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After an intra-band breakup, the Philly noise experimentalists return with a brief, focused EP that clears away some of their elaborate studio trickery. | After an intra-band breakup, the Philly noise experimentalists return with a brief, focused EP that clears away some of their elaborate studio trickery. | Spirit of the Beehive: i’m so lucky EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spirit-of-the-beehive-im-so-lucky-ep/ | i’m so lucky EP | The recording of Spirit of the Beehive’s new EP, i’m so lucky, was, in some senses, a peaceful reprieve from the chaos of years past. The Philadelphia band’s distortion-scuffed early records, like 2014’s The Spirit of the Beehive, were recorded in a freezing studio while chain-smoking cigarettes, popping Adderall, and dodging the “billion” people who lived in the building. A rotating lineup settled into a core trio of Rivka Ravede, Zack Schwartz, and Corey Wichlin just in time for the pandemic. Working at a distance made for a more fragmented process, which spawned the frantic, paranoid collages of 2021’s ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH.
Now they’ve returned to working in person, in a studio that Schwartz and Wichlin built together in a vinyl pressing plant in Philly. They still indulge in stuttering sampledelia and electronic experimentalism, but i’m so lucky is relatively more straightforward and pleasant than much of their recent work. The opening pair of “human debenture” and “really happening” recalls the bleary-eyed indie rock—like Alex G’s mysterious early experiments—that was bubbling within the Philadelphia DIY scene when they were first coming up. Even when they detour through distressed noise rock in “human debenture,” it feels sleek and approachable.
But this polish and efficiency conceals a different kind of disarray. In 2022, Ravede and Schwartz broke up after a romantic relationship that lasted over a decade. At first, neither was sure if the band would continue. “For the first three or four months after it ended, it was pretty rough,” Schwartz said in a statement. But they pressed on, and used these songs to process some of the confusing feelings—both the pain and the lasting tenderness—in the wake of their dissolution.
Their lyrics remain elliptical and elusive, but from the fragments that do surface, it’s clear that they’re working through some heavy emotions. On “natural devotion 2,” a sequel to a yearning 2015 song, Ravede sings about a relationship that’s gradually receding into the past. “Now I feel the shadow of your touch,” she sings. “The years return to memory for us.” On the blown-out, sludgy “tapeworm,” Schwartz screams about the insatiable appetite of the parasite, “eating all and then register the bereaved who are left with nothing.” It’s an intense contrast between nostalgia and bitterness, and like most breakups, this one seems to have inspired a little of both.
Because it’s only four short tracks, one imagines that i’m so lucky only scratches at the surface of this complicated period in the band’s life, but it feels clear-headed and complete in its own way. The intensity expressed in these songs is felt all the more directly because they aren’t clouded in compositional contortions or studio trickery. The record’s very existence feels like a commitment to trudge on together, even though things have changed. On i’m so lucky, Spirit of the Beehive stare directly at the chaos, unsteady but unafraid. | 2023-09-08T12:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | September 8, 2023 | 7 | 15de789a-ed51-435b-bf41-1bbf866ded97 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Electronic producer James Holden has remade himself into a bandleader on his new album—a collection of self-described “folk-trance” recorded with improv ensemble the Animal Spirits. | Electronic producer James Holden has remade himself into a bandleader on his new album—a collection of self-described “folk-trance” recorded with improv ensemble the Animal Spirits. | James Holden / The Animal Spirits: The Animal Spirits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/james-holden-and-the-animal-spirits-the-animal-spirits/ | The Animal Spirits | Like most electronic producers, James Holden is a man of few press shots. But the photograph that accompanies the English musician’s radically different new album—a moonlit trance bacchanal recorded live with an ensemble of improvisers dubbed the Animal Spirits—gives us a strong hint of his strange new direction. Dressed in the drab grey overalls of an industrial technician, Holden seems to have wandered out from the concrete towers behind him, lured towards us by strange forces lurking in the long grass. With clouds brooding above and a crackle of electricity in the air, there’s a sense that something revelatory is happening, a machine-builder heading into the unknown.
Holden’s lengthy career in electronic music, which began in 2000 with a progressive dance hit that hailed him as a teenage wunderkind, has been a constant battle against dancefloor conservatism. It’s taken a long time for him to shake off his reputation as a master of melodic euphoria, as perfected on his tear-jerking 2004 remix of Nathan Fake’s “The Sky Was Pink.” And since 2006, he’s been leading his own self-described “rebellion against dance music,” armed with wonky mixes, loose timing, and chaotic systems. But seen from the perspective of The Animal Spirits, Holden’s back catalog also reveals itself to be a determined, nearly two-decade-long exploration of every possible facet of “trance”—first as a genre, then as a state of mind.
With 2013’s The Inheritors, his long-in-the-making second album, Holden brought his modular synthesizer to life through computer systems that could mimic the subtly shifting rhythms of a human player. In the last few years, Holden has only released collaborations: three swirling folk dances with Moroccan Gnawa musician Maalem Mahmoud Guinia, and a 47-minute tribute to minimalist shaman Terry Riley with tabla player Camilo Tirado.
The Animal Spirits is an album-length amalgamation of all of these collaborative projects, expanding his live setup with Tom Page to include saxophonist Etienne Jaumet (who previously lent his freeform skronk to The Inheritors), cornetist Marcus Hamblett, multi-instrumentalist Liza Bec on recorders and North African ghaïta, and Lascelle Gordon of free jazz group Woven Entity. It’s also his most dramatic rejection yet of anything resembling “dance music” in the functional, DJ-led sense. The album was recorded live in one room at Holden’s Sacred Walls studio in London: single takes, no overdubs, no edits. While his modular synth still guides much of the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material, Holden occupies the role of bandleader rather than frontman, simply laying the stage for his collaborators’ off-the-cuff creativity; he specifically names Don Cherry and Pharoah Sanders as inspirations, drawing a link between the universal preoccupations of their spiritual jazz albums and the sense of ritual abandon at the heart of what Holden calls “folk-trance.”
In tribute to the Eastern influences of Cherry and Sanders, the album opens with a loose incantation by a feral-sounding choir; you can picture them shaking out their limbs and stretching their tongues as they “om” and “ah” over shakers and bells, which bleed into the second track, “Spinning Dance.” Here, the pagan barn-dance really gets going—clapping hands and drum rolls lay an unstable foundation, as Bec’s treble recorder trills its way through the gaps, drunk on moonshine and tripping over hay bales. “Pass Through the Fire” is a ritual performance, drums landing like a dozen pairs of feet shimmying round the burning pyre, while Holden layers his noisy synths against the chunky blast of Jaumet’s saxophone. It’s absolutely silly, but also incredibly loud, and the sheer volume is enough to carry us into their bacchanal.
Holden’s North African inspirations are audible on the outrageously titled “Thunder Moon Gathering,” where organs and brass coalesce into a snaking, freeform melody, and the closing track, “Go Gladly Into the Earth,” which riffs on the topsy-turvy organ playing of Ethiopia’s Hailu Mergia. Occasionally, however, the ensemble travels on straighter tracks. The cycling arpeggios of “Each Moment Like the First” call back to the krautrock influence running through The Inheritors, though Page’s live drums add a layer of unnecessary fuss. On that track, there’s a sense that playing loose doesn’t always come easily; halfway through, a handful of noisy synths interrupt the groove for no particular reason, a blurted improvisation that feels too self-aware.
Mostly, however, the clumsiness and chaos feels built-in. The foundational edict of Holden’s “folk-trance” mission—that repetition brings about an altered state of mind—remains true no matter how loose the rhythm, how un-griddable the swing. The leap Holden has made from The Inheritors is colossal—now a bandleader of a live ensemble rather than a solitary synth programmer, he has opened the door to an entirely different sort of career for himself, one where concerns for the dancefloor shrink away to nothing, and the possibilities of repetition are infinite. | 2017-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Border Community | November 8, 2017 | 7.4 | 15df3f1c-d127-46ab-9aec-eb670ab7e3de | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
The fourth album from the French Canadian producer explores the claustrophobic interior life of the club in frighteningly, sometimes comically deadpan detail. | The fourth album from the French Canadian producer explores the claustrophobic interior life of the club in frighteningly, sometimes comically deadpan detail. | Marie Davidson: Working Class Woman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marie-davidson-working-class-woman/ | Working Class Woman | “Workaholic Paranoid Bitch” is a great appellation for Marie Davidson. When this song makes an appearance towards the end of Working Class Woman, she’s tired as all hell. Davidson, who is also one half of the darkwave duo Essaie Pas, has spent nearly six years of her career as a solo artist, using her work as a platform to critique what happens inside of clubs and their surroundings. She excels at putting people in their place: Her 2016 album Adieux au Dancefloor (“Farewell to the Dancefloor”) took down drug-addled fans and techno scensters who were too cool to care. The record was a brutal exposé with a title that felt like both a threat and an inside joke. To listen to Davidson’s music is to be unsure whether or not you’re supposed to laugh or be genuinely frightened for your life.
On Working Class Woman, Davidson continues to explore the claustrophobic interior life of the club in frighteningly deadpan detail. The images here are even more incisive than they’ve been in the past, inhabiting a transgressively feminist comic style of writing not unlike that of Virginie Despentes or Chris Kraus, and with a sound somewhere in between the spoken word electroclash of Miss Kittin and the dreamy dissonance of Julee Cruise. That comedy shows itself as early as the album’s first track, “Your Biggest Fan.” In an unsettling miasma of chopped up vocal samples in French, German, and Italian textured by bulging synths she personifies a fan trying to strike up conversation: “I love your music! Wait, do you play in a band? Yeah I totally saw you!” But then she steps back and bluntly asks, seemingly apropos of nothing, if Working Class Woman is about taking risks. The lines between seriousness and humor are blurry, and that’s kind of the point, where the album excels is in Davidson’s ability to very much intentionally confuse her listener. Working Class Woman is a bold-moves-only album where feminist theory and house music are inseparable. If you’re not paying attention, you are going to miss something.
Davidson’s bluntness mutates throughout the course of the album. In some of the most uncomfortably funny moments, it takes the form of sex, placing Davidson in the hedonistic headspace of a Berlin nightclub at six in the morning. Take “The Psychologist,” where she has a conversation with a disembodied male voice, responding to his questions with sexual self-reflexivity. Or perhaps on “Work It,” where she plays the role of what could be interpreted as both a dominatrix and a SoulCycle instructor: “Tell me how does that feel?/Is sweat dripping down your balls?/Well then you’re not a winner yet!” She goes there, and does so with strident electronics that sound like a woodpecker drilling its beak into a lead pipe.
Thankfully, Davidson doesn’t hide behind irony for the entirety of this record. She never over-relies on a single set of muscles, she flexes them all. On the album’s final track, “La Chambre intérieure,” she takes us to a room where we bare witness to memories of life in a much more bucolic version of her native Québec. There’s no dark humor for Davidson to enshroud herself in, what we see instead is wind turbines spinning in the breeze, tractors, children laughing—an expanse of North American sprawl that is breathtakingly bleak. The synths here are more introspective and subdued, swapping out high BPM bangers for something that moves at the pace of a marathon runner’s resting heartbeat.
In the album’s final moments, Davidson soberly explores what it means to love, and what it means to exist, and to be alive at this very moment in time. All lofty ideas, sure— but then again, this is a record slated in a milieu of chaos, loftiness, and beauty. It would be simplistic to say this album is just a critique of dancefloor culture, there’s more here. She’s also critiquing herself, and in the moonlit glow of her gear, sequencers and all, despair transforms into possibility: “J’existe vraiment,” (I really exist), she whispers. | 2018-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | October 10, 2018 | 7.8 | 15e06dde-e9c1-41bf-bc57-733371b7dfbd | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
The Atlanta rapper’s latest imagines a higher dimension where outré flexes and endless love affairs are enveloped by waves of metallic crunch and mind-expanding guitar. | The Atlanta rapper’s latest imagines a higher dimension where outré flexes and endless love affairs are enveloped by waves of metallic crunch and mind-expanding guitar. | Bktherula: LVL5 P2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bktherula-lvl5-p2/ | LVL5 P2 | From the time she was 16, Bktherula has claimed to exist at what she calls Level 5. The Atlanta rapper told The Face she gave a name to this “egoless” space above the third and fourth dimensions as she was graduating high school; to her, it’s a plane where clout-chasing and self-doubt give way to creative freedom. Since then, she’s made her own name by chiseling aspects of trap, rage, plugg, and bubbly SoundCloud sing-song rap into jagged, psychedelic hedonism. On the average Bk track, ideas flail like neon-colored bike tassels—she can roar about stealing your girl over drums and sirens one minute and sing about relationship problems over Mac DeMarco samples the next. Individual moments are thrilling and unpredictable, though early full-lengths like 2020’s Love Santana occasionally veered off course. Every subsequent Bk album has worked to plant her songs on sturdier ground. On her latest project, LVL5 P2—the second in a series that started last year—Bk imagines a fifth dimension where outré flexes and endless love affairs are enveloped by waves of metallic crunch and mind-expanding guitar.
P2 ups the ante by nudging Bk further toward popular sounds without diluting her live-wire spark. For every romantically wounded interstellar croon session like “Just Make Sure” or “The Way,” there are prickly digital slappers like opener “Code” or “Tatti,” where the boasts are outlandish (“We don’t ride with the stick, we are the stick, we livin’ scarecrow”) and no one’s girl is immune from Bk’s FaceTime call. A foray into the world of sexy drill on “Shakin It,” complete with an airy beat and feature by New York maverick Cash Cobain, makes perfect sense: The duo are essentially trying to out-horny each other. Late-album cut “Woman” is less successful, trying on producer Azure’s buzzy synths and drums and coming up as a colorless drag. It’s a shame because Bk’s kiss-offs to an ex who hears her song every time they turn on NBA 2K are snappy, but the delivery and plodding beat stymie her and guest JID’s verses.
Bk’s writing has become slightly stickier and more memorable since the “Lightweight” and “Faygo” days in 2018, but her songs rise and fall on the flows, ad-libs, and delivery. “Inasne” is built on clichés (money, drugs, women, day ones), but it works thanks to the technicolor bounce of AyeLavish’s beat and Bk’s bunny-hop cadence. It may feel like Carti homage on the surface, but the contrast between the fluctuating melodies and deadpan ad-libs sends the song swinging down to Earth and back up to the stratosphere. Little details like these—Bk racing a half-measure ahead of the beat on “Boi,” the Juvenile-indebted hook on “Tatti,” the way her voice blends with longtime collaborator SimmyAuto’s zig-zagging 808s on “Wishuwasdacrew”—are old tricks that still work wonders. Sometimes, like on “Feathers,” the gambit works a bit too well, rendering Bk as background noise on her own song.
But LVL5 P2’s hits outweigh the misses. Bk’s style has evolved a lot from the minimal, spacey thumpers that established her SoundCloud presence, and she’s spent her tenure at Warner flirting with more palatable textures without sanding down her edges too much. And while not every experiment bears fruit, it never feels like she’s being forced where she doesn’t fit. Bk may not have it fully figured out yet as far as albums are concerned, but P2’s ambition is potent enough to cause a contact high.
Correction: Bktherula is from Atlanta, not North Carolina. This review has been updated. | 2024-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Warner | March 22, 2024 | 7.1 | 15e09a4a-eb6f-4035-ba29-245abb98b4e6 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Since 2007’s Woke on a Whaleheart, Bill Callahan has moved counterclockwise to the rest of the world’s spin. As life has become crowded with text, he has, with each record, become more laconic. His quietly devastating new album finds him in typically minimal form, this time exploring the power of human connection. | Since 2007’s Woke on a Whaleheart, Bill Callahan has moved counterclockwise to the rest of the world’s spin. As life has become crowded with text, he has, with each record, become more laconic. His quietly devastating new album finds him in typically minimal form, this time exploring the power of human connection. | Bill Callahan: Dream River | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18491-bill-callahan-dream-river/ | Dream River | The first thing you notice is that Bill Callahan is in no hurry. On “The Sing,” the ballad that opens his warm, weary new album, Dream River, words roll by like cloud formations on a calm day: “Drinking… while sleeping… strangers… unknowingly… keep me company.” And afterwards there’s a pause as the line hovers there, like something hanging above the doorway into the record’s peculiar, intimate universe. In the past, Callahan has compared songwriting to an act of carpentry (“There’s this huge block of silence and you carve little bits out of it by making sound”), but never before has one of his records embodied that feeling so richly. Each line on Dream River forms so slowly and deliberately it's like we're watching him whittle it out of oak.
Call it naturalism, polluted with the occasional puff of bleak humor. From his earliest days recording as Smog, Callahan has always been consumed by the natural world. To him, nature is often a taunt, a provocation, a reminder of the smallness of human life. Although he is among music’s most astute observers of human truth and absurdity, in a Bill Callahan song, being a person is often a wry, cosmic joke. The sky can broadcast all the violently beautiful hues of, oh, say, a late-summer sunset, and what’s the best we can do? Late Night With David Letterman (on Apocalypse’s “America!”) and radio interviews with Donald Sutherland (on Dream River’s “Winter Road”) and—it’s always implied, with a meta-chuckle—Bill Callahan records.
Since 2007’s Woke on a Whaleheart, the first record released under his own name, Callahan has moved counterclockwise to the rest of the world’s spin. As life has become crowded with text, Callahan has, with each record, become more laconic. As people have grown (ostensibly) more connected, Callahan’s records have increasingly embraced feelings of isolation. Those early Smog records, with their aggressive textures and anarchic sneers, thrashed in opposition to the outside world. Now Callahan sings like someone blissfully oblivious to its churn. “I set my watch against the city clock,” he sang on the opening track of his stunning 2011 record Apocalypse, chuckling with faint surprise. “It was way off.”
