also the source of its occasional directionlessness and the fuck-around vibe of "Dali". The approach gives Deathfix a certain slightness that may rankle fans of either of its principals' more serious work. It's hard to imagine that bothering Morel and Canty much, though; they're clearly having way too much fun. | 2013-03-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2013-03-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | Dischord | March 8, 2013 | 6.4 | 1245b7b8-137f-42db-955e-7b483dea9a02 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
With a nonchalant flow, Eto paints a grim and familiar world where only survival-of-the-fittest tactics prevail alongside sumptuous production from Superior. | With a nonchalant flow, Eto paints a grim and familiar world where only survival-of-the-fittest tactics prevail alongside sumptuous production from Superior. | Eto / Superior: Long Story Short | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eto-superior-long-story-short/ | Long Story Short | “The new crack era ain't built for soft flesh,” snarls Eto midway through Long Story Short, the rapper’s 10-track collaboration with German producer Superior. With a granular voice that radiates warmth even when delivering grisly threats, Eto depicts a universe we've heard many times before: Born into a hellish environment, struggling to get by and inevitably getting sucked into the crime and drug world, where survival-of-the-fittest tactics ensure only the most bloodthirsty and ruthless prosper. This time, hell is Rochester, New York, where Eto hails from and where over half the city's children live in a state of poverty.
On “Another Day,” Eto updates a lyrical sentiment from JAY Z's “Dead Presidents”: “It was all good just a month ago/Now if I let a week pass, it'll get comfortable/Today's math didn't pay cash—it brought peace though.” The calm doesn’t last long: Next verse, Eto’s rationalizing destroying a foe—“I blow his lights out calm”— on the basis that “he likely got a junkyard pops and a piped-out moms,” before he and his team gloat how they’ll “pop a cork on his grave date.” Backed by lush, soul-dripping strings on “It’s Only Right,” Eto sketches surroundings populated by “young’un going through gun phases/Rest of ‘em die young ages/Backstabbers, front pages/Homicide drug cases.” Then on the flute-infused “Fortune,” he blithely recalls “a few fights with stabs/Juice wiped and grabbed.” He switches between block-corner philosopher and fighter from song to song, bar to bar.
Long Story Short gets over mainly on Eto’s nonchalant delivery. He shares Roc Marciano’s same lack of compassion: The violence may be brutal, but Eto is always unruffled. Parts of Long Story Short recall Clipse album-closers, the moments where Malice and Pusha-T inched towards confessing regret and then inched away. But Eto’s remorse doesn’t concern the specific ill deeds he’s seen or carried out—it seems directed at the broader fact he was placed in a situation where they had to happen in the first place. On “Wolves” he ad-libs it most tellingly: “If all of us is guilty then no one is, you hear me?” Rappers have long channeled elements of the Scarface fable and idolized Tony Montana’s ruthless approach to achieving the American capitalist dream. But Long Story Short feels closer in spirit to Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America: The footage can be wickedly violent, but the tone is rueful. | 2019-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Below System Records | April 12, 2019 | 7.6 | 1248b8eb-d07a-4eeb-b2d3-fc64b4d94fd3 | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
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 a dream pop classic, a spare and gauzy outpouring of feeling that still ripples through modern music. | 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 a dream pop classic, a spare and gauzy outpouring of feeling that still ripples through modern music. | Mazzy Star: So Tonight That I Might See | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mazzy-star-so-tonight-that-i-might-see/ | So Tonight That I Might See | In a 1994 interview, a journalist asked Hope Sandoval, the vocalist of the dream pop group Mazzy Star, how she would respond to those who find the band “too dark.” Sandoval’s answer was simple: “That’s part of reality. Sometimes life is dark.” Mazzy Star made music for those who implicitly know this to be true—introverts, wallflowers, loners. People who spend enough time lost in their own minds to understand that melancholy is often mistaken for misery.
Raised in a large Mexican American working-class family in East Los Angeles, Sandoval was comfortable lingering in shadows behind a wall of long, dark hair. As a child, she was intensely shy and struggled in school. Like so many thinkers and dreamers, Sandoval found refuge in music and often ditched class to listen to records. She especially adored the Rolling Stones, particularly their covers of blues classics like Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” or 1965’s The Rolling Stones, Now!, which includes versions of Bo Diddley, Willie Dixon, and Chuck Berry songs. At night, Sandoval would sneak into nightclubs to catch performances by bands like Rain Parade, the Dream Syndicate, and the Three O’Clock, leaders of an L.A. ’60s psych-pop revival called the Paisley Underground.
The co-founder of Rain Parade, David Roback, was quiet like Sandoval, completely engrossed in his own vision. Willfully enigmatic by most accounts, he idolized musicians like John Lennon and Syd Barrett, trailblazers who pushed their art past pop beginnings toward avant-garde ends. Roback left Rain Parade after one record (1983’s Emergency Third Rail Power Trip) and soon partnered with former Dream Syndicate bassist Kendra Smith and started a psychedelic blues project called Opal. Meanwhile, Sandoval and her friend Sylvia Gomez had formed a band of their own, a folk duo called Going Home. A demo tape made its way to Roback, who ended up producing the group’s first—and never released—record.
In the middle of Opal’s winter 1987 tour supporting the Jesus and Mary Chain, Smith suddenly quit the band and abdicated her rock’n’roll throne for a quiet life in the woods. Down a vocalist, Roback called up Sandoval, who flew across the country to help finish out the tour, something she later called “the hardest thing I ever did.” Back in California, Roback and Sandoval began writing together. They decided that this new material required its own identity. “Opal was David and Kendra’s thing,” Sandoval succinctly explained. “So we started Mazzy Star.”
Mazzy Star’s debut, 1990’s She Hangs Brightly, is a staggering introduction to this communion. The record sounds straight out of a haunted honky-tonk, all country twang drowned by a hefty coat of feedback; Entertainment Weekly put it best when they said it was “as if Patsy Cline had lived long enough to record with the Velvet Underground.” She Hangs Brightly was a success by indie standards, garnering positive reviews and airplay on college and alternative-rock radio. Meanwhile, the band’s label, Rough Trade, declared bankruptcy and dissolved, leaving Mazzy Star without a home.
Then, in 1993, after being picked up by Capitol, Mazzy Star emerged from two years in near-seclusion with their major-label debut, So Tonight That I Might See. Produced once again by Roback, its 10 tracks hover on the border between consciousness and a dreamland that quietly threatens to tip over into a surrealistic nightmare. Though it evokes musical touchstones like Cowboy Junkies, So Tonight That I Might See feels totally removed from time or place—a retreat completely inside the dark corners of two introverted minds. “I prefer the Rip Van Winkle approach to art,” Roback once quipped. Mazzy Star’s dream pop contemporaries, like the UK’s Cocteau Twins or East Coast Ivy Leaguers Galaxie 500, each had their own unique energies; here, finally, was the dream pop for the glitzy decay that is L.A.
At the heart of Mazzy Star is the tacit interplay between Roback and Sandoval, outsiders who built a creative partnership based on trust and intuition. “There’s an improvisational element to what we do,” Roback explained to Guitar Player in 1994. “We don’t play dots on a page. My approach to the guitar is in response to the song’s feeling.” As a result, the destination of each song is unclear; their heavy-lidded melodies can be so atmospheric that you could seemingly fall through them for an eternity. “Bells Ring” is driven by a lethargic guitar and an undercurrent of fuzzy bliss. “Nobody asked about your story/Nobody wants to know the reason why,” Sandoval sings with languor. The eerily seductive “Mary of Silence” and an acoustic cover of Love frontman Arthur Lee’s “Five String Serenade” sound like ghostly lullabies lingering in the purgatory of twilight. Especially sparse is “Into Dust,” which recognizes the inevitable end of love, life, and pain: “I could possibly be fading/Or have something more to gain/…I could feel my eyes turning to dust/And two strangers turning into dust.” There’s no sense of resolve on these songs, only self-obliteration and the inescapable hypnosis of a waking dream.
Rather than shoving uneasy feelings—longing, mortality, loneliness—away, So Tonight That I Might See bears witness. The effect is the revelation of comfort amid solitude. Sandoval yearns for a world just beyond her reach on the swooning, organ-drenched “Blue Light.” With a steady softness, she strings together impressions of this distant land, the shimmer of light reflected in a best friend’s eye, a ship sailing towards nameless harbors, and “waves crashing me by.”
Mazzy Star’s downcast softness existed in stark contrast to their ’90s alternative counterparts, who tended to express their discontent through fury and a fuck-you. So Tonight That I Might See has moments where the images remain ethereal but the music grows harder, intoxicated on a mix of elation and exhaustion. “But she’s just like lightning/She goes right through you/Then you know you’ll never be the same,” Sandoval moans on “She’s My Baby,” whose bluesy grunge sounds straight out of Twin Peaks’ Roadhouse. If her voice is usually on the verge of floating away, on these songs she sinks into the earth and digs into an almost carnal hunger: “After I stuck my hands/Into your ground/And pulled out somebody else’s son/I felt a little unfortunate/A little mistake.” So Tonight That I Might See is remembered for its gauzy torpor, but it is equally full of moments like this: reminders that abstract, internal feelings like sadness, longing, agony, and regret can be articulated in corporeal ways.
All of their dusky amblings come to a head on So Tonight That I Might See’s monumental title track, a seven-minute gothic hallucination that echoes the wandering mysticism of the Doors’ “The End” or the Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” Channeling the incantatory spirits of Patti Smith and Stevie Nicks, Sandoval conjures a vision of transcendence: “Come so close that I might see/The crash of light come down on me.” As her spoken word spirals into a monochrome trance, Roback jabs at his guitar as if he’s sticking a fork into an outlet over and over again just to feel the shock. When the track finally waltzes into the dark, it wraps up without fanfare only a sudden stillness.
Rather than letting So Tonight That I Might See disappear into an ether of its own conjuring, Capitol pushed the album’s most accessible track for nearly a year. “Fade Into You” opens the record with a pensive acoustic guitar, quivering slide, and gently shaking tambourine. From this reverie comes Sandoval’s sandalwood murmur: “I want to hold the hand inside you/I want to take a breath that’s true.” “Fade Into You” is a haunting ode to all-consuming desire, perhaps one of the best ever penned. (It borrows a chord progression from another song about evanescence, Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”) Its melody burns like the last candle of the evening with delicate, curliquing tendrils of smoke. Like all of Mazzy Star’s music, “Fade Into You” urges you not to think but to feel; it’s dream pop in the purest sense. Capitol’s director of marketing put it a little differently to Billboard: The track had serious makeout potential. “All those kids have boyfriends and girlfriends, and they like to neck, and I don’t think they listen to Barry White,” the executive explained. The label’s faith paid off: By summer 1994, “Fade Into You” was a hit, and by 1995, So Tonight That I Might See went platinum. Countless shows and movies have used the song to soundtrack slow dances and unrequited romances ever since.
But mainstream success was not Mazzy Star’s goal and they refused to let the indie fame induced by “Fade Into You” compromise their individuality. (“Follow anybody, is that what you do?” Sandoval sings on “Unreflected” with atypical contempt.) Roback and Sandoval were known for being painfully shy in interviews. They had equal trouble performing live, thanks to nerves and the intimate, lulling nature of their songs. “Once you’re onstage, you’re expected to perform,” Sandoval explained to Rolling Stone in 1994. “I don’t do that. I always feel awkward about just standing there and not speaking to the audience. It’s difficult for me.” In a clip of the band’s set at Neil Young’s 1994 Bridge School Benefit, Sandoval stands alone at the lip of a massive stage, folding into herself. Without the cover of darkness, she looks like she wishes the earth would open up and swallow her whole.
As the popularity of “Fade Into You” bloomed, Capitol decided that the song needed a new visual. The original music video recalled the song itself: a series of fleeting glimpses shaded by shadows. The second version, directed by Kevin Kerslake (who had filmed the clip for She Hangs Brightly’s “Halah)” is considerably brighter and weaves blue-toned performance footage with shots of the band wandering through a blazing Southern California desert. Crucially, the VP of A&R at Capitol told Billboard, the new video “showed Hope more.”
The undertext of a decision to push a female frontperson further into the spotlight is that beauty (or, more cynically, sex) sells. But capitalizing on Sandoval’s image perhaps unintentionally trivialized her role in the band, making her seem like merely the Nico to Roback’s Lou Reed. (Nico, of course, spent a lifetime reclaiming her agency from the myth of the muse.) But So Tonight That I Might See is not about keeping one musician behind a curtain. The creative partnership between Roback and Sandoval is the heart of Mazzy Star. They knew that the band would wilt if pushed into the spotlight more than necessary. So they stuck to the shadows, two quiet, introspective souls deeply engaged in one dream. Together, they drifted into a hazy unknown. | 2020-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | June 14, 2020 | 9.4 | 125004d4-db79-474c-b362-d07dbc72525f | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
The Welsh singer and producer leaves her indie rock past behind and mixes dream pop and ambient techno on her immensely varied and fully-formed debut. | The Welsh singer and producer leaves her indie rock past behind and mixes dream pop and ambient techno on her immensely varied and fully-formed debut. | Kelly Lee Owens: Kelly Lee Owens | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23032-kelly-lee-owens-kelly-lee-owens/ | Kelly Lee Owens | In electronic music, debut albums are often statements of aesthetic purpose. They are initial arguments in favor of a certain style or technique and pledges of allegiance to this or that subgenre. The debut of Welsh-born musician Kelly Lee Owens feels more personal; not so much a way of saying, “This is what I do,” but, “This is who I am.” The 28-year-old musician grew up singing in choirs and dabbled in bass and drums. In her early 20s, she interned at XL Recordings, played in the indie rock band called the History of Apple Pie, and worked in record stores. It was there she met fellow coworkers Daniel Avery and Ghost Culture, who got her into the studio and gave her a push to put her own music out in the world. But her debut album doesn’t feel like a debut. Its songs don’t so much feel like the product of her experiences as they do some hard-to-measure leap beyond them—a message in a bottle that’s come bobbing back from somewhere in the future.
One of the big surprises is the extent to which dream pop gives the record its overarching shape, despite her tutelage with techno guys Avery and Ghost Culture, and despite the floor-filling bent of her early remix of Jenny Hval’s “Kingsize.” The first sounds on the album are strings and her own voice, beatific in its aura of breath and reverb, paired with deep sub-bass. Over ringing tabla accents and a synth melody that burbles like a water fountain shot in slo-mo, she sings of love and the meeting of minds. There are more gaps than words, lending the impression that we’re listening in on her inchoate thoughts as they assemble themselves out of nothingness. The album’s second song, “Arthur,” is a tribute to Arthur Russell, the avant-pop polymath, and while it may not sound much like his own work, her samples of running water and her echo’s wispy contrails capture his vision of music as something that could emerge from the mist, or disappear into it.
There’s no single stylistic through-line and the tempos are all over the map. “Evolution” is bleepy, minimalist techno that’s content to hang back in the shadows; “CBM,” whose title condenses the song’s looped chant of “The colors, the beauty, and the motion,” is a dreamier take on peak-time abandon, when strobe lights turn a dancefloor’s moving bodies into snapshots of a roiling sea. At the other end of the spectrum is the shimmering “Keep Walking,” which sounds like the Jesus and Mary Chain covered in balloons and glitter, or the gorgeous “Anxi.,” where Owens channels Sarah Records and Slumberland in falsetto harmonies the color and texture of milk quartz. In the song’s first section, it’s easy to imagine it as an ambient remix of Frankie Rose.
Her songs are dead simple, often consisting of just a handful of electronic instruments: one or two synth parts, three or four drum sounds, and her voice, layered and patched through endless reverb. But she keeps them engaging by frequently switching up what would seem at first to be completely linear progressions. “Keep Walking” could be three songs in one: the introductory dream-pop passage constitutes another of her impressionistic interior monologues (“City through the window/Make it our own/Run to it/Plastic cherry blossom/Eyes never close/Run to it”). Then there’s a bouncy bridge for 808, chimes, and bass synth—an understated but effective drum groove she could easily draw out for six or eight minutes if the dancefloor were full and the fog guns were firing. Finally, an outro of wordless falsetto and echoing murmurs, like an entirely benevolent siren song.
Because it centers largely around vibes, you either submit to its spell or you don’t. There’s not much to pick apart here, and formalists may find themselves grasping at straws. But in her best tracks, there is a kind of magic at work—an emotional resonance that can’t be traced back to the rudiments of technology or arrangement. In her interview with Pitchfork, Owens talked about her interest in healing frequencies, and you can hear that play out in tones that feel super-charged with energy: plucked kalimbas producing impossible-to-map overtones, bass fifths that seem to make your entire body vibrate. The closing song, “8,” deploys a slowly oscillating sitar, for Westerners long an icon of spiritual music, as the launchpad for a 10-minute meditation on breath, rhythm, and drone. Whatever actual healing powers she may be channeling probably depends upon the patient; nevertheless, Kelly Lee Owens presents an artist with an unusually focused vision of what music is capable of. | 2017-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | March 28, 2017 | 8 | 125330ad-cae3-4fab-ade9-5f5639a947e9 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
A collaboration between the Japanese electronic artist and the Raincoats founding member lands at the natural middle of each musician's sensibilities. | A collaboration between the Japanese electronic artist and the Raincoats founding member lands at the natural middle of each musician's sensibilities. | Ana da Silva / Phew: Island | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ana-da-silva-phew-island/ | Island | When Phew and Ana da Silva speak to each other on their collaborative record Island, their words have to pierce a thick fog before they can reach their intended recipient. The synthesized drones and stray noises that curl around each woman’s voice threaten to submerge them entirely, and so when the two artists speak, or sing, or speak-sing to each other in the other’s native language—Phew in da Silva’s Portuguese, da Silva in Phew’s Japanese—their words fly like detached missives from a sanctuary under siege. Their communication here does not unfurl as easy conversation (even though one of the songs is titled “Conversation”), but shudders out in fits and starts: a corrupted distress signal. Island is an unsteady record, less interested in closing the gap between its two participants than it is in exploring that gap for all its nooks and crannies. It seeks the productive friction that can sometimes emerge from misunderstanding, alienation, and confusion—the learning and healing that can result from losing one’s bearings.
Since playing in punk bands in the late 1970s and early ’80s (da Silva in the Raincoats, Phew in Aunt Sally), both artists have seized upon the voice as an instrument of provocation. Punk, after all, was mostly about the cynical passion the voice can rouse when compressed into a sneer. But neither the Raincoats nor Aunt Sally settled into the mold set by Ramones or the Sex Pistols, even if they were inspired by them. Teetering on the edge of punk and post-punk, the Raincoats embodied more color and flair than the most famous acts of either adjacent genre, while Aunt Sally folded psychedelic and experimental textures into a freewheeling punk mode. For both bands, punk was a starting point, not an end in itself—the ethos of irreverence mattered more than—and outlasted—a commitment to power chords and yelps. The solo records Phew and da Silva have released in this millennium let their curiosity roam even further from their more structured origins, and Island lands at the natural middle of each musician's sensibilities. Da Silva’s needling percussion and wiry melodies spur on Phew’s voice-curdling miasma. It’s a good fit.
Island’s strongest, climactic track “The fear song” begins with a whisper and a trace of voice that sounds like it’s sampled from someone’s answering machine. A drone buoys the two voices, and then the voices evolve to take the place of more typical instrumentation. The beat feels as if it derives from a clipped syllable, a stutter excised from its context; the percussive effect comes not just from the “k” sound at the start of the fragment, but from the hard line left by its removal. As the drone swells, Phew and da Silva raise the volume of their voices to rise above it. They sing few notes; it’s not the complexity of their melodies that makes their performances compelling, but the striving quality of their delivery, the searching, reaching urgency to their wails. The beat picks up, and both women hasten their words to match it, repeating the same phrase to each other. It sounds as if they were running to each other in pitch darkness, navigating only by the sounds of their voices and their echoes.
Many of the vocal tracks on Island follow a similar structure: A whisper grows into a bellow as the instrumental environment starts closing in. At times, like on “Konichiwa!,” cracks appear in the record’s overall malaise. As a voice—an original recording or maybe a cut-up sample from a Japanese language training program, it’s hard to tell—repeats the title, a low synthesizer uncoils a sour melody. A drum machine beat stutters and sways. But, in patches, the melody sweetens, brightens up, cuts through the haze. The album’s closer, “Dark but bright,” enjoys a similar joviality in its melodic development, the kind of semi-comic synthesizer ornamentation that populated da Silva’s 2005 solo album The Lighthouse. “Dark but bright” even samples birdsong, as if the world inside Island were finally allowing the sun to rise. In these moments, Phew and da Silva sound less like they’re searching for each other and scrabbling for common ground. It’s like the air has cleared, and in the new light, the two musicians can finally greet each other. | 2018-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | shouting out loud! | October 6, 2018 | 7.3 | 12551753-ff19-4a5c-acb3-e4c1903ce014 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The jazz trio continues its outstanding work, reflecting in their music our age of information and chatter. And they do a mean cover of "Galang". | The jazz trio continues its outstanding work, reflecting in their music our age of information and chatter. And they do a mean cover of "Galang". | Vijay Iyer Trio: Historicity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13412-historicity/ | Historicity | The classic Bill Evans Trio, with Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums, is sometimes cited as the best jazz piano trio ever. It's not a point I'd argue-- they were otherworldly. On Portrait in Jazz it doesn't even sound like three musicians playing. The record meets your ear like a feeling meets your brain-- you can't grasp it but you know it's there. Few pieces of music made by more than one person suggest quiet and solitude as powerfully.
The Vijay Iyer Trio, with Stephan Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums, is almost a negative image of the old Bill Evans Trio. The sense of telepathic interplay is there, but it's put toward different ends. If Portrait in Jazz is the sound of aloneness, Historicity is the sound of crowds, a heaving, seething swirl of cross-talk, phrases meeting in often unexpected combinations. It reflects how far both jazz and our world have come in the last 50-odd years. Today, we're never far from information and chatter, and Iyer uses both his own compositions and those of others to stir conversation with his bandmates.
The most strikingly modern and heavy-hitting track is Iyer's cover of M.I.A.'s "Galang", a startling, compact, and ultimately breathtaking reinvention of the song. It's not some Brad Mehldau look-a-jazz-guy-playing-Radiohead thing either-- this has all the vitality of the original coursing through its thundering block chords, funky backbeat, and fluttering hints of melody on the chorus. He uses the upper octaves of the piano to hammer out a Morse code-like pattern at the beginning of each verse. It stands perfectly well on its own, but it also made me appreciate the original more than I used to, which is about all you can ask of a cover.
The other covers don't require quite as much stretching. Stevie Wonder's "Big Brother" is a natural fit for this trio, while the version of pianist Andrew Hill's "Smoke Stack" reveals an ingredient in Iyer's own sound with its rushing phrases and unceasing motion. Historicity is defined in the liners as "a condition of being placed in the stream of history," and this is something jazz musicians have long been conscious of and displayed in the way they quote each other or interpret each other's tunes. Iyer's placement of a Hill interpretation right next to his own "Helix", a cascading, slow-building composition that showcases his pulsing chord-cloud style, historicizes his work in a way by showing its roots. Gilmore's solo is a marvel of textured, nuanced drumming that never gives up its sense of rhythm.
The trio's take on Julius Hemphill's "Dogon A.D." is faithful to the original's sense of hobbled rhythm and high/low melodic interaction, with Iyer's piano dueling against Crump's lurching arco bass. Iyer's own "Segment for Sentiment #2" creates a space for reflection at the album's close, dialing back the ferocity of the trio's interplay for a quiet, almost Evans-ish conversation. It's the kind of respite from daily overstimulation we all need. Iyer and his cohorts have spun the piano trio format into great art here, acknowledging their contemporaries and their musical ancestors. Iyer may be floating in the stream of jazz history now, but if he keeps making records like this, he may one day be a rock that influences the stream's very flow. | 2009-11-18T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2009-11-18T01:00:04.000-05:00 | null | ACT Music + Vision | November 18, 2009 | 7.8 | 12596933-7dde-43cd-82e2-15f788a34d8f | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The British band’s outrageous and eclectic third album attests to the worth of putting in an honest effort in the face of near-constant gloom. | The British band’s outrageous and eclectic third album attests to the worth of putting in an honest effort in the face of near-constant gloom. | The 1975: A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-1975-a-brief-inquiry-into-online-relationships/ | A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships | The 1975 dare to be too much. Led by frontman and lyricist Matty Healy, the quartet has made its name on an unruly brand of abundance throughout this decade: musically, referentially, emotionally, all of it. Did Healy pop pills, lick coke, and twirl a revolver before holding up a convenience store and getting shot in the torso—but ending up totally fine!—in the video for early hit “Robbers”? He did. Did they lavish the title I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it upon their second album because it was the only thing grandiloquent enough to match the record’s fizzy mix of sunblast synths, plastic guitars, and millennial neuroses? Of course. And did they preface their new LP, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, with a 24-page manifesto that includes manic scribbles (“THIS IDEA HAS BEEN DONE BEFORE”), a picture of Healy petting a dog whilst on the toilet, and a technophobic survey of our contemporary clusterfuck of an existence that concludes: “THE LEFT AND RIGHT GROW MORE APART BUT YOU CAN JUST CLICK ‘ADD TO CART.’” Yes, yes, and more yes. To infinity.
Such a riot of excess may cause the casual observer to think: Who the fuck do these guys think they are?! This is reasonable. But it is also misguided. Because the 1975 are a thrillingly unreasonable band for unreasonable times. Healy is their generational mouthpiece—a guy who’s never met a contradiction he couldn’t fully inhabit, to arresting effect.
The 29-year-old is a pop star who is both infatuated with and embarrassed by pop stardom. He will play his charismatic part onstage or in interviews and then immediately flog himself for doing so, as his incessant inner monologue does battle inside his skull. Five years ago, in an effort to quiet his brain buzz, he turned to heroin, and then to rehab, and is now a former addict who is wary of glamorizing the rock’n’roll cliches he’s lived through. He is constantly online and constantly alarmed by what that does to our sense of self, our humanity. He hates Trump but knows that talking about hating Trump is boring. He is the son of two British TV stars who, in his youth, was treated to regular family visits by the likes of Sting; he also once said, with a smile, that his “biggest fear” is “being Sting.” He’s an atheist who believes in a thing called love.
All of these curiosities play out spectacularly on A Brief Inquiry. The album is similar to its predecessor in its boundless sense of style, swerving from Afrobeats to brushed-snare jazz balladry to one track that sounds like a trap remix of a Bon Iver ayahuasca trip. But whereas I like it when you sleep… sometimes could be a tick too clever and unwieldy, A Brief Inquiry, produced almost entirely by Healy and drummer George Daniel, is more purposeful. Take that Bon Iver–type freakout, “I Like America & America Likes Me,” where Healy’s voice is transformed into a smear of Auto-Tuned slogans, an adbot on the fritz. But listen closely and his bionic spasms start to sound like the meter readings of a society that’s moving too fast to process anything in a meaningful way. “Am I a liar?!/Will this help me lay down?!” Healy yelps, too harried to stop for answers, too wired to take a nap. It’s impossible to tell exactly where his actual voice ends and where the digitized effects take hold.
When it comes to the 1975’s more widescreen scope—filtering in culture’s ills along with personal ones—the album hits a daunting apex with “Love It If We Made It.” It is the rare Anthem for Our Time that actually gets the job done: This thing holds the mirror up to our collective faces so close you can see your breath on it. As gargantuan drums clear a path before him, Healy mimics the endless scroll, where dead refugees and dead rappers all slide by on the same timeline. He recasts one of the year’s most cursed tweets—“Thank you Kanye, very cool!”—into one of the year’s best lyrics, in turn laying bare Ye’s current fallen status as nothing more than mere flotsam for the churning news cycle. Healy repeats the track’s title for a vaguely optimistic hook, but his gasping delivery tells a different story. The song ends with staccato strings that recall a clock ruthlessly ticking down the seconds.
According to A Brief Inquiry, if there is any sort of solution to our modern apocalyptic predicament, it involves stepping outside, risking a broken heart, and searching for connections beyond the screen. And yet, Healy is the first one to acknowledge that this is harder than ever to do: The album’s only marriage is presented as a cautionary tale, read by Siri, about a troll who falls in love with the internet. “The Man Who Married a Robot” acts as a sly sequel to “Fitter Happier,” Radiohead’s doomsaying, robo-voiced nightmare from OK Computer. It sits atop a bed of treacly piano plinks, like a demented parody of a Facebook commercial that’s desperately trying to get you to log on again. In the end, the troll dies. The internet does not.
The members of the 1975 began playing together in their teens as an emo band, and they are still interested in wringing out unadulterated feeling from everything they touch. This is the thread that grounds even their most dubious dabblings, and makes their dilettantism amount to more than a series of stunts. At first, with its glistening synths and languid tempo, “I Couldn’t Be More in Love” seems like pure ’80s schmaltz, something that Michael Bolton could have cut between yacht rides. But instead of luxuriating in the musical ooze around him, Healy takes the slickness as a challenge and turns in his rawest performance on the entire album. Recorded the day before he entered rehab late last year, his vocals are frayed as he laments the end of a four-year relationship with the panic of a crashing pilot. When he howls, “What about these feelings I’ve got?” it sounds elemental, a refashioning of emo’s core into something jarring and new.
The album is bookended by a couple of songs that offer some hard-won comfort while nodding to the band’s hometown of Manchester and the lives they once led there. “Give Yourself a Try” is all pinched guitars and staticky drums, a salute to fellow Mancunians Joy Division and their singer, Ian Curtis, who killed himself at 23. On the song, Healy looks back at what he’s done, what he could have done better, and what he would do differently given the chance. He also mentions a 16-year-old 1975 fan who took her own life. “Won’t you give yourself a try?” he asks sweetly, over and over.
A Brief Inquiry ends with “I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes),” the most life-affirming 1975 song to date. Its familiar fist-pump theatrics bring to mind the Glastonbury-leveling power of another one of Manchester’s most imposing bands, Oasis. But this is more than a tribute. Healy takes the broad ambition and jubilance of a classic Oasis song and turns it inward, with words that acknowledge the mettle it takes to simply get through the day—words that could only come from him. “There’s no point in buying concrete shoes/I’ll refuse,” he sings, resolute, before giving up one more plea: “If you can’t survive; just try.” Life becomes him. | 2018-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Dirty Hit / Interscope | November 29, 2018 | 8.5 | 125d5911-8650-4284-9b51-a34a2bfad55b | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
Former Stereolab member Laetitia Sadier just released two new albums, one solo effort and one with her latest outfit Little Tornados. Both albums are full of seemingly simple, subversively sophisticated avant-pop, with Sadier’s breathy, balmy voice as the high point. | Former Stereolab member Laetitia Sadier just released two new albums, one solo effort and one with her latest outfit Little Tornados. Both albums are full of seemingly simple, subversively sophisticated avant-pop, with Sadier’s breathy, balmy voice as the high point. | Laetitia Sadier / Little Tornados: Something Shines/We Are Divine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19659-laetitia-sadier-little-tornados-something-shineswe-are-divine/ | Something Shines/We Are Divine | “We want to be able to be inspired, contemplate beauty, achieve excellence, and live life to the fullest. But we are governed by an exploitative economic system which is keeping this from happening”. So states Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier—in her native French—in “Manifest”, a track from We Are Divine, the debut album by her latest outfit Little Tornados. It’s far from her first extracurricular project; she previously played in Monade, and she’s also just released her third solo album, Something Shines. Regardless of how these various projects have been played, produced, packaged, and presented over the years, Sadier’s songs remain similar at their core, and that goes double for We Are Divine and Something Shines. Both albums are full of seemingly simple, subversively sophisticated avant-pop, with Sadier’s breathy, balmy voice as the high point. And as “Manifest” almost painfully demonstrates, both albums follow Stereolab’s tradition of unabashed leftist sloganeering.
In Stereolab, those slogans have always felt more abstract than literal, swirled as they are into pulsing Krautrock, bubbly yé-yé, retro-futurist exotica, and post-C86 jangle. But Sadier always sold her Marxist lullabies with a straight face, and if there’s one thing We Are Divine in particular conclusively proves, it’s that she was never even remotely joking. Little Tornados are a collective of instrumentalists formed around the core of filmmaker (and longtime Stereolab photographer) David Thayer, as well as Sadier; she’s on vocals and bass, while he handles vocals and guitar. In other words, it’s a similar group dynamic to the one Stereolab uses—only with Thayer assuming the role of Tim Gane. We Are Divine tracks like “In the Garden”, “How Many,” and “Space Liner”, laden with jazzy chords and playful ambience, could pass for decent, latter-day Stereolab outtakes, only looser and less densely layered. But it’s the lyrics of “Manifest” that hew closest to Stereolab’s alchemy of politics and pop, only it gets the balance wrong; over bouquets of vintage synths, Sadier’s pamphleteer-level pleas for freedom, equality, and brotherhood come off as canned, regardless of how exquisitely phrased they are in French.
We Are Divine, however, is not simply a cloned version of Stereolab; Thayer weighs in often with his distinct, low-key, mystic-bohemian ramble, and it brings a winning prog vibe to “Unicorn”; “Ben’s Boat” is a twangy, twinkling instrumental that borders on kosmische-country. The album’s definitive moment, “Have a Balloon”, is dashed and dotted with Sadier’s signature ba-ba-bas and da-da-das, with the occasional jazz-fusion fanfare on horns. The song is gorgeous, but it also gently mocks: like day-glo highlighting in a used Guy Debord textbook, the title and melody work together to magnify the Society-of-the-Spectacle message Sadier has been whispering into our ears all along.
Balloons aplenty can be found on Something Shines, too. Sadier’s third solo album smoothly continues her arc as an artist over the past three decades; like 2012’s Silencio and 2010’s The Trip before it, Something Shines is a satellite orbiting the Stereolab home world. “Quantum Soup” remixes the same elements she’s been surrounded with for three decades: sonar synths, chanson delight, Françoise Hardy-through-a-CB vocals. But here she impishly dissolves the glue that holds them together, until the song fades into a wash of spacious chaos. It’s the inverse of a noise breakdown, and when it all comes back together at the end, it feels less like a reinvention than a reaffirmation. During Stereolab’s prime in the 1990s, Sadier was part of one of the most exciting ensembles in music, genre notwithstanding. She doesn’t fight that overshadowing fact, but she doesn't let it slip by unchallenged, either.
Something Shines abounds with warm, swaying breezes that carry with them the smell of winter. “All of the roots we grew/ We will pull out,” she warns with a lash of her tongue in “Then, I Will Love You Again”; her voice has never sounded so near, let alone so large. The stiff, sci-fi samba of “The Scene of the Lie” and “Echo Port”, on the other hand, reveals the album’s biggest weakness, and that of Sadier’s solo work as a whole: there’s no avoiding that it comes off like Stereolab with too many of its pieces missing. The chords don’t stick, the melody doesn’t hook, and the delicate, intimate strength of tracks like “Butter Side Up” wind up lost in the shuffle. The slogans pop up again, naturally; couplets like “Meanwhile the ultra-rich in all impunity/ Rots our society” are harrowingly enunciated on the eerie, semi-acoustic “Oscuridad"—but in terms of depth, they don't rise above the quality of radical bookstore bumper stickers. As ardent and inviting as Something Shines and We Are Divine both are, Sadier seems content at this point to coo to the converted. | 2014-09-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-09-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | null | September 24, 2014 | 6.7 | 1260a0fc-23c2-48c8-a65f-be3a66227fa6 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
This Nashville based guitarist, a member of Lambchop who has worked with Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Silver Jews, and more, has crafted a stunning solo debut. | This Nashville based guitarist, a member of Lambchop who has worked with Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Silver Jews, and more, has crafted a stunning solo debut. | William Tyler: Behold the Spirit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14999-behold-the-spirit/ | Behold the Spirit | Every genre has its icons and its iconoclasts. Rock'n'roll will likely always have both bands that sound like Led Zeppelin and bands that absorbed Led Zeppelin but marched proudly in an unforeseen direction. Country music has chicken grease-and-cheap beer adherents in addition to pop crossover darlings, while rap brims with boom-bap purists and backpacking sonic explorers. These divisions are rarely as evident or amusing as they are in the world of guitar instrumentalists, a realm where either John Fahey is some sanctified combination of Zeus, Athena, and Poseidon or the brilliant dude who has become annoying because he's the only touchstone most people have. You either fully embrace Fahey-- like, say, the late Jack Rose-- or you run the other way, like Ben Chasny with his work as Six Organs of Admittance. A middle ground exists, certainly, but it's rarely been claimed with the grace and elocution of Behold the Spirit, the debut from young Nashville guitarist William Tyler. Arguably the most vital, energized album by an American solo guitarist in a decade or more, it accepts Fahey's legacy while escaping its shadow. Moreover, it's simply a joy to hear.
You might recognize Tyler's name from his long stint as a multi-instrumentalist in Lambchop, or from album credits alongside Charlie Louvin, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Silver Jews, and Wooden Wand. Lambchop's oeuvre should give you some hint as to what makes Tyler special. Just as Lambchop's pan-American indie incorporates soul, rock, country and outsider music into one weirdly warped mold, Tyler integrates a dozen different approaches. He's as comfortable with an electric as an acoustic, as accomplished conducting a long, coruscated drone as he is gliding through fingerpicked hymns. The English folk of Pentangle and the American hum of Tom Carter are clear references, as are Indian ragas and Appalachian ballads. Unlike the work of fellow polyglot Sir Richard Bishop, though, Tyler engages all of those muses at once, consistently folding them into surprising revelations.
Behold the Spirit is a sterling mixture of bravado and dexterity. Tyler could be an ace in any rock band, so crafted are his chops and developed is his taste. During the elegant climber "Missionary Ridge", Tyler winds through a complex circuit of melodies and variations with perfect clarity, the low notes resonating and the high ones shimmering resplendently. "The Green Pastures" feels like some sort of tantric test of his skill, as Tyler picks the notes from a handful of chords while an ace country band-- pedal steel, then drums, then piano-- threads melodies and tones through the lines of his acoustic. His guitar always prevails. But if technique were enough to recommend an instrumentalist, we could all save a lot of money on records by applying for a job at Guitar Center. Tyler tempers his skills with patience and ease, delivering these winding passages with unimpeachable composure. "Tears and Saints" for instance, is a rugged waltz for electric guitar that depends as much on the rests as it does on the notes. Tyler takes his time with the tune, giving each phrase time to radiate.
The nine numbers collected here never, however, feel like expressions of Tyler's skill. Rather, each feels like its own compositional springboard, where Tyler's guitar simply happens to take the lead. Each of these pieces seems to suggest a story, too, whether through the arc of its music or the sound of its instruments. Opener "Terrace of the Leper King" admittedly keys on flurries of acoustic guitar notes, but the song peaks when a chorus of horns and fiddle wail between guitar breaks. It sounds like quiet conquest. In "Oashpe", a 12-string guitar breaks through the still of field recordings only to create the same atmosphere with a listless but meticulous drift of chords. Tyler takes advantage of that torpor, though, eventually racing ahead, pulling fleet strings of melody from a cloud of overtones. As with the roaring electric drone that follows or the workmanlike acoustic hymn that closes the album, or really like all of Behold the Spirit, both the sounds and the stories they imply are mesmerizing.
Back to the question of icons and iconoclasts among guitar instrumentalists, it's no secret that neither lot courts a very big audience. John Fahey died a legend, sure, but he didn't die a superstar. Behold the Spirit doesn't feel marginal, though; rather, it feels like the sort of album that can achieve crossover success without alienating that core who can hum "Imaginational Anthem" from memory. These spry melodies and generous arrangements are the stuff of pop fantasy, while the reach of Tyler's music offers calling cards for fans of folk and more textural avant garde pieces. Behold the Spirit works as well on a lethargic Sunday afternoon as it does after dark, on headphones in a still space. It's the sort of achievement that acknowledges and challenges the expectations of its form-- and smiles knowingly the whole time. It's iconoclastic, then, just classically so. | 2011-01-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-01-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Tompkins Square | January 19, 2011 | 8.6 | 126119e7-49a1-4a22-92aa-33e4c3c068a7 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The Norwegian producer, once at the nexus between pop and electronic music, offers many new collaborations but little in the way of new thrills on his latest album. | The Norwegian producer, once at the nexus between pop and electronic music, offers many new collaborations but little in the way of new thrills on his latest album. | Cashmere Cat: 9 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23055-9/ | 9 | In the late-’00s, Magnus August Høiberg repped for his native Norway at the DMC World DJ Championships under the handle of DJ Final. But by a few years later, Høiberg went with a name more befitting of his playful musical style. As Cashmere Cat, he began uploading to Soundcloud his spin on the fixtures in the pop firmament—be it Lana Del Ray, Drake, or 2 Chainz—materializing in the spaces between R&B, pop, trap, EDM, and indie, never quite beholden to any one sound. Moving against type is one of Cashmere Cat’s keenest tricks: garlanding Starrah, 2 Chainz, and Tory Lanez in stately harpsichords, swaddling Britney in whispers and echoes, twining Kanye’s vocoder vocals with Pulitzer Prize-winning vocalist/composer Caroline Shaw on “Wolves.” So the prospect of him finally having some major label clout to put such curious ideas before Ariana Grande, Travis Scott, and the Weeknd was tantalizing.
A few of his previous employers appear on 9, an album chock full of guests but few of the notable features that originally put Cashmere Cat at the nexus of pop and electronic music. For most of this slender ten-track, 34-minute album, Høiberg winds up at the median of the mainstream, nimbly padding away from both the gluttonous hooks and towering thrills of either sound. And almost every voice within is processed to the point of being indistinguishable from one another. Rather than the upending of norms on his previous work, 9 offers little in the way of new thrills.
No drop no problem, as EDM has moved away from that rollercoaster trick the past few years, but Cashmere Cat still tries to wring drama out of the faux builds. After the wheezing, Auto-Tuned proclamation from Kehlani “to go all damned night” on opener “Night Night,” Cashmere Cat builds up not to a frenzied, Red Bull-raising anthem, but rather a latticework of string quartet and choral voices. On the standout “Quit,” he again works with Ariana Grande, dropping her yearning vocal into a near-void of a track. As a muffled snare ratchets up the tension, the song then dissolves into fluttering butterflies and what may as well be a nose flute patch.
Cashmere Cat’s collaboration with Selena Gomez and Tory Lanez on “Trust Nobody” is 9’s best pop moment. It's low-key, toning down Cashmere Cat’s excesses while accentuating his nimble way of a flipping a trap beat into something slick as massage oil. The mashing of trap-pop gunshots, ethereal ambience, and owl hoot on “Love Incredible” (co-produced with SOPHIE) finds a good counterpart in former Fifth Harmony member Camila Cabello, delivering mellifluous high notes and growls alike.
The closest Cashmere Cat comes to big tent festival fare is on “Victoria’s Veil,” an instrumental that tweaks tiny blips and jazz finger keys and cagily builds towards a much-promised peak. In a few months time, it might soon be better known for making hundreds of thousands of festivalgoers put their hands in the air for…the Alan Parsons Project. “Wild Love,” foregoes beats entirely, Cashmere Cat instead suspending the Weeknd’s warped voice and Francis and the Lights’ Prismizer in a zero-G field. If only Høiberg could have refrained from triggering a maddening squelch not unlike Q*Bert hopping around a pyramid, rupturing the otherwise gaseous effect of the track.
But it’s not as cringeworthy as “9 (After Coachella)” his team-up with MØ and second track with SOPHIE. MØ’s voice easily segues towards the confessional singer-songwriter mode (versus her turn as near-anonymous EDM vocalist), but is the 2017 admission that “I like the way you spread confusion” an ode to a rowdy bro or to Putin-sown discord? In the hands of some, Japanese digital tones are judiciously deployed to tasteful effect, but the sound that Cashmere Cat and co-producers Benny Blanco and SOPHIE go for here plops “9 (After Coachella)” between the flippers of Flower Drum Song: The Pinball Game. It is an instance of Cashmere Cat’s album being hijacked by the PC Music aesthetic, clanging and cloying in equal measure. Like so much of this album. his sound becomes muddled in the mainstream and dissolves into the background.
Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly implied that SOPHIE has recorded for the PC Music label. | 2017-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Interscope / Mad Love | May 3, 2017 | 6.1 | 1263cf24-9e44-4541-8e0a-6d2cf24cf044 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The unreleased songs Springsteen wrote during the time of Darkness on the Edge of Town form the basis of a new 2xCD collection and a lavish box set. | The unreleased songs Springsteen wrote during the time of Darkness on the Edge of Town form the basis of a new 2xCD collection and a lavish box set. | Bruce Springsteen: The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story / The Promise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14869-the-promise-the-darkness-on-the-edge-of-town-story-the-promise/ | The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story / The Promise | Sometimes reissues add a few demos or outtakes, sometimes they add a bonus disc with a live show or additional music, and sometimes they go so far with the bonus material they become something else entirely. The Promise, a name given to two sets based around unheard music from Bruce Springsteen dating to 1977 and 1978, when he was writing and recording the seminal Darkness on the Edge of Town, doesn't fit easily into typical reissue categories. There's a 2xCD, 3xLP set that contains 22 unreleased songs from the period, and then there's a deluxe box set that augments the unreleased material with a remastered version of Darkness and three DVDs. And the latter is housed in a faux spiral-bound notebook with facsimiles of Springsteen's handwritten studio notes from the time. Taken all together, we're talking 10 hours plus of video and audio, along with the booklet. So calling this a reissue of Darkness on the Edge of Town is not accurate. This is a trove, a vast clearinghouse from a fertile period, the product of which turned out to be one terrific album. And in addition to containing its share of treasure, The Promise ultimately confirms that Springsteen is a brilliant editor of his own material.
That much is clear when listening to the album itself, which is in danger of being overshadowed by everything released around it. Where the Born to Run box from 2005 looked intently at the album proper (there were few outtakes from those sessions anyway) and portrayed what resulted as a landmark, The Promise focuses on a period of time that produced one memorable album but could have produced others. Much of the material was written when Springsteen was embroiled in a lawsuit with his former manager, and a lot has been made of the impact the legal proceedings were said to have on Springsteen's muse. He made a bleak and bombed-out album, the story goes, because he was feeling lost in the world himself, fearful that he was losing control of his career. And since the lawsuit kept him out of the studio when he wanted so badly to record, he kept piling up songs while he waited for the smoke to clear.
Even more than the lawsuit, Darkness seems like Springsteen's instinctive recoil from the Born to Run hype. That's partly why he burned to cut another record-- to "find out what he's got," to quote a line from "Badlands" that particularly appealed to him. The Promise documentary included with the box, which combines black-and-white video footage taken in the studio while the album was recorded with recent interviews, makes clear that he wanted to make an "honest" record that people would take seriously. He was embarrassed by the hype that had put him on the cover of Time and Newsweek simultaneously in 1975, and he didn't want to be the "next big thing."
Indeed, it's striking just how different Darkness is from its predecessor in tone and theme. Where Born to Run was about drama, with a sense of bombast that pushed past cinematic and wound up somewhere closer to Broadway, Darkness, despite its share of rockers, is about grim acceptance and pressing on in the face of doubt. In "Racing in the Street", the bittersweet ballad that ranks with the best songs Springsteen has ever written, the narrator's girlfriend "Stares off alone into the night/ With the eyes of one who hates for just being born." But she's not going anywhere. The darkness that envelops the town keeps the characters in and the rest of the world out. Where the characters in Born to Run were racing against death, the characters here are cursed with the burden of survival. So like all Springsteen records in the early part of his career, there are many songs about cars and driving, but these people seem to be going in circles, idly moving from one place to the next. "You can ride this road 'til dawn, without another human being in sight," goes a line in the richly emotional mid-tempo rocker "Something in the Night". With no chance of escape, you have to figure out how to deal with what's in front of you.
The stark reality of the songs is reinforced by the album's production. Darkness is in its own way as sonically consistent and coherent as Born to Run; but where that album drew inspiration from Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, Darkness tries to do as much as possible with a minimum of embellishment. A few tracks break from this dry and barren template. "Candy's Room" and "Something in the Night" have the tinkling piano and glockenspiel that might have helped them to fit on Born to Run, while "Racing in the Street" has a very particular and hugely effective atmosphere, with just the right touches of reverb and backing vocals to make it sound like an elegy. As for the remastering, I'm not hearing a lot of difference here, but Darkness always sounded good. From the opening drum fill of "Badlands" to the grim fade of the title track, there's not a weak song on the album and it deservedly ranks with Springsteen's classics. Which means that it ranks with rock's classic albums, full stop.
And it took a long time to get it that way. The music on the 2xCD set The Promise, which was written during the Darkness sessions, shows what Springsteen had to leave behind to get the record that he wanted. That meant no big pop songs. There's "Because the Night", given to Patti Smith before being completed, which she then improved and turned into her biggest hit. And then "Fire", which Springsteen gave to the Pointer Sisters, and which went to No. 2 on Billboard. It also means no songs about easy times, hope, and escape. So "Gotta Get That Feeling", an appealing mid-tempo track with horns and sweet backing vocals and lines like "We ain't got no money but we don't care" was shelved. (In Darkness, people have no money but they do care, a lot.) And "Save My Love", a catchy piano-led tune, isn't going to make Darkness with lines like "If we open up our hearts/ Love won't forsake us." Tell that to the couple in "Racing in the Street".
The Promise is also a good demonstration of how Springsteen mines his unused songs for material, and shows how many ways he tried to record things before figuring out how they worked best. The set kicks off with "Racing in the Street ('78)", a version that begins as an austere ballad but builds into a rock song. It's nowhere near as effective as what came to be on the record, but it is riveting, showing just how elastic Springsteen's melodic and thematic ideas could be. An early version of "Candy's Room" is here, too, and it's called "Candy's Boy"; instead of the original's dark and explosive sensuality, here it's a clean, shuffling guitar-pop tune, charming but without a lot at stake.
The tracks on The Promise CD aren't left out just because of subject matter or tone-- they also sound different. As with some songs on Tracks, some of these songs had parts added later. "Where needed, I worked on them to bring them to fruition," Springsteen writes in the notes. "Many stand as they were recorded all those years ago." The re-touching is at its most extreme on "Save My Love", which was written in the 70s but cut in 2010. In other places, the vocals and music sound fundamentally different from the recordings of the era. Certainly, the arrangements are thicker than what wound up on Darkness, which makes sense since some of the songs left behind were R&B-based bar-band songs and swooning songs of love and lust. Still, despite the lack of consistency, the 22 new songs (there are 21 tracks, but "The Way" is a hidden bonus track at the end) are mostly very good and occasionally great. None feel like they should have been on Darkness, but almost all of them hold up to repeat plays and stand on their own as very good Springsteen-- easily on the level of mid-level stuff on The River, say.
On the visual side, one DVD has a bizarre recording of Springsteen and the E Street Band playing Darkness on the Edge of Town straight through in an empty theater in Asbury Park in December 2009. I suspect that this decision was inspired in part by the notion that the album is about loneliness and open spaces, but there's something off about seeing this band, known so well for its deep connection to its audience, playing by themselves in a large room without people.
More interesting on the same disc are the live odds-and-ends from rehearsals at Springsteen's rented Jersey home in the 70s. The band is packed into what looks like a small bedroom, Springsteen is shirtless, with the familiar guitar around his neck, standing before a microphone taped to a stand. And the band is running through a couple new songs in an intimate space with no sense at all of posterity. (They are so casual, Steve Van Zant isn't even wearing a hat!) Also on this disc are songs from a 1978 show in Phoenix, including the famous clip for "Rosalita" that got some play in the early days of MTV. These Phoenix performances are generally superior to the three-hour set from a 1978 show in Houston included on a separate DVD. The video comes from the arena's video feed and, given the quality of video in 1978, quality could be better. But it is a multi-camera shoot with good coverage and Springsteen and the E Street band were in amazing form throughout that year. So no complaints about more live Springsteen.
Which leaves the documentary, which in one sense serves as the centerpiece of the project. As with the film included with the Born to Run box, there are interesting details about the technical aspects of the album. Chuck Plotkin's theory behind his approach to mixing vocals is fascinating, and explains why this album feels so balanced. We see fragments of songs, lots of exhaustion and sitting around, and get a look at how Springsteen works as a bandleader. There's a moment in the first scene where he looks tired and frustrated and a little pissed off and you realize that it would be scary to have him mad at you. He's not always an easy guy to work for. It's refreshing to see such a simple display of humanity when the documentary obviously has very specific points that it wants to hit.
Still, there's something odd about these "making of" documentaries about albums coming from the artist themselves. In part because they seem so intent on directing how the music is heard. Sets like this and Neil Young's Archives reflect a desire for artists to take control of their legacy and shape the narrative of their careers. It's easy to understand this impulse, and doubly so when you are talking about people as controlling as Springsteen or Neil Young. And yet it's also futile. As listeners, our stories are what will ultimately matter, and by having the music in our lives, we give it significance and form. Darkness is the kind of record you sink into, an album of power and dignity and loss and just a hint at the possibility of transcendence, which is something Springsteen's fans have known all along, even without hearing a single detail of how it is made. We'll take it all and have loads of fun exploring all the ephemera, but Springsteen carved through all this-- the pile of songs, the legal bullshit, the media image he wasn't comfortable with-- to make that one magical record, which is the most impressive part of it all. | 2010-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | November 17, 2010 | 9.5 | 1264c941-748c-4555-bba2-26614c1929c7 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Long Island prog-metal band bursts with enthusiasm and rabid energy, as if Mastodon's apocalyptic visions were replaced with cosmic wonder. | The Long Island prog-metal band bursts with enthusiasm and rabid energy, as if Mastodon's apocalyptic visions were replaced with cosmic wonder. | Moon Tooth: Crux | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moon-tooth-crux/ | Crux | Moon Tooth draw attention like the big, bold letters of a comic book: Their technical prowess, rabid energy, and pristine-sounding records all work in favor of making your eyes light up, your heart rate accelerate. The Long Island quartet’s sophomore album, Crux, pairs down the hyperactive whimsy of 2016’s self-released Chromaparagon in favor of simpler pleasures. Hooks abound. Lighters are raised. The last decade’s rock heavyweights—from radio titans like Foo Fighters and Incubus to more progressive acts like Tool and the Dillinger Escape Plan—all seem, at various points, like fair comparisons. It’s rock music built from familiar sounds, all drawn together by an ability to swerve suddenly into pyrotechnics.
What separates Moon Tooth from legions of shred-happy colleagues is their emotional urgency and the unexpected ways in which they contort their influences. The lyrics do little to offset the band’s cartoonish ferocity—one of the best choruses culminates in a cry of, “Not today, motherfucker!”—and yet they never sound like they’re just screaming slogans in wild time signatures. They’re always reaching toward the audience with the hopes of pulling you up, an intimacy that’s almost entirely derived from the performance of frontman John Carbone. His soulful, clean singing weaves through the imaginative riffs of guitarist Nick Lee, like if Mastodon’s apocalyptic visions were replaced with pure cosmic wonder.
This style would collapse under the weight of too much seriousness, and Crux tightens Chromaparagon’s scope without sanding away the fun. It’s energetic enough for each song to feel like its own distinct action sequence but concise enough to avoid monotony. The wailing chorus of “Awe at All Angles” takes cues from pop-punk, while “Musketeers” spreads messages of solidarity over a frantic new-wave pulse. In the opening “Trust,” Carbone sings about drifting through life, but his bandmates demand his full presence, lest he miss the half-time breakdown or the saxophone-accompanied finale. If Chromaparagon was the sound of a band showing off all their tricks at once, then Crux radiates with a sleeker and starker energy.
It’s also a blast. Carbone is destined to become a polarizing metal vocalist, though it’s hard to deny the strange passages he draws through the maze his bandmates lay out for him. Highlights like “Motionless in Sky” and “Omega Days” are deceptively intense compositions and Carbone is able to connect their various parts with the lucidity of a pop songwriter. The dazzling, waltz-time closer “Raise a Light (Epilogue)” is wobbly and off-center, with a momentum like a deranged animal barreling toward you. “I’ll rage my way home,” Carbone sings in its closing refrain. “But I’m not going there alone.” For all Moon Tooth’s left turns and explosive ambition, the biggest thrill is in knowing they’re just getting started. | 2019-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Metal | Modern Static | April 3, 2019 | 7.3 | 126938ef-bc74-468c-bbe5-6f897e976cc5 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Just eight months after the release of their debut album, Los Campesinos! already return with the follow-up-- a messy, glorious, noisy document of internet café-era indie life that sounds best when sung by heart. | Just eight months after the release of their debut album, Los Campesinos! already return with the follow-up-- a messy, glorious, noisy document of internet café-era indie life that sounds best when sung by heart. | Los Campesinos!: We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12424-we-are-beautiful-we-are-doomed/ | We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed | First there's the rule about not naming your band with an exclamation point, period. Then there's the one about not changing your last names so they're all the same as the band's, unless you're the Ramones (or arguably the Pastels). Referring to yourselves in a language not spoken in your country of origin? Another bad idea. Welsh boy/girl septet Los Campesinos! proved themselves an exception to all those rules this spring with Hold on Now, Youngster..., a debut album that encapsulated the best of three decades of indie's participatory culture.
There's no rule yet about not releasing a follow-up to your debut album in the same year, mostly because few bands have had the audacity to try it. Los Campesinos! are hedging their bets: they have yet to refer to We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed as their "second album," even when they announced it would come in a limited pressing with a DVD documentary, poster, and 30-page zine (including contributions from members of Xiu Xiu, Grandaddy, Tender Forever, Menomena, Parenthetical Girls, and the Beautiful South). There will be no singles (and to these ears, there are none), and some online retailers have taken to listing the 10-track, 32-minute release as a "mini-album." Forget the technicalities and call it what it is: a messy, glorious, and cohesive artistic document of internet café-era indie life that sounds best when sung by heart.
Recorded in Seattle with John Goodmanson (Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Wu-Tang Clan), We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed is a fittingly noisy release from a band who recently spent time on the "Shred Yr Face" tour with No Age and Times New Viking. The seismic instrumental "Between an Erupting Earth and an Exploding Sky" is reminiscent of a Swell Maps soundscape, and leads directly into the motorik-locked melancholia of "You'll Need Those Fingers for Crossing". Standout "Heart Swells/Pacific Daylight Time" is a lovelorn miniature epic, with gusting guitars and Parenthetical Girls-quoting lo-fi vocals which shift midway through to folky strums and scratchy, indecipherable mumbling. If you mistakenly dismissed the band as another set of childish twee-poppers, our special today is crow.
Los Campesinos! haven't changed drastically, though. Their self-loathing, anti-romantic bitterness, and LiveJournal detail have only intensified. Several songs sound like scuffed-up, feedback-streaked versions of the first record's shouty, strings- and glockenspiel-touched punk-pop, only the despair is now less deceptively perky, and more, um, desperate. Crashing opener "Ways to Make It Through the Wall" resigns itself to hopelessness, death, and the inevitability of becoming like our parents, even as it wonders "how you break the rules that you yourself imposed." Bleaker still, "The End of the Asterisk" rages of another person's self-deprecation, "It's spot on, and I'm better."
The precocious youngsters of the debut have become increasingly like the prematurely old man of Weezer's classic Pinkerton. Vomit is a recurring theme, on the cathartic title track and on "Miserabilia", which describes kneeling at urinals and imagines an ex masturbating. From 4 a.m. drunk dialing, "It's Never That Easy Though, Is It? (Song for the Other Kurt)" goes on to contemplate which is worse: "To see my ex-girlfriend/ Who by the way, I'm still in love with/ Sucking the face of some pretty boy"? Or to watch it happen "with my favorite band's most popular song in the background"? The finale, "All Your Kayfabe Friends", screeches to a halt after a fateful closing line: "I love the look of lust between your thighs."
Los Campesinos! know their history; they may be doomed, but not just to repeat it. We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed's ragged sound and distinctive packaging, like the band's propensity for non-album 7"s, hearken back to previous decades, but they're also an attempt to develop a new underground community in the here and now. "We want this to feel like a proper event, the sort of thing that you're going to be hyped about going to see for days or weeks before, and the sort of thing that when you leave will stick long in your memory, and that you'll be happy to have been a part of," co-lead singer Gareth Campesinos! says ramblingly of the Shred Yr Face tour, addressing us-- as rappers often do but indie rockers so far usually haven't-- via YouTube. "It is, undoubtedly, a little narcissistic," he adds. It ain't trickin' if you got it. | 2008-11-18T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2008-11-18T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Wichita | November 18, 2008 | 8.3 | 126a02a4-2046-44bd-acbc-a085a9654d1c | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
After a forgettable Def Jam debut, 2x realizes Durk’s full potential as drill’s last major-label hope. | After a forgettable Def Jam debut, 2x realizes Durk’s full potential as drill’s last major-label hope. | Lil Durk: Lil Durk 2X | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22136-lil-durk-2x/ | Lil Durk 2X | Few artists withstood the peaks and valleys of the short-lived drill surge better than Lil Durk, who got a major label deal, landed two breakout hits, weathered a string of bad breaks and later an underwhelming debut album, all before he turned 23. He also lost his manager OTF Chino and his cousin OTF NuNu to gun violence during that stretch. His Def Jam debut, Remember My Name, was uneven and largely forgettable, but he didn’t stay down long, opting instead to refocus. Durk seemed to turn a corner months later on 300 Days 300 Nights, an action-packed mixtape led by the Dej Loaf duet “My Beyoncé” (which felt refreshingly out of character for the rapper, who once made a song called “Bang Bros.”) He found his footing within the tape’s 19 tracks, regaining his grasp on Auto-Tune and rediscovering his range. It serves as a lead-in to Lil Durk 2X, a continuously-delayed mixtape turned sophomore album that realizes Durk’s full potential as drill’s last major-label hope.
Durk has ascribed several different meanings to the title 2X—in an interview with XXL, he said it represents his “second chance,” and it’s also a reference to his two sons (who are pictured on the album’s cover) and how they’ll follow his lead—but the concept might be best explained by the opening moments of the title track: “I’m doing me/I get it by myself, I get this money by myself/I swear I do it like there’s two of me.” The premise is simple: this Durk is twice as good. And 2x supports that thesis with a renewed commitment to hammering cadences lathered in a bittersweet candy varnish. In fact, this is the best Durk has ever been, as a writer, rapper, and performer, for the duration of any project. All three angles intersect on songs like “Glock Up” and “Check,” which allow Durk to operate freely inside hollowed-out beats.
Sonically speaking, there is a great deal of variety on 2X, a project that still revolves primarily around gun violence—shootouts, revenge killings, and even gangland posturing (“Lil Booka will drop you”)—but isn’t beholden to its gloom. It can, at times, be just as dark as past projects, like on the bloodthirsty “True” (“Real killas, they don’t leave witness … Call my shooters, they got no limits”), but a more colorful tonal palette provides relief. Lighter tracks, like the Ty Dolla $ign-featuring love song “She Just Wanna” and the strutting “Money Walk” with its pixiphone-toned backbone, provide balance “My Beyoncé” gets slotted in as the closer, and its sweet tone, accented by chirping birds, is a welcome addition. Atlanta mainstays Wheezy, Cassius Jay, and Zaytoven, along with longtime Durk collaborator C-Sick bring a mix of distant, atmospheric mood inducers, MIDI keyboard-driven trap soul (adorned in the increasingly popular sample from Nelly’s “Dilemma”), and plush, full-bodied pop crossovers__,__ but Young Chop and ChopSquad DJ step outside themselves to provide the brightest spots.
By his own admission, this is the happiest Durk has ever been in his life, and you can hear it in fragments on 2X: “Spent eight on the section, said fuck Section 8/I bought my mom a new crib/No more rent being late,” on “Set It Off;” “Thank God for my mama/Thank the lord for my brothers/We gonna take on the world,” on “Super Powers;” “You and I, White dress, flowers, and a suit and tie/Me and you like Bonnie and Clyde,” on “My Beyoncé.” There’s positive energy sprinkled throughout, which helps to cut through the shadows cast by a lifelong exposure to death. When he raps “Made it out ‘cause I had to,” it’s a reminder of the tightrope he’s walking. Passing mentions of surviving the summer—the season where murder rates spike in inner cities—reveal that he’s still entrenched in the streets, tied to a community plagued by an endless cycle of murders. Those still fighting the battle are never far from his thoughts; he’s still fighting it, too. There are no reprieves from the harsh realities of the war zone that is Chicago’s South Side.
But there’s one moment on 2X where Durk manages to completely untether from this reality, the world that took his cousin, his manager, and his friends and demands he respond with barbarism: The standout “Super Powers,” a Young Chop-produced opus that makes the strongest case for Durk’s growth as a musician and a young man. It’s an escapist anthem that champions inner strength and considers resilience superhuman. The reverb from his Auto-Tuned croons bleed into strobing Simon-esque synth notes, selling the euphoria. It’s introspective and optimistic. As Durk grapples with leaving his old life behind to create a better life for his sons, he creates his most gratifying and moving work yet. Lil Dirk 2X seeks rehabilitation but finds evolution. | 2016-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | July 28, 2016 | 7.7 | 126c08d0-812d-4a49-8dc6-0d4550dcc9b7 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The Melbourne quartet’s catchy, plainspoken post-punk songs speak to the drudgery of life under capitalism, marrying poetics and politics without an ounce of pretension. | The Melbourne quartet’s catchy, plainspoken post-punk songs speak to the drudgery of life under capitalism, marrying poetics and politics without an ounce of pretension. | Primo!: Sogni | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/primo-sogni/ | Sogni | In 2004, socialist feminist icon Barbara Ehrenreich offered an astute piece of advice to the women reading her work: “No matter how many degrees the experts dangle in front of you, no matter how many studies they cite,” she wrote, “dig deeper, value your own real-life experiences, and think for yourself.” This advice spoke to an often unmentioned truth: when so many of the so-called experts installed to govern the lives of women are men, every seemingly arbitrary choice becomes significant, an opportunity to escape the grip of unseen, often malevolent, forces.
Melbourne quartet Primo! make music guided by an almost Ehrenreich-ian ethos: Catchy and plainspoken post-punk songs that, while not as grandly political as the anarchist polemics of scene compatriots Total Control or Terry, place significance in day-to-day choices. With their second record Sogni, Primo! sharpen their vision, continuing to write songs that find mystery and magic in otherwise-mundane life while honing in on a surreal, romantic aesthetic.
Ideologically, not much has changed for Primo! since the 2018 release of their debut album Amici; their songs still speak to the drudgery of life under capitalism, and feel built from the aphorisms we feed ourselves in order to keep going. (“Onwards and upwards, say bye to the day, say bye to the night,” sings guitarist Violetta Del Conte-Race on “Comedy Show.”) Structurally, the band has expanded, bringing in Amy Hill of Constant Mongrel and Terry on bass, a change that, along with a newfound clarity in recording, rounds out the band’s sound.
Stylistically, one only has to look at Sogni’s cover art to clock the shift the band has made: Where Amici’s artwork was in stark black and white, Sogni is lit up with neons, a change in palette that feels in tune with the new breadth of Primo!’s sound. Building on the synth-gilded post-punk of Amici, Sogni is artier and less linear than its predecessor, with a handful of jolting production choices—a squeaking saxophone on “Perfect Paper,” shrill vocal compression on “Machine”—deployed sparingly but effectively.
The pummelling “Machine” is Sogni’s most out-and-out punk track, and one that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Constant Mongrel record. A diatribe against the increasing automation of “low-skill” jobs, “Machine” is as camp as it is bracing, the silly, Dalek-y scream of the song’s hook (“Machine! Machine! Machine!”) injecting surreal humor despite the song’s weight. Closer “Reverie” pushes the boundaries of Primo!’s style, the wandering synths that underscore the band’s chanting vocal conjuring memory of Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks score.
The song that best encapsulates Primo!’s plainly philosophical spirit is “Best and Fairest.” Over Suzanne Walker’s spritely drumming, guitarist Xanthe Waite ponders the decisions one must grapple with in order to mold a good life: “What company will you be keeping?” she asks, “Who will you pay? And who will pay you?” Key words in the lyrics point to the jargon of capitalism and its associated doctrine—rich, company, pay, best—with the melancholy dream of a family floating far beneath: “Motherhood and other dreams slowly come out of hiding,” Waite sings. In this way, they are able to evoke the ruthless exceptionalism of western neoliberal capitalism without writing song-length pamphlets about it.
The central metaphor at play reinforces this common touch. “Best and fairest” refers to the trophy awarded to the best player at the end of an Australian football season. No matter how skilled a player you are, you can’t win best and fairest if you’ve incurred even the most minor reprimand. The prize rewards good sportsmanship—in other words, a collectivist spirit—as much as it does talent. This is Sogni’s linchpin: the ability to seamlessly marry poetics and politics without an ounce of pretension. In the process, they conjure something galvanizing, class-conscious, and profound.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Upset the Rhythm / Anti Fade | May 6, 2020 | 7.5 | 1274cf41-e0e1-4a47-a05e-4fe9e5dd4b14 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
Sonny Smith's final installment in his 100 Records project, in which he inhabits a universe of fictional musicians, has the feel of a compilation sourced by grabbing random 45s from a bargain bin. But importantly, he always sounds decidedly like himself. | Sonny Smith's final installment in his 100 Records project, in which he inhabits a universe of fictional musicians, has the feel of a compilation sourced by grabbing random 45s from a bargain bin. But importantly, he always sounds decidedly like himself. | Sonny Smith: 100 Records Vol. 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17620-100-records-vol-3/ | 100 Records Vol. 3 | With the third volume of Sonny Smith's 100 Records project, he's once again ditched the Sunsets and inhabited a universe of fictional musicians. He's back as Hank Champion, the poet who talks about his sex life over a quaint country instrumental. Zig Speck and the Specktones, the garage rock band formerly fronted by Ty Segall in Volume II, return with an earwormy nugget called "Fruitcakes". He's a soul group, a reggae band, a folkie guitar picker, and a country balladeer. The LP has a similar aesthetic to one you might find from grabbing several 45s out of a bargain bin and putting them on a compilation. But here's the important bit-- even when he travels outside his comfort zone, Smith sounds decidedly like himself.
In an interview about the project back in 2010, Smith hinted that he was less than confident in his ability to deliver such a wide range of songs. "There was one guy that was kind of a reggae guy, and I don't play reggae music or whatever, so that was kind of tricky." And in reference to the soul characters, "I can't sing like Otis Redding or anything." On paper, it makes sense that Smith's voice could potentially pose a limitation for those genres-- his voice is distinctively his own. But by side-stepping vocal affectations and delivering strong, tight arrangements, he's crafted some legitimately catchy reggae and soul songs. With a strong organ solo and a quiet, echoing piano driving the beat, "Half Boy Half Girl" is a reggae ballad that smacks of early American R&B. (Makes sense-- the Wailers, after all, were inspired by that stuff.) And with a killer hook and some on-point back-up singers, "A Steady Stream of Love" is one of the best country soul throwbacks in recent memory.
The tinges of country in Smith's soul music make sense-- the most recent Sunsets album, Longtime Companion, featured some beautiful country songs ("Year of the Cock" appears there and here), and by letting himself stretch out under the guise of different personae, Vol. 3 is a great venue for his knack with the genre. His two songs as Bobby Hawkins are maybe a bit too simplistic-- he delivers a lonesome howl on "Minimum Wage" and drawls out the titular lyrics of "Difficulties, Mistakes and Errors". He offers 1970s country rock barn burners ("Cosmorama") alongside quiet Johnny Cash-like acoustic tracks ("Some Women Artists All Around Town").
Vol. 3 is at its best when Smith is at his boldest, like when he's offering a cautionary tale to the masses (and the president) on "If You Don't Make a Change". Although the instrumental tracks "Medication" and "Wolf Like Howls From the Bathhouse" are subdued by comparison, they serve the crucial role of offering a palate cleanser between stylistic shifts. And while you can almost always predict the genre by looking at the track and fake artist name (the Wayward Youth are behind the reggae song, Little Antoine and the Sparrows did the soul song), it's to Smith's credit that only one track, "Space Travel's in My Blood" by Earth Girl Helen Brown, feels like a throwaway novelty song due to its cartoonish sci-fi sonics. For an art project that's in constant danger of veering into gimmickry, his final 100 Records collection is much stronger than it has any right to be. | 2013-02-05T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2013-02-05T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl / Glitter End | February 5, 2013 | 7.4 | 1277601a-fa74-4e96-925b-8e6df2c7718e | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
This remix set, based on Glasper’s 2016 album, moves with the freewheeling rhythm of a beat tape. It’s a low-stakes but very fun session. | This remix set, based on Glasper’s 2016 album, moves with the freewheeling rhythm of a beat tape. It’s a low-stakes but very fun session. | Robert Glasper / Kaytranada: The ArtScience Remixes EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/robert-glasper-kaytranada-the-artscience-remixes-ep/ | The ArtScience Remixes EP | You can trust Robert Glasper to honor your favorite throwback sounds. He’s the cool custodian of old-school grooves who, with his band, the Robert Glasper Experiment, has built a flourishing career out of reinterpreting African-American music history, bridging jazz, soul, R&B, and hip-hop. The two installments of his guest-heavy Black Radio series in 2012-2013 and 2016’s Artscience all flowed like curated mixtapes of the finest vintage. On The Artscience Remixes, the keyboardist and producer probes another vital form of Black musical expression: the remix.
Glasper has bowed down to the concept before. Black Radio Recovered: The Remix EP saw his tracks flipped by old-world heads like Pete Rock, 9th Wonder, Georgia Anne Muldrow, and Questlove. For The Artscience Remixes, the keyboardist plumps for just a single collaborator in 25-year-old Canadian Kaytranada. Given his youth and his affinity for fizzing electronic textures, it’s not necessarily the most obvious choice. Yet Kaytranada has in the past shown plenty of respect for his golden age hip-hop forefathers, and that serves him well on this set. The remit of the remixer has always been simple enough to be scrawled on the back of a pack of cigarettes: keep the cuts fresh and keep them glorious. Here, Kaytranada finds enough new angles to make the project meaningful while staying true to Glasper’s long-term modus operandi. Spin these tracks out of context and the thought of alternative versions existing might never enter your head.
The Artscience Remixes moves with the freewheeling rhythm of a beat tape. The drums are crisp and the keys flow like liquid gold. These are tracks that would sound great crackling through your old Sony Walkman on a beat-up C-90. Take “Find You”: The jittery arcade electronics of the original have been dramatically stripped out and replaced by a cool, dusty groove that echoes J Dilla’s early beats. The thick, 1980s boogie-style orchestration of “Thinkin Bout You”—a sweet love song that captures being in a relationship when you’re touring—is now a fluid, dapper R&B number. “Written in Stone” features some classical-style piano chords before falling out of step as the vocals are slowed and screwed. It’s a welcome moment of tension in an otherwise satin-smooth set.
The only real disappointment is “No One Like You.” The original nine-minute version focused on spontaneous jazz expression. Here, the borders of the song are reined in, with the vocals replaced by those of Alex Isley, imbuing the track with a more contemporary R&B feel. It’s fine in concept, but spoiled by a hyperactive drum loop that blemishes the record’s otherwise urbane groove.
The Artscience Remixes lasts for just 28 minutes and eight tracks, only five of which are fully functional songs. It’s even bookended by two daft but enjoyably absurd skits featuring Don Cheadle, who worked with Glasper on the Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead. As the stakes never feel particularly high, this will go down as a minor release in both Glasper and Kaytranada’s discographies. Never mind—the timeless nature of these grooves is hard to grow bored of. | 2018-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Pop/R&B | Blue Note | April 19, 2018 | 6.7 | 127764f8-b272-4d4b-9c81-7806be2be925 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
On their third full-length, Baltimore drone-rockers Horse Lords prove the rewards of "difficult" music. | On their third full-length, Baltimore drone-rockers Horse Lords prove the rewards of "difficult" music. | Horse Lords: Interventions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21781-interventions/ | Interventions | Horse Lords make music with guitar, bass, drums, and sometimes saxophone, but you couldn't really call what they do rock music. Rock is just a small piece of the greater amalgamation—a simple-yet-complex affair that welds repetitive riffing in strange time signatures to microtonal harmonies that glint like flecks of mica. It might be tempting to call it math rock, but these aren't problems to be solved—they're patterns that unfold as if of their own accord. Maybe "biology rock" would be more apt. It's fluid, not angular, and instead of architecture, branches and rivers and spiraling sunflower heads feel like its analogues in the physical world.
The Baltimore band has released two albums up to this point, both of which alternate switchbacking studies in rhythm and drone with noisy, knotty studio experiments. They've also released three freeform "mixtapes" containing sidelong collages of full-throttle rave-ups, modular synth sketches, and live recordings whose audio fidelity suggests that they may have been recorded to a Dictaphone at the bottom of someone's gym bag.
Interventions marks a major step forward in every way: The jams are both more focused and more hypnotic, while the quality of the recordings has a newfound clarity and fullness that does wonders for the music. Guitarist Owen Gardner and bassist Max Eilbacher play instruments re-fretted according to the principles of just intonation, and their curious tuning—intermingled with saxophonist Andrew Bernstein's complementary bleat—yields an unusual and visceral sound. It's subtle, but you can feel it vibrating in the air all around you.
"Truthers," which opens the album, plunges you straight into the band's muscular minimalism. Drummer Sam Haberman doles out a lurching rhythm in 6/8 time while guitar, bass, and saxophone pile up in teetering heaps. Their scales have an odd, in-between quality, neither major nor minor, that makes me think of Sahara Desert blues crossed with the smoldering skronk of the Stooges' Fun House. Throughout the album, they'll return again and again to the same essential themes, and the fact that "Toward the Omega Point," "Time Slip," and "Bending to the Lash" sound like they are in the same key as "Truthers" lends to Interventions' deep sense of structural integrity. But they never stop pushing forward: The unhinged "Toward the Omega Point," in which Bernstein sets aside his saxophone in order to lay down complex polyrhythms on percussion, veers into an unexpected country blues before pivoting back into Glenn Branca territory, while the brooding "Time Slip" overdubs guitars and sax in creamy waves over a toe-scuffing groove in five.
Much like their mixtapes, the excellently sequenced album is broken up by shorter, sketch-like pieces. "Encounter I / Transfinite Flow" braids taut guitar plucks and staccato sax blasts around one another like the strands of a double helix; "Intervention I" is a chiming modular synth miniature that feels like standing in the lobby of a Reno casino; and "Encounter II / Intervention II," the album's still center, is a mournful saxophone solo, suffused in reverb, that sounds like it was recorded in a dank underground chamber.
Following the punishing onslaught of "Bending to the Lash," the album closes with "Never Ended," a disorienting swirl of chants and street noise recorded at the Baltimore protests following the death of Freddie Gray. You wouldn't necessarily recognize the source material, but knowing its provenance helps explain some of the album's urgency. This is a band that believes that experimental music has the potential to be more than merely aesthetic, and every one of their choices—like taking apart their instruments and rebuilding them according to an alternate musical logic—speaks to a desire to upend the status quo. Sometimes difficult and always thrilling, Interventions asks listeners to meet it halfway—and rewards them copiously when they do. | 2016-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Northern Spy | April 28, 2016 | 7.9 | 12797558-ef4e-42d2-a09d-ab84bb0a2c55 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On his second solo album, the Norwegian saxophonist continues to develop an entirely new vocabulary for his instrument, using electronic treatments to yield a curiously disembodied sound. | On his second solo album, the Norwegian saxophonist continues to develop an entirely new vocabulary for his instrument, using electronic treatments to yield a curiously disembodied sound. | Bendik Giske: Cracks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bendik-giske-cracks/ | Cracks | When Norwegian saxophonist Bendik Giske surfaced on the scene three years ago, he instantly fit in with Oslo’s Smalltown Supersound label. The label’s adventurous, polyglot roster, home to mavericks such as Supersilent and Deathprod, has a long history blurring the parameters of “ambient” and “jazz.” Giske’s 2019 debut album, Surrender, summoned an interiorized soundworld in which the sax, rather than a conveyor of melody, becomes a generator of fractalized sonic microbes that coalesce into mesmerizing shapes. That release established him as one of the label’s most fascinating artists.
Giske’s approach has more in common with the otherworldly fever-dreamscapes of the late trumpeter Jon Hassell and his young sax acolyte Sam Gendel than with any jazz traditionalists. Assisted by André Bratten’s electronic treatments, what issues out of Giske’s horn are miniaturist Joan Miró paintings made out of Nordic breath, aswirl with dazzling ripples and angular abstractions. Cracks delves deeper still into this bizarre approach, which is highly disciplined while maintaining a baseline calmness.
The drama in Giske’s tracks is informed by his keen ear for when to recede and when to surge. It’s the familiar quiet-loud-quiet ethos, but micromanaged on a second-by-second basis. Similarities exist with the music of circular-breathing master saxophonist Colin Stetson, as loads of reply guys under Giske’s YouTube clips have observed, but the Norwegian musician’s work lacks the bravado and the “elephant with a spear lodged in its hindquarters” anguish of his American predecessor. Where you vividly sense the intense physical effort that Stetson brings to his recordings, Giske’s sounds, by contrast, seem more disembodied.
Ironically, bodily movement played a foundational role for Giske: As a youngster, he practiced dance while dividing his time between Bali and Oslo, and when he moved to Berlin as an adult, he expanded his horizons in the discipline by immersing himself in that city’s vital club milieu, though what he’s created on Cracks cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called dance music—unless your limbs are made out of liquid. Opening cut “Flutter” rides in on insular whorls and intimate taps of the sax’s leather pads, weaving a delicate tapestry of almost flute-like trills fibrillating in an expanse of celestial ambience. The title track conjures profound spectral strangeness, something akin to distant demons in a wind tunnel, bringing neck hairs to attention and then frosting them. It is doubtful that saxophone inventor Adolphe Sax would recognize anything in this piece as deriving from his brainchild. “Cracks” could be a contender for placement on a long-awaited second volume of Kevin Martin’s Ambient 4: Isolationism comp.
It’s on “Cruising” where Giske comes closest to the earthy rhythms and mellow oscillations of Hassell’s arcane ecosphere. As the song progresses, Giske’s sax gradually becomes more unruly and echoplexed, haloed in ghost notes that tint the air like exhalations in sub-zero temperatures. It’s the album’s tour de force, an expansive journey to a zone where spiritual jazz meets polar ambience. Throughout Cracks, Giske appears to be striving for an alien, private vocabulary with an instrument saddled with 175 years of tradition and tropes. Against great odds, he succeeds.
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. | 2021-08-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | August 27, 2021 | 7.5 | 127bf49b-3cd5-4d6f-9e7f-c1152c77cb5e | Dave Segal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dave-segal/ | |
Continuing Thee Oh Sees' impressive run of the last couple of years, the John Dwyer-fronted garage rock band's newest album is another resounding success. With its dark undertones, and lyrics about splattered blood and dead children, it's also sort of a sadistic success. | Continuing Thee Oh Sees' impressive run of the last couple of years, the John Dwyer-fronted garage rock band's newest album is another resounding success. With its dark undertones, and lyrics about splattered blood and dead children, it's also sort of a sadistic success. | Thee Oh Sees: Floating Coffin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17866-thee-oh-sees-floating-coffin/ | Floating Coffin | For John Dwyer’s “5-10-15-20” interview, the Oh Sees frontman talked about discovering the work of the Mexican psych prog band Los Dug Dug’s. The legend behind their 1972 album Smog, as Dwyer heard it, goes like this: Armando Nava went up to the mountains, took acid, and conceptualized that LP. “He came back and taught it to the band, and it is by far their biggest triumph,” Dwyer said. Although Thee Oh Sees sound almost nothing like Los Dug Dug’s-- the latter laying on the flute solos a bit too thick-- the opening track on Floating Coffin is called “I Come From the Mountain”. Like most of Dwyer's best songs, it's got muscle and drive. As usual, the story is fractured, abstracted, and therein, too nonspecific to be exclusively about Nava. But the spirit of the myth is there: “I come from the mountain, I return again,” Dwyer sings. Yes, but is he emerging from the mountain with his masterwork?
Based on their output from the past two years alone, it's hard to fathom what “biggest triumph” would even look like for Thee Oh Sees at this point. Castlemania had Dwyer bleating “I Need Seed” in a strained toad voice; the centerpiece of Carrion Crawler/The Dream was a blistering Krautrock masterwork; “Goodnight Baby” from Putrifiers II was a Nuggets lullaby capped by field recordings of chirping birds. Each of those albums are triumphs, and picking the "best" one feels like an arbitrary decision-- they suit different moods, different purposes. In that tradition, Floating Coffin is another resounding success.
And it's sort of a sadistic success. In the tradition of tracks like “The Dream”, “Tunnel Time” is carried by an adrenaline-fueled drive. But this time, the lyrics are about murdering a whole bunch of people, and the central hook is the band singing an evil laugh: “HA HA HA HA HA, HA HA HA HA HAAAA HA!.” Behind every infectious riff, there's a dark undertone. What's behind the strawberries on the album's cover? A murderous gaze. What's behind the earworm hooks and vamp-filled rock'n'roll? Lyrics about splattered blood and dead children. There are a few references to “the maze” as it relates to the narrator's descent into madness. In “Maze Fancier”, he's trapped and sings that there's “nothing inside of me.” Perhaps that dispassionate void manifests later on “Sweet Helicopter” when he takes a dementedly detached view of murder: “I look down and see them looking up.” With his unsettling disconnect between sweet falsetto and portrayal of a glazed-eyed killer, Dwyer definitely earns his spot in the prestigious club of murder balladeers.
Of course, you have to listen pretty carefully to hear Dwyer as demon or serial killer. The lyrics are run through the band's go-to filter of falsetto, voice effects, and extremely loud guitars. The title track is a chaotic burner that sounds like it could fall apart at any moment-- each element is barely held together by the bassline-- so any vocals are pretty well obliterated by volume. But for an album stuffed with great melodies, smooth transitions, shredding guitar solos, and stellar percussion work (the spastic percussion simmering in the background of “Sweet Helicopter” is a particular highlight), it's hard to mind when the lyrics take a backseat. That said, although Floating Coffin does quite well with its searing powerhouses, the quieter moments add a much-needed sonic diversity. The viola melody that introduces “Minotaur” is gorgeous, and once again, that's for a song that tells a fairly miserable story.
Arguably, the most powerful song on Floating Coffin is “No Spell”. The majority of the track features a gentle melody, buoyed by a soft rhythm section, and some ethereal vocals. There are words on the lyrics sheet for the song, but they appear more as a series of evaporating vowel sounds. And naturally, the quiet is broken by a WOO, a series of hefty power chords, and a guitar solo-- a thrilling stab of power amid the quiet warmth. It's a sweet melody that offers a brief respite from the bloodshed. It also illustrates that there's no pre-established blueprint for an Oh Sees album, which means there's no telling what's next. As usual, that's an exciting prospect. | 2013-04-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-04-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Castle Face | April 15, 2013 | 8 | 127d97b0-063b-4d4e-aa8c-7520ba528d79 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
The California producer’s debut album channels new-age synths and retro dance styles into a dreamlike synthesis of disparate musical modes. | The California producer’s debut album channels new-age synths and retro dance styles into a dreamlike synthesis of disparate musical modes. | Tomu DJ: FEMINISTA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tomu-dj-feminista/ | FEMINISTA | In late 2019, the California-based producer Tomu DJ was driving down I-5 when her back tire blew out. Her car flipped three times—the windshield shattered; her airbags exploded. Though she walked away relatively physically unscathed, the accident left her with psychological trauma and, eventually, a period of psychosis. She turned to music to regain a sense of self, retreading the breakbeats that spawned her love of electronic music and exploring the palliative effervescence of Balearic beat and piano house. After a series of EPs, her debut album, FEMINISTA, is a synthesis of her disparate musical modes, floating in the dreamlike space between ambient and techno.
Tomu DJ shelved her first attempts at a full-length, and FEMINISTA jitters with the nervous energy of a postponed debut. After a relatively subdued first half—the reggaetón of “Dula Peep,” the introspective synths of “Schizoaffective” and “Rock69”—”Exposed Nerve” digs into her musical roots as a DJ, a passion she developed after meeting Chicago’s famed Teklife crew in 2015. The sub-bass, breakbeats, and featherlight flutes combine the influence of her current collaborators—for instance, the weightlessness of Toronto-based producer Ciel, who hosted Tomu DJ on her Rinse.fm show earlier this year—with her love of ghetto house, juke, and footwork. “Pretty Stuff,” with its rapid-fire rhythms and delicate synth overlay, sounds like a Teklife spa, pushing the Chicago producers’ penchant for experimental melodies further into the realms of ambient bliss.
The album also plays with nostalgia and memory, appropriating the sounds of ’90s pop without ever fully diving into pastiche. “Cali / Florida” feels like a warm, comforting hug from childhood, layering synths that evoke the breeziness of Steely Dan’s saxophone over a whirring and clicking sound reminiscent of a music box. “What’s Next” answers the question posed by its title with a retro-futuristic soundscape, fusing the shuffling beats of drum’n’bass with the washed synths of new age. Buzzing with the sidechain compression of Eurodance, it feels like a secret doorway to EDM’s past.
It can be difficult to successfully crack a joke within the typically self-serious spaces of new age and dance music, but Tomu DJ has already carved out a uniquely ironic, occasionally absurd voice. It takes a degree of humbling self-deprecation to call your 2020 single “Goes To Bossa During Covid Once,” title your May 2021 followup “Second Dose,” or tag an EP about psychological distress as both “420” and “schizophrenia.” In her typically wordless music, such wordplay comes off as an attempt to add clarity and signal the inspirations behind her work. That carries over to FEMINISTA, whose opening track is named for Wendy Williams’ mispronunciation of Dua Lipa’s name. But just as on her previous releases, jokes provide context—“Dula Peep,” with its downtempo, dembow-inspired beat, might be an opaque reference to the British singer’s penchant for reggaetón and Latin trap. The chintzy smooth-jazz melodies of “Rock69” similarly reflect its tongue-in-cheek title, layering schmaltz onto an already sentimental song.
Tomu DJ has said that the album was influenced by Janet Jackson’s legendary The Velvet Rope, and though there’s little directly reminiscent of the R&B classic, there is a clear throughline to that album’s breadth. FEMINISTA’s eight songs aren’t so much in active conversation as they are pulled from the same subconscious. The timbres and textures of Tomu DJs music, which she tends to coat with luminous reverb, often feel like attempts to translate a mental state into sound. The wobbling synths on “Schizoaffective,” the uneven melodies on “Confundida”—they sound off-balance, as if mimicking her tilted headspace in the months after her accident. But when that same filtered echo appears across her juke and drum’n’bass tracks, it also evokes the woozy afterglow of a night out—the way the thump of the rave rings in your ear as you walk home at daybreak. FEMINISTA is as much an album about recovery as it is about longing to safely return home to the dancefloor.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Side Chick | August 11, 2021 | 7 | 12820c9b-5be1-4c4f-999a-633dd654f619 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Glorified/vilified: I don't give a shit what anyone thinks of Tim Kinsella. I don't care if he ... | Glorified/vilified: I don't give a shit what anyone thinks of Tim Kinsella. I don't care if he ... | Joan of Arc: In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4267-in-rape-fantasy-and-terror-sex-we-trust/ | In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust | Glorified/vilified: I don't give a shit what anyone thinks of Tim Kinsella. I don't care if he's pretentious, I don't care if he does retarded airplane dances onstage, I don't care if he squats over a mirror with two fingers up his ass. I don't care if his self-martyring lyrics are written and performed for the sole purpose of getting pussy, or if he's a tortured genius making esoteric-surreal-referential art, or if he wrote this entire album while sniffing rails of coke and listening to Louis Armstrong records (whose voice he approximates on "No Corporate News Is Good News", and which is probably one of the most offensive/creepy moments on In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust). I'm just glad he's given up the gory melodrama of How Memory Works, even if that means we get the fractured poetic dadaist freakout stuff on recent JOA records-- including Rape Fantasy-- instead.
The fact is, Tim Kinsella is a figurehead in the realm of independent music because of the vehement reaction of his critics, fans, and deriders. There's just no in between: people either love him with frothing passion or hate him with ferocious vitriol, to the point that he matters at least as much as any other artist in the increasingly gray area of what we call indie rock, purely because of indie rock's cultural reaction to him.
So. In interviews, Kinsella has said this record consists of outtakes from their February full-length So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness-- the ones that Jade Tree thought sucked. This is a cursed way for a piece of art to come into the world, with the knowledge of being unwanted and second-best. But one lady's trash is another lady's treasure, as they say, and to me, the cache of "weird" songs on Rape Fantasy is better than the tracks collected on Staying Alive.
Maybe it seems stronger because there's less pained singing and more instrumentation, which can be awfully pretty at times (even when it oscillates in noise wankouts), or maybe it's because of the personas Kinsella tests out on different tracks: he sings, "Ignorance is my privileged right," in a protest of American apathy and suddenly, he's Frank Zappa; the aforementioned Louis Armstrong impression is, if nothing else, uncharted territory; and then there's Tim's old failsafe, the grating, wailing juvenile toddler, which he's channeled at every opportunity for the better half of Joan of Arc's career.
Kinsella's toddler persona comes directly to the fore on "Happy 1984 and 2001", as he begins intoning the "shadow government" chorus in that scrawly whine (you know the one), and then lists other kinds of shadows in a children's theater-style singsong ("sidewalk shadow, cowboy shadow, BBQ shadow, hackeysack shadow)-- a sort of "Now I Know My ABC's" of the illuminati. Kinsella's harped on the government a lot recently, which fits in nicely with his contempt for authority (boyhood Catholicism seems to be at the core of "Dinosaur Constellations Part 1", when he repeatedly screams, "God is the bomb"), and also with his inner conspiracy theorist. But you know. I don't care about those things.
Here's what I do care about, really: a semblance of human emotion, a snippet of beauty, a boatload of comedy, some musical friction and a good story. In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust-- and by extension, Tim Kinsella-- possesses those things at varying points, and sometimes all at once. On "Them Brainwash Days", someone credited as "Ingersol Torniquet" reads unintelligible poetry while a graceful guitar blossoms quietly, a steady drum beats, and a piano unfurls-- and to paraphrase Kinsella, it's just nice. On "Them Heartache Nights", austere vocal samples and another burst of pretty guitar fill out the emotion requirement. In the simple beauty of these moments, the question has to be asked: what could Joan of Arc accomplish if they tossed aside their shock-rock tactics and primal scream therapy, and aimed for this instead?
It seems to me that when they're just spazzing the fuck out, it's not for a lack of talent on the behalf of the players-- which, this time out includes members of Califone, Friend/Enemy, 90 Day Men, Ghosts and Vodka, Chicago Underground, Bent Leg Fatima, and just about every other Chicago-based indie session player you can think of-- it's just a lack of attention span. The formula is for everyone to play what sounds like random measures at once; it's not about applying the aesthetics of free jazz to indie rock, so much as getting a bunch of kids on Kool-Aid to jam out together in the basement. The results are never brilliant or violently disagreeable-- just kind of funny and weird.
In Rape Fantasy is more of a curio than anything-- think of it as Duchamp's suitcase meets Richard Pryor's Bicentennial Nigger. But for all the squawky, experimental shit that gives this band its divisive controversy, there are some genuinely nice arty folk moments that would probably get more credit were it not for Kinsella's by-now well established persona. I don't care what side you're on-- if you think this man is this generation's Ginsberg or an idiot fooling no one; when he lets his act slip and indulges his melodic vice, he proves himself far more talented than he otherwise lets on. | 2003-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Perishable | May 18, 2003 | 5 | 12837643-e2bc-4489-bf3b-3d91e0127f3f | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | null |
This live album, consisting mostly of late-career highlights, emphasizes what Sleater-Kinney does best: playing not just with urgent feeling, but in service of immense meaning. | This live album, consisting mostly of late-career highlights, emphasizes what Sleater-Kinney does best: playing not just with urgent feeling, but in service of immense meaning. | Sleater-Kinney: Sleater-Kinney: Live in Paris | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22782-sleater-kinney-live-in-paris/ | Sleater-Kinney: Live in Paris | In the recently released video for “Surface Envy,” there’s a “stop Bush” sign in the background of one of the many live performances that comprise the clip. Written about their reunion after about eight years apart, “Surface Envy” is the story of Sleater-Kinney in that it is the story of bands—groups of people, really—that attempt to go against the grain: “We win, we lose, only together do we break the rules,” goes the chorus. So while the No Cities to Love standout is not about “the system” per se, it is one of the best fight songs they’ve ever written—a fact underscored by the pummeling version that appears on their new live album.
If there is one unifying thread among many of the songs that make the cut on Live in Paris, it’s not just that they’re late-era Sleater-Kinney highlights (five of the 13 songs come from No Cities to Love, four from 2005’s The Woods). From the post-recession terror of opening track “Price Tag” to the sly sendup of capitalist femininity on closing song “Modern Girl,” the tracklist emphasizes what Sleater-Kinney does best: playing not just with urgent feeling, but in service of immense meaning. Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss came back swinging in 2015 as strongly as they ever had—a gift considering how rarely it happens in rock. Live in Paris is the victory lap leaving us wanting more.
The setlists for S-K’s comeback tour throughout 2015 were maximized to show the band’s power after the better part of a decade away, and Live in Paris—recorded at the historic venue La Cigale about a month into the trek—has enough of it to make anthems out of lesser S-K songs. Girl-gang harmonies originally made One Beat’s “Oh!” sound delightfully bratty, but Tucker’s exaggerated vocals on the chorus resemble a demented Mickey Mouse; it’ll stick with you like a childhood trip to Orlando. Old live footage suggests she hasn’t always sang it so idiosyncratically, which can be said of numerous vocal takes here from both Tucker and Brownstein. The latter’s blood-curdling bird squawks on “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” will make you A.) wonder why Carrie Brownstein hasn’t formed some avant-garde metal band for the sole purpose of squawk-singing (could also work as a “Portlandia” sketch); B.) love it even more.
Listening to Brownstein and Tucker sing together now, 20+ years after Sleater-Kinney’s founding, you can hear how their voices have changed. On early Sleater-Kinney records, their vocals often recklessly (and joyfully) clashed, like a pit of dance-punks tossing their bodies at one another. These days, it's more common that their voices fall into worn, soulful grooves when they harmonize, like in the chorus of No Cities’ “A New Wave”; Tucker hoists her voice up above Brownstein’s like she’s casually hopping out of a pool.
The obvious downside of being a band with serious history is that fans who prefer the old stuff are probably always going to be a given. Sleater-Kinney toured around the January 2015 release of eighth LP No Cities to Love, so clearly those songs were prized. It was an excellent album, but S-K also played older fan favorites like “You’re No Rock n’ Roll Fun,” “Words and Guitar,” and “Little Babies” throughout the tour and they don’t end up here. That’s the only real downside to what is surprisingly the first live album from a touring rock band that remains one of America's best.
Sleater-Kinney’s existence as, in their own mocking words, “the girl band” may seem less revolutionary now than it did on the other side of their hiatus, but it’s partially because S-K helped pave a way for the women who now lead indie rock. In this sense, their presence is inherently political, even when they’re playing a characteristically Corin love song like “Turn It On.” With that and with our current world in mind, Live in Paris makes an inspiring mixtape for the various battles at hand. Like Tucker belts on “Surface Envy,” “We've got so much to do, let me make that clear.” | 2017-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | February 2, 2017 | 8.3 | 128b3922-c01b-4413-99a6-01a6d49b7b15 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
Pusha T's sophomore studio album is an exercise in pure craft for everyone involved. The beats sound like money, and the raps are whip smart and cleanly tailored; imagine Tony Montana slipping out of the country scot-free ahead of his career-ending Scarface raid, and you arrive at the cocktail of spite and incredulity fueling Darkest Before Dawn. | Pusha T's sophomore studio album is an exercise in pure craft for everyone involved. The beats sound like money, and the raps are whip smart and cleanly tailored; imagine Tony Montana slipping out of the country scot-free ahead of his career-ending Scarface raid, and you arrive at the cocktail of spite and incredulity fueling Darkest Before Dawn. | Pusha T: Darkest Before Dawn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21337-darkest-before-dawn/ | Darkest Before Dawn | Pusha T occupies a unique spot in hip-hop. He's a twenty-year veteran with access to the swankiest production but very little of the nagging pressure to surf mainstream trends that runs his peers ragged. He wrestled the major label rap machine and won, and his scathing sneer has menaced a decade of hip-hop top dogs, from Lil Wayne to Drake. He's the rare instance of a rap talent sharpening over time; few who made their first recordings in the late '90s, as he did as one half of the Clipse, can be argued to possess a firmer grasp on their voice today than in their youth. Since jumping to Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Music after the Clipse began a now-permanent hiatus, Pusha T has zeroed in on a mercenary style both weathered and totally disrespectful; he's seen whole labels, crews, and organizations dissolve, and he's happy to tell you how yours will come apart on you if you're not careful.
A popular rapper with a disdain for the machinery of hip-hop fame is a dangerous assassin, and Pusha spends a good piece of his sophomore studio album Ki**ng Push – Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude pulling back the curtain on rap stardom to reveal it for smoke and mirrors. "M.F.T.R." razzes rappers who'd "rather be more famous than rich," and "Crutches, Crosses, Caskets" shames a platinum rapper whose "momma lives in squalor," before smirking that Push's own mother is "in the Bahamas for the month/ She probably sittin' in her pajamas, having lunch." In a year where a multi-platform media mogul like 50 Cent declared bankruptcy, and Drake and Lil Wayne grumble publicly about Cash Money not paying up, Push's dart in the Biggie-sampling lead single "Untouchable" about which companies' checks don't bounce is sound business advice as savage quip (or vice versa).
Darkest Before Dawn isn't all trash talk; Pusha still takes inspiration from his dealer days, both good and bad. Some of the more revealing corners of the record delve into how he coped when things went sour. "The crash don't kill, it's how you survives it," he raps on "Keep Dealing." Early on in "F.I.F.A." he snaps "I'm my city's Willy Falcon/ How you niggas celebrating Alpo?" in reference to the Floridian coke trafficker who once beat charges of pushing nearly 80 tons of white by bribing the jury and the Harlem shooter Alpo Martinez, subject of the movie Paid in Full. Pusha's second act, both after his group folded and after the Clipse's former manager pled guilty to charges alleging he was a drug kingpin, is a rebirth few inside rap or out have enjoyed. Irv Gotti was never the same after the Feds ran into the Inc offices, and try as he might, Family Hustle Tip will never be King again.
Imagine Tony Montana slipping out of the country scot-free ahead of his career-ending Scarface raid, and you arrive at the cocktail of spite and incredulity fueling Darkest Before Dawn. The swing from moneyed gall to grizzled paranoia is a well-trodden path in hip-hop and elsewhere, but the eye for detail in the writing and the claustrophobic, foreboding sonics set it apart from other rote goon rap fare. That these 10 songs hang together is testament to the writer's bleak vision, since they're technically flotsam from the forthcoming King Push (hence the protracted The Prelude subtitle). Perhaps the prevailing feeling he's not trying to impress us comes from the records he really intends to impact radio being saved for a different project. Whatever the case, Pusha dragged a crack team of rap maestros well outside their respective comfort zones for the occasion.
The production on Darkest Before Dawn is uncompromising headphone boom bap from people who don't really make it anymore. The curt "Intro" is a Metro Boomin beat uncharacteristically light on hellacious synths and heavy on cavernous, tribal stomp. For "Untouchable," Timbaland leaves his trademark bells and whistles behind for a skeletal array of dizzyingly tricky bass and snare hits. "M.P.A." is the most unfussed Kanye West production since "Otis." "F.I.F.A." gets a sputtering Rick Rubin style breakbeat from Q-Tip. Rap producers are dying to make and sell weird shit like this, but thirst for easily recognizable signature sounds pigeonholes rapper and beatsmith alike. Pusha T getting his collaborators to set aside their pet sounds is the mark of fearless showmen and inimitable chemistry.
To that end, Darkest Before Dawn is best explained as an exercise in pure craft for everyone involved, the kind of record being scared out of existence because chickenshit execs won't fund what they can't see topping the charts. The beats sound like money, and the raps are whip smart and cleanly tailored. Like Pusha's career post-Clipse, it's godly providence everything has gone as swimmingly as it has here. The resourceful hustler always finds his way. | 2016-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam / G.O.O.D. Music | January 4, 2016 | 8.2 | 128c6c82-248c-445b-b6a5-5f0ff79068de | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
In the wake of a family tragedy, the producer crafts a genuinely transportive work, seamlessly mixing Jersey club with Middle Eastern instruments. | In the wake of a family tragedy, the producer crafts a genuinely transportive work, seamlessly mixing Jersey club with Middle Eastern instruments. | DJ Haram: Grace EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-haram-grace-ep/ | Grace EP | In the wake of a family tragedy, Discwoman affiliate DJ Haram uses her debut EP, Grace, as an escape valve. Grace soundtracks a mythological world that hangs between paradise and hell, drawing on Haram’s New Jersey upbringing and her Middle Eastern roots.
This duality plays out everywhere across the EP. The darbuka, a goblet-shaped drum commonly associated with Egypt, rubs up against against the raucous, percussive crunch of New Jersey club and ballroom, and celestial melodies share space with dark, distorted riffs that fuse hardcore rave with Middle Eastern souk. Often in electronic music, this kind of dichotomy is characterised as x versus y, with elements pitted against each other. On Grace, these seemingly contrary elements interact respectfully, each taking a turn to bask in the limelight and play a supporting role.
Haram has said that drums are “the invisible soul and feeling” of her songs and it shows. “Body Count” and “No Idol (Remix),” two of the record’s most striking songs, are essentially drum jams, in which the sub bass, earthen thump, and sound effects of Jersey club lead a dazzling dance around Haram’s elastic darbuka lines, their interplay coated with the slightest hint of melody. At other times, melody takes the lead: On the original “No Idol,” a breezily evocative Middle Eastern flute riff shares space with an anxious string line, while the mesmerising synth on “Gemini Rising” is pitched somewhere between ethereal and uneasy, like walking through a deserted city park at sunset.
Haram leaves enough space for the various elements to breathe, so the listener is never overwhelmed or beaten over the head by the ingenuity of it all. Grace’s only real misstep comes, perhaps surprisingly, in the contribution from 700 Bliss, Haram’s collaborative project with poet, musician, and activist Moor Mother. The 700 Bliss remix of “Candle Light,” the only track here with a full vocal, feels cramped and unwieldy, its distortion oddly flat on a record of impressive peaks, troughs and wide range.
Maybe the main problem with the “Candle Light” remix is that amid an EP of reverie, it feels too earthbound. Grace is a record for star gazers, romantics and wanderers, a genuinely transportive work that flies from the mundane. | 2019-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | July 22, 2019 | 7.5 | 128e315e-ed08-4dd8-bc69-28646d95261f | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Twenty-three-year-old producer Henry Steinway first made his name as Clockwork, featuring brash, energetic electro-house for labels like Dim Mak and Mad Decent. His RL Grime alias is said to be inspired by equal parts James Blake and Lex Luger. | Twenty-three-year-old producer Henry Steinway first made his name as Clockwork, featuring brash, energetic electro-house for labels like Dim Mak and Mad Decent. His RL Grime alias is said to be inspired by equal parts James Blake and Lex Luger. | RL Grime: Void | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20035-rl-grime-void/ | Void | Dance music has always been fiercely tribalist in nature, but those inclinations seem to be breaking down in the era of EDM—a movement whose very name speaks to its purportedly all-inclusive nature. The Internet has facilitated links between geographically distant scenes and structurally distinct styles, and it has given fans instant access to the whole sweep of dance music's history. And then there's the food-court model of the contemporary festival, in which attendees can sample a range of styles with relative ease—sometimes, without so much as wandering from one stage to the next.
The budding career of a 23-year-old producer named Henry Steinway is exemplary of this shift in dance music's politics. For a time, he was known principally as Clockwork, a maker of brash, energetic electro-house for labels like Steve Aoki's Dim Mak and Diplo's Mad Decent. Clockwork fit the profile of an EDM main-stager: he bootlegged Avicii's "Levels", dealt in crowd-stoking mashups (Wolfgang Gartner's "Nuke" with the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army", for instance), and harnessed the usual array of atom-smashing snares, roller-coaster crescendos, and supersonic whoosh.
Around the same time that he first signed to Dim Mak, Steinway began exploring a different sound under the alias RL Grime. Inspired, he has said, by both James Blake and Lex Luger, he set about attempting to connect those worlds with a cat's-cradle of pitched-up vocals, chiming keys, diamond-cutter snares, and clickety-clackety hi-hats. A 2011 mix sketched the outlines of his adopted terrain: Rustie, Untold, and Joy Orbison on the one hand, and Drake, D'Angelo, and Missy Elliott on the other. Recently, RL Grime's profile has risen considerably via his interpretation of "trap," a gruff, swaggering style informed by Southern hip-hop and Dutch hardstyle.
With VOID, his debut album, he's clearly keen to showcase his versatility. Roughly half of the album forsakes trap in favor of various bass-heavy strains of club music or its home-listening variants. It's refreshing to see him unbound by genre strictures, but it can seem like he's trying too hard to please too many people. The opening "Always" features a pitch-shifted Janet Jackson sample over moody minor chords and 2-steppy drum programming that invariably bring to mind Four Tet and Burial; it's followed by the Boys Noize co-production "Danger", a taut-electro-techno stormer aimed at Boddika's sullen corner of the dance floor.
Both tracks sound like attempts to shore up his underground bona fides, but neither are exactly best-in-class productions, which is a problem that plagues the album: RL Grime may have range, but he doesn't have a terribly original voice. Too many of these feel like items on an imaginary checklist of requirements for any "serious" dance album. Pensive scene-setter? Check. Non-beat-gridded "cosmic" interlude? Check. Ecstatic drum'n'bass roller? Come and get it! Then there's "Reminder", Steinway's contribution to the burgeoning canon of gauzy R&B, complete with guest vocals from How to Dress Well himself. Tom Krell's falsetto is strained and pitchy, and there are points where it might be confused for an ungenerous parody of Bon Iver. Steinway overcompensates by piling on turgid synths, trap hi-hats, and pitch-shifted echoes of Krell's voice run through oodles of reverb. It's a mess.
Steinway sounds far more at home when he's making trap. Had he stuck to his favored lane, in fact, he could have gotten a potent six-track EP out of VOID. "Core", with its Middle Eastern reed melody and jump-up vocal refrain, is a veritable earthquake of a tune; it comes on like a .gif of a landslide demolishing a house, over and over—awe-inspiring violence reduced to a few elegant strokes. "Scylla", with its Koyaanisqatsi-inspired arpeggios and drum'n'bass undercurrents, is busier and maybe even heavier, with horn riffs that could go toe to toe with Hudson Mohawke's gnarliest anthems.
Given that Steinway is still, apparently, making music as Clockwork—his last single under the alias, "Signals", came out in July, on Dim Mak, and it sounds like more of a sop to the EDM middle ground than ever—it does seem curious that there's such a wide gulf between that project and the music showcased on Void. In an electronic-music scene distinguished by its blurred lines, and on an album allegedly meant to celebrate the same, why does he continue to compartmentalize? Discussing how his sets vary from city to city, he told Resident Advisor, "In the UK people may expect different things because they've grown up in a different scene and less of the EDM stuff has come through there. I guess I try to tone down the EDM stuff when I'm in Europe." The comment, like Void itself, sounds like he's hedging his bets. | 2014-12-01T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2014-12-01T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Wedidit | December 1, 2014 | 5.5 | 1291fc71-0933-47a4-8eea-8869ac155df8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
If anyone had told me in 1992 that ten years later I'd be stepping up to praise this record ... | If anyone had told me in 1992 that ten years later I'd be stepping up to praise this record ... | Sonic Youth: Dirty: Deluxe Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7345-dirty-deluxe-edition/ | Dirty: Deluxe Edition | If anyone had told me in 1992 that ten years later I'd be stepping up to praise this record, I'd probably have shot him. When Dirty first came out, it was an almost universal disappointment to anyone who'd listened to Sonic Youth beyond Goo-- and amidst the cries bemoaning what a major-label contract had done to their music, it wasn't as clear then that, beneath the glossy sheen Butch Vig and Andy Wallace had inflicted upon their beloved chaos, there was a damn good record waiting to be heard. Sure, it won them the seeds of a new fanbase-- though the majority had probably been re-alienated by the time they got around to Washing Machine-- but back then, it felt like a slap in the face from David Geffen himself.
Listening to the instrumental B-sides and rehearsal takes that make up the second disc of this deluxe reissue, though, the final Dirty product makes a lot more sense. Even if they're mostly meandering jams with cells of future songs congealing here and there, these tracks show how the big-league production simply smoothed out the frayed edges of the group's sound. Of course, the noisier parts of songs like "On the Strip" still feel more calculated than the ecstatic beauty that seemed to organically materialize in the past, but the record really isn't anything worse than the band beginning to play with some of the toys they suddenly had at their disposal.
But is the second disc worth more than a cursory listen? Not really, at least beyond the covers. Hearing Kim Gordon grunt her way through Alice Cooper's "Is It My Body" or flatly drone above the acoustic shambles of the New York Dolls' "Personality Crisis" is a pleasure to which I'll gladly return, but once the insight is absorbed from blueprints of "Wish Fulfillment", "Youth Against Fascism" and "Drunken Butterfly", among others, they don't make for the most compelling of repeat visits.
It's also worth re-examining the subject matter of these songs because, as Byron Coley points out in the liner notes, Dirty marked the first record where Thurston, Lee and Kim made direct statements with their lyrics instead of using a Beat-like detachment to throw smoke clouds over their true targets. Where lyrical content in the past had dealt with surreal portraits of unlikely pop icons or had offered subverted political commentary like "Total Trash", Dirty had them throwing pointed barbs like "Youth Against Fascism" or offering elegiac tributes to murdered friends ("100%" and "JC")-- not to mention that Kim's prior feminist manifestos had never been so bitingly succinct as they are on "Swimsuit Issue" and "Shoot".
Even among the less confrontational tracks, there are still so many more great songs on Dirty than a lot of people ever realized. "Theresa's Sound World" fuses some of the better guitar interplay of Daydream Nation and Goo into a concise proclamation, while "Sugar Kane" and "Purr" are pure pop songs dressed up with a thousand pounds of overdrive; even a near throwaway like "Crème Brulee" is salvaged by Kim's sultry delivery. The four B-sides that accompany the original tracks on the first disc are enormous finds, too-- especially the LP bonus track "Stalker" that shows how only Sonic Youth could conjure the Sex Pistols covering Lynyrd Skynyrd. They might be a little rougher around the edges, but each of these tracks is as good as anything that made it onto Dirty proper.
The only thing that really stands out as worthy of true criticism now is the tendency toward mining and repackaging some of the older material that becomes visible through the cracks of this reissue. "Orange Rolls, Angels Spit" recycles the riff from "Stereo Sanctity" into a grungy vehicle for Kim's angst, while "Shoot" fails to look any farther back than "Kool Thing", slowing the trendy alterna-hit down to an unsettling dirge about a woman ready to gun her way out from under some asshole's thumb. Several other tracks have that familiar vibe to them without borrowing outright from previous songs, showing that even if they weren't entirely catering to the new ears Nirvana's success was sending their way, they were at least taking it into consideration on a semi-conscious level.
Of course, we should be clear about one thing: there's no chance of Dirty usurping Evol, Sister or Daydream Nation on my list of favorite Sonic Youth records, and even this 180-degree change of heart won't make me apologize for all the shit I've talked about it over the years. Still, even if there's a distinct possibility that I'm in the minority of Dirty-haters who'll eventually come around, this package at least makes a good case for reassessment. But if I'm talking like this when the expanded remaster of Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star comes around, just do me a favor and put me out of my misery. | 2003-05-14T01:00:05.000-04:00 | 2003-05-14T01:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock | DGC | May 14, 2003 | 8.6 | 129563b2-be04-4176-85a4-3d395bd667c6 | Pitchfork | null |
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The Ontario musician caps a prolific year with his tenth album of 2020: a rip-roaring rock record that draws on a hodgepodge of styles and sounds, from blustery horns to roadtrip folk-rock. | The Ontario musician caps a prolific year with his tenth album of 2020: a rip-roaring rock record that draws on a hodgepodge of styles and sounds, from blustery horns to roadtrip folk-rock. | Daniel Romano: How Ill Thy World Is Ordered | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daniel-romano-how-ill-thy-world-is-ordered/ | How Ill Thy World Is Ordered | Already this year, Daniel Romano has released nine records, possibly with more on the way. Technology has made prolificity less impressive, but what distinguishes this Ontario firebrand’s flooding of the market isn’t the quantity of new music, but the quality. Everything he’s done this year—including a book of love poetry—is reasonably good to pretty great, and at best a compelling document of a musician working at the height of his imaginative powers. More than that, there’s the dizzying range of sounds and styles on those nine releases, none of which even dig into the neo-trad country on which he staked his reputation in the 2010s. On Forever Love’s Fool, a single, 20-minute song featuring Tool’s Danny Carey, Romano wears prog rock like an oversize foam cowboy hat. His Super Pollen EP is a power-pop extravaganza recorded with members of Fucked Up and Jade Hairpins, while Spider Bite is a one-off punk explosion featuring the Constantines’ Steve Lambke (his You’ve Changed co-founder).
How Ill Thy World Is Ordered is the culmination of this hodgepodge of side hustles, mostly because Romano manages to integrate so many disparate genres into one rip-roaring rock record. He’s not always successful in his syntheses—the whimsy sometimes feels shoehorned in—but a seamless integration of styles isn’t what he’s after. Romano wants you to hear these songs as high-wire acts, feats of derring-do with real stakes. The album leaps jubilantly between the styles covered on his previous nine releases, and just for kicks he adds a few more. One minute he’s Gram Parsons reciting Shakespearean sonnets; the next Romano and his backing band the Outfit sound like the Raspberries protesting in front of the White House. “Joys Too Often Hollow” begins as roadtrip folk-rock, with Ian Romano’s drum counting the highway lines and Mark Lalama’s organ evoking the sunset they’re driving into. The song fades out, then fades in again when you flip the record: The guitar fuzz on side two opener “Joys Too Often Hollow Pt. Two” suggests they’re now traversing rockier terrain.
These are deeply, and in some cases overly, familiar sounds, yet through sheer force of will Romano and his Outfit put them across as fresh, often exciting, occasionally subversive. When he and his backing band met in the studio, they decided to record the album live and in order of sequencing. More dauntingly, they gave themselves only three takes to get it right and denied themselves any overdubs. The seat-of-pants strategy feeds the album’s sense of urgency, speeding from one riff, melody, and idea to the next. The pace can be dizzying. It’s as though the band can’t wait to finish a song, and once they do, they don’t pause for breath before jumping into the next one. They’ve barely had a chance to hit the final note of “Green Eye-Shade” before the blustery horns of “First Yoke” burst in.
Even before “Drugged Vinegar” breaks down into a round of rapturous applause, How Ill has already succumbed to and recovered from its own cleverness many times. But the album is never just clever. Romano might write in knotty syntax (check the album title) with archaic words (check the album title again), but the power he’s speaking truth to feels current and real. His anger and his worry sound genuine. And while there’s always risk in reading an album in light of current events—especially particularly dire ones—it’s not hard to hear Romano’s songs about perseverance and confusion as pandemic consolations, a warm hand on your shoulder from a guy kick-jumping off a drum riser. By the time the second-to-last song rolls around, a barbed and wounded tune called “No More Disheartened by the Dawn,” he manages to summon a bit of hard-won hope, which bleeds into the gentle closer “Amaretto and Coke.” “No matter what the days provoke, amaretto and Coke,” Romano sings over the band’s sloshed sway. It’s a fitting end to an album about doing whatever it takes to get by, whether that’s a cocktail or another weirdo record.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | You’ve Changed | September 17, 2020 | 7.5 | 129c0d9a-44cf-48a6-a24b-86691ee293f9 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Rave throwback producer branches out to explore dubstep and R&B on his new EP and keeps up his perfect hit-to-miss ratio in the process. | Rave throwback producer branches out to explore dubstep and R&B on his new EP and keeps up his perfect hit-to-miss ratio in the process. | Kingdom: That Mystic EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14585-that-mystic-ep/ | That Mystic EP | Dance music in 2010 does a lot of things very well: paranoid dubstep throb, blissed-out space-disco thump, idiosyncratic bedroom-producer clippety-clop. But I'm not hearing a whole lot of chaos-- the sense of apocalyptic noise-riffs exploding, of producers layering as many weird elements as they could manage on top of each other. That's what used to keep me up listening to the one weekly techno radio show on my crappy clock radio, ear up to the speaker, getting my mind blown by stuff like the Prodigy's "Charly" or L.A. Style's "James Brown Is Dead". These days, nobody really gives me that feeling like the Brooklyn producer Kingdom.
Kingdom made his first real dent earlier this year with "Mind Reader", a gleefully frantic pileup of house-diva wails and euphoric bass-farts. Next to that, the new EP That Mystic feels restrained to the point of austerity. But there's still a ton of shit happening here. Kingdom maintains the same sort of head-rush intensity of early-90s rave producers-- so many different percussive synth riffs beeping their way onto the track and than bouncing all around the interior like ping-pong balls. But as many new elements as Kingdom introduces, he keeps everything working in service of the basic, central pulse at the heart of every song.
That's especially true on the opening title track, which sets the blueprint while the other tracks just get busy within that foundation. But even as one track, "Pang", almost works as an experiment in straight-up dubstep, there's still a cluttered sort of simplicity at work here. All those bleeps and dings and whirs are there for a reason, and they all serve the tracks' central propulsion. This is fun music, and it doesn't have any big aim beyond that.
One neat wrinkle on this EP: Kingdom has a habit of sampling kinda-big R&B hits like Cassie's "Me & U" and Beyoncé's "Sweet Dreams", taking ghostly snatches of those familiar vocals and letting them flit around in the background, dodging in and out of the beats. Those songs are new enough that they still exist somewhere within memory, but old enough that it takes a second to dredge up where that little slice of vocal comes from. They sound like just-out-of-reach memories. But Kingdom never builds his tracks around those samples, and he rarely introduces them in the first half of the track. They're just one more weapon in the arsenal-- and that arsenal's getting bigger all the time. | 2010-08-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-08-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Night Slugs | August 24, 2010 | 7.9 | 12a05a92-c9db-4e43-8c7a-43b55aa82a29 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
It's Album Time is, as advertised, disco producer Todd Terje's first full-length album, and its title sets the tone: casual, confident, and unburdened by the imagined need for significance that scares so many good dance producers into losing their cool when given a bigger platform. Terje is a careful artist that's fluent in history, an expert with texture, and possessing a grasp on composition more akin to a 1960s film composer than a contemporary dance producer. | It's Album Time is, as advertised, disco producer Todd Terje's first full-length album, and its title sets the tone: casual, confident, and unburdened by the imagined need for significance that scares so many good dance producers into losing their cool when given a bigger platform. Terje is a careful artist that's fluent in history, an expert with texture, and possessing a grasp on composition more akin to a 1960s film composer than a contemporary dance producer. | Todd Terje: It's Album Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19148-todd-terje-its-album-time/ | It's Album Time | In early 2012, the music director of a Norwegian state-funded radio station called P3 declined to add a song called "Inspector Norse" by disco producer Todd Terje to its rotation, saying it sounded like "background music at a beach bar." When an interviewer asked him what he thought about the radio station's description, Terje said he agreed with it. "It sounds like elevator music. Good, danceable elevator music." Then, in a pun fit only for hypothetical dads, he added, "Elevate your body!" In Terje's world, there is no distinction made between beating and joining—it's all join, join, join.
It's Album Time is, as advertised, his first full-length album. The title sets the tone: Casual, confident, and unburdened by the imagined need for significance that scares so many good dance producers into losing their cool when given a bigger platform. Most of the music on it could be classified as disco, with shades of cocktail lounge, exotica, surf instrumentals, and other styles that favor whimsy and novelty over sober artistic expression. Not that Terje isn't an artist—he is, and a careful one, fluent in history, expert with texture, and with a grasp on composition more akin to a 1960s film composer than a contemporary techno producer. But for as much ground as he covers on It's Album Time, the music feels effortless, gliding from Henry Mancini-esque detective jazz to bouncy, Stevie Wonder funk like breeze blowing through the waffle weave of a leisure suit. Conventional wisdom bears out: The looser the grip, the tighter the hold.
Despite recycling four of its twelve tracks from previously released singles and EPs, It's Album Time has a linear, cohesive feel. Instead of trying to top "Strandbar" or "Inspector Norse", Terje ties them together with short interstitial tracks—valleys that give perspective to the mountains. If he ever capitulates to the conventions of making a full-length album, it's in structure, which here is less redolent of disco than classic-rock pranksters like Paul McCartney or Frank Zappa: an introduction that features men whispering the words "It's album time" repeatedly, peaking with a ballad halfway through; closing with the joyous "Inspector Norse", and dying away to the sound of distant applause.
Terje is, at heart, a comedian. "I like my music very fruity," he told Resident Advisor in 2007. "Lots of percussion, lots of silly effects." When I interviewed the illustrator Bendik Kaltenborn, who has drawn the covers for most of Terje's releases including It's Album Time, he told me that the two first bonded over what Kaltenborn called a "Stupid" sense of humor. Everything about It's Album Time and Terje's self-presentation—whether it's the fart-like synth sounds, the conga-line enthusiasm, or the promo photos of him flexing his minor biceps with a pout on his face—is so studiously carefree that he sometimes seems less like a human being than an all-night party incarnate.
But like all comedy, Terje's act is held together by a taut thread of sadness. The beauty of his music is the beauty of a neon sign outside a cheap motel: It's kitschy but it knows it, and in its kitsch conveys both loneliness (it's dark outside and you've been driving for hours) and its easy resolution (it's warm inside and happy hour never ends, pink paper umbrella gratis). In the mockumentary-style video for Terje's "Inspector Norse" (which is excerpted from a Norwegian short film called Whateverest), a failed electronic musician living with his elderly father in a small town spends a day bowling and cooking drugs from household chemicals before turning out the lights and dancing to "Inspector Norse", alone. Afterwards, he wanders the streets in facepaint, confused, crying. He survives mostly on illusions, and without happy music, he'd be lost.
The album's least representative song is the one that sticks with me the most: A cover of the Robert Palmer ballad "Johnny and Mary," sung by Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry. The song is heavy, melancholic, and almost oppressively romantic—moods that the rest of It's Album Time feel designed to make you forget about. The lyrics tell the story of a couple who know they're alienated from each other but have hung on for so long they struggle with whether or not to break up. "Johnny's always running around, trying to find certainty," the opening line goes. "He needs all the world to confirm that he ain't lonely/ Mary counts the walls, knows he tires easily."
Ferry has spent his entire career crying crocodile tears, exploring the ways a seemingly insincere performance can ring with more feeling and pathos than something we recognize as "real". His voice—once a dazzling, cartoonish instrument, like Elvis with his finger in a wall socket—sounds hollowed-out and whispery, an old man whose wisdom brings him no comfort. In the original song, Palmer seems to hover above the characters, observing them, maybe even judging. Ferry sounds like he's in the next room, suffering troubles of his own.
As the song crests and the rippling arpeggios of Terje's synths reach their climax, you might wonder: What is a song so sad doing on an album so relentlessly upbeat? Not to ruin the mood, I think—only as a reminder that sadness is a choice. You could be "Inspector Norse" if you wanted to, peacocking wild across the dancefloor, spilling drinks on a stranger, recognizing the brevity of life by enjoying it. From an artist like Terje, it's proof that he could go deep if he wanted to. He'd just rather have fun. | 2014-04-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-04-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Olsen | April 7, 2014 | 8.7 | 12a76b8b-e04c-47a2-98c4-9b10558dd8c9 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Accompanied by a handful of his Solar Motel Band collaborators, the Philadelphia guitarist seeks the third path between classic-rock peaks and floating experimentalism. | Accompanied by a handful of his Solar Motel Band collaborators, the Philadelphia guitarist seeks the third path between classic-rock peaks and floating experimentalism. | Chris Forsyth: All Time Present | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chris-forsyth-all-time-present/ | All Time Present | On All Time Present, Chris Forsyth’s most ambitious album yet, he continues to make the case that there’s yet more to be wrought from the electric guitar. Though the Washington Post not long ago reported the instrument to be on the virtual brink of extinction and rock has been declared dead too many times to count, the Philadelphia guitarist finds new spaces for his instrument between familiar ecstatic structures and the experimental horizon. Forsyth sings here only on one track, mostly bolstering his reputation as a tasteful and inventive shredder, updating the neon acrobatics of Television’s Richard Lloyd with a host of maneuvers both big and little. Despite the occasional nod to rock formalism, All Time Present achieves a scope only hinted at on Forsyth’s previous full-lengths.
Forsyth’s playing is less reinvention than re-entrenchment, finding his voice inside the permanent revolution of guitarists yearning to combine their six strings in previously un-struck combinations, like mystic transliterators committed to a mathematical religion. And while Forsyth sometimes cranks up the wizardry and spits lightning through his strings in the traditional note-filled manner, there are just as many moments that don’t depend on Forsyth’s flash. On the acoustic-driven “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” the song climaxes with a repeating phrase that seems to get quieter as it goes.
As a member of the experimental trio Peeesseye for much of the 2000s, Forsyth located himself deep in the celestial noise fringe, making music that actively challenged form. With 2013’s solo album Solar Motel, though, he reframed his playing inside the vocabulary of classic (or at least canonical) rock. Epic and tasty solos over punk/motorik/hippie grooves followed. Forsyth has continued his allegiances with guitar experimenters, too, including a striking ongoing duo with spectral minimalist Loren Connors, but his subsequent albums leading the rotating Solar Motel Band have remained decidedly inside, their energy easily classifiable as rock.
Billed as a solo project, All Time Present channels the flaring Solar Motel energy on extended workouts like “New Paranoid Cat” (the newest iteration of his standard “Paranoid Cat”) and, especially, the nearly 20-minute album closer “Techno Top.” Most cuts feature semi-fixed Solar Motel dwellers, too, including keyboardist/saxophonist Shawn Edward Hansen and bassist Peter Kerlin alongside the soulful and melodic drumming of Ryan Jewell. The results are something different, more a fully stocked geodome than a motel.
“The Past Ain’t Passed” is nine minutes of raga-like wanderings, tension turning to release in an explosion that seems to happen with the slowness of leaves changing colors, aided greatly by Jewell’s flowing percussion. The album’s highlight is the layered and looping “(Livin’ on) Cubist Time.” Over a flickering guitar grid with no rhythm section at all, Forsyth weaves between foreground and background while Hansen’s saxophones hover at the edge of cognition, fluttering and vaporous. It’s a sublime performance that follows its own rules, both strange and conventionally beautiful.
Rosali Middleman’s singing on “Dream Song” and Forsyth’s own vocal dabbling on “Mystic Mountain” might be heard as additional textures. Despite a limited range, Forsyth isn’t a bad singer or lyricist, copping a serviceable attitude. But if his voice isn’t nearly as striking as his guitar playing, its presence serves All Time Present by adding another layer to his creative vision. The album’s many moods might also be heard as a series of refusals, and a reflection of Forsyth’s career—the refusal to just be a guy with a guitar, or just play fast or loud over a band, or quiet and abstract without one.
In recent years, plenty of guitarists have made the leap from local noise-weirdo post-freak-folk undergrounds to more orthodox forms with (perhaps) the potential for many more listeners. It’s not a hard equation to understand, creatively or commercially. Forsyth’s contemporary Steve Gunn, whose own experimental trio GHQ existed in almost exact parallel to Peeesseye, has found a voice and audience as a singer-songwriter by matching his playing to moody lyrics. But Forsyth, who also uses familiar and sometimes rocking modes in an attempt to do unfamiliar things, has carved out his own path. All Time Present is guided by a restlessness that is both utopian and utilitarian, where classic rock is only one point of the always incomplete map and the electric guitar can still spark something better than joy: freedom. | 2019-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | No Quarter | April 15, 2019 | 7.5 | 12a9ecb5-bf45-4f7d-9a84-68d7bd6a245f | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | |
Bonnie "Prince" Billy, the Handsome Family, and others cover this itinerant folk-gospel artist, who preached salvation more than damnation. | Bonnie "Prince" Billy, the Handsome Family, and others cover this itinerant folk-gospel artist, who preached salvation more than damnation. | Various Artists: Face a Frowning World: An E.C. Ball Memorial Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13838-face-a-frowning-world-an-ec-ball-memorial-album/ | Face a Frowning World: An E.C. Ball Memorial Album | That album cover up there is misleading: When E.C. Ball faced a frowning world, he did so with a smile. Or at least that's the impression his songs give-- that the stern-voiced singer and songwriter took immense joy in praising the Lord through music. When he wasn't driving a school bus and running a service station in Rugby, Virginia, the folk-gospel artist and his wife Orna traveled around Appalachia, playing churches of all denominations and radio stations of all wattages. Ball was no fire-and-brimstone scold, though, nor did he fashion himself as a God-appointed teacher with special moral authority. Instead, he remained humble, content, and hopeful, writing simple songs with simple messages. Even at his darkest, his songs celebrate faith: "Lord, I want more religion," he sings on one of his most famous compositions. "Religion makes me happy."
Not that every song is upbeat, but Ball preached salvation more than damnation. By and large, the artists on Face a Frowning World, which declares itself a "memorial album" rather than a tribute (I'm guessing for reasons of Christian humility), revere this aspect of Ball's music, and in covering his songs, they also consider his faith-- whether they share it or not. Dave Bird testifies proudly on "He's My God", and Bonnie "Prince" Billy extols the stalwartness of "John the Baptist" before keening ostentatiously over Catherine Irwin's earthy vocals on "Beautiful Star of Bethlehem".
By contrast, Rayna Gellert's soft-spoken "Lord, I Want More Religion" is a ruminative, plainspoken prayer, a subdued take that suggests a one-on-one with the Big Man Himself. Even on "Tribulations", sung here by Joe Manning and Glen Dentinger, Ball's depiction of the apocalypse contrasts dramatically with the promise of rescue and reward: "When the fire come down from heaven and the blood shall fill the sea, I'll be carried home by Jesus and forever with him be." The two Louisville musicians sing those lines steadfastly, with a content resignation bolstered by the band's spare arrangement.
Face a Frowning World has the feel of a jubilee, as Louisville's Health & Happiness Family Gospel Band back a range of Ball fans and followers with the enthusiasm of a Sunday morning pick-up band. On the whole, they keep things loose and lively, although at times their energy gets the better of them: They liven up Jon Langford's "When I Get Home I'm Gonna Be Satisfied", but while the spirit is willing, their cover is too loud, too lusty, too worldly. Not that Ball was strictly a religious singer. In fact, he and his wife had a sprawling repertoire that included secular songs, and Face a Frowning World strains to make room for a few of them. Michael Hurley smocks through "The Early Bird Always Gets the Worm" as if he wrote it himself, and Pokey LaFarge turns "Poor Old Country Lad" into a jumpin' C&W romp. On the other hand, the Handsome Family inexplicably transform the playful children's rhyme "Jenny Jenkins" into a slow, dour duet that sucks all the fun out of the song's jumble of syllables. They turn Ball's smile upside down. | 2010-02-15T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2010-02-15T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | Tompkins Square | February 15, 2010 | 6.4 | 12b0fde7-088e-42d3-a0f3-45858672ae09 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
After the slight letdown of Living With the Living, Ted Leo's new LP is hopeful, purposeful, direct-- an improvement on every level. | After the slight letdown of Living With the Living, Ted Leo's new LP is hopeful, purposeful, direct-- an improvement on every level. | Ted Leo and the Pharmacists: The Brutalist Bricks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13992-the-brutalist-bricks/ | The Brutalist Bricks | Cred is essentially goodwill borne of good instincts. Ted Leo's got some fine instincts, and over the course of his career he's built up cred at an enviable rate. Lifers like Leo, unafraid of inserting passionate personal politics into ebullient guitar rock, don't come around too often, and few can boast a track record like his. The ease with which he synthesizes punk and its many roots and branches into something distinctly his own has only occasionally shown signs of slowing down.
Still, you couldn't be blamed for being a little worried about Leo's dedication in the wake of his flimsiest full-band effort to date, 2007's Living With the Living. Living had its moments, for sure, but it was an overlong, unbalanced, occasionally sluggish record, one that felt especially weary in the wake of 2004's vitriol-guided Shake the Sheets. It felt almost instantly like one of those long, all-over-the-place punk records you admire and namecheck but don't ever pull out; the kind of thing that's historically ushered in the sunset of a once-firebrand career.
The Brutalist Bricks, the first Pharmacists LP for the increasingly punk-leaning Matador, feels like a massive corrective to Living's letdowns. It runs 20 minutes shorter and has tauter, better tunes. After the bitter Shake the Sheets and the resigned Living, Bricks feels hopeful, purposeful, direct-- a mood helped along by the Pharmacists' most [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| impressive musical showing on wax since 2003's masterful Hearts of Oak. One never doubted Leo's passion, but Bricks finds him sounding rejuvenated, a refugee from the Bush regime poking his head above ground after lying low for Living and finding that now's the time to get to work.
Bricks kicks off with the throat-grabbing "The Mighty Sparrow", and from there, the stink of shrapnel hangs in the air through the rest of the proceedings. Leo, ceasing to shout only to peel off a blistering solo, sounds plenty invigorated, but it's the Pharmacists-- new bassist Marty Key, longtime drummer Chris Wilson and jack of many trades James Canty-- who seem to be straightening Leo's spine and providing these tunes with a solid backbone. Leo's sound, so expansive in The Tyranny of Distance days, has been pared down further with each subsequent record, and despite a few dubby touches and a bit more acoustic guitar, Bricks follows that path. These tunes feel distilled to their very essence, and the first half of the record feels more like one long earworm.
The middle third of Bricks is where you'll find its best bits, none better than "Bottled in Cork". Leo's long been a master of the travelogue; this one details the experience of being an Jerseyite overseas through the Bush era, and providing tips on how not to come off as an American idiot. The lightly funky "One Polaroid a Day" finds an unusually husky Leo him bemoaning the loss of true experience to constant documentation; take note, bloggers. The more breathless "Where Was My Brain?" and "Gimme the Wire" manage to stick despite their breakneck paces, thanks to Leo's insistence here on piling hooks on top of hooks; largely gone are the long expository verses from the Hearts/Sheets era and the never-ending choruses of Living.
But in distilling everything down to their essence, some of Leo's lyrical directness comes across a bit blunt-- not all, mind but there's a distinct lean towards sandwich-board fodder rather than the carefully constructed, metaphor-laced screeds of old. Few songwriters could kick off their best tune in years with a line like "There was a resolution pending on the United Nations floor" without inspiring either a yawn or a giggle, but Leo does it here with "Bottled"; he pulls it off okay, but there are a few more metaphor-eschewing moments like these where Leo goes way literal. "We all got a job to do and we all hate God" is how he kicks off "Woke Up Near Chelsea", and it reads better than it sounds on record. The otherwise lovely "Ativan Eyes" begins with a too-clever nod to Marx: "The industry's out of touch. The means of production are now in the hands of the workers" just isn't a line that belongs in a pop tune, particularly one that implores someone to lay their hands on Leo just a couple stanzas later. Leo's still exceptionally adept at saying a lot in a small space but there are more than a few lines that feel a little too forceful no matter how many times you run into them, sitting slightly askew next to the richer images and more pointed jabs here.
That occasional obtuseness is really the only thing keeping Bricks from the absolute upper-tier of Leo records; well, that, and "Tuberculoids Arrive in Hop", an unfocused, murky number that's serves as little more than a breather amidst the LP's hyperkinetic back end. Still, you hit play on Brutalist Bricks and these things seem, at best, like secondary concerns; weak spots and strained metaphors aside, the passionate, instinctual Bricks is the finest record from one of the greats in six rocky years. | 2010-03-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-03-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Matador | March 9, 2010 | 7.9 | 12b23966-58ce-4417-827d-b522d5709ebd | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The Queens native brings a directness and precision to his latest album, an unassuming notebook of observations from a mature rapper with nothing left to prove. | The Queens native brings a directness and precision to his latest album, an unassuming notebook of observations from a mature rapper with nothing left to prove. | Homeboy Sandman: There In Spirit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/homeboy-sandman-there-in-spirit/ | There In Spirit | Consistency and longevity have become the defining traits of Queens-native Homeboy Sandman, whose first EP turns 15 years old this month. Though nowhere near as verbose as his regular collaborator Aesop Rock, he’s almost as prolific, with a consistent stream of albums and mixtapes under his belt, as well as full-length collaborations with the likes of Blu and Quelle Chris. His latest album There In Spirit, produced entirely by Detroit beatsmith and emcee Illingsworth, is more condensed than his previous solo records: It plays like an unassuming notebook more than a full-fledged piece of art.
While other backpack rappers might have spiraled off into abstraction, Homeboy Sandman has found a bluntness in maturity, bringing a deadpan precision and defined sense of melody to his flow. On the anthemic “Stand Up,” each couplet and bar comes together like two hands shaking, interlocked tightly together. The words arrive fairly directly, without much dense metaphor or description, his voice endowing even the simplest of words with a charismatic weight. Though he’s capable of constructing dense bars and elaborate webs of words, there’s a restraint to There In Spirit that feels slightly more intimate, an acknowledgement that sometimes the most straightforward word is the most evocative.
Sandman’s more unguarded bars pair well with the enveloping beats of Detroit stalwart Illingsworth, who has previously appeared on records by Open Mike Eagle and R.A.P. Ferreira. Fittingly, his productions are somewhere between Dilla-ish soul chops and the cartoonish electronics of the L.A. beat scene. Illingsworth’s beats have an analog warmth, pulling samples of string tremolos, piano lines, and soothing vocals from soul and vintage pop, to most vivid effect on “Voices (alright).” But the production is not entirely a throwback, fused with electronic wonkiness, like the fluttering hi-hats and bassy synth lines on “Keep That Same Energy.” These are beats that sound like they were chopped up live on an MPC, unquantized and human even when flirting with more futuristic textures.
As he enters his 40s, Homeboy Sandman is more mindful and cautious, sounding like a rapper who has worked too hard to chase clout or confine himself to trends. With sarcastic defiance on album closer “Epiphany,” he declares a well-earned indifference to the opinions of critics, haters, or jealous peers: “These people do not have swag.” While he’s concerned about the world at large, he ultimately keeps a cool distance by recognizing that those who would try to make him feel insecure are deeply dissatisfied themselves.
The key to his longevity is moving at a consistent pace, rather than dashing to get the first word in, like a veteran fighter choosing his blows carefully instead of rushing in hot. He’s more than able to pick up the tempo when he wants to, but here, he focuses on forming a melodic chain of allegory and slice-of-life-imagery, stretching his muscles more than flexing them. Repetition becomes a pointed rhetorical device, forming the very structure of his songs. Album opener “Something Fly” hinges on his inflection of the word “something,” which he clips and twists into a multitude of meanings. The hook of “Stand Up”—“If you don’t stand up, they’ll never stop”—is repeated with a clipped ferocity more befitting a battle cry or mantra than a chorus.
Homeboy’s skepticism of social media hasn’t waned since 2018’s “Never Use The Internet Again.” He’s frequently at odds with digital life, and he succinctly depicts his relationship with technology on “The Only Constant”: “Got emojis from my godfolks/Couldn’t see em cuz I don’t have an iPhone.” He comes off like a rap game Monsieur Hulot, responding with droll confusion and bemusement to how the world has changed. Sandman’s relationship with his interiority parallels his relationship with technology. He’s not necessarily guarded, just protected. There’s a dose of real vulnerability to There In Spirit, frequently framed with sly humor as a disarming mechanism. Where his work has so often been focused on lyrical invention, the cathartic expression of a track like “Feels so Good to Cry” reveals a simpler purpose, allowing his writing to become more diaristic. There In Spirit shows an upside to staying in the game as you start to age: Once you’ve cut your teeth and proved your worth, you can relax a little bit, reflect, and breathe. | 2022-03-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-03T18:32:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | March 4, 2022 | 6.8 | 12b3190c-a12c-4abe-aaef-1d1485ca0882 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Using only pedal steel, lap steel, and effects, Lanois turns traditional sounds into ambient and effortless music, brilliantly masking the complexity of its source. | Using only pedal steel, lap steel, and effects, Lanois turns traditional sounds into ambient and effortless music, brilliantly masking the complexity of its source. | Daniel Lanois: Goodbye to Language | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22289-goodbye-to-language/ | Goodbye to Language | The pedal steel guitar is a remarkably complex instrument, both a marvel of modern engineering and a stubborn beast. It’s predicated on the idea of a hard cylinder skating up and down the fretboard, and all the tradeoffs required to bend notes and chords around its sleek but unforgiving axis. To allow the notes to glide the way they do, while still letting players modulate chords in the fashion of a conventional guitar, workarounds had to be built into the instrument as it developed over the years: a mind-boggling array of foot pedals and knee levers, plus multiple necks of 10 or even 14 strings each.
But it works, almost miraculously so. All those pulleys and levers come off less like simple machines and more like circuits in a computer; we just hear music pouring forth—a sound like water, like air, like colors loosed from the spectrum and left to run free in unpredictable rivulets. Daniel Lanois’ *Goodbye to Language *is a celebration of that elegant artifice. Recorded solely using pedal steel, his collaborator Rocco Deluca’s lap steel, and Lanois’ characteristic battery of effects, it highlights the instrument’s mutability—its legato touch, soft attack, long sustain, and tremulous vibrato—and it channels those qualities into free-floating music that flirts with the very dissolution of structure, even as it makes the most of its harmonic relationships.
It helps that Lanois has considerable expertise with effects boxes, tricks with tape, and assorted mixing-desk voodoo. He got his start recording Christian a cappella groups in a multi-track studio he pieced together in his mother’s basement in Hamilton, Ontario, and by the early ’70s, he was recording Rick James down there. A decade after that, he helped Brian Eno realize groundbreaking ambient albums like Ambient 4: On Land, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, and The Pearl, with Harold Budd. Working on albums like U2’s The Unforgettable Fire* *and The Joshua Tree, and Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy—in which he had Dylan play and sing to the accompaniment of a Roland TR-808 drum machine—he developed a style that balances extreme technique and extreme naturalism until the two create a new kind of truth, a kind of enhanced realism.
Lanois has recorded many solo albums before this one, most of them focused on more traditional songwriting. His last, 2014’s Flesh and Machine, flirted with the idea of ambient and experimental music, and one of its songs, “Aquatic,” even introduced the reverberant, free-flowing pedal-steel techniques of Goodbye to Language. But his new album distills that vision to achieve a kind of purity that is rare for any musical process. It sounds like country music that has been dubbed from tape to tape until it has achieved the consistency of spun honey. It’s difficult music to talk about in any detail because the details themselves are so diffuse; no two tracks sound exactly the same but they all blur together, even after dozens of listens, into a blissful kind of ur-music, amniotic and quietly ecstatic. Parsing its mechanics is a little like trying to describe the specific qualities of different kinds of sunlight.
That title, Goodbye to Language, speaks directly to the pedal steel’s uncannily expressive qualities. Motifs appear and dissolve again just as quickly. There is just enough dissonance to keep you caught up in its mechanics, and the relationships between chords can be quite counterintuitive and strange, but there is no real discord. As the songs shift from chord to chord, they move with an easy, lilting motion, and the most obviously electronic aspects—the loops, the backmasked bits—disappear faithfully back within the whole, determined never to call attention to themselves. Occasionally, a sense of physicality comes to the fore: squeaks of fingertips against strings, whorls of ribbed wire peeling off in delay. But for the most part, the music gives the illusion of being something sourceless, something created without effort—not product, but pure being; not labor, but freedom. | 2016-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- / Red Floor | September 9, 2016 | 8.1 | 12b6e9ce-87b7-4606-b284-546449113ef2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Rooted in authenticity but still layered in artifice, the rising pop singer’s debut is ambitious yet shallow, seemingly intent on proving its own seriousness. | Rooted in authenticity but still layered in artifice, the rising pop singer’s debut is ambitious yet shallow, seemingly intent on proving its own seriousness. | Madison Beer: Life Support | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madison-beer-life-support/ | Life Support | At 21, pop singer and TikTok star Madison Beer has spent an uncomfortable amount of her career navigating mini “scandals”—accusations that she copied Ariana Grande, that she lied about plastic surgery, that she romanticized Lolita. Beer signed to Island when she was 13, shortly after Justin Bieber tweeted one of her many YouTube covers, Etta James’ “At Last”; three years later, she split from the label, saying she felt “trapped” by the “Disney queen” image thrust upon her. The internet deals in absolutes, particularly for young women: She’s either fake or so raw it’s empowering; she’s rebelling against the patriarchy or bowing to it; she’s subversive or she’s derivative. Beer’s debut album is muddier. Life Support is rooted in authenticity but still layered in artifice, molded in the conventions of pop’s more unconventional players.
The comparison to Grande is clear from the intro, an elegiac run of harmonies ranging from breathy to belting. Beer borrows liberally—when she exhales “oh honey” over a heartbeat drum pattern and slow, strum-along guitar, it’s impossible to not think of Born to Die-era Lana Del Rey. “Good in Goodbye,” all maximalist sound effects hurled over a trap drum, is Demi Lovato by way of reputation. Beer’s biggest hit so far, “Baby,” is cobbled out of harps and glitter and a dense, writhing layer of synth-smeared vocals. It was originally called “Prescription Love,” she told NME, a song about “how it could be unhealthy to be dependent on love.” Instead, the final product sounds like every pop song about sex stitched together. “I can turn you on, on, on,” she wails through Auto-Tune.
Life Support is a concept album in the loosest sense. Beer has said the record explores her diagnosis with borderline personality disorder, sieved through the emotional arc of a breakup—a fascinating lens that rarely manifests in the music. Much of the album is spent confusing ceremony with cohesion: Beer seems so intent on proving that this is a big, serious record that she undercuts her more nuanced ideas. The production stays obvious and persistent. Mournful strings clobber sadness into your headphones. “Default” offers an elegant meditation on anxiety that gets lost in melodramatic gusts of violin; “Stay Numb and Carry On” fumbles a metaphor about cherry Alka-Seltzer to describe a panic attack—“Shake it up, and find some shelter to hide,” Beer says in a staccato pseudo-rap. “Follow the White Rabbit” buries a catchy beat in juddering bass and heady Alice in Wonderland imagery. Beer has an impressive voice, and when it’s freed from layers of effects it can convincingly convey fear and resignation, or glide into a gleaming harmony. On “Homesick,” the walloping production pauses, and Beer croons over just a guitar. It’s a reprieve, until she murmurs, “These ain’t my people, ain’t my crew, it ain’t my planet.” Soon after, a “Rick and Morty” sample belches in.
But even when Beer herself sounds lovely, her explorations of vulnerability and self-definition tangle in stiff, obvious metaphors. The writing relies on flimsy framing devices, shoehorning a delicate narrative about hiding and healing into simplistic slogans: the countdown chorus in “Emotional Bruises,” the color descriptions in “Blue,” the faux significance of spelling (“Ain’t no I in trouble/Just the U since we met”) in “Good in Goodbye.” Often her simplest lyrics carry the most weight. “Used to do these things so effortlessly, somehow,” she moans on “Effortlessly,” her vocals dragging and distorted. The beat pauses for a second, the wrenching want in her voice laid bare, as if the track itself is too mesmerized to continue. But then, with an almost tangible sigh, Madison Beer sings on.
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. | 2021-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | February 26, 2021 | 5.9 | 12c109f8-75bf-4c46-9702-a96e90f60df8 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The former mash-up maker suggests that he could build a second career as a backpack-scale Rick Rubin, rejuvenating rap veterans by reconnecting them with their most dependable muses. | The former mash-up maker suggests that he could build a second career as a backpack-scale Rick Rubin, rejuvenating rap veterans by reconnecting them with their most dependable muses. | Girl Talk / Wiz Khalifa / Big K.R.I.T. / Smoke DZA: Full Court Press | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/girl-talk-wiz-khalifa-big-krit-full-court-press/ | Full Court Press | It’s probably been a while since your friend emailed you a mashup. The medium, so cutting-edge in the mid-’00s, is now as much a relic of the decade as a Shepard Fairey “HOPE” poster or a burned DVD of Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay. So what do you do when the very craft you’ve dedicated your career to proves to be a fad? That’s the question facing Girl Talk’s Gregg Gillis, whose human iPod shuffle routine represented the pinnacle of mashup culture and, in hindsight, its conclusion. Once you’ve mashed up everything, there really isn’t anywhere else to go.
Gillis hasn’t released a Girl Talk album—or at least what we think of as a Girl Talk album, a Red Bull-guzzling megamix of popular music in any and all incarnations—since 2010’s All Day. But for 2014’s Broken Ankles EP, Gillis partnered with Roc-A-Fella castaway Freeway, who sounded absolutely nourished by production that paid homage to his early-’00s heyday. Gillis pulls a similar trick on a wider scale with his new album Full Court Press, which pairs him with not one but three rappers just past their commercial and critical primes: Wiz Khalifa, Big K.R.I.T., and Smoke DZA, who convened for several days of sessions in Los Angeles. Taken together, these projects suggest Gillis could build a second career as a backpack-scale Rick Rubin, rejuvenating rap veterans by reconnecting them with their most dependable muses.
It’s astounding how rarely rappers record together in the same studio. In an age when artists Dropbox each other verses with all the fanfare of emailing an invoice, most projects barely bother to create the illusion the talent involved was even in the same vicinity. One of Full Court Press’s chief selling points is the mere notion that four compatible artists spent so much time hanging out, spitballing ideas, goading each other to try a little harder than they normally might. Full Court Press is never better than when it feels like a true session, as on the closer “Everyday,” where Khalifa, K.R.I.T., and DZA all volley short bars over some Cali funk, all effortlessly synced with each other. Curren$y joins them just for that final track, but his bong-smoke vibe hangs so heavy over the album it’s as if he’d been there the whole time.
Wiz Khalifa isn’t the bona fide A-lister he used to be, but alongside this cast of internet favorites, he still sounds like a genuine star. Khalifa’s track record with albums is horrid; it’s as if the burden of carrying a full-length project sucks all the air out of him before he even arrives at the booth. But in short doses he’s an absolute charisma machine, and with three co-headliners to help him carry the weight, he raps with uncharacteristic joviality. If only his own records captured him this amiable, this focused, this awake. DZA, meanwhile, raps as ever with something to prove, while K.R.I.T., always so great with a hook, summons a fantastically sticky one on “Put You On.”
Between Khalifa’s lava-lamp dorm music, K.R.I.T.’s UGK-worshipping Southern soul, and DZA’s shadowboxing New York rap, Full Court Press’s lineup gives Gillis plenty of range to play with. None of these are proprietary lanes, of course, and plenty of producers work in them. But few of those producers are festival headliners, and Gillis distinguishes himself with his command of dynamics. Although his production is never nearly as busy as his old Girl Talk mixes, these tracks have an underlying antsiness to them. Much as he performs, Gillis produces like his finger is always hovering over the skip button in case things ever get dull. It’s a credit to his curatorial skills that on Full Court Press they never do. | 2022-04-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rap | Asylum / Taylor Gang | April 14, 2022 | 6.9 | 12c1cc51-141f-41ab-8ade-7c5c0fd6a7e6 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
In a minimalist piece presented in four different iterations—for strings, woodwinds, brass and organ, and choir and electronics—the Los Angeles composer strips her music down to its bones. | In a minimalist piece presented in four different iterations—for strings, woodwinds, brass and organ, and choir and electronics—the Los Angeles composer strips her music down to its bones. | Sarah Davachi: Long Gradus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-davachi-long-gradus/ | Long Gradus | The first few notes of “Long Gradus (strings)” are so fragile that they might break at any moment. Each member of string quartet Quatuor Bozzini bows one long tone without any vibrato or other ornamentation, stretching it out until it becomes paper thin. It’s like a skeleton of a Sarah Davachi piece—just the notes, none of the reverb. To write Long Gradus, the Los Angeles-based composer draws on many of the ideas that have shaped her work over the years—slow tempos, just intonation, harmonies inspired by Medieval and Renaissance polyphony. But where her previous albums felt cavernous, Long Gradus strips her music down to its bones, zeroing in on the timbre of each individual note.
Davachi composed Long Gradus while she was in residence at Quatuor Bozzini’s Composers’ Kitchen. The artists worked closely together to develop the piece, which explores psychoacoustics—the science of sound and perception—through sustained tones. It is composed of four movements, each between 15 and 17 minutes long, that progress through a series of intervals, tracking their evolution in time. Intended as an open-ended work, Long Gradus offers guidelines but no strict rules, so it may be played by any group of four instruments.
In the album version, Davachi shows the composition’s adaptability by presenting recordings of string quartet, woodwinds, brass and organ, and choir and electronics, demonstrating how the piece translates across instrumentations. Davachi has never shied away from writing long pieces—her albums often run an hour or more—but Long Gradus takes her work to a new extreme. Its four discs spread out over four and a half hours, examining the contours of the work from seemingly every angle.
Throughout, tones enter and fade with the ease of breathing. Each movement creeps from low to high pitches almost unnoticeably, save for some occasional clashes between frequencies, and ample pauses between notes give the music a glacial quality. Davachi has always explored measured, subtle motion: Her stretched-out progressions often seem to exist outside of time, moving at a pace that’s guided by intuition. But that’s a zoomed-out picture, and Long Gradus shows the granular: With this composition, Davachi invites us to take stock of every tone in the minutest detail.
The four iterations take on strikingly different qualities. When notes get close together in the string quartet version, there’s pronounced beating; when woodwinds play, there are soaring overtones. The strings often sound ghostly, while the woodwinds are bright and feathery; organ and brass feel deep and resonant while choir and electronics take on a Medieval air. Those changes are so subtle that listening to each feels repetitive—this is the same piece, after all, just played by a different set of tools. But the four versions of Long Gradus do show how the work transcends the particularities of a given adaptation. No matter the instrumentation, Davachi’s music is still evolving. | 2023-11-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Late Music | November 7, 2023 | 7.4 | 12c6aea2-d144-4ed8-88cb-8854f3c14ecc | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
With the debut of his new project Metronome, Mikel Rouse reaches the rarified level of production ambition he first achieved in the ’80s, as he weaved together classical, electronic, and indie rock. | With the debut of his new project Metronome, Mikel Rouse reaches the rarified level of production ambition he first achieved in the ’80s, as he weaved together classical, electronic, and indie rock. | Metronome: Take Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22184-take-down/ | Take Down | New York’s 1980s club scene boasted famously cavalier attitudes regarding genre convention. Composers worked in rock venues, improvisers experimented with turntablists, and few musicians derived more joy from the era’s stylistic permissiveness than Mikel Rouse. Using the then-new LinnDrum machine, he painstakingly programmed Quorum—a complex, thumping percussion opus that was promptly adopted by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (and is still used today). He also fronted a melodic indie rock outfit called Tirez Tirez, which opened for Talking Heads and saw its final recordings distributed by IRS Records.
At the same time, the composer led a contemporary classical group, Broken Consort. This quartet drew clear inspiration from the minimalist-meets-rock energy of the Philip Glass Ensemble. But Rouse worked rewarding changes on this inheritance, even toying with approaches to atonal writing that were generally considered antithetical to minimalist trends. Overall, Rouse’s polyglot catalog of recordings from this decade still holds up; the Tirez Tirez albums remain in need of reissuing.
Now Rouse is on another hot streak. While some of his pop-song collections from the ’90s and ’00s strained to balance his hooks with his polyrhythmic play, recent albums like Recess and Boost/False Doors have displayed more cohesion. And on Take Down—the debut of his new project, Metronome—Rouse approaches his production duties with greater ambition than at any point since Quorum.
The opening track, “Habibi Lossless,” combines several Rouse hallmarks to stirring effect. His tenor voice and slide guitar both offer indie-folk comforts, while drier pitched percussion lines swerve around seductive electro-pop beats. Over the course of the 10-minute song, minimalist phrases of varying length cycle through the arrangement, creating cross-rhythms and a swirl of melodic information. Still, the center always holds. This attractive but mercurial structure is also suited to the lyrics, which hint at a romance interrupted (if not fully extinguished).
Longing for an affection that may already be lost is not novel subject matter. But Rouse’s musical evocation of this psychology is ingenious. The vocals take care of the present-tense melancholy, while the madly cavorting instrumental activity represents all the mental what-ifs and counter-arguments that rebel against a discouraging romantic prognosis. Toward the end, a slow vocal-and-guitar refrain is paired with blissfully untroubled techno programming; in addition to being a druggy juxtaposition, the compositional choice creates an affecting portrait of someone trying to dance through pain. Naturally, this strategy hits a dead end, too, and Rouse’s narrator can be heard expelling some exhaustion as the song concludes.
Solitude and romantic discord are themes that appear elsewhere on the album, though nothing else on Take Down is as heavy as the leadoff track. Songs that push vocalist Claire Karoly forward in the mix have a buoyant quality: “Habit” contains a synth-driven theme that draws from new wave, while the breeder-dissing “Growing Pains” has a middle-aged punk’s rejectionist spirit.
The composer doesn’t take any guitar-hero solos, but his range on the instrument is evident across all of these winding pieces. He threads playfully funky licks throughout “Ambulance Chaser” that go well with the song’s teasing vocal performance. On a track like “Side Myself,” Rouse can begin with acoustic, Delta-blues accents before turning to some exultant electric accompaniment during the climax. More than any lyrical or conceptual through-line, it’s this consistently well-judged mixing of parts—with elements and strategies culled from dance music, rock, and classical forms—that gives the album its unity.
There are scattered suggestions of an overarching concept, here and there, as is common with Rouse. He calls this album a “soundtrack to America’s future,” and so a particular song’s narrator may broach concerns over personal money-management issues, or class inequality, that are apt to sound timely not only now but in years to come. Yet those fears are never more than sketched, leaving these lines to impress more strongly as the stray worries that can be part of life as it’s lived, disappointment to disappointment.
Take Down isn’t as interested in any systematic critique of contemporary culture as it is in the idea that a frustrating circumstance might be bettered through some surprising new choice. Whenever the cynicism of a lyric threatens to make a song seem too cloistered, a new harmony or vocal cadence has a way of throwing open a window and letting in a new vibe. After growing up in those protean New York clubs of old, it’s as though Rouse knows full well that whatever room you’re in can be made to host the sounds you need to hear at any moment, conventions be damned. | 2016-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Exit | August 1, 2016 | 8.3 | 12c9e44d-94ee-4979-a67f-2c6112f830be | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The band’s sixth album is familiar and intimate, updated with touches of synth and drum machine but still rooted in melancholy brass and Zach Condon’s distinct baritone. | The band’s sixth album is familiar and intimate, updated with touches of synth and drum machine but still rooted in melancholy brass and Zach Condon’s distinct baritone. | Beirut: Hadsel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beirut-hadsel/ | Hadsel | The note of surprise on Hadsel, Beirut’s sixth studio LP, is not so much that Zach Condon has recorded an album on a remote Norwegian island with free access to a church organ, it’s that he hasn’t done so before. This sneaking feeling of familiarity is at the heart of Hadsel’s comfortable and occasionally underwhelming charm. Condon has, objectively, changed the Beirut sound since the Balkan brass days of Gulag Orkestar, his whirlwind 2006 debut. But his rich baritone croon, which swoops and curls around melodies like an eagle after a rabbit, is so distinctive, his brass arrangements so stridently mournful, that he can’t help but sound like himself.
Hadsel, named after the municipality in which it was recorded, has its moments of reinvention. The use of the Hadsel kirke organ, whose ministerial drones underlie several of the album’s songs, introduces an austere, baroque elegance to the title track (especially) that is far removed from the ultra-bright tones of much modern pop music. For a blackened moment, the listener is transported to the hostile beauty and long nights of a Norwegian winter, the cold wind blowing around an icy wooden church. But as soon as the brass starts its stately call, we’re plunged right back into the world of Gulag Orkestar et al.
At the same time, the modular synthesizers and drum machines that made their bow on 2019’s Gallipoli are more prominent on Hadsel. “January 18th,” “Spillhaugen,” and the second half of “Süddeutsches Ton-Bild-Studio” take on a borderline jolly, Switched-On Bach-style electronic wobble, while “Stokmarknes” and “The Tern” are marked by writhing electronic beats. But it almost feels like Condon has used these elements too well, weaving unfamiliar sounds around his lugubrious vocal so snugly that his invention slips by unheralded.
This isn’t necessarily a problem, given the album’s lucidity and songwriting strength. Condon recorded Hadsel at a time of great personal difficulty, after health problems forced him to cut short Beirut’s Gallipoli tour in 2019. Upon arriving in Norway, he threw himself into recording as if “lost in a trance”; when he later returned to Berlin, rather than turn to his band for help, Condon fleshed out the Hadsel recordings on brass, percussion, and ukulele. The resulting sound is not exactly minimal, but it has greater clarity of purpose than Beirut’s more overblown records. This is an intimate, unflinching album that draws its power from Condon’s voice, which is frequently multi-tracked into giant choirs, like a lonely man who has invited his imaginary friends to a party.
It remains thoroughly cathartic to hear Condon in full canorous flight, pushing simple vocal lines to grandiose conclusions. Drum machine aside, “So Many Plans” is a classic, horn-heavy Beirut heartbreaker in the style of “Elephant Gun.” “The Tern,” meanwhile, is a master class in pared-down songwriting, riding one melodic thought to towering emotional extremes. Condon went to Norway and came back with a familiar tangle of contradictions: Hadsel is a new beginning for Beirut that sounds like old times, a record born of despair and solitude that still feels full of life. | 2023-11-15T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-15T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Pompeii | November 15, 2023 | 7.2 | 12cae189-706c-4e0d-98aa-3280cd9e0309 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The live album captures a night of the exuberant collaboration Karin Dreijer fostered with the Plunge stage production, adding volume and dimensionality to old and new songs alike. | The live album captures a night of the exuberant collaboration Karin Dreijer fostered with the Plunge stage production, adding volume and dimensionality to old and new songs alike. | Fever Ray: Live at Troxy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fever-ray-live-at-troxy/ | Live at Troxy | For their 2014 Shaking the Habitual Tour, Karin Dreijer and their brother Olaf expanded their synthpop duo the Knife from a twosome to a troupe. The siblings wore the same jewel-toned jumpsuits and glittery makeup as the nine other performers they invited into the group, visually diminishing any sense that they were bandleaders. The symbolic collectivism of the stage show accentuated the themes running through the album of the same name: freedom, communalism, and the urgent need to dismantle social hegemony to clear space for a better world.
While touring behind their second album as Fever Ray, Dreijer applied a similar conceptual bent to a rather different show. The performers on the Plunge tour each wore distinct costumes—a fur coat and thigh-high boots, an orange polyester muscle suit, facepaint and velvet opera gloves—creating characters from the messy, ad-hoc getups. Hoping to challenge the music industry’s pervasive gender disparity, Dreijer hired as few men as possible for the tour. Five out of the six stage performers were about 40 years old, and four were parents—Dreijer's effort to counteract the ageism and sexism that often freezes mothers and women past their 20s out of performing creative work.
Fever Ray’s live album, Live at Troxy, captures a night of the exuberant collaboration Dreijer fostered with the Plunge stage production. While the Shaking the Habitual Tour made extensive use of pre-recorded backing tracks, allowing the performers to dance freely and lip-sync to the music, Dreijer opted on the Plunge tour to have everything played live. Physical percussion bolsters live-triggered drum machines on the record, adding volume and dimensionality to old and new Fever Ray songs.
Dreijer’s 2009 self-titled debut as Fever Ray sprung from a place of isolation and deep introspection. A few songs from that album appear on Live at Troxy, but they are newly reinvigorated: They sound like memories of isolation now dispelled by having found community. “When I Grow Up” and “I’m Not Done” were both significantly revamped for the Plunge tour, spiked with higher tempos, gulping vocal samples, and newly colorful percussion. These new incarnations fit right in alongside the playful offerings from Plunge, but even Fever Ray’s iciest cuts fill with new warmth here. The drumbeats tower on “Keep the Streets Empty for Me,” while synthesizer figures twirl irreverently. It’s as though the speaker has finished a long nighttime walk home only to find their apartment filled with friends. And the powerfully chilling “If I Had a Heart” sounds like Dreijer making peace with past selves: They sing live and unaffected over a recording of their pitch-shifted performance from 10 years ago, voice cracking and rasping in ways the processed vocal didn’t allow.
Even in their studio versions, most songs from Plunge sound like they were written to be played in a club full of people—it’s an album about fucking your way out of your shell, and it lends itself to joyful, gay celebration. Live, tracks like “To the Moon and Back” and “Wanna Sip” flare with life and color, animated by the urgency and risk of live performance. When the drums crash in at the beginning of “IDK About You,” and the synths peal and squiggle, you can almost see the band members grinning at each other.
On Plunge, Dreijer openly celebrated their queerness for the first time, never losing sight of the fact that even romantic relationships don’t transpire in a vacuum. To grow close to another person is to open yourself to the world in which they’re enmeshed, to participate in the broader social fabric. Plunge expertly traces the threads connecting the sexual and the political, the bond between two people in a couple and the bonds that link a community. On Live at Troxy, we get the chance to hear Fever Ray—a band, now—exalt all of that good human love as a collective, a chosen family thrilled to share their music and their play. | 2019-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mute / Rabid | August 7, 2019 | 7.5 | 12d47398-48f4-47f7-96c2-22b9bc38120c | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Rapper associated with Busta Rhymes' Flipmode Squad steps out with an album that combines early 1990s boom-bap with an impressive flair for storytelling. | Rapper associated with Busta Rhymes' Flipmode Squad steps out with an album that combines early 1990s boom-bap with an impressive flair for storytelling. | Roc Marciano: Marcberg | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14720-marcberg/ | Marcberg | "Don't be out showing your teeth/ Niggas will think shit is sweet, so keep it low and discreet." Long Island's Roc Marciano follows his own advice. Once destined to be an also-ran of Busta Rhymes' Flipmode Squad, Marciano has locked himself in a dilapidated apartment and recorded a masterwork of insular, borderline-sociopathic hip-hop, much in the vein of the mid-1990s heyday of Mobb Deep. Prodigy once threatened to stab you with the bone of your own nose, and Marciano also comes from the streets of pre-Giuliani New York, where it's so dark you can barely see three feet ahead of you, where "niggas [are] duct-taped up and mistaken for lunch." In Marciano's New York, the weak get devoured and smacking someone is explicitly referred to as an involuntary movement.
Marcberg could be heard as revivalism in the vein of Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...Pt. II from kindred spirit Raekwon, mainly because it sounds like it was released in 1992. Marciano still refers to police officers as "jakes," Naughty by Nature and Earl Boykins(!), as well as London Fog(!!) are all referenced. The beats are minor-key, sample-based boom-bap, as if Swizz Beats, shiny suits, and rappers in skinny jeans never happened. The key to the record's appeal is that while it clearly pays homage to a bygone hip-hop era, it never sounds dated or overtly reverent.
Much of that is due to Marciano's hyper-syllabic and percussive flow, narrative flair, and fastidious eye for detail as both a rapper and producer. Along with the eerily visceral thump of "Pop", he keeps his eye on the kids on roller skates, hoping none of them get hit with a stray bullet during an impending gunfight. The blaxploitation groove on "Whateva Whateva" serves as the perfect backdrop for Marciano's gifted wordplay and dark comedy, where Marciano threatens to "pop the air out of your balloon and the spare, too." None of the music on Marcberg rises above a dull roar, but that makes it that much scarier; here, you have no idea when someone is going to jump out of the corner and shoot you.
Even when Marciano tips toward cliché, he finds a way to make it work. The whole drug-as-woman metaphor has been around forever, which makes "Jungle Fever" all the more impressive. A tender ballad centered around a bright-but-dusty piano sample, Marciano attacks the subject of dealing cocaine by envisioning it as an interracial relationship. But what makes "Jungle Fever" special is that while other rappers might adopt the obvious "Hey, white girl, let's have fun" pose of the song's premise, Marciano lets his guard down after he and the girl in question start making money together, letting her buy him clothes and hiding her from his mother. By the end, he's waiting by the phone for her to call, stressing over when she's going to return, or if she's even going to return at all.
"Fuck being a taxpayer," Marciano snorts. If Marcberg sounds so claustrophobic and unconcerned about the rap scene surrounding it (one that has changed over at least four or five times since this record's closest counterparts have been recorded), it could be because Marciano has been too busy honing his craft to worry about swag rap. | 2010-10-08T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2010-10-08T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | Fat Beats | October 8, 2010 | 8.1 | 12d5ed7f-0f56-4e33-8903-870b9dfcdb77 | Martin Douglas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/martin-douglas/ | null |
Like their previous work, the British production duo's latest album contains heavy doses of sounds that rile, pacify, and intrigue, but here they constantly tip their hand. | Like their previous work, the British production duo's latest album contains heavy doses of sounds that rile, pacify, and intrigue, but here they constantly tip their hand. | Plaid: Scintilli | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15860-scintilli/ | Scintilli | Over the past several years, as European electronic music's moved from its all-minimal-everything phase into fuzzier areas, I've made a mental note of comparing no less than a dozen young producers to Plaid. I didn't listen to Plaid-- British production duo Andy Turner and Ed Handley-- very much, not even their 1999 mini-masterpiece Rest Proof Clockwork. Instead they remained faintly but firmly ensconced in my memory, the result of a burgeoning electronic music fan seeking a group Radiohead wasn't constantly namedropping (scratch Aphex Twin, Autechre), but that was still available at Sam Goody. I would never suggest that Plaid were a direct inspiration for a group like Mount Kimbie, though there are worse things than being a token in the revival of soft-focus, reasonably scaled beatmongering.
Scintilli is Plaid's first non-soundtrack work since 2008 and their first proper studio album since 2003 (2006's Greedy Baby having been an audio/video collaboration). It doesn't count as a "new direction" for the duo because they've never really fucked with "direction" in the first place. At their best, Plaid nestled into the wide crevasses between hardline, dystopian techno, broken beat, and experimental composition. Their synthesis was recognizable but not unrepeatable; they stood out for their casual, unhurried sense of adventure. (In the late 1990s, they were called Intelligent Dance Music because their records had "Warp" on the back, and they didn't sound like Moby.)
There's a danger in this lack of direction, though: sometimes you exist comfortably outside electronic-music narratives and sometimes you get lost. Scintilli isn't the first time Plaid have stumbled into the latter state; all things being equal, they operate in this mode better than most. Still, Scintilli underwhelms, lacking the ease with which Plaid used to stitch sound together. They're no longer inscrutable; like their previous work, Scintilli contains heavy doses of sounds that rile, pacify, and intrigue, but here they constantly tip their hand. The dolloping keyboards of "Craft Nine" calm; the walloping bass of "Sömnl" disrupts.
Plaid's skillful incorporation of the female voice remains intact (Björk sometimes seems to aspire to "Lilith", her 1997 collaboration with the duo) on soft-footed opener "Missing" and closer "At Last". Their overall sound has remained eclectic even as their tracks grow compartmentalized. I still appreciate Plaid's baselessness-- how I can never quite place what I'm listening to. They're less diffuse than their late-90s Warp peers but far more so than, say, Mouse on Mars or Flying Lotus, artists with whom Plaid share sensibilities but little more. I find Scintilli-- and its ambitious alternating of composure and chaos-- admirable, but "admirable" sounds (and feels) like a backhanded complement. I would prefer to find it fizzy or confusing or aggressive. Scintilli is a disappointingly static record from a duo of born tinkerers. | 2011-09-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-09-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | September 28, 2011 | 5.8 | 12ded6d4-8eae-4114-9e8d-ae9329e36121 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Combining elements of the best ambient music with the emotive nostalgia and accessibility of Fennesz's Endless Summer and Boards of Canada, From Here We Go Sublime may wind up 2007's most luxuriant electronic record. | Combining elements of the best ambient music with the emotive nostalgia and accessibility of Fennesz's Endless Summer and Boards of Canada, From Here We Go Sublime may wind up 2007's most luxuriant electronic record. | The Field: From Here We Go Sublime | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10022-from-here-we-go-sublime/ | From Here We Go Sublime | After centuries of music consumption, we're still obsessed with the crescendo. From all that classical music we learned in school to modern soundtrack fodder to the banal quiet/loud/quiet dynamics of groups like Explosions in the Sky, people still seek the thrill that comes when music reaches its stirring Big Moment. Blame remote controls or the death of vinyl, but 30-odd years after Brian Eno invented ambient music, most people are wary about "turning off" to any music that doesn't actively seek to engage them. Deep listening remains mostly theoretical in the age of mp3s.
Minimal techno isn't exactly built for the iPod age, so what's a post-disco producer to do when he wants the restraint but also the explosion? If most 21st century pop music could be whittled down to a ringtone without losing any of its effect, a dance producer who actually manages to hook the ear for six or seven minutes after that opening jolt-- while still rejecting, you know, narrative or harmonic development-- is doing something special.
Axel Willner, founder and sole member of the Field, is hardly the first to split the difference, but his formally simple yet functionally overwhelming music captures not only those big ecstatic peaks but also the initial ringtone-esque bursts like the two sides of the same coin they are, and basically just repeats them until he decides to stop tape. Willner's records under his Field alias (his other guises include Cordouan, Lars Blek, and Porte) do away with the build-up almost entirely while still milking the climax like a chemist running real-time tests to see just how long he's got until the drug's effect wears off.
That kind of pared-down sound-sculpting is everywhere in continental European electronic music these days, but rarely is it as instantly enveloping or as comforting as the Field's debut, From Here We Go Sublime. The album recalls Kaito, another artist on the German label with one great idea, likewise pushing wistfulness and simplicity to the brink. Favoring a dreamy minimalism of just a few sounds waltzing around each other, Willner smears, chops, and processes slivers of musical information-- the tips of a vocal, a note and a half of an instrumental-- in a delicate computer-assisted retrieval process. But unlike other maestros of hiccup and twang, Willner favors uncomplicated, revolving compositions rather than a loom-like mesh. It's a bare bones compositional gambit that could wind up utterly irritating, but with the ears of a hip-hop cratedigger and the hands of a surgeon is bliss. Gliding like zero-gravity skaters, opener "Over the Ice" spins, twirls, and pivots on just a shivering vocalized "e"-- split across two octaves-- and an undulating "i."
But if Sublime initially sounds set for the dancefloor and not the couch, it's strictly down to Willner favoring quick tempos and rhythms, like the concussive "uh!" and the bumping acid bassline on "The Little Heart Beats So Fast". Despite its nods to house and techno, Sublime is really an extension of the best ambient electronics of the last decade or so, especially Gas, a project of Wolfgang Voigt, who as co-owner of Kompakt Records is now releasing the Field's music. (Not for nothing did Willner's sublime "Kappsta" appear on Kompakt's Pop Ambient 2007 even as it could easily fit here.) Folks may also call the Field trance, because there's an often anthemic bigness to Willner's little sounds, a certain shameless bombastic quality to the way he deploys his loops and builds his arpeggios. And like both bog-standard dancefloor trance and ethereal Gas records such as Pop, Field tracks sound loud, even when played soft.
People may also call it trance because of Willner's elementary drum tracks, often just a deflated machine thump flecked with hi-hat hiss. Compared to peers like Perlon, Kompakt may not be particularly known for its adventurous drum programming but Willner's purposefully entry-level beats shift much of the percussive burden onto his melodies. And while Willner may be building his arpeggios out of baby love sighs snatched from the mouths of the Temptations (on "Things Keep Falling Down", sadly not included here) or strummed guitar loops nicked from nuggets of yacht rock instead of preset synth pads or Ableton plug-ins, his spirit animals are the likes of Sasha, Digweed, and Tiesto, guiding him on how to put his sounds together for maximum spine-tingly impact. There's a reason those guys sold so many records to a whole generation of folks looking for, well, the sublime. And like all those 2xCD 1990s trance mixes, an hour of Willner's vibrations may have you drooling for an off-beat or a key change or, hell, a build-up to crescendo.
But forget pop musical concerns for a second-- Willner's triumph on Sublime remains how he manages to isolate and repeat his little moments, transmuting them through the basic dance music building blocks of juxtaposition and repetition into something bigger, wringing pleasure out of the always potentially dull aforementioned "sound sculpting": The metallic schlurp of the drums and background hum of robot cicadas on "Mobilia"; the fingertip flutters of the textural stuttering all over Sublime; the hot and heavy pressurized soaking of "Sun and Ice"; the disembodied zombie doowop filched from the Flamingos' "I Only Have Eyes for You" that echoes through the title track like Kraftwerk daydreaming they're a soul duo, before the voices finally unspool into a timestretched blur as the record fades out-- one of the most shiver-inducing moments you'll hear all year. Often the best part of Willner's tracks are those final few seconds, as on "A Paw in My Face", the guitar sample finally escapes its loop with a joyous twang of freedom (only to reveal its source as Lionel Richie's bloodless lite-FM staple "Hello"). If Willner doesn't hit at least some of your pleasure centers, well, forget your ears-- your nerve endings might actually be dead. Even three months in, it's a safe bet that From Here We Go Sublime will wind up 2007's most luxuriant record. | 2007-03-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-03-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | March 26, 2007 | 9 | 12df827f-4926-4dfd-935d-305b0ae96b6d | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The extremely online 25-year-old comedian’s foray into a more traditional comedy format makes for an imposing and uneven listen, even for the most logged-on. | The extremely online 25-year-old comedian’s foray into a more traditional comedy format makes for an imposing and uneven listen, even for the most logged-on. | Brandon Wardell: An ASMR Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brandon-wardell-an-asmr-album/ | An ASMR Album | For better and worse, social media is a spawning ground for people who thrive on getting laughs—and that certainly includes Brandon Wardell. The 25-year-old Los Angeles-based comedian is part of a micro-generational group of aspiring funnymakers who have essentially gotten famous through cracking wise online, even while pursuing more traditional routes such as stand-up and sketch comedy. To date, he’s amassed more than 665,000 Twitter followers who keep tabs on his topical musings ranging from Juuls to Sprite-bottle gravity bongs and meeting Post Malone. “It’s the purest form of expression that I have,” Wardell told Rolling Stone in 2016 regarding his Twitter account. “There’s something super-visceral about Twitter. It’s just a lot of like brain vomit.”
You have him to thank (or blame, depending on how you look at it) for the “Dicks out for Harambe” meme, which he told Rolling Stone was riffing off of a joke made by his Twitter friend SexualJumanji; he served as the “opening act” for Bob Odenkirk’s 2014 comedy album Amateur Hour and has since hosted a Comedy Central Snapchat series, along with appearances on TV shows ranging from “What Would Diplo Do” to “@midnight with Chris Hardwick.” His press bio notes that “since Brandon’s appearance on those programs, they have all been canceled,” a self-effacing aside that nonetheless highlights a simple truth: the 280-character comedy Wardell and his peers traffic in doesn’t always translate well to more traditional formats. It’s new-medium stuff for new-medium audiences, which is totally fine.
Wardell’s brand of comedy is largely geared towards the Extremely Online, and that goes double for his first comedy album, An ASMR Album. Despite being loosely constructed around a smattering of stand-up material, it’s not quite a comedy album in the traditional sense; for one, the audience is wholly imaginary, and much of the material has been crafted to service the conceit of recording an “ASMR” stand-up set—specifically, an “Autonomous sensory meridian response” experience that resembles what Wikipedia cites as a “low-grade euphoria” as a result of hearing close-miked sounds. ASMR videos have taken up plenty of real estate on YouTube for a while now, and to promote the album Wardell recorded two mock-ASMR videos of his own for online content hub Super Deluxe’s Tingles video series (which typically showcases actual ASMR videos).
Suffice to say, the learning curve for enjoying—or even understanding the basic premise of—An ASMR Album is harsh and unforgiving for anyone who doesn’t spend a minimum of eight hours online per day. Even so, this combination of sounds-of-the-studio trickery and joke-telling can be a bit imposing for even the most logged-on. A few infuriatingly imprecise comparison points come to mind: Drag City’s gleefully antagonistic Andy Kaufman voice-memo collection Andy and His Grandmother from 2013, experimental composer Robert Ashley, and the unbridled antagonism of the closing minutes in Andrew Dice Clay’s The Day the Laughter Died. An ASMR Album isn’t so much a comedy record in search of an audience as it is seeking listeners to send into a state of utter confusion.
By extension, whether any of the material on An ASMR Album “lands” with listeners is largely irrelevant, and picking apart the jokes and set pieces it’s structured around seems to be of little worth amid audio gags like a tiny house band performing chiptune-sized jazz niblets, and Wardell supposedly lint-rolling his “damn ass.” But some jokes (a bit about a DJ who drops an entire Woody Allen album into a set filled with artists that have allegedly committed sexual assault) do land a little better than others (a similar bit in which Wardell warns his younger self not to go to a party at Bryan Singer’s house, in vain); other jokes that riff on “wokeness” and straight men engaging in gay sex come across as dated and carrying the potential to needlessly offend.
Perhaps the most inspired bit of joke-writing comes during “Crowd Work,” in which Wardell imagines what it would be like to do a stand-up set with an ex-girlfriend as the only member in the audience—but it doesn’t take long for the gag to go into the deep end, mutating into a homoerotic gag in which Wardell falls in love with his ex-girlfriend’s father. Without ruining the “twist,” it only gets more convoluted from there, as the album sputters to a surrealist and near-nonsensical conclusion. The pretense of performing for an audience almost disappears completely, and that’s kind of the point. If a Tweet goes un-fav’d in the woods, there’s no one around to read it, and An ASMR Album is similarly unconcerned with who’s listening. The antagonism is admirable, even if it’s not much fun to experience. | 2018-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Nice Life | June 9, 2018 | 5.7 | 12e5b4d5-0baa-4ce5-965e-267a4b163b74 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Playboi Carti's go-to producer goes solo, crooning in AutoTune over his blissfully simple earworm beats. | Playboi Carti's go-to producer goes solo, crooning in AutoTune over his blissfully simple earworm beats. | Pi’erre Bourne: The Life of Pi’erre 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pierre-bourne-the-life-of-pierre-4/ | The Life of Pi’erre 4 | Most hip-hop producers could put in their 10,000 hours on FruityLoops and still never come close to Playboi Carti’s “Magnolia.” The blissfully simple four-note earworm earned Carti his cult following and turned its maker, Pi’erre Bourne, into a sought-after producer.
Rather than continue to feed hits to stars like Carti, Lil Uzi Vert and 21 Savage, Bourne has put all his attention into his solo career as a rapper. Which brings us to The Life of Pi’erre 4, his major-label debut and the first real test of whether he can carry a project. The answer is not quite—his heavily Auto-Tuned vocals have a tendency to get washed out by his hazy backdrops, and Pi’erre 4 is one-note as a result, more vibe than statement.
At least the vibe is enticing. Bourne’s beats hum with the same off-kilter melodies that made “Magnolia” so thrilling, and the edges are filled with interesting noises. The fuzzy synth notes on “Be Mine” sound like they were played on an electrified toy piano, while “Romeo Must Die” turns on a distorted refrain that sounds recorded 500 feet below the ocean surface. Most of the tracks are accentuated by over-the-top sound effects—a lion roar, or a reworked vintage DJ drop (“Damn Pi’erre, where’d you find this?”)—that give the project the momentum of a street-bought mixtape.
Once you get past the initial dopamine rush, Bourne starts to run into trouble. Unlike the MCs who buy his beats, none of which are featured here, he fully saturates his voice in Auto-Tune, more akin to T-Pain or Fetty Wap than Uzi. His voice often drowns in the mix as a result. Add this to the fact that none of the songs evolve much over their runtimes —put Pi’erre 4 in waveform, and it’d look like a bread loaf, a hunk of sound with no peaks or valleys—and you start to tune out.
Which is a shame, because Bourne puts effort into his lyrics. All the obvious tropes are here—money-chasing anthems (“Doublemint”), odes to jealous exes (“Feds”)—but he hints at a more interesting story in between. On “How High,” he dives into his formative years in Queens (where he split time between South Carolina): “Just a college nigga, honor roll/I dropped out of college, lost my home.” On “Try Again,” he speaks of the loneliness that comes with his sudden rise in fame: “It’s just me, and I’m alone again/Spending all my money on my own again.”
There are some catchy hooks as well—on “Racer,” Bourne croons nimbly alongside some late-’90s R&B keyboards—but for the most part, the beats on Pi’erre 4 speak the loudest. Nowhere is that more obvious than on standout track “Guillotine.” The beat sounds like Bourne looped a creaking screen door; a warped sample breathes with the beat, groaning ruefully every four bars. The sound alone says more than the forgettable clichés of Bourne’s lyrics, demonstrating that the producer, for now, does his best work behind the boards. | 2019-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | SossHouse / Interscope | June 28, 2019 | 6.7 | 12e5e27c-0e9a-498e-95b2-842838e29c08 | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
A seven-track accompaniment to the brothers’ album Mixing Colours—released as both standalone EP and digital add-on—highlights the nuances of their playing and the limits of the attention span. | A seven-track accompaniment to the brothers’ album Mixing Colours—released as both standalone EP and digital add-on—highlights the nuances of their playing and the limits of the attention span. | Brian Eno / Roger Eno: Luminous | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brian-eno-roger-eno-luminous/ | Luminous | Five months after the release of their duo album Mixing Colours, Brian Eno and his younger brother, Roger, pick up what they’ve called a “back-and-forth conversation” with Luminous, an EP featuring six new tracks and a tune previously restricted to the album’s Japanese edition.
The two men’s musical exchange took place over the course of 15 years: Roger, a pianist, would improvise pieces on a MIDI keyboard, then pass them off to Brian to treat with effects and electronics. For years, there was no goal in mind, but eventually, they built up enough material for an album. Perhaps too much material: The resulting full-length was a lovely if minor work from the two musicians, one hampered by a numbing 75-minute runtime that undermined both the nuance of Brian’s treatments and the grace of Roger’s Satie-like refrains.
On Luminous, with its focused 28-minute length, similar material takes a stronger hold on the listener’s attention. Although created with the same methods and technology, these finely spun instrumentals have an underlying energy that Mixing was often missing. A fine example is “Manganese,” a song anchored by a simple melodic phrase that, when filtered through Brian’s effects, sounds like a player piano set adrift in deep space. “Pewter,” the original album’s Japan-only bonus track, floats free alongside it—a glistening mass of synthetic chords and haunting atmosphere that calls to mind a previous Eno brothers collaboration: 1983’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks.
Luminous’ brevity also puts both men’s individual contributions into sharper relief. Roger’s playing on “Malachite” rolls and sways like a slow, joyous waltz, and his melodies on “Vermillion” and “Violet” feel as thick and languorous as a summer afternoon. Brian’s contributions provide all the finer details: the fireworks-like electronic bursts throughout “Vermillion,” the gorgeously clashing overtones within “Moss,” the understated bass on “Pewter.”
On vinyl, Luminous exists as a standalone release. But for digital service providers, the Enos and Deutsche Grammophon made the curious decision to fold these seven tracks into the original tracklist of Mixing Colours—not sprinkled throughout, but plunked en masse toward the end, preserving Mixing Colours’ two closing tracks as a finale. It’s an unusual move, one telling of the ways that the album format has evolved in the streaming era. The Eno brothers aren’t going the route of Kanye West, who made changes to both The Life of Pablo and ye long after they were released. But in their own small way, Roger and Brian are embracing the idea of an album as a living document.
Which might not be to the benefit of Mixing Colours. Whatever mood and flow they were trying to create with the original album is disrupted—and the lift that the songs from Luminous provide is quickly whisked away with the return of Mixing Colours’ pleasant but forgettable material. However unwittingly, the Enos make the case that Mixing Colours might have been better served by treating its material in the manner of this new EP: doled out in smaller servings, the better for the richness of their collaboration to be appreciated.
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. | 2020-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Deutsche Grammophon | August 18, 2020 | 6.8 | 12e8872f-1895-4002-ba7a-9d627a08acf5 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
On their latest, Thee Oh Sees show an eagerness to drift away from their foundational ’60s psych-pop and garage-punk roots into more cosmic realms. | On their latest, Thee Oh Sees show an eagerness to drift away from their foundational ’60s psych-pop and garage-punk roots into more cosmic realms. | Thee Oh Sees: A Weird Exits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22185-a-weird-exits/ | A Weird Exits | In stark defiance of pop music’s “don’t bore us, get to the chorus” maxim, John Dwyer believes the best antidote to boredom is getting rid of the chorus altogether. Rather than introduce a rousing, anthemic melody to elevate a song to the next level, Dwyer takes the shortcut to ecstasy: after riding a relentless robo-punk rhythm through a couple of creepily cooed verses, he simply screams “wooo!,” and uses his fuzzbox as a springboard into the stratosphere. At this point in the band’s 11-album run, you can pretty much set your watch to this maneuver—A Weird Exits’ pulsating opener, “Dead Man’s Gun,” dutifully triggers its strobe-lit squall at the 40-second mark. But the trick never fails to exhilarate, because Thee Oh See’s blast-off moments never feel like smooth, assured ascents—they’re more like riding a whirling fairground attraction and realizing your safety belt has come unlatched.
Even as recent albums have introduced stoner-prog jams and Mellotron-swirled ballads into the mix, Thee Oh Sees have become, as John Peel famously quipped about the Fall, one of those “always different, always the same” kinda bands. With each hastily released album, you’re guaranteed a healthy dose of the band’s patented motorik mayhem, but in Thee Oh Sees’ case, that signature sound is no dead end—it functions more as a home base from which the band can confidently roam and to which it can safely circle back. A Weird Exits doesn’t make any surprise detours like Drop’s Beatlesque lullaby “The Lens” or Mutilator Defeated At Last’s psych-folk pastorale “Holy Smoke”; rather than slam on the brakes and pull a U, it gradually eases off the accelerator. But while raygunned rave-ups like “Gelatinous Cube” will keep the stagedivers busy at the band’s legendarily unhinged live shows, more than ever, Thee Oh Sees show an eagerness to drift away from their foundational ’60s psych-pop and garage-punk roots into more cosmic realms. And, as this album proves, you can venture even further afield when you have two drummers powering the ship.
A Weird Exits is Thee Oh Sees’ first LP to showcase the double-thump tandem of Ryan Moutinho and Dan Rincon, whose interplay naturally encourages a greater degree of rhythmic variation. While Krautrock remains the driving force in Thee Oh Sees machine, the guiding spirit here is more Jaki Liebezeit than Klaus Dinger, with a premium on loose, limber mid-tempo grooves instead of locked-in momentum. That balming effect can be felt even on a windmilled exercise like “Plastic Plant,” which has all the qualities of a classic Oh Sees rocker, yet opts for a cool shuffle instead of a full-torque thrust. But the double-barreled attack is most potent on the instrumentals: the punnily titled “Jammed Entrance” etches a squiggly morse-code keyboard pattern into a mushroom-heady funk; the jazzy guitar refrains of “Unwrap the Fiend Pt. 2” give way to a taut, tambourine-shakin’ strut and phased-out solo that open up a vast, spectral sense of space. (By contrast, the droning eight-minute reverie “Crawl Out From the Fall Out,” doesn’t give the drummers much to do other than tentatively tap their cymbals, but then its swirling, lung-engulfing Spacemen 3-via-“Ode to Street Hassle” haze is too thick to encourage much muscle movement.)
As Thee Oh Sees are wont to do, they close A Weird Exits with a slow dance—though it’s the rare one in their canon to push the VU meter to the same extremes as their high-octane ragers. With its mournful, church-organ melody, “The Axis” initially waltzes in like a dirtbag “Whiter Shade of Pale,” the romantic yearning replaced by scathing anti-sentiment (“Don’t you know how much / I don’t love you”). But, in its dying moments, Dwyer unleashes a squealing, distorted guitar solo: Even when their pendulum is swinging at a steadier pace, Thee Oh Sees still have the power to hypnotize—but from its twitchy jams to its blown-out power ballads, A Weird Exits’ most intriguing moments come when they break the trance. | 2016-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Castle Face | August 12, 2016 | 7.5 | 12ea1258-39ed-4ab5-9164-4de3ed40fe07 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Billed as a country album, the latest LP from the idiosyncratic soul artist born Jerry Williams Jr. examines grief from a distance, taking time to savor life’s little sweetnesses. | Billed as a country album, the latest LP from the idiosyncratic soul artist born Jerry Williams Jr. examines grief from a distance, taking time to savor life’s little sweetnesses. | Swamp Dogg: Sorry You Couldn’t Make It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/swamp-dogg-sorry-you-couldnt-make-it/ | Sorry You Couldn’t Make It | Jerry Williams Jr. knows how to tell a colorful story because he’s lived one. Ever since a revelatory psychedelic experience in the late 1960s, the 77-year-old musician and producer has issued some two dozen volumes of far-out funk and soul explorations as his larger-than-life alter ego, Swamp Dogg.
In 2018, Williams told Rolling Stone that he wanted to “shock the shit out of [listeners]” with Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune, an album that made heavy use of the titular audio program to warp his voice as he continued to reckon with the death of his wife, Yvonne, in 2003. His new album Sorry You Couldn’t Make It restores him to a more even keel, examining grief from greater distance while savoring life’s little sweetnesses. Billed as Williams’ country album, Sorry You Couldn’t Make It hits its thematic marks within funkified arrangements. “I’d Rather Be Your Used to Be” and “Sleeping Without You Is a Dragg” are exemplary tearjerkers; “Family Pain” addresses the intergenerational fractures of poverty and addiction. “A Good Song,” meanwhile, feels like a zoomed-in update to Tom T. Hall’s plainly gorgeous “I Love.”
As on Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune, Williams is accompanied by a handful of guests. Justin Vernon and Poliça’s Ryan Olson, who helped Williams actualize his Auto-Tune landscapes, return to the fold; alongside them are Nashville titan John Prine, Jenny Lewis, and Olson’s Poliça bandmate Channy Leaneagh. Across the album, Vernon serves as an unobtrusive sideman on guitar. Prine first appears on “Memories,” but he and Williams find surer footing on closer “Please Let Me Go Round Again,” as they look back on life in wistful bewilderment. Prine’s affinity with Williams feels natural and immediate; set to a relaxed soul shuffle, their gentle ribbing makes a charming finale.
The record’s only real derailment comes at the end of “Memories,” when the song begins to garble and warp as though recorded on damaged tape. The analogy to human memory is a familiar one; here, it feels like an overt effort to prevent the atmosphere from getting too warm and nostalgic. (God forbid those glowing, lightly goofy guitar ripples linger, lest we start trusting our own rose-tinted glasses.) The more muted instrumental reverberations in the back half of “Billy” pursue the same effect, tilting the song away from saccharine balladry.
Williams has long been celebrated as a cult figure, sharing his generous appetite for experimentation only among those curious enough to tune in for themselves. Half a century later, he remains a broad-minded explorer whose genre-free approach to his craft reveals fresh curiosities. But, as Williams lays out across Sorry You Couldn’t Make It, even his creative victories are bittersweet: He must go on living without the people with whom he’d most like to celebrate.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Joyful Noise / Pioneer Works Press | March 17, 2020 | 7.1 | 12f3728d-1efd-4c5b-8dd8-5afe7d5584ca | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
On his fourth solo LP, the indie rapper shifts from scattered journal entries to focused autobiography, telling the story of his family and his neighborhood with intimacy and warmth. | On his fourth solo LP, the indie rapper shifts from scattered journal entries to focused autobiography, telling the story of his family and his neighborhood with intimacy and warmth. | The Koreatown Oddity: Little Dominiques Nosebleed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-koreatown-oddity-little-dominiques-nosebleed/ | Little Dominiques Nosebleed | For a decade, Los Angeles rapper and producer the Koreatown Oddity has drifted around the city’s indie-rap scene with a leisurely detachment. Distributing cassette beat tapes by hand, making dusty, stoned records with vaunted producers like Ras G and Jeremiah Jae, and occasionally sporting a wolf mask, he treats rap more like a pastime than a calling. His name, a reference to the neighborhood where he was raised, has always underscored his origins, and his music has tended to be diaristic, capturing his observations, wisecracks, and hijinks in real time. On Little Dominiques Nosebleed, his fourth solo LP, he shifts from scattered journal entries to focused autobiography, telling the story of his family and his neighborhood with intimacy and warmth.
Koreatown is central to his story, but he presents it on his terms, subverting the enclave’s current status as a hub for nightlife and haute cuisine. Avoiding the awkward mix of admiration and anointment that tends to paint the 1992 riots that ravaged the neighborhood as a footnote, the Koreatown Oddity treats his namesake as a living, breathing place, embracing the baggage and the cachet. On “Koreatown Oddity,” he recounts standoffs between Korean shop owners and Black residents with a disarming nostalgia: “Riding around with my moms in a riot salute/Terry with the jheri curl tying plastic bags on his shoes/Koreans on the roof/Of the California Mart/With the shotguns ready to shoot.” Compared to Ice Cube’s fury on “Black Korea” and fellow Koreatown native Dumbfoundead’s competing loyalties on “Unplaceable,” the Koreatown Oddity’s version of black and Korean tension feels like a family squabble. Even when it's under siege, his Koreatown belongs to all its residents.
On “Kimchi” he expands this idea into a cheeky rundown of Koreatown’s assorted history. Over a thick bassline flecked with whistles and cowbells, he unveils the city beyond the Yelp reviews, citing the neighborhood’s ironic demographics (mostly Latinx), Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, and gang conflicts. “The place where I be/It ain’t all kimchi,” he summarizes. It’s definitely perverse for a black man to be a tour guide for an Asian community, but the Koreatown Oddity sells it because he’s complicating Koreatown’s narrative rather than rewriting it. His added chapter enriches the saga.
This emphasis on landscape and heritage enhances his writing, which feels less scatterbrained than his previous music. He’s still a bit of a rambler, and his rapping is notably less dexterous than usual, but his lumbering flows work well with his vignettes. The album’s best song, the breezy “Weed in LA,” compresses his personal history—from his favorite hill to his dad’s music collection to his mom’s migration from Ohio to California—into a brief verse bookended with an affected ignorance. “I heard they legalized weed in L.A./Oh woooord?” he smirks, making Koreatown feel like the center of the universe.
His recollections aren’t always nostalgic. The title tracks detail two childhood car accidents, one leaving him with chronic nosebleeds and the other a broken leg. His production does the heavy lifting on both songs. For “Little Dominiques Nosebleed Part 1” the arrangements move from triumphant horns to a loungey swing to a sour organ chord as he goes from cruising the streets to suffering in them. You can feel his impression of his home shifting from pleasure to pain. “Little Dominiques Part 2” makes that danger feel ambient. Built around a jagged symphonic loop that buzzes and whirrs like the throne room of a beehive, the song treats the second car accident like an inevitability.
The album falters when the Koreatown Oddity goes philosophical. He’s got a spiritual streak that tends toward floofy new ageisms, a habit that short-circuits songs where he attempts to condense his experiences into mantras. Compared to the nuance and keenness that characterize his tales of his home and family, his spiritualism comes across as vague at best (“Chase the Spirit”) and obtuse at worst (“A Bitch Once Told Me”). On “We All Want Something” Anna Wise sings the title, and that’s it; that’s the whole song.
Though Little Dominiques Nosebleed doesn’t stick the landing, it’s a rich portrait of place and personhood. The Koreatown Oddity raps about Koreatown like it’s an extension of his body, claiming every crevice and surface of the locale as his own. The specter of gentrification looms over his home, but strangely he seems unfazed. While he can’t repel all the foodies and tourists, he can savor the flavors that aren’t for sale. | 2020-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | June 23, 2020 | 7.1 | 12f7e4f6-65bb-477a-ac57-0f63c10245ba | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Working with a cellist and producer Mike Mogis for the first time in more than a decade, Tim Kasher’s angriest but most vulnerable band squares up against the era of Trump. | Working with a cellist and producer Mike Mogis for the first time in more than a decade, Tim Kasher’s angriest but most vulnerable band squares up against the era of Trump. | Cursive: Vitriola | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cursive-vitriola/ | Vitriola | You can argue that making a true anti-war movie is impossible. The cinematic treatment inevitably glamorizes conflict and prompts the audience to pick a side. Tim Kasher has the same issue. Cursive detractors and diehards can agree that the band’s classics, 2000’s Domestica and 2003’s The Ugly Organ, are cautionary tales of unchecked male insecurity. But Kasher turned divorce and artistic narcissism into such compelling theater that they could feel like endorsements.
Since 2003, he has tried to live up to and downplay The Ugly Organ while trying not to repeat it—the only thing more depressing than The Ugly Organ and Domestica themselves, after all, would be a married 44-year-old continuing to autopsy every last sexual and artistic failure. On Vitriola, the first Cursive album in six years, he revisits those career peaks from a different angle. This is the first Cursive record to feature original drummer Clint Schnase and Saddle Creek house producer Mike Mogis in 12 years, but, more important, the first with a cellist since The Ugly Organ. They haven’t sounded this inspired since.
Given his multiple projects and side-hustles, Kasher won’t make a Cursive record for any old thing. Cursive records have to be about the only things—marriage, art, sex, religion; even their least-imaginative work required a libretto. Though Cursive had already started work on new music in 2016, you can probably guess what motivated Kasher to finish this one. He faces the same issue as most artists who have recently pivoted to politics: Do you have an obligation to do more than restate the obvious? On Vitriola, screaming “I’ve had enough” suffices. “Free to Be or Not to Be You and Me” and “Under the Rainbow” aren’t expressing anything novel about existential torment or economic oppression. “It’s Gonna Hurt” doesn’t elaborate much beyond its declarative title, because it doesn’t need to.
Kasher may be a songwriter, a new label impresario, a bar owner, and often seen as synonymous with Cursive. But Cursive is still a band, one that once fashioned an orchestral version of punk where the pretty instruments became primitive prison weaponry. Bowed cellos sounded like a dulled handsaw. Pianos were pounded into wooden shards. The guitars would have twinkled were they not wadded into tinfoil balls. But swerving away from The Ugly Organ brought them toward the middle of the road, turning Cursive into a more conventional rock act. Since Vitriola is meant as a soundtrack to the horror show of daily life, much of it sounds like a second-wave emo band falling down a flight of stairs and hitting every one. And it’s not just the violence of Cursive’s early years that returns—their softer moments have never sounded so beautiful or vulnerable.
Kasher credits new multi-instrumentalist Patrick Newbery with the interlude “Remorse" and its fragile piano and feedback conjure a hungover sunrise so clearly even the title seems redundant. The anxiety of an overdraft fee is embedded in the pins-and-needles guitar flickers of “Life Savings.” “Noble Soldier/Dystopian Lament” slowly tightens the noose as Kasher gives a farewell address to his idealistic former self. Megan Siebe’s cello is the pure embodiment of Cursive, offering a stereotype of sadness while harboring a disturbing capacity for viciousness.
That used to be true for Kasher, too, but his poison pen has mellowed these days to a fatherly mix of earnestness and sarcasm. By the second track, he already makes his “our civil war ain’t so civil anymore” and “thoughts and prayers” quips. He used to call himself full of shit, but now he’s just full of scatological puns—at least three on “Pick Up the Pieces” alone. He grinds through “Ouroboros” for a seemingly interminable six minutes with time-for-some-game-theory lyricism: “The voice of man has been exposed as vitriol/Don’t gotta read between the HTML.”
If these “Weekend Update”-style wisecracks aren’t overly useful as a political tool, they’re at least helpful in confronting the day’s latest outrage. “I’ve been screaming for years/But it gets me nowhere,” he bleated on The Ugly Organ. He picked a good time to start screaming again, if only because so many others are, too, albeit to mixed results. On Vitriola, Cursive songs again supply the satisfaction of blaring your horn at a shitty driver or hanging up on a robocall—fighting against an encroaching sense of cosmic impotence with contained acts of victimless aggression. | 2018-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 15 Passenger | October 11, 2018 | 6.8 | 12fd2bc3-701e-4cbd-8377-c6d94f2af4e1 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
After years of being a a critical darling Charli XCX assisted Iggy Azalea on the song of the summer and landed her own "Boom Clap" on the soundtrack for The Fault in Our Stars. Sucker is her second studio album, and it's a record that seeks to bend the mainstream to its will rather than conform to its reigning trends. | After years of being a a critical darling Charli XCX assisted Iggy Azalea on the song of the summer and landed her own "Boom Clap" on the soundtrack for The Fault in Our Stars. Sucker is her second studio album, and it's a record that seeks to bend the mainstream to its will rather than conform to its reigning trends. | Charli XCX: Sucker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20066-sucker/ | Sucker | Looking back on the year she's had, it's hard to believe that the phrase "Charli XCX, mainstream pop force" was nothing but daydream fodder for the pop cognoscenti little more than a year ago. Forged in the late-'00s crucible of the MySpace music scene and signed to a label when most people are trying to get through high school, Charlotte Aitchison was a critical darling long before she was a chart presence: after leaving a scrappy self-recorded debut in the dust, early singles like "Stay Away" and "Nuclear Seasons" picked up plaudits but failed to dent the conversation of casual pop fans. It took the surprise explosion of "I Love It"—a demo she tossed to Swedish party gremlins Icona Pop on a whim, and helped to sing—into an international hit to generate the momentum required for her first full-length, True Romance. An amalgamation of her best singles to date and some sterling new material, the album sated critics again but came and went without leaving any sort of commercial impression.
After peppy advance single "SuperLove" landed with a thud at the end of 2013, Charli found herself in a familiar position: beloved by pop Twitterati and devoted fans, but lacking the sort of chart firepower many felt her talent warranted. By the summer of 2014, the script had flipped: with assists from rapping Australian supernova Iggy Azalea and a soundtrack spot on teen drama The Fault in Our Stars, she had credits on the defacto Song of the Summer (the former's "Fancy") and her own solo top 10 hit, the swooning "Boom Clap". Sucker is her second studio album, and perhaps the years of hard work and compositional refinement it took to reach the top helped to shape the record's uncompromising sensibility; this is an album that seeks to bend the mainstream to its will rather than conform to its reigning trends. And in a bold display of self-confidence and strength of personality, it operates under the premise that Charli is a viable star even though the record will ultimately constitute a referendum on the validity of that assumption.
There's a great deal of volatility to Charli's writing and artistic growth, and it shows in both her evolution leading up to Sucker and the sound of the album itself. Her great early singles were glittering and booming and a little desperate, wrapped up in love in all of its life-or-death glory; on cuts like "So Far Away", she sunk into swooning, gaseous dreamscapes. By the end of the period covered by True Romance, she had moved on to brash anthems for cool cheerleaders like "I Love It" and "SuperLove"; disillusioned with the music industry in the time leading up to Sucker, she decamped to Sweden with producer pal Patrik Berger (whose credits are all over the finished product) and put together an unreleased roaring punk record that's already entered into the annals of pop myth. Imagine a world where the boisterous onomatopoeic chant that kicks off "Boom Clap" is sped up and made the whole song, and it's an even bigger hit somehow; that's the world of Sucker.
Broadly speaking, it's a collection of colorful power-pop that occasionally veers outside the lines into punk and new wave; there are a few sentimental songs, but they're a lot more compact than the breathy, grand highlights of True Romance. And though Charli keeps the pace brisk and focuses more on speed and attitude than detail, there's a real sense of craft that seeps through cracks in the record's sneering facade. Rampaging highlights like the hilarious "London Queen" are still stained with harmony and impressive vocal layering. With its sharp riffs, tight structure, and confident, bratty snarl—tricks cribbed from the Strokes and Weezer, Kesha and Gwen Stefani, and M.I.A.—Sucker distances itself from the work of many other female pop stars that have ruled 2014: the Gothic precociousness of Lorde, the tidy lines and weaponized hooks of Taylor Swift, the focus group LCD pandering of Meghan Trainor. Its closest cousin might be One Direction's Four, a record that finds the hunky urchins steering into classic rock and gleaming Phoenix-like riffs; Sucker is a little harder to pin down, a little less formulaic.
Charli also seeks to differentiate herself from her peers through her attitude; she defines herself through her opposition to the machinery of the pop music industry, and through a sneering independent streak that's strong enough to be distinct but complementary rather than disruptive. Where other pop stars are reliant, even dependent, on the cultivation of relatability, she embraces and lampoons wealth and power and independence, often to humorous effect. On "London Queen", she conquers America, drives on the wrong side of the road to feel like JFK, and refuses to return to Britain until she's won enough to fill a wall with plaques. She builds a fortress out of money on the blown out "Gold Coins" and relaxes with a cigarette inside. She has a gift for line delivery that grants her put-downs a spiteful glow, and when she opens the raucous "Breaking Up" with, "You had an ugly tattoo, and fucking cheap perfume!" it's all the characterization the listener needs. Sucker is also a record that's largely detached from romance—any saccharine stuff, like girl group tribute "Need Ur Luv", is delivered with tongue firmly in cheek—and Charli is content to revel in hanging with friends and in her individual sexuality, like on salacious pro-masturbation romp "Body of My Own".
If you think this sounds like a lot to swallow, you're absolutely right; Sucker is a crowded and surprisingly dense record, given that the majority of its songs are concerned with the various fruits of stardom. It can be an exhausting listen if you're not fully prepared for its willfully destructive energy. The credits are stuffed with a wide breadth of writers and producers plucked from every corner of the contemporary pop world: industry superstars like Benny Blanco and Greg Kurstin, rising producers like Cashmere Cat, indie darlings (Ariel Rechtshaid, Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij, gonzo doofus Ariel Pink), and none other than Weezer godhead Rivers Cuomo (on the "Beverly Hills" rip "Hanging Around"). That the album has any sort of coherence and consistency is a credit to Charli's personality and presence, her lust for life and palpable joy. And that may not be enough for some listeners. With its carefully chosen samples (Todd Rundgren!) and swirling, love-drunk arrangements, True Romance oozed craft and measured cool; Sucker opens with a chorus built around the gleeful chant of "Fuck you! Sucker!"
With that said, there's something undeniably exciting to me about a scenario in which a young fan, fresh out of falling in love with "Boom Clap" or "Fancy", comes to this record and discovers an uncompromising, ferocious talent, self-assured and empowered and incredibly versatile. Sucker isn't an endpoint for Charli—she's already talking about her next record, inspired by J-pop and "intensely weird and childlike"—and it's not her finest work, but it's plenty good enough to rope a cohort of new fans into what's promising to be one hell of a creative ride. | 2014-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic / Asylum / Neon Gold | December 12, 2014 | 7.6 | 12fdd577-2908-49c3-8da4-e6794d5c1ac3 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | null |
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