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Between the end of “Twin Peaks” and filming its prequel, David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti made a wild album of sinister spoken-word jazz, available at last. | Between the end of “Twin Peaks” and filming its prequel, David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti made a wild album of sinister spoken-word jazz, available at last. | David Lynch / Angelo Badalamenti: Thought Gang | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-lynch-angelo-badalamenti-thought-gang/ | Thought Gang | Soon after television executives pressured the makers of “Twin Peaks” to solve Laura Palmer’s murder midway through the second season, the show came to an abrupt, ignominious end. The creative team of David Lynch and Mark Frost soon pivoted to their full-length film prequel, Fire Walk With Me, but Lynch briefly turn his gaze to another project, too. As a lark, Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, composer for both the film and show, concocted a musical experiment: The director would dream up some outlandish scenes, and Badalamenti and a crack team of jazz players (including legendary drummer Grady Tate and Herbie Hancock bassist Buster Williams) would provide the soundtrack. “There were no arrangements or preset orchestrations,” Badalamenti told Rolling Stone. “We simply gave a tempo and an initial key to get started and asked them to play what they felt.”
Outside of a few menacing cues that appeared in Fire Walk With Me, the short-lived HBO miniseries “Hotel Room,” and “Twin Peaks: The Return” decades later, Lynch and Badalamenti’s rumored “jazz record” remained unheard. Nearly two decades later, Sacred Bones has pried those sessions from the vaults and presented the full picture of Thought Gang. While Lynch remains the marquee name, this unearthed hour of skin-crawling, malevolent, ludicrously doomy spoken-word jazz mostly reveals the vast range of Badalamenti’s talents—not just as an arranger and player, but also as a menacing vocalist. For many of these improvisations, Badalamenti sends his voice through the kind of busted payphone that Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits often used to garble and distort themselves. So startling is Badalamenti’s vocal turn here that, when a disbelieving Lynch first heard him approach the mic and cast a spell on “A Real Indication,” he laughed until he gave himself a hernia.
Thought Gang avoid the smeared dream-pop collaborations with Julee Cruise and the simmering jazz that propelled “Twin Peaks” and Fire Walk with Me. “Logic and Common Sense” bears the barely controlled careening speed and creeping noir of 1980s downtown-era John Zorn, while “Stalin Revisited” veers from pure noise to skin-prickling bowed bass. The industrial ambient of the epic “Frank 2000” will be familiar to anyone who caught Eraserhead at a midnight screening, its smoggy atmosphere even undiminished by unnecessary slap bass.
“Angelo is going to make a complete fool of himself,” Lynch whispered to his engineer during these sessions. He wasn’t altogether wrong. The set hinges on Badalamenti’s circus geek-like need for debasement before the microphone, his unhinged performances making it grimly fascinating and noxious by turns. He repeats “the black dog runs at night” over rubber-band bass and whispering wind; it goes from grim incantation to irritant in under two minutes. “Woodcutters From Fiery Ships” involves a character named Pete and some cats in his backyard, some menacing woodcutters, a boy bleeding from his mouth, and Pete’s apple pie. Badalamenti’s voice is so distorted he nearly drops the call. As frightful and bewildering as a Dion McGregor nightmare, Thought Gang reveals Lynch and Badalamenti’s shared drive to disrupt any through line or logical outcome, the sounds and words as baffling as dream logic. | 2018-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Sacred Bones | November 14, 2018 | 6.2 | 1440b417-c1c4-4beb-af69-2a8473cc7fca | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Dälek follow 2002's From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots with another collection of dense, well-sculpted hip-hop. On Absence, the rhymes are more direct than on its predecessor but they're still complex and considered. | Dälek follow 2002's From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots with another collection of dense, well-sculpted hip-hop. On Absence, the rhymes are more direct than on its predecessor but they're still complex and considered. | Dälek: Absence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2149-absence/ | Absence | I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to describe Dälek's third album without making it sound repetitive and boring, two things it most certainly isn't. Whereas many modern hip-hop albums spill over with infectious beats and sci-fi sounds, and draw variety from a wide array of hired-in producers and guest spots, this does the opposite: It's the product of just three guys-- Dälek, Oktopus, and Still-- and the entire record is built around essentially a couple of simple beats with slight yet important variations.
Dälek have a knack for taking basic elements and sculpting them differently every time, a controlled, deliberate attack designed for pinpoint destruction and insight. They can turn a sheet of blistering, white-hot skree into a convincing hook simply by attaching it to the right part of the beat and controlling the volume and density of the noise, allowing Dälek's complex, considered rhymes to weave their way through the tangle. Here, the harsh, cavernous textures coating the songs are ostensibly all dissonant, droning walls of noise cut through with scratches and samples.
The templates of Dälek's tracks are augmented by an incredible wealth of detail in both their beats and backdrops. Cascading flumes of gutter noise torment the edges of "Asylum (Permanent Underclass)": They heave and bend, wavering in pitch and contorting into snatches of tortured melody. Close listening reveals that the squall is actually a tight cluster of dozens of drones, added and subtracted to mold the music into grit-teethed crescendos and dizzying passages of spiraling, exquisitely controlled chaos.
Dälek the MC spits head-spinning verses like "Who trades his culture for dollars/ The fool or the scholar/ Griot, poet, or white collar" ("Culture for Dollars") and "Seen your movements through peripheral/ Remain same individual/ When a man's viewed as criminal to act animal is logical" ("Distorted Prose"). There's nary a nod to sex or personal enrichment, and in fact he opens the album by rapping, a cappela, "Broke stride as last of men realized their deep deceit/ This troubling advance of half-assed crews crowd these streets," a broad and open indictment of what he seems to see as hip-hop straying from its early ideals.
In "Eyes to Form Shadows", he speeds up his flow as melody is forcibly wrenched from queasy, metallic tones, before culminating with "Addicts move in slow increments within granite/ Hands bound and damaged are weapons we brandish/ Deemed savage by masses/ When this anger's just average." Dälek's unsatisfied with nearly everything-- and politics are no exception. On "Asylum", he skewer administration arrogance and fear-mongering with clear-eyed and direct lyrics that avoid the tendency toward opaque abstraction that bogs down so much underground hip-hop.
Crunching along in an endlessly innovative fashion, Absence seems old-school in its simplicity, clarity and forthrightness, but sounds futuristic. And although the album is full of abstract noise and painstaking sound sculpture, the no-nonsense approach to beat-making and Dälek's modest flow make this album more accessible than its presecessor, 2002's From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots. That album had higher peaks than this one, but Absence is more consistently engaging-- and another powerful statement from one of modern hip-hop's greatest crews. | 2005-02-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-02-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Ipecac | February 16, 2005 | 8.3 | 144289e1-d9ea-4ee9-a149-980cee2febaa | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
On Berlin house producer Moomin's second album, ruminative, dewy-eyed house music remains the name of the game—one part Larry Heard, one part '70s tearjerker, and as richly textured as it gets. These songs scratch a very particular emotional itch in extremely satisfying ways: They're both melancholy and zippy at the same time, downcast yet fleet of foot. | On Berlin house producer Moomin's second album, ruminative, dewy-eyed house music remains the name of the game—one part Larry Heard, one part '70s tearjerker, and as richly textured as it gets. These songs scratch a very particular emotional itch in extremely satisfying ways: They're both melancholy and zippy at the same time, downcast yet fleet of foot. | Moomin: A Minor Thought | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21493-a-minor-thought/ | A Minor Thought | The opening song on Moomin's debut album, The Story About You, said a lot about the Berlin house producer's approach. Its looped Rhodes keys were tentative and misty, and its drum programming skipped just so; the rhythm folded in the sloshing of waves and the looped cries of seagulls, sounds that imbued the song with an unmistakable pang of wistfulness, while the title, "Doobiest," scanned as slightly tongue in cheek. Did it refer to marijuana? Yacht rock? (From the sound of things, probably a little bit of each.)
The gulls reappear on "123," the opening track on A Minor Thought, his second LP for Hamburg's Smallville label. Once again, ruminative, dewy-eyed house music is the name of the game—one part Larry Heard, one part '70s tearjerker, and as richly textured as it gets. The drum machines are apple-crisp, and the song's main riff, a rising and falling horn loop, is as soft and rounded as sandstone. Over it all, a two-bar phrase of muted saxophone flutters like a tattered flag over a beach house that's been boarded up for winter. It is so him that it's almost self-parody. Moomin (Sebastian Genz) joined Smallville in 2010, four years into its run, but the way he has internalized the label's aesthetic might make him their most representative artist. Every one of his productions feels like a perfect distillation of an ideal type, and the same is true here, where each track renders the Smallville universe in miniature.
But nothing on A Minor Thought feels redundant. For one thing, these songs scratch a very particular emotional itch in extremely satisfying ways: They're both melancholy and zippy at the same time, downcast yet fleet of foot. Just listen to the way the piano in "Loop No. 1" tumbles up and down the scale, like a daydreamer with a restless leg. His songs are twee but never sappy, flirting with sentimentality while remaining at a winking remove from it. On top of all that, he's just very good at this sort of thing. Anyone could try to write a Moomin-style track by gathering up the requisite elements: the bone-dry 808, the airy keyboard loop, the layer of vinyl hiss. In fact, all of those sounds could probably be dialed up via sampler presets. But the way Moomin massages all his favored elements together is unusually artful.
How does he do it? Well, his drum loops collage together both patterns sourced from classic drum machines and hits sampled from physical kits. He's particularly fond of lone hi-hat hits swiped from old records and EQed until they sizzle in the mix, and he likes breaks that leave a little something extra in, like a scrap of crowd noise or a whisper or a laugh. In "Stotheh," some kind of voice lurks beneath the white-hot drums and lowing horns, and while it's impossible to tease out where it comes from or what it might be, it lends a crucial additional element of presence to the music. On "A Minor Thought" and "You Neva Know," the looped vocal samples are pushed up in the mix, but they remain largely indistinct and unintelligible, like human fingerprints smeared back toward pure abstraction.
Another of Moomin's tricks is to loop a chiming glissando, often a Rhodes electric piano or a xylophone, so that it seems to shimmer in midair. He favors background elements with soft, smooth attacks, so that they seem less played than simply willed into being, set free of the usual cause-and-effect relationship. He's a clever polyphonist, too: On "Chemistry," he begins with a backwards bell tone, adds wheezy organ, then paints on a high, sour ostinato that's not quite dissonant and not quite consonant, either. The bassline might or might not belong to the same key, and the same could be said of another synthesizer that he adds to the mix. The result is a cotton-candied swirl of tone that doesn't apply to the usual modal rules; severed from anything resembling a root note, the chords float in the air like colored mist, never touching the ground.
There is not, it is true, much variety here: All 11 tracks are paced somewhere between 120 and 125 beats per minute; all of them follow pitter-patter house beats; all of them use the same palette of cool jazz samples and Chicago house basslines and warm, watery keys. But if you're a fan of this kind of thing, A Minor Thought proves that sometimes variety isn't the most important quality in an album. Just like the sound of seagulls at the beach, sometimes familiarity offers its own rewards. | 2016-02-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | Smallville | February 12, 2016 | 7.5 | 14431ca5-1f0a-46f8-9ce7-b225a6034c43 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
With their third LP and major-label debut, the hardcore band Code Orange offer up compelling, caustic, and occasionally even catchy evidence that they have earned their alpha-dog scene posturing. | With their third LP and major-label debut, the hardcore band Code Orange offer up compelling, caustic, and occasionally even catchy evidence that they have earned their alpha-dog scene posturing. | Code Orange: Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22717-forever/ | Forever | A warning to the Warped set: The band once known as Code Orange Kids are children no longer. The Pittsburgh savants—musical partners since high school, barely legal at the time of their 2012 signing, long barred from the club circuit due to their age—have certainly paid their dues. They’ve spent the past decade plotting and pummeling their way from the hardcore underground to rock’s MainStage, touring with everyone from Full of Hell and Touché Amoré to Deftones and the Misfits and recording under the guidance of two of the most respected luminaries in their genre. Their first two albums (2012’s Love Is Love // Return to Dust and 2014’s I Am King) were released on Converge frontman Jacob Bannon’s Deathwish Inc. label, and produced by his bandmate Kurt Ballou, one of metal’s most highly-regarded board wizards. And yet, even as they stay the course, the group continue to grapple with their precocious past, leading some to reframe them as interlopers, snooty art school kids trying to act tough.
Certainly, Code Orange’s aesthetic and presence involve plenty of mean mugging: grisly music videos and artwork, on-the-record refusals to tour with acts they consider “bargain-bin deathcore bands,” unflinching accounts of in-studio fist fights, vows of Darwinist vengeance against the “fake rockstar mentality” espoused by scene hotshots like Asking Alexandra (“They will be the first to go,” the self-proclaimed “thinners of the herd” stated ominously in a Facebook post). With their third LP and major-label debut Forever, Code Orange have offered up compelling, caustic–occasionally, even catchy–evidence that their claims of intra-scene superiority are, for the most part, justified.
Despite all this talk, the Code Orange crew's approach is surprisingly communal. There’s no bandleader to speak of; instead, we’ve got a vocal tag-team between drummer Jami Morgan and guitarists Reba Meyers and Eric Balderose, the latter of whom’s on power electronics duty as well. They’re less a trio than a cacophonous hydra fighting with itself, each head bearing a distinctive battle cry: Morgan’s razor-throated yelps and deadpanned raps; Meyers’ piercing shrieks, alternated with the haunting alto typically reserved for her pop-punk side project, Adventures; and Balderose’s guttural death growls. This multivalence is partially to blame for the album’s erratic atmosphere; rather than reconcile these disparate approaches, the band duke things out in turn, leaving the guitar hooks (and Joe Goldman’s unfussed, even-keel bass playing) to tie everything together. Sometimes, a twisted choir forms: the half-sung, half-shouted chorus of “The Mud” for instance, or the end of “Hurt Goes On.”
There are many moments on Forever when the band momentarily vanishes for a few voiceless, riffless seconds, before re-materializing with axes in hand. These trap-door jump-scares are a staple in Code Orange’s live show; they turn mosh pits into fever swamps, making you doubt it you’ll make it out of the venue alive. Unfortunately, they fail to generate that level of excitement on record, killing the momentum on tracks like “Kill the Creator” and “The Mud” just as the band hit their stride. Even with Ballou and Will Yip (La Dispute, Touché Amoré) behind the boards, the Reznor-ian scare tactics grow wearisome, especially on “Hurt Goes On,” a Downward Spiral case study dragged down by Morgan’s stale sneers—“Mentally,” he drones flatly at one point, as if reading from a highway sign, “I want to hurt you mentally”—followed by (you guessed it) more silence.
High-definition production and label home aside, Forever is hardly the platonic ideal where heavy-metal crossovers are concerned. Its 11-track, 35-minute runtime proves an abrasive, acerbic listen from start to finish, firmly situating it within the burned wheelhouse occupied by bands like Nails and Knocked Loose, as opposed to, say, Nothing’s big-tent breakthrough Tired of Tomorrow. There’s one notable exception, of course: “Bleeding In The Blur,” a grungy ballad carried by Meyers’ clean vocals which features a head-spinning guest solo from Sumerlands’ Arthur Rizk. That the album’s biggest shot at a radio hit functions as a venomous kiss-off to all the scene snobs who wrote them off (“You’re bleeding into the blur/You’re dying in a ditch/Paint the picture how you want/It’s yours to make fit”), not to mention a formal fiat against Asking Alexandria and company (“Faith in numbers on the paper/the view will never change/constructed just to fill the void, you oil the machine”) only reiterates what we, and the band, knew all along: the heavy rock mainstream could use a good razing, and Code Orange are well-equipped for the demolition job. | 2017-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Roadrunner | January 9, 2017 | 7.5 | 144b3c71-0346-4dd8-badd-5be5b9722077 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The double album from Jeff Tweedy and son Spencer carries a subtle, personal theme: many of the songs address, usually in a roundabout way, Jeff's wife and Spencer's mom Susan Tweedy’s battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Sukierae takes her family nickname as its title, and the backstory lends the breezy music a different urgency. | The double album from Jeff Tweedy and son Spencer carries a subtle, personal theme: many of the songs address, usually in a roundabout way, Jeff's wife and Spencer's mom Susan Tweedy’s battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Sukierae takes her family nickname as its title, and the backstory lends the breezy music a different urgency. | Tweedy: Sukierae | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19682-tweedy-sukierae/ | Sukierae | Jeff Tweedy makes sure he's never the best musician in the room. Ever since he learned the ropes from the more experienced Jay Farrar in Uncle Tupelo, he's surrounded himself with players who are either more technically skilled or possess a distinctive style. It’s an odd strategy for an artist who is himself technically skilled and possesses a distinctive style, but over the last 25 years, it's proved a successful approach. In Wilco 1.0, Jay Bennett helped shape the sunburnt pop of Summerteeth and the twitchy roots-noise grandeur of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; in Wilco 2.0. it was guitarist Nels Cline and drummer Glenn Kotche stretching Tweedy’s songs into k**osmische jams. This is not to downplay Tweedy’s contributions to the band he fronts—just the opposite, in fact, as he uses these idiosyncratic musicians to color in the corners of his own vision.
Spencer Tweedy doesn’t have the pedigree of those musicians—at least, not yet. He may have played on albums by Mavis Staples, White Denim, and Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion, but as of this writing he can’t drink legally. Any allegations of nepotism, regardless, are handily dispelled on Sukierae, the double album that Spencer and his dad have recorded under their shared surname. On these 20 songs, the younger Tweedy emerges as the kind of musician who actively challenges his old man. His playing is rooted in jazz, rock, and avant-garde, which means he doesn’t simply keep time and add a lot of fills—but he still defines the grain and texture of these songs. Spencer gives “Diamond Light, Pt. 1” its jittery gallop, “Low Key” its low-key hustle, “World Away” its classic rock rumble. Favoring what might be described as a strum—rolling across toms and kick drum in a rhythm that rocks toward and away from the beat—Spencer ensures his father’s pop melodies never sound settled or merely decorous. Instead, he conveys a jumpy paranoia, as though he and his dad expect to hear the worst news possible.
Listen for his brief pause in the beat on “Slow Love”, which Spencer punctuates with a cymbal crash. It’s a sly trick, which at first seems to disrupt Jeff’s dad-folk tune—as teenagers typically do—but ultimately that small glitch in the song’s momentum commiserates with his dad’s understated rumination on love and commitment, creating a fleeting moment when you can identify the security of a long-term relationship or question it. “What to call it but falling in love,” Jeff sings, striking that familiar tone of laid-back melancholy. “I never needed to know what is was.” The lyrics are straightforward, but the music injects some ambiguity into the song even as it underscores the father-son dynamic. The song works better when you know it’s all in the family.
There are other musicians on Sukierae, including Scott McCaughey on keyboards and vocalists Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig on backing vocals. But Sukierae is typically at its best when it emphasizes Jeff as the proud singer-guitarist and Spencer as the drummer—in other words, when the music is stripped down to its barest essentials, when it’s at its most minimalist, when even the saddest tunes sound like they were a joy to create. And there are many sad tunes on Sukierae, or at least many conflicted tunes pitched somewhere between celebratory and commiserative. Most of them address, usually in a roundabout way, Susan Tweedy’s battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a malignant but treatable form of cancer. The album takes her family nickname as its title, and the backstory lends the music a different urgency, one that belies the breeziness of songs like “Summer Noon” and “Wait for Love”. Jeff is too experienced as a lyricist to address that subject directly, which would makes these songs either too obvious or simply exploitive—the emotion overpowering the music. Instead, he writes around the crisis, transforming the travails of love and commitment into sharp, deceptively sunny hooks. “Low Key” and “I’ll Sing It” continue the subdued power-pop of Wilco’s most recent albums, but the songs are distinguished by the more austere palette of drums and guitar.
Of course, there’s no reason it needs to be a double album. Reportedly, the elder Tweedy penned 90 tunes, but pared it down to a somewhat more manageable 20. But this isn’t Being There, whose two sides obviously commented on and complicated each other. Instead, it’s more like Sky Blue Sky, both in its aggressive breeziness and its repetition occasionally curdling into tedium. The sprawl is less generous than it is indulgent, rendering the album more intimidating and less accessible than it should be. Only Jeff and Spencer can comprehend the full implications of these songs; the rest of us can grasp them only generally. Perhaps, given the story behind the album, that’s exactly what they intended. | 2014-09-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-09-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | dBpm | September 17, 2014 | 7.3 | 145094c0-c2a5-40ec-bf18-70d251c05a88 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Combining elements of post-bop jazz and chamber music, the Claudia Quintet have found a unique and engaging hybrid. | Combining elements of post-bop jazz and chamber music, the Claudia Quintet have found a unique and engaging hybrid. | The Claudia Quintet: Royal Toast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14561-royal-toast/ | Royal Toast | It's fun to grapple with music that doesn't fit a prescribed notion of genre-- it forces you to listen a little harder and think a little more about actual sound. For instance, I could call the Claudia Quintet "post-jazz" or something similar, but without getting into the details of the music, you wouldn't know what that means. "Jazz" itself is a term that doesn't mean a whole lot anymore without modifying it-- the tent pitched by the word is huge. Here, when I say that the Claudia Quintet combine elements of jazz and modern chamber music, the jazz I'm referring to is mostly the post-bop stuff that's been swirling around in various permutations since the early 1960s, small ensemble music that doesn't necessarily lean on swung rhythms, is built on modal composition, and doesn't fear dipping into the avant-garde.
On Royal Toast, the Quintet, led by drummer John Hollenbeck and here augmented to a sextet by pianist Gary Versace, moves easily between improvisation and intricately arranged composition. For instance, "Sphinx" spends most of its first minute charging through a series of seemingly disconnected phrases that make more sense as they're repeated and combined, then pulls back for an almost funky midsection in which Chris Speed gets a chance to wail a bit on his clarinet. Bassist Drew Gress gets a little spotlight, too, almost as a reward for holding down the hyperactive low-end that gives everyone else their exploratory foundation on the rest of the song.
This is the group's fifth album, and they're clearly good at reading each other and knowing when to shift the rhythm to help a soloist escape a cul de sac. The band's unorthodox instrumentation-- bass, drums, reeds, accordion, and vibraphone-- gives it a distinct sonic signature. Ted Reichman's accordion is used in every conceivable way, playing leads, soloing, harmonizing with the clarinet, and in some of the album's slowest and most rewarding passages, hypnotically vamping in a static dance with Matt Moran's vibraphone. Though they can clang along with the best of them, they do quiet and meditative well. These more placid moments balance out the record's stormier passages and offer respite from fussy sections where the shifts in rhythm and time signature are a bit too much.
It's fitting they'd land on the Cuneiform label. The overall effect the band gives off is that of a more well-adjusted cousin to doom-obsessed labelmates Univers Zero, offering the sturm without so much of the drang. I wouldn't mind hearing Hollenbeck use the group to explore his softer side, because the pulsing comedowns on this record are some of its most arresting moments, even though the in-betweenness makes it unique and enjoyable on its own merits. | 2010-08-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2010-08-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Cuneiform | August 19, 2010 | 7.1 | 145b20ef-2ccf-4d15-badc-db39b479bfd9 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Building on the success of their highly lauded 2004 singles "Formed a Band" and "Modern Art", Bang Bang Rock & Roll finds Art Brut obsessing over girlfriends, little brothers, and other rock bands while bashing out three sloppy chords that imbue their minutiae-riffing rants with a paradoxical fist-pumping grandeur. | Building on the success of their highly lauded 2004 singles "Formed a Band" and "Modern Art", Bang Bang Rock & Roll finds Art Brut obsessing over girlfriends, little brothers, and other rock bands while bashing out three sloppy chords that imbue their minutiae-riffing rants with a paradoxical fist-pumping grandeur. | Art Brut: Bang Bang Rock & Roll | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/475-bang-bang-rock-roll/ | Bang Bang Rock & Roll | WE'RE JUST TALKING... TO THE KIDS!
When you start to measure the amount of music you listen to in gigabytes and jumbo-size Case Logics, it's easy to forget the awesome power of the simple declarative statement. Nothing against all those 30-piece ensembles, nautically focused concept albums, intricate field-recording pastiches, and three-hour drum circles that dominate our musical neighborhood, but sometimes it's refreshing to hear a band maximally juicing a single sentiment down to two-minute concentrate. Meet South London's Art Brut: They're here to fill that vacancy.
I'VE SEEN HER NAKED, TWICE! I'VE SEEN HER NAKED, TWICE!
That it's difficult for me to find a recent point of reference for Art Brut is a testament to just how self-serious indie rock has become-- although they do share a refreshingly bratty quality with proto-punks like the Buzzcocks and Television Personalities. Frontman Eddie Argos even appears to share Joey Ramone's love for first-person narratives that sound no more complex than a transcript of just-some-guy's thoughts on a completely unremarkable day. Ruminations on ex-girlfriends, new girlfriends, little brothers, modern art, his band, other bands, Italian currency, Los Angeles-- all are expressed in language too shallow for even diary-scrawling, but lifted up to anthemic status through sheer multiple exclamation-point enthusiasm.
I CAN'T STAND THE SOUND OF THE... VELVET UNDERGROUND!
Oh my God, heresy! But of course, it's only half-serious, a joking reminder to today's bands that VU ended up writing (gasp!) unabashedly fun songs like "Sweet Jane" and "What Goes On", too. If these sloppy, succinct three-chord bashers fail to tread any ground that isn't already well-worn, they do so in an appealing way that underscores Argos' oscillations between humility and delusions of grandeur. Art Brut might display more versatility than one-tempo Ramones, but not by much, contenting themselves with fast songs ("18,000 Lira", "Bad Weekend") or slow songs ("Rusted Guns of Milan", "Stand Down"). It's just enough to give these minutiae-obsessed songs their paradoxical fist-pumping grandeur, and not a bit more.
NO MORE SONGS ABOUT SEX AND DRUGS AND ROCK N' ROLL... IT'S BOOOOOORING!
That this line comes amidst the album's most straight-ahead rock number-- and that about 90% of Argos' lyrics discuss these very topics-- is probably the best joke on the album, though it's not wanting for humorous company. The sly origin story "Formed a Band" and art-fetish celebration "Modern Art" (both re-recorded here from their 2004 single versions) may have laid the foundation of Art Brut's blog rep, but Bang Bang Rock & Roll's new material is equally hilarious when it aspires to be. Argos paints the perfect picture of musical awakening in "My Little Brother", the subject of which expresses his frustration through mixtapes of "bootlegs and B-sides," and makes "Emily Kane" more than just a casual remembrance of young love by being able to recollect the last time he saw her, right down to the second. It's tempting to think of Art Brut as the foreign replacement for the catchy/clever observances Weezer used to traffic, the escape fantasy of "Moving to L.A." obliterating the clichés of "Beverly Hills", with its shirtless motorcycling, hanging with Axl and Morrissey, and foolish tattoos.
HAVEN'T READ THE NME IN SO LONG... DON'T KNOW WHAT GENRE WE BELONG!
Well, let me try to help. See if you can follow this: Art Brut, through their thoroughly unpretentious embrace of pretentiousness, are the most punk new band I've heard in years, punk having lost itself long ago to the pretentiousness of unpretentiousness. So even though Argos boasts of wanting to "write the song/ That makes Israel and Palestine get along," and planning to perform Art Brut's hit eight weeks in a row on "Top of the Pops", any chance you might take him seriously is deflated by the little meta-moments like the one caps-locked above. As with the best LCD Soundsystem singles, Bang Bang Rock & Roll is at times some of the best music criticism going right now, and far better than our boringly verbose bullshit 'cause you can dance to it.
AND ART BRUT, WE'VE ONLY JUST STARTED!
The optimism of that statement is infectious and hard to argue with, though I'm perfectly aware of the large pile of empty Brit-hype firecrackers that went off with a barely a whimper Stateside. Given their reliance on dry English humour (yes, two u's) and lack of a timely U.S. distribution deal, it's unlikely Art Brut will fare well as well with North American listeners as fellow countrymen Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, and the Futureheads. But then, just a year ago, it seemed unlikely that any of those bands would find fans in the States at all, let alone enough to spark yet another small-scale British invasion-- and all told, it's not hard to imagine their dagger-sharp guitar lines and pop-fueled bash carving its own niche in those other bands' wake if given the opportunity. The only thing to do is start a letter-writing campaign, suffer the import prices, and hope Art Brut's got enough in their tank for another album or two. I can't wait to hear "Recorded a Sophomore Album!" | 2005-06-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-06-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Fierce Panda | June 2, 2005 | 8.9 | 14623129-c734-4336-a7a0-b96333708330 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
The Nashville brothers' seventh album, their first for a major label, was produced by the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach. Coming from a fuzz-pop band that has just two members and three guitar strings to its name, Hypnotic Nights covers a deceptively wide swath of sonic terrain. | The Nashville brothers' seventh album, their first for a major label, was produced by the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach. Coming from a fuzz-pop band that has just two members and three guitar strings to its name, Hypnotic Nights covers a deceptively wide swath of sonic terrain. | JEFF the Brotherhood: Hypnotic Nights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16831-hypnotic-nights-ep/ | Hypnotic Nights | It's summertime, which means that, right now, all across the land, lifetime friendships are being forged and virginities are being lost, and the fond reminiscences thereof will be forever associated with whatever songs happen to be playing in the background. Because the soundtrack to our lives is often accidental and serendipitous, comprising random tunes that turn up on the radio, or on shuffle, or in a DJ's playlist at just the right moment, thereby conflating a certain song and a certain shared experience into the best night of your life. But JEFF the Brotherhood ask: Why leave it all to chance? Why not just reach for a record that's already as up for a good time as you are?
The fraternal Nashville duo's seventh album-- and debut for Warner Bros.-- is their version of celebration rock, if not quite Celebration Rock. Where fellow two-piece Japandroids' recent second album is a paean to the good times as seen in the rearview mirror, Hypnotic Nights captures the memories as they're being made-- specifically at 3 a.m. in the overcrowded kitchen of a home belonging to some classmate's oblivious, vacationing parents. And from the sound of things, Jake and Jamin Orrall's idea of the perfect house party involves little more than The Blue Album on full blast and a thick cloud of pot smoke. Hypnotic Nights continues with the Weezer worship introduced on 2011's We Are the Champions, but answers the fuzz-pop frivolity with equal doses of motorik groove and psychedelic drone: In the giddy, phased-out thrust of "Hypnotic Winter" and bubblegum-covered Krautrock of "Wood Ox", you can imagine what kind of record Rivers Cuomo might've made post-Pinkterton had he gone to Cologne instead of college.
JEFF the Brotherhood's concerns are so basic in their everydude needs-- "I want a place where I can smoke meats/ Where I can drink and swim in a creek," Jake offers by way of mission statement on "Country Life"-- we might as well call them J-Brah. But coming from a band that has just two members and three guitar strings to its name, Hypnotic Nights covers a deceptively wide swath of sonic terrain: Dan Auerbach's production incorporates everything from saxophones and piano to synths and sitars into the mix, mostly to thicken the band's distorto-rock drive rather than provide a respite from it. However, Auerbach does coax an impressively straight-faced performance out of the duo on the mid-60s-styled psych-pop reverie "Region of Fire", an effective late-album comedown that makes the closing cover of Black Sabbath's cigarette-lighter igniter "Changes" all the more superfluous. Even if it's meant to suggest that every epic bender must ultimately come to a sobering end, the gospel singer-assisted reading is too melodramatic to be introspective, and-- by swapping out the original's piano melody for amateur-hour synth taps-- too half-assed to be taken seriously. Given how well Hypnotic Nights otherwise lives up to its name, the Orralls' ersatz-Ozzy act proves to be an unnecessarily rude awakening. | 2012-07-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-07-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | July 18, 2012 | 7 | 1462f27f-4fcc-44da-beb0-a27d99072a05 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Fourteen years after their first collaboration, the unlikely duo reunites for a well-curated selection of covers that spans generations, while adding their fascinating mystique to every one. | Fourteen years after their first collaboration, the unlikely duo reunites for a well-curated selection of covers that spans generations, while adding their fascinating mystique to every one. | Robert Plant / Alison Krauss: Raise the Roof | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/robert-plant-alison-krauss-raise-the-roof/ | Raise the Roof | The success of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ Grammy-winning 2007 record Raising Sand set a lofty bar for their bewitching energy as a duo. Fourteen years later, Raise the Roof maintains their careful simplicity, rising to the challenge of releasing another record of mostly cover songs that are still impactful and original. When their talents are interlaced, Plant and Krauss are masters at dusting off generations-old tracks and making them saunter to a fresh, personal rhythm.
Between his Led Zeppelin roots, his love of 1950s doo-wop, and a decades-long passion for Asian and South Asian music, Robert Plant has tried many musical derivatives on for size. Equal parts glimmering golden ringlets and devilish rock’n’roll mystique, his career is one of inarguable expansion and divergence. It was incomplete, however, until a 2004 Lead Belly tribute concert where he met bluegrass singer Alison Krauss, the lifetime Grand Ole Opry member, who, until this year, held the record for most Grammy awards won by a woman, having won her first at age 18.
Despite seemingly polarized genre identifications, the pair’s “almost telepathic” connection was immediate, first yielding the effulgent Raising Sand. Produced by T Bone Burnett, the collection of 12 covers and one Jimmy Page/Robert Plant original showcased how the two musicians coalesced when venturing into what Plant dubbed the “music of the mountains.”
Raise the Roof, also produced by Burnett, is the dark and spacey counterpart to Plant and Krauss’ first release, with covers that span from modern indie-folk band Calexico to early Delta blues musician Geeshie Wiley. Their cover of Calexico’s “Quattro (World Drifts In),” the song that ignited Krauss’ desire for a second duo record, suspends Plant and Krauss in a personal nomadic catharsis, delivered with such ardency that it is as if the two penned the track themselves. Similarly, despite the insidious nature of Wiley’s “Last Kind Words Blues,” Krauss’ voice soars above it all, like a sunflower straining towards sunlight. The opposing tones of Krauss and Plant, coupled with Marc Ribot’s gentle banjo plucks and Stuart Duncan’s hypnotizing mandolin, harkens back to Plant’s galvanizing vocal symmetry with his other female duet partner, the immortal folk singer and Fairport Convention frontwoman Sandy Denny, the only guest vocalist on any Led Zeppelin record.
Plant and Krauss’ rendition of the Anne Briggs classic “Go Your Way” feels like a dark and stormy folkian B-side to Led Zeppelin III’s crown jewel “That’s the Way,” both haunting and divine. The stylistic changes, such as the ebbs and flows of Plant’s soft rasp with an emphasized drum beat and sorrowful pedal steel, thoughtfully reinvent the track as a farewell letter that feels miles from the original. Plant is persuasive and comfortable on “Searching for My Love,” the softest and most innocent track on this intimately dark record. The bridge’s magmatic guitar riffs pair tremendously with his boundless vocals.
Written by Burnett and Plant, “High and Lonesome” is the zenith of Raise the Roof, with the weathered energy of a dirt-dusted cowboy boot stomping the stage. The clapping percussion dances the track into a fireside incantation; Plant chants “Will she still be mine?” and “There I must find my love” as if casting a spell, while violins swirl up from the cauldron of his lower register. Plant and Krauss’ paralyzing and disquieting reimagination of Appalachian-life raconteur Ola Belle Reed’s “You Led Me to the Wrong” continues the record’s theme of revealing their darker side.
The album falls into a valley of platitudes with the final number, “Somebody Was Watching Over Me.” The Brenda Burns cover falls short, with a haphazard piano part and incongruous backing vocals. Raise the Roof should have ended one track sooner, on Merle Haggard and Dean Holloway’s “Going Where the Lonely Go.” Glinting with Russ Pahl’s pedal steel touches, it’s Krauss’ most empyreal moment, conjuring the lonesome dreamscape imagery simply by her stunning approach as a vocalist.
Plant and Krauss remain an unexpected pairing, at least on its face. But what beauty lies beneath. With versions that bend and reshape the originals, they once again leave their imprint on a well-curated songbook that suits their mystical nature. They dig deeper into the corners of American music and by doing so, come up with something far more rare and incisive about its past.
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. | 2021-11-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | Rounder | November 19, 2021 | 7.3 | 146538e4-6fdd-441c-96b7-10970b2f3f33 | Olivia Lane | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-lane/ | |
On her excellent new album, Juana Molina continues shedding formal pop structures to reveal more of her own artistic voice. Her occultish narrative is defined not by words, but by moods. | On her excellent new album, Juana Molina continues shedding formal pop structures to reveal more of her own artistic voice. Her occultish narrative is defined not by words, but by moods. | Juana Molina: Halo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23124-halo/ | Halo | The first songs Juana Molina wrote on her guitar as a young girl in Argentina were simple things, repetitive melodies comprised of a few notes and chords. She would play them over and over for weeks on end, lulling herself into a trance. Without the confidence to explore her droning ambient tendencies, she dressed them up with a chorus, verse, and bridge, a spoonful of sugar meant to disguise her kookier tendencies.
Her 1996 debut LP Rara did much of the same, a folky pop record that only offered glimpses of the rhythmic experimentation she would later explore more fully. Her early career was marked by a slow shedding of her protective pop armor. And when she discovered the Boss RC-20 loop station for 2004’s Tres Cosas, she finally had the tool to take those trance-inducing loops she’d been drawn to since childhood and craft lush, layered compositions. With each record, as she’s shed layer after layer of constricting pop and folk structures, she seems to reveal more and more of herself.
Halo is Molina’s seventh and strongest LP. She wields a sonic palette refined by two decades of experimentation to create a narrative defined not by words, but by mood. Loosely based on the folk legend of the “luz mala”—a halo of “evil light” that floats above the ground where bones are buried—the record evokes the occult in its music as much as in its Spanish lyrics. The fickle protagonist of “Paraguaya” feeds potions to a lover in order to manipulate his desires, but beyond the words, there’s clearly some brujería at work. The ominous strings and purring percussion make that clear, if the 1,000-yard stare peering at you from the femur on the album’s cover didn’t already.
On 2008’s “Un Día,” Molina sung of a desire to deliver songs with no lyrics; in 2017, she’s perfected the form. Three tracks on Halo—“In the Lassa,” “A00 B01,” and “Andó”—feature her voice but no words. Her rhythmic vocals are looped and layered, blending in as another instrumental layer in the ambient compositions. Above each song hangs a looming specter, its characters in search of paranormal assistance in the physical realm to soothe their confusion and regret. Occasionally she even seems to speak with her synthesizer; its brooding warble on “Cálculos y Oráculos” is as expressive as any vocal.
Much is made of Molina’s past as a comedic television performer in Argentina. Her decision to walk away from her show “Juana y Sus Hermanas” at the peak of its popularity is an alluring part of her mystique, but it also underscores her intention. Her acting career was a means to an end, a way to support her music, the art she cared about. Her early folk tendencies and pop structures served a similar purpose, a means to explore the off-kilter rhythms and ambient melodies that lulled her into a trance as a child, pulling us in along with her.
Halo suggests a self-realization that is often breathtaking. On “Cara de espejo,” Molina sings of a woman looking in the mirror, shocked by the truth she finds in her own reflection. “Cuando uno sabe qué va a verse en un espejo/Pone la cara que espera ver en el reflejo,” she sings. Or, in English, “When you know you'll look at yourself in the mirror/You pull the face you hope to see in the reflection.” It seems Molina finally sees her true self staring back at her. | 2017-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Crammed Discs | May 9, 2017 | 8 | 146bb5b9-171b-4395-82cd-69feb95e3eae | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | null |
While the Big Thief guitarist’s solo work makes more room for American country music than his main band, it offers much of the same warmth and whispery intimacy. | While the Big Thief guitarist’s solo work makes more room for American country music than his main band, it offers much of the same warmth and whispery intimacy. | Buck Meek: Two Saviors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/buck-meek-two-saviors/ | Two Saviors | Buck Meek sings a bit like someone who didn’t expect to find himself singing. When the Big Thief guitarist opens his mouth, he comes off slightly hesitant and bashful, not entirely committed to the pitches or the rhythm. He sounds like he might be singing just over your shoulder, so even when he lets a little goose-honk crack disrupt his voice, he’s appealing and warm. His solo work carries much the same whispery intimacy as his main band, even if it lacks some of the intensity.
Two Saviors follows Meek’s self-titled 2018 solo debut, which was released in the gap between Big Thief’s second and third albums, 2017’s Capacity and 2019’s U.F.O.F. Somewhere in this time, Meek and Big Thief’s leading force, singer-songwriter and guitarist Adrianne Lenker, quietly divorced. Their marriage was never much spoken of in the press, nor was its dissolution: “I feel like it made us stronger and closer,” Lenker told the New Yorker. “A lot of our love is funnelled into the music, which is maybe the form it was always meant to have.”
The songs on Two Saviors glow with some of that transposed love. They have the customary ease of folk rock, of course—save for drummer James Krivchenia’s experiments in electronic music, most of the Big Thief projects fall under the same homespun umbrella—but they also have the intimacy of a love letter written to a former flame. “Remember the time/You snuck in through the bathroom window and waited for me there?” Meek asks on “Pareidolia,” the album’s first song. The words don’t trouble themselves to make much literal sense, but now and then he’ll ask a direct question, charged with love and its loss: “Did your eyes change? I remember them blue/Or were they always hazel?”
The instruments all seem to step lightly over each other, the drums and Rhodes and pump organ tangling around the edges of the downbeat. Meek makes more room for American country music in his arrangements than Big Thief does, from the expert pedal steel on “Cannonball! Pt. 2” and “Candle” to the Sun Records boom-chicka of “Two Moons (morning).” The whole album sounds like it just spilled out of a junk drawer you pulled open looking for something else, and the spirit of the Grateful Dead, or at least a couple of their T-shirts, drapes lightly over the proceedings.
Meek and his band tracked the album over seven days in an old Victorian house in New Orleans, with no second takes. The rickety house infuses the album with so much room tone it nearly deserves a credit in the liner notes; it’s easy to close your eyes and envision the drafty stairwell ceiling in the distortion-clipped drum track of “Ham on White.” This is very comfortable music, but Meek threads strange disturbances into its weave. Residing alongside the blankets and stars and blue jays of his lyric sheet are darker things—faces forming on the ceiling, broken tongues, swimming pools full of turpentine. He sums up his brand of gentle uncanny nicely, on “Second Sight”: “If you have a need of which you can’t describe/A feeling of the third kind/That’s my specialty.”
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. | 2021-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Keeled Scales | January 21, 2021 | 7.1 | 146f585f-000e-45ec-857f-4d218f5b5021 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Tim Presley's solo debut reteams him with producer Cate Le Bon for a stark, stream-of-consciousness odyssey. | Tim Presley's solo debut reteams him with producer Cate Le Bon for a stark, stream-of-consciousness odyssey. | Tim Presley: The Wink | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22360-the-wink/ | The Wink | On last year’s DRINKS, Tim Presley and Cate Le Bon threw out the rock rulebook and forged their own scrappy tools of invention. Wielding their guitars like crudely hewn spades, the newly formed duo tilled indiscriminately through history, splicing krautrock with hippie folk and welding inside jokes to piercing proto-synths. Partially inspired by Soul Jazz’s Punk 45: There Is No Such Thing As Society Vol 2 compilation, the agitated vibe mussed Le Bon’s usual tidy surfaces on this year’s Crab Day, and returns to scare every trace of classic rock out of Tim Presley’s solo debut, The Wink, which Le Bon produces.
Over the course of their six albums to date, Presley’s shaggy classicists White Fence have marched ever closer to something resembling clarity. The Wink is also a clean listen, but significantly starker than White Fence fans might expect, trading jet-thrusting psychedelia for the rickety twang common to “Bike”-era Pink Floyd, post-punk anarchists, and the Fiery Furnaces at their most ornery. Throughout, Presley seems like the willing supplicant to Le Bon’s autodidact.
Although it starts with an interlude that suggests seals welcoming you to a séance, The Wink is a more coherent and approachable record than DRINKS. As Presley’s songwriting comes back into focus after that wigged-out record, he seems both damaged and reinvigorated, his atonal guitar and nervy register often exuding an appealing, hen-pecked panic. On these harder moments, Le Bon chucks in curveballs to up the ante, like the dabbles of vaudeville piano on the title track, Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa’s trolley-crash emphases on “Solitude Cola,” and the slack saxophone on “ER” that billows like a deflated Airdancer. The disparate elements combine to something resembling a riff from Presley’s track “Clue,” albeit one that also evokes Television attacking an obstacle course.
Presley’s abstract impressionism is surprising and rich with detail, though there are gentler life rafts here as respite from the madness. “I can’t wait to write to you, love of my life!” he swoons on the amiable “Goldfish Wheelchair” (where the Californian sounds suspiciously Welsh). “All done!” he declares, as if he’s just plopped his note in the letterbox. Presley’s lyrics are mostly inscrutable streams of consciousness that are meaningful to him alone, but the occasional plainspoken tenderness leaps out like a shooting star: “And I’ve whittled my sticks/And my love cannot miss,” he chants on “Long Bow,” “It’s a long bow/Pull tight.”
The Wink is a high-wire act that may find more fans among, say, free jazz listeners than conventional rock lovers. But even if the scratchy destination lacks home comforts, the journey is its own thrill. In DRINKS, Le Bon and Presley tore up the rules; on The Wink, they set about rewriting them to their own addictive whims. | 2016-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | September 15, 2016 | 7.8 | 146fdf98-f472-4ed9-9313-992ed3821016 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The London quintet’s second album takes a softer approach to Britpop-infused post-punk and a more emotional perspective on working-class consciousness. | The London quintet’s second album takes a softer approach to Britpop-infused post-punk and a more emotional perspective on working-class consciousness. | High Vis: Blending | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/high-vis-blending/ | Blending | As High Vis frontman Graham Sayle explains, the title of the London band’s latest album, Blending, is Liverpool slang for looking sharp—“Like ah, lad, you’re blending.” The quintet’s second LP, however, has little to do with getting a fit off and everything to do with breaking down the superficial posturing that drives us apart. High Vis are no strangers to raging against the machine; on their 2019 debut, No Sense No Feeling, they sang candidly about the nihilism permeating their lives in working-class Britain. Blending explores themes of class consciousness and anti-capitalism through a more emotional perspective. Like Turnstile’s funk-inflected hardcore, High Vis’ Britpop-infused post-punk brings an electrifying softness to its own rough edges.
The current of hope that blooms throughout Blending is a surprisingly gentle one: Sayle delivers his blunt, visceral lyrics with town-crier muscle over Martin McNamara and Rob Hammeren’s strobing, Flock of Seagulls-like guitars and Rob Moss’s buttery Fugazi bass. The warmer approach is also indebted to drummer Edward “Ski” Harper, who encouraged Sayle to seek therapy and abandon the self-described “fuck it, that’s life, innit” attitude that had left him feeling angry and depressed. Still, Blending is never superficially cheery; many of the record’s most hopeful moments shine in tandem with its bleakest assertions. On album opener “Talk for Hours,” Sayle acknowledges the fragile connection forged between strangers in search of anything to lose. “I hardly know ya/But I’m listening,” he assures. “I’m listening to you cry.” “Fever Dream” opens with a callback to the band’s debut—“There’s no sense where there’s no feeling”—before launching into a plea for connection and life. “I’m as empty as the waste and the green land,” Sayle cries in a nasal, Gallagher-esque moan.
Throughout Blending, High Vis acknowledge that anger often coexists with hope, even suggesting that to an extent, the two are inextricable. “The working class is good as dead,” Sayle shouts over blown-out guitars and thrashing drums on “0151” (the Liverpool area code). In his impassioned yowl, dashed hopes and the “ghosts of the docks and the factories” become regenerative, even revolutionary: “If you won’t give it then we’ll fucking take it!” Blending’s emotional centerpiece, “Trauma Bonds,” which was written in the wake of a friend’s suicide, takes an unflinching look at the desperation that both precedes and precludes healing. “Are we still lucky to be here?” Sayle rasps through cutting instrumentals, as if the answer could only be a resounding no. Still, he manages to strip away the apathy and self-destruction to reveal genuine fear. Sayle has said “Trauma Bonds” is difficult for him to perform live.
While its calls to action and emotional candor are undeniably moving, Blending ultimately feels as if the loose ends have been tucked out of sight, rather than tied up. Songs sometimes veer inscrutably towards arena rock, as on the album’s weakest track, “Join Hands,” and some lyrics can read simultaneously preachy and oblique. While Sayle always performs with sincerity, the scope of his music can feel too grand, too consciously results-oriented, to reflect it. High Vis are at their best when they tell it like it is, and Blending too often grasps for an answer that isn’t all there. | 2022-09-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dais | September 29, 2022 | 6.7 | 147222cc-4dff-41c7-bb85-9f2d3ae34591 | Sue Park | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sue-park/ | |
The singer-songwriter’s new album tackles the tenderness of motherhood with a series of transportive, ambient-adjacent experiments. | The singer-songwriter’s new album tackles the tenderness of motherhood with a series of transportive, ambient-adjacent experiments. | Bat for Lashes: The Dream of Delphi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bat-for-lashes-the-dream-of-delphi/ | Bat for Lashes: The Dream of Delphi | Natasha Khan has always treated pop music like it’s spell-casting; her pinches of synth-bass and sprinkles of fantastical lyrics create an unmistakable sparkle. Over nearly 20 years performing as Bat for Lashes, the singer-songwriter has become an expert daydreamer—her last album, 2019’s Lost Girls, was written from the perspective of a female biker gang—and her theatricality has drawn frequent comparisons to Kate Bush. Then, in 2020, Khan had a baby. Her body became impossible to ignore, and its tenderness inspired her latest album. Dedicated to and named after Khan’s daughter, The Dream of Delphi offers several intriguing ambient-adjacent experiments—until its enchantment fades like a half-formed thought.
To continue the Kate Bush comparisons, The Dream of Delphi is Khan’s own Aerial. Like that 2005 album, in which a typically enigmatic Bush describes her son as sunshine, The Dream of Delphi sees Khan exchange personal sensuality—the wild horses and weepy kissing of past albums—for more earthly musings. The Dream often sounds like a cut-up version of Khan’s discography, taking her beloved strings, sappy ’80s synths, and seashell drums and slicing them into translucent slugs. The instrumental “Breaking Up” twitches slowly, like many of Khan’s bittersweet pop songs, with an imposing synth-bassline that gurgles like an empty stomach. The harpist Mary Lattimore releases starbursts into the title track, matching Bat for Lashes’ tendency to use strings as a sweetener. Khan sings hypnotically of “milk and opal light.” It’s all pretty, but, in comparison to her more hearty compositions, it’s missing protein.
Khan is an efficient maximalist when she allows herself to be, drenching everything with cascading synths—every second should be a waterfall or bust. The impulse to make things bigger translates well to the melody-forward ambient music that makes up most of The Dream, so songs like “The Midwives Have Left” have lovely balloon-like buoyancy. Khan’s fudgy voice thins out as she dips into weightless cooing, nested in piano splinters. These moments are some of the album’s most transportive; they recall the best experimental music about motherhood, like Medulla by Björk. A few of the songs on The Dream of Delphi are a little too underdeveloped and end up dissipating into thin air. But it’s Khan’s lyrics, always so full of gravity and grace, that keep the album from stalling out. “Remember you came from a spiral, unfolding,” Khan sings on “Letter to My Daughter” with the measured insight of motherhood. In this music, motherhood sounds as supernatural as it feels to the people who experience it. | 2024-06-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mercury KX | June 4, 2024 | 7 | 1476fcbc-5885-4730-847b-09b888db8daa | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
Grown, sexy, and horny on main, the Dreamville singer’s second album pursues pleasure without compromising on self-love. | Grown, sexy, and horny on main, the Dreamville singer’s second album pursues pleasure without compromising on self-love. | Ari Lennox: age/sex/location | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ari-lennox-age-sex-location/ | age/sex/location | Ari Lennox’s crisp, velvety soprano evokes both the lavender incense at a successful girls’ night in and the sensual intimacy after a delightful date night out. The amorous flair of her music channels a rich lineage of Black women neo-soul artists of the 1990s and early ’00s, who prioritized their sexual desires along the journey to self-acceptance. Drawing on Jill Scott’s jazz-inflected tension and Erykah Badu’s philosophical ruminations, Lennox’s own brand of neo-soul finds freedom in the flesh. The DC native’s 2016 EP Pho employed the retro flair of ’70s R&B to capture the bliss of having her carnal needs met; her 2019 full-length debut Shea Butter Baby exuded the aroma of passion while embracing the autonomy of a young single woman trying to understand her worth beyond sex. On her second album, age/sex/location, Lennox ditches the formulaic takes on lust and romantic uncertainty for a steamier, sexier collection of songs that push her further along in her quest for self-acceptance.
Lennox has described the new album as “the transitional space before my current eat, pray, love journey”—a clichéd yet accurate assessment of her most assured-sounding project yet. If Shea Butter Baby highlighted her frustration at not receiving the love she desires, Lennox is now more interested in giving that same love to herself. Situated in the transit space between the longing for external validation and the confidence required not to need it, age/sex/location offers a bountiful exploration of what it truly means to be grown and sexy. On the groovy, upbeat “Waste My Time,” co-written by British singer and producer MNEK, Lennox tests the limits of her upper range as she affirmatively decides to enter a relationship that will provide only temporary satisfaction: “Waste my time/Get on my line/’Cause I got the time to waste,” she instructs.
It’s the only time we see her indulge in an unsustainable encounter simply because she wants to: Lennox devotes most of the record to asserting her power in understanding what she doesn’t want. “Young Black woman approachin’ 30 with no lover in my bed/Cannot settle, I got standards,” she sings on the bluesy opener “POF,” featuring backing vocals by J. Cole. The humorous duet-skit “Boy Bye,” which casts Lucky Daye in the role of an earnest suitor failing to court a skeptical Lennox, sounds like a contemporary update of the interlude in Erykah Badu’s 1997 classic “Next Lifetime.” On “Blocking You,” Lennox’s voice floats over funky guitar chords and dreamy synths as she demands privacy to restore her inner peace: “Blocking you on everything.” On previous projects, Lennox sang about sex positivity and the self-doubt associated with relationships as if a romantic connection with a partner were required to survive (see “Whipped Cream”). Now she’s starting to understand that it’s not.
The best moments on age/sex/location arrive when Lennox fully leans into the explicit details of her sensual pleasures. Though rarer here than on earlier records, her talent for using her voice to convey the heights of physical satisfaction is peerless. On the stellar “Mean Mug,” which ends with a sultry trumpet solo, her honeyed tone vividly conveys the arousal she feels hearing a lover’s voice over the phone. “Voice noting on the daily/Vocal stroking my sweet valley,” she sings. The intensity peaks on “Leak It,” a heaven-sent vocal match-up between Lennox and Chlöe, who sound invigorated to discover just how freaky they can get when the long-distance connection on “Mean Mug” becomes an in-person night of piercing moans and melodic orgasms.
Lennox’s masterful vocal evocations of her horny-on-main tendencies hit a snag on “Stop By,” where her vocals seep into the background. But the slow moments don’t outweigh the album’s abundant confidence. The Summer Walker-assisted closer, “Queen Space,” marks Lennox’s commitment to give herself the love and respect she expects from her partners. Anchored by mellow keys, the track seamlessly melds Walker’s trap-R&B with Lennox’s old-school soul, spotlighting them as leading voices in their respective styles. Across age/sex/location, Lennox refreshes classic R&B stylings for a contemporary audience, sounding at ease with herself as she offers up her sexiest and most assured music to date. | 2022-09-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dreamville / Interscope | September 15, 2022 | 7.7 | 14781546-fc27-48fc-b241-40918999b12d | DeAsia Paige | https://pitchfork.com/staff/deasia-paige/ | |
Working again with members of David Nance & Mowed Sound, the North Carolina singer-songwriter finds an easy, patient groove pitched between Americana and classic rock. | Working again with members of David Nance & Mowed Sound, the North Carolina singer-songwriter finds an easy, patient groove pitched between Americana and classic rock. | Rosali : Bite Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rosali-bite-down/ | Bite Down | Rosali Middleman, the singer-songwriter known as Rosali, first crossed paths with Nebraska rock guitarist David Nance out on tour. In his group’s full-bodied classic rock sound, she heard a kindred spirit—and a new possibility for what became her third album, 2021’s No Medium. After the reverb-heavy acoustic fare of her 2016 debut Out of Love and the steely edged folk rock of Trouble Anyway two years later, Nance and his band Mowed Sound helped to refract the flickering lamplight of her voice like a gold-veined vintage mirror. Together, they fashioned her Americana instincts—soft traces of pedal steel, banjo, and harp—into the warm, plush sound of 1960s rock’n’roll.