A quiet masterpiece, Apocalypse seemed like a culmination of Callahan’s career so far, but it also had a feeling of finality to it. On Dream River, though, the aesthetically restless Callahan has found a few new mountains to climb. He challenged himself to make a more subdued record where the only percussion comes from hand drums and brushes, but he’s challenging himself thematically, too. Dream River finds Callahan tackling a question that has haunted his music for decades: What happens if the guy who once declared, “Alone in my room I feel like such a part of the community,” makes a moving, occasionally honest-to-god romantic record about the power of human connection?
That line comes from “Ex-Con,” a song found on Smog’s 1997 album Red Apple Falls, and it’s striking to consider how much has changed in the years since. Callahan’s baritone has lowered about an octave; he used to sing through his nose but now his voice (a much richer and more resonant instrument) seems to come direct from the murkiest depths of his lungs. His arrangements have also grown more sparse, and on all fronts he’s learned how to say more with less. It’s one of many paradoxes in Callahan’s music, that in abandoning a method of singing more traditionally considered “expressive,” he’s actually learned how to express more. His delivery is animated by the subtlety of tiny gestures, which is why although there are maybe a total of three words on Dream River that a third-grader would stumble over, its musings still feel profound. “The Sing” boasts one of the album’s most undeniably quotable lines—“The only words I’ve said today are ‘beer’/And ‘thank you’”—but the real joy comes from hearing him mutter, “Beer” and “Thank you” a couple of times afterwards, each time intoning it with an almost imperceptible change in tone. Somehow, each “beer” contains multitudes.
Callahan’s learned to use negative space so well that there’s even poetry in the pauses. Take “Summer Painter,” an instant addition to his canon of great songs; for what else can be said of a song that begins, “I painted names on boats…/For a summer” and then unfurls, glacially, like an elliptical yarn spun by a leathery old shanty-dweller who has, without question, seen some shit. Callahan’s learned how to use his voice like a camera (“When the hurricane hit some found it suspicious/That I’d just since left the frame”), and here he’s shooting a wryly funny mock-epic. “Rich man’s folly and poor man’s dream,” he sings, and then pauses for effect, “I painted these.” It’s a masterful little zoom-out, and it only heightens the sense that Callahan’s playing director here, a feeling furthered by guitarist Matt Kinsey’s torrential freak-out when a storm rolls in.
The grandeur, though, is short-lived, and that’s the most profound and affecting thing about Dream River. At its core, this is a record about accepting and even embracing the smallness of human life, and how difficult that can be, given our damnably innate sense of adventure, ambition, and restlessness. For at least four minutes, though, Callahan finds peace and stillness in the form of “Small Plane.” The song is a quiet miracle; an afternoon epiphany told in dream logic and simple language to no one, because his only companion is taking a nap. And yet, what a perfect moment to take stock of things: “I really am a lucky man/Flying this small plane.” It’s a testament to simplicity, or maybe just the power of his wistful, prismatic delivery, that a songwriter once known for his delight in intricate wordplay has never sung more stirring words than these.
To call Dream River “content” or “serene” feels wrong, because there’s still a pang of longing to it. But in all of this album's searching, it does bring back one hopeful find: that maybe the closest we can come to the thrill of wilderness is the adventure of being with another person. “I see the true spring is in you,” he sings at one point, and it might just be the happiest moment on the record. For once he’s not wishing he were an eagle or a tempest or a sunset. He is just Bill Callahan, flying his small plane with a co-pilot by his side, and for the moment at least, that is enough. | 2013-09-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-09-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | September 17, 2013 | 8.5 | 15e3cc80-d8a0-424b-831b-5214de152eac | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | |
In 1989, Pauline Oliveros coined the term Deep Listening to describe a practice of radical attentiveness. This double LP collects the famed original record with selections from her Deep Listening Band. | In 1989, Pauline Oliveros coined the term Deep Listening to describe a practice of radical attentiveness. This double LP collects the famed original record with selections from her Deep Listening Band. | Pauline Oliveros / Stuart Dempster / Panaiotis: Deep Listening | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pauline-oliveros-stuart-dempster-pan-deep-listening/ | Deep Listening | Listening is an inherently empathetic act, requiring receptivity to the intentions of others and the natural world. Composer Pauline Oliveros wrote frequently about what it means to listen throughout her career, which spanned over half a century and encompassed electronic works, compositions for magnetic tape, improvisation, and exercises in focus and reflection designed to deepen everyday engagement with sound. She considered sound not only to be the audible vibrations of the air around us, but the totality of many vibrational energies throughout the universe. To listen is to be aware of one’s self in that collective whole.
Since her death in 2016, Oliveros’ ideas about what she called “Deep Listening” (which she described as “a practice that is intended to heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible”) have become increasingly popular. In her 2019 book How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell returns several times to Oliveros’ Deep Listening techniques as a salve to the increasingly chaotic flow of information in the Internet age. A 2016 article in The New Yorker brought her Sonic Meditations to a wide audience, saying they “make a timely case for listening as a form of activism.” Events have been staged throughout the country, from Houston to St. Paul to Washington, DC, celebrating her sonic legacy.
The salience of Deep Listening resides in its contrast to mainstream culture’s riptide trajectory towards distraction and saturation, towards siloed media and political environments. It also stands in opposition to the numbing listening habits encouraged by streaming, which positions music as a utilitarian tool for productivity, something to be ignored while your concentration rests elsewhere. Oliveros provided a secular alternative to the increasingly commodified mindfulness movement that paradoxically co-opts the posturing of meditative practice in the service of productivity and capital. Deep Listening exists as its own end, without a pretense of functionality.
Oliveros coined the term Deep Listening in 1989 to describe her collected improvisations with trombonist Stuart Dempster and vocalist Panaiotis, it would go on to become the name of the album released that same year on the under-appreciated avant-garde classical label New Albion. Important Records, which has spent nearly a decade producing impressive new editions of an array of Oliveros’ recordings, has collected the entirety of that seminal album in a new double LP, augmented by related material from a follow-up of sorts, 1991’s The Ready Made Boomerang, credited to the Deep Listening Band. The release is a remarkable realization of her ideas and demonstrates the sensitivity of the musicians to their physical environment, as well her profoundly expressive accordion playing and singing.
Both Deep Listening and The Ready Made Boomerang were recorded in a massive underground cistern in Washington State that Dempster had discovered some years before. The space, which once held two million gallons of water, has a 45-second reverberation time, and the recordings are defined by a surreal smearing of tones. Like much of Oliveros’ and Dempster’s work around this time, most of these improvisations are focused around extended drones, with Dempster’s trombone and didjeridu providing the backbone. Far from evoking any sort of stasis, these tones swell and resonate actively throughout the space, and the effect is hallucinatory. Melodic lines intertwine as they ripple and decay, and momentarily raised voices seemingly emerge from within the insistent, omnipresent root. “The cistern space, in effect, is an instrument being played simultaneously by all three composers,” Oliveros stated in the album’s original liner notes.
With the exception of “Nike,” which consists of the reverberant clang of metal on metal segueing into extemporaneous vocalizations and discordant trombone interjections, this collection is largely consonant, reveling in the resonances produced by the careful tuning of the instruments to just intonation. It would be inaccurate to describe music produced with such intensity as strictly pleasant, but there is a quality about it that feels centered and calming in a strange, otherworldly way. Pieces like “Lear” and “Ione” are meditative without falling into the trappings of new age music; instead, they enact core tenets of meditative practice—reflection, attentiveness, an openness to one’s surroundings—in a musical framework. Each musician is listening intently and reacting in kind not only to each other but to the space around them. The cistern stands in for the world, the entire universe, as they listen to its contours.
In a contemporary context, Deep Listening still sounds revolutionary. While drone, minimalism, and ambient music have proliferated in the intervening decades, few albums in those fields are as rich texturally and harmonically or have such a clarity of vision. The album remains vital largely because it embodies Oliveros’ ideas, which have themselves resurfaced as a corrective to the sinister undercurrents of social and technological advancement. If art is a way to grapple with philosophical and societal hardships, Deep Listening may resound with just as much, if not more, clarity now than when it was created.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Important | February 10, 2020 | 9.2 | 15e69f34-7028-4eae-9182-34dedb3dfb8a | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
Where Castlemania was the apotheosis of frontman John Dwyer's vision as a singer/songwriter, Thee Oh Sees' second collection of 2011 showcases the full-band version of the SF gargage rockers at the height of their powers. Now with two drummers. | Where Castlemania was the apotheosis of frontman John Dwyer's vision as a singer/songwriter, Thee Oh Sees' second collection of 2011 showcases the full-band version of the SF gargage rockers at the height of their powers. Now with two drummers. | Thee Oh Sees: Carrion Crawler/The Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16013-carrion-crawlerthe-dream/ | Carrion Crawler/The Dream | Propulsive, careening, and at times, openly dangerous, Thee Oh Sees are like the house band for a runaway train. Much of their appeal comes from the fact that they're a machine with four equal parts: the wide-eyed, cult-leader charisma of frontman John Dwyer, the effortless cool of keyboardist/singer Brigid Dawson, the pulsating low end of Petey Dammit, and the steel-solid rhythmic anchor of Mike Shoun. With unspeakable chemistry and an instinctual bond that borders on telepathic, the band has taken its wildly cacophonous and setlist-free live show to must-see status, turning music venues populated by arm-folding spectators into anarchic riot scenes. An Oh Sees show is a place where combing the floor for your shoes when the house lights come on becomes ritualistic, where getting kicked in the face by a renegade crowd-surfer provokes a shit-eating grin instead of a scowl. Most of the band's best albums serve as recorded documents of their live sets; you can practically hear Dwyer swallowing microphones and spitting upwards to the rafters.
Castlemania-- Thee Oh Sees' first record of 2011-- made it easier to remember that the band started out as Dwyer's solo project, a vehicle forged as a left turn from the eardrum terrorism of his garage-punk cult heroes Coachwhips. Rife with kaleidoscopic woodwind arrangements and vocals akin to the green cartoon monsters that grace the cover art of many Oh Sees full-lengths, the record was a refreshingly weird slab of hallucinogenic psych-pop, a headphones record for the arty garage-rock über-faithful. (You know, the kind of people who own more than two volumes of Back From the Grave or take a road trip to Gonerfest every single year.)
The opening seconds of Carrion Crawler/The Dream feature the squawking of a saxophone-- the last remnants of Castlemania's woodwind-centered psychedelia sputtering out like smoke from a 1920s automobile that ran out of gas. Just as Castlemania was the apotheosis of Dwyer's cracked vision as a singer/songwriter, Carrion Crawler/The Dream showcases the full-band version of Thee Oh Sees at the height of their powers. Many of the album's songs have been road-tested for over a year, and Intelligence brain-trust Lars Finberg was drafted as the band's second drummer. Instead of disrupting the dynamic, Finberg fits in perfectly, occasionally adding some polyrhythmic flair, bolstering the already tight and rock-solid rhythm section. Dammit, Shoun, and now Finberg serve as the grounded basis that allow the songs to veer off on wild tangents without completely falling apart.
Having the bassist and two drummers holding everything in place gives the high end room to explore, a task in part handled by the extraordinary vocal interplay of Dwyer and Dawson. In spite of the former being the creative nucleus of the band, there is no "lead singer" designation in Thee Oh Sees-- Dwyer and Dawson singing nearly every lyric in unison. As Dawson's straight-laced vocal presence stays in line on most of the songs, Dwyer naturally plays the madman, his voice coasting below, zigzagging between, and occasionally even scaling above hers-- the latter reminiscent of the way Black Francis would often take the higher octave over Kim Deal on several Pixies tracks. Dawson provides poppy "ba-bas," while Dwyer shouts his head off on "Contraption/Soul Desert", and she's there to eerily coo while he's practically speaking in tongues on "Crack in Your Eye". But more often than not, it sounds like Dwyer is singing backup for Dawson, a testament to how equal the parts in Thee Oh Sees really are.
Scratching away at his strings with bloodthirsty ferociousness, Dwyer's guitar playing is best described in terms usually reserved for feral cats. His solos are not as much foot-on-the-monitor, spotlight-capturing moments as they are products of primal instinct. This is particularly evident on the album's two longform tracks, the two songs that combine to make up the album's title. Much like last year’s "Warm Slime"-- the audio equivalent of a pro-wrestling iron man match-- "Carrion Crawler" and "The Dream" experiment with what happens when you tighten things to a breaking point and then let go. Short blasts of distortion leave their mark throughout the album, guitar tones evoking the image of exploding paint cans in a mid-size room, adding to the unruly spirit of the band's albums and live sets. See, Thee Oh Sees understand the intrinsic value of making a huge mess. | 2011-11-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-11-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | In the Red | November 22, 2011 | 8 | 15e8fc08-d985-496d-8b63-075d920a59ab | Martin Douglas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/martin-douglas/ | null |
Trent Reznor's defection from the music business might be the best thing that ever happened to him financially and ideologically. Aesthetically, Reznor's move is, so far, reminiscent of Prince's a decade ago-- his first new self-released project is a two-hour, 4xCD instrumental work. | Trent Reznor's defection from the music business might be the best thing that ever happened to him financially and ideologically. Aesthetically, Reznor's move is, so far, reminiscent of Prince's a decade ago-- his first new self-released project is a two-hour, 4xCD instrumental work. | Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I-IV | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11289-ghosts-i-iv/ | Ghosts I-IV | When Trent Reznor got his Just Blaze on last year to produce the Saul Williams slam-opera The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, he sent it out into the world through a just-blazed distribution path, biting Radiohead's weeks-old pay-what-you want idea. Then, when not enough people paid actual money for the thing, he bitchily blogged about it. Now he's doing it again, this time under his own name. If you want the new NIN all-instrumental 36-track drone-marathon, you can pay as little as $5 or as much as $300. (Or, rather, you could have once paid as much as $300; the 2,500-copy limited run of the deluxe-packaging version of Ghosts I-IV sold out within three days.) That Radiohead model, it turns out, only works if you're a band on Radiohead's or Nine Inch Nails' level-- one with an arena-rock history and a rabid internet fanbase. Reznor stands to make millions from Ghosts, something that certainly wouldn't have been true if he'd released this two-hour 4xCD instrumental work on a major label. Reznor's defection from the music business might be the best thing that ever happened to him financially and ideologically. Aesthetically, it might be the worst.
Reznor's greatest strength has always been his ability to let his fundamental pop sensibility show through his fuzzed-out industrial signifiers and screaming-at-a-wall tantrum-rock pretensions. For all its heavily processed walls of guitar and reptilian electro lurching and cusswords, Pretty Hate Machine, still my favorite of Reznor's albums, is basically a dirtied-up Human League album (and Human League albums, it turned out, could stand to be dirtied up). The gas-masks, megaphone yowls, and apocalyptic despair of his subsequent albums were fun, but his old-school devotion to song form and titanic hooks were the real reasons I once carved the NIN logo on a treehouse wall. As a producer, Reznor knows how to stack drones on top of each other and crystallize pianos like nobody else, but those studio tricks don't add up to much when he's not welding them to actual songs. There's not a song to be found anywhere on Ghosts; nearly every one of the untitled instrumental sketches here feels emaciated and half-finished. What we're left with is two hours' worth of really good soundtrack music for American remakes of Japanese horror films.
In the 90s, Reznor played patron saint to IDM OGs, commissioning Aphex Twin remixes and signing Meat Beat Manifesto to his nothing label. In that regard, Ghosts is almost Reznor's IDM record, only he's never been all that interested in jittery side-panning drum programming or vintage-synth blob-farts. And this isn't ambient music either; nearly every piece here feels like a piece of a Nine Inch Nails song, a DVD extra to a movie we might never see. Many of the best tracks here are straight-up fuzz-rock stomps, but without the burden of lyrical conveyance or song-progression, that riffage just hangs there, churning without purpose.
Elsewhere, Reznor pits staticy drones against each other to see what happens, and often there's a built-in sense of melody and a dynamic force at work; it's just frustrating that we never hear what Reznor might do with it. Sometimes he'll bury chattering electro beats under forebodingly tortured synth-tones. Sometimes he'll offer shockingly clear impressionistic Erik Satie-esque pianos, letting them plink prettily away for minutes at a time before sending some new ominous machine-hum to molest them. Every once in a while, he'll use a riff or a bassline that I could swear he's used before but can't quite place. But even if every one of these tracks stands as a formal experiment unto itself, after an hour or two these half-formed ideas begin to bleed indistinctly into each other, evolving into puddles of vaguely ominous aural mush.
When Ghosts works best, it's as a showcase for Reznor's estimable studio skills. Plenty of the individual sounds here are just gorgeous, and Reznor even expands his palette a bit to encompass marimbas, banjos, and percussively Beck-like slide-guitar. He layers these sounds expertly, setting glassy pianos against distant roaring-siren counterpoints or interrupting a pulsing drone-hum with a surprisingly accessible bar-rock chug. But even as the tracks progress, nothing really goes anywhere or stands on its own-- even the best track here is essentially half of a really good Nine Inch Nails song. And maybe it still will be; Reznor could take the pieces here and and make great songs out of them, sort of like how James Murphy took a beat from his Nike-sponsored long-form LCD Soundsystem piece 45:33 to make the incandescent "Someone Great". Until then, though, we're left with pieces of songs, nothing more. If I were one of those early deluxe-pacakge customers, I'd want my $300 back. | 2008-04-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-04-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | The Null Corporation | April 2, 2008 | 5 | 15ee3363-6013-4fdc-83f5-2a3f6b7d1e00 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
The first in a series of pointedly social records from Erykah Badu, this fascinating, sonically adventurous album finds her exploring a post–Civil Rights landscape in which African-Americans have been left to sort out how to have a cultural identity as part of a nation that had, up until very recently, been a dedicated adversary. Madlib, 9th Wonder, and Shafiq Husayn are among the producers. | The first in a series of pointedly social records from Erykah Badu, this fascinating, sonically adventurous album finds her exploring a post–Civil Rights landscape in which African-Americans have been left to sort out how to have a cultural identity as part of a nation that had, up until very recently, been a dedicated adversary. Madlib, 9th Wonder, and Shafiq Husayn are among the producers. | Erykah Badu: New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11562-new-amerykah-part-one-4th-world-war/ | New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War | The American media and public have spent a fair bit of the past months being fascinated and appalled by various remarks from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, of Chicago. Those months have also seen a fairly warm critical reception for Erykah Badu’s terrific new album—one whose notions and ideologies sometimes come from the same nexus as Wright’s. Badu’s theology is different, of course: more personal, more scattered, less Christian, laced with Five-Percenter notions. And Badu salutes Farrakhan explicitly, rather than just nodding politely across the South Side. But there’s an odd echo in her wording on that one: “I salute you, Farrakhan/Because you are me.” Less than a month after this record’s release, Wright’s most notable acquaintance was describing the reverend as someone who “contains within him the contradictions—the good and the bad—of the community…. I can no more disown him than I can disown the Black community.” He is me? Until he hits the press club, anyway.
