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The London songwriter’s mesmerizing second album turns towards porous, avant-garde love songs that celebrate kinship, change, and the wonder of quotidian experience. | The London songwriter’s mesmerizing second album turns towards porous, avant-garde love songs that celebrate kinship, change, and the wonder of quotidian experience. | Tirzah: Colourgrade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tirzah-colourgrade/ | Colourgrade | Manicured, glossy, easily digestible music takes up so much space in pop culture that when an artist like Tirzah finds some success, you have to wonder: How? The London-based singer-songwriter’s 2018 debut, Devotion, was filled with offbeat R&B melodies and soft vocals that offered a quiet escape. It was pop music stripped of all its bells and whistles—introspective, DIY, off-kilter—instantly rising to cult status. On Colourgrade, Tirzah’s follow-up, the formula changes, but the effect doesn’t. Written alongside close collaborators Mica Levi and Coby Sey, Colourgrade trades those pop-adjacent structures for darker, more guttural elements and alien embellishments, creating a stunning collection of porous, avant-garde love songs and Tirzah’s most enigmatic project yet.
Lying directly beneath Colourgrade’s glassy production and wavering vocals is a document about creating life and honoring kinship. Colourgrade was written while Tirzah was touring behind Devotion, and recorded and produced in 2019, the year after the birth of her first child. “Going through pregnancy and birth and motherhood, the anatomy found its way into all of the songs,” she told Stereogum. Centerpiece “Beating” reads like a handwritten love poem to her partner (and sometime producer) Kwake Bass, with a layer of noise that adds intimacy to the recording. When she exclaims, “We made life/It’s beating,” it’s one of the album’s most personal lines. “Sleeping” opens with a startling guitar noise that evokes a baby’s cry, then transitions into Tirzah’s soft lullaby: “So close/I hold you/Hold you tight.” Even as she’s actively working through these monumental changes, she’s unafraid to invite us into the process.
Part of this process means making space for corporeality. On the sensual “Tectonic,” Tirzah whispers, “Pursued as the rhythm magnetized our hips/Techno to tectonic plates,” binding the power of the Earth with the energy of human bodies. The accompanying video follows suit as the camera abstractly traces two people lying naked beside each other. Similarly, the video for “Sink In” zooms in on the sudden movements between two men, who passionately dance in a puddle of water. Colourgrade marvels at the body, a more artful kind of navel-gazing, evoking images that are regenerative and mesmerizing.
Though Tirzah continues to work closely with Mica and Sey (who sang on Devotion’s title track), her approach to song-making has changed drastically. Devotion was compiled from 10 years’ worth of material, with the intention of allowing each song to stand alone. Here, she aimed to leave things unpolished: “The roughness, the accurate recording, the time it takes to get places, it’s a bit of a statement on how things feel live,” she’s said. In this way, Colourgrade has a certain organismal quality: the mid-sentence throat clearing on “Beating,” or the sirening synths that illuminate Tirzah and Sey on “Hive Mind.” Bookended by a pair of tracks emulating conception and death, the album’s sequencing is reminiscent of life itself. The titular opener is Tirzah at her most unfamiliar: abstract lyricism, Auto-Tuned vocals, and uncanny, bird-like synth whistles signal a new beginning. On the other hand, saccharine closer “Hips” zaps all over the place, like a sudden rush to settle all your accounts: “Cold grips my mind/Cold hits my chest.”
But Tirzah leaves the middle tracks tantalizingly open-ended, as rootless as driftwood. She meditates on the existential, everyday life of a parent, bringing us into her new and ever-changing world. On “Recipe,” granular synths drenched in reverb seep through her voice, as if to wash away her anxieties. Or take “Crepuscular Rays,” a long, meandering song in the album’s second half that, according to Tirzah, is foundational to its structure. Moving through droning vocal manipulations and skeletal instrumentation, it unites the unearthly production with the fleshiness of the vocals. In nature, crepuscular rays are the angled beams of sunlight that appear near dusk or dawn. It’s no coincidence that Tirzah named one of Colourgrade’s defining tracks after a phenomenon of change.
We tend to measure life by the dots on the timeline, but Colourgrade studies all the distance in between, absorbing each moment and making space for it to settle. The songs move between rumination and enchantment, simulating the multiplicities of being alive. And while it’s a feat to watch these experimental songs come together, Tirzah isn’t trying to be anything beyond her music; the wonder is in the process. While she remains a very private individual, her music is generous even through its haziness. As Colourgrade highlights, love, family, intimacy are central to her everyday. Luckily, she allows us to partake in these familial affairs, and the outcome is spellbinding.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | October 1, 2021 | 8.5 | 1303493b-4bbb-4160-ae1b-2d417c63ad51 | Gio Santiago | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gio-santiago/ | |
Common’s latest is a loungy meditation on love and its many forms. It is at turns hopeful and naive. | Common’s latest is a loungy meditation on love and its many forms. It is at turns hopeful and naive. | Common: Let Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/common-let-love/ | Let Love | Let Love is clean, edifying rap that is as trusting as it is noble. The album, which Common has dubbed a companion to his new memoir, Let Love Have the Last Word, released earlier this year, is a meditation on love and its many forms—familial, romantic, five-pillars love (aka a love of hip-hop), self-love, the love of God, and an unconditional love he’d like to foster among all humans. Common would like to use his platform to change the world, but he’d settle for giving pep talks to anyone listening. “I’m in a phase, all I see is victory/You on that wave, then come and get with me,” the Chi-town guru raps on opener “Good Morning Love,” and while it’s unclear where exactly he’d like to lead us, his hope can be galvanizing.
Produced with a trio of jazz specialists—percussionist Karriem Riggins (who last collaborated with Common alongside Robert Glasper on 2018’s August Greene), composer and pianist Samora Pinderhughes, and upright bassist Burniss Earl Travis II—Common’s Let Love often sounds more like lounge music than rap music. It suits him. The live instrumentation, mostly warm keyboard chords and soft pattering drums, build mellow, subtle grooves that support both his vibe and demeanor. From the jam-heavy energy of “Leaders (Crib Love)” to the more muted “Show Me That You Love Me” with Jill Scott, these songs feel understated, constant, and tender, often in service of firsthand revelations. Where the album falters is when it stops illustrating how love can be applicable in our everyday lives and starts looking at the entire world through rose-colored glasses. It isn’t that he’s too optimistic; it’s that his optimism isn’t pragmatic. It’s the sort of naivety that overlooks how loving A.I. could easily lead to Skynet.
Common transcended conscious rap and evolved into virtuous rap in the wake of his hollow Oscar-winning Selma collaboration with John Legend, “Glory,” becoming a living, breathing social justice hashtag in the process. The fury and force that fueled 2016’s Black America Again have dissipated. If August Greene was a call-to-arms for unity, Let Love is simply a plea for compassion. Occasionally, Common loses the plot and gets so theoretical that real love isn’t at the center of his verses anymore. After a bit of word salad on “Hercules,” he raps, “Slow down, we can hold down/The fort of profound, thoughts that go ’round/The world is your town, it’s my town/It’s the new wave, we on high ground.” The concepts can become so abstract that they lose all meaning entirely. Across the album, his raps sometimes sound as if they were generated by an algorithm from an inspirational quote word cloud. Take this one: “Read me truth, lead me truth/The birth of freedom can’t be induced.” He wants so badly to make love a doctrine here, but love is a feeling, not an idea.
Common finds the most success exhibiting the ways love has played a role in his own life. On “Memories of Home,” he reflects on the interactions that shaped him, bravely opening up about being molested as a child and how love helped him heal. “What’s a kid supposed to do?/When they goin’ through, what I was goin’ through,” he asks before having an epiphany: “Emotions meltin’, I began to release it/Things you can’t change, you could come to peace with.” Dilla cut “HER Love,” a spiritual sequel to his seminal Resurrection cut “I Used to Love H.E.R.,” finds Common falling for rap once again. It’s as if he’s renewing his vows. He raps to hip-hop as if it were a woman, exuding true love. There’s a wholeheartedness to its cornball enthusiasm that only he could pull off.
Common is still an impressive rapper, though a bit more simplistic now than in the past. As he’s become more positive, his raps play it a bit safer. He leans into his signature flows like a crutch but he remains graceful. He can still puzzle out wordplay (“Tryna feed your fam, get Fed time”) and stack phonetic sounds with the best of them. He can still unravel an intricate thought with a string of words so elegant that listening demands empathy. Then there are the times where he’ll compare himself to a metaphorical cake just to preserve the structural integrity of his internal rhyme schemes. Sometimes it really does seem like he’s rapping to instill love, sometimes he’s rapping for rap’s sake, and those lines get smudged at times, but more often than not he’s methodical. It is in the moments where his precision underscores his affection that Let Love truly conquers.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Loma Vista | September 5, 2019 | 6.7 | 130976df-b69f-41bb-b2b6-a059fcef3e2e | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The New York duo's debut full-length is a wildly fun noise-pop thrill-ride, delivering on the promise of last year's widely circulated demos. | The New York duo's debut full-length is a wildly fun noise-pop thrill-ride, delivering on the promise of last year's widely circulated demos. | Sleigh Bells: Treats | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14251-treats/ | Treats | Once in a while a record comes along that makes you re-think loud: King of Rock; The Land of Rape and Honey; Nation of Millions; Super Ae; I Get Wet; Kesto. Setting aside the quality of the material-- there are classics here, along with albums I never listen to anymore-- these albums are notable for me because the first time I heard them, music just seemed bigger than it had before, like it took up more space and hit with more force and went further than once seemed possible. When I was getting into these records, I'd get a specific kind of kick just from putting them on. They felt like rides at an amusement park, and I'd get a feeling in my stomach when the first notes kicked in: Here we go. I'm adding another record to my list.
Demos of songs from Sleigh Bells' Treats first started making their way around the Internet last fall, and they immediately served as conversation starters. The distortion in early track "Crown on the Ground" was so intense that every other second the song seemed on the verge of shutting down. But while Derek Miller's overdriven guitar and bass were distressed in the extreme, vocalist Alexis Krauss remained calm as chaos raged around her. Her cadence, somewhere at the intersection of singing, speaking, and chanting, conveyed an easy confidence, like she belonged in the middle of this maelstrom and knew she didn't need to shout to be heard. The contrast between her relaxed bearing-- where she seemed to rule over it all-- and the dangerous splatter of the music was striking to say the least. It was as easy to be taken in as it was to understand why someone else might be repelled. I felt some of both feelings, to be honest, but I also wanted to hear more.
Treats delivers completely on the promise of those demos. Sleigh Bells haven't stopped living in the red, but the improved recording quality makes songs including "Crown on the Ground" that much heavier, and the duo have managed to extend their uncomplicated formula across 11 tracks without it wearing thin. The combination of the music's essentials-- jackhammer riffs clipped from punk and metal, mid-tempo beats from hip-hop and electro, and supremely catchy sing-song melodies-- is striking on its own, sounding remarkably fresh and unlike anything else right now. But an even greater source of the record's appeal is how it doesn't sound especially referential.
When so much music seems designed to evoke the mood and vibe of a specific era, either through direct imitation or playing with the memories of the music's context, Sleigh Bells deftly avoid any single pigeonhole. There are references, but it never feels like the music is merely pointing. Genre here is something to be twisted around and pulled and braided with something else, a mangled container struggling to hold the energy and ecstasy of the music. They gather up bits from all over and use them to create music that puts you squarely in the present moment.
The music hits so hard, and in such a satisfying way, and it seems designed to bring you back to the totality of the sound. It's hard to say what the songs are about, since so many words are so difficult to make out, but they work. The lyrics of "A/B Machines" consist only of, "Got my A machines on the table/ Got my B machines in the drawer," repeated over and over, and who am I to question Krauss on this point? We're talking about "a-wop bop a-loo bop a-lop bam boom" and "Da Doo Ron Ron" here, which is just right for what the music tries for.
So my ear on "A/B Machines" goes to the searing guitar lead, which screeches out a few penetrating notes, and then pauses on the clanging low-end and the interludes and Western-sounding guitar rumble. And on the opening "Tell 'Em", the focus goes to the call-and-response drum machine pummel, soaring riff, and finger snaps compressed into sharp little diamonds, as Krauss chirps a short, repetitive melody with the insistence of a pep rally cheer. "Rill Rill" takes the immortal acoustic guitar bit from Funkadelic's "Can You Get to That", blows it up to Hollywood blockbuster size, and loops it along with clicking percussion as Krauss sings what may prove to be the pop earworm of the year, the kind of tune you'd swear you were singing over and over to yourself years ago. "Straight A's" has some of the electro-punk rage of Crystal Castles, the less frantic tracks like "Rachel" have a bit of shoegaze, and the pacing of the album is just so, taking you right to edge in one song and then pulling you back a few inches in the next.
Though both Krauss and Miller have been making music for a while-- he in the hardcore band Poison the Well, she in some kind of manufactured teen-pop group that never got off the ground-- it's easy to see them as a connected band with the right gimmick at the right time. They live in New York, they've played hip shows for important people, and from the beginning the online chatter has been almost as deafening as the guitar tones. But what works in their favor is that they've taken advantage of these breaks and marshaled their talent to make something that oozes joy. There's spirit to this music, and the sonic assault is celebratory, asking only that you come along with it and join in. All of which, for me, anyway, makes the hype melt away. And if it's true that records this intense and exhilarating don't always sustain themselves over the long haul, that's not a worry either. The visceral thrill of Treats may not last forever, but neither does life; right now, this feels like living it. | 2010-05-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-05-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | N.E.E.T. / Mom+Pop | May 14, 2010 | 8.7 | 13156f5d-6b62-43a2-bde5-33ac7ac62d61 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Will Oldham's latest is a fittingly titled, string-band live LP released digitally and on vinyl with little fanfare during the final bleak days of 2009. | Will Oldham's latest is a fittingly titled, string-band live LP released digitally and on vinyl with little fanfare during the final bleak days of 2009. | Bonny Billy and the Picket Line: Funtown Comedown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13803-funtime-comedown/ | Funtown Comedown | Is Will Oldham having a good laugh at our expense? Does he cackle to himself when critics note every name change or parse every reference to darkness and light? For someone who maintains a steady stream of releases, Oldham remains elusive, impossible to pin down. Take his latest, a live album titled Funtown Comedown, released digitally and on vinyl with little fanfare during the final days of 2009. As the story goes, he recorded it in the "metaphysical community" of Funtown, which lies just outside the Louisville of the mind. One presumes the hamlet appears in the mist annually and exists solely to host Oldham's shows.
If Oldham didn't make good music, we might laugh right back at him. But for nearly 20 years, he has proved not only prolific but indefatigable, always ready with a quick hook and a dark thought on mortality and music. Funtown Comedown pulls from every corner of his rich catalog, spanning his first EP (opener "Ohio River Boat Song") through his recent peaks ("The Glory Goes", from 2008's Lie Down in the Light). This being an Oldham release, these aren't simply run-throughs of familiar songs. He studiously avoids redundancy by constantly reinterpreting and reinventing his songs. Here, he resets them in a string-band context, courtesy of the Picket Line.
Louisville's the Picket Line accompany him with a ramshackle sound and a hootenanny dynamic that fit his ramblin' songs nicely. The spry performances make some of the studio versions sound dour by comparison, as the musicians punctuate the songs with shouts and hollers. They actually howl like junkyard curs on "Wolf Among Wolves", and whoop it up on the clap-along closer "Idle Hands Are the Devil's Playthings". Cheyenne Mize plays Loretta Lynn to Oldham's Conway Twitty, harmonizing sweetly on "We All Us Three Will Ride" and "You Want That Picture". Oldham has duetted with so many female singers over the years, from Scout Niblett to former Frente! frontwoman Angie Hart, but Mize makes a dashing foil for him, with a wry, crystalline tone to counter his grainier, hangdog voice. (They released an under-everybody's-radar EP last year on Karate Body Records.)
The Picket Line kick up the dust on the first set, delivering a stormy take on Ralph Stanley's "Hemlocks and Primroses" complete with raucous call and response, but they quiet down a bit on the second set. Cleetus Redundementia's bass makes a comfy bed for Oldham and Mize's vocals on the soft, subtly sinister "Lay and Love", and Pork Chop's "outta-tune banjo" snakes through the ruminative "Rider" (these are the names listed on their MySpace, so don't blame me). As with most of the current crop of string bands, there's a strong Appalachian feel to these new interpretations, as if the musicians have modeled themselves after the Carter Family. But they shoot these songs full of classic Nashville country flourishes and Kentucky bluegrass filigrees, and their Bakersfield licks light up their cover of Merle Haggard's "Rambling Fever" and "May It Always Be" like fireworks. This is Oldham's flip-side America, where regional distinctions and variations compress into one sound. His idiosyncratic brand of traditional music, wherever he makes it and under whichever guise, has always sounded both otherworldly and earthy, and Funtown Comedown demonstrates how that contradiction energizes his music and enlivens a genre that too often gets bogged down in reverence and gravity. | 2010-01-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-01-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | Drag City | January 14, 2010 | 7.3 | 13187920-433d-4a68-9bf1-8b00f3ab8e6a | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Phil Elverum resurrects his beloved Microphones alias for a 45-minute song about art-making, self-mythologizing, and the endless search for meaning. | Phil Elverum resurrects his beloved Microphones alias for a 45-minute song about art-making, self-mythologizing, and the endless search for meaning. | The Microphones: Microphones in 2020 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-microphones-microphones-in-2020/ | Microphones in 2020 | Before he borrowed the name of the mountain that looms over his hometown of Anacortes, Washington, Phil Elverum wrote and performed songs as the Microphones, named in tribute to his recording equipment, which seemed to breathe and swell with a life of its own. In the summer of 2019, 16 years after the project’s last proper release, Elverum exhumed this moniker for a show filled with old friends. As he writes now, the performance—and the internet’s subsequent elation—raised some existential quandaries about past identities and “self-commemoration.” Over the course of a year, Elverum coalesced these thoughts into Microphones in 2020, a 45-minute song about many things, including artmaking, self-mythologizing, and what it means to bear witness to one’s own existence and transformations.
Elverum’s art has always tackled complex trains of thought. The Microphones’ music tended to do so on a cosmic scale, gazing out at the natural world for meaning. Elverum veered away from these wide-eyed tendencies following the death of his wife, the multi-disciplinary artist Geneviève Castrée, in 2016. “Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about/Back before I knew my way around these hospitals” he sang on the album recorded very soon after. Since then, his solo work under the Mount Eerie moniker has been rooted in plainspoken specificity. But as Elverum has made clear over the years, the titles that separate his projects are irrelevant because the questions he pursues have remained the same. “...Every song I’ve ever sung is about the same thing: standing on the ground looking around, basically,” he sings here. “If there have to be words, they could just be/‘now only’ and ‘there’s no end.’”
Though Microphones in 2020 looks back at a specific moment when Elverum was finding his footing as a young musician, it carries the weight of every experience he’s had since. The skeletal two-chord melody that carries the song evokes his stark compositions of recent years but is punctuated by bursts of analog noise, calling back to earlier experimentations. (The strumming itself echoes the opening of 2000’s It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water.) He channels the wonder of his youth as if no time has passed, exalting the sublimity of waterfalls, rainstorms, and crashing waves. “We’d go up on the roof at night and actually contemplate the moon,” he murmurs, in quiet awe at the purity of these practices. “My friends and I trying to blow each others’ minds just lying there gazing, young and ridiculous and we meant it, our eyes watering.” His voice is steady, his gaze unflinching. He is kind to this version of himself, the soft kid who saw meaning and metaphor in everything.
Elverum imbues these memories of constant experimentation with undeniable romance. “When you’re younger every single thing vibrates with significance,” he sings. “Gazing at the details in the artwork of a 7", devouring every word in a zine, there was barely internet/Meaning gets attributed wherever appetite bestows a thing with resonating glowing ringing out through a life.” (To that end, a significant and delightful chunk of the song is dedicated to a revelatory screening of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at a dollar theater in Aberdeen.) But even as he sprinkles references to the work that would blossom from these rushes of inspiration, Elverum never falls prey to the wistfulness that so often accompanies nostalgia. “The beast of uninvited change,” as he calls it, always makes itself known no matter how much we will it away.
The line Elverum traces through his life is not a linear one. His thoughts skip around in time and space, from the big picture to minute detail, tethered only by the hypnotic guitar melody, but sometimes that, too, slips away. New textures arise, occasionally drowning everything else out: distorted basslines, cavernous drums, amp hiss, harmonious overdubs, and glimmers of fuzzy tape deck ghosts. At one point, after Elverum dives down into the center of a lake, everything dissolves into a dazzling, mysterious shimmer fully embodying the beauty of an earlier line: “Extravagant solitude invigorates.” Then, the double-tracked chords return and the song rumbles back to life: nothing stays the same.
Near the end of Microphones in 2020, Elverum recalls running into the touring outfit of Bonnie “Prince” Billy in a parking lot in Italy. The band, he casually notes, was wearing matching tracksuits, “a kind of Italian tour costume.” It’s a delightful, mundane image, the sort of observation that other songwriters might find superfluous, but one that—like noting the exact date of that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon showing—does the heavy lifting of making an already detailed world even more vivid.
The memory of this encounter kicks off a line of inquiry that doubles as the song’s coda: What is the root of this lifelong pursuit of creativity? Why is Elverum driven to make “wild swipes at meaning”? His tendency to play with words and poke around for significance started in childhood, Elverum explains here. But was it nature or nurture that has led him to “blur the boundary between myself and the actual churning dirt of this place, that it feels normal to me to speak with the voice of weather”? He touches on the bizarre power and privilege of being an artist, especially one with a platform.
“When I took my shirt off in the yard I meant it, and it’s still off,” Elverum declares in the song’s closing minutes. Elverum devotees will recognize this as a direct allusion to the title track of the Microphones’ most beloved record, 2001’s The Glow Pt. 2. But it’s what comes next that transcends any familiarity with Elverum’s catalog: “I’m still standing in the weather looking for meaning in the giant meaningless days of love and loss repeatedly waterfalling down and the sun relentlessly rises still.” “Meaning” and “meaningless”: these words appear again and again across Microphones in 2020 and Elverum’s discography at large. There are no easy answers in life; some questions will always remain unresolved. But there is a great and terrible beauty in this universal, timeless uncertainty.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | P.W. Elverum & Sun | August 7, 2020 | 8.5 | 131a3638-e356-4669-805b-00b855a49c2d | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
The former Lone Justice singer’s history is the stuff of great rock memoirs, but on her first album in 13 years she looks ahead, celebrating her new life as an out queer woman. | The former Lone Justice singer’s history is the stuff of great rock memoirs, but on her first album in 13 years she looks ahead, celebrating her new life as an out queer woman. | Maria McKee: La Vita Nuova | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maria-mckee-la-vita-nuova/ | La Vita Nuova | In the 13 years since her last album, major changes altered Maria McKee’s approach to making music, along with her sense of self. Biggest among them was coming out as queer. She has become an advocate for queer and trans rights, and she has had to reassess and redefine many relationships, in particular her marriage to filmmaker Jim Akin. There were smaller changes, too: She began splitting her time between Los Angeles and London. She renewed her obsession with the Romantic poets, especially Keats and Swinburne, whose work had inspired her as a teenager. She read a lot of Dante, studied the occult and Western esotericism, and listened to a lot of English folk music.
Taking its title from Dante’s 13th century meditation on unrequited love, La Vita Nuova depicts the profound upheaval as McKee embraces her new life and ponders what to do with the old one. Her past is the stuff of great rock memoirs. The daughter of California evangelists, she went to high school in Beverly Hills and mingled with future actors and rock stars. She started a band with her older brother Bryan MacLean, whose tenure with the ’60s band Love endeared his sister to aging hippies and record execs. In the mid ’80s, her band Lone Justice, labeled “cowpunk” at the time, scored a hit with “Ways to Be Wicked,” a song written by Tom Petty and Mike Campbell that cast her in an overly sexualized light. As a solo artist she notched a No. 1 hit in the UK with “Show Me Heaven” and stepped into a new role as an alt-country heroine in the early ’90s.
But she exploded that persona on 1996’s Life Is Sweet, a pivotal record that traded twang for glam guitars, towering vocals, and more artfully oblique songwriting. It ought to have redefined McKee as an art-rock auteur, but her label did little to promote it, more willing to let it flop than try to market her outside the country-rock market. Soured by such treatment, she was not nearly as prolific in the 21st century, recording only a handful of albums and acting in two of Akin’s films. But 2005’s Peddlin’ Dreams and 2007’s Late December sound weirdly distant and unengaged, as though she made them out of obligation rather than inspiration.
Instead of a memoir, McKee has written an epic Romantic poem, although La Vita Nuova is less concerned with such professional travails and more interested in the person who endured them. Using Dante as her own Dylan, Blake as her Bowie, McKee adjusts her songwriting and singing to reflect these more recent changes, favoring a florid lyrical style and a dramatic vocal delivery that often verges on the operatic. This is her most commanding performance since Life Is Sweet, not to mention her most resourceful. On “Page of Cups,” which imports her older brother’s folk-rock philosophizing to the British countryside, she rattles off lines that on the page might appear anachronistic: “And I wonder, is it kind?” she chimes, her voice like a bell. “And will it understand that its provision as a practicality gave mechanism to a stunning bit of alchemy?” It’s bracing, even thrilling, to hear her fit all those syllables into such short melodic lines, rushing her phrasing and savoring the jamb of consonants in words like “practicality” and “mechanism.”
Her lyrics as well as her performance may strike some listeners as overly literary, but there is method in these mannerisms. That unwieldiness becomes one of the album’s most appealing traits, especially considering that unwieldy desire is one of the primary themes of La Vita Nuova. “Courage,” the album’s seven-minute centerpiece, conjures a woman whom McKee calls Beatrice, after Dante’s beloved, and describes her as “so winsomely arranged” and “rooted to the earth in such an arresting way.” If the verses evoke the rush of sexual thrall, the chorus is all aching uncertainty: “And I will never have the courage to tell her.” McKee doesn’t belt that confession, although we know that she can. Instead, she turns it into a forceful sigh, which gives more power to her next line: “I must love suffering!” The physical sensation of unrequited desire can be just as powerful as its consummation.
There is excitement over new possibilities in these songs, but there is also something like grief for those left behind. La Vita Nuova is an album full of goodbyes: to her brother on “I Just Want to Know That You’re Okay,” the song most rooted in the bright, generous melodies he brought to Love, and ostensibly to her husband (who co-produced the album with her) on the conflicted closer “However Worn.” But the biggest, if not the fondest, farewell is to her old self, to those parts of herself that weren’t compatible with what she calls her new “fanaticism of a daring kind.” McKee’s vita nuova is sweet, but contains just as many puzzles as her old life.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire | March 14, 2020 | 7.7 | 1322b1ba-2dfd-456e-a0ef-47c761fe11dd | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
With low-stakes dance-pop that simmers just beneath the surface, the artist formerly known as Kitty Pryde attempts to transcend her internet bubble. | With low-stakes dance-pop that simmers just beneath the surface, the artist formerly known as Kitty Pryde attempts to transcend her internet bubble. | Kitty: Rose Gold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kitty-rose-gold/ | Rose Gold | Kitty (fka Kitty Pryde) seemed to enter the digital world at a sort of attention apex. Were it released today, her mumble-rap hit “okay cupid” might briefly trend on Twitter or feature on a few TikToks before being swept into post-viral oblivion. But in 2012, the track’s woozy beat and Kitty’s bubbly, tossed-off delivery launched a modest career; she released EPs, played DIY shows, and moved to New York. For Kitty, though, rap was limiting, a box constructed by the hype machine. Following 2017’s Miami Garden Club, a synth-pop departure that met a tepid response, the self-produced Rose Gold is Kitty’s attempt to transcend her internet bubble.
Kitty has spent the past two years touring with her husband, Sam Ray, as one-half of the Pom Poms and a member of his band American Pleasure Club. In Rose Gold’s strongest moments, Kitty softens those groups’ rough edges—the shallow production of the Pom Poms’ day-glo EDM, the desperation of American Pleasure Club’s breathless lyricism—into low-stakes dance-pop that simmers just beneath the surface. Opener “Counting All the Starfish” has a bass drop, sure, but it’s blown out and fuzzy, like it’s being played underwater. Paired with a sparse drum beat and warbly synthesizer, it sounds like an eerie cross between The Twilight Zone and Boards of Canada. The production is thin, like a college kid experimenting with Ableton presets, but the style fits Kitty’s whispered, anxious vocals.
“The Window,” the only track featuring live instrumentation by American Pleasure Club, uses the winding post-rock affectations of latter-day emo to set up a wistful love song. As a rapper, Kitty had a lazy, sloping flow, blending one line into another as though she were simply too bored to enunciate. Here, as on the echoing dance track “Medicine,” that cadance works to her advantage, a hazy, breathy texture that seems to swim amid the instrumentation. In these moments, Rose Gold feels like a long-lost cousin to the brooding electronica of Arbutus Records, the Montreal label that fostered pop-forward avant-garde acts like Blue Hawaii, Majical Cloudz, and Grimes.
But Rose Gold also can feel like a bad résumé, showcasing too many skills and honing too few. The Miami Bass intro on “Look Demure” lasts less than 30 seconds before it’s replaced with a sparse and springy interlude, which is again usurped by a bubbly synthesizer. Each element jumps in before the last could make more than a momentary impression, overpowering the potential for danceable electro-pop. “Strange Magic” has the opposite problem, with an awkward synthline reminiscent of a trombone and a slow, halting pace.
Since releasing Miami Garden Club, Kitty has moonlighted as a video game soundtrack composer, a talent that shines through on the instrumental “Kitty’s Farm,” with its warm electric piano and shuffling beat, and “Don’t Panic Interlude,” which pairs guided meditations (“Breathe in, two, three, four/Breathe out, two, three, four”) with a mellow synth line. These songs sound almost like another internet phenomenon, “Lofi Hip Hop Radio - Beats to Relax/Study To,” the innocuous background music, popular among the gaming community, with just enough dynamism to keep the listener focused on the activity at hand.
In its prettiest moments, Kitty’s production is reminiscent of Mark Mothersbaugh’s charmingly understated score for Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. But almost at every turn, it’s overshadowed by painfully straightforward lyricism. “B.O.M.B. (Peter)” finds Kitty doing her best cabaret impression, a schmaltzy, juvenile boast about her power over a client as a professional financial dominatrix: “That’s right I’m back on my bullshit/You’ll wear my footprints on your back/Call me a cab to the nearest bank.” “Mami” aims for a similar kind of sexual empowerment, but it’s hard to shake the Oedipal connotations as Kitty scolds a clingy lover: “Mommy got things to do/Mommy don’t like your tone.”
The playfully poignant closing track “Florida,” originally recorded in 2013, highlights the lyrical inadequacies of newer work. Kitty’s seamless flow and easy rhymes about escaping small-town life in her home state feel second nature: “I don't think I'll make it hanging here another day/I wanna get spirited away.” In these moments, Kitty again feels like a friend in a distant bedroom, conjuring a mix of aloofness and intimacy that resonates long after her viral stardom has faded. | 2019-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Pretty Wavy | April 17, 2019 | 5.8 | 132327b9-c68e-449c-8de3-eb15e74b106d | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Damon McMahon’s work as Amen Dunes has been a process of expansion, and
Love is an even grander step forward, both in the roster of musicians McMahon employs—including members of Iceage andGodspeed You! Black Emperor—and the more accessible, classic-leaning songs he’s written. | Damon McMahon’s work as Amen Dunes has been a process of expansion, and
Love is an even grander step forward, both in the roster of musicians McMahon employs—including members of Iceage andGodspeed You! Black Emperor—and the more accessible, classic-leaning songs he’s written. | Amen Dunes: Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19234-amen-dunes-love/ | Love | Damon McMahon’s work as Amen Dunes has been a process of expansion. The confined, loner vibe of his 2009 debut DIA sounded like it was made in a cabin in the woods—which it was—but it also hinted at wider vistas McMahon might someday explore. That promise was realized on 2011’s Through Donkey Jaw, as he extended his sonic palette while retaining his introspective bent. *Love *is an even grander step forward, both in the roster of musicians McMahon employs—including members of Iceage and Godspeed You! Black Emperor—and the more accessible, classic-leaning songs he’s written.
This also means that Love, in line with its broad title, is less unique than previous Amen Dunes efforts. There are more obvious reference points here—the solitary creep of Syd Barrett, the slow croak of Will Oldham, the bittersweet swing of David Kilgour, and the patient twang of Wooden Wand. But the decreased individuality actually makes the music stronger. McMahon is so open to (and adept at) simple melodies and turns of phrase that he’s bound to evoke lots of other good music along the way, as if he’s tapping into something more elemental.
Besides, as long as McMahon is singing, Amen Dunes will never sound quite like anyone else—and on *Love, *he sings better and more ambitiously than ever. Each song rises and falls with the elastic stretch of his voice, which makes shapes the way a glass blower inflates raw material into art. His voice does echo some other spirit-conjuring singers, particularly the warbled croon of Devendra Banhart. But where Banhart’s mannerisms can come off as affected, McMahon sounds like he’s trying to channel something bigger than himself—a goal at which he succeeds quite often.
That searching approach is reflected in McMahon’s wondering lyrics, which step toward a horizon that keeps receding. Though McMahon’s musings are often in the first person, he’s filled with uncertainty, fascinated and confused by the self and what he can know about it. He darts around the subject and skirts obvious meaning, recalling the way Oldham bent tangents on the latest Bonnie “Prince” Billy album. Even when McMahon hits on some answers, as in the bluntly-titled “I Know Myself”, he still questions and doubles back, over meditative acoustic strums that suggest his journey won’t end, and shouldn’t.
Still, when all of McMahon’s seeking comes together, the results can feel like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Two examples stand out: the loping “Lonely Richard” marches forward with one tempo and little chord variation, yet McMahon makes it sound like he's scaling a mountain, to the point where a chorus as objectively banal as “have yourself a good time” becomes bracingly profound. That’s topped only by “Lilac in Hand”, whose stoned lilt should by all rights sound lackadaiscal, even lazy. But again McMahon sees simplicity as a chance to explore and discover (an effect captured nicely by the tune’s blurry, black & white video). Building an expanding universe with just a few tools: it might not be a new trick, but it’s one McMahon continues to perfect with Amen Dunes. | 2014-05-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-05-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | May 13, 2014 | 7.8 | 13233729-2d44-49f9-8ca3-6941740d4ce7 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
On their second album, Ebony Hoorn and WU LYF’s Ellery Roberts sell a mix of motivation and despair with sheer bombast. | On their second album, Ebony Hoorn and WU LYF’s Ellery Roberts sell a mix of motivation and despair with sheer bombast. | Lost Under Heaven: Love Hates What You Become | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/luh-love-hates-what-you-become/ | Love Hates What You Become | The Manchester duo Lost Under Heaven, or LUH, have never been keen on subtlety. Super-sized in every dimension, the music of former WU LYF leader Ellery Roberts and visual artist Ebony Hoorn sought grand answers about love and mortality by way of drastic melodies on their 2016 debut, Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing. They haven’t downsized for Love Hates What You Become, a 10-track set that finds Roberts and Hoorn blowing out every sentiment, string sample, and crescendo while investigating larger-than-life characters and existential dilemmas. This vigor can offer a welcome jolt out of apathy, but the pair’s lack of restraint sometimes moves into alienating melodrama, too, like an epic film that’s moving to the point of being maudlin.
At its best, Love Hates What You Become rattles with perfect intensity. Roberts’ sawtooth snarl is commanding, while John Congleton’s production is hyper-attentive to shifting moods, pulling back to sparse piano or pushing into total distortion as needed. Opener “Come” exemplifies the pair’s electro prowess: Roberts’ brash voice works through a cacophony of digitized percussion that spits and sputters, like steam escaping a pressure cooker. Bass and blast beats swirl at the periphery, as though some colossal machine is being ripped apart from the inside out. Roberts’ rasp finds equilibrium in the dissonance. “For the Wild” and “Bunny’s Blues,” meanwhile, cloak their arena-rock DNA in scaly exoskeletons. In these tracks, the lyrics are largely unintelligible—a good thing, since the trifecta of overpowering arrangements, grave subject matter, and Roberts’ vocal yearning is too rich a meal for a single song.
On “Post Millennial Tension,” it actually becomes too much. Tides of reverb and celestial string samples magnify Roberts’ severe growl to the point of cartoonish tragicomedy, and his broad-brushed pronouncements of youthful rebellion don’t help. “Everybody singing, ‘Fuck the world’/Close our eyes, we will be all right/All the lovers sing, ‘This our world,’” he implores. “Do we stand, take up the fight?” The chest-beaten battle cry is unintentionally laughable, with any sense of what Roberts is fighting for lost to bombast. His caustic howl pushes the title track to the point of absurdity, too, especially in its juxtaposition with Hoorn’s laid-back drawl. Hoorn’s voice is often the antidote to Roberts’ venom, but it just makes Roberts sound like he’s trying too hard here.
The crown jewel of Love is, somewhat ironically, its least-produced number. “Savage Messiah” swaggers to saloon piano and lashing guitar. The sauntering arrangement is lively and raw, owing to its improvised origins. Recorded hours after the band landed in Los Angeles, the song conjures jetlag haze, punctuated by Thor Harris’ driving percussion and paved with Hoorn’s smoky murmurs. LUH keep close to the ground, rolling along like a tumbleweed tangled with dust, barbed wire, and bits of bone. “Savage Messiah” makes a strong case for moderation and spontaneity, rare assets across Love Hates What You Become. | 2019-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mute | January 22, 2019 | 6.8 | 1324c835-e226-4a6f-b777-769cafec9c4a | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
One of indie rock’s more consistent guitar bands charts its evolution with a career-spanning collection of non-album singles, B-sides, and cover songs. | One of indie rock’s more consistent guitar bands charts its evolution with a career-spanning collection of non-album singles, B-sides, and cover songs. | Screaming Females: Singles Too | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/screaming-females-singles-too/ | Singles Too | With a discography ranging from good (All at Once) to great (the Steve Albini-produced Ugly) to secretly influential (“Jonah,” from 2006’s Baby Teeth, predated Courtney Barnett by six years), Screaming Females are among the more consistent guitar bands of Bandcamp-era indie rock. That’s the story told by Singles Too, a 17-track compilation that charts the New Brunswick, New Jersey trio’s 15-plus year career not through its hits—did this band ever have any actual hits?—but through its non-album singles, B-sides, and covers. Some of these songs appeared on 2010’s Singles, but it’s nice to have everything in one place. Luckily, there are enough moments to justify its existence.
The first two tracks, 2006’s “Arm Over Arm” and “Zoo of Death,” capture the essence of most Screaming Females songs: fuzzy riffs, singalong chorus, one verse or chorus too many. By 2008’s “No Being Disgusting,” the songs get tighter, and you can hear the band learning to play with dynamics. It’s also the first time we hear singer and guitarist Marissa Paternoster’s signature howl, which often acts as a fourth band member; it sounds like a Greek god yelling into a paper towel tube.
Around 2013’s “Ancient Civilization,” Screaming Females start to sound better, though better studios don’t always mean better songs. But because of the comp’s low stakes, it’s not such a big deal that the riffs on “Let Me In” don’t quite add up to a song, or that “Skeleton” would sound better in a pit than on a playlist, or that the melody of “Take It Back” doesn’t stick. The peak of the compilation’s original music, “Pretty Okay” (which also appears on 2014’s Live at The Hideout) and “I Do,” are the songs that sound most likely to appear on an album. Other highlights include an acoustic demo for Rose Mountain’s “Hopeless” and a remix of All At Once’s “End of My Bloodline” by Sammus and Moor Mother.
The bonus CD of cover songs is the real revelation. Screaming Females’ takes on Neil Young, Sheryl Crow, Patti Smith, Guided By Voices, Taylor Swift, and Eurythmics are loose, jammy, and, most importantly, fun—perfect for people who like the idea of karaoke but don’t want to watch their co-workers botch “If It Makes You Happy,” which the band absolutely crushes. There and on “Shake It Off,” bassist “King” Mike Abbate and drummer Jarrett Dougherty prove to be the perfect anchors to Paternoster’s furious guitar playing. Annie Lennox’s otherworldly performance on “No More ‘I Love You’s’” becomes an unexpected showcase for Paternoster’s gentler upper register. It makes you wish there were another Screaming Females song like it.
Singles Too doesn’t challenge or complicate Screaming Females’ strengths and shortcomings, and it doesn’t try to. Instead, it focuses on the band’s evolution. This is less “greatest hits” and more “here’s what you might have missed.” It’s as good an introduction as any to a trio that still sounds more similar to its 2005 self than different. More often than not, this is a compliment.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Don Giovanni | October 17, 2019 | 6.8 | 132677b8-4d4a-46c0-adba-51efaeab039e | Brady Gerber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-gerber/ | |
Kacey Musgraves’ chronicle of marriage and divorce looks to the stars but takes pains to stay grounded. Writing in the plain language of someone desperate to be understood, she sounds alternately vulnerable and triumphant. | Kacey Musgraves’ chronicle of marriage and divorce looks to the stars but takes pains to stay grounded. Writing in the plain language of someone desperate to be understood, she sounds alternately vulnerable and triumphant. | Kacey Musgraves: star-crossed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kacey-musgraves-star-crossed/ | star-crossed | There is no great betrayal on star-crossed; no bloodletting; no revenge. While Kacey Musgraves’ fourth album intends to guide you from the early stages of a marriage through the aftermath of a divorce, the East Texas songwriter barely mentions the other person at the heart of her story, and her narrator doesn’t seem all that surprised when things start heading south. The 15-track record is billed as a “tragedy in three parts”—inspired by Shakespeare and a pivotal experience on psychedelic mushrooms, paired with an expensive-looking film and the most elaborate production of her career—but Musgraves takes great pains to ground the songs in reality, where things happen subtly, quietly, and without poetry. “If this was a movie, love would be enough,” she sings. “But it’s not a movie.”
Like so much of her best work—the clever, tragic turns of phrase in “Space Cowboy,” the double portrait of a proud outcast and her tight-knit community on 2013’s Same Trailer Different Park—Musgraves’ latest album offers something of a bait and switch. In country music, breakups are discussed with the severity of mass extinction events: When life goes on after love, it is haunted, tortured, joyless. And when it doesn’t, dirty laundry is aired in public, bodies torched and disappeared. Musgraves, who filed for divorce in the summer of 2020, is aware of the gravity of her subject matter: “I wasn’t going to be a real country artist without at least one divorce under my belt,” she joked, and star-crossed arrives to both the highest expectations of her career and a storied lineage in the genre.
Matters are complicated further by Musgraves’ previous album, 2018’s radiant, Grammy-winning Golden Hour, a pop breakthrough inspired by the glow of a happy relationship. The best thing that new love offered Musgraves in those songs was perspective—a vantage from which she could muse with newfound wisdom on her family, her future, and her past. Take “High Horse,” where the joyful momentum of a disco beat led her to realize that even her worst ex wasn’t just something awful that happened to her—he was a type of person, an experience she was never alone in enduring. “Everyone knows someone who kills the buzz every time they open up their mouth,” she sang with bravado, speaking for multitudes.
On star-crossed, Musgraves stands by herself, taking no comfort in this type of insight. This album’s “Breadwinner” feels like a dark counterpart to “High Horse,” with a muted dance beat that plays like steady rain from a gray sky. “I wish somebody would have told me the truth/Say he’s never gonna know what to do/With a woman like you,” she sings in the chorus, isolated and full of doubt. If being in love made Musgraves feel connected to the world, these songs find her burrowing inward, questioning everything. Accordingly, the tragedy unfolding on the album is not that of a good relationship turning bad; it is of a once-confident person losing touch with the things that made her feel complete, worried that life might never be so simple again.
To communicate this anxious frame of mind, Musgraves sings plainly using stark, simple language—the way you speak when you’re desperate to be understood, seeking immediate answers. The songwriter who, on her breakthrough single, spun a million little puns out of the phrase “merry-go-round” now leans toward choruses that could be stitched onto throw pillows: “God help me be a good wife,” she sings through a fog of Auto-Tune. Sequenced early in the album, the song is meant to represent the humble beginnings of a marriage, but its lyrics suggest that, even back then, she felt forced into a role she wasn’t particularly suited for, bracing herself for failure.
Albums like Golden Hour seem to flow unburdened and inspired: little worlds that invite you inside to explore. To both its benefit and detriment, star-crossed is not one of those albums. Its seams show at every moment, in ways that feel artful—spoken interludes, thematic callbacks, a disorienting cover of Violeta Parra’s eternal “Gracias a la Vida” that shifts between settings like the grand finale of an Oscar-bait drama—and others that feel forced. “I’ve been to hell and back/Golden hour faded black,” Musgraves sings in “What Doesn’t Kill Me,” an attempted fight song that feels slightly redundant between the softer revelations of “Keep Lookin’ Up” and the more euphoric ones in “There Is a Light.”
“Healing doesn’t happen in a straight line,” Musgraves observes in “Justified,” and the album falters when you sense her searching for a clean narrative, struggling to place her thoughts in order. The film accompaniment, directed by Bardia Zeinali, hits a similar roadblock, setting itself up to address societal concerns—see Musgraves and friends armed with medieval weaponry, assaulting a bridal shop and declaring themselves “anti-matrimonials”—but finding its most effective visualization with Musgraves alone in her car, singing along to the music. Ballads like “Angel” and “Camera Roll” mirror these tender moments of introspection, returning to the folksy atmosphere of her previous work as she finds her footing in the more complicated present.
Sometimes, the facts of Musgraves’ public life lend themselves to a breakup album that only she could have written. In “Easier Said,” which seems to be about a songwriter witnessing the anticlimactic end to the relationship that inspired her most popular material, Musgraves searches for a punchline in her trajectory. It is her favorite type of subject—happy and sad at the same time—as a reverb-heavy swirl of banjo, pedal steel, and synth offers its own perspective on her evolution. The film captures this surreal, self-referential tone by occasionally following actors back to their trailers on set, where they watch the final scene of Romeo and Juliet (“That’s a shame,” actress Diane Venora reacts, pouting) and help Musgraves through her many costume changes.
These winks at the camera are reminders that Musgraves has always seen herself as an outsider, using her fierce independence to shine through a corrupt, heartbreaking world. This quality, as she remembers in the album’s brightest moments, is the spark that has sustained her unlikely ascent to pop stardom. There is a particular irony in Musgraves’ saddest, messiest album being the one she delivers to her largest audience yet, working with a wide team of collaborators to amplify its obsessive self-reflection into something befitting mainstream reception. This tension provides star-crossed with alternating tones of vulnerability and triumph, as she pieces together a story whose ending we already see coming. “And the truth is,” Musgraves admits early in the record, “I could probably make it on my own.” She can, and she will.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Interscope / UMG Nashville | September 9, 2021 | 7.7 | 13268a35-c908-4b04-8c14-d4ef75b21769 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
On his latest album, Kieran Hebden forgoes the lullaby instrumentation and straightforward rhythms of its predecessor, Rounds, for a darker, more intricate sound-- one rooted more in chaotic free jazz than skewed folk. | On his latest album, Kieran Hebden forgoes the lullaby instrumentation and straightforward rhythms of its predecessor, Rounds, for a darker, more intricate sound-- one rooted more in chaotic free jazz than skewed folk. | Four Tet: Everything Ecstatic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3168-everything-ecstatic/ | Everything Ecstatic | Kieran Hebden will not be your cuddly electro-organic playdate. He will not acknowledge the term "folktronica" in casual conversation. And he will most certainly not prattle on about Bruce Springsteen using his song "Slow Jam" (humorously mislabeled as "Slow Burn" on the Boss' official site) as walk-out music for the Devils & Dust Tour. After the minor success of his third solo full-length, 2003's Rounds, it seems like a good old-fashioned bout of rebellion is in order.
With *Rounds, Hebden created a blissful blend of his small-time, insular sound-swirls and bold-face beats. Accordingly, Radiohead, Beth Orton, and Super Furry Animals commissioned remixes, and even some non-nerds started to pay attention. But apparently Hebden isn't totally comfortable with his music filling the "chill" role at a progressive frat house's latest hackey-sack soiree. * Everything Ecstatic sees the sunken-eyed Brit forgoing the lullaby instrumentation and straightforward rhythms of its predecessor for a darker, more intricate sound-- one rooted more in chaotic free jazz than skewed folk. While this stylistic move is admirable, though, it sometimes sacrifices Hebden's more accessible melodic gifts in its quest for fresh ideas.
Whereas the amplified thump of a human heart gave Rounds an instant corporeal quality, Ecstatic opens on the back of a harsh, scraping bass loop. The low growl remains constant throughout "A Joy" as an army of programmed snares nimbly cross over each other before the organized noise dissolves into a computerized Jim O'Rourke-style cacophony of screeching bells, other-worldly whistles, and an overarching sense of many computers crashing at the exact same time. The tattered beginning is an adequate primer to Ecstatic's scruffier palette.
The slow-building "Sun Drums and Soil" is the album's strongest example of Hebden's Ornette-Coleman-meets-Sun-Ra direction. Near tribal drums build an underworld base for the song to snake out from. Keyboard lines wrap around each other as radio static muddies the mid-song breakdown. What sound like distant, effected vocals conjure another set of crushing drums and, eventually, a wonderfully wailing saxophone bleats, furthering the fury. Haunting, challenging and ultimately rewarding, the raucous track sees Hebden letting his freakout-flag fly, but not everything on Ecstatic is so dense.
The languid "And Then Patters" harkens back to Rounds' lush simplicity, while the jubilant "Smile Around the Face" may be the closest Hebden's ever come to an in-the-flesh pop song. The rinky-dink hi-hats keep it playful as Hebden puts his phaser effect to use, employing washes of synths that cut in and out across the speakers. But the track's unique, irresistible calling card is a sped-up vocal sample lifted straight out of Kanye West's Louis Vuitton backpack. The happy-chipmunk loop sticks and Hebden justly milks it, adorning the track with a multitude of additional sonic drips and fluffy atmospherics. Undeniably catchy and unabashedly cheerful, "Smile Around the Face" attests to Hebden's appealingly child-like anything-goes quality.
On the flipside of that fresh-breeze highlight is "Turtle Turtle Up", a two-minute jumble of vintage video game blips and pummeling drums that comes off as an in-process demo. The lackluster tune is followed-up by the BPM-bumping dancefloor clear-out "Sleep, Eat Food, Have Visions", near the end of the album. The eight-minute epic sees Hebden recreating the beat-busting portion of his live show where he gradually turns the speed knob all the way up until just a sheet of sound remains, which he toys with accordingly. The trick works in concert thanks to his improvisational tact and resourcefulness, but when nailed down on record, the technique becomes laborious.
Taking into account his recent impressive Madvillain remixes and the forthcoming album he's producing for Beth Orton, it seems like Hebden may be using his Four Tet albums to further his stylistic reach so he can apply his sound to more typically song-based collaborations. And more power to him. Everything Ecstatic marks his first slight step backward as a solo artist but it's hardly a failure. Like a natural jazz improviser flailing about in search of the precise moment to let loose a flurry of inspired notes, Hebden consistently sticks his neck out every which way here, knowing full well it may be chopped off at any moment. | 2005-06-01T02:01:23.000-04:00 | 2005-06-01T02:01:23.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | June 1, 2005 | 7.4 | 1329c7ad-302d-48e1-bb62-b3dfc0eb1851 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Stones Throw expands and reissues Madlib's 2000 solo bow. | Stones Throw expands and reissues Madlib's 2000 solo bow. | Quasimoto: The Unseen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6613-the-unseen/ | The Unseen | When The Unseen was released in 2000 as the solo debut from Lootpack MC/producer Madlib, no one could have known that it would be just the first album in an arm's-length discography that would cover everything from live jazz to Doom and Dilla collaborations, mostly to gushing critical acclaim. At the time, it was simply a quirky leftfield hip-hop record by a guy who burned grass like a wildfire and lived in Peanut Butter Wolf's basement-- like literally lived in the basement studio known as the Bomb Shelter. No one knew that Madlib preferred the solitude of the studio to pretty much anything else and that records flowed from his mind and sampler at a dizzying pace. Now, thanks to endless profiles and album reviews, we know, and it makes The Unseen even more interesting.
What once seemed a crafty producer's gimmick now sounds more like the imaginary friend of a shy dude who needed someone to talk to in the studio while he chain-smoked blunts. Reefer Madness? Probably, but wildly entertaining, as well, imagining Madlib sitting in a basement making songs all day everyday and getting so bored with himself that he finds a way to put a pig-nosed yellow hippo on record. And most of what he says under that persona is crazy shit, outlandish, hilarious fiction. Exactly what everyone stands around thinking about when he's got a helium balloon pinched in his fingers is what comes out of Lord Quas' mouth. We all know profanity is crass, violence a nuisance, and misogyny quite boring, but dude, his voice sounds funny when he says it. Whether it's the grandiose self-shout-outs, ludicrous threats, or adolescent come-ons, Quas is Webster with pimp juice while Madlib leans on the wall, mumbling affirmations and encouragement, and if you want to justify the content to your stuffy friends just tell them the pitch-shifted vocals are Madlib's commentary on the mental immaturity and irresponsibility of typical hip-hop subject matter.
Of course, the main attraction of any Madlib record is his production, and The Unseen holds up particularly well because Madlib hasn't changed this particular strain of his beatmaking all that much. Instead of tinkering with his style, he creates a new one. When he wanted to do some live jazz, he did Yesterday's New Quintet. Street bangers went to the Jaylib album. Pop remixes, reggae mixtapes, instrumental 12"s, nothing stays on paper with Madlib. So anyone who slobbered over Madvillainy or The Further Adventures of Lord Quas won't be disappointed by the now five-year-old production, nor should they skip Lootpack's Soundpieces or MED's Push Comes to Shove. If anything, The Unseen is a better "album" than Further Adventures because the compositions are more fleshed-out, more cohesive and, well, more. Madlib has a short attention span, but he kept most of the songs to almost three minutes here without much junk. The jazz and soul samples are as obscure and well-selected as ever, with Madlib's particular style of chopping a drum sample keeping the beat from becoming a bore. The skits and interludes play to the mood, and the seamless transitions, which usually include a bonus beat or two, echo the give 'em more of DJ Premier of Gang Starr.
I can't say for sure why The Unseen is being re-released, other than Madlib didn't a have another record ready this month. It's a nice treat for the Serato kids to have the full instrumentals on one CD, which is included. And if there's anything to be learned from George Lucas, it's that trusting the public to remember how awesome you are is a fool's paradise. Legacies are constructed, and with the new Quasimoto album still on the New Release wall, it doesn't hurt Madlib or Stones Throw to jog some memories. I'm sure Quas would say, "Buy my shit, or I'll cut your head off and smoke green out your socketholes," or something to that effect. | 2005-08-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2005-08-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | August 31, 2005 | 8.5 | 132b92ec-bf59-4827-b024-abb747156edd | Peter Macia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peter-macia/ | null |
A new reissue collects the entirety of the 1973 television score for the first time; it’s a lithe, funky counterpart to the wintry, wistful moods of A Charlie Brown Christmas. | A new reissue collects the entirety of the 1973 television score for the first time; it’s a lithe, funky counterpart to the wintry, wistful moods of A Charlie Brown Christmas. | Vince Guaraldi: A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (50th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vince-guaraldi-quintet-a-charlie-brown-thanksgiving/ | A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (50th Anniversary Edition) | Vince Guaraldi rarely sang, but when he crooned over an East Bay funk beat on “Little Birdie,” he made a song so irresistible that it eventually inspired someone to turn it into a one-hour loop. The apex of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, “Little Birdie” chronicles Snoopy and Woodstock as they attempt to set up a table for Thanksgiving dinner (and get in a fight with a beach chair). Guaraldi responds to their antics, wondering why Woodstock flies upside down and his friend “can’t do nothin’ right” while a muted trumpet interjects laid-back riffs. It’s a carefree and fantastical song that captures the quintessential swing, playfulness, and panache of Guaraldi’s Peanuts scores.
Like “Little Birdie,” A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving trades the moody piano of Guaraldi’s most celebrated score, A Charlie Brown Christmas, for exuberant brass and buoyant Clavinet, drawing on the growing funk movement of Northern California in the early 1970s. The soundtrack represents the pinnacle of Guaraldi’s jazz-funk output, but it has never been released in full outside the television special—it could only be found scattered across compilations. A new 50th-anniversary edition presents the entire score for the first time, with remastered tracks and an array of outtakes that highlight the pure joy of Guaraldi’s most boisterous music.
To realize these upbeat songs, Guaraldi assembled a brass- and rhythm-heavy ensemble who brought heavy chops and a flair for experimentation. Drummer Mike Clark is a pioneering funk musician who worked with Herbie Hancock; his broken rhythms give the music its sprightliness and sense of cool. Trumpeter and arranger Tom Harrell and trombonist Chuck Bennett make the brass section sound as big as a marching band. Guaraldi stretches his own limits, picking up the guitar—not his primary instrument, by a long shot—and using Clavinet and Fender Rhodes to add quick-stepping flair.