Teaming once again with Nance and members of Mowed Sound on Bite Down, her new album and first release with Merge, Rosali commits definitively to rock’n’roll’s most well-worn textures. It’s clothing she wears well, sounding at times like Stevie Nicks’ drowsy-voiced niece in the way she assesses life’s lingering bruises with cool disregard. “Said it was nothing/Well, what was it then?” she sings with a hint of side-eye on “Is It Too Late.” The track moves along at an easy drift, reflecting Rosali’s outward indifference, until the band accelerates to a frenzy on the last chorus, and reveals the deeper ache provoking her retorts.
Rosali perfumed No Medium with romance, but on Bite Down, those flowers have withered. New possibilities present themselves with no clear way forward. “I am here but I too may go/My body cares for nothing anymore,” she sings on the scuttling “Hopeless,” electric guitar fuzzy and dense behind her as she watches the last embers of love die out. Rosali has stumbled up against these questions before, but the hard-won confidence she displays across Bite Down is more willing to relinquish the need for an answer. “There is no way/No one way/Be there, OK/Be awake,” she sings on “Change Is in the Form.” James Schroeder’s glinting autoharp breaks up the album’s predilection for guitar jams, spiking the chorus with psychedelic sun glare.
Rosali finds the headiest chemistry with the Mowed Sound on mid-tempo grooves like “Hopeless” or slow burns like “Hills on Fire,” which builds a kind of atmospheric heat lightning. You can hear their chummy interplay on the skittering rhythm of “On Tonight,” a warm-hearted confab that sets delicate traces of acoustic and electric guitar against JJ Idt’s thick, rolling bassline. But when they crank songs up, like the jump-start of the Crazy Horse-nodding “My Kind,” Rosali’s voice gets lost, her attitude of nonchalance running against the grain. “My Kind” waits for her to impart a larger emotional flourish, as when her voice rises in confession on “Hopeless,” but instead she holds back.
At times Rosali can linger too long in a song. “My Kind” begins to feel like an extended chorus because she repeats the title phrase so frequently, the music ruminating alongside her rather than evolving to punctuate the churning repetition. Even the charming “On Tonight” burrows down into the chorus, spending the song’s final minute repeating some variation of the phrase, “You’re on tonight.” Bite Down is at its best when Rosali complicates an idea rather than simply circling it. In a rare flash of earnestness, she sings on “Rewind”: “I’m a gold light made of rhythm and space/She’s a soft wind, you’ll meet her someday.” What a tender surprise. | 2024-03-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Merge | March 27, 2024 | 7.3 | 147943c3-8073-4a91-a024-d4a26c8c3096 | Amanda Wicks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-wicks/ | |
ESP reissues these albums from the late free jazz legend. | ESP reissues these albums from the late free jazz legend. | Albert Ayler: Spiritual Unity / Live on the Riviera | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11649-spiritual-unity-live-on-the-riviera/ | Spiritual Unity / Live on the Riviera | Saxophonist Albert Ayler recorded Spiritual Unity for a new label called ESP-Disk in 1964. For years, ESP-Disk has been semi-dormant, licensing its back catalog to other labels for manufacture, but they've now reasserted control and have started a reissue campaign. Spiritual Unity and Live on the Riviera, which are interesting pieces in Ayler's astonishing run, are part of the first wave.
My favorite Ayler material involves him working with another horn. Something about his fat, driving tone-- the way it conveys joy even as his overblowing threatens to crack his instrument-- sounds a little lonely with just bass and drums. Still, some of his best music was recorded in the trio format, and he had a telepathic empathy on Spiritual Unity with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray. Together Peacock and Murray form a sound backing that at times seems more like an endlessly shifting cluster of sound than an actual rhythm section. Murray has a light, rapid touch, keeping the cymbals and snares going pretty much constantly, never breaking the flow of the music with a heavy roll, and Peacock functions as an extension of his textures.
Out front is Ayler, sounding strong and huge, opening and closing with versions of "Ghosts". His approach to this signature piece sets the tone for what he tried to accomplish with his music. Though he obviously has a deep love of simple folk melodies, the intensity of his feeling is such that a tune could never contain it, and the sound spills over and around the structure until it eventually bursts forth in a chaotic torrent. "The Wizard" doesn't begin quite as catchy and features an even harsher tone, moving into more challenging areas of free jazz, and "Spirits" is a swooning lament that has Ayler stretching notes to melodramatic and deeply moving lengths. Spiritual Unity is short (just under 30 minutes), intense, and a deserved classic.
Fast forward to the final year of Ayler's life, 1970, as he toured Europe with a quartet. Constantly searching for new textures, during the past couple years he'd experimented with vocals, bagpipes, harpsichord, and rock bands. On Life on the Riviera, the main remnant from these restless years is the presence of Ayler's girlfriend, the poet and musician Mary Maria. While her spoken words on "Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe" are on the one hand painfully dated hippie drivel ("music causes all bad vibrations to faaaade away") there's something oddly fascinating about the clash between her sentiments and Ayler's insane screeches. He's screaming through his tenor, pinching it to sound like a kazoo as the force of his wind drives it up a few octaves, and yet Maria's words ("it makes one want to love instead of hate, it puts the mind in a healthy state of thought") imply that what they're doing is a universal expression of affection and warmth.
Maria's voice is scattered throughout, sometimes reciting verse, sometimes singing, sometimes mimicking Ayler's phrasing with blubbery scat. Her crooning on the straighter ballad "Heart Love" is pretty solid, and when Ayler pipes in to sing a verse, as he often did in his later years, he makes her sound like Dionne Warwick. But as awkward as the vocals can get, the material is strong enough to survive it. The bouncy "The Birth of Mirth" shows that Ayler was writing great themes all the way to end.
A rousing version of "Ghosts" is the closer. Seven minutes into it, the band stops playing-- it's the apparent end of the set-- and the crowd applauds appreciatively. After 15 seconds or so of cheers the band kicks in with a reprise of the theme, the crowd explodes, and then, for three more minutes, the variations continue. It's incredible to think of how many places Ayler could still take the tune. Sadly, within four months the ending would be final and his opportunities would cease. | 2005-03-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-03-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Jazz | null | March 14, 2005 | 9.3 | 147dfb73-c028-471e-9029-1d5091ff03b5 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The witty, word-drunk Maine rapper (a.k.a. milo) follows up his 2017 breakthrough with a middle finger flipped in the direction of any remaining doubters. | The witty, word-drunk Maine rapper (a.k.a. milo) follows up his 2017 breakthrough with a middle finger flipped in the direction of any remaining doubters. | Scallops Hotel: sovereign nose of (y)our arrogant face | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/scallops-hotel-sovereign-nose-of-your-arrogant-face/ | sovereign nose of (y)our arrogant face | Last year’s who told you to think??!!?!?!?! was a watershed release for milo, the 25-year-old rapper and producer who’s found himself pitched as the reluctant poster boy for an art-rap movement that might not particularly exist. It’s no mystery why he’s seen this way: Residing in Maine, milo, who releases much of his music under the name scallops hotel, favors cryptic lowercase song titles and stream-of-consciousness lyrics full of literary and art-world references. “I feel like Arthur Miller when The Crucible drop,” he gleefully brags on that album’s “Yet Another,” while on “Take Advantage of the Naysayer” he recalls hipping fellow-traveller Open Mike Eagle to the French sculptor Jean Dubuffet while on a trip to a museum. These high-brow bars are relayed over a backdrop of free-form-leaning production built on kooky loops and digital ticks, swaddled in the warming ambience of static.
At times, milo’s style has been more of an endearingly experimental idea than something that produces cogent albums—but with who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, he found a way to back up his witticisms with weightier production that encourages repeat listens. His latest effort, sovereign nose of (y)our arrogant face, reinforces that forward movement. A compact 24-minute project that was snuck out on January 1st, it resonates as both milo’s most accessible work to date and a robust middle finger to the way his music has been misperceived.
Cutting right to the chase, milo spits hard and angry over an ominous piano loop on the opening track, “A Terror Way Before Falling.” “Cue yawning zeitgeist/Wack motherfuckers flounder for limelight,” he vents, before bigging up his label as only he can: “Ruby Yacht’s magnificence is bioluminescence.” He’s still going strong 10 tracks later on the album closer, “Sedans,” a dramatic outing co-produced by the Brooklyn-based beatsmith and engineer Steel Tipped Dove: “I wish I could give a fuck about a brush stroke,” milo says, pairing this barb with a warning to sucker MCs that works as a restatement of classic hip-hop ideals: “Know it’s no remorse ’cause rapping is a blood sport.”
This is the thing that’s often overlooked with milo: Many of his references might be more likely found nestling in the shelves of a university bookstore than on the racks of a streetwear pop-up shop, but he delivers them with an unimpeachable flow and a deep, palpable love for hip-hop tradition. Who else in 2018 is channelling their rap nerdery by referencing Boogiemonsters’ mid-’90s summer jam “Honeydips in Gotham,” as milo does on the woozy “A Method (JAWGEMS Pausing in the Hotel Lobby)”?
As if to address the way some of his lyrics might cause listeners to hit up Wikipedia before admiring the flow, on “Whereareewe” milo mentions Dee Dee Skyes, a character from the late-’70s Hanna-Barbera cartoon “Captain Cavemen.” The slow-tempo, smoldering song ends with a snippet of a conversation between the rapper and Steel Tipped Dove, who questions the reference to a decades-old Saturday morning deep cut. “I thought it was super-fun as a kid,” milo explains with a shrug. He knows that sometimes being a likable MC is mostly about saying something that sounds cool—and when it comes to saying cool shit, milo does it better than most. | 2018-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Ruby Yacht | January 9, 2018 | 7.6 | 147f525b-7bed-4e8f-a17f-4bd5a2215342 | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
Filled with sampled ephemera and vintage television clips, the rapper’s latest EP looks to science fiction for a pessimistic, paranoid vision of the present. | Filled with sampled ephemera and vintage television clips, the rapper’s latest EP looks to science fiction for a pessimistic, paranoid vision of the present. | Infinite Aziz: Lost Navigator | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/infinite-aziz-lost-navigator/ | Lost Navigator | There’s little information readily available on Infinite Aziz, the rapper and producer behind Lost Navigator. His new EP is an astral mix of jazz and rap that feels like it came from nowhere, a flowing mix of sampled bits of movies and television shows interspersed with songs that feels like tuning in to a radio channel from an undiscovered planet. A cryptic description on its Bandcamp page reveals its ethos: “The understanding of the lost navigator is that yes, he or she can be mocked for being lost. However, the irony is that the mocker does not realize that the navigator is traveling while they are simply mocking in place.” Aziz is willing to take risks to end up somewhere new, and for most of the EP they pay off.
Opener “Ann” begins with a sample of a television announcer explaining what rap is (“A music that is all beat—strong beat and talk”) and proceeds to offer Aziz’s vision of what rap should be. Not content merely to sample the Arsenio Hall Show theme music, he bookends the song with a snippet of an interview with Hall. Between these throwbacks, he raps over a collage of voices and a piano loop. People can be heard speaking in the background as Aziz throws out pearls of wisdom: “You fight life/Embrace death, you got it backwards kid.” It’s disconcerting yet engaging, like watching someone make themselves heard over a busy open-mic night.
This sense of a lone voice through a storm is enhanced by the production, which manages to be frenetic and melodic at once. A whirring noise reverberates throughout “Grace Race,” as if Aziz is being carried off by a rocket. As he lays down alarmist bars about alien races (“Stockpiling our melanin for their trip to the heavens”) and state oppression (“We charged up but misdirected/My nephew facing 50 for some bullshit, please bless him”) on “The Gambler,” satellite beeps punctuate the march of the drums, lending a ringing menace to his paranoia. You get the feeling that Lost Navigator’s narrator has just watched a program that interspersed the horrors of American history with the wildest sci-fi, and he now finds it impossible to tell the difference between what was real and what was imagined.
By embracing this chaotic mode of interpretation, Aziz comes to revelations impossible to reach any other way. On “Really Out There,” he speaks in metaphor over a hazy fog of what sounds like slowed-down ECM jazz, musing out loud about the worst possible results of a mass uprising: “You really think the Death Star won’t collide with Earth?” he raps, sounding incredulous. Mass extinction seems more plausible to him than true equality. Over the piercing organ notes of the Goblin-sounding “Magnetic,” he gets as close to upfront as he can: “Violence saturates everyday life/We getting numb to that/These orchestrations all being funded so that they don’t collapse.”
You leave Lost Navigator feeling dejected, yet informed. Aziz’s vision is bleak but difficult to fully reject. Surrounding his pessimistic missives with ’80s ephemera and science-fiction scenarios is his way of adding noise to the signal, making real the conflict inherent in his content. How much can you change in a world that continually falsifies who you are? On Lost Navigator, Aziz proves that you may have to glide far out into space in order to see earthly problems with clarity.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | March 16, 2021 | 7.6 | 1481fc29-b443-4aae-af85-80433154b964 | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
On R Plus Seven, Oneohtrix Point Never’s follow-up to 2011’s Replica, Daniel Lopatin builds new music using the bright yet cold textures of the early computing age. The album plays with our collective unconscious of music technology to develop something that comes off as strange and otherworldly and, most importantly, rich with feeling, despite the icy surface layer. | On R Plus Seven, Oneohtrix Point Never’s follow-up to 2011’s Replica, Daniel Lopatin builds new music using the bright yet cold textures of the early computing age. The album plays with our collective unconscious of music technology to develop something that comes off as strange and otherworldly and, most importantly, rich with feeling, despite the icy surface layer. | Oneohtrix Point Never: R Plus Seven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18537-oneohtrix-point-never-r-plus-seven/ | R Plus Seven | There’s a continual tension in experimental electronic music between developing and owning a particular sound and exploring new ones. Creating a unique identity is difficult, and sometimes breaking out of it once it's been established is even harder. Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never is an artist working at one end of this spectrum. He’s restless, searching for new terrain, and his more recent full-lengths have found him reinventing himself with each new record. R Plus Seven, the follow-up to 2011’s Replica, sounds little like previous OPN releases. But despite the radical shifts—and this is what makes this project so consistently rewarding—you can still hear him in it; there are bedrock approaches and clear musical values that you can pick out as Lopatin.
The general approach on R Plus Seven is to build new music using the bright yet cold textures of the early age of personal computing. The aesthetic is identifiably “’80s,” but it’s not the ’80s of new wave, with its familiar array of synthesizers. Instead, Lopatin focuses on the hauntingly clean and clear pre-set sounds that were available for early, crude digital music production (and which were often used in commercial applications, from bumpers for local PBS shows to soundtracking instructional videos) and adds the kind of short-burst bits of information that were common when a sampler could hold two or three seconds of 8-bit audio. While this sort of throwback is common in electronic music, for Lopatin it serves a purpose beyond reference. R Plus Seven is aware of how music and textures like this are likely to be received, but it plays with our collective unconscious of music technology to develop something that comes off as strange and otherworldly and, most importantly, rich with feeling, despite the icy surface layer.
There’s a weird kind of innocence in this sound palette. The fake horns and whooshing vocal samples evoke a time when “the computer” as a concept was still very much rooted in the future rather than the present. The chintzy approximations of common instruments contain a sort of implicit critique of the idea that technology will save us all, but Lopatin’s music doesn’t get hung up on irony, even though it's definitely in the mix. It’s this quality, of highlighting the vacuous side of this music while simultaneously embracing its humor and poignancy, that elevates the OPN project to another plane.
Along those lines, during my first few listens to R Plus Seven, it was hard not to think of James Ferraro’s recent work in this area, specifically his album Far Side Virtual, which used the impossibly cheerful and polished sound of early digital culture to emphasize the music’s connection to mindless, friction-free commerce. To Ferraro’s credit, he’s kept a poker face when presenting this music, and you never quite knew where he was coming from, which made the listening experience fraught with ambiguity and anxiety. But Lopatin comes at it from another angle. He wants his music to do things that music is traditionally known to do: change, develop, use melody to convey feelings, build tension and then release it. That all of this happens within such tightly controlled parameters makes the fact that the record is emotionally engaging that much more impressive. Common sonic threads include wispy digitized voices on tracks like “Americans” and “Chrome Country” that bring to mind the then-exotic turn-of-the-’80s sound of the Fairlight synthesizer, an early sampling device, along with many brittle digital versions of sounds that are distantly “exotic,” conveying the feel of a blocky pixilated representation of a jungle or beach scenes.
Indeed, with “Americans” and “Inside World”, the album makes sharp use of contrasts between the real and the virtual, between “natural” and the representation of natural. I’m tempted to call it Fifth World Music in homage to the 1980 Jon Hassell/Brian Eno album Fourth World: Possible Musics, a record that has a clear spiritual connection to this one. Hassell and Eno hoped to filter ancient tribal sounds through the sound of technology to create an alien but distantly familiar landscape (their project generated discussion about clumsy wording and potentially problematic ideas of what constituted “primitive” music, but that’s a subject for another time). Lopatin grapples with some of those ideas of decontextualization and colliding worlds, but the meeting place is closer to a tableau from Second Life, providing another layer of disorientation.
Still, I can’t underscore strongly enough that, as with Replica, all of this takes place in a realm where musicality is paramount. You don’t listen to this record thinking about theory; it’s beautiful stuff, with chords and tunes and sections you remember. And it also draws from more sounds and eras than I’ve given it credit for. Opening track “Boring Angel” seems a tribute to the glorious repetition of Terry Riley’s process music, while “Along” and “Cryo” are closer to the mood and structure of that place where late-’90s IDM sounds met the winding structures of post-rock. R Plus Seven doesn’t have quite the disembodied weirdness of Replica, but it’s no less accomplished, another intriguing chapter from an artist whose work remains alive with possibility. | 2013-10-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-10-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp | October 4, 2013 | 8.4 | 1482236a-d398-493c-a91a-eba7674194d6 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
Liturgy frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's latest work is electronic side project Kel Valhaal, which mixes his interests in Southern rap with ambient drones and glitch. | Liturgy frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's latest work is electronic side project Kel Valhaal, which mixes his interests in Southern rap with ambient drones and glitch. | Kel Valhaal: New Introductory Lectures on the System of Transcendental Qabala | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22122-new-introductory-lectures-on-the-system-of-transcendental-qabala/ | New Introductory Lectures on the System of Transcendental Qabala | Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, frontman for the theory-forward black metal band Liturgy, is a big fan of continental philosophy—Nietzsche, the German Idealists, and psychoanalysis—and he’s used the lessons from his readings to craft an entire mythological system to drive the writing of his music. In his music, if you choose to believe it, there are messianic figures, divine life sources, and origin stories, one of which gives him the name for a new electronic side-project called Kel Valhaal.
The Sparknotes for his mythology goes something like this: A powerful deity/force of energy called 01010n gave her “light” to a messianic figure called S/he/im (us paltry mortals at our highest perhaps) who couldn’t handle all that power, so was destroyed immediately. So 01010n leaves the universe, leaving a flicker of energy called “The Genesis Caul,” guarded by two figures, Reign Array and Kel Valhaal. Their task for all of eternity is to produce “poetic/cultural/symbolic structures that might work as prisms so as to refract and reflect 01010n’s light.” Hunt-Hendrix’s debut album as Kel Valhaal, New Introductory Lectures on the System of Transcendental Qabala, is supposed to be the first “poetic/cultural/symbolic structure” that will help us come to grips with the awesome power of 01010n. The way for us to see this light? Apparently, it is through what Hunt-Hendrix has described in an interview with *THUMP *as an “art shaman character—a rapping art shaman.”
According to Hunt-Hendrix, the music is supposed to mix acid house, industrial noise, and glitch with Southern rap. A best-case-scenario result might be “Tim Hecker meets Bone Thugs-N-Harmony,” or somewhere near Dälek or Death Grips. It opens with “Mea Culpa” a short instrumental intro, that sounds like an action sequence in a Z-grade sci-fi horror film: Jason X, maybe, or Battlefield Earth. After this inauspicious start, we're treated with the first track with, uh, art shaman rapping, “Tense Stage.” It’s almost impossible to catch what he says, and once his voice enters, notes and noises get splattered like a bucket of paint thrown from a skyscraper window. If you expect to glean any knowledge from Hunt-Hendrix’s lyrics, perhaps in order to harness 01010n’s light ....don’t, because as he’s said in the past: “I just free-associate prophetic nonsense, and then I find a way to deliver it.”
The album’s two best songs are very short tracks like “Bezel,” which utilizes washes of static paired up against claustrophobic keys and spare organ notes, or “NMWE” the only palatable vocal track because it is completely muted. The greatest musical offense that can be found in *NILOTSOTQ *is its centerpiece “Ontological Love.” It is the album's longest song, coming in at ten minutes, and the most Southern rap influenced and rap heavy piece on the album as well. Strange approximations of Mike WiLL Made-It’s murky drum machine whacks and whimsical synth arpeggiations occupy the entire space of the first three minutes. And when he does start singing, almost five minutes have passed by, and his badly processed voice comes off as nasally and out of focus. He screams the chorus (“Ontological love!”) in a robotic monotone that is equally lifeless and clownish. It’s purposefully confusing and uncomfortable, without any actual goal in mind.
Hunt-Hendrix’s interviews have indicated that in some ways, maybe, he is in on the joke. But if that is so, why is this project so self-serious and utterly humorless? He is bold enough to say that his music, his career, will be a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork so engrossing and multivalent that it speaks to all walks of life. And yet his music, time and again, is treated like an afterthought, just another piece of a larger and more pointless scheme of self-aggrandizement. | 2016-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | YLYLCYN | July 15, 2016 | 3.5 | 1487d70b-bf1b-425b-b5ac-a54ced286705 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Abandoning black metal’s harsh intensity in favor of softer, gentler sounds, Deafheaven push themselves into surprising terrain. It’s a tricky proposition. | Abandoning black metal’s harsh intensity in favor of softer, gentler sounds, Deafheaven push themselves into surprising terrain. It’s a tricky proposition. | Deafheaven: Infinite Granite | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deafheaven-infinite-granite/ | Infinite Granite | Were they less restlessly creative, Deafheaven’s 2013 breakout, Sunbather, might have defined the band’s legacy. But throughout a gradual stylistic evolution, and beyond the provocations of their early days—the pink album artwork, the trendy haircuts, the hawking of the Sunbather font—an unwavering commitment to catharsis kept their music vital and thrilling. Deafheaven’s sweeping crescendos and relentless intensity have encouraged the kind of emotional bloodletting that attracts listeners from all across the musical spectrum, even ones who aren’t usually fans of black metal.
The elevator pitch for Infinite Granite, the band’s fifth album, is “Deafheaven minus the screaming and blast beats.” There’s no disputing that it’s their most subdued, least aggressive work by far, but that description also undersells how many gentler moments exist throughout Deafheaven’s discography, as well as how much clean singing there’s been on their last two records. Infinite Granite may push the band’s harshest elements to the margins, but its most striking departure is its abandonment of dynamic buildups and climaxes. Since Sunbather, the band’s music has been a linear, side-scrolling video-game landscape of cliffs and valleys; now it’s the famous Windows XP background of hi-res rolling hills with unknown scale but finite boundaries. Deafheaven are capable of gorgeous shoegaze, dream pop, and post-rock tapestries, but their replications of those styles begin to lose their emotional resonance when not interwoven with heavier fare.
As Infinite Granite progresses, it’s hard to tell if the songs are getting weaker or if it’s just your third or fourth time running up the same hill. Almost every track begins with ambient swirls of synth or guitar effects, which are soon paired with plaintive guitar strums and hi-hat-driven drum patterns. Once the full band kicks in, they’ll either ride it out for the song’s full runtime or select one of three options for transitions: blasting off on the back of a big Slowdive/My Bloody Valentine-style shoegaze riff, slowing down into a slightly heavier half-time breakdown, or granting us a brief glimpse of their black-metal side at the very end of the song, as a treat.
Deafheaven’s previous albums are hardly hyperpop-style mashups of a million different ideas—and indeed, by the mid-song breakdown in 2018’s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love closer “Worthless Animal,” it may feel like you’ve heard slight variations of the same Daniel Tracy drumbeat a dozen times—but this is the first time the usually innovative band has felt like it’s playing by a set of predetermined rules. Infinite Granite’s update to a well-defined sound may seem like a brave attempt to escape whatever container that Deafheaven, their fans, and their critics have built for the band, but ironically, they haven’t sounded this boxed in since 2011’s Roads to Judah.
Still, within those limits, they do some impressive things. Frontman George Clarke’s poetic writing, now intelligible without the help of a lyric sheet, holds up under the spotlight, and his longstanding desire to deliver singalong hooks comes to fruition on the full-throated choruses of songs like “Shellstar” and “Lament for Wasps.” Guitarists Kerry McCoy and Shiv Mehra take the effort they once put into composing heart-wrenching solos and refocus it on laser-precision tonality, each new riff a microcosm of subtle shifts between reverb, chorus, and fuzz effects. Tracy may take more of a back seat than usual, but his thunderous fills telegraph where the rest of the band is headed, providing the spark for powerful moments at the tail ends of “Great Mass of Color” and “Villain.” The empty space where the screams, solos, and blast beats used to be is filled marvelously by bassist Chris Johnson, who, by virtue of both the softer style of music and fuller production, gets more space to roam than ever before.
Just as integral to Infinite Granite’s shift in sound is the presence of producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen, who, in addition to his work for rock heavy-hitters like M83, Paramore, and Jimmy Eat World, is a former member of Beck and Nine Inch Nails’ touring bands. This is the first Deafheaven album that’s not produced by Jack Shirley (though he’s still on board as engineer), and the difference between Shirley’s hands-off ethos and Meldal-Johnsen’s more involved approach is apparent. Eliminating blast beats is always going to allow for a wider range of frequencies—that constant pounding usually requires producers to roll back the bass levels or risk a muddled low end—but Infinite Granite sounds lush in a way that even the quietest moments on Deafheaven’s previous albums never have. Part of that’s all the layering of multi-tracks and effects, and part of it’s simply access to fancier gear—check McCoy and Mehra drooling over Meldal-Johnsen’s array of studio goodies in a recent Guitar World interview.
The idea here, as the band has said, was to set aside Deafheaven’s customary dramatic compositional dynamics in favor of subtler textural shifts achieved via the recording process itself. While that may delight audiophiles, an immersive headphones listen is only ever as powerful as the performance that drives it. On Infinite Granite, that performance is always skillful but rarely—aside from perfectly paced closer “Mombasa”—powerful in the ways Deafheaven have been in the past. If Infinite Granite was a debut by a band with no backstory, it’d be impressive as hell. But knowing Deafheaven’s singular ability to pull off thrilling highwire acts, their latest subversion of expectations feel less like a bold statement and more like a predictable move to gentler pastures.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Sargent House | August 23, 2021 | 6.5 | 148ad53a-c7bb-4150-a413-96f67d908de5 | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
The former Chairlift singer-songwriter centers her sweeping solo debut on her powerful voice, crafting love songs about the moment of surrender, the pain preceding it, and the euphoria after. | The former Chairlift singer-songwriter centers her sweeping solo debut on her powerful voice, crafting love songs about the moment of surrender, the pain preceding it, and the euphoria after. | Caroline Polachek: Pang | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caroline-polachek-pang/ | Pang | Caroline Polachek named her album Pang after the bursts of adrenaline that jolted her out of sleep. She describes this as an internal thing, the sudden shock of emotion that “pricks you emotionally from the inside.” But it’s corporeal, too; you can’t say the word “pang”—or sing it, as Polachek does on the title track—without a quick release of breath, somewhere between a gasp and a sigh.
Pang is Polachek’s first album under her own name (she released 2014’s Arcadia as Ramona Lisa, and 2017’s Drawing the Target Around the Arrow as her initials, CEP) and perhaps not coincidentally, this album centers on her vocals. The music doesn’t depart too far from her work in Chairlift: a little Tango in the Night sophistipop, a little ambient, and a little from the charts. Her usual lyrical themes recur: living unexpected dreams, getting away with something sneaky-fun, tears in public and in oceans. There’s also that familiar tension between the anonymity of the city and the pastoral, even suburban; on “Parachute,” Polachek sings about love as a force pulling her “back to strip malls, highways, and treetops.” The scope of Pang, however, is wider.
She produced much of the album with PC Music’s Danny L Harle, and massively tones down his fripperies. At times, there’s a new age or modern classical tinge to the arrangements. Sometimes Pang sounds so sweeping it’s almost symphonic; the first few notes of “The Gate” almost sound like a synthetic orchestra tuning up. It’s a PR cliché to tout artists’ “classical training,” which can mean anything from actual classical training to a semester of voice lessons in college, but in her work, you genuinely can hear it. She’s mentioned writing melodies as wordless stretches of singing—she calls it “applesaucing.” For most of the decade, she’s taken classical voice lessons, specifically in baroque singing. This comes out not just in the soaring, near-operatic vocalizations throughout Pang, but in the crisp way she attacks words and syllables, the controlled vocal leaps, and precise staccato.
Even more specifically, Polachek took up opera lessons after hearing the version of Handel’s “Lascia ch’io pianga” in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. The non-traditional recording perhaps inspired her to use her training to non-traditional ends. Melodies that are heavily vocoded or Auto-Tuned often sound a little like a machine-made baroque run. As Polachek put it, “the voice just becomes the ultimate analog synth,” and it’s an effect she goes for a lot: the ornamentation throughout “Insomnia” and “Hey Big Eyes,” the digitally augmented glissando on the “Ocean of Tears” chorus, or the tumble of a vocal run, almost like a guitar solo, from the bridge of “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings.” The influence also filters into the instrumental at times, most clearly the harpsichord-esque notes that underpin “Hey Big Eyes.”
Pang is such a coherent musical statement that when something doesn’t fit, it stands out. Polachek restructured the album somewhat late, swapping out five songs; what’s left is a sweeping, delicately latticed album with a few odd pop songs. They’re not bad pop songs. “New Normal” matches quick-cut lyrical scenes with a chameleonic arrangement: Polachek’s melody is yanked between two keys, and the instrumental goes from a conspicuously yeehaw opening of slide guitar to an almost dancehall beat to sputtering percussion and vocal clips from hip-hop. Somehow, it all works, but it belongs to an entirely different record. The Andrew Wyatt co-write “Hit Me Where It Hurts” feels like it was intended for Charli XCX—the low, throaty, near-spoken verses are drastically unlike Polachek’s vocal arrangements throughout Pang, but very much something Charli might handle.
What those five new songs—“The Gate,” “Pang,” “Ocean of Tears,” “Caroline Shut Up,” and “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings”—do have in common is that they’re all love songs about the moment of surrender, the pain preceding it, and the euphoria after. These are something Polachek’s said she’s hesitant to write. Whether this is true—after all, this is the singer of “I Belong In Your Arms” and “Crying in Public,” two of the decade’s most unabashed love songs—one still detects a certain wryness on Pang. “Caroline Shut Up” is the record’s most swooning track, a waltz-tempo love ballad. The title is what she shouts at herself, an exasperated reminder to stop overthinking lest she ruin the moment. She gets punchy and self-mocking in “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings.” The arrangement is ’80s, somewhere between “Every Breath You Take” and “Everywhere,” but the scene is ’10s: crying in public over the Snaps you’re getting from your long-distance partner, culminating in the goofy-horny “show me the banana.” The chorus is punctuated, louder each time, with a gasp: the sound of a crush so sudden you feel like running out of the room, or bursting into a grin and never stopping. After all, laughter is a pang too. | 2019-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Perpetual Novice | October 18, 2019 | 7.3 | 148e8c01-77aa-4832-8a52-6ec073843cfc | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
After going synth-pop on 2013's Heartthrob, Tegan and Sara team up once again with super-producer Greg Kurstin for the follow up. At their best, they boil love songs down to their aching essence. | After going synth-pop on 2013's Heartthrob, Tegan and Sara team up once again with super-producer Greg Kurstin for the follow up. At their best, they boil love songs down to their aching essence. | Tegan and Sara: Love You to Death | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21952-love-you-to-death/ | Love You to Death | In 2013, Tegan and Sara released their seventh album Heartthrob and immediately shot to a new level of fame. After a slow build over nearly 15 years, in which they steadily massed a fervent hardcore fanbase as a folk-inflected singer/songwriter duo, they metamorphosed in a blink into a massive pop group: instead of dual acoustic guitars and unadorned, harmonic vocals, they teamed up with Top 40 producer Greg Kurstin and adopted an ultra-glossy, near-blinding synth-pop sound. There's a razor-fine line between populist and derivative, and theirs was a calculated risk that paid off—not only was the record critically and commercially successful, it contained some of Tegan and Sara's best songwriting work to date.
After such an impressive and self-imposed breakaway, it's a bit of a shame that their new album, Love You to Death, feels like a focused retread of its predecessor. It's not a bad record—it's well-crafted, with some peaks equal to Heartthrob—but it lacks that intangible magic that so effortlessly bridged the first phase of their career to this new one. It might be unfair to ask them to recapture that moment, when they so recently were able to pull off the double accomplishment of becoming a new band while keeping their longtime fans, but between the bouncy synth hooks and sleek pop production (the band reconnected with Kurstin), you can feel some of the excitement draining away.
Their creative DNA has stayed more or less the same since they first began writing music, no matter the genre trappings around them. At their best, they boil down love songs to their purest, aching essence, capturing complicated emotions in economical, less-is-more lyrical strokes. “You kiss me like your boyfriend,” they coo on the album's lead single, “Boyfriend”—a moment of unrequited affection that sears through the buoyant synths and strike at your heart without halting the pace of the party. It's rare to find complex, personal songs about love and relationships matter-of-factly sung from a queer perspective, and in that respect alone Tegan and Sara remain a crucial voice in the pop landscape.
Elsewhere on the album, things a just a little less distinct; album cuts like “Faint of Heart” and “Stop Desire” are sturdy, but rely on a certain generic, contemporary-pop sound that could belong to anyone. Another highlight, “100X,” again shows how affecting they can be when they bend the tools of Big Pop to their personal ends. It's another tale of a relationship gone sour, this time with the narrator taking responsibility for the breakdown: “You were someone I loved/Then you were no one at all/It was cruel of me to do what I did to you,” they sing, the words placed simply around a sparse piano melody and some softly glowing synths. There's a straightforward emotional maturity in the moment that has always distinguished their best work. The minimal instrumentation serves double duty as both stark moment of contemplation and mid-album comedown.
Although songs like the Vince Clarke-indebted “BWU” begin to quicken the album’s pulse in the second half, it's not until the second-to-last track that Love You To Death reaches its bombastic peak, when “U-Turn”'s wet, squelching keyboards punch through the record's firmament and blast off into the stratosphere. It sounds like the Song of the Summer 1986, all pool parties, tiki torches and BBQs. It's proof that even though they might not capture lightning in a bottle twice, Tegan and Sara are still pushing hard to beat their own expectations, even this far into their career. | 2016-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | June 8, 2016 | 7.1 | 1493672e-f803-4a61-b1d9-f2d5201b79e0 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
This newly issued 1971 set helpfully complicates the iconic harpist and pianist’s legacy, revealing her as not just a spiritual-jazz mystic but also the heir to her late husband’s harshly ecstatic fire music. | This newly issued 1971 set helpfully complicates the iconic harpist and pianist’s legacy, revealing her as not just a spiritual-jazz mystic but also the heir to her late husband’s harshly ecstatic fire music. | Alice Coltrane: The Carnegie Hall Concert | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alice-coltrane-the-carnegie-hall-concert/ | The Carnegie Hall Concert | Around 23 minutes into “Africa,” the epic centerpiece of a newly issued 1971 Carnegie Hall concert, Alice Coltrane takes control. Prior to this moment, the performance has featured her exclusively on harp, but for “Africa”—a composition by her late husband John, first released a decade earlier—the bandleader switches to the piano. The rendition takes a winding path, moving through fervent tenor saxophone solos set against a salvo of double drums, a hypnotic percussion break, and two lengthy bass features. Then Alice returns as though banging a gavel, pounding out the bluesy vamp that forms the backbone of the piece and calling the proceedings back to order. Her left hand acts as a booming bass-register engine, while her right answers with meaty chords, echoing the grand big-band orchestration of the 1961 version that led off John’s Africa/Brass LP. As the horns and drums reenter, wailing and exploding around her, she answers with the occasional burst of clanging energy from the keyboard but mostly holds down the center of the music, conveying authority amid the bedlam.
There are a lot of reasons to be excited about The Carnegie Hall Concert. It’s only the second full live album in the official Alice Coltrane catalog (an incomplete version of this same Carnegie Hall concert was previously released as a bootleg), and it dates from her most celebrated period as a bandleader, recorded just one week after the release of her acknowledged masterpiece Journey in Satchidananda. It features generously roomy renditions—including versions of two key Journey tracks, each clocking in at more than double the length of the original—that readily transport and at times overwhelm despite the occasionally rough sonics of the source tape. (Sadly, the 4-track master tapes of the concert were lost over the years—“Don’t ask me how,” writes Coltrane’s frequent producer Ed Michel, who oversaw the original Carnegie Hall recording, with palpable frustration in his production notes—so the release is drawn from a 2-track reference mix.)
And the album’s supporting cast is extraordinary, bringing together musicians from Journey—Pharoah Sanders on tenor and soprano sax, flute and more, Cecil McBee on bass, and Tulsi Reynolds on tamboura—with bassist Jimmy Garrison, a previous sideman to both Alice and John; Archie Shepp, a collaborator of John’s and, like Sanders, a strongly established saxophonist-bandleader in his own right; dual drummers Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis, the former of whom had joined John on 1960 sessions co-led by Don Cherry; and harmonium player Kumar Kramer.
But there’s another, perhaps even more valuable aspect to the album, exemplified by the “Africa” reentry described above: the way it helpfully complicates Coltrane’s rapidly crystallizing legacy. At this point, Coltrane’s overdue canonization has fully taken hold. During roughly the past decade, thanks to a series of illuminating reissues and tributes and a steady stream of namechecks (from tastemakers including Solange and André 3000), her work has been given its rightful due apart from the long-enshrined catalog of her iconic husband and collaborator, reaching a slew of new listeners in the process. But as her name has morphed into a kind of buzzword—often invoked in conjunction with the now-inescapable descriptor “spiritual jazz”—her image has at times been reduced to a near-caricature, that of the serene queen of the ashram, smiling benevolently from within her brilliant orange robes.
While there is of course some truth to that characterization, Alice Coltrane was not all prayer rugs and incense. As Flying Lotus—her grandnephew and frequent, outspoken champion—noted in a 2021 interview, Coltrane “was the matriarch of the family, but she was also the Godfather. She took care of everybody, but you couldn’t mess with Auntie.” In a starker way than any other prior Alice Coltrane release, The Carnegie Hall Concert allows us to glimpse these two incarnations side by side: Coltrane as both matriarch and Godfather; Coltrane as spiritual-jazz mystic and formidable heir to the harshly ecstatic fire music that her husband had spearheaded in the last few years of his life.
That juxtaposition seems almost intentional, as the concert is divided into two neat halves. First comes the Journey material, the title track and “Shiva-Loka,” as they’re sequenced on the album. In starting the show this way, Coltrane was both showcasing her new LP and honoring her guru. As Lauren Du Graf lays out in her helpful and detailed liner notes, the Carnegie Hall performance was actually part of an all-star benefit for the Integral Yoga Institute founded by Swami Satchidananda, Coltrane’s spiritual teacher at the time, her guide both out of grief, in the wake of her husband’s death, and on a transformative 1970 trip to India, and—as she’d cited in the Journey liner notes—a “direct inspiration” for the album.
Much like their studio counterparts, these live takes are beautifully chill and hypnotic in their simplicity. The main differences have to do with personnel and pacing. On “Journey in Satchidananda,” after a bit of introductory mood-setting, McBee and Garrison lock into the indelible 6/4 vamp that McBee played alone on the album, tolling like an eternal mantra. The tamboura and harmonium, elements inspired by Coltrane’s growing interest in Indian culture, are less present than on the studio version; here, Coltrane’s harp sets the mood, draping the whole performance in billowing, chiming splendor.
And whereas Sanders solos on soprano sax on the record, for this version, according to Michel’s notes, he plays flute, achieving a striking incantatory texture by vocalizing as he blows into the instrument, while Shepp plays soprano, bringing a bluesy pathos to the role. The longer running time gives both soloists plenty of room to explore the theme as it cycles into a pleasing quasi-infinity. On “Shiva-Loka,” another vamp-driven bliss-out, Sanders and Shepp both play soprano, the former dazzling with whirling sound shapes and the latter creating a lovely arc by starting out gentle and gradually turning up the grit. Blackwell and Jarvis, meanwhile, keep pace with a regal, laid-back pulse that harks back to John’s early-to-mid-’60s compatriot Elvin Jones.
Coltrane’s harp work on these first two tracks is flat-out gorgeous, but she seems content to play a mainly textural, supportive role. That changes dramatically on the final two pieces, 20-minute-plus renditions of two compositions by John, “Africa” and the minimal, staccato fanfare “Leo,” both featuring Alice on piano, the instrument she’d played in John’s band and worked at diligently in her earlier, largely undocumented musical apprenticeship in Detroit. These performances are as shatteringly intense as the first two were quietly meditative. The ensemble seems to be not just performing John Coltrane repertoire but consciously channeling the relentless rush of his most forbiddingly dense free-form work. “Africa” has a strong flavor of Trane circa the mid ’60s, when he beefed up his working band with extra drummers and saxophonists—with Shepp joining in occasionally and Sanders eventually signing on as a permanent addition—to create ever-escalating action paintings of sound.
As Alice switches instruments, so do Shepp and Sanders, picking up the tenors they proudly hoisted alongside Trane on 1965’s Ascension, and seeking out similarly furious peaks (Shepp’s roaring, ragged cries around the 5:00 mark are particularly arresting, as are Sanders’ multiphonic shrieks around 8:00). Alice also had plenty of experience playing alongside John in this mode—check out Live at the Village Vanguard Again! or Live in Japan, both recorded in ’66—but here, she’s even more commanding. During her solo, she establishes the firm bedrock of the piece while letting fly with swooping, swirling right-hand cascades. She often sounds here like either two or three pianists playing at once, nodding to the great McCoy Tyner, who was at the keyboard for John’s original version, while blasting off into her own distinct stratosphere.
More magic comes during her extended feature on “Leo,” a piece she had performed many times with John and would often reprise in later years. Starting around the 5:00 mark, she conjures a massive wall of rippling notes before launching into a series of breakneck dashes with the double-strength rhythm section, punctuated by prismatic storm clouds of sustain. You rarely hear Alice Coltrane mentioned in the company of the great power pianists of free jazz—Cecil Taylor, Don Pullen, Matthew Shipp, and others—but her staggering performances during this latter portion of the show confirm just how much she deserves to be regarded as a titan of that idiom.
The sound quality of the set is occasionally distracting, especially on “Shiva-Loka,” which contains some dropouts and intrusions of static. And there are moments when the mix feels disorienting—particularly when it comes to the contributions of the two drummers, which can be hard to parse as distinct musical statements—making you long, as Michel surely does, that this release could have been mixed from proper masters. But the recording has real presence and punch beyond its inarguable historical value; it sounds far better than posthumously unearthed John Coltrane recordings such as The Olatunji Concert.
Ultimately, the release of The Carnegie Hall Concert feels right on time, providing a welcome jolt of focus to a widespread impression of Alice Coltrane that’s started to seem just a tad vague. She’s here in full: the matriarch we now know well and duly appreciate; the Godfather we may not have ever properly reckoned with. The devotee of Satchidananda; the torchbearer for John. And the bandleader and instrumental powerhouse who marshaled formidable talents like Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp, and found space for them within her rapidly expanding musical vision. There were more Alice Coltranes still to come, as she moved into challenging orchestral music, mind-bending organ work, and, ultimately, decades filled with devotional song. As this set shows, she always contained multitudes. | 2024-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | Impulse! | March 23, 2024 | 8.4 | 149b5cf8-e923-434a-a97c-3623e9b8cb84 | Hank Shteamer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hank-shteamer/ | |
On Wolf's second album, he romanticizes travel and escape, pines for lost youth at age 21, dreams of domestic pleasures, and takes potshots at a debased culture. | On Wolf's second album, he romanticizes travel and escape, pines for lost youth at age 21, dreams of domestic pleasures, and takes potshots at a debased culture. | Patrick Wolf: Wind in the Wires | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8774-wind-in-the-wires/ | Wind in the Wires | In his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, as well as in numerous short stories, Steven Millhauser has explored the dark gift of genius, particularly in children, and the toll it exacts. His precisely situated historical bildungsromans are rich with period detail and Bunyanesque protagonists who fulfill the wildest promises of their eras, each a larger-than-life manqué whose preternatural abilities (be they in entrepreneurship or the construction of detailed miniature automatons) lead them along the same delirious arc: A meteoric rise to success, a period of virtuosic clarity, and then a flame out as genius shades into unhealthy obsession or is rendered effete by novelty.
It's from such embroidered yet prescient pages that young Wolf-- 6'4", striking, and outlandishly attired-- seems torn wholesale. He began to dabble in recording at age 11, recording violin, junky analog organs, and homemade theremin on his four-track. He joined the art collective Minty at 14 and impressed Fat Cat Records enough that they gave him a computer and mixer to further his explorations. At 16, he left England to form the raucous Mason Crimineaux in France and won over Capitol K, who would release Wolf's solo debut, the bombastic, uncontained electro-folk grab bag Lycanthropy, in 2003.
Until Wolf's story has been written in full, it's impossible to say whether his sophomore effort, Wind in the Wires, belongs to the rapid upsurge or the crystallization of vision, but there are signs to indicate the latter. Millhauser's characters' zeniths of achievement are often presaged by their returning changed from a long absence-- some outer expression of a burgeoning darkness within them. After Lycanthropy put him on the radar, Wolf absconded from London to a cliff-side chalet in Cornwall. The formerly blond singer returned with a shock of black hair and Wind in the Wires, which boils off the excesses of his debut and simmers in elegant pools of glitchy beats, found sound collages, crackling electrical sounds, and gothic shadows.
Wind in the Wires is like Bright Eyes' Digital Ash in a Digital Urn if Nick Cave had made it, a fertile nexus of tradition, technology, and Wolf's powerful pipes, as he romanticizes travel and escape, pines for lost youth at age 21, dreams of domestic pleasures, and takes potshots at a debased culture. "The Libertine" opens the album with clip-clopping hooves, a gypsy-disco beat, sawing violins and a spitting electrical undercurrent as Wolf inveighs against duplicitous priests, immoral heroes and other phonies, while the simpler, poppier "Land's End" gripes about the music industry's promotional apparatus. The languidly beautiful "Teignmouth" longs for release from banality: Over a staticky pulse and angelic choir, Wolf sings, "So when the birds fly south/ I'll reach up and hold their tails/ Pull up and out of here/ And bridle the autumn gales." And on the ukulele madrigal "The Railway House", Wolf imagines the placid contentment of growing old: "So wave goodbye to living alone/ I think we've found our home/ Let's paint these walls and pull up the weeds/ And cast our fevers in stone."
But to focus only on the broader traits is to miss what makes Wind in the Wires so outstanding: Wolf festoons his songs with strange, understated details that ratchet them toward the mysterious. Sputtering electricity, alien frequencies, and sculpted static billow across the record in sparkling clouds. In the midst of the mournful strains of "Ghost Song", a perfectly incongruous Bobby Digital-style "Whoop!" floats up like a bubble, and the same sound of cycling voltage that opens the first song ends the last one, wrapping the album in a closed circuit. Nothing here has been left to chance.
Wolf's strange blend of postmodernism and antiquity is where he seems to break away from being a Millhauser character and gains an affinity with the author himself: Millhauser honors traditional yarning while being fully aware of its archetypal implications; his characters' failures are the waking at the end of the dream or the bleak ending edited out of the fairy tale. For Wolf's sake, one hopes that with Wind in the Wires, he's caught that southbound bird's tail and escaped from Millhauser's inexorable parabola: To be the dreamer of dreams, rather than the dreamt, is clearly his heart's desire. | 2005-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2005-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Tomlab | March 3, 2005 | 8.2 | 14a5b459-fd77-4c9c-8f52-153528225908 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The introspective St. Louis rapper builds a self-contained world with his magnetic monotone and intricate, evocative raps. | The introspective St. Louis rapper builds a self-contained world with his magnetic monotone and intricate, evocative raps. | Chester Watson: A Japanese Horror Film | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chester-watson-a-japanese-horror-film/ | A Japanese Horror Film | Is Liquid Swords a concept album? It probably isn’t, but part of the mystique of GZA’s defining statement is it feels like it could be one. From the meticulously structured verses to the skits and extensive dialogue excerpts from Shogun Assassin, the entire record works in the service of a dense mythology that’s all the more alluring because it never coalesces into a clean narrative. It’s a masterpiece not of storytelling, but of world-building.
Chester Watson’s A Japanese Horror Film is that kind of album, too. The Los Angeles rapper is part of a long lineage of monotone spitters who pride themselves more on their pen than their presence, combining the rap-as-chess intricacy of GZA (whose samurai fascination he also shares) with the absurdist splatter of MF Doom and the philosophical free-associations of R.A.P. Ferreira. Watson credits Earl Sweatshirt for making him start rapping as a teen, and on his earliest releases there was no mistaking that debt, but the two artists’ visions have diverged as they’ve entered their twenties. Where Earl's introspective raps have continued to retreat ever inward, Watson uses his to build something more fantastical and conceptual.
He raps like a dorm kid who sees messages on dollar bills. On opener “Life Wrote Itself,” he tells of wisdom handed down from gods and aliens and conveyed by shamans and pyramids, and that’s just a warm-up for the tracks that follow about spirit worlds, inter-dimensional travel, and reincarnation. “Got a lotta grim tales leaking from my stem cells,” he grumbles on “Yokai,” “Catching up on folklore, lying on the cold floor/My only regret in life is that I don’t know more.” While Watson isn’t above stacking syllables just because they sound great together, he also knows when to simplify his rhymes for added punch, which he often does when his bars turn to his frayed mental state. “Remember Biggie telling me something dark in a dream/I get no answer when I’m singing my prayers, they must be outta key,” he intones over the dank, creaky beat of “Fog,” part of a stark final stretch that closes out the record.
Like Liquid Swords, A Japanese Horror Film evades a linear reading, and yet it teases the possibility that with enough effort you might unlock a unifying theory that brings an entire story into focus. In spoken stretches between verses, Watson dialogues with celestial voices who inform him of his past lives and grand destiny, like NPCs guiding the hero of a video game. It's an effective, low-commitment framing device, creating an illusion of exposition while leaving Watson’s songs free to chase whatever whims they’d like. Their injections about Atlantis or the ins and outs of astral projection may not pay off narratively, yet they create a sense of momentum anyway.
Watson’s lane may be narrow, but it’s crowded; there will never be a shortage of rappers with big vocabularies and blasé deliveries rhyming over bare beats. Yet few have translated that style into a statement album that’s quite as substantial as entertaining as A Japanese Horror Film, a record that’s committed to the fantasy it builds yet tactful enough not to give away too much about it. As a lyricist, Watson understands the importance of specificity. But as a creator, he knows it’s the open ends that keep you coming back. | 2020-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | POW | November 5, 2020 | 7.7 | 14b8c400-4944-49f9-bb37-32c8d80d4a8a | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
A Tribe Called Quest's seminal debut is an album that's largely focused outside of itself and its creators. There are three added cuts for this reissue—remixes by Pharrell, J. Cole, and CeeLo—that are passable and melodic but unneeded. Tribe's music needs no updating, even when it sticks out like a sore thumb, because that's exactly what it did in 1990. | A Tribe Called Quest's seminal debut is an album that's largely focused outside of itself and its creators. There are three added cuts for this reissue—remixes by Pharrell, J. Cole, and CeeLo—that are passable and melodic but unneeded. Tribe's music needs no updating, even when it sticks out like a sore thumb, because that's exactly what it did in 1990. | A Tribe Called Quest: People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21218-peoples-instinctive-travels-and-the-paths-of-rhythm/ | People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm | Approaching A Tribe Called Quest's seminal debut in 2015 is a loaded venture. The Queens, N.Y. trio (and sometimes "y" quartet, counting Jarobi) is one of the most revered acts in hip-hop—and with good reason. As part of the Afrocentric and innovative Native Tongues collective—which included De La Soul, Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah, Black Sheep, and others—they created and refined a template for '90s hip-hop that was street-astute, worldly, and more inspirational than aspirational.
Even without the Native Tongues' legacy, Tribe's heritage is not a light one. There's no stretch in saying that, without A Tribe Called Quest, the biggest rap artists of this year—Drake, Future, and Kendrick Lamar—would not exist as they do. Drake would not be Drake without Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak; Kanye would not be Kanye without his Tribe influences. Without Tribe, the Dungeon Family—birthplace of Outkast, Goodie Mob, and Future—arguably does not exist. And the improvisational looseness of Kendrick's opus is unthinkable without the innumerable branches of jazz and hip-hop sprouting from Tribe's experimentation, which differed significantly from the cooler jazz-sample leanings of Stetsasonic and Gang Starr. There's no Mos Def, no J. Cole, no Common, no J Dilla, no Digable Planets, no Neptunes, and no Clipse as we know them. Tribe is that important. And this album—the first ever to receive a perfect "5 Mic" rating from The Source magazine—is where it all began.
Arriving a year after De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm showed Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Jarobi to be whimsical yet grounded in reality. They weren't heady, hermetic, and puzzling like De La; in comparison to 3 Feet High's astounding range and informative sound collages, People's Instinctive Travels was clean and focused. Where De La went wide musically, Tribe went deep; where De La was deep and dense lyrically, Tribe went wide and abstract. That both projects managed to do all they were able to do and remain fun is one of the great wonders of hip-hop's first golden age.
Encountered now, in 2015, A People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm feels like a palette cleanser. Considered with Kendrick Lamar's layered and angsty self-examination on To Pimp A Butterfly, the blunting and numbing escapist bounce of Future's DS2, and Drake's bombastic and moody mythological affirmations from If You're Reading This It's Too Late, it's an album that's largely focused outside of itself and its creators. There are three added cuts for this reissue—remixes by Pharrell, J. Cole, and CeeLo—that are passable and melodic but unneeded. Tribe's music needs no updating, even when it sticks out like a sore thumb, because that's exactly what it did in 1990.
"I Left My Wallet In El Segundo", with its eight-bar flip of the Chamber Brothers' "Funky" and Wes Anderson-like narrative, is sparse and simple. But it more than stands up, thanks in no small part to Bob Power's remastering, which makes everything sound fuller and crisper and which uses the empty space between the newly clarified sounds to create groove and warmth. On a fresh listen, the reason "Bonita Applebum" (powered largely by a generous sample of Ramp's "Daylight") is still considered one the best loved songs hip-hop has ever produced becomes clear—musically it's sunny and spry, capturing blushes of virgin courtship. It's objectifying, but respectful; cocksure but awkward; flattering and freaky: Q-Tip praises his desired's "elaborate eyes," promises to "kiss you where some brothers won't" and offers that, "So far, I hope you like rap songs."
The rhymes here are at once conversational and repressed, the topics concurrently large and small. Diet is tackled on "Ham 'N' Eggs" with Tip and Phife rhyming in tandem, "A tisket, a tasket, what's in mama's basket?/ Some veggie links and some fish that stinks/ Why, just the other day, I went to Grandma's house/ Smelled like she conjured up a mouse. " Sexual fidelity and STD's are dealt with on "Pubic Enemy" via "Old King Cole" who "wore the crown but not the jimmy hat" until one day "the fair maiden in the royal bedroom/ Caught the king scratching." Sex and safe sex were at the forefront of Q-Tip's mind—props (women) are referred to often, and the most important thing about retrieving his wallet from El Segundo seems to be reclaiming his "props' numbers" and condoms, or "jimmy hats."
The group is marked for their social consciousness, but not merely because of their awareness, but their ability to wax simultaneously about politics and art. On "Push It Along", Tip traverses police brutality, community unity, and rap dreams in a few bars, managing to be an approachable advocate for responsibility without seeming didactic: "The pigs are wearing blue/ And in a year or two/ We'll be going up the creek in a great big canoe / What we gonna do? Save me and my brothers?/ Hop inside the bed and pull over the covers?/ Never will we do that and we ain't trying to rule rap/ We just want a slab of the ham, don't you know, black?" The lyrics are 25 years old. But were they released today they'd seem right on time, while being out of place—because all these many years later People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm is more than a nostalgia artifact. It's a worthy listen, not because of what it was, but because of what it is. | 2015-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Legacy | November 13, 2015 | 10 | 14b8e9ef-fd26-42ce-859e-9bd40a7112ee | kris ex | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kris-ex/ | null |
The Philips Years is a humble title for a collection that contains some of the most important, moving documents of American history. Nina Simone’s Philips records remain her most essential. | The Philips Years is a humble title for a collection that contains some of the most important, moving documents of American history. Nina Simone’s Philips records remain her most essential. | Nina Simone: The Philips Years | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22159-the-philips-years/ | The Philips Years | Nina Simone hurts you. She does it with her voice, which is sharpened and ready, versatile as a set of top flight chef’s knives able to slice through the music making a myriad of purposeful and precise incisions, wounds, gashes or lacerations. She does it through words, delivered sometimes like poisoned darts, other times like butterfly kisses from a child on the cheek of an exhausted mother. She does it by staring you down and withering your resolve; looking at you the way death looks at you, and in so doing giving you life.
Her pain becomes yours, and her pain is eternal and without limit. It is a human pain, a ghostly, ancient suffering that comes through her more than it does from her. Having been dropped to the earth in Depression-era America, she sang this pain through blues and Broadway, through jazz and campy lovestruck standards. She played Bach fugues and cantatas with the same urgent grace that she lent to the hammer-busting work ballads of the black south. Born a classical prodigy in a hot and rural segregated North Carolina town, she was formed into (or perhaps already was) a warrior of unmatched regality; a woman in possession of kind, delicate fingers and the kind of emotional bloodlust that only comes when you grow up in a place where people are lynched for looking just like you.
Ms. Simone attended Juliard with money her hometown collected to further her career, but left the school when her cash ran out. After a rejection from a conservatory in Philadelphia, she took on gigs at a supper club, and eventually earned a recording contract first with Bethlehem and then Colpix where she released eight albums, became a darling of the folk scene and culminated with a performance at Carnegie Hall in 1963.
But then civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway by a Klan member. And several months later a bomb ripped through a black church in Birmingham, Alabama murdering four children. And within months Nina Simone switched labels to Philips and unleashed a series of songs about civil rights and anger and freedom, the most noted of which is “Mississippi Goddamn,” a sprightly show tune that slow-builds into an unrestrained call to arms. The tune is based on a passage on Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s “Alabama Song” from the 1927 experimental play, Mahagonny-Songspiel aka The Little Mahagonny. Brecht and Weill would prove consistent and proper antecedents to the particular brew of theatricality and revolution that defined much of Ms. Simone’s work after she joined Philips. Her cover of “Pirate Jenny” from Threepenny Opera is one of the creepiest recordings of all time for a great many reasons, one of which being Simone’s implicit understanding of how closely 1930s Germany paralleled the violent psychosis of American racism.
These songs and scores more all appear on the seven albums she recorded at Philips from 1964-1967, which have been re-released as a boxed set. The set, simply called, Nina Simone: The Philips Years, covers a period of time that is arguably her creative best.
Too large to be subsumed under one description, the 74 songs contained herein cover all corners of the Simone musical universe, from the bright and lacy Sunday best of “Nearer Blessed Lord,” to the hellfire and brimstone of “Sinnerman,” from the lush, indulgent ennui of “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” to the bold, agonizing solemnity of “Strange Fruit.” Nearly every song in this far-flung cycle has its opposite, because Nina Simone was the nexus point of nearly all the western musical ideas of her time. She may be the only artist to find the link between Sam Cooke and Edith Piaf, between Bertolt Brecht and Malcolm X. Her thorough and strict classical training (she was in the truest and least sensational sense a diva) allowed her to treat the music of black Americans—soul, jazz, blues, roots and folk—with a level of deference typically reserved for Rachmaninov.
On display in these recordings is Simone’s vast and unmatched set of gifts, technical and otherwise. Her pure jazz keyboard work on tracks like “Mood Indigo” makes her one of the few pianists to legitimately rival Duke Ellington’s combination of clarity and melodic complexity. Although she largely interpreted other people’s songs, some of the strongest lyrical content in her catalogue comes from her own compositions, particularly “Four Women,” a spare, trenchant character study that manages to capture all the impossible contradictions of black American womanhood in just 16 lines. And the impact of her vocals went beyond her distinctive voice. She was an incisive and adroit singer, who could seamlessly navigate the vulnerable passages that appeared in ballads like “Don’t Smoke in Bed,” and “I Loves You Porgy,” while also bringing a virtuosic gravitas even to syrupy standards like “One September Day.”
The other end of her skill set was her unmatched ability to make listeners feel every bit of what she was feeling. Think of the vast and prickly joy of a track like “Feeling Good,” how it conveys a manic freedom, a heart-bursting love that shoots from the chest in nerve-sized lightening bolts, tingling like chandeliers shattering throughout your limbs. Or the meandering mourning of “Plain Gold Ring,” that unfolds itself slowly over the dark, creeping motive that comprises the song’s melodic underpinning. She delivers, “In my heart it will never be spring” in a way that darkens the skies of your own heart, stripping the foliage, laying bare the branches of your skeleton. At their peak, Simone’s powers bordered on emotional clairvoyance.
Predictably it was when she turned the full power of these weapons to the cause of affirming the rights and humanity of black people that her career began to falter in ways from which she could never fully recover. It is difficult to overstate how strident and militant she was about ending racism and injustice, how unabashedly she proclaimed her love for blackness and the preciousness of the lives of black people. My own mother and her sisters have told me for years that of all the civil rights leaders of their generation, it was Ms. Simone, dark-skinned, natural-haired, big lipped, seated at a piano with a head wrapped in queenly cloths, and fingers that have mastered Western music, who meant the most to them. It was Ms. Simone who loved them when she sang their pain. It was Ms. Simone who entitled them when she sang their anger.
This boxed set contains some of the best pure music ever recorded. It doesn’t really matter what your genre loyalties are. At its essence, music is about chords, melodies, and harmonies, and an artist whose humanity is so fully on display that you, as a listener can’t help but to vibrate sympathetically. When you hear “Mississippi Goddamn,” sung in 1964 in New York City, you are hearing a song that is so honest and fearless that it is still impossible to deny. And 2016 is a lot like 1964. Racially motivated murders still take place under the cover of night. Black people are still killed in churches to advance the cause of white supremacy. A nation still threatens to devour itself. At its most glorious, the work collected here is an affirmation of the level of humanity needed to keep the soul in tact and fight for one’s freedom. At its most mournful, it is evidence of the cost. | 2016-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Pop/R&B | null | July 30, 2016 | 10 | 14be59d6-0894-4219-acb2-64dcd6856b21 | Carvell Wallace | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carvell-wallace/ | null |
On the New York ensemble’s second album, their arid ambient-country landscapes take on a different tone, sounding less like a vacation than a dinner bell for the apocalypse. | On the New York ensemble’s second album, their arid ambient-country landscapes take on a different tone, sounding less like a vacation than a dinner bell for the apocalypse. | SUSS: High Line | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/suss-high-line/ | High Line | On their 2018 debut album, Ghost Box, the New York ensemble SUSS evoked the American Southwest in mystical, ambient-country instrumentals. After their song “Late Night Call” attracted millions of Spotify plays, the band updated Ghost Box that fall, fleshing out their original work with vivid new tracks. On their second album, High Line, their arid sonic landscapes take on a different tone, sounding less like a vacation than a dinner bell for the apocalypse.
High Line begins gently in “Salt Flats,” its dusty swirls of synths building around slow-burning guitar. Soon, though, SUSS establish an ominous, lingering tone with “Wetlands.” Pedal steel approaches in piercing high range before low strings ripple up below, and dark electric guitar gradually surfaces amid the waves. The bent guitar notes burbling within the pedal steel’s elastic framework are gently combative, like a jellyfish bumping against the walls of an aquarium tank.
High Line offers less immersion than Ghost Box; its compositions feel like anxious, half-remembered dreams, evaporating just before they unfold fully. Spaced throughout the record, High Line’s trio of dune-titled pieces—“Blue Dune I,” “Blue Dune II,” and “Dunes III”—spread lingering tension. A swampy acoustic guitar arrives and disappears like an itinerant stranger near the end of “Blue Dune I,” pushing away background prickles of gently scraped strings. The acoustic guitar is more restless on “Blue Dune II,” hopping around with restrained half-strums; on “Dunes III,” distorted electric guitars wriggle alongside synths and pedal steel, with even darker synth flares adding a sinister foil. Like wind-shaped dunes themselves, the song trio shifts gradually, as if controlled by titanic forces that can be felt but never seen.
Tension seeps into “Too Young to Die,” which opens with a clear, lightly twangy guitar melody that’s subsumed by a thrumming bassline and sporadic background hisses. Turning skyward, “Ursa Major” is more mercurial, beginning brightly on wavering channels of pedal steel, fiddle drone, and synth fizz. It changes midway, turning to stormy post-rock with the arrival of lumbering drums and splashy cymbals before closing with a single, sparkling chime. Then SUSS finish on a serene note with “Sundowner,” the distinct metallic sparkle of a mandolin pairing with fluttering synths and blooming acoustic guitars. It’s a welcome uplift, though it doesn’t feel exactly hopeful, and so it suits the present moment. High Line is more clipped, on edge, and overcast than anything SUSS has done before—but then again, so is the world they live in.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Northern Spy | January 10, 2020 | 7.1 | 14cf8d45-1cc2-4cbc-925a-65dfad36e96f | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Mac Miller's debut is the first independently distributed debut album to go to No. 1 in 16 years, but the Pittsburgh rapper is mostly just a crushingly bland and intolerable version of Wiz Khalifa. | Mac Miller's debut is the first independently distributed debut album to go to No. 1 in 16 years, but the Pittsburgh rapper is mostly just a crushingly bland and intolerable version of Wiz Khalifa. | Mac Miller: Blue Slide Park | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16113-blue-side-park/ | Blue Slide Park | At the 2000 VMAs, Eminem's performance of "The Real Slim Shady" featured him walking across Sixth Avenue in Manhattan and into Radio City Music Hall followed by a few hundred extras that had been styled in his image, bleached hair and all. The performance was an arresting, and very literal, visual representation of the song's claim of there being "a million of us just like me." Pittsburgh rapper Mac Miller is having his "'The Real Slim Shady' at the VMAS" moment right now, even if he'll never actually perform there. There are hundreds of thousands of listeners trailing him intensely-- Blue Slide Park sold just about 145,000 copes in its first week in stores, making it the first independently distributed debut album to go No. 1 in 16 years. And the reason Miller's mass of fans follow him is not because of his music, at least not completely. It's because he looks just like them, because they can see themselves up on the stage behind him, if not next to him.
It's a presumptive conclusion, but it's hard to find much, if anything, in Miller's music that suggests otherwise. He is an outsider, but he brings no outsider's perspective to his music. Forget Eminem, Miller's point of view is less unique than Asher Roth's or Childish Gambino's. He lusts after fame, money, and women, and he smokes weed and parties. Obviously, there's nothing wrong with that; it is rap music, of course. But it does raise the question of why Miller is so popular, because despite his claim of being a cross between John Lennon and UGK, he's mostly just a crushingly bland, more intolerable version of Wiz Khalifa without the chops, desire, or pocketbook for enjoyable singles. Unless you buy into Miller's persona-- and why would you?-- Blue Slide Park offers you nothing that you can't find done more much artfully by, say, Curren$y.
This is, in a way, rap music's fault. Mac Miller has been called "frat rap," and while there's a slight truth to that, the term leaves unacknowledged the fact that frat guys used to engage with the rap world writ large. That interaction may have involved an unhealthy appreciation for Jurassic 5, but it also involved rocking YoungbloodZ and Ying Yang Twins songs at parties. The pop world has left rap behind, save four or five rappers, and it's opened a door for someone like Mac Miller to seize the college-aged, white-male fanbase. If that fanbase is interacting less with rap music, then maybe they've rallied around Miller because he also barely engages with the wider rap world. Consider the fact that Blue Slide Park has not one feature-- not a guest verse or chorus. For a contemporary rap album, let alone a No. 1 rap album, that is basically unheard-of. Before you consider that to be a noble pursuit, the album could've used somebody, anybody, to break up the monotony of Miller on the mic.
Miller's world is a hermetic one, and unless it's one you inhabit, the album holds no appeal. It's a normal rap album, sure, but as listeners we should strive for more than a no-stakes work by a guy wearing the same streetwear brands and snapbacks as everyone else, who has merely found a niche and exploited it. Miller's hustle can't be knocked, and it shouldn't be, but his art is 144,487 times less remarkable than his first week sales numbers would have you believe. His success is not a mirage, no. But it is a projection. | 2011-12-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-12-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Rostrum | December 8, 2011 | 1 | 14d09794-dcfa-4a49-9fe1-37de9e31f6df | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
After the straightforward radio-rock trappings of the Raconteurs, the back-to-basics Icky Thump packs an unexpected freshness, resulting in the best White Stripes album in years. | After the straightforward radio-rock trappings of the Raconteurs, the back-to-basics Icky Thump packs an unexpected freshness, resulting in the best White Stripes album in years. | The White Stripes: Icky Thump | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10344-icky-thump/ | Icky Thump | For all intents and purposes, the White Stripes appeared to be defunct in 2006, put on hiatus while Jack White gallivanted the globe with Midwestern pals the Raconteurs. The previous year's Get Behind Me Satan, commercial success that it was, sounded in retrospect like a man frustrated with his duo's limited options, fiddling with more keyboards and pedals than previous Stripes LPs. Coupled with White's perceptible glee at the Raconteurs' expanded sonic palette and shared frontman duties-- not to mention the more diverse wardrobe options-- some thought it unlikely he'd don the red and white again any time soon.
Icky Thump, then, is a bit of a resurrection: Reuniting with Meg gives Jack the opportunity to slip back into sister-lover character, get his weird clothes out of the attic, and return to basement blues. After the straightforward radio-rock trappings of the Raconteurs, Icky Thump packs an unexpected freshness, even given its back-to-basics premise; had it come immediately after Satan, it could have seemed like a cynical, regressive gift to the core fanbase, but following Broken Boy Soldiers, it recaptures a sense of goofy fun and a caustic edge that the duo haven't possessed since White Blood Cells launched them to the A-list.
Recorded over what qualifies as a marathon session for the Stripes (a whole three weeks), Icky Thump re-assembles most of the scrap-heap elements that characterized the White Stripes' pre-fame trilogy: grimy garage-blues, a left-field cover, bizarre spoken-word bits, and shameless Zeppelin and Dylan cues. The most obvious breaking development is White's instrument sound-- its tones are so aggressively tweaked that it's hard to tell whether he's playing a guitar that sounds like a keyboard or a keyboard being played like a guitar (prediction for the next White Stripes album gimmick: keytar).
The leadoff title track declares this territory nicely, alternating an overdriven, tortured organ with savage guitar jabs, and already proving a better integration of keys and frets than Satan's marimba experiments. "I'm Slowly Turning Into You" blends Wurlitzer verses with fuzz-guitar choruses almost seamlessly; "St. Andrew (The Battle Is in the Air)" finds White facing off against bagpipes (yes, bagpipes) with chainsaw seizures; and on "Conquest", he trades shrieking Casio tones with a trumpeter.
Yet, Icky Thump also treats us to a band that once again seems comfortable with its broken-in sounds, from the reverb-thud hammer of "Little Cream Soda" and the British Invasion 12-bar of "300 MPH Torrential Outpour Blues" to the back-porch ditty of "Effect & Cause". Perennially dismissed, Meg White once again puts the lie to the theory that John Bonham like totally made Led Zeppelin bro, squeezing the most from her limited repertoire and unsteady tempo when locking in with Jack on classic Stripes-stomp breakdowns like the one in "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)", where raw talent takes a backseat to chemistry. The duo's effortless dynamic on "Bone Broke" dismisses the garage-rock trend starting to tiresomely re-bubble yet again amongst the indie dregs, showing that world tours haven't taken them too far away from sweaty suburban Detroit house parties.
But unlike most other 10th-time-around blues-rock revivalists, the Stripes don't settle for endlessly rewriting "96 Tears", as the record's two weirdest (and maybe best) cuts prove. "Conquest", with its theatrical vocal and faux-mariachi fanfares, teases a promising revved-up early Scott Walker direction until you realize that it's a meticulous recreation of the Patti Page original. "Rag & Bone" with its spoken-word verses, is practically a thesis statement for a band that loves to write songs about itself, casting Jack and Meg as junk collectors with a way-creepy relationship, prone to amphetamine rambles and big, chunky rock choruses.
If there's a complaint to be registered about Icky Thump, it's that certain aspects of the Stripes' early character appear to have been annexed off: The sweet pop of "You're Pretty Good Lookin' (For a Girl)" would probably be Raconteurs property nowadays, and White's country dalliances (i.e. "Hotel Yorba") are totally absent. Revisiting old territory also carries with it the hazard of backward comparison, and the highest highs of Icky can't quite reach the altitude of the band's breakthrough singles, but some of that inadequacy is tempered by the group's more robust sound-- De Stijl now feels anorexic in a side-by-side taste-test. Whether it was remembering their own advice from "Little Room" or the freedom to write in another mode with the Raconteurs, White's strategy worked its rejuvenating magic, allowing the Stripes to roll back the stone on Icky Thump. | 2007-06-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-06-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | June 18, 2007 | 8 | 14d5542f-72f7-4e3e-9899-4fde8164ca0f | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Almost 15 years after Kicking a Dead Pig comes Mogwai's second remix album, featuring Jesu/Godflesh's Justin K. Broadrick, Tim Hecker, the Soft Moon, and others taking on tracks from the 2011 LP Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will. | Almost 15 years after Kicking a Dead Pig comes Mogwai's second remix album, featuring Jesu/Godflesh's Justin K. Broadrick, Tim Hecker, the Soft Moon, and others taking on tracks from the 2011 LP Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will. | Mogwai: A Wrenched Virile Lore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17374-a-wrenched-virile-lore/ | A Wrenched Virile Lore | Mogwai made their name on a simple formula: be very quiet, and then, without warning, be sadistically loud. But very early on, the group showed they weren't especially precious about their practice. Their 1997 full-length debut, Young Team, was quickly followed by Kicking a Dead Pig, wherein Young Team's tracks were subjected to sonic surgery by a cast of noted studio scientists that included Kevin Shields, Alec Empire, and µ-Ziq. At the time, it hardly seemed odd that the most undanceable band in all of Scotland would welcome the opportunity for a beat-based rethink. After all, in the wake of the late-90s electronica boom, remix albums had effectively replaced live albums as the default cash-cow-milking measure for rock bands (as acknowledged by the collection's piss-take of a title), and the ample negative space in the band's music presents producers with a large canvass to color in. But despite its impressive cast and elaborate double-CD presentation, Dead Pig ultimately sounded like random attempts at applying Mogwai's metallic noise to the darker strains of electronic music of the era (drill and bass, digital hardcore), to the point of using its entire second disc to determine who could produce the most gonzo version of the band’s epic signature track "Mogwai Fear Satan". (Shields' titanic take won in a landslide.)
Fourteen years later, the band's second remix album, A Wrenched Virile Lore, arrives as a more cohesive work, presenting a cerebral, alternate-universe reimgination of Mogwai's 2011 release, Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will. Despite its severe title, Hardcore counts as the band’s most blissful and texturally rich to date. *Hardcore'*s sound provides producers with more jumping-off points than the band's mountainous art-rock would normally allow. If Kicking a Dead Pig was mostly about giving Mogwai's atomic guitar eruptions a mechanized makeover, A Wrenched Virile Lore repositions the songs' central melodies in more splendorous surroundings. In the hands of Justin K. Broadrick, the post-punky krautrock of "George Square Thatcher Death Party" becomes the sort of gently ascendant, anthemic opener that you could imagine blaring out of a stadium to kick-off an Olympics ceremony; Pittsburgh prog-rockers Zombi hear the mournful piano refrain of "Letters to the Metro" as the basis for a glorious, strobe-lit Trans Europe Express flashback. Or in some cases, the material is stripped down to its essence: Glaswegian troubador R.M. Hubbert re-routes the motorik pulse of "Mexican Grand Prix" off the speedway into the backwoods and transforms it into a hushed, Jose Gonzalez-like acoustic hymn, while San Fran neo-goth upstarts the Soft Moon scuff away the surface sheen of "San Pedro" to expose the seething menace lurking underneath. However, there are limits to this approach: Umberto's distended, ambient distillation of "Too Raging to Cheers" simmers down this already serene track to the point of rendering it inconsequential.
Like Hardcore, A Wrenched Virile Lore features 10 tracks, though it only references eight of the originals. However, even the mixes that draw from the same songs are different enough in approach and sequenced in such a way that the reappearances feel like purposeful reprises: Klad Hest's drum and bass-rattled redux of "Rano Pano" finds its sobering aftershock in Tim Hecker's haunted and damaged revision, while Cylob's cloying synth-pop take on Hardcore's opener "White Noise"-- which fills in the original's instrumental melody with lyrics sung through a vocoder-- is redeemed by UK composer Robert Hampson's 13-minute soft-focus dissolve of the same track. Renamed "La Mort Blanche", its appearance provides both a full-circle completion of this record (by book-ending it with mixes by former Godflesh members) while serving as a re-entry point back into Hardcore by reintroducing the source song's main motifs and widescreen vantage. But more than just inspire a renewed appreciation for Hardcore, A Wrenched Virile Lore potentially provides Mogwai with new avenues to explore now that they're well into their second decade, and perhaps instill a greater confidence in the idea that their identity can remain intact even in the absence of their usual skull-crushing squall. | 2012-11-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-11-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | November 27, 2012 | 7 | 14d9f6c0-d56f-43d6-b962-9dce0d26ee67 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Ripe 4 Luv, the full-length debut of Fucked Up guitarist Ben Cook as Young Guv, mines genres like soft rock, power pop, and R&B for the general feel and quick hooks, then moves on. It’s Cook’s cleanest, most easygoing release yet, and far and away his catchiest. | Ripe 4 Luv, the full-length debut of Fucked Up guitarist Ben Cook as Young Guv, mines genres like soft rock, power pop, and R&B for the general feel and quick hooks, then moves on. It’s Cook’s cleanest, most easygoing release yet, and far and away his catchiest. | Young Guv: Ripe 4 Luv | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20241-ripe-4-luv/ | Ripe 4 Luv | The video for Young Guv’s "Crushing Sensation" plays like a failed Rocky montage. Inspired by the images of athletes posted around his apartment, singer Ben Cook rolls out of bed, throws on some sweats, and hits the streets. His heart’s not in it, though: He attempts some pull ups and listlessly swipes at a punching bag, but mostly he putters around the city, kicking snow, smoking cigarettes, and staring at nothing in particular.
That same noncommittal attitude has carried through Cook’s many bands outside of his primary gig playing guitar for Fucked Up. He’s bounced from one flash collaboration or side project to another—among them Marvelous Darlings, the Bitters, Roommates, and Yacht Club—leaving a trail of demo tapes and 7-inches but never devoting himself to any act for the long haul. Some of those bands flamed out before they could realize their potential, others were probably never intended to have much of a shelf life, but each inched Cook ever so slightly away from messy punk and toward the tuneful comforts of power-pop, the jumping-off point for his full-length debut as Young Guv, Ripe 4 Luv. Tying some of the loose ends from his previous projects, though never too neatly, it’s Cook’s cleanest, most easygoing release yet, and far and away his catchiest.
Like every album released by Slumberland Records since its 2006 resurrection, Ripe 4 Luv is versed in the shimmery indie-pop of the label’s heyday years. But Cook is too restless to limit himself to any single musical tradition, so Ripe 4 Luv also detours into soft-rock slow jams, giddy new wave, and Prince’s hormonal R&B-pop. The title track is straight out of Dirty Mind, all bubblegum guitar and funk strut, while "Aquarian" sets its 10cc-style pillow talk against a mechanically cool, Sade-esque groove.
Cook has the songwriting chops to pull off all these styles. He’s ghostwritten for such unlikely big names as Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson, and Maroon 5, so he’s never been as bound by punk orthodoxy as his years in the Canadian hardcore scene suggested. And unlike many indie acts that have moonlighted with soft rock and R&B over the last half decade—Blood Orange on Cupid Deluxe; Destroyer on Kaputt; Gayngs with Relayted—Cook isn’t too concerned with nailing the nuances of these genres. Instead, he captures the general feel, mines it for a quick hook, then moves on. He’s just not the type of musician who’s going to dedicate the effort required for a sustained, elaborate genre homage, especially when the gist will suffice.
Ripe 4 Luv is relentlessly sunny throughout its 33-minute run, though Cook can’t resist letting a little skeeziness in here and there. Behind its ringing guitars and Alex Chilton harmonies, "Kelly, I’m Not a Creep" disguises an unnerving portrait of an inter-apartment building stalker. The seven-minute closer "Wrong Crowd", meanwhile, stretches Young Guv’s throwback soft rock to the point of sleazy parody. The joke grows stale even before some Showtime After Dark saxophone arrives to close out the song. It’s the album’s only bum track, but thankfully it’s tucked at the end, and it doesn’t sour what came before it. Throughout Ripe 4 Luv you can sense that it’s taking every ounce of discipline Cook has to play these pop songs as straight as he does, so he can be forgiven for indulging a little kitsch at the finish line. | 2015-03-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-03-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Slumberland | March 10, 2015 | 7.5 | 14dcf17e-6c64-432f-98ce-867e1b382d06 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Featuring most the magisterial Dusty in Memphis and its lesser follow-up A Brand New Me, plus a bevy of related tracks, a new collection captures one of pop’s most fascinating personalities in her second act. | Featuring most the magisterial Dusty in Memphis and its lesser follow-up A Brand New Me, plus a bevy of related tracks, a new collection captures one of pop’s most fascinating personalities in her second act. | Dusty Springfield: The Complete Atlantic Singles 1968-1971 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dusty-springfield-the-complete-atlantic-singles-1968-1971/ | The Complete Atlantic Singles 1968-1971 | By 1968, Dusty Springfield had begun to suspect that there was no easy way down. Cool enough to duet with Jimi Hendrix on her regrettably named ITV show It Must Be Dusty but hobbled by increasingly dowdy material, Springfield realized it wasn’t a good time for singers with bouffant hairstyles who hoped to stay hip. Signing with Atlantic and relocating to Memphis that year looked like a smart move, resulting in a body of work as substantial as Aretha Franklin’s own Atlantic recordings. The Complete Atlantic Singles 1968-1971 collects most of the magisterial Dusty in Memphis (1969), its lesser follow-up A Brand New Me (1970), and a bevy of tracks orbiting the albums like lonely satellites.
Before turning to this fecund epoch, it’s important to appreciate Springfield’s achievements. To savor the run of singles recorded between 1963 and 1967, from “I Only Want to Be With You” to “The Look of Love” means appreciating Springfield’s combination of winsomeness and submersion; unlike Dionne Warwick, another beneficiary of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s compositions, Springfield wasn’t detached, as her performance of the 1966 Pino Donaggio and Vito Pallavicini composition “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” rewritten in English, testifies. But Springfield, who wrote a song here and there and exerted more production control than credits aver, had grown restless. She insisted on working with the redoubtable producer Jerry Wexler. The eight songs he brought to what became Dusty in Memphis represented the best of the so-called Brill Building songwriters: Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Randy Newman and Michel Legrand chipped in too. With Arif Mardin and engineer Tom Dowd joining Wexler, the venture had promise.
A combination of Springfield’s mild anxiety about singing live with a rhythm section and her insistence on controlling the material stalled the project at first. “To say yes to one song was seen as a lifetime commitment,” Wexler carped later. Most of the vocals she eventually recorded in New York, a development with no bearing on the album’s swampy, undulating sonics: Dusty was in the fantasy-selling business. Aretha had already rejected a John Hurley-Ronnie Wilkins soul number called “Son of a Preacher Man.” Time and impatience with the Pulp Fiction mythos hasn’t dulled Springfield’s signature tune, in which she sasses and upbraids one “Billy” while an ebullient horn section blows its support and bassist Tommy Cogbill plucks the sweetest line she’d ever sung over. So self-assured was Springfield’s performance that Franklin recorded a version for This Girl’s in Love with You (1970)—and it’s merely decent (Springfield and Annie Lennox remain the only women to have gone eye-to-eye with Franklin and survived).
Bifurcating erotic abandon and a melancholy as permanent as soul death, the rest of Dusty in Memphis depends on the intuitiveness with which the players and the singer understand their respective needs: Springfield’s for ballast, house band the Memphis Boys for ethereality. It’s not a concept album as such but it often unfolds like one: Dusty Springfield recreating herself as lover and loved, essaying her stylized version of soul music. “It is a love that is all at once diffuse, dark, unpredictable, ecstatic, and a terrible deal,” Warren Zane speculated in his 33 1/3 book on the album. This sparkling remix underscores the achievements: the oboe in “I Don’t Want to Hear It Anymore” circling her mediations like a long-legged fly; Reggie Young’s forlorn guitar arpeggio in “Just One Smile” and—it was 1968—his sitar in “In the Land of Make Believe.” Singers dependent on an upper register risk tiring listeners with their intensity; with Springfield, the syllable-at-a-time approach noted by future producer Neil Tennant, torturous to her current record makers, transforms her into a co-creator. Tangling the sensual and the threatening, she masters assonance (“br-eh-kfast in b-ehhh-d”), discretion (quietly breathy in the verses of “Don’t Forget About Me” as if afraid of wearing out a welcome), timing (a full stop for each word in the chorus of “No Easy Way Down”).
A Brand New Me steps away from the brink. Relocating from Memphis to Philadelphia with songwriter-producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Springfield doesn’t inhabit the material: she externalizes it. The album is soft-focus, blurry. Gamble and Huff approach her as if circling a runway. Sweet banalities like “Bad Case of the Blues” unfurl alongside gutbucket funk pop like “Lost.” The title track, her last American Top 40 hit until 1988, is a manifesto in search of a cause. The mildly bossa nova-flavored “Let Me in Your Way” works best: Springfield follows bassist Ronnie Baker’s melody. For a hint of what could’ve been, look to the bonus material collected on the anthology, most of which has found homes on reissues of the studio albums over the years: “Haunted,” graced with swampy organ lick, and a momentum similar to Martha and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run”; the way in which “Someone Who Cares” switches from cocktail ballad despondency to I’m-here-to-tell-ya euphoria; and “Willie and Laura Mae Jones,” a sharecropper-era fantasia by Tony Joe White in which the cotton is high and the corn is growin’ fine.
One part of that tale rings true: lots of corn, fine and high, on the last half of this compilation—itself redundant, for remastered and expanded versions of both albums have existed for years. Yet Dusty Springfield remains one of pop’s most fascinating, protean personalities. Not just a British woman singing R&B but a queer British woman, she dwelled in a sinister twilight where objects of desire bobbed gender-fluid but no less distracting. She was the poet of the afterglow. The 1970s she spent doing TV theme material and backing vocals for buddies like Elton John; after the collapse of her relationship with erstwhile collaborator Norma Tanega, she was scared about British tabloids outing her. She waited a pop eternity for Tennant and Chris Lowe, aglow with childhood memories of her and Cilla Black and Sandie Shaw, to give her sympathetic arrangements again. Like Gladys Knight and her Pips, Springfield needed backtalking backup singers and horn blasts after breakfast in bed. The Complete Atlantic Singles is the un-easiest of listening. Thank Dusty Springfield.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Real Gone | February 15, 2021 | 8 | 14e197ad-d8cb-4a91-9493-b0d1aea7f182 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
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 an ambitious, righteous piece of hip-hop storytelling from 1999. | 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 an ambitious, righteous piece of hip-hop storytelling from 1999. | Prince Paul: A Prince Among Thieves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prince-paul-a-prince-among-thieves/ | A Prince Among Thieves | Prince Paul is responsible for some of the most important music in the hip-hop canon, but despite his contributions, he is also hip-hop’s perennial odd man out. Too often overlooked, sometimes rejected, and at various points dispossessed by the music biz, Paul Huston’s alternating perspectives as insider and outsider have given him a unique ability to engage with the absurdity of it all. A Prince Among Thieves, is, on its surface, a masterpiece of humorous hip-hop storytelling over 35 tracks and 77 minutes, featuring an ensemble cast of Golden Era rap stars and underground legends. What lies beneath, however, is biting satire born of a decade of career hardships and their residual effects on the psyche of this goofy genius from Long Island.
In the 1980s, Prince Paul was a bright-eyed, prodigious teenager who earned a rep in the black suburban enclave of Amityville, New York as a young DJ with skills and taste. His rep would stretch to the streets of East New York, Brooklyn, where lauded hip-hop band Stetsasonic added him to the group, first as their DJ and later as one of their in-house producers. Seeking more autonomy to execute his left-field ideas, Paul connected with three like-minded young men who attended his alma mater, Amityville Memorial High School. In De La Soul’s Posdnuos, Trugoy, and Mase he found kindred spirits who were just as nerdy and willing to get weird as he was.
With his new creative accomplices, Paul sought to upend the rap clichés of the day. While other hip-hop producers were wringing James Brown’s catalog dry of samples, Paul and De La’s eclectic palette of sources included everything from Johnny Cash to Sly and the Family Stone. Where their contemporaries wore gold, De La wore black leather Africa medallions; where their peers were self-important, they were at times self-effacing; and while other acts were busy coming out hard; De La came with jokes.
Their formula worked. 1989’s 3 Feet High and Rising gained widespread critical acclaim, as did De La’s 1991 sophomore effort, De La Soul Is Dead. Together, the four young men subverted stereotypes, expanded rap’s sample palette and perfected the rap album skit as a storytelling device, making them essential to the cohesion of an album. Riding high off of these successes, Prince Paul was, for a few years, an in-demand producer working with rap’s hottest acts at the time, including Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick, Queen Latifah, Boogie Down Productions, and 3rd Bass—he even produced a song for Brooklyn MC the Jaz on which a young JAY-Z rapped and shouted him out by name.
The remainder of the ’90s weren’t as kind to Paul. These days, it’s entirely possible for rappers like Drake or producers like Pharrell to enjoy years-long hot streaks In hip-hop’s adolescence, rappers were lucky if they made it to a third album without getting dropped by a label, and producers may have had a window of a year or two while their sound was hot before the music of the day moved past them. To an early ’90s audience that was increasingly becoming enamored with the sounds of gangsta rap coming from the West Coast, Paul’s signature weirdness and eclecticism were passé. Paul and De La found also found themselves growing apart creatively during the making of the group’s third album, Buhloone Mindstate. Suddenly, the guy who co-produced the answering machine jam “Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)” couldn’t get his hip-hop friends and associates to return his calls.
By the middle of the decade, Paul’s career was in decline and his personal life was in disarray. His imprint Dew Doo Man Records had failed, he was De La Soul-less, and on top of it all, he was embroiled in a custody battle with his ex-girlfriend over his son, Paul Jr. Paul prepared to say goodbye to the music biz with a final middle finger in the form of his 1996 album, Psychoanalysis: What Is It?!. The record was an equally bizarre and intriguing exploration of the recesses of his mind, featuring his far-from-famous, ’round-the-way friends on vocals. His taste for absurdity was now tinged with disillusionment and his humor was at it darkest. Paul explained the thinking behind the project in an appearance on The Cipher podcast in 2015: “My career’s over, people hate me, nobody’s gonna hear this record ... Let’s make this record all about somebody who has all these psychoses and all this other crazy stuff and not worry about what people will say.”
To his surprise, the album earned acclaim as an oddity on the hip-hop spectrum and soon, his former label Tommy Boy reached out to re-release the album and to work with him again. Tommy Boy wanted Paul to be their resident prestige artist at a time when they were making money from pop-rap acts like Coolio and Naughty By Nature. Reinvigorated by the new interest, he pitched an idea: Instead of an album with a narrative told solely through skits, why not do an album that’s a story from beginning to end? The project could be acted out through low-budget music videos, and the label could launch Tommy Boy Films with it. The label bit on the idea of the album but tightened their purse strings when it came to film production costs. In those days, digital video wasn’t readily accessible, and proper filmmaking was too expensive. They put up a measly $10,000 for him to shoot a trailer.
Undeterred and even inspired, Paul wanted to create something at the intersection of schlock and hip-hop—funny, off-kilter, and entertaining. “I wanted to make a movie on wax, I wanted to make an adults’ kid album,” he told Complex in 2011. As he started to piece together the plot of the album, he studied the B-movies he loved growing up, adapting the most cliche scenes for his script. Deciding how he would end this story, Paul thought about the bumps and bruises he had acquired in the years prior and indulged the chip on his shoulder. Thinking back to all of his disappointments and failures in the music biz, and a family court proceeding where a judge awarded his ex-girlfriend custody of their son, the idea that would underpin the story came to him: “The bad guy always wins.”
The story would center on a schmuck of a protagonist named “Tariq,” an aspiring rapper and part-time slacker in need of $1,000 to finish recording a demo for an impending meeting with the RZA. To get the money in a week’s time, he reaches out to his not-nearly-as-straight-laced friend, True, who, instead of loaning him the cash, offers him entrée into the criminal underworld to earn it. A naive and gullible Tariq would quickly learn that a grand don’t come for free and fall victim to dirty-dealing and betrayal. Tariq was a victim of shady people, circumstance, and poor decisions. Tariq was Paul.
With the tragicomic storyline sorted out, Paul had to play casting director, too. Though Psychoanalysis re-opened the door to work with people like comedian Chris Rock, it did not fully restore the industry clout he had enjoyed in his heyday. Tommy Boy wasn’t giving him a huge budget, so ideas like getting Notorious B.I.G. to play “True” were out of the question. So he would do what he had always done—appeal to the outcasts.
For his cast of rappers-turned-voice actors, he sought out underground emcees to play the main characters and rappers who had been largely deemed over-the-hill as the supporting cast. For the lead, he tracked down Breeze Brewin of the underground rap group the Juggaknots. In the mid-’90s, Breeze Brewin went from being doomed to obscurity after his group was dropped from East West Records to being a part of the vanguard of a burgeoning college radio-propelled NYC underground rap micro-scene that included El-P and his group Company Flow as well as acts like Non-Phixion and Natural Elements. Prince Paul knew Breeze Brewin’s serpentine flow—full of internal rhyme schemes and tongue-in-cheek jokes—would be perfect for A Prince Among Thieves; a starstruck Breeze Brewin jumped at the chance to work with a man he considered to be a living legend.
For True, Paul cast a rapper named Sha from a local Amityville group called Horror City. Paul called in favors to round out the rest of the cast: a post-House of Pain and pre-Whitey Ford Sings the Blues Everlast played the racist crooked cop “Officer O’Malley Bitchkowski”; Kool Keith was “Crazy Lou,” a crazed black-market arms dealer who was an ex-Marine captain “discharged for sexual misconduct with a deadly weapon” (read: he fucked guns); Big Daddy Kane was a smooth-talking pimp named “Count Mackula”; Xzibit, Kid Creole, and Sadat X played rowdy convicts in a jail cell; Breeze’s younger sister, rapper Queen Herawin, played Tariq’s skeptical yet loving girlfriend; and Chubb Rock was the kingpin, “Mr. Large.” Paul’s old crew De La Soul even popped up with Chris Rock to play over-eager crack addicts.
“The crazy thing about making that album is that nobody knew what was going on,” Paul told Shawn Setaro of The Cipher. “Nobody knew the whole story, how it went. I gave people [their] parts and they didn’t see the other person’s part and I just recorded [them] line for line for line and edited it all together.” This was 1998, years before Pro Tools was in wide use, so Paul went about the tedious work of putting together the music piece by piece and the dialogue line by line using an ASR-10, ADAT digital tapes, and a MIDI sequencing program. For the project’s beats, he simplified his approach, making the tracks from a sample or two with overlaid drums programmed onto them. It was more economical and it put the story and his players in the foreground.
After nearly two years of work, A Prince Among Thieves was released in February 1999. The album begins at the end of the story, as EMTs attend to our wounded protagonist. Sirens wail in the background and Tariq’s internal monologue sets the stage. The skit gives way to the mournful strings of “Pain” where we discover that Sha has also been shot. As Tariq, Breeze Brewin paints a picture of violence and betrayal that tease the twists and turns to come. He’s presented as a relatable loser who lives with his mom on “Steady Slobbin.” Flipping the concept behind Ice Cube’s day-in-the-life-of-G “Steady Mobbin,” our protagonist recounts all of the L’s he takes during his day, from being broke and harangued by his mom to his premature ejaculation during in a sexual encounter with an unattractive woman.
To flesh out the characters, Tariq gives us some background on his relationship with his sly-tongued homie True on “Just Another Day”: The two go way back. True taught Tariq how to rhyme when they were younger but wound giving up his rap dreams when Tariq surpassed him. Tariq detects envy but figures something so small could never come between brothers. The contradiction and cognitive dissonance lend depth to the two main characters and their relationship while grounding the cartoonish supporting characters we meet later. Paul’s dim view of human nature at the time informs the story, as Tariq sets out on his Faustian path to $1,000, his morals loosening along the way.
In a genre that was, especially at the time, obsessed with authenticity and realness, Paul delighted in skewering cliches with the sharp tip of satire. Recurring themes in rap that had since become tropes were now fodder for parody, as Tariq made his descent into the underworld. To get a gun—de rigueur for any aspiring hustler or posturing rapper—he has to visit Kool Keith’s “Crazy Lou,” at his hideout (the password is “enema bandit”). The romanticized subject of guns gets sent up as Kool Keith runs down a list of real and fantastical firearms before unveiling his ultimate weapon: a “six-foot gorilla” with “the aluminum skin of an alligator” otherwise known as “Dragon Plus ... with a twist.” By the time he’s done talking about this imaginary arsenal, you’re unsure if the weapon he’s just described is animal or mechanical but you are certain that it is nonsense. You can almost hear Paul giggling in the studio.
And what allegory about temptation would be complete without sex? A hilariously simulated love scene—complete with a boinging sound effect to signify an erection—is interrupted by Everlast as a crooked NYPD officer. The character is another stroke of comedic genius: He embodies every stereotype of a racist New York City cop with lines like, “It’s the Bad Lieutenant runnin’ up in your tenement/Plantin’ evidence on any black resident,” and, “I’ll shoot you in the alley/And burn you like a cross at a fuckin’ Klan rally.” But characters like Everlast’s and Big Daddy Kane’s “Count Macula” are more than just cool cameos in Paul’s cynical story, they are agents of betrayal. Characters meant to convince the listener that the odds are stacked against the good guys. They’re Paul’s adversaries, disappointments, and failures personified.
For all of its surprises, Easter eggs, guest stars, the dramatic center of A Prince Among Thieves remains Breeze Brewin’s Tariq. When he realizes that he’s been set up and the extent of the betrayal our loveable simp is overcome with a vengeance that leads him to a Western-style showdown on “You Got Shot”: “It’s hard to live/Knowin’ that you’re doing the same/Knowin’ ‘bout you and your game/Let God forgive, I won’t...” His innocence lost, Tariq’s climactic transformation from gullible chump to jaded would-be avenger mirrors Paul’s experience in the music biz. But Paul, our auteur, knows that righteousness and victory seldom come together. | 2019-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Tommy Boy | February 10, 2019 | 8.7 | 14e19fb0-d4b7-45c5-a133-d641dd65b30d | Timmhotep Aku | https://pitchfork.com/staff/timmhotep-aku/ | |
One of the most surprising mixtapes of 2012 was made by a Flatbush teenager named Jo-Vaughn Scott a.k.a. Joey Bada$$, but the enthusiastic momentum that buoyed 1999 is missing on his second mixtape, Summer Knights. | One of the most surprising mixtapes of 2012 was made by a Flatbush teenager named Jo-Vaughn Scott a.k.a. Joey Bada$$, but the enthusiastic momentum that buoyed 1999 is missing on his second mixtape, Summer Knights. | Joey Bada$$: Summer Knights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18276-joey-bada-summer-knights/ | Summer Knights | One of the most surprising mixtapes of 2012 was made by a Flatbush teenager named Jo-Vaughn Scott a.k.a. Joey Bada$$, an Edward R. Murrow High School student who channeled Native Tongues-style rap music with a deceptively sharp edge while heading up the intriguing Pro Era collective. Simply put, the kid could rap. No matter how much his flows echoed the work of his chosen style’s well-entrenched pioneers (Mos Def, Common, Q-Tip, Doom), his skills were such that 1999 was a fresh, welcome spin on well-worn subject matter.
Since that initial excitement, a lot has happened. In December, one of Joey’s best friends, Pro Era’s Capital STEEZ, tragically took his own life amid a storm of strange rumors, tweeting “The end” the night he committed suicide. Around the same time as STEEZ’s death, Joey turned down an offer to sign with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation imprint, later saying it would take a $3 million dollar advance to sign him (A$AP Rocky, who rose to prominence at roughly the same age, reportedly got that figure from RCA). All the drama pulls down Summer Knights, a record that mines the same bank of 90s rap influences but does so with a more negative, fuck-the-world mentality. The enthusiastic momentum that buoyed 1999 is missing, and Summer Knights is much cloudier proposition.
Even imbued with a darker tint than his debut mixtape, the touchpoints often feel clumsy. It starts with the lyrics: “Somehow the rap game reminds me of the trap game/ In fact is the exact same, and these tracks is my crack ‘caine,” raps Joey on “Sweet Dreams”. Knotty lines like “Fulfill your needs with similes non similar/ Spit that unfamiliar, put that on familia” (“Hillary $wank”) amount to nicely rapped nonsense. There’s much talk of “similes and verbs”, “metaphysics”, and there are direct homages: “Sorry Bonita” chops up A Tribe Called Quest’s spacey classic “Bonita Applebum”, and there’s a song called “Word Is Bond”. It’s one thing to bat around references, ping-ponging them in a way that riffs on the established themes and vocabulary of rap music. But the approach feels off. Take “Death of YOLO”, a song built off a promising, darkly funny concept-- the protagonist of the song is dead, having taken YOLO too far. Why deliver it with a straight face?
All that said, Summer Knights features strong production. If I had to pick a Native Tongues record to compare it to, it'd be the back half of A Tribe Called Quest’s relatively downcast Beats Rhymes & Life, where keys, hi-hats, snares, and low basslines mingle to create a warm bed of texture to get loose over. Joey can still rap, but the producers on Summer Knights-- Pro Era affiliates Chuck Strangers, Kirk Knight and Lee Bannon with single tracks produced by DOOM, Statik Selektah and Oddissee respectively-- are the real highlights here. While something like “#LongLiveSTEELO” is an affecting, heartfelt cut from Joey-- it’s basically Joey’s version of “I’ll Be Missing You”, complete with Faith Evans-like backup-- you’re 16 tracks deep into a listless affair.
Instead of embracing the styles of more contemporary-minded peers and bending those sounds into his own shapes-- seemingly a must in today's rap climate, if you want to work with a major and get played on the radio-- Summer Knights moves in the other direction, retreating to well-made templates without adding anything to them. Joey deals with heavier shit, but feels weighed down by it. The clunky lyrics wouldn't be a big of a deal if lyricism in the mode of his heroes wasn't one of the aspects he was deliberately playing up. But the deeper problem is one of tone. Joey too often comes out looking like someone who’s already grown weary of the system, an 18-year-old curmudgeon, a sharp contrast with the energy that 1999 promised. | 2013-07-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-07-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Cinematic | July 12, 2013 | 6.8 | 14edce51-304f-4507-9f5e-c457a071ef2e | Corban Goble | https://pitchfork.com/staff/corban-goble/ | null |
Returning after a five-year absence, the Brooklyn musician slots into a tradition of cryptic, pastoral singer-songwriters; more than his lyrics, it’s the peaceful mood-setting that stands out. | Returning after a five-year absence, the Brooklyn musician slots into a tradition of cryptic, pastoral singer-songwriters; more than his lyrics, it’s the peaceful mood-setting that stands out. | Zachary Cale: False Spring | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zachary-cale-false-spring/ | False Spring | False Spring is a long, sweet ramble of an album. Like the view from an early morning flight, it assumes a vantage where everything looks still and glowing and peaceful. Brooklyn artist Zachary Cale works in the tradition of cryptic, pastoral singer-songwriters like Jeff Tweedy and Cass McCombs. But unlike his more lyric-driven peers, Cale’s goal is to stay out of the way of his songs. On False Spring, his work has more in common with wordless, new age-leaning Americana projects like the recent work of William Tyler or the ’80s output from the label Windham Hill. More than with his impressionistic words, Cale expresses himself most eloquently through subtle instrumental details: his fingerpicking, the way he places a piano in the mix, how one song’s fadeout speaks to the next one’s opening.
During the first half of the 2010s, Cale released nearly an album a year, each one a clear evolution from the last. But after 2015’s full-band breakthrough Duskland, he stepped away. “The last five years have felt like one long winter,” he wrote about this album’s long genesis. False Spring offers little insight into the darkness he might have faced; instead, he meditates on transformation, on deeper changes. Through the album’s hour-plus runtime, Cale seems less concerned with his own place in the world than with how the world has moved on without him: “The sand is shifting/The clocks are turning,” he sings brightly in “Mad Season,” surveying his environment before immersing himself back in it.
The instrumental songs come in pairs: the title track and “Magnetic North” near the top, “Black Dirt Drift” and “Seaside Downtime” near the end. Their sequencing gives the album a narrative thrust, and the band’s performances complement him at every turn. The sound is polished but exploratory, vibrant but refined. Hearing them at work is like the feeling of walking barefoot over wet grass. Cale encouraged his accompanists to write their own parts to each song, lending the music a more collaborative spirit. When a hushed saxophone solo emerges during the lilting “Come Morning,” it sounds almost inquisitive, answered by one of the album’s most mournful verses. Cale sings about feeling exhausted and voiceless, so the music trudges alongside him.
Even at their darkest, his songs aim to pacify, never settling too long on dissonant thoughts or minor chords. Amid all his introspection, Cale searches for hope. The closing “Free to Go,” accompanied by Alfra Martini’s gentle background vocals, might be his version of a sweeping finale: The lyrics turn wistful, the band settles into twilight balladry. “Please God, don’t let this be a mirage,” he sings. It’s a thought that might occur when life seems too beautiful to be real, and it’s a fitting sentiment to end an album so steeped in calmness and solitude that it sometimes seems to float just above reality.
Minus a few surging highlights—particularly the open-tuned uplift of “Careening,” a grand melding of Wilco circa Summerteeth and Yo La Tengo’s more blissful, acoustic jams—the mood itself is what stands out. According to Cale, he recorded several albums’ worth of material in the half-decade since Duskland, but these songs are what spoke to him. Their purpose is clear. “I wanna be your piece of heaven/In a world that’s cold and broken,” he sings in “Man Beside You.” From him, it’s a romantic gesture, and the key word is “piece.” On False Spring, he hopes to be part of something greater, a companion for the long haul. | 2020-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | All Hands Electric / Ride Through The Rain | June 26, 2020 | 7 | 14ee8091-e100-4e1d-956e-01d8722476b1 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Texas musicians and real-life “bffs” mari maurice and claire rousay work in the same room for the first time. More than a cool biographical detail, this fact defines the album’s lovingly meta style. | Texas musicians and real-life “bffs” mari maurice and claire rousay work in the same room for the first time. More than a cool biographical detail, this fact defines the album’s lovingly meta style. | claire rousay / more eaze: an afternoon whine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/claire-rousay-more-eaze-an-afternoon-whine/ | an afternoon whine | Texas musicians mari maurice (more eaze) and claire rousay make music from field recordings, found objects, Internet noises, and the other everyday ephemera that define the idle stretches of our lives we might otherwise forget. an afternoon whine is their first release made in the same room together, and that’s more than a cool biographical detail: That mutual presence defines the album’s whole approach. Laced with room noise and friendly chatter, an afternoon whine captures the joy of a day shared by real-life “bffs.” It’s a celebration of togetherness and, by extension, their very friendship.
The margins of these pieces are flooded with domestic signifiers. One of the first sounds we hear is a toilet flushing, followed by the washing of hands. Later we hear the patter of a dog’s feet across the floor, the tattoo of fingers against a computer keyboard, the distant rumble of a dryer, and the flick of lighters (the latter is as much of a trademark for these two as it is for Lil Wayne). Dialogue between the artists occasionally finds its way through the firmament, and it’s as much a compositional tool as a way of letting us know that they’re not remote goddesses, but goofballs like us. Their banter is specific and personal, and we hear maurice and rousay’s dog Banana both addressed by name. The end of “songs for tuned guitar,” when we hear them half-jokingly discussing their artistic process (“I love telling people what to do,” says rousay), offers a microcosm of this lovingly meta album’s approach.
maurice and rousay call their music “emo ambient,” and they’re not just being glib. The two are enraptured by the distinctly 2010s intersection of Auto-Tune and emotional bloodletting, and last year’s </3 remains about as straightforward an emo-R&B album as we’re likely to hear from either of these restless experimenters. For the most part, the five-song, 30-minute an afternoon whine has less in common with that album than the sprawling compositions on their first joint effort, if I don’t let myself be happy now then when? But the two let us know what they're capable of by letting little phosphenes of Auto-Tune flicker through “floor pt. 3,” and a few minutes later, a serrated synth chord and patient guitar introduce the album's only full-on song, “smaller pools.”
“smaller pools”—alongside rousay’s stunning “peak chroma,” from this year’s a softer focus—is the most complete integration yet of the musicians’ singer-songwriter and Tascam-nerd personae. It’s a pop song, but it seems to assemble itself naturally out of all the domestic rustlings. Both sing through thick swaths of Auto-Tune, maurice preferring a soft flutter and rousay adopting a pitch-shifted caterwaul. It’s a delightful duet partnership, with maurice as the R&B diva and rousay as the gremlin determined to throw a monkey wrench into the album's Big Sincere Moment, but the goofy camaraderie hardly detracts from its poignancy. “It’s hard for me to feel that I deserve this at all,” maurice muses at one point, and for a brief moment a cloud of self-doubt shadows the landscape. Then rousay starts singing, too, and joy takes over.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Ecstatic | July 27, 2021 | 7.3 | 14f0c75f-47a1-4061-a3f8-051815a21d5e | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
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 landmark 1972 album from the legendary saxophonist, responding loudly and passionately to the tragic outcome of a prison uprising. | 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 landmark 1972 album from the legendary saxophonist, responding loudly and passionately to the tragic outcome of a prison uprising. | Archie Shepp: Attica Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/archie-shepp-attica-blues/ | Attica Blues | On January 26, 1972, Archie Shepp packed up his tenor and soprano saxophones and headed to A&R Recording in New York for the third and final session of an album he was planning to call Attica Blues. If he happened to flip through a newspaper that morning, Shepp would have seen a few articles relevant to his cause: the Attica Prison uprising, which had transpired four months earlier but still amounted to an unfolding story.
In its aftermath, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller appointed a bipartisan commission on penal reform, which was just issuing its first report. “We are profoundly troubled that the present correctional system reflects an anachronistic, bastille‐like philosophy,” the committee chairman told The New York Times. “We doubt that there is any real hope that it can accomplish society’s objectives today.” The quote appeared in the paper on Jan. 26, below a separate article with the headline, “Impeach Rockefeller Over Attica, A Buffalo Assemblyman Demands.”
Shepp probably wouldn’t have been surprised, or much impressed, by these indictments. What happened at Attica Correctional Facility, in upstate New York, amounted to one of the deadliest confrontations on American soil since the Civil War. On the morning of Sept. 13, 1971, state troopers opened fire on the prison in a siege-like effort to end a four-day rebellion in protest of inhumane conditions. According to a stark racial calculus, the protesting prisoners were mostly black and the assaulting troopers were mostly white. The savagery of the attack—39 people, inmates and hostages, were slain by police gunfire, with more than twice as many wounded—registered as an instant scandal and an unspeakable horror. As investigative journalist Tom Robbins characterized it several years ago, in an article for The Marshall Project, the assault on Attica was “a massive bloodletting marked by spasms of sadism.”
So it was a bold stroke for Shepp to respond to this moment with Attica Blues. It was also totally in character for him: A leading provocateur of jazz’s radical “New Thing,” he had titled his previous album Things Have Got to Change. The same Afrocentric and revolutionary energies pulse through Attica Blues, with resolute conviction but a shifting center of gravity. The album is a sociopolitical statement shaded with human complexity. There is protest in it, but also tenderness and wistfulness and hopeful rumination. It’s a landmark in part because it refuses the stoical clarity of a broadside, just as it wriggles free of the parameters that typically apply to a so-called jazz album.
Shepp came out of the avant-garde black-music tradition that proudly claimed Cecil Taylor and anointed John Coltrane. Those two lodestars were instrumental in his career: Shepp made his earliest recordings with Taylor in 1960, and when he signed a deal with Impulse! Records in ’64, it was through Coltrane’s intervention, under the label stipulation that he play Coltrane’s music. That first effort, Four For Trane, initiated a potent run of Shepp albums for Impulse!—including Fire Music, a Hall of Fame entry from ’65—that most observers filed, somewhat reductively, under “free jazz.” With all this in mind, it’s reasonable to expect that Attica Blues would open with a sorrowful dirge, like Coltrane’s “Alabama”; or in a cacophonous roil, like Coltrane’s Ascension; or in simmering rage, like “Malcolm, Malcolm, Semper Malcolm,” a spoken-word piece from Fire Music.
Instead, Attica Blues opens with wah-wah rhythm guitar, a snaking electric bass, and a clattering tambourine—signifiers of the street, in tune with the glorious stank of Funkadelic and the impudent grandeur of a blaxploitation score. Ten seconds into the title track, veteran gospel-soul singer Carl Hall (credited on the album by an alias, Henry Hull) bursts in like an emergency alarm. “I got a feeling that something ain’t going right!” he sings in a piercing, androgynous cry. “And I’m worried ’bout the human soul!” The lyrics come from a poem by Shepp’s drummer, Beaver Harris (credited on the album by his given name, William G. Harris), but it’s clear that Shepp shares the stated conviction: I’m worried about the human soul. As the song balloons into a psychedelic-funk fever dream, it quickly becomes clear that Shepp’s concerns are much bigger than, if also inextricable from, the systemic failure and heinous outcome at Attica. “Through his music here,” writes percussionist Abdul Zahir Batin in the album liner notes, “we can feel the roots of a plight.”
Shepp’s essential partner on Things Have Got to Change had been Cal Massey, a visionary trumpeter and arranger who shared his political perspective. They teamed up again for Attica Blues, and Massey, in turn, recruited Romulus Franceschini, his composing partner in a concern called The RoMas Orchestra. On “Steam,” a dreamy waltz that takes up much of the album’s first side, the flexibility of Franceschini’s string orchestration—featuring an all-star violin section of Leroy Jenkins, John Blake, and L. Shankar, along with cellists Ronald Lipscomb and Calo Scott—allows the song to morph from succor to astringency and back again. The song’s singer is Joe Lee Wilson, and his expressive baritone gives Shepp’s lyrics a tangible shape: “Summer,” he half-sings, half-sighs, “Soft as the rain/And sweet as the end of pain.” (If you have ever admired the work of Dwight Trible and Patrice Quinn in Kamasi Washington’s band, the declaratory stance of the singing should ring agreeably familiar.)
There’s an interlude between parts one and two of “Steam,” and it pairs a deep and droning solo by Jimmy Garrison, Coltrane’s longtime bassist, with the recitation of a poem by Bartholomew Gray. The poem, “Invocation to Mr. Parker,” pays homage to alto saxophonist and bebop progenitor Charlie Parker—“that driving music man/who used to wail out back.” It’s a nod to jazz lineage that might seem out of place on such a politically charged album, until you consider Shepp’s understanding of black music as unavoidably political in and of itself, a point of view he shared with poet and critic Amiri Baraka. Later, on side two, there comes “Good Bye Sweet Pops,” Massey’s elegy for Louis Armstrong, who’d died in the summer of ’71. The song has no words, but still manages to hail Armstrong as a village elder; it’s a regal, bittersweet ballad that kicks into double time for Shepp’s breezy yet commanding soprano solo. The album’s thematic framework invites a reading of “Sweet Pops” as a valiant soldier, weathering so much injustice in his time, and finding the ultimate dignity in release. Sweet as the end of pain.
The way that all of these songs and spoken-word passages swirl one into the next speaks to the realization of Shepp’s ambitions on Attica Blues. (Praise is also due to his producer, Ed Michel.) The way it all coheres is what makes Attica Blues one of the more successful concept albums in jazz history. But Shepp would probably object to at least two words in that encomium—starting with “jazz,” given his public disavowal of the term as a white man’s yoke for African American music. The other might be “concept,” with its lofty aesthetic baggage. “I don’t believe in the word ‘art,’” he told critic John Litweiler in 1974. “It’s, to me, not functional, it’s passive. It’s bourgeois in the sense that art develops at a point when people have leisure time. That’s like the Platonic ideal, something that can be observed as art, something outside experience.”
Attica Blues seeks the inside track of experience. The album cover is a Chuck Stewart photograph of Shepp at work, seated at a piano with a tenor saxophone lying prone beneath his gaze. But what he appears to be studying, as he smokes a cigarette, is sheet music. Over his left shoulder is a bookcase crammed with books and records; over his right is an Olympics ’68 poster, showing Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their black-gloved fists on the podium. A keen student of revolutionary politics, Shepp was well aware that the Attica uprising had a precipitating event clear across the country: the killing of author and activist George Jackson, shot dead by prison guards during a failed escape at San Quentin.
“Blues For Brother George Jackson,” which opens Side Two of Attica Blues, is Shepp’s paean to this fallen hero—and probably the most straightforward piece on the album, a 12-bar form with a grooving ostinato and a polished blare of horns. Shepp’s tenor solo, which follows a squawking alto statement by Marion Brown, exudes a characteristically robust charisma. Despite the temptation to memorialize Jackson in words—as Bob Dylan had in “George Jackson,” which was rushed to release the previous November—Shepp lets the soul in the song speak for itself.
That is, until “Invocation: Ballad For a Child” fades in, featuring another Beaver Harris poem; “I would rather be a plant than a man in this land,” it begins. As on a similar interlude from side one, the solemn recitation is by William Kunstler, a radical lawyer who’d been an appointed witness to the doomed negotiations at Attica, and who would later defend several of its prisoners at trial. The very presence of Kunstler may be the purest act of provocation on Attica Blues. But it also underscores a core conviction about the uprising, which came about because the largely African American prison population objected to subhuman treatment and brutal living conditions. The massacre that followed was just a dire confirmation of their plight. As Kunstler intones in “Invocation: Attica Blues,” speaking words by Harris: “Some people think that they are in their rights/When on command they take a black man’s life.”
We don’t need to draw an explicit parallel with the Black Lives Matter movement to recognize the undying urgency of Shepp’s argument. We don’t need to study the scourge of mass incarceration to understand that Attica Blues has lost none of its relevance. And we don’t need to strain, at least not much, to grasp the faith that the album places in the purity of a child. On “Ballad For a Child,” the bittersweet, Marvin Gaye-like reflection that follows Kunstler’s second reading, Carl Hall’s gospel vocals return. “But what the whole world really needs,” he sings, flipping into his buttery falsetto, “is a baby’s smile.”
The earnest sentimentality of that lyric might feel gauzy and credulous on an album so mired in hard realities—an impression that Shepp readily disarms by concluding Attica Blues with a song called “Quiet Dawn.” Composed by Massey as an Afro-soul bossa nova, it features a stirring vocal by the composer’s daughter Waheeda Massey, who was in grade school at the time.
The orchestration on “Quiet Dawn,” credited to RoMas, makes it one of the most vividly textured pieces on Attica Blues. The string section toggles between a quiet shimmer and a twitchy pizzicato, while the brass and reed sections meld into a soulful mass. Shepp’s rhythm section on the track—Garrison on bass, Walter Davis, Jr. on piano and Billy Higgins on drums, with several percussionists—maintains a strong pull without upsetting the song’s tonal balance. Shepp delivers his most bravura tenor solo, notes pouring out of his horn as if from a spigot.
But it’s the small, determined voice of Waheeda Massey that you remember after the song and the album are done. “Quiet Dawn” doesn’t have the most singable melody on the album, and her intonation often lands under a given pitch. That imperfection speaks to the innocence and vulnerability of a child—but young Waheeda also exudes a steady, untroubled self-assurance.
You can almost picture her gazing out toward the horizon line as she sings her father’s deceptively simple lyrics, more in reassurance than in resignation, at the top of the song:
It’s quiet
At dawn
And life
Moves on. | 2020-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Impulse! | May 10, 2020 | 9.3 | 14f13649-00af-4a6d-abeb-d1420edc6360 | Nate Chinen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-chinen/ | |
Regina Spektor’s latest album takes the unabashed earnestness that has always marked her music and rewrites it in a somber, minor key. | Regina Spektor’s latest album takes the unabashed earnestness that has always marked her music and rewrites it in a somber, minor key. | Regina Spektor: Remember Us to Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22499-remember-us-to-life/ | Remember Us to Life | Nobel Prize precedent aside, this is not a particularly great time to be a pop singer-songwriter. Royalty pay is underneath the toilet for most songwriters for hire, and solo songwriters aren’t faring much better. What used to be, for better or worse, its own genre—a solo acoustic, piano or guitar, maybe some strings—is practically nonexistent in today’s market. The pop chart has drowned it out for years. The alternative music charts are capricious, but lean rock and male. The adult contemporary chart is basically just the pop chart, minus rap.
It’s not that these artists have stopped making music. That music’s just been decontextualized and diluted-down and flung in a dozen directions. You can succeed with traditional singer-songwriter fare if you're male—see Ed Sheeran, or Jake Bugg, or whoever else is being heralded as the savior of musical authenticity this year—but if not, your niche is dead of a thousand market fluctuations and Lilith Fair insults, and your options are limited. The closest things in the past few years to traditional singer-songwriter hits are Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song,” which sounds basically like Katy Perry, or Ruth B’s “Lost Boy,” which is literally four-and-a-half minutes of Vines.
Such a market doesn’t allow singer-songwriters much of a legacy. The 2000s had no shortage of talent, much of it sharp enough to resist dumbing-down and some of it rewarded commercially, but it hasn’t produced a mainstream household name, a Fiona Apple or a Tori Amos. In an alternate universe one of them might have been Regina Spektor, whose 15-year career deserves much more recognition than it's gotten. The problem is, there are two Regina Spektors: the public perception and the actual musician. The actual musician records character studies, often set to dizzying classical-piano gusts like “The Flowers” and “Aprés Moi,” and writes with an earnestness not often seen these days. You can draw a direct line from Spektor’s albums to artists working today like Sara Bareilles or Ingrid Michaelson.
The public perception takes that earnestness and recasts it as one-dimensional quirk—it’s probably not coincidental that this style of music peaked around the same time the “manic pixie dream girl” archetype did—in order to dismiss it. This has actually been an incredibly good few years for Spektor; her theme song to “Orange Is the New Black” was nominated for a Grammy in 2013, and she’s recorded with artists like zeitgeist-y Chance the Rapper. But it’s been a low-key kind of success, one that hasn’t resulted in any inescapable singles like “Fidelity” or “Samson.” And yet, Spektor has continued to release, every couple of years, some pretty decent albums.
Remember Us to Life is another pretty decent album, but a more somber affair. Spektor recorded it with a full orchestra—“I almost felt like the subconscious of the record was strings,” she told Rolling Stone—and it lends the album a certain weightiness. There are undertones of preoccupation with one’s legacy throughout. It often rises from subtext to actual text, as on the resigned “Obsolete” (“This is how I feel right now: obsolete manuscript no one reads and no one needs”) or “Tornadoland,” which sets Spektor’s plainspoken line against a blossoming orchestral swell that at one point resolves itself into something resembling the THX intro. Against this, Spektor’s piano line becomes an almost cartoonish downward dive, matching the lyrics: “Everybody’s time has come, it’s everybody’s moment except yours.” The mood is one of panic, restrained until the moment it no longer can be; see also single “Bleeding Heart,” about pain tamped down, featuring a bridge that shouts and claps and exults until it too is snuffed out.
The biggest buy-in with Spektor’s music has been that earnestness, its requiring you to be OK with songs that talk about rowboats feeling trapped in paintings, or laughing at God as one of us, or ditching your corporate job to take off your shoes and splash around in puddles. Remember Us to Life doesn't dispense with these nostrums, but it does rewrite them in a minor key. “The Trapper and the Furrier" is much like “Ghost of Corporate Future,” but the shoe-splashing of the former is replaced by a funeral dirge in which the rich only get more, more. If that sounds dreary, “Small Bill$” is what passes for upbeat: the same message (pretty much Discworld’s Sam Vimes theory, rewritten to include weed and Coca-Cola and an implied 99% uprising), just in the form of funhouse cabaret with bitterly lilting backup vocals. (If that sounds equally intolerable, Spektor’s probably never going to be for you.)
Remember Us to Life suffers from inconsistency; against the weightier atmosphere, less adorned, more traditionally Spektor songs like “Older and Taller” or “The Light” sound like they come from an entirely different album. But Spektor’s albums have always been tonally inconsistent—Begin to Hope had classical pieces “Aprés Moi” next to ballads next to electronic moves like “Edit” next to fizzy and (yes) quirky singles like “Fidelity” and “On the Radio,” and it all was perfectly fine. In Spektor’s catalogue, Remember Us to Life balances comfort food for Spektor fans with the maturity and wisdom you'd expect from a singer-songwriter passing the 15th year of her career.
CORRECTION: The original version of this piece used an incorrect title and insinuated that Spektor received a Grammy nomination in 2016. | 2016-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sire | October 18, 2016 | 6.6 | 14f22928-e5d8-4e7a-836b-5b14696aa602 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
Andrew Bird fashioned I Want to See Pulaski at Night around “Pulaski at Night”, a song he wrote but didn't want to hold until he had enough for a full-length. He composed a handful of instrumentals to form prologues and epilogues around it, comparing it to soundtracking a film. | Andrew Bird fashioned I Want to See Pulaski at Night around “Pulaski at Night”, a song he wrote but didn't want to hold until he had enough for a full-length. He composed a handful of instrumentals to form prologues and epilogues around it, comparing it to soundtracking a film. | Andrew Bird: I Want to See Pulaski at Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18753-andrew-bird-i-want-to-see-pulaski-at-night/ | I Want to See Pulaski at Night | It’s hard to think of Andrew Bird’s new EP as an EP. It’s an appropriate seven tracks, arranged to be reasonably cohesive across a half-hour, and concerned only with a handful of musical ideas, which it teases out intelligently and patiently. So far so good. Bird fashioned the release around a single song, “Pulaski at Night”, which he wrote but did not want to hold until he had enough for a full-length. Instead, he composed a handful of instrumentals to form lengthy prologues and epilogues to “Pulaski”, comparing it to soundtracking a film. So think of the EP as the director’s cut of the main song. Or an extended mix. Or a short suite. Think of it as an EP, however, and it feels slight—never quite the sum of its parts.
“Pulaski at Night” is prime Bird: tightly crafted, lyrically witty, understated yet sophisticated in its arrangement of loops and plucks and thrums and whistles. “I paint you a picture of Pulaski at night,” he sings on the chorus. “Come back to Chicago, city of light.” The galloping violin strums give that sneaky hook its subdued grandeur and steady insistence, Bird’s bow tracing the topography of the Midwestern landscape. It sounds as though he’s trying to erase the many miles between him and the person he’s addressing, who is clearly far away. At one of his Gezelligheid shows last winter, Bird explained the song’s origins and specified which Pulaski inspired him, but there’s something so teasingly vague about the song's shadowy “you” that it’s better left unexplained. On its own, the song could be about a departed friend, a distant lover, or every fan who isn’t in the town Bird is playing that night.
If “Pulaski at Night” is Bird at his most dependably and stalwartly Romantic, the rest of the EP is just Bird. There is, admittedly, a warm familiarity to the plaintively whistled theme of “Lit from Underneath”, to the staccato plucks of “Hover 1”, to the evocative bowing on “Hover 1”. As well, a few unexpected flourishes illuminate some of these songs, such as the loose-limbed raga rhythm on opener “Ethio Invention No. 1” and the quickly fading notes that arc across “Logan’s Loops”. At times that familiarity curdles into predictability, and nothing else carries the sense of purpose and longing as the title track. Not that Bird needs to reinvent himself on a minor release like this one, but an EP is an ideal medium for indulging new experiments and rethinking one’s approach. The most innovative and intriguing aspect of Pulaski is not its music, but ultimately its not-quite-definable form. | 2013-11-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-11-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Grimsey | November 19, 2013 | 6.5 | 14f2355e-6aba-4339-8783-2424755d24ad | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Paid For It is San Francisco songwriter Mark Treise's second album as Jealousy. The shapeshifting, odd grooves underline stories of indulgence and guilt. | Paid For It is San Francisco songwriter Mark Treise's second album as Jealousy. The shapeshifting, odd grooves underline stories of indulgence and guilt. | Jealousy: Paid For It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21546-paid-for-it/ | Paid For It | Paid For It is Mark Treise's second album as Jealousy. The San Francisco songwriter—who also plays bass in the leaden, woozy rock outfit CCR Headcleaner—issued Viles in 2011, which featured similarly elliptical lyricism and oblong, idiosyncratic grooves. Paid For It, which was recorded in Los Angeles, features Don Bolles, best known as drummer of The Germs, behind the kit on some songs. Otherwise, Treise is responsible for the sounds, including power drill, broken bottle, gurgling electronics, and field recordings, but principally bass guitar, which he’d loop live in the studio and ply with effects until sufficiently forbidding.
The emphasis on overlaid bass lines rather than chord patterns lends Jealousy songs strange, shifty shapes. "Doin’ a Little Time" is typical of the strongest tracks on account of its consistent, pulsing bass motif, which anchors an ebb and flow of hiss and noise. There are deceivingly few sonic components to Paid For It, but their nightmarish dub reflections swell to fill what feel like massive chambers. The six-minute highlight "Fresh Kill," for instance, features little more than rhythmic pitter-patter augmented by two-or-three note melodic gestures. Like Paid For It overall, the song eschews conventional structure and development in favor of cyclical, rippling bass beneath Treise’s eerily enchanting voice.
On Paid For It, Treise yearns for visceral, elemental experiences. The title track, which invokes goddesses and autoeroticism alike, seems like a fraught meditation on personal identity. Florid mythical imagery recurs throughout, but passion most often dovetails with destruction: "And I loved hard like iron," goes "Fresh Kill." "And bent the word ‘love’ into a crescent moon / terminal swoon." He's a glutton for self-loathing: In one song, Treise is "sucked up and fucked up" and a "sleazebag scumbag scumfuck" whose face is a "wretched cliché." And yet, the track is called, "I Want It." If indulgence is paramount to Paid For It, the next most important theme is guilt.
Generous reverb and delay tends to render vocals soothing or spooky but indistinct. Not for Jealousy. The effects warp Treise’s weary incantations, moisten his lisp, and lend his leering murmur a sense of bleary, opiated oblivion. That means Paid For It is a druggy album, but few druggy albums capture the balance between blissful stupor and nausea so well. And while dull gloom is often peddled under the pretenses of chic austerity, Paid For It evades the trappings of stylish-but-innocuous miserablism. A couple songs feel impenetrable to a fault (including the vertiginous opener "Been Wrong"), but the album's overall pleasures—in the terms of Treise’s spiritually conflicted lyrics—are akin to a rewarding séance: shock and awe before the medium’s ritual flair, followed by an uneasy, lingering sense of connection. | 2016-03-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-03-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Moniker | March 10, 2016 | 7.6 | 14f3b5f0-3403-4a85-900d-59dc185b874e | Sam Lefebvre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-lefebvre/ | 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 major-label debut from the sludge-metal pioneers, an album that marked their transition from rockers to experimentalists. | 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 major-label debut from the sludge-metal pioneers, an album that marked their transition from rockers to experimentalists. | Melvins: Houdini | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/melvins-houdini/ | Houdini | Even as a kid, Buzz Osborne had the hair: that splendid shock of aerodynamic curls that rose above the crowd like a sail at the 2010 World Series playoffs, a crown befitting the name King Buzzo. Born in the remote Washington lumber town of Morton, Osborne moved around the state with his dad, who worked in the timber industry, before the family settled in Montesano in coastal Grays Harbor County. Twelve-year-old Osborne was an outsider: a new face in a tight-knit community, a musical omnivore in a place where record stores were nonexistent and playing the high school dance was the peak of most musicians’ ambitions. The hair didn’t help. “He was a freak and no one liked him,” said Matt Lukin, one of the first like-minded kids Osborne met in Montesano, with whom he’d form one of the Northwest’s most influential heavy rock bands, the Melvins.
Osborne’s dad wanted him to sign up for the Army, but when Buzz fell sick he went to the local recruiter’s office and got a permanent excuse from service; instead, he got a job at the local Thriftway, where a disliked employee named Melvin became the inspiration for the name of his band. He met Lukin at Montesano High School, and their social circle would expand to include Osborne’s coworker Mike Dillard and a couple of kids named Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic. During this time, Osborne positioned himself as a relentless rock’n’roll evangelist, spreading the gospel of ’70s groups like Kiss and Cheap Trick and punk bands like Black Flag and MDC to his friends. He burned compilation tapes, made pilgrimages to the DJ’s Sound City record shop in nearby Aberdeen to talk music with clerk Tim Hayes, and even wrote an article for the Montesano Vidette arguing the value of small shows; years later, Novoselic would credit him with bringing punk rock to their community.
When Osborne formed the Melvins in 1983, with Lukin on bass and Dillard on drums, he found a new vehicle for his crusade—and a way out of Montesano, as the band started gradually playing gigs closer and closer to the nearest major city, Seattle. The Melvins played covers of Jimi Hendrix, the Who, and Osborne’s beloved Kiss, mixed in with fast hardcore punk. That changed in 1984, when Black Flag confounded their fellow punk rockers by concluding their album My War with three six-minute-plus tracks that pulled away from the breakneck speed of hardcore toward the wounded crawl of doom metal.
Black Flag were enjoying an absurdly productive year, releasing three albums (starting with My War) and playing roughly 170 shows. One of these shows was September 25, 1984 at the Mountaineers Hall in Seattle, with a hungry young band called Green River opening. Osbourne, Cobain, and Lukin all went, with Cobain selling his entire record collection to buy tickets. None of them emerged the same. Cobain started spiking his hair, spray-painting cars, and screaming to strengthen his vocal cords. As for Osbourne and Lukin: “The Melvins went from being the fastest band in Seattle to the slowest, almost overnight,” in the words of another Washington punk named Kim Thayil, who would form a band called Soundgarden that same year.
By this time, the Melvins had replaced Dillard with a drummer named Dale Crover, whose mother’s house in Aberdeen made for a makeshift practice space. The fledgling C/Z Records picked them up and put them on a 1986 compilation called Deep Six that was meant to highlight the new sound brewing in the Northwest, but after cutting 1986’s self-titled EP for C/Z and 1987’s Gluey Porch Treatments for Bay Area label Alchemy, Osborne and Crover moved to San Francisco. Lukin alleges that Osborne declined to formally fire him, telling him he’d broken up the band; it wasn’t until Lukin ran into Osborne in San Francisco that he learned the truth. (Lukin would go on to co-found Mudhoney, then retire from music to pursue carpentry.)
The Melvins’ early years in the city produced some of their best work: Ozma and Bullhead, with Lori Black (the daughter of Shirley Temple, of all people) on bass, and the mighty drone-metal ur-text Lysol, with Joe Preston holding down the low end on an early entry in one of underground metal’s most enviable resumés. Meanwhile their old buddies Cobain and Novoselic were building steam fast in Seattle, exalting the influence of the Melvins at nearly every turn. “You couldn’t buy better advertising,” said Osborne, and soon, major labels intent on snatching up as much of the Seattle sound as they could were looking to this manifestly, militantly bizarre band in hopes they might be the next Nirvana. The Melvins went with Atlantic and booked San Francisco’s Brilliant Studios to make their fifth album, 1993’s Houdini.
If the industry climate was ideal for a band like the Melvins finding an inkling of commercial success, the band’s personal circumstances were not. By the time they started working on Houdini, they’d fired Preston and taken Black back on, but she checked into rehab after being busted for heroin possession in Portland, and Osborne and Crover played bass on most of the album. Meanwhile, ostensible “producer” Cobain was deep into his own heroin addiction and consumed with the making of Nirvana’s In Utero, released on the same day as Houdini. Originally scheduled to workshop songs with Osborne before production, he flew into San Francisco on the first day of sessions and was asleep by 6 p.m. “I went to [Nirvana manager] Danny Goldberg’s office in L.A. and said, 'Look, Kurt Cobain’s strung out,’” Osborne said. “Kurt was really bad, as bad as he’s ever been.”
Houdini’s status as the best-selling Melvins album no doubt owes a lot to Cobain’s name on the sleeve. Yet its status as the most beloved Melvins album speaks to how well the band weathered these circumstances. Houdini isn’t a blown opportunity, nor does it sound like a stab at the charts. For the most part, it sounds like the album they might have made if they’d still been bouncing around Bay Area indie labels. The Melvins made a habit of working fast and loose, usually banging out albums in a few days. Osborne often made up the words to his songs on the spot, and the lyrics on Houdini are gloriously impenetrable. It’d be easy to totally dismiss them as phonetic gibberish if not for the presence of a lyric sheet in the liner notes. Say it with me now: “Los ticka toe rest!”
There could be an objectively correct interpretation of these songs somewhere in Osborne’s head, but he’s at no great pains to share it with the listener. If a song like “Night Goat” seems to be about sex, not every verse has to corroborate that interpretation, and if “Sky Pup” finds Osborne affecting the nasty nasal tone people use when they’re making fun of someone else, it’s more likely that that’s just how he decided to sing that day. Osborne’s approach to songcraft brings to mind Magma singer Klaus Blasquiz’s explanation of his outré French avant-rock band’s self-invented phonetic language: “The language has of course a content, but not word by word.” There’s a fearsome purity to these songs, free of context, existing only to be themselves.
With the vocals free from the obligation of meaning anything, the Melvins invite us to listen to what’s going on with the guitars and drums, particularly the latter. Dale Crover’s role is more architectural than anything else. “Hooch” begins with a Bonhamesque clatter that simmers down to a single kick drum before the voice and guitar enter; the two tom hits that punctuate Osborne’s first two lines feel as crucial to the song’s meaning as anything out of the singer’s mouth. The riff cycles between a few basic power chords; Crover is really the soloist. “If the drums were different, the song wouldn’t be as good,” Osborne admits. “It’s effective because of the dynamics of the way the drummer plays.”
The brilliance of “Night Goat” lies in the way the drumbeat never gets off the ground—it always seems to be stuck in dead space like the metal equivalent of a TV “breaking news” theme, anticipating nothing. There’s a bit on “Lizzy” where the riff is accompanied only by Crover’s woodblock, and those hollow thunks on the off beat somehow sound significant, even if you can’t place your finger on why. “Hag Me” is so slow that it feels beatless, almost ambient; it’s this album’s answer to Bullhead’s “Boris” and Lysol’s “Hung Bunny,” a glacier moving under its own weight. It’s no coincidence that Crover’s most straight-ahead rock beat comes on a holdover from the circa-1983 Mike Dillard days—nor can it be a coincidence that the song in question is called “Set Me Straight.”
If there’s anything everyone can agree on about the convoluted credits for Houdini, it’s that Cobain played on two songs: “Sky Pup” and the 10-minute closer, “Spread Eagle Beagle,” which consists entirely of percussion. “It’s cool, but I’ll never listen to the whole thing,” Osborne said of the latter, and it’s easy to understand why. This is no “Moby Dick” or “Toad.” Instead of building to a climax or playing rhythmic tricks on the listener, “Spread Eagle Beagle” clatters obstinately until the distances between the drum thwacks grow so long that it’s almost as if you’re listening to a parody of CD-era albums whose bonus tracks come after a long silence. Listeners are likely to ask “is it over yet?” for more reasons than one.
It speaks to the talent and work ethic of the Melvins that they were able to come out of the strange, sad circumstances of Houdini’s making with an album that feels like the logical next step in their career. But it’s also hard to shake the feeling that had the Melvins actually spent some time with Cobain or a more reliable producer working this thing out, they might’ve made a better record. Bullhead and Lysol are tighter, and the Melvins sound much more comfortable on their second Atlantic album—1994’s sensual, atmospheric Stoner Witch—whose ambient and noise experiments are far more purposeful and enjoyable.
Houdini feels both definitive and transitional. It’s definitive because “Hooch,” “Night Goat,” “Lizzy,” “Hag Me,” and the mid-tempo bruiser “Honey Bucket” rank among the band’s best songs, and because it shows them at the peak of their powers as a pure metal band while hinting at their budding experimental impulses. It’s transitional because it’s the last album they’d make before they’d let those impulses take over. “Spread Eagle Beagle” is more interesting as a prank than as a piece of music, and “Pearl Bomb” lives and dies by its curious stuck-typewriter percussion track, but they would predict the Melvins’ output for the subsequent decade, starting with their next album, 1994’s Prick, made in an adulterous coupling with Amphetamine Reptile while still on Atlantic—and home to such songs as “Pure Digital Silence,” which is exactly that.
By Stoner Witch, the deliberately prankish Atlantic swansong Stag, and their first post-Atlantic album, Honky, these left turns would be a crucial part of their sound. Their music since then has generally bounced between variations on their early heavy-rock sound and diversions both fascinating (the wintry, underloved Honky or the electrifying remix album Chicken Switch) and grating (their predilection towards jokey covers like “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” or, infamously, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”).
The Melvins are still active and prolific, even if their inability to hold down a bassist has become such a running joke that 2016’s Basses Loaded built its whole concept around juggling six current and former Melvins on low-end duties. As indelible as their impact on Northwest rock was, it seems like a small part of a career that’s placed them at the center of the Bay Area’s stable of art-metal oddballs, centered on their longtime home of Ipecac and its boss Mike Patton, and as pioneers of sludge metal, which is more true to the Melvins’ original Black Flag-meets-Black Sabbath vision than the music Nirvana would become famous for.
Given the Melvins’ refusal to compromise their sound and disgust for “rock stars” and institutions such as the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, it’s hard to imagine they’d be happier if they were a Seattle success story than in their present role as a hardworking cult band. Houdini ultimately sold 100,000 copies, and the band even cracked the Top 200 with The Bride Screamed Murder in 2010, but they have no hits to begrudgingly play for casual fans, no single towering underground classic hanging like an albatross. In a 2012 interview after taking the stage at the Loft in Atlanta, Osborne expanded on a philosophy that hasn’t changed since he exalted the values of tiny punk shows in the Montesano Vidette. “This is about as big as I like to go,” he said of the 650-capacity venue. “You can see from everywhere; you don’t feel like you’re in some airplane hangar. There’s a reason I liked punk rock to begin with. I haven’t forgotten that.” | 2022-09-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Atlantic | September 18, 2022 | 7.7 | 14f42656-4be7-47ae-8ced-586a71bb41de | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
The New York quintet diverges from its dance-punk roots, stirring in dashes of surf-pop, big beat, and classic rock on an album that explores the mysteries of the universe and the human psyche. | The New York quintet diverges from its dance-punk roots, stirring in dashes of surf-pop, big beat, and classic rock on an album that explores the mysteries of the universe and the human psyche. | Guerilla Toss: Twisted Crystal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/guerilla-toss-twisted-crystal/ | Twisted Crystal | Since their formation in 2010, Guerilla Toss have maintained an appealing mix of hyperactive exuberance and sonic innovation. From their dance-punk palette to their homages to LSD, the New York-based quintet’s outré energy seems to grow with each new project. Their uncanny and otherworldly instrumental concoctions complement their uncanny and otherworldly themes, whether they’re singing about a talking parrot or Jesus Christ. Twisted Crystal, their third DFA release, finds them traversing new compositional terrain in their exploration of yet another colorful abyss.
Diverging from their previous forays into punk and new wave, the album embraces sweeter melodies, stirring in dashes of surf-pop, big beat, and classic-rock showmanship. Despite this honeyed approach, things still get weird on Twisted Crystal. Occultists of sound, Guerilla Toss bend their instruments in strange, mysterious ways; guitarist Arian Shafiee employs Eastern tuning, while the album uses Eventide processing to add a coat of burnished reverb that recalls classic-rock monoliths like Led Zeppelin. Cowbell gallops in, guitar riffs zigzag in unexpected directions, and sci-fi spaceship sound effects light up the songs like burst glow sticks. As they’re exploring these novel sounds, Guerilla Toss saturate their songs with social commentary. The album captures the hysteria that comes with struggling to understand the world, and the universe, around us—tripping on blind faith, falling into potholes of ideology, and awakening oneself to paralyzing complacency in order to act against it.
Twisted Crystal feels post-human and extraterrestrial, a mystical attempt to connect with a higher power. Warped, gooey guitar lines and spiraling synth flutters hit like a sugar rush, most impressively on opener “Magic Is Easy.” The album’s production offers just the right amount of overstimulation, incorporating sounds seemingly imported from both dreams and nightmares as it emphasizes lyrics steeped in metaphysical inquiry. “Jesus, take me from this planet/You’re the leader and I’m your little rabbit,” frontwoman Kassie Carlson sings on “Jesus Rabbit.” It feels like a bizarre children’s song, as Carlson schemes her way off Earth, poking fun at humanity and the idea of divinity in the same breath.
On “Walls of the Universe,” skittering strings and a climactic synth crescendo conjure the infinite enormity of the cosmos. Carlson sings in a robotic voice about a journey across the universe with a talking bird, once again escaping the mundanity of earthly existence for adventure in another world—or, as she puts it, “crossing the line from boring to obscene.” Lead single “Meteorological” finds her plumbing the depths of human emotions, where moods can be as unpredictable as the weather. Led by a spunky bass riff and propulsive drums, she reflects on her inability to read other people’s reactions—and even her own—with total accuracy. Time and time again, Carlson launches inquiries, only to conclude that much of the human experience is impenetrable.
But when Guerilla Toss are confronted with the limits of their understanding, they take it as an invitation to expand their minds. On closing track “Green Apple,” Carlson turns her attention to the sights and sounds that surround her. Both senses awaken as she describes spirals of green-apple incense, while textural chaos erupts around her voice in the form of bandmate Peter Negroponte’s unrelenting drums and flute-like synths. Carlson leaves us with haunting questions, sowing doubt about the reliability of our own perceptions: “Did you really see?/Do you really think that?/What do you believe?”
On Twisted Crystal, Guerilla Toss journey to the edge of the universe and grapple with the mysteries of human existence. Such adventures can be panic inducing, but here they conquer anxiety through curiosity, finding excitement and even solace in abstruseness. | 2018-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | DFA | September 15, 2018 | 7.3 | 14f9cfcc-a865-43dc-a299-8eee66cd6317 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
The 20-year-old UK producer broke out on TikTok with snippet-sized songs that ache with nostalgia for the recent past. Her intimate, lived-in music succeeds where cheaper imitations fail. | The 20-year-old UK producer broke out on TikTok with snippet-sized songs that ache with nostalgia for the recent past. Her intimate, lived-in music succeeds where cheaper imitations fail. | PinkPantheress: to hell with it | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pinkpantheress-to-hell-with-it/ | to hell with it | Within the cultural whirlpool of TikTok, home movies of high schoolers from 2004 represent a strange utopia: “[Life] just seemed to be happier and easier back then,” reads a top comment on a popular video. Like many of her peers, the British producer and singer PinkPantheress projects a sense of wistfulness about the early aughts. “[M]usic was so unpolished and cool because I feel like people weren’t afraid of being a little bit cringe,” she told i-D. Since releasing her first song on TikTok in late 2020, she’s cultivated a sound that she calls “new nostalgic”; for the 20-year-old singer, that means websites designed to look like Myspace profiles and music videos uploaded with intentionally low resolution. On her debut mixtape, to hell with it, PinkPantheress sketches a Y2K fantasy that’s strongest when she uses the past as a guide, not a gimmick.
PinkPantheress is savvier and slicker than other young musicians who’ve cribbed aesthetics from the 2000s. Unlike newly minted viral stars like Jxdn or Addison Rae, PinkPantheress has put her songs at the forefront of her fame, obscuring her identity behind a moniker adopted from her TikTok username. It wasn’t until months after her first TikTok that viewers got more than a glimpse of her face; her real name remains almost impossible to find.
And then there’s the music itself, quicksilver slices of bubblegum breakbeats that blink to life and fade out in just over a minute. Her breakout song, “Pain,” sampled UK garage megahit “Flowers,” but slows it down to match her sleepy state of mind. Rather than try to overpower the sample with her lyrics, she fills the space with “la la las,” letting the simple two-note sample breathe, revealing the “lo-fi hip hop beat” inside the pulsing, dance-ready rhythm of the original. Her songs have a welcome, deceptive simplicity that’s missing from the cynical sheen of ultra-famous U.S. TikTok artists; she’s content to let a beat simmer, sing a few coy phrases, and leave before the concept grows tired.
But what sets PinkPantheress’ music firmly in the modern day is her voice, an ethereal, pixelated miasma that breaks from the earnest delivery of her British predecessors. Her pinched coos feel hyperreal, the edges of her syllables sharpened as if sung by a swooning voice-to-text machine. There are obvious comparisons to futuristic singers like Grimes and Poppy, but PinkPantheress’ strangely soothing vocals also recall the performative over-enunciation of “TikTok voice.” That intimate quality reflects the recording process for most of her early singles, which were tracked lying down in her college dorm room because she felt unable to sing standing up. The combination of retro samples and Clairo-esque bedroom pop delivery breaks the early-2000s spell: Sure, those songs were perhaps more “cringe,” but their vocals were overdubbed to the high heavens. PinkPantheress feels like she’s whispering in your ear.
While she’s clearly a passionate scholar of the early millennium, she also seems aware that this era of her career can only go so far. Most of her songs are maddeningly fleeting, as if a longer look would reveal cracks in the facade. But PinkPantheress is beginning to push beyond genre tropes; though to hell with it is essentially a collection of previously released singles, the tape’s new songs hint at broader palettes and bigger risks. Where earlier lyrics were almost all outward projections onto an anonymous crush, “Reason” and “Nineteen” reflect on her own life. The latter, with its crashing waves and drawn-out violins, is the closest the record gets to a ballad. “I wasn’t meant to be/This bored at 19,” she confesses, a grounding moment on an album saturated with post-party depression. It’s a slow and sensual track underscored by a low bassline, and unlike the rest, it builds without cutting to a breakbeat drop. It still doesn’t exceed the maximum allotted time for a TikTok, but it’s constructed for private sentimentality, not internet virality.
PinkPantheress succeeds where cheaper imitations fail because her reference points feel lived-in rather than opportunistic. She adds an undeniably contemporary spin on her trove of samples, imbuing them with the intimacy and immediacy that comes from a childhood spent on self-confessional platforms like Tumblr and TikTok. On to hell with it, PinkPantheress sculpts a digital-age paradise that exists only in an invented memory of the past, setting the stage for a career set more firmly in the present.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Parlophone | October 15, 2021 | 7.3 | 1500348f-2ca6-4494-be59-dd9d3d8cf9b6 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Veteran rapper/producer Black Milk teams up with D.C.-based live band Nat Turner for his latest release, a raw and unhindered affair that brings to mind organic hip-hop experimenters like Dilla and A Tribe Called Quest. | Veteran rapper/producer Black Milk teams up with D.C.-based live band Nat Turner for his latest release, a raw and unhindered affair that brings to mind organic hip-hop experimenters like Dilla and A Tribe Called Quest. | Black Milk / Nat Turner: The Rebellion Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21741-the-rebellion-sessions/ | The Rebellion Sessions | In 2013, almost two years before Kendrick Lamar released To Pimp a Butterfly, rapper/producer Black Milk trekked a similar path on No Poison No Paradise, a jazz/hip-hop hybrid partially about his upbringing in Detroit. Amid an otherwise dark soundtrack, songs like “Sonny Jr. (Dreams),” featuring keyboardist and Lamar collaborator Robert Glasper, and “Perfected on Puritan Ave.” best exemplified that fusion, the latter giving way to a raucous breakdown mid-song. The musical integration wasn’t as pronounced as Lamar’s, but it showcased Milk’s ability to merge genres without losing his signature sound. Across several recordings from the last decade, this artist has become known for his mix of hard drums and gripping samples as well as his masterful engineering, which makes everything refreshingly clear and crisp. In some cases, Milk’s instrumentals—steeped in funk, 1970s soul, and electronic dance—can outstrip his rhymes, which range from humble bragging to civic despair, leading some to debate his lyrical ability.
For The Rebellion Sessions, Milk links with Nat Turner, a largely D.C.-based band that has backed him up live. The project came together on a whim and was recorded in one week as something of a creative challenge. The results are mostly stripped down in a way that separates them from Milk’s usually heavy compositions. The genesis of Milk’s live sound dates back to 2010’s Album of the Year, a conceptually expansive project on which the rapper assessed personal strife over thick percussion. Only three instruments show up on Rebellion: drums by Zebulun Horton; bass by Malik Hunter; and keys by frequent Milk collaborator Aaron “Ab” Abernathy.
Milk plays conductor on this album, orchestrating the vibe of the tracks, setting Rebellion’s introspective mood. The record plays like four guys in a room, one riffing off the next in a relaxed environment. The music is decidedly modern, shaded by the influence of Miles Davis, J Dilla, and D’Angelo, floating by in quick sketches. On “The Ancient Rebellion,” for instance, the band mimics the volcanic opener of Davis’ “Bitches Brew,” its guitar and cymbals milling in the background, crashing in sporadic heaps. “Electric Spanking” deeply resembles Voodoo: Over a stomping funk jam a la “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” the vocal tone seems borrowed from D’Angelo himself. Songs like “Burn,” “Take 2,” and “The Knock” float by too quickly, leaving me to wonder what could’ve been if they played on a little while longer. Rebellion is somewhat transitional in that regard, yet it’s still anchored enough to last well beyond first listen.
There’s a strong rap strain throughout Rebellion that brings to mind A Tribe Called Quest and Guru’s Jazzmatazz recordings. It has a serene aura that continues the work Milk established on 2014’s If There’s a Hell Below, following the atmospheric “Hell Below” and “Story and Her,” especially. While those tracks were more structured, Rebellion is raw and unhindered, as if the quartet sculpted it in one take. It’s nuanced black music without borders, an extension of Milk’s vast sonic arc. | 2016-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Jazz | Computer Ugly | April 1, 2016 | 7.1 | 15081c75-4589-4982-98f1-a7b540b203d0 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
The avant-garde guitarist expands her compositions to fit her largest group ever, creating one of the most intricate and entrancing sets of her career. | The avant-garde guitarist expands her compositions to fit her largest group ever, creating one of the most intricate and entrancing sets of her career. | Mary Halvorson: Away With You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22347-away-with-you/ | Away With You | Mary Halvorson has been hailed for her technique ever since the debut of her trio. Recorded with bassist John Hébert and Xiu Xiu drummer Ches Smith, the guitarist’s first album as a bandleader referenced the power of noise-rock and the manic leaps of melody prized by her onetime teacher Anthony Braxton. Nearly a decade after that big splash, Halvorson still shreds with distinction, and that’s just one widely admired aspect of her art.
With each subsequent recording on the Firehouse 12 label, she has kept a recognizable language intact while refusing to repeat herself. First, she turned her core trio into a quintet, adding alto sax and trumpet. Then she built the band into a septet, incorporating trombone and tenor sax. As her lineups have increased in size, Halvorson’s sophistication as a composer has come into focus. After a solo-guitar covers project in 2015, she’s back to enlarging her compositional palette—this time with an octet that adds pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn to the roster.
This isn’t one of the instruments you’d typically expect to hear in a jazz group of any size, but its expressive range makes it a perfect fit for Halvorson’s quick-change compositional style. Alcorn’s pedal steel can suggest the warmth of country-western aesthetics, and also the droning sustain of ambient moods, often within the same tune. Opening track “Spirit Splitter (no. 54)” opens with a swaying line for the pedal steel on the surface. But underneath, the song teems with melodic activity. Ingrid Laubrock’s tenor saxophone navigates a tricky, ascending phrase, while other brass and reed players hit strutting, staccato passages. Amid the manic quality of the writing, there is still a relaxed vibe thanks to the players’ collective subtlety. The well-blended sound of this group can also be heard during the song’s spotlight features, as when trombonist Jacob Garchick improvises behind alto saxophonist Jon Irabagon’s incendiary solo.
On Away With You, performances veer from tightly scripted to more free-sounding sections, before heading back toward established themes. But these transitions rarely feel jagged. The title track begins with arpeggios from Halvorson’s guitar that gradually fade into the background once harmony lines for the other instruments take over. After a development section, Alcorn’s guitar emerges, referencing Halvorson’s original part. Then the two guitarists break the theme down again, collaborating on some intense, minimalist riffing.
Though Halvorson’s flintier attack is usually distinguished from Alcorn’s more rounded tone, here that’s not always the case. On “The Absolute Almost (no. 52),” Halvorson picks up a slide, occasionally emulating the sound of her pedal steel counterpart. Elsewhere, Alcorn uses an extended solo on “Fog Bank (no. 56)” to evoke experimental strumming effects that will sound familiar to Halvorson’s fans. The composer-bandleader doesn’t take as many solos this time around—she prefers to linger inside the sound of her octet. But when Halvorson does cut loose, as on “Safety Orange (no. 59),” she’s as inventive as ever.
Trumpeter Jonathon Finlayson sneaks up on the listener, moving from a mellow to a regal sound in the course of a few bars. And Ches Smith’s drumming is similarly adaptable—offering straight-ahead swing rhythms as well avant-garde marches and clattering explosions. There aren’t many fast tempos to be found on Away With You, though the album still has a live-wire feel, thanks to the density of the writing and the crispness of all those performances. The result is one of Halvorson’s most entrancing sets yet—and the first one in which ensemble interplay seems even more important than the various soloists’ individual fireworks. | 2016-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Firehouse 12 | November 9, 2016 | 8 | 1509ce2a-3ba0-46b1-9e2b-9166ecf79ae2 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The digicore scene’s two biggest rising stars aren’t yet distinct enough to complement each other in interesting ways. | The digicore scene’s two biggest rising stars aren’t yet distinct enough to complement each other in interesting ways. | glaive / ericdoa: then i’ll be happy EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/glaive-ericdoa-then-ill-be-happy-ep/ | then i’ll be happy EP | Ostensibly, Glaive and ericdoa recorded part of their new EP, then i’ll be happy, back in January at a sleek North Carolina Airbnb that fans quickly dubbed the Hyperpop Hype House. The final product makes that label feel like a misnomer. This music might soundtrack a hype house, but it rarely sounds like hyperpop. Instead, it’s frustratingly safe and directionless, the growing pains of two ascendant teenagers reconciling their digicore roots with new musical interests.
Over the last couple years, the digicore/hyperpop scene has come to understand Glaive and ericdoa as future stars. At their best, they blend genres with the fluency of international pop icons and the unhinged creativity of young, online artists, matching stadium-sized hooks about breakups to SoundCloud-native flows. In their beats, produced by a rotating cast including Whetan, glasear, and youngkimj, the guitars swing into EDM drops and the drum patterns switch up almost obsessively. Both signed to Interscope, Glaive and ericdoa currently sit somewhere between the online underground and the charts, poised for a real crossover.
After a few fleeting moments on loosies and posse cuts together, then i’ll be happy marks the duo’s first extended collaboration. While compelling as solo artists, Glaive and ericdoa aren’t yet distinct enough to complement each other in interesting ways. They both sing in a similar nasally shout and write in angsty aphorisms. Their chemistry occasionally comes to life, like when Glaive seamlessly passes the baton to ericdoa on the enveloping opener “naturale,” which charts how the pair are navigating life after a bit of fame. And the way they harmonize “men-tal! an-guish!” on the following song recalls the stronger moments on ericdoa’s 2020 album COA.
The bigger issue is that their individual artistic tics seem to be dissolving. Songs like Glaive’s “sick” and ericdoa’s “sheaskedwhatmylifeislike” became digicore canon not because they hopped genres, but because they sounded like SoundCloud rappers drawing outside the lines. then i’ll be happy resorts to blatant chameleonism: The middle stretch doles out three sterile, paint-by-numbers pop songs, the worst offender being “pretending,” which sounds like Big Time Rush karaoke. All their songs are short, but this one bizarrely fades out after barely a minute and a half, like they just didn’t care about it anymore. New fans might not sense anything wrong, but to digicore diehards, these songs suggest the grimmest possible artistic trajectory: a descent into the grey mush of bankrolled, “genreless” artists.
Fortunately, the EP closes with its two strongest songs, the singles “cloak n dagger” and “fuck this town.” On the former, Glaive hurtles through four-on-the-floor madness and gated drums as he barks one of the most spiteful hooks he’s ever written: “Fuck you! I hope you rot in hell/I know you never cared, but I’m still doing well.” “fuck this town,” meanwhile, slinks through darker, dancier rhythms, with a perfectly dejected chorus mixed so that it flashes like strobe lights over the drums. In these Glaive and ericdoa songs, you can hear a kernel of the scene that birthed them: off-the-cuff arrangements, confessional writing that could be read as rap or emo, thoughtful genre explorations that subvert norms instead of succumbing to them.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Listen to the Kids / Interscope | October 12, 2021 | 5.5 | 1511a2d9-b9df-4803-86a6-722a771ff0dd | Mano Sundaresan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mano-sundaresan/ | |
With easy hooks, surprise structural twists, and a gift for non-sequiturs, the Canadian quartet’s debut is a vivid portrait of the big-city struggle. Pavement’s influence is impossible to ignore. | With easy hooks, surprise structural twists, and a gift for non-sequiturs, the Canadian quartet’s debut is a vivid portrait of the big-city struggle. Pavement’s influence is impossible to ignore. | Kiwi Jr.: Football Money | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kiwi-jr-football-money/ | Football Money | In 2013, Jeremy Gaudet relocated from Canada’s smallest province, Prince Edward Island, to its biggest city, Toronto. And he soon became acquainted with the cruel irony of moving to a vibrant, bustling metropolis overflowing with cultural activity and opportunity—i.e., that you often need to find a soul-sucking, creativity-stunting desk job to survive there. (A librarian by trade, Gaudet has quipped that “I work in Excel.”) A natural big-city survival strategy is to carve out a small community that reminds you of home—which Gaudet did by starting a band with fellow Charlottetown expats Mike Walker (bass), Brohan Moore (drums), and Brian Murphy (guitar).
But their group, Kiwi Jr., has proven to be more than just an after-hours amusement. Nor is it fair to classify them as a side-project offshoot of Alvvays, the popular indie-pop group in which Murphy plays bass. Rather, Kiwi Jr.’s debut album, Football Money (released last year in Canada on Mint Records and now more widely available via Persona Non Grata) is a vivid portrait of acclimatizing oneself to a new hometown exponentially bigger than the one you’ve known—of being constantly bombarded by stimuli and aspirational messaging that leaves you feeling both exhilarated and exhausted. And while they may not be the only band singing about the struggle of trying to make rent in a place where “everything is out of my price range,” few do such an expedient job of making you laugh out loud while you’re dying on the inside.
The very name Kiwi Jr. may elicit a smirk from a certain type of indie-rock fan, one who views New Zealand’s Flying Nun label as the Narnia of the underground, and who appreciates the nod to J Mascis’ tactic of adding a paternal suffix to avoid cease-and-desist lawsuits from similarly named artists. And the name fits: After all, if you could combine Antipodean indie rock with Dinosaur Jr., you’d essentially get Pavement—a band whose influence on Football Money is impossible to ignore. Not only does Gaudet’s voice drawl and crack in unmistakable Malkmusian fashion, he possesses a similar gift for piling on non-sequiturs about sports, scene politics, and the privileged class that cohere into uncannily pointed social commentary.
Throughout Football Money, Gaudet spews a ceaseless stream of celebrity namedrops, historical figures, and local landmarks that includes, but is not limited to: the SS, James Dean, The Book of Daniel, beloved Toronto Chinese restaurant New Ho King, Ren and Stimpy, the Toronto Transit Commission, the Front de libération du Québec, the “Luke, I am your father” scene, Burt Bacharach, the IRA, Jesus, R.E.M.’s “Talk About the Passion,” Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones, and the Cy Young Award. But more than just show off Gaudet’s pop-cultural panache, they provide crucial color that make these tales of everyday woe feel lived-in.
On “Salary Man,” Gaudet frames the life of a rat-racing corporate suit as a sardonic superhero origin story, boasting of his perfectly Marie Kondo-ed lifestyle (“nothing says ‘home’ like a basket of folded white shirts”) and his formidable ability to make it to work on time after a night of binge-drinking. But beyond presenting a damning portrait of the typical finance bro, “Salary Man” leaves open the possibility that the most loathsome and handsomely paid office drones have become that way because they’re not able to do something more spiritually fulfilling. “I gaze through the window, there is still poetry there,” Gaudet’s streetcar-riding protagonist sings, dreaming of a life outside the financial-district skyscrapers. And when it comes to critiquing those who indulge in the spoils of unchecked capitalism, Gaudet hardly lets himself off the hook. Locomotive rave-up “Gimme More” is a cheeky indictment of instant-gratification addiction, with Gaudet reading out a shopping list of needs like a kidnapper negotiating ransom demands: “Gimme more Star Wars, gimme open barre chords, gimme more, gimme more, more, more!”
Gaudet has such a witty way with one-liners, and the band is so effervescent in their execution, that it’s easy to overlook the elevated level of craft at work. Football Money clocks in at a lean 10 songs and 27 minutes, with nary a second wasted. (Only the mid-album interstitial “Soft Water Apple”—a brief, dirgey recasting of what appear to be “Salary Man” lyrical outtakes—feels dispensable.) Songs like “Leslie” and the title track breeze by at such a brisk clip, and are loaded with so many easy hooks and surprise structural twists, you barely notice that they lack proper choruses. And while it’s tempting to align Kiwi Jr. with equally erudite and urgent contemporaries like Parquet Courts and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, winsome turns like the gleaming “Comeback Baby,” the glammy stomper “Wicked Witches,” and jaunty jangle-pop gallop “Swimming Pool” (in which Gaudet transposes his life story with the legend of Brian Jones’ death) ground the singer’s wandering wordplay in ’60s and ’70s pop fundamentals.
It’s a degree of craftsmanship that earns Kiwi Jr. the right to subtweet their less imaginative peers—or even themselves. On the frenetic “Nothing Ever Changes,” Gaudet sings: “This boy knows I hate his bands/Everyone looks like a lumberjack,” before adding, with an audible eye roll, “Guitars!/More guitars!” While Kiwi Jr. are too clean-shaven and tidily dressed to pass as lumberjacks, surely Gaudet—as the frontman of a guitar-centric band making Pavement-inspired indie rock in the year 2020—is aware that such a dismissal could easily be volleyed right back at him. That just speaks to the confidence flowing through every track on Football Money: It may be slanted at familiar angles, but the enchantment is their own. | 2020-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mint | January 21, 2020 | 7.7 | 151283dd-aab3-4916-a62f-763385cb2808 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The Nigerian-born artist collages highlife, Afrobeats, and electronics into his bravely experimental second EP. While the medley is audacious and impressive, it sometimes feels unfinished. | The Nigerian-born artist collages highlife, Afrobeats, and electronics into his bravely experimental second EP. While the medley is audacious and impressive, it sometimes feels unfinished. | Loshh: akọle EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loshh-akle-ep/ | akọle EP | When Loshh Aje released his debut EP Ífaradá last February, he was set on finding joy in unlikely places. Across seven tracks, which swayed between gospel, funk, and highlife, the Nigerian-born, London-based musician explored the possibilities of resistance against longstanding oppression. He addressed slavery and police brutality in England, contentious topics that were in the zeitgeist when he recorded the EP, all while exhorting the importance of celebration in the midst of struggle.
On his sophomore EP akọle, Loshh has shifted slightly away from political matters. He remains a person of deep thought and careful consideration, no matter how light or dense his thematic concerns are, but here, personal introspection takes precedence over social issues. On Ífaradá, he played the observer and participant, preacher and congregant. But akọle is a lengthy diary entry filled with the musician’s desires and most intimate moments of vulnerability. At all times, he, and not the corrupted world, sits in the middle of the conflict. On akọle, he is more focused on personal progress, making money, and the enemies preventing him from reaching his blessings. There are moments when he returns to gloomier days, examining how far he has come, and there are other times where he is simply thinking on his feet. Having shed the glum textures that marked his previous work, akọle is a profound (although sometimes hastily constructed) project, buoyed by unglamorous but steadfast soul-searching.
“a” begins with a gentle wail before unspooling into a skeletal beat, buffered by talking drums and uneven drum pads. This is a song of supplication: in the background, his mother, Funke, prays for him in Yoruba, while his guttural sing-talking resembles a Yoruba native priest in the middle of incantations. “All these weapons formed against me no/They shall not prosper,” he declares. Loshh’s writing remains as witty and ironically unserious as ever. He sings with the fervor of a prophetic Nigerian pastor in the peak of Sunday service, declaring the scripture as a personal manifesto, as convictions, as matters requiring immense urgency.
“k” is a more cohesive groove, featuring fellow London-based Nigerian musician Obongjayar. The Santiago Morales-produced track—which is also the most memorable number on the EP—pays homage to the gritty percussive foundation of “Konko Below,” the famous Afropop number by Lagabaja. The Afrobeats enigma rose to fame around the early 2000s for merging West African instruments, such as talking drums, with the saxophone. As was common for Afrobeats artists of that era, he also had a penchant for digging into sociocultural issues. On “k,” Loshh grapples with self-preservation. At times the lyrics feel slapdash and poorly improvised, taking unexpected turns, as though they were made up on the spot and left without further review. But several key changes manage to keep the track adequately centered. By its end, “k” overflows with undeniable honesty.
Loshh is difficult to categorize; his influences transcend the boundaries of genre and include hip-hop icons like André 3000 and Snoop Dogg, as well as highlife and Afrobeats maestros King Sunny Adé, Yinka Ayefele, Fela Kuti, Pasuma, Psquare, and Lagbaja. Though he draws on multiple sources, Loshh’s practice of combining these inspirations all at once can sometimes leave his songs at an embryonic stage—they never seem to reach a point of mature development.
Across akọle, it often feels as if buckets of paint were thrown on a blank canvas, leaving the art staring back difficult to make sense of. Even his brief return to the topic of police brutality in the Fela Kuti-esque “l” feels like an afterthought; it is brash and fevered in its delivery, but lacks the much-needed poetry that his songwriting can carry. Ultimately, akọle is the work of a prodigious talent carefully building his own sonic language—unpredictable, charged, bravely experimental—that only he can lay claim to. At his best, Loshh’s instinct for uncanny storytelling imbues his work with a bold and timeless quality. Sitting just a little longer to refine his ambitious but riotous experimentations would have served akọle well. | 2022-10-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Don’t Sleep | October 28, 2022 | 7 | 1512d153-7d43-4f60-81b4-004eb74495d2 | Nelson C.J. | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nelson-c.j./ | |
With their spectacular 2002 debut, Turn on the Bright Lights, Interpol set an immeasurably high mark to follow, and its popularity has ensured equally high stakes: If the band stumbles on this highly anticipated follow-up, their humiliation will be very public... | With their spectacular 2002 debut, Turn on the Bright Lights, Interpol set an immeasurably high mark to follow, and its popularity has ensured equally high stakes: If the band stumbles on this highly anticipated follow-up, their humiliation will be very public... | Interpol: Antics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4116-antics/ | Antics | It's hard to imagine what spurred the density and gloom of Turn on the Bright Lights, an album that, in retrospect, sounds like a popular band reacting to massive overexposure; its masterful statement of bruised withdrawal begged to divide a large fanbase, not create one. There was nothing about Interpol's self-contained, visionary debut that might have suggested their subsequent eyebrow-raising catapult to fame, particularly given their aversion to the traditional single format. Perhaps Paul Banks' lucid expression of discontent and impending dread spoke to an increasingly frustrated audience inundated by a generalized threat. Or maybe Interpol's popularity is simply a case of viscerally powerful music confounding formulas of public taste, breaking through purely on the basis of songwriting merit. Either way, Bright Lights set an immeasurably high mark to follow, and its popularity has ensured equally high stakes: If the band stumbles, their humiliation will be very public.
Fortunately, the members of Interpol understand what other bands take for granted: Careers aren't necessarily made or broken by second albums alone, and an ideal follow-up needn't engage the perceived potential of a defining debut or consciously redefine a pre-established sound in order to be effective. Redefinition, in particular, is a non-issue for Interpol, because one of the most enduring pleasures of their first album is its timeless singularity. Accordingly, it has been well understood that Antics wasn't going to be, nor could it be, Bright Lights 2. Bootleg versions of new material-- notably the live recordings of "Narc" and "Length of Love" that leaked last summer-- didn't suggest a radically altered aesthetic or faceless repetition, nor does Antics deliver either. Interpol avoid common sophomore pitfalls because they refuse to engage the immense weight that surrounds this release, and their tenuous position between shrewd self-consciousness and diversionary costume changing informs this album's openness and plasticity.
Antics exudes a preceding aura of heaviness-- even the packaging is heavy; the album's cryptic liner notes consist of little more than stark grayscale photos and epigrammatic Morse code spelling out bits of song titles ("Length", "Narc", "Cruise", "Exit", respectively). An image from the band's debut appears on the first single, "Slow Hands", and becomes a representative metaphor for the album as a whole: After reflecting on the aftermath of a soured relationship, Banks takes the "weights" described in Bright Lights' "Obstacle 1" from his "little heart" and projects them onto the woman who presumably put them there to begin with. Musically, however, the song is far removed from the layered density of Interpol's former material, exhibiting pristine, unmuddied production and a chorus ("We spies/ We slow hands/ You put the weights all around yourself") that slithers and stomps with post-punk dance-floor swagger. Similarly, Antics casts off the weight of advance hype, stewing anticipation, and unreasonable expectations, and wisely distinguises itself as a strong collection of singles rather than as an immaculately cohesive album. And, where Interpol were once synonymous with emotive desolation, they here opt for an atmosphere of poignant resignation.
Opener "Next Exit" is immediately jarring; a tranquilized doo-wop organ progression and spare percussion announce a very different band. It is explicitly clear that Interpol have changed, from the band's more casual tone ("We ain't going to the town/ We're going to the city/ Gonna track this shit around") to new mixing techniques: Carlos D's bass and Daniel Kessler's guitar are relatively hushed in the mix to make room for Banks' underscored vocals, allowing him a range of expression previously unexplored and buoying the band's newfound pop leanings with lyrical eloquence. His vocals on tracks like "Narc" soar where they were once buried in the impermeable fog of their surroundings, and many who found his delivery in the past to be occasionally monotonous (company that includes Banks himself) will find his melodic range here to be a welcome change of pace.
Although most songs evince a clear shift to singles territory, a natural progression of the band's sound is evident. "Evil" employs a Pixies-esque bassline and upbeat rhythm section to counterbalance its ambiguously bleak lyrical themes. The band demonstrates judicious restraint on "Narc", relegating a potentially overbearing blanket of synth strings and organ to a peripheral role while punching up Kessler's crisp guitar lines and Carlos D's almost imperceptibly fluid bass work. The syncopated funk bassline and disco-pop rhythm of "Length of Love" initially seem to be at odds with the song's lush orchestration, but these counter-intuitive touches add a dynamic element to the limited confines of the song's composition. The band hasn't lost its knack for exploration and epic construction, though; "Take You on a Cruise", "Not Even Jail", and "Public Pervert" steep the album's middle section in the kind of dark theatricality that distinguished their debut, while the expansive "A Time to Be So Small", with its deliberate pacing and depiction of "cadaverous mobs," concludes Antics with unsettling macabre.
Though Interpol couldn't be expected to surpass their previous heights, it's difficult to imagine a savvier or more satisfying second step. But the real revelation is that the band has wisely ignored a shortsighted perception of their career which dictates that where Bright Lights was an audacious plunge from a great height, Antics is the crucial landing. Even on those terms the band has succeeded. However, their liberation of form emphasizes the fact that, in the grand scheme of Interpol's career, this is only one in a series of great, if not Great, albums. Antics shows Interpol shedding the weight of their accumulated baggage and (hopefully) staying a while. | 2004-09-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-09-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | September 26, 2004 | 8.5 | 15133017-c009-4e52-8bf7-4c5315741aea | David Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-moore/ | null |
Book Burner is Pig Destroyer's fifth album, and despite a five-year gap since their last record and the addition of a new drummer, it's the work of a long-haul, tour-honed grindcore unit in frightening control of their caustic materials and even more caustic philosophy. | Book Burner is Pig Destroyer's fifth album, and despite a five-year gap since their last record and the addition of a new drummer, it's the work of a long-haul, tour-honed grindcore unit in frightening control of their caustic materials and even more caustic philosophy. | Pig Destroyer: Book Burner | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17255-book-burner/ | Book Burner | The new millennium has seen indie kids finally investigating metal as if it were part of their heritage, rather than as if they were facing down a hostile army doing unspeakable things behind enemy lines. Despite their relatively high profile with false-metal media outfits, though, grindcore titans Pig Destroyer have ferociously exempted themselves from any crossover discussion, all without doing much more than being themselves. The reasons why that kind of resoluteness would keep them outliers should be obvious if you know what "grindcore" means. If not, the first four tracks of Book Burner are a pretty good crash course: You shouldn't need more than four minutes to figure out if this band is for you.
During those four minutes, we get saturation-sprayed by the kind of rasping scream that will keep some future ear-nose-and-throat specialist in cushy golfing weekends. Frontman J.R. Hayes has one of the best and most convincing lunatic presences in metal. Even if he's a pussycat in his home life, when he's psycho-raving on record he turns into the guy on the subway you hope would move along to the next car. Presence is important for outsiders when dealing with a genre where some of the biggest stars "sing" like a troubled digestive tract. Pig Destroyer have loads of it thanks to Hayes, a desperation and rage they manage to communicate like actual desperate and angry humans, rather than relying on played-out metal scariness.
Now given those running times, the tempo on those four opening statements is obviously set at "insane," and only occasionally notched down to "mosh," with new, presumably non-cyborg, drummer Adam Jarvis doing stop-on-a-dime swerves and shifts that only programming should be able to pull off. It's Jarvis' first record with Pig Destroyer, and he wastes no time in introducing himself to the fold: The third track, "The Underground Man", which lasts all of 32 seconds, is just awesome, a senses-battering overload that manages to both swing and clobber. It's as if Jarvis, who also plays in the deathgrind band Misery Index, took about six hardcore songs he'd been tinkering with, all of them at different speeds, and then decided, hey, why not just slam them all together without once losing the groove. When it's over you feel like you just staggered off a broken tilt-a-whirl.
Maybe you should give it to track five though, because that's when guitarist and band mastermind Scott Hull unleashes the first of many sick-ass riffs that any lover of heavy guitar could understand, a woozy swamp-muck strut that could quite plausibly be called anthemic. Hull's own affinity for perverse grooves is another reason for Pig Destroyer's improbable sense of swing between the full-frontal assaults. Despite their commitment to total destruction, PD's guitar does offer a ton of familiar pleasures, little blurts of fierce thrash or low-down Southern boogie, with the few seconds of righteous evil that close out "Eve" being both typical and exemplary. It's just that we really are often talking literal seconds to grab onto. And though he clearly invested many childhood hours studying metal's unholy texts, Hull's just as interested in making sounds like a swarm of killer bees squeezed into your ear via a turkey baster. So yeah, this is still music with zero intention of meeting the non-extreme audience halfway.
Book Burner is Pig Destroyer's fifth album, and despite a five-year gap since their last record, the epochal Phantom Limb, and the addition of a new drummer, it's the work of a long-haul, tour-honed grindcore unit in frightening control of its caustic materials and even more caustic philosophy. Like a Hollywood stunt choreographer let loose on a demolition derby, Pig Destroyer attacks these minute-and-change bursts of chaos with dominating precision. Even when they ride out a groove, like riff-monster "Baltimore Strangler", it's more like breaking a bad horse than enjoying a friendly gallop. Plus, the title alone should let you know the kind of blasted emotional world we're inhabiting here. Think one of those max-out-the-credit-cards underground horror films made by and for obsessives: Book Burner is utterly ugly, thoroughly alienating stuff that doesn't give half a shit if you can stomach its musical and spiritual violence.
It's also one of the best rock albums of the year, though maybe it should come with a sticker that reads "abandon hope of rockin' good times, all ye who enter here." And Pig Destroyer even have qualities to please those who go to metal for its "avant" qualities as much as the abuse. If even the most room-clearing metal can get praised for its sonic adventurousness in our texture-obsessed times, for a grindcore band-- extreme metal often at its furthest-out extreme of rawness and ragged production-- Pig Destroyer have an incredibly rich sound. The addition of noise dude Blake Harrison for the last couple of records has given the music an extra horrible-blare layer of gnarled electronics. And despite the band's famed lack of bass guitar, the weight of Hull's typically low-end-intensive production job reattaches the heaviness to a genre where too often the pursuit of speed leaves everything tinny and weirdly weak.
The one thing that's hard to deny is that Book Burner's even less user-friendly than Phantom Limb, which wasn't exactly a freindly how-do. It's like PD decided to take the innovations of Limb-- the massive and unashamed riffage, the body-bruising weight-- and apply it to the chewed-and-chopped frenzy of their first few, more traditionally grind LPs. One thing for sure though is that PD continue to play with an invention and intensity that sucks the breath out of fans, a dedication to both grind's visceral appeal and shaping it into new forms that puts them leagues beyond most of their peers. It's that raging conviction, the totalizing whomp of their sound, one you can feel in your gut as much as hear, that makes them powerful, above and beyond however much their sense of rock groove and rock drama nudges their genre's self-imposed boundaries forward.
So PD put this crazed and hateful stuff together with as much smarts as any high-brow metal band, but also with an end-of-their-rope furty that's more Jake LaMotta punching prison walls than John Petrucci doing Rimsky-Korsakov-for-idiots. There's a queasy joy you feel in your lizard brain with heavy music played with PD's can't-be-faked physical force. Their aggression seeps into you like an unwanted, but eventually not-unpleasant sickness. Maybe that's not your bag. It's not a lot of people's bag. But if it is, Book Burner is seriously cathartic. However convoluted things get, you still wanna pump fist and bang head, even if you're not always sure when you should be doing so. | 2012-10-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-10-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | October 22, 2012 | 8 | 15141003-1db5-4fc2-9fdf-813f0fc6cf52 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
A fundraiser for Polish LGBTQIA+ organizations presents a bounty of progressive electronic music, compiling 10 hours of material from Rrose, Violet, Peder Mannerfelt, and more. | A fundraiser for Polish LGBTQIA+ organizations presents a bounty of progressive electronic music, compiling 10 hours of material from Rrose, Violet, Peder Mannerfelt, and more. | Various Artists: Total Solidarity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-total-solidarity/ | Total Solidarity | On July 27, a month after World Pride brought some five million queer revelers to the streets of New York City, the city of Bialystok, in northeast Poland, held its very first Pride march. It ended in a terrifying display of vitriol and violence, spearheaded in large part by the Catholic Church. Women and children and men held an armed “family picnic” near the march, according to reports in The Guardian, then proceeded to kick the shit out of their fellow citizens. In an irony almost unbearably ridiculous, the brutes wore shirts reading “Fags Out” and chanted the slogan to the melody of the Village People’s (via Pet Shop Boys) “Go West.”
Appropriating gay culture to terrorize queer communities feels very 2019. But so does Total Solidarity, a marathon release compiled by Oramics, who work in Poland and throughout Europe “to empower women, non-binary and queer people in the electronic scene,” and Vincent Koreman of the crucial Dutch experimental house label New York Haunted. Its 121 tracks, spanning more than 10 hours, present a state of the union for global electronic music, an alphabetical assortment of the major figures (Catz ‘n Dogz, Danny L Harle, Ekoplekz, Rrose, Varg2™) and dozens of artists who, by evidence of their exemplary contributions, shouldn’t be unknown for long.
Proceeds of Solidarity will go to grassroots LGBTQIA+ organizations throughout Poland, who surely need actual funding and not just the social-media currency of “awareness.” Good intentions don’t always make good albums; luckily, as a whole, Solidarity astonishes with its consistency of quality, if not genre, offering versions of virtually every kind of big room, side room, chillout area, bedroom, backroom, and interzone soundtrack.
How to approach such a bounty? Put it on shuffle while hosting a sign-painting party for the next demonstration? Listen while you work your desk job or shift at the food co-op or animal shelter? Feed it through Bluetooth speakers to drown out the Proud Boys stans across America? Many of the inclusions are dancefloor dreams come true: Violet takes two trends seemingly past their prime, broken-beat breaks and dubstep’s wobble, and fashions an irresistible charmer called “Self-Inspection” that couldn’t sound fresher. Kai van Dongen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” with its plush toms and pads, is exactly what you’d want to hear while doing just that, unless the minimalist sleaze of Dale Cornish’s “Raise Your Voice” or the hardcore/Cabaret Voltaire mixup “Accepted” by Graham Dunning get you off quicker. Others eschew beats altogether. Kamil Szuszkiewicz’s “Power Ballad” is a slow fanfare of what sound like clusters of horns, bursts of static, and held resonance. Peder Mannerfelt’s “A Drone Against Homophobia” is pretty and aptly titled. Best of all, Object Blue’s “Pure” is an ominous swoon that dissolves into a quick snatch of field recording, as if a dream becoming a nightmare reality.
Some artists look back, like Le Chocolate Noir, whose “Act” is woozy proof that trying to sound like Chris & Cosey is an excellent start; Mirt summons the goopy dub of Pole or vintage Orb for “Remake the Past,” which does in a lovely kind of way. Lee Gamble’s “89” is as catchy as anything he’s put out in ages, with a submerged electro beat, loosey-goosey bassline, and industrial accents that tease Depeche Mode’s wan plea for tolerance, “People Are People,” without kitsch. Drzewna’s “There’s a Man” and Baasch’s “Sneaker Fairytale” are perfectly queer New Wave gems. Others look ahead: “Geneva Drive” by drmcnt is house like a Zaha Hadid building, all slick and swoopy curves. Liar’s “Americana” builds a screaming diva epic out of screeching eagles and gunshots and should be the intro music for next year’s presidential debates.
In 21st century queer diasporic fashion, I listened to Total Solidarity almost entirely in one sitting, on a flight from Sao Paulo to New York, sunk into my chair beneath a couple Spanish Valium and four or five fingers of Kentucky bourbon. I was moving from a country with a new fascist dictator who, several people told me with a kind of shell-shocked quizzical sigh, hadn’t (yet) quite followed through on his promises to literally disappear Brazil’s queer communities. I was entering a country whose white supremacist president is gleefully installing institutions of terror against LGBTQIA+ Americans, particularly those who are trans and of color, that will last for generations to come. In my climate change-accelerating flying tube, I had a panic attack: I lucid dreamed about an installation I saw by the artist Vulcânica PokaRopa in which video testimonies of trans Brazilians played in a half-moon between blood-spattered floors and rabble-rousing banners and flying mannequins; I stood in the bathroom and let Felicita’s “oooh heavy” melt my brain. How you hear Total Solidarity, like how you hear “Go West,” depends on how free you really are. Meanwhile, since Bialystok, things have only gotten worse in Poland, with right-wing forces joining up with Catholics to establish “LGBT-free” zones throughout the country. These PR stunts proceed on the assumption that the existence of queer people is somehow optional. Fuck that. We are everywhere: Just listen. | 2019-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Oramics | August 24, 2019 | 8 | 151cf86f-df5f-4eb0-9278-e02f92072565 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
A decade into the East Nashville rapper’s latest incarnation, he delves into the dark corners of his mind on an album that’s dense, prickly, and full of jarring personal details. | A decade into the East Nashville rapper’s latest incarnation, he delves into the dark corners of his mind on an album that’s dense, prickly, and full of jarring personal details. | Starlito: At WAR With Myself Too | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/starlito-at-war-with-myself-too/ | At WAR With Myself Too | There’s a New York Times item from the winter of 2008: “Waiting (and Waiting) for a Big Rap Moment.” The subject, a then 23-year-old rapper from East Nashville, went by the name All $tar, and he was in a sort of purgatory. He’d landed a regional hit with “Grey Goose,” which popped up across different mixtapes in various different remixed versions, featuring combinations of other Southern stars like Yo Gotti, Lil Wayne, and Young Jeezy. He was signed to Cash Money. But his debut album, Street Ball, was nowhere to be found; in the piece, the rapper chalked up the idea that the record might be a hit to “wishful thinking.” He was recording and releasing sprawling, self-flagellating mixtapes at an impressive clip, but when it came to an above-board, bankable career as a rap star, he was waiting (and waiting).
Street Ball never came out. Before long, All $tar, born Jermaine Shute, retreated into the underground and into his own head. He renamed himself Starlito. In the decade since the Times story, he’s put out more than two dozen releases without ever reaching the commercial heights a marquee spot on mid-aughts Cash Money seemed to offer. But in his defense, he’s rarely even tried for that sort of fame: Shute’s music under the Starlito name is dense and prickly, and it leans far away from pop. His three collaborations with fellow Tennessean Don Trip—a Memphis native who was also briefly crushed by the major-label wringer—as the Step Brothers made him a critical darling.
Those Step Brothers records have grim crime tales and sober screeds about American racism, but they’re buoyed by the levity (and joy) that Lito and Trip evidently feel when rapping together. Lito can be a very funny, very sarcastic writer, but on his solo work—there’s tons, nearly all of it worth at least a cursory listen—he often burrows as deep as possible into the dark corners of his mind. His writing is tinged by paranoia—founded fears, like cars parked out front of his house for hours on end or sordid, unglamorous affairs coming to light. His latest album, At WAR With Myself Too, is similarly unsparing.
WAR is nominally the sequel to a mixtape from 2011 and it is, predictably, contemplative and punishing in mostly equal measure. But there are telling contrasts: Today, Lito leans deeper into his voice, which can turn low and guttural to the point of vocal fry when he’s at at his most exhausted. The strongest vocal performance here is on a song called “Crying in the Car,” where Lito raps, as deliberately as if he were on a therapist’s couch, about starting to play basketball again to block out the weapons that cloud his mind’s eye, about quitting prescription drugs, about the pick-up game allowing him to sweat the alcohol out of his system. Where some confessional rap reads as manic or leaves the listener feeling like a voyeur, Lito has a unique ability to drop jarring personal details in a way that seems to reassure and calm his audience.
Yet Lito’s greatest gift as a writer is not his ability to reveal himself through confession, but to condense everything—confession, threat, fear, sneer—into short, clear, stylish couplets. From the album’s closer, “You Don’t Know the Half”: “I was trapped out with my phone jumping, then I cashed out, told ’em ‘Don’t front me’/I was searching for an early exit, tryna back out ’cause I know they’re coming.” The way he raps the first bar, his nerves seem still. Then he confides that he declined the re-up because he could sense the walls closing in. It’s a shoulder shrug that does a ton of heavy narrative lifting. Like the rest of Starlito’s catalog, At WAR With Myself Too is the sound of a man reckoning with the world and with his own worst impulses—and breaking even at the very least. | 2018-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Grind Hard | August 4, 2018 | 7.7 | 152306ca-19b8-46e4-992d-09e13fdb10f0 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
The Brooklyn quartet's excellent new LP treats the last four decades of rock music like an amusement park rather than a museum. | The Brooklyn quartet's excellent new LP treats the last four decades of rock music like an amusement park rather than a museum. | The Men: Open Your Heart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16295-open-your-heart/ | Open Your Heart | "huh-HAAWWWACK." I don't know if I transcribed it properly, but Chris Hansell's revolting cough, which appeared midway through the Men's 2011 LP Leave Home, was pretty much everyone's favorite lyric from the record. Understandably so. While Leave Home was often ugly and brutal, it felt almost physically necessary, an allergic reaction to the repression of all things abrasive and loud amidst indie rock's digitized echo chamber. The music itself was bracing enough, but perhaps the biggest shock of all was hearing a Brooklyn band that didn’t carry themselves like they were primarily motivated by a desire to make friends.
But for fans of aggressive indie rock as described in Our Band Could Be Your Life, that's an easy image to project on the Men and, as the band told us in a Rising interview earlier this year, not necessarily a correct one. Now a steady four-piece, they're setting the record straight on Open Your Heart, the title of which is so plainspoken and commonplace it's easy to overlook just how much the band backs it up by maintaining every last bit of visceral power of Leave Home while letting in so many more people to the party. Open Your Heart is both tremendously physical and friendly, knocking you on your ass one second, then immediately helping you back up to put a beer in your hand.
And I can't stress the word "party" enough, because it's difficult to remember a rock record that managed to be this much fun without resorting to cheerleading. Most people I've played opener "Turn It Around" for have remarked on its resemblance to Foo Fighters' introductory salvo "This Is a Call". It's pretty on-point: Mark Perro's vocals sound remarkably similar to those of a young Dave Grohl on this particular song, but what's crucial is how they align in spirit. "Turn It Around" comes off like a tribute to the pure rejuvenating powers of rock'n'roll itself by going nuts with all the things that got you hooked the first time: breakneck Zep riffs! Duel-guitar leads! Drum solos! It's essentially a teenager's highlight reel, and the giddiness of Open Your Heart comes through in ostensibly meaningless slogans like "I wanna see you write a love song!/ I wanna see you go down!/ I wanna see you when you try so hard!/ I wanna see you when you turn it around!" Compare it to the only lyric of Leave Home's opener "If You Leave…": "I would die."
While there's a surface shift in attitude, Open Your Heart shares Leave Home's uncanny ability to balance reverence and irreverence, enthusiasm, and expertise, treating the last four decades of rock music like an amusement park rather than a museum. "Country Song" isn't even the one song on Open Your Heart deserving of that title (that would be "Candy"), but it shows how their minds work. A gummy tremolo riff, whining pedal steel, and an atypical waltz beat are the raw ingredients, but through the Men's artistic prism, it becomes something akin to a Southern bar band saying "fuck it" and letting their freak flag fly for a lengthy last-call jam. Likewise, is the title of "Presence" an indication that they're trying out the sort of loose, blues-prog of that particular Led Zeppelin album? With its patient, patient build and tamboura-ish drone, maybe it is, but like most of Open Your Heart, the referential recognition is a bonus rather than the end result.
Of course, the question with Open Your Heart is how it can manage to be such a thrill despite conceivably doing nothing actually new. Not to demystify what the Men do here or downplay the artistry, but these guys strike me as fixers and problem solvers. I hear a band analyzing modes that have just become tired and stodgy and delivering them back running smoother than ever. Liked the coed ragers from the last Fucked Up album, but wish it wasn’t neutered by thousands of overdubs? Have a blast with the all-id caterwaul of "Animal". Wish krautrock ditched the metronomic straitjacket and actually rocked? There’s "Oscillation", which hums more like a motorbike than a motorik, punctuated with blasts of pure MC5 ruckus. Want *Isn't Anything-*styled shoegaze with a backbone? An SST throwback without the razor-thin production? Alt-country without having to deal with Deer Tick's obnoxiousness? Enjoy the midrecord trifecta of "Please Don’t Go Away", the title track, and "Candy".
It isn't diversity for diversity's sake, though-- Open Your Heart is smartly sequenced to metabolize genre and morph like a masterful DJ mix, subtly rationing out its true peaks even while seemingly going full-throttle throughout. After the 1-2 headbutt of "Turn It Around" and "Animal", "Country Song" provides a momentary breather and also a swooning leadup to the Men at their most gorgeous and overwhelming, the tail end of which has "Please Don't Go Away" ushering in Open Your Heart's most traditionalist stretch. But just when it feels like Side B is going to be the Men's straight-up indie rock record, they burn that bridge with the willfully destructive two and a half minutes of "Cube", which then builds another one towards the LP's bright and expansive closers. And while "Ex-Dreams" doesn't overtly sound like a curtain call, there are two points during Open Your Heart's finale where everything drops out but a steady, crowd-pleasing drum break and you can all but imagine Perro happily lending the listener a chance to give themselves a round of applause for being such a good audience.
We haven't talked much about what the Men actually say on Open Your Heart-- about half of its 10 songs are instrumentals or something close. To get to its lyrical center, you'll have to go through "Candy", the one I imagine many might consider the dud or at least the outlier on account of foregrounding acoustic guitars. On the toast-worthy chorus, Perro sings "When I hear the radio play/ I don't care that it's not me." Around the same time I stared hearing "Candy", many of my colleagues were pushing "Radio" as the true standout on Lana Del Rey's Born to Die, a song that uses hearing oneself on the airwaves as a means of self-validation and smiting one's enemies. That sort of thing can only help "Candy" to be misread as being another in a long line of "Left of the Dial"-type, anti-mainstream indie rock lectures-- that its drunk-country shamble recalls the Replacements doesn't hurt either.
But when you consider the lyrics that come immediately after-- "Remember the days I'd shout anything for you to see me/ I could never sing now my voice it rings.../ I just quit my job/ now I can stay out all night long"-- it's clear that like most of Open Your Heart, it's not at all angry and, in fact, quite content. All four members of the Men are at the border of 30, an age where you have enough critical distance from your youth and life experience to really start to figure out what success means to you. If I read "Candy" correctly, it's about being able to make a living off this thing while being a very loud band with no radio prospects whatsoever on a boutique label: the rewards seem modest by most standards, but once achieved it means everything, the sort of self-sufficiency that's inspired indie bands to form since forever.
Before Leave Home became their first widely available LP, the Men's recorded output consisted mostly of self-made cassettes that they recently gave away for free through their website. They had to play a little rough if they wanted to be heard. A year later, Open Your Heart is the sort of record that proves while pain and loss are often viewed as great art's true catalysts, bands like the Men can be inspired by the sort of confidence born of the bills being paid and the boss no longer breathing down their necks. And they're passing on the goodwill to everyone who made it possible: if you bought their t-shirt, came to their show, raved about Leave Home on your Tumblr, or seek to carry on tradition by starting your own band, Open Your Heart is the Men thanking you in the best way possible. | 2012-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | March 5, 2012 | 8.5 | 15246b5a-c682-4370-a07c-e311977b3f84 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On Shy Layers’ second album, his chill-but-adventurous aesthetic snaps into clearer focus. Highlife, funk, Ethio-jazz, and more all swirl together in every measure of music. | On Shy Layers’ second album, his chill-but-adventurous aesthetic snaps into clearer focus. Highlife, funk, Ethio-jazz, and more all swirl together in every measure of music. | Shy Layers: Midnight Marker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shy-layers-midnight-marker/ | Midnight Marker | JD Walsh’s debut album as Shy Layers, two years ago, came laced with déjà vu. He was hardly shy about his influences: There were hints of Arthur Russell in the vocals, African highlife in the guitars, and Kraftwerk in the sweetly cooing vocoders, but, more than any specific reference, you were left with a sense of familiarity that was hard to place. His balmy yacht-pop sounded like the soundtrack to a half-remembered childhood vacation, maybe, or an AM radio humming in the background of a dream. On first listen, you felt like you already knew it, intimately; you just didn’t know why.
Shy Layers’ new album, Midnight Marker, shares many of its predecessor’s qualities: Between its unique blend of analog synths, rippling guitar melodies, and acoustic drum kit, there’s no mistaking it for the work of anyone else. But it also feels less indebted to its inspirations, like Walsh is getting out from under the shadow of his influences and shaking off the déjà vu. Across all ten tracks, Walsh’s aesthetic snaps into clearer focus—even though it’s an aesthetic heavily predicated upon ambiguity.
As before, Midnight Marker’s breezy melodies and lilting grooves make for a nice, chill listen—good morning-coffee music, cooking music, countryside-drive music. But this is nothing like the studied, stoned remove of anything you’ll find filed under “#chill” on any streaming service. His synths have real bite. His drums, recorded with real sticks on real skins, are enviably muscled. Walsh has said that one of his takeaways from both highlife and funk was that the guitar could function primarily as a percussive instrument, and he continues down that path here, backing up more melodically outgoing riffs and runs with plucked pulse and flicker.
His rhythmic sensibility has gotten more adventurous, too, with slow/fast beats fracturing heavy downstrokes into wiggly explosions of movement. The andante bounce of “Tomorrow” works like a springboard, sending Ethio-jazz keyboard runs somersaulting through the air. In “Gateway,” a quickening-and-slowing tremolo gives a synth lead an elastic quality, as though the music’s innards were being pulled like taffy. “The Keeper” uses its half-speed beat to spin a kaleidoscopic array of finely detailed sounds: fidgety bassline, vocoder, chiming keyboards, and what sound like three or four or maybe even five discrete guitar patterns, including one treated to sound like steel drums. In virtually every measure of music on the album, there is more going on than you can actively focus on. Yet at the same time, there’s an overriding sense of simplicity baked into its playfully wistful melodies and harmonies. In that contradiction between complexity and directness lies much of the music’s subtle magic.
Most of Shy Layers’ music remains primarily instrumental, but he does try out new vocal techniques here. On his debut, he took the unusual step of hiring a guest singer off Craigslist; this time, he says, he invited vocalists whose voices he admired, but who he didn’t know personally, and their contributions—Luther Vandross-like bellowing, airy harmonies, even the occasional country tinge—help extend the music’s expressive reach. Throughout, Walsh’s own voice swims through vocoder and talk box, the omnipresent processing even more intricate than before. But the vocals are rarely the focal point; they’re as swirled as his contrapuntal guitar and synth lines.
It was often difficult to tell if Shy Layers’ debut was the work of a full band or a single musician, and the new one muddies the water even further. Midnight Marker inherits the grand tradition of lone weirdos making humble bedroom pop from the materials at hand. Yet, for a solo project, it also feels unusually ego-free, as though all his inspirations had swirled together in a kind of imagined utopia. It’s a singular vision that contains multitudes. | 2018-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Beats in Space | May 29, 2018 | 7.9 | 152e053a-43fc-4fb6-8144-07b172b23124 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
After several albums of traditional, jazzy folk-rock, the Chicago-based singer-songwriter finds a more instinctive voice. | After several albums of traditional, jazzy folk-rock, the Chicago-based singer-songwriter finds a more instinctive voice. | Ryley Walker: Deafman Glance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ryley-walker-deafman-glance/ | Deafman Glance | Deafman Glance is road-trip music for a car that keeps breaking down. Taking its name from the title of experimental theater artist Robert Wilson’s 1970 play set in a cryptic, menacing world with no sound, the latest album by Chicago-based singer-songwriter Ryley Walker repeatedly collapses into silence only to pull itself back together again, injured but emboldened. Up until now, the 28-year-old guitarist’s work was some of the most traditional and reverential to be released by his generation of forward-thinking Americana acts; his jazzy take on folk-rock felt like a fogged-up tribute to heroes like John Martyn and Bert Jansch. On his new record, he distances himself from those influences and finds a more instinctive voice.
Walker’s lyrics previously served as a mere complement to his winding, pastoral fingerpicking, but now he writes closer to home, describing the familiar landscapes of Chicago and the self-destructive monotony of life on the road. His music is heavier and more complex than it used to be, the arrangements harsher and stranger. And then there’s his singing: Once a competent and breezy instrument, Walker’s voice has evolved into a throaty speak-sing that sounds depleted, as though it’s been scooped out of itself. These shifts give the record a deeper emotional resonance than anything else he’s put his name to. “I’m not flipping through record bins anymore,” he recently declared. “I’m just making Ryley Walker records.”
As so often happens when we leave our trusted guides, things quickly fall apart. After gentle, hallucinogenic opener “In Castle Dome” and the dusky fusion of “22 Days,” the scenery collapses, the sky darkens, and shit gets weird. “Accomodations” is Walker’s most discomforting composition—a cacophony of bad-trip ambience and loopy imagery (“Nothing to eat/Only a pound of flesh”) that echo between caustic refrains. Placed so early on the album, it’s a sign that Walker trusts his audience to follow him into unfamiliar territory.
This adventurous spirit makes Deafman Glance a coherent mood piece and a confident expansion on 2016’s Golden Sings That Have Been Sung. The multi-part “Telluride Speed” is immediately striking, with Chicago jazz fixture Nate Lepine’s flute guiding the song through its dreamy verses, proggy breakdowns, and stomping, psychedelic coda. It’s not the first of Walker’s compositions to resemble a long stretch of quiet road, but it’s the first that takes you somewhere distinctly surprising. This is a trick the album pulls off repeatedly, without losing its thrill. “My word is divine/I control the weather,” Walker once sang, with a hint of self-deprecation. Deafman Glance marks the moment when his work actually has the power to alter the atmosphere around it.
The force driving these songs—from the exquisite slow burn of “Expired” to the instrumental guitar ramble “Rocks on Rainbow”—is an embrace of the unexpected. Melodies and grooves expand in a way that was previously limited to Walker’s famously experimental live shows. The passages that stand out, like the warped soft-rock guitar solo in “Opposite Middle” and the skittering climax of “22 Days,” have the ephemeral quality of improvisation. These moments add up to an album that feels equally thoughtful and spontaneous, restrained and unpredictable.
“Spoil With the Rest” closes Deafman Glance by pairing Walker’s tale of confronting his limitations with a triumphant swirl of guitars. “I woke up with intuition,” he affirms softly, his voice nearly overpowered by the music. It’s not a straightforwardly happy ending, but it sends a hopeful message: Dig through the crates for long enough and you might discover yourself. | 2018-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Dead Oceans | May 22, 2018 | 7.9 | 152eece5-4925-4f73-9fda-2c1daaa58a38 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
On his first ever collection of original solo songs—a companion piece to his recent memoir—the Wilco leader uncovers himself like never before. | On his first ever collection of original solo songs—a companion piece to his recent memoir—the Wilco leader uncovers himself like never before. | Jeff Tweedy: WARM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-tweedy-warm/ | WARM | Near the beginning of WARM, Jeff Tweedy sings, “What I’ve been through should matter to you.” Coming from the tenderest reaches of his soft, broken tenor, the line is raised more like a question than a command. But he has a point. While Tweedy’s songbook in Wilco and Uncle Tupelo has obliquely touched on his personal life, his music often feels more like an outstretched arm, a box of tissues slid across the table, a series of words spoken with the implicit follow-up question, “And how does that make you feel?” Scan Wilco’s audience during the opening notes of any song, and you’ll see the response: tears, hugs, the saddest fist-pumps in rock music. It’s a relationship that Tweedy himself observed a decade back when he promised, “Sonic shoulder for you to cry on/Wilco will love you, baby,” in a song called “Wilco (The Song).”
Now the 51-year-old has finally opened up, and it’s not just a confession—it’s an avalanche. His new book, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), is one of the most engaging rock memoirs in recent years because it dispenses with the assumed responsibility of a quiet, beloved figure like Tweedy. In contrast with his koans of empathy in Wilco, he writes about his family, fatherhood, addiction, and creative process in charmingly unfiltered prose. A companion to the book, WARM radiates with similar openness. Characters and quotes reappear; old influences become newly apparent; words are not minced. A scene from his time in rehab during the early 2000s is retold in the bleary opener “Bombs Above.” “Suffering is the same for everyone,” he sings in a whisper, relaying the advice that once gave him permission to address his own struggles guilt-free. Much of the album follows suit: a moral guidebook from a songwriter who sings with such compassion that even his simplest advice (“Don’t forget to brush your teeth”) can make your eyes well up.
After hearing Tweedy trade riffs and sprawl out with full bands for so long, WARM’s solo setting feels fresh. This is his most threadbare collection of music. Songs drone on as long as he wants or stop abruptly once he runs out of words. This spontaneity allows Tweedy’s wisdom to feel both casual and all-encompassing: worn-in proverbs that just occurred to him, as he elaborates and pokes holes in his own fatalist tendencies. Textured with acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and brush-stroked drums from his son Spencer and Wilco percussionist Glenn Kotche, WARM follows a legacy of reflective, autumnal works like Neil Young’s Harvest Moon. This is music that, in and of itself, feels autobiographical, touching on sounds and themes that have always characterized his work without sounding like a retread.
In the most harrowing section of his memoir, Tweedy writes that Wilco’s impressionistic 2004 album A Ghost Is Born was sculpted during the throes of opiate addiction as an attempt to leave a comprehensive self-portrait for his sons in his absence. Written from a more stable perspective, WARM mirrors that eulogistic process with a more straightforward, less metaphorical bent. “Sometimes we all think about dying,” he sighs in “Don’t Forget.” “Don’t let it kill ya.”
Tweedy thinks about dying a lot on WARM. The recent death of his own father casts a cloud over the record, stopping the clock as he looks at an old photograph during the sparse, slow-pulsing “How Hard It Is for a Desert to Die.” For every stark expression of grief, there’s a search for hope, embracing the inevitability of losing the things that come to define us. “If I die,” he instructs in “From Far Away,” “Don’t bury me/Rattle me down like an old machine.” He treats these songs similarly, like weary vehicles for moving on. In “Let’s Go Rain,” he forecasts the apocalypse as a karmic “act of love,” while the title track defines the afterlife as something that glows within the people we leave behind. None of these ideas are new. It’s his acceptance, his understanding, that feels pivotal.
The album’s most revealing moment is also one of Tweedy’s best songs to date. “Having Been Is No Way to Be” is a statement of self-affirmation that not many songwriters live to make, addressing how Tweedy’s sobriety affected some of Wilco’s fair-weather followers. “Now people say,” he sings to a slow, sturdy beat, “‘What drugs did you take?/And why don’t you start taking them again?’” He’s referring to the oft-discussed shift in Wilco’s music during the mid-2000s, when they stopped aiming to be the decade’s most adventurous American rock band and starting sounding, well, a little more like the Eagles. Here, Tweedy draws a line in the sand. “They’re not my friends,” he continues, “And if I was dead, what difference would it ever make to them?” Alive and inspired, WARM is a different type of reinvention—as daring as Wilco’s early landmarks but more subtle and sustainable. He’s not trying to break your heart. He just is. | 2018-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | dBpm | December 3, 2018 | 8.3 | 1534c864-5b72-4c79-b19c-2c583820b51e | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The deluxe reissue of Ryan Adams' most beloved solo album highlights that what we loved most about this album isn't misery; it is nostalgia, and fondness for an earlier version of ourselves. | The deluxe reissue of Ryan Adams' most beloved solo album highlights that what we loved most about this album isn't misery; it is nostalgia, and fondness for an earlier version of ourselves. | Ryan Adams: Heartbreaker (Deluxe Reissue) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21901-heartbreaker-deluxe-reissue/ | Heartbreaker (Deluxe Reissue) | Remember when Ryan Adams released Heartbreaker* *and confused diehards wondered what happened to the *real Ryan Adams? You know, the lovable fuck-up who made alt-country sound dangerous, *lived the words of "Waiting to Derail" and needed no assistance breaking his own heart? If this scenario sounds too remote, just sub out *Heartbreaker *for “basically *anything *Ryan Adams has done in the 21st century.” Of course, none of those things have achieved the sterling reputation of *Heartbreaker, which makes the album seem like the least interesting choice for a reissue: *aren’t *Rock N Roll and 29 *better conversation-starters? But maybe Adams isn't expecting another round of exaltations with this deluxe repackage: In fact, bundling it with a bunch of wearable merch (i.e., "exclusive 3-inch Heartbreaker patch") might be more a sly commentary on its supposed “authenticity”—even it still towers over Adams’ solo work, it’s no more *real *than 1989**.
The myth of *Heartbreaker *as the realest breakup album ever starts to fall apart the minute you press play: it is certainly the saddest record to contain the line, “a mouth full of cookies,” however. “(Argument with David Rawlings Concerning Morrissey)” presents Ryan Adams as what he’s repeatedly proven to be in the years since—a hilarious trivia nerd and musical advocate. It’s an important part of what makes Ryan Adams Ryan Adams, and the source from which we were given *1984, *the Extra Cheese EP, his long-rumored banjo and mandolin cover of *Is This It?, *and his prog-metal odyssey *Orion. *However, it’s the first and maybe last time he could be that guy without feeling like he was *trying *to make a point. Back then, there was no construct of Ryan Adams, and this presumably *in media res *debate snippet was an effective way for him to establish an identity on his solo debut.
More importantly, it’s an argument concerning Morrissey—not Gram Parsons, not Bob Dylan, not Paul Westerberg. The influence of the Smiths would fully manifest on Adams’ Love Is Hell, and the inclusion of a “Hairdresser on Fire Jam” demo in the bonus material here suggests that maybe his maligned bedsit opus has more in common with *Heartbreaker *than we think. Either way, it’s an important artistic allegiance, linking Adams and Morrissey as the rare artists who can recognize the inherent absurdity in exchanging performative sadness for adoration.
After all, a truly inconsolable song couldn’t possibly be given a title like “To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High).” On it, Adams appears more wise and empathetic than young and sad; note that it’s sung in the past tense. Like so much of *Heartbreaker, *its focus isn’t misery, but nostalgia—its inclusion during the opening credits of Old School, a comedy suffused with longing for a simple forms of self-destructive behavior, made its flexibility all the more apparent. It’s a song that Adams plays at nearly every one of his shows, not to commiserate with the crowd, but to celebrate a past time when its linear logic made all the sense in the world. Think of it as Adams’ “Rubber Ring,” an open invitation to fondly remember that time when you relied on a fucked-up guy like him to save your life.
The introduction is an outlier, though—would Heartbreaker be held in the same regard if it was just wistful folk-rock like “My Winding Wheel?” Even though “AMY” outright names the supposed inspiration behind *Heartbreaker *and is the most striking stylistic divergence from Whiskeytown (prior to the experimental Pneumonia), an album of weeping, floral psychedelia might have been too much, too soon. Though Adams claims that the titling of *Heartbreaker *was a last-second decision made while staring at a Mariah Carey poster, *Heartbreaker is Heartbreaker *for the times it allows the listener sees themselves in its own album cover—prostrate, staring at the ceiling, half-hoping that cigarette drops onto their bed so they can feel something different.
Despair alone never accounted for *Heartbreaker’*s unusual resonance. It isn’t the most dire or confessional account of bad romance; its language is not the most clever. There are all kinds of odd tangents, character is frequently broken, and it’s probably a few songs longer than it really needs to be. *Heartbreaker *isn’t a tidy narrative or song cycle about relationships anyways; otherwise, how to explain the inclusion of the barroom brawl “Shakedown on 9th Street” or the Dylan goof “Damn Sam (I Love a Woman That Rains)?” Even “In My Time of Need” isn’t actually about *Ryan Adams’ *time of need and certainly inapplicable to a broken relationship between an up-and-coming rock star and a music publicist; it’s pretty much a Whiskeytown-style character study about rural financial distress (“I work these hands to bleed, cause I got mouths to feed/and I got $15 hid above the stove”).
No, the power of this album, and the reason it reminds its devotees too much of him, or her, or a past version of themselves, can be found in “Come Pick Me Up.” “Come Pick Me Up” is the that ends most of Adams' concerts these days and probably will for the rest of his career. On a basic level, it could slot alongside petulant, scorned-dude screeds like “Song for the Dumped” or Kanye West’s “Heartless;” it is about a woman who seemingly fucked him over. But the most important lyric isn’t the one about this is the kind of person who would steal your records and screw your friends without the slightest remorse. It’s “*I wish you would”—*the point of “Come Pick Me Up” is not to marvel at this person’s monstrosity and project it outwards. It’s to see yourself in Ryan Adams and remember every single time you’ve allowed yourself to get fucked over and even worse, sought it out.
In every repetition of “I wish you would,” Adams underlines not just the appeal of Heartbreaker, but most breakup albums in general. On some level, they make no evolutionary sense: life is hard enough, why would anyone be drawn to music that lets you relive your most miserable moments? Yeah, there’s jokes and asides and times where Heartbreaker rocks, but those defense mechanisms malfunction on “Call Me on Your Way Back Home” when Adams sings, “oh, I just wanna die without you” and it sure as hell sounds like the truth.
Maybe you wanna die. But you didn’t. And that’s OK. Like Morrissey, or really any singer-songwriter worth hearing on the topic, Adams doesn’t see the occasional heartbreak as a terminal fate, but an essential part of the human condition. In closing one of his performances captured on 2015’s Live at Carnegie Hall**, Adams yells, "THAT’S IT! YOU’RE SAD NOW!!! NOW YOU’RE SAD!!! EVERYBODY’S SAD NOW! YEAAAAHHH!!!!" Everyone gets the joke. “Come Pick Me Up” isn’t miserable; like Heartbreaker, it’s actually enjoyable knowing you can hit bottom for 50 minutes and still appreciate the view. | 2016-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Pax-Am | May 14, 2016 | 9 | 1536a867-48a1-4faf-910e-9aa4aa827279 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Bruce Springsteen's work this decade first played up to listeners' notions of post-9/11 recovery, then conjured up bleak visions of Bush-era America; here the Boss settles into some sense of contentment on Working on a Dream, as if that Dream had already been achieved. | Bruce Springsteen's work this decade first played up to listeners' notions of post-9/11 recovery, then conjured up bleak visions of Bush-era America; here the Boss settles into some sense of contentment on Working on a Dream, as if that Dream had already been achieved. | Bruce Springsteen: Working on a Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12614-working-on-a-dream/ | Working on a Dream | Working on a Streak is more like it. First, there's that Golden Globe for "The Wrestler", then a performance at the We Are One concert at the Lincoln Memorial, a handful of Grammy noms for a two-year-old song, a greatest-hits package exclusive from Wal-Mart, this weekend's Super Bowl halftime show, and a just-announced reissue of Darkness on the Edge of Town. So that Oscar snub can't sting too much. In the middle of a pretty amazing month, Bruce Springsteen is releasing his 16th studio album, one whose title sounds more like a campaign slogan than a rock record. Maybe that's intentional: After spending much of this decade playing up to listeners' notions of post-9/11 recovery and conjuring up bleak visions of Bush-era America, the Boss settles into some sense of contentment on Working on a Dream, as if that Dream had already been achieved. In this regard, the album sounds like the final installment of a trilogy he began with The Rising in 2002 and continued with Magic in 2007-- ignoring Devils & Dust, which isn't hard to do, and We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, which remains his best and most freewheelin' late-career album.
Tracing his personal-- and, arguably, our national-- mood from wounded to outraged to somewhat contented, these albums are linked by Springsteen's ongoing collaboration with producer Brendan O'Brien, whose work has grown increasingly capable and adventurous with each release. Despite removing any trace of regional shuffle from these songs, O'Brien puts them across like the proficient bar band they are, roaring through "My Lucky Day" and "What Love Can Do" with professional abandon. O'Brien erects an impressive 1960s wall of sound on "Surprise, Surprise", with its carnivalesque organ and girl-group backing vocals, and in general he streamlines the E Street Band's sound to highlight one central melody or riff. Opener "Outlaw Pete" rides an ascending/descending theme not dissimilar to KISS' "I Was Made for Loving You". Strings protrude from the song at odd angles, Springsteen's vocals echo through what sounds like a deep valley, and Roy Bittan contributes a hyperactive organ as the song spins a yarn about an outlaw so vague he sounds only theoretical. The track is overstuffed with ideas, and at eight minutes, it's a strange, ineffective opener, setting a curiously detached mood for an album that is, for Springsteen, typically engaged.
Of his three E Street Band releases of the 00s, Working on a Dream is the one that most sounds like a solo album, indulging a range of ideas that reveal Springsteen as still musically curious and more than willing to play around with his sound. Another American rock saint-- Brian Wilson-- shows up in the walking bass line on the title track as well as in the Pet Sounds percussion and ba-ba-ba's of "This Life". The scribbly guitar on "Life Itself" recalls the Byrds on "Eight Miles High" more than Nils Lofgren or Steve Van Zandt, providing a tense backdrop for Springsteen's pleading lyrics. The garbled-blues "Good Eye", one of the album's weirdest tracks, ratchets Springsteen's distorted vocals to a yelping beat and electrified banjo, but like his recent one-off download "A Night With the Jersey Devil", it feels like merely a demonstration of studio technique.
Working on a Dream works hard on sound, but sleeps on actual songs. "Queen of the Supermarket" may be the worst thing he's ever written, an overly symphonic ballad about crushing on the stock girl. It's sweet, but there's something about the high-flying strings and the intensity of the imagery ("A dream awaits in aisle number two") that suggests parody. The checkout beeps that help the song out to its car certainly don't dispel the wink. "At night I take my groceries and drift away," Springsteen sings, but here his working-class identifications sound a little condescending and inappropriate. Just as "57 Channels (And Nothing On)" failed to convince anyone that Springsteen watched a lot of TV, "Queen of the Supermarket" can't persuade listeners that he does his own grocery shopping. Now that his big dream has come true, Springsteen doesn't seem to know what to do with himself. So he's trying to do everything. | 2009-01-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-01-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | January 27, 2009 | 5.8 | 153bcea6-72cf-4217-b4be-ab1fcadc8b66 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The new reissue of a landmark album of 1970s funk restores the Los Angeles group’s reputation as multi-cultural pop savants and unstoppable improvisers. | The new reissue of a landmark album of 1970s funk restores the Los Angeles group’s reputation as multi-cultural pop savants and unstoppable improvisers. | War: The World Is a Ghetto: 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/war-the-world-is-a-ghetto-50th-anniversary-collectors-edition/ | The World Is a Ghetto: 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition | It was a simple idea: Combine the everyday music of Long Beach and nearby Compton with the ascendant sounds of funk, soul, and R&B, and shape it all into something that would sound right coming out of a radio anywhere in the United States. By the time they released The World Is a Ghetto in 1972, War had the levels dialed in perfectly.
The Long Beach party band had spent 1969 banging around Los Angeles County playing heavy R&B as the backing band for future NFL Hall of Famer Deacon Jones when producer Jerry Goldstein caught their live show. He thought they’d be a perfect match for English singer Eric Burdon, who was just beginning his solo career following the dissolution of the Animals. The interracial band—Burdon and harmonica player Lee Oskar were white, the rest of the band was Black—had a hit by mid-1970 with “Spill the Wine,” a talky pastoral funk song that set Burdon’s Kinks-indebted lyrics against a snapping rhythm. The singer would leave the group following 1970’s regrettably titled The Black Man’s Burdon, but the spirit of multicultural brotherhood—and the freedom from genre expectations it would provide—remained. Working closely with Goldstein, War became both a heavyweight live band and a sophisticated pop machine, slicker than Sly and the Family Stone and more down to earth than Funkadelic.
Five decades later, War are primarily remembered for 1975’s “Low Rider,” an all-time great song that’s been licensed so frequently and decontextualized so thoroughly it now feels like something of a novelty. Rhino’s new reissue of The World Is a Ghetto—the best-selling album of 1973, with a single that shipped a million copies—not only restores War’s reputation as some of the savviest and most omnivorous pop composers of the 1970s; its bonus disc of in-studio jams suggests they might have rivaled Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters as one of funk’s greatest groups of improvisers.
The World Is a Ghetto was originally intended to be a stage play that War percussionist Papa Dee Allen was developing about a character named Ghetto Man. One night, while the band was jamming in their Long Beach warehouse, he hit upon a revelation, as co-founder and keyboardist Lonnie Jordan recalls in the reissue’s liner notes. They’d been playing around in Malibu and Santa Monica, and had seen firsthand that wealth and privilege didn’t necessarily guarantee a great life. In their view, Ghetto Man wasn’t any different from the guy with the beachfront property who still struggled with addiction. And that changed how they saw the world: “The world is a ghetto.”
This was only one year after Marvin Gaye reached toward a better world on What’s Going On, a year after Isaac Hayes stepped out with Shaft. Singing about oppression and personal confusion, and finding inspiration and power in Blackness, was clearly artistically and commercially viable. But War were more dedicated to interracial harmony than Black liberation. Their debut album depicted two disembodied forearms connected at the bicep, one Black and one white, each flashing a W sign. “Our mission was to spread a message of brotherhood and harmony,” the band said.
For them, to declare that the world was a ghetto wasn’t a political statement, it was a reminder of the universal nature of suffering—or, as drummer Harold Brown once put it, rich people’s toilets clog up, too. “Wonder if I’ll ever find happiness,” B.B. Dickerson sings on the title track. He draws out his verses over glowing stacks of soul harmonies, singing like he’s measuring the distance to a future he can almost glimpse. When the chorus comes, his voice hardens and the melody flattens into a simple statement of the present: “Don’t you know that it’s true, that for me and for you, the world is a ghetto.”
While their music isn’t as emphatic in its politics as some of their contemporaries’, their emphasis on a collective brotherhood of man allowed them to recontextualize virtually all music as street music. Doo-wop harmonies, marching-band cadences, Latin percussion, country guitar, banging salsa piano, front-porch harmonicas: If it can be played by one person outside of a studio, it has a home on The World Is a Ghetto. “Where Was You At?” is an earthy, shuffling funk song in the Meters’ lineage that, appropriately enough, began life as a jam on the New Orleans band’s home turf at Tipitina’s. But as Lee Oskar honks away at his harmonica over a bed of handclaps, the song shifts subtly into mid-’60s R&B and Chicago blues, drifting in the direction of the Capitols’ “Cool Jerk” as it crests. “Beetles in the Bog” struts at a parade pace, with Funkadelic-style gang vocals, steel pans, and snares all moving in sync over Dickerson’s cyclical bassline; a flourish of prog-rock keys lights up the song’s bridge.
While the fluid nature of the music makes The World Is a Ghetto feel loose and spontaneous, it’s often meticulously crafted. On the set’s bonus disc of alternate takes, the band works out different approaches to “The Cisco Kid,” the album’s opening track, which moves atop a chassis of conga, kick drum, and bass. One attempt is dismissed as sounding too much like “Shaft,” leading someone in the band to suggest they call their version “Shift.” The version that made the record is one of the era’s definitive rhythms. Jordan matches the groove with his keyboard, which he runs through distortion, and picks out notes one by one. Together, it feels like a thousand little stipples of percussion ducking effortlessly in and out of one another, a minor miracle of precision played with the good-time vibes of a few guys jamming in the sea breeze at Bluff Park on a Saturday afternoon.
“City, Country, City,” which was originally composed for the 1973 film A Name for Evil, shows War at their most conceptually ambitious. As the title suggests, the song rambles back and forth between a cowpoke country-gospel mode and a long funk jam played at freeway speed. The former might be the album’s best moment. It feels bathed in the glow of a long sundown, with Oskar playing a slack harmonica line over clip-clopping drums. When the band bursts into pacier sections, Charles Miller’s reverb-drenched saxophone takes the lead. He doesn’t match the battering of the rhythm section so much as smooth out their chopping, gesturing toward overblowing without ever quite getting there. It’s a strange mix—it makes the song feel plump at the edges and thin in the middle; one wonders what a more active sax player might have done with it.
While The World is a Ghetto is a collective triumph, the individual band members’ personalities come through more strongly on the jams collected on the bonus LP. While “L.A. Sunshine” would eventually find its way to 1977’s Platinum Jazz in dramatically different form, the embryonic version here is a showcase for Jordan’s piano playing. In a flourish, he moves from an absurdly fast and mechanically precise salsa rhythm into a solo that flits through R&B triplets, hammered chords that nearly predict house music, and an eloquent run of notes that begins as Debussy and resolves into the blues. Behind him, Dickerson’s bass and Howard E. Scott’s guitar chase one another around a palindrome of a riff, nearly oblivious to the rest of the band. It’s an incredible moment, more inventive and sprightly than anything that made its way onto the final album. Jordan lets loose again on “Lee’s Latin Jam” with a waterfall of notes, while on “War Is Coming,” the whole band generates a hazy desert blues and basks in its heat.
The reissue package also includes three LPs of side-long tracks that stitch various jams, work sessions, and studio chatter into more or less coherent chronologies of how each of the original album’s six songs came together. While it’s interesting to follow the album’s evolution, and the production makes the narrative flow of each song’s history surprisingly easy to engage , it’s hard to imagine anyone who isn’t already living deeply inside of these grooves returning to them after a preliminary listen.
War made themselves singular by celebrating the many cultures that surrounded them—not synthesizing diverse inspirations into a perfect union so much as giving it all equal space to shine. The World Is a Ghetto is a landmark album of ’70s funk, one that deserves to be remembered alongside the best work of the Meters, Parliament-Funkadelic, and Sly and the Family Stone. The group’s signature sound was amorphous, and the depth of their impact isn’t as obvious as that of those bands. But the syncretic funk they forged, which reached its pinnacle on The World Is a Ghetto, is a personal and musical realization of the social harmony they spent their career fighting for. | 2023-12-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rhino | December 16, 2023 | 8.8 | 153f8a8a-4b4d-4a43-96e5-6a6609532ee1 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
The young Atlanta rapper’s debut mixtape finds a cloudy and economical mood and stays there, but it’s Carti’s magnetic confidence that turns just enough into plenty. | The young Atlanta rapper’s debut mixtape finds a cloudy and economical mood and stays there, but it’s Carti’s magnetic confidence that turns just enough into plenty. | Playboi Carti: Playboi Carti | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23196-playboi-carti/ | Playboi Carti | Whatever Playboi Carti lacks in substance, he makes up in sheer audacity. For the better part of two years, he kept his fans waiting for a full-length project, held over by a handful of songs, guest verses and previews. “Less is more” is the Atlanta-native’s mantra, and the arrival of his eponymous debut is only further confirmation.
Playboi Carti is an exercise in efficiency—more beats, less words in number and variation. It’s an exaggerated take on an old formula that all but guarantees his tracks will become earworms, which they do. Verses and hooks smash into each other with repetition, as his signature ad-libs command space in a way not even Jim Jones or Young Jeezy could’ve imagined. Here, they aren’t just highlights or devices to advance the song’s conversation; they’re the main attraction. Ad-libs become parts of hooks, outlines of lyrics and, sometimes, simply just are the lyrics.
When Carti does rap, his syllables stack on themselves, and the rhymes seem to float between the production rather than on top of it. His punctuated flows discard of conventional song structure to allow his beats to breathe—“Location” becomes a celestial trip, and “No. 9” feels exotic and regal. Showing up for lyricism is a mistake when this is all about atmosphere. Nothing is heavy-handed or contrived. When he slurs “this is not pop, this some rock” nearly 30 times on “Half & Half” or rhymes most of “Other Shit” with the name of the song, it’s simply an economical method of getting from one “Yuh” and “Ooh” to the next. But Carti is tactful in discerning where and when he can get away with letting the instrumental ride and when he needs to rise to the occasion.
Earlier this year, he attributed some of his tape’s delay to his search for a producer that could help him develop “Carti’s sound.” It seems he’s found it in Pierre Bourne who helps the rapper balance cloud rap with straight up bangers. Playboi Carti’s immediate standout comes only two songs in with “Magnolia” (previously known as “In My Sock”). It rumbles infectiously, accented by a summery flute, as Carti gives a charismatic performance on par with his 2015 breakout “Broke Boi.” They find the magic again on “woke up like this*” with an able assist from Lil Uzi Vert whose natural energy upstages his frequent collaborator.
Though Uzi and Carti have both been tagged with the “mumble rap” descriptor, Carti is only a rapper by loose definition. He’s decidedly more interested in a rapper’s lifestyle and fashion a la his mentor A$AP Rocky (who offers a show-stealing verse on “New Choppa”) than he is the raps themselves. Music is a means to an end, but in this overcrowded landscape, it’s Carti’s magnetic confidence that turns just enough into plenty. Even when he seems more interested in his hiccuped “WHAT” ad-lib than the bars themselves, curiosity and intrigue are reason enough to keep listening.
The hype that surrounded Playboi Carti before and after its release is a testament to the near mythological anticipation it generated and sustained. Minimal and on brand, the rollout utilized everything good about rap’s internet: leaked snippets scattered across YouTube and Twitter functioned as free and continuous marketing; Soundcloud informed the aesthetic and kept it relevant while the continued indecision around the release took on a meme-like life of its own. Outside of the internet, Carti signed a deal, earned a few high profile co-signs, and kept up appearances in the fashion world. The mixtape is ultimately part of a larger Carti branding campaign which has boosted his star considerably. But when it came time to finally put it out, he wound up sharing a release date with Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. The competitive nature of rap rendered the two inadvertent rivals, but Carti isn’t the nemesis here—he’s the comic relief.
Playboi Carti feels like a break from life, the soundtrack to a mindless good time. Women, money and all types of drugs are everywhere, but mostly Carti’s just flexing so that his listeners can do the same. That this mixtape wasn’t totally eclipsed by King Kendrick speaks to the perpetual draw of lifestyle rap and personalities that transcend rap. People don’t just want to listen—they want someone to model themselves after. But perhaps more importantly, Carti reflects the demand for music that exists simply because it can, music that lends itself to some much-needed escapism. | 2017-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | AWGE / Interscope | April 22, 2017 | 7.3 | 15439ea2-f0b9-4667-b082-9fb7503a8ce5 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | null |
The fourth album from the literary Detroit rock band Protomartyr is sinuous and allusive, dense and at times dizzying. It contains a constant sense of unease about the world and its future. | The fourth album from the literary Detroit rock band Protomartyr is sinuous and allusive, dense and at times dizzying. It contains a constant sense of unease about the world and its future. | Protomartyr: Relatives in Descent | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/protomartyr-relatives-in-descent/ | Relatives in Descent | In the middle of Protomartyr’s fourth LP, Relatives in Descent, frontman Joe Casey’s phone rings. It’s a telemarketer named Lazlo dialing in from Bangalore, or maybe Mahabalipuram. Most of us would probably send Lazlo straight to voicemail, but then again, Casey isn’t most of us. So he and his faraway friend get to chatting. “All calls are answered,” Casey explains. “I just wanted to talk.”
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of topics broached on Relatives of Descent: talking horses, night-blooming cacti, the Flint water crisis, the glum sterility of gentrified neighborhoods, the long-awaited irrelevancy of garbage-brained Bukowski acolytes. I could go on; Casey certainly would. Few bands offer up quite as much text as Protomartyr do. The Detroit foursome’s fourth album is, like every Protomartyr album before it, a loose-lipped, allusion-loaded saga, the sound of a scarily smart dude plunging the vast recesses of his mind, looking to make some sense of an increasingly senseless world. Recorded in Los Angeles with producer Sonny DiPerri (Avey Tare, Dirty Projectors), Relatives is probably the least Detroit-centric Protomartyr release yet. Though the band has often bristled at the notion that they’re strictly a Motor City concern, past albums have found them conjuring a kind of half-mythical Detroit with burned-out buildings and street-corner sages.
Most of Relatives was written in the wake of the 2016 election, with the abhorrent situation in nearby Flint never far from Casey’s mind. Direct references to Trump aren’t exactly easy to pluck from the maelstrom of Relatives, but there’s an overarching sense of unease about the future—“dread 2017-18, airhorn age, age of horn-blowing,” he offers on the especially rambly “Here Is the Thing”—permeating the album’s every dark corner. Casey has said his lyrics here are largely concerned with the unknowability of truth, the cloud of uncertainty that seems to hang over everything in this era of fake news and real shit.
But the so-called Paris of the Midwest still casts a shadow over the proceedings. “Windsor Hum” sees Casey gazing wistfully across the Detroit River into Canada, wondering how much better things really are in the country to the north. But the temporary relocation to Tinseltown seems to have widened Casey’s perspective. “Caitriona” finds him touching down in County Galway—he’s been reading Máirtín Ó Cadhain—while snarling closer “Half Sister” flits from ancient Palestine to a South Carolina racetrack to a northern Michigan horse farm.
This expansive lyrical tack is met more than halfway by Casey’s bandmates. The grisly, subterranean propulsion of Protomartyr’s early records now sports more twists and turns than Detroit’s mazy Outer Drive. Guitarist Greg Ahee’s roundabout leads buzz and flash of neon on wet pavement. But wherever the band can get a word in edgewise, they add new wrinkles. Flickers of strings, dead-of-night synth washes, stereo-panned drum work from Alex Leonard—it’s all in there somewhere, each element elbowing its way into the fray as these songs double-back on themselves. Lyrical motifs recur all the while; Relatives is somehow an even windier affair than 2015's byzantine The Agent Intellect, the band matching Casey tangent-for-tangent.
Protomartyr songs don’t always contain a clear beginning, middle, and end. Casey is less interested in story than backstory, in explaining exactly how his subjects became so fucked. When it works, it’s brilliant as ever; when it doesn’t, it can feel unknowable, disjointed, a series of red herrings taking the approximate shape of a song. And by inching away from the Detroit-centered world-building of previous Protomartyr records, Casey’s sacrificed a certain amount of the thematic consistency that’s helped past records hold their center; these songs here, for better and worse, splay out all over the map.
It’s been said that Protomartyr records don’t really click until after the fifth or sixth listen. The same is no less true here; it takes time to catch every reference. But every second song takes a sharp left each time Casey takes a badly-deserved breath, and Relatives gets to feeling a bit muddled. A couple of Relatives’ more straightaway rockers lose a little Casey in the mix, while the bordering-on-proggy constructions of some of these tunes can feel scattershot. The band’s tenacity has always made for a solid counterpoint to Casey’s frequent lyrical detours. On Relatives, they’re nearly as prone to digression as Casey, and the effect can be dizzying. Closer “Half-Sister” is up there with Protomartyr’s finest: a rumbling bassline, a gnashing guitar lick, Casey gone intercontinental. It works so well largely because the track doesn’t attempt to outdo Casey, egging him on without crowding him out.
On the one hand, bless Protomartyr for making records like these: wordy, sinuous, all but designed to buck the modern one-and-done listener. Until you take the time to pore over Relatives at a near-forensic level, the whole thing's likely to feel a bit intimidatingly dense. But there are no casual Protomartyr fans—Protomartyr fans, as a rule, are not the casual type—and Relatives is destined to be the favorite of some diehards. For those whose interest in the band stops just short of obsession, there’s something to be said for the punchiness of the earlier, more compact work. As long as the world keeps crumbling around us, though, Protomartyr won’t want for material, and Relatives is another solid entrant in a catalog well worth poring over. Still, it’s easy to come out of the wildly exhaustive, borderline exhausting Relatives feeling a little like poor Lazlo, your ear talked clean off your head. | 2017-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | October 2, 2017 | 6.9 | 1545270f-fce5-498c-ab28-b93a8e3515f3 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | |
In her soundtrack to the choreographer Wayne McGregor’s DNA-inspired dance work, the post-footwork producer moves from her serpentine IDM toward a new style informed by ambient minimalism. | In her soundtrack to the choreographer Wayne McGregor’s DNA-inspired dance work, the post-footwork producer moves from her serpentine IDM toward a new style informed by ambient minimalism. | Jlin: Autobiography | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jlin-autobiography/ | Autobiography | Jlin’s Autobiography is a contradictory beast. It is, technically, the Gary, Indiana, producer’s third album, following 2015’s Dark Energy and 2017’s Black Origami, although the label and the artist herself are framing it as a collaborative work that sits outside of this timeline. Meanwhile, the title refers not to Jlin’s life but to that of Royal Ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor, who commissioned Autobiography to soundtrack his high-concept dance piece of the same name.
Perversely, though, in soundtracking someone else’s intimate work—Autobiography uses McGregor’s DNA to select the dance sequences the audience will see—Jlin has produced a record that serves as a recap of her whirlwind career, one that has seen her trade the footwork-indebted beats of her early productions for an intricate, pan-global drum funk that nods to the serpentine spirit of IDM without bowing to its often dry delivery.
Autobiography was recorded at the same time as Black Origami, and it is little surprise that that album’s crisp mixture of acoustic-sounding instrumentation (leaning heavily on the sounds of the Indian subcontinent) and drum-machine fury returns periodically. “Kundalini” rides in on the evocative drone of a sārangī, with stirring string lines completing the sense of cinematic adventure, while “Blue i” uses a percussive palette straight out of Black Origami, all galloping tabla drums, echoing claps, and gliding shakers. Best of all, though, is “Carbon 12,” a song full of air, flight, and fancy, which takes a circular marimba melody and straps it to Jlin’s rocket-fueled funk, creating the first Jlin song I can imagine a drum circle jamming to as the sun sets on a Goa beach.
At other times Autobiography feels like more of a throwback to Dark Energy’s coal-black menace, thanks to the presence of sawtooth synth lines—“Mutation” and “Permutation,” in particular, seem to share the same rasping patch—diamond-hard bass drum smack, serrated hi-hat shuffle, and, on lead single “The Abyss of Doubt,” chilling vocal samples. Listening to these songs is akin to enjoying latter-period Aphex Twin, where the pleasure lies not so much in hearing an artist break new ground but in appreciating a producer in total command of his or her element. The drum programming is so well worked here, like Squarepusher raised on footwork and trap rather than jungle and techno, that it makes the impossible feel graceful and the contorted serene, much like ballet itself.
But the most revealing side of Autobiography comes in the handful of songs where Jlin leaves her back catalogue behind in favor of new pastures, delivering music of open spaces, hazy recollection, and the lurking peril of nature, rather than urban intensity and horror-stricken dreams.
In “Anamnesis (Part 1),” a shifting, unresolved piano melody worthy of Brian Eno’s Ambient series dissolves into a rainforest haze, the odd piano note breaking through the sonic gloom like sunbeams through a thick leaf canopy. Six tracks later “Anamnesis (Part 2)” takes up the theme, the melody now reduced to disparate notes that poke through the curtain of forest sounds like an abandoned temple throttled by jungle vines. Elsewhere, this minimalist approach is more stylistically alluring than physically gratifying. “First Interlude (Absence of Measure)” and “Second Interlude (The Choosing)” work within the context of the album—and, you imagine, as part of the ballet—but feel a little bare for repeat listening, as if grieving their dance accompaniment.
That Autobiography is ultimately not the equal of Dark Energy and Black Origami is perhaps to be expected. Those two albums were shockingly new, an injection of pure Jlin that stung like a bath of iced water, while Autobiography feels party to the tale that McGregor’s ballet will tell. Even so, it is an accomplished album full of puckish invention, singular production twists, and ambient murk that offers scintillating hints at where Jlin might go on her third album proper. | 2018-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | October 2, 2018 | 7.9 | 154538bf-d491-4802-a315-01f1cf783c0c | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The latest from Syria’s Omar Souleyman comes via the Mad Decent label, making him labelmates with the likes of Major Lazer and Riff Raff. He works with producer Hasan Alo for a sleek, hypnotic sound. | The latest from Syria’s Omar Souleyman comes via the Mad Decent label, making him labelmates with the likes of Major Lazer and Riff Raff. He works with producer Hasan Alo for a sleek, hypnotic sound. | Omar Souleyman: To Syria, With Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23277-to-syria-with-love/ | To Syria, With Love | When Sublime Frequencies’ 2007 compilation Highway to Hassake (Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria) introduced Syrian singer Omar Souleyman to the West, one could write about the jalabiya and keffiyeh-clad artist with perhaps only a side mention of his home country. Besides its secondary status during the Bush era as an extension of the “axis of evil,” Syria was otherwise not part of the nightly news cycle. But as Souleyman made inroads in pop culture—his coarse voice finding itself alongside the likes of Björk and Gorillaz in the studio and on festival stages with Yeah Yeah Yeahs and MGMT—Syria and President Bashar al-Assad occupied more of the news feed. Since the start of its civil war in 2011, news of chemical warfare, the millions of refugees fleeing the country, its festering humanitarian crisis—not to mention its status as part of a new president’s travel ban—Syria may yet plunge into all-out international conflict.
How did Souleyman and his gruff plaints of love and heartbreak become the sound of Syrian music in the west? Souleyman works in the musical form of dabke—primarily line-dancing fare for weddings throughout the rural parts of the Levant. As DJ/rupture noted in his 2016 book Uproot, “ignorance of dabke is a prerequisite for his success… plucking an artist from a scene and repackaging him or her for wider consumption is as old as the music biz itself.” A decade after being introduced to Souleyman’s music, I’ve yet to hear another dabke artist, which may be by design. Even if he’s the exception that proves the rule, in foregrounding the electronic stomping beat that powers modern dabke, Souleyman has gained access to a Western dance music culture that few from his and other regions could possibly imagine. Since a split with Sublime Frequencies earlier this decade, Souleyman has found himself in a wide range of company: Four Tet, Gilles Peterson, Legowelt, Modeselektor, and Trilogy Tapes-associated producer Rezzett. On To Syria, With Love, Souleyman now counts the likes of Major Lazer, Baauer, and RiFF RAFF as labelmates. It’s a peculiar fit.
To Syria also marks the first time that Souleyman hasn’t had his right hand man Rizan Sa’id handling the bank of synthesizers and drum programming. Instead he works with Hasan Alo, who, like Souleyman, is also from the Hasaka region and displaced by the war. Like most of Souleyman’s work, few of the song topics touch upon current events, instead depicting the never-ending war that is romance. Lyrics come from longtime collaborator Shawah Al Ahmad and even amid the sleek club squiggles and beat bombast of “Ya Boul Habari,” Souleyman sings of the heart’s pain. “You are the incarnation of love and beauty,” goes one line. Though when Souleyman sings “You’ve been holding my soul captive for a year/Send me your news, at least once a month,” it seems eerily close to a different kind of hostage situation, especially considering Al Ahmad’s own recent brush with Daesh. (He was imprisoned by the group near his home in Aleppo and had his flock of sheep taken away from him.)
Dizzying polyrhythms make “Ya Bnayya” one of the album’s most hypnotic tracks. The needling synthesized mijwiz tones that Alo provides alternate across it: sometimes sounding tightly-wound to the beat, other times wobbling with wild abandon. But too often, the sonic palette that Alo puts behind Souleyman lacks the subtle blend of coarse and silken that Sa’id could toggle with the nimblest of moves. The heavy kick that thuds through each track here feels anonymous and monotonous, making the album a slog to push through. Amid the high warbling of “Khayen,” Alo somehow manages to shoehorn in even more tech-y squelches. The dramatic piano flourishes of “Aenta Lhabbeytak” offer up a change of pace. But the canned beats and whooshes that comprise the song’s backdrop make it seem like it could come from any shiny shirt nightclub from Athens to Beirut.
The last two tracks are where Souleyman truly changes up his approach, both songs serving as pleas for peace. Closer “Chobi” retains its firecracker percussion and canned synth tones, but Souleyman thinks not of love when he growls “we are in exile, and our nights are long.” As the penultimate track suggests, the slower, more agonized songs best reveal Souleyman’s strengths. Often in his back catalog, Souleyman’s voice has evoked the cries of a desperate man at the precipice of unbearable heartache, no doubt the work of a great singer embodying his role in detailing the pain of love. But on “Mawal,” it cuts closest to home for the displaced Syrian: “Oh, I’m tired of looking for home/And asking about my loved ones/My soul is wounded.” An entertainer in exile, Souleyman’s voice embodies the thousands from his land who are now refugees, who simply want to return home whether it’s been leveled or not, the grain of his voice as wearied and fraught as anything you will hear all year. | 2017-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Mad Decent | June 6, 2017 | 6.5 | 1548724e-b53b-4142-8618-e63262d0ae56 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Atop a base of field recordings made near her home, the Australian composer layers pensive piano and electronics into a meditation on perception and memory. | Atop a base of field recordings made near her home, the Australian composer layers pensive piano and electronics into a meditation on perception and memory. | Madeleine Cocolas: Spectral | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madeleine-cocolas-spectral/ | Spectral | “A Memory, Blown Out,” the tender opener of Madeleine Cocolas’ Spectral, gradually expands from a lone hum into a vibrant array of vocals and electronics. This slow unfurling, driven by a sense of tension and release, forms the album’s backbone. In a note accompanying the album, the Australian composer describes the music as “a subtle shift in memory” and a “recolouring of the world we think we know.” Its sustained tones and poignant, evolving melodies explore how tiny motions can create larger shifts in perspective.
Cocolas’ inspiration for Spectral initially came as she made field recordings near her home, capturing birdsong, crickets, storms, and conversation. But Cocolas’ music rarely foregrounds specific, place-setting sounds or details. Instead, she uses her recordings as a jumping-off point for her pensive music, swirling doleful piano and electronics into an expansive, nostalgic sound.
Spectral’s gauzy palette and structure feel similar to 2020’s Ithaca, which meditated on the idea of home in upbeat rhythms, but here, Cocolas takes on darker tones, often dealing in hollowed-out sounds and haunted musical motifs. “Enfold” exemplifies these themes: It begins with a static cloud, gradually adding electronics, echoey vocals, and melancholy piano chords that rise and fall. While much of the track feels suspended in time, these elements provide movement, swinging from poignancy to hopefulness and back again.
Many of Spectral’s tracks move in sweeping waves that can sometimes feel vague and distant. But “Northern Storm” and “And Then I Watch It Fall Apart” render spacious dimensions in vivid terms. The back-to-back pieces both feature crescendoing forms that eventually burst. On “Northern Storm,” sporadic beats lie beneath a sustained tone, eventually swallowing it in a dramatic gulp; on “And Then I Watch it Fall Apart,” faraway drones lie beneath resonant piano and buzzing electronics, growing in volume and then fading away. Different elements dart to the top of the mix and fall to the bottom, morphing into different shapes and highlighting the subtle motion that makes Cocolas’ music come to life.
Much of the album feels forlorn and wistful, but the final track, “Rip,” offers a surprising conclusion: Here, Cocolas strums a bright chord on an electric guitar while piano flutters around it. There’s a feeling of resignation, and a pulse—those two strums continue to beat, creating an unmistakable sense of time marching on. After all the amorphous sound, Cocolas gives us something concrete to grasp, leaving us with one final moment of clarity. | 2022-07-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Room40 | July 20, 2022 | 7.2 | 154b736a-1dd6-472a-be59-17bd2bf81cb4 | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
With intricate guitar playing, vulnerable songwriting, and a surprising turn toward free-jazz exploration, the Grizzly Bear multi-instrumentalist reintroduces himself on his full-length solo debut. | With intricate guitar playing, vulnerable songwriting, and a surprising turn toward free-jazz exploration, the Grizzly Bear multi-instrumentalist reintroduces himself on his full-length solo debut. | Daniel Rossen: You Belong There | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daniel-rossen-you-belong-there/ | You Belong There | Several months after the release of his 2012 solo EP, Silent Hour/Golden Mile, Daniel Rossen turned 30. That’s when his brain planted the seed of self-doubt that has hindered the Grizzly Bear co-frontman and multi-instrumentalist’s intuitive approach to making music ever since. “Everything became a constant interrogation: Is this any good? What are you doing, and why are you still doing it?” Rossen recalled. “It sucks. It never ends.” The next year, he ditched the indie rock scene in Brooklyn and moved to rural upstate New York with his girlfriend. He wanted to escape the city’s claustrophobic, productivity-obsessed mindset, but he couldn’t find peace, even in remote pockets of nature—an inevitability he anticipated but wasn’t quite ready to accept. And so, Rossen caved and welcomed change: He recorded 2017’s ambitious Painted Ruins with Grizzly Bear, moved across the country to New Mexico, and married his longtime partner, with whom he is now raising a daughter. If he couldn’t outrun the unpredictability of life, he might as well take it in stride.
Rossen embraces this vulnerable state of mind on You Belong There, his debut full-length. Over 10 songs, he uses sweeping woodwind harmonies and his customary intricate guitar work to color in tales of self-sovereignty, creeping anxiety, and the daunting open-endedness of adulthood. In the past, Rossen has tended toward cryptic minimalism, but emotional honesty suits him. The warmth of his voice counterbalances the darker moments he recounts, with lyrics exploring the isolation of rural living, his vaguely spiritual connection to nature, and the way new fatherhood led him to reconsider tendencies inherited from his own parents. “Deep red seething anger/It is natural, all too familiar/That legacy is yours and mine to own,” he sings on “I’ll Wait for Your Visit.” In Grizzly Bear and Department of Eagles, he often deferred to his bandmates when it was time to pen lyrics. On You Belong There, Rossen places the spotlight on himself: It feels like a reintroduction.
During the last two years, Rossen taught himself to play upright bass, clarinet, and other woodwinds from the comfort of his home studio. But his most dazzling work occurs, as always, on the guitar. Rossen is a virtuoso, and his influences—Brazilian folk, blues, classical, ’70s jazz—melt together in a hypnotic way. It’s no wonder that he was drawn to Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, and Jim O’Rourke as a teenager; all three use atypical chords in unconventional tunings, an approach rooted in the desire to push the guitar to its limits. For Rossen, these techniques allow him to experience amorphous chords, dissonant progressions, and unpredictable tension with a sense of discovery. On songs like “Celia” or “I’ll Wait for Your Visit,” Rossen never experiments for obscurity’s sake; he seeks melodies that sound like they’re on the outside of pop music looking in. It’s the closest he has ever come to composing classical guitar pieces that stand up alongside his heroes.
With his deft touch on drums and percussion, Grizzly Bear’s Chris Bear adds chamber pop complexity to You Belong There. “It’s a Passage” and “Shadow in the Frame” in particular recall the elegant arrangements of Yellow House. Their collaboration shines on the jazz numbers, an unexpected evolution in Rossen’s songbook. Drawing from the mid-century LPs his parents played and new-to-him discoveries like Brazilian musicians Egberto Gismonti and Baden Powell, Rossen melds his influences to pursue skills beyond formalist composition. Take “Tangle,” where Rossen delivers a flurry of hectic piano runs, spirited upright bass notes, a smirking clarinet line, and slightly discordant vocal harmonies. Bear’s thundering drumrolls and ominous cymbal crashes hover like storm clouds above it all. The two almost transform into a free-jazz ensemble in the title track and “Keeper and Kin”—the former roots itself in improvisation as a means of inquisitive exploration; the latter is a foggy, ambient synth drone reminiscent of Sung Tongs. It’s a bold new direction for an artist who could have remained in his comfort zone of expansive indie rock, where freeform passages and gorgeous production are common embellishments but rarely the focus.
Two years ago, in the midst of writing You Belong There, Rossen revealed a humble ambition: “How do I get back to the thing that, in the first place, drew me to music? Why was it so life-changing?” With the spiraling, finger-plucked guitars and cozy vocal hums of “Unpeopled Space,” he captures that enchanted feeling. As Rossen sings about retreating to the woods, the pace accelerates and new instruments emerge, ushering a rush of blood that evokes the feeling of escaping a crowded place, the cleansing scent of pine trees, the ominous realization that you’re truly all alone. Not until the quiet, remorseful piano chords that conclude the song dissipate does its full weight sink in. More than ever, Rossen is performing with his heart on his sleeve, imbuing his labyrinthine guitar parts and jazz flourishes with a sense of sheer awe. | 2022-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp | April 7, 2022 | 7.5 | 15519aa1-10fb-421d-8bfd-40d4f0dfa5ae | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
A pair of new singles from London’s Whities label demonstrate that there are few better places to take the pulse of adventurous UK club music. | A pair of new singles from London’s Whities label demonstrate that there are few better places to take the pulse of adventurous UK club music. | Forest Drive West / Pugilist: Blue 05 / Blue 06 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/forest-drive-west-pugilist-blue-05-blue-06/ | Blue 05 / Blue 06 | When the dance-music site Resident Advisor named Whities one of the best labels of 2016, the London imprint was keeping a pretty low profile: It had put out a scant four records that year, adding to the five it had released since launching in 2014. Since then, the label, founded by Nic Tasker, has dialed up the pace. Its catalog is now three dozen releases deep, but it still prefers the shadows to the limelight. Most Whities artists are known primarily to fans on club music’s fringes, if they’re known at all; the biggest names on the roster (Avalon Emerson, Lanark Artefax) got a significant boost in the wake of their Whities debuts.
There are few better places to take the pulse of adventurous UK club music, and that’s especially true of the Whities Blue sublabel, which maintains a slightly more dancefloor-oriented focus than its parent label. Until now, Whities Blue had been dedicated to split singles, but the latest two in the series, from Forest Drive West and Pugilist, respectively, break that mold.
Forest Drive West, aka East London’s Joe Baker, active since 2016, is the better known of the two artists. A typical Forest Drive West production is a good reminder of why dance music tends to use the term “track” in place of “song”: His drum programming stretches out in long, steely, unswerving lines, hi-hats flashing like railroad ties. Rhythmically, his two cuts here are as linear as anything he’s done, but the atmosphere around his drums is in constant flux. “Other” is the heavier of the two tunes, built around booming toms and a beefy, syncopated groove; despite the ample force of his low end, there’s a wealth of high-end detail that lends an electrifying dynamism. (Listen closely and you might hear an echo of Plastikman in the triplet figures rippling across the surface of the mix.) “Time” takes a similar approach into vast metallic clouds of reverb, with taut plucked tones glinting dully in the fog. If the Cure’s “A Forest” were reborn as minimal techno, it might sound something like this.
Melbourne’s Pugilist, aka Alex Dickson, is a relative newcomer; his early productions, from 2017 and 2018, tended toward classic, half-speed dubstep with a decidedly mid-aughts feel. But lately he’s been quickening his tempos, bringing him more in line with his UK bass contemporaries. “Descendant,” the opening track on his EP, recalls Forest Drive West’s linear shapes while incorporating an almost Latin sense of swing; every so often, rushing breakbeats burst like geysers through the surface. For a bass musician, he knows how to make the high end sing: The treble register is a turbulent field of nonstop motion—metallic shrieks, flayed hi-hats, and alien wibbles. It’s a powerful, peak-time track that plays the long game rather than going for the easy payoff, and so is the more hypnotic “Undulate,” where 808 depth charges plunge through an aquamarine swirl of keys and drum hits. With “Encrypted,” Pugilist tries his hand at a new cadence, toying with the 160-BPM pulse of drum’n’bass while letting dub’s dragging anchor slow the tempo to a crawl. It sounds almost like a contemporary take on Seefeel’s doleful clang.
A little-known fact about Whities Blue is that the label began as a response to Brexit. When the British pound dropped precipitously in the face of uncertainty as to how, exactly, the UK was going to extricate itself from the EU, the price of manufacturing and shipping records shot up—especially for a label like Whities, with its lavishly printed full-color record covers. Sporting generic sleeves, the Whities Blue series—the name is a subtle reference to the European Union’s flag—became a means of putting out records more cheaply and quickly. There’s no solution to Brexit in sight, but on these two releases, Whities Blue maintains its resolutely international perspective, drawing together sounds from the U.S., Germany, Latin America, and the Caribbean into a cosmopolitan web of influence and exchange. Like the best dance music, it makes an airtight case that we’re stronger together than alone. | 2019-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | August 8, 2019 | 7.5 | 155877f5-23a4-4e3b-9e5b-ca25278d65e7 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Working with producers including Flying Lotus and Gaslamp Killer, vocalist Gonjasufi has created a fascinating slab of hallucinogenic head-nod music. | Working with producers including Flying Lotus and Gaslamp Killer, vocalist Gonjasufi has created a fascinating slab of hallucinogenic head-nod music. | Gonjasufi: A Sufi and a Killer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13968-a-sufi-and-a-killer/ | A Sufi and a Killer | The best description of Gonjasufi's voice may have come from Flying Lotus, who gave the new Warp artist a high-profile appearance on Los Angeles deep cut "Testament". FlyLo called it "timeless, incredible filth," which reads more laudatory than descriptive, but there's something about that voice that escapes simple specifics. On "Testament", Gonajsufi lost himself in the track's wispy, ghostlike soul, but on earlier self-pressed records like Dead Midget on Stilts (Crutches) and Flamingo Gimpp (released under the name Sumach), his voice had a gruff, restless quality. His singing can sound raw, maybe a bit off, but his ability to pull off a frail falsetto and ragged rasp in equal measures gives him a serious depth of range.
In pairing with L.A. producer Gaslamp Killer, Gonjasufi has found a powerful outlet for his otherworldly strain of singing. Together they've created A Sufi and a Killer, one of the most fascinating slabs of hallucinogenic head-nod music to arise from Southern California's post-hip-hop vanguard. Unlike the digital bleeps and squelches of SoCal contemporaries FlyLo and Nosaj Thing, however, Gaslamp Killer and Gonjasufi draw from their hip-hop background to create an LP that could as easily fit on the Stones Throw roster as well as it does IDM-centric Warp. The beats knock, but for every moment of b-boy-friendly atmosphere, there's another moment-- or a simultaneous one-- that makes like 21st century acid rock.
Gonjasufi's vocals are both haunting and haunted, coolly assertive yet frequently fixated on mortal matters, and they bleed vividly through Gaslamp's corroded analog wall of zero-fi psychedelic noise. The results are stark: Brooding, bad-trip laments ("Kobwebz"), a doo-wop number punctuated by spacey twang ("Duet"), a warping of the blues ("Ageing"). Even the more straightforward stuff has a grimy quality to it, particularly the heavy soul of "Change", the bar-jazz tension of "Advice", and the woozy "Kowboys & Indians" with its Eastern vocals looped against a rust-covered revision of club rap beats circa 2003. A couple of previously issued tracks helmed by other L.A. producers sneak into Gaslamp Killer's showcase as well: Warp 2010 comp selection "Ancestors" maintains the psychedelic mood with a sitar-driven Flying Lotus boom-clap, while both sides of last year's Mainframe-produced "Holidays"/"Candylane" single contribute mini-Casio chirpiness and roller-rink funk. Even with the additional producers and the stylistic elasticity, it all coheres nicely.
And if the production on A Sufi and a Killer proves anything, it's that Gonjasufi can stitch himself into the beat whether it's a heavy banger or a quiet ballad. "Sheep" is the most notable example of the latter, as well as a testament to both the singer and the producer's ability to salvage a potentially corny concept: The lyrics are a vague and contradictory metaphor about wanting to be a sheep instead of a lion, but Gonjasufi sells it expertly with a fragile, subtly harmonic multi-tracked voice. And in the more impassioned moments-- "She Gone", "DedNd", "Stardustin"-- his off-kilter wail pushes an already surreal junkshop-rock aesthetic into a kinship with Safe as Milk-era Captain Beefheart. There are plenty of times where the mix renders the exact words elusive and indistinct, and a track or two where you might wish they'd stay that way, but the meaning comes clear enough. And what the words don't hold, that incredible, filthy timbre does. | 2010-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Warp | March 4, 2010 | 8.4 | 1558e4ca-570e-4648-a751-d194b6a664ec | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The cloudy grooves of the Oakland singer’s second full-length album showcase both her voice and her clear-eyed approach. These are love songs about all the forces that make and break romance. | The cloudy grooves of the Oakland singer’s second full-length album showcase both her voice and her clear-eyed approach. These are love songs about all the forces that make and break romance. | Kehlani: It Was Good Until It Wasn’t | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kehlani-it-was-good-until-it-wasnt/ | It Was Good Until It Wasn’t | Three days after the Valentine’s Day release of Kehlani and YG’s lovebird duet “Konclusions,” Kehlani uploaded an anti-Valentine to SoundCloud. By design “Valentine’s Day (Shameful)” has the dour feel of an uprooted flower bed, a gnarl of dirt and worms and grit. The song is nominally a breakup ballad, but tucked between the kiss-offs and spilled tea is a quiet grace. “Ain’t no regrets ’cause I’m proud that my heart was so pure/And I’m never ashamed of my love,” Kehlani sings, consoled by her honest effort.
It Was Good Until It Wasn’t expands that poise into an ace R&B showcase. Less explicitly autobiographical and triumphant than her previous music, the album’s emphasis is on immersion. Kehlani takes emotions and situations and bathes in their contradictions and tensions, often arriving at clarity rather than catharsis. This results in love songs that are more about the mechanics of relationships, how and why they work (or don’t), rather than their discrete participants. The album feels like a subtle rejoinder to the aughts obsession with phones and miscommunications, mining all the other forces that make and break romance.
The record begins with “Toxic,” an ode to a partner who Kehlani likens to tequila for the way he unhinges her. Built on reluctant praise, 808s, and dulled chimes that pulse like a headache, the song introduces the thesis of the album. “I get real accountable when I’m alone,” Kehlani sings as she yearns for a problematic lover. For Kehlani, accountability is separate from resolution. When she looks into the dark heart of this toxic arrangement, she recognizes that its danger is precisely what she wants.
That sense of love as risk is a feature of Kehlani’s music, but It Was Good Until It Wasn’t has a sharper sense of the specific stakes of taking the plunge. “Bad News” distills the thug-love trope to its anxious essence: “Don’t wanna get no call with no bad news,” Kehlani sings frankly. It feels like a prediction more than a plea. “Tell your girlfriend that you single,” she demands on “Can I,” flipping Aaliyah’s coy “Come Over” into naked lust. On “Everybody Business,” she deflects ambient gossip into a warning to the naysayers: “Don’t make me feel bad for lovin’.” In all these instances, love has ramifications beyond the feelings of two people.
Isolation and distance are recurring themes, giving the record’s timing an eerie relatability. On highlight “Hate the Club,” Kehlani’s harmonies swell and shimmer as she watches the clock and the door, drinking to endure the arrival of an estranged lover. Jahaan Sweet and Yussef Dayes’ lush, loungey production laces the scene with sweet irony; it’s as if the mere thought of her amour showing up makes the night bearable. On “Can You Blame Me,” that intense craving for affection produces one of the strongest couplets Kehlani’s ever written: “I would rather argue than me sleep alone/Rather call you out than no one call my phone.” The line conveys the underlying cravenness of affection, its ability to melt away reason and indulge the lonely human within.
Coincidentally and intentionally, R&B artists have made some of the strongest songs about separation during quarantine, but It Was Good Until It Wasn’t is best understood as a continuation of the genre’s longer tradition of probing loneliness. The production here fits that pursuit, replacing the sunny, poppy swells of SweetSexySavage with cloudy grooves that rock and sway rather than ascend and drop. This shift allows Kehlani to layer her voice as well as flex it, an approach that works wonders on “F&MU,” where her background vocals trace the main melody as well as Jahaan Sweet’s synths. She’s alone but she isn’t.
The lack of distinct characters in Kehlani’s storytelling can make the conflicts and hookups at the heart of her songs feel diffuse, as on “Grieving,” where it’s unclear whether James Blake is playing the ex mentioned in the first verse or himself. Likewise, the lover praised on “Water” just sounds like some schmuck who gave a good lay. But she’s becoming an increasingly agile performer, rapping, singing, and everything in between. It Was Good Until It Wasn’t channels all those skills into sterling R&B that feels like a homecoming of sorts. Just a few years ago she declared, “I don’t even make R&B.” Change is good. | 2020-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | May 11, 2020 | 7.7 | 1559386f-032b-417e-8ad8-10ee0554b413 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Uniform's sound is a marriage made in industrial-punk Hades, draping righteous pique over a grind lashed together from guitar groan and staple-gun electronics. | Uniform's sound is a marriage made in industrial-punk Hades, draping righteous pique over a grind lashed together from guitar groan and staple-gun electronics. | Uniform: Ghosthouse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22560-ghosthouse/ | Ghosthouse | Michael Berdan has a brawler’s voice, spittle-flecked and dissolute. Those nagging vocals seized center stage on Perfect World, the blistering 2015 debut LP from Uniform, Berdan’s duo with multi-instrumentalist Ben Greenberg. Theirs was a marriage made in industrial-punk Hades, draping righteous pique over a grind lashed together from guitar groan and staple-gun electronics. Over the course of six songs—capped by churning, spoken-word downer “Learning to Forget”—the NYC-based pair forged a bracing, singular sound as strong as its Bad Religion-esque logo, strong enough to sustain a cult career.
With Ghosthouse, Berdan and Greenberg demonstrate a healthy willingness to interrogate and even upend that sound. The duo’s core certainly remains in place: that punishing glower, that pounding thump, those declamations. But as the title track convulses, it is overwhelmed by a smear of effects, a mutation that might have sat in the background on their first album suddenly assuming center stage.
Crazed Sabbath cover “Symptom of the Universe” represents Ghosthouse’s most significant departure. Thundering pop-metal riffs cement the song’s melodic backbone, ultimately exploding into the kind of frenzied, epic soloing that fell out of mainstream favor a decade back; effects skitter and sizzle at the margins, while Berdan’s chants are yanked backwards through vocal filters. Rob Zombie and Mastodon may be the last touchstones you expect to encounter on a Uniform record, yet they apply here. This, after all, is what the EP format is truly for: to bravely dip a toe into the unknown, to strain a bit against the boundaries of what listeners have come to expect. Sophomore LP Wake In Fright arrives early next year; we know, now, to anticipate anything and everything. | 2016-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Sacred Bones | November 10, 2016 | 7.2 | 155a0261-5ffc-48b7-b82f-5b5088799b63 | Raymond Cummings | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raymond-cummings/ | null |
The music legend returns with a companion piece to 2001's Love and Theft, offering new tracks of jazz-inspired, rockabilly-scamming, ragtime-aping rock'n'roll, more heavily indebted to blues and honky-tonk than Woody Guthrie and Folkways. | The music legend returns with a companion piece to 2001's Love and Theft, offering new tracks of jazz-inspired, rockabilly-scamming, ragtime-aping rock'n'roll, more heavily indebted to blues and honky-tonk than Woody Guthrie and Folkways. | Bob Dylan: Modern Times | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9361-modern-times/ | Modern Times | As an artist and a conundrum, Bob Dylan is well-versed in semi-hysterical critical hyperbole. With each new record since 1997's stellar Time Out of Mind, music writers and editors have been tripping all over themselves trying to sputter out the best, most dramatic encapsulation of Dylan's rebirth (which, given the relative late-career flops of his peers and his own 1980s shitstorm, still seems strange and thrilling). Now, 45 years into a perfectly studied, over-anthologized, well-chronicled career, even talking about the cult-of-Dylan seems clichéd: Analysis of Dylan-love, Dylan-backlash, Dylan-histrionics, and Dylanology is moot. Books have been published, academic treatises have been defended, documentaries have been ordered and directed, cover stories have been savored and parsed-- but every time Bob Dylan cranks out a new record, we still try, again, to figure out what it all adds up to.
Modern Times is Bob Dylan's 31st studio LP, and an obvious companion piece to 2001's Love and Theft, offering new tracks of jazz-inspired, rockabilly-scamming, ragtime-aping rock'n'roll, more heavily indebted to blues and honky-tonk than Woody Guthrie and Folkways. The record does little to persuade disbelievers, will continue to infuriate those who cheered when Pete Seeger jerked the plug at Newport, and isn't entirely unfamiliar: Anyone who's seen Dylan play in the past five years will recognize the silhouette here, hunched over a keyboard, all crags and angles, brambles of hair puffing out from under a big black hat, pencil mustache combed into place, pounding keys, infinitely more compelled by his fellow players than his sycophantic audience. Unsurprisingly, Modern Times is musically intricate, thick, and expertly played, more the product of a well-rehearsed-- but still gorgeously mellow-- band than an auteur. It also contains some of the softest, funniest, and most charming songs of Dylan's late career, as he snickers to himself, cooing about love, God, and doing it ("I got the pork chops/ She got the pie").
Dylan recently spat a series of (now-notoriously) curmudgeonly comments to Jonathan Lethem in Rolling Stone, pining that nothing sounds like shellac-- and while his complaints seemed depressingly stodgy, they were also promptly misconstrued and yanked out of context; as it were, Dylan was deriding contemporary production/studio techniques and not the whole of modern music, which becomes instantly and weirdly obvious to anyone who listens to the lyrics to raucous opener "Thunder on the Mountain" ("I was thinking about Alicia Keys, couldn't help from crying/ When she was born in Hell's Kitchen, I was living down the line/ I'm wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be/ I been looking for her even clean through Tennessee"), or considers the fact that Dylan produced this record himself (under favored stage-name Jack Frost).
Still, it's obvious that Dylan's most beloved songs are old ones, and he borrows gleefully from Nina Simone, Memphis Minnie, Carl Perkins, Muddy Waters, and, in the grand tradition of AP Carter and John Lomax, plenty of unnamed songwriters whose work long ago slipped into public domain. "Rollin' and Tumblin'" (Muddy Waters famously recorded the song in 1950, but its origins date back to at least 1929) is given a new workup, infused with Dylan's signature clatter and wheeze and punched up with peppery guitar and even spicier lyrics ("I got trouble so hard, I just can't stand this dream/ Some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains"). Meanwhile, "Nettie Moore" (a well-worn 19th century ballad) is staggering, a spare blend of vocals and light, airy instrumentation, Dylan's decaying pipes tut-tutting sweet proclamations of love: "When you're around me/ All my grief gives way/ A lifetime with you is like some heavenly day/ Everything I've ever known to be right has been proven wrong." "Workingman's Blues 2" is similarly gentle and lapping, and "The Levee's Gonna Break", with its familiar Zeppelin-via-Memphis-Minnie refrain ("If it keeps on raining/ The levee's gonna break"), seems almost self-referential ("I paid my time/ And now I'm as good as new…Some of these people are gonna strip you of all they can take").
The biggest disappointment here is that Modern Times is probably Dylan's least-surprising release in decades-- it's the logical continuation of its predecessor, created with the same band he's been touring with for years, fed from familiar influences, and sprinkled with all the droll, anachronistic bits now long-expected. Dylan's voice, sinking further into grit, is all wheeze and mew, rolled in salt but still instantly recognizable. And now that he's eyebrows-deep in the rock'n'roll canon, maybe the heart-stopping appeal of Bob Dylan has less to do with his output-- which, tangentially, remains outstanding-- and more to do with his cowboy boot-saunter. Maybe we all want a little bit of Dylan's superhuman restraint, and whether it's real or brutally calculated doesn't actually matter: The fuck-off detachment, the unconcerned genius, the squinty-eyed disdain, the arid, gut-punching humor, the total (if feigned) disinterest in his growing superhero status. He's the boy who doesn't love us back, the one everyone yearns for, the Holy Grail, the last American hero. | 2006-08-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-08-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | August 29, 2006 | 8.3 | 155a049b-0f5b-4dfb-92e0-b99df37eb270 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
The band's sixth LP demands more seats at the table. It's a powerful folk concept album from a Nuyorican runaway who grew up obsessed with West Side Story before being liberated by Bikini Kill. | The band's sixth LP demands more seats at the table. It's a powerful folk concept album from a Nuyorican runaway who grew up obsessed with West Side Story before being liberated by Bikini Kill. | Hurray for the Riff Raff: The Navigator | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22955-the-navigator/ | The Navigator | Alynda Lee Segarra, the creative force behind Hurray for the Riff Raff, spent her formative years crisscrossing the country on greyhounds and freight trains. She climbed from the streets of New Orleans to the airwaves of NPR with a washboard and a banjo, a Horatio Alger narrative for the Americana set. Her last LP, Small Town Heroes, felt like a thesis presentation from a student of American folk music. She’d spent years studying the form and its practitioners, a product of a community that helped lift her from street corners and coffee shops to international tours and a record contract. While searching for herself, she also imitated others, living inside classic folk, roots, and country songs while shaping her own powerful voice.
In that sense, The Navigator represents a departure—she hasn’t abandoned those sounds, rather she’s graduated to something singular. It's roots music for the immigrant ID, a folk concept album from a Nuyorican runaway who grew up obsessed with West Side Story before being liberated by Bikini Kill. They lay bare the conceit in the album’s Playbill-themed packaging: The songs are presented in two “Acts” that follow her alter ego, a Puerto Rican street kid named Navita Milagros Negrón, who visits a bruja at the end of Act I looking for an escape from the oppressive confines of her city. When she wakes up from the bruja’s spell at the start of Act II (40 years later), everything she knew is gone, and she begins to realize what she’s lost.
Navi is a character, but she’s also very much Segarra. She puts years of telling others’ stories to work telling her own; in “Living in the City,” she sets the scene for the first act, a snapshot of life in the PJs for a young girl. Navi brushes off casual harassment with a shrug, watches friends self-destruct with drug abuse, and sneaks into stairwells for fleeting moments of intimacy. The city is a thinly veiled but unnamed stand-in for New York, a city and culture Segarra fled from the day after she turned 17.
The Navigator is ostensibly a rock’n’roll record, but it expands Segarra’s palette beyond the folk/country/blues lane she’s thus far occupied. Her boozy, morning-after croon is still gorgeous, but now there’s elements of Puerto Rican bomba and salsa, son cubano, doo-wop, and even the spoken-word poetry of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe she haunted as a teen. Her band has gone through a variety of lineups, but this one feels like a clean slate. Her longtime creative partners Sam Doores and Yosi Perlstein are nowhere to be seen—in their place, she’s recruited five hand percussionists, a trio of doo-wop backup singers, and Yva Las Vegass, a Venezuelan folkie from Brooklyn. She even samples the ghost of Pedro Pietri, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe co-founder whose “Puerto Rican Obituary” serves as a bridge between the two movements of her piano ballad showstopper, “Pa’lante.”
In the few moments when she strips away the beer-soaked barroom blues of “Life to Save” and the acoustic spiritual “Halfway There,” she almost sounds like her old self. But when the bongos break in on “Rican Beach,” and she begins to list “our” things that “they” stole—language, names, neighbors, streets— she’s in a different place. Like many Latin-Americans, she’s somewhere in the middle, colored not just by her ancestors but the stimuli of the diaspora: The places she’s seen, the people she’s met, the music she’s loved. The Navigator, which reclaims folk’s protest roots and marries them to the sounds of the Caribbean, is a statement of that identity.
Segarra speaks to a broader reconciliation with the assimilation engrained in the American Dream, an acknowledgment of the limited perspective that comes with the white history taught in schools. She never learned Spanish and admits that for years she carried an inexplicable shame of her heritage. While writing this record, she pored through the Fania records back catalog, fell in love with the Puerto Rican poets Julia de Burgos and Pedro Pietri, and learned the history of the Young Lords and their newspaper, Pa’lante. Like Navi, the city Segarra returned to after traversing the country was unrecognizable from the city she left—the culture she once took for granted now fading away. When the “Fourteen Floors” of her old project building come crashing down, she wistfully remembers her father’s tales of the long journey from Puerto Rico, a haunting whisper of “it took a million years.” It's the universal dilemma of the displaced—where do you go when you can’t go home again?
Segarra’s first big foray into activism came with the feminist murder ballad “The Body Electric,” the centerpiece of Small Town Heroes; she would later re-release her 2013 Trayvon Martin tribute “Everybody Knows” as part of the Our First 100 Days project. But the most declarative statement she’s made yet came in the form of a scathing blog post admonishing the silence of her peers in the folk scene, near demanding that they use their art to join the struggle of their black and brown brothers and sisters whose bodies have been on the front lines of a civil rights movement that never really ended.
The Navigator’s activist bent leans mostly towards systemic symptoms of colonization and gentrification, issues at the heart of both Navi and Segarra’s story. If the call to arms of “Pa’lante” is the spiritual heart of the album, “Rican Beach” is an angry protest, a condemnation of both the villainous and the apathetic: “Now all the politicians/They just squawk their mouths/They say ‘We’ll build a wall to keep them out’/And all the poets were dying of a silence disease/So it happened quickly and with much ease.”
La gente del barrio has always had a voice, but too often it has been silenced. Not unlike Solange did on her stunning 2016 opus, Segarra uses The Navigator to demand more seats at the table for those voices that have always existed, but simply went unheard. And as she rallies the troops for the fight to come on “Pa’lante,” “From El Barrio to Arecibo…from Marble Hill to the ghost of Emmett Till” she unites the struggle of all the survivors of white supremacy, and urges them onward, together. | 2017-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | March 15, 2017 | 8.1 | 1562d38a-fa65-418b-a39d-f77ea541b91a | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | null |
To mark their 30th anniversary, the Charlatans continue the unbroken streak of good-not-great albums they’ve released since 1997—this time with guests like Paul Weller and Johnny Marr. | To mark their 30th anniversary, the Charlatans continue the unbroken streak of good-not-great albums they’ve released since 1997—this time with guests like Paul Weller and Johnny Marr. | The Charlatans UK: Different Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23247-different-days/ | Different Days | For good and for ill, the Charlatans have been one of the most consistent British pop bands around since their inception in 1989. Of all the bands that emerged from the Madchester/baggy scene—those appropriately loose genre descriptors for acts that aimed to connect 1960s pop and psychedelia with the pulse and energy of acid house—this West Midlands group hasn’t played the long-hiatus-then-reunion game that nearly all of their contemporaries did. They’ve instead stayed the course, releasing a new album every few years that dutifully land in the top half of the UK charts. As the Charlatans approach their 30th birthday as a group, they’ve arrived at elder statesmen status, and it’s allowed them to call on famous fans and friends like novelist Ian Rankin, actor Sharon Horgan, Paul Weller, and Johnny Marr to contribute to the cause of their 13th studio album Different Days.
But like many bands of their age and ilk, that consistency has been to the Charlatans’ creative detriment. Unlike many of their peers, such as Blur or James, the group has been slow to evolve beyond the agreeable, danceable sound of their 1990 debut Some Friendly. They’ve dressed it up at times with front-facing guitars (their 1995 self-titled album), a touch of Dylanesque rumination (2004’s Up At the Lake), and charmingly wobbly reggae experiments (2006’s Simpatico), but the skeleton remains the same. On Different Days, the only elements that feel out of the ordinary are the interesting but unnecessary spoken word interludes by Rankin and Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner. Everything else pretty much stays the course.
For longtime followers of the group, that is surely a source of comfort. You know exactly what you’re going to get with a new Charlatans album. The fun then becomes listening for those ways in which they slightly tweak the formula. For Different Days, it’s all about what their many guests brought to the table.
As ever, Marr leaves the most refreshing mark on these songs, with his recognizable guitar melding into the Stones-ian groove of “Not Forgotten” and the utterly delightful title track. He also helps provide added ballast on “Plastic Machinery” so Brian Jonestown Massacre leader Anton Newcombe can fly free on his buzzing guitar line. New Order members Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris evoke the title of “The Same House” by adding rave-ready rhythm tracks to this charming but repetitive number. And Weller coaxes a nice smooth 1970s R&B feel out of the band with gruff contributions of piano, percussion, and vocals to the album closer “Spinning Out,” which he also co-wrote.
All of those augmentations simply aren’t enough to elevate Different Days beyond the Charlatans’ unbroken streak of good-not-great albums that they’ve released since their creative high point of 1997’s Tellin’ Stories. The majority of the songs here are plenty engaging with some rising above the fray. The title track showcases the group’s ability to play with and against a programmed beat—in this case, a jaunty music box melody that rattles beneath the song’s pleasant midtempo ramble. And the jangly “Let’s Go Together” is one of the kindest love songs that singer/bandleader Tim Burgess has written to date (“If I succeed in being in your dreams/I will unwind, I’ll be easy to find”) aided by some swimmy tones created by keyboardist Tony Rodgers.
Again, that’s been the mark of a Charlatans album for the past 20 years: a couple of cracking singles surrounded by a bunch of thoughtful, forgettable tunes. It gets doubly frustrating when looking at the varied work that Burgess has done outside of the group, including his Mark Nevers-produced, Nashville-recorded solo album Oh No I Love You and his wonderful electronic pop collaboration with composer Peter Gordon (last year’s Same Language, Different Worlds). Asking his band to change course in a dramatic fashion after nearly three decades together might be too much. But allowing themselves to get away from the tried and true could give the Charlatans a nice creative jolt to keep them going for another 30 years. | 2017-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | BMG | June 6, 2017 | 6 | 1566123c-4d29-4c6f-aaec-87d504ff6bd6 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | 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 Fiona Apple’s second album, full of diamond-sharp writing that mines the depths of her psyche and emotion. | 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 Fiona Apple’s second album, full of diamond-sharp writing that mines the depths of her psyche and emotion. | Fiona Apple: When the Pawn... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fiona-apple-when-the-pawn/ | When the Pawn... | Fiona Apple started writing in order to more effectively argue with her parents. As a kid who’d been identified as troubled and sent to therapy, she struggled to make authority figures see her side of conflicts. “So I’d go back into my room and I would write a letter and an hour later, I’d come out and read it—‘This is how I feel’—and I’d go back into my room,” Apple recalled in a 1999 Washington Post interview. “I would love the way that it felt to have your side of an argument right here in front of you. If I wrote a letter, I didn’t even need to win an argument.”
In this, as in so much else, she was precocious. Great art has been motivated by that same impulse to correct the record—to impress a divergent worldview on those who’d prefer to ignore it, whether that audience numbers two or, in the case of Apple’s first album, 1996’s Tidal, three million. That remarkable debut contained rejoinders to a fickle lover, a rapist, and anyone foolish enough to write off Apple because she happened to be young or small or female. As a hip-hop fan, Apple understood the power of a boast. In its bluntness, Tidal also functioned as a preemptive act of self-defense from a person already accustomed to being misunderstood.
A legion of new fans, many of them girls younger than Apple (who was 18 at the time of the album’s release), understood her messages of individualism and resilience instinctually. But her candor didn’t exactly prevent the press or the public from judging her harshly; though her notorious “this world is bullshit” speech at the 1997 VMAs constituted a cannier analysis of celebrity culture than most people in the entertainment industry wanted to admit, its messiness suggested that she was still a more eloquent writer than speaker. By the time she started composing her second album, Apple had a reputation—as a bitch, a brat, a heroin-chic waif and possible anorexic, a performer who, according to The New York Times, “plays a Lolita-ish suburban party girl” on TV but comes on more like a “shrinking violet” in concert. It was hers to shake off, or at least to reshape on her own terms.
Although When The Pawn is, on its surface, a suite of 10 songs that dissect embattled loves and unhealthy desires, demonstrating the impossibility of maintaining romantic relationships when you’re always at war with yourself, the “you” to whom Apple addresses so many of her lyrics isn’t necessarily singular. Female singer-songwriters are generally presumed to be memoirists, but Apple has always maintained that the songs on this record were composed without any specific, personal incidents in mind. Often, she could just as plausibly be speaking to a derisive, judgmental public.
The first clue that she was looking outward as well as inward is in the 90-word poem she chose as the album’s title:
When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He’ll Win the Whole Thing ’Fore He Enters the Ring There’s No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights and If You Know Where You Stand Then You Know Where to Land and If You Fall It Won’t Matter Cuz You’ll Know That You’re Right
Dismissed at the time as a meaningless ploy for attention, the poem is in fact pretty legible (despite the mixed sports metaphors) as a pep talk to a vulnerable person who’s gearing up to defend their unpopular truth in public—and, inevitably, get pilloried for it. Apple composed it on tour, after paging through reader responses to a 1997 Spin cover story, with photos by Terry Richardson and slobbery physical descriptions to match, that had painted her as a pretentious, melodramatic pill. “I had just sat on the bus and there’s Spin with Bjork on the cover and I picked it up and there were all these terrible letters in reaction to my story—‘She’s the most annoying thing in the world, etc,’” she recounted in the Post profile. “And I got so upset, I was crying, and I didn’t know how to make myself go on, make myself feel like it was all going to be OK.”
But she did go on, by pushing back against her public image with blunt self-analysis. Released on November 9, 1999, When the Pawn isn’t a carefully constructed self-portrait so much as an aura-photo that captured a snarled psyche untangling itself with a fine-tooth comb. The narrator’s mistrust of happiness threatens an all-consuming romance in opener “On the Bound.” On “A Mistake,” over cymbals and synthetic boops that suggest an emergency without resorting to siren samples, Apple’s voice builds urgency as she confesses, “I’ve acquired quite a taste/For a well-made mistake/I wanna make a mistake/Why can’t I make a mistake?” Yet what begins as self-destructive rock cliché transforms into a lament about the not-exactly-punk qualities of conscientiousness and perfectionism: “I’m always doing what I think I should/Almost always doing everybody good/Why?”
In place of the bravado of Tidal’s “Sleep to Dream” and “Never Is a Promise,” there is Apple’s keen understanding of the effects her intensity can have on others. And it doesn’t seem like a fluke that this theme is most pronounced on the singles. A jittery, syncopated sprint that plays up the nimbleness of her smoky alto, “Fast as You Can” famously taunts, “You think you know how crazy/How crazy I am.” It doubles as both a warning to a lover and a reclamation of a slur that had followed Apple throughout the publicity cycle surrounding her debut—one that has been used to dismiss willful female artists since the beginning of time. Years before pop culture got serious about authentically depicting mental illness, the song likens her inner struggles to sharing a body with a beast that could never be defeated or appeased, characterizing that fight as a process of “blooming within.” (In 2012, Apple began speaking publicly about her experiences with OCD.)
“I went crazy again today,” she sings in “Paper Bag,” the Grammy-nominated single that may be the most fondly remembered track on When the Pawn. It’s Broadway meets the Beatles in its triumphal horn blasts, but as the melody grows ever bouncier, the words increasingly counter that levity with disappointment. The lyric starts out all stars and daydreams and doves of hope, before dispelling those pop song illusions to reveal the grim reality that the man Apple desires sees her as “a mess he don’t wanna clean up.” She’s never had trouble laughing at herself, and “Paper Bag” hinges on a sly reference to her own solipsism—“He said ‘It’s all in your head’/And I said ‘So’s everything’/But he didn’t get it”—that drags the singer and an uncomprehending public at once.
The song is emblematic of an album that broadened Apple’s fragile, mercurial image not just with self-awareness, but also by expanding her sound beyond the jazzy, beat-backed piano ballads of Tidal. When the Pawn’s producer Jon Brion (whose baroque arrangements had recently created context for the dateless, scene-less voices of Rufus Wainwright and Aimee Mann) intuited that her style was distinctive enough to absorb other elements without losing cohesion. Still, even in his own estimation, he tends to get an outsized share of the credit for the record’s innovations. In a conversation with Performing Songwriter, Brion clarified that its unusual rhythms—namely, the time-signature shifts in “Fast as You Can”—originated with Apple’s songwriting. “In terms of the color changes, I am coordinating all of those,” he said. “But the rhythms are absolutely Fiona’s.”
It was, in fact, Apple who dictated that division of labor. Brion recalled her beginning their collaboration by playing an almost fully realized When the Pawn on the piano, then telling him plainly: “I write pretty well, I’m a good singer, and I can play my songs well enough on piano. You’re good at everything else. So I think that’s how we should proceed, and if we are ever off-base, I’ll let you know." With that in mind, he recorded her vocals and piano first, sometimes simultaneously, then added other instruments with help from a deep, impressive roster of professional session musicians. Despite mixing diverse sounds and styles, Brion’s arrangements cohered, giving the album a darkly romantic texture that overrode the clichés of any one genre.
The results could have overwhelmed Apple’s songs, like collages pasted over pencil sketches, but Brion favored fine detail work over heavy-handed flourishes. The big kiss-off, “Get Gone,” pivots between enervated verses where sparse piano meets a brushed snare and defiant choruses that intensify Apple’s barroom keys with Douglas Sirk strings punctuating each acerbic vocal line with a bell. A groaning electric piano in the outro of “To Your Love” cuts through the prettiness of the song’s rhyming couplets, injecting some emotional complexity. Sandwiched between two of the album’s most daring tracks, “Paper Bag” and the delirium of “Limp,” is “Love Ridden,” a tender track in the Tidal mold where Brion’s string section merely shades in some negative space around Apple’s voice and piano.
When the Pawn was, if anything, more frank in its descriptions of physical intimacy than Tidal had been. Yet the later album avoided exploiting Apple’s sex appeal in quite the same mode as that first album’s witty and widely misunderstood song “Criminal,” whose seductive slink and infamous video nonetheless resembled innuendo-laden ’90s teen pop more than anything she’s put out since. Apple’s new approach to sexuality was aggressive to the point of being fearsome. “I’m not turned on/So put away that meat you’re selling,” she growled in “Get Gone.” The frenzied chorus of “Limp” evoked gaslighting, sexual assault, and the public’s predatory voyeurism at once: “Call me crazy, hold me down/Make me cry; get off now, baby/It won’t be long till you’ll be lying limp in your own hands.”
With the leverage of an artist whose first album had gone triple platinum—and a brilliant collaborator in her boyfriend at the time, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson—Apple also exerted control over the way she presented herself in music videos. A production number that had her dancing with besuited boys in a goofy reverie, Anderson’s clip for “Paper Bag” struck a blow against her morose reputation. In “Fast as You Can,” she wipes a foggy window until the camera can see her clearly. Most striking, “Limp” situated her in a home as dark as the one in “Criminal”; she puts together a self-portrait puzzle but fails to locate the piece that would complete a word scrawled on it: “angry.” In the final seconds, she stares down the camera as she spits out, “I never did anything to you, man/But no matter what I try, you’ll beat me with your bitter lies.” Every video in this series challenged the way viewers thought of Apple; “Limp” went farthest, implicating everyone outside the frame who would attack a well-intentioned stranger for sport.
Some of these sadists were critics, of course. And they didn’t all see that Apple deserved to be excluded from this baby-vamp-slash-harpy narrative they’d invented for her. Even positive appraisals of When the Pawn (which predominated) made sure to get in a few shots. “Apple’s public persona has done her more damage than any mean-spirited journalist could ever hope to inflict,” wrote Joshua Klein in the A.V. Club. “At 22, she’s already more insufferable than Courtney Love, a fact that often threatens to overshadow her compelling music.” Jokes about the title were all but required in these pieces. Eric Weisbard at Spin may have hit on what was behind the negs from other male critics who knew the record was good when he noted, “The album, and I say this with appreciation, is a real ball-breaker.”
If it didn’t quite boost Apple’s image among listeners who weren’t already fans, at least When the Pawn emerged at a time when her music could speak for itself. Tidal had appeared in a year when Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill spent 10 weeks at No. 1, despite having been released in June of 1995. With No Doubt, Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, Natalie Merchant, Sophie B. Hawkins, Melissa Etheridge, Merril Bainbridge and Joan Osborne all on the Hot 100, it was Women in Rock season. The cover story that hurt Apple so much appeared in Spin’s November 1997 “Girl Issue,” not long after she toured with the inaugural Lilith Fair. The “angry woman” trend that had enabled her stardom meant constant comparisons to Alanis (another pissed-off young woman) and Tori Amos (another female pianist with a song about her rape).
By 1999—a year dominated by rap-rock, teen pop, Smash Mouth, and Santana’s Supernatural—her singularity was apparent. (So devoid of Apple analogs was the pop landscape at the time that author and Rolling Stone critic Rob Sheffield allowed himself a rare overreach: “In a way, Apple’s music is a spiritual sister to the angst-ridden rap-metal of Korn and Limp Bizkit.”) In retrospect, her real peers were artists like Erykah Badu, the Magnetic Fields, Lauryn Hill, and Cornershop, unclassifiable songwriters who blended old and new styles into something timeless. As Entertainment Weekly framed it in their When The Pawn review, “the seemingly nonstop blur of young acts swamping the charts and MTV’s ‘Total Request Live’ does make one occasionally yearn for performers with—how to put it delicately?—longevity and substance.”
It would take two more stunning sui generis albums (2005’s Extraordinary Machine and 2012’s The Idler Wheel…) to usher in the rise of pop feminism, and a more open, informed public conversation about mental health to convince the wider world of what sad teen girls had known since 1996: that Fiona Apple is far from crazy. But When The Pawn was so good it forced her detractors to take her seriously anyway, earning their grudging acclaim and launching the opening salvo in a fight she’d ultimately win. “What I need is a good defense,” Apple had pleaded on “Criminal.” Three years later, she’d become her own best advocate. | 2019-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sony | March 24, 2019 | 9.4 | 156c5e9a-c8b1-456f-9f82-daa9f9db78f2 | Judy Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/judy-berman/ | |
Joan of Arc’s latest troll manifesto offers a nasty reminder of Tim Kinsella’s ability to ruffle feathers, playing up one of his most off-putting qualities: his humor. | Joan of Arc’s latest troll manifesto offers a nasty reminder of Tim Kinsella’s ability to ruffle feathers, playing up one of his most off-putting qualities: his humor. | Joan of Arc: He's Got the Whole This Land Is Your Land in His Hands | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22734-hes-got-the-whole-this-land-is-your-land-in-his-hands/ | He's Got the Whole This Land Is Your Land in His Hands | “We’ve never had an audience that gets any validation of its coolness through liking us,” Tim Kinsella writes of Joan of Arc. That’s putting it delicately. For a good stretch of their two decade run, Joan of Arc were the most hated act in emo, unpopular with listeners, critics, and at times seemingly their own record label. Revisiting reviews of their old albums is a crash course in just how vicious music criticism could be around the turn of the century. The group attracted that special kind of vitriol reserved not for bands that piss people off but for those that seem to be trying to piss people off; especially for fans of Kinsella’s previous band Cap’n Jazz, Joan of Arc’s low-passion art-rock seemed like a personal insult. Few of Kinsella’s peers seemed to relish destroying the trust they’d cultivated with their fans quite so much.
At some point—probably around 2000’s The Gap, certainly by 2003’s In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust—Kinsella began to own the fact that the average listener despised this group. With its unsteady lineup and blurry genre focus, the group had never really operated with clear parameters anyway, so Joan of Arc became the default outlet for Kinsella’s most contentious ideas. On paper, there’s a certain logic to that: When people have no expectations for your band, you’re free to do just about anything, and to go to uncomfortable places a band with a reputation to preserve might steer clear of. That’s on paper, though. In practice, Joan of Arc never had all that much great music to show for their scorched-earth approach.
Kinsella has downplayed some of his more disagreeable instincts on his recent records, most prominently on the crowd-pleasing sophomore album from his Owls project. But he also made a broader appeal on Joan of Arc’s 2011 offering Life Like, a satisfyingly straightforward rock record a lot more listeners might have given a chance if it hadn’t come out under the Joan of Arc moniker. Lest anybody get the impression that Kinsella has begun to seek approval with age, though, Joan of Arc’s latest troll manifesto He’s Got the Whole This Land Is Your Land in His Hands offers a nasty reminder of Kinsella’s ability to ruffle feathers by playing up one of his most off-putting qualities: his humor. It plays like Kinsella’s belated answer to the smirking whimsy-pop of the Unicorns, but without the inclusive spirit, and it may be the most overtly irritating thing he’s ever done. He’s Got the Whole is an album designed to test the limits of your nerves from its sing-songy very first line: “What the faaaaaahhhhh-uuuuuuuck?”
And so the silliness commences. “Pizza and cunnilingus both give me heartburn,” Kinsella snickers over some seasick electro-clash on “This Must Be the Placenta.” Elsewhere he pledges to “kill the little Hitler in my heart” on “Stranged That Egg Yolk” and milks a jingle-like chorus out of the rhyme “I know how the nicest guy in ISIS feels” on “New Wave Hippies,” before unloading any surplus zingers in an MC Paul Barman-esque word spray on “Ta-Ta Terrordome.” Throughout it all, he’s accompanied in tunelessness by singing guitarist Melina Ausikaitis, who cheers him on with off-kilter injections and takes a couple of eccentric lead turns on “Two-Toothed Troll” and “Never Wintersbone You,” the latter of which begins with some beat poetry about Phil Collins.
Ausikaitis brings a weird energy to the record, and, really, just the mere presence of any energy at all is enough to distinguish it from most Joan of Arc albums. But lack of energy has never been Joan of Arc’s biggest fault. You can write off the band’s aimless drone or meek art-rock experiments of the past as an acquired taste. The more glaring problem has always been Kinsella himself, and the satisfaction he seems to take from refusing to let the listener in on his jokes. He’s Got the Whole is presented as good fun, but it’s only fun in a one-sided, “why are you hitting yourself?” sort of way. It’s an album that seems to exist primarily to be disliked, and it couldn’t seem prouder of itself for achieving that sad goal. Credit Joan of Arc for this, though: 20 years in, they’re still finding new ways to alienate and infuriate. | 2017-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | Joyful Noise | January 17, 2017 | 3.8 | 156f5a09-a3c1-4500-94de-91c8f0b161c1 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The third volume of Hyperdub's 10th anniversary compilation series focuses on the ambient, minimalist, and experimental side that artists like Laurel Halo, Inga Copeland, and Dean Blunt have successfully tapped into. Yet given the artistic depth of those names and their precursors—most notably Burial, the Bug, and label head Kode9 himself—it's strange that this volume of Hyperdub's 10th anniversary series is the hardest yet to love. | The third volume of Hyperdub's 10th anniversary compilation series focuses on the ambient, minimalist, and experimental side that artists like Laurel Halo, Inga Copeland, and Dean Blunt have successfully tapped into. Yet given the artistic depth of those names and their precursors—most notably Burial, the Bug, and label head Kode9 himself—it's strange that this volume of Hyperdub's 10th anniversary series is the hardest yet to love. | Various Artists: Hyperdub 10.3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19707-various-artists-hyperdub-103/ | Hyperdub 10.3 | It's illuminating to compare Hyperdub's 2009 anniversary comp, 5: Five Years of Hyperdub, with the staggered-release phases of their 10th anniversary series five years later. The half-decade anniversary collection depicted a tight-knit yet adventurous label that took the dubstep-informed foundation of Steven Goodman, aka Kode9, and built it out in every direction that the structure could feasibly hold. Five years later, the label's roster and house style has expanded: 10.1 put forth a label canon that gave footwork, funky, and grime as much attention as the dubstep sound that put Hyperdub on the map, while 10.2 made a cohesive case for UK bass music's incorporation of straight-up R&B.
So it stands to reason that the third volume focuses on another facet entirely, centered as it is around the ambient, minimalist, and experimental side that artists like Laurel Halo, Inga Copeland, and Dean Blunt have successfully tapped into. Yet given the artistic depth of those names and their precursors—most notably Burial, the Bug, and Kode9 himself—it's strange that this volume of Hyperdub's 10th anniversary series is the hardest yet to love. The label's strong history with ambient and left-field music is underrated in the context of their greater role in transforming 2-step, but those experimental tendencies were always in the music, sometimes subsumed but always within reach. With the songs collected here, however, the sum of those efforts seems a bit bewildering: oddly beautiful one moment, disorienting and grating the next, and usually throbbing with some queasy undercurrent of dread that makes it hard to piece together.
The biggest sign that something's off is a deceptively simple fact: there are 23 tracks rolled out over the course of 74 minutes, and twelve of those tracks are an intermission-length two-and-a-half minutes or less. That in itself isn't a dealbreaker when it comes to ambient music—anyone who owns Brian Eno's Music for Films can vouch for that—but this collection of wide-ranging artists, featuring a number of tracks pulled from the context of pre-existing albums, represents Hyperdub's leftfield side with brief and sketched-out pieces (sometimes completely uncharacteristic ones, to boot) that don't go a long way to leave distinct impressions.
The more familiar of those earlier tracks, like Burial's "In McDonalds" and "Night Bus", Darkstar's "Ostkreuz", or Kode9 & the Spaceape's "Hole in the Sky", might stir up fond memories. But they're jumbled up and juxtaposed with so many like-minded songs riding on truncated buildups, foggy atmospherics, and beatless drones that the cumulative effect is a shivering blur. It's best to take things piece by piece, then, before reassembling again. Among the briefer selections from earlier albums, Ikonika's Aerotropolis deep cut "Completion" finds a new lease on life and outdoes its peers by building smartly over its abbreviated space, wrapping cresting oscillations around a simple, piercing three-note refrain. Cooly G deserves the entry-point nod for the yearning "Trying", a cut that draws the more intimate side of her already tactile sound even more forward-thinking, while still featuring a rich bass-ride ambience that keeps the rhythm up front even when the sparse drums drop out.
But the new cuts demand the most attention, especially since they reveal just how wide that ambient influence has spread throughout the label. Inga Copeland's freezer-burnt "I Am Your Ambient Wife" rests on the other side of the scale from Cooly G's warmth, never quite resolving into shape but pulling off the sonic equivalent of simultaneously melting and crumbling. Most other tracks hit some fascinating, if occasionally impenetrable, points in between sparse beauty and anxious cacophony; Kevin Martin's double duty as the Bug ("Siren") and King Midas Sound ("Blue") reveal that his ruffneck and introspective sides share an ear for calmly drifting chords and the tendency to push bass until it's thick enough to wrap around yourself. Lee Gamble's "DSM" drifts through a simple wave of minimalist melody and canyon-reverbed wooden blocks, a calm lull that makes its last-minute bass tremors feel like an ambush; Dean Blunt's "Urban" is a moody juxtaposition of a restlessly pacing synth riff and a fragile sax solo that threatens to fall apart just before emerging with the prettiest moment on the whole compilation.
Aside from "Blue", all those compositions are of a more substantial length, which is a good thing; the more space the artists have to work within, the better the end result, even when it's the type of fare that vast majority of people who were into into the beat-focused 10.1 and song-driven 10.2 might recoil from. Not every track features quick brushes against ambient, and there's a lot to work with in the album's two longest cuts: the day-glo chrome cyberpunk ascent of "Liloos Seduction", from King Britt's 2012 12" as Fhloston Paradigm, Chasing Rainbows, and Jeremy Greenspan's previously-unreleased pure wall-of-analog nightmare drone "Gage". Back in July, Kode9 declared on Twitter that "10.3 will be the soundtrack to slitting your wrists in a warm bath of champagne," which accurately sums up the atmosphere of bloodstained elegance that turns a lavish scene gruesome. | 2014-09-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-09-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | Hyperdub | September 22, 2014 | 6.5 | 15738160-0112-4674-9865-70b87ffc9eb4 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The New York producer’s second album is a dense and dizzying suite of collages that invites close listening. | The New York producer’s second album is a dense and dizzying suite of collages that invites close listening. | Slauson Malone 1: Excelsior | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slauson-malone-excelsior/ | Excelsior | Excelsior is Jasper Marsalis’ first album under the moniker Slauson Malone 1, but it’s his second solo album since leaving the Brooklyn-based collective Standing on the Corner. Where that group fashioned their tastes in jazz, lo-fi indie, and soul-sampling hip-hop into genre-spanning mixtapes and beats for Earl Sweatshirt and Solange, Marsalis is more interested in layering dissonant sounds on top of one another for dense collages. And so Excelsior is ambitious: Marsalis accompanies himself with nearly two dozen different instruments, from guitar to theremin, from Mellotron to Wurlitzer; the genre experiments combine grungy no-wave, free jazz, chamber music, and more. The results are always unpredictable and occasionally sublime.
Album opener “The Weather” crackles to life like the opening synths of a film score, recorded straight to tape. Marsalis’ syrupy vocals rise and exit with the thump of a piano before the tape loops and the whole process begins again. Those fuzzy, moody compositions will sound familiar to anyone who listened to Marsalis’ previous album, 2019’s A Quiet Farwell, 2016–2018 (Crater Speak). But where that record was a quiet landscape with occasional cracks of thunder, Excelsior fills every corner with words and sound. Some of the strongest moments come when he shares the stage with collaborators who rein in the wilder tastes. On “Decades, Castle Romeo,” cellist Nicky Wetherell provides baroque accompaniment to Marsalis’ guitar work that flows between dreamy strumming and dissonant psych rock. Later, “Us (Tower of Love)” puts Wetherell front and center, creating an affecting piece of modern classical composition to support Marsalis’ modulated vocals.
Marsalis plays with this type of tension throughout the album. “I Hear a New World” begins like a noise rock interpretation of police sirens before resolving into the lull of a harpsichord. “Half-Life” sounds as much like Sonic Youth as it does like a Jeff Parker guitar suite, while the sleepily intimate “Voyager” could as easily be a bedroom-pop B-side or the instrumental for an experimentally-inclined rapper like MIKE. Even “No! (Geiger Dub),” one of the most straightforward tracks, begins with a reggae bassline before Marsalis pairs it with an indie folk vocal that eventually resolves into a short psych-rock jam. While this shapeshifting might seem overwhelming, Marsalis provides some grounding wires: His work on guitar features heavily throughout, either looped (“Voyager,” “Divider”) or gently strummed (“Olde Joy,” “Decades, Castle Romeo”) to help bridge the tracks together.
While Marsalis is swiftly evolving his own sound, his work continues to nod to experimental artists like serpentwithfeet, King Krule, billy woods, and he has expanded his cast of collaborators and references to match his expanding horizons. Excelsior includes production credits from Chocolate Genius and assists from BADBADNOTGOOD drummer Alexander Sowinski; the tracklist includes a cover of eccentric audio engineer Joe Meek and a track (“Undercommons”) named after a collection of essays from the Black cultural theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. It’s a dense piece of work and a dizzying journey, but at its best, you get the sense Marsalis knows exactly where his spaceship is going. | 2023-10-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Experimental | Warp | October 16, 2023 | 7.4 | 15823f3c-6703-44ec-a220-d7b27ef3cd75 | T.M. Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.m.-brown/ | |
Across a mostly fun, guest-filled 22 minutes, the young New York rapper does what needs to be done and puts on for his city. | Across a mostly fun, guest-filled 22 minutes, the young New York rapper does what needs to be done and puts on for his city. | Lil Tjay: State Of Emergency | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-tjay-state-of-emergency/ | State Of Emergency | The cover of Lil Tjay’s latest album features a portrait of the rapper wandering an empty New York street, mask fitted to his face, crows eerily circling overhead, everything tinted into an unnatural shade of blue. But instead of a treatise for “these times,” State of Emergency remains focused on more historic issues. On opener “Ice Cold,” the South Bronx rapper mentions the global pandemic only to alley-oop a criticism of the education system—“JT my aroma, city got Corona/Sad to say I know like just two niggas with diplomas.” As it turns out, Tjay is more interested in addressing the NYC murder rate than the rate of infection. By the time guest rapper Sleepy Hallow shows up on “Wet Em Up Pt.2” to drop a bar like, “No Corona, boy, I’m too sick,” it’s outlandishly clear that this isn’t going to be a probing examination of this terrifying new horror.
Instead, State of Emergency is an act of defiance as the 19-year-old Tjay and a supporting cast of local rappers pledge love and loyalty to their home soil. On “My City,” Tjay gives thanks for his recent success while remembering the hardships and incarceration that color his origin story. On “City on My Back,” he teams up Jay Critch—a rapper who always seems to be on the cusp of a breakthrough—to make specious assertions like, “We put the city on the map.” Sure, but the underlying message of State of Emergency is clear: New York rap is going nowhere.
Some traditionalists will simply never take to Tjay’s voice. Chirping, tuneful, unorthodox, it can resemble an off-key American Idol contestant or his most apparent forefather, Young Thug. There are times when his vocals fly too close to the sun: The repetitive, high-pitched hook of “Shoot For The Stars” borders on abrasive. But when he hits the sweet spot, Tjay’s vocals offer a smooth counterpoint to some of the huskier Brooklyn drill rappers in his orbit.
Perhaps of most consequence here is “Zoo York,” featuring Pop Smoke, tragically shot dead earlier this year. The pair went together like steak and shakes—Smoke’s fire iron vocals contrasting Tjay’s pleasing pop-rap. “Zoo York” is diluted by Fivio Foreign, an associate who struggles to keep up, but over a beat that carries all the familiar Brooklyn drill hallmarks—engulfing womp-womp bassline, foggy keys, general sense of peril—it reasserts the lost potential of a Pop-Tjay team-up full-length record to be a catastrophe for the culture.
Lil Tjay will probably better albums than this. State of Emergency is too thin at just 22-minutes, too hastily assembled, too stuffed with guests that take attention away from the star. But with a healthy number of his peers committed to pulling New York rap into strange new terrain, Tjay refreshes his commitment to represent his city—and reminds us that the wounded neighborhoods aren’t going to disappear and, eventually, everything will be OK. | 2020-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | May 15, 2020 | 6.7 | 158a8d19-2751-42c8-b1b4-3e61c325f526 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The expansive, emotionally weathered *Integrity Blues is *perhaps Jimmy Eat World's best record since Bleed American, and even serves as its unlikely spiritual sequel. | The expansive, emotionally weathered *Integrity Blues is *perhaps Jimmy Eat World's best record since Bleed American, and even serves as its unlikely spiritual sequel. | Jimmy Eat World: Integrity Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22378-integrity-blues/ | Integrity Blues | Jim Adkins had written himself off. Judging from the open letter announcing Integrity Blues, the Jimmy Eat World frontman had spent the band’s first-ever hiatus soul-searching. For 15 years, Jimmy Eat World had been judged against their self-help smash hit “The Middle,” and this past April, Taylor Swift gave it a signal boost with an uncomfortably mixed message: “I used to listen to this in middle school!” The expansive, emotionally weathered Integrity Blues sounds nothing like “The Middle,” but it’s perhaps their best record since then on account of being its unlikely spiritual sequel.
It does feel odd praising Adkins for taking the initiative to actually write about himself, given Jimmy Eat World’s status to many as emo’s quintessential band. But unlike the other songwriters responsible for breaking emo onto alt-rock radio in early ’00s, Adkins never created a persona that made him inextricable from his music, allowing the audience rather than the author to inhabit the role of the narrator—this is why Clarity and Bleed American have aged much better than unearthed LiveJournals like The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most or Deja Entendu. But after Bleed American redeemed Jimmy Eat World commercially, their albums have been increasingly self-conscious and reactionary: the blue-black millennial malaise of Futures led to the peacocking radio-rock of Chase This Light; the band reunited with Clarity and Bleed American producer/donut innovator Mark Trombino for Invented, an ambitious and uneven collection of character sketches inspired by Cindy Sherman and Hannah Starkey photography. It led to another precipitous drop in sales and was followed by the streamlined Damage, pitched as an “adult breakup record,” but sounding complacent and AOR enough to soundtrack a date night movie at AMC Cinema.
Their new partnership with Justin Meldal-Johnsen on Integrity Blues is both sensible and inspired: he’s worked on recent records for Paramore and Tegan and Sara, acts with emo foundations who are unrepentantly making rewarding pop now and Jimmy Eat World is as much a pop act as Carly Rae Jepsen is emo. Meldal-Johnsen is perhaps best known as the producer and bassist for M83—a band that sounds little like Jimmy Eat World, but still uses “can you still feel the butterflies” as an operating artistic principle, creating fantastical safe spaces in which teenage melodrama is a life-sustaining renewable resource rather than an escape.
At least from a production standpoint, Integrity Blues is the exact opposite of what the title promises: it’s a complete fabrication of a four-person rock band, a proudly produced record where barely anything sounds like it does in its natural state. The guitar that opens “You With Me” is almost comically opulent, like a harp strung with liquid crystal and wrapped in icicle lights. Falsetto harmonies channel an ultralight beam through stained glass, sounding closer to the synth-prog hosannahs of Mew or Passion Pit. Every element of Zach Lind’s drum set is tweaked with crackling EQ and Rick Burch’s bass is a pulsating synth bubble. And yet the modesty that would often dulled and sanitized Chase This Light and Damage provides necessary heft on Integrity Blues. “You With Me” still feels like four guys in a room.
Integrity Blues is in the exquisite, crystalline mold of “Polaris” or “Ten” and they’ve never successfully spent the majority of any album in this mode until now. The rumbling exposition of “Sure and Certain” and its choral liftoff nods back at professed superfans Chvrches, “It Matters” is unusually slinky and guitar-free, “Pretty Grids” is damn near translucent. Elsewhere, they prove deft and evoking their past glory without rehashing it: actual adult breakup ballad “The End Is Beautiful” is a crossbreed of “Hear You Me” and“Cautioners,” and Jimmy Eat World can still write spring-loaded, major-third melodies (“Through”) and add to their flawless run of 6+-minute epics (closer “Pol Roger” is “23”going on 40).
The deceptively worded “You With Me” (“what makes our love so hard to be/is it you or is that you with me?”) is also indicative of Adkins’ subtle and progressive growth as a lyricist. Freed from the narrative strictures that Damage and Invented couldn’t support, Integrity Blues unpacks an adulthood spent “destination addicted,” whether the arrival is financial, romantic or even emotional success. At times, it’s almost like he’s ripping up the lyric sheets of his past—20 years after “Episode IV” promised a chance to dance all night, Adkins sneers, “But that’s something we never do...there’s my dream, doesn’t that sound good to you?” “Our weakness is the same, we need poison sometimes,” went the refrain on Clarity’s intoxicating “Ten”; Integrity Blues' frostbitten title track declares, “no one’s making you spend lonely nights poisoned through and through.”
Even in his less resolute days, Adkins was always a try-hard type, and and his new bootstraps mentality can aggravate that impulse: the thematically impenetrable “Pass the Baby” creeps from a monotone, no-fi electronic lurch to math-rock pummeling, a reminder that Adkins once branded himself a Jesus Lizard ripoff artist and proof that menace and obscurity are the opposite of what they’re good at. Lead single “Get Right” serves as Integrity Blues’ thesis (“disguised as patience, time gets wasted”), but it's probably the least compelling Jimmy Eat World single ever released.
It’s immediately followed by one of their best; “You Are Free” is earnest and comforting, on the edge of cloying, and unabashedly anthemic—like all of Jimmy Eat World’s best songs, it tells you what you need to hear right when you’re vulnerable enough to hear it. “Amazing the emotional bridges, tunnels, roads and ways we go around what’s one step from our face,” Adkins sings. “You Are Free” echoes the sentiments of “The Middle,” but not its belief that “everything will be alright”—it can be, if you’re willing to accept your responsibility.
Though Jimmy Eat World hasn’t had much part in the ongoing renaissance of emo—in fact, some of it may be a reaction to what Bleed American hath wrought—Integrity Blues finds itself sharing its dominant concern of using the genre’s inherent vulnerability and introspection to promote self-esteem rather than self-pity. Summarizing his view of integrity, Adkins sings, “It’s all what you do when no one cares,” on the title track, written during a brief solo tour where he played to small crowds in bars and churches in places like Billings, MT and Maquoketa, IA. It’s indicative of Integrity Blues’ diamond-cut polish that this is the rawest thing here—while Adkins is backed by tearful Sigur Rós strings, his vocals are completely unadorned, possibly even first-take. It just took some time, but we’re finally hearing what Adkins has to say for himself. | 2016-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | October 22, 2016 | 7.3 | 158abda6-000f-4ca2-abef-0cbca0f26a25 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Scissor Sisters frontman’s solo debut could’ve been a disaster: A pop star moseys down to New Orleans to find “real music.” But if you’re not a stickler for authenticity, it’s actually irresistible. | The Scissor Sisters frontman’s solo debut could’ve been a disaster: A pop star moseys down to New Orleans to find “real music.” But if you’re not a stickler for authenticity, it’s actually irresistible. | Jake Shears: Jake Shears | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jake-shears-jake-shears/ | Jake Shears | In his existential 1963 novel City of Night, which follows a male sex worker hustling his way across America after dark, John Rechy maps out the four waves of revelers drawn to New Orleans for Mardi Gras: First come the hustlers and their “lean young faces… with maybe guitars and patched bags if any,” hitchhiking or via Greyhound. Next, the “restless queens” who don drag to “challenge—and, Maybe, for an instant, be acknowledged by—the despising, arrogant, apathetic world that produced them and exiled them.” After them, the deluge of “tired richmen, the tired richwomen… and the other Young men and women—equally curious but not as defiant.” Finally, there are the inevitable “busloads of carefully chartered tours” in a “determined pilgrimage to Frantic Happiness.”
Similar waves crashed over postmillennial Brooklyn. The sedimentary layers of modern gentrification, after all, tend to go: artists and queer people, then tastemakers, then tourists. Jake Shears and his fellow Scissor Sisters arrived in the borough during the first phase and came up through its electroclash scene but quickly changed costumes, sewing the sincere glam of Peter Allen and the sleaze of the Skatt Bros into electro-disco confections both tacky and catchy. “Frantic happiness” turns out to be an apt description of what they had to offer, and their audience grew in waves much like Rechy’s—particularly in Europe, where they were for a moment the brightest stars in the firmament. Americans, at least those who didn’t live in the night cities, mostly resisted their charms. They were simply too much.
City of Night ends with a spectacular psychological breakdown, and to hear Shears tell it in Boys Keep Swinging, his recent memoir, so did Scissor Sisters. He moved to New Orleans to write that book and this debut solo album. Jake Shears could have been an insufferable disaster: A pop star cleans up and moseys on down to New Orleans to find real music, man, and, in its appropriated authenticity, himself. It could have been a hodgepodge of Lestat and “Treme,” a “New Orleans state of mind” groaner, a “problematic” post-Lemonade whitewash. It could have been more flotsam dredged up by the dispiriting (and gentrification-adjacent) wave of pop stars gone rootsy—Timberlake’s woods, Kanye’s frontier, the rural dives of Lady Gaga’s Joanne.
Instead, Jake Shears is a breeze, with members of My Morning Jacket and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band gathering to lay down the tracks in single takes. The result is pretty irresistible, as long as you’re not looking for authenticity, and if you don’t mind vocals that sound like a honky-tonk take on jazz hands deployed in the service of lyrics like “Cuz baby I love you/More than the trash can.” (And that’s a rave, not a read; for Shears, nothing succeeds like excess.) He sells the hell out of “S.O.B.” and “Clothes Off,” tracks that could be cleverer as they shimmy in the shadows of Bourbon Street, rather than on the throbbing floor of the Mineshaft, but mostly do the trick. In the grim but game “Creep City,” he shakes it Chaka-style during verses that descend like “Tell Me Something Good,” if the only good news on offer were that death and its marching band will come for us all someday. “The Bruiser” is a leering “Nightclubbing” manqué that sounds unconvincingly masc, which might be the point; speaking of butch identity, the dude in “Big Bushy Mustache” sure would like to embrace his, if only his girlfriend would let him. Something tells me his desire for “a silky carpet with the drapes to match” and a “neon pink Mustang” might be queering the deal.
Tracks like “Good Friends” carry on Scissor Sisters’ inimitable legacy of imaginary love themes to Muppet movies in which Kermit falls for Fozzie. Three ballads are among the best Shears has ever made: “Everything I’ll Ever Need” is a banjo-and-Bee Gees showstopper. “All for What” glows with a backwoods glamor, like Roxy Music using slide guitars in place of synths. And “Palace in the Sky” is so City of Night that if revelers don’t end up humming it while their coke-ruined noses drip blood into strangers’ bathroom sinks, I’ll eat Shears’ feather boa.
It’s true, Jake Shears is performative. It might veer into appropriation here and there, particularly in its closer, “Mississippi Delta (I’m Your Man).” But faux isn’t always false. After calling New Orleans almost everything else, Rechy praised the city as a “Pied Piper playing a multikeyed tune to varikeyed ears.” Generations later, it’s a hell of a good time hearing Shears sing along. | 2018-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Freida Jean Records | August 10, 2018 | 7.4 | 158e5bc9-d8ee-40ab-a773-1cde5419eee0 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
The 1972 classic is given a remaster and a deluxe reissue. | The 1972 classic is given a remaster and a deluxe reissue. | The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main St. [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14264-exile-on-main-st-deluxe-edition/ | Exile on Main St. [Deluxe Edition] | Despite an absence of the band's best-known songs, the sweaty, grimy Exile on Main St. has grown into the Rolling Stones' most universally acclaimed record. Despite dozens of hits, putting together a cohesive album often seemed to be beyond the Stones, tripped up by either manager Allen Klein's publishing-rights parasitism or the band's 1970s hubris. That leaves a catalog in which only Exile is built not on hits but on vibe and: the album's singularly sleazy sound and making-of legend.
To create Exile, the band escaped Britain as tax exiles, decamping to a French villa. Paradoxically, the posh surroundings created the band's rawest effort. They were a heroin-ragged band, jamming late into the night with calloused fingers and vocal cords in a stale basement with sweaty walls. So the best thing a remastered reissue of the record can do is not give the production a bath, a shave, and a haircut. Happily, this new cleanup job doesn't Photoshop out the flaws and flubs, with the band's loose performances still presented in all its debauched glory.
Of course, like most treasured nuggets of rock history, that story is undermined by pesky facts. In Stones in Exile, the documentary released with this 38th anniversary reissue, producer Jimmy Miller talks about isolating each band member in a different room of the villa to make the impromptu studio work. That's a fitting image for the Rolling Stones at the time-- while the band was musically at its peak, it was in practice at its most fractured, with singer Mick Jagger and bassist Bill Wyman barely involved for the bulk of the recording. The Exile we know and love is actually the hybrid product of two sessions, two bands really: the Keith Richards-led material from Nellcôte shotgun-wed to the Los Angeles gospel dabbling of Jagger and co-conspirator, keyboardist and former Beatles collaborator Billy Preston.
In a way though, Jagger's lack of involvement may have been the key to Exile's success (and probably explains his oft-voiced dislike of the record). With Richards at the helm, the record sounds closest to the American roots music the band relentlessly name-dropped. Vocally, Richards' nasal whine fights for space with Jagger more than anywhere else in their history, adding thrillingly imperfect harmonies. The rest of the supporting cast also gets more of the spotlight: the brilliant barrelhouse piano of Nicky Hopkins singlehandedly defines "Loving Cup" and "Torn and Frayed", Mick Taylor adds counterpoint leads and the toodling bassline of "Tumbling Dice", Al Perkins' pedal steel and Bobby Key's sax contributes soul and country cred.
But despite his relative absence, Jagger's contributions on the back half of the record give Exile its dramatic arc. Though the album's concept record status has always been somewhat oversold, the plot does chart a rough path from drunken late-night revelry to next-day regret: The last third of the record looks back on the first two-thirds with a wince and a headache. "I Just Want to See His Face", "Let It Loose", "Shine a Light"-- there's a profound need for redemption here unique to the Stones, an odd moment of guilt for a band known for consequence-free sexual bluster. As the last complete sentence of the album says, "you're going to be the death of me."
Unlike the album proper, the bonus tracks are given a clean scrubbing, and it's blatantly obvious in places that Jagger's vocals are circa 2009, not 1972. That added grooming offers the experimental results of an Exile sans Nellcôte-- still a band in the zone, but more Jagger-dominant and sterilized. Still, many of the unreleased songs work: "Plundered My Soul", wins on the merits of its falsetto backing vocals, and "So Divine (Aladdin Story)" is like a pastiche of Aftermath-era Stones played by an older, saltier band.
If allowing Jagger to touch up those vocals was the price to pay to allow Exile receive the tribute it deserves, it's still a bargain. All the same, it's a bit strange to see the Stones, somehow still alive, on the talk show circuit celebrating the product of their darkest years, treating their addictions, tax evasion, and near-breakup as just a colorful set piece on Rolling Stones: The Ride. The true thrill of Exile on Main St. is that it doesn't require all that backstory to be dramatized and Ken Burns-ed-- all the pain, fun, joy, and regret of being the biggest rock band on Earth, kinda loving it and kinda hating it, is right there in the filthy grooves of the record. Oh, what a beautiful buzz. | 2010-05-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-05-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | May 19, 2010 | 10 | 158fbe00-8e06-4c09-82e4-5bf1f083f06e | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Six tracks on an atmospheric new mini-album for Atlanta label Geographic North feel like dispatches from deep within a fogbank. | Six tracks on an atmospheric new mini-album for Atlanta label Geographic North feel like dispatches from deep within a fogbank. | Carmen Villain: Sketch for Winter IX: Perlita | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carmen-villain-sketch-for-winter-ix-perlita/ | Sketch for Winter IX: Perlita | Perhaps Carmen Villain was always an ambient musician disguised as a singer-songwriter. There were clues: On her debut album, 2013’s Sleeper, the Mexican and Norwegian artist wrapped skeletal songs for guitar, drums, and voice in billowing layers of echo, like early Cat Power gone shoegaze. She leaned into her mood-setting instincts on 2017’s Infinite Avenue, drawing out resonant tendrils of guitar like wisps of candle smoke. Then, on her third album, 2019’s Both Lines Will Be Blue, she abandoned vocals in favor of purely instrumental excursions—dialing up the reverb, digging into dub rhythms, using church bells and thunderclaps to add overcast drama. Villain’s new mini-album for Atlanta label Geographic North’s Sketch for Winter series—collecting ambient recordings from artists like Pan•American, Seefeel’s Mark Van Hoen, and the cellist Louise Bock—is even more atmospheric. Its six instrumental tracks feel like dispatches from deep within a fogbank.
Villain is a good fit for a series tied to the emotional overtones of winter. Her brand of melancholy has always sounded made for lighthouses and log cabins, and Sketch for Winter IX: Perlita evokes a similar sense of solitude. It begins with near-whiteout conditions: “Everything Without Shadow” opens the album with four minutes of mostly featureless fuzz, with just the slightest hint of a tentative flute melody pushing through the murk. Over the tape’s 27 minutes, Villain luxuriates in bittersweet vibes, layering gentle, slow-moving refrains over hazy soundscapes that resist close listening but reward time spent in the echo chamber of one’s own feelings.
The tension between opacity and clarity gives the record its shape. Tracks typically assume form first as gaseous swirls of tone. Field recordings—birdsong, barking dogs, a burbling creek—imbue the music with a sense of place, while indecipherable scraps of conversation lend an intimate air. Out of this dreamlike expanse, melodies gradually take shape. In “Two Halves Touching,” a lilting flute figure mimics the swaying melodica of roots reggae. Flute, played by Villain’s frequent collaborator Johanna Scheie Orellana, takes an even more dominant role in the closing “Agua Azul,” the most song-like of the tape’s six tracks. In “Molina,” sustained piano chords cycle beneath a cosmic shimmer of guitar; in “Light in Phases,” a treated zither traces auroras above murmuring voices and tight spools of delay.
Low key and unassuming, these tracks don’t do much; they get by mainly on their powers of suggestion. But they’re easy to listen to, offering the familiar comfort of a faded woolen blanket. And, at their best, they make room for interesting things to happen, particularly when Villain turns her attention to rhythm. This was the case with “Dissolving Edges,” her contribution to the 2020 Geographic North compilation A Little Night Music: Its dubby pulse and grayscale sonics sounded like an attempt to reimagine the sounds of Berlin’s Chain Reaction label using Villain’s earthy toolkit. Here, she does something similar some two-thirds of the way through “Things That Are Solid,” as the song’s lullaby-like melody spins down and gives way to overlapping loops of breathy white noise and scraping sounds. Reminiscent of Bellows’ loop-based improvisations, it’s a quietly spellbinding passage, and the more it frays, the more engrossing it becomes.
Named after Villain’s grandmother, Sketch for Winter IX: Perlita feels in many ways like a companion piece to last year’s Affection in a Time of Crisis, Villain’s contribution to the Longform Editions series. Stretching held chords and cavernous static into a 20-minute reverie, that recording represents her most focused exploration of “pure” ambient music to date. Like the new album, it also foregrounds an airy flute melody that occasionally overpowers its surroundings. Villain’s work is more compelling when it’s not telling you how to feel, but rather inviting you to explore your own mode of listening, deep down where accidental sounds tangle up in the mix. By finding unusual patterns in creaking floorboards and cawing crows, taking inspiration from the organic shapes of snowdrifts and icicles, Villain offers a fine companion for a winter weekend holed up far from everything, alone with your thoughts and whistling wind.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Geographic North | January 26, 2021 | 6.8 | 159cbc82-7762-46ac-be7c-5b36f3aef365 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Deerhunter guitarist/songwriter's fantastic second solo LP is unerringly tuneful and immediate, the sort of thing that seems unambitious until you step back and ask yourself just how many records actually manage to pull this off. | The Deerhunter guitarist/songwriter's fantastic second solo LP is unerringly tuneful and immediate, the sort of thing that seems unambitious until you step back and ask yourself just how many records actually manage to pull this off. | Lotus Plaza: Spooky Action at a Distance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16432-lotus-plaza-spooky-action-at-a-distance/ | Spooky Action at a Distance | Deerhunter is one of the most fascinating bands going because they're a democracy functioning the way most of us experience democracy, whether in politics or the workplace: fully participatory, but with a wildly disproportionate power structure. With Bradford Cox fronting the group as one of rock's most dominant personalities, it's easy to view Lockett Pundt as following in the lineage of reclusive guitar wizards who serve as a necessary counterbalance. Whether or not Cox goes off the grid any given night, you can catch Pundt standing catatonically still and staring off into the distance when his gaze isn't intently focused on an armada of effects pedals.
Based on that persona, no one could've been surprised by his solo bow as Lotus Plaza, 2009's The Floodlight Collective. A mélange of looped guitar and amorphous vocals slathered in amniotic goo, it wouldn't have stood out in any year, and released smack dab in the midst of indie's deadbeat summer, it was the kind of solo record that could only be the result of a guy who goes to the greatest lengths possible to not get noticed. But even if he gets approximately 0% of the good quotes in any Deerhunter interview, the relatively egalitarian division of the band's songwriting labor makes Spooky Action At A Distance every bit as unsurprising as its predecessor. In an infinitely more rewarding way, of course: save for a minute-long intro that recalls Floodlight, these are nine reminders that Pundt also is responsible for soft-focus beauty of "Agoraphobia", "Neither of Us, Uncertainly", and the juggernaut centerpiece of Halcyon Digest, "Desire Lines". This consistency means Spooky Action lacks the galvanizing force of Deerhunter and the unpredictability of Atlas Sound, but in fully realizing its comparatively modest ambitions, it's one of the strongest indie rock records of the year so far.
Comparing how Cox and Pundt function in their solo ventures tempts a needless quarterback controversy, but nonetheless, it is helpful to see how they're complementary. While Atlas Sound allows Cox to indulge in genres, collaborations, and haircuts that wouldn't vibe with Deerhunter, Pundt tends to find inspiration in limitations, patterns and forms. Pundt prefers echoing guitar, slow-moving vocal melodies, and distorted washes that generally signify qualifiers like "shoegaze" and "dream-pop," but neither of those really sit well with me. The "dream" part implies exaggeration or illogic, while nearly all of Spooky Distance is handcrafted, thriving on structure and restraint-- a constant, kraut-like pulse, strict patterns of verses and choruses broken down into repeating chord progressions, loops, loops, and more loops.
Moreover, along the lines of Real Estate and especially the War On Drugs, Pundt embodies a wakeful, meditative state associated with various forms of transit: your physical being stays relatively still while being in motion, a symbiosis between human and mechanical effort. I can't help but think of each song here as having some sort of vehicular spirit animal, so to speak. As with "Desire Lines", the anti-flash "solo" that breaks from the casually soaring chorus of "Strangers" could be visually represented as medians on a deserted open road, and the anticipatory effect of its repetition brings the relief of arrival during the final minute of decrescendo. Meanwhile, the timbres on "Out of Touch" are fit for a vigorous bike ride, sleigh bells and metallic guitar loops jangling rhythmically over a cyclical kick drum pattern. The shambling acoustic closer "Black Buzz" feels just right for foot traffic, and "Jet Out of the Tundra" cruises at speed like its namesake, the same handful of chords repeating throughout a remarkably brisk seven minutes while Pundt seamlessly adds and removes trebly acoustic strums, Superball bass riffs, and a gorgeous, one-finger piano melody like he's slowly pulling levers in the cockpit. Spooky Action then plays out like ten self-contained, daily commutes where familiarity brings not contempt but a private joy in recognizing the landmarks and shortcuts.
Lest it seem like Spooky Action is an overly subtle work, it's worth reiterating that its 44 minutes are unerringly tuneful and immediate, the sort of thing that seems unambitious until you step back and ask yourself just how many records out there manage to actually pull it off. And Pundt's means of cranking out one instantly memorable chorus after another brings to mind someone who's incredibly good at sports wagering: there's surely some intuition and luck involved, but Pundt's a guy who's figured out how certain mismatches and trends work to his advantage. To get specific: the hyperextended guitar bends that push "White Galactic One" are technically a slight bit off, yet it's that serration that demonstrates why things like these are called "hooks." Where a specific minor chord might be more harmonically congruent, Pundt inserts a major and the result finds "Monoliths" and "Strangers" stocked with ear-turning melodies as opposed to folky familiarity. Heck, it's likely the greatest testament to Pundt's abilities that Spooky Action is in a major key and dedicated to simple pleasures of escape and memory more often than your typical "power-pop" record, and yet it always comes off as warm and generous rather than cloying.
And so while Lotus Plaza is truly a solo project for Pundt, I hear more purposeful solitude than isolation-- like reading a book or swimming laps, "antisocial" with all the pejorative connotations removed. Maybe I'm reading too much into things, but in light of Deerhunter's notoriously volatile personnel dynamic preceding Halcyon Digest, it's tempting to hear Lotus Plaza as Pundt's platonic ideal for a band, where people are as predictable and helpful as loops and are united in their pursuit of the kind of reverberant pop music that makes perfect sense for the times you most enjoy getting caught up in your own thoughts. It's a common ambition for artists to capture the music that plays out in their head and if Spooky Action is really what Pundt's hearing, you can't really blame him for looking so lost within himself all the time. | 2012-04-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-04-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Kranky | April 2, 2012 | 8.4 | 15a26a32-3c5e-46b7-8208-4cb1e1df2276 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The New Orleans rapper’s latest album is a meditation on the gravest, most tranquil parts of modern American life, marked by moments of trauma and ones of tranquility. Quelle Chris guests on two key tracks. | The New Orleans rapper’s latest album is a meditation on the gravest, most tranquil parts of modern American life, marked by moments of trauma and ones of tranquility. Quelle Chris guests on two key tracks. | Cavalier: Private Stock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cavalier-private-stock/ | Private Stock | The video for “Open Season,” a single from Cavalier’s lush, rewarding new album Private Stock, is punctuated with symbols of the reactionary South: a waving Confederate flag, a raised, white arm with REVOLUTION tattooed in block letters, the road sign for Lee Circle. This is New Orleans, a city that was once the epicenter of the American slave trade, became one of the most culturally vibrant cities on the continent, was destroyed by a hurricane, and is clawing its way back. Cav’s apartment is papered with printouts of articles detailing the removal of Confederate monuments and the ensuing backlash. As he rounds up his friends to grab a meal at a Creole restaurant, he and everyone else slip into robes and headwraps and seem to occupy another plane, at peace. But in short video clips, we see white protesters slashing fingers across their throats, defending the Robert E. Lee statue before it was finally toppled. The wheels on frozen daiquiri machines spin in flat, endless circles.
Cavalier is not from New Orleans, at least not originally. The Brooklyn native has been kicking around the headier corners of underground rap for some time now, perhaps best known for playing Ghostface to Quelle Chris’s Raekwon on the latter’s Niggas Is Men, a brilliant record that’s much narrower in scope than Cuban Linx, but at points nearly as virtuosic. In recent years, Cav has partnered with the Los Angeles-bred singer and producer Iman Omari, who handles the musical side of things and appears occasionally as a vocalist. Their effort prior to this, a 2015 EP called LemOnade, was, in hindsight, a slighter, formatted-to-fit-your-screen prelude to this album, full of jazz and warmth and stuttering drum patterns. Private Stock builds on that to create a meditation on the gravest and calmest parts of modern American life, marked by moments of trauma and ones of tranquility.
“Open Season” takes its name from comments that Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Georgia) made on the House floor in 2015 about police murders of black men and women. On “State of Mind,” Cav ponders Flint water and Floridian ground-standing and raps: “They tried to throw Harriet Tub on the front of a dub/Hilarious when little white girls in the club got one rolled to do rails/But not underground.” As a writer, Cav excels at slipping into the naturalistic (the taste of Old Bay seasoning, the way money clips fit in his pocket, different from rubber bands) and the utterly abstract without losing his narrative or ideological threads. His characters, even those who only get half a bar, are fully realized—“I know cats behind bars adorned with a fez/Or shorties who could shoplift a pregnancy test.” He’ll call himself “the last weedman in the apocalypse” and sound like he’s fully considered both the end days and the way eighth prices are reactive to ballot referendums six states away; his style is, as he says, “highbrow with a hot comb flow.”
As engrossing as Cav can be on his own, it’s his give-and-take with Quelle that drives Private Stock across the finish line. Quelle appears here on back-to-back songs, his chemistry with Cav pulling the latter into his loosest and most penetrating modes. (In addition to those two tracks, Quelle co-produced “Medicine Man” and helped arrange the album.) Niggas Is Men is notable, in part, for how it starts off freewheeling and becomes almost crushingly sober toward its end; in their two-song suite here, Cav and Quelle mimic that arc in miniature. “Watch Me” broaches anxiety and self-medication and the afterlife—and Cav watches someone order Chinese food with an IV still stuck in his arm—but is the breezier of the two cuts, with “Bar Therapy” turning more contemplative. “When y’all was wishin’, I was listenin’,” Cav raps. “I pay attention.” He flashes to images of “judges in black cloaks, gavels/Yards with gravel.” By the end of his verse, he’s hungry for more, praying. It’s Private Stock stripped down to the bone. Having considered the grisliest things, Cavalier is ready to write, full of life again. | 2018-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Sav Cav Music | April 12, 2018 | 7.5 | 15a2a223-c7c5-4812-8674-a21c86ec9f13 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Australia’s Impetuous Ritual take death metal to its outermost limits, with guitars that blossom and decay. On their latest, they progress by getting even more extreme. | Australia’s Impetuous Ritual take death metal to its outermost limits, with guitars that blossom and decay. On their latest, they progress by getting even more extreme. | Impetuous Ritual: Blight Upon Martyred Sentience | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/impetuous-ritual-blight-upon-martyred-sentience/ | Blight Upon Martyred Sentience | Australia’s Impetuous Ritual have solidified their place in their country’s tradition of taking death metal to its outermost limits. They’ve taken a Panopticon-like approach (the idea, not the band), and built cavernous walls of perpetually howling guitars; were it not for drums blistering in the deep background, it would be formless. It does not seem like a sound that would lend itself to progression, but then again, Impetuous Ritual do not progress in the conventional metal sense. Growing as a metal band usually entails getting more melodic, working in more prog and experimental elements, or going for a more commercial sound. Blight Upon Martyred Sentience, their third full-length, is as impenetrable as their first two, while advancing in the only way they could—getting even more extreme.
Blight begins how 2014’s Unholy Congregation of Hypocritical Ambivalence ended: a churn that feels inescapable, where the band is wearing you down gradually. Guitarists Ignis Fatuus and Omenous Fugue, both members of avant-death metal band Portal, blossom and decay throughout, sounding like they’re both building and disintegrating at the same time. It makes the next two songs, “Apoptosis” and “Inordinate Disdain”—both faster, chaotic tracks—feel more restless. The former lashes out suddenly; death metal’s familiar atonality gets severed and floats like a pack of malevolent ghosts. Throughout, the guitarists throw out lead patterns without warning, and they are more noticeable than on previous Impetuous Ritual records, where they were buried. Unholy was defined by its devotion to an unending marathon of down-tuned rhythm; Blight is more about smashing through that foundation.
Ignis Fatuus’ vocals are so low they’re sometimes barely indistinguishable from the guitars, similar to how Will Rahmer of Mortician blends his guttural voice with his bass. While Impetuous Ritual does have (scant) lyrics, Blight effectively functions as wordless music. (Their song titles are impeccable death metal word salad, though, an example that metal thrives on absurdity, inadvertent or not.) That isn’t unusual for death metal, where comprehension comes close to dead last, and it’s also true of Impetuous Ritual’s previous work, though Blight makes the case that vocals can really be a textural element. In reverse, when the guitars shriek in a higher register, they create an interplay with Fatuus’ vocals. “Synchronous Convergence,” in particular, shows how the guitars and vocals trade off like singers. You can recommend Blight to more metal-inclined Cocteau Twins fans as easily as Incantation diehards.
Blight is a more grueling affair than its predecessor. And yet, across the album, it’s also easier to trace Impetuous Ritual’s lineage. The brutality currently emanating from Australia is so far on metal’s fringes that it looks nothing like any form of rock music, and more like noise with metal instrumentation. But in bringing the leads up in the mix—“leads” here meaning anything deviating from the churning rhythm, not always in the classic metal sense—Impetuous Ritual show their debt to Sadistik Exekution guitarist Reverend Kriss Hades, who conjured million-note flurries on an ultra-scalloped guitar. They also nod to Bestial Warlust’s Joe Skullfucker and K.K. Warslut’s “war metal,” which simplified black metal into a faster and freer form. Bestial Warlust has long been inactive, and Sadistik Exekution isn’t likely to reform after a sluggish one-off reunion in 2009, which leaves Impetuous Ritual to spearhead a new direction in metal barbarism, for their country and abroad. | 2017-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Profound Lore | June 26, 2017 | 7.9 | 15a64aae-26f6-41bd-be4d-98c6f25a0f56 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
Bay Area composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's Euclid is her most complete album yet, with a range that encompasses something approaching song structure and a form of ambient drift that nimbly floats up into the stratosphere. | Bay Area composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's Euclid is her most complete album yet, with a range that encompasses something approaching song structure and a form of ambient drift that nimbly floats up into the stratosphere. | Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: Euclid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20084-euclid/ | Euclid | There’s a gentle kind of alchemy at work on Euclid, making it feel like the work of someone with an unshakable belief in magic. Bay Area composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has produced works before, ranging from the glacial wistfulness of Useful Trees to electronic compositions with a distinctly agrarian hue (Cows will eat the weeds). This album, her first for Western Vinyl, is Smith’s most complete album yet, with a range that encompasses something approaching song structure and a form of ambient drift that nimbly floats up into the stratosphere. The overall feeling of enchantment is only heightened by learning that Euclid was recorded primarily on a Buchla Music Easel, a synth as colorful as the sounds it creates, and vocal passages that only occasionally resemble words. She puts some separation between its two sides, flooding Euclid’s first half with song-y material then plunging into a reflective pool in its backend, making it feel like Smith took out a pair of scissors and carefully cut the record in two.
The most noticeable trait of Euclid is how light it feels—there’s very little bass, nothing much to hold it down. It appears to just float there in front of you, opening up its kaleidoscopic layers. Smith grew up in isolation, on an island in Washington state, and there’s a certain singularity to her work that surely grew out of those roots. She often appears adrift in her music, endlessly laying strips of sound over one another until everything’s just right. For "Careen", Smith works in a space similar to the one inhabited by High Places in the latter part of the last decade, where hippy idylls, rustic charm, and gusty pop combine as one. If there is a darker component to her work it’s in the processed vocals, which resemble the type of squelchy effects Karin Dreijer Andersson tried on for the Knife’s Silent Shout on "Wide Awake". Still, those are only loose comparisons—a big part of the charm of Euclid is in hearing someone mapping out their own space and time, figuring out their own destination to land in.
Of the first half-dozen songs here it’s in "Sundry" that everything coalesces, with Smith drawing on a tone that’s just the right side of whimsical. It’s here that her instrumental passages squeak and cry, feeling like she’s conducting a dialogue with them through the wordless vocal inflections skirting across the top. There’s joy, although not the kind that gives over to abandon—her music is slightly too studied for that. Smith indulges the considered side of her personality further on the set of "Labyrinth"-themed tracks that make up the second half of Euclid, where rain-like trickles of synth vie with cloudier electronics and deep pulses purposefully obscured in the mix. It’s in a similar sphere to Laurie Spiegel’s The Expanding Universe, where rhythms come together then break apart, where a single one- or two-note riff becomes a macrocosm unto itself. Sometimes it’s a little too blurry, but it’s superseded by the way Smith works her way around sounds to open up new dimensions in them.
There’s a video clip of Smith playing her Music Easel, which enforces this album’s air of beauty mixed in with color and conjury. Smith plugs brightly colored cables into its modular interface and her hands drift over its silvery keys, creating an expanse of sound that’s more elastic than you might expect from just a few operations. There’s an element of gear fetishization to it for sure, but also a healthy dose of wonder, causing it to feel like you’re watching someone just as enamored of the process of discovery as they are with delivering a final product. That’s a useful way to describe Euclid, with Smith figuring out a place to operate in somewhere between structure and freedom, often indulging one and not the other. This feels like a beginning rather than a natural way forward, but it’s driven by an important idea—where the process of separation can be a more powerful and intuitive way of working than forcing harmony upon contrasting ideas. | 2015-01-19T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-01-19T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental | Western Vinyl | January 19, 2015 | 7.3 | 15a89347-dce7-4549-9221-ffe6b00a6cba | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
The L.A. beatmaker’s 11th release on Leaving Records moves between wobbly R&B loops, musique concrète, stoned sonic detours, and E.T.-friendly G-funk. | The L.A. beatmaker’s 11th release on Leaving Records moves between wobbly R&B loops, musique concrète, stoned sonic detours, and E.T.-friendly G-funk. | Ras G & the Afrikan Space Program: Stargate Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ras-g-and-the-afrikan-space-program-stargate-music/ | Stargate Music | Los Angeles beat warper Ras G has spent the better part of the past decade flaunting his alien status, with titles like Brotha From Anotha Planet and El-Aylien Part II: C.razy A.lien accompanying disjointed productions as dizzying as the Milky Way. His copious output (including four albums in 2016 alone) places him in a constellation of prolific beatmakers like Madlib, Knxwledge, and Karriem Riggins. But recently he’s been dropping back down to earth. Stargate Music, his 11th release on Leaving Records, is dedicated (or “livicated,” according to Ras G’s terminology) “to the Womb-man...to the Vagina, The Stargate.”
Ras G’s choice of theme places the album in a lineage extending through Gustave Courbet’s “The Origin of the World” and Funkadelic’s “Nappy Dugout,” but Stargate Music’s concept comes across more as an abstract notion than a literal one; the album lopes through drunken R&B loops, musique concrète, stoned sonic detours, and E.T.-friendly G-funk. Opener “Primordial Water Formations 1” bears all the squelches and static from the dawn of electronic music, like a sonogram from INA-GRM. And the gurgling rhythms of “Water Broken (The Opening of the Stargate)” find Ras G making taffy of a vocal snippet that’s closer in execution to the destabilizing ring modulations of voices on Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Gesang Der Jünglinge” than to any of his Brainfeeder brothers.
On “The Arrival,” Ras G uses playground handclaps (evocative of FlyLo’s “Putty Boy Strut”) before veering off into a spongy space filled with vocal scatting, laser pulses, and alien radio signals squiggling in the mix. Throughout, Ras G tends to fidget about, and most pieces move on after just a few minutes, never ending up quite where they began. “Quest to Find Anu Stargate” packs the set’s heaviest wallop, but soon, diaphanous jazz chords looming behind the beat spread wider and an R&B coo gently muffles the kick, so that the track winds up feeling more like a drifter than a banger.
The back half of the album becomes harder to pin down, as Ras G switches up styles every few minutes. Phased funk guitar loops, dusted flutes, melted vocal snippets, and flat-tire drum loops wobble in the mix, thumping erratically like sneakers in the dryer. Whether these sounds fizzle or snap, they soon give way to something new. An eerie group chant crops up near album’s end that could have been sampled from some strange, Osho-esque cult recording—which is perhaps only fitting. Bearing titles like “The Nector of Stargate (taste),” “Is It Lust or Love,” and “Heaven is between her legs... (Initiate the return),” Stargate ultimately suggests that as much as Ras G positions himself as an astral traveller, he’s also an earthbound horndog. | 2018-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Leaving | April 24, 2018 | 6.7 | 15a97906-cdec-4007-8550-2b23bd2ab0fa | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Liverpudlian Philip Jeck studied visual art at the Dartington College of Arts in Devon, England. During the early 80s, he ... | Liverpudlian Philip Jeck studied visual art at the Dartington College of Arts in Devon, England. During the early 80s, he ... | Philip Jeck: Stoke | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4226-stoke/ | Stoke | Liverpudlian Philip Jeck studied visual art at the Dartington College of Arts in Devon, England. During the early 80s, he drifted from painting and sculpture to music, and began working with old and discarded turntables. Though he's roughly a contemporary of Christian Marclay, recognition for Jeck came much later, beginning in 1993 with his massive installation "Vinyl Requiem", which incorporated 180 record players and multiple film projections. Since then, he's released several solo records for Touch and the German label Intermedium, and has collaborated with Otomo Yoshihide, among many others.
Much of Jeck's solo output is culled from edits of live performances. Using a number of battered turntables, a Casio keyboard, and a CD player or minidisc, Jeck creates dense, pulsating sound collages from the grooves of ancient and forgotten records. Like Yoshihide and Marclay, Jeck is no DJ. Though he stands over his decks with headphones on, his intention and methods with records has nothing to do with beat-matching or spinning tunes. Records are truly just sound sources for Jeck, raw material to be shaped via mixer and effects into his ghostly compositions.
Listening to his most recent album, Stoke, it's hard not to think about Jeck's background in visual art, and how it informs his audio work. There's something very cinematic about these pieces, though the music sounds nothing like a soundtrack. Some of the visual referencing could come from the regular pops and scrapes in the vinyl, which are reminiscent of the sound of a spool of film being fed into a projector. Jeck's endlessly rotating platters, like the whirr of moving film, serve as a constant reminder of the time-based nature of the medium. These pieces happen, and all you can do as a listener is try to extract information before they fade back into nothingness. You have to listen close and listen often.
Stoke finds Jeck more in the realm of focus and refinement. While the tracks in his "Vinyl Coda" series (worth checking out, by the way) ranged from 20 to 60 minutes, the seven distinct pieces here average less than eight. The relatively tight construction of the tracks means that Jeck can hone in on a single sonic idea and amplify it, extracting the maximum amount of emotional material from a few grimy loops. "Pax" is an uncharacteristically minimal piece combining a simple organ refrain and slowed-down vocals, possibly from an old gospel 78. The keyboard is very clean-sounding and might not be sourced from a record, but it perfectly complements the churched-up feel of the warped vocal, stretching the anguish of the indecipherable lyric to its breaking point.
"Close" uses ancient recordings of sacred music from another culture to beautiful effect, this time the ringing sounds of Indian classical. The undisciplined hiss of a loose sitar string is clipped to ribbons, then looped and recombined to sound like a warning, some indeterminate alarm sounding through a Himalayan valley. The piece takes a stunning left turn in its final quarter, turning to a loop of surface noise with an echoing and unbearably lonesome vocal floating on top.
"Lambing" is Jeck in drone mode, patiently adding and removing layers of sound and noise whose vinyl sources remain a complete mystery. The style on "Lambing" could be considered Jeck's signature, and it's amazing what he accomplishes through additive processes. There's something wonderfully machine-like about the operation. Since Jeck has the entire world of sound at his disposal, he has to figure how much of it to let in at any given moment, like mixing air with fuel inside a carburetor. Stoke proves him a master mechanic. | 2002-11-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2002-11-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Touch | November 26, 2002 | 8.4 | 15a9cf9c-249e-4e1f-977b-cd79ac7f7ad7 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Dev Hynes follows Test Icicles and Lightspeed Champion with a new solo project, a highly stylish album that frequently forgoes things like melodies, energy, and vocal choruses in favor of slinky, solitary guitar lines and seductively spare, post-punk atmospherics. | Dev Hynes follows Test Icicles and Lightspeed Champion with a new solo project, a highly stylish album that frequently forgoes things like melodies, energy, and vocal choruses in favor of slinky, solitary guitar lines and seductively spare, post-punk atmospherics. | Blood Orange: Coastal Grooves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15722-coastal-grooves/ | Coastal Grooves | As a member of short-lived dance punks Test Icicles, Dev Hynes abused eardrums and EQ levels with glee. Since that group's demise, he's flashed surprising proclivities towards lush, orchestral-tinged folk-pop in the vein of Okkervil River with his solo project Lightspeed Champion. There have been growing pains at every step along the way, but they were always the result of Hynes admirably trying to do too much, trying to pour too many words and ideas and emotions into his compositions. So it's a real shock listening to Coastal Grooves, the debut LP released under Hynes' newest solo moniker, Blood Orange. Coastal Grooves is all about what's missing-- it's a highly stylish album that frequently forgoes things like melodies, energy, and vocal choruses in favor of slinky, solitary guitar lines and seductively spare, post-punk atmospherics.
Most of the album's 10 tracks feel like promising skeletal demos of songs that are close to being truly great. Hynes is a gifted and voracious guitarist, displaying here particular predilections for sounds from Asia and the American West. Aside from a couple of purely moody pieces ("Can We Go Inside Now", "Complete Failure"), Coastal Grooves is also largely propelled by strong, strutting rhythmic foundations, while Hynes' vocals remain appealingly florid throughout.
The problem is there are almost no payoffs. Far too often, Hynes lays intriguing groundwork for a sexy, indie-funk jam or a sweetly kissed pop song, arrives at the chorus, and gives us only a stark guitar line or plinky little rhythm. I suppose this minimalist approach is in keeping with the album's artfully space-conscious post-punk leanings, and sometimes the device is evocative (particularly on first single "Sutphin Boulevard"), but it gets to a point with Coastal Grooves that you halfway start expecting to hear Hynes mumble, "Chorus goes here," during some of the seemingly placeholding moments. Subsequently, the few songs that have genuine vocal refrains-- like "Forget It" and "The Complete Knock"-- end up feeling more fleshed out and dynamic than they really are.
Hynes is the type of demonstrative, emotionally engaging artist who definitely feels more at home being messily overambitious than coolly restrained. The sounds he pursues here as Blood Orange might be more hip than his work as Lightspeed Champion, but the end results are less satisfying. Ideally, a blend of the two styles would be best, the artfulness of one project with the human connection of the other. So which sounds better: Blood Champion, or Lightspeed Orange? | 2011-08-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-08-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Domino | August 26, 2011 | 5.9 | 15a9e7a3-ac15-452f-a4eb-1b6d11d8af45 | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
The Aussie psych-rock group’s fifth album of 2017 is anything but a tossed-off afterthought, showing a new dedication to pop craftsmanship. | The Aussie psych-rock group’s fifth album of 2017 is anything but a tossed-off afterthought, showing a new dedication to pop craftsmanship. | King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Gumboot Soup | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-gizzard-and-the-lizard-wizard-gumboot-soup/ | Gumboot Soup | If anyone had reason to celebrate this past New Year’s Eve, it was King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. On December 31, the Australian psych-rock collective finally fulfilled their long-standing promise to release five new albums in 2017, surreptitiously making Gumboot Soup available on their Bandcamp page hours before the year came to a close. Whether they were scrambling to make the deadline or were just withholding the new record until the last possible moment for dramatic effect, the photo finish felt just right for a wildly unpredictable band that always seems to be flying by the seat of its cut-off shorts, yet always manages to get the job done. The remarkable thing about King Gizzard’s 2017 isn’t just that they managed to release five records—it’s that not a moment of them felt half-assed. They didn’t cook the books by dropping a 30-minute improv jam or cobbling together a bunch of acoustic song sketches and calling it an album. Whether it was released by a big label like ATO, a small Aussie indie like Flightless, or, well, you, each of their 2017 releases is an elaborately constructed, carefully considered statement that opened up new universes for the band to explore.
A title like Gumboot Soup might suggest a sloppy collection of leftovers, but the record features some of the most delicately rendered songs ever released by this bull-in-a-china-shop band. In it, you’ll hear echoes of the band’s other 2017 releases—the ominous eco-conscious parables of Flying Microtonal Banana, the over-the-top motorik metal of Murder of the Universe, the jazzy looseness of Sketches of Brunswick East, the pastoral prog of Polygondwanaland. But there’s an emphasis on pop craftsmanship and concision here that greatly distinguishes it from its immediate predecessors (not to mention a gesture toward late-’70s Bowie-esque art-funk, via “Down the Sink,” that constitutes another new look for this stylistically promiscuous group).
Where the vocals in a given King Gizzard song tend to mimic the pattern of the main guitar riff or underlying rhythm (often encouraging mantric repetition), here, the arrangements rally around the melodies. Keyboardist Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s atypically relaxed voice leads the way on the gently swinging cocktail-lounge pop of “The Last Oasis,” gradually submerging the song in a blissful, aquatic whirl. And the dreamy, psychedelic soft-rock of “Beginner’s Luck” is so enchanting, you could be forgiven for thinking its scenes of high-stakes casino gambling constituted a celebration of excess, rather than a cautionary allegory for unchecked greed. (The spastic, squawking guitar solo that overtakes the song in its final minute brings the band’s subversive intent to the fore.)
As “Beginner’s Luck” makes clear from the outset, Gumboot Soup’s tilt toward pop accessibility doesn’t come at the expense of the band’s burgeoning social conscience. King Gizzard’s recent records have toed the line between wacky and woke, but on Gumboot Soup, the apocalyptic allusions become all the more vivid, as if bearing the crushing weight of all the geopolitical misery that 2017 wrought. Over a rumbling Can groove, the self-explanatory “Greenhouse Heat Death” finds ringleader Stu McKenzie singing of environmental degradation from the Earth’s perspective in the pained croak of a torture victim. And the growling “Great Chain of Being” would verge on heavy-metal parody if only its megalomaniacal ravings (“I usurp the precious stones/I have come to take the throne/I transcend the natural flesh/I will lay your god to rest”) didn’t resemble dispatches from the Oval Office. Even the band’s clarion call for off-the-grid living, “Muddy Water,” is rendered as a sax-blasted blitzkrieg boogie, as if to suggest that our time to enjoy nature’s spoils is rapidly running out.
But if there’s a song here that best sums up the events of the past year—for both the band and the world at large—it’s “I’m Sleepin’ In.” In its downsized, vacuum-sealed sound and slumberous spirit, it’s a worthy successor to the pantheon of John Lennon songs about getting some shut-eye. And like those tunes, it’s less a slacker’s anthem than a cry for help, a plea to disconnect from the pressures of the outside world. “I need to locate the switch hidden in me/Which will turn me off,” McKenzie sings. Given that he’s just released five musically and ideologically dense albums in 12 months, dude has more than earned the right to power down. | 2018-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Flightless | January 15, 2018 | 7.7 | 15ab9552-6c44-4d31-9399-85ecfc231c63 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Former Ridgewood, NJ-based singer/songwriter takes a major creative leap, refining his eclectic collage-pop aesthetic while retaining its emotional tug. | Former Ridgewood, NJ-based singer/songwriter takes a major creative leap, refining his eclectic collage-pop aesthetic while retaining its emotional tug. | Julian Lynch: Mare | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14366-mare/ | Mare | Julian Lynch first hit our radar last year with a few promising tracks on the first Underwater Peoples compilation, followed by Orange You Glad, his debut release (and first non-CDR full-length) for the Brooklyn-based experimental label Olde English Spelling Bee. The record introduced us to his folksy collage-pop aesthetic, but while often beautiful, its low fidelity often felt more like a hindrance than a benefit, and the more traditional song structures could feel slight or meandering. His newest album, Mare, is another story. An earthy, eclectic record that manages to be challenging, but also remarkably patient, it's the sound of the formerly Ridgewood, NJ-based songwriter quietly coming into his own.
Lynch once worked for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, and now studies ethnomusicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and you can hear those diverse influences at work on Mare: The music is recorded on humble equipment, is rough around the edges, and pulls liberally from lots of different genres. There are traces of drone, noise, and African percussion, for instance, alongside more traditional pop and rock elements. His instrumentation is unusual and eclectic, incorporating clarinet, watery guitar lines, shuffling maracas, and delicate drum work. But where bedroom pop tends to be somber and even unsettling at times, Lynch's music is very much at ease with itself. And it sounds very organic. Tracks are experimental in composition but ultimately echo the mood of folk or country-- music that feels like it should be played outdoors.
There's a kicked-back, front-porch quality to the album-- songs are sedate and unfurl slowly. Lynch sings but obscures his vocals until they act as a loose guide rather than a specifc blueprint. So Mare is primarily about atmosphere, and in that sense it's very much like an ambient record. And as with good ambient, it soothes without drifting off into the distance. This balance is key to the record's success, and Lynch acheives it with a smart rhythmic touch. "Interlude" is airy and gentle but it has propulsion and direction. Under its woozy synths and indistinct vocal coos is a funky guitar line that keeps it moving forward.
The album is also sneakily complex. You can just let it wash over you-- and it's good at that-- but the closer attention you pay, the more detail emerges. "Ruth, My Sister" is a pleasant wisp on first pass, but more spins show a dynamic arrangement that builds tension an inch at a time. And the sequencing is excellent: The record picks up steam around the seventh track, "Ears", which is bright and celebratory and just the right amount of spark so things don't become sleepy. Lynch is also smart to save some of his most straightforward material for the end of the record as a nice payoff. "Travelers" is probably the poppiest thing here-- just a simple vocal hook and melodic bassline-- but totally effective within the larger scheme.
One of the most likable things about Mare is that, for how druggy and narcotized it sounds, it doesn't comes across as sad or tuned-out. A lot of artists use these kinds of woozy textures to enhance a detached viewpoint, but ultimately this is colorful and engaged music. It's relaxed and inviting, and if the idea of summer music wasn't so generally overstated then I'd say it's also very season-appropriate. More centrally, though, it's a major creative step forward for Lynch, whose absorbing ambient pop sounds prove how refreshing this kind of subtlety can be. That's an easy sentiment to embrace. | 2010-06-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-06-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Olde English Spelling Bee | June 28, 2010 | 8.5 | 15b79631-c734-4136-bb6c-33b3e377e0db | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
New remasters of the country singer’s first three solo albums highlight his unique blend of honky-tonk, rockabilly, and Tex-Mex influences—a sound that could only have come from his native West Texas. | New remasters of the country singer’s first three solo albums highlight his unique blend of honky-tonk, rockabilly, and Tex-Mex influences—a sound that could only have come from his native West Texas. | Joe Ely: Joe Ely / Honky Tonk Masquerade / Down on the Drag | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joe-ely-joe-ely-honky-tonk-masquerade-down-on-the-drag/ | Joe Ely / Honky Tonk Masquerade / Down on the Drag | Driving across West Texas can feel a little like piloting a Mars rover: life signs minimal save for the stray prairie dog, an endless sky suffocating overhead. The cities of Amarillo and Lubbock appear like distant waystations on the horizon, first as hazy mirage and then as reality. Even within those denser zip codes, a profound alienation hangs in the air, a truly physical awareness of how distant your existence is from the rest of the state. Yet the isolation of West Texas has served as an incubator for a distinct kind of futurism, one best symbolized by the Cadillac Ranch installation outside Amarillo: a slash of modernism cutting against a landscape that’s flatter than Hank Hill’s ass.
This barren country gave birth to early rock pioneers like Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison, whose electrified guitars were signal conductors connecting remote listeners to the big city, like telephone wires across an empty highway. As a teenager in Lubbock in the early 1960s, singer-songwriter Joe Ely proved particularly receptive to the transmissions of rock’n’roll. Though his music might be branded Americana, Ely has always had a rockabilly soul, emphasizing the shared rhythm-and-blues roots that country and rock sprang from. In a career that stretches back more than 50 years, Ely found success as both a regional superstar and international cult favorite, even if mainstream American recognition often seemed to elude him—a songwriter’s songwriter, as they say.
New remasters of Ely’s first three solo albums—Joe Ely (1977), Honky Tonk Masquerade (1978), and Down on the Drag (1979)—by engineer Dave Donnelly blow the dust off a rich body of work. It was these records in particular that made Ely—alongside artists like Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, and former classmate Terry Allen—a pillar of the progressive country scene that revolved around public television’s Austin City Limits. Their audience may have been the same, but the West Texas sound had a few crucial differences from the “gonzo” music brewed up at the Armadillo World Headquarters. Where Jerry Jeff and friends brought the folk and jazz of the West Village down south to Austin, Ely went south of the border, borrowing from the sounds of Tejano music and Mexican norteño. The result is pure Tex-Mex fusion, with a penchant for waltz time and as much accordion as steel guitar. It’s the soundtrack of a region that’s always been a cultural crossroads of blended influences—by way of norteño, Ely’s songwriting especially highlights the polka and waltz traditions that German and Eastern European immigrants brought to Central Texas, a region where the Czech kolache remains a long-standing breakfast staple.
Much the way the Panhandle exists between the Southwest and the Midwest, Ely’s music straddles countless lines. He’s a hardcore honky-tonker clearly influenced by the western swing of Bob Wills, but not someone you’d consider a country neotraditionalist; a rockabilly revivalist, but not a nostalgia act like the contemporaneous Stray Cats; a cowboy poet who keeps his tongue slyly tucked in his cheek but never gets too clever. Honky Tonk Masquerade in particular is as revelatory as an oasis in the desert, a midway point between the rough-and-tumble party of outlaw country and the more self-consciously literary “alt-country” of lyricists like Lyle Lovett and James McMurtry.
Ely’s musical career formally began with the Flatlanders, a group filled out by high school pals Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock. The trio would become something like the Velvet Underground of Texas music—“more a legend than a band,” as the title of a compilation would describe them years later. Their hippie-adjacent cosmic sound, all group harmonies and neo-Buddhist koans, is a far cry from the rough and rowdy ways of Ely’s solo work. Before the group reformed in the 1990s, Ely gave their songs his own interpretation; Honky Tonk Masquerade’s version of “Tonight I Think I’m Gonna Go Do Town” adds a baritone grit where Gilmore’s voice is gentler.
After the Flatlanders’ first run, Ely would live the kind of rambling life that makes for good country music, imbuing his work with both a droll absurdity and a deeper sense of yearning—the odd jobs he kept during the mid 1970s included time as a roadie for the Ringling Brothers Circus. As a solo performer, Ely would cut his teeth on the same dive-bar circuit as bluesmen like ZZ Top and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and that raucous energy has remained at the core of his music.
With his first solo albums, Ely became a surprising sensation in Europe, where he befriended the members of the Clash on tour. If you listen closely to the Spanish-language vocals on “Should Or Stay or Should I Go,” you can even hear Ely’s drawl doing backup duty, the first of many jam sessions between the two bands. What Glen Campbell was to the Beach Boys or Dylan to the Beatles, Ely became to the Clash, kindred souls whose mutual genre-bending sensibilities fostered an organic exchange of collaborative energies. In line with punk’s primal instincts, Ely was also returning to the origins of rhythm and blues, with a delinquent spirit and mod-leaning look not too far removed from the California cowpunk of X and the Gun Club, part ranch hand and part Lynchian highway drifter.
Ely’s 1977 self-titled LP is sparse compared to the fuller sound of subsequent records, but it demonstrates the development of his hybrid style and an ear for textured production. It’s also the most Flatlander-esque of his early solo work, with tracks like “Treat Me Like a Saturday Night” bearing the distinctive wistfulness of Jimmie Dale Gilmore. The record is still grounded in acoustic guitar, but the big-band sound Ely became known for is bubbling underneath, with a cameo from the Muscle Shoals horn section on “Johnny’s Blues.”
On the Butch Hancock-penned “She Never Spoke Spanish to Me,” Ely plays with Tex-Mex flavor more for novelty’s sake, but by Honky Tonk Masquerade, the norteño influence had become integral, with accordionist Ponty Boone joining the band full time. The classic lineup of Ely’s live band—Jesse Taylor on electric guitar, Lloyd Maines on steel, Gregg Wright on bass, and Steve Keeton on drums—had at this point become a well-oiled machine, as central to his sound as Ely himself. The production on Honky Tonk Masquerade aims to replicate the tactility of live performance; you can almost hear the pick against the strings on the opening riff of “Cornbread Moon.” The Jerry Lee Lewis impression on “Fingernails” even turns his body to an instrument, like an old Mickey Mouse cartoon: “I keep my fingernails long, so they click when I play the piano.” The steel guitar work by Lloyd Maines—an institution of Texas music in his own right who, among many other credits, played on Wilco’s A.M. and fathered Natalie Maines of the Chicks—is especially foundational to the Ely style, the main source of the honky-tonk flavor that distinguishes his solo tunes from the Flatlanders; the picking on “Because the Wind” is like the sound of weeping. It’s not all country-and-western pastiche, though. “Boxcars” makes for a foreboding hobo ballad that could have been covered by Tom Waits, with a fuzzy electric guitar subbing in for the wail of a train whistle.
Ely’s warbling delivery suggests someone who sincerely loves country music but can see through its tropes, affecting a character in the pursuit of a greater sincerity—he even breaks into a slight yodel to embody the heartbroken patsy of “I’ll Be Your Fool.” There’s a distinctive swagger in his voice that could only come from Texas, and he has a rascally sense of humor. On “West Texas Waltz,” he playfully acknowledges that some of his stylings might be a little old-fashioned, encouraging his listeners to “bind up their bunions” and “dance away the arthritis.” The cover of “Honky Tonkin’” transforms Hank’s sinful original into a strutting dancehall bop, the kind of big-band jam that sounds like it could last until the cows come home, if not for the fade-out.
While Joe Ely and Honky Tonk Masquerade were recorded by legendary Nashville guitarist Chip Young, for Down on the Drag he recruited Bob Johnston, who cut countless classics by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash—perhaps an indication of the kind of artist Ely hoped to become, a lyrical auteur drifting between genres but beloved by all. The title expresses Ely’s complete immersion in the Austin scene: “The Drag,” where Ely imagines himself down and out, is an overcrowded thoroughfare on the edge of the University of Texas campus. “Standin’ at a Big Hotel” is classic gonzo sound in the vein of Jerry Jeff Walker, while “Crawdad Train” works in a touch of Delta blues. The drumming on Ely’s records always sounded a little more forward in the mix than other country of the era, but Down on the Drag indicates his more rock-facing turn with its emphasis on percussion; Steve Keeton serves as a strong backbone on songs like “Crazy Lemon” and “Fools Fall in Love.”
Despite the radical transformations country music has undergone in the last 50 years, Ely has somehow weathered them all. In the ’70s, Ely was opening for Carl Perkins and Merle Haggard; by 2000, he was touring with the Chicks. As often as his music looked to the past, Joe Ely was regularly on the cusp of the future, in the tradition of his amplified forefathers. The unexpected cameo from a Moog synthesizer on “Fingernails” foreshadows Ely’s later experimentation: After his honky-tonk period, Ely would dabble in “computerized” music with Hi-Res, a bedroom pop album produced on an Apple II in the vein of McCartney II or Neil Young’s Trans. And in a parallel to his many unexpected musical friendships, Ely’s long nights of technological tinkering led him to become virtual pen pals with Steve Wozniak.
More than any name-brand hit ever could, those fertile relationships with creatives and performers of all stripes speak to the quality of Ely’s work, revealing an understated influence felt far beyond the West Texas plains. He’s the kind of artist you want as your jam partner or back-up vocalist, an effortlessly talented musician who also knows how to function as a member of a band. But these new remasters make the case for Ely as a leading man in his own right, separate from his many cameos, as a singer who embodies the inherently hybrid nature of Texas culture. As his English comrades in the Clash did with genres like reggae and lovers rock, Ely absorbed the musical diversity of his native landscape and synthesized a new blend, equal parts reverent and unholy. | 2023-03-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | null | March 21, 2023 | 7.7 | 15b7bb0a-dd37-4399-9754-e0cc5d0b77c7 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
As U.S. Girls, Meghan Remy buries simple melodies and vocal hooks under layers of noise and echo. But her third full-length is significantly cleaner than her previous two, the increased clarity revealing true pop gems. | As U.S. Girls, Meghan Remy buries simple melodies and vocal hooks under layers of noise and echo. But her third full-length is significantly cleaner than her previous two, the increased clarity revealing true pop gems. | U.S. Girls: U.S. Girls on KRAAK | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16064-us-girls-on-kraak/ | U.S. Girls on KRAAK | "It's pretty much all I listen to," Meghan Remy told me when I asked her about pop music last year. "It's the only thing I am really influenced by." That might come as a surprise when you hear the music of her solo project U.S. Girls, which buries simple melodies and vocal hooks under layers of noise and echo. She's even turned pop classics like Bruce Springsteen's "Prove it All Night" and B.J. Thomas' "I Don't Have a Mind of My Own" into basement dirges. But according to Remy, her lo-fi approach is more financial necessity than aesthetic choice. "I would love to make a really clear recording," she said in the same interview. "It's my dream!"
That dream is realized on U.S. Girls on KRAAK, which is significantly cleaner and less cacophonous than her previous two full-lengths. The increased clarity reveals some true pop gems, especially the stunning "Island Song", in which Remy's expressive singing sounds both stirring and exultant, inspiring chills and smiles in equal measure. Nearly as good are tracks bearing the influence of doo-wop, Motown, country, and R&B. Remy's love of the latter is especially clear in a Residents-like reworking of Brandy and Monica's "The Boy Is Mine".
An album made solely of tunes like that would be strong enough, but what makes U.S. Girls on KRAAK great is how Remy mixes in sounds that are just as odd and idiosyncratic as her previous work. For every melodic nugget, there's a hallucinatory loop, a cloudy drone, or what sounds like the remnants of an exploded pop song-- half of a chorus, shards of a hook-- echoing in the distance. In lesser hands, alternating experiments and tunes could come off forced or gratuitous, but Remy connects them in a way that sounds natural and almost effortless. So when the creepy, voice-in-head "Wells Dubs" flows into the Patsy Cline-styled "Peotone", it's far from jarring. Instead, you can hear how Remy approaches minimalist loops and pop hooks as if they were the same thing and capable of the same infectious effect.
Remy recently signed U.S. Girls to FatCat, so even glossier, higher-fidelity work might be in her future (and will perhaps come in a longer format, as U.S. Girls on KRAAK lasts only 26 minutes). If so, this album is a perfect launching point in that direction. But it's also a triumph on its own. Remy has widened and universalized her music without losing a drop of what previously made it so special and personal. | 2011-11-22T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2011-11-22T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | K-RAA-K | November 22, 2011 | 7.9 | 15b8e11a-30ac-4203-b28c-e8bc53db0e63 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Blending UK bass, deconstructed techno, and abstract ambient, the Bristol producer crafts stripped-back club tracks distinguished by their crystalline sound design and icy atmospheres. | Blending UK bass, deconstructed techno, and abstract ambient, the Bristol producer crafts stripped-back club tracks distinguished by their crystalline sound design and icy atmospheres. | Bruce: Sonder Somatic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruce-sonder-somatic/ | Sonder Somatic | Much like the output of his labelmate Joe, the bewildering dance music that Larry McCarthy makes under the nearly anonymous name of Bruce can be hard to keep tabs on. Not only across the stereo field: Just Googling his name is something of a fool’s errand. (On Discogs, he's listed as “Bruce (40).”) Over the past five years, McCarthy has released a heady string of singles for revered, cutting-edge UK imprints ranging from Livity Sound, Timedance, and Idle Hands to Hemlock, an early James Blake booster. Outside of his iridescent, beatless entry on this year’s thrilling Patina Echoes comp, Bruce has kept a low profile since dropping three wildly divergent singles back in 2016.
Call what Bruce makes UK bass, deconstructed techno, abstract ambient, or even weightless grime, but his crystalline sound design is as breathtaking as it is emotionally evocative, putting him on a level with Objekt, Pearson Sound, and Batu. His previous productions were as likely to be dropped at peak hour as they were to soundtrack anxious insomniac states. On Sonder Somatic, Bruce straddles both worlds, emphasizing his club chops while still retaining the surreal quality of lucid dreaming.
A track like “Cacao” has the sorts of sinister kicks and bass rumbles that could make it a Berghain staple. But all around those measured thumps, Bruce riddles the negative space with a dizzying array of beeps and mechanistic whirrs, like a UFO cockpit in a crash-landing. “Ore” foregrounds that sense of space, filling it with syrup-slow dub techno, so that each element—be it a snare, photon pulse, or low-end lurch—echoes like a rock kicked into a canyon.
A pulse as big as Thanos’ heartbeat powers “Meek,” which belies its title: It’s one of the album’s heaviest tracks. Bruce pressurizes the build to a claustrophobic extreme, only to plunge it all into an ice bath. “What” is another dancefloor weapon, methodically scaling up in intensity, stretching acid arpeggio and vocal snippet into a precipitous howl. As “What” peaks, it turns as vertiginous as one of Inception’s city blocks, throwing everything suddenly into zero gravity.
Previous singles like “The Trouble With Wilderness” were heartbreaking and pulse-quickening, with glints of sunshine and melancholy emergent. Yet much of Sonder Somatic revels in dark spaces and icy tones, suggestive of a club in the dead of winter. Even the downtempo meltdown of “Patience St Pim” takes its name from the blue-lipped Ice Elemental from “Adventure Time.” The first half of “Baychimo” finds McCarthy in Selected Ambient Works Volume II territory, an atmospheric state he excels at. But soon a submerged throb crests, a bullroarer at the midway point cracking the track wide open. Against such drum programming, the alien washes from the opening now impart a dark, haunted cast. It’s chilling, which is apt for a track named for an Arctic ghost ship. Sonder Somatic downplays his strength in crafting emotionally resonant ambience for tracks that are impressive and foreboding, if somewhat colder. But Bruce’s debut makes him a name worth remembering. | 2018-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hessle Audio | October 27, 2018 | 7.4 | 15bfcd93-9b0e-4879-9bbd-a8d9129c67e2 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The Glasgow-based band, which released a handful of singles and the cult-classic LP Any Other City around the turn of the millennium, is legendary among critics, DJs, and post-punk completists, but far from an indie household name. Hopefully this posthumous live album will act as a corrective. | The Glasgow-based band, which released a handful of singles and the cult-classic LP Any Other City around the turn of the millennium, is legendary among critics, DJs, and post-punk completists, but far from an indie household name. Hopefully this posthumous live album will act as a corrective. | Life Without Buildings: Live at the Annandale Hotel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10535-live-at-the-annandale-hotel/ | Live at the Annandale Hotel | Upon hearing about Life Without Buildings' posthumous live album (which, given its total lack of press, probably happened just seconds ago), you either said "who?" or fell sideways out of your chair. The Glasgow-based band, which released a handful of singles and the cult-classic LP Any Other City around the turn of the millennium, is legendary among critics, DJs, and post-punk completists, but far from an indie household name. Of course, if you're someone who collects songs like Pokemons, part of LWB's appeal lies in that obscurity, as well as in their meager catalog-- they're the archetypal band who broke up too soon to tarnish their legacy. But mostly, Life Without Buildings are beloved because they were freaking incredible, inhabiting a personality-driven idiom with more charisma and originality than most anyone else.
LWB's spiky rock instrumentation and talky vocals place them in a lineage that begins with classic Rough Trade post-punk bands such as the Fall (aptly, Rough Trade affiliate Tugboat originally released Any Other City in 2001) and continues today with bands like Love Is All, Kiss Me Deadly, and Art Brut. As such, the band's one-of-a-kind aura isn't the product of inventing a new style. It stems largely from the vocal prowess and boundless personal magnetism of singer Sue Tompkins. Tompkins emerged suddenly from the visual art world-- LWB formed while studying at the Glasgow School of Art-- and vanished just as suddenly back into it (she warned us on "Love Trinity": "I'm not willing to leave the visual world"). But in reality, she never left it-- her singing is painterly, mirroring the typographical emphasis of her collage-based visual art.
Tompkins' style seems descended from the look, if not the political content, of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's seminal Futurist text Zang Tumb Tumb, with its onomatopoeias, contrasting font sizes, anarchic typography, and jumbled cases. She translates this page-bound aesthetic into seductively coded lyrics where meaning is sometimes ambiguous, but feeling never is, and internal logic is always apparent. Tompkins stretches words like taffy or bites them off like fingernails (often in tight contrast: "Liberty Feeeeeeeeel-up!"), shuffles letters and syllables like a card sharp (as on "The Leanover": "b-b-b-b-baby, g g g, so g g g, you you," later repeating "MBV" in a rollercoaster cadence that probably refers to everyone's favorite shoegazers), breathes into the beats, abruptly shouts out numbers, jukes, hiccups and chirps. She circles her limber tongue-twisters, feints, and attacks from unexpected angles, dicing and rearranging them with the superhuman brio of an anime ninja and a telegraphic sense of lexical rhythm.
Attributing LWB's appeal solely to Tompkins does a disservice to the rest of the band, particularly to guitarist Robert Johnson, whose style is just as strikingly colorful: Cool green and ice blue, spangled with quicksilver curlicues, the elegant lattices of his fretwork are never taken for granted by Tompkins' verbal espaliers. But Life Without Buildings were always a band who overshadowed themselves. Just as Tompkins' sui generis vocals made it easy to take their musical surroundings for granted, one song, "The Leanover", seemed so miraculous as to make the rest of their consistently fantastic music pale by comparison. As Johnson's guitar spews clouds of billowing glitter, Tompkins, with a tonal mixture of wonder, belligerence, sentimentality, and petulance, achieves the single most inspired rendition of her inimitable style. Dense with fractured refrains, seamless glides between melodious notes and spoken syllables, supple nursery rhyme cadences, peremptory vernacular, and mutating imagery ("Kiss me, break my mind, close the door/ Black steel, break my mind, close the door/ Black steel, the sight of you, falling out"), it sounded at once spontaneous and intricately composed, flirting with poetic structures (the aforementioned example resembles a corrupted pantoum). The melting elegy "Sorrow" shows that Tompkins could stunningly adapt this style for more pensive effects, but the wide-eyed effervescence of "The Leanover" remains the band's signature sound.
What's truly remarkable is that "The Leanover", as well as all the other LWB songs, appear fully intact on Live at the Annandale Hotel, with every vocal strobe and chirrup, if not carbon-copied, faithful to the complex spirit of the studio version. Recorded at the venerable Sydney venue in December 2002, near the end of LWB's career, the album finds the band experienced enough to recreate their music with confidence, yet green enough to be ecstatic about doing so. The driving "PS Exclusive" cycles through its asymmetrical refrains ("the right stuff," "the red villa," "tonio, tonio") without faltering; the fluidly hitching "Juno" keeps its dizzy flocks of pronouns in order; the plangent anthem "New Town" enlivens its chant of "I forgot" with studio-caliber tonal nuance. Unreleased track "Liberty Feelup", one of the last LWB wrote before disbanding, features an inspired performance by Johnson: a bright and rolling jangle that remains melodious even when corkscrewing into dissonance or bottoming out into feedback glides.
Tompkins' is breathlessly giddy for the duration. Glib but earnest, she's hard-pressed to make it through a sentence without breaking down into giggles. Even more than the excellent musicianship, her enthusiasm and genuine quirkiness carry the set. Typical banter goes something like this: "That was a funny ending. [Laughs nervously] Well that was our first song. [Sort of wheezes] Whoo! I'm sorry, I shouldn't say that." While Tompkins is charming and clearly having a blast, it's possible to read a burgeoning dissatisfaction with the predetermination of band life in her ongoing meta-narration. "If I look over, it's because of the set list thing," she tells someone in the audience after "Let's Get Out". And later: "We're here tomorrow, so we're gonna do the same songs in a different order," adding, "that's cheeky."
It's as if the platitudes of touring ("[insert town name] is our favorite place to play!") are too much artifice for the ingenuous singer to muster-- "We haven't seen anything of Sydney yet, so we can't even say what we think of it," she says, acknowledging the tacit contract she's too honest to honor-- compelling her back to the more remote artistic sphere of visual representation. We, the fans, are left with one irreplaceable album, one equally amazing live document, and the lingering hope that, in this day of unexpected reunions, we might yet get to see Life Without Buildings for ourselves. C'mon guys, if Slint and Dinosaur Jr can do it... | 2007-08-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-08-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Absolutely Kosher / Gargleblast | August 15, 2007 | 8.7 | 15c06c48-24f0-4f40-81fc-873990ac0a44 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Scrapping big-name guests and harnessing the live fury they've shown in recent years, the Chems make their best LP in more than a decade. | Scrapping big-name guests and harnessing the live fury they've shown in recent years, the Chems make their best LP in more than a decade. | The Chemical Brothers: Further | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14359-further/ | Further | Back when people were still figuring out what electronic dance albums were supposed to be, the Chemical Brothers worked out a durable and recognizable formula, and they stuck with it: dancefloor bangers up front, woozily expansive psychedelic tracks at the end, big-name collaborations wherever possible. That formula served them well through three classic albums (Exit Planet Dust, Dig Your Own Hole, and Surrender) and one pretty good one (Come With Us). But they stuck with it two albums too long. The duo's last two full-lengths, 2005's Push the Button and 2007's We Are the Night, were, respectively, a spotty mess and an outright disaster. After an album like that, it's time to blow things up and start again, and that's what they've done with Further.
Further doesn't open with a banger. In fact, there's barely a single track among the album's eight that could be termed as such. There are no hackneyed stabs at British chart relevance, like 2005's clumsy and pandering but (let's face it) successful Q-Tip collab "Galvanize", which still gets play as go-to-commercial music during NBA games. Further features vocals on about half of its tracks, but they're all anonymous, mostly used to repeat one mantra or another over and over. And rather than attempting some sort of crossover-dance smash, the Chems do something new here: an album-length suite of warm, gooey utopianism, one that never smashes you over the head with obvious hooks or high-concept floor-fillers. It's a slow, patient piece of work, all vibe and no frenzy. The drums don't kick in until a couple of minutes into track two, and they sound glorious when they finally do. Further is a retrenchment move, and it's a good one.
That retrenchment works best during the album's first two tracks. Opener "Snow" has no drums at all; it's all sculpted guitar feedback and bass-based motorik pulse, and it calls up memories of Spacemen 3's Playing With Fire or Panda Bear. Female voices repeat a couple of phrases over and over: "Your love keeps lifting me," "lifting me higher." Slow bursts of fuzz build and build, and then we're suddenly at track two. "Escape Velocity" is a marathon blissout, with vintage synths piling on top of each other, as well as what might be a chopped up sample of the Who's "Baba O'Riley" synth arpeggios. The Chems pack a ton of peaks and valleys into the track's 12 minutes, and the end result is a great piece of giddy zone-out music, something that will probably kill when the Chems take it to the festival circuit this summer.
Nothing else on the album reaches the starry-eyed heights of those first two songs, but the vibe remains intact throughout. "Another World" has a soul-sample lope; it could be dusty backpacker hip-hop before the raved-out synths kick in. "Wonders of the Deep" lives up to its title with a burbling, impressionist keyboard lifted straight from an 80s PBS nature documentary. "Horse Power", the hardest thing here, is sort of a low-key big beat take on clipped, staccato Detroit techno, with a vocoder refrain and a horse-whinny sample that made my wife bust up laughing out loud. The whole album works something like an expansion on the last three fuzzed-out tracks from Dig Your Own Hole. The Chems aren't in the same do-no-wrong zone they were when they recorded that stuff, but Further brings them closer than anyone could've reasonably expected. That late-career slump? It's over now. | 2010-06-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-06-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Virgin / Freestyle Dust | June 17, 2010 | 8 | 15c6f7af-2885-4993-a006-f1fe76710bdf | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Los Angeles beatmaker Ringgo Ancheta engages with classic ’80s R&B and boogie funk, pairing his adventurous sound with themes of self-actualization and human connection. | Los Angeles beatmaker Ringgo Ancheta engages with classic ’80s R&B and boogie funk, pairing his adventurous sound with themes of self-actualization and human connection. | Mndsgn: Body Wash | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22381-body-wash/ | Body Wash | Ringgo Ancheta’s come-up story is an increasingly familiar type—the independently educated bedroom producer, influenced by friends and family, whose DIY approach led him towards Los Angeles’ beat scene. What might make that story a bit more curious than others’ is that Ancheta’s path began on a rural New Jersey commune, where he grew up in the ’90s. And in the late ’00s, it brought him to run in a crew called Klipm0de alongside future Kendrick Lamar producer/collaborator Knxwledge. The intrigue of those formative experiences is borne out clearly in his music. Mndsgn’s releases, from his contributions to 2011’s Bitches Brew-mutating compilation Blasphemous Jazz to his 2014 headswimmer of a Stones Throw breakthrough Yawn Zen, have darted from reference to reference in a way that would make his next move unpredictable, but he ties them all together in a way that makes perfect sense.
Perhaps due to a healthy dose of L.A. sunshine, Body Wash has Mndsgn engaging with classic ’80s R&B and boogie funk. At some points, it sounds as if he’s channelling the synthesized soul of SOLAR Records in-house producer, Leon Sylvers III. It might seem like a big leap from the gleaming, crackling FlyLo-isms of his clanky 2014 work, but Ancheta’s curious, philosophical approach is more than ready for it. Mndsgn emerges here as a sort of koan-dispensing, prog-funk astronaut, and it’s made some of his more tenuous strengths feel a lot more natural.
That starts with his voice, typically a restrained, almost introverted murmur that often sounds like he’s scanning for something far on the horizon. Accordingly, Ancheta tends to lean towards themes of self-actualization and human connection in his lyrics. “Cosmic Perspective” and its references to “searching for the right way” and heading for “the land of music” are vintage Zen funk worthy of mid ’70s Lonnie Liston Smith. Even at its clearest, Mndsgn’s voice is an almost detached entity that expresses these realizations as they happen. (When he multitracks his own voice, it sounds like the “ohhhhh” of a person finally getting it.) A running theme, to paraphrase “Ya Own Way,” is getting from where you’re at to where you’re going, whether chronologically, mentally, or geographically. Ancheta holds fast to this idea, offering a means of connection and solidarity through uncertainty.
Pairing that sense of direction-seeking with a deep dive into West Coast funk is a natural fit. But Body Wash also refocuses some of his familiar tendencies into new modes. As someone young enough to have dreamed of contributing to Stones Throw before even thinking it was possible, Mndsgn makes clear his debt to the label’s mid-to-late-’00s adventurousness, even as he recombines their sounds into his own thing. Think of the slightly-off-kilter, human-touch rhythms of Dilla, only rerouted to little chirpy synth riffs instead of the drums—or Dâm-Funk with the extended-voyage drifting drawn into more concise sketches.
Half the cuts here don’t make it to three minutes, but they still drill into your mind with ease. There’s a three-part “Searchin” suite that runs through a “Shalamar goes to the Moon” masterclass in neo-boogie—you can hear it shift from disco to g-funk to Jam/Lewis while still cohering as its own thing—in less than seven minutes. If the elusive destination that Ancheta’s music has been trying to reach turns out to be a 1981 roller-rink party, it’s been a journey well-spent, and only makes the next destination more eagerly anticipated. | 2016-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Stones Throw | September 19, 2016 | 7.7 | 15c844a7-80c7-49d2-be5d-0757a64e3e75 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The Richmond, Va., band Windhand's second album, and first for Relapse, shows all the signs of an attempted doom metal classic. The dual guitars are enormous, the rhythm section is relentless, and the voice of Dorthia Cottrell settles over it all like a dense fog. | The Richmond, Va., band Windhand's second album, and first for Relapse, shows all the signs of an attempted doom metal classic. The dual guitars are enormous, the rhythm section is relentless, and the voice of Dorthia Cottrell settles over it all like a dense fog. | Windhand: Soma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18418-windhand-soma/ | Soma | Soma shows all the signs of an attempted slow metal classic: On their second album and first for Relapse, Richmond, Va., quintet Windhand coughs up three low-tempo burners, follows them with a foreboding acoustic creak, and aims to end with its longest and strongest-- a 14-minute rumbling insurgency called “Cassock” and the 31-minute astro fade “Boleskin”. The record spotlights every asset of the band, too. The dual guitars are enormous, with the tube-amp tones delivering the riffs in massive waves and presenting the solos less as interruptions and more as big, breaking-news events. The rhythm section is relentless; swollen bass pushes between every deep groove, underlined and emphasized by ubiquitous cymbal splatter. And the voice of Dorthia Cottrell-- Windhand’s lugubrious and bewitching frontwoman-- hangs above it all, her dark-minded tunes settling over the monolithic music like a dense, mountainous fog. Her haunting turn as a solo singer-songwriter serves as the record’s surprising centerpiece. It’s a quiet coup within an otherwise very loud and insistent marathon.
While Windhand understand the sound and the structure of their liminal stoner rock and doom metal, the actual songs on Soma fall short of their forebears. Of these six tracks, only “Woodbine” offers a truly compelling hook, with Cottrell singing a loving if laughable ode to Satan-- “Come on, Satan, surround me”-- with the hidden verve of a pop singer. The band traces her motion perfectly, strengthening the thread of melody rather than swallowing it. Oftentimes, though, Windhand treat the songs like kids too excited to have a new coloring book, their heavy hands drawing so far outside the lines that the shapes themselves become obfuscated. During “Orchard”, for instance, Cottrell moves in interesting dynamic arches, howling her lines only to slink suddenly behind them. But Asechiah Bogdan and Garrett Morris crowd her out, filling so much of the space with a rote weedian riff that she’s barely there at all. The same applies to “Cassock”, where her two short verses seem almost like add-ons for a piece simply meant as a showcase for Windhand’s tempo range--mid-tempo to something slightly faster to something slightly slower to something a bit faster still to the silent end.
If that sounds tedious, it can be. That’s another problem with Soma. Windhand consistently take their time to do very little, a flaw epitomized by the relatively punch-less one-two combination of “Cassock” and “Boleskin”. The latter builds from an acoustic intro into a riff that’s, once again, very plain. There’s one great, squealing solo and another good one, but Windhand mostly plod along, restating their case until the tune becomes more nuisance than mantra. Even on shorter numbers, that sense of fatigue reoccurs because Cottrell's effects-laden voice and hooks are pushed so far afield. The band’s self-titled 2011 debut didn’t feature an acoustic track from Cottrell because it didn’t need it. Well-paced and less burdened by its own seismic sounds, that five-song record felt urgent and varied, giving its guitar leads more to do than circle back and forth. “Heap Wolves” was a quick dose of Sabbath-baiting perfection, while the 11-minute “Summon the Moon” took care to anchor its length to an indelible chorus. But Soma feels impregnably monotonous. When Cottrell’s multi-tracked coo arrives without distraction at the start of “Evergreen”, the break feels more like a necessary respite than an interesting diversion. You might find yourself wishing she’d just keep singing.
Earlier this month, a Spin interview with Morris opened with this proclamation: “I don’t want to get pigeonholed as a ‘doom’ band.” On Soma, Windhand actively fight against that identity but lose, the collection's songs turning into stylistic slogs even as the band ostensibly works to avoid that end. Following their two-year-old debut, their deal with Relapse, and their colossal split with fellow Richmond heavies Cough, Windhand were poised as one of the year’s potential metal breakthroughs. But Soma sits still, paralyzed by the weight of a sound that’s too big for this promising band to manage, at least for now. | 2013-09-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-09-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | September 25, 2013 | 7 | 15d40d8e-349c-4e6a-a6fd-b86631266161 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
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