New Amerykah is the first in a series of pointedly social records from Badu, and “you are me”—or maybe we are we—could be its motto, or possibly its intended effect. I don’t bring up politics for nothing. That attitude, and a lot of the record's concerns, have their roots in the same era that animates Rev. Wright—those Civil Rights and post–Civil Rights moments when African-Americans were left with some strange, heavy tasks: sorting out how to have a cultural identity as part of a nation that had, up until very recently, been a dedicated adversary, and sorting out how to clean up the wreckage that had accumulated in the meantime. A lot of the critical love for New Amerykah seems rooted in a love for the music of that period—a time in which popular Black artists made records filled not only with visionary, avant-garde sounds, but with a social expansiveness, a fire and ambition to say something important to and for a community. Reviews put this record in a line with those artists: Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, Funkadelic; you could tie it even more easily to a lot of smart-guy late-’80s hip-hop digging into the same ideas. Nobody who’s been paying attention will be surprised at the thought of that mantle being picked up by a woman.
This album doesn’t just have the personal and social ambitions of those old records—plenty of charmless “nu-soul” records aspire to that—but some of the sonic ones, too. Big tracks aside, it’s an awfully static record, which gives it the kind of high-art “difficulty” that we critics have been known to like. The beats, by hip-hop producers like Madlib, 9th Wonder, and Shafiq Husayn, trail sneakily by, leaving Badu—without the aid of verses, choruses, or much structure at all—to scribble all over them in her perfect/imperfect voice. (One track, “My People,” is mostly just a repeated mantra; the rest of Badu’s vocal scribbling is buried far back in the mix, like an incidental decoration.) These things should pose problems; one of the chief wonders of New Amerykah is that they don’t. Instead, they allow for a sense of intimacy and freedom. At the end of one already-great track, there’s an offhand doodle that’s one of the most amazing pieces of music I’ve heard all year: It’s just Badu, with some chatter in the background, singing her mother’s history in unison with a muted trumpet. But you can hear the two musicians working happily to stay in unison, all through a complex jazz run, even trying to match their vibratos; you can imagine the takes where they miss it and laugh a little. It makes a little joke, and it closes on a terrific line about her mother’s resilience—“Even though it was hard, you would never ever know it”—and in the end I can't think of a nobler use for recording equipment.
It’s those personal moments that sell things, even more so than in Badu’s back catalog; credit usually goes to her gift of a voice, which she uses impressionistically instead of composing, but it’s always been her keen writing about people that gives her tracks much of their shape. The trumpet comes at the end of a track called “Me,” which despite the title is more candid than narcissistic—a gorgeous, sunny, soft-soul beat over which Badu sings about getting older, getting thicker, having two kids with different fathers. That candor is also a lot of what sells Badu’s social concerns, which could otherwise sound like a laundry list of Black-community struggles: poverty, urban violence, bad policing, AIDS, the psychological hard spot of teenage girls, complacency, and get-mine nihilism versus hope for something else. These things get filtered through Badu’s head into real scenery instead of placeholders, and folded in among other things that seem remarkably sincere and personal: mourning for the late producer J Dilla, an earnest belief in hip-hop as a uniting culture, and that we is we attitude. Even the beats wind up feeling earnest. The bulk of them are dark, blunted, woozy, and paranoid; the exceptions are light, breezy, calm. But all of them feel like walking out onto an empty big-city sidewalk in the hours after sunrise, when everything’s chilly, dewy, and strange.
There are times, as the album drags on, where that static darkness really does become a problem—where the record begins to seem indulgent, half-finished, or slapped together. Part of the marvel of it, though, is how she still pulls this off, every bit of it, on sheer... Baduizm: Even when she seems wrong, or dippy, or maybe a little batty, she's still a ridiculously compelling and likable personality. This is something no one should criticize in music: recognizable, complex, three-dimensional character. Neither should we be too skeptical about people inclined to laud this as a strong new flash of old-style, socially engaged R&B: Those ambitions are worth praising, and those eras worth looking back on, so long as it doesn’t come along with the mean-spirited, bad-faith complaint that “all” of today’s Black music is “just about guns/sex/money,” or with this free-floating idea that the experiences of Black people must always be treated as a socio-political “issue.” Badu’s difficult and complicated, and not even in a self-absorbed way—it makes for good, deep records and shows that’ll never start on time. (“Time is for white people,” she recently joked to Blender, one-upping the old line about running on African Time.) I don’t know if we’re still voting for public policy based on who we’d rather have a beer with, but it occurs to me that I don’t know many people who wouldn’t love to grab a drink with Badu. | 2008-06-06T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-06-06T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Universal Motown | June 6, 2008 | 7.8 | 15f1cec5-70a4-4ef0-8526-f7d597e57e42 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | |
Sweden’s God Mother blend black metal, d-beat, grind, math rock, and more, contorting tradition rather than kowtowing to it. Their hellish new album offers occasional glimpses of greatness. | Sweden’s God Mother blend black metal, d-beat, grind, math rock, and more, contorting tradition rather than kowtowing to it. Their hellish new album offers occasional glimpses of greatness. | God Mother: Vilseledd | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/god-mother-vilseledd/ | Vilseledd | As in life itself, a proper introduction to the Swedish wrecking crew God Mother and their new album, Vilseledd, starts with a well-rounded breakfast. The video for “Weak,” the LP’s potent, whiplash-inducing centerpiece, puts a nightmarish spin on the typical Scandinavian spread. Its menu features toast and pancakes slathered with neon goop, pork and beans drowning in sludge, and a bag of cereal dumped haphazardly on the table, among other delights, all served up by people with a melting faces. God Mother’s music is the sonic equivalent of this hellish Nordic feast. Although the band draw heavily from locally-sourced styles like black metal, d-beat, and death’n’roll, they’d rather contort tradition than kowtow to it.
On their 2015 debut Maktbehov, God Mother spliced together the aforementioned genres with an all-American, Frankensteined approach: Pig Destroyer’s sludgy grind, Converge’s melodramatic hardcore, and especially the Dillinger Escape Plan’s freewheeling math rock are prominent in their DNA. Many groups would buckle under the pressure of such an explosive juggling act, but not God Mother. They toggle between bone-crushing barnstormers and slow-churned stoner metal with remarkable technical proficiency. That Ben Weinman, Dillinger Escape Plan’s soon-to-be-former guitarist, signed them to his Party Smasher Inc. label (with the bold cosign “Torch, officially passed”) is fitting considering the two groups’ mutual, attention-challenged mindsets. But God Mother don’t explore enough uncharted territory on Vilseledd to fully justify their characterization as next-generation freak-metal luminaries.
To wit, the quartet are miles ahead of their peers where well-rounded cruelty is concerned. From 30-second, hyper-condensed grindcore (“Enkla Svar,” “Dödfödd”) to rabid hard rock (“Caved In”) to tormented sludge (“Burdenless”), God Mother’s arsenal here runs deep and diverse, their fearsome chemistry amplified further by the punishing mix. Sebastian Campbell’s larynx-lacerating screams periodically pierce guitarist Max Lindström’s pointed riffs like a bayonet dipped in poison, threatened all the while by bassist Daniel Noring and drummer Michael Dahlström’s bifurcated percussion. “De Ovälkomna” and “By the Millions” are less songs than warzones: cramped, chaotic spaces where friendly fire is embraced with open arms and ample blast beats.
The main problem with this thrilling firefight is that we’ve heard much of it before, however unpredictable the arrangements seem at first. “By the Millions” and “No Return” play out as hot-wired Converge songs, the lurching arrangements and staggered riffs shamelessly plucked from the grooves of 2001’s Jane Doe. The tremolo licks that open “Acrid Teeth” and “Charlatan” are nearly indistinguishable from each other: the kind of Darkthrone-esque noodling you’d expect from a garden-variety black metal band.
Vilseledd might not paint God Mother as agents of the hardcore zeitgeist, but it does offer the occasional glimpse of greatness. “Burdenless,” the album’s five-minute shape-shifting closer, traps the album’s disparate influences in a mucky web, where they promptly fester like A-grade Neurosis. Besides providing a much-needed respite from God Mother’s bludgeoning zig-zags and recurrent fake outs, the song provides convincing evidence that the band’s protean tricks may be more unified than they let on. A little bit of discipline goes a long way. | 2017-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Party Smasher Inc. | September 30, 2017 | 6.4 | 15f2e1a4-2a5e-455c-ae87-0cb77a379726 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | |
Reissued for its 25th anniversary, this dynamic and momentous release from the Philadelphia rock band features some of their highest peaks. | Reissued for its 25th anniversary, this dynamic and momentous release from the Philadelphia rock band features some of their highest peaks. | Bardo Pond: Amanita (25th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bardo-pond-amanita-25th-anniversary-edition/ | Amanita (25th Anniversary Edition) | You can learn a lot about Bardo Pond from their choice of cover songs. Their interpretations of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” Pharoah Sanders’ “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” and Roxy Music’s “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” reflect a group who play the long game, valuing slow builds and subtle climaxes. It also reveals an obsession with mind expansion of the highest order: While drug references litter the Philadelphia-based psychedelic rock band’s song and album titles, they’re handled in a non-cloying manner. Amanita muscaria, the mushroom after which their 1996 album is titled, has both poisonous and hallucinogenic properties. The implication is clear, but no over-the-top images appear on the album cover, nor do proselytizing lyrics blast you with mycological advocacy. The music is the drug, Bardo Pond convincingly insinuate.
While some of Bardo Pond’s many albums tend toward a monolithic buzz-drone, Amanita, which is being reissued on vinyl for its 25th anniversary, displays the band at their most dynamic. As guitarist Michael Gibbons notes, “Amanita was a manifesto of everything we were trying to do. It was really a template for everything we did later... There were songs, but they were still rooted in our free-improv base.” At their core, Bardo Pond are minimalists who maximize their limited range of sounds. Most of their songs move with a stolid grandeur, with brothers John and Michael Gibbons’ guitars accruing dense masses of fuzz and loosing rigorously sculpted scree, conjuring an electrical storm above mushroom clouds rising at one-quarter speed. Vocalist/flautist Isobel Sollenberger essentially turns her voice into a second flute: Her singing, which often seems like muffled howls in a tornado, acts as a conveyor of ineffable feelings, as affecting and ethereal as her instrument. Bassist Clint Takeda and drummer Joe Culver provide a deceptively seductive undertow, though their efforts usually get subsumed by the Gibbons’ towers of electric guitar.
The clarion call introducing Amanita’s 10-minute opener “Limerick” prepares you for a momentous experience. The Gibbons brothers intertwine their timbral gradients and unifying noise with melody in a solemn display of fraternal telepathy. What often gets overlooked about Bardo Pond, though, is how sensuous their sound is, due to Takeda and Culver’s subliminally prodding rhythms and Sollenberger’s filigreeing of the higher frequencies. Speaking of which, “The High Frequency” is the album’s peak. After a false start, the band locks into a groove and the rhythm section creates a sense of magic-carpet-riding bliss that sounds as loose and nonchalantly trippy as the Beatles’ “Flying.”
The music on Amanita often emphasizes Bardo Pond’s carnal side. “Tantric Porno” stands as one of the sweetest cuts in their vast discography. It’s one of the few songs on which the bass at least partially takes the lead, its methodical undulations lending a mellow frisson in the root chakra. “Rumination” follows a similar path, exuding an eerie desolation before blooming into a familiar, gnarly Gibbons bro guitar duel. “Wank,” meanwhile, is lascivious in its woozy, stoner-rock way, with Culver shifting into an alpha-male strut on his kit.
The relatively sprightly “Sentence” might be the closest Bardo Pond ever came to indie-rock conventionality, with the lead guitar squealing in the vicinity of Stephen Malkmus. A kernel of a college-radio hit lurks beneath the mammoth, down-tuned boluses of guitar and blurred, stoned vocals, and the lyrics—“Collarbone figure eights/Sentenced to a lifetime in the ocean”—exemplify Sollenberger’s elliptical thoughts.
The bonus tracks on this edition, “Clean Sweep” and “Brambles,” are striking anomalies. The former moves through Slint-like passages of ominous tension and brief spurts of rampaging noise rock while the latter is a lurching funk-rock song that steadily gains impact and chaos. These sorts of fractious dynamics rarely surface in this most even-keeled of rock units.
After relative commercial success with Liz Phair and Pavement and a partnership with Atlantic Records, Matador had the luxury of taking risks on low-commercial-potential acts like Bardo Pond in those mid-’90s boom times. The iconic indie label was quickly rewarded with Amanita, one of the band’s grandest releases and one worthy of this remastered and expanded edition on two slabs of purple vinyl. The label also plans to reissue the group’s three other Matador titles and a rarities comp. For a band who have accumulated a surplus of adulation and cred in the intervening years, it feels like a karmic victory.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | October 11, 2021 | 8 | 15f3fed1-821d-4bbb-9700-a722c3a0a836 | Dave Segal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dave-segal/ | |
After nearly breaking up and instead making their best album in years, the once-restless Japanese trio become something new again: self-satisfied. | After nearly breaking up and instead making their best album in years, the once-restless Japanese trio become something new again: self-satisfied. | Boris: LφVE & EVφL | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boris-love-and-evol/ | LφVE & EVφL | New Boris albums once offered joyous upheaval and a sense of shock. At their best, and sometimes their worst, they ventured into whatever forms fit their loose-fitting creed of “Heavy Rocks.” Pink, one of the band’s early, essential breakthroughs, moved from the reinvented shoegaze anthem “Farewell” into wild-eyed D-Beat and squalid noise-rock, as if beating a gleeful retreat from perfection. Sure, there have been gimmicks and missteps along the way, but Boris’ restlessness has often been rewarding and contagious.
But it is hard to muster much more than a shrug for LØVE & EVØL, Boris’ double-album debut for Jack White’s Third Man Records. LØVE & EVØL finds Boris at a strange career crossroads—or, rather, just beyond it. Three years ago, they recorded what was meant to be their farewell album but instead stumbled into Dear, their most ecstatic and aggressive LP in years. Boris sounded reborn, their vows renewed. LØVE & EVØL, however, suggests that the euphoria of this second honeymoon has faded. These seven anemic songs find Boris becoming something new yet again—self-satisfied.
They remind us of a lot of their best tricks: Wata’s solos, like the one that leads the lumbering “LOVE” out of its torpor, still streak across these tracks like a rainbow somehow appearing against a moonless night sky—few guitarists sound so rapturous with a trick so simple. And in its ascendant second half, “EVOL” recreates the band’s most disorienting and beautiful effect—the ability to drop down in tempo, key, and distortion and still shoot for the stars, as if the rules of gravity have been temporarily reversed.
Those little moments of wonder stud songs that, by and large, feel like adult-coloring-book versions of Boris triumphs past. “uzume” is a surging wall of noise, with wave after wave of distortion and drums moving ever inward, but it lacks the wild radiance of their earlier drone experiments. Closer “Shadow of Skulls” lingers in the same space for 12 minutes without shifting into anything heavenly or heavy. It plods ever-onward because Boris don’t know what else to do with it—a fitting end for an album that adds little but another entry into an already-enormous catalogue
The band once served as a generational gateway to the worlds of international psychedelia and doom-adjacent metal. Accessible and enigmatic, they drew you in, making you sort through alternate editions of their records to find the next weird gem. But accessing the world’s musical extremes is easier than it was even a decade ago, with point-and-click access to infinite wormholes. Boris, meanwhile, simply feel staid, a band that missed its best chance to take a bow.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Third Man | October 4, 2019 | 5.8 | 15f53b8e-50c7-43ab-820c-cc7f062f2716 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Jessy Lanza’s new EP features remixes from former collaborators and tourmates DJ Taye and DJ Spinn of Chicago footwork crew Teklife, Morgan Geist aka Storm Queen, and Leon Smart as DVA [Hi:Emotions]. | Jessy Lanza’s new EP features remixes from former collaborators and tourmates DJ Taye and DJ Spinn of Chicago footwork crew Teklife, Morgan Geist aka Storm Queen, and Leon Smart as DVA [Hi:Emotions]. | Jessy Lanza: Oh No No No Remixes EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22698-oh-no-no-no-remixes-ep/ | Oh No No No Remixes EP | To cap off a busy 2016, in which she released and toured behind her sophomore effort Oh No, Jessy Lanza dropped the Oh No No No Remixes EP. On Oh No, co-produced with label mate Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys, Lanza explored a breadth of genres from pop to new wave on the way to establishing her own neatly curated sound—one that thrives in the overlap between electronica and R&B. She explored the angst of romantic entanglement usually associated with the latter genre, but her penchant for vibrant synthpop melodies and stuttering drum patterns transformed anguish into a danceable incentive. Just as it says on the tin, this EP puts a new spin on three tracks from the album: “I Talk BB,” “Could B U,” and “Going Somewhere.” The remixes come courtesy of former collaborators and tourmates DJ Taye and DJ Spinn of Chicago footwork crew Teklife, Morgan Geist aka Storm Queen, and Leon Smart as DVA [Hi:Emotions].