Together, the quintet managed a lot with very little. On “Thanksgiving Interlude,” for example, 30 seconds are enough to capture a whole world of mischievous, elastic groove. Guaraldi would often revisit and tweak themes in his Peanuts scores, and with Thanksgiving, he and the quintet take low-key cues and transform them into uproarious reworks. That penchant for reinvention is most prominent on “Linus and Lucy,” the quintessential Peanuts song, which is sped up and filled out with a full brass section, wandering improvisations, and an ecstatic trumpet riff; here, it sounds loud and bright, fit for a holiday bash.
This complete version of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving also provides a revealing glimpse into Guaraldi’s methods. The back half of the record is full of alternate takes, bonus mixes, and reprises that show how the musicians put the building blocks together. Across the seven versions of “Thanksgiving Interlude,” for example, the same beat makes up the backbone, but it’s a little slower here, or with a little more cymbal there. In one take of “Thanksgiving Theme,” Guaraldi gets upset that he “keeps blowing” it and bangs out the melody on piano like a Beethoven étude. Guaraldi’s Peanuts scores are beloved in part for their unflappable cool; the clip offers an endearing behind-the-scenes glimpse at the composer breaking character (and channeling Schroeder while he does).
And while Guaraldi’s Peanuts music might be remembered for its wintry melancholy—“Linus and Lucy” aside, of course—A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving reminds us of the full breadth of his scores. Much of Peanuts’ lasting impact boils down to the expansiveness of Charles M. Schulz’s vision for his characters. Neither the comic strips nor the TV specials ever stuck to just one mood: They jumped from madcap moments to pensive ones, offering an unusually grown-up take on the contradictory, mercurial rush of feelings that defines childhood. The genius of Guaraldi’s scores was the way he mapped the many emotions that erupted in a Peanuts comic strip, and on Thanksgiving, he shows them all. | 2023-11-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Lee Mendelson Film Productions | November 22, 2023 | 8.2 | 132d1128-f833-490f-ab5f-1f540651ef99 | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
The English songwriter Lianne La Havas' voice marries youthful lightness with a gravitas most often ascribed to artists well beyond her 25 years. Her complex, layered second album is dynamic and poignantly self-assured. | The English songwriter Lianne La Havas' voice marries youthful lightness with a gravitas most often ascribed to artists well beyond her 25 years. Her complex, layered second album is dynamic and poignantly self-assured. | Lianne La Havas: Blood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20855-lianne-la-havas-blood/ | Blood | The English songwriter Lianne La Havas may be young, but her voice marries youthful lightness with a gravitas most often ascribed to artists well beyond her 25 years. Blood, her second album, builds on the immutable grace of Is Your Love Big Enough?, her 2012 debut. Whereas Is Your Love Big Enough? looks outward for validation, Blood is dynamic and poignantly self-assured in its introspection.
Blood's first single, "Unstoppable" is a breezy summer jam that pairs lighthearted bass and groove with a whimsical video to match. In it, La Havas twirls through an empty house singing of the unique invincibility that comes post-healing: "Our polarity shifted around/ There was nothing else left holding us down/ But it's just gravitational/ We are unstoppable!" Warm and affirming, the track eases listeners into a complex, layered album with La Havas' earthy notes complementing meditations on love.
La Havas, whose soulful tunes place her most often in conversation with artists like Alice Smith, Laura Mvula, and Corinne Bailey Rae, handles her six-string acoustic with elegance and precision. Where she is less graceful, and at times even awkward, is the integration of more electric sounds. "Never Get Enough" alternates between her trademark lullaby and brash chords to almost jarring effect. The tonal shift matches the urgency of the cat-and-mouse lyrical arc, but the abrupt jumps add discordant conflict to an otherwise harmonious track sequencing. The song feels erratic, ill-suited to the pleasant lilt of La Havas' smooth voice. "Grow" alternates between acoustics and strong percussion, but its melodic shifts build gradually, matched by La Havas' rising vocals.
Though La Havas is best known for her dreamy love songs, she shines naturally when exploring her own internal world. "Green & Gold" traces her coming of age through motifs from both her Jamaican and Greek backgrounds: "I'm looking at life unfold, dreaming of the green and gold/ Just like the ancient stone, every sunrise I know/ Those eyes you gave to me, they let me see where I come from." The nods to her mixed race heritage are childlike in their innocent inquiry, but the track still retains its maturity; its strong percussive notes deviate from her tendency toward ballads, evoking the same island influence depicted in the track's lyrics.
The album's strongest ballad, the stunningly simple "Wonderful" showcases her at her finest: sultry, nostalgic, and sweet. The track is a gorgeous ode to love lost, its chorus enchanting: "But wasn't it kinda wonderful?/ Wasn't it kinda wonderful, baby?" With slow snaps punctuating La Havas' voice, "Wonderful" seduces as it soothes. It is the soundtrack to slow motion surprise encounters with an ex. La Havas weaves contentment with a charged reflection on past romance to tantalizing effect: "You can trip, flick a switch negative/ Break the circuit between us/ But electricity lingers/ In our fingers."
Melodic interruption of "Never Get Enough" notwithstanding, Blood is an almost seamless album. Tracks flow into one another with the fluidity and serenity of rain into a freshwater pond—light, refreshing, natural. But there is substance moving here, weight in the currents. La Havas' even, powerful vocals ride syrupy strings with grace and latch onto sharper rhythms with authority. She is deft and adaptive, at once inspiring dancing and melancholy reflection: La Havas is always in motion. | 2015-07-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-07-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Nonesuch | July 28, 2015 | 7.7 | 132e7500-cb46-4573-99ec-df3fbc757fbd | Hannah Giorgis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-giorgis/ | null |
Puff Daddy's luxurious 1997 debut plays as both a cautionary tale and an affront to mortality. We examine its history on the 20th anniversary of the death of Christopher Wallace. | Puff Daddy's luxurious 1997 debut plays as both a cautionary tale and an affront to mortality. We examine its history on the 20th anniversary of the death of Christopher Wallace. | Puff Daddy & the Family: No Way Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22953-no-way-out/ | No Way Out | As folk singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin shuffled out of the wings to collect her Grammy for Song of the Year in 1998, chaos was already brewing. Wu-Tang Clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard made a beeline for the stage, beating Colvin to the mark. He appeared suddenly in front of millions in a brand new maroon suit, delaying her acceptance speech to protest Puff Daddy’s earlier Best Rap Album win for his debut, No Way Out, which defeated the Clan’s Wu-Tang Forever and The Notorious B.I.G.’s posthumous Life After Death. Bad Boy had dominated the rap Grammys that evening with wins in two of the three categories, landing nominations in each one, and scoring seven nominations total. Puffy, Faith Evans, and 112 were all winners. Biggie and Mase were both nominees. ODB had enough. “I don’t know how y’all see it, but Wu-Tang is for the children,” he said. “Puffy is good, but Wu-Tang is the best.”
The scene is among the most memorable images in Grammy history, despite the fact that the rap Grammys themselves were not televised that year. As if getting the last laugh, two new Bad Boy collaborations were in the Hot 100 Top 20 when the charts went live three days later: Puffy’s “Been Around the World” with Mase and Biggie and Mase’s collaboration with fellow Bad Boy signee Total, “What You Want.” The week underscored a key point about the label then: despite its opponents and skeptics, Bad Boy Records was a machine, and all it did was win.
Bad Boy's near-sweep at the Grammys capped a year of successes for the hit factory and for Puffy, who dominated the charts, the clubs, and the award ceremonies. But those fleeting highs were sullied by a far greater loss: the murder of Christopher Wallace. The specter of death hangs eerily over No Way Out, through near prescient verses delivered by Biggie from beyond the grave (“Niggas wanna hit me, if they get me, dress my body in linen by Armani”) and reflective odes bared by those living in the aftermath of his slaying. Puff explores paranoia, grief, and self-awareness in the wake of losing a dear friend, an icon at the peak of his powers. It's an album as much about celebrating and surviving as it is mourning, but more than anything, it’s a label compilation that bound its participants together, one marked by a refusal to stop winning—even when under the gun.
When Biggie was shot and killed in a drive-by weeks before the release of his sophomore album, it instantly made the Bad Boy modus operandi obsolete. They were a posse built around a transcendent star. Everything revolved around Biggie. He appeared in several Bad Boy videos. He appeared on singles and notable tracks for Craig Mack, Total, and 112. He was their face. He was the brand. In the long term, his death would create a power vacuum in rap Mecca—starting a turf war between would-be kings like Nas and Jay Z—but the immediate aftershock was felt more subtly within his camp, which was searching for a way to sustain without one of the most heavily felt presences in all of popular music. “After Big died, we were searching to see who was gonna carry the torch,” Mase remembered in GQ’s oral history of the Bad Boy run. “Everybody would’ve had the right to get out of contracts because of the violence. Instead, we rolled together. If I had a verse or beat that was better for you, I’d just give it up.” Mase’s verses for No Way Out were written in his Harlem bedroom long before he was signed. “I gave them to Puff, because he was the one with the hot hand.” Starting with Biggie’s Mase-featuring smash “Mo Money Mo Problems,” Puff’s hot hand would continue to deal hits at an unprecedented rate.
By ’97, Sean “Puffy” Combs had already established himself as one of the finest producers and talent scouts in the country. After cornering the rap market with Big and Craig Mack (with Mase and the LOX waiting in the wings), he diversified into R&B, signing new acts like 112, Total, Mario Winans, and Carl Thomas. He executive-produced Mary J. Blige’s My Life and co-produced Usher’s self-titled debut, and he scored credits on TLC’s CrazySexyCool. Along with his in-house production team, the Hitmen, he cut records for everyone from Jodeci to Mariah Carey to Aretha Franklin. Not long before his death, Biggie convinced Combs to try his hand at rap, and with his team surrounding him production began on Puffy’s debut. Taking the name Puff Daddy, he would adopt an uber glamorous image, helping to coin the term “ghetto fabulous.” Combs wasn’t a naturally gifted rapper by trade, but he had remarkable taste and a clear vision. His Bad Boy bio, shared in a ‘98 Vibe story, exposed his solo rap career as merely a means to further his roles as a premier impresario and tastemaker in true Puffy fashion: “I’m not an MC,” it read. “I’m a vibe giver.”
In January ’96, Puff Daddy set the tone for No Way Out with the Mase-featuring single “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down,” a body-roll-friendly jam that heavily sampled “The Message.” The video was a crash course in “new money” extravagance—silk pajamas, pristine white jumpsuits, action movie pyrotechnics, Eddie Griffin, driving through the desert in a drop top Rolls Royce, rapping about rocking Versace and Hawaiian getaways. The album was originally headed in a fun, glitzy direction, in the vein of “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” and the forthcoming single “Been Around the World.” But Biggie’s sudden death caused Puffy to redo half the album, creating a party record spotted with bouts of depression and sorrow; coupling words from the deceased with remembrances of his life and the impact of his passing. “[The album’s] more serious now than when I first got into it,” Puffy told SPIN that September. “There are still days where I just wake up and feel like I don’t want to do this anymore. But it’s become a situation in which I have no choice. This is what I do. I have no way out.”
No Way Out is a living document of the most tumultuous period in Bad Boy’s run. It embodies the complex mix of emotions felt while persevering through great trauma amid triumph. It's a record that splits itself in two trying to capture a gaudy lifestyle and the devastation of loss all at once, equal parts funeral pyre, signal fire, and beach luau. One minute they’re jet-setting around the globe with Big in tow, the next Puff is alone peeking over his shoulder for armed assailants, contemplating his final hour. Samples of Marvin Gaye’s “If I Should Die Tonight” and New Edition’s “Is This the End?” become vehicles for distress and alarm, as he prepares his last will and testament. But a song like “I Got the Power” reestablishes control: “I be that nigga that yo niggas can’t fuck wit,” he raps. “That nigga that'll die for his main man/That nigga with the gettin' money gameplan.” For its somewhat whiplashing nature, everything the album does is packaged neatly, spotlighting Puff as its star while exalting a slain legend and comrade and reassuring Bad Boy culture stockholders that the remaining roster was ready to carry the mantle. This is the all-conquering rap debut of a production and marketing guru.
With production from the Hitmen aces—Puffy, Stevie J, D-Dot, and Amen-Ra, in particular—and a host of talented role players, namely Big’s widow Faith Evans, his mistress Lil Kim, the star-to-be Mase, The Lox, and more, No Way Out crafted a near perfect Bad Boy time capsule, capturing the label’s highs and lows of ‘97. From the agony of “Pain” to the celebrity-critiquing “Do You Know?,” it chronicles every natural reaction to Big’s shooting dutifully and without fully compromising Puffy’s Bad Boy mission statement: make feel-good music that tops the charts.
Puff Daddy proves himself to be a more than capable leading man, talking his shit with supreme confidence one minute and humbling himself at the altar of his fallen friend the next. He’s among the most believable boasters in rap history—“You ain’t gotta like me, you just mad/‘Cause I tell it how it is, and you tell it how it might be,” he raps on “Victory”—and he’s his own best hype man who’s equally enthusiastic stumping for others. But for the most part, No Way Out pivots on its exceptional Biggie cameos. His aura lingers. There’s a slickness to his bars that’s unparalleled, that fills up all the surrounding space with brio. He makes a seam-splitting Jay Z verse seem pedestrian (“Young G’s”) and brings half the fun to “Been Around the World” with his goofy rendition of Lisa Stansfield's “All Around the World.” On the slow-building “Victory,” he trades verses with Puff, backing his play. (The song’s final verse, the last Big ever recorded, is believed to be a reference track for Puffy.) The remix to “All About the Benjamins,” a chief among posse cuts once deemed by XXL the second best rap song of the ’90s, is among the last truly great artifacts of the Bad Boy era: the perfect blend of varying personalities and top notch performances all winding around the same axis: Biggie and the mutual appreciation of stunting.
“Statistically, this was one of the best years of my life,” Puffy told Rolling Stone in December ’97, “but personally, it was one of the worst. I would rather not have this. I would do anything—I would turn the hits into negative hits if I could just be with Biggie again.” Biggie was gone, though, and the hits kept coming. Puff Daddy’s first two singles topped the charts and his next two peaked at No. 2. No Way Out set the stage for Mase’s hugely successful debut Harlem World later that year, and the next year it was the LOX’s turn. As the run continued and the accolades kept mounting, Puffy became rap’s unexpected celebrity executive, notching more No. 1’s than any rapper in history to that point. But there’s something singular about No Way Out, which somehow feels like both a cautionary tale and an affront to mortality: The Notorious B.I.G. had been assassinated by his enemies, but his legacy was eternal. The album remembers him, not as man but as myth.
There’s something fascinating about following a song as mournful and self-serving as “I’ll Be Missing You”—which turns “Adagio for Strings” and the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” into a rousing eulogy with Puff and Big at its center—with a song as triumphant as “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down.” The transition seemed to build the strength necessary to overcome tragedy. With or without Biggie, their superstar and genius, the Bad Boy machine would continue to roll. Nobody—not even the ghost of an all-time great—could hold Sean Combs down. When the dust settled and No Way Out was on its way to going septuple platinum, SPIN ran a January ‘98 feature titled “The Mourning After,” taking stock of the post-Biggie Bad Boy climate and wondering at what point public grieving became shameless promo. “Marketable mourning,” as Sia Michel called it, contributed at least in part to the ongoing sales spike. Martyrdom is misery porn for some. But No Way Out is more than just the commissioning of lifeless tributes or some flagrant attempt to merchandise tragedy; it’s an attempt to do the most difficult thing in adversity’s wake: keep going. | 2017-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Bad Boy | March 9, 2017 | 7.8 | 132eb83b-236b-4dcf-80f3-640a70c09066 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The rising 24-year-old Florida rapper surfs affably on TikTok trends and sounds exactly like a label executive’s idea of the future. | The rising 24-year-old Florida rapper surfs affably on TikTok trends and sounds exactly like a label executive’s idea of the future. | Dominic Fike: What Could Possibly Go Wrong | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dominic-fike-what-could-possibly-go-wrong/ | What Could Possibly Go Wrong | If you haven’t had a substantial conversation with anyone under the age of 25 or been on TikTok over the last six months —if you are, say, a label executive with money to burn and a fuzzy, Post Malone-shaped image of what Kids These Days are into —Dominic Fike might sound like the future. The 24-year-old Florida singer won a multi-million dollar record deal shortly after he got out of jail for violating house arrest tied to an alleged battery of a police officer; he didn’t have any actual finished music to instigate the bidding war, just a few demos kicking around the Internet. But for trend-chasers, that was enough; he moans when he sings, his face is smothered in tattoos, and the beats change with the grace of an accidentally opened browser window—how do you do, fellow kids!? On his debut album, though, Fike proves to be no pioneer—he’s just the latest shrugging embodiment of streaming trends.
Fike, or whoever runs his marketing campaign, bills himself as “genre-less” or genre-bending, which is an accurate, but not revolutionary, statement. Billie Eilish zigzags through Soundcloud rap and piano pop ballads. Taylor Swift makes "indie" music now. Drake continues to wriggle through so many styles it barely registers when he adopts a new one. The songs engineered to go viral on TikTok contort through genres and textures, so that a 15-second snippet that whirls around the app can sound completely different from the rest of the song.
Over What Could Possibly Go Wrong's 34 minutes, Fike swerves from crooning over swelling strings to Brockhampton-esque treated vocals to raspy raps over chaotic guitar licks, sometimes all in the same song. "Joe Blazey" halts its muffled vocals midway through for an audio of what seems to be Fike confessing to a panic attack; when the music starts again, the song shifts into sinister bass, as he hisses about "going dark mode" in a hotel bar. On “Why,” he shows off a palatable boy-band croon. The blithe, catchy “Chicken Tenders" starts with whiny, pitched-up vocals clearly cribbed from Frank Ocean. By the time the song's two and a half minutes are up, the track has mutated into a call-and-response pop tune with a twitchy electronic drum pattern while Fike proclaims “The best part of my day is/When I get to see you naked.”
These are claustrophobic songs, and even aside from some of the more grating production choices (the extraneous outro on “Wurli” that morphs from elegiac strings into a siren-like blare, the sound effect of a baby crying in “Florida”), the lyrics prove equally suffocating. The album focuses on fame, which often seems like a confusing choice (Fike has 492,000 followers on Instagram; Doug the Pug has 4 million). “What’s it like being famous?” he asks himself on “Good Game.” “Hollywood doesn’t need a reason to make you think you look bigger than you are,” he wails on the self-serious “Politics & Violence.” “I hope they cancel me,” he chants on “Cancel Me,” a trollish track that's currently coursing through TikTok and seems desperate to provoke. “I hope I get Me-Too’d,” he says on the final verse; it’s yet another upsetting statement designed to provoke on an album in which he also says, “I done took an L on every corner like a swastika."
For the majority of the album, though, Fike strives to be aggressively palatable, another aspect of the sound that makes these tracks seem like TikTok bait. For all their incessant beat switches and transformations, these songs end up largely breezy and buoyant, opting to create a vibe rather than to telegraph any actual emotion. He may get credit for what happens next, but ultimately, the future of popular music is on the same course it's been on for the last year: regardless of, and maybe despite, this album, there was always going to be an upcoming slew of artists that sound just like Dominic Fike, slouching towards virality.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | August 14, 2020 | 6.1 | 13324d4f-ec72-464a-8717-a89f08b95315 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
For the first time in years, the trap music co-architect sounds less like a copyright lawyer and more like a contributor to a culture he loves, even if he gets a little overzealous. | For the first time in years, the trap music co-architect sounds less like a copyright lawyer and more like a contributor to a culture he loves, even if he gets a little overzealous. | T.I.: Dime Trap | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ti-dime-trap/ | Dime Trap | For the past year, T.I., Gucci Mane, and spectators have been embroiled in a debate about who invented trap music. Trap has become such a force—in hip-hop, in music, in style—that its creators can credibly say they have helped shape modern culture. T.I. staked his claim to the genre’s origins on his 2003 album, Trap Muzik, arguing the proof was there in the title. But last month, announcing a new pop-up museum dedicated to trap, T.I. dropped the language of invention and proposed the genre was a group effort. “Trap Muzik wouldn’t be shit without ALL OF US,” he wrote. “I made it [an] album… but WE MADE IT A GENRE!!!!” This pivot from ownership to participation animates Dime Trap. For the first time in years, he sounds less like a copyright lawyer and more like a contributor to a culture he loves.
Back in 2015, T.I. envisioned Dime Trap as the second installment of a trilogy that began with 2014’s pop-leaning Paperwork. He’d recently received a Grammy nomination for “Blurred Lines,” was Iggy Azalea’s mentor and defender, and was the patriarch of a reality-show family. In a sense, the T.I. vs T.I.P. duel—that is, the clash between the CEO and the streetside hustler—had been settled. But he wanted Dime Trap to reset the balance and provide “unadulterated trap music” with “young, hungry, talented producers.” This return to the trap was so straightforward that, at one point, Dime Trap was simply called Trap Music.
But the Dime Trap of 2018 focuses on legacy instead of legend. T.I. still likes to flex, and balling remains a priority. But throughout this record, there’s an emphasis on consequences. Narrated by Dave Chappelle, another black artist who’s publicly wrestled with questions of legacy, Dime Trap finds T.I. in repose, mapping the choices he’s made and teasing out their effects. On “Seasons,” he quotes his marriage counselor, who tells him to focus on the pain his decisions have caused. When he dismisses the advice and sets his sights on hip-hop moguldom, instead, you can feel the weight of that choice. “What Can I Say” transforms T.I.’s unlikely ascent into a cautionary tale. “In the trap with a trap door,” he raps, insisting that a successful hustle only begets more hustles.
The past serves as muse and burden. “Laugh at Em” melds T.I.’s memories of his days in the trap with observations from this ongoing era of hyper-visible police brutality. “Swear to God I coulda been Freddie Gray/Or Mike Brown, getting shot down/With a pistol on me and half a brick of yay,” he reflects. That single sequence is more potent than T.I.’s entire last album. He seems to have rediscovered the power of fluidity, zipping through his thoughts until larger ideas settle into place.
A murderers’ row of both new and seasoned producers match his breezy rapping with zesty beats. For “Jefe,” Bangladesh blends mariachi horns and marching-band percussion into a spirited thump, landing between Nola bounce and Latin trap. Shawty Redd and Pyro da God’s “Big Ol Drip” beat is a slow, bluesy burner with bold drops and ragtime riffs. Scott Storch’s sparse arrangement on “Wraith” steadily expands and contracts, creating strange little pockets of dead air that T.I. punctures with his newly husky pitch. T.I has dabbled in a range of sounds since his debut, but that range resonates as renewal here.
The record falters when T.I. gets maudlin. The weepy keys and morose verses of “Pray For Me” are monochromatic, as if YFN Lucci and T.I. were dramatically reenacting a self-help book. The frosty lechery of the Young Thug collab “The Weekend” is undercut by an outro where T.I. explains that trap music isn’t “one-dimensional” and describes Dime Trap as “TED Talk for hustlers.” Hasn’t his career made that clear?
T.I. ends “Be There” by framing trap as a form of revenge against the carceral state and white supremacy. “I’m sure the people who put crack cocaine in our communities, infested us with all this hate, all these guns, all this violence, all this rage, you see, they never counted on us takin’ those very experiences, packaging them as philosophical presentations set to music,” he says. Like Jesse McCarthy’s essay “Notes on Trap,” the moment limits trap to its function and its impact. Trap has reached unexpected heights, but the genre’s soul exists in elusiveness—the way it shifts the moment it’s pinned down, the way its architects endlessly toil toward unpredictable ends, the way its originators don’t just invent but evolve. It doesn’t matter what “they” counted on. We made it. | 2018-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Grand Hustle / Epic | October 11, 2018 | 7.4 | 13339d71-8380-4187-84e1-e2328915de08 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The Ohio songwriter Spencer Radcliffe enlisted a seven-piece band for his latest album. The musicians give his doomy themes a billowing energy like a cloud of smoke. | The Ohio songwriter Spencer Radcliffe enlisted a seven-piece band for his latest album. The musicians give his doomy themes a billowing energy like a cloud of smoke. | Spencer Radcliffe & Everyone Else: Enjoy the Great Outdoors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23219-spencer-radcliffe-everyone-else-enjoy-the-great-outdoors/ | Enjoy the Great Outdoors | Spencer Radcliffe has made most of his recorded music on his own and it shows. Both under his given name and with the dreary drone project Blithe Field, he’s made albums that feel vacant—soundtracks for late nights in empty rooms, when you’re probing big questions and finding no answers. But at some point in the couple years since he released his debut solo LP, Looking In—a bleary-eyed collection of slowly plotted songs that explored both existential and domestic anxieties—he decided he’d had enough of the loneliness.
“For now at least, the crest had been reached for the theme of [an] individual playing every instrument on a recording,” he told The Fader in March. So for his new album, he invited the band that he’d brought along on tour into the studio—alongside a few other friends—and called them “Everyone Else.” The resulting record, Enjoy the Great Outdoors, bears many of the same themes as his past recordings—smoke’s on the horizon, apocalypse is just a day away—but there’s an endearing looseness that he’s never achieved on his own.
On opener “Land & Sea,” his winding guitar lines creep around crawling, cymbal-heavy percussion. He dazedly describes a dream, but wakes up as the track takes shape. Elements steadily enter the frame—harrowed backing vocals, distant strings—and build towards a cacophonous conclusion. The song’s ebb and flow feels fitting of its title, but also represents Radcliffe’s subtle power as a bandleader—he mostly seems to stay out of the way.
As a result, the seven-piece band—which, on most songs, consists of drummer Jack Schemenauer, lead guitarist Grant Engstrom, cellist Ben Austin, bassist/keyboardist Nathan Dragon, singer Tina Scarpello, and Brennan Zwieg on Rhodes piano—has an energy that sort of billows. Lines loop around one another, intersecting occasionally, but mostly drifting in a slow-moving smoke cloud around Radcliffe’s muted pessimism. At the center of these are Radcliffe’s songs, which are as winningly downcast as anything in his catalog (or, for that matter, those of his young DIY rock peers like (Sandy) Alex G, Elvis Depressedly, and Girlpool). He’s always had a knack for writing soaring instrumentals with sinister undercurrents, but Enjoy the Great Outdoors has some of his most cleverly deceptive pieces yet.
“Slamming on the Brakes” begins with the opening couplet of The Sound of Music’s “Do-Re-Mi” (“Doe a deer/A female deer”), but something’s off. Radcliffe and his bandmates reduce the sprightly melody to a single note and turn it into body horror, as a mangled animal splatters across the hood of the narrator’s car. His talent as a songwriter is that it doesn’t just end there—he uses the accident to muse on the existential questions these sorts of songwriters are often mulling. He’s “praying for deliverance from a life of small mistakes,” but it never comes.
These songs hang heavy, as Radcliffe’s compositions often do, but his band keeps it from sinking too far into despair. “Wrong Turn”—the chorus of which gives the record its National Park Service slogan of a title—is another song that begins at the end of the world. Radcliffe’s narrator sees all-consuming fire in the distance and contemplates how nice it might be to drive his car right into the destruction. But the instrumental offers some ballast: Schemenauer’s percussion sets a cruise-control pace, Engstrom’s leads feel like a desert breeze, and drizzly strings lend a surprising coolness to the doomsday prophesying.
The chorus, then—“maybe we’d enjoy the great outdoors”—is winkingly undermined by the rest of the song, which is about driving to the ends of Earth to watch it all burn down. But the addition of Everyone Else makes it land a little differently. It’s not a solitary cruise into the sunset, but a road trip with a group of your best friends—even if the end result is still doom. | 2017-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | May 15, 2017 | 7.4 | 13380821-f9b0-4a5e-8938-464f1f562787 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
In a dramatic departure from their previous projects, the UK collective taps into the spirituality of choral music and contemporary classical in an uplifting, celebratory, utterly gorgeous album. | In a dramatic departure from their previous projects, the UK collective taps into the spirituality of choral music and contemporary classical in an uplifting, celebratory, utterly gorgeous album. | SAULT: Air | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sault-air/ | Air | SAULT’s aim, since its inception, is to twirl through every hue in the kaleidoscope of Black existence. The enigmatic UK collective—which, despite their aversion to the media, is agreed by most to be helmed by producer and songwriter Inflo, whose real name is Dean Josiah Cover—has run through a slew of musical styles and themes in service of that goal. They laid out their thesis with 2019’s 5 and 7, a fuzzed-out collection of minimalist funk songs about pride, the struggle, and everything in between. They sharpened their focus the following year with another pair of albums released while the Black Lives Matter movement was at a height of international attention—Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise)—putting a finer point on the particulars of protest and the importance of keeping the faith while swerving into Afrobeat-inspired territory. Their next album, NINE, dove into the murky depths of trauma and anger, juxtaposing those feelings against uneasy humor with nursery rhymes. It’s tempting to read their releases as a Kübler-Ross-esque model of intergenerational grief, but the Black experience is far too manifold to be so easily simplified. There’s always cause to mourn and reflect, but there’s just as much reason to celebrate and to uplift.
AIR—the group’s sixth album in only three years—tilts the balance back toward the positive. In a drastic turn from their previous output, SAULT have cast aside almost all of their identifiable hallmarks; gone are the funky rhythms, driving disco beats, and soulful crooning. As opener “Reality” begins with a crescendo of strings, horns, and a classical choir, your first thought might be that you’ve put on a record that should be filed closer to the choral works of György Ligeti. Sonically, there’s little anchoring AIR to the group’s previous output, but its themes still zero in on a critical element of the Black experience: the need for self-care and celebration of individual Blackness.
And as the group makes a sharp pivot to lush contemporary classical, they take the opportunity to remind us that even a style of music seen as traditionally European has been deeply influenced by Black innovators. “Luos Higher” makes plucked stringed instruments and chants its centerpiece, drawing influence from the music of the Luo people of Kenya for whom the track is named. The delicate string work of “Heart” conjures the specter of an Alice Coltrane spiritual journey, while the nearly 13-minute symphonic suite “Solar” calls back to the exuberance of Julius Eastman’s kinetic masterpiece Femenine with its twinkling pitched percussion. Every piece on AIR wears its heart on its sleeve, conveying an emotional urgency that makes the album feel like SAULT’s most personal body of work, despite being mostly wordless.
Unbound by the limitation of language to convey meaning, AIR leans into the spiritual effect sound has on the mind and body. As “June 55” ratchets up the intensity with dissonant flourishes and a tidal wave of vocals and horn blasts, the moment that tension releases feels like a relief—a weight has been lifted from your shoulders. When a harmonious roll of voice and brass moves in to fill the space left behind, there’s a sense of triumph. Without being told how to feel, one can simply feel; the music meets you where you are.
“Time Is Precious” offers a faint trace of the familiar SAULT of albums past, and the most direct acknowledgment of the significance of their genre metamorphosis. The track slowly builds itself up to the stratosphere, vocal harmonies and orchestral swells surging sky high as it speeds through several movements like a pocket-sized Philip Glass opera. Reaching its peak, the layers quickly fall away as an intelligible vocal appears for the first and only time, imploring the listener to use their precious time wisely. “Life will always bring its pressures,” the choir sings in a gospel-style vocal. “Use it wise and keep those treasures.” As the track winds down, the choir becomes muffled as if being heard through the doors of a church foyer. It serves as a comforting reminder: the refrain will play on whether you’re there or not, and you’re always welcome to return when you’re in need of reassurance.
Though Cover doesn’t give interviews, his short public statement in response to being named Producer of the Year by the BRIT Awards—the first time a Black artist has won the prestigious prize since its 1977 inception—is revealing. “All the Black producers before me, I’m in awe and have studied you,” he said. “I am you.” For him, digging deep into the history of great Black musicians wasn’t only an exercise in mastering a diverse range of genres; he wanted to understand their hardships, their triumphs, and how it informed the art they made. Music about the Black experience often feels timely, and it rarely matters if it was made for 1971 or 2022. As long as the cycle of hurt, the necessity for action, and the need for healing remains unbroken, music made for every point on the spectrum retains something that could be useful to another person down the line. With AIR, Cover intends to pass on an important message: love being Black, but don’t forget to love yourself. | 2022-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Forever Living Originals | April 21, 2022 | 8.3 | 133cf998-da1b-4087-803b-d472ddb4dba9 | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
Rapper's first solo album in almost three years is a small-globe statement that jumps stylistically across continents on a hip-hop goodwill-ambassador tour. | Rapper's first solo album in almost three years is a small-globe statement that jumps stylistically across continents on a hip-hop goodwill-ambassador tour. | Mos Def: The Ecstatic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13161-the-ecstatic/ | The Ecstatic | People looking for offhanded symbolism can feel free to try tracking Mos Def's career trajectory as an MC through his album covers. Iconic solo debut Black on Both Sides: a stark, immediately-striking photo portrait that renders the attribution of his name unnecessary. Aggro experimental follow-up The New Danger: that same face now obscured by a stick-up man's mask, his bright red, bloody-looking index fingertip pointing to his own head on some Taxi Driver shit. Contractual obligation mishap True Magic: no actual album art whatsoever, with a blank-looking Mos staring into space off the surface of the disc itself. And now The Ecstatic, which depicts not Mos Def himself but a red-tinted shot from Charles Burnett's classic 1977 film Killer of Sheep. You might go so far as to say this indicates that the best way for Mos Def to reassert what he really means as an artist would be to take his as-seen-in-Hollywood face out of the equation entirely, replacing it with a shot from an entirely different strain of independent, neorealist cinema that more clearly gets at what he represents as a lyricist. Maybe it's a stretch, but what the hell.
And while Burnett's Watts isn't quite the same place as Mos Def's Bed-Stuy, it does exist as one of many geographical reference points in The Ecstatic's international style. This is Mos Def's small-globe statement, an album that comfortably jumps stylistically across continents on a hip-hop goodwill-ambassador tour, prefaced by a statement from Malcolm X during his 1964 appearance at Oxford: "I, for one, will join in with anyone, I don't care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth." It's a high-minded intro for an album that most people will hear first and foremost as the comeback bid of a rapper-turned-actor, but it also serves as an important indication that Mos actually gives a shit here, and that he has a stake in something greater than just one corner of the rap world.
It starts with the production, which originates from assorted French touch cats (Mr. Flash) and Stones Throw siblings (Oh No; Madlib) and the producer from True Magic who actually contributed a couple decentish beats (Preservation). Oh No usefully repurposes some of the Turkish psych from his album Dr. No's Oxperiment, particularly the massive Selda-sampling acid-rock monster "Heavy" for lead track "Supermagic". Madlib contributes a couple tracks from his Beat Konducta in India series, diverting in their original form but done real justice by Mos' rhythm-sparring flow (and, in the case of "Auditorium", Slick Rick's). Ed Banger alum Mr. Flash covers the Caribbean ("Worker's Comp"), the Middle East ("Embassy"), and neon Euro-American club-kid slickness ("Life in Marvelous Times"). And Mos' own co-production touches in conjunction with Preservation's beats drive it all home: "Quiet Dog" opens with a defiant Fela Kuti soundbite, "Casa Bey" is built off Banda Black Rio's samba-funk number "Casa Forte", and Mos spends the entirety of "No Hay Nada Mas" rapping and singing in Spanish. There's a good chance you've heard some of this before-- aside from the aforementioned Oh No and Madlib contributions, "Life in Marvelous Times" recycles Mr. Flash's beat for "Champions", his collaboration with French rappers TTC-- but it's not a stale familiarity, at least in the context of The Ecstatic's ambitious B-boy diaspora.
But it wouldn't mean shit if it felt like the itinerary of a jet-set movie star showing everyone his vacation slides. Fortunately, the good thing about Mos Def not having brought his A Game in a while is that, like many rappers whose reputations have slipped, he was due for a something-to-prove moment. The Ecstatic has a bunch of those, smuggled inside the usual big-up Brooklyn and hip-hop preservationist lyricism and welded-to-the-beat flow that made him shine in '99, and his better turns of phrase have a way of sneaking up on you and smacking you in the back of the head. "Soul is the lion's roar, voice is the siren/ I swing 'round, wring out and bring down the tyrant/ Chop a small axe and knock a giant lopsided," he proclaims on "Auditorium" with the kind of delivery that makes the complex and convoluted sound natural. His anti-wack-MC diatribes on "Quiet Dog", the gunfight-love narrative of "Pistola" and the tone of sardonic but sincere Afrocentrism on "Revelations" reveal the versatility he still maintains in his repertoire. And even when he's just rattling off ego-trip riffs, the way he locks into a beat is scary; it's kind of hard to notice or care that he mostly keeps repeating the same Mary Poppins-derived hook on "Supermagic" when every syllable is like another percussion instrument boosting that head-nod factor by ten.
There are still some moments of weird, dope-hazy fuck-around on Mos' part, and while they don't really distract to the point where they test your patience, the frequent times when he drops into quasi-aimless sing-song vamping-- or straight-up attempted singing-- give The Ecstatic the feeling of a weeded-out jam session that didn't always go entirely according to plan and somehow fell together anyways. Still, it's the kind of fucking around that's clearly coming from a dude who sounds liberated, and a lot of it-- like the outro in "Pistola" where he interpolates the Intruders' "Cowboys to Girls" over some Madlib-provided vibes and King Tubby cookie-sheet-smacking percussion, or the casually amped don't stop the rock/can't keep me down declarations of closing track "Casa Bey"-- is too damn joyous to feel over-indulgent. Even absurd stuff like the Spanish track and his cod-reggae delivery on "Workers Comp" (try not to crack up the first time you hear the way he sings "fie-yerd" in the chorus) are more eccentric than bad. And anyone who wants to complain about those, well, go enjoy "History" instead: It's a Black Star reunion over a Dilla beat. Looks like we finally got the Mos Def we were waiting for. | 2009-06-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-06-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Downtown | June 10, 2009 | 8 | 13465d86-86c0-40f8-a1bb-028c1fbb7824 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The new Feelies album is both mellow and intense in ways only the New Jersey band can pull off. With the increased use of acoustic guitar, it feels like a spiritual sequel to 1986’s The Good Earth. | The new Feelies album is both mellow and intense in ways only the New Jersey band can pull off. With the increased use of acoustic guitar, it feels like a spiritual sequel to 1986’s The Good Earth. | The Feelies: In Between | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22923-in-between/ | In Between | In 2011, when the Feelies released their first album in 20 years, it came with hints of indecision. It was called Here Before—possibly as in “been there, done that”—and began with the lyric “Is it too late to do it again?/Or should we wait another 10?” The music certainly sounded confident, in the breezy but determined style that the New Jersey quintet patented around the time of their second album, 1986’s The Good Earth. But you could forgive diehards for wanting clearer signs that the Feelies were back to stay.
With this new Feelies album, there remains no explicitly outlined future for the band. But the record is called In Between—presumably there’s more to come—and it offers hope in titles such as “Stay the Course” and “Time Will Tell,” and in lines like, “Take your time, not going anywhere.” Beyond these small signs, there are increased levels of musical commitment and design. The record is more purposefully-sequenced than its predecessor, with tracks that build on each other through subtle motifs. In press materials, guitarist and singer Glenn Mercer describes the record as “laid back,” and he’s right. But it’s as precise and efficient as it is casual and comfortable.
In its best moments, In Between sounds both mellow and intense in ways only the Feelies can pull off. That’s helped along by the increased prominence of acoustic guitar compared to Here Before (making the album a kind of spiritual sequel to The Good Earth). Acoustic guitars naturally exude calm, but Mercer and Bill Million imbue them with a sharpness. The quick strums in the pithy “Turn Back Time” and aforementioned swayer “Stay the Course” both soothe and energize. Acoustics even tighten the otherwise placid ballad “Make It Clear.”
Still, the Feelies remain a democratic machine, with each sound snugly complementing the other. They’re masters at weaving their moving parts into a kinetic whole: Take “Gone Gone Gone,” an insta-classic that escalates simple chords into a cycle of tension and release. While Mercer intones open-ended lyrics (“What do you want to know?/What do you want to do?”), the tune peaks when bassist Brenda Sauter redirects the band’s momentum like a ship’s rudder.
All the instrumental symbiosis on In Between connects its songs into an arc. That’s emphasized by how the album begins and ends. On previous records, the Feelies liked to conclude with a cover: the Velvet Underground’s “What Goes On” on 1988’s Only Life, the Stooges’ “Real Cool Time” on 1991’s Time for a Witness. Here, they cover themselves, reprising the sparse opening title track as a long, dense closing jam. Explicitly framing the album as a cycle is a typically Zen move, suggesting that this evergreen band plans on more trips around the sun. | 2017-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Bar/None | February 27, 2017 | 8 | 1347db66-1c76-46c7-ae67-a204bd74ea5b | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The Quin twins follow their career peak The Con with another eclectic and personal record. Death Cab's Chris Walla produces. | The Quin twins follow their career peak The Con with another eclectic and personal record. Death Cab's Chris Walla produces. | Tegan and Sara: Sainthood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13644-sainthood/ | Sainthood | Carefully selected case studies could convince you anyone can be a star with a well-timed leak, blog post, or P2P push, but there are still few substitutes for good ol' fashioned hard work. Case in point: Tegan and Sara, who have worked their way up from cult status to wider prominence through a steady regimen of touring and a gradual musical evolution and maturation that's made it harder to ignore their increasingly impressive achievements.
Those achievements peaked to date with 2007's The Con, but that shouldn't negate the merits of the Canadian Quin sisters' somewhat likeminded follow-up, Sainthood. The Con, sympathetically produced by Chris Walla, found Tegan and Sara trading the occasional preciousness and banal power-pop tropes of their earlier work for something more eclectic and personal, and Sainthood, which once again enlists Walla, continues to showcase the pair's confidence and peculiarities.
What's different is that the Quins have closed the aperture ever so slightly, retaining some of the character of the album's predecessor while applying a slightly sharper focus to the songs and their musical scope. In theory, tracks like "Don't Rush", "Hell", "The Cure", and "The Ocean" count as power-pop, but tightly wound as they are, they're closer to high-strung 1980s new wave (think: Missing Persons), albeit thankfully short on the attendant affectations and coursing with subtly dark undercurrents. "I've got the cure for you," sings Tegan in "The Cure", and in fact, given the enigmatic lyrics, it's unclear if the object of her attention should accept or refuse the help. Or whether they even have a choice.
Those aforementioned songs, incidentally, are Tegan's-- the more pop-oriented of the pair. But to set up such a dialectic does a disservice to sister Sara, whose own pop instincts clear the quirkier hurdles of songs like "Arrow" or "Red Belt". Certainly, "On Directing" or "Alligator"-- two obvious album highlights, the latter playing like a late-night backroom flip of Madonna's "Holiday"-- don't lack in hooks, but they're developed with a welcome austerity and Sara's disinclination for easy "big moment" build up and release.
Sara's "Sentimental Tune" is no less restrained; it could easily go for Kelly Clarkson bombast, and maybe would even be better for it, but kept in check, that song-- like Sainthood as a whole-- achieves a less immediate but perhaps more gratifying impact. The album's infectious, but with enough edge to temper its undeniable desire to connect. Which it does, just on its own terms, a broadcast from two idiosyncratic musical minds whose biggest talent may be in making their most eccentric traits sound downright normal. After all, from the Quin twins' perspective it's the audience that's accessible, and they know just how to reach them. | 2009-10-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-10-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Vapor | October 30, 2009 | 7.3 | 134b0013-7059-4b37-bc86-649cf4c8d728 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
The California producer’s next-gen dubstep rolls shards of digicore, hyperpop, shoegaze, and ASMR into elaborately pixelated clouds of chaos. | The California producer’s next-gen dubstep rolls shards of digicore, hyperpop, shoegaze, and ASMR into elaborately pixelated clouds of chaos. | Syzy: The weight of the world | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/syzy-the-weight-of-the-world/ | The weight of the world | For a moment in the early 2010s, dubstep was the delirious new sound of the electronic world. The laser-bright synths and vomity wubs of sub-scenes like brostep and riddim took over from the stark, murky UK style of the aughts and set the festival circuit ablaze. We all know how that ended, but the style never really died, and now the kids who grew up mainlining music from Monstercat and Trap Nation are throwing up their own futuristic insanity and calling it dubstep. Perhaps the most thrilling new-gen producer is Syzy—a virtuosic sound designer whose new album, The weight of the world, is the genre’s most intoxicating debut in years.
The California producer has worked in the shadows for a while now, dropping a couple of ear-lacerating dubstep EPs and experimenting with madcap side quests in the SoundCloud underworld. They made dariacore mashup weirdness and internet-fried Jersey club as a member of the anarchic collective TwerkNation28; cult streamer iShowSpeed hijacked one of their beats for an infectious viral hit. The weight of the world combines these zany impulses with pristine technical know-how. It’s an artful take on a genre often reviled as mindless carnage.
These songs feel like gazing at pixelated constellations where synth shards glisten between dark clouds of bass fog. Syzy stacks the songs’ sumptuous intros and outros with vocal slivers, infernal burbles, and ASMR-soft twinkles. Ornate drops feel less suited for raving than paying close attention. “HEART123” sparkles madly, as if a glacier could be stretched like an accordion. The ecstatic climax of “Caught up (in circles)” is like seeing color after a life of monochrome. “Get a grip!” deftly ratchets up the tension, then pops two drops in quick succession: The first is gnarly but it’s a pump fake compared to the fantastically feculent second, which resembles a robot-monster puking a torrent of neon-green bile.
The weight of the world feels so immersive partly because Syzy didn’t intend it to be purely functional. Rather than macho bass or daredevil drops, the artist cites hyperpop and homespun alt-rock (like twikipedia’s “seams”) as primary influences on this record’s emotionally vertiginous sound palette. The eruption of chattering noise on the intro smacks of Jane Remover’s “kodak moment.” The kitschy “Eureka!” sample motif is redolent of something off an Underscores tape. “In your face!” shivers with Rustie-shiny synths, as if bass wizard G Jones took a course in PC Musicology. The five-minute outro to “Experience (HIGHER)” is so packed with blurred bleeps and pixelated mist it’s like shoegaze for cyborgs.
The few audible lyrics—sampled refrains and digicore singer kmoe’s windswept feature—don’t paint a coherent narrative, but a sensitive vulnerability comes across in dreamy, minimal passages and songs like “Dancing on my own,” a possible tribute to Robyn’s similarly bittersweet anthem. Several track titles read like urgent imperatives, perhaps directed at Syzy themselves, as if each soaring keyboard squiggle and bass blow-up were a plot point in a poignant internal conflict.
By the end, the constant build-drop flow starts to get constrictive. Predictable rise-and-falls have long been a liability in dubstep, and here, they feel at odds with textures and sounds as layered and hyperreal as 3D models. You long for Syzy to shatter the structure and inject some surprises from their SoundCloud toolkit, like unhinged nightcore vocals or deliciously organic ambient tones. On highlight “DOPE1!” a new idea warps in every second: dariacore’s pulverized vocal gibberish, brostep’s cheeky taunts, the quivery electricity of color bass, even an amped-up Dragon Ball Z sound effect. That might sound excruciatingly dense, but Syzy and featured guest Olswel weave it perfectly. The weight of the world sounds simultaneously similar to and absolutely nothing like the juddering mayhem of EDM dubstep’s golden age: powered by festival-sized energy yet sculpted for meditative headphone listening. It’s the frenetic, heartfelt work of a young production obsessive honoring a genre but tearing it up at the same time. | 2024-07-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Create Music Group | July 11, 2024 | 7.2 | 13509012-5c30-4a38-be91-0486ac8129ee | Kieran Press-Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kieran-press-reynolds/ | |
Navigating the divide between club culture and conceptual art, the UK producer repurposes the momentum-based language of dance music into a hauntingly frozen inversion. | Navigating the divide between club culture and conceptual art, the UK producer repurposes the momentum-based language of dance music into a hauntingly frozen inversion. | Lee Gamble: Mnestic Pressure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lee-gamble-mnestic-pressure/ | Mnestic Pressure | In the closing chapter of Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 sci-fi psychodrama Solaris, the protagonist, Kris Kelvin, finally ventures out from his space station to explore the titular ocean planet—a sentient organism which seems to be testing its human visitors by mimicking their most powerful memories. He sets his course for one of the many “mimoids” the planet creates, towering constructions that rise from its depths before dissolving back into the sea. Upon examination, the structure feels oddly familiar, like an ancient city in ruins—a “twisting labyrinth of streets partially blocked by rubble: their steep winding descent toward a shore washed by clammy foam.”
This image of a funhouse reflection of life on earth, drawn out from the deepest layers of the subconscious and molded in a porous alien substance, kept coming to mind as I listened to Lee Gamble’s new album, Mnestic Pressure. Starting with the title (“mnestic” means “pertaining to memory”), the album casts an eye toward the past, which looms as imposingly as Solaris’ empty cityscape. Gamble drags a wide net across three decades of UK dance music’s hardcore continuum—acid house, rave, jungle, 2-step, and IDM—and wrests its raw materials into rugged, austere formations. The 13 tracks on Mnestic are like sculptures built from the fragments of a life lived in club culture. Isolating his peak experiences and liminal impressions in time, the album repurposes the momentum-based language of dance music to construct a shimmering, hauntingly frozen inversion.
This shouldn’t be news for Gamble’s followers. His 2012 LP Diversions 1994-1996 sampled breakdowns from jungle mixtapes, and since then he’s often approached techno with a conceptual, anti-club swagger. But Mnestic Pressure works more convincingly than much of his output up to this point. On 2014’s Koch, Gamble juxtaposed 4x4 kick workouts with gurgling synths and static bursts that seemed to creep invasively from a primordial swamp. On Mnestic, many of those same textures are present, but the album breathes and gels, opening up easily even at some of its strangest moments.
With many of the tracks hovering around three minutes or less, and often bleeding into each other, the sequencing suggests the ghost of a DJ mix. Like this piece made by “salvaging the sounds and images lost to compression via the MP3 and MP4 codecs” of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner,” Gamble creates his eerie atmosphere by omitting most of the expected dynamics. Sounds layer without necessarily interacting, or push hard against the grain. “Istian” tumbles into a funky, swung groove but quickly deconstructs itself with a glitching, off-time melodic arpeggio, heaving chords, and collapsed drum programming. The whole thing lurches to a close, refusing to play anything straight for its entire two-and-a-half-minute runtime. It gives way to “East Sedducke,” which strobes and stutters in place, unable to decide if it wants to sink into the couch or leap into hyperdrive.
If anyone’s discography looms particularly large over Mnestic, it’s Autechre’s. The duo’s pioneering work integrated hip-hop, techno, dub, and breaks into an avant-garde opus that’s both icy and playful, opaque yet streetwise. Their spirit is palpable in the pulsating glassiness of “Swerva,” with its ping-ponging percussion, dissonant flickers of melody, and lone minor chord floating like mist, and in the zigzagging groove disruptions of “Ignition Lockoff.” Gamble’s palette, both chewed up and crystalline, directly echoes albums like Confield.
Not everything works. Often Gamble creates luscious atmospheres only to toss them quickly aside, or approaches a stunning melody and then veers away. That may be the point, but it would help, rather than hurt, his cause if his own motifs had a little more space. “UE8” drags at the album’s midpoint, its caveman drums neither flattering the intellect nor seducing the senses. Still, there are many moments of beauty amid the deluge of twisting and disjointed synthesis.
In Solaris, the characters grapple with apparitions of their lost loved ones, which the planet has created for reasons unknown. Meanwhile, out on the ocean, the mimoids riff on larger concepts, studying our earthly experience without context or apparent purpose. They are as spasmodic and emotionless as solar flares. So it is with Mnestic Pressure. Gamble’s world redraws dance music through a coldly exacting yet highly intuitive lens. It’s as if, long after the club has shuttered, the producers have moved on and started families, and the technology has slipped into obsolescence, these sounds still sputter, writhe, and skitter of their own accord, freed from any human agenda, compulsively enacting their own natural state of grace and decay. | 2017-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | November 13, 2017 | 7 | 1351db44-285e-42da-9a98-c781162d0922 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
A significant step forward from her debut, Natasha Khan's Two Suns is home to some of the year's most thrilling music so far. | A significant step forward from her debut, Natasha Khan's Two Suns is home to some of the year's most thrilling music so far. | Bat for Lashes: Two Suns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12910-two-suns/ | Two Suns | Natasha Khan likes pretty things: fur, gold, melody, the moon, feathers, things that sparkle, chords that resolve. Since she began recording and performing as Bat For Lashes a few years back, the Brighton native has loosely assembled those things around her person like so many thrift store trinkets. Were it not for "What's a Girl to Do?", the lone song from her otherwise-too-precious 2006 debut to suggest that she might have the chilly songwriting charisma to match her outward appearance, it could have been easy to write Khan off as nothing more than an over-reaching asthete.
Actually, to be honest, that temptation remains. Khan's aesthetic is such a perfectly struck balancing act between earth mother hippie mystic and post-modern Gen Y art student (see: the cover for her latest single "Daniel", which depicts her on a beach, shivery and windswept, with a painting of The Karate Kid's Daniel LaRusso adorning her entire naked back) that it's difficult to forget about the sheer workaday craft that must go into constantly seeming so effortlessly, artfully rumpled. Nonetheless, as of Two Suns, her second full-length album, all of that takes a backseat. A significant step forward from her debut, Two Suns is home to some of the year's most thrilling music so far.
Khan's real breakthrough might simply be her willingness to wear her influences more brazenly. One needn't have any more than a basic working knowledge of female innovators from the past few decades to be able to spot the ghosts lurking around this stage. The strident piano chords and lone snare of "Traveling Woman" echoes PJ Harvey's desolate roadsongs, while "Moon and Moon"'s delicate piano playing and cabinet-reverbed backing vocals evoke early Tori Amos. Elsewhere, with its pummeling rhythms, double-timed handclaps, glass harmonica trills and vocal histrionics, the moonstruck rave-up "Two Planets" owes its entire existence to Björk. But even in the moments where those influences risk running on the wrong side of overt, they never feel stolen or unearned. Just as Khan seems most comfortable when she's adorned in a patchwork of styles, eras, and ideologies, this record feels more satisfying and fully formed for its overt cutting and pasting of those different sensibilities.
What's more heartening, though, is that during Two Suns' highlights, Khan has few peers. I could probably fill this entire space just writing about "Glass", the album's aggressively propulsive opener, and about how its strange mix of elements (chamber pop, prog metal, new age-- what?) magically coalesced into some entirely new genre that I wish existed and yet still can't quite wrap my brain around. Then there's the booming "Sleep Alone", which, with its rusty guitar licks, Knife-inspired synths, buzzing basslines and floorboard percussions, feels kind of like a sea shanty circa 2074. Or the aforementioned "Daniel", the album's first single, which marries brittle, 80s-influenced electro and an inspired viola arrangement with what has to be, hands down, one of the most insidious choruses of the year.
For all that, though, the album's most vindicating moment comes at the end. Clocking in at just under three minutes long, closer "The Big Sleep" consists of a swoonsome duet between Khan and a suitably broody Scott Walker. Accompanied by nothing more than a stormy piano coda, the pair dip and dive around each other, stringing out syllables, dancing around each others' voices and generally soaking in the drama. Not only does Khan hold her own, there are moments when she holds his, too. That she's capable of doing so is evidence enough that we should be paying attention. | 2009-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Astralwerks / Parlophone | April 10, 2009 | 8.5 | 1359a821-71c0-4137-9558-65309f26ff93 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
With production by Peter Kember and an added gospel choir, the Danish band’s fifth album completes their transformation from grim-faced nihilists to wearied soothsayers. | With production by Peter Kember and an added gospel choir, the Danish band’s fifth album completes their transformation from grim-faced nihilists to wearied soothsayers. | Iceage: Seek Shelter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iceage-seek-shelter/ | Seek Shelter | Iceage barrelled into the pit on their 2011 debut, New Brigade, like a band disgusted with the idea of creation itself, as embodied by a death-staring frontman—Elias Rønnenfelt—who delivered his manifestos as if spitting out the last remnants of puke in his mouth. In the decade since, they’ve undergone a metamorphosis even more surprising than their fellow gutter-dwellers the Men (who turned into Wilco) or the Horrors (who became Simple Minds): They’ve embraced the light, one creeping step at a time, and on Seek Shelter, they complete their transformation from grim-faced nihilists to wearied soothsayers, gospel choirs and all.
Tapping the production expertise of fuzz guru Peter Kember (Spacemen 3, Sonic Boom) and bolstering their lineup with an additional guitarist (Casper Morilla Fernandez), Iceage stretch out in ways that would’ve been nigh unimaginable for this band three years ago, let alone 10. Even as Plowing Into the Field of Love and Beyondless embellished Iceage’s attack with brass and strings, Rønnenfelt still embraced the role of bedraggled punk raconteur, with the ravaged voice of someone who’d been to the dark side and barely lived to tell. The singer who greets us on Seek Shelter’s rousing opener, “Shelter Song,” is practically unrecognizable by comparison, displaying newfound melodic grace as he offers words of comfort for the downtrodden. When the Lisboa Gospel Collective joins him on the exhausted, triumphant chorus (“Come lay here right beside me/They kick you when you’re up, they knock you when you’re down”), the song soars into a Glastonbury-sized anthem.
But as much as it draws on familiar influences of classic rock and Britpop, Seek Shelter is hardly the sound of a band settling into their Jools Holland years. The strobe-lit shuffle of “Vendetta” drops them in the middle of Madchester circa 1989, but the song is less an invitation to get lost on the Hacienda dancefloor than an account of the shady dealings going down in the back alley. By contrast, the spectacular “Gold City” imagines Nick Cave hanging out on E Street, outfitting its piano-powered “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” strut with impressionistic lyrics that, depending on your vantage, scan as either heartland reveries and apocalyptic premonitions.
For Iceage, Cave is not only the ideal model of a former punk nihilist turned dignified elder rock statesman, but also a useful guide in matters of faith. Beyond the gospel choir, Seek Shelter is awash in religious symbolism, which isn’t an entirely new look for a group led by a lapsed Bible student, but here the band seems more interested in veneration than subversion. As Rønnenfelt recently explained to Pitchfork, “Whether it’s religion or any kind of thinking that wants to make sense of things in a way that’s beyond the laws of the concrete—that’s a very basic human need, and I don’t think it is to be shunned.” And so “High & Hurt” stages a battle between the dirty and divine, answering gritty verses with a cloud-parting chorus that quotes the traditional hymn “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” (which was, perhaps not coincidentally, also once half-covered by Kember’s old band). “Dear Saint Cecilia” salutes the patron saint of music through another act of worship—a reverential, open-road rocker that sounds like Definitely Maybe-era Oasis jamming on the riff to Booker T. & the MGs’ “Time Is Tight.”
Seek Shelter also reaffirms Rønnenfelt’s transformation into a true romantic, one who can convey the hot-blooded rush of desire without succumbing to the sentimental aftertaste. He pirouettes through the precarious chamber pop of “Love Kills Slowly” with the confidence of a red-wine drinker dancing on white carpet and channels the 1930s jazz standard “All of Me” on “Drink Rain,” delivering its grey-skied salutations (“I drink rain/To get closer to you!”) like a goth Ray Davies. For many once-unruly rock’n’roll bands, the shift to writing love songs is a tell-tale sign of maturation (if not outright stagnation), but even at its most sophisticated, Seek Shelter retains Iceage’s restless spirit. The album closer, “The Holding Hand,” is at once its slowest and most agitated track, a seasick spiritual whose crashing riffs and sinister orchestration hit like slow-motion tidal waves. “And we row, on we go, through these murky water bodies,” Rønnenfelt sings, “Little known, little shown, just a distant call of sound.” The future is uncertain; the beyondless beckons once again.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2021-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | May 7, 2021 | 8.3 | 1360a316-07c3-4651-8a17-3389f0d58aa2 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
An expanded reissue of the Band’s charming, loose-limbed album from 1970 reveals its relatively small stakes are inextricable from its charm. | An expanded reissue of the Band’s charming, loose-limbed album from 1970 reveals its relatively small stakes are inextricable from its charm. | The Band: Stage Fright (50th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-band-stage-fright-50th-anniversary-edition/ | Stage Fright (50th Anniversary Edition) | After many tours of duty backing the rockabilly legend Ronnie Hawkins and providing the muscle behind Bob Dylan’s move towards electric rock, the four Canadians and one Arkansan comprising the Band were pedigreed to a legendary extent even before making their first album. By the time they issued the twinned masterpieces Music From Big Pink in 1968 and The Band in 1969, their polymathic command of multiple genres, and self-conscious embrace of traditional American folk, country, bluegrass, and zydeco had established them as the thinking fan’s alternative to the diminishing returns of psychedelia and the counterculture. On tracks like “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” principal songwriter Robbie Robertson alchemized the group’s hard-won experience into songs whose subject matter was the grand mosaic of human comedy and endless suffering, with an emphasis on those who survive and persevere. For critics, audiences and no-lesser peers than the Beatles, they had come to represent authenticity personified. So. How do you follow that up?
The answer came in the form of Stage Fright, a charming, loose-limbed collection that elides the chore of living up to the previous records by basically not even trying. If their first two LPs inspired the Beatles and Stones to return to basics, Stage Fright connotes an entirely different sphere of influence: it’s a nonpareil boogie album, whose in-the-pocket playing establishes the Band as the equal of groovemaster peers like Booker T. and the Meters and sets a predicate for followers like Little Feat and NRBQ. The Band’s signature was always the telepathic interplay between bassist Rick Danko, guitarist Robbie Robertson, drummer Levon Helm, pianist Richard Manuel and multi-instrumentalist-shaman Garth Hudson. This is Stage Fright’s great selling point. The group never sounded more effervescent or imaginative than on tracks like the strutting “Strawberry Wine” or the layabout-anthem “Time to Kill,” a rollicking tribute to a week off the road that serves as a subtext to the punishing touring schedule that would eventually become the Band’s undoing. What Stage Fright lacks in history lessons it makes up for in palpable joy. They would never seem so happy again.
The new 50th-anniversary reissue restores the album to its ostensible original running order, appends a typically epochal live concert from the following year, and retrieves an intimate set of early demos recorded on a long night in a Calgary hotel. None of this is uninteresting and some of it is indispensable, but it’s ultimately a long way around towards building up the reputation of an LP that never really needed defending. Like Dylan’s New Morning from the same year, the relatively small stakes of Stage Fright are inextricable from its charm. Sometimes music needs to carry the weight, and other times it needs to feel weightless.
Revising the tracklist of a record on its 50th anniversary is a dubious enterprise, but the updated running order is a compelling thought experiment. New opener “The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show” is among the Band’s most sterling jams, led by a buckshot guitar riff that anticipates Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” by two years. “The Shape I’m In,” now batting second, is an ebullient tribute to volitional desiccation that bears the imprint of emergent weirdo-genius Todd Rundgren, Stage Fright’s surprising choice for a sound engineer. Rundgren and the Band are a strange admixture, but somehow the Badfinger-meets-Bakersfield vibe brilliantly coheres. The supercharged hooks of the title track trade in the slow-rock of the first two LPs for something approaching power-pop: an urtext for Big Star and Wilco.
The Band had greater records to come and many rivers to ford. 1975’s wonderful Northern Lights-Southern Cross returned them to deeper historical considerations and 1978’s concert film and album The Last Waltz effectively sealed their legend and put a pin in both the Band and the era they’d reigned over. In the fractious aftermath of all that occurred—the endless days on the road, the fights over publishing rights, the impossible way of life—tragedies kept mounting. Manuel’s suicide in 1986, Danko’s slow decline and death by heart failure in 1999, and Helm’s passing away in 2012 from throat cancer. Oh, you don’t know the shape I’m in.
Fifty years on Stage Fright is an oasis, an exhalation, a genial respite from the ongoing crucible of the Band’s accumulating days. The final moment when the music came easy, before the weight became unmanageable.
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. | 2021-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Capitol / UMe | February 13, 2021 | 8.3 | 1363614b-4a98-4081-aae7-e4ae28267ca4 | Elizabeth Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elizabeth-nelson/ | |
Producer Stuart Li has been a source for left-of-center techno and house for years, for a variety of dance labels. Under the Same Sky is his second album as Basic Soul Unit, with walloping techno drums, old school breakbeats, and industrial percussion that replicates the grind of machinery and the scraping of metal on metal. | Producer Stuart Li has been a source for left-of-center techno and house for years, for a variety of dance labels. Under the Same Sky is his second album as Basic Soul Unit, with walloping techno drums, old school breakbeats, and industrial percussion that replicates the grind of machinery and the scraping of metal on metal. | Basic Soul Unit: Under the Same Sky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21223-under-the-same-sky/ | Under the Same Sky | Anyone with an interest in left-of-center house or techno can find something impressive in the catalog of Stuart Li, aka Basic Soul Unit. It's a testament to Li's chameleonic nature that he has proven a seamless fit with the cult Japanese deep house imprint Mule Musiq; the UK bass driven techno label Nonplus Records; Berlin behemoth Ostgut Ton; and Jamal Moss' purposefully abstract Mathematics Recordings. Each of these labels has successfully staked out a patch of deep and slightly weird dance music territory, and Li's edgy-yet-accessible style has endeared him to the DJs who also reside there; he appeals to selectors of many stripes, as his productions consistently come to life when thundering down towards darkened dancefloors.
It is Li's professionalism that ends up being the slight undoing of Under the Same Sky, his second artist album and debut release for Amsterdam tastemakers Dekmantel. This is the toughest-sounding version of Basic Soul Unit thus far, with walloping techno drums, old school breakbeats, and industrial percussion that replicates the grind of machinery and the scraping of metal on metal. However, he ends up drawing unwelcome attention to the downside of his talents. Li's sound is so tailored to the blast of monitor speakers and big club rigs that it bogs down under closer inspection, revealing pixelated weaknesses in the bigger picture.
There are some exceptions where Li seems prepared to throw some dirt and grit into the mix, and it's always for the greater good. The slowly menacing "Until the End Comes" very suddenly inhabits all three dimensions, cleverly allowing a 90-second introduction of measured static and pillowy bass drum to then click into a full-bodied and richly textured version of itself. In a similar way, "Restless in Thoughts" works to makes disorientation seem balanced and appealing, circling around lopsided dubby loops and itchy percussive accents, and it glows with warmth. While lacking the qualities of those two tracks, "Temptress" and "Without Fears" will appeal to fans of Skudge and Levon Vincent, who aren't at all concerned with separating the swing of house from the gruff ruggedness of techno.
Elsewhere on the album, Li is to be found mostly returning to the same sound palette. "The Rift Between", "Unwavered", and "Landlocked" may look to broken beats, classic techno, and electro, but they're all a little too bleak, too clean and undynamic. "Fate in Hand" may well be an attempt to alleviate some of the grayness toward the album's end, but its overbearing drums are too present to be enjoyable, and not textured enough to provide a good counterweight to the track's delicate and Detroit-indebted melody.
Each track of Under the Same Sky will undoubtedly find a home in a record bag or set list somewhere, and rightly so, as there's really nothing fundamentally wrong with any of them. As an album, though, Under the Same Sky leaves you wanting more of a moody, immersive experience, and less of its clean surfaces and precise negative spaces. | 2015-10-27T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-27T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dekmantel | October 27, 2015 | 6.5 | 13645da6-3430-445a-9332-219f91c9da58 | Christine Kakaire | https://pitchfork.com/staff/christine-kakaire/ | null |
Mercury Rev's influential orchestral rock landmark from 1998 has been reissued in 2xCD form, with an extra disc of demos and rarities. | Mercury Rev's influential orchestral rock landmark from 1998 has been reissued in 2xCD form, with an extra disc of demos and rarities. | Mercury Rev: Deserter's Songs [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15393-deserters-songs-deluxe-edition/ | Deserter's Songs [Deluxe Edition] | Early promo copies of Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs were mailed out to press in a cardboard-replica postal packet, complete with a stamp and a postmark advertising its release date. This was no random act: In 1998, a new Mercury Rev album could have felt like a postcard from a long-lost, old friend. Unlikely beneficiaries of the post-Nirvana major-label cattle call, Mercury Rev initially overcame the inter-band acrimony that fueled their first two brilliantly frazzled albums (1991's Yerself Is Steam and 1993's Boces), only to slip further into oblivion with the more refined but commercially ignored 1995 release, See You on the Other Side. A subsequent improvised recording released under the name Harmony Rockets (1995's Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void) suggested the band was forsaking populist ambition to delve deeper into the psych-noise underground. Aside from a songwriting credit for Rev ringleader Jonathan Donahue on the Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole, by 1997, Mercury Rev had effectively vanished.
The arrival of Deserter's Songs on the nascent V2 label was a brow-raiser in and of itself; but that sense of pleasant surprise turned to dumbstruck disbelief once the CD was dropped in the player. Mercury Rev had flirted with symphonic flourishes and sentimental balladry before, but usually delivered them in a haze of distortion (Boces' "Something For Joey") or cheeky, irreverent arrangements (See You on the Other Side's "Everlasting Arm"). Deserter's Songs' opening track, "Holes", however, was something else entirely: Never before had Donahue left his helium-high croon so vulnerable and exposed, and never before had the band's densely textured arrangements been deployed to such moving emotional effect, with the song's eye-welling surge of orchestration and weepy bowed-saw lines perfectly complementing Donahue's crestfallen lyrics.
And while there were always themes of New York state iconography running through the band's disjointed discography-- the Coney Island Cyclone, the Rockettes, Bronx cheers-- Deserter's Songs projected an especially vivid sense of place, casting a set of intimate, romantic narratives against the staggering natural beauty of the band's upstate New York surroundings. Credit producer/bassist Dave Fridmann for foregrounding certain agrarian classic-rock influences-- namely, Jack Nitzsche-era Neil Young, the Band, and Brian Wilson-- that were heretofore buried behind the band's wall of squall; Mercury Rev even went so far as to solicit guest contributions from Levon Helm and Garth Hudson for some authentic Big Pink flavor.
In a sense, Deserter's Songs practically functions as a tourist brochure for the Empire State, with the stirring centerpiece track "Opus 40" referencing both the titular stone-sculpture garden in Saugerties and the looming Catskill mountains, while "Hudson Line" pays tribute to the train route that provides an upstate escape from New York City. I had always written off the latter track as Deserter's Songs' most frivolous-- owing to Hudson's supper-club-smooth sax line and the meek vocal courtesy of guitarist Grasshopper-- but in it, we hear the album's guiding philosophy: "Gonna leave the city, gonna catch the Hudson Line/ You know I love the city, but I haven't got the time."
Deserter's Songs was likewise a necessary act of retreat for a band that had long been defined by chaos and turmoil, and its peaceful, back-to-nature ethos felt all the more radical at a time when the harsh, mechanized sounds of big-beat electronica and nu-metal dominated the airwaves. The album's considerable critical success practically spawned a sub-genre of its own, with subsequent releases by the Flaming Lips (The Soft Bulletin, also recorded by Fridmann at his Tarbox Studios), the Delgados (The Great Eastern; Fridmann again), and Grandaddy (The Sophtware Slump) all hewing to a similar balance of lyrical intimacy and orchestral expanse. And while Mercury Rev's spotty track record since Deserter's Songs has currently driven the band into the same sort of limbo in which they found themselves prior to recording the album, you can still hear a distinctly Deserter's mix of the rustic and the epic in contemporaries like Fleet Foxes, My Morning Jacket, and Arcade Fire.
Hopefully, this 2xCD reissue will serve to raise the band's stock once again, and that could very well be the true impetus behind this package; tellingly, Mercury Rev have chosen to mark their 20th anniversary not by re-releasing their 1991 debut, but rather the record that has effectively allowed them to survive for two decades. Collectors of Deserter's Songs' singles will know that, for B-sides, the band often resorted to its deep arsenal of covers, but none of these is represented on this issue's bonus disc (presumably because many of them were already compiled on the 2006 best-of collection, Stillness Breathes). But we do get a batch of rough yet illuminating demos that help connect the dots between Mercury Rev's experimental roots and Deserter's Songs' immaculate conception. The Tascam takes on "Endlessly" and "Tonite It Shows" sound closer to early-70s Lennon than their more Disneyfied final versions, and the sax-less "Hudson Line" feels much less anomalous in this setting.
Most remarkable of all is an embryonic version of "Goddess on a Hiway", both for its crude, tape-decayed presentation and its original recording date: 1989. That Donahue was sitting on Deserter's Songs' lead single for almost 10 years could be seen as proof of the early Mercury Rev's preference for the anarchic over the affecting. Or maybe he just needed to wait for his band's darkest, most uncertain hour to sing that chorus-- "I know... it ain't gonna last"-- with the conviction and desperation it demands. | 2011-06-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-06-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | V2 / Fontana / Cooperative | June 16, 2011 | 9.3 | 136aeba9-bf81-49ef-b7ff-8eb6afcbaae2 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Alchemist and Dilated Peoples' Evidence bring their shared understanding of the history and context of rap (and a guest list that includes Domo Genesis, Action Bronson, Styles P, and Blu) to their new project Lord Steppington, a welcome addition to the collection of solid boom-bap rap albums that Alchemist has helmed over the last few years. | The Alchemist and Dilated Peoples' Evidence bring their shared understanding of the history and context of rap (and a guest list that includes Domo Genesis, Action Bronson, Styles P, and Blu) to their new project Lord Steppington, a welcome addition to the collection of solid boom-bap rap albums that Alchemist has helmed over the last few years. | Step Brothers: Lord Steppington | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18952-step-brothers-lord-steppington/ | Lord Steppington | The Alchemist and Evidence are old friends—they’ve known each other since the early 90s. Each is a rapper and a producer, and both are dedicated students of the rap game with a preternatural awareness of the history and context of their art that endows the music they create together with additional meaning. The pair bring that shared understanding to their new project Lord Steppington, a welcome addition to the collection of solid boom-bap rap albums that Alchemist has helmed over the last few years.
Alchemist has been a prolific producer for more than a decade, but as the gangster-rap complex he was once a cog in has evaporated, he's emerged a key player, uniting a host of veterans and young rap nerds alike to create classicist rap music. Starting with Return of the Mac, a 2007 collaboration with Prodigy of Mobb Deep, Alchemist has released a string of solid projects with rappers like Action Bronson, Boldy James, Curren$y, and Domo Genesis. What unites these rappers is a reverence for the art form of 90s rap, combined with a welcome dedication to not taking themselves too seriously. Jokes and skits that reek of weed abound on these albums, which add to the sense that you’re listening to a collection of above-average rappers who feel supremely comfortable making music with one another.
That sense is heightened given the relationship between Alchemist and Evidence. The two share an outsider’s take on rap music (which may have something to do with being two of the only non-black kids in their neighborhood). Since their early days of working together, when Alchemist used to craft beats for Evidence’s group Dilated Peoples, there’s been a sense within their music of striving for credibility. And the way they’ve achieved that credibility is by building an insular world of musical references that’s both dense and possibly invisible to those who haven’t been listening to rap’s odds and ends for the last 10 odd years. Lord Steppington is an album that clowns on Theophilus London’s lips, and Bubba Sparxxx’s country-rap opus Deliverance. It’s an album that refashions the old New Orleans song “Iko Iko” as a mantra full of gangster menace. It is filled to the brim with insider references, so casually delivered in such a non sequitur fashion, that the uninitiated might not even know what was going on.
Not surprising then to hear that this sort of music will work best for those denizens of the rap universe who are well positioned to understand its in-jokes. But Alchemists’ style doesn't rely on stacks of signifiers—he's got that postmodern ability to mine new meaning from old forms and the musicality of L**ord Steppington should recommend it to those who might be put off by its rap-nerd bona fides. Alchemist’s beats on the album (Evidence only has one producing credit, on “Byron G”) fuse the iron underpinnings of New York boom-bap with either expansive soul or psychedelic edge, or both. The first track here, “More Wins”, may sound like a simple looped sample, but right before the two-minute mark, the full force of the original song comes in and the track shifts on its axis. Elsewhere, “Banging Sound” (more harmless than the name suggests), combines disparate elements: a trippy childlike sing-song for a chorus that contrasts nicely with the descending bassline and minimalist snare on the verses.
The raps often sound equally pieced together but their hip-hop-almanac quality makes them feel familiar, comfortable as worn-out clothing. “Step Masters”, for example, feels like something the Beasties would have made during the Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 2 sessions, Ricky Bobby references nestling nicely besides Evidence’s improvised aphorisms (“I ain’t the mover, I’m the man that you hand the cream.”). The guest apperances contribute to the album’s happy mixing pot; on “Byron G” (which starts and ends with a sample of Kanye at the 2008 Brit awards), Domo Genesis spits one of the more tightly wound verses of his still-young career, only to hand the mic off to Scott Caan, who rapped with Alchemist in the Whooliganz before Varsity Blues jump-started his acting career. Action Bronson, Styles P, and Fashawn all make appearances, and each sounds relaxed, flowing naturally. Even the easily-agitated Blu sounds at home on the album, keeping Evidence and his fellow Dilated Person, Rakaa, company on the mellow track "Tomorrow".
These sorts of fun surprises can make Lord Steppington feel like a Saturday morning cartoon, the kind where a lack of depth doesn't matter because the colors are so bright, the action is so fast, and the jokes are funny. But the album, like so much of Alchemists' recent work, occasionally unleashes a Rembrandt. There are two songs here that astound. The first, “Swimteam Rastas”, is a memoir-esque take on the rap life from a dialed-in Evidence elevated by heavenly chipmunk soul in its middle third. “See the Rich Man Play” is even stronger, with an on-point Roc Marciano character sketch about a mescaline-addled gambler with the fix in contributing to a three-part meditation on risk.
Songs like these don't diminish the fun collection that they reside in. But they're so head and shoulders above, so exquisitely crafted, that it makes the rockist in me wish we could hear a full album’s worth, something that Alchemist has yet to do with any single collaborator other than Prodigy. (Rap nerds I know have taken to editing together songs from different albums to achieve these results.) Lord Steppington is just the latest remarkably solid offering from Alchemist and co. and the artists involved clearly think of the endeavors as fun and games. Of course, the fun that the artists are having is what makes albums like Lord Steppington work. Still, I’d love to see the Alchemist take a risk and hear the results when things get more serious. | 2014-01-24T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2014-01-24T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers | January 24, 2014 | 7.3 | 136fe9d8-b6d7-4498-97ef-e3c52ca7407b | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The Chilean band journeys through icy, alien frontiers on their mesmerizing new album. | The Chilean band journeys through icy, alien frontiers on their mesmerizing new album. | Föllakzoid: V | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/follakzoid-v/ | V | Föllakzoid’s V begins like an incoming transmission from a distressed spaceship. The barbed remnants of a synth tone modulate and wriggle; low-slung bass notes throb with menace; a kick lumbers into the mix as spiky harmonics jut against it in a syncopated rhythm. After swirling around each other for nearly two minutes, the elements click into place, the groove snapping into focus. But instead of moving in any clear direction, we’re ushered further into the void, staring wide-eyed at the vast expanse the band conjures.
Over the past 14 years, the Chilean band, led by guitarist and filmmaker Domingæ Garcia-Huidobro, has set out to explore psychedelia’s outermost reaches. While they made their name referencing the scorched riffs and repetitive chug of bands like Hawkwind and Loop, on 2015’s III, they shifted toward the insistent pulse of dance music, assisted by German producer Atom™ (née Uwe Schmidt). They pushed further into electronic territory on 2019’s I, foregoing in-person jam sessions and instead handing Schmidt 60 independently recorded parts to arrange as he saw fit. This time on V, they compiled more than 70 stems and relinquished any control over the music’s structure.
The result is the group’s most pupil-dilating record, straddling the line between vicious minimal techno and heady space rock. Whereas previous Föllakzoid records topped out around 120 bpm, Schmidt sets V’s tracks to about 130, what some consider the sweet spot for techno and trance music. His arrangements are more dynamic and detailed than ever, the standard four-four thump of the kick drums augmented with tom fills and splashy cymbals. The music is often brutal enough to soundtrack a blood rave, but has gentler moments, resembling the verdant synthesized ecosystems of Voices from the Lake or Segue.
Each piece contains tiny, spellbinding moments of beauty amid the echoing din. Guitars, mostly relegated to single note accents or pick scrapes, ring into infinity through trembling delay. There aren’t really melodies or chord progressions to speak of, but synth notes sometimes cluster around each other, momentarily coalescing and fading away. In the final minutes of “V - III” the bass pokes out from behind a screen of shimmering noise and plays an almost optimistic-sounding figure that never repeats again, like a fleeting gasp of oxygen in an endless vacuum.
Though Föllakzoid has traded some of their initial accessibility for intricacy, the result is ultimately mesmerizing. The album’s chilliest and best song is “V - II,” which white-knuckles through serrated distortion and uneasy drones. Galloping noise anxiously lopes just ahead of the beat, giving way to a latticework of shuddering, colorless guitar. About midway through, the drums expand into a rollicking pattern, collapsing into massive EDM-like bass wubs. Suddenly, everything cuts out, leaving you blinking. V is relentless in its intensity, but allow yourself to be swept into its icy, alien atmosphere you’ll be utterly awestruck. | 2023-09-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | September 25, 2023 | 7.6 | 137020d0-1b1c-440b-a345-5073d5ee726a | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
The New York hyperpop duo’s True Panther debut is crammed full of ideas but feels creatively vacant: the soundtrack to a party where everyone’s pretending to have fun. | The New York hyperpop duo’s True Panther debut is crammed full of ideas but feels creatively vacant: the soundtrack to a party where everyone’s pretending to have fun. | Frost Children: SPEED RUN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/frost-children-speed-run/ | SPEED RUN | Hyperpop has entered an awkward stage. As the once-meteoric genre has trailed off into a number of micro-scenes that can’t agree on whether they’re dead or not, questions that plagued the music since its genesis have finally come home to roost. How do artists maintain an edge once the majors get involved? Where does the line between shock value and substance lie? And at what point is it brave to continually resuscitate abandoned genres—be it blog house, dubstep, nu-metal, or whatever Blood on the Dance Floor was—until the reflexive nostalgia itself becomes tired and predictable?
Frost Children aren’t here to answer any of those questions. The New York duo, consisting of siblings Angel and Lulu Prost, has taken the throw-everything-at-the-wall approach to its logical extreme and demonstrated its limits in the process. Like their forbears Dorian Electra and 100 gecs, Frost Children are vocal advocates of living on the cheesier side of life. They’ve spoken about “the zen of cringe,” and their handful of self-released albums over the last few years have felt like an exercise in seeing how cartoonishly stupid a project can get while still clinging onto its veneer of cool. As producers, the Prosts are undeniably clever, and their lack of self-restraint has resulted in flashes of inspiration. But for every sugar-coated, so-bad-it’s-good happy hardcore remix, there’s a brutally unfunny Spongebob-rap themed side project to match, and their best ideas can’t keep up with their grating, worst ones. So it goes with their True Panther debut SPEED RUN, whose over-the-top emo-club theatrics are crammed full of ideas but still come off creatively vacant.
To classify Frost Children under the hyperpop banner doesn’t fully capture the roots of the Prosts’ music, which is just as much a product of New York’s fledgling indie-sleaze revival. As with their frequent bill-mate the Dare, Frost Children’s influences date a couple years past Y2K and into the trashy mid-’00s (think Cobra Starship and LMFAO). It’s a savvy, if somewhat unsurprising move to mine this era of party music, particularly as the larger club circuit’s ongoing ’90s obsession seems to be finally wearing out its welcome. Unfortunately the duo doesn’t make a good case for bringing any of these sounds back, stirring one flimsy mashup after another into a McFlurry of cliches.
The problems start with the Prosts’ migraine-inducing vocals. Their nasally enunciation begs for the bombast of Panic! at the Disco, yet Frost Children rarely land on hooks juicy enough to even qualify as guilty pleasure material. “COUP” tees off the album with the Prosts singing, “Like, oh my god, what the fuck, who are you?” in their cattiest voices, their posturing playing like a flimsy attempt at camp. SPEED RUN’s saving grace in these moments lies in the duo’s production, which favors a dry, buzzy bass tone reminiscent of Ed Banger’s raucous glory days. This raw treatment lends tracks like “FLATLINE” a punchy danceability; the song’s dial-tone feedback and tick-tocking cowbells add a deliriously playful, PC Music-ish touch that significantly jacks up the energy. But this momentum leads into a brick wall during the bridge, as the Prosts unleash their worst 3OH!3 impression: “Cut the shit/Are you fucking with me?” they shout snottily in unison, the soundtrack to a party where everybody is pretending to have fun.
This tension between inventive electronic styling and gimmicky genre-mixing is SPEED RUN’s driving force; the Prosts seem unable to fully embrace cringy vulnerability while maintaining their sleek, clubby exterior. It induces a special kind of nausea to hear the duo punctuate the house stomp of “SICK TRIP” by breathily whispering “awesome sauce, for the win,” then turning around and bragging about how their guestlist is full. Do Frost Children want us to see them as nerdy shut-ins or as untouchable club kids? SPEED RUN repeatedly attempts to thread these two needles at once, but the results rarely become more than shallow, winking shout-outs. Look, there’s Death From Above 1979 on the electro-clashy “OBSESSED”; there’s Muse on the Super Smash Bros.-interpolating “SERPENT”; there’s Hellogoodbye, by way of lo-fi hip-hop radio, on “WONDERLAND.” Normally the issue with biting influences too hard is that it makes you wonder why you wouldn’t just listen to the original instead. In Frost Children’s case, it asks whether any of this is worth reclaiming at all.
The Prosts are becoming more polished as dancefloor producers, and they’d be wise to lean further into those talents. Even their worst tracks are littered with sweet little sonic details, like the blown-out synth line that kicks in halfway through “HI 5,” or the rubbery arpeggio that bounces about the Eurodancey “ALL I GOT.” A more developed, less annoying set of tracks might’ve made the path forward for hyperpop seem less uncertain, but ultimately SPEED RUN’s flat songwriting and clumsy aesthetic gestures just seem like a dead end. | 2023-04-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | True Panther | April 17, 2023 | 5.4 | 137300e4-b032-4a82-929d-053a49d472ee | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Channeling squalls of feedback and waves of downtuned guitars, Montreal’s BIG|BRAVE represent the raw unconscious turned up as loud as their amps will go. | Channeling squalls of feedback and waves of downtuned guitars, Montreal’s BIG|BRAVE represent the raw unconscious turned up as loud as their amps will go. | BIG|BRAVE: Ardor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bigorbrave-ardor/ | Ardor | BIG|BRAVE sound like no other band signed to Southern Lord, but they somehow fit right in. On paper, at least, their sound—a churning, slo-mo experimental metal that revolves around squalling feedback and the dynamics of tension and release—lies smack in the comfort zone of the label that has brought us SunnO))), Earth, Boris, et al. But this Montreal trio is rich with idiosyncrasies. They’ve got no bass guitar, to begin with; those downtuned waves of sludge typically stream from a pair of six-strings. There’s that sense of spaciousness and pause—the chasms of silence that open up as riffs crumble and fall away, leaving listeners gasping and spinning their arms at the edge of a sheer face. And then there are frontwoman Robin Wattie’s clear, piercing vocals, which occupy an emotional zone right at the point between ecstasy and abject despair.
BIG|BRAVE might be a metal band, but perhaps they are better understood as a Montreal band. Their second album, 2015’s Au De La—the one picked up for release by Southern Lord after they mailed it, unsolicited, to label boss Greg Anderson—was recorded in the city’s analog recording studio Hotel2Tango by Efrim Menuck, of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and this, their third long-player, was produced in the same location by another Constellation mainstay, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, of Jerusalem in My Heart.
These relationships feel key; the Constellation bands’ characteristic doomed grace runs throughout Ardor. The opening “Sound” commences as a trudging march, with overdriven guitars howling their protest to an uncaring sky, and violin (courtesy of Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s Jessica Moss) sawing out keening tones somewhere at the heart of the clamour. Another Montreal mainstay, GY!BE founder and Hotel2Tango co-owner Thierry Amar, adds contrabass to two of the album’s three tracks. BIG|BRAVE’s sense of ebb and flow has clear parallels with Godspeed’s apocalyptic post-rock. With each of the album’s songs stretching to over 10 minutes in length, there is plenty of time for motifs to be established, abandoned to wither and die, and then revived and reprised with terrific force.
In places, Ardor is an album of quiet restraint. The second of the three tracks, “Lull,” gives most of its running time to moody slowcore rumination, with peals of guitar feedback snaking in gradually as the track gains weight. Other moments suggest an affinity for the brutal excesses of noise rock and no wave. There are echoes of Swans in the mantra-like repetitions of “Sound” and “Borer,” their clanging riffs cast out in the direction of the horizon. Meanwhile, Wattie’s siren-like vocals vacillate between imploring sensuality, raw self-flagellation, and blank affect in a way that’s reminiscent of Lydia Lunch. Lunch’s music was often jagged like razorblades, though, while BIG|BRAVE are big and oceanic, their music flowing and crashing like waves.
For all these points of comparison, Ardor feels like an album primarily powered by the instincts of its players. BIG|BRAVE started out as a duo playing minimalist folk music and gradually got louder as they learned to play their amplifiers, harnessing the chaotic possibilities of feedback to sculpt and shape their sound. Their lyrics—like a chant on “Borer,” “I am immune/And I am protected”—have an abstract quality, as if dredged up from some half-remembered dream. “A lot of unexplainable feeling goes into our songwriting and live performance,” guitarist Mathieu Bernard Ball told The Quietus. “And I believe that that's what people connect with. All truth, no lies.” Perhaps that’s why Ardor ultimately feels emotionally coherent but tricky to categorize. BIG|BRAVE are the sound of the raw unconscious, turned up loud. | 2017-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Southern Lord | September 14, 2017 | 7.6 | 1378b87e-a8f4-4aed-8e1a-9eabec3d5896 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | |
Jack White's Third Man Records has started a program reissuing selections from the vault of Document Records, beginning with Charlie Patton, Blind Willie McTell, and the Mississippi Sheiks. While all are filled with excellent music, the reissues also afford an opporunity to discuss how and why reissue programs exist. | Jack White's Third Man Records has started a program reissuing selections from the vault of Document Records, beginning with Charlie Patton, Blind Willie McTell, and the Mississippi Sheiks. While all are filled with excellent music, the reissues also afford an opporunity to discuss how and why reissue programs exist. | The Mississippi Sheiks / Blind Willie McTell / Charley Patton: The Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order Volume 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17727-the-mississippi-sheiks-blind-willie-mctell-charley-patton-the-complete-recorded-works-in-chronological-order-volume-1/ | The Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order Volume 1 | From a critical perch, reissues (especially of widely available material) are tricky fodder. Glibly re-assessing the work of Charley Patton-- one of the most exhilarating and unknowable figures in the American canon, an ur-influence on the whole of popular music-- feels ridiculous in 2013. Patton's work is inarguable, established. The best reissues should proffer some kind of revelation: either by gathering unreleased or under-heralded material, or by the imposition of a compelling rubric (in the spirit of Harry Smith), or by making something sound extraordinary.
Since 1986, Document Records has been engaged in a vigorous hustle to reissue every pre-war blues song ever commercially recorded, while periodically doling out other forms of rural American music (gospel, old-time, country) recorded between 1900 and 1943. Many of Document's old LP pressings are expensive if not backbreaking to procure, but for anyone who discovered the country-blues that way, they represent a kind of sacred gateway-- those stark white covers, that black block type, a grainy photograph, some mystifying voice eeking out from the grooves. Still, Document's engineers are notorious for their overuse of noise reduction filters, which impose a shrill flatness on performances sourced from decaying 78rpm records, and in the 78 re-mastering community-- a terrifying micro-universe presided over by Yazoo Records' Richard Nevins-- Document remains a source of moderate derision.
Which is why Jack White's decision to reissue selections from the Document vault (beginning with Patton, Blind Willie McTell, and the Mississippi Sheiks) on his Third Man label can feel like the apotheosis of a very specific kind of fetishization. The blues, maybe more than any other American genre, is subject to endless mythologizing-- it is famously apocryphal, shrouded in crossroads-at-midnight mystery. Those romantic notions are, as In Search of the Blues author Marybeth Hamilton points out, "enormously seductive." It feels good to position the blues as a singularly raw, marginalized expression, to champion its so-called strangeness; the magnetism of those narratives can blind a listener to everything else. For White, those Document LPs led him directly to a well of source material that later fed an entire body of work (if not an identity), and these reissues feel like an expression of earnest gratitude to the label. What they don't always feel like is an appropriate paean to the music.
Charley Patton's Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Vol. 1 collects all the sides from Patton's 1929 sessions for the Grafton, Wisc.-based Paramount Records. A Delta-born guitarist and singer, and widely considered the finest practitioner of pre-war, acoustic country-blues, Patton possesses a throaty, lawless voice, which he employs to staggering ends. Blues music can be spiritually crushing, but it can also be caddish, if not obscene: On "Pony Blues", listen to Patton's raunchy, snarled delivery of a line like "Baby, saddle my pony, saddle up my black mare/ I'm gonna find a rider, baby, in the world somewhere." Bluesmen knew torment, but they also knew the solace of sin.
The songs included here-- some of Patton's best-- are above reproach, and unsurprisingly, this material is not currently under-represented in record shops. If you're after an artifact, Revenant's comprehensive Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton, was a more deserving indulgence, containing seven CDs housed in reproductions of Paramount sleeves (there's also a gold-embossed box, pages of notes and annotations, and a short paperback book by John Fahey), though that is now out of print and terrifyingly expensive. If you're more compelled by fidelity (itself a dicey quantifier as it relates to gouged 78s), Yazoo's Charlie Patton: Founder of the Delta Blues 1929-34 is peerless, sourced from the cleanest discs and artfully re-mastered by Richard Nevins. If you're immovably devoted to long-playing vinyl, there are the gray-market European releases, including five (note- and source-less) LPs by the Italian label Monk, and the scads of reissues cooked up and released by various imprints since Patton was first deified by collectors in the 1940s. If you're less concerned with the material world, most of these songs are now instantaneously accessible via Spotify and iTunes. In 2013, there are many roads to 1929-- which makes the basic utility of White's mission dubious.
And at the risk of assuming the persnickety, exacting voice of a 78 collector-- that high, lonesome sound!-- the package itself is underwhelming. Patton's name is spelled both Charley and Charlie, depending on where you look (for whatever it's worth, it appears on the original Paramount 78s as "Charley," although many believe Patton himself preferred "Charlie"), and the accompanying essay, by the British critic Mick Middles, is not without grammatical blunders (Middles also quantifies Patton's influence by noting that he's been name-checked in song titles by Bob Dylan and the "British indie band Gomez," which seems like a deeply preposterous way to compute his legacy). There's also a mistake in the track-listing on my copy: "Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues" is the second song on Side B, not Side A, where it's been swapped with "Shake It and Break It (But Don't Let It Fall Mama)". (I will now attempt-- and fail-- to resist pointing out that the “But” should also be out of the parenthesis in the title of that track). In White's curated universe-- where the idiosyncratic and the analog are prized, aesthetics are multi-dimensional, and the presentation of art is as essential as the art itself-- it seems like a more exacting approach should have been applied. Or: if you’re gonna be precious about your shit, be precious about your shit.
The other two records in the bundle fare better. Blind Willie McTell, a Piedmont-style fingerpicker from Georgia, came up as a street performer before he was recruited to record for Victor in 1927, and he enjoyed a relatively prolific career before his death in 1959. The tremble in his voice is echoed, often, in White's own vocals-- it's a stunning little wobble, an undulating admission of total vulnerability. White, like McTell, knows how effective it can be; it's nearly impossible to dislike McTell, even when he's opining the various women he's already bedded today ("One for in the morning, one for late at night/ I got one for noontime, to treat your old daddy right," he warbles in "Three Women Blues"). Although McTell's work has been reissued before, his records aren't as rare as Patton's, and were rendered in better studios (ergo: they sound better), so the question of what gets obscured or highlighted in the re-mastering is less pressing. And while Middles could stand to stop using Bob Dylan as justification for liking blues music (he invokes Dylan's 1983 track, "Blind Willie McTell", in his opening line), the reissue feels more benign than egregious. Same goes for the Mississippi Sheiks, a guitar-and-fiddle family band from Bolton, Mississippi whose "Sitting on Top of the World", first recorded for Okeh in 1930, has since been covered by Bob Wills, Cream, the Grateful Dead, Frank Sinatra, Bill Monroe, Howlin' Wolf, and Jack White (on the Cold Mountain soundtrack). For a Sheiks fan anxious to hear these songs on vinyl-- and who can't find the Monk records, or the Matchbox Records releases from the mid-1980s-- whatever new re-mastering current Document owner Gary Atkinson performed yielded worthwhile results: the singer Walter Vinson, performing "Driving That Thing", sounds close, clear.
In the spirit of the Folkways archive, White has pledged to keep these records in print (on vinyl) "as long as Third Man Records exists." His intentions seem pure, and any gesture that makes these songs more available to listeners should be appreciated, if not applauded (although in this particular case, White may have flubbed an opportunity to champion a more obscure artist, like Big Bill Broonzy or Johnnie Temple). But it's still imperative to remember that blues music-- its nuances and devastations, its cadences and riddles-- should be heard and appreciated beyond whatever personal or cultural subtexts we might choose to apply to it; that the sound is the thing. There are good reasons to reissue extant material, but it's hard to recognize any here. | 2013-02-27T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-02-27T01:00:02.000-05:00 | null | null | February 27, 2013 | 6.5 | 137933e1-c21a-4bff-9207-4cc047a3e755 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
Kieran Hebden's conceptually tight Fabriclive 59 mix is built upon the restless UK garage scene, which from the late 1990s to the early 2000s mutated from a simultaneously roughed-up and opulent take on house music to the fierce and rap-derived clang-and-bang of grime. | Kieran Hebden's conceptually tight Fabriclive 59 mix is built upon the restless UK garage scene, which from the late 1990s to the early 2000s mutated from a simultaneously roughed-up and opulent take on house music to the fierce and rap-derived clang-and-bang of grime. | Four Tet: Fabriclive 59 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15830-fabriclive-59/ | Fabriclive 59 | Kieran Hebden has always been singled out for his adventurous tastes and the way his disparate obsessions have been seamlessly melded into his own stylistically restless music. Hebden listened without prejudice, a value prized by both the post-rock and DJ communities he came out of at the tail end of the 1990s. Even as eclecticism took a beating in the early 2000s, with mash-up acts and bedroom DJs turning the whole idea into a one-note joke or a cheap way to get noticed, Hebden never shied away from mixing it all up, provided the whole felt greater than the trick of joining seemingly incompatible parts.
Fabric has made a point of flagging Hebden's new mix for its sonic and conceptual unity. Certainly it does feel all of a piece compared to his last commercially released mix, a 2006 installment for the DJ-Kicks series that swerved from Akufen to Animal Collective. By contrast, Fabriclive 59 sticks pretty consistently to one scene. But it's a restless scene built on a premise of constant reinvention: UK garage, which from the late 1990s to the early 2000s mutated from a simultaneously roughed-up and opulent take on house music to the fierce and rap-derived clang-and-bang of grime.
So already we've got the promise and surprise inherent in a famously eclectic selector bringing a freshness and fearlessness to music usually only spun by purist DJs sticking to music from within the scene. On that level, Hebden doesn't disappoint. For one thing, he includes ringers from way outside late-90s London, like Ricardo Villalobos. And despite their modern, weirdo-techno palette of sounds, these left-field inclusions fit perfectly with the vibe of the old-school tunes, especially the way someone like Villalobos treats his own heavily syncopated drums. As usual, it's to Hebden's credit as a DJ that he hears ways to join old and new that others might not.
But this is also a pretty unexpected and exciting way to tackle a big-time commission from Fabric, especially considering the Fabriclive series tends to focus on up-to-the-minute dance sounds rather than the archival impulse. UK garage as an inventive and real-time underground phenomenon already seems a distant part of dance history, despite being only about a decade gone. So for longtime garage heads, Hebden's obsessive crate-digging will provide them with lots of unfamiliar and almost lost-to-history moments of genius. I've spent more time tracking this stuff down than I care to admit, and I recognize only a couple of the vintage tunes here. But Fabriclive 59 will also expose Four Tet fans who come from entirely different worlds (indie, IDM) to some truly luscious and forward-thinking dance music that's otherwise available only on out-of-print vinyl singles and even-more-out-of-print CD comps.
Despite his rep as a boundary-crosser not beholden to any one scene, Hebden has deep roots here as an engaged fan. The B-side to one of his first Four Tet singles, "Calamine", was an avant take on UK garage when almost no one in the rock or electronic worlds seemed to be paying attention. It's easy to see what appealed to him. UKG fulfilled dance music's no. 1 rule (keep it funky) while also sticking to a less-often-followed guideline (make that funk feel new again). Few producers at the time were doing as much to reinvent the art of beatmaking without trying for something expressly "experimental" and alienating clubbers along the way.
So if you're a fan of those moments in rap or dance when baffling syncopations become an art in themselves, when drum patterns feel like they couldn't possibly be played by a human with just two arms, you'll find a lot to love here. And if you like your mixes to have the smooth bump and ingratiating warmness of house, amazingly, this music also fits the bill. After all, the earliest UK garage cuts, like Persian's "Feel da Vibe", weren't so far from house's more steady sense of groove. It just had a lot more swing. Making broken-sounding rhythms swing was actually the primary goal of the best garage DJs, and Hebden proves himself very attuned to making all these not always mix-friendly rhythms flow together. So much so that, when he drops Musical Mob's "Pulse X"-- the stomping and snarling and totally blunt track that announced grime as a new thing-- it seems to fit naturally with all these super-subtle syncopations.
But true to Hebden's status-- insider fan trying to rekindle the UKG vibe and outsider after-the-fact archivist not beholden to the scene's rules-- Fabriclive 59 doesn't really play out like a true vintage garage mix would have. For one thing, our DJ has some formalist fun with the disc's structure. After building a stretch of groove, he lets things simmer down, bridging the sections with sampled crowd noise from the Fabric club itself, less breaking the mix's momentum than allowing a breather before things bubble back to life. The effect is like catching a pirate radio DJ in the mix, only to dial across the airwaves and find another just-as-good set on a different station. Keeping listeners on their toes while also mimicking the way this music was often heard by fans-- it's an odd but effective approach, especially considering the usual keep-the-party-going Fabriclive style. Fabriclive 59 feels more like a mixtape in the handcrafted sense, one friend making another a tape of special moments they may have missed. But of course few of us have a friend with the mixing skills or deep record collection of Kieran Hebden. | 2011-09-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-09-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Fabric | September 21, 2011 | 8 | 137952ae-2003-43d3-8f6c-a5cd8a177974 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Following an all-too-brief turn on Drake’s More Life, one of Nigeria’s preeminent musical ambassadors shares his own hybrid vision, drawing on Afrobeats, dancehall, and road rap. | Following an all-too-brief turn on Drake’s More Life, one of Nigeria’s preeminent musical ambassadors shares his own hybrid vision, drawing on Afrobeats, dancehall, and road rap. | Burna Boy: Outside | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/burna-boy-outside/ | Outside | Burna Boy was supposed to get the coveted crossover cosign from Drake. The two had first linked up in London, where the rapper reportedly shared his vision for a “playlist” collecting sounds from around the world. The Afropop-dancehall hybridist ended up submitting five tracks for the project. Ultimately, though, only one, a song titled “More Life,” made the cut—and even then, it was relegated to a reverb-soaked outro to “Get It Together,” itself a rework of South African singer Bucie’s “Superman” featuring Durban house pioneer Black Coffee and Midlands R&B upstart Jorja Smith. With Outside, the Nigerian musician finally gets a chance to show off his song in full—it’s the first track on the album—and to flaunt his own skill at musical synthesis.
Some of that facility probably has something to do with his musical background. Burna Boy, born Damini Ebunoluwa Ogalu, started making beats on FruityLoops when he was 10. His father played dancehall records in their home; his grandfather was once Fela Kuti’s manager. These influences, alongside his own interest in American rap music—“I just wanted to listen to DMX,” he told The FADER in 2016—form the elements of bricolage that Burna Boy calls “afrofusion” and is fine-tuned on Outside. Songs like “Giddem” and “Ye,” which interpolates Fela’s “Sorrow, Tears, and Blood,” take the playfulness of 2000s pop-rap and shroud it in guitar; “Sekkle Down” is a romantic take on dancehall that features UK rapper and fellow diasporic hybridist J Hus. With Lily Allen on “Heaven’s Gate,” hints of highlife guitar and road rap merge into something new, but just as vibrant as its sources.
He is most confident on “Ph City Vibration.” It doubles as a mini-biography (“I was born inna the teaching hospital/The 2nd of July of 1991”) and an ode to his hometown, Port Harcourt, in Nigeria’s River States, replete with references to roasted plantains and fish and the city’s soccer stadium, Yakubu Gowon Stadium—which he still calls by its old name, Liberation, much as a lifelong Mets fan might reflexively refer to Shea. But not all of the album’s influences are as sturdy. The title track, which features UK pop singer Mabel, is laced with EDM and while it is fun, it doesn’t have the same life as the rest of the album. Burna Boy says that the track was recorded on Pete Townshend’s studio boat, though, and that added mythos gives it a little bit more juice.
This versatility is one of the reasons that, alongside WizKid and Davido, Burna Boy is one Nigeria’s preeminent musical ambassadors. Where WizKid softens some of the edges of Afrobeats, making the genre more familiar to newcomers, Burna’s output is more kaleidoscopic. It makes Outside a fine lesson in mixing genres without making mud. | 2018-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | February 2, 2018 | 7.7 | 137b5c9e-ea06-425f-a4bf-28edbf5b155f | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | |
Livity Sound displays past and present iterations of its elliptical sound on this anniversary compilation, a low-key affair that serves as a testament to the focus and consistency of the Bristol label’s approach to dance music. | Livity Sound displays past and present iterations of its elliptical sound on this anniversary compilation, a low-key affair that serves as a testament to the focus and consistency of the Bristol label’s approach to dance music. | Various Artists: Molten Mirrors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-molten-mirrors/ | Molten Mirrors | Bristol’s Livity Sound was founded in 2011, a year in which it was not at all clear where UK dance music might go next. The last big upstart style, dubstep, was almost a decade old, and long since old hat. Yet nothing had come along to replace it. The predominant sound, known simply as “bass music,” drew from three decades of dance music, amorphously amalgamating bits of dubstep, grime, garage, drum’n’bass, jungle, IDM, techno, and house. Sometimes, the friction from all this recombinant activity threw off exciting sparks, but the pull of retro was getting stronger; electronic music’s habitual forward march was turning recursive, a MIDI cable in the shape of an Ouroboros. By turns fertile, uncertain, and aesthetically conservative, club culture stewed in an amoebic interzone.
Livity co-founders Peverelist, Kowton, and Asusu had all been active in Bristol for a few years, and they stepped into this gulf without any grand designs. “It was one record at a time, just some friends doing music,” Peverelist told DJ Mag. “The plan was to have no plan, just see how things developed.” But the label quickly developed a signature sensibility, if not exactly a clearly delineated sound. Early Livity releases, along with those on sister label Dnuos Ytivil, shared certain hallmarks: charcoal streaks of sub-bass; staccato tones and syncopated rhythms; textures of desiccated wood and dented metal. Above all, Livity records emphasized the space of the mix, arranging glinting drum hits against a black velvet backdrop of silence.
All those hallmarks are still in play on Molten Mirrors, a compilation marking the label’s 10th anniversary. In typical Livity fashion, it’s a low-key affair; there are no big statements or overt themes, and while many of the label’s longtime affiliates are present—Hodge, Forest Drive West, Simo Cell—a number of artists here have only a single prior release for the imprint under their belts. But the compilation shows how focused Livity’s approach has remained over the past decade, even as the label has broadened its horizons beyond the broken techno and post-dubstep of its early years.
All 18 songs could be classified as dance music, loosely speaking, though some tracks have a more tenuous relationship to club conventions than others. Azu Tiwaline’s “Nissa,” which opens the album, boasts a low end as substantial as the heaviest dubstep, but instead of percussive force, the French-Tunisian producer opts for porous, almost powdery sound design; her swirls of brushed cymbals, iron qraqebs, and triplet toms move like dust devils through the desert. Forest Drive West has long been known for his minimalist take on UK techno, but his track here forsakes straight-ahead beats in favor of an implied 4/4 pulse; by leaving a hole where the kick drum should be, the rest of the percussive elements seem to float several feet off the ground. Other tracks throw weight into the drums while simultaneously leaning on the brakes: London producer Kouslin’s “Racket” dips into swaggering, industrial-strength dancehall, while Lebanese Australian producer DJ Plead’s wildly inventive “Glebe!” flips tightly rolling snare and tom samples into a seasick fusion of fast and slow, like a speedball of caffeine and Dramamine.
The standard account of the label’s development often describes a brightening of the palette that accompanied the arrival of Tess Redburn as art director, back around the label’s fourth year, when black-and-white designs gave way to Redburn’s whimsical, richly hued abstract imagery. I’m not sure you can hear much of that color in the compilation; most of these tracks are largely monochromatic, with little in the way of melodic hooks or even hummable basslines. The big, floor-filling tracks here—the brooding techno of Batu’s “Melts Into Air,” the lumbering UK funky of Bakongo’s “Ashy”—are drums-first affairs; they lavish most of their energy on carefully carved hits and keenly balanced frequencies. (The shimmering, Detroit-inspired chords of Facta’s lush “FM Gamma” and Hodge’s even more vibrant “Do What You Need to Do” are welcome exceptions.) Even garage producer Al Wootton skips that genre’s customarily bubbly riffs on “Sancode,” a sullen callback to the dubby 2-step of ’00s acts like Horsepower Productions.
But despite the consistency of its palette, Molten Mirrors ably demonstrates the ways that Livity continues to push forward, carving out space for music that doesn’t abide by stylistic formula. Arraying ominous bass throbs and unexpected doorbell chimes around a lurching hi-hat pattern, Simo Cell’s “El Gato Loco” is a master class in stoking tension: Bar by bar, it builds, morphs, and falls away again, teasing clubbers with a climax that never comes. Bruce’s ominous, otherworldly “Just Getting on With It” takes a similar approach, pouring its percussion into a bobbing current that feels perpetually on the verge of overflowing its banks, yet never does. (The track’s mix of voluminous bass and skittish Latin rhythms sounds exactly like what I wish Ricardo Villalobos was making these days.) Ido Plumes is responsible for another of the record’s most captivating selections: “Albeit,” a dusty riot of lawn sprinklers, broken radios, and whirly tubes. Slotted in penultimate place here, it’s a testament to the thought put into Molten Mirrors as a listening experience. And coming from one of the label’s relative newcomers, it’s also a testament to the health of Livity Sound’s vision: Ten years in, a new generation seems ready to put a fresh spin on the label’s elliptical, impossible-to-pin-down sound.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Livity Sound | October 4, 2021 | 7.1 | 137ecdd7-0fe7-49cd-bbd4-a511e10f8f7f | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Paperwork is T.I's ninth album as well as the first installment of a promised "trilogy," an imposing prospect for a rapper whose career peak is eight years in his rearview. But the album, featuring Pharrell, Usher, Iggy Azalea, Chris Brown, and others, feels fired up instead of tired and muddled. | Paperwork is T.I's ninth album as well as the first installment of a promised "trilogy," an imposing prospect for a rapper whose career peak is eight years in his rearview. But the album, featuring Pharrell, Usher, Iggy Azalea, Chris Brown, and others, feels fired up instead of tired and muddled. | T.I.: Paperwork | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19939-ti-paperwork/ | Paperwork | Paperwork isn't just T.I's ninth studio album; it's also the first installment of what will lead to his tenth and eleventh. Paperwork will be a "trilogy," T.I. has promised, an imposing prospect for a rapper whose career peak is 8 years in his rearview. He has a habit of "returning," whenever coming off of a break (voluntary or involuntary), with a torrential, unmanageable flood of new material. He did it with 2010's No Mercy, a bone-tired and dogged-sounding effort that felt like clockwork from someone determined not to disappear but lacking a larger reason to be recording.
On the surface, Paperwork appears like it come from this same place; it arrives at what looks like the beginning of T.I.'s post-gangsta rap "suburban dad" phase, when his most visible recent contributions to pop culture are his "Blurred Lines" verse and the ascendency of Iggy Azalea. The album feels fired up, though, instead of muddled and tired. His last record boasted that he was the Trouble Man, but with a clear mind and fewer visible burdens, Clifford Harris has produced his most thoughtful and substantive record in years.
It is also the most excited he's sounded to be rapping since Paper Trail. His voice and flow patterns are so inimitable they run the risk of becoming sound effects, but he's pushing himself out of familiar cadences and revisiting some of the demented, spitfire youthful energy that used to make him unpredictable. You can also hear subliminal Jay-style flow-patterning at work, an old trick you'd hear whenever Jay Z appeared next to a truly great rapper. It's usually a sign that a rapper is engaging with his guests instead of just pasting their emailed verses into sound files, and Tip is flaunting it here: He sounds vaguely Boosie-esque on the Boosie-guested "Jet Fuel", and on the Young Thug-featuring "About That Money" he takes a few tentative hops into Thugga's stratosphere, pinching his throat and rapping in a near-insectoid voice.
Perhaps not-incidentally, Paperwork is also T.I.'s first record since his contract with the infamously risk-averse Atlantic Records ended. Now he's signed his Grand Hustle imprint to Columbia and is acting more and more like a label mogul, and Paperwork bears the marks of an artist grateful for stretching room. There is, to be sure, a fair amount of commercial-rap-record box-checking: He still does DJ Mustard, who produces the Iggy Azalea-assisted "No Mediocre"; a Chris Brown-featured sex jam (for "Private Show") and another Usher collaboration ("At Ya Own Risk"). But he finds ways to enliven even these pro forma moves: "At Ya Own Risk" is a novelty—a menacing, even murderous-sounding bedroom song. The Skylar Grey power ballad ("New National Anthem") is an indignant and incisive commentary on America's gun culture.
There are a lot of intriguing "off" notes like this that make Paperwork feel like T.I.'s passion project, cleverly disguised as a superstar's contractual-obligation release. (That album title doesn't help.) The four songs co-produced by Pharrell—"G Shit", "Oh Yeah," "Paperwork", and "Light Em Up"—are rough, sharp-edged, and unique compositions, somewhere between current trap and early N.E.R.D. His rapping consistently fires off sparklers—"suicide, you should commit it, save a G a life sentence," he leers on "Oh Yeah". "If only the masses could see your ass when it's in action," he says, sliding into all the "sss"s, on the otherwise-rote "Private Show". On "Light Em Up", a song that deliberately recalls the vivid murkiness of classic Dungeon Family, he pays powerful tribute to his friend and labelmat Doe B, who was shot and killed in 2013. "At your video, I could feel it then," he raps. The hook is simple and bleak: "You were supposed to make it." It's quietly powerful, which is something Tip hasn't been in a long time. | 2014-10-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-10-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia / Grand Hustle | October 24, 2014 | 7 | 137f2643-e219-4521-9819-dbaf298d51f6 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
null | So far, this extensive reissue series has seen the Cure transform from a spiky post-punk act (*Three Imaginary Boys*) to a spooky new wave one (*Seventeen Seconds*), and from a grand, glacial rock band (*Faith*) to a fiercer, darker one (*Pornography*). That's more than enough to make for a striking career in itself: It's 1983, and the Cure is already epically great. But there's a difference between a great rock act and the kind of long-running international pop favorite this band was bound to be, and the music that comes next is what makes that difference.
The mid-80s are the years | The Cure / Robert Smith: The Top / The Head on the Door / Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me / Blue Sunshine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11887-the-top-the-head-on-the-door-kiss-me-kiss-me-kiss-me-blue-sunshine/ | The Top / The Head on the Door / Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me / Blue Sunshine | So far, this extensive reissue series has seen the Cure transform from a spiky post-punk act (Three Imaginary Boys) to a spooky new wave one (Seventeen Seconds), and from a grand, glacial rock band (Faith) to a fiercer, darker one (Pornography). That's more than enough to make for a striking career in itself: It's 1983, and the Cure is already epically great. But there's a difference between a great rock act and the kind of long-running international pop favorite this band was bound to be, and the music that comes next is what makes that difference.
The mid-80s are the years in which the Cure ceases to be a rock band and becomes a vehicle to plumb Robert Smith's imagination. Asian art, psychedelics, hallucinations-- with the act's lineup effectively swapped to bits, Smith takes up the reins of the studio, and he seems to see each individual song as a chance to literalize some particular dream of his, using pop arrangements to create little worlds that feel astonishingly visual. It's a shame these reissues can't include the band's already-compiled singles from this era, because it's in their ever-changing styles that you get the best sense of what he was doing: trying on a joyous fake-jazz strut for "The Lovecats", making "The Caterpillar" sound like a broken-down music conservatory for fairies, doing bratty, funky synthpop on "Let's Go to Bed" and chilly electro on "The Walk". Rock bands sound good within the context of being rock bands; pop songs like these carried their own context with them, each one a dream to step into.
The Top (1984), however, is not that Cure. Yes, "The Caterpillar" is on here, and "Dressing Up" has a sexy pop-song elegance that's certainly new. But this full-length is the sound of a rock band stretching out in a much less controlled and occasionally bitter way: There are shades of gnarled psychedelia scattered throughout. Songs like "Give Me It" and "Shake Dog Shake" scream and blurt with a grim, bristly rage. The band's signature dirges suddenly feel formless and lethargic in a bad way. The rough home and studio demos on the bonus disc are hard listening in spots, but also instructive: In hearing Smith labor to make this material whole, you get a better sense of how the scattershot styles of the album could be stemming from the same source.
Around the same time, Smith was also recording and touring as a guitar player for fellow goth travelers Siouxsie & the Banshees-- which is part of how we get the Glove, a psych-pop side project for Smith and Banshees bassist Steve Severin. This series is kind enough to include a deluxe package of the band's sole, hard-to-find full-length, 1983's Blue Sunshine. With singer Jeanette Landray taking Siouxsie-like leads on most tracks, the sound is about what you'd expect from a Cure/Banshees crossover, or at least one entranced by Beatles psychedelia. (The band's name comes from Yellow Submarine; around the time this was released, the Banshees were enjoying a hit with a cover of "Dear Prudence".) For most of the record, though-- "Like an Animal", or the Smith-sung "Mr. Alphabet Says"-- what you'd expect is something fairly great, and a definite treat for Cure and Banshees fans who haven't gotten their hands on this yet.
Then there's The Head on the Door (1985). Saying that this is the Cure's most focused pop album-- with a crucial new band lineup solidified, Porl Thompson's guitar on board, and everyone sounding keen and intent-- might seem like a massive compliment, but that designation turns out to be a bit tricky. The singles here were the band's most straightforward to date: An ingratiating rush of guitar on "In Between Days", a jolly twinkling love song on "Close to Me", sappy 80s drama on "A Night Like This". The songs in between make for the sole 80s Cure album you could think about playing at a beach party-- check the strangely Van Halen-ish sustained chords on "Push." And Smith's dreamy imagination of far-away places gets pleasantly touristic: plinking atmospherics on "Kyoto Song," super-speed Spanish guitar on "The Blood". It's a tight, terrific package, and more imaginative than albums this controlled usually get, but it's oddly removed from one of the qualities people have always loved best about the Cure-- the deep, sprawling sound of an album like Disintegration.
But then there's Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (1987), the place where every one of these things comes together. This band is best remembered for Disintegration, yes-- it's the kind of epic, single-minded "statement" that asks to be put up on pedestals. Thing is, you don't get the kind of teenage-bedroom devotion this band got by making epic, single-minded statements. In order to get people to dress like you-- to make a whole world out of your music-- you have to offer them a whole world, one that encompasses all of their moods, every waking moment of their days.
The 18 tracks of Kiss Me's double-LP do exactly that. Every major mode of the Cure is here, and sounding better than ever, each one a realm of its own. There's grand, tormented wailing ("The Kiss", "Fight") next to tender, sunny numbers ("Catch"). There are creepy-crawly Orientalist nightmares ("The Snake Pit", "If Only Tonight We Could Sleep") and slow, sparkling romances ("One More Time"). There are bitter shouts ("Shiver and Shake"), all-pop numbers ("Just Like Heaven"), and complex intersections between the two ("Hot Hot Hot", "Why Can't I Be You?"). Smith's lyrics even find, among the usual animals and anguish, a set of linchpin images that reflect in each of those directions. There is a mouth on the cover, and the songs are full of devouring-- both the devouring mouths of desire and the fear of being consumed. Christmas gets to evoke both gaudy colors and sad nostalgia. There's the deep, dark water that would soon be all over Disintegration, and there's an endless romantic push and pull: someone so perfect that Smith asks "Why can't I be you?" and someone else so perfect that Smith asks, "You want to know why I hate you?" Some of these songs play out mixed-up emotions-- weird crossovers of depression and joy, love and loathing, anger and resignation-- that we barely have names for. Bitter torture and giddy excitement and desire, desire, desire: They all come together into one almost maniacally impassioned thing.
This is the world of the raccoon-eyed, mumbling, moping, endlessly sensitive late-80s Cure fan in one gorgeous, totally immersive package, and it's one of the most convincing, emotionally whole, and individual albums of the decade-- an entire imagined land, complete with sounds, visions, and styles, huge on romance and drama. If you were only ever to buy one Cure album, most people would point you to that landmark Disintegration, and there's every chance you'd be amazed by it. But for the whole breadth of the Cure-- and what seems like the whole head of Smith-- in one glorious package, this is the one that matters. | 2006-08-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-08-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | August 25, 2006 | 6.9 | 13814228-8a94-422a-a4f7-af10f9cc35b0 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
Bombay Bicycle Club frontman Jack Steadman taps Charles Bradley, De La Soul, Horace Andy, and more for a crate-digging, sampledelic record that feels safe compared to the risks he took with his band. | Bombay Bicycle Club frontman Jack Steadman taps Charles Bradley, De La Soul, Horace Andy, and more for a crate-digging, sampledelic record that feels safe compared to the risks he took with his band. | Mr Jukes: God First | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mr-jukes-god-first/ | God First | God First would like to be judged by its front and back cover. Given its playful, soul-boutique image and impressive list of guest vocalists, Mr. Jukes cuts an immediately likable image for a producer/curator—enigmatic but impeccably connected, a locus for funk, old-school R&B, golden age hip-hop, and modern pop. If all of this suggests a up-and-coming, Mark Ronson-style polyglot, take advantage of the first two minutes of God First. Because after the queasy orchestration of the opening “Typhoon” gets its sea legs, Jack Steadman’s vocals come in and, oh right, this is the guy from Bombay Bicycle Club.
This drastic rebrand shouldn’t come as a surprise. Since emerging as teenage festival-folkers nearly a decade ago, Bombay Bicycle Club spent the first half of their run accumulating commercial goodwill they would subsequently gamble on increasingly bold artistic shifts. This is all relative: they’re not exactly Talk Talk or Radiohead, but there’s a sizable difference between the “quiet is the new loud” retread Flaws and turnt up-is-the-better-loud So Long, See You Tomorrow, which maintained the band’s Patsavas-core framework within EDM razzle dazzle. Steadman’s new style doesn’t really feel risky either since his trajectory from acoustic-toter to soul crate-digger is encouraged every month by basically every single men’s magazine in existence.
The fundamental irony here is that Steadman sounds far more conservative in his new role. Albums of this type usually tend to feature risk-averse writing anyway, resetting itself with every guest vocalist despite staying firmly within the realm of professionally sung relationship vaguebooking. While a capable producer, Steadman isn’t yet a confident one, never pushing the luminaries to do anything other than the exact thing one would expect from them. With all due respect, “Grant Green” is the kind of rafter-reaching Charles Bradley could do on cue, while Steadman’s shellacked samples provide him an Animatronic version of the Extraordinaires as backup. The cluttered De La Soul/Horace Andy feature “Leap of Faith” has more in common with his track-stuffing on So Long than actual hip-hop production meant to facilitate flow. He attempts the density of Prince Paul without any of the depth or dexterity—plus De La sounds like they’re saving the primo material in case there’s another Gorillaz album.
The discrepancy between Steadman’s skill set and the kind of music he’s trying to make here is hard to overlook: “Angels Your Love” is a sampledelic tapestry modeled after the Avalanches, albeit with a much lower thread count. Steadman loves his breakbeats, but isn’t willing to get his fingers dusty—God First’s safe place is a spirited boom-bap whose non-quantized, chunky drums still manage to sound rigid as an 808 and as clean as any Bombay Bicycle Club record. Hell, even the Steadman solo features (“Ruby”, “Typhoon”) would’ve passed for maybe the eighth or ninth most adventurous tracks on So Long. If you’re a former Brit-popper who can wrangle Charles Bradley, Horace Andy, BJ the Chicago Kid, Lalah Hathaway, and De La Soul onto your album and you’re not Damon Albarn, you do it and figure out the rest later. Perhaps the next Mr. Jukes project will find Steadman willing to show us his soul, but for now he’s only comfortable showing us his record collection. | 2017-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | July 17, 2017 | 5.8 | 1381579d-fe7d-401f-9510-ff712a1bedec | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The first two full-lengths by Modest Mouse, out of print for many years, have been reissued by Isaac Brock's Glacial Pace imprint. Heard now, they are a reminder of the group's insular, visionary oddness. | The first two full-lengths by Modest Mouse, out of print for many years, have been reissued by Isaac Brock's Glacial Pace imprint. Heard now, they are a reminder of the group's insular, visionary oddness. | Modest Mouse: This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About/The Lonesome Crowded West | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19884-modest-mouse-this-is-a-long-drive-for-someone-with-nothing-to-think-aboutthe-lonesome-crowded-west/ | This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About/The Lonesome Crowded West | The Modest Mouse of the 2000s was very of its time, when indie rock was turning more porous and mainstream. The Moon and Antarctica from 2000 clothed their decrepit strains in major label finery and production by someone outside of their local bubble, Califone's Brian Deck. The record also let in influences that were not yet entirely indie-approved, such as dance music on "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes". Morbid lyrics and backmasked guitars notwithstanding, "Gravity Rides Everything" was catchy enough to sell Nissan Quest minivans. Moon, though clearly a classic now, caused debates over whether Modest Mouse had "sold out," something people still earnestly fretted about as the Internet was upsetting old hierarchies.
This commercial openness was quite a shift for a band defined by a sense of isolation in its own secret world. The Modest Mouse of the '90s had also been very much of its time, when indie rock was less of a popular genre than a refuge from them. Weird bands from nowhere places strained their quirks through a punk filter, and their styles were narrower but, perhaps, deeper than those of their polyglot descendants. Modest Mouse fit the mold. Formed by singer and guitarist Isaac Brock, drummer Jeremiah Green, and bassist Eric Judy in the Washington suburb of Issaquah, they had a kind of insular, visionary oddness.
Modest Mouse quickly found purchase in the Pacific Northwest scene. In 1994, they made their first EP with Calvin Johnson in Olympia for his twee-punk label K Records, as well as a single for Seattle's Sub Pop. They also recorded the album Sad Sappy Sucker, which sat on the shelf until 2001, when it did indeed turn out to be their most K-style record—bright, baggy, and loose at the seams. During this time they veered off into a wilderness of their own devising, debuting with the darker and tauter This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About on Up Records in 1996. That and their second Up album, 1997's The Lonesome Crowded West, have just been reissued by Brock's Glacial Pace label. Both are excellent, but it's the more fully formed Lonesome that consummates an era.
From the start, Modest Mouse were instantly recognizable: Judy's ropy bass and Green's drumming, heaving from a caveman bash to a disco skip, are indispensable to the rangy, volatile sound. But it's the guitars that really define it, so strange and particular—Brock's hearty riffs, string bends, harmonics, and whammy-bar tremolo push up toward trebly extremes of panicked intensity. The songs break down into wheezes and coughs as the band pounds the ends of bars until they curl up like sheet metal.
But they weren't completely ex nihilo. Like other '90s indie groups, Modest Mouse reflected their region before pulling free from it on later albums. There's grunge in the whisper-scream dynamics here, metal and punk in sections of breakneck thrash, twee in the richly jangling acoustic guitars and in Brock's voice, always petulant and pleading. There are also outlying indie touchstones—"Might" sounds like Built to Spill if someone had knocked Doug Martsch on the head, other songs evoke the Pixies by way of Pink Floyd. Even alt-rock is absorbed in the patchwork pop of "Lounge", a medley of surf-rock, hot jazz, and chamber music with shout-rapped lyrics. But Modest Mouse were already fortifying their hermetic island on Long Drive, where they pitted the jarring against the lulling in diverse ways.
The great theme of both albums is travel, or more essentially, how motion through space feels. This is also intricately bound up with the physical geography Modest Mouse inhabited. The urban paranoia of post-punk seeps into wide-open rural, looming industrial and encroaching suburban vistas, all alike in their sinister, hypnotic repetition. With the first words of Long Drive, "traveling swallowing Dramamine," a sense of drugged conveyance through some grand monotony settles over us. We seem to glimpse empty landscapes with twisty bits of things blowing through them in the window of a train. Strip malls and parking lots, monuments and steeples, empty fields and dark forests scroll by in a purgatorial loop. This becomes overt on "Convenient Parking", a dusty practice riff with broken springs.
For Brock, these enclosing physical confines are tantamount to mental ones; he's always moving forward without getting anywhere different, and he confronts this existential emergency with disdain and terrified awe. The music cultivates its particular urgency by devising and then breaking free from psychic traps. "From the top of the ocean/ From the bottom of the sky/ Well, I get claustrophobic," Brock bellows on Lonesome's "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine", an image that would return in different form a few years later on "Ocean Breathes Salty". The earth and heavens are not mediums but inescapable masses, crushing us in the seam where they meet. The feeling of being stuck in a small town inflates to cosmological proportions.
Home-schooled in religious hippie communes, Brock was primed for this visionary vocation. His lyrics are marked by a war between militant atheism and kind of crypto-Christian mysticism, a tension that twists his perspective into strange shapes. On these records, the pavement is steadily encroaching on the wild in ways that feel spiritually symbolic. Brock wants to wrench apart ground and sky, prefabricated towns and consumer culture, to find an exit hatch into some deeper, more meaningful state of being which, as he suspects on "Exit Does Not Exist", is a fantasy.
Modest Mouse never captured their particular rural paranoia better than on Lonesome's "Cowboy Dan", a minor key dirge that takes us to a jet-black desert rustling below the occasional shooting star. It's a folkloric tale of a cowboy who tries to shoot down God as revenge for mortality, with eerie calls and groans floating out of a vast, breathing darkness. "I didn't move to the city, the city moved to me," he cries, via Brock's rabid goblin croak, "and I want out desperately," a theme that first began to develop on Long Drive's "Beach Side Property".
It's all about inverted insides and outsides: huge landscapes that feel like small cages, civilizations that breed a savage misanthropy, disbelief that feels like religion. "Doin' the Cockroach" begins with the elusive dichotomy, "I was in heaven, I was in Hell/ Believe in neither but fear them as well." Brock excoriates riders on the Amtrak for "talking 'bout TV," punctuating his condemnations with pleas to "please shut up." He also slips in one of the best of the obscure aphorisms that would come to increasingly infiltrate his litany of complaints: Some number of years "down the road in your life, you'll look in the mirror and say, 'My parents are still alive.'" I think it's about getting older, but it's open to numberless interpretations, all of them with the indescribable ambient menace of a bad dream.
The Lonesome Crowded West fine-tunes forms that were introduced on Long Drive. "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine" and the sprawling "Trucker's Atlas" draw the erratic thrust of "Breakthrough" into sleeker, more commanding arcs. "Lounge (Closing Time)" is a less novelty-based, more structurally balanced version of "Lounge". And "Shit Luck" is even more potent than"Tundra/Desert", with two-note power chords growling up and down the neck in breakneck syncopation with wailing string bends. The record also refines some new looks that would soon be developed, such as the scratchy rural funk jam of "Jesus Christ Was an Only Child" and tender, ringing ballads such as "Heart Cooks Brain" and the gentle confessional "Trailer Trash".
With Moon, Modest Mouse caught a new wave of spacey psych-pop alongside the likes of The Flaming Lips, and it let them out on a foreign shore: mainstream success. Good News for People Who Love Bad News (2004) went platinum, produced hit single "Float On", landed the band on SNL and earned a Grammy nomination. To me, that was the last real Modest Mouse album—and even it was on the verge—as the personalities that made the group unique got diluted by new personnel, i.e., someone as externally defined as Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr. We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank (2007) was the band's first number one album, but it felt like an ending, and only an EP of leftovers from the last two albums has emerged since.
Lonesome came out right on the hinge between indie rock's regional phase and its global one, in 1997, the year I got my first email address, and I still have the original LP I bought around then. Listening to albums you loved that long ago often feels like looking at old photos, but the remarkable thing about these reissues is that their thrill feels contemporary, a present sense of physical and psychological danger. Indeed, something you notice in an almost manically retro indie music climate is a striking absence of nostalgia. Things are fucked now, with no inkling that they were ever any better, no state of grace to return to.
The end of the '90s were packed with epochal last gasps of pre-Internet indie rock that came out just as Radiohead's OK Computer was becoming the avatar of the next, more mainstream phase. Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Pavement's Brighten the Corners, Elliott Smith's Either/Or—all exhausted blazes of glory, like light bulbs flaring brightest as they burn out. The Lonesome Crowded West stands tall and defiantly weird among them. | 2014-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | November 5, 2014 | 8.5 | 1382b4f4-813a-4e75-9db2-8df5e33e05e3 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Joined by his Imposters in the studio for the first time in a decade, the silver-tongued songwriter turns tunes from abandoned musicals into a surprisingly cohesive record. | Joined by his Imposters in the studio for the first time in a decade, the silver-tongued songwriter turns tunes from abandoned musicals into a surprisingly cohesive record. | Elvis Costello / The Imposters: Look Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elvis-costello-the-imposters-look-now/ | Look Now | More than a decade ago, Elvis Costello suggested his recording career may be over. “I’m not of a mind to record anymore,” he told Mojo. “There’s no point… In terms of recorded music, the pact’s been broken—the personal connection between the artist and the listener. [The] MP3 has dismantled the intended shape of an album.” For a spell, it seemed Costello was making good on that promise. After 2010’s sprawling National Ransom, he effectively retired from the studio, resurfacing only for Wise Up Ghost, a collaboration with the Roots that they actually initiated. Earlier this year, Costello revealed he survived a bout with a “small but very aggressive” cancer, so his return to the studio for the sumptuous Look Now, his first album with the Imposters in 10 years, is especially welcome.
Costello stayed busy throughout the past decade, pouring his energy into themed-based shows, whether reviving his Spectacular Spinning Songbook after a quarter-century or transforming his memoir into a solo tour that partly played as an homage to his dear departed dad. Just last year, he and the Imposters—the name he gave to the Attractions after dismissing perpetual pest and bassist, Bruce Thomas—celebrated the 35th anniversary of Imperial Bedroom, the 1982 album where Costello’s sophisticated songcraft really flowered.
During this self-imposed studio exile, Costello continued to write, something he proved with new songs during each tour. He kept his eye on the other sort of stage, too. He had two theatrical projects in the hopper with Burt Bacharach—one based on their 1998 album, Painted From Memory, the other a new concept—and toiled away on a musical adaptation of A Face in the Crowd. None of these came to fruition, due to the complexities of Broadway financing, but their pieces are, in part, the fodder for Look Now.
Imposters drummer Pete Thomas cobbled a few of the demos Costello had sent into a playlist, modeling it after Dusty Springfield’s sultry 1969 classic, Dusty in Memphis. Intrigued by the sequencing, Costello began to fashion an album from these homeless tunes and stray songs, poaching from his unfinished musicals and rifling through his cupboards of compositions. Echoing Momofuku, the 2008 album that marks the last time Costello recorded with the Imposters, Look Now plays at first like a simple set of songs that eschews grand concepts for immediacy.
Despite their statliness, these tunes are startlingly direct, both emotionally and melodically. They carry only the vaguest air of Costello’s signature cleverness and no trace of anger. Opener “Under Lime” is Costello’s explicit sequel to “Jimmie Standing in the Rain,” a 2010 tale of a down-on-his-luck cowboy crooner. “Under Lime” chronicles a dark backstage exchange between the washed-up singer and a young female intern. It’s a dazzling tune, a miniature five-minute musical where the dexterous arrangement matches wordplay so witty that the title’s lime comes to represent alcohol, stage lights, and the grave. It suggests the arrival of a rich, audacious song cycle. But the rest of Look Now proceeds at a gentler, empathetic pace, lingering upon the bittersweet plights of their protagonists—usually women, always etched with kindness—instead of rushing toward a conclusion.
These details abound because this material had an unusually long gestation. “Suspect My Tears,” a gorgeous ballad that functions as a showcase for all the melodic tricks Costello learned from Bacharach, first aired during a 1999 duo tour between Costello and pianist Steve Nieve. Costello revived “Unwanted Number”—a sensitive girl-group pastiche written from the perspective of a teenager dealing with an undesired pregnancy—from a 1996 film loosely based on Carole King’s time writing at the Brill Building. He penned “Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter,” a densely layered confection, with King herself around the same time. Rather than forming a patchwork, these disparate origins inspire a surprisingly cohesive album, as they follow a distinct, deliberate point of view—lush, complex, and proudly mature, music that champions tradition while shunning nostalgia.
As a collection of tunes, Look Now is a triumph for Costello, a showcase for how he can enliven a mastery of form with a dramatist’s eye. But as an album, Look Now is a success because of the Imposters. Unlike Imperial Bedroom or Painted By Memory, the focus isn’t studio trickery or strings but rather the lean muscle of a band who has spent decades following their leader’s every whim. They are a sharp, supple outfit that can swing and sigh, sometimes within the same number, as when they effortlessly pivot between bossa nova verses and a radiant chorus during “Why Won’t Heaven Help Me?” This subtle sophistication and palpable flair make Look Now more than a mere set of songs—it’s a record worth getting lost within. | 2018-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Concord | October 18, 2018 | 8 | 1387f729-165b-44b9-89d1-b6a23b086463 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Three years after the landmark Silent Shout, the Knife's Karin Dreijer Andersson returns as Fever Ray. Fans of the Knife will not be disappointed. | Three years after the landmark Silent Shout, the Knife's Karin Dreijer Andersson returns as Fever Ray. Fans of the Knife will not be disappointed. | Fever Ray: Fever Ray | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12845-fever-ray/ | Fever Ray | That the Knife's 2006 breakthrough Silent Shout didn't set the dominoes on a series of similarly grotesque and unnatural sounding imitators is less an indictment on its impact than a comment on its inimitability. The current apex of ten years' collaboration between siblings Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer, it's one of a handful of albums from the past decade that one might argue sounded like nothing before it. In the three years since, the Dreijers have treaded lightly, touring and remixing in carefully managed bursts before quietly receding back into silence altogether.
When news of a Dreijer Andersson solo project called Fever Ray broke in October, one would have been forgiven for wondering if the duo hadn't secretly made good on their threats to call it quits. God knows, they still might. The point is, you'll get no clues here: although every bit as alluring, this debut has as much in conflict as it has in common with Silent Shout. The sounds often square, but the ferociousness has been subsumed by a slow drip of anxiety and dread. The macabre nursery rhymes have given way to lyrics that imply a sort of domestic cabin fever. It's still of the same creator, just not from the same swamp.
Things move slowly here; they slither instead of stomp. The house-inflected, booming low end of Silent Shout has been scrubbed away, leaving Karin's voice naked and upfront, anchoring the songs in a way it hasn't previously been required to. Although no less inscrutable, her lyrics adjust. Where those on Silent Shout had a witchy scale and ambition appropriate to the hugeness of the songs, Fever Ray's words feel so interior as to seem slightly unhinged. Indeed, one of Fever Ray's most remarkable aspects comes from how Dreijer Andersson funnels little moments of humor, banality, remembrance, mania, and anxiety through her deadpan affect to create a central character worthy of any psychological horror. You might even reasonably suggest this record is about psychosis. "I've got a friend who I've known since I was seven/ We used to talk on the phone/ If we have time/ If it's the right time," she declares conspiratorially, amidst pattering drums and faintly tropical synths in "Seven". In the morose, slumbering "Concrete Walls", she slows her voice to a pained yawn, which repeats the final couplet to a resigned fade: "I live between concrete walls/ In my arms she was so warm/ Oh how I try/ I leave the TV on/ And the radio."
In addition to many of the same plasticky percussions and goofy synth sounds that the Knife made their stock in trade, Fever Ray also brims with fragile, more finely articulated sounds, such as the delicate mallet instruments that punctuate "Now's The Only Time I Know", the bamboo flute that wanders through "Keep the Streets Empty For Me", and the grinding guitar sound in "I'm Not Done". The album moves at roughly the same pace and with the same general tone, rendering some of the songs indistinguishable at first, but committed listens will reveal this to be as nuanced and as rich of a production as anything either Dreijer has done.
The highlights are many. Opener "If I Had a Heart" is a shivering, timely meditation on greed, immorality, and lust for power that dovetails nicely with AIG and Madoff ("This will never end cause I want more/ More, give me more, give me more"); "I'm Not Done" is a pressurized squall that culminates with Karin dueting with a helium-voiced version of herself; while seven-minute closer "Coconut" rumbles on a pattern of synths and staccato drums before a ceremonious wall of voices arrive at the midpoint to march it to a close. Except, "close" implies it was written: the more time you spend with Fever Ray, the more you become convinced that these songs aren't written so much as they're temporarily let out. They're too starved, too eerie, and too transfigured to have been anything but. | 2009-03-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-03-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mute / Rabid | March 20, 2009 | 8.1 | 138a976e-ad6b-473b-8bd9-193dac042cae | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
A second installment of John Prine covers includes some of the legendary songwriter’s best-known material, illustrating how his legacy—and the definition of Americana—has shifted since 2010. | A second installment of John Prine covers includes some of the legendary songwriter’s best-known material, illustrating how his legacy—and the definition of Americana—has shifted since 2010. | Various Artists: Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine, Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-broken-hearts-and-dirty-windows-songs-of-john-prine-vol-2/ | Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine, Vol. 2 | During the last 10 years of his life, John Prine underwent a profound reappraisal in Nashville. In 2010, when the first installment of Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows was released, he was a niche influence, beloved by many but still considered something of a cult figure. In 2021, however, he’s the granddaddy of left-of-center country music: a benevolently eccentric artist who deftly blended pathos and humor, as well as a businessman who founded and steered Oh Boy Records, one of the longest-running artist-owned indie labels in Nashville. He located a different kind of success and then scribbled out a roadmap on an Arnold’s napkin for subsequent artists who’d been edged out of the mainstream. Especially with his swan song, 2018’s The Tree of Forgiveness, Nashville finally hailed his artistry, his business acumen, and his determined longevity.
During that same decade, the Americana scene has undergone a tectonic shift, with these two tribute albums serving as fine points against which to measure the change. Vol. 1 featured a dozen acts from various scenes, as though “Americana” extended to the art-country croon of Lambchop, the punk-country DIY of the Avett Brothers and the classic-rock swagger of the Drive-By Truckers. Vol. 2, however, suggests that the roots world has grown narrower, suppressing its twang as well as its eccentricities. Most of these covers, especially on the album’s second side, sound stark, solemn, and very, very serious; they’re missing Prine’s wry sense of humor, his beatific sense of wonder.
Partly that’s down to the song choices. The first volume bypassed some of his best-known songs—“Sam Stone,” “Hello in There,” “Paradise”—in favor of deep cuts and fan favorites, allowing the artists to draw on their personal connections with the catalog. This second volume includes all of those best-known songs, suggesting that this generation of artists must contend with Prine as a public figure. John Paul White’s version of “Sam Stone” somehow sounds even graver than the original, turning it into a funeral rather than a protest. Sturgill Simpson fulfills his ancient destiny by covering “Paradise,” and it sounds exactly like you would expect, no more or less.
Prine’s peers don’t fare much better. The oldest artist here—Emmylou Harris—gets stuck singing about the loneliness of old people on “Hello in There.” She sings beautifully, but the song needs a younger voice to draw out the empathy and compassion. Bonnie Raitt has been singing “Angel From Montgomery” since before Oh Boy hung out its shingle, but her umpteenth version doesn’t find a new angle on the material. On the other hand, Iris DeMent brings a knowing poignancy to “One Red Rose.” She was Prine’s best duet partner for years, with a voice like an arched eyebrow, so it's heartbreaking to hear her sing one of his songs by herself. Prine’s absence is crushing.
Nathaniel Rateliff invests “Pretty Good” with a preening weirdness that suits the material, and when he gets to the line, “All them gods are just about the same,” he sounds like the Cheshire cat puncturing spiritual pieties with a big grin. Tyler Childers sings “Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You” like there’s a barroom brawl going on around him, subverting country drinking songs by sounding slightly sloshed himself. But the best moment here is Amanda Shires’ “Saddle in the Rain,” which adds a mirrorball flair to the muted country funk of the original. By changing the voice from male to female, she teases out some of the sexual implications of Prine’s lyrics (“He could drink my wine and eat me like a sacrament”), adding shrugs and winks, eye rolls and middle fingers. It’s transformative, witty, fun. Too many of the songs on this tribute sound predetermined, as though Prine’s reputation now forestalls any radical reinterpretation, but Shires shows how his songs welcome and even thrive on irreverence.
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. | 2021-12-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Oh Boy | December 14, 2021 | 6.3 | 138b6313-ea06-472f-8414-798736e916cd | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The North Carolina rapper’s fourth album clarifies her identity and the depth of her talent over lush blends of R&B, gospel, reggae, and trap. It’s a vivid affirmation of self and community—and a rap clinic. | The North Carolina rapper’s fourth album clarifies her identity and the depth of her talent over lush blends of R&B, gospel, reggae, and trap. It’s a vivid affirmation of self and community—and a rap clinic. | Rapsody: Please Don’t Cry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rapsody-please-dont-cry/ | Please Don’t Cry | For years, Rapsody has done the exhausting work of reminding people that Black women aren’t a monolith. On 2019’s Eve, she named each song after a Black woman, using each muse to build out bespoke worlds of sounds and images. The concept subtly applied to Rapsody as well: from a prominent Uncle Luke sample, to a fun refrain about big ole butts, the North Carolina rapper chipped away at the idea that her love of lyricism is antithetical to sexuality and fun. She’d clearly heard the puritan calls to “Listen to Rapsody,” a thing goobers like to say to diminish other female rappers, and felt misrepresented.
Please Don’t Cry sets the record straight. Taking a hammer to the idea that she is merely a lyricist or conscious rapper—her own monolith—Rapsody clarifies her identity and the depth of her talent over lush blends of R&B, gospel, reggae, and trap. The record is a vivid affirmation of self and community, and a rap clinic. She sounds unleashed.
Rapsody frames the shapeshifting album as a verklempt therapy session with storied actress Phylicia Rashad, who encourages her to let the feelings flow. She obliges, cycling through styles as she reflects on her career and struggles. Please Don’t Cry is clearly a reset. It’s her first album without production from longtime mentor and label head 9th Wonder, and though the record has traces of Jamla Records’ soulful boom-bap, there’s more sheen than dust. Besides Eric G, Rapsody sources the production entirely from outside her label, tapping A-list vets like S1 and Hit-Boy and fresh faces like BLK ODYSSY. She also recruits more singers than fellow rappers, departing from the posse cuts of her past work. The result is an album festooned in tones and melodies, its mix of modern and classic sounds evoking humid Dungeon Family funk, uplifting Miseducation spirituality, and moody TDE medleys. The beats alone relay Rapsody’s raging multiplicity.
At 41, Rapsody’s got nothing to prove, but plenty on her mind, and lots of ways to share it. From the opening lines of “Marlanna,” her real name, she’s in constant flux, reintroducing herself as a vocalist and composer as much as a lyricist. “The one they call boring, still boarding/I’m unseen, I’m morphine, I tried to ease your pain/Now I’m morphing, some never change, I had to,” she raps, her pitch rising with each line. “DND (It’s Not Personal)” flips Monica’s “Don’t Take It Personal” into a balmy G-funk ode to solitude. Rapsody’s voice swings between peeved and pianissimo as she details her perfect day alone, building to a clever “Juicy” interpolation that somehow also has shades of 2Pac: “Me days are the best days/Days like these days, I’m on the beach sippin’ lychee,” Rapsody sings. Impressively, the music never strains under all these currents. It is sumptuous and referential without feeling cluttered.
The tidal flows and layered writing aren’t just for show. Like Denzel Curry on Melt My Eyez and Kendrick on Mr. Morale, Rapsody has been going through some things, and her expanded toolkit of vocal tics lets her express her shifting emotions. She’s conflicted on the watery “Look What You’ve Done,” thankful for the way the Grammy nomination for Laila’s Wisdom gave her career a second wind, but irked by backhanded compliments. “Don’t lift me up throwing shade at my sistas that made it out with ass and bass/Support what you like, you ain’t gotta show love using hate,” she snaps.
She details her own sexual experiences on the reflective “That One Time” and steamy “3:AM,” examining doomed relationships with women that nonetheless fortified her sense of self. “You my lesson, blessin,” a sultry Erykah Badu sings on the hook, capturing the spirit of grateful heartbreak. On “Loose Rocks,” an elegiac track about dementia eroding a loved one’s memory, Rapsody sounds on the verge of tears, her impassioned verses garlanded with cool melodies from Alex Isley. The fluid vocals enhance her lyricism, allowing her to emphasize the feeling of words as much as their meaning.
That doesn’t mean there’s not still plenty of her signature wordplay. Amid the soul-searching of reggae-tinged “Never Enough,” she breezes through the Fugees’ discography: “Blunted on reality like Wiz Khalifa/Like a nappy head through all my logic, theories, and my thesis/Add pussy to it so it reach ’em.” The spacey “Asteroids” finds her “out the window like the Joker in the foreign,” while the triumphant “Back In My Bag,” which flips the Afrobeat song “Love and Death” into booming trap, has her bouncing on niggas like Sanaa Lathan in Love & Basketball. Amid the gushing and weeping, she is playful and sly. She’s having the time of her life. In fact, this spectrum of emotions is her life.
By the end, Please Don’t Cry is as much a flex as it is a clarification. Lyricist is just one of Rapsody’s titles, and she relishes the chance to show all the flows, cadences, and deliveries she’s mastered. She’s no saint, cudgel, or fantasy. She’s not even an apologist for pussy rap, which she says bores her on “Diary of a Mad Bitch.” She’s just herself, a veteran b-girl who found her voice and kept evolving. Watch her work. | 2024-05-23T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-23T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | We Each Other / Jamla / Roc Nation | May 23, 2024 | 8.1 | 138bd082-3f6a-459f-b688-72591fbdc868 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Saying "au revoir" to longtime friend and collaborator Nicolas Fromageau, Anthony Gonzalez goes it alone for M83's third LP, a mammoth collusion of synth gasps and distorted swirls that's darker and more urban than its meadow-bound predecessor, Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts. | Saying "au revoir" to longtime friend and collaborator Nicolas Fromageau, Anthony Gonzalez goes it alone for M83's third LP, a mammoth collusion of synth gasps and distorted swirls that's darker and more urban than its meadow-bound predecessor, Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts. | M83: Before the Dawn Heals Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5009-before-the-dawn-heals-us/ | Before the Dawn Heals Us | Although critics consistently nudge away the term, M83 create high-concept emo embossed with glittery snow angels, packing more synthy bombast than a Tangerine Dream/Mineral mash-up. 2003's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts found the duo lazing on their backs in an Antibes field, watching stars and birds gently collide above green mountain tops. A pleasingly disembodied traipse through the French countryside, it was a lesson for anybody who thinks electronics have no soul.
After saying "au revoir" to longtime friend/collaborator Nicolas Fromageau, Anthony Gonzalez goes it alone for album three, upping the drama (there's even a track called "Teen Angst") by layering electro-acoustic sci-fi backdrops atop often-campy dialogue (written by his brother), and then buoying it all with by a massive noir choir. From the buzzing nighttime Blade Runner skyline of the cover art to lyrics investigating car wrecks and dislodged brains, this is a mammoth collusion of synth gasps and distorted swirls, darker and more urban than its meadow-bound predecessor. If Gonzalez had gone ahead with only epic Vangelis modulations, Before the Dawn Heals Us would collapse under hollow ponderousness. Instead, he weaves a rock backbone into his tangerine-dream landscape with steady doses of highly effective live drums, gigantic post-MBV guitar, and sharper, more defined songwriting that helps to beef up the diaphanous symphony.
As those familiar with the group would expect, the icy Sigur Rós estuaries and incidental glaciers are ably glorious (as are the commingling interludes, tentative minimalist pairings with children's voices, drifting sound-streams, and assorted channel surfs), but the larger success belongs to denser, more propulsive Kevin Shields-style hooks. Launching amid the urgent, ghostly sighs of "Tina" draped over a frantic drum/synth meltdown, "Don't Save Us From the Flames" is a coiled bit of apocalyptic pop compulsion with a J.G. Ballard storyline: "A piece of brain in my hair/ The wheels are melting." Also built on rock'n'roll, "Fields, Shorelines, and Hunters" punts a precipitous Milky Way barnstorm of cascading feedback, drum buildups, and vocal cut-ups that lead into the even headier "*", which breaks orbit, uncoiling the previous track's static energy with a patch of cathartic shoegaze glaciers from Saturn. (If you close your eyes, you might feel like you're levitating.)
Still, however cathartic, these baroque bursts will more than likely overwhelm listeners pragmatic and/or cynical enough to reject the purple poetry of a John Hughes first kiss or a flitting cliffside Robert Smith love note. It's interesting that M83 don't receive the same sort of "vainglorious" tag as Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes. Borrowing a page from Oberst, Gonzalez even opens the new record with a dramatic monologue: Languid drum rolls and chiming guitar/key-drifts pile up alongside a breathy "They say I made the moon" spoken by American actress Kate Moran, and culminating in "raise your arms the highest they can, so the whole universe will glow." Which, really, is what Gonzalez attempts to do over the course of these 15 tracks. (As we later learn, closing your eyes could perhaps kill the sun). But where Oberst sounds out of place on Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, Gonzalez confidently weds ones and zeros, forgoing millennial chilliness for depth and color.
Which is one of a million reasons why Gonzalez is hard to frame. Not exactly a singer/songwriter or a dance-floor hero, Gonzalez is less about shoegazing or rock-boy myopia than the unbounded and gargantuan romanticism of a Vincent-Gallo-esque auteur: Entering the realm of M83 is less about Mogwai-esque post-rock than it is about going along with the ebbs and flows of Gonzalez's nearly faceless otherworldly flights of fancy.
As with most ambitious undertakings, there are dull spots and moments when the dialogue, sentiments, or other indulgences can try a listener's patience. But more often than not, Gonzalez strikes gold, admirably upping the ante from the subtler Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts and creating a massive, teeming, gaudy edifice that at its best dazzles like its own misty solar system. And even when it implodes, the unintentional fireworks of its collapse create compelling, stunning patterns that leak like colored ink through the nocturnal cloud cover. | 2005-01-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-01-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Mute / Gooom | January 26, 2005 | 8.6 | 138c1b28-5af6-49f8-9454-596220bfca2f | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Kurt Vile's albums draw you in with the vibe, but you return to them for their human qualities, the way they offer a manner of seeing the world. His tossed-off musings on b’lieve i’m goin down remind you that every sage worth a damn knew that life was absurdly funny and tragic simultaneously. | Kurt Vile's albums draw you in with the vibe, but you return to them for their human qualities, the way they offer a manner of seeing the world. His tossed-off musings on b’lieve i’m goin down remind you that every sage worth a damn knew that life was absurdly funny and tragic simultaneously. | Kurt Vile: b’lieve i’m goin down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20840-kurt-vile-blieve-im-goin-down/ | b’lieve i’m goin down | Kurt Vile has a persona, and you know him by now: He is the weird quiet kid in the corner, the one who seems at first lost in his own world and disconnected from everything around him, but turns out to be smart, observant, and low-key hilarious. So while his albums draw you in with the vibe—the impeccably recorded and mixed songs that shuffle bits of folk, new wave, or country in the mix but are always squarely down-the-middle rock—you return to them for their human qualities, the way they offer a manner of seeing the world, a glimpse at a perspective that feels both voyeuristic and easy to connect to your own life.
You have to feel for Vile when he does early interviews for one of his records and he’s asked to characterize them. Music writers look for a story, an angle, a hook, and he gamely tries to give them one, a reason why an upcoming record is different from his last few. In the case of b’lieve i’m goin down, he pointed out that it was darker, an album from the night, written in the lonely quiet hours after his wife and two children had gone to sleep. (My favorite quote on this came from his interview with Rolling Stone: "It’s definitely got that night vibe…KV’s Night Life—it’s my sequel to Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly"). But Vile’s albums mostly vary in smaller details; they are collections of songs that generally draw from a similar handful of influences, and Vile’s style as a guitarist, songwriter, and especially a vocalist keep them relatively uniform. His arc so far has been a process of refinement, of gradually figuring out settings in which the songs work best.
On b’lieve i’m goin down, that means he’s incorporated a bit of banjo and a bit more piano and has eased off just slightly on the reverb. The essential quality of his music is no different, but the banjo picking draws out a bit of folkiness, and piano shifts things slightly from capital-R Rock to singer-songwriter territory. But many of these songs could have just as easily been found on either of his last two full-lengths, which in his case is not a bad thing.
Something that has changed over the years is that Vile has grown steadily funnier, and his lyrics have grown more sophisticated. Humor was always part of his music, but on b’lieve i’m goin down it’s an animating principle. Lines like "When I go out I take pills to take the edge off or to just take a chillax, forget about it/ Just another certified badass out for a night on the town" scan as goofy on the page, but in the context of the arrangement of "That’s Life, tho (almost hate to say)" they become something else entirely. The song is a dark, doom-laden thing, with fingerpicked guitar out of "Can’t Find My Way Home" and a bleak undercurrent of synth, something in the realm of Nick Drake in "Black Eyed Dog" mode. In this setting, Vile’s tossed-off musings, where punchlines alternate with striking imagery ("I hang glide into the valley of ashes"), remind you that every sage worth a damn knew that life was absurdly funny and tragic simultaneously.
The quotable lines are many. It’s been a while since I heard a description of a hangover as evocative as "A headache like a ShopVac coughing dust bunnies"; "I’m an Outlaw"’s banjo accompaniment might make you think of a folk ballad, but Vile’s outlaw is like one you’ve never seen, one "on the brink of self-implosion, alone in a crowd on the corner, in my Walkman in a snow globe going nowhere slow." "Pretty Pimpin" describes a moment of existential confusion in front of the bathroom mirror, with Vile brushing a stranger’s teeth before realizing "they were my teeth, and I was weightless"—whoops. "Lost my Head there" has a piano riff like the theme from an early '80s sitcom, but played a step too slow, like you’re about to watch the usual ridiculous "Three’s Company"-style misunderstanding happening in drug-induced slow motion. But then it turns out to be a tune about its own creation, and Vile’s description forever colors how you hear it: "I was buggin’ out about a couple-two-three things/ Picked up my microphone and started to sing/ I was feeling worse, than the words come out/ Fell on some keys and then this song walked out."
As compelling as Vile’s words can be, much of the magic lies in his delivery. Like Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan, Vile’s singing voice has acquired an unstable accent of indeterminate origin that shifts to suit his musical decisions, rather than connecting to genre or region or even his own upbringing. Most often, he’s got a nasally twang unlike that of any other native Philadelphian, and it helps his low-key murmur cut through the wooly mid-tempo haze. That twang makes his music feel more grounded and conversational, and there’s also a bit of a "Hey, it’s me again" quality the first time you hear it on a new album, an aural watermark that never leaves you any doubt that you are listening to a Kurt Vile record.
Vile’s signature qualifier is "I guess…"—the phrase shows up frequently in his songs. It’s easy to believe he’s never quite sure of what he’s seeing or exactly how he’s feeling. Vile’s version of reality is always slightly confused, a blurry approximation of what’s out there, one in a state of constant revision. This could strike some as lazy, like he can’t be bothered to whittle the blunt stick of his music down to a fine point, and it’s this perpetually fuzzy quality that leads people to label Vile a spaced-out stoner. But from another angle the uncertainty feels honest, an acknowledgement that a great deal of life involves making it up as you go along. Or as Vile puts it on "Dust Bunnies", "There ain’t no manual to our minds, we’re always looking, baby, all the time."
Vile now plays "rock" in the most '70s sense of the word—album oriented, guitar solo-friendly, very much about long-haired dudes sitting in a room playing instruments. That he’s hitting his peak as an artist at a time when rock music of the type he practices is falling out of favor and is becoming just another genre instead of the center of the musical universe only adds to his appeal; this is not an artist concerned with being in step. Vile’s relevance to the music world at large rises and falls, but he keeps plowing ahead, secure in the knowledge that in an examined life there will always be more to explore, another bleary morning with another unfamiliar face looking back at you over the bathroom sink. | 2015-09-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | September 22, 2015 | 8.4 | 1390cadb-01cd-468f-8f96-f1db263c8dd4 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Temporarily abandoning the guitar, the prolific garage rocker channels his indulgences and comes away with an unusually focused album. | Temporarily abandoning the guitar, the prolific garage rocker channels his indulgences and comes away with an unusually focused album. | Ty Segall: First Taste | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ty-segall-first-taste/ | First Taste | Ty Segall races through ideas as though they’d disappear if he didn’t commit them to wax as soon as possible. The records pile up: In 2018, he expanded his vast discography by four albums, and earlier this year added a noise-drenched live album called Deforming Lobes for good measure. First Taste, his first studio set since last year’s sprawling double-LP Freedom’s Goblin, suggests Segall may be warming to the concept of restrictions. He recorded First Taste without a single guitar, seemingly renouncing his allegiance to garage-psych skronk. Relying entirely on keyboards, percussion, and stringed instruments of different persuasions, the album winds up sounding like… well, like a lot of other Ty Segall records, really.
Segall has a catholic definition of psychedelia, opening the door to prog freak-outs, a bit of fractured folk, cascading vocal harmonies, and spooky synths. None of these accents change his basic architecture. He’s still working from a common vernacular—a bit of Led Zeppelin here, a bit of T. Rex there—not intending to recreate the past as much as to give his flights of fancy some context. It’s hard to sound weird without a baseline for normality.
The new additions brighten First Taste, giving it a bold and intense sheen. But make no mistake: To a garage rocker, every instrument looks like a guitar. A Greek bouzouki and a Japanese koto can still make a racket if they’re strummed like a Fender Telecaster, and double-tracked drums don’t hurt, either. Consequently, First Taste is sometimes just as frenetic as Deforming Lobes. But as a producer, Segall is intent on leaning into empty spaces and absences—to play with the elements of light and shade that Jimmy Page brought to Zeppelin.
Segall, though, remains a patron of low-rent scuzz-rock, so First Taste can sound cheap—intentionally so. He pushes levels into the red on “The Fall” to accentuate its breathless velocity, and he uses schoolyard recorders to bring unruly circus energy to “I Sing Them.” This elevated trash isn’t the only trick in his toolbox. First Taste is sharply paced, sequenced for maximum impact as two separate vinyl sides but also effective as a seamless 41-minute listen. The over-saturated “Taste” serves as a frenzied fanfare for the entire affair, while the malevolent, tarry grind of “I Worship the Dog” is paired with the sweet, steady-rolling “The Arms.” “Lone Cowboys,” an epic suite crammed into four and a half minutes, concludes the album with the suggestion of more music lurking around the corner.
Leaving the crowd wanting for more has never exactly been Segall’s style, so the album’s sudden end isn’t merely bracing—it’s a source of perspective. Abandoning the guitar has sharpened his senses as a record maker, making him cognizant of his excesses. By trimming slack and channeling indulgences into bursts of pandemonium, he comes away with an unusually focused album. If the songs don’t linger as long as the sound, chalk that up to Segall being a “first idea, best idea” kind of guy. This time, he concentrated on production. Maybe next time around, he’ll turn his attention to the tunes.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | August 5, 2019 | 7.5 | 1392f48c-f9df-432e-8ae9-199f11703d22 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The coming-of-age film reveals the life-changing power of some of Bruce Springsteen’s most famous songs, but its soundtrack doesn’t measure up. | The coming-of-age film reveals the life-changing power of some of Bruce Springsteen’s most famous songs, but its soundtrack doesn’t measure up. | Various Artists: Blinded by the Light (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-blinded-by-the-light-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Blinded by the Light (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | In the new movie Blinded By the Light, the lead character Javed is saved by rock’n’roll, delivered into salvation by two scuffed Bruce Springsteen cassette tapes. Born in the U.S.A. and Darkness on the Edge of Town transport Javed away from his dreary English hometown of Luton, suggesting all the directions his life could lead if he only followed the gospel of Springsteen.
Generations of listeners have seen their own dreams reflected in the songs of Springsteen. For Javed, Springsteen is a lodestar, guiding him as he figures out how to develop a personality separate from his family. Teenage rebellion may be a cliché, but Javed isn’t merely interested in breaking curfew. He’s the son of Pakistani immigrants, whose father is determined to follow tradition in a new homeland—a country also populated with far-right skinheads who spit on Javed as he’s walking home.
These scenes of racial discord anchor Blinded By the Light, offering a reminder that the movie isn’t entirely fiction. It’s a cinematic adaptation of Greetings From Bury Park, the 2007 memoir from Sarfraz Manzoor, a British journalist and documentarian, and its best moments are grounded in how Javed, the fictionalized version of Manzoor, squares his familial obligations with his own burgeoning dreams. The film has a less secure grasp on music—the catalyst for his emotional evolution—a problem accentuated on its accompanying soundtrack.
Given the Springsteen’s centrality to the plot, the Blinded By the Light soundtrack taps into the deep reservoir of Boss classics written and recorded between 1975 and 1984. As part of his participation in the project, Springsteen gifted the producers “I’ll Stand By You,” a song he originally composed for the 2001 adaptation of Harry Potter & The Sorcerer’s Stone. The fact that “I’ll Stand By You” could be so easily swapped from a fantasy film to a coming-of-age comedy hints at how the song is a pro forma ballad in the vein of “Secret Garden,” Bruce’s smash from the Jerry Maguire soundtrack.
“I’ll Stand By You” provides a sedate contemporary coda to the bustle of the film, murmuring reassuringly over the film’s credits and slotted toward the end of the soundtrack, after all the rousing, restless anthems have been aired. These are the songs you know by heart even if you’re not much of a fan, the songs that form the backbone of any Bruce greatest hits collection: “Dancing in the Dark,” “Badlands,” “Hungry Heart” and “Born to Run,” augmented by relative rarities of live versions of “Thunder Road” and “The River” from the 1970s.
Tellingly, this list of Springsteen songs lacks anything from Tunnel of Love, the melancholy masterpiece released in 1987, which is when Blinded By the Light happens to be set. Its absence is deliberate. Tunnel of Love is steeped in middle-aged disappointment, not adolescent yearning, so its songs don’t quite suit Javed’s journey, but the deeper reason they’re missing is that it suits the film’s thematic purposes to have Springsteen portrayed as he was in his glory days of the late ’70s and early ’80s. That generous, working-class rebel stands in direct contrast to Javed’s world, whether it’s the Pakistani heritage at his home or the big-haired New Pop evangelicals on his campus. Neither camp understands Bruce. The father’s complaints are predictable, but the college DJ dismisses Springsteen as “history,” even though Born in the U.S.A. went triple platinum in the UK just three years prior. They may be on opposite sides of the cultural spectrum, but these naysayers are united in their belief that Springsteen says nothing about British life.
All this helps paint Springsteen as a conduit to liberation, a theme the film handles with heavy hands by plastering lyrics on the screen and mocking anybody who believes synthesizers are the sound of the future. This didacticism trickles down to the soundtrack, where the Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s a Sin” and A-Ha’s “The Sun Always Shines on TV” help paint the steely, cold landscape of Thatcher’s Britain, while Heera’s pounding Mideastern disco cut “Maar Chadapa” and Amer Chadha-Patel’s stiff New Wave protest “Get Out of My Way Fascist (Pigs)” are no more than period accents. Bits of dialogue are scattered throughout the record to help make the case that Springsteen is not merely Javed’s savior, but protector: At one point, Javed and a friend chant the lyrics to “Badlands” as a way of warding off a bunch of racist louts.
It’s a moment that’s crucial in the film but on record, it’s corny and clunky, as are all the dialogue snippets and the pair of drippy original songs from composer A.R. Rahman, for that matter. Both are contextually necessary, though, because without them, Blinded By the Light is a pretty rote Springsteen best-of collection, diligently hitting the expected beats but carrying none of the urgency, spectacle or grandeur of Bruce’s original albums. As they’re presented here, none of Springsteen’s songs have the power to change a life. Instead, they can merely soundtrack it. | 2019-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Columbia / Legacy | August 13, 2019 | 5.3 | 139318c4-0393-479a-9264-dce10d632afa | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Percussionist Ches Smith has played on over half a dozen Xiu Xiu releases, but in recent years he's been consistently active on the contemporary jazz circuit, playing with guitarist Mary Halvorson, saxophonist Tim Berne, and others. His first album as a composer and bandleader on the iconic ECM label burns with a subtle heat. | Percussionist Ches Smith has played on over half a dozen Xiu Xiu releases, but in recent years he's been consistently active on the contemporary jazz circuit, playing with guitarist Mary Halvorson, saxophonist Tim Berne, and others. His first album as a composer and bandleader on the iconic ECM label burns with a subtle heat. | Ches Smith: The Bell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21350-the-bell/ | The Bell | Ches Smith is best known to indie rock liner-note devotees as a percussionist who has appeared on over half a dozen Xiu Xiu releases (going all the way back to Knife Play). In recent years, he’s been consistently active on the contemporary jazz circuit—lending his talents to a series of celebrated albums by artists such as guitarist Mary Halvorson and saxophonist Tim Berne. The music of both those composers occasionally strays close to avant-rock, which helps explain Smith’s in-demand status around jazz’s cutting-edge galleries. But he also led those bands through quieter, softer passages, proving his depth and range.
For his first album as a composer and bandleader on Germany’s iconic ECM label, Smith has chosen a subtlety that seems influenced by his most recent bandmates and peers. It’s a stylistic course that will be broadly familiar to fans of Manfred Eicher’s jazz-and-classical imprint, and less so to fans of Women as Lovers. But The Bell isn't placid, either: In the company of pianist Craig Taborn and violist Mat Maneri—an experienced pair of collaborators—Smith forges a quiet intensity. There’s heat here, even if it takes some time to feel it.
Things begin calmly. The album’s title-track opener announces itself with a lone, delicate smack of pitched percussion, before the other players enter. Though the nine-minute piece never strays very far from a static and spacious feel, there’s often something new happening: Smith moves from the bell-like elements in his kit to some vibraphone shimmers, or thrumming timpani playing. Maneri moves from a low drone on his viola to high-pitch wisps of brief, almost-scratchy timbre. Collectively, the group’s sound is constantly tempting you into a false sense of ease that individual players delight in subverting with little tics—adding extra notes to minimalist phrases before they become too predictable.
While all The Bell’s tracks were composed by Smith, the group’s status as "an improvising trio" is clear during "Barely Intervallic," a cut where Smith indulges skittering, freer playing. "I’ll See You on the Dark Side of the Earth" and "I Think" follow the big-canvas, pensive-but-driven feeling of "Isn’t It Over?" In the album's final third, "Wacken Open Air" gives up its theme right away, the better to let us hear the group work the spare material into a potent acoustic riff. Maneri deals in some lyrical soloing toward the end of "It’s Always Winter Somewhere." And the finale, "For Days," re-establishes the set’s quiet equilibrium.
The largely hypnotic, not-quite-repetitive quality of the music will, for some listeners, call to mind Taborn’s own Junk Magic, an early-21st century triumph of electrified chamber jazz (and an album that also featured Maneri). But The Bell isn’t just some less kinetic, acoustic redo of that project, with Smith holding down the percussion chair. Despite the album’s restricted range, it suggests a malleable aesthetic, likely the result of the year and a half these improvisers put in together before recording their debut outing. You can imagine this band doing a wide variety of impressive work, in the very near future: perhaps adding in some electronics, or including compositions from all members. But for now, it’s persuasive enough as a demonstration of Smith’s continued career shift into contemporary jazz. | 2016-01-06T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-06T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Jazz | ECM | January 6, 2016 | 7.6 | 13946c8b-9ffc-45ec-8272-921fda9642ca | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The deluxe edition is a continuation of the album’s block-spinning flexes, the pertinent one being that even his B-sides are unforgettable. | The deluxe edition is a continuation of the album’s block-spinning flexes, the pertinent one being that even his B-sides are unforgettable. | Tyler, the Creator: Call Me If You Get Lost: The Estate Sale | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tyler-the-creator-call-me-if-you-get-lost-the-estate-sale/ | Call Me If You Get Lost: The Estate Sale | Welcome to Tyler, the Creator’s The Estate Sale, where everything is out of your budget. DJ Drama returns as host, hyping up Tyler like a proud uncle greeting you at the finish line with Gatorade and grapes. Though these eight songs are cut from the Call Me If You Get Lost sessions and tacked on to the 2021 album like a deluxe edition, they flow thematically like a post-album EP. No longer an underdog, Tyler is growing into life as a star. The high of a sold-out arena tour has worn off. It’s like he expected success to patch up old wounds but as it turns out, you cannot perform kintsugi with gold trophies and your psyche. He opens with an earnest thank you to his supporters.
In his early years, Tyler could be something of an edgelord, delivering violent lyrics about sexual assault through a mischievous grin. As he’s evolved in his artistry, he’s replaced shock value with boasts whose imagination and precision—“I got a jelly bean, Kelly green Rolls/And the guts off-white like a jalapeño”—are almost outdone by the Goblin-like freneticism of his delivery. Fellow Californian Vince Staples rides into “Stuntman” like he’s behind the wheel of a monster truck: “No, you can’t be my girl, bitch, are you dumb?” If you have beef, he suggests you duel him in Milan—if you can afford the flight, that is. Tyler’s own biting, almost Pusha T-like inflection over the New Boyz-type beat could’ve spawned a dance trend in the early 2010s.
The stylistic adventurousness of The Estate Sale offers insight into the sounds that would become Call Me If You Get Lost. He brings back his love for ’80s synth-funk on “Boyfriend, Girlfriend” and taps into New Orleans bounce and Southern trap across “Dogtooth” and “Stuntman.” A$AP Rocky gushes about spoiling his lady on “Wharf Talk,” while Tyler croons with the angst of his Flower Boy and IGOR eras. The breezy and soulful “What a Day” and “Heaven to Me” bring in a John Legend sample and an unreleased Madlib deep cut to complement the album’s leisurely, jet-setting atmosphere.
As he adjusts to the altitude, Tyler’s position as a community leader presents itself as a new source of anxiety. On “Sorry Not Sorry,” he glimpses guilt and helplessness about not leveraging his status for Black liberation: “I can’t save niggas/I’m not Superman, but I could try.” On “What a Day,” he shouts out Black women, especially the ones who raised him. Twenty seconds into original album track “Massa,” a drum beat cuts Tyler off when he begins to idolize his passport. “Heaven to Me” diverts that incomplete thought with a tender ode to domesticity—date nights, water-gun fights, loved ones in the kitchen, and seeing a piece of yourself in the children you helped to bring into the world.
When I first heard Tyler associate himself with his Baudelaire persona on Call Me If You Get Lost, I didn’t think of the French poet: I thought about the orphans at the center of Lemony Snicket’s children’s novels A Series of Unfortunate Events. Constantly on the run, they’re never in one place long enough to unpack their suitcases. The cover of The Estate Sale depicts Tyler in a similar position—gazing into the distance, suitcases in hand—though he would probably call them valises now. An estate sale insinuates the death of its owner: death of preconceived notions of success, death of ego, death of self-destructive nihilism. After the success of IGOR, Tyler took a solo joyride: “Bought another car ’cause I ain’t know how to celebrate.” A chapter-closing gift for fans, The Estate Sale is a lake house afterparty. | 2023-04-05T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-05T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | April 5, 2023 | 8 | 139eeaf5-49c0-4c2f-868b-dc7acae2d329 | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
The Australian singer’s second album exudes a chic kind of vulnerability. It is a warm and delicate pop album about life as a young gay man. | The Australian singer’s second album exudes a chic kind of vulnerability. It is a warm and delicate pop album about life as a young gay man. | Troye Sivan: Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/troye-sivan-bloom/ | Bloom | I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that Troye Sivan gets it. The Australian YouTuber-turned-pop star has all the qualifications you’d look for in a modern-day gay icon—a devoted army of long-time fans, elfin features, celebrities and designers on speed dial—and the good sense to recognize how meaningless and outmoded that kind of title is. “I just don’t represent everybody, because I’m extraordinarily lucky,” Sivan told British style magazine Another Man in May. “I come from a middle-class white family in Australia, and all of my dreams have come true by 22. I had the easiest coming out in the world… There are plenty of other people who need to be heard first.”
Give him an opportunity, and he’ll happily rattle off the names of other musicians at the vanguard of queer representation: Sam Smith, Halsey, Kehlani, Perfume Genius, Kevin Abstract, Hayley Kiyoko. He invited Kim Petras on tour as an opening act and deftly handled the ensuing backlash over her work with Dr. Luke, making donations to the Ally Coalition and RAINN. His humility would feel performative and cynical if it weren’t so thorough. Blink and you might forget why Sivan is holding court on these topics in the first place: He’s an evolutionary artist, one whose existence and career is the product of decades of baby steps and boundary-pushing. Being gay is an integral and visible part of Sivan’s art, just as much as his voice or his choice of collaborators.
Bloom, Sivan’s second studio album, is best described in terms you rarely see associated with male pop stars: delicacy, transparency, and vulnerability. He sings about experiences that are commonplace for young gay men in 2018 but feel totally transgressive in a broader pop context. He wrote opener “Seventeen” about sneaking onto Grindr with a fake ID and hooking up with older men, and the title track captures bottoming for the first time in all of its agony and ecstasy.
The subject matter draws headlines, but it’s less revelatory than what’s between the lines. You can feel the power dynamics underpinning each of these songs shifting in unpredictable ways. Sivan starts both “Seventeen” and “Bloom” in a playful mood, teasing his partner, flirting, issuing commands. He’s an object of desire, and that puts him in control. “I got these beliefs that I think you wanna break,” he taunts on “Seventeen.” “Got something here to lose that I think you wanna take from me.” Just a few seconds later, he’s lost his footing: the older man he’s sought out for a virgin fling might not be so easy to manipulate in the heat of the moment. The “Bloom” pre-chorus is a nervous whimper—“I need you to tell me right before it goes down/Promise me you’ll hold my hand if I get scared now”—just before Sivan relaxes and enjoys the ride.
There’s a remarkable amount of tension in those moments, and Bloom would feel exhausting if every song was built around those kinds of formative experiences. It also offers less complicated pleasures, songs that are simpler yet still breathtakingly tender. Sivan is comfortable with desperation. He knows how it can feel like life and death hinge on scheduling a second date or sending a postcard. Lead single “My My My!” feels euphoric because of the interplay between its growled verses and pulse-pounding chorus; it feels uniquely Sivan’s because of the stakes. He’s found a guy who makes him feel like he’ll “die every night,” and when he reaches the bridge, he dares to dream of a life spent that satisfied. (He calls his lover a “treasure” and inhales sharply through clenched teeth, and it feels like the most consequential breath he’s ever taken.) Sivan also has a knack for gorgeous, concise imagery. On “Plum,” a relationship that’s nearing its end is “like bitter tangerine/like sirens in the streets.” He wants to “skip stones on [the] skin” of a boy who tastes like Lucky Strikes.
Bloom’s fragility makes for an interesting contrast with its surprisingly conservative sound. Sivan largely works with the same team and palette that defined his 2015 debut Blue Neighborhood: mid-tempo, richly hued post-Lorde pop. And while there are some welcome flourishes from unexpected sources—Ariel Rechtshaid and cult fave Jam City add celestial sparkle to regretful ballad “The Good Side,” and massive closer “Animal” swerves from a menacing rumble (courtesy of Rechtshaid, Jam City, and the Haxan Cloak) to a bridge clearly inspired by Frank Ocean’s Blonde—too much of Bloom congeals into a tasteful, muted lump. Beyond “My My My!” and the title track, its melodies and arrangements lack the urgency that defines its writing.
You can draw an interesting comparison between Sivan and his friend and collaborator Ariana Grande. They duet on “Dance to This,” an understated celebration of the pleasures of domesticity: Why go out on the town when you could stay in and have a party for two? Sivan and Grande have both made albums about how love and sex can make you feel: safe, secure, and joyous in one moment, nervous but thrilled in the next. Bloom isn’t as consistent or engaging a musical experience as Sweetener, but it still feels meaningful. If Sivan is the product of baby steps, then maybe this is one of his: bonding with one of the planet’s biggest pop stars over quiet moments with the men they love, with absolutely nothing to hide. | 2018-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol / EMI Australia | August 31, 2018 | 7.5 | 13a0a9e8-0286-46f6-8081-d80ec4825e1a | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
Memphis garage-rock fixture Greg Cartwright continues to unearth intriguing corners of 1950s and 60s rock and pop. | Memphis garage-rock fixture Greg Cartwright continues to unearth intriguing corners of 1950s and 60s rock and pop. | Reigning Sound: Love and Curses | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13297-love-and-curses/ | Love and Curses | One of Memphis' most popular local celebrities during the 1960s was television personality Watson Davis, who donned death-pallor make-up, exaggerated fangs, and a dapper Dracula tux to become Sivad. He cracked corny jokes and introduced cornier monster movies on WHBQ-TV's "Fantastic Features" and even recorded a few novelty hits, including the stiffly swinging "Sivad Buries Rock and Roll". Just a few years later, however, Davis was off television and mostly forgotten, working as a mechanic in rural Arkansas. Yet Sivad remains a pop-cultural touchstone for Mid-Southerners of a certain age, including Greg Cartwright of the Oblivians and Reigning Sound, who chose Sivad's motto as the title as the Sound's long-awaited fourth studio album, Love and Curses.
That reference works as a grim reminder of the status of so many of Cartwright's influences, who prospered decades ago but are less than footnotes today, inspiring crate-digging musicians but rarely reaching the large audiences they once commanded. If Sivad buried rock'n'roll, Cartwright digs it up under torchlight in the dead of a moonless night, unearthing outer-boroughs girl-group sounds, deep-South R&B rhythms, and universal garage-rock skuzz. It's no coincidence that the only cover on Love and Curses is an obscure single called "Stick Up for Me" by the Glass Sun. Does anyone remember them? Reigning Sound do, and the song's organ-drenched boogie momentum and shouted call-and-response are simultaneously nostalgic and immediate.
Coming across as the period's most diligent archivists, Reigning Sound have over the past few years backed former Shangri-La Mary Weiss in the studio and on tour and worked with Muscle Shoals legends Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, and Cartwright was briefly a member of Michigan garage rock lifers the Detroit Cobras. Love and Curses sounds as much a product of the present as of the past, and the new songs attack with goblin force but vampire sophistication, thanks to another new line-up. The rhythm section of drummer Lance Wille and bass player David Wayne Gay (formerly of Freakwater) add muscle and agility to the stomping "If I Can't Come Back" and "Dangerous Game", while Dave Amels lays down sweeping organ riffs on "Something to Hold Onto" and "Broken Things".
The album never quite sounds as life-or-death urgent as 2004's Too Much Guitar, but that album lived up to its name by burying Cartwright alive. Love and Curses brings his vocals back to the forefront, although he still sings like he's being chased by some unknown specter. In addition to his open-wound rasp-- few singers today can convey grievous pain so easily-- he also has an eye for the cruelties and ironies of romance, which slice through every track. On the stand-out "Debris", he sings about a lover's heart turning to stone and his own turning to rubble, straining his voice like he has to cover his eyes but can't look away. Love can be horrifying, hilarious, gory, and deeply disturbing, so why not have a horror host like Sivad presiding over the chills, creeps, and scares? | 2009-08-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-08-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | In the Red | August 3, 2009 | 7.6 | 13a388b8-88be-43a3-bb08-73cc2ae031f3 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
It's on their third album this year that rap crew BROCKHAMPTON’s whole gestalt comes into focus. There are more memorable performances, and more fascinatingly unorthodox compositions servicing them. | It's on their third album this year that rap crew BROCKHAMPTON’s whole gestalt comes into focus. There are more memorable performances, and more fascinatingly unorthodox compositions servicing them. | BROCKHAMPTON: Saturation III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brockhampton-saturation-iii/ | Saturation III | If the whole BROCKHAMPTON ethos relies on inclusivity and a DIY spirit, it’s no wonder the internet factors so heavily into their mythos. They’re a group of twentysomethings who started making things as a collective through the KanyeToThe forum, who were inspired by The Social Network to move in together. They borrowed their egalitarian blueprint from Odd Future—build community online, work communally, create and share constantly and control the means of production—and grew their fanbase on Tumblr. One of their members is a webmaster.
The collective’s defining contradiction—an imaginative rap crew who prides themselves on independence but pines after signifiers of focus-grouped, factory-made corporate pop—makes more sense under these circumstances; pop stardom as populism. The internet has flattened separate worlds once deemed “real” and “artificial” into the same spaces, creating a playing field where some Tupac fans also worship One Direction unironically. BROCKHAMPTON wholly embody this. Even their insistence on being labeled a “boy band” is an attempt to redraw these lines and reclaim zones once reserved for teenybopper bait and flipping them to mean “black,” or “queer,” or “offbeat,” or “rapper.” This context is important to understanding everything the crew does, from how they make music to how they interact with their fans. They’ve so far struggled to translate their ideology into a working piece of art but on Saturation III, the collective’s objective begins to come into focus. They still paint in broad strokes and their songs sometimes still lack continuity, but they’re truly moving as a unit now, and the star power is all but obvious.
The strongest entry in this year’s Saturation trilogy, III is the first time BROCKHAMPTON have amounted to more than just a group of talented artists rapping in sequence. Songs have the same energies as before and have similar ambitions, but they are staged better and fully rendered. There are fewer clunky lines and clumsy changeovers, more memorable performances, and more fascinatingly unorthodox compositions servicing them. This is much closer to the teamwork they envisioned, weird, web-savvy rap as a pop music performance art. Before, their songs tended to be scatterbrained and incomplete, veering all over the place. Now, things are precise. “Could’ve got a job at McDonald’s but I like curly fries/That’s a metaphor for my life, and I like taller guys/Could’ve got a deal if I wanted but I like owning shit, and I like making shit, and I like selling it,” Kevin Abstract raps on “JOHNNY,” his mission obvious.
Saturation III puts their message of self-belief into practice, a crew of broken kids banding together to form the sort of in-group that always shunned them; creators, dreamers, and lovers finding their voices in fellowship. Self-deprecation is a weapon used to reclaim their identities—“I’m a shithead’s son, and I’m bad at growing up”; “Yeah, I’m ugly and genius”; “Don’t let god see me/I got a lot of demons/And I’ve been sleeping with ‘em.” On “STAINS,” a brief interjection mocks their skeptics by parroting them: “You muthafuckas made three albums, still talking ‘bout the same shit: the one gay, the one selling drugs, the one tryna act like Lil Wayne. What the fuck is this shit, man?” In actuality, they are growing out of these categories; no longer typecast into specific roles, they finally sound as self-assured as they seem.
Their individual development has benefited the whole. Abstract dictates much of what happens in BROCKHAMPTON, which works because he is becoming a more confident rapper, a cleaner performer, and an even more competent hook-maker. Ameer Vann is undeniably the group’s sharpest rapper, often turning tales of personal trauma and turmoil into parables, and on III he maximizes his space. “I used to work for people/I made a couple hundred dollars, wasn’t worth it even/I’m worth a hundred thousand/Not dollars but diamonds/I am mud out the bayou/Rip a page out the bible/Come and crucify me,” he raps on “ALASKA.” Dom McLennon has noticeably improved and is right on Vann’s heels, experimenting more with melody and trading in verbosity for efficiency. Merlyn Wood and JOBA used to be wild cards, but now they fit into the natural flow. Everyone moves with purpose.
There are more exchanges on III, members trading off every few bars or popping up in the middle of each other’s verses. Many of these transitions are effortless, the byproduct of an obvious chemistry built through practice and repetition. Abstract, McLennon, Vann, and Matt Champion swap in and out on “JOHNNY,” each piggybacking on the verse before. On “LIQUID,” members finish each other’s sentences. Several different Auto-Tuned voices segue one into the next on “ZIPPER” before Champion springs forth with a sleepy flow. Collaboration has always been key to BROCKHAMPTON but these songs are better choreographed and feel more rehearsed.
Recently, BROCKHAMPTON trolled their fans, tagging III their “last studio album,” which was funny for two reasons: As Abstract pointed out, they didn’t make these albums in a studio—they’ve recorded all of their music in their shared Los Angeles home—and they never actually planned to stop making music as a collective. “If this was the last one, I’d be really happy,” he said. “But it also feels like we have more to say.” This is a fitting end of a trilogy called Saturation, but it should be just the start of the BROCKHAMPTON experiment. | 2017-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Empire | December 15, 2017 | 7.5 | 13ab9b0e-2e8d-49d2-b6a7-68aca1dd2949 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
19-year-old British musician Låpsley makes shimmering synth-pop shot through with longing. The best songs on her XL Recordings debut sound both intimate and enormous, while the less-inspired ones feel like trying to recall something boring that happened to you once. | 19-year-old British musician Låpsley makes shimmering synth-pop shot through with longing. The best songs on her XL Recordings debut sound both intimate and enormous, while the less-inspired ones feel like trying to recall something boring that happened to you once. | Låpsley: Long Way Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21667-long-way-home/ | Long Way Home | Longing is an emotion generated by absence, which makes it tricky to convey well in pop songs. When rendered with economy, on a song like Madonna's "Live to Tell," longing becomes part of the atmosphere, something unspoken that is too subtle and subatomic to see. When it's blown up to become the only feeling a in a song, it becomes alienating: Adele songs, for example, sometimes feel like vast deserts of longing in which she is the sole inhabitant.
19-year-old British musician Låpsley combines something of both approaches. Her work, a kind of shimmering synth-pop that also inherits its more reptilian rhythms from trip hop, attracted the notice of the BBC Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac in 2014, who invited her to contribute to a compilation. Now, Låpsley (full name Holly Låpsley Flesher) has been signed to XL Recordings, and her debut album for them expands on the crisp flutterings of her early EPs. Her music tends to be subtle in texture but direct in composition; “Hurt Me,” one of the singles from her debut album Long Way Home, is an adult contemporary pop ballad packaged in a glittering exoskeleton. It unfolds in discrete cellular units, like most songs on her record; a piano, a finger snap, the muted pulse of a kick drum, which eventually combine and flower into a small terrarium. Her vocal moves through this environment with the kind of sublimated warmth that powers Sade records and her many lesser imitators.
The unusual dependence on space in the arrangements can make the interiors of Låpsley’s songs seem uncannily empty, glassy structures with their insides removed so all that’s left is angled crystal. Låpsley’s thick, gelatinous voice is ostensibly intended to seal these isolated textures together, and she makes “Hurt Me” work almost despite itself; the melodrama of her vocal contrasts so much with the percussive decay of the backing track that it feels faintly violent. The song sounds both intimate and enormous as a result. “Operator (He Doesn’t Call Me)” employs the retrofuturism of disco and then refracts it through a second nostalgic lens, a sample of the 1975 Manhattan Transfer gospel single “Operator.” Here Låpsley’s sense of space benefits the song; the sample and the light, rolling disco collide at odd, interesting angles, like light passing through glass.
But in other instances her voice dissolves into an overabundance of negative space, and listening to the less-inspired sections of Long Way Home can feel like trying to remember something boring that happened to you once. Strangely, the most exciting songs on the record are both the oldest and most shapeless. On “Station,” Låpsley’s voice is processed at three different speeds, and all three vocals are arranged so that it seems she’s interacting and harmonizing with three different versions of herself. “Painter” resembles the frozen swirl inside a single marble. Both songs resist verses and choruses; instead they inhabit a central melodic idea until it is sufficiently complicated, then abandon it, while the remainder of the track drains gently away. These songs are her most direct expressions of longing, a form of desire that can be aesthetically assumed and discarded, but which is a vast and illegible universe of feeling when fallen into. | 2016-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | XL | March 11, 2016 | 6.6 | 13ac4919-dc39-4639-99f7-65424e32d448 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
Latest from half of the sadly departed DFA79 always seems to be shouting over itself, a tone that accounts for its virtues and shortcomings alike. | Latest from half of the sadly departed DFA79 always seems to be shouting over itself, a tone that accounts for its virtues and shortcomings alike. | MSTRKRFT: Fist of God | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12835-fist-of-god/ | Fist of God | At the beginning of "Click Click", guest E-40 says, "MSTRKRFT, what is it doe," dwarfed by a maelstrom of pulverizing riffs that seem to come with their own laser show. What it is, for E-40, turns out to be something of an endurance test: Even the limber-tongued rapper struggles to assert himself through the breakneck pace of MSTRKRFT's power chords. It's like listening to someone trying to rap in a lightning field. This is a telling moment on an album that always seems to be shouting over itself, a tone that accounts for Fist of God's virtues and shortcomings alike.
Jesse F. Keeler still played bass and synths in Death from Above 1979 when he formed MSTRKRFT with producer Alex Puodziukas (aka. Al-P), which is now his primary endeavor. The transition represents Keeler gradually weaning himself off of rock, trading his bass guitar for various consoles and his dance-inflected rock music for rock-inflected dance music. Indebted to Daft Punk's vocal-infused robo-house, Justice's arena-sized stomp, and Vitalic's tooth-grinding tunnels of distortion, Fist of God has an metallic quality that doesn't falter even when riffage occasionally subsides, like on John Legend vehicle "Heartbreaker", where piano phrases seem wrought in gleaming chrome. More often, the tracks are comprised of loops caught perfectly between guitar- and synth-sounds. MSTRKRFT use delay, reverb, attack adjustments, and distortion to carve up these loops, reveling in quicksand bass and scintillating treble. At their most aggressive, the various strands of each track seem locked in mortal combat. "1000 Cigarettes" is like an electro-funk version of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", with Eddie Van Halen as Johnny and a Roland drum machine as the devil.
Fist of God improves on MSTRKRFT's first effort, The Looks, simply by jettisoning its omnipresent vocoder. If anything, it's too well-groomed, despite its wild-out vibe. There's a whiff of genre-exercise in the way strobe-light drum claps telegraph whooshing surges, vocal snips crisply striate each measure on the title track, and each contorting lick moves inexorably through real-time filter sweeps. With an ever-expanding collection of hardware and software, samples and sound banks, analog and digital synths, MSTRKRFT's sound is formally pristine, but a few stray hairs would lend it more character.
As it stands, Fist of God is a roundly enjoyable album with few highs and lows. A couple of the cameos are worthwhile: N.O.R.E.'s turn on "Bounce" suits the record's tone, and the track rates a prestige-bolstering remix on A-Trak's forthcoming mix album, Infinity + 1. Freeway is game and energetic on the alternate mix of "1000 Cigarettes", although he sounds rushed (and you can imagine how gnarly a track must be to rush Freeway), and Little Moe's deep-house diva turn on "It Ain't Love" holds up surprisingly well against the track's dot-matrix abrasion. John Legend's incredibly insipid lyrics about butterflies and rainbows don't do "Heartbreaker" any favors, but neither do they completely ruin it. It's a mystery why Jamal of soul-punk band the Carps warranted two guest spots, as both are profoundly anonymous.
And what the hell happened with "Word Up", the Ghostface collab? His warm-up chatter predicts a firebrand verse that never arrives-- instead, a couple of innocuous phrases ("word up," "do it hard") get cut up in uninteresting ways with clipped rave sirens and gymnastic synth-bass. You have to wonder if they got Ghost in the studio and then couldn't get anything worthwhile out of him, but you can't blame them for attempting to work with what they got-- would you pass up the chance to write "feat. Ghostface Killah" on your tracklist? In a way, this is representative of the album-- it's got all the right moves in place, but MSTRKRFT's handle on content is still slightly lagging behind their facility for tone and form. But if you're just looking for well-turned, rock-friendly, dance-party fodder, you could do a lot worse than Fist of God. | 2009-03-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-03-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dim Mak / Downtown | March 17, 2009 | 6 | 13b6e006-c4a1-4c13-a6bc-487e44d02a34 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The weird pop veterans return with their 13th album. It's among their most accessible records, reaching for moments of escapism that never entered the frame on 2012's Breakup Songs. | The weird pop veterans return with their 13th album. It's among their most accessible records, reaching for moments of escapism that never entered the frame on 2012's Breakup Songs. | Deerhoof: La Isla Bonita | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19917-deerhoof-la-isla-bonita/ | La Isla Bonita | Do Deerhoof ever get bored? In a revolving gallery of evaporative avant-pop weirdos, they churn out album after distinctive album without ever breaching self-parody. As an aesthetic conceit, "weird" only works as long as it's novel—if you're going to wallow in it for two decades, you'd better be prepared to regenerate yourself constantly. But Deerhoof make music like a group of friends who never get sick of each other's jokes. Their 13th album, La Isla Bonita, is among their most accessible, reaching for moments of escapism that never entered the frame on 2012's Breakup Songs.
Between the album's title and the name of its first track, "Paradise Girls", La Isla Bonita promises tropical hues that it only delivers superficially. On a mechanical level, it functions the way Deerhoof's music has always functioned: isolated lyrical snippets pop in and out, refusing to cohere into a narrative, while the guitar, drums, and bass alternately concoct blissful grooves and total disorientation. Deerhoof thrive in the space between the sugar you want and the acid you get.
They're generous with their ironies on La Isla Bonita, starting with "Paradise Girls", a song that inverts its own premise. The title calls to mind women's bodies presented as set decoration for a steamy male utopia—ad copy for sleazy West Coast entertainment. Satomi Matsuzaki's lyrics counter that expectation by describing girls who make their very own paradise: "Girls/ Who play the bass guitar...Girls/ Who are smart." Rumbles of her bass mingle with John Dieterich's itchy guitar riffs and Greg Saunier's spacious drumbeats.
Breakup Songs leaned heavily on anemic synthesizer sounds to round out its eerie, space-age profile, but with La Isla Bonita, Deerhoof sink back into punk rock's bare bones just to see how much they can crank out of them. With a purely organic template behind her, Matsuzaki's voice finds new pockets of space to fill, which helps her nail in her nonsensical lines even deeper. Run through the sour, bass-driven groove of "Last Fad" a few times, and you'll have no idea how the words "Baseball is canceled/ it is running late" keep getting stuck in your head. It doesn't matter—they're there. Matsuzaki slips them in so skillfully you'll want to adopt them as a catchphrase for when everything goes wrong: "Fuck it! Baseball is canceled!"
The record's climax "Black Pitch" sweeps Deerhoof's tight patterns into a satisfying pop catharsis. It starts with something like a threat: "We're gonna want you/ We're gonna want you/ We're gonna want you 24/7," Matsuzaki insists. The riffs behind her stay nervous; Saunier's drums shift and shake. And then the song crests. Matsuzaki sings over herself as if from far away, stretching her syllables until the backing drops out and it's just her and her own echoes, alone in the void.
A big part of Deerhoof's power comes from their inscrutability. They've got the rare talent of affecting emotion without supplying a direct line into any kind of inner narrative, of inspiring release in the abstract. La Isla Bonita doesn't solve any mysteries, but it does cut some new faces on a band that feeds on its own newness. | 2014-11-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-11-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Polyvinyl | November 7, 2014 | 7.6 | 13b87d1d-947e-4656-a719-eb86069df8d3 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
The Swedish rapper scales back some of his rave ambitions on his most distilled creative package yet as he becomes something approaching a star. | The Swedish rapper scales back some of his rave ambitions on his most distilled creative package yet as he becomes something approaching a star. | Bladee: The Fool | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bladee-the-fool/ | The Fool | The phrase “boy band” usually brings to mind groups that, regardless of whatever genuine fanbase they have, are relentlessly manufactured and market-tested: the Osmonds, New Kids on the Block, BTS. Even a self-described boy band like BROCKHAMPTON has more industry oomph behind them than your average internet-born rap group. The genre-flipping Swedish collective Drain Gang has the features of a boy band—its members are fashion-forward babyfaces, its fans are a devoted and meme-generating street team, its sound is aching and pretty—but the bones are different. As its most prolific member, Bladee is the group’s de facto leader alongside vocalists Thaiboy Digital and ecco2k and producer whitearmor. The Fool is the rapper’s fourth full-length in a little over a year, and despite his busy release schedule, he remains elusive, ambiguous, even a little androgynous, drawing in fans with enough mystery while also sating their appetite for new music.
Bladee’s heavily accented earlier work is still something of an acquired taste, but over the years, he’s proved himself a formidable and surprisingly family-friendly pop stylist: “I’m a good boy on the track, no cussing,” he raps on “Hotel Breakfast.” His work has long circled trance and dance-pop, with its glossy electronic production and sparkling beats, but last year’s Good Luck, a forwardly maximalist album full of euphoric synth lines and high-energy drops, embraced EDM like never before. The Fool scales back those rave ambitions somewhat, and the result is Bladee’s most distilled creative package thus far. The title is a tarot reference, a metaphor that extends to the album’s sound. The record is like a full hand, each card representing a different side of Bladee or character he embodies: on “Let’s Ride,” he’s the reluctantly boastful MC riding a BMX bike and making Rich Homie Quan references; on “desiree,” he’s the sensitive crooner and lover; on “Trendy,” he’s the admitted Joker of the deck.
Long before the cult following of Drain Gang, Bladee emerged as an associate of Yung Lean, who transitioned from a viral meme star to a much noisier, rough-edged experimentalist. In the recent documentary Yung Lean: In My Head, Bladee is only a brief, fly-on-the-wall presence, despite the artists’ close relationship, remaining guarded while Lean opts for transparency. The irony is that Lean’s music is less accessible, while Bladee dabbles in the glittering sheen of hyperpop, to the point of even dropping a recent remix with Charli XCX. The beats on The Fool are bass-heavy and drum-driven, but each instrumental overflows with the sense of dreaminess that’s become Bladee’s specialty; the kaleidoscopic, trance-like synth lines on “Search True” or “Thee 9 Is Up” could easily be expanded into full-length dancefloor cuts.
The heady EDM flavor of his work lends it a euphoric optimism, but Bladee’s reluctance to soak in the spotlight pairs the positivity with an iciness and sense of emotional complexity. Even in his bright vocals, there’s a shyness to his presence. Individual words often don’t stand out; what registers is the quality of his voice, fragile and crystalline, capable of gliding to falsetto with ease. Bladee’s vocals are frequently layered, as overdubs turn him into a chorus of angels. But it’s not just his voice that has become clearer—pop music as a whole is now more in line with his unfamiliar timbre. The word “pop” has grown to encompass a broader range of music than ever, as international styles from reggaeton to K-pop have found mainstream success in the United States, and experimentalists like PC Music have made an impact on chart-topping sounds.
One of The Fool’s track titles points to a much more prefabricated boy band than Drain Gang: “I Want It That Way.” But there’s no Lou Pearlman behind the scenes or industry strings being pulled—Bladee’s unexpected rise as an online heartthrob and trance poet has felt organic and natural. With each release, his production leans more toward dance and synthpop. He seems more and more confident, as something approaching a star, melding the lyrical tropes and trap drums of American rap, the emotions and ethereality of European dance music, and the experimentation of pop’s new international vanguard. Almost a decade ago, when Bladee first started releasing music, it may have seemed unlikely for a Swedish rapper influenced by Eurodance and IDM alike to find a serious mainstream audience in America. Now it doesn’t seem like such a foolish dream.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Year0001 | June 3, 2021 | 7.7 | 13b9c8d6-081b-4d21-b120-424660cd9950 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
First released in 1996, Tom Jenkinson’s debut album feels like a time capsule of the era’s drill’n’bass and jazzy jungle. It’s steeped in inventive rhythms, gorgeous melodies, and giddy fun. | First released in 1996, Tom Jenkinson’s debut album feels like a time capsule of the era’s drill’n’bass and jazzy jungle. It’s steeped in inventive rhythms, gorgeous melodies, and giddy fun. | Squarepusher: Feed Me Weird Things (25th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/squarepusher-feed-me-weird-things-25th-anniversary-edition/ | Feed Me Weird Things (25th Anniversary Edition) | Feed Me Weird Things, originally released in 1996 on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, is the Squarepusher LP you could take home to meet your mom—the well-dressed eccentric to “Come on My Selector”’s slobbering psychopath. That’s not to say it is easy listening, exactly, but Squarepusher’s debut album marked a rare moment in Tom Jenkinson’s long and extremely irregular career when he sounded vaguely in line with prevailing musical trends—relaxed and relatively sociable, rather than creeping around in his habitual field of one.
No one will confuse Feed Me Weird Things—long out of print but now reissued for its 25th anniversary—with Faithless’s “Insomnia” or the other big Ibiza hits of 1996. Squarepusher’s music is a tangle of beats, bass, and melody, a combustible mixture of musical ideas that dynamites the repetitive nature of much electronic music. But the short-lived mid-’90s trend for drill’n’bass, spearheaded by Aphex and Luke Vibert, meant that Squarepusher’s beat mangling and hall-of-mirrors funk didn’t feel quite as solitary in 1996 as it often does today. Echoes of Richard D. James’ dual Hangable Auto Bulb EPs, released in 1995, can be heard in Feed Me Weird Things’ fractured grooves, and album highlight “Theme From Ernest Borgnine” is straight out of the Aphex playbook, marked by a colorful melody and tortured breakbeats.
Drum’n’bass—particularly the jazz-influenced strain that was approaching its peak in 1996—was another kindred spirit. If you squint, you could imagine Feed Me Weird Things’ “Squarepusher Theme” or “Kodack” slotting onto Roni Size / Reprazent’s debut EP, Reasons for Sharing, or 4 Hero’s 1997 EP Earth Pioneers: Squarepusher’s shared loved of live bass and moody chords reflects the jazz-funk heritage that underpinned a lot of British dance music in the ’90s.
Squarepusher’s drums, too, have a certain groove on Feed Me Weird Things that sometimes gets submerged in the wild beat contortions of his later work. The intricate rhythmic cut-ups and shock FX attack that would become Squarepusher’s trademarks are certainly present on Feed Me Weird Things but remain at recognizably humane levels, making a song like “Smedleys Melody”—essentially Django goes jungle—almost a straightforward listen.
Despite the album’s familiar touches, there are still moments that sound like no one but Squarepusher. Perhaps Jenkinson’s biggest innovation over his mind-bogglingly fertile career has been to combine the maximal drum programming of drum’n’bass with the extreme noodle of his live fretless bass playing, and that combination comes to the fore on Feed Me Weird Things. Jungle, for all its kinetic intensity, would usually leave a solid bassline to hang your critical faculties on; the dazzling complexity that closes “Windscale 2,” however, provides almost no mental repose, as bass and drum face off with all the unhinged intensity of speed-chess fanatics at a blitz-game orgy.
The sugar that gilds this particular pill—as so often in Squarepusher’s career—is his lustrous tonal sensibility. Gorgeous melodies and harmonies run rampant on the album’s best songs. This, of course, is another gift that Jenkinson shares with Aphex Twin. But whereas Aphex’s melodies tend to be indebted to classical music, Jenkinson also knows his way around an artful jazz chord progression. “Squarepusher Theme” and “Tundra,” Feed Me Weird Things’ two opening tracks—also two of its best—throw you into this divide right from the off. “Squarepusher Theme” has a chord sequence of abnormal elegance, while “Tundra” combines a funereal melody with an “Amen”-bothering beat that suggests Metalheadz meets Selected Ambient Works Vol. II.
Squarepusher has moved on considerably since Feed Me Weird Things, exploring everything from mutant UK garage (“My Red Hot Car”) to the aptly named live album Solo Electric Bass 1. But Feed Me Weird Things might be his most personal release, giving us a peek at the jazz-funk-loving bass enthusiast behind the outrageous production tricks. For all the audaciousness of his music, it sounds like Jenkinson is having fun here, reveling in the excess of his own indulgence. This timely re-release, which brings Feed Me Weird Things to streaming for the first time, allows the wider world to join in his twisted game.
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. | 2021-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | June 3, 2021 | 8 | 13ba0e69-8e10-40de-b53b-aa0cfac6f87d | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
With four hypnotically uncomplicated, 11-minute tracks, this is Dominick Fernow at his simplest and most powerful. | With four hypnotically uncomplicated, 11-minute tracks, this is Dominick Fernow at his simplest and most powerful. | Prurient: Pleasure Ground | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9694-pleasure-ground/ | Pleasure Ground | Pleasure Ground is Dominick Fernow (aka Prurient) at his simplest and most powerful. Originally released on a double cassette by Fernow's Hospital Productions, the album contains four 11-minute, hypnotically uncomplicated tracks. His black din and bruising screams continue to test ears, but Fernow's noise is never sloppy, hewing to repetitive patterns that build into trances. Calling this the most accessible Prurient album is like calling the Antarctic sun warm, but anyone who finds previous releases forbidding might be surprised by how much there is to latch onto here.
Fernow begins with a piercing tone similar to the opening salvo on his last effort for Load, Black Vase. That record's siren rang for 15 minutes, but here crunching jolts quickly break up the dog-whistle spine of "Military Road". A lung-stretching howl soon chimes in, extending a lone stanza ("Will you miss the abuse/ The intimate violence/ The parade of bruises/ The badge of punishment?") into a glacial mantra. Doling out his words in metered chunks, Fernow's singing mirrors the rhythmic lurch of his surrounding noise.
"Military Road" sets a template that the rest of Pleasure Ground perfects: Long tones and extended screams sliced into simple patterns. These protracted pieces can be intense, but they're also surprisingly song-like, like three-chord punk tunes stretched to painfully beautiful extremes. "Earthworks/Buried in Secret" follows with descending chords that bend and collapse under the weight of Fernow's fire-breathing. Here he turns four words-- "what of this destruction"-- into a novel's worth of abstract vowels and consonants. His lyrics in the past have teetered between dark poetry and gothic cartoon, but on Pleasure Ground their simplicity is effective.
The album's final two pieces pull Fernow's approach into new territory. "Outdoorsman/Indestructible" is a Prurient first: A piece so quiet you actually have to turn it up. Over a distant rumble, Fernow moans a Haiku-like description of burning paper falling to the ground. The music's restraint is similarly Zen-- even a final burst of singing sounds stoic, like an eerie calm after a storm. "Apple Tree Victim" is even better. Like a black-noise version of Fennesz's "A Year In a Minute," the piece loops distorted chords under Fernow's lyrics, which equate sexual climax with gory death. Prurient records can feel like footnotes to Fernow's engulfing live show, whose muscular workouts whittle arena-sized metal to its purest core. But "Apple Tree Victim" captures his sweaty stage energy perfectly, and it's difficult to imagine Fernow topping it or the rest of Pleasure Ground anytime soon. | 2006-12-06T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2006-12-06T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental | Load | December 6, 2006 | 7.8 | 13ba51d0-d458-4b55-bc08-56212fc9ef06 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The UK techno producer Anthony Child, better known as Surgeon, returns to techno after a few years of ambient electronic music. The more time you spend with the album, the more it begins to feel like a universe of pure texture: There are no melodies, just gnarled one- and two-bar loops that wend their way across the tracks like inchworms through radioactive ash. | The UK techno producer Anthony Child, better known as Surgeon, returns to techno after a few years of ambient electronic music. The more time you spend with the album, the more it begins to feel like a universe of pure texture: There are no melodies, just gnarled one- and two-bar loops that wend their way across the tracks like inchworms through radioactive ash. | Surgeon: From Farthest Known Objects | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21450-from-farthest-known-objects/ | From Farthest Known Objects | The UK producer Anthony Child, better known as Surgeon, traffics in toughness. He's long represented one of the most forbidding corners of the techno scene; just consider the name of his turbulent duo with Regis, British Murder Boys. But even at its most bruising, his music is marked by its formal inventiveness and formidable intelligence. The beats on his late-'90s Tresor trilogy—Basictonalvocabulary, Balance, and Force + Form—seem unusually alive, like the shuddering birth pangs of AI; when people talk about electronic music having "organic" properties, this is what they mean.
While he once titled a mix CD This Is for You Shits, Child has been dialing down the screwface lately. Recent years have found him trading dungeon pummel for beatless soundscapes: His ambient sets at the Freerotation festival have become legendary for their lysergic drift, and on albums like 2013's The Space Between People and Things and last year's Electronic Recordings from Maui Jungle Vol. 1, both released under his own name, he has turned his hand to experimental electronics—cerebral, austere, and unconnected to anything as carnal or compromised as a dancefloor.
With his new album, From Farthest Known Objects, he wades back into techno's roiled waters. All eight tracks employ four-to-the-floor rhythms, flickering triplets or 16th-note syncopations, and studiously greyscale atmospheres. There are no melodies, just gnarled one- and two-bar loops that wend their way across the tracks' blasted expanse like inchworms through radioactive ash. "z8_GND_5296" swings like Kompakt's slinky "Schaffel" releases; "GN-108036" barrels forward as inexorably as Jeff Mills' most single-minded rollers. (The track titles all reference distant galaxies at the dawn of time; Child imagines the tracks themselves as waveform transmissions from these faraway star clusters, which is itself an idea that goes straight to techno's roots.)
On closer inspection, though, nothing here resembles conventional techno: for one thing, save for the anchoring kicks, where are the drums? This is not your usual percussive array: There are no snares, no hi-hats, no claps, no toms—just knots of metallic whine and white noise. The low tones grumble like weary old men; the high ones scatter like drops of water in an oiled pan. Even the kick drums barely register as such; on the opening "EGS-zs8-1" they crumple like paper bags, and on "BDF-3299" they might be gargantuan oil drums struck by a felt-tipped mallet.
The more time you spend with the album, the more it begins to feel like a universe of pure texture. But to say that there are no drums is also to acknowledge that there are no "notes," either: Put another way, it's all drums, just not the usual sound sets we've become accustomed to. Despite the softness of their attacks, every element here is essentially percussive in nature, which imbues the music with an unusually primal sensibility: The gnarled "A1703 zD6," with its wooden clunk and spongy texture, suggests early humans thwacking gourds and logs, and it heaves like a rotten tree trunk spitting termites.
One of the things that distinguished Maui Jungle was its sense of discipline: Most of its tracks sounded like they had been made using just one machine or process, and From Farthest Known Objects is no different. Despite its greater density and complexity, it represents the same kind of rigor. I have no idea how Child made the music—he has said only that he explored "new production techniques using old and unlikely hardware"—but it doesn't sound like the output you'd get from a standard array of gear, with drums and bassline down below, and pads and leads on top. It sounds like one source being spun in nearly infinite ways, like a single electrical signal being channeled down a long, convoluted pipe and emerging like a live wire spitting sparks. It feels elemental, which is appropriate, given the subject matter—like a techno tribute to Carl Sagan's famous maxim: We are made of star stuff. | 2016-01-29T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-29T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Dynamic Tension | January 29, 2016 | 7.8 | 13be00b4-b81a-4065-b668-600356be612d | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On a striking live set, the Grateful Dead rhythm guitarist and vocalist stages some of the band’s most beloved material with passion and reverence. | On a striking live set, the Grateful Dead rhythm guitarist and vocalist stages some of the band’s most beloved material with passion and reverence. | Bob Weir: Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros: Live in Colorado, Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-weir-bobby-weir-and-wolf-bros-live-in-colorado-vol-2/ | Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros: Live in Colorado, Vol. 2 | How fast should a Grateful Dead song be played? There is perhaps no question that has occupied Deadheads’ time and consumed more emotion over the last 20 or so years, ever since bassist Phil Lesh and guitarist Bob Weir reunited the band after Jerry Garcia’s 1995 death. The tempo wars have claimed several versions of the post-Garcia Dead, and if the question seems banal, it nevertheless conceals irreconcilable philosophical differences. For Lesh, these songs are meant to pump with energy, swirling up the audience in a psychedelic dervish. For Weir, they should be played slowly, with purpose and focus, “an audio playlet that needed to sink into the audience’s mind,” as writer Joel Selvin puts it. The music of the Grateful Dead, in Weir’s formulation, is bigger, vaster, and contains sweeping views; why speed through it?
On Weir’s second official release with his Wolf Bros project, Live in Colorado, Vol. 2, he stages some of the most beloved material in the Grateful Dead’s catalog with the passion and reverence of a couple spending their 50th anniversary looking back on their wedding day. It’s a striking set, one that does justice to Weir’s vision without ever succumbing to the sense of drag that can occasionally topple Dead & Company, the stadium-touring band he fronts with John Mayer. As is typically the case with Weir’s solo work, there is no lead guitarist, and thus no attempt to dig around in the DNA of these songs to discover what else they might contain. Leaning instead on bassist Don Was, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, and especially drummer Jay Lane, Weir’s arrangements expand these songs outward, their scope and sense of majesty evoked by the horns, strings, and pedal steel of the accompanying Wolfpack ensemble. There’s never a question as to where we might be going, only an offhanded awe at how stately this music turns out to be.
Much of the album’s grace is owing to the pleasant contrast between Weir’s late style as a rhythm guitarist and the slickness of the band. His instrument is constantly buzzing, and he doesn’t strum it so much as brush at it in a way that makes it sound like a live wire being batted with a feather. He can be halting, sometimes a touch behind the beat, frequently rough as he roots around the edges of the songs in search of new rhythmic pathways. It’s a winningly hardheaded mode of playing, one that comes from having abandoned the concept of perfection or completion decades ago, and the romantic swirl of the band mimics the emotion of his playing if not the tone. It’s strangely comforting to hear them polish Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” as if Weir’s blocky soloing is a totally normal way for a guitar to sound in a country song.
Like Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions band, the ensemble is founded on the principle that folk music can also be dance music. Where the former group’s cavalcade of trombones and fiddles overflowed with ecstasy, Weir’s group is swishier and more straightlaced, occasionally coming off like a soul revue. In “The Other One,” they circle around the rhythm, the horns and piano coaxing Weir into the vocals like the JBs playing their boss onto the stage. They turn “Eyes of the World” into a ballroom shuffle that’s dewy with nostalgia, Chimenti throwing complicated chords that resound like questions and playing his way in and out of key like Thelonious Monk. The band sidesteps into “What’s Going On” in a starry-eyed flow state, with Weir altering Marvin Gaye’s lyrics to decry “culture wars”—a dodgy move for any white artist covering a Black singer—and equivocating the original’s source of power. “Let’s hope that love will conquer hate,” he sings, his uncertainty regarding its efficacy at least in keeping with the doubt-riddled ethos of the Dead’s songbook.
The Dead, after all, were not a reverential band. “Ripple” feints in the direction of psalmody, but it refuses to resolve itself, and makes a point of insisting that the listener has the imperative and responsibility to find their own way in the world. On Live in Colorado, the crowd is kept high in the mix as the band rounds into the song’s last verse, their collective rendition of the wordless coda making the entire thing feel like last call at a honky tonk. Weir takes “Brokedown Palace” to its vocal limits, fluttering the high notes like he’s waving goodbye along with the thousands of people singing the “fare thee well” chorus. Both songs are standout tracks from 1970’s American Beauty, and high points in the Dead catalog at large, but like any hymn, they achieve brilliance when they’re sung loudly and in earnest by a whole lot of people.
Across the Dead’s songbook, ambiguity and imperfection are spiritual principles to which one must submit oneself. “His job is to shed light, and not to master,” Weir sings of the storyteller in “Terrapin Station,” the song suite presented here in its entirety. The original band never performed “Terrapin Station” all the way through, and on Live in Colorado, the track’s 21 minutes are stitched together from a pair of performances, with Wolf Bros. having played the first half one night and the second half the next.
It’s one of the more beguiling songs Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter ever wrote: The opening guitar line, one of Garcia’s most delicate, seems to weave itself into being, and Hunter’s lyric uses a tale of thwarted love to suggest that heaven isn’t a place we set out to find so much as the product of the quest itself. Weir makes his way through the song with care, his oaken tone bringing a new level of gravitas to a song that’s already been invested with plenty of it. He knows how to rest the melody, dropping into a speaking voice for half a line, sharpening the story and drawing the listener in closer. Even if the technique is the byproduct of age—and his stunning performance on a dark and drifting “Days Between” suggests that Weir has greater control over his voice now than he ever has—the way his vocal ebbs and flows, gathering strength and spending it, reflects the song’s imperative to push onward despite knowing one’s limitations. Fifty-five years into a career that continues to take surprising and emotionally affecting shape, it suggests that Weir’s greatest audience is himself. | 2022-10-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Third Man | October 13, 2022 | 7.3 | 13cf57a8-bb0e-49ba-9391-05375236bc63 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Dan Snaith's sixth album as Caribou is his most overtly personal record to date, one that’s remarkable for its intimacy, openheartedness, and joy derived from basic human connection. Owen Pallett and Jessy Lanza contribute. | Dan Snaith's sixth album as Caribou is his most overtly personal record to date, one that’s remarkable for its intimacy, openheartedness, and joy derived from basic human connection. Owen Pallett and Jessy Lanza contribute. | Caribou: Our Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19762-caribou-our-love/ | Our Love | Dan Snaith spent the first decade of his career attacking a wide range of genres with the intensity of an autodidact and the cerebral coolness of an academic. Back when he was still recording as Manitoba without fear of legal challenges from disgruntled punk veterans, he dissembled the IDM of the late 1990s and early ‘00s on debut Start Breaking My Heart before moving on to kaleidoscopic, colorful psychedelia on Up in Flames. From there, it was on to chugging krautrock and rich, melancholy ‘60s pop on The Milk of Human Kindness and Andorra, respectively; the 2010 LP Swim, cobbled together from leftover DJ set material and inspired by the sounds of deep house and contemporary club music, grew his fan base further. Despite the huge breadth of sounds they explore, these albums all share an essential playfulness and engrossing curiosity.
It’s always been enjoyable to hear Snaith dive deep into a new passion and emerge with a new record awash in the ecstasy of influence: finely detailed, in love with its inspiration, simply tuneful, and yet thematically complex. Our Love, his first album as Caribou in four years, is his first full-length that doesn’t come with a major shift from the sound of its predecessor. This is body music on the same general wavelength as Swim, albeit slightly warped and refined. The differences, then, are deeper: this is Snaith’s most overtly personal record to date, one that’s remarkable for its intimacy, openheartedness, and joy derived from basic human connection.
Our Love is a quietly ambitious record, despite its modest title: in documenting Snaith’s personal vision of love, it seeks to render love in all of its universally complicated glory. It’s a warts-and-all depiction of a state of being that’s so often constrained to one or two facets in pop songs: obsession and disconnection, passion and jealousy, companionship and loneliness, all given equal weight. From the outside, Snaith looks the picture of domestic bliss, or at least stability—he’s been married for 13 years, and his first child was born in 2011—but many of Our Love’s lyrics hint at romantic trouble or marital discomfort. Nameless characters feel mistreated, are haunted by lurking suitors and bad memories, lament their broken love, look towards the future; when they’re in love, it’s with an intensity that verges on the maniacal. But it’s reasonable to conclude that the album’s songs aren’t near-direct transcriptions of events and feelings from Snaith’s life; instead, they’re extremes pulled from the necessarily complicated life two people build together over years and years, rich with joy but laden with baggage.
In any long-term relationship, there are moments of deadening melancholy where you feel like your organs have been put through an industrial shredder. It’s in those moments where you sniff at imagining your life completely different, or even with someone else—fantasies enabled by intense emotional pain. And then, somehow, things get better, and your heart is overflowing with love; you’re almost in disbelief, thinking, “How could I imagine a different life, even for a second?” Our Love captures the zig-zag between these two poles with an authenticity and honesty few albums manage, and the album’s excellent two singles, “Can’t Do Without You” and “Our Love”, focus on the latter sensation.
The kind of complex, slowly shifting relationship the album seeks to depict is mirrored by its own relationship to “dance music,” a term that’s broadly applicable to Our Love but awkward and inadequate upon closer examination. Snaith is an accomplished DJ, remixer, and producer, and he has a rock-solid grasp on the mechanics of the dancefloor: he understands how to get people moving, how to sustain intensity, and how small moves behind the boards can yield surprising results. A good example is the way he uses dynamic variation on highlights “Can’t Do Without You” and “Back Home”, using volume to make hooks hit that much harder. His 2012 record as Daphni, Jiaolong, was a dance nerd’s delight, a lean and brittle release forged by crate-digging and the need to churn out hours of material for marathon sets at European clubs, and its influence is felt in subtle ways on Our Love.
This album is glassy, warped, and largely digital where Swim was bold, bright, and decisively analog in places; there’s a warmth to it, but much of it comes from Snaith rather than his largely digital soundscapes. That said, Our Love only really glances at straightforward dance composition before choosing to shrug it off and take a different path. Most of the album is too slow and strange for the club, and its songs mutate in ways that are unexpected and offer different kind of rewards. The title track spends four minutes building to a strobe-lit, wildly pulsing frenzy, only to turn left into a lovely string outro arranged by contemporary maestro Owen Pallett, a longtime Snaith pal. The back half twosome of “Julia Brightly” and “Mars” are the two tracks that offer any kind of predictable dance-oriented pleasure, and even they’re a little off-kilter, with the former’s searing synth washes and the latter’s perky flute melody.
The key attribute is ultimately confidence. Our Love is a very assured record, from its unconventional, austere arrangements to its unrelenting focus and thematic consistency. This can be traced, in part, to Snaith’s solid collaborative circle: from respected advisors like Kieran Hebden and his wife to other artists like the aforementioned Pallett and Jessy Lanza, he’s surrounded himself with people he trusts and appreciates, freeing him to take risks and pursue a pure artistic vision. Pallett’s arrangements on the title track, “Silver”, and closer “Your Love Will Set You Free” lend a lightness to an album that sometimes verges on uncomfortable depth; Lanza’s winning feature on “Second Chance” is a welcome dose of female perspective on a record dominated by Snaith’s, her melody and fluttering voice taking the album from one person’s love to something larger.
Speaking of voices, Snaith’s isn’t half bad either: a reluctant vocalist earlier in his career, he’s improved by leaps and bounds since then, lending an imperfect humanity to these songs even if he’s not quite carrying them. His imperfect delivery makes plenty of sense in this context, anyway: you can imagine him warbling these songs to his wife, or turning them into lullabies for his daughter. It’s a subtle cultivation of intimacy, but one that works in driving home the album's central conceit: that the love you feel for your partner, and the life and family you can choose to shape together, can be transformative. It’s hard work, and it’s not always easy, but it pays remarkable and lasting dividends. It can change your perspective and the effect you want to have on the world, and Our Love is a worthy tribute to that messy, unbelievably powerful force. | 2014-10-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-10-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Merge / City Slang | October 7, 2014 | 8.6 | 13d84c82-9ee0-431b-9a59-8538056e72d9 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | null |
On their second album and first for Sub Pop, the Canadian indie rock group pairs shaggy guitars with sardonic observations. | On their second album and first for Sub Pop, the Canadian indie rock group pairs shaggy guitars with sardonic observations. | Kiwi Jr.: Cooler Returns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kiwi-jr-cooler-returns/ | Cooler Returns | Kiwi Jr.’s Jeremy Gaudet has a gentle voice that naturally tempers his barbed observations. Over the course of the band’s second album Cooler Returns, he takes passing shots at office drones, art school students, film school rejects, cancel-culture alarmists, sports bros, people who care too much and people who care too little—really anybody who lives an unexamined or over-examined life. And yet for all the judgement in his lyrics, you never hear contempt in his voice, which carries the unflappable quippiness of Stephen Malkmus and wry astonishment of Jonathan Richman. It’s puppyish, sometimes almost tender, with a kid-brother quality that makes even his most cutting barbs land like a very gentle ribbing. If he called you out by name, you’d have a hard time thinking he really meant anything by it.
On their 2019 debut Football Money, the Canadian group made a spirited grab for some of Parquet Courts’ market share, meting out jangly hooks with the affable dependability of a SpongeBob Pez dispenser. Cooler Returns, their first for Sub Pop, maintains the exuberant tempos and party sensibility, leaving a trail of red plastic cups in its wake even as it largely subs out electric guitars with acoustic ones, accompanying them with splashes of piano, organ, and harmonica. It’s an impatient, slacker-rock imagining of a folk album, Highway 61 Revisited by way of Harlem’s Hippies.
Once again their guitars are perfectly pitched. On the country-hued “Only Here for a Haircut” (yes, a haircut song, and no, Pavement comparisons never bothered this band), some chords ring out with George Harrison glossiness while others are as shaggy and impetuous as The Clean—rarely do hi-fi and lo-fi splendors coexist so harmoniously. But if those guitars are the foundation of these songs, Gaudet’s prose is always the centerpiece. His sardonic storytelling and mocking asides stand out even more than his 12-string, whether he’s skewering the arts scene on “Undecided Voters” (“I take photos of your photos and they really move people”) or roasting the exurban lifestyle on “Highlights of 100” (“I got plans to build my house, a great big house out in the country, 16 terabytes of land with asterisk and ampersand.”)
On “Tyler,” Gaudet recalls “falling apart in the green room while you drank half the headliner’s rider.” On a Hold Steady record, that vignette might have played into the band’s sordid look behind the red curtain. It could be a Los Campesinos! lyric, too, if the narrator puked at some point, but Gaudet never goes that sour. On Cooler Returns, it’s one pithy rhyme then it’s on to the next—and there are so, so many to get through. “I am not American but I feel the beat sometimes/When I run into the screen door at the retreat trying to learn the new lines,” he huffs over the jerky post-punk of the title track.
If Kiwi Jr.’s songs fall short of some of the great slacker-rock smartasses Gaudet fashions himself after, it’s because he doesn’t always have the conviction to match his irreverent observations. Behind their aloof veneers, Jonathan Richman and Stephen Malkmus’ lyrics outline very particular sets of values and beliefs. Gaudet’s sarcasm, on the other hand, feels more like a posture than a worldview. Still, it makes for an indisputably good time, and this band wears their light touch well. What Cooler Returns lacks in heft it makes up for with unadulterated kicks.
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. | 2021-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | January 22, 2021 | 7 | 13d92bba-dc30-4bc8-ad7a-c855ca251d7f | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Backed by a killer band of Nashville musicians, the guitarist electrifies and expands his inventive blend of Southern rock and space rock. | Backed by a killer band of Nashville musicians, the guitarist electrifies and expands his inventive blend of Southern rock and space rock. | William Tyler / The Impossible Truth: Secret Stratosphere | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/william-tyler-and-the-impossible-truth-secret-stratosphere/ | Secret Stratosphere | William Tyler’s songcraft was forged in the South, but it needed space to grow, so he set his sights on the West like so many musical pioneers before him. The music of the Nashville-born, Los Angeles-based guitarist now evokes the desert vistas of the Southwest as much as the flatlands of Middle Tennessee, but there’s also a sparseness in keeping with the stretched-out landscapes and wide sky. The sense of isolation central to works like 2020’s New Vanitas and 2021’s “Frozen Shelter,” a 40-minute ambient composition that owes as much to the Caretaker as the KLF’s Chill Out, was inevitably influenced by the pandemic, and Tyler’s work has since tilted back toward collaboration. Secret Stratosphere, a new live album recorded in Huntsville, Alabama in 2021, is his first record credited to a full band, dubbed the Impossible Truth.
Each member of the band embodies a corner of the homegrown Nashville music scene that exists adjacent to—and in spite of—Music Row. Drummer Brian Kotzur is a veteran of countless bands, including Country Westerns and Silver Jews, but he’s most infamous outside the city’s limits thanks to his starring role in Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers. Bassist Jack Lawrence is a longstanding player in the Third Man extended universe, while steel guitarist Luke Schneider synthesizes Cosmic American Music and new age. The Impossible Truth moniker might be new, but the relationships here are old and effortless, and Tyler’s been collaborating with his bandmates in some capacity or another for years.
As a collective, the Impossible Truth maintains the spiritual minimalism of Tyler’s solo work while expanding the sound. Kotzur’s drums roll like thunder on the horizon on “Our Lady of the Desert,” grafting a heavy backbeat that transforms the gentle Goes West cut into an enlivened Southern rock groover. The interplay of Tyler’s looping on lead guitar maintains a post-rock ethereality, but Lawrence’s chugging bassline is beamed straight out of an Allman Brothers set. Kotzur’s steady rhythmic foundation gives “Gone Clear” from 2016’s Modern Country a new intensity, its lush and twinkling layers replaced with fuzz and sweat. The Tyler recordings that most prefigure the Impossible Truth are the full band versions “Whole New Dude” and “We Can’t Go Home Again” from 2014’s Lost Colony EP. Both are reprised here, but there’s a restless spirit and livewire energy that the studio versions couldn’t capture.
In one of the set’s most unexpected moments, the band mutates the contemplative twang of “Highway Anxiety” into an interpretation of Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity.” The distinctive electronic tone of Kraftwerk’s original is here substituted for throbbing drum and bass, while Tyler’s impressionistic guitars fill in on vocal duty. The result is similar to the spaced-out wanderings of Darkside, with a forceful beat scaffolding ethereal loops, but there’s a touch of whimsy, thanks to a sprinkle of glockenspiel. Tyler has often been credited with a kraut influence, but he disarms any pretensions after the performance: “That’s our favorite Blue Öyster Cult song!”
Tyler makes a similar crack before “Area Code 601,” the album’s finale: “We’re going to end with a kind of Hawkwind meets Charlie Daniels Band number,” an apt distillation of his current style. The song, a long-time staple of his live sets that has gone previously unreleased, is a nod to both of his homelands. 601 is the area code of Jackson, Mississippi, but the title is also a riff on Area Code 615, the instrumental supergroup of Nashville studio titans that came together in the wake of Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. Almost 50 years later, Area Code 615’s forward-thinking synthesis of down-home country and funky drum breaks is almost startling to hear. Their spirit is alive and well in Secret Stratosphere, a record that exudes the kind of off-the-cuff inventiveness and open-minded collaboration that can only come from years of fine-tuned experience. | 2023-04-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | Merge | April 26, 2023 | 7.3 | 13dde423-ca1a-490f-992b-155677e32c2e | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Many of the most enchanting and popular indie pop records of the past few years have been filed under lap-pop ... | Many of the most enchanting and popular indie pop records of the past few years have been filed under lap-pop ... | Camera Obscura: Underachievers Please Try Harder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1748-underachievers-please-try-harder/ | Underachievers Please Try Harder | Many of the most enchanting and popular indie pop records of the past few years have been filed under lap-pop/indietronica. By marrying The Field Mice's shimmering sonics with (where applicable) lovelorn lyrical impulses, those on the Morr and City Centre Offices rosters, Múm, The Postal Service, Freescha, Casino Versus Japan and Broadcast have been providing the warm hugs for the Darla set that used to be administered by post-C-86 jangle-pop. True, The Aislers Set, The Lucksmiths, and The Clientele have continued to proudly (and successfully) wave the flag for more classic melancholia, but in the first couple of years of this new millennium, too few other have bands managed to approach their charm.
However, in the past year or so, there's been a shift back toward the more traditional indie pop thanks to the slight return of Belle & Sebastian and records by Saturday Looks Good to Me, PAS/CAL, Pipas, The Happy Couple, Ballboy and, most of all, Camera Obscura. The Scottish band's second album, Underachievers Please Try Harder, captures a portion of the wispy bedsit magic that used to mark some of The Field Mice's best work and boosts it with the lush, "Hazey Jane II"-like chamber-pop of Belle & Sebastian's first flourishes of glory. (Admittedly, as a co-ed, Glaswegian sextet, B&S comparisons would have come fast and easy even if Camera Obscura hadn't once featured Richard Colburn on drums or got their foot in the door of public consciousness with a single produced by Stuart Murdoch, "Eighties Fan".)
Underachievers was released in the UK last year on Spain's Elefant Records, and now Merge spreads the word in the U.S. and adds B-sides "I Don't Want to See You" and "Footloose and Fancyfree". Ignoring the infantilism of some of the more twee indie pop, Camera Obscura scold immature relationship decisions on "Teenager", offer tender advice on "A Sister's Social Agony", and go on the make on "Suspended from Class". Their honest, wide, and adult approach to heartbreak, romantic liaisons, and escapism is extended to the subtle range of influence-- most of which is shown off on the tracks sung by John Henderson. "Before You Cry" is a graceful nod to Nashville, "Your Picture" is a dead ringer for Leonard Cohen, and Motown stomper "Let Me Go Home" is the best of their soul boy all-nighters.
Camera Obscura keep their cards closer to their indie pop chest when Tracyanne Campbell is alone on the mic, and, despite the success of the aforementioned tracks, are all the better for it. "A Sister's Social Agony" apes the gentle harmonies and chimes of sibling-led vocal groups Four Freshman and The Beach Boys-- an appropriate and sly arrangement for the subject matter. Best of all are the gentle, luminous "Suspended from Class" and "Books Written for Girls", each of which feature self-deprecating lyrics, tender arrangements, and a lifeline for heart-on-sleeve acoustic pop. | 2004-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2004-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | January 20, 2004 | 8 | 13dea941-020e-4451-9c76-eadc7c8c7ec7 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
The magnetic Jeff Rosenstock stays fully armed with his power-pop anthems, as full of indomitable hooks as they are of paralyzing doubt and cynicism. | The magnetic Jeff Rosenstock stays fully armed with his power-pop anthems, as full of indomitable hooks as they are of paralyzing doubt and cynicism. | Jeff Rosenstock: POST- | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-rosenstock-post-/ | POST- | Many artists spent the past year trying to make sense of our toxic sociopolitical landscape, but few did a better job than a guy whose album dropped several weeks before the 2016 presidential election. The results of November 8 may have hit like an isolated, cataclysmic incident, but it increasingly appears to be the logical endpoint of the American experiment, caused by and resulting in economic and cultural panic which Jeff Rosenstock’s breakthrough solo album WORRY. tackled with righteous, frenzied eloquence. To paraphrase “Wave Goodnight To Me,” when it all came into focus—insistent police brutality, urban displacement, the bursting of the music festival bubble, Reddit’s sociopathic influence—Rosenstock was ready for it, the rare artist who managed to be both prescient and timely in 2017.
WORRY. itself was an unexpected culmination of a more encouraging decades-long process, an undersung, anti-commercial punk lifer making the record of his career and getting frighteningly close to mainstream acceptance while everyone played catch up. Hours after a cathartic, drunken New Year’s Eve show in Philly, Rosenstock surprise-released his third solo album POST-., which asks the $7500 question: Can Rosenstock’s musical and political passion withstand expectations now that the inconceivable is his new normal?
Rosenstock toured WORRY. relentlessly from the moment it dropped and he hasn’t lost his ability to read the room. "USA" announces his presence: “Dumbfounded, downtrodden and dejected/Crestfallen, grief-stricken and exhausted/Trapped in my room while the house burned down to the motherfuckin’ ground.” Later, while collapsing hungover into a dream-pop breakdown, he rallies a crowd to sing in unison: “We’re tired and bored.”
“USA” is a moment that could be found on Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor—a seven-minute us-against-them salvo that sees the Civil War as unprocessed national trauma, continuing and ever-evolving along culture and race lines. He’s seeing them everywhere; not just the burnouts at Midwestern gas stations that are exoticized in Red State safaris, but the patriarch of a suburban family in a crossover SUV. “I won’t hate you, I just need to know/Please be honest/Tell me was it you?” he begs, demanding to find out who exactly betrayed America and put people in power whose entire platform runs on political shitposting meant to do little except expedite the death of the disadvantaged. It all builds to a cheerleading chorus of “Et tu, USA!”, but it really sounds like “F U/USA,” already the frontrunner for the most fortuitous misheard lyric of 2018.
As an outright call to arms, “USA” is an outlier on POST-. True to its title, it takes stock of what happens after the shock subsides and a more unsettling fear arises—a world where a steady refrigerator-buzz of dull outrage becomes our emotional baseline. “Yr Throat” and “Powerlessness” touch on how invigorating it felt to finally be heard, the moments of genuine hope in seeing us finding common ground. But those songs are only briefly about hope; they’re mostly stewed in the pervasive, underlying doubt about whether any of it is sustainable or whether America is worth saving in the first place—and whether even bringing these doubts up makes you a cynic or an asshole.
“I called it positivity and congratulated myself on a job well done/But after a couple of days the fire that I thought would burn it down was gone,” he sings on “Powerlessness,” a painfully relatable self-flagellation. How much can one give of themselves before it becomes necessary to fall back on the things that bring you mindless joy? Is it so wrong to lose yourself in “first-person shooter games/Guitar tones, ELO arrangements/The differences in an MP3 and a vinyl record that you can hear”? GUILT might have been the more appropriate title for this record, as it’s often the byproduct of acting on worry and fear.
The darker, more introspective POST- inverts the festival-core unity of WORRY. with accounts of lovelorn sadsacks trying to pull themselves out of the quicksand of self-pity by leaning forward and staring at their navel. “TV Stars” and “9/10” continue to tease out the musical theatre that’s underpinned Rosenstock’s best work, Broadway pop-rock ballads that find an unforeseeable midpoint between Ted Leo and Billy Joel. But the brief victories that propel the day forward—finding lost keys, minor lotto winnings—get sucked down a void of crippling distractions, staring at the news trying to stay awake and, later, getting stoned and staring at sitcoms trying to go to sleep. “Melba” is the closest thing we get to an unequivocally happy song, and it’s only because a dream of starting over in Australia is sufficient enough to get through a shit day.
No one needs Jeff Rosenstock to tell us “it's just like Black Mirror, innit?” in 2018, but POST- never lets its righteous anger or exhaustion come at the expense of empathy and melody. Even when “Beating My Head Against a Wall” is the only way Rosenstock can resist giving an opponent a Richard Spencer, we get a brilliantly primitive Ramones homage out of the exchange. Whereas any praise of WORRY. likely mandated a retelling of his backstory as an ethical compass and consummate defender of punk’s least credible subgenres, POST- is a confirmation of Rosenstock as one of punk rock’s greatest, most effusive living songwriters. It’s his most easily accessible work yet. Compared to the genre-spanning opus of WORRY., POST- is immediate, raw, and yet more open to interpretation. It’s almost a throwback to his former band Bomb the Music Industry!’s chug-and-point Long Island shout-alongs without the whiz-bang synth effects. While the subject matter of POST- ensures its relevance and substance, much like everything else Rosenstock has ever done, it also sounds like the most fun thing one could possibly do. It’s a motivation to, at the very least, get out of bed.
To hear Rosenstock tell it, we’re all gonna need it. Which brings us to closer “Let Them Win,” a preposterous 11-minute saga. In light of what came before, had it been presented with the same triumphant resilience of WORRY.’s grand finale “Perfect Sound Whatever,” “Let Them Win” could’ve come off as cheap pandering or sloganeering. Instead, Rosenstock’s band stumbles and trudges, a callback to the punchdrunk chants of “USA”—they’ve felt tired and bored and disillusioned and now, dear lord, we are exhausted. But with every bit of depleted energy Rosenstock and friends can muster, they swear there’s absolutely no way we’re gonna let them win again and concludes with five minutes of synthesizer drone. POST- could not have ended on a more appropriate note than one of sustain—whether or not Rosenstock’s prophecies once again come to pass in 2018, for now this is the sound of a cautiously optimistic new year. | 2018-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Quote Unquote / Polyvinyl | January 5, 2018 | 8.2 | 13e4c38b-4800-4326-bba3-c33e92263a2d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Now down to a quartet, the group’s latest album falls short of the kind of stellar pop songwriting the UK girl group once possessed. | Now down to a quartet, the group’s latest album falls short of the kind of stellar pop songwriting the UK girl group once possessed. | Fifth Harmony: Fifth Harmony | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fifth-harmony-fifth-harmony/ | Fifth Harmony | Fifth Harmony, the group’s third studio album, opens with “Down,” a song that sports practically the same perfect hook from their 2016 hit “Work From Home.” Only this time, there is absolutely nothing supporting the song other than the same pseudo-tropical keyboard line that has been plaguing Spotify Daily Mix for the past five years. “Down” is briefly salvaged in the middle eight by a strangely complementary Gucci Mane, whose bare-bones verse is underlaid with crunchy, distorted bass. Fifth Harmony acrimoniously lost a popular member, Camila Cabello, last year, and the group has a lot to prove with this album—beginning with an ersatz facsimile of your last hit single truly does not bode well.
Let’s zoom out: During a recent stint on “Celebrity Big Brother,” former Girls Aloud member Sarah Harding drew serious ire for dismissing Fifth Harmony, probably the world’s most prevalent girl group, as “slutty,” criticizing them for their sexualized stage outfits and video choreography. In response, Fifth Harmony’s Dinah Jane threw out a swift Mariah-Carey-“I-Don’t-Know-Her,” and ex-Girls Aloud member Nicola Roberts took to Instagram to call out Harding’s poor judgement. It was petty tabloid drama, and Harding’s comments were completely reprehensible, but the whole debacle illustrated an interesting point in the history of girl groups in general. Both Girls Aloud and Fifth Harmony were born from reality TV competitions (the former on “Popstars: The Rivals” in 2002 and the latter on “The X Factor” in 2012), and during that decade, what the public looks for from a pop group has changed dramatically.
At the turn of the 21st-century, access to pop stars was limited to things like fan clubs and TV appearances, with the traditional music industry serving as a stringent gatekeeper to that content. Now, there really isn’t a way to reach tweens—forever the pop star's bread and butter—without social media and massive online appeal. It’s in this realm that Fifth Harmony have flourished internationally in a way that old-school, second-tier groups like Girls Aloud never could. Between the four of them, the members of Fifth Harmony have almost 15 million Instagram followers, and even their two most famous songs, 2015’s “Worth It” and last year’s absolutely ubiquitous “Work From Home” have taken on a life of their own online, in the form of ridiculous, brilliant memes.
The downside to a social-media-driven public profile is that your music can’t help but seem secondary when it is so crucial to actively promote the music’s image and brand. And listen, image and brand have always has been a hugely important aspect of pop music, and some of the most iconic moments in pop history have come from fashion and style. But in the early ’00s, the girl group (and boy band) market was fiercely competitive—coming off the glory years of TLC, Destiny’s Child, *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, and countless others, there was just no room for boring tunes. Today, the only other girl group to match Fifth Harmony’s popularity is Britain’s Little Mix, and even they have cornered the market on middle-school sleepover pop while FH strive for something more adult. But ultimately, on their third, self-titled album, Fifth Harmony have fallen short of just about every conceivable metric other than Billboard streaming chart positions and YouTube views.
Even with “Down,” they even fail to reach their own standards for what makes a pop hit. That song is as good as it gets on Fifth Harmony, with the exception of little moments here and there that hint at something as immediately likable as their past successes. “He Like That” uses a sleepy, slowed-down surf guitar to sweep the group into a sensual groove, but lyrics like “Pumps and a bump/Pumps and a bump/He likes the girls with the pumps and a bump,” convey playground fumbles rather than the raw sexuality they were clearly going for. “Angel,” a mid-tempo R&B jam that uses trap-like percussion to its advantage, repeatedly asks the question: “Who said I was an angel?” Well, no one did, most notably yourselves, who frankly haven’t said much of anything this entire time.
Fifth Harmony isn’t offensively bad, in fact, it sits quite comfortably with many other acts dominating the charts at the moment. But it’s too safe, too by-the-numbers, too beige to stand up to even Fifth Harmony’s previous work, which carried more lyrical and musical heft. At just 33 minutes, so much feels like filler greater ideas of the past and future. The real shame here is that, in the midst of a worldwide girl group slump (except for Asia, where J-pop and K-pop groups still reign supreme), Fifth Harmony could actually build something worth celebrating, even if it’s just for the teens who make up their core fanbase. Say what you will about One Direction, but they went from “X Factor” also-rans to some of the most successful pop acts around, at a time when the mere concept of a boy band was laughable. From the 1960s onwards, girl groups have tackled themes of love, heartache, betrayal, and independence just as potently as the most obscure and ardent singer-songwriter or rock god, and it’s a shame that Fifth Harmony represents such a lackluster marker in that history. | 2017-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | September 8, 2017 | 5.3 | 13ea36a7-b5a3-44d0-b982-33591f7d2ace | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
In 1995, the indie rock trio lurched headlong into its own sound. Now, newly reissued on vinyl, the pop-focused and densely referential Electr-O-Pura remains a monument in the band’s vast catalog. | In 1995, the indie rock trio lurched headlong into its own sound. Now, newly reissued on vinyl, the pop-focused and densely referential Electr-O-Pura remains a monument in the band’s vast catalog. | Yo La Tengo: Electr-O-Pura | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yo-la-tengo-electr-o-pura/ | Electr-O-Pura | In the fall of 1994, Yo La Tengo spent three nights opening for Johnny Cash, then at the cusp of a resurgence with his Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings. The Hoboken, New Jersey trio have been characteristically self-deprecating about the experience: Guitarist Ira Kaplan—who shares vocal duties with his wife, drummer Georgia Hubley, and the bassist, James McNew—remembers accidentally insulting the audience, who were none too taken with the band’s understated noise-pop. A star-struck McNew, spotting Johnny and June Cash Carter at the side of the stage, almost dropped his instrument mid-song.
“Everything’s gotta be rebooted these days,” Kaplan said from his and Hubley’s home in a recent retrospective, discussing a 25-year-old music video that enacts a similar juxtaposition. Directed by Yo La Tengo’s then-roadie Phil Morrison, who went on to helm the breakout 2005 indie movie Junebug, the 1995 clip for “Tom Courtenay” imagines the band being asked to open for a fantastical reunion of the Beatles. It’s no spoiler to say that the gig doesn’t quite pan out as hoped. The song and the video are each funny and heartfelt, referential and personal, grandiose and unassuming. Both tell you a lot about who Yo La Tengo are, and where they were as the ’90s alt-rock boom fizzled.
Electr-o-pura, currently being given a reboot of sorts by longtime label Matador, occupies a place in Yo La Tengo’s discography that was rarefied before and seems almost impossible now. Released in May 1995, about 11 years after the band formed, Electr-o-pura was their seventh album. So it was a long time coming, maybe unthinkably long, given their modest popularity, in this era of streaming’s short-attention-span economies of scale. But Electr-o-pura was also the second in a nearly impeccable four-album run that began with 1993’s noise-pop gauntlet Painful, peaked with 1997’s expansively intimate I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, and then slipped away into the moonlit hush of 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. And it still sounds low-key monumental, like the work of a group that might share a bill at the Mercury Lounge with a reanimated Fab Four.
Unlike the albums immediately before and after it, Electr-o-pura doesn’t represent a gigantic leap, just a great band lurching headlong into its own. It was Yo La Tengo’s second album on the upstart label Matador, and second album with producer Roger Moutenot, who would go on to oversee all of the group’s following albums until 2013’s Fade. And it was their second album with the official membership of McNew, who’d originally stepped in to stop a revolving door of temporary bassists on 1992’s inchoate May I Sing With Me. Emboldened by all this familiarity, the band tore into their emerging signature style—woozy folk-pop ballads, feedback-streaked guitar jams, organ swells, plenty of ba-ba-bas—with shrugging audacity. Fittingly, it’s the first Yo La Tengo album with all three members identified as co-songwriters.
“Tom Courtenay,” again, illustrates why Electr-o-pura and Yo La Tengo have stood the test of time. At the most superficial level, this beloved live-show staple is one of the band’s uptempo fuzz-pop songs, like Painful’s “From a Motel 6” or I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One’s “Sugarcube,” and probably their catchiest. The name-dropping of British Invasion-era movie stars also fits into the concept of this band of dedicated fans (Kaplan, as is often noted, was formerly a music critic for New York Rocker and Village Voice) cosplaying their way into the big show. Most importantly, though, Kaplan himself didn’t actually know much about these old movies—Hubley, the daughter of two professional animators, was the film obsessive. “It was another way of writing about and to Georgia,” Kaplan has said. This was a private world for two. Opened up to an audience, the couple’s shared secrets and inside jokes could signal not exclusivity, but personal connection, ultimately fostering a community of fellow fans.
The rest of Electr-o-pura doesn’t always stick in your head as quickly, but it’s often as rewarding. The opening “Decora,” where Hubley begins with a nonchalant murmur of, “I see you crawling across the floor,” picks up from the flickering dream-pop of Painful; the way that Hubley bends syllables and moans the title phrase on the chorus recalls My Bloody Valentine’s wavy “glide guitar” technique. “It’s not the first time you’ll take a fall,” Hubley warns, memorably adding, “Act like you’ve never seen double before.” The closing “Blue Line Swinger,” also sung by Hubley, is one of Yo La Tengo’s very best songs. No strangers to lengthy instrumental passages, here they stretch out for nine-plus drum-heavy minutes of whammy-bar mangling and organ rushes, as Hubley seems to address a lover gnawed by depression and self-doubt. “Out of the darkness you will come around,” she assures, “and I’ll find you there.” The song is proof. It’s indie rock at its most epically beautiful.
In between, the songs engage in a dialogue with other music that’s like an intimate conversation by other means. After “Tom Courtenay” fades out, “False Ending” fades in, with a raucous clamor akin to the infamous “I buried Paul” section tacked on as the fake-out conclusion of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” A couple of tracks later, though, “Paul Is Dead” recalls not so much the Beatles as the subway strut of the Velvet Underground and the sunshine harmonies of the Beach Boys, while Kaplan deadpans about a guy who’s singing along to the Rolling Stones song blasting in his headphones (“Sympathy for the Devil,” judging by the “woo, woo!”). The second verse shifts dramatically toward the personal, as Kaplan describes a drunken first meeting that grows into something more, then recognizes the impossibility of ever fully understanding another human being, even those we know best. “I try not to hide what is true,” Kaplan sings, and it’s like an artist’s statement.
The lessons from cult records could also be used to convey behind-closed-doors desires. A year after Electr-o-pura, Yo La Tengo appeared, as the Velvet Underground, in the film I Shot Andy Warhol (they have self-deprecating stories about that, too). On “My Heart’s Reflection,” simmering with barely suppressed tension, Kaplan repurposes the central conceit of “I’ll Be Your Mirror” as he suggests, with disarming vulnerability, that he and a lover dress up as each other, locking the room and throwing away the key. There’s even a thrill of danger in his voice as he blurts, “Let’s jump the ship/Let’s cut out.” Why not? The best reason for being intensely protective about privacy is to enjoy it.
A similar tinge of downtown disquiet runs through the guitar workout of “Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1)” and the clanging, organ-blasted “False Alarm” . But there’s self-aware humor, too. The former is the first of two songs on the album, that pun simultaneously on Flying Burrito Brothers song titles and the prime culinary offering of Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack in Nashville, where Yo La Tengo were recording for the first time. On “False Alarm,” Kaplan refers to McNew by name and mentions the title of a song tucked away deeper on the album, “(Straight Down to the) Bitter End.” That one is Hubley-led fuzz-pop, a caustic character study that features the evocative line, “The stars that shine but don’t belong to you.” Yo La Tengo shone while walking among us.
In the video looking back at “Tom Courtenay,” Kaplan, who is wearing a black band T-shirt, jokes about how he still dresses the same all these years later. Yo La Tengo’s vision of a welcoming, everyday bohemianism has gone in and out of fashion, but it was never exactly trendy. Electr-o-pura attracted the group’s normal glowing reviews, but it sold less than Painful. Yo La Tengo wouldn’t crack the Billboard 200 album charts until the 2000s. Back then, they were just moderately successful enough to lose to Pavement at ping-pong on the Lollapalooza tour, headlined by Hole and Sonic Youth. While the beverage museum that prompted the album’s title (Electropura was a brand of purified water) was eventually donated to Goodwill), Yo La Tengo have continued to put out several mostly strong albums, along with film scores and other instrumentals. If the pre-reboot High Fidelity, originally published the same year as Electr-o-pura’s release, exhibited toxic masculinity and the misbegotten belief that what you like matters more than what you are like, Yo La Tengo offer the possibility of a more coequal relationship between romantic partners—and one where what you like matters because you, generally, like each other.
For this reissue—part of Matador’s Revisionist History series, which also includes Mary Timony’s Mountains, Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, and Guided By Voices’ Alien Lanes—Yo La Tengo labelmate Lucy Dacus reminisced fondly about discovering Electr-o-pura, with its CD packaging that intentionally messed up the track times (purportedly because reviewers kept singling out the longest songs on the band’s albums as the worst!). Dacus’ stark “Tom Courtenay” cover brings to mind Yo La Tengo’s acoustic, Hubley-led rendition from a 1995 B-side, which sounds like Camera Obscura and might be better than the album version. The reissue rightfully concentrates on the proper LP only, now pressed for the first time across two vinyl records. But part of the Yo La Tengo experience, driven home in their free-wheeling concerts, is the notion that their songs are never finished. Electr-o-pura lives up to that standard, whether in alternate takes or subsequent re-recordings.
The song on Electr-o-pura with the most quintessentially Yo La Tengo-esque story is the serene ballad “The Hour Grows Late.” A whispery Kaplan paints a scene not too distant from some that Yo La Tengo must’ve experienced in their earlier years. A musician packs up his drum machine and, gradually, his guitar, peeking out at empty seats, clock ticking. Kaplan sings that he wants to send this song out to someone called Richie Van “in his thrift store corner of the world.” It’s a nod toward an amazingly obscure singer, whose equally obscure record—a thrift-store score for Kaplan—inspired Yo La Tengo to cover the future Gilmore Girls soundtrack highlight “My Little Corner of the World” a couple of years later. On Electr-o-pura, Yo La Tengo were poised in between finding themselves and going their own way, and the end result is still exhilarating. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings-era audiences may have been irritated, but after Electr-o-pura hit shelves, Yo La Tengo started covering Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band” during encores. They’d learned from the best, and they knew that even though they might only be a triumvirate of hapless Richie Vans, they belonged on the same stages.
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. | 2020-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | September 14, 2020 | 9.1 | 13eb1784-3a51-4c44-bf9d-c8f55a9ee28d | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Strong melodies and actual songs always lurked deep inside-- or perhaps underneath-- the music of Liz Harris' Grouper, but you had to work to hear them underneath layers of sonic muck; here, she strips away much of the effects-laden gauze and the result is an arresting album of pastoral psychedelic pop. | Strong melodies and actual songs always lurked deep inside-- or perhaps underneath-- the music of Liz Harris' Grouper, but you had to work to hear them underneath layers of sonic muck; here, she strips away much of the effects-laden gauze and the result is an arresting album of pastoral psychedelic pop. | Grouper: Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12119-dragging-a-dead-deer-up-a-hill/ | Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill | Liz Harris, who does business as Grouper, strips away much of the effects-laden gauze of her earlier work on this, her third proper album. Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill is ethereal and hazy, but never overly so. Two songs reference sleep in their titles, three water. Some strong-ass melodies and actual songs always lurked deep inside-- or perhaps underneath-- Grouper's music, but you had to work to hear them underneath layers of sonic muck. Here, those elements are more prominent, and there's something simple and beautiful but also a little bit obscure going on. Laconically strummed acoustic guitars and gently plunked pianos serve as the primary instruments, abetted by ambient washes and echo boxes (which this time are not all set to 11).
Released earlier this year, the record has already been compared to classic releases from the British label 4AD, especially their flagship act the Cocteau Twins. This makes sense in that both have subdued, minor-key melodies. And both feature whispery-voiced female singers whose words are tough to pick out. Beyond that, though, it's about as exact as comparing KISS to the Ramones-- both those bands were loud and made records in the mid-1970s and had lead singers who were dudes, but that's about it. This remarkable album is actually what I personally always wanted 4AD records to sound like, only they never quite delivered the hazy pleasures their beautiful sleeve art promised (with the exception of Kurt Ralske's rock band Ultra Vivid Scene). Dead Deer is druggy and sexy and arty and pretty, but never pretentious.
Others have made similarly reverb-drenched, pastoral psychedelic pop before. In terms of contemporary musicians, the work of the Portland, Ore.-based compatriots Eva Saelens (aka Inca Ore), Charalambides co-founder Christina Carter, and Honey Owens (aka Valet) might spring to mind. Inca Ore's music is far heavier and murkier, however. And Christina Carter is more firmly working within a psych-folk idiom, while Valet is much more on a bluesy, guitar-based trip. Let someone else criticize me for making my own inexact comparisons to sounds of yore: A handful of these songs bring to mind the criminally forgotten records that Lida Husik recorded for Shimmy Disc in the early 90s. On "When We Fall" and "Invisible", Harris sounds like Vashti Bunyan singing in an echoey hallway. Others bear some resemblance to the band Clay Allison (who later became Opal and, in a different configuration, Mazzy Star) ca. their 1984 Fell From the Sun EP. And "Traveling Through a Sea" recalls the work of the always echo-friendly New York-based singer-songwriter Azalia Snail.
I had the best experience playing this album on a long drive the other week. It's easy to apply whatever music you're listening at any given moment to your surroundings; when the music plays and you're by yourself, you can imagine it as the soundtrack to the imaginary movie you star in. Anyway, here I was driving in the morning past farmland north of Eugene, Ore. This would not be the most fascinating movie, OK. But I kept seeing these small dirt storms form out in the unplowed fields to the left while the lovely "Fishing Bird (Empty Gutted In The Evening Breeze)" played on repeat. I'm not sure this album is the perfect road trip music for everyone-- I'd certainly caution against playing it late at night when you're already sleepy, or operating other heavy machinery as it plays-- but since these songs seem to appear and then vanish into the air, the mini-tornadoes gathering themselves together lazily out of the wind and the dirt seemed the ideal, hypnotizing accompaniment. | 2008-08-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2008-08-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Type | August 25, 2008 | 8.2 | 13ebc0cd-9c2a-4ae2-9ac3-72fdee9da214 | Mike McGonigal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-mcgonigal/ | null |
Though their 1994 album became most famous for a surprise hit remix, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt’s spare, pensive style never sounded more fully realized than here. | Though their 1994 album became most famous for a surprise hit remix, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt’s spare, pensive style never sounded more fully realized than here. | Everything But the Girl: Amplified Heart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/everything-but-the-girl-amplified-heart/ | Amplified Heart | A phoenix rising from the ashes. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Pick a cliché we use to talk about resilience, and it can probably be applied to Everything But the Girl. The British duo’s career appeared dead in the water when Todd Terry’s club remix of “Missing,” the lead single from their 1994 album Amplified Heart, swept across American dancefloors, eventually carrying the song to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100—their first U.S. top 10 single—and paving the way for their reinvention as trip-hop/drum’n’bass fusionists on 1996’s Walking Wounded, the most successful album of their career. No one expected Terry’s remix to take off the way it did—certainly not Everything But the Girl’s UK label, Blanco y Negro, which had summarily dropped them a few months before.
Today, it’s ironic to think that the duo’s biggest hit was right around the corner, and some suit just couldn’t hear it. But at the time, Everything But the Girl had been twisting in the wind for a while, and perhaps it’s understandable that major-label A&Rs didn’t see the record’s potential, couldn’t fathom that pop music’s pendulum was finally swinging back toward the duo’s spare, pensive style, which never sounded more fully realized than on Amplified Heart.
If Walking Wounded is remembered as Everything But the Girl’s miraculous, odds-beating comeback, Amplified Heart represents the first time they got a second chance. Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt had been making music together, their creative partnership inextricable from their romantic one, since 1982. Not only had they outlasted virtually all of their post-punk contemporaries, but they’d put out six albums and traversed nearly as many musical styles: bossa nova, jazz, jangle pop, orchestral soul-pop, adult contemporary. By the time they released 1991’s Worldwide, a too-smooth-for-its-own-good record that was met with total indifference, they were running on fumes. “In many ways it was absolutely invisible,” Thorn wrote of the album (not “a dreadful record, just a not-good-enough record”) in her memoir Bedsit Disco Queen. They were an ’80s band with ’70s ideals, and the wan Worldwide suggested they just weren’t made for the new decade.
Worldwide came out in September 1991; a few months later, Watt’s health mysteriously began worsening. He was hospitalized for weeks, wasting away; doctors scratched their heads. Finally, they put him in a coma, opened him up, and discovered a rare disease, Churg-Strauss syndrome, ravaging his insides. Several times, he almost died. It’s not hard to detect signs of the experience carved into Amplified Heart. Written and recorded in the year following Watt’s recovery, the album presents a rare mix of austerity and optimism, fragility and determination.
The very first notes of “Rollercoaster” signal a newfound sense of purpose: There’s an unusual eloquence to the call-and-response interplay between double bass and synth that opens the song. It’s not only a matter of tasteful restraint; Thorn and Watt had done that plenty of times before. Here, the way the two sounds twine around each other, gliding fretwork mirrored by the synthesizer’s G-funk legato, feels as perfect an expression of two lovers’ self-sufficiency as anything in their catalog.
Across the record, virtually all of the fluff of their previous album—twinkling digital keys, flugelhorn and soprano-sax solos, reverb plusher than the seats of a luxury SUV—has been banished. The duo’s newfound minimalism came in part from Massive Attack, who, in the summer of 1993, had sent Thorn a cassette of demos for their second album and asked her to sing on them. But where the resulting “Protection” was foggy, skunky, stoned, Everything But the Girl’s approach to reduction sparkles. Pared down to guitar, standup bass, drum kit, and the occasional programmed beat, Amplified Heart champions the virtues of economy without sacrificing any of the group’s habitual luster. There are few elements in play, but every one sounds like a million bucks. And by rubbing away the generic sheen of high-end production that smothered Worldwide, the duo’s music breathes anew.
So do their lyrics. (On earlier albums, Watt had let his partner handle the bulk of lyric writing; here, each contributed five songs.) Though Thorn had long excelled at nostalgic snapshots and finely drawn character studies, Amplified Heart moves in the opposite direction, boiling down universal sentiments—loneliness, longing, confusion—into simple, indelible images. A turbulent love rolls like a freight train through someone’s life; a depressed woman eats her meals in bed, watching Saturday-morning cartoons with the sound turned down.
Only a fool would try to map the inner life of this most private of couples onto their lyrics (for years, interviewers tried, and failed, to understand their domestic dynamic), but Amplified Heart excels at giving voice to the inevitable frustration of any long-term relationship—particularly the occasional, nagging doubt that you can never really know your partner. “Even though I share your bed/Baby, I don’t get inside your head,” Thorn laments on “I Don’t Understand Anything,” and a few songs later she pleads, “Do you ever get me?”—her voice catching on “get,” clicking like a key unlocking an empty room. Balancing out the doubt is “We Walk the Same Line,” a deceptively chipper song about hanging in for the long haul that’s built upon memories of Watt’s hospital ordeal. The two had been through hell, and though they were loath to reveal too much, they were happy to drop artful clues. (In “I Don’t Understand Anything,” Thorn even hinted at a frustrated desire to have children—terrain she finally revisited on her 2018 song “Babies.”)
The album’s first side is the stronger, with a stellar three-song opening run (“Rollercoaster,” “Troubled Mind,” and “I Don’t Understand Anything”), a charming (if slightly cloying) he-said/she-said duet (“Walking to You”), and, finally, “Get Me,” an understated love song flecked with the faintest trace of house music. But the second half’s few failings—namely the jump from the maudlin “Two Star” to the perky “We Walk the Same Line”—are more than compensated for by “Missing.”
What, 25 years later, is left to say about “Missing”? For a song that has largely been eclipsed by its most famous remix—and Todd Terry’s rework is a masterpiece—the original stands out in part for its quirks. The time-keeping cowbell is louder than you might have remembered it, and at first seems almost out of place; the first few notes of the bassline are dead ringers for the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.” Almost immediately, though, Thorn draws you into one of her typically detailed vignettes, as the song’s narrator steps off the train and stands beneath the window of a lover from years ago, long gone, maybe dead. The song’s chorus—“And I miss you/Like the deserts miss the rain”—shouldn’t work; on paper, it’s just a hair too much. But singing it, their voices twinned in close harmony, they sell it. Thorn’s voice, in particular, is the very incarnation of yearning. At regular intervals, an eerie, synthetic siren sound—a key element of the remix that gets its start in the original—drives home the hurt. In the face of such emotion, any corniness in the metaphor falls away. Of course it’s a desert, it had to have been rain—these things are elemental, fundamental, and so is the feeling the song captures.
Far beyond the impact of Todd Terry’s remix, the sound of “Missing,” and that of Amplified Heart in general, has resonated widely. Its careful strain of folktronica set the precedent for Beth Orton’s Trailer Park two years later, and then a whole raft of tuneful, trip-hop-adjacent sounds. Fifteen years after the album’s release, its gauzy mix of guitars and drums resurfaced on the xx’s debut album. And Everything But the Girl themselves turned out to have the world ahead of them: two more albums as a duo, three children, parallel solo careers, and several acclaimed memoirs. The narrative around them is of a group rescued from the brink; it’s one of pop music’s great comeback stories. But the genius of Amplified Heart is that none of that was foreordained. Here, all you can hear is relief at being alive, and the hunger to hang on a little longer.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commision from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Buzzin’ Fly / Chrysalis | July 16, 2019 | 8.6 | 13f4d5ae-6673-4d59-9b36-2aca6ef9a21f | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
This live album is culled from a show late in David’s Bowie’s 1974 tour. It’s heavy on material from Diamond Dogs and Aladdin Sane and finds a drug-addled Bowie in a moment of transition. | This live album is culled from a show late in David’s Bowie’s 1974 tour. It’s heavy on material from Diamond Dogs and Aladdin Sane and finds a drug-addled Bowie in a moment of transition. | David Bowie: Cracked Actor (Live Los Angeles ’74) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-bowie-cracked-actor-live-los-angeles-74/ | Cracked Actor (Live Los Angeles ’74) | The 1975 BBC documentary Cracked Actor captured David Bowie at his lowest point, hollowed out so exquisitely by drugs that you wince to look. Riding a limo through the California desert, he mouths Aretha Franklin’s’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” like someone half-starved: a dark speck adrift in a blank landscape. “Since you’ve been in America,” the director Alan Yentob ventures, “you seem to have picked up a lot of the idioms and themes of American music, American culture. How’s that happened?” Bowie peers down at the carton of milk he’s been drinking from, and mentions the fly floating around there—a “foreign body,” just like him, gorging on the scenery.
Cracked Actor documents the Diamond Dogs tour, which posed glam rock’s dying form in angles of severe decadence. Bowie spent millions of dollars on the sets, among them a nightmarish cityscape and glass-walled “asylum.” He sashayed along moving catwalks; he sang “Time” sitting cross-legged in the palm of a giant hand. Psychedelic Dietrich. The cocaine mania is still visible: such brittle abandon, so many fleetingly brilliant ideas. “Cracked Actor” the song, one of Bowie’s cruelest lyrics, describes a former movie star sniping at his prettier hirelings: “Forget that I’m fifty, ‘cause you just got paid.” On the Diamond Dogs tour, Bowie reduced this exchange to abstraction. He would do “Cracked Actor” wearing shades and holding a skull, eventually making out with the prop.
It was one of the only times Bowie seemed uncertain about his next self. Midway through his scheduled 1974 dates, he dumped the elaborate theatre (imagine those dystopian facades rusting in the sun) and rebranded as the Soul Tour. Bowie’s first live album, David Live, was taken from that first half of the tour, but the recording process went badly wrong, forcing various players to overdub their parts in the studio; its final mix muffles all but the flimsiest noise. A damp jog would feel more intense than this “Suffragette City.” Bowie even grew to hate the cover, where he looks barely capable of holding up a microphone—he later joked that David Live should’ve been called David Bowie Is Alive and Well and Living Only in Theory. With the new live album Cracked Actor, produced by Tony Visconti, Bowie’s longest-running collaborator tries to reconstruct that time, a moment of grand ambivalence.
Cracked Actor the album and Cracked Actor the film draw on the same recordings, as if each were miming shadow puppets against a common light. Fans have bootlegged the show for almost three decades now—anyone could make this material sound better than David Live. Hearing drums here distinct from murk, you can tell how complex the rhythm of “1984” was, its groove swerving in circles to welcome every new element. Bowie spent the mid-‘70s obsessed with power, wielding it through deeper and deeper timbre, until his seductions seemed purged of emotion: a ballad sung by a vampire. Cracked Actor shows he was already using his phrasing to command attention. “Moonage Daydream” finds him slinking around like some cabaret diva, his voice alternately a pout, a gasp, and a broken squeal. “The Jean Genie” begins with Bowie at a diffident snarl, sliding lyrics along the lone guitar as it trembles in response. He sings the line about underwear, and the crowd whistles.
The few Cracked Actor tracks considered for 1975’s Young Americans got cut from the final release, but it could be a premonition of that album. Bowie had changed his band mid-tour trying to approximate R&B, adding extra backup singers and the endlessly nimble guitarist Carlos Alomar. The bulk of the setlist draws on his last two glam-era records, neither of which were terribly coherent to begin with: Diamond Dogs especially resembles a paranoid collage, thrown together from disparate sources, including a 1984 musical vetoed by Orwell’s estate (rather too perfect given the author’s contempt towards “fashionable pansies.”) That allows the musicians to insert funk riffs or piano flourishes at will. Horn parts first recorded with blown-out, raucous production swoon and beguile. He always did hire the best. Bowie studied genres like captivating faces—the most devoted mimic a girl could hope for.
“John, I’m Only Dancing (Again)” was such a strange gambit in 1974 that it only got released five years later, when every white anglo wanted to record disco singles. Closing out Cracked Actor, the song might be heard as a knowing joke, the parable of the horny bisexual: “If he gives it to you/He'd better take it from me.” In Alan Yentob’s documentary, Bowie sings it to no one and everyone, flicking his hair around. But that groove just keeps going, swiveling towards infinity, as backing vocals collapse his denials into a single word: “I’m dancing, dancing, dancing…”. The mask has splintered; the smile is helpless with yearning. | 2017-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Parlophone | June 29, 2017 | 8 | 1403b14e-1b22-4cc6-9707-dd67eebb6def | Chris Randle | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-randle/ | null |
Engaging with a Terre Thaemlitz record is a commitment. Though he started making ambient house records in the early 90s ... | Engaging with a Terre Thaemlitz record is a commitment. Though he started making ambient house records in the early 90s ... | Terre Thaemlitz: Lovebomb | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8237-lovebomb/ | Lovebomb | Engaging with a Terre Thaemlitz record is a commitment. Though he started making ambient house records in the early 90s, latter-day Terre Thaemlitz music is not for the background. Well, you might get away with playing a record while you read one of his lengthy essays from the CD booklet, thus interfacing with Thaemlitz's ideas on two levels simultaneously. But in general his theory-driven work requires both heavy concentration and a certain amount of back-end reflection to be absorbed. There's nothing light about his intent, concept, tone or sonics.
Lovebomb is Thaemlitz' exploration of "love", and I use quotes because Thaemlitz is a skeptic. The tightly-spaced 32 pages of liner notes, which are written in both English and Japanese (Thaemlitz moved from the Bay Area to Tokyo) lay out in detail how, despite the spread of the West's version of "love," the meaning of the word still varies greatly from place to place, and indeed even within a single closed cultural system.
The essays that accompany the tracks provide the theoretical backing, but despite their liberal use of poststructuralist jargon, the meaning of the music is even less clear. This is a strange album. Having listened to it 15 times or more, I can hardly recall a thing about it once I slip it back into its case, and sometimes my memory doesn't even last that long. As Lovebomb is filled with odd pockets of silence ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes long, sometimes it's easy to forget that you're listening to music at all. The music seems designed to resist easy assimilation, and this is one of the more fragmented records I've heard. Tracks range from tiny snatches of sound to epics more than ten minutes long. There are plunderphonic cut-ups, noise, raw found recordings, ambient drones, delicate piano mediations...just as you're getting into one mode Thaemlitz he changes his pitch up, thus keeping you at arms length.
And yet, despite the pretension and the dense impenetrability, certain aspects of Lovebomb are so undeniably powerful that you have to give yourself over to Thaemlitz. First, there is "Between Empathy and Sympathy is Time (Apartheid)". On this track Thaemlitz takes an Apartheid-era militant speech from a member of South Africa's African National Congress and filters it through the music of Minnie Riperton's "Lovin' You". I mean "filters" literally here. The speech is run through a vocoder that varies along with the Riperton tune, so that the words of the speech-- about acquiring weapons, killing policemen, bombing factories-- are shaped the harmonic qualities of the song. It's a haunting and utterly unique effect, and the track is difficult to describe in terms of emotional complexity. It's somehow sad, frightening, confusing, inspiring and intellectually engaging all at the same time.
And then there are several places where Thaemlitz' genius for sonic texture and dynamics come through. The title track moves from almost inaudible silence to room-shaking, bassed-out distortion and back again over its 10 minutes, but it somehow manages to remain compelling and coherent as a composition. And "Sintesi Musicale del Linciaggio Futurista (Music Synthesis of Futurist Lynching)" provides an interesting contrast between its minimal Music For Airports-style piano and a mangled spoken word collage. And in running down Lovebomb's high points, I would be remiss if I failed to mention the gorgeous sleeve (drawings of a lynching and a scene from a subway terrorist attack are gussied up with scattered photographs of roses), which Thaemlitz illustrated and designed.
And somehow, some way, something about "love" is what ties all this together. It's difficult to understand the ideas at work without going back to the liner notes, but even the essays bring more questions than answers. In the CD booklet Thaemlitz offers, "Love-- no matter how inexplicably mentally consuming-- is not so much an emotion as an equation of contextually specific cultural variables." And elsewhere, "Love is...a redundant construction of pacifying hysteria, a mandatory insult to appease our senses." I'm not positive, but I think this is just a fancy way of saying:
I've had the blues
The reds and the pinks
One thing for sure
Love stinks | 2003-05-22T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2003-05-22T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mille Plateaux | May 22, 2003 | 5.8 | 140b48eb-0e07-4c0a-a776-4aab467941d9 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
On their first album in nearly 40 years, the Zamrock pioneers prove their malleable, genre-spanning style still sounds like the future. | On their first album in nearly 40 years, the Zamrock pioneers prove their malleable, genre-spanning style still sounds like the future. | Witch: Zango | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/witch-zango/ | Zango | On October 24, 1964, the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia gained independence, ending 75 years of colonization. The newly sovereign African nation renamed itself Zambia, for the Zambezi River that carved its way through the western part of the country. The spirit of liberation was in the air; the booming copper mines offered native Zambians unprecedented economic freedom, which in turn led to a flourishing of culture. Emmanuel Chanda was 13 years old and obsessed with the pop radio stations whose broadcasts reached the mining town of Kitwe, where he and his older brother lived. He adopted the nickname “Jaggery” in tribute to his rock’n’roll hero, later Africanizing it to “Jagari.” By 1972, he would be the frontman of Witch and arguably the biggest rock star in Zambia.
Witch (an acronym for We Intend to Cause Havoc) headlined the thriving local music movement known as Zamrock. The genre blended traditional African rhythms and instrumentation with a host of countercultural influences—psychedelia, hard rock, soul music, funk. (James Brown’s 1970 concerts in Zambia would prove a foundational moment in the genre’s history.) Witch’s 1972 full-length Introduction was the first commercially released Zamrock album, and the band soon became leaders of the burgeoning scene. Those halcyon days wouldn’t last long. The copper market crashed, the AIDS epidemic killed almost everyone who had ever been in the band, and Chanda took up a humble, pious life as a gemstone miner. Now 71, he’s made an improbable return to music with the vibrant, vigorous Zango (“meeting place”). It’s the first new Witch album in almost 40 years.
The seeds of Witch’s resurrection were planted in the early 2010s, when Now-Again Records reissued their ’70s albums and stoked a new wave of interest in Zamrock. We Intend to Cause Havoc, a Searching for Sugar Man-style documentary, followed in 2019. Director Gio Arlotta introduced Chanda to bassist Jacco Gardner and drummer Nico Mauskoviç, both of whom play on Zango. The new band also includes keyboardist Patrick Mwondela, an architect of Witch’s short-lived disco era who never played with Chanda in the group’s first iteration. With its diverse assortment of musicians from across Zambia and Europe, the new version of Witch has a freewheeling, shambolic quality. Zango is accordingly all over the map. Recorded at the same Lusaka studio where the band made much of their iconic ’70s work, the album feels like a late-night Zamrock party, with Chanda and a flock of guest vocalists passing the mic while the band bobs and weaves behind them.
Zango is rooted in classic Zamrock, and it builds on the inherent malleability of the genre’s sound. The band slinks seamlessly between passages of Fela Kuti-style Afrobeat, spacey psych-pop, and stomping, Sabbathian proto-metal. They also fold new sounds into the framework. Hip-hop hadn’t yet reached Africa in the ’70s, but the Zambian rapper Sampa the Great sounds at home trading slithery verses with Chanda on the smoldering “Avalanche of Love.” Soulful guest vocalists Theresa Ng’ambi and Hanna Tembo complement Chanda elsewhere on the record. Their presence serves as a welcome rejoinder to the dearth of women in the original Zamrock scene.
In simultaneously nodding to the Zamrock tradition and updating its sound, Chanda and his bandmates capture the same feeling of possibility that characterized those early Witch records. On Zango’s closing track, “Message from WITCH,” he assumes the same emcee persona he used on “Introduction,” the first song Witch ever recorded. Just as he did in 1972, Chanda introduces his bandmates, only this time, he also sheds light on his intentions with this music: “It unites beliefs/Conquers xenophobia/It laughs at hate speech/Ends sexism/It erases homophobia/Shatters antisemitism/Embraces every race.” Zamrock isn’t stuck in the ’70s. In Witch’s hands, it still sounds like the future. | 2023-06-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Desert Daze Sound | June 7, 2023 | 7.7 | 140bb788-feca-4649-b9af-0d435a4fca6d | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
The orchestro-punk Godspeed offshoot Thee Silver Mt. Zion's excellent seventh album examines the difficulties of keeping one’s moral compass steady in a society that’s becoming ever-more indifferent to the things you value. The songs are more outwardly anthemic and viscerally rocking than Godspeed’s slow-surging, side-long epics. | The orchestro-punk Godspeed offshoot Thee Silver Mt. Zion's excellent seventh album examines the difficulties of keeping one’s moral compass steady in a society that’s becoming ever-more indifferent to the things you value. The songs are more outwardly anthemic and viscerally rocking than Godspeed’s slow-surging, side-long epics. | Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra: Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18855-thee-silver-mt-zion-memorial-orchestra-fuck-off-get-free-we-pour-light-on-everything/ | Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything | Last September, at the Polaris Music Prize gala in Toronto, writer/Pitchfork contributor Jessica Hopper introduced shortlist nominees Godspeed You! Black Emperor by distilling their many achievements down to a single word: “no.” Which is to say, the Montreal ensemble’s success is a direct product of their refusal to engage in traditional music-industry practices or self-promotional glad-handing—an outlook that also extended to not showing up at the Polaris ceremony, nor gladly accepting the $30,000 purse they won later that night. (As per band tradition, they let their feelings be known via a collectively written communiqué.) However, offshoot band Thee Silver Mt. Zion—featuring Godspeed guitarist Efrim Menuck, violinist Sophie Trudeau, and bassist Thierry Amar, along with violinist Jessica Moss and drummer David Payant—has been more amenable to countering all that “no” with the odd “yes.” Though they share with Godspeed a deep suspicion of authority and institutions, and the faintest of hopes that sanity will prevail in a world gone mad, they’ve come to broadcast their ideas through more clearly communicated means: interviews, lengthy onstage addresses, lyrics we can all join in on, and songs that are both more outwardly anthemic and viscerally rocking than Godspeed’s slow-surging, side-long epics.
But while Menuck has become a more confident and charismatic vocalist over the years, his lyrics are often rendered in broad-strokes, addressing faceless bogeymen (a Dylanesque procession of bankers, hangmen, and the like) and macro societal maladies, while rooting their more sanguine songs in communal, universal affirmations. So the great strides made on the band’s seventh album, Fuck Off Get Free We Pour the Light on Everything, aren’t so much musical—it’s a logical extension of 2010’s Kollaps Tradixionales—but philosophical: This time, it’s personal. The album is less concerned with asserting a specific worldview than examining the difficulties of keeping one’s moral compass steady in a society that’s becoming ever-more indifferent to the things you value—and how one must remain all the more resolute once kids enter the picture.
Menuck and Moss became parents in recent years; that’s their boy Ezra we hear in the new album’s opening seconds, delivering the band’s simple mission statement: “We live on the island called Montreal, and we make a lot of noise… because we love each other!” The experience of new fatherhood factored into some of the songs on Menuck’s scaled-down 2011 solo release, Plays High Gospel, but that intimate perspective is retained here amid Thee Silver Mt. Zion’s orchestro-punk onslaught, with the band’s usual big-picture concerns intensified by the lingering question of what kind of world their children will inherit.
True to the band’s “Memorial Orchestra” and “Tra-La-La Band” suffixes, Thee Silver Mt. Zion albums have always contrasted eulogy with euphoria, but on Fuck Off Get Free the feelings of joy and terror are one and the same. Rather than use violins to embellish their guitar riffs, the album’s monstrous opening track (which, like Kollaps’ “I Built Myself a Metal Bird” is the rare TSMZ song to just charge out of the gates without an extended build-up) fuses the two into the same dissonant frequency. But amid this sound of confusion, Menuck leads the band in a group chant that’s almost nursery-rhyme-like in its simplicity; that album title may seem like a mouthful to read, but it’s surprisingly easy to sing. Fuck Off Get Free’s most exhilarating song is likewise a maelstrom of conflicted emotions: over the course of its 14 minutes, “Austerity Blues” channels screeching cacophony into rousing catharsis, however, Menuck’s triumphant refrain—“Lord, let my son/ Live long enough/ To see that mountain torn down”—is undercut by the implication that the singer won’t be around to see the better world he’s fighting for. And that latent anxiety comes boiling to surface on the raging “Take Away These Early Grave Blues”, which refines the heavy-metal klemzer heard on Godspeed’s 2012 colossus “Mladic” into a more concentrated burst; Menuck coyly acknowledges this otherwise despairing song’s shout-along accessibility when he fashions a hook—“let them sing our/ pretty songs”—that recalls the similarly sarcastic chorus of Nirvana’s “In Bloom”.
But even the album’s actual pretty songs are suffused with grave prophecies: The deceptively gentle “Little Ones Run”—a piano ballad sung by Trudeau and Moss—presents a bedside lullaby that parents can sing to calm down babies during the next extreme-weather eco-disaster (“Wake up darling the moon is gone/ The sky’s a mess and falling down”). Meanwhile, the album’s emotional centerpiece, “What We Loved Was Not Enough”, is a comment on modern-age ennui that could conceivably waltz its way onto the back half of Arcade Fire’s Reflektor (if that album was a little less disco and a little more Dischord), however, for Thee Silver Mt. Zion, the cost of apathy is more severe than just social disconnection: “There’ll be war in our cities/ and riots at the mall,” Menuck warns, before repeating his most chilling prognostication four times—“all our children gonna die.” All the while, the rest of the band sings, “and the day has come, when we no longer feel,” the sweetest of harmonies couching the bitterest of sentiments—i.e. that numbing oneself to atrocities is the only way to endure them.
And yet, amid this procession of devastation, Menuck sees a sliver of a silver lining, when he sings, “kiss it quick and it’ll rise again,” and the album’s closing track, “Rains Thru the Roof at the Grande Ballroom (For Capital Steez)”, channels that cautious optimism into a dreamlike haze that's equally haunting and comforting. Its title name-checks the Detroit theatre where The MC5 recorded their incendiary 1968 debut, Kick Out the Jams, and the song is introduced by an interview clip in which guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith issues a statement of purpose that Thee Silver Mt. Zion could easily claim as their own: “Music is a way of life, it’s more than just something you do on the weekend … it’s something you devote your life to.” But more than simply forge a spiritual connection between Thee Silver Mt. Zion and their proto-punk forefathers, the song’s central image—of a once-legendary venue reduced to ruins—serves as a symbol for the loss of radicalism in popular music.
And through that lens, the parenthetical shout-out to Pro Era rapper Capital Steez—who threw himself off a New York City building in late 2012—makes more sense, as a requiem for a kindred, politically outspoken voice silenced before his time. But for all the sorrow couched in Menuck’s trembling tenor, there is a sign of life amid the Grande Ballroom rubble: “The glass in its windows are still breathing,” he sings, suggesting the same anti-establishment ethos that fuelled a band of Motor City delinquents in the late-60s, and his own cabal of Montreal outsiders in the late-90s, and a teenaged Brooklyn MC in the early 2010s will persist long after he’s gone. Back in 2003, when this once-instrumental band was still literally finding its voice, Thee Silver Mt. Zion asserted their core ideology by naming their third album This Is Our Punk-Rock, and the increasingly aggressive albums released in the interim have made the members’ hardcore roots all the more apparent. But to ensure that the contrarian, questioning spirit of punk endures through future generations, Fuck Off Get Free reminds us of one of the key principles of hippiedom: teach your children well. | 2014-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Constellation | January 21, 2014 | 8 | 140fea1a-3a08-4953-a284-d259c004a332 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Another retrograde UK guitar band held up as the Next Big Thing, the very solid Vaccines aren't either as good or bad as that claim suggests. | Another retrograde UK guitar band held up as the Next Big Thing, the very solid Vaccines aren't either as good or bad as that claim suggests. | The Vaccines: What Did You Expect From the Vaccines? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15406-what-did-you-expect-from-the-vaccines/ | What Did You Expect From the Vaccines? | Late last summer, months before the Vaccines had gone on to grace the front of the NME above a cover line heralding "The Return of the Great British Guitar Band," the magazine's website was already reporting concerns about the London band getting over-hyped. After the feverish debate that quickly ensued in the UK music press, such talk has come to sound like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Among the Vaccines' detractors, meanwhile, hardly a review deadline goes by without some pun on the quartet's debut album title, What Did You Expect From the Vaccines?
The Vaccines, much to their credit, are savvier about expectations than their champions and critics alike. Led by singer Justin Young, who previously played indie-folk under the name Jay Jay Pistolet, and guitarist Freddie Cowan, whose older brother is in the Horrors, these guys know firsthand how hype can be a double-edged sword-- one that has already propelled their meat-and-potatoes pub rock near the top of the UK album charts, to uncertain impact on their long-term reputations. The real joke of the album title, after all, is that it raises the same question the band posed of "Post Break-Up Sex" on their bombastic, pleasant-enough second single.
The answer, on that song, is that we should expect a chance to forget our past loves for a little while, followed by a sense of overwhelming guilt. For better or worse, there's nothing here that warrants either such reaction, let alone the paroxysms of hyperbole going on in the British press. Sure, the band's buzzing guitars, thick reverb, and bouncy rhythms lack any particular spark of originality that might help listeners avoid compulsively thinking of names like Ramones, the Jesus and Mary Chain, or, yes, the Strokes. Then again, there's no shame in catchy, concise, sharply executed tunes that communicate mildly fresh takes on relationships, either-- and this album has more than a few.
The Vaccines are at their best when they're upbeat, flecked with surf, and surprisingly hard to get out of your head. Take "If You Wanna", which bops likably along like a somewhat higher-fidelity Best Coast as Young warbles about an ex he'd take back in a second, or "Nørgaard", a playfully loutish ode to a Danish model. But there's also "Blow It Up", which borrows from the Beatles' "I Should Have Known Better" a little too blatantly to enjoy in its own right. "Under Your Thumb", for its part, appears to take critic Ellen Willis's argument that the Rolling Stones' similarly titled tirade actually isn't sexist as a challenge to write a song about a man completely submitting to his (presumably, female-- name's Eleanor, anyway) lover.
It's easy enough to imagine the Vaccines' slower songs going over well with an outdoor crowd drunk on sun and beer. Previous NME favorites Glasvegas already have the "swooning anthems with girl-group beats" thing pretty much covered, but the Vaccines do it here twice: over droning organ on "Wetsuit", which again recalls the U.S. beach-pop crowd, and then another time on the dreary "All in White", which occupies much the same U2-echoing expanse as lesser bands the Temper Trap or White Lies. The most awkward moment is slo-mo finale "Family Friend", which builds to an embarrassingly neutered wall-of-noise crescendo. In a final possible reference to Best Coast, Wavves, and their stoned sunshine set, Young wonders aloud if everybody really feels "as high as a kite": "Well, I don't really know if they do, but they might." An old "MADtv" sketch comes to mind: "Lowered Expectations". | 2011-05-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-05-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | May 31, 2011 | 6.2 | 1413df6d-dd2a-435c-91a7-8f2df7c69694 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
In diaphanous compositions like color field paintings, this full-band ambient album conveys relaxation, whimsy, and a vague sense of dread. | In diaphanous compositions like color field paintings, this full-band ambient album conveys relaxation, whimsy, and a vague sense of dread. | Piotr Kurek: Smartwoods | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/piotr-kurek-smartwoods/ | Smartwoods | Piotr Kurek’s Smartwoods comes on gradually, then all at once. An electric guitar plucks out a tentative phrase; a harp responds with unhurried plucks; metallic taps, like steel pans, add shading. Finally, an acoustic bass draws a thick, smudgy line on the ground, while harmonized woodwinds breathe the rest of the picture into being. The stereo field fills in the way that pavement darkens, drop by drop, in the opening moments of a light rain. But here, instead of mottled asphalt, we’re presented with a sumptuous wash of color, a soft pointillism of rich pastels. Over the next 36 minutes, Kurek and his players extend that approach across seven alluringly splotchy tracks that aspire to the condition of abstract painting.
Kurek’s last album, Peach Blossom—released just this past April—was a very different affair. There, the Warsaw-based composer focused his attention on the disorienting effects of Auto-Tune and an unsteady mix of acoustic and resolutely digital timbres. Smartwoods’ palette, in contrast, is largely acoustic, emphasizing Anna Pašic’s harp, Tomasz Duda’s woodwinds, and Wojtek Traczyk’s double bass. But the longer you spend inside this odd, diaphanous landscape, the more you may come to suspect that its seeming naturalism is an illusion. Listen carefully, and the album is awash in alien squiggles.
Unassuming instrumental timbres occasionally wobble in place as though flicked by a fingertip. A minute into the first track, a pitch-shifted twinge of harp sounds like a cartoon projectile ricocheting off a bouncy castle; later in the same song, a vocoded swoosh shimmers and extinguishes like a hologram. Halfway through the album, there’s a splash of synthesizer that we haven’t heard before and won’t hear again. All of these moments display Kurek’s signature knack for defamiliarizing the conventional—and making the unfamiliar feel like second nature.
Occasionally, what sounds like a human voice murmurs a single, wordless syllable and falls silent again, as though clearing the throat for an utterance that never comes. Like the synthesized glissando that periodically plunges across King Sunny Adé’s Juju Music, these flashes of otherness are fleeting; they feel like tiny, temporary portals to another world.
Smartwoods’ broad, slightly ragtag swatches of color—reminiscent of Richard Diebenkorn, perhaps, or Helen Frankenthaler—are loose in form and ambiguous in mood. Songs can feel playful, even naive; their moderate tempos and hazy palette, frequently carried by flute or clarinet, have a relaxed, bucolic air. Yet these whimsical worlds, like those of fairy tales, are shadowed by a vaguely ominous undercurrent. There are hints of disturbance beneath the placid surface, as the music is tugged ceaselessly between consonance and dissonance. There’s a weird contradiction at play: You may find yourself wondering why, given the music’s sunset hues and dandelion-tuft drift, you feel so unsettled.
It’s not easy to get a foothold in this cotton-candy terrain. Many of the album’s tracks share the same key, and the palette remains uniform throughout. There are few hummable melodies. Kurek’s arrangements frequently sound like he has taken a passage from Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock and twisted the focus ring until there’s nothing visible beyond spongy globs of blown-out bokeh. But that apparent formlessness is also one of Smartwoods’ great achievements. Listening back to recordings of Kurek’s quartet at Krakow’s Unsound festival last fall, where they premiered this material, the live performance often sounds remarkably faithful to the album versions. That’s striking, because it means that what here sounds largely improvised, as incidental as a rock tumbler full of colored pom-poms, may well be carefully composed, mapped out note by note. There is an elusive logic snaking through this strange, elastic record, and trying to tease it out is half the fun. | 2023-09-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Unsound | September 18, 2023 | 7.5 | 141429e8-60ff-4837-99f1-6c9dd4f19e89 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
More than a decade ago, a teenage Prodigy-- half of the existential Queensbridge duo Mobb Deep-- was one of the fiercest and murkiest rappers in New York. But after six years of car-crash career decisions, Prodigy's made the comeback no one saw coming. | More than a decade ago, a teenage Prodigy-- half of the existential Queensbridge duo Mobb Deep-- was one of the fiercest and murkiest rappers in New York. But after six years of car-crash career decisions, Prodigy's made the comeback no one saw coming. | Prodigy: Return of the Mac | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10116-return-of-the-mac/ | Return of the Mac | When it quietly showed up on YouTube last November, the darkly surreal video for Prodigy's "Mac 10 Handle" felt like a glorious fluke. More than a decade ago, a teenage Prodigy-- half of the existential Queensbridge duo Mobb Deep-- had been one of the fiercest and murkiest rappers in New York. But that dark star faded quickly in 2001, when Jay-Z, onstage at Hot 97's Summer Jam, sneeringly displayed a picture of a young Prodigy wearing a dance-class uniform: "You was a ballerina/ I got the pictures, I seen ya." That blow seemed to send Mobb Deep into freefall. The next few years saw the group making a series of ill-advised moves, collaborating with the silky r&b quartet 112 and the braying producer Lil Jon on tracks that defanged the Mobb's nihilist magnetism. Later still, the apparent final nail: Mobb Deep signed with G-Unit and released the dismal Blood Money, an album that tried to replace their gritty expressionism with vindicated new-money gloating. It failed colossally.
But six months later, there was Prodigy on YouTube, muttering hazy death threats over the nervous percussion-ripples and eerie bass-burbles of Edwin Starr's "Easin' In". With its harsh, grainy film-stock, the "Mac 10 Handle" video seemed miles removed from anything on the Sucka Free Countdown mixtape. It was the image of a once-great rapper tossing away his commercial ambitions and digging instead into what we loved him for in the first place. Prodigy maintains that grizzled intensity through the entirety of Return of the Mac, a stronger comeback than anyone would ever have guessed.
Return of the Mac* is just 10 songs and four interludes, and it's over in 40 minutes, barely half the length of the average major-label event-rap album. The beats all come from the New York-based producer and frequent Mobb collaborator Alchemist, whose intuitive chemistry with Prodigy makes for one of the most fruitful rapper-producer pairings in a while. Here, Alchemist creates a warm, organic bedrock for Prodigy's cold, weary monotone; in the producer's hands, the rapper's weathered crackle of a voice feels like a natural outgrowth of the landscape. Alchemist heavily samples the lush psychedelic soul of early-70s blaxploitation film soundtracks, wringing those weeping strings and disembodied moans for maximum pathos. Over those tracks, Prodigy's violent threats don't sound gratuitous; they become the commonsense warnings of a tired old gunslinger.
Over and over on Return of the Mac, Prodigy laments his own desensitization, constantly muttering variations on one theme: "New York made me this way." Success was never a great fit for P; a sufferer of sickle cell anemia, he always had a joyless bluntness in his voice even when he was celebrating his wealth, like the money in his pocket couldn't ease the pain in his bones. So the patient hardness he displays on this LP feels much more natural. Half the time, he doesn't even bother to rhyme, but his images still resonate: "Have different colors leaking out you/ Like red, yellow, and white/ Got some stomach on your Nikes."
Lyrically and musically, Return of the Mac feels like an immersion into a pre-Giulinani New York that may never have actually existed. Slowly, a lyrical picture emerges of the old, hard New York, a place where hopelessness leads to bad faith and violence. But as at home as he might be in the squalor, Prodigy never delights in it, lamenting instead: "Niggas bodied JMJ right there in Queens/ Goes to show there's no respect for the OGs." Alchemist's invocation of that era is entirely theoretical. The producer, after all, grew up white and privileged in Beverly Hills, first coming to prominence with the Whooliganz, the rap duo he formed as a teenager with James Caan's son Scott. But even if Alchemist's New York is a fantasy dystopia learned from old movies and rap records, it meshes perfectly with Prodigy's battered memories.
Return of the Mac* isn't a rehabilitation move for Prodigy; he neither flaunts nor denounces his G-Unit affiliation, and only makes occasional passing references to 50 Cent. What it is is the announcement of a stunning and unexpected late-career renaissance; Prodigy is tapping back into the fearsome frustration that once drove him. Amazingly, P originally conceived this piece of work-- the best thing he's done in well over a decade-- as a promotional mixtape, a quick move to build anticipation for H.N.I.C. 2, his official second solo album. "This the mixtape; imagine how the album sound," he says on "Stop Fronting". But if the presumably more commercially aware H.N.I.C. 2 is anywhere near as powerful as Return of the Mac, I'll be amazed. Again. | 2007-04-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-04-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | Koch | April 20, 2007 | 8.5 | 14143e4b-c5db-4162-81ec-992797bc6b34 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
After several excellent singles, New Jersey's Real Estate deliver on their full-length debut with a rich collection of evocative and haunting songs. | After several excellent singles, New Jersey's Real Estate deliver on their full-length debut with a rich collection of evocative and haunting songs. | Real Estate: Real Estate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13703-real-estate/ | Real Estate | Real Estate were born in the depths of one New Jersey summer. Frontman Martin Courtney had just returned home to his native Ridgewood from college in Washington State, a few fresh songs in his pockets. He'd been playing music with bassist Alex Bleeker and guitarist Matthew Mondanile since high school in various forms, even covering Weezer and the Strokes records from tip to tail. But during the summer of 2008, Real Estate didn't get nostalgic for just their specific suburban nights, crushes, or favorite bands as teens-- they fashioned a tin can-and-string to memories more universal. Their self-titled debut LP is a collection of those first underwater pop songs and onward, 7" cuts and mpfrees that have been backstroking their way across the Web and into lo-fi nerdpiles. Over the past year, many of these songs have soundtracked a time when it feels like every kid in or just out of college seems to be handcrafting/clamoring for music that shuttles us back to a time before career choices, adult responsibility, and this recession.
And while the Jersey Shore has clearly become the beating heart of their current aesthetic, Real Estate captures a rock band several lengths ahead of the fuzzy beach bums with which they pine. Real Estate share tones with North Jersey indie rock titans Yo La Tengo and the Feelies, pouring those influences through warm impressions of oldies radio. Riffs are cyclical and massaged, harmonies familiar. Each song is dunked in reverb and delay, though always with serious restraint. Most importantly, all boast architecture that still allows for swaths of jamming, the feeling that every measure's unfolding as easily as life ought to.
"Atlantic City" is a fitting entrance point, an instrumental that lopes along on a humid bass line before Courtney and Mondanile (the mind behind the cassette adventures of Ducktails) begin gently braiding together strands of trebly surf guitar over Mexican güiro. Single "Beach Comber" keeps things light as Courtney looks for meaning in the sand while Mondanile pokes around with his Strat. The bedrock here (see "Fake Blues") is almost krautrock-y in the way each layer repeats itself, a bent that might prove too drowsy for some. But as is the case for much of the experience, Mondanile adds classic rock sugars throughout, taking off on a solo at the three-minute mark that unbuttons everything really gracefully.
Elsewhere, "Black Lake" is a gorgeous waltz whose slide recalls Modest Mouse's late-1990s take on the 1959 Santo & Jonny classic "Sleepwalk". Because Courtney's croon can be tough to make out at times, those watercolor frequencies lend that overwhelming sense of longing real grip, jam passages often more evocative than spaces that feature vocals. Nowhere on this debut is that better absorbed than on midpoint palate-cleanser "Let's Rock the Beach" or the six-minute shimmer of "Suburban Beverage".
With the exception of the limp "Pool Swimmers", every part remains remarkably crisp. But what sets Real Estate apart from the rest of the herd is how evergreen its beauty can be. Despite the summery song titles and the beach balling associations that might follow these guys around, this music transcends the notion of seasons. Inside the overcast tenor of "Black Lake" and the airy upstrokes of "Green River", there's much more at play here than what goes on between the months of June through September. And impressionism aside, this is a band whose chemistry and technical gifts suggest there's more coming down the pipeline: more good times to be soundtracked, and more songs and records and sounds to communicate exactly that. | 2009-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Woodsist | November 17, 2009 | 8.5 | 14170cab-87a7-45b0-af74-9868aa934ca0 | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
This Moog synth album from 1976 was meant to help houseplants grow. Jury’s out on that, but it became a cult classic nonetheless. | This Moog synth album from 1976 was meant to help houseplants grow. Jury’s out on that, but it became a cult classic nonetheless. | Mort Garson: Mother Earth’s Plantasia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mort-garson-mother-earths-plantasia/ | Mother Earth’s Plantasia | The Moog changed Mort Garson’s life. Until the moment in 1967 when he attended a demonstration by the synthesizer’s inventor, he had been carving out a respectable niche for himself in the pop world, working with the likes of Brenda Lee, Cliff Richard, and Doris Day, although he might be best known for arranging strings for Glen Campbell. Once he discovered the Moog, however, Garson devoted the rest of his career to composing on the modular synth, which seems to have freed something up in him. He stopped thinking in terms of pop songs and began writing album-length compositions, like Black Mass (about the occult), The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds (about the signs of the Zodiac), and Music for Sensuous Lovers (about… you know). Because his compositions remain open to experimentation and wonder, because Garson was a master of mood and variation, these odd, endearing albums survive as more than artifacts.
Perhaps his most beloved album, at least among crate-diggers and record collectors, is also his most whimsical. The story behind Mother Earth’s Plantasia, subtitled Warm Earth Music for Plants… and the People Who Love Them, is just as fascinating as the music. Garson conceived the album with Lynn and Joel Rapp, who ran Mother Earth Plant Boutique on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. Joel had been a writer for My Favorite Martian, but had burned out on the TV industry. So he switched from little green men to little green plants, and the Rapps’ store, as well as their series of best-selling books, helped popularize the houseplant trend that lasted throughout the 1970s and has become commonplace today; in fact, it’s one of the few industries millennials aren’t actively killing. Plantasia was given away free at Mother Earth’s with any purchase of a houseplant; it was also included with the purchase of a Simmons mattress at certain Sears locations, although nobody remembers how that promotion came about. (Surely Music for Sensuous Lovers would have been more appropriate.)
Of course, Plantasia wasn’t intended for human ears. Or human anything. It was designed to help your indoor plants thrive and grow. This was a new idea at the time, one of those nutty beliefs from the West Coast, which in the ’70s was riddled with cults and communes and a brand-new thing called vegetarian restaurants. The idea came from a 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants, written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird and containing some hilariously specious claims: Plants can communicate telepathically, they can identify pain in others, they carry ancient wisdom in their little green cells, and they love music. The New York Times called it “the funniest unintentionally funny book of the year,” which didn’t stop it from climbing like bougainvillea up the best-seller lists and inspiring a documentary film scored by none other than Stevie Wonder.
So, what kind of music do plants like? According to Plantasia, the synthetic tones of the Moog. The same instrument that Garson applied to Satanic rituals and erotic couplings gets similarly deployed for the plant world, and while it’s not his best album (I’m partial to Black Mass, which he released under the name Lucifer), Plantasia stands out in his small catalog for its indefatigably chipper tone and its effervescence. There are no dark notes, only a palpable wonder, which fuels the high, reedy theme of the title track as well as the miniature toy orchestra that breaks into the song partway through. With its winking humor and percolating rhythms, Plantasia might turn away some human listeners, but there’s a sense of joy and possibility in songs like “Rhapsody in Green” and “A Mellow Mood for Maidenhair.” Will it actually deliver on its promise to nurture your begonia or your philodendron? Even Joel Rapp isn't quite sure: "Frankly, we do not know for sure that it will," he writes in the original liner notes. "However, we do know one thing—it couldn't possibly hurt." More than forty years later, the effect this music has on plants is less important than the effect it has on us. It’s hard not to smile at the oddball charm of this strange enterprise.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sacred Bones | July 6, 2019 | 7.2 | 141e144e-fb50-4fac-8d6e-a564abb9ce9b | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Seamlessly weaving disparate strands of modern dance music, this mix is a pulsing paean to up-to-the-minute club rhythms as well as a headphone-dependent feast of electronic sound at its most miniaturized and luscious. | Seamlessly weaving disparate strands of modern dance music, this mix is a pulsing paean to up-to-the-minute club rhythms as well as a headphone-dependent feast of electronic sound at its most miniaturized and luscious. | Gold Panda: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15991-gold-panda-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | Gold Panda's 2010 debut, Lucky Shiner, asked you to accept a number of seeming contradictions, echoing some of the great contradictory artists of electronic music as it went along. Like the work of Boards of Canada, its emotion-loaded melodies were both whimsical and mournful. Like the collage-funk productions of Matthew Herbert, it built tracks from a myriad of tiny samples, but warped them so that even field recordings and snippets of analog instruments felt denatured, computerized, alien. The production had the crammed-waveform fullness of the Field's fluffy maximalist trance epics, but the way GP put his tracks together from all those little bits somehow also recalled the fragile, handmade miniatures of not-quite-dubsteppers Mount Kimbie.
Whether or not GP would claim any or all of those acts as influences or peers, it was clear he was enjoying the same sort of freedom as they did, the freedom of belonging to no one particular electronic music niche. He drew inspiration from sounds as far-flung as the more obvious physicality of London's ever-evolving beats-and-bass subculture, the twitching and gurgling micro-syncopations of experimental techno, and the shameless and affecting melodicism of IDM. More crucially, he also found ways to layer them into something his own. On GP's new DJ-Kicks entry, he attempts to fuse these strands of modern dance, just as he did on Lucky Shiner, except this time using mostly other people's records as raw material. The result is another seeming contradiction, a DJ mix that's both a pulsing paean to up-to-the-minute club rhythms and a total headphone-dependent feast of electronic sound at its most miniaturized and luscious.
He does this quite simply, pairing left-field bangers with tracks that tend more toward the art-techno end of the spectrum, accentuating the subtleties of the former and teasing out the grooves in the latter. And in the mix's most effective moments, he mingles them until they create new hybrids, not quite dancefloor ready and always with so much to listen to that you could never call them ambient. GP draws out the strange staggering gait of Bok Bok's "Charisma Theme", what might have seemed like a slab of party-ready bashing and clonking in a mix of similar post-dubstep party tunes, by linking it with the more steely, abstract electro of Decay's "Charisma's Theme". He hears a bit of gnarled drums and synthesizer murk, clipped from a Brainiac record of all things, as the perfect perverse segue into Untold and LV's spartan dubstep. He ranges as far as he ever has on his own records, from Berlin minimal to American indie rock, divining brilliant connections between artists who seem to come from opposing aesthetic universes.
Amazingly, this rarely makes for choppy transitions. Given the wildly disparate materials used to construct it, the bubbling, slurping, rustling flow of this DJ-Kicks is a marvel, the kind of seamless weaving together of tiny sounds into a new tapestry that's been sadly unfashionable since the days of old-school micro-house mixes. And like vintage micro-house, many of the tracks take minimalism not as an opportunity for acetic reduction but a chance to revel in all the ear candy sound-as-sound qualities of electronic music, without totally skimping on the funk. Tune your ears down to its reductionist frequency, and the vinyl-esque crackle and barely audible hiss of Jan Jelinek's "If's, And's, and But's" feels as lush and wombing as any massive, bass-booming deep house jam operating on a similarly warm tip. Like the records that make it up, Gold Panda's DJ-Kicks is too interested in these (often literally) small pleasures and subtle entwinings to say it demands your attention. But in his own dogged, idiosyncratic way, he's keeping a neglected strain of dance music alive here, and while the joys are subtle, the more attention you give the mix, the deeper they feel. | 2011-11-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-11-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | !K7 | November 1, 2011 | 7.5 | 141e35d8-cabd-4db1-ab64-ade7ac1b9847 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Filled with ruthlessly efficient grooves, the latest EP from the Montreal producer is his most assured work yet. | Filled with ruthlessly efficient grooves, the latest EP from the Montreal producer is his most assured work yet. | Martyn Bootyspoon: Lickety Split EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/martyn-bootyspoon-lickety-split-ep/ | Martyn Bootyspoon: Lickety Split EP | Under the Lothario-like nom de plume of Martyn Bootyspoon, Montreal’s Jason Voltaire makes sexed-up club music that’s deliberately tongue in cheek. He got his start under the influence of booty house and ghettotech fixtures like DJ Assault and DJ Funk, Midwestern producers who brought a sly, lascivious spirit to house and techno. When Voltaire discovered them as an impressionable, extremely online adolescent, something clicked: As he told FACT, “Hearing something like DJ Assault’s ‘Ass N Titties’? That’s just gonna stick with you.” But Voltaire, the son of Haitian and Guyanese immigrants, also credits an influence closer to home: the campy sense of humor that’s endemic to his native Quebec. Recalling French Canada’s history of novelty disco and other records “not to be taken seriously,” he approvingly told Radio Primavera Sound’s Line Noise Podcast, “There’s a lot of slapstick and tacky things that happen in Montreal.”
Bootyspoon’s first appearance on record, a cameo on former Montreal producer (and Kanye collaborator) Sinjin Hawke’s 2011 EP The Lights, falls under the category of things not to be taken too seriously. Over Hawke’s rapturous soundscaping, Voltaire imagined swan-diving into the oceanic depths of his object of desire, nasally ad-libbing a libidinal stream of consciousness about his “world of pretense” and “oversexed personality.” But over the past few years, Voltaire’s acumen as a producer has begun to eclipse his antics. On 2018’s Silk Eternity EP, for Hawke and Zora Jones’ Fractal Fantasy label, his heavy-lidded come-ons couldn’t disguise the force of his sternly percussive club beats, and on last year’s No. 1 Crush EP, his production got both beefier and more psychedelic. Lickety Split, for London’s Local Action label, showcases his most assured work yet and confirms that while the Bootyspoon persona is unabashedly extra, his grooves are ruthlessly efficient.
Though he was initially inspired by bare-bones ghettotech, Voltaire covers plenty of ground on these five tracks. The relentless hi-hats of the hard-charging “Lickety Split” recall the drums of the classic 1995 anthem “Flash”—a signature tune by Chicago house ringmaster Green Velvet, whose over-the-top stage presence is an obvious antecedent for Bootyspoon’s role-playing. “Resonant Freq,” though, hops the Atlantic to plug into sounds and textures more closely associated with grime, like brooding squarewave bass and stark, minor-key string-synth stabs, all of it as chilly as a spell in Wiley’s igloo. “KEYGEN 2 MI H34RT,” the record’s furthest stylistic outlier, melts down Bootyspoon’s usual club reference points into a detuned goo of trance stabs and sickly-sounding Auto-Tune.
The glue holding together these disparate ideas is Voltaire’s appealingly gravelly baritone growl. On the title track, he chops up stray syllables, breaths, tossed-off asides (“You know I’m tryna get lit”), and callbacks to the mother of all vocal fry; he’s so seductive, he can make a question like, “What’s in your Amazon wish list?” sound dirty. He’s more fanciful on “Ice Cream Mane,” where he urges, “Think about me in the summertime, because I’m cool on a hot summer’s day/I’m the ice cream man, baby/Cooler than the Atlantic spray.” His voice grabs your attention first, and his production keeps it: With dissonant, 8-bit bleeps drizzled over a slippery electro pulse, the track is as experimental as it is effortlessly propulsive.
The most interesting cut on the EP, “Airdrop,” is largely instrumental, relegating the voice to a colorful strip of vocoded tone. Over a muted 4/4 kick, electronic marimba and synthetic bell tones pulse and clang around scattershot snares. For all the song’s percussive intensity, there are virtually no conventional drum sounds at all; the overall effect is of a kind of weaponized new age, at once bruising and meditative. A swirl of bright, glassy tones, it moves without obvious direction, unpredictable as a weather system. Far from Martyn Bootyspoon’s occasionally slapstick tendencies and typically carnal thrust, it offers a glimpse of the Montreal musician in a headier, more serious mode.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 2 B Real | August 13, 2020 | 7.2 | 1420fbad-9b08-416d-a16d-de599f1aabdc | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The third full-length from singer/songwriter/producer Natalie Mering overflows with the misty sounds of late '60s folk and '70s AM radio, but her presence in these songs is modern and slyly knowing. | The third full-length from singer/songwriter/producer Natalie Mering overflows with the misty sounds of late '60s folk and '70s AM radio, but her presence in these songs is modern and slyly knowing. | Weyes Blood: Front Row Seat to Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22463-front-row-seat-to-earth/ | Front Row Seat to Earth | Weyes Blood makes serious music, but she doesn’t take herself too seriously. Proof of that can be found in the final seconds of Front Row Seat to Earth, the third full-length from the singer/songwriter/producer born Natalie Mering. A brass band breaks through the din of hazy film samples and warped classical piano with the kind of royal proclamation that declares, “I’m here!”—just as the soiree is ending. Oops! Or look to the album’s cover. The scene—a river winding through a dystopian landscape, with Mering perched on her side in the middle of it all, clad in a stylish turquoise satin suit—is mesmerizing. Then the eye moves towards her shoes: beat-up sneakers. What the hell?
Front Row works sort of similarly. The songs overflow with tender harmonies worthy of a Roches record and ornate instrumentation (from Mering and a strong cast of contributors) that blends ’70s AM radio, the psychier end of late ’60s folk, and touches of Celtic and Renaissance music. But listen closer and there's often a slightly alien (and typically electronic) undercurrent that keeps you intrigued. It’s there in the ominous synth line that rises up from below a peaceful acoustic and tasteful woodblock and shakers in “Away Above,” and again in the deadpan background vocals that haunt “Seven Words” just below the surface of a doe-eyed slide guitar solo from Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy.
The over-the-top pinnacle of this effect comes on the knockout six-and-a-half-minute single “Do You Need My Love,” where Mering sustains a note—on the word “need”—intermittently in the song’s last half. All around her calm belt, calamity stirs: a brass band, piano chords, a thick bassline, graceful and complex percussion, and above all, an ominous synth that glows like an orb, brighter and brighter to the end. Keep in mind, this is a song that two minutes earlier, featured a breakdown comprised of psychedelic organ and thunder noises, which sounds like an oddly specific combination to anyone who hasn’t endured the Doors. At times Mering really does sound like “Enya Does the Lost Songs of Karen Carpenter (Backed by Ray Manzarek).” But thankfully her lyrics don’t also lose themselves in mystical platitudes borrowed from generations past. She cuts through the bullshit here: “Do you need someone?” she asks, walking the line between robotic and serene. “Do you need my love?”
As much of a throwback as Mering can seem, at her best she captures her era in her words. On “Generation Why,” arguably the album’s centerpiece, she actually sings the letters “YOLO” with more thoughtful care than the phrase ever deserved. Using the kind of dulcet finger-picking and flowery folk-singer phrasing that’s been easy to dismiss as wimpy for decades, Mering essentially chronicles how she learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. “I’ve been hanging/On my phone all day/And the fear goes away,” she says, trying to embrace the kids’ distraction of choice from the coming end times. Later, she surmises, almost kicking herself halfway through for jinxing it, “It’s not the past/That scares me/Now what a great future/This is gonna be.”
Even Mering’s less philosophical takes feel distinctly modern. “Be Free,” the song that sounds the most like a waltz, finds her embracing an independent approach to drifting apart that seems more* now* than of the free love era its far-out sounds might have worked within. “It’s just the two of us/And I want you to be free/Don’t worry about me/I got my thing,” she sings. As first she sounds perfectly clear (the record’s production is excellent), but by the end, in creep those alien background vocals again.
It’s this ability—to twist an homage just enough to show that you’re aware of how totally saccharine it sounds—that makes Mering shine in a way she hasn’t on her albums up to this point. She commits more fully to the world she’s building here, though 2014’s sprawling rock rumination The Innocents is not without its highlights. Her approach (not her sound) recalls Angelo Badalamenti’s lush, over-the-top score to “Twin Peaks.” It was overwhelming and kitschy, but you could tell that he knew it, particularly when paired with David Lynch’s work. Mering’s music might sound like it belongs from a bygone era, but she definitely knows it. If you listen closely enough, you can start to locate her in this fantastical backdrop—sly and assured. What, doesn’t everyone wear sneakers to the apocalypse? | 2016-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | October 19, 2016 | 8.3 | 14217003-2d41-44b3-9ecc-8ad6c482ef49 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
German producer Aksel Schaufler, aka Superpitcher, has long been a leading light of Cologne’s Kompakt label. His eclectic new solo album renews his commitment to duration—it’s nearly six hours long. | German producer Aksel Schaufler, aka Superpitcher, has long been a leading light of Cologne’s Kompakt label. His eclectic new solo album renews his commitment to duration—it’s nearly six hours long. | Superpitcher: The Golden Ravedays | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/superpitcher-the-golden-ravedays/ | The Golden Ravedays | Like any dandy worth his salt, Superpitcher knows how to balance dewy-eyed sensitivity with wily eccentricity. In the early 2000s, when European minimal techno tended toward resolutely functional, unsparingly Spartan beats, the German producer oozed druggy melancholy on songs like “Heroin” and “Tomorrow.” Superpitcher (aka Aksel Schaufler, long one of the leading lights of Cologne’s Kompakt label) slowed his tempos to a crawl, fleshing out spacious club anthems with fluttering Hammond organs and feathery acoustic guitars. He covered the Peggy Lee and Sarah Vaughan staple “Fever” and Françoise Hardy’s schlager hit “Träume”; his song “Sad Boys,” kissed with throaty whispers, came long before emo rappers like Yung Lean popularized the trope for a new generation. And with his remix of Dntel’s pre-Postal Service song “(This Is) the Dream of Evan and Chan,” he inaugurated an entire wave of cottony emotronica for which there was little precedent in European club music.
Over time, his quirks came to the fore. In 2007, he teamed up with Michael Mayer on the deeply irreverent (and in retrospect, largely irrelevant) Supermayer project. Six years after his debut—at the time, it felt like an eon—Superpitcher’s second album, Kilimanjaro, went gonzo with gusto, suffusing disco-indebted house tracks in see-sawing frequencies and stoned philosophizing (“Rabbits in a hurry always drink too much/Too drunk, too drunk/You’ll get used to the confusion”). And in the duo Pachanga Boys, with the similarly irrepressible Mexican producer Rebolledo, he subsequently doubled down on heady excess. Their trademark single “Time” dissolves into 15-plus minutes of hedonistic rapture; in 2013, they made headlines with a 25-hour DJ set.
Seven years after Kilimanjaro, Superpitcher’s new solo endeavor renews that commitment to duration. As if to make up for lost time, Schaufler has come up with an ambitious proposal. In the fashion of a 19th-century serialized novel, The Golden Ravedays has been trickling out in installments all year long, two tracks every month. And for whatever reason, those tracks have been, without exception, unusually long. Let’s run through the numbers: None of the album’s 24 songs is under 10 minutes, and the longest is nearly 20. The full album is just seven minutes shy of six hours long. You could hit play on the opening “Little Raver” as you were rolling away from the gate at JFK and, weather permitting, the final notes of the closing “Punky Reggae Party” would fade out right about the time your plane docked at LAX.
Along the way, Schaufler covers a lot of ground. Atop programmed pitter-patter and leathery hand percussion, he layers all manner of tricks: twangy steel guitar, twinkling harp, wolf howls, and unhinged wails. There is a surprising preponderance of Ethio-jazz saxophone. “Burkina” evokes mid-century exotica in wispy Theremin and rainforest effects, while the bluesy “Bluesin” shines thanks to its uncredited African vocalist. (A shame about the press release, which suggests a children’s book fashioned after Heart of Darkness: “Rumor has it that Superpitcher visited South Africa and adventurously traveled into the deep bush-bush where he met new friends with captivating voices who speak in enchanting tongues.”)
In sound and spirit, The Golden Ravedays represents Superpitcher’s most seamless fusion yet of sad-boy dreaminess and playful hijinks. The beats are largely atmospheric and the atmospheres positively ethereal; it’s all shot through with a subtly twisted undercurrent, like the giggly iridescence that everyday objects take on when you’re on your second or third straight day without sleep. The opening track sets up the premise pretty well. “Hey little raver/Where have you been?” Schaufler asks, in his slightly tuneless coo, over a ruminative Rhodes loop; in a dreamy sing-song, he answers himself with a self-evident reply: “Raving.” It’s morning-after music for party people still wearing traces of the night before.
Based on the highlights, that party sounds like a bacchanal for the ages. “What Do You Miss” smears slide guitar, kittenish mewling, and chorused saxes over a drawn-out dembow rhythm. “Andy,” a tribute to Andy Warhol, is crisp, slashing robo-disco bathed in sparkling harmonics. A few songs mark the welcome return of Superpitcher’s trademark velvet touch: The brooding “Hiding” is mournful ambient house, while “Pocket Love” borrows the bright synths of classic Border Community and sets them on a slow simmer. But he might be even better when he ventures further afield. “Brothers” sounds like a Daft Punk epic burnished to a brilliant gleam; the new-wave/krautrock hybrid “Protest Song” is a a weird, wooly take on minimalism that unfurls spooky whispers over thrumming toms and jaw harp, sounding a little like a jug-band Bauhaus.
Occasionally, though, he can’t quite move beyond memories of the 1990s’ home-listening electronica: “Let’s Play Doctor,” with its jazz flute and drum ‘n’ bass groove, might be something off Mo Wax’s Headz 2 compilation, and other songs are dead ringers for DJ Shadow, Röyksopp, and Kruder & Dorfmeister. And if the best tracks earn their runtime, many do not. In fact, a back-of-the-envelope tally suggests that, put together, the outros alone account for more than an hour of the album’s expanse. In other words, you could make a substantial, full-length ambient LP simply by pasting all the beatless bits together—and you’d still have almost five hours of dance music left over.
Whatever kind of reverie The Golden Ravedays is meant to induce, the album ultimately feels self-indulgent. That’s a shame, because even at his weirdest—sometimes, especially at his weirdest—Schaufler is exceptionally good company. “Punky Reggae Party,” for instance, is loopy in the best way, and on the right kind of dance floor, at the right time of silly o’clock, you might happily twirl along to its post-punk bassline and mantra-like vocals for upwards of a quarter of an hour. But The Golden Ravedays is crying out for an edited version, something to distill all Schaufler’s jokes and poems and scribbles into a manageable frame. Life is short, and Superpitcher’s music is too endearing to be turned into an endurance test. | 2017-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hippie Dance | December 19, 2017 | 6.6 | 14220c10-8ebf-499e-9434-31c7e5097713 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The challenging art-poppers led by Dave Longstreth have made their best and most accessible album, a record that's one of the year's real highlights. | The challenging art-poppers led by Dave Longstreth have made their best and most accessible album, a record that's one of the year's real highlights. | Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13159-bitte-orca/ | Bitte Orca | I've heard Dave Longstreth cursed at length, and I've heard him compared to some of the lesser deities. In the Dirty Projectors frontman we have a fellow who fancies himself not so much a songwriter as a modern composer, a Yale grad with one of indie rock's most divisive voices. Early DPs records carry with them ambitions so grandiose it's no wonder they range from wildly inventive to practically unlistenable-- occasionally in the span of the same song.
Then there was 2007's Rise Above, which saw Longstreth and company misremembering the hell out of Black Flag's Damaged by slathering embellishment onto one of the most gloriously unadorned LPs ever. It wasn't exactly a gimmick, but-- and I say this as a fan of both of those records-- it wasn't all that far from one. In spite of its comparatively light tone and the band's tight clutch on melody and rhythm, it was art-damaged and, to some, impenetrable. However you sized it up, you had to admit it was intriguing, even if your interest level waned with every passing yelp. This has heretofore been the story of Dirty Projectors: a band so brainy, so good at the very particular thing they do, they can be hard to like.
Now comes Bitte Orca, the band's best, and certainly most likable, album by a mile. Bitte doesn't actually switch up the Rise Above formula that much: Intricate (if roomier) full-band arrangements abound, Longstreth largely sticks with his clear King Sunny Ade-meets-Jimmy Page guitar acrobatics, and he's still singing his strange, loping songs with that voice. But it whittles down the jarring time signatures and off-kilter arrangements and vocal bleats (er, for the most part) to create a triumphant art-pop record destined to please longtime fans and win him a whole slew of new ones. The key is that, rather surprisingly, Bitte Orca is one of the more purely enjoyable indie-rock records in an awfully long time; remarkable by any means, but even moreso considering the source. It's breezy without a hint of slightness, tuneful but with its fair share of tumult, concise and inventive and replayable and plain old fun. It is the sound of Longstreth the composer and Longstreth the pop songwriter finally settling on a few things together after years of tug-of-war between the two.
There are some triumphant standalone songs in the DPs back catalogue-- "Fucked For Life", "I Will Truck", and "Rise Above" spring to mind-- but never has Longstreth laid nine of them out in a row, as he does on Bitte Orca. From the chiming opening chords of "Cannibal Resource" to the supple swivel that closes "Fluorescent Half-Dome", there's a forward motion at play when you spin Bitte Orca all the way through, but it's an album of such a high uniform quality and such indelible range, practically any tune could be your favorite. Songs run the gamut from Zeppelin III-style swirl (sorta-title-track "Useful Chamber") to delicate balladry ("Two Doves", a dead ringer for Nico's cover of Jackson Browne's "These Days" and no less gorgeous for it) to R&B bob-and-weave ("Stillness Is the Move", which owes a great debt to the dearly departed Aaliyah-Timbaland braintrust) to adult-contemporary pop (no shots, "No Intention"). Apart from the ultimately transitional whoosh of the brief "The Bride", the run from "Cannibal Resource" to "No Intention" is as solid and variegated a display of songwriting acumen and instrumental virtuosity as any you'll hear this year. But it sure doesn't feel as heavy as that sentence might have you believe.
I don't dare pick one highlight-- hell, my favorites keep changing-- but I'll point to "Useful Chamber" as the best encapsulation of what Bitte Orca does so well. A woozy synth line underpins one of Longstreth's gentlest vocal performances to date, a melody line I find myself singing in all sorts of inopportune places. Roughly halfway through, the beat breaks, Longstreth half-raps a little pre-chorus pep talk, and the song explodes in sound and vision. I don't quite understand what Longstreth is going for with the song's whale-plea mantra, but when it sounds like this-- so gigantic, so effortless, so unbelievably catchy-- I could really give a fuck. It's pure bliss, tension that results in glorious release. And while the song-- like the album it features on-- sacrifices precious little of the art-pop leanings of Longstreth's past work, he's traded obfuscation for overtness on nearly all levels, channeled his frenetic energy into paring down the songwriting as opposed to putting it all into the performances, and the results positively sing.
I'm only slightly less enamored of Bitte Orca's final twofer than I am with what precedes it, though either would be a clear highlight on any of the other DPs albums. "Remade Horizon" starts a bit slow and Longstreth's voice seems a tad strained on the verse melody; despite an ebullient shoutalong chorus, it seems more an excuse for the impressive feat of vocal pummelhorsery from Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian in its second half than it does a tune's tune like the seven that come before it. It's the first time on Bitte Orca Longstreth allows chops to stand out in front of the song, and while it's neat to hear them pull it off (and is an absolute marvel in a live setting), it feels showy in a way Bitte Orca otherwise avoids in favor of direct hits. The emphasis on Coffman and Deradoorian's vocals throughout is one of the best things about the record; "Horizon" just happens to be the one moment they seem overused-- a problem of arrangement, really-- and it suffers a bit for it.
"Fluorescent Half Dome" has the opposite problem; it's a bit too simplistic getting going and doesn't quite earn its bizarre chorus. While, like most songs here, it picks up when Coffman and Deradoorian start in with their vocals, it's not quite the closer a record like this deserves. But even focusing on relative difficulty among tracks on the record seems odd: Jaw-dropping virtuosity was the best thing the DPs had going for them prior to Bitte Orca. Here, it stands behind so many other newly apparent strengths-- a testament to the leaps and bounds Longstreth has made as a songsmith and Dirty Projectors have made as a band. | 2009-06-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-06-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | June 9, 2009 | 9.2 | 14226de5-3603-4684-8637-030c7add8d1f | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
This collection of B-sides, demos, and covers is terrific and revelatory in its own right. It's a trail of dropped clues to the creative process of the defiantly mercurial Olsen. | This collection of B-sides, demos, and covers is terrific and revelatory in its own right. It's a trail of dropped clues to the creative process of the defiantly mercurial Olsen. | Angel Olsen: Phases | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/angel-olsen-phases/ | Phases | A couple of years ago, Angel Olsen performed a show inside a church revival-style tent in Luck, Texas. I’ll wager that most of us camped out on those wooden benches had never actually been to an actual revival, and the situation in which we found ourselves, below the low, pointed roof of a round canvas tarp out of which a succession of bands played on a tiny wooden platform, was more akin to a production design rendering of what a revival might look like. In fact, we were on a film set. Olsen’s concert was part of the daylong Heartbreaker Banquet at Willie Nelson’s Red-Headed Stranger ranch, the setting for his 1986 film of the same name. Outside the tent, there was a fake jailhouse, a fake opera house, people streaming by with South by Southwest wristbands and plastic cups of keg beer. Inside, as dusk fell and darkness filled the tent, Olsen went on, delivering a spare and haunting performance in tune with the murky glow of the lanterns.
It was a year between two pivotal albums for Olsen—the stunning and scarred folk songs of Burn Your Fire For No Witness, and 2016’s My Woman, writ much larger in every sense—still contemplative, but escalating in power. She seemed to summon Stevie Nicks in arena-ready songs like “Sister,” she skated backwards in a tinsel wig in the video she directed for “Shut Up Kiss Me.” Though she’s graduated to bigger stages, backed by a full band, cracking jokes between songs, it occurred to me there in the tent that this wasn’t just a singer downsizing to a smaller venue, but that Olsen was using the setting in a hyper-explorative way, approaching the idea of a song as a transfiguring, mutable thing. It’s in that spirit that her new album, Phases, which collects a dozen of Olsen’s demos, B-sides, and cover songs recorded over the past five years, arrives now.
“[I]t’s like a diary was stolen and mass produced,” Olsen wrote in a recent Instagram post, “but that’s chill with me, I got nothing to hide.” She was being, of course, a little bit coy. By its nature, Phases isn’t as cohesive as her previous albums but, terrific and revelatory in its own right, it feels like a link between them, a trail of dropped clues to the creative process of the defiantly mercurial Olsen. Sequencing tracks out of the chronology of their recording, the album nevertheless forms its own arc—a trajectory between daring and solace, a protagonist learning what it means to risk love. Songs like the demo “Sans,” which yearns for a solution “as easy as just picking up the phone,” and “Special,” recall Exile in Guyville-era Liz Phair in their spare, strumming core—they draw fuel from their admission of longing. “Only with You” is a cry-yourself-to-sleep lullaby and lament (“You can love you can love you can lose/ Even at your own game”), but the song that follows “It’s All Right,” also from the Burn Your Fire for No Witness sessions in 2013 is a beautiful bolstering, as if the same person woke up and delivered herself a self-affirmation.
I’m partial to the dirty guitars, desert echo, and pounding drums of “Sweet Dreams,” the way Olsen turns the word alone into an incantatory Roy Orbison wail. By this point in the album, Olsen seems to be trading vulnerability and power equally. There’s nothing so risky and naked as revealing your heart’s desire, as she does in “California,” where the album crescendos. When she sings, “I’ve never felt quite so open for love/ I’ve never felt quite so open before,” her voice gapes wide, hitting a high soprano vibrato so tremulous it feels like she’s on the verge of tears. But that’s just Olsen fooling again—right when she reaches a kind of emotional and vocal free-fall, she snaps it all back, reminding you she was in control the entire time. This isn’t the story of someone defending a delusory romance—“I’m not dreaming this time”—but a person with newfound confidence and a thrill in finding herself in new territory, even at the potential cost of a broken heart.
Phases is worth it for the covers too—her take on Bruce Springsteen’s “Tougher than the Rest,” from Tunnel of Love, removes the swagger of that song for a disquieting come-on, spelling out a different definition of tough. Olsen does heartfelt justice to Roky Erickson’s “For You,” one of the most rarest and most beautiful of his solo songs; a forthright declaration of love in a jaunty Orbison-esque rhythm. Olsen’s home-recorded rendition, with a guitar and chorus, is warm and unadorned—there’s little you need to add to a line as indelible as “I’m cooked to you so rare.”
I’d always figured “Endless Road,” which Olsen regularly includes in her set lists, to be a Johnny Cash ballad I’d somehow never heard. It exists somewhere in that gruff, gothic timbre, a hymn to lonesome waywardness, dropping wholesale references to the dark folk blues of “In the Pines.” But “Endless Road,” in fact, is a cover that appeared on an episode of Bonanza, sung by Hoyt Axton, who’d guest-starred as a singing drifter. Olsen first heard it while watching rerun TV with her mother; later she learned that Axton’s mother wrote the song. In any case, Olsen plaintively identifies with the curse and blessing of being the restless seeker, refusing to be pinned down, but also acknowledging its costs. Her voice soars far past the even timbre of Axton’s delivery, reaching treacherous heights at its apex: “Till I can lay this lonesome body down.” It’s her traveling song, and the perfect closer to an album that pulls together winding, thrilling paths, united here in their searching. | 2017-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | November 10, 2017 | 7.9 | 1425f35b-e969-40ab-9dd6-1b619c9f4ed6 | Rebecca Bengal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca-bengal/ | |
Morby's spare, remorseful fifth solo album evokes the world-weariness of gospel-phase Dylan. | Morby's spare, remorseful fifth solo album evokes the world-weariness of gospel-phase Dylan. | Kevin Morby: Oh My God | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-morby-oh-my-god/ | Oh My God | Across four solo albums (and turns in bands like Woods and the Babies), Kevin Morby has always worn his influences on his sleeve. Or record sleeves if you will: Depending on your Ikea shelf space or online playlists, one might hear throughlines to Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and Leonard Cohen’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony, the rock-as-savior gestures of Spiritualized and Springsteen. Or maybe you hear Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Randy Newman, and the War on Drugs instead. Depending on the line and moment, Morby can deftly emulate all of the above. The more you appreciate this rock canon, the more likely that Morby hit some of your sweet spots. Even when it came to covering the feral punk of the Germs, Morby found a way to make “Caught in my Eye” sound like a lost Dylan cut.
On Oh My God, Morby’s fifth solo album, he continues to speak in rock’s vernacular, right down to crafting the kind of spare, remorseful album that sounds like the aforementioned artists’ attempts at gospel. Even on his 2013 debut, he gave a nod to Dylan’s then-maligned gospel phase, so it’s always been latent in Morby’s music, but the world and life events that have transpired since then have brought them to the surface. Oh My God makes these strains overt and heavy-handed.
Right from the start, Morby and band are in solemn states of mind. “Oh My God” features little more than piano, organ, and Morby’s unanswered prayers to “come carry me home.” Celestial hums swoop down to accompany him and a filigree of saxophone takes over. It’s tasteful if toothless, imparting not so much a sense of salvation as a smooth jazz interlude.
Meticulous as the sound palette is throughout, favoring sustained organ chords, close-mic’d guitar strums, and the patter of hand drums, the effect starts to smudge everything together. Repetitions of phrases like, “Sing a glad song,” and, “Carry me home,” and, “Oh my God,” creep across a number of songs, each time delivered with such weariness that you wonder whether you’re listening to the same songs on repeat. The exclamation of the title soon feels as rote as a text message acronym sent out ad nauseam.
There are grim themes to grapple with in our modern world, and a recent profile on Morby suggests he too was dealing with the same awful aftermath of 2016 as the rest of us, unable to get a handle on answers. Yet rather than scrabble for hard-fought insight, Morby time and again veers off into cliché, giving us insipid lines like, “Everything we do is a mess/But oh, honey, may this mess be blessed,” and, “Fe-fi-fo.” Elsewhere you can find rhyme schemes for “pray/say/okay” and “fly/sky/cry.” Halos and horns and wings abound, but there are no stakes to be found. You start to pray that Morby sees his way to stop looking to the gods of rock’s past and just speak his own language. | 2019-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | May 1, 2019 | 6.2 | 142a46ae-ffc2-413f-8e0f-613a38737a3e | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Hotly hyped UK singer/songwriter Jack Garratt blends earnest bluesman's style with a light fizz of electronica and quavering voice. His debut seems forged from equal parts James Blake and Jai Paul, and somewhere inside the sentiment and bombast you can hear a sensitive man who's trying to explore his flaws and desires candidly. | Hotly hyped UK singer/songwriter Jack Garratt blends earnest bluesman's style with a light fizz of electronica and quavering voice. His debut seems forged from equal parts James Blake and Jai Paul, and somewhere inside the sentiment and bombast you can hear a sensitive man who's trying to explore his flaws and desires candidly. | Jack Garratt: Phase | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21495-phase/ | Phase | Jack Garratt has only just released his debut album, but his success has been sewn up for months. Last October, the 24-year-old British songwriter/producer announced a show at London's 5000-capacity Brixton Academy for this coming April. In November, he won the Brits Critics' Choice Award for 2016; last month, the BBC Sound of 2016 poll. From the other side of the Atlantic, those might look like insignificant spoils, but in the UK, it's a case of mutually assured industry triumph: Garratt dominates radio, plays sweet televised spots at major festivals, boosts live revenues, and makes the organizations that backed him look smart. Such are the perks of signing to Island, an imprint of Universal, who have had Garratt in a development deal for years—and scooped 11 of the past 14 BBC Sound of... polls thanks to their massive spending power.
Brits are cynical of being marketed to, and even more suspicious of what looks like instant success, so Island have carefully made Garratt look Very Authentic. There's a lovelorn songwriter at the heart of his music—a side he displayed when he covered Disclosure's "Latch" in earnest bluesman fashion—that's been coated with lightly fizzing electronica. Phase seems forged from the sounds of James Blake's CMYK EP and Jai Paul's "BTSTU": subaquatic synth motifs and juddering basslines that burst into scrunching supernova choruses. There's also lots of gospel-influenced warbling and soft, bluesy piano. Whenever Garratt plays the latter, you hear his stool squeak very clearly, as if it's been amplified for effect.
Marketing aside, Phase doesn't sound unpleasant, just generic. Phase starts strong enough: The delicate, swimmy first verse of opener "Coalesce (Synesthesia Pt. II)" suddenly goes hyperdrive, gathering nastier textures as Garratt's vocals fracture and writhe. "Breathe Life" is the catchiest song, with a bright, shimmying soulful chorus that owes as much to the aforementioned Jai Paul as it does Florence and the Machine's cover of "You Got the Love." "Far Cry" is also compelling, with screaming mosquito synths and agile bass driving the hectic pace.
Things get weaker from there: "Weathered" has the unctuous sentimentality of Mumford & Sons (whom Garratt has supported in stadiums), and its lyrics are the equivalent of those manipulative commercials showing a child turn into a senior citizen in 45 seconds: "When I grow old/ The sun will cope/ Shine down on every youth stain," Garratt simpers. He has a tendency to reach for grandiose overstatements as shorthand for profundity, a tendency that gives his romantic lyrics an unwittingly sinister edge. His neediness is intense: "To love you takes every waking thought I have," he declares on "Fire." On "The Love You're Given," he sings, "I promise if you're gonna lock me out I will stay as your ghost/ But if you take the love you're given I will leave you alone," and echoes the sentiment on "I Know All What I Do": "If I ever leave you, eyes will remain."
To give him credit, he seems to recognize a certain OTT tendency within himself. On the hard-grinding "Chemical," he makes various unflattering admissions about his love: how it's "overdone, selfish, and domineering … chemical, shallow, and chauvinistic." But as with almost all his lyrics on the topic, it feels empty, drawing from overcooked cultural tropes about urgency. Somewhere within all this bombast is a sensitive man who's trying to explore his flaws and desires candidly. You sense that the thing that he needs is intimacy, a smaller scale. And it's the one luxury he's not going to get, because Jack Garratt is too big to fail. | 2016-02-18T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-18T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Island | February 18, 2016 | 5.6 | 142b7855-ede1-4b00-bc2a-3752f52c971e | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | 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 high-art synth-pop of the Human League’s Dare, a prismatic album that all pop music would soon pass through. | 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 high-art synth-pop of the Human League’s Dare, a prismatic album that all pop music would soon pass through. | The Human League: Dare | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-human-league-dare/ | Dare | In late 1980, the singer Philip Oakey was scheduled to go on tour and make a third record with his band the Human League. The problem was that there was no Human League. The founding members had departed acrimoniously, leaving Oakey with just the name and a lingering associate, Philip Adrian Wright, whose only role was to project slides of rocket schematics and stills from old movies behind the group’s live performances. Together, Oakey and Wright had to somehow make a new band and a new album out of nothing.
Oakey didn’t have any finished songs, just a few disconnected ideas. The recently departed synth technicians Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh had written most of the music for the first two Human League records and, as far as critics were concerned, they were the real talent of the group, the masterminds behind the eerie yet often danceable synthesized music which sounded like it could’ve emanated from a post-apocalyptic nightclub or a dark alien obelisk in the desert.
Oakey, by comparison, was a pretty face, a deep voice, and an eye-catching asymmetrical haircut—one side cropped close, the other a dark waterfall of hair. He and Wright were the visual element of the band, the kitschy surfaces that made even their bleaker electronic ruminations pop. Oakey could sing but he didn't have much in the way of musical talent, and he was anxious about writing a new Human League record on his own, especially with the added pressure of delivering something more successful to the record label than their previous album, 1980’s Travelogue. “I thought we were going to fail and everyone was going to laugh in our faces,” Oakey told the Sunday Herald Sun in 2009. But Dare, the album he made with the ruins of a broken band, was a paradigm shift: It signified the end of something old—the original Human League—and the beginning of something new—synth-pop—all at once, a kind of prism that all pop music would soon pass through.
Three years earlier, Oakey had just been hired as the singer of a band called the Future, whose other two members, Ware and Marsh, had run in the same Sheffield arts circles since they were teenagers. They were all obsessed with science fiction, and many early Human League songs—for instance, “The Black Hit of Space,” about a song so dull it opens up a black hole that swallows the listener and the world around them—read as if they were pulled from a Philip K. Dick story collection. They grew up on glam rock, whose influence lingered in Oakey’s appearance, his features softened by makeup, his ear often sporting a long shimmering earring. But when Ware and Marsh heard German electronic group Kraftwerk, along with Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” they thought they were hearing the future of music. They noticed that the future didn’t seem to have any guitars. The future was a vortex of processed sound.
With the addition of Oakey’s shadowy, handsome voice, they renamed themselves the Human League and started to reconceptualize themselves as a pop band. Befitting their avant-garde origins, they worked from an indiscriminate definition of “pop,” covering advertisement jingles and themes from film scores, absorbing and refracting every kitsch artifact in their grasp. But their approach proceeded from a true love of pop culture and its ephemera; the cover of the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” on their 1979 debut album Reproduction, manages to be truly heartfelt and warm through the cold glitter of its instrumentation. Human emotions were timeless, the League seemed to say. Only the technologies that conveyed them changed.
But Ware and Marsh’s departure in 1980 left Oakey without even that bed of technology. So Wright was promoted to occasional synth player, and he and Oakey searched the Sheffield streets for new band members. Oakey had been listening to Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and wanted to incorporate a high, androgynous falsetto into the Human League’s music, something that could hover like a spotlight over his own dark baritone. A few weeks before the tour started, he visited the Sheffield discotheque Crazy Daisy, which was hosting its “Futurist” night. Through a tangle of chic glittery people dressed like Gary Numan, Oakey glimpsed two girls—Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley—dancing in the lights. Something about their appearance and the way they moved—angular and awkward, charming and unselfconscious—mesmerized him, and he invited them to join the band even though they were both still attending high school. They were also fans of the band, and had purchased tickets to a Human League show on the very tour they were being hired for.
Catherall and Sulley were neither trained singers nor professional dancers. Their voices wavered through notes, but they glowed around Oakey’s gloom like museum light on a sculpture. Their presence added an ineffable layer of glamor to the group—where the old Human League appeared inflexible and robotic on stage, this new League blushed with movement and color. Oakey’s method of saving his band wasn’t necessarily creative or musical but utterly visual. Could anything be more pop?
Regardless, Oakey still needed to put together the pop music that would reinforce the visual shift. After the tour ended, Virgin Records sent in producer Martin Rushent to help shape the new Human League material into something not only professional but commercial. When he arrived, the band had just started work on a track called “The Sound of the Crowd,” a song Oakey and recent Human League recruit Ian Burden were building on synthesizers around a very simple, lopsided figure of thumping tom sounds. When Oakey first played the demo of it for Sulley and Catherall, it sounded simplistic and a little rickety, but they knew it was a hit—they could envision themselves dancing to it. Rushent wasn’t as impressed; he wanted more. He threw the demo out and insisted they start from scratch.
What Rushent turned “The Sound of the Crowd” into remapped the world of pop music around it. He programmed a song without much potential into a chain reaction of synthesizer and drum patterns, all pulsing together in white space. Nothing on the radio, beyond Gary Numan’s geometric synth constructions, sounded quite like it. Each sound is so clean and separated you can hear them leave different impacts on the blankness. It’s also a staggeringly simple composition, a verse and a chorus culminating in a breakdown where Oakey, Sulley, and Catherall’s voices build to a scream. But in Rushent’s hands, it’s shaped into something as modern and distinct as space-age furniture.
During the recording process, the band fused two different songs into “Love Action (I Believe in Love),” its synths sinking and creeping through like water leaking through a tar roof. Oakey broods through the whole thing, except for an abrupt monologue between the first and second chorus (“I believe, I believe what the old man said”) that reels out of him nearly at the speed of rap. None of them—not even Burden and Jo Callis, experienced touring musicians whom Oakey and Rushent had planted in front of unfamiliar synthesizers—knew exactly what they were doing, or if anything they were writing would work as a song. Rushent would listen to the rough mixes of Dare songs when he returned home from the studio and couldn’t figure out whether the album they were making was brilliant or terrible.
This is, incidentally, why Dare works so well. The songs are simple, sometimes containing only one or two melodic ideas, and synthesizers connect in lattices around them. Opener “The Things That Dreams Are Made Of” is just a few sing-songy sequences stacked on top of each other, while Oakey sings lyrics that have all the frenzied energy of travel brochure slogans: See the world—Berlin or New York! Spend money and acquire new friends! “Dare to feel! Take the chance! Make the deal!” he sings in “Open Your Heart” as two-note synth chords drone around him like rays of daylight. It works almost like an advertisement: Very little is happening, but there’s just enough to catch your eye. Dare’s title and art were modeled after an April 1979 Vogue UK cover where the word “Dare!” glowed in neon pink above the warm blush of a model’s face; in all of the variations of the album’s cover design, a member of the band presses their face against a narrow rectangle, staring out into the same glossy white void it feels like the music was born in.
But Dare is more than an advertisement for itself. There’s a hole at its center where the band abruptly slips into a dark glimmer of the old Human League. A spare cover of the theme for the 1971 crime film Get Carter opens the second side, retaining only the harpsichord line from the original, transposed here to a synthesizer so high and keening it sounds like a disembodied cry in the dark. Then the dystopian “I Am the Law” slithers into view, Oakey seeming to sing from the perspective of a police officer who believes he knows what’s best for the people he’s supposed to protect. It’s sinister and terrifying—the instrumentation creeps like the shadow of a hand over an insect. “Seconds” seems to snap the album out of this black mood, but its lyrics depict John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and eventually, the song just lapses into repetitions of the chorus: “It took seconds of your time to take his life.” Oakey runs through the shared cultural memory over and over again as if he were circling it on a track, trying and failing to see it from a new angle.
Of course, Dare isn’t remembered for the darkness that engulfs its middle, but for the frozen glow of its singles, which presaged the dawning of a new era in pop music, one where synthesizers and drum machines processed the flutter and ache of crushes, romance, and heartbreak. But the League never again achieved the world-blanketing success of Dare, especially not its fourth single and final track, “Don’t You Want Me.”
Oakey didn’t want “Don’t You Want Me” released as a single, and fought with the record company when he learned they’d selected it; needless to say, it’s ironic that the song on Dare that most wants to be wanted would be the one Oakey was most embarrassed over. For the lyric, he rewrote the plot to A Star Is Born as a duet of intraband drama between himself and Sulley. It’s perfect: the thick fog cast by the opening synth line, Oakey’s stone-faced gloom quickening into desperation in the transition from the verse to the bridge, the way Sulley’s voice gets shaky as if it’s feeling the desolate cold of the song. They ask each other the same question, yet the disconnection between them is so profound that neither person can hear it, a lonely signal sent into darkness as vast and quiet as space: “Don’t you want me?”
Oddly, the League didn’t get to participate very much in the strain of pop they helped develop. “(Keep Feeling) Fascination” and “Mirror Man” were released over the next two years, but the sessions for the follow-up, 1984’s Hysteria, were so torturous and overextended that Rushent abandoned his role as producer and was replaced by Hugh Padgham. A few years later, the band would enlist Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to write and produce one of their signature songs, the redundantly-titled “Human,” which plunged their voices into a liquid R&B soundworld and gave them another hit.
But the aesthetic and commercial successes of Dare were unrepeatable; the Human League could never be as unaware of the music they were making ever again. It’s the unconsciousness, that not knowing, that makes the record so great, that makes it sound like it’s beamed in from some vast emptiness. It was pop music that resembled the most enduring pop culture in history, things that didn’t know what they were until it was too late—the Beatles, Marilyn Monroe—massively popular figures that were absorbed as images before they were ever accepted as art. In making a record that no one involved could tell if it was any good, they made something unprecedented. | 2020-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Virgin | May 17, 2020 | 9.1 | 142c2abf-61d1-4edd-ad88-f345fa533c4f | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | |
Common bounces back from the low point of his career with his best album since 2005's Be. Produced by soul-rap veteran No I.D. and featuring Nas, Maya Angelou, and John Legend, The Dreamer/The Believer has moments that recall the humanity and thoughtfulness of his mid-90s classics. | Common bounces back from the low point of his career with his best album since 2005's Be. Produced by soul-rap veteran No I.D. and featuring Nas, Maya Angelou, and John Legend, The Dreamer/The Believer has moments that recall the humanity and thoughtfulness of his mid-90s classics. | Common: The Dreamer/The Believer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16156-common-the-dreamerthe-believer/ | The Dreamer/The Believer | Common is confused, and who can blame him? His career has stumbled in so many directions that confusion is kind of unavoidable. He's gone from being a troubled, semi-alcoholic underground rapper, to a knit-cap, Soulquarian prince, to Kanye West's older, less-cool cousin, to now, just a friendly-looking guy who occasionally appears in Gap ads. At this point, it's anyone's guess who the "Common" on Common's records might be. The confusion reached its low point on 2008's Universal Mind Control, in which we were introduced the mortifying sight of strip-club Common. Now, The Dreamer/The Believer finds him banging his chest, demanding to know when hip-hop got all soft and sweet, and attempting to engage Drake in a war on wax.
It's a bewildering spectacle, but a painful midlife crisis can cut two ways: In one corner, yes, we have the guy responsible for a song called "Electric Wire Hustle Flower" demanding machismo credentials from the former star of Degrassi: The Next Generation. But in the other, we have the best, hardest-hitting, and most consistent Common album since Be. In fact, The Dreamer/The Believer occasionally recalls the rough humanity and humble thoughtfulness of his still-untouchable mid-90s classics Resurrection and One Day It'll All Make Sense. It's hard to know where this guy still draws his creative fire from, but there are points on this record where Common raps as if his gift for slick embedded wordplay and tactile storytelling was just in a pocket he hadn't looked in for 10 years.
Much of the album's fuel comes from soul-rap veteran No I.D., who handles the majority of the production. The Chicago producer has undergone a startling creative renaissance in the last two years: Until about 2009 he seemed destined to live out his life as local legend, the Godfather of Chicago Rap and the Guy Who Taught Kanye West. Lately, though, he's become what DJ Premier used to be: the guy you hire when you want to cozy up to Unimpeachable Authenticity. Even better, his latest work hits harder and more viciously than anything he's done before. "Ghetto Dreams", featuring a fully awake Nas, is the gulliest track Common has rapped on since "The Corner". "Blue Sky" chops up ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky" into a looping, affecting plea. "Celebrate" is the best G.O.O.D. Music BBQ-jam since Kanye's "See Me Now". And the back-firing-Hooptee snare kick on "Sweet" almost lets you peek through your fingers as Common rails against "hoe-ass" rappers and informs us that he is "to hip-hop what Obama is to politics."
Common raps so hard on The Dreamer that you can almost hear his neck veins throb. And for every bit of overcompensation-- he actually cracks a bottle over a dude's head in "Raw"-- there's something vividly rendered and honest. That kind of honesty used to be Common's territory, but he surrendered it long ago to smarminess: by Finding Forever, he only seemed capable of rapping in fortune cookies. On "Gold", he paints fond memories of his early nights: "Hats from liquor stores, to avoid syphilis/ Frivolous spending/ Drunk nights with storybook endings." "Lovin' I Lost" is disarmingly humble and open-hearted about heartbreak: "I must confess, I miss the days of you laying on my chest." Of course, there's still nothing worse than a Latter-Day Common Simile, and goofy lyrics abound. But the reason The Dreamer/The Believer sticks-- and it does-- isn't because Common reclaims some musty real-dude credentials he never had: It's because something seems to have reminded him that he's not a persona, but a real, blood-pumping human. | 2012-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. / Think Common | January 10, 2012 | 7.6 | 142cac71-5415-4504-be00-dba4120f9dff | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are a seven-person band from Australia who specialize in unpredictable psychedelic music. Their fifth album, I'm in Your Mind Fuzz, is out on John Dwyer's Castle Face label, and comparisons to Thee Oh Sees make perfect sense. | King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are a seven-person band from Australia who specialize in unpredictable psychedelic music. Their fifth album, I'm in Your Mind Fuzz, is out on John Dwyer's Castle Face label, and comparisons to Thee Oh Sees make perfect sense. | King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: I'm in Your Mind Fuzz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20019-king-gizzard-the-lizard-wizard-im-in-your-mind-fuzz/ | I'm in Your Mind Fuzz | When a band hits the stage with more than five members, you're looking at something that's bound to be either a spectacle or a complete fiasco. Sure, the history of popular music is full of excellent bands with unwieldily large lineups (Funkadelic, Talking Heads on Stop Making Sense). Sometimes, it's just a mess (various jam, nu-metal, and high school talent show bands). King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are a seven-person band from Australia who specialize in unpredictable psychedelic music. Their ranks include two drummers, three guitarists, and a harmonica player. To reiterate: They're a septet with a name that sounds like it could've been ripped from "Masters of the Universe" who make heady soundscapes punctuated by blues harp.
Ridiculous as this all sounds on paper, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard aren't wasting anyone's time with throwaway joke music. While they started as a side-project (following in the great Australian tradition where each member plays in other groups) and self-admitted "joke band", the Melbourne band have definitely paid their dues over the past four years with critically acclaimed live sets and a prolific string of records. I'm in Your Mind Fuzz is their fifth album to date, and if their discography tells a story, it's one of a band who never fully settle into one sound. Their album Oddments from earlier this year featured flashes of bubblegum pop and Hammond organ-led soul. On their debut album 12 Bar Bruise, they invoked Oblivians-style garage punk. It's never clear from the outset exactly which path they'll explore or what sounds they'll plop into the mix along the way. Horses neighing, xylophones, and instruments of unidentifiable origins have appeared in their songs, and impressively, King Gizzard always manage to wrangle the chaos into well-crafted compositions.
As usual, the band's latest collection, I'm in Your Mind Fuzz, partially recorded at Daptone in Brooklyn, isn't easily categorized. While the blues feels like an inevitable touchstone thanks to Ambrose Kenny-Smith's harmonica (disorienting as it sounds when caked in psychedelic effects), it's also got the psych pop jaunt of the Millennium. But as varied as King Gizzard are, they've established one surefire safe bet with each record: They implement their "more is more" approach for maximum impact. Their songs are dense, intricately crafted, and most importantly, powerful. It's appropriate that Mind Fuzz is out via Castle Face (in North America—Heavenly's got it out in Europe and Flightless once again have them covered in Australia), as the 17-minute ripper "Am I in Heaven?" is arguably the best Thee Oh Sees track to be released in 2014. There are easy comparisons to be drawn between the two bands—Stu Mackenzie lets out a point-perfect John Dwyer "WOO" before employing explosive, rapidfire guitar lines. And like their label overlords, King Gizz also know when to let urgency eventually give way to elation.
The album's overall lyrical concept is mind control. If they've managed to brainwash their listeners, they've done it by making a record that's hard to tune out. Take, for example, I'm in Your Mind Fuzz's absolute peak—the opening 12-minute chunk comprising the four song stretch of "I'm in Your Mind" to "I'm in Your Mind Fuzz". They churn and choogle relentlessly forward, each rafter-reaching jam bleeding into the next. The rhythm section—bassist Lucas Skinner, drummers Michael Cavanagh and Eric Moore—stay locked in the same groove across all four songs while the guitars, harmonica, and Mackenzie's vocals explore various melodies within that structure—different movements operating in the same theme.
But a steady stream of bangers comes at a price. When you open with a sprint, things eventually have to slow down, and the comedown is right where King Gizzard trip up. Immediately following the all-power introduction are a pair of tracks ("Empty" and "Hot Water") that sound like watered-down versions of what came before them. They make the save later, though, closing the album with some of their best slow jams. (Two of which are titled "Slow Jam".) And, right when it seems that they've settled into a restrained groove, they shake it up again: the speed picks up, guitar solos are delivered, vocals are augmented and distorted. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard don't do predictability. | 2014-12-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2014-12-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Heavenly / Castle Face / Flightless | December 5, 2014 | 7 | 142f015b-10e4-4728-aa99-33c40227d7d9 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
On her sixth album, Demi Lovato finds a consistently compelling space: flinty, flirty R&B that’s just as thrilling hushed as it is at full blast. | On her sixth album, Demi Lovato finds a consistently compelling space: flinty, flirty R&B that’s just as thrilling hushed as it is at full blast. | Demi Lovato: Tell Me You Love Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/demi-lovato-tell-me-you-love-me/ | Tell Me You Love Me | You can learn almost everything you need to know about this decade in pop by tracing the careers of last decade’s Disney kids. Selena Gomez sat at the genre’s vanguard with a mixture of massive EDM-pop collaborations and whispery solo hits. Miley Cyrus ignited a still-burning conversation about race and appropriation and flew her freak flag with Wayne Coyne before remembering Republicans buy Spotify memberships, too. Nick Jonas is an apt stand-in for a group of male pop stars who lack the transformative charisma of their musical ancestors. None of these artists have broken into the stratosphere reserved for figures like Beyoncé and Kanye West, but they’ve more or less defined teen pop’s last eight years.
The fourth and final late-’00s Disney alum worth mentioning is Demi Lovato, the star with the most obvious musical asset—an absolute cannon of a voice—and the longest road to stability. Lovato’s struggles with mental health and addiction are well-documented at this point, in large part because she’s spoken about them with transparency. (You can always count on her for a refreshingly frank interview: when asked by Glamour about parts of her life that trigger her addiction, she said she’ll never be able to watch The Wolf of Wall Street.) Her commitment to advocacy and accountability was ahead of the curve, especially in a moment where even the most apolitical public figures are taking stands. But for Lovato, musical maturity has proven more elusive.
She has dipped her toe in almost every pop-adjacent genre since her debut, 2008’s spunky Don’t Forget. She churned out two albums of tame pop-punk while still toiling in the Disney machine; Unbroken and Demi, released after rebounding from her public nadir, leaned towards generic, clubbier fare. 2015’s Confident was a step forward anchored by an infectious hit—the bold, bi-curious “Cool for the Summer”—but Lovato still felt like a voice (and a personality) in search of material that would do her justice. With Tell Me You Love Me, she’s finally settled into a consistently compelling space: flinty, flirty R&B that’s just as thrilling hushed as it is at full blast.
Demi’s always taken to power ballads like a hammer to nails: the Unbroken standout “Skyscraper” was her first “adult” hit, and her career may have taken an entirely different shape had it not been launched by the legendary Camp Rock banger “This Is Me.” She’s never been scared of a booming vocal showcase in the Adele or Kelly Clarkson modes, and two of these showcases serve as early anchors on Tell Me You Love Me. The title track is a desperate plea for affection that gradually morphs into a declaration of self-love; “You Don’t Do It for Me Anymore” is even better, a soaring breakup anthem dedicated to Lovato’s old vices rather than an old flame. These are songs that seek to overcome you with sheer athleticism rather than construction or pacing. They’re impressive in isolation, but they also have the impact of a huge meal or a hard workout: it doesn’t take long to feel completely exhausted.
This is where Tell Me You Love Me improves on Lovato’s previous albums: It gives you enough space to see Demi as something other than a no-holds-barred belter. There’s a Kehlani-like jack-of-all-trades behind those pipes, an artist with can skilfully, successfully make hip-hop and R&B work in a pop context. Lead single “Sorry Not Sorry”—her biggest hit in nearly half a decade and climbing—is a defiant gospel-pop kiss-off that wouldn’t sound out of place in Chance the Rapper’s hands. When you listen to the album in full, the craft keeps coming. “Ruin the Friendship” smolders like something cut from CrazySexyCool; “Games” is studded with goofy, giddy ad-libs; the remarkable DJ Mustard-produced “Lonely” stuns without feeling remotely showy, growled F-bombs aside. (Lovato and Lil Wayne—poking his head in for a moody, warbling verse—make a surprisingly good team.) You can even start to hear the influence of Frank Ocean’s instant-classic Blonde trickling down into laid-back deep cuts like “Concentrate” and “Hitchhiker.”
The woman behind these songs knows herself well enough to rein in her most destructive impulses, but she still can’t help but take a series of romantic risks. Lovato isn’t precious about the bumps in her road, either: “Sexy Dirty Love” builds a pre-chorus around an extended addiction metaphor, and “Daddy Issues” is remarkably frothy for someone whose recent albums featured dramatic accounts of her relationship with her late, estranged father. (“Forget all the therapy that I’ve been through/Lucky for you, I’ve got all these daddy issues.” Fun!) She’s willing to throw away a perfectly good platonic relationship (“Ruin the Friendship”) and take an emotional leap with a stranger (“Hitchhiker”) because she knows she can always rely on herself. You want to get to know the Lovato behind Tell Me You Love Me, something you can’t definitively say about any of her other releases. It’s the first album she has made that captures the woman who stumped for Hillary Clinton and brushes off questions about her sexuality in all of her complicated and captivating glory. | 2017-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island / Hollywood | October 4, 2017 | 7.2 | 142fd8c7-cb0a-4918-9485-47e5c7f96324 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
William Basinski doesn’t play a single note on his new album Cascade: the tape-loop-and-delay technique that produced it is akin to Eno’s on Ambient 1: Music for Airports. It comes with The Deluge, a related studio recording where Basinski filtered Cascade through gradually elongating feedback loops, creating the sound of something being almost remembered. | William Basinski doesn’t play a single note on his new album Cascade: the tape-loop-and-delay technique that produced it is akin to Eno’s on Ambient 1: Music for Airports. It comes with The Deluge, a related studio recording where Basinski filtered Cascade through gradually elongating feedback loops, creating the sound of something being almost remembered. | William Basinski: Cascade / The Deluge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20900-cascade-the-deluge/ | Cascade / The Deluge | Brian Eno and Harold Budd loom large over all piano-based ambient music, and William Basinski’s Cascade is no exception to this rule. They spring to mind as soon as the first notes slip out, and the music reaches the same core of beatific sadness. But it gets there in its own way. After all, Budd played live on Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror and The Pearl, filling metronomic piano lines with human presence, while Basinski doesn’t play a note on Cascade. The tape-loop-and-delay technique that produced it is more akin to Eno’s on Ambient 1: Music for Airports, though again, Basinski does it his way. Instead of a plush, pristine sound full of regal pauses, he unleashes a continuous scrawl of murk. This is but one of the things you think about while listening to the same Basinski piano loop for a very long time.
Cascade is very simple. A high minor arpeggio darts purposefully forward and then turns into a scatter of reflections as a midrange note tolls a few times in answer, followed by a distantly trumpeting howl. It lasts for a matter of seconds and then repeats—surge, collapse, glide—for 40 minutes, followed by a brief coda of Arvo Pärt-like sacred stillness. There is little sound in the low range, so the whole structure seems to hang over an abyss. With no variation at the macro level, the music shouldn’t describe much more than a figure skater tracing an infinity sign. But it has endless variation at the micro level, which creates the sense of a paradox—repetition that is impossible to grasp, slipping ceaselessly through your fingers.
Cascade is released alongside The Deluge, where the same piano motif is process as to become more garbled, throwing longer and longer shadows over itself, and stormy frequencies overtake the placid weather of Cascade. By halfway through, a long serpent of digital tape echo has all but swallowed the motif, but it keeps glinting through. It’s the sound of something being almost remembered, something that’s nagging at you but won’t quite slip into focus. The comparatively brief "The Deluge (The Denouement)" splices a different fragment of piano with passages of maddened, Caretaker-like shortwave radio orchestration, with dark bass growing in under it like black mold.
Cascade is a new work, though "new" is always a slippery term with Basinski, whose oeuvre is as nested as matryoshka dolls. Not only is the loop drawn from the archive of recordings he made in the '80s, but he also already used it, in an easily recognizable form, on 92982, where it enters the piece shortly after the 40-minute mark. Is it a coincidence that you could replace the first 40 minutes of 92982 with Cascade and arrive at a new, continuous piece?
With Basinski, it’s hard to tell. He certainly doesn’t like endings—his pieces make you keenly aware that they’re just audible portions of infinite lines—and he treats little bits of captured time like bottomless wells. Disintegration Loops is his standout work because it dropped the illusion of eternity, letting us hear the tape decaying on the reels. Basinski admitted, with crushing poignancy, that things end. But on Cascade, he’s back to forestalling that knowledge through repetition, which is what gives his abstract pieces their surprising sentience and unaccountable melancholy. The machine is doing the work, but the composer has done the thinking and feeling, and that makes all the difference. | 2015-07-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-07-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Temporary Residence Ltd. | July 29, 2015 | 7.4 | 1434cb65-2ae2-4539-8c4e-2fe1fc4fd62d | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Mogwai's second album, released in 1999, is getting a reissue with a bounty of bonus material that includes demos and the Travels in Constants EP. On Come On Die Young, Mogwai went about becoming the most sullen, brooding post-rock band they could possibly be. | Mogwai's second album, released in 1999, is getting a reissue with a bounty of bonus material that includes demos and the Travels in Constants EP. On Come On Die Young, Mogwai went about becoming the most sullen, brooding post-rock band they could possibly be. | Mogwai: Come On Die Young | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19466-mogwai-come-on-die-young-deluxe-edition/ | Come On Die Young | Though few of their songs contain actual words, Mogwai have always been fond of big statements. Having emerged during the late-1990s post-rock boom, the Scottish quintet used every means possible to distance themselves from the sullen stereotype that defined so many instrumental art-rock brooders of their era. EP titles were turned into protest placards, interviews inevitably became merciless slag fests, and concert t-shirts doubled as a form of music criticism. Even the abrupt calm-to-chaos eruptions that defined the band’s 1997 debut, Young Team, seemed to be delivered with devious, mischievous grins. So naturally, the band came up with a doozy of a title for their second album (and the first to receive a proper U.S. release via Matador): Come On Die Young, a two-fingered retort to the “Live Forever” platitudes of the Britpop they so despised.
As such, it was no surprise that Mogwai’s would open the album with a song called “Punk Rock:”, even if it wasn’t a punk rock song at all. Rather, overtop a foreboding, percussion-less guitar instrumental, we hear the voice of Iggy Pop in a televised 1977 interview with Canadian broadcaster Peter Gzowski, explaining the difference between the commoner’s caricatured conception of punk and his own more spiritual, empowering interpretation of the term. But as much as it overtly asserts Mogwai’s allegiance to the rock iconoclasts of yore, the track also betrays the band’s own frustration with being misunderstood; beyond being propped up as post-rock poster boys, Mogwai had been variously hyped as the Scottish Slint and the new Pink Floyd. Tellingly, “Punk Rock:” ends on an open-ended note, with an increasingly exasperated Iggy asking Gzowski, “Do you understand what I’m saying, sir?” The question is left hanging in the ether, as if to suggest that no amount of reasoning will change the opinions of those who’ve already made up their mind about you.
So on Come On Die Young, Mogwai went about becoming the most sullen, brooding post-rock band they could possibly be, with each melancholic guitar refrain and desolate, dead-of-night snare-drum tap serving as a deliberately set breadcrumb trail to more Spiderland comparisons. But by playing to post-rock type, Come On Die Young ultimately expanded Mogwai’s emotional vocabulary. Where they once shocked with volume and dissonance, Come On Die Young disarms with elegance and grace. Even the sudden, eardrum-blasting jolts of Young Team signature “Like Herod” are no comparison to the surprise that occurs when the ominous, pressure-building hum of “Punk Rock:” dissolves into the teary-eyed tranquility of “Cody”, which sees Mogwai hitch themselves to Galaxie 500’s “Tugboat” and—thanks to a rare and surprisingly affecting lead vocal from guitarist Stuart Braithwaite—produce the most quietly devastating song in their canon to date.
By uncanny coincidence, this 15th-anniversary reissue arrives mere weeks after Slint’s more randomly timed 23rd-anniversary Spiderland box set was released, but revisiting both records in tandem highlights their differences as much as their similarities. Here, Mogwai aren’t so much copying Slint as envisioning the more expansive, exploratory band they could’ve evolved into: “Year 2000 Non-Compliant Cardia” may swipe its jagged opening strums straight from the “Good Morning Captain” playbook, but redirects them into a slumberous, opium-den psychedelia that counts as one of this album’s few moments of levity; “May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door” embellishes the “Cortez the Killer”-inspired lurch of Slint’s “Washer” with glockenspieled counter-melodies and a gradually intensifying climax. And in lieu of creepily whispered Brian McMahan-style narratives, Come On Die Young sees Mogwai deploy found-sound dialogue to equally unnerving effect. The mournful “Helps Both Ways” is interlaced with color commentary from an NFL game, but far from undermining the track’s mournful tone, the chatter enhances it—the song feels like a cathode-ray-lit crime scene, as if we’re surveying the aftermath of some terrible domestic tragedy while "Monday Night Football" unsympathetically blares in the background.
So much instrumental rock music is often described as “soundtracks to movies that don’t exist,” but Come On Die Young always felt like the unofficial score to a film that did. Four months after the album was released, The Blair Witch Project hit theaters, and my memories of each tend to blur into one: there’s the shared desolate woodlands setting (the album was recorded at Dave Fridmann’s Tarbox Road Studios in Upstate New York) and chilly, frosty-breath atmosphere (thanks to Fridmann’s uncharacteristically stark, I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-Albini production), never mind the fact that Come On Die Young’s eerie cover shot of bassist Dominic Aitchison could easily pass for a still from the film. And most tellingly, like Blair Witch, Come On Die Young moves at a slow, subtle, incremental pace that can test one’s patience and make one long for the high-voltage immediacy of Young Team, but oh-so gradually ratchets up the tension. The heart-palpitating payoff finally arrives in the form of late-album colossi “Ex-Cowboy” and “Christmas Steps”, which once again see Mogwai charting new extremes of effects-pedal abuse, but without overwhelming the songs’ expertly chiseled definition.
That sense of discipline is all the more apparent when wading through the bounty of bonus material on this deluxe edition. While none of the demos here differ dramatically from their finished versions, you get a clearer picture of just how much studious fine-tuning went into the final tracklist: in its original form, “Christmas Steps” was a couple of minutes shorter, before the band wisely decided to stretch out its nerve-wracking build-up even longer; a rough-sketch version of “Punk Rock:” suggests even this seemingly simple composition underwent a few passes before achieving the right spectral ambience. (“Hugh Dallas”, meanwhile, would have been a keeper on any other Mogwai release, but its breathy Braithwaite vocal and elegiac sway drift a bit too closely to “Cody”.)
Some supplementary tracks, on the other hand, provide a welcome respite from Come On Die Young’s meticulous approach: the included Travels in Constants, Vol. 12 EP—a limited-edition release for Temporary Residence’s mail-order series—both hearkens back to the post-shoegaze drone of Mogwai’s earliest work, while anticipating the anthemic surges of the subsequent Rock Action. The EP’s mix of tremulous guitar reverberations, flute-like melodies, and pretty piano reveries may boast a decidedly different tenor and texture than Come On Die Young, but are nonetheless a product of that album’s guiding philosophy: For all its seeming ideological alignment with crash-and-burn punk-rock nihilism, Come On Die Young is the sound of Mogwai committing themselves to the long haul. | 2014-06-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-06-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Chemikal Underground | June 18, 2014 | 8.3 | 14362709-825e-467d-b943-e34fdef4f60d | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Though the Pennsylvania band favor post-rock swells, tricky song structures, and off-kilter time signatures, their restrained maximalism defies expectations. | Though the Pennsylvania band favor post-rock swells, tricky song structures, and off-kilter time signatures, their restrained maximalism defies expectations. | String Machine: Death of the Neon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/string-machine-death-of-the-neon/ | Death of the Neon | String Machine like to think of themselves as an extension of their surroundings: The septet split time between blue-collar Saxonburg, Pennsylvania and their homebase in perpetual “next big thing” Pittsburgh. On their second LP, the bucolic and bustling Death of the Neon, frontman David Beck derives visions of wrecked cars, broken humans, and natural decline from the faded farming towns that lie in between, carved up by developers who “name their housing plan Pasture Place… and the streets after the wildflowers that used to grow there.” But in these frozen fields, Beck sees an opportunity to give the socalist ideals of the past another go. String Machine are forward-thinking, but not futurists; progressive, but not revolutionary.
Though it featured many of the same personnel, their 2016 album Threads From the Youth Fossil was essentially Beck’s solo debut. On this new record, he functions as more of a community leader than an auteur, one voice among many. It’s easy enough to describe what String Machine sound like: Name any indie rock band that referred to themselves as a collective and/or featured more than six people on stage at all times. String Machine’s DIY studio Earthwalk, modeled after Elephant 6’s approach, is home to a couple dozen Pittsburgh-area artists who variously show up to contribute strings, synths, horns, backup vocals, and the occasional Crock-Pot. Otherwise, they present as a modern affair. “I could see if my band was featured in someone’s Instagram story/I could bide my time ’til the morning/Reliving my 30 seconds of glory,” Beck twangs in the opener, holding a dead phone in a busted tour van. His imagery reads tactile and pungent on the page—he is variably a spent parcel of bubble wrap, a shattered ornament, a rotting peach, “kimchi marinating in motor oil”—but it’s all pleasantly smoothed over with harmonies and strings.
In place of the 4-track psych and classic pop-rock of Neutral Milk Hotel or Olivia Tremor Control, String Machine favor polished post-rock swells, tricky song structures, and off-kilter time signatures that bring up inevitable comparisons to the World is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die or Saintseneca. But this band is emo only in their unabashed earnestness and their inclusion of a deceptively upbeat song about a dead dog. Whether it’s the stein-swinging chorales of “Old Mack,” the traces of digital freak-folk dotting “Engine / It’s Time,” or the mere presence of banjo, they evoke not just the chockablock sound of mid-’00s buzz bands like Annuals or Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s, but also that era’s affinity for wholesome handicraft. They recorded the album’s piano parts at a local church in the dead of winter, braving 20-degree temperatures and sustained by homemade curry.
Even if the comparisons are warranted and basically unavoidable, String Machine’s restrained maximalism defies expectations. They’re averse to overstatement, easy catharsis, or clutter for its own sake. “Engine / It’s Time” slowly bubbles up to a lather of manipulated vocals and strings that never boils over. The band white-knuckles their way through the anxious arc of “Eight Legged Dog” and takes a breather just at the point where fans of orchestral emo have been conditioned to expect a detonation. Exploratory mini-epics “Death of the Neon (Pt. 1, 2, & 3)” and “Pit of the Peach” capture barren Western Pennsylvania in the summer, taking the scenic route over sloping hills and through bleakly beautiful farmland in seemingly endless sunlight. Neither goes anywhere unfamiliar, but this is how Death of the Neon fulfills its aim of self-contained serenity. If Beck has successfully executed his vision of the album as a product of its environment, you’ll skip past the obvious genre signifiers and call it Americana. | 2020-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Know Hope | January 25, 2020 | 7.1 | 143731f3-91e2-4d02-ba6d-cce284865b39 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Why is it that hip-hop artists have so much trouble reinventing themselves once they're established in the\n\ game ... | Why is it that hip-hop artists have so much trouble reinventing themselves once they're established in the\n\ game ... | Common: Electric Circus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1565-electric-circus/ | Electric Circus | Why is it that hip-hop artists have so much trouble reinventing themselves once they're established in the game? In the rock and roll milieu, someone like David Bowie can adopt a different persona with each record he drops, and not only get away with it, but have it increase his marketability. With hip-hop, though, conventional wisdom is to stick with the tried-and-true as long as it moves units, then get the hell out. Think about it: Run-D.M.C.'s Back from Hell was based upon the premise that they went underground and re-emerged as hardened thugs, a ploy that got hip-hop's equivalent of the three wise men nearly laughed out of the kingdom. Meanwhile, others that have had drops in the bucket of post-revisionist success either possessed suspect credibility in the first place (can I get an Everlast?) or just changed the punchline to what was already a bad joke (that's you, Kid Rock).
Upon first glance, it appeared Common may have achieved that kind of transformation with his follow-up to Like Water for Chocolate. From the Sgt. Common's Lonely Peeps Club Band cover art to an 8\xBD-minute ode to Jimi Hendrix, Electric Circus resonates with a lava lamp glow that's a lot more hip-pie than hip-hop. But that's Com's idea of where hip-hop should be headed-- to a land far, far away from the bling-blingity of his mainstream peers; if only his record hadn't been released so close to The Roots' Phrenology (note to MCA management: fire the person responsible for that little "oversight"), Common's three steps backward might not pale so harshly in comparison to his peers' two steps forward.
The most difficult sword to swallow in this particular circus is the near-absence of noteworthy vocals. Though Common's never exactly been a top-shelf emcee, his previous records always had enough good ideas to cover up what he lacked in invention on the mic. This time out, Com comes off as alternately uncomfortable and downright lazy, half-speaking-- or worse, singing-- new-age revelations to the masses. Even on a crunk-ass Neptunes track like "I Got a Right Ta", he plods along with an awkward flow only to boast, "I'm the only cat in hip-hop/ That can go to a thrift shop/ Bring that get-up to the ghetto/ And get props," as if it's something to be proud of. But for better or worse, he still delivers some vintage Common flow on "I Am Music" and the equally imposing (and nonsensical) "Electric Wire Hustle Flower", making it impossible to write him off completely.
Common's also always had a soft side, which has more often than not stood up in defense of his tendencies toward lyrical misogyny. Unfortunately, returning to that comfort zone on Electric Circus translates into some of the record's weakest moments. If "Star *69 (PS With Love)"-- a totally predictable phone-sex love song that reeks of cheap incense and leopard-print upholstery-- isn't example enough, Com's smarmy duet with Mary J. Blige on "Come Close" should be sufficient. With a line like, "The pimp in me may just have to die with you," Com invalidates any claims he might have to renaissance man status in a mere eleven syllables.
Yet there's one crucial element to Electric Circus that salvages it from the razor-sharp ends of our three-pronged fork: listening to it on headphones is another experience altogether. The record has a mellow tide to it much like that of Like Water for Chocolate, with brief musical interludes that fuse even the sharpest stylistic changes together nicely. It all builds up like a slow fever to the two marathon-length tracks that dismantle the big top-- "Jimi Was a Rock Star" and "Heaven Somewhere"-- both of which are laudable for their ambition, even if they're not quite cohesive.
If nothing else, Common does at least succeed in his mission to offer an alternative in a culture that, on the surface, values material wealth over spiritual well-being. Because even if Electric Circus isn't the sonic coup d'etat he might've intended, it does plant the seeds for future revolution within anyone who cares enough to kick back and listen. | 2003-05-14T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2003-05-14T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | MCA | May 14, 2003 | 6.5 | 143a9a05-184b-4a0c-a831-5dd631a73338 | Pitchfork | null |
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Despite missing early single "I'll Stick Around", and including blah new songs, these modern rock survivors prove their singles band cred on this comp. | Despite missing early single "I'll Stick Around", and including blah new songs, these modern rock survivors prove their singles band cred on this comp. | Foo Fighters: Greatest Hits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13658-greatest-hits/ | Greatest Hits | We all know the hero myth of Nirvana: Kurt Cobain stormed MTV and radio with punk anthems of genuine rage, and saved us all from the vapidity of hair metal. This story has been repeated so many times that it's rare to find Cobain's music framed in any other context, especially since his suicide served only to make him a rock'n'roll martyr. Foo Fighters have something of a hero myth going on too, but it's a lot less dramatic: Following the death of his comrade, Dave Grohl rocked on as the leader of his own band, and spent the next 15 years making mainstream rock radio, uh, slightly more listenable.
Grohl's task may not be anywhere near as glamorous or as era-defining as that of his former band, but in a way, it's much more difficult and thankless. In the years after Cobain's death, corporate consolidation of rock radio took hold and quickly snuffed out nearly every bit of underground weirdness that made its way into the mainstream after the record industry went through its phase of signing every cult band they could get in the hopes of finding another Nirvana. The playlists got tighter, and if you're reading this site, we probably don't need to tell you just how bad the music on these stations got, and how to this day it only seems to get worse. Grohl and his band may have been grandfathered into the radio format mainly for his connection to Nirvana, but he earned his keep and turned out a reliable string of enjoyable hits.
This probably sounds like faint praise. Indeed, you barely need to be mediocre to outshine the likes of Nickelback, Creed, and Hoobastank, but Foo Fighters are not merely a tolerable band floating along in a sea of crap, or a decent band that somehow remains mainstream against the odds. Foo Fighters are excellent at being mainstream, and, over the course of six albums, Dave Grohl has gone through the unlikely transformation of being known only as the powerhouse drummer of Nirvana to becoming his generation's answer to Tom Petty-- a consistent hit machine pumping out working-class rock.
Part of what makes Foo Fighters thrilling, at least from an indie/alt-rock perspective, is that Grohl manages to smuggle bits of underground sounds into his arena-filling hits. "All My Life", a smash from 2002's One By One, owes a significant debt to the slashing chord progressions of math rock titans Chavez, and "Big Me" is one of the few songs to come out of twee to enjoy major commercial success in the United States. "Everlong", perhaps Grohl's most enduring and beloved composition, bridges the gap between the midwestern post-hardcore emo of Hum and Braid and the more commercial iterations of emo that would follow.
Grohl doesn't appropriate in order to seem hip, and his reference points are not particularly relevant to getting across the appeal of his music-- he simply has good taste and borrows ideas that work. His soaring ballads, like "Learn to Fly" and "Times Like These", are not nearly as cool, but his punk influences shine through in his total commitment to a sentimental tone without allowing for mawkishness or surrendering to cheesiness. Grohl is known to be a funny guy, but there is never a trace of an ironic smirk in the guy's music, and he shines when his earnestness is most apparent, whether it's the gleeful riffing of "Monkey Wrench" and "This Is a Call", or the tortured romantic angst of "The Best of You".
As a compilation, Greatest Hits offers few surprises other than that Grohl somehow resisted the temptation to title this thing The Best of Foo. Though the record conspicuously lacks the band's breakthrough single, "I'll Stick Around", the first 13 tracks make good on the promise of the title and provide a relentless hit parade of modern rock radio staples. Of course, modern-hits compilations are unnecessarily larded with new tracks recorded to promote the set upon release, and this is no exception. Like nearly all songs recorded specifically for these releases, "Wheels" and "Word Forward" are catchy but uninspired, and have no place among the heavy hitters in this collection. "Wheels" is particularly aggravating, sounding something like a half-hearted attempt at a country-rock crossover, which indicates a nervous desperation for continued success that has been absent from Grohl's work to date.
The band surely had better options for non-album tracks. Why not instead include their well-known cover of Prince's "Darling Nikki", their soundtrack hit "The One", or a new recording of a strong B-side like 1996's "How I Miss You" or Grohl's sole Nirvana composition, "Marigold"? At least those songs would've fit into the general conceit of a career survey. These bonus tracks are contractual obligations and a simple fact of the modern record industry, but Foo Fighters' Greatest Hits is a perfect example of an otherwise valuable catalog release marred by this unnecessary meddling in the interest of stimulating first-week sales. | 2009-11-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-11-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | RCA | November 3, 2009 | 7 | 143c267d-ab94-4be3-a961-728255dc071b | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
Harmonix updates the hugely popular video game for the Beatles-- 45 songs from across their career are represented-- and gives it a markedly different vibe. | Harmonix updates the hugely popular video game for the Beatles-- 45 songs from across their career are represented-- and gives it a markedly different vibe. | The Beatles: Rock Band | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13443-rock-band/ | Rock Band | Here's the story of the Beatles, as told by the intro to The Beatles: Rock Band. They started as four lads in a basement club, covering Chuck Berry for hours at a stretch. Girls screamed, and the band got bigger and bigger 'til it stormed the world (specifically, America). Tours and celebrity and more screaming girls followed, until suddenly the world was a drag-- and they ascended a magic escalator to the sky, where they rode the giant elephant god Ganesha up to the edge of the creation. They became saints, or gods, or something just as sacred, and on a tablet it was written: "You don't mess with the Beatles."
That was Harmonix's mantra going into the project. The developers knew if they were going to handle one of the biggest properties in popular culture, they would take excruciating care to make it loyal, even worshipful. The visual design is warm and adoring, and each Beatle looks gentle and kind-- especially John Lennon, who's so beatific you almost forget that George Harrison has died, too. And the Beatles dominate the game. They're the only people on the virtual stage: Eric Clapton never plays guitar and Billy Preston and Yoko Ono are expunged. More importantly, the Beatles ignore you. Every song is shown with period dress and setting: You can't play "Helter Skelter" in the Cavern in Liverpool or "Boys" at their 1969 rooftop concert. When you screw up, the screen just fades to black. In the first few clubs, the camera regularly cuts to those girls in the audience, screaming, in love. But they're not screaming for you.
You, the player, are the disciple. You're here to study the music: To play as fast and loud as the band did in its youth, to finish the delicate "Dear Prudence" without a single bum note, to master Paul McCartney's bass line to "I Saw Her Standing There" on expert. The challenge is moderate compared to other music games, and harmony vocals are the only new feature: While the Beatles used strings, tape loops, and other effects, these are all channeled through the standard four instruments (guitar, bass, drums, and mic), and playing the strings for "I Am the Walrus" with the guitar controller works better than you might expect. But the harmony vocals make it a far better party game than previous Rock Band editions. I've played with two additional singers, a guy who likes to belt Rush and a woman who's in a choir, and listening to them chant "GUTEN MORGEN GUTEN MORGEN GUT" was worth the price right there.
The 45-track setlist balances better-known Beatles songs ("Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds", "Day Tripper") with deep cuts chosen for gameplay. (The loping, sad "Dig a Pony" is an instant favorite.) The game even bends the canon, reaching out to the Love soundtrack's mix of "Within You Without You" with "Tomorrow Never Knows", which gives you the melody of the first with the drums of the second. Many songs also cut off before their fade-outs-- which was the right call, but it sounds strange on a song as burned in your brain as "Yellow Submarine".
The first chapters take place in concert settings in front of screaming crowds. But after the Beatles quit the road in 1966, the game segues to the Abbey Road studio, where each song gets a "dreamscape." These vignettes recycle well-worn references for each song, and none of them would make the creators of Yellow Submarine lose sleep. Covering the band's psychedelic period, they're a thin metaphor for the fact that the band was well off their tits, but they also reinforce what an insular and magical place these recordings seem to emerge from-- especially if you skip the turmoil behind the scenes.
That's not to say the game ignores their history. Good scores unlock rare photos dug from the archives, as well as clips of sound and video. You get their 1963 Christmas fan club record, a rough rehearsal for "Ed Sullivan", and a promotional film for "Get Back" edited out of outtakes from the Let It Be film. And there are clips of the band just chatting or goofing around.. They're candid, but the candidness doesn't make the band seem more human; rather, you feel like you're eavesdropping on a whole new level of divinity.
The storytelling is at its finest in the last act, the rooftop show in London in 1969. The audience has aged and the band is tired. We never watch them fight, but the break-up is implied in the climax of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", where the camera jitters until the song cuts off. But encore "The End", the unannounced 45th song, is the proper send-off: Ultimately, the band was judged by the love they made.
The word "love" sums up the entire vision for the game. Where past Rock Band and Guitar Hero titles emphasized the thrills and the grinds of rock, The Beatles: Rock Band feels completely different: it's soothing and cozy, and the songs keep luring you back not just because they're excellent and fun, but because the familiar recordings, the nostalgic visuals, and the Beatles' smiling faces make a peaceful, loving place. As a painstakingly crafted piece of fandom, it's a bullseye.
But all this worship has a drawback. Discussing Rock Band 2, which doesn't use the likeness of any real stars, Harmonix's Helen McWilliams once told me, "We want it to be about you, and your rock star fantasy... You're there with your band, for each other, and you're fulfilling your rock star dream together, and the audience is there for you." The Beatles: Rock Band is the total opposite. The "characters" are untouchable, and the tracks don't even toss you a freestyle section. Your only choices are to get the song right, or not. Sure, it's a cliché that most videogames make you save the world, but at least in those games, you know you're needed. I've never felt less important in a game than this one.
But I'll let 'em get away with it. After all, they're the Beatles.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.] | 2009-09-09T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-09-09T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Electronic Arts | September 9, 2009 | 9.5 | 143ca82f-e772-4f85-b3b6-10e43a867ceb | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
On their sixth record, the New York band is stuck in a Medium Mood and a new producer doesn’t help energize their increasingly frozen-in-time sound. | On their sixth record, the New York band is stuck in a Medium Mood and a new producer doesn’t help energize their increasingly frozen-in-time sound. | Interpol: Marauder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/interpol-marauder/ | Marauder | More than any of their frenemies in the 2000s indie-rock tell-all Meet Me in the Bathroom, Interpol understood the power of a unified front. They’ve survived parting ways with the only guy in the band who clearly wanted to be a celebrity, a widely mocked dalliance with a major label, a rap mixtape by frontman Paul Banks called Everyone on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be that actually happened, and another Banks rap album on Warner Bros. that actually happened after that, mostly proving the adage that 80 percent of success is simply showing up. Their return to Matador resulted in two essentially self-titled albums that were variously lauded as “returns to form”—an objective truth, since Interpol outlasted all of their contemporaries and soundalikes to be the only game left in town. Survival has been a pretty good look for them, and with Marauder, they act on their newfound surplus of goodwill by conducting something other than business as usual.
The album has them enlisting a plus-value producer for the first time since Antics in MGMT and Flaming Lips guru Dave Fridmann, and then there’s the “concept” behind it. According to Banks, Marauder is voiced from the perspective of a titular character who represents, “the portion of your personality that isn’t really concerned with accountability and just kind of does.” The irony is that most people have always chosen to see Interpol as brooding hedonists in the first place.
But Marauder is definitely Interpol’s most topical project, and maybe their only one—pervasive societal cynicism (“If You Really Love Nothing”), social media desperation (“Party’s Over”), the ghost of Prince (“NYSMAW”), and third-eye-in-the-sky theorizing (“Surveillance”), is all new territory for the group. (The illicit tryst of “Stay in Touch” is not.) Then again, Banks and the “Marauder” don’t seem so different. “The Rover” isn’t a Led Zeppelin cover, but “I can keep you in artwork, the fluid kind” is phrased and sung with Banks’ own rock’n’roll virility. It’s genius or ridiculous nonsense, or most likely, the kind of ridiculous genius nonsense that Banks writes because it sounds both profound and absurd at the same time—the true essence of an Interpol song.
For too long, people have attempted to mock Banks’ lyrics simply by quoting them, but we should know better by now. He was taken far more seriously than he should have at the start, and he’s actually way funnier and more self-aware than he’s ever given credit for. “Ella, Teletext or you can call me/Galavanting heart,” “Like Prince sang in Tennessee/I wanna drive with you down there to Alphabet Street,” these are the words of someone leaning into their reputation as a wine-soaked Manhattan dandy rather than combating it. Or, the way he cheekily acknowledges the “back to basics” narrative of Marauder: “Rock’n’roll, bitch/I’m into it/Let me show you my stuff.”
The most distinct parts of Marauder likewise result from Interpol doing Interpol things as loosely as possible—Daniel Kessler has become one of the most distinctive guitarists of the 21st century by simply playing straight eighth-note leads, and drummer Sam Fogarino is the broad-shouldered classic rocker. These two things are still true, but when they slacken just the slightest bit, Interpol can actually sound the slightest bit bluesy (“The Rover”) or funky (“It Probably Matters”). Then again, the near absence of any notable bass save for an occasional synth blob shows that they haven’t even tried to replace Carlos D (recall that a working title for Turn on the Bright Lights was Celebrated Basslines of the Future suggested by Carlos D of course). It’s all immediately identifiable as Interpol, and even if they can’t convincingly do “loose,” it’s at least dressed down. This is how Turn on the Bright Lights might’ve sounded from a band that looked and acted more like the Strokes.
But this isn’t a band that ever impressed through sonic innovation, or lyrics that speak to universal emotional truths, or inventive melodies, or even being cool; everything from the suits to the stylized typography to Turn on the Bright Lights’ lush production to the opening gigs for U2 smacked of effort and ambition. Despite the temptation to nostalgize Interpol as a bastion of a druggier, sexier, and more sinister version of indie rock that wouldn’t last a day in these more morally circumspect times, they essentially served the same purpose as the more benign and scandal-free War on Drugs or Tame Impala: They are a carefully curated vibe. It’s an elusive quality. At their best, Interpol speaks to the feeling of invincibility among the ruins of your life, rising like a phoenix from the ashes and coke residue of one’s early 20s. Or, on Antics, the seductive power of holding onto that ideal in spite of a growing body of evidence to the contrary.
For the past 15 years, Interpol have tried to either replicate this vibe or find another to replace it. The band is stuck in a Medium Mood, and most of the blame on Maurader lies with Fridmann’s mix; my burned CD copy of 128 kbps Turn on the Bright Lights mp3s had less digital clipping. Marauder was recorded to 2-inch magnetic tape without ProTools in the interest of recapturing some of the intuitive electricity of Bright Lights, but the actual mix is so compressed, doughy, and airless, it might as well come packaged inside a Grands! biscuit tin. That said, it’s certainly more appealing than their previous records, which were defined by their various forms of malaise. Marauder is the least-bad Interpol album in more than a decade, but that still doesn’t make it great. Interpol were once able to transmute urban ennui into something so transcendent, even the most sheltered and secure suburban kids understood. On Marauder, there’s a new kind of emptiness, of hearing an Interpol album that doesn’t really seem concerned with doing better than “good enough.” | 2018-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | August 27, 2018 | 6.1 | 143e1665-1bbd-4802-8fcd-2d51c7a2ff02 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ |
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