While Oh No leaned into the chaotic musings about a budding romance, the EP soundtracks the left-brain, logical analysis. Geist adds a light touch to “I Talk BB,” brightening up the album version with synths and a drum machine. Lanza’s breathy falsetto from the original serves as an instrument on the remix, blending in with the beat rather than standing apart. This holds true when “Could Be U,” the ambient outro to Oh No, is given the Teklife treatment by DJs Taye and Spinn. There are brief hints of Lanza’s voice over a subdued but frenetic drum pattern, which is similar in tone to the original despite the slight increase in tempo, but it seems like she’s not necessarily the star of her own EP. The remixes don’t pounce at the chance to celebrate the upper reaches of her voice—used often, instead of the modal register, to express uncertainty and anxiety on the originals.
This point is hammered home on the final track, DVA [Hi:Emotions]’ take on “Going Somewhere,” one of the more upbeat compositions on Oh No that also highlights Lanza’s range, removes her vocal almost entirely. For seven and a half minutes, the track plays out like the audio from some kind of immersive art installation, interpolating snippets of Kim Kardashian’s voice with haunting synth lines and R2-D2-esque droid sounds that mimic most reality shows' warped relationship with the truth (“I just wanna impress you,” Lanza repeats, a relatable impulse that can turn psychotic if it becomes a compulsion).
The Oh No No No Remixes EP makes for good ambiance, but they don't say much on their own. They set a relaxed mood, and they function as a mellow, cohesive mini-supplement to the album. But the EP is more of a showcase for Lanza’s collaborators and less a celebration of her voice and everything that made Oh No so good. It’s likely that fans of the latter record, where her songwriting and vocal talent take center stage, will stick with it instead. | 2016-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Hyperdub | December 16, 2016 | 6.5 | 15f57d6b-3202-4f28-82df-ddfdad262348 | Vanessa Okoth-Obbo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa- okoth-obbo/ | null |
The Chicago rapper’s follow-up to his riveting debut LP argues for him as an adaptable and unmissable talent, an unlikely star in a new major-label system. | The Chicago rapper’s follow-up to his riveting debut LP argues for him as an adaptable and unmissable talent, an unlikely star in a new major-label system. | Polo G: The Goat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/polo-g-the-goat/ | The Goat | Polo G raps with a sing-song lilt, but his songs are shaded with murders, heartbreak, and incredible pain. Each line is rendered in careful, writerly fashion, his voice barely produced and almost never doubled, so there is often little to distinguish chorus from verse. Memories, boasts, threats—all of it simply spills out. His songs are informed by the drill music that Polo grew up on on Chicago’s North side and once tried to imitate, but also borrow from rap’s more classicist branches. This approach was perfectly crystallized on Die a Legend, his arresting debut album from last year, which plays like an LP made up exclusively of the bloodlettings that sneak onto some albums’ B-sides. Its hits seem inevitable outgrowths of Polo G’s larger approach, the way its verses slide naturally into hooks. And the world it creates is unspoiled by outside interference: no treacly A&R-insisted beats or clumsily grafted features. It was easy to get lost inside.
Polo G’s follow-up, The Goat, is not quite so shut off to the world. Its front half is especially adventurous, folding in kinetic collaborations with rappers from North Carolina and Tennessee and tender love songs. It is not the singularly engrossing experience that Die a Legend is, but it argues for him as an adaptable and unmissable talent, an unlikely star in a new major-label system. When he does return to that well of somber reflection, Polo G draws some of his most chilling material yet: see the desperate “Relentless,” where he tries to convince skeptical friends: “Heaven ain’t the only way we can escape up out the gutter.”
It cannot be overstated how plain Polo G’s preferred syntaxes are, and how unsettling an effect they can have depending on the subject matter. This is, after all, a young rapper whose biggest hit includes a chorus that goes “We come from poverty, man, we ain’t have a thing.” When he raps about pain or trauma from his childhood and teen years, he often refers to them as “pain” and “trauma”; rather than make his music vague, this clarity is a helpful guide through dense verses packed with detail. Take the shimmering “No Matter What,” where he laments that his new money and power can’t bring back his departed friends: “But my homies died young and that wasn't part of the plan/Flying on these planes, wish I could reach and touch your hand/I don't wanna be awake, that's why I keep popping these Xans.” The problems are laid bare and the solutions are destructive, but the music—its lyrics and its sound—is always searching for a sort of exaltation.
Later in that same song, Polo G recalls sitting in a Cook County Jail cell as a public defender explained the details of a plea deal. He juxtaposes this memory with a more recent one, of him on stage in front of thousands of fans, but the latter does not scrub away the former. Polo G often raps about a string of arrests and short incarcerations as a teenager (weed possession and car theft) as a turning point in his life, and you can hear the weight of responsibility in his raps: a new father, Polo G has moved along with several of his family members to Calabasas. But he’s still haunted by loss. On “33,” he raps bitterly about a friend’s murder that has gone unavenged, a loose end that will never be tied.
There is another, curious motif in Polo G’s music. While it’s hardly uncommon for musicians to write about their self-medication, both Die a Legend and The Goat are littered with references to ecstasy. At the beginning of the 2010s, rappers often cited it in its traditional sense, as a party drug; more recently it has been given far grimmer purpose, as a salve for would-be shooters to steel their nerves before deadly confrontations. In Polo G’s songs, its purpose is characteristically plain: to steal by brute force the joy that can be hard to access otherwise. But this, of course, becomes another hurdle to overcome; Polo G has spoken in interviews about the pills’ nagging, lingering effects on his brain and body, and here, on “Relentless,” he raps that he’s “still trying to recover” from them.
Beyond the language, Polo G’s music itself has a sort of emotional earnesty. The closing track, the BJ the Chicago Kid-assisted “Wishing for a Hero,” samples the same Bruce Hornsby song that 2Pac flipped for “Changes.” Polo G does not undercut this grandiosity: He not only compares his business mind to Jay-Z’s, but promises Malcolm X that he’ll follow in his footsteps. It is difficult for a sense of destiny like this to read as anything but silly, but who better to sell it than a creatively fearless, uncompromised young rapper who’s bucked conventional wisdom to stand on the precipice of national stardom? | 2020-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | May 21, 2020 | 7.7 | 15fbfa53-569e-4182-99f8-019dce2d8e05 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
null | null | The Beach Boys: Smiley Smile/Wild Honey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11667-smiley-smilewild-honey/ | Smiley Smile/Wild Honey | In the mid-60's, Brian Wilson declared a race to the next major development in record production techniques. Everything looked good in Wilson's Beach Boys camp. He'd just produced one of the most revolutionary albums pop music had yet seen with 1966's Pet Sounds, and the reports of the follow-up, Smile, were extremely promising. "Our new album will be better than Pet Sounds," he pledged. "It will be as much an improvement over Sounds as that was over Summer Days." One can only imagine how great an improvement that must have originally been, and how exhilarating it would have been to look forward to such a dramatic shift occurring again after such a short period of time.
So who were his worthy competitors? Well, there were the Beatles, and then... well, really, that was all. Always the tough competitors, the Beatles were the group with Rubber Soul, the album that inspired Wilson to create Pet Sounds in the first place. He respected and admired them, and felt he could beat them to a pulp. And with Smile set for release in late '66, Wilson felt that he had the race "in the bag."
That is, until December of 1966, at which time label disputes and tension within the group had reached such a level that Wilson forced himself to abandon the Smile project as he had envisioned it. To fulfill contractual obligations, the Beach Boys recorded Smiley Smile in the first three quarters of 1967. The hype died, the album failed, Sgt Pepper came out, and Wilson began a quick descent into madness. He stopped taking sole production credits, and lost all confidence, fully aware that, without the possibility of Smile ever being completed, he could never top Sgt. Pepper.
It's truly a shame that Smile failed the way it did. And like any modern everyday thief in the age of Napster, I've been afforded the opportunity to hear the Smile recordings, or at least what's out there, unfinished, with an "unofficial" tracklist. It's hard to imagine how it would have sounded if completely finished; as it stands, however, it sounds like the beginning of something that could have changed popular music history. Perhaps we wouldn't be so monotheistic in our pop leanings, worshipping only at the Beatles' altar the way some do today. With the Smile material, full of vignettes, lush harmonies, unique arrangements and some of the most gorgeous of melodies, Brian Wilson proved that he was a man of virtually limitless genius.
So now that the history business is out of the way, let's talk about what the Boys and Capitol Records chose to release in lieu of Smile. Smiley Smile is a near-masterpiece. Without any awareness of Smile's existence, this album could have been a contemporary classic. Remnants of the vignette style are still there, along with a sense of humor both musical and lyrical. Group harmonies shine just as beautifully as any on Pet Sounds, and although the album isn't anywhere close to the sonic revolution that Sgt. Pepper had already brought, Wilson's innovative production and arrangements still bring out the best in every single track. And one of his best melodies can be found in "Wonderful," matching, if not topping, anything on Pet Sounds.
As someone who's heard the Smile sessions, I find many moments sorely missing, of course; if I had to choose, the most notable exclusion is the lounge-psychedelic mini-epic "Cabin Essence." And the songs that do appear from Smile are pretty radically reworked, with the exception of "Good Vibrations," already a #1 single from '66, which can be found in its final and perfect form here. Strangely enough, the most disappointing re-recording is of "Wonderful"; standing on its own, the Smiley Smile version is gorgeous enough, but it nearly pales in comparison to the stripped-down harpsichord and heartbreaking harmonies of the original.
As for bonus tracks or outtakes included here, the centerpieces are those culled from the "Good Vibrations" sessions. There are some takes from the original recording sessions, in which we're given a fascinating glimpse of Wilson's way in the studio; he directed most of the players live, as if he were conducting minor symphonies in pop music. Also included is an early alternate version with different lyrics and even a slightly differing melody, which, while interesting to compare to the final version, just doesn't fully succeed.
"Heroes and Villains" also appears in two forms. As Smiley Smile's opener, it remains a multi-part, multi-layered, harmonious pop single, true to the form of Wilson at his peak. Luckily, Van Dyke Parks collaborated on the lyrics as he did for much of Smile, ensuring a poetic success rather than a hit-or-miss Wilson affair, since Brian's lyrics tended to miss more often than not. As a bonus track, it appears the way it may have been originally premiered on Smile, with even more random sections, unpredictable twists and vocal samples. Surprisingly, the re-recorded "Heroes" works even better; rather than relying on twists and turns, it's based more on the voices of the gorgeous "psychedelic barbershop quartet," as Jimi Hendrix once referred to it.
Indeed, Capitol were smart to include 1968's Wild Honey on the disc as part of their two-for-one Beach Boys re-release series. But when comparing it to such an album as the one preceding it here, it barely deserves a paragraph. One or two of its tracks succeed, mostly when it's either a classic bittersweet Wilson melody ("I'd Love Just Once to See You") or a throwback to 50's dance-pop ("How She Boogalooed It"). And naturally, the production still sounded good as long as Brian was at least in the studio. The rest of the record is in the R&B; vein as interpreted by white surfer boys-- Beach Boys, even. There's also a Stevie Wonder cover sung with as much faux-soul as Carl Wilson could have possibly mustered. It's not pretty, and, to be blunt, neither is the majority of Wild Honey.
Back to 1967, on the day the Beach Boys recorded the bare and light-hearted "Vegetables," another track written for Smile: Paul McCartney decided to drop by the studio. He can be heard chewing vegetables for the track's only percussion. And, as Al Jardine recalls, McCartney and Wilson could be seen together behind the console at one point, and McCartney even ventured to play Wilson the just-finished "A Day in the Life" before Sgt Pepper was even released. While a supposedly "burned-out" genius was creating the most simplistic recording he'd made in years, he became a first-hand witness to the popular sonic revolution that he could have been. In the public eye, the Beatles were the clear victors, and the people simply weren't satisfied with second place. Now, with Smiley Smile finally reissued in America after years of out-of-print status, hopefully people will begin to analyze the whole race again. In my mind, it was a photo finish. | 2001-03-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2001-03-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | null | March 29, 2001 | 9.5 | 15fe18c1-4397-4f90-85c1-6dd5c638b58d | Pitchfork | null |
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Kevin Morby’s captivating fourth album feels spacious and intimate at once. It possesses an elegant, dusky atmosphere and Morby’s hopelessly optimistic songwriting is the best it has ever been. | Kevin Morby’s captivating fourth album feels spacious and intimate at once. It possesses an elegant, dusky atmosphere and Morby’s hopelessly optimistic songwriting is the best it has ever been. | Kevin Morby: City Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-morby-city-music/ | City Music | Big city music has always been a fantasy: romanticizing filth, creating pockets of utopia in cruel systems, rich kids slumming it in an attempt to glom onto gutter poet romance. Making music that reckons with storied cities demands hard-bitten cynicism, but also a quasi-religious belief in their transformative potential. Earlier in his solo career, Kevin Morby made more direct references to the artists who consecrated places like New York and Nashville in the popular imagination. These days, he’s a songwriter of such elegance and gentle wisdom that he can make a record interrogating the concepts they proposed—heroism, definition, belonging—while remaining sincerely convicted about their importance.
Contrary to City Music’s theme, Morby’s fourth album was made on the beach in California, in a studio with an ocean view. Its spacious sound is out of sync with his bustling setting, but it draws you into his warm, eye-level focus. Joining him are guitarist Meg Duffy and drummer Justin Sullivan (his former bandmate in the Babies), and Richard Swift on production. Together they create a dusky atmosphere, an unshowy product of the band’s intuition. The playing is cottony and spare yet full of winning melodies and its sound is consistent enough that when they break from a dreamy lull, it becomes all the more captivating.
Sometimes that means a jolt of energy. The title track is almost seven minutes of a cascading, sleepy riff that suddenly yanks a ripcord and scampers into oblivion. “Oh! That city music! Oh! That city sound!” Morby sings over and over, his belief in the idea sending him spiralling into another dimension. But both the sad, sexy “Come to Me Now” and the idly groovy “Pearly Gates” have the opposite effect, cracking open to reveal moments of cosmic beauty. On the latter, it’s Swift’s three daughters singing a wordless, heavenly refrain that’s mirrored by Meg Baird’s eerie cry in Morby’s bittersweet cover of Germs’ “Caught in My Eye.” Both moments are captivating, inviting awed contemplation—one of Morby’s most distinctive skills as a writer.
“Come to Me Now” and “Caught in My Eye” are among the rare moments on City Music where Morby sounds genuinely desolate, his voice cracked and broken. But mostly, his voice stays buoyant and puppyish. His ever-welcoming tone is a key part of a record that asks what it means to belong, and how you find your people. On the surface, “1234” seems like City Music’s most obvious moment—a lean, surfy rocker that hurtles and clatters like a runaway train. The world does not need another Ramones tribute, but Morby smartly repurposes their starting-gun countdown as a code to a secret world. (Plus, his subtle reference to poet Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” adds a wry shade of knowing to his naïve performance.) He keeps hustling on “Tin Can,” which sounds like the cast of “Sesame Street” doing a Velvet Underground skit, and is just as charming as you’d imagine.
Really, Morby’s city is a stand-in for a heart, for community; his band’s nuanced interplay is living proof of the fact that he knows how good it feels to be part of something bigger than yourself. He sings about the childhood friends who bring out your best parts, about how we’re all made up of the people who pass through our lives, however briefly, and wishes for laughter, dance, freedom and connection for everyone. It’s hopelessly naïve and optimistic, which is what makes it so beautiful, particularly now. It’s not hard to hear City Music as a lament for lost innocence, a pledge to maintain optimism and humanity at a time when those qualities don’t just feel like vestiges of youth, but of some better civilization that’s rapidly disappearing. In his best album yet, Morby makes a prayer out of the squall. | 2017-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | June 21, 2017 | 8.1 | 1600e747-346a-4ec2-bea6-1847be58c40d | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Weezer's Rivers Cuomo hooked up with Scott Murphy, frontman for pop-punk band Allister, for this Japanese-language album. Released on Universal’s Japanese imprint, Scott & Rivers splits most of its time between ruthlessly utilitarian power pop and midtempo, jangly acoustic alt-rock. | Weezer's Rivers Cuomo hooked up with Scott Murphy, frontman for pop-punk band Allister, for this Japanese-language album. Released on Universal’s Japanese imprint, Scott & Rivers splits most of its time between ruthlessly utilitarian power pop and midtempo, jangly acoustic alt-rock. | Rivers Cuomo / Scott Murphy: Scott & Rivers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18138-scott-rivers-scott-rivers/ | Scott & Rivers | There’s a 99% possibility that some 10th-grade boy out there is currently relying on Pinkerton to guide him through the indignities of adolescence, and how’s this for some perspective: He wasn’t even born when Weezer released that album. And it’s been that long since any form of denial played a role in Rivers Cuomo’s music. From “Pork and Beans” to “Can’t Stop Partying”; from the Raditude cover art to the Hurley cover art; from the Weezer Cruise to the Pinkerton reunion tour, Cuomo has pretty much done everything over the past 17 years except take “no” for an answer. So when you consider his longstanding predilection for Asian culture (to put it mildly), the only thing surprising about him making a Japanese-language album is that it took him until 2013 to do so. And yet, Scott & Rivers is one of the few unequivocally good ideas he’s had in a very, very long time: name a 21st century Weezer album that wouldn’t be immediately improved if you didn’t understand English.
Cuomo linked up with a suitable travel buddy in Scott Murphy, frontman for Allister, a Drive Thru pop-punk band you might be familiar with if you keep tabs on the Warped Tour, but have likely only heard if you’ve been to the Warped Tour. They're very much “big in Japan.” So what can be expected of Scott & Rivers? Are Murphy and Cuomo going to fully concede to the stylistic tenets of J-pop? Is it simply going to split the difference between Girlfriends and Dead Ends with lyrics like “goddamn you half-Japanese girls” sung in full Japanese? Is it going to appeal to the 18-year old girl who lives in small city in Japan or the 35-year-old she grew up to be since Pinkerton? Holy shit, there’s a song called “Butterfly” on here; is Rivers really going there?
Some of these questions are answered definitively, all are answered rather uninterestingly. No matter what language you speak or how familiar you are with either artist's work, there isn't much culture shock to be had listening to Scott & Rivers. In short, it’s a hell of a lot like an off-brand recent Weezer album, in that the style isn’t guitar rock taking cues from factory pop, but factory pop interpreted through clinical guitars that sound like they’re sourced from test tubes rather than tube amps. It would sound overproduced for 1998 yet seems curiously rinky-dink compared to the current pop maximalism of any continent; Scott & Rivers splits most of its time between ruthlessly utilitarian power pop and midtempo, jangly acoustic alt-rock that reimagines the break between Pinkerton and the Green Album as one where Cuomo ditched Harvard for higher education in the form of Stroke 9 or Eve 6 CDs. Or, in the case of the pure synth-pop numbers and the cover of Kimura Kaela's "Butterfly" (sorry), those of Vitamin C or any other sub-Spice I can’t immediately recall.
This isn’t some Kickstarter lark-- it’s being released on Universal’s Japanese imprint. But the few hooks that are sung in English make it abundantly clear that neither Cuomo nor Murphy's songwriting has been altered in the slightest: “I love, love, love my homely girl!/ She just knocks me to the ground!” “I freakin’ love my life!/ It’s turning out just right!/ It’s a party every night!” Those two songs are “Homely Girl” and “Freakin’ Love My Life”, naturally. Otherwise, the frictionless production and rounded, vowel-heavy Japanese phonetics gives Scott & Rivers a sonic viscosity where consuming one song or all 12 feels roughly equal. It sticks with you, but the sweetness has a sickly chemical feel.
Cuomo told us from the beginning that his favorite rock group was Kiss, so we shouldn’t be surprised about him using his artistic goodwill as quarters in a perpetual game of whack-a-mole, going after whatever monetization opportunity presents itself. In some ways, it’s weirdly admirable. Scott & Rivers just seems more savvy than anything-- you sense that he and Murphy know something us Yankees don’t, or maybe Scott & Rivers is just prelude to Weezer’s inevitable Live at Budokan. There’s a heartening belief in how Cuomo still sticks to writing the kind of songs that need mass exposure for them to mean anything to anybody, and assumes rock radio still has the juice to provide it. There’s no doubt he believes it, so there’s no way a song called “Freakin’ Love My Life” could be ironic; Cuomo’s fantasy world is the realest thing he knows. | 2013-05-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-05-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Universal Japan | May 30, 2013 | 4.9 | 1601b235-6058-4402-82c0-95b09d426b85 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The acclaimed Norwegian avant-rock band splits the difference between jazz and metal while still transcending their influences. | The acclaimed Norwegian avant-rock band splits the difference between jazz and metal while still transcending their influences. | Shining: Blackjazz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14215-blackjazz/ | Blackjazz | Though they're separated by profound differences-- most especially improvisation and rigidity-- jazz and metal have a lot more in common than most fans would admit. In particular, both tend to be torn over innovation: There are those who believe that no art form can survive without pushing its boundaries outward and upward, and those who believe that straying too far from those boundaries turns the music into something else, something undesirable and ugly. Into this morass of dreary arguments over authenticity wade Jørgen Munkeby and his colleagues in Shining, and they handily illustrate how the whole issue can be mooted by just not caring that much about pleasing either side.
It's not as if Blackjazz, with its electrifying fusion of jazz structures and punishing metal instrumentation, is unprecedented: The first buzzy guitar chords of "The Madness and the Damage Done", which quickly settle into unpredictable jazz patterns, call back to Borbetomagus or Peter Brötzmann. The appearance of a spastic saxophone owes more than a bit to American jazz-punk, and Shining's extreme metal elements recall Enslaved, with whom they've collaborated in the past. Even the band's past as an acoustic jazz ensemble, and its use of distinctive rhythm patterns and odd instrumentation, are reminders of other forward-looking Scandinavians like Jaga Jazzist.
But Shining manage to transcend their influences, numerous as they may be, by simply throwing themselves into the sum of their parts with such gusto. From beginning to end-- and including a predictable but enjoyable cover of King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man" that tips their prog influences-- Shining never fail to convince themselves, or listeners, they're presenting something new. That conviction, combined with their undeniable chops-- Munkeby's unhinged sax work and the extremely adept drumming of Torstein Lofthus deserve special attention-- carries Blackjazz into somewhere worth exploring.
It's when Blackjazz fails to go whole hog, in fact, that they're at their least convincing. The world certainly doesn't need another Opeth, and Shining still gets a bit carried away with the synth noodling with which symphonic metal has cursed an unlucky world. Even Helte Hermansen's guitars are hooky, powerful, and wound up in exciting progressions, but they could stand to get a little dirt on them; Munkeby's vocals also benefit from grit, and a less clinical guitar sound would definitely benefit Shining's overall attack. Still, Shining are combining jazz and metal in original ways, from the filling up of jazz's precious empty spaces with ticking nervous energy to the replacement of metal's vocal aggression with creepy and disconnected noise. And if that's not the same as true originality, it's close enough. | 2010-05-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-05-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Jazz / Metal | The End / Indie | May 14, 2010 | 7.7 | 1606bb81-7129-4946-9f46-db955b51cf39 | Pitchfork | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pitchfork/ | null |
null | Like plenty of other bands in the internet era, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart seem poised to attract an audience that will far outstrip that of their easily identifiable precedents-- in their case, groups like Rocketship or Shop Assistants, each obscure these days even by Approved Indie Influence standards. A few other twee/noise-pop revivalists arguably pulled off that same trick last year, but Pains of Being Pure at Heart are likely to appeal to listeners beyond online name-droppers and Brooklyn scenesters.
That these second-wavers are getting first-rate attention shouldn't be a worry unless you're into dick-measuring contests about the | The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12644-the-pains-of-being-pure-at-heart/ | The Pains of Being Pure at Heart | Like plenty of other bands in the internet era, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart seem poised to attract an audience that will far outstrip that of their easily identifiable precedents-- in their case, groups like Rocketship or Shop Assistants, each obscure these days even by Approved Indie Influence standards. A few other twee/noise-pop revivalists arguably pulled off that same trick last year, but Pains of Being Pure at Heart are likely to appeal to listeners beyond online name-droppers and Brooklyn scenesters.
That these second-wavers are getting first-rate attention shouldn't be a worry unless you're into dick-measuring contests about the late-1980s (but I was there) or still holding a grudge against Vivian Girls and Crystal Stilts. Despite being such a streamlined listen, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart acts as something of an indie Rorschach: Once our staff got a hold of the fuzzy, major-chord fizz of "Come Saturday" or "Stay Alive", it raised comparisons to everything from Sleepyhead to Black Tambourine to even Peter Bjorn and John (at their most shoegazy) and Ride (at their most heavy-lidded). In other words, you'll dig this record as long as you're a fan of trebly, melancholy pop music. Which is quite a lot of people reading this review.
What distinguishes POBPAH from the rest of their modern peers is a sense of craft located in the sweet spot between wilfull amateurism masking incompetence and not gumming things up with bells and whistles. It's immediate and substantial, but initially, it can seem distracting that the band is built more for speed than muscle. Yet these aren't songs that need anchors-- as much as Alex Naidus' bass plays an integral role in pushing everything forward, he's more likely to contribute melodic counterpoint than low end. Kip Berman's voice is appropriately unaffected, working in melodies that almost feel like 45-degree angles-- exact, acute, and just right. Keyboardist Peggy Wang-East doesn't harmonize in a traditional sense with Berman very often, but particularly on "Young Adult Friction", her vocals are a hook in themselves, taking an already strong chorus to a higher plateau.
So yeah, they've got the sound figured out, but what ensures that this will be something that'll make it past the point where the indie cycle of life goes on and bands are inevitably starting to cop the sounds of, say, Archers of Loaf? Regardless of the b&w cover art, there's more gray matter than initially appears. The title alone of "This Love Is Fucking Right!" is enough to set off the sugar shock factor (it's a nod to the Field Mice), and that's before the chorus which renders the f-bomb "feckin!," but the invocation of "you're my sister" before the title is as dark as you want it to be.
"Stay Alive" is the record's centerpiece, boasting the most anthemic chorus; initially, it could pass for cloyingly optimistic, with bell-like keyboard pinches accenting thumbs-up signifiers like "shoot at the sky" and "you'll stay alive." But once again, after closer listens it takes a darker tone, possibly talking down a suicidal friend. Most tellingly, "Come Saturday" sets the stage for the rest of the record with a promise of ignoring parties for a summer wasting and spent indoors. It's every bit as heartfelt as the later lyrical nod to Another Sunny Day.
But then again, sincerity never made me turn up the volume. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart simply made a slyly confident debut that mixes sparkling melodies with an undercurrent of sad bastard mopery, and you're just being a dick if you think the past has some kind of patent on that. That's just the way good pop music works. | 2009-02-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-02-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Slumberland | February 6, 2009 | 8.4 | 1608146b-7b9e-42cb-89e3-bd89231653c1 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On his solo debut—assisted by Sufjan Stevens, Justin Vernon, and Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan—the multi-instrumentalist rethinks the horn’s role as an album’s driving creative force. | On his solo debut—assisted by Sufjan Stevens, Justin Vernon, and Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan—the multi-instrumentalist rethinks the horn’s role as an album’s driving creative force. | Carm: Carm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carm-carm/ | Carm | CJ Camerieri, the horn-playing co-founder of chamber ensemble yMusic, begins and ends his debut solo album with repose; in between, there is murk. Camerieri has recorded with Paul Simon, Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens, the National, and, once, Taylor Swift, and two of those famous friends, Stevens and Justin Vernon, join him on the album’s bookending songs. Expectedly, they’re the most familiar-sounding entries on Carm. “Song of Trouble,” co-written and arranged with Stevens, begins with a procession of Camerieri’s brass and is tenderly blotted with French horn and trumpet as it develops into a recognizable Stevens hymn. “Land,” featuring Vernon, is graceful and pastoral. They are light moments on an otherwise overcast album, one that is often surprising in structure, if not mood.
After its wintry opener, Carm is dense and foreboding. One after another, the songs take on different shades of black, with Camerieri’s horns adding glinting accents. At times, they’re the focal point, as on “Nowhere,” where they buzz and swirl, punctuating the steady groove with staccato pulses. Elsewhere, Gayngs leader Ryan Olson’s production takes over: “After Hours” borrows from dubstep with its blown-out bass and threatening, chopped-up vocal sample, using just a bit of trumpet to add color. What’s unshakeable is the absolute darkness within which Camerieri operates. Dread is pervasive. Vernon’s sampled howls, for instance, are littered across “Invisible Walls,” a track that also features “feedback” in the credits. But a surfeit of bleak, minor-key compositions offering little in the way of release or resolution leaves the album feeling top-heavy, no matter how finely detailed the individual songs are.
Throughout Carm, Camerieri attempts to rethink what it means for the horn to be an album’s driving creative force. Frequently, rather than casting himself as the protagonist, he assumes a supporting role. Camerieri’s trumpet and French horn are part of the story, and while they guide the proceedings, they don’t always feel the need to stand out.
Some of the best moments come when Camerieri is somewhere between showman and accompanist. He takes the lead on the easy-going “Soft Night,” but his own synths, Mike Boschen’s trombone, and a rustling beat from Amati help complete a piece that feels like it progresses and tells a story, wordlessly mirroring the pop structure of the opener and closer. “Already Gone,” featuring Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan, is balanced and gentle, Camerieri’s horns acting like pillows for the hushed vocals. In stark contrast is the Mouse on Mars collaboration “Scarcely Out,” a skittering composition that follows the duo’s rhythmic sensibilities; it’s a fascinating, if hyperactive, experiment. But “Song of Trouble” and “Land” remain the moments when Camerieri seems most comfortably situated as a complementary force, the brass that amplifies a piece to greater effect. Here, it feels like he’s returned home.
Buy: Rough Trade.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | 37d03d | February 2, 2021 | 6.5 | 1608d303-0049-4e96-b46b-e778676ae8d6 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
The Melbourne quartet’s fifth album doesn’t counteract any Sonic Youth comparisons, but it does conjure an alternate history where the rock formalism of Goo and Dirty became the band’s defining sound. | The Melbourne quartet’s fifth album doesn’t counteract any Sonic Youth comparisons, but it does conjure an alternate history where the rock formalism of Goo and Dirty became the band’s defining sound. | Deaf Wish: Lithium Zion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deaf-wish-lithium-zion/ | Lithium Zion | There’s a fine line between encouraging an intra-band democracy and having an identity crisis. As a four-piece with four singers, Melbourne’s Deaf Wish are liable to sound like four different bands. On their 2015 Sub Pop debut, Pain, they sought catharsis through any means necessary: clanging noise brutalism, hoarse-throat hardcore, frazzled indie rock, distortion-soaked psych. But it was one of those albums that sounded like the band was getting its shit together in real time. Once you got through Pain’s scatterbrained first side, you could sense Deaf Wish learning to let their melancholy melodies lead the way, with singer-guitarists Jensen Tjhung and Sarah Hardiman settling into a familiar Thurston/Kim dynamic.
Lithium Zion, their second Sub Pop album and fifth overall, picks up right where they left off—though not without some shake-ups along the way. After a decade of bashing out makeshift-space recordings, the band graduated to a proper studio, with Total Control’s Mikey Young overseeing the mixes. They also bid adieu to bassist Nick Pratt, the member responsible for their fiercest circle-pit stompers. But if Deaf Wish are still very much fueled by a love for frayed-nerve noise, there’s a consistency of vision here that distinguishes Lithium Zion from the band’s caterwauling back catalog. That evolution is apparent in the band’s choice of opening tracks. On Pain, you were instantly confronted by the impenetrable post-punk of “The Whip,” a song that climaxes with the sort of hammering assault that can make you see stars. But with “Easy,” on Lithium Zion, Deaf Wish make the initiation process, well, easy, by hitching their churning guitars to a cascading, “Tomorrow Never Knows”-style drum beat, striking a perfect balance between dissonance and groove. Hardiman’s “FFS” follows, with two exhilarating minutes of restless agitation and revved-up noise-punk that demonstrate the greater focus in effect.
Alas, the specter of Sonic Youth is impossible to avoid in these songs. But the album doesn’t mimic Deaf Wish’s spiritual forebears so much as it imagines an alternate history for them, one where the rock formalism of Goo and Dirty became the band’s defining characteristic, rather than a blip in their sprawling discography. (Not only is Lithium Zion’s title track an asphalt-ripping instrumental like Goo’s “Mildred Pierce,” it’s even slotted in a similar side-two position.) Yet there’s an absurdist sensibility at play here that rarely cut through Sonic Youth’s ultra-cool veneer: The needling mid-tempo rumbler “The Rat Is Back” finds Tjhung curling up with his cat to fend off an invasive rodent; “Hitachi Jackhammer” opens with Tjhung and Hardiman reciting ad copy for the titular product, before unleashing a juddering punk squall that conjures its operational qualities.
But more than just harnessing the band’s unbridled energy into tightly coiled rockers, Lithium Zion displays a greater willingness to play Deaf Wish’s singers off one another, projecting a deeper sense of camaraderie. Like Pratt before him, new bassist Lee Parker serves as a caustic counterpoint to Tjhung and Hardiman’s disaffected sneers, but his sensibility meshes more naturally with theirs. On “Deep Blue Cheated,” Parker transforms the band into an evil twin to fellow Melburnians Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, until the song’s hyper locomotive thrust is cooled by Hardiman’s soothing counter-melody, a trick she deploys throughout the record.
As Lithium Zion confirms, the story of Deaf Wish’s evolution is very much the story of Hardiman’s own. Her increasingly versatile vocals have brought greater emotional depth to their music, from the haunting spoken-word passage that interrupts the PJ Harvey-esque “Afraid for You” or her sad-eyed duet with drummer Daniel Twomey on careening closer “Smoke.” And the swooning “Birthday,” a shot of Brill Building-via-Knitting Factory melodic discord, counts as the most affecting pop song in the band’s canon to date. Deaf Wish may still be suckers for hair-raising noise, but the real thrills on Lithium Zion come when they embrace nuance. | 2018-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | August 9, 2018 | 7.7 | 160be893-bba5-4a18-8bc4-3d171ff25a36 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Beck's Odelay-- the album on which this former folk-hop singer combined the disparate noise, blues, and subverted hippie-isms of his early work into a showy post-modern marvel-- is reissued with a disc of era-appropriate B-sides and two previously unreleased tracks. | Beck's Odelay-- the album on which this former folk-hop singer combined the disparate noise, blues, and subverted hippie-isms of his early work into a showy post-modern marvel-- is reissued with a disc of era-appropriate B-sides and two previously unreleased tracks. | Beck: Odelay: Deluxe Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11104-odelay-deluxe-edition/ | Odelay: Deluxe Edition | In Spin's 20 Years of Alternative Music, Beck is called "a generation's consolation prize after the death of Kurt Cobain." Chronologically, it's an apt assessment: Cobain killed himself on April 5, 1994; "Loser" peaked at #10 on the Billboard charts three weeks later. But back in the mid-90s, Beck was practically Cobain's polar opposite. Whereas Kurt exuded raw power with every phlegm-spewing roar, Beck rapped in monotone (when he wasn't crooning like a sleep-deprived folkie). Kurt hunched and staggered; Beck pranced, did splits, and mimicked robots. Kurt raged against a doomed world with a vitriolic mix of anger and sincerity; Beck took the piss out of a doomed world with a mix of irony and showmanship. Admittedly, they were both known to wear flannel shirts from time to time.
Beck's popularity can not only be read as a consolation prize to Cobain's legend, but as a reaction to it-- the weirdo L.A. huckster who could sing "I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me" as a t-shirt-ready slacker joke rather than a seething slacker lament. So, after getting their hearts busted by an unlikely savior, Alternative America turned to a cheese-whiz rhyming folk-hop clown who treated death as just another convention to flout. With "Loser", Beck was the rebound boyfriend, the one who'll make you laugh for the time being. And then came Odelay-- a thoroughly carefree-sounding affair that made everyone take this boyish imp very seriously. It's the album where he managed to combine the disparate noise, blues, and subverted hippie-isms of his early work into a showy post-modern marvel.
In hindsight, the record sounds like the world's most accomplished demo reel-- an introductory smorgasbord pumped-up on its own premeditated randomness. The origins of Mutations' shambling acoustic blues can be found within come-down closer "Ramshackle". And Odelay's funkiest, most scatterbrained tracks like "Where It's At" and "High 5 (Rock the Catskills)" were later pushed to their logical extreme on Midnite Vultures' ingenious Prince-isms. Add some sweeping strings and "Jack-Ass" easily becomes a Sea Change highlight. So while Beck has spent the last 12 years largely sampling and expounding upon the ideas he presented on his most popular album, Odelay's most distinguishing feature is its effortless summation of decades of popular music by-way-of the Dust Brothers' still-fresh production.
From the nervy opening chords of "Devil's Haircut" (based on the garage-rock classic "I Can Only Give You Everything") to the signature sax riff of "The New Pollution" (lovingly pilfered from forgotten tenor player Joe Thomas's "Venus"), Odelay is the album every record-diving MPC-phile wants to make. Though the LP was a huge commercial success, its sound was never successfully equaled by savvy opportunists. Chalk it up to the increasingly complicated legalities of sampling, as Beck explained in a 2005 interview: "Back [on Odelay] it was basically me writing chord changes and melodies, and then endless records being scratched and little sounds coming off the turntable. Now it's prohibitively difficult and expensive to justify your one weird little horn blare that happens for half of a second one time in a song and makes you give away 70% of the song and $50,000." And, of course, it's the little lifts-- the sex-ed dialogue on "Where It's At", the snippet of Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony #8 in B Minor" on "High 5", the dozens (hundreds?) of unique drum hits and perfectly placed sonic scribbles-- that makes Odelay such a deep and engaging listen even after all the headphone sessions and Best Album of the 90s accolades. Tellingly, when Beck and the Dust Brothers tried to recreate their signature style on 2005's Guero they couldn't pull it off, inadvertently reinforcing Odelay's lasting appeal in the process.
To some, it may seem a bit premature for this 12-year-old LP to get the deluxe treatment, but in this age of shameless instant-reissues put forth by disintegrating major labels, it's a relatively classy (if not exactly indispensable) barrel scrape. Along with a playfully drawn-over cover and liner note contributions from Thurston Moore and Dave Eggers, the reissue is padded with an entire disc of era-appropriate B-sides along with two previously unreleased tracks. While sometimes intriguing and ecstatic, the bonus tracks rarely live up to anything from the proper album. Of the unearthed songs, the schizophrenic dial-flip pastiche "Inferno" contains many genre-hopping ideas across its seven minutes but none are fully realized. And "Gold Chains" is a decidedly less funky version of "Sissyneck" with lyrical hip-hop symbolizers in place of country tropes. Unwisely, the extra disc begins with U.N.K.L.E.'s never ending "Where It's At" redo, which at 12 minutes is easily nine minutes too long. Elsewhere, semi-songs, stepping-stones, and studio wankery abound, revealing Beck's growth post-Mellow Gold in real time-- they're interesting in theory, at least. The most enduring tracks-- "Feather in Your Cap" and "Brother"-- are somber ballads Beck recorded before he hooked up with the Dust Brothers. With lines like, "Disappointment is a feather in your cap/ You want the truth so you can crush it in your hand," these songs suggest the straightforward emotionalism of Sea Change-- an approach Beck would need a few more years to feel comfortable bringing to the fore.
For all of their differences, both Kurt Cobain and Beck had overarching obsessions with death and decay. Kurt took his preoccupation with the ultimate end to its ultimate end, but Beck chose to gussy it up on Odelay, going on cryptically about Gods and devils while hip-hop-tinged party music juxtaposed the existential angst. On "Novocane", he screams through a bullhorn: "Got so numb, longhorn drums/ Detonate with the suicide gate." Later on, he's "more dead than alive" over a distinctly lively old-school jam. "Put a song in your throat/ Let the dead beats pound all around," he hums on "Ramshackle". Through ingenious technical savvy and an ear for hooks that span generations, Beck and the Dust Brothers managed to turn many dead beats into signs of life on Odelay. Twelve years on, it's still a prize-- no consolation necessary. | 2008-01-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-01-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Geffen | January 29, 2008 | 8.5 | 160ffb6b-6233-4c49-a9c2-4f1aa93ce6f4 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
This reissue stays true to the darkness and exuberance that defined the band’s revelatory 1999 album. | This reissue stays true to the darkness and exuberance that defined the band’s revelatory 1999 album. | Wilco: Summerteeth (Deluxe Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wilco-summerteeth-deluxe-edition/ | Summerteeth (Deluxe Edition) | The late ’90s saw a widespread mutiny in the alt-country scene, as several mainstay acts dropped the twang to explore new sounds and styles, but no band went quite as far as Wilco did to shed their association with that movement. On Summerteeth, their third album, they embraced the Beach Boys, the Zombies, the Kinks, and Van Dyke Parks. Not just those sounds, but those ideas: They experimented in multiple studios, building the songs up with timpani and chimes, the ersatz strings of Jay Bennett’s Mellotron, the bleeps of ancient keyboards, even some back-masked vocals. It was another in a series of impressive transformations, after the band had already managed to grow out of alt-country also-ran status with 1996’s Being There.
On Summerteeth Jeff Tweedy and Wilco sound jumpier and nervier than they’d ever sounded before, as though they’ve been struck by lightning. There’s a sense of buoyancy and joy in the music, a sense of renewed mission in their engagement with a new set of influences and references—none of which has dimmed in the ensuing two decades. In fact, if Being There pondered the folly of playing in a midlevel rock and roll band, their follow-up is full of love songs to love songs. It’s not too wild a theory to suggest that the “you” Tweedy keeps singing to might actually be the music of the bands who influenced this record. “It’s for you I swoon,” he declares on “I’m Always in Love,” sounding like a man whose favorite song is whichever one is playing at the moment. Music is his shot in the arm. It’s what tells him every little thing’s gonna be alright. It’s the reason you undertake this foolish enterprise. Music is the other woman, the third point in a love triangle, and on some level that’s not even figurative: Tweedy knows he’s sacrificing time with his family—and security and stability and love and direction—to take these songs out on the road and show them off to people.
As exuberant as Summerteeth often sounds, it’s a dark and dire album—a missive from a man teetering on the edge of addiction and estrangement. After years on the road, Tweedy was trying to kick painkillers and largely failing, while Bennett was moving in the opposite direction and nurturing a new set of bad habits. That’s all compounded by Tweedy’s alienation from his wife and young sons; he describes a “fragile family tree” on “She’s a Jar” and laments his detachment from those he loves so much. “Watch me floating inches above the people under me.” To convey his disconnection, Tweedy took a new approach to songwriting, schooling himself in the works of experimental writers like Henry Miller and William H. Gass and tinkering with exquisite corpses and cut-and-paste techniques. Summerteeth is somehow both opaque and almost uncomfortably revealing: a tragically fragmented self-portrait.
After so many years and so many albums, that defining tension between the joy of music and the misery of the music business has only grown more poignant, perhaps because we’ve seen the committed dad rocker Tweedy has become, we’ve heard the music he’s made with his sons and their friends, and we’ve watched as he has established what you might call a family business. Summerteeth looms ominously in Wilco’s catalog, marking a point where he knows it all could have gone wrong. He now sounds like a man who understands pop music will save his life.
That quality makes the bonus material on this drinking-age-anniversary all the more potent. Let’s start with the scratchy demos, which could be Tweedy’s lost ‘90s lo-fi album, as though he was listening to nothing but Sebadoh and One Foot in the Grave. He sounds weirdly compelling in this stark setting, especially considering the direction these songs would take over time. There’s an unexpected loneliness to these songs in this state, as these same lyrics mean very different things without their billowing pop orchestrations. “All I Need” is a cough of a song, its delicate melody nearly ripped apart by his hoarse vocals, and this version of “I’ll Sing It” sounds intensely despairing even before you remember that he re-recorded the demo with his son Spencer Tweedy for 2014’s Sukierae. That makes the small flourishes more affecting, especially on “I’m Always in Love,” when someone—presumably his wife—sings dreamily along with him, perhaps offering comfort or just a reminder that he’s not alone in his musical madness.
It’s clear from these rough sketches that Wilco could have taken these songs in any direction—well, any direction but alt-country. The handful of early run-throughs and weird takes are all over the place, gesturing toward the large well of music from which they were drawing. With its breezily shifting keyboard chord and lazy snare tap, the “Slow Rhodes Version” of “Summer Teeth” sounds like ’70s yacht-soul, as Tweedy punctuates his vocals with a few shaky falsetto woo-hoo’s. One alternate take of “Nothing’severgonnastandinmyway (again)” recalls the unabashedly bouncy choruses of Tommy James & the Shondells, while the other sounds like their stab at a ’90s alt-pop radio hit. There’s also a strain of fuzzy punk running throughout these tracks, with the soundcheck recording of “We’re Just Friends” evoking a Midwestern Undertones and the non-album track “Viking Dan” sounding frayed and feral—more like the messy migraine noise rock of A Ghost Is Born than the tidy pop confections of Summerteeth.
Wilco sound like yet another completely different band on the live discs, which document a show in Boulder, Colorado, from November 1999. Away from the studio and up on the stage, Wilco are further refracted: sunny and light at one moment, heavy and crunchy at another. There’s an uncomfortable divide between the new songs and the old; Bennett’s Mellotron stands out even more than usual on the Summerteeth tracks, but it’s mostly absent on the older numbers. In fact, Wilco reverts back to familiar form as the show progresses, which is a shame, as it’d be fascinating to hear a song like “Casino Queen” or “Kingpin” dolled up in summer psychedelia. The standouts, oddly enough, might be the handful of tunes from Mermaid Avenue, released the year before. Tweedy did surprisingly well conveying Woody Guthrie’s warm sentimentality and goofy humor, and those virtues are even more pronounced in this setting. Wilco play “Hesitating Beauty” and “Hoodoo Voodoo” like they’re making them up on the spot, and they sound free and casual—refreshingly far from any dark thought.
When the crowd applauds a boisterous version of “Passenger Side,” Tweedy remarks, “If I wasn’t so heavily sedated, I would have been really aroused.” He’s going for a laugh, but it’s not even a joke. He makes several drug references, which he apparently intended to be charming, but his disorientation is alarming, especially when they invade the songs. On “Can’t Stand It,” he rewrites the lyrics so that “Our prayers will never be answered again” becomes “I swear, I’ll never eat acid again.” Such moments cast a pallor on an otherwise fine set, although that may be more representative of Wilco at this particular moment than anyone would like to admit. At the same time, it’s refreshing to get such a warts-and-all portrayal of a band hitting their stride even as they trip over their own shoelaces. In that regard, this reissue stays true to the spirit of the album, giving equal time to the delight as well as the despair.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rhino | November 6, 2020 | 9 | 161109d6-9e28-42d7-9bd6-c70bcf115610 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
With Slowdive’s Neil Halstead in the producer’s chair, the Los Angeles harpist swells her gentle ambience with a more strident sound but remains as transporting as ever. | With Slowdive’s Neil Halstead in the producer’s chair, the Los Angeles harpist swells her gentle ambience with a more strident sound but remains as transporting as ever. | Mary Lattimore: Silver Ladders | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-lattimore-silver-ladders/ | Silver Ladders | What makes Mary Lattimore’s work so entrancing is its interiority. With just a harp and loop pedals, the Los Angeles musician creates dreamscapes from the patterns behind her own eyelids and sweeps her audience up in them. She expanded her arsenal on 2018’s Hundreds of Days, adding theremin, electric guitar, and her own voice. On her new album Silver Ladders, she has teamed up with Slowdive’s Neil Halstead, swelling her gentle ambience with a more strident sound.
The two were introduced by a mutual friend at a festival, and although Halstead had never recorded a harp, Lattimore asked him to produce her next album, which she ended up recording at Halstead’s studio in Newquay, on the north coast of Cornwall. Silver Ladders is imbued with a mixture of nostalgia and fresh inspiration—the product, perhaps, of shifting to a small rural town with few distractions and ample opportunities to reflect.
Halstead’s touch is perceptible throughout the album as a subtle bolster to Mary Lattimore’s ideas. His influence comes through strongest on “Til a Mermaid Drags You Under,” where his reverb-soaked guitar dances around the steady harp melody. His dissonant, razor-sharp tones cut through the solemn, meditative bass line, and the guitar follows Lattimore’s lead as the song rises out of the melodic depths and takes a redemptive turn. Halstead’s thrumming guitar also enters halfway through “Sometimes He’s in My Dreams,” gradually introducing a secondary voice to Lattimore’s layered harp. A restless track, it feels like a vivid dream; Halstead’s guitar speaks as if for the title’s “he,” a mirror for the subconscious.
Drenched in memory, Silver Ladders concerns itself with the sublimity of small moments. The album’s title track is inspired by an experience Lattimore had swimming in the sea on the Croatian island of Hvar; the opening harp melody is disjointed and uncertain until it falls into a bassy lull, recalling the experience of being held in the water’s bobbing restlessness. Album opener “Pine Trees” evokes walking through a pine forest: It exudes light, like rays of sun breaking through the forest canopy, while also suggesting a sense of thickness and depth. “Chop on the Climbout” originated from Lattimore mishearing a pilot during takeoff; the pulsing drones that open the track synthesize the feeling of an airplane’s engine, while Lattimore’s layered harp chimes create a bubbling sense of mystery, like being the first in a crowd to spot a minute detail. Lattimore uses her music like a teleportation device, transporting her listeners to places and times that are both imagined and real.
Silver Ladders is energetic yet also deeply calming. Lattimore’s virtuosity goes beyond technical ability: She has the uncanny ability to pluck a string in a way that will instantly make someone remember the taste of their fifth birthday cake. On Silver Ladders, Mary Lattimore brings the world to her level gently and without force, but always compellingly.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Ghostly International | October 13, 2020 | 7.7 | 1612bd3c-dad7-4c41-bc1b-dbe031824fa0 | Jemima Skala | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jemima-skala/ | |
A$AP Ferg’s new free tape, Ferg Forever, features guest spots from M.I.A., Big Sean, SZA, and Tinashe as well as production work from Big K.R.I.T., Clams Casino, Mike WiLL, and others. It's a mixed bag that finds an interesting young rapper trying shit out. | A$AP Ferg’s new free tape, Ferg Forever, features guest spots from M.I.A., Big Sean, SZA, and Tinashe as well as production work from Big K.R.I.T., Clams Casino, Mike WiLL, and others. It's a mixed bag that finds an interesting young rapper trying shit out. | A$AP Ferg: Ferg Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20048-ferg-forever/ | Ferg Forever | It was smart when RCA decided to release A$AP Ferg’s Trap Lord debut as a for-profit digital download, rather than the free mixtape it was originally conceived as. The album had the anthemic songs to justify being a formal debut, electric tracks like “Let It Go”, “Shabba”, “Work (Remix)” and the majestical “Hood Pope”. Though Ferg’s name probably wouldn’t pop up in the screenplay for Top Five, his energy and charm carried him through the material, blowing through wide-open running lanes thanks to a “HOOO!” or two.
That Ferg Forever is a free mixtape, then, says it all; the quality is a mixed bag, and the sonic threads are far less uniform. Much like Trap Lord, Ferg relies on a stable of up-and-coming producers—two highlights in particular, “Fergsomnia” and “Dope Walk”, are respectively produced by VERYRVRE and Stelios Phili. He’s also collected tracks from known entities such as Big K.R.I.T., whose woozy direction on “Bonnaroo” feels out of place (not to mention that all Ferg does is list off ways he picked around at Bonnaroo) and Mike WiLL Made It, who teams up with Tinashe” on the flat “Thug Cry (Remix)”. There’s a dancehall song, “Jolly”, along with an ode to group anal sex (“Weaves”) which makes the “I FUCKED YOUR BITCH” refrain on Trap Lord lowlight “Dump Dump” feel downright classy. Clams Casino even shows up on "Talk It", but his typically insistent energy is swapped for the effort of a goth teenager picking around in the “Mario Paint” song editor. Mixtapes are often dumping grounds for whatever comes to the artist’s mind, but here, it’s hard to argue for the form.
Still, the tape shines in the right places—the parts where it’s fun. Take “Fergsomnia”, whose stupendously goofy “FERGSOMNIA!” chant gives way to a characteristically knotty Twista verse. The reworked “Reloaded (Let It Go Pt. 2)” is a blast, full of “YAH!” ad-libs, a pair of blazing verses from Crystal Caines and Ferg’s former tour partner, M.I.A., and a hilariously deployed sample from the slightly more famous “Let It Go”. It’s within these tracks that Ferg finds his voice, and while relationship songs like "Commitment Issues" have their heart in the right place, the undercooked, stream-of-consciousness recaps never tap into the glee of the highlights.
Even so: Ferg is a compelling young dude trying shit out, so it’s hard to fault the weaknesses of Ferg Forever too much. This wasn’t released as his sophomore album, after all, and in the meantime it’s interesting to watch Ferg style-sample, freewheel deliveries and rotate producers. Not everything floats, but if the shelf life of jams like “Shabba” are any indication, the handful of hits on Forever will hold Fergensteins over till Trap Lord's sequel is out in stores. | 2014-12-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2014-12-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | RCA / Polo Grounds Music | December 11, 2014 | 6.4 | 16142494-26ca-4c46-97f6-f7ad87812603 | Corban Goble | https://pitchfork.com/staff/corban-goble/ | null |
Mark Kozelek turns over all non-vocal responsibilities to the Album Leaf's Jimmy Lavalle on this collaboration, setting his ruminations on memory to Lavalle's subtle electronic pulses. The effect underscores Kozelek's lyrics with a new and more urgent desperation. | Mark Kozelek turns over all non-vocal responsibilities to the Album Leaf's Jimmy Lavalle on this collaboration, setting his ruminations on memory to Lavalle's subtle electronic pulses. The effect underscores Kozelek's lyrics with a new and more urgent desperation. | The Album Leaf / Sun Kil Moon: Perils from the Sea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17960-the-album-leaf-sun-kil-moon-perils-from-the-sea/ | Perils from the Sea | Has Mark Kozelek ever written a truer or more succinct description of his creative process than “Ceiling Gazing”? “Layin’ in my bed ceiling gazing/ Wide awake with jet lag from Australia,” he sings on the standout from Perils from the Sea, his new collaboration with Album Leaf founder Jimmy Lavalle. As a churchly organ repeats an insistently ascending phrase, Kozelek describes the stack of mail that awaited him after a tour, including “a wedding invitation from a new young relative I never even knew of.” The card sets his mind reeling around his family tree, until it alights on memories of his sister. She’s just suffered through a bad divorce and is raising two daughters, age four and seven; he wants to live a long life just so he can see how they grow up. It’s a quietly poignant song, one that subtly lays out the distance between Kozelek and his loved ones even as it tries to connect them in song. “Can’t stop my mind from racing,” he concludes. “It’s not good or bad, it’s just how God made me.”
Few songwriters can sketch a scene with Kozelek’s eye for detail or his economy of language, and fewer still can match the insight with which he can draw a character. In recent years, however, the sheer volume of work Kozelek has released through his Caldo Verde Records has tended to dilute the impact of his songs. Not even the most avid fan could keep up with the deluge of bonus discs and live albums, and musically he has narrowed his palette to a single instrument: that nylon-string guitar he introduced on Admiral Fell Promises. It makes more financial than aesthetic sense, as it allows him to keep touring expenses to a bare minimum, but those nylon strings have comes to define his sound both on stage and in the studio, collapsing his songs into one another.
That makes Perils from the Sea unique in Kozelek’s recent catalog. He mostly turns over all the non-vocal responsibilities to Lavalle, so instead of plucks and strums, we hear forlorn beeps and bloops-- somewhat more hushed than on the Album Leaf output, yet distinctively textured and tailored to Kozelek’s signature phrasings. Lavalle favors a subtle pulse and thrum that gently reinforces the concreteness of the details. On “Caroline”, the stuttering beat gooses the tempo a bit and gets Kozelek singing faster than usual. It’s another song that contrasts the securities of home (waking up next to his love and her rat terrier pup, hanging around familiar coffeeshops) with the lure of the road, yet the music lends the emotions a new and more urgent desperation. It may be Kozelek’s finest moment since anything off Ghosts of the Great Highway.
Kozelek writes songs by simply letting his mind wander, then spends years retracing his steps on stage. That his songs move by tangent and discursion can frustrate a listener since it means he tends to eschew choruses, bridges, hooks, and other structural embellishments. Instead, his songs are built almost exclusively from verses, and they often worry over a single, simple melody. When it works, as it does on “Ceiling Gazing”, that approach can locate immense symbolic power in even the most seemingly banal items: a scratched copy of Heart’s Dreamboat Annie that he and his sister played countless times, for example, or the lonely house in Ohio where she lives now.
Lavalle understands this, and he crafts beats to represent the mechanisms of memory. Only occasionally do they sound at cross-purposes. The psychedelic synths on “1936” sound too ominous and otherworldly for what is a pretty thin story centered around a special dime, and on “You Missed My Heart”, the burble of background noise cannot redeem a strained account of a murderer who kills-- and eventually dies-- for love. The sentiment is too clever to ring particularly true, which is on Kozelek’s shoulders, but Lavalle’s beats are too noncommittal to add much gravity or levity. Still, the effort is appreciated, if only because the song shows both men readily moving out of their comfort zones. Perils from the Sea may not be a seamless collaboration, but neither artist has sounded so purposeful in his reverie in years. | 2013-04-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-04-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock / Folk/Country | Caldo Verde | April 30, 2013 | 7.3 | 16151d97-b616-44d1-811f-51bf736bef1e | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The experimental jazz and classical composer’s newest work uses wildly divergent sounds to conjure a subtle, mournful mood. | The experimental jazz and classical composer’s newest work uses wildly divergent sounds to conjure a subtle, mournful mood. | Jen Shyu: Song of Silver Geese | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jen-shyu-song-of-silver-geese/ | Song of Silver Geese | Many experimental musicians draw inspiration from multiple styles. Fewer make these excursions sound as fluid and natural as the composer and multi-instrumentalist Jen Shyu does. Most familiar to contemporary jazz audiences, thanks to her frequent presence as a bandleader and session player on the celebrated NYC-based jazz imprint Pi Recordings, Shyu’s work holds just as much appeal for fans of modern chamber composition. In live performance, she’s apt to incorporate a variety of dance traditions; the press release for her latest album cites Javanese shadow puppetry as a key influence. While madly diverse interests can make for a fascinating profile page, the trick for a composer is to make all those reference points cohere into something new.
Song of Silver Geese shows Shyu working at a high level. The nine-movement album is made up of selections from a longer stage show, and the recorded versions have plenty of dramatic movement. Over the course of the work, which is dedicated to two of Shyu’s recently deceased mentors, she employs a dizzying range of languages: English, Indonesian, Javanese, Taiwanese, Mandarin, Tetum Wehali, and Korean. During “Door 1: Prologue—Song of Lavan Pitinu,” she delivers a few lines that give a sense of the album’s funereal tinge: “I’m no longer able to recount in detail the story of my life/Now that it’s twilight and there is so much silence.”
At the same time, the supporting music reflects Shyu’s joyous performer’s sensibility. While plucking a spare and haunting motif on a string instrument, Shyu can also bring vivid variety into her vocal lines. Her straight-tone notes have a poise that communicates profound calm. And when her voice breaks, it does so with precision. After this, the introduction of vibrato can suggest a new sense of exploration. This all makes for subtle material, and yet Shyu’s way of navigating these slight changes feels fully alive, giving an extra emotional dimension to an otherwise mournful album.
Her instrumental writing for other players thrives on a similar sense of contrast. The Mivos String Quartet, guests from the avant-garde classical sphere, appear alongside the more jazz-like backing of performers who have worked with Shyu before, in her Jade Tongue ensemble. “Door 3: Dark Road, Silent Moon” is driven by the string ensemble, whose members seem to revel in the brief solo jaunts and ensemble dances that Shyu has scheduled in between passages flush with long, meditative tones.
A hint of jazz propulsion begins to emerge during “Door 5: World of Hengchun.” But Shyu is saving the real bash for the penultimate track, “Door 8: World of Baridegi.” During its most feverish passages, this track offers a concise experience of the qualities that make Shyu such a magnetic performer. Here, conceptual density and improvisational fire manage to complement, rather than obscure, her overall compositional design. There may never be a genre heading that can do justice to such a method. But that is no great loss. Shyu’s personal language—the product of singular study and many curiosities—can tell her story persuasively on its own. | 2018-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Pi | January 13, 2018 | 7.4 | 16173672-de04-4e2b-a540-d5c7fecf1221 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | |
Nas has produced an excellent 21st-century record that balances political powderkegs, audacious Escobar floss raps, complementary beats, and honest-to-god inspiration-- too bad that record was his recent mixtape with DJ Green Lantern, not Untitled. | Nas has produced an excellent 21st-century record that balances political powderkegs, audacious Escobar floss raps, complementary beats, and honest-to-god inspiration-- too bad that record was his recent mixtape with DJ Green Lantern, not Untitled. | Nas: Untitled | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12002-untitled/ | Untitled | I'd hate to confuse correlation with causation, but the 18 months since Hip Hop Is Dead have gone a long way towards proving Nas wrong. Graduation and Tha Carter III showed that challenging mainstream artists can still produce genuine Billboard blockbusters, the avant-garde has been well-represented by stellar releases by Dälek, Subtle, and El-P (amongst others), and Jay Electronica (producer of the astounding intro "Queens Get the Money") and Wale have emerged as exciting new voices with promising commercial prospects. Even Nas seems to have gotten the message this year, producing an excellent 21st-century record that balances political powder kegs, audacious Escobar floss raps, complementary beats, and genuine inspiration. Unfortunately, that record was the far superior DJ Green Lantern Presents: The Nigger Tape (whose songs are sadly underrepresented here), not Untitled.
Not that it's going to matter. Whether Nas intended to actually follow through with his incendiary, original album title, he's been treating his own self-fulfilling martyrdom as the record's main goal. (See the claim on "Hero": "Try telling Bob Dylan, Bruce, and Billy Joel they can't sing what's in they soul/ So Untitled it is/ I never changed nothing.") Whatever the unfettered vision for the record, through masterful PR work, Nas has given ample reason for listeners to blame everyone but himself for his most cynical and arguably worst album yet. At least Nastradamus was up front about being a shitty crossover bid.
The most frustrating thing is that this could have been a solid record. But now, how is Nas going to come off like he intended Untitled to be an unflinching look at race relations and yet somehow leave off the track he did with stic.man? Worse still, the righteous message of "Association" (strength through interaction with those who inspire you) is forsaken for the stilted, spoken-word ramblings of "Testify", in which Nas accuses white downloaders of being unwilling to "ride" with him for whatever reason. And what about the hallucinogenic "Esco Let's Go", where he fantasized about "[writing] hood movies like Posse and Five Heartbeats" while summoning Elizabeth Taylor for career advice? Instead, we get an elderly German rhyming "knotty head" with "Nazi sled" ("America"), "Breathe" and its boring consumption rhymes ("First I cop/ Then I yacht"-- do go on!), and the gutless "Make the World Go Round" in which Nas, Chris Brown, and Cool & Dre top even Fat Joe in terms of trend-hopping insincerity, toasting to ballers, gangstas, hustlas, and the very same ringtone rappers he was willing to throw under the bus just two years ago when it was convenient for his public image.
On Untitled you get to decide whether you prefer Nas thoroughly exploring half-assed concepts or half-assedly exploring thorough concepts. Note the distinction: Either he's missing obvious targets or hitting ones not worth aiming at. Peep "Sly Fox", a concerted attempt to be the "She Watch Channel Zero?!" for conservative news zombies, right down to its steady guitar chug. The main difference is that "Channel Zero" risked alienation by confronting its target head on, whereas when it comes to preaching to the choir and picking easy fights, Nas has no problem being the Morgan Spurlock of this rap shit. Speaking of rhymin' for the sake of riddlin'-- "The Fox has a Bushy tail/ And Bush tells lies and Fox trots, so I don't know what's real." Which essentially means nothing.
More successful is the Busta Rhymes-featuring "Fried Chicken", which might actually be the record's strongest cut, but it doesn't take the expected route of cultural subtext, instead working the blues trope of female/food personification. But immediately after, you get the perspective piece "Project Roach", and in case Nas' verses somehow went over your head, a Last Poet intones, "Niggas is like roaches/ We're never gonna go away." Just because you understand him, it don't mean that he's nice, and just to make sure you're even more confused once the record finally ends, he precedes the suspiciously fence-sitting Obama song ("Black President") with "We're Not Alone", a cashed-bowl musing on extraterrestrial life.
As anyone who has followed Nas in the past decade knows, you're not here for the beats. Though he's never been hesitant to enlist the trendiest producers, they're rarely inspired to step up their game; here, it's obvious what the difference is between second-rate Timbaland tracks and something from the new line of pop-savvy super-producers. Particularly in the first half, Untitled is turned into Vice City, where each hired gun coats their tracks with ugly layers of polyester drums, fluorescent synths, and aimless violence. You can distinctly hear Polow Da Don buying into his own hype on "Hero", ignoring Nas as a lead instrument and bombing out the mix with pinwheeling keyboard arpeggios and obtrusive unison bends. On previous listens, "N.I.G.G.E.R. (The Slave and the Master)" sounded like the record's centerpiece and DJ Toomp's honest approximation of the fat cat lounginess of American Gangster. But check its tinny string section and punchless snares back-to-back with "Say Hello", and Toomp's trying to make it rain with nickels.
Though many view Illmatic as the gold standard for hip-hop albums, it's abundantly clear that Nas is better off doing anything but trying to recreate it. His best work of the past decade ironically goes against the very concept of traditional album-making (The Lost Tapes, The Nigger Tape). When caught up in the increasingly antiquated promotional cycle, Nas is more likely to rely on ugly manipulation of people who tend to care way more about his work than he apparently does, and accomplish the exact opposite of what he presumptively set out for-- see how Stillmatic took advantage of those who needed to believe that it had equal footing with The Blueprint (illustrated by The Source's hilariously opportunistic 5-mic rating). See how Hip-Hop Is Dead took advantage of people willing to believe that Nas had anything trenchant to say about a game that increasingly sounded like it didn't need him anymore. Thanks to about a half-hour's worth of music made nearly 15 years ago, Nas will never lack a following, and the press battles surrounding Untitled will keep his name hot enough so we can do the same thing all over again in 2010, when he announces the release of his new album, McCain Killa. | 2008-07-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-07-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | July 16, 2008 | 3.8 | 1618c263-d7ac-4fc2-833a-fc48953ccc2b | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Louisville band sell classic pop-rock almost perfectly. Their sophomore album is smart, well-polished, and cheeky—loaded with more riffs than you can fit into the trunk of a Camaro. | The Louisville band sell classic pop-rock almost perfectly. Their sophomore album is smart, well-polished, and cheeky—loaded with more riffs than you can fit into the trunk of a Camaro. | White Reaper: The World’s Best American Band | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23064-the-worlds-best-american-band/ | The World’s Best American Band | Rock music hasn’t been the sound of popular youth culture in a very long time and there is no shortage of real, systematic causes: the irreversible narrowing of radio and print media, the economic and logistical nightmare of putting five dudes and their gear on tour and the undeniable fact that rock bands are extremely bad at creating content for music’s 24-hour news cycle. The competitive spirit, self-promotion, and obsession with quantifiable metrics that make hip-hop and pop music into a compelling spectator sport are invariably considered poor taste on and off-record. White Reaper, on the other hand, are from Louisville, KY—where the Muhammad Ali Center stands as a tribute to its native son who backed up the greatest anthology of shit talk ever heard. It’d be enough to have the sense of humor to call their album The World’s Best American Band. Even better if they have the heart to actually mean it. But White Reaper have the chops and the guts to make their hometown hero proud: bragging is when a person says something and can’t do it and White Reaper do what they say.
In White Reaper’s world, being coy about influence means you have something to hide and they proudly flaunt theirs like denim patches—Ramones, of course, but also Cheap Trick, Kiss, Thin Lizzy, Van Halen, rock bands who essentially functioned as pop. The opening title track poses The World’s Best American Band as both a concept record and self-fulfilling prophecy, piping in the kind of crowd noise that can only be generated in arenas far bigger than White Reaper may ever see in this lifetime. But as the Louisville Lip once said, “I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.” “Rally up and dress to kill/Lace your boots and crush your pills,” Tony Esposito snarls before a ridiculous and necessary key change celebrates a victory lap after trying to snort the finish line: “If you fight and win/Throw the pool chairs in/And then confess your sins.” It’s the lowbrow wisdom of a band that’s either been there or seen enough Burt Sugarman videotapes to get the gist of it. But then a school bell rings and they’re back playing the teenage dirtbag on “Judy French,” a song that can make a Kia in rush hour traffic feel like a Camaro doing donuts in a high school parking lot.
The question remains as to why they stopped short of just calling it The World’s Best Band. They’re not the kind of caricatured, po-faced folk-rock that tends to be called “Americana.” But throwing “American” in the mix keeps their streak of self-deprecating farce intact: their debut was called White Reaper Does It Again. And the mere phrase “American Band” immediately triggers the wild shirtless lyrics of Mark Farner: “We’re coming to your town, we’ll help you party it down.” If these aren’t the only concerns of an American rock band, White Reaper believes that they should at least be the top two.
Up to this point, they’ve developed a reputation for wild live shows and fun, if rather derivative garage rock hooks, which made them not altogether different than 96% of the bands playing Burgerama any given year. But not only does the play-acting on The World’s Best American Band lend them a discernible personality, it makes their ambitions all the more obvious. In the tradition of modern classics like Is This It and It’s Never Been Like That, White Reaper are spiritually burning through a label advance but obsessing over efficiency and the bottom line like accountants. There’s nothing even remotely close to a ballad here, and in the slots where these would usually show up on a 10-song record, we get a blatant “Blitzkrieg Bop” homage (“Party Next Door”) and a 12-bar punk ripper that they could pass off as a Chuck Berry tribute (“Another Day”).
Who said craft had to be subtle? Unlike its puffier, unbalanced predecessor, The World’s Best American Band is mixed significantly louder than anything else you’re probably listening to right now and it’s equally glittery and gritty like a blood-caked switchblade—far more polished than the similarly indebted Sheer Mag, but with more edge to rule out any comparisons to the ’70s LARPing of Free Energy. And of course, the invocation of Grand Funk Railroad makes the connection from the band to Richard Linklater and his vision of boys and girls in America partying to British music all the more clear.
The Dazed and Confused comparisons are inevitable given Esposito’s snot-rocket vocals and the twin-guitar leads, while the keyboards and anxious drumming push White Reaper towards the MTV and new wave forms of pop-rock that typified Everybody Wants Some!! As with those films, a reductive reading of White Reaper can criticize the apparent lack of stakes and a worldview that only delays gratification rather than presenting actual conflict—boys will be boys and they’re always back in town. Yet, the words of “Eagle Beach” are as bashful as a Dashboard Confessional song: “I just wanna be a real good pair of your blue jeans/But you never wear the house when you’re wearing me.” And besides, whether it’s a high school dance or a garage rock festival, Esposito makes it clear on “The Stack” what he's learned about how rock becomes pop: “If you make the girls dance, the boys will dance with ‘em.” | 2017-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | April 7, 2017 | 8 | 1619a098-9efb-43a1-8ae0-3f8912b82ada | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Italian synthesizer wizard follows up her 2019 album Ecstatic Computation with an instrumental set of controlled abandon and rapturous minimalism. | The Italian synthesizer wizard follows up her 2019 album Ecstatic Computation with an instrumental set of controlled abandon and rapturous minimalism. | Caterina Barbieri: Myuthafoo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caterina-barbieri-myuthafoo/ | Myuthafoo | Nothing signals synthesizer psychedelia quite like the combination of an arpeggio and a delay. The arpeggio divides a chord into looping sequences of notes. The delay allows those sequences to overlap. Once set in motion, the pairing can sound like a hall of mirrors receding toward infinity. When employed by dilettantes, it’s a simple trick that gets tired fast, but in the right hands, it’s magic. Caterina Barbieri is a wizard—and she knows a lot of other spells, as well.
An Italian musician based in Milan, Barbieri has been recording since her mid twenties. Now 33, she’s ready to look back. Her latest, Myuthafoo, serves as a companion to her 2019 album Ecstatic Computation, originally on Editions Mego. Myuthafoo appears on Barbieri’s own label, light-years, which is due to re-release Ecstatic Computation. Myuthafoo follows that album’s model, managing to be tight (six tracks in just 32 minutes) and rangy at the same time. The earlier record had a broader variety, and it included vocals—or at least vocaloid sounds. Myuthafoo is more self-assured, more controlled, less goofy. (Then again, the pinging synth pop of Ecstatic Computation’s “Pinnacles of You” may just be your thing.)
In the past, Barbieri has regularly played with her voice. Last year’s Spirit Exit brought to mind masterful Auto-Tune tinkering, like if Max Headroom produced Kate Bush. Better still was Barbieri’s 2014 album Vertical, a richly gloomy outing of layered glottal intonations—Diamanda Galás’ Tuvan goth rituals put to resonant purpose by way of ambient grandmother Hildegard of Bingen.
Myuthafoo, however, dispenses with vocals entirely, and is better for it. The absence of singing brings Barbieri’s synths to the fore. Part of the wonderment of Myuthafoo isn’t just how she sequences; it’s what. The tones on “Sufyosowirl,” heard loud, are thick and syrupy—yet also utterly frictionless, leaving no sticky residue.
While many of her peers aspire aesthetically to the sympathetic minimalism of, say, La Monte Young or Michael Nyman, Barbieri has her sights set on more riotous heights. Much of Myuthafoo suggests she’d rather be the synthesizer equivalent of Franz Liszt or Sergei Rachmaninoff. This music speaks of a hunger, at times for something boisterous, rambunctious, and extroverted; at others there’s an unabashed emotional longing.
She signals this urge right at the outset, with “Memory Leak.” At just 78 seconds long, it is less a song than an overture, a fanfare. It sounds like the sort of thing a massive arena would blast as the headliner takes the stage, Klieg lights spinning and theatrical fog filling the hall.
“Math of You” is like Underworld’s “Rez” as reworked by Ryoji Ikeda. It takes the rhythmic patterning of rave music and funnels it into a form that’s precise, immersive, and generative. In place of Underworld’s unfettered abandon, we get another sort of catharsis. It may feel controlled, but so does a roller coaster. The illusion of chaos—in the sense of an ornate employment of physics—is thrilling nonetheless. “Alphabet of Light” exhibits prowess on some imaginary organ-like instrument where the notes are freed from anything resembling a keyboard and veer upward exponentially for countless octaves. You can picture Barbieri in one of Rick Wakeman’s capes, pointing toward the heavens. It can get a bit samey, but it’s never not fun. And the album closes on what could pass for a collaboration between Aphex Twin and Angelo Badalamenti, a somber pop crowd-pleaser titled “Swirls of You.”
This may seem like “headphone music”—intricate, virtuoso, open-ended—but it’s also living-room music. The fractal vapor trails and oceanic drones are all the better when they’re magnified to full size. If you sit in front of your speakers while the title track blasts, prepare to become convinced that some sort of invisible yet somatically present shimmering lattice of metallic particulate has spontaneously unspooled in the space before you. Really. For at her best, Barbieri doesn’t just make music; a wizard, she excites the air. | 2023-06-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Light-Years | June 16, 2023 | 7.1 | 161db459-2988-4247-9d20-0b4c68731d44 | Marc Weidenbaum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-weidenbaum / | |
On this two-and-a-half hour, semi-improvised opus, the two guitarists and composers approach finely wrought detail and vast empty space in ways that can warp one's perception of time itself. | On this two-and-a-half hour, semi-improvised opus, the two guitarists and composers approach finely wrought detail and vast empty space in ways that can warp one's perception of time itself. | Keith Rowe / Michael Pisaro: 13 Thirteen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/keith-rowe-michael-pisaro-13-thirteen/ | 13 Thirteen | The first recorded collaboration between veteran guitarists Keith Rowe and Michael Pisaro is dauntingly ambitious. Before making a note of music, the pair decided 13 Thirteen would last 140 minutes. They each separately wrote and recorded scores, then improvised together along with those pre-recorded elements. Pisaro’s score includes four samples from Shostakovich’s 13th String Quartet, each occurring three times in 10-minute intervals, and the composition is divided into 13 discrete sections. As if to emphasize their ambition, Rowe calls his own score “Fate” and his half of the improvisation “Life” (a reference to Russian author Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate).
Absorbing those concepts along with nearly two-and-a-half hours of music might seem like a formidable task. But as a listening experience, 13 Thirteen is far from intimidating. There is a lot of space and near-silence here; that’s often the case with the kind of music that Rowe and Pisaro each make and that Erstwhile frequently releases. But 13 Thirteen also offers plenty of warmth and detail. Even when they get busy or loud, the sounds the two musicians make are patient and resonant. Once your ears acclimate to their long-form approach, the vibration of a single guitar string can sound both welcoming and monumental.
The momentousness of Rowe’s playing comes from a long career of study and practice. The English-born 77-year-old, known best for his work with pioneering British group AMM, has heard and made so much music that every improvised sound he creates—usually with tabletop guitar and electronics—is informed by layers of history. Pisaro brings a lot to the equation too, as a prolific player, collaborator, composer (he has written over 80 scores, many published by Germany’s Edition Wandelweiser), and professor currently teaching at California Institute of the Arts.
All of this combined experience is clear on 13 Thirteen, especially in the way each sound fits into an evolving narrative. Every choice is distinct and measured, giving the listener ample time to contemplate it and connect it with what came before. Rowe and Pisaro are like tour guides for their own sonic worldviews, never rushing you but also never lingering too long. That might sound facetious, given how lengthy and sparse 13 Thirteen is, but focused attention reveals that even the most gradual sections continually move forward.
Despite the album's weighty classical influences, you don’t need much prior knowledge to track the piece’s recurring motifs. The way the string samples, guitar plucks and strums, and Rowe’s harsher, metallic sounds periodically surface gives 13 Thirteen the feel of wordless verse, filled with subtle rhymes and complex rhythms. This effect is aided by the intense clarity of the recording. Even the softest sounds are sharp and detailed, making everything refreshingly concrete and life-like, especially for music that could be called abstract.
As Rowe and Pisaro’s motifs build, 13 Thirteen becomes physically and emotionally affecting, and in the right frame of mind, it can slow you down, warping and even dissolving your internal clock. More subtly, 13 Thirteen will likely stretch your understanding of improvisation. Free-form music often toggles between bracingly abrupt moments and placid stretches where players spin wheels before regaining momentum. But Rowe and Pisaro find a middle path where all sounds are surprising yet none are shocking. Following their interplay is like taking a meditative roller coaster ride. By working their craft in such a thoughtful, considered manner, Rowe and Pisaro open up space, both within their music and within anyone who chooses to listen. | 2017-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Erstwhile | June 24, 2017 | 7.5 | 162011be-c8a6-4de9-929c-d44c1a7d2bdc | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Even noise guys need break-up albums, records that can pull them out of their funk without making them feel like ... | Even noise guys need break-up albums, records that can pull them out of their funk without making them feel like ... | Death From Above 1979: You're a Woman, I'm a Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2587-youre-a-woman-im-a-machine/ | You're a Woman, I'm a Machine | In the corner of every show-- even if it's the dirtiest, smelliest AS220 showcase or an impromptu Lightning Bolt concert in a Jamaica Plain kitchen-- there's always some guy with a beard talking to another guy with a beard about feelings. There they are, right in the thick of no-bullshit rock 'n' roll-- fucking noise rock, mang-- bitching about trust and love and What She Did, while all their buddies are breaking dishes during "13 Monsters" and sweating in the July heat and Spiewak sweatshirts they all secretly bought off Karmaloop. Today the noise is just too much-- something Beard Guy No. 1 never thought he'd say-- and he takes a taxi back to his parents' house in Greenwich, climbs into his Throbbing Gristle pajamas, and cries cries cries until his hornrims fog up.
Even noise guys need break-up albums, records that can pull them out of their funk without making them feel like complete assholes-- and simply put, Death From Above 1979's second album and Vice Records debut, You're a Woman, I'm a Machine, is the answer. The album title only hints at the viciousness with which this Toronto bass/drums/vox administers its own emotional purge. The whole affair sounds admittedly far-fetched, especially considering both the band's musical history-- their 2003 debut Heads Up was good and short but merely barked-- and the band's apparent dickheadedness: After Death From Above Records (aka the DFA), approached the band to change its name, the duo responded by tacking on the legal minimum of numbers to their moniker and posting to their former web site: "FUCK DFA RECORDS FUCK JAMES MURPHY WE DECLARE JIHAD ON THEM HOLY WAR ENDING IN THIER DEATH AND DISMEMBERMENT... james murphy is a selfish piece of fuck that will burn in the flames of a specially dedicated rock and roll jihad. if i had the resources i would fly a plane into his skull."
You're a Woman comes as an unexpected and almost regrettable delight in that sense-- it has the attitude, but possibly too much substance, for a true Vice Records release. This is high-gloss, feel-better noise-rock that balances riff-heavy micro-Sabbath bravado with a tenderness quite foreign to the current Providence-born noise scene (of which DFA79 may not be considered to be their contemporaries after You're a Woman). Some might bemoan the album's accessibility, but that's hooks, actual song structure, and broken hearts for you: By turning the rock knob down a notch, DFA79 have kept You're a Woman loud and nasty and ensured a cohesion and unusual degree of listenability-- something that the harder, better, and admittedly more authentic Lightning Bolt still hasn't been able to do in concert or on record.
From the livid call-to-arms stomp of "Turn It Out" to the scraps and squelches and metalloid pathos of "Romantic Rights" to the strangely powerful teenage schlarp-turned-massive Oedipal joke of "Going Steady" ("I have never seen you suffer/ I will never hurt you, lover," then, "I will never make you suffer/ I will never hurt you, mother") to the redrum rant of fiery first-half climax "Blood on Our Hands" ("There's blood on the shoes from all the people you stepped on"), DFA79 waste no time on subtlety-- their lyrics and singular jingles are huge but fully exposed and vulnerable as all hell. Frustration and jealousy increase to painful degrees until the title track's punk chorus ("Now that it's over, I love you more and more"), an avatar of the album's bitterness.
This purge over, DFA79 end You're a Machine with two responses to this draining ordeal. The first is the sex-furious, self-explanatory graphic fete "Pull Out"; the second, "Sexy Results", is about getting back to the prowl, and it's the best dance-punk song since the late genre's untimely death earlier this year. There's the obligatory French introduction, there's cowbell, there's handclaps, and the lyrics put Nic Offer's "what did George Bush say when he met Tony Blair?" hook to shame. And, at the end, a superfunk synth straight outta Chocolate City makes it clear that the DFA79 libido is back. Will the cycle of You're a Woman repeat itself? Probably, but for now get out of the corner and just fucking dance. | 2004-10-28T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-10-28T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Vice | October 28, 2004 | 8.3 | 1622e3f7-c307-4aa7-847a-2b77b54f2869 | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
The Roots follow their tightly-knit return to rawness Game Theory with another record that finds them coming across as intelligently aggressive firebrands, as they express precisely and without compromise an increasingly universal strain of anxiety and frustration | The Roots follow their tightly-knit return to rawness Game Theory with another record that finds them coming across as intelligently aggressive firebrands, as they express precisely and without compromise an increasingly universal strain of anxiety and frustration | The Roots: Rising Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11458-rising-down/ | Rising Down | It's gotten to the point where I can't even imagine the Roots being soft anymore. Not to be dismissive of their first few albums, which were thoughtful without being mushy or maudlin, but their three recent records-- the underrated/overhated alleged-sellout The Tipping Point, the Def Jam-released tightly knit return to rawness Game Theory, and now Rising Down-- are so singularly focused on a kind of distilled, uninhibited force that it's now difficult to think of the Roots as anything but intelligently aggressive firebrands.
You don't throw on these albums if you want to chill out, and Rising Down does more than any of them to express, precisely and without compromise, a specifically African-American but increasingly universal strain of anxiety and frustration. A lot of Rising Down's urgency and immediacy owes to the massive guest roster. The Roots' Philly core of affiliates-- vets Dice Raw, Peedi Peedi, and Truck North, former member Malik B., and relative newcomer/search engine nightmare P.O.R.N.-- appear on more than half the record's songs, and they help give the record a sense of a communal strength in numbers; their appearances on vicious throwdown "Get Busy" (with the some deft cuts from Philly's legendary DJ Jazzy Jeff) and a stretch of tracks in the middle ("I Will Not Apologize", "I Can't Help It", and "Singing Man") feel like the spiritual and lyrical core of the album.
The guests from outside Philly work just as well: Talib Kweli spits with an atypically growly delivery on the anti-defeatist anthem "Lost Desire", Common displays glimpses of his late-1990s shine ruminating over tour fatigue on "The Show", Wale kills it with some so-corny-they're-great metaphors ("good rappers ain't eatin', they Olsen twinnin'") on "Rising Up", and Saigon's final verse on "Criminal" is the fierce peak of a three-MC slow lyrical burn. And while Styles P's turn on the title track works well enough (it's something to hear the dude behind "Good Times [I Get High]" go after the pharmaceutical industry), Mos Def's verse-- the first one on the whole record-- is one of the best he's ever done, and probably the best guest spot on Rising Down: "Identities in crisis and conflict diamonds/ Blindin', staring at lights till they cryin'/ Bone gristle popping from continuous grindin'."
But despite the massive ensemble cast, Black Thought is still the core of the record and the well-worn accusations of him being anti-charismatic feel largely false here. Most of his great moments come on tracks which feature a lot of other MCs' great moments, and after getting overshadowed on "Rising Down" (can any MC make the subject of global warming into a dope lyric?) he comes out swinging for the rest of the record. On "Singing Man", even with P.O.R.N. portraying himself as a vividly realized school shooter and Truck North putting together a disturbingly evocative characterization of a suicide bomber, Black Thought's depiction of an African child soldier justifying his violence ("13 year-old killer, he look 35/ He changed his name to Little No Man Survive") is both sharply written and unsettling. His delivery is a bit more varied than you might expect, too, particularly when he's rapping about getting underpaid like he's got a clenched jaw in "I Will Not Apologize" or sweating his way through a pills-and-stress panic attack on "I Can't Help It". And when he's turned loose on a hookless lyrical exhibition, Black Thought is nearly unstoppable; it's scary the way he blazes through the one-take assault of "75 Bars (Black's Reconstruction)", throwing out endless Big Daddy Kane-level proclamations of untouchability ("My hustle is long, my muscle is strong, my man put the paper in the duffel I'm gone/ Y'all still a light year from the level I'm on/ Just a pawn stepping right into the head of the storm"). The abrupt way it ends, it sounds like he could've gone on full throttle for another two hundred bars if someone hadn't taken a cleaver to the tape reel.
A revamped production style accompanies the deeper, darker lyrical tone, taking the aesthetic of Game Theory to its grimiest conclusion. Most of Kamal's keyboard work here isn't with the archetypal Fender Rhodes of Roots albums past; he's using a number of grimy analog synths that snarl and spit and hiss, the kind you hear in dead prez's "Hip Hop" or Outkast's "Stanklove" (or the J.B.'s' "Blow Your Head", for that matter). That racket combining with ?uestlove's fierce, crisp percussion makes for some diabolical rhythmic low-end, and since it dominates Rising Down's personality it gives the album the feeling of being this bionic monstrosity that just so happens to have a lot of headknock to it.
There are a couple of exceptions, like the guitar-driven midtempo Fela pastiche of "I Will Not Apologize" and the unexpected country-blues tinge to "Criminal", but they're rare breathers in an album that otherwise closes in on you. Only when the triumphant, old-school Roots return on the demi-go-go of "Rising Up" does it feel like the weight's been lifted, and even then something about it-- the endless Oprah/Travolta namedrop hook, the mawkish Chrisette Michele vocal about a crying b-girl, the overly tidy-sounding keyboards-- seems a bit out of place. (Maybe not as out-of-place as the now-infamous and super-creepy Patrick Stump collab "Birthday Girl", however; excising that disaster singlehandedly saved the album's character.) Rising Down isn't always an easy listen, but it's an exciting one, and its abrasiveness never gets in the way of a good throw-your-hands-up beat or a well-crafted lyric.
If you've been paying any damn attention to the world around you, most of Rising Down's messages ring familiar, and frequently true: This is an album that tells you the entertainment industry is turning into a coon show, the climate (both environmental and cultural) is getting fucked up, and broke people are still struggling. But this record states these ideas with respect to the notion that you know them already, and puts all the revelation and subtext into its unyielding sound. You could call it preaching to the converted, but it also feels like a reminder to the lapsed, less a wake-up call than a shot of renewed adrenaline. | 2008-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | April 29, 2008 | 7.8 | 162310f7-3e34-4d13-a032-028cac6d836e | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Jade Lilitri, frontman for Long Island pop/punk outfit Oso Oso, assembles an album-length tribute to ‘00s indie rock and emo, one style and song at a time. | Jade Lilitri, frontman for Long Island pop/punk outfit Oso Oso, assembles an album-length tribute to ‘00s indie rock and emo, one style and song at a time. | Oso Oso: The Yunahon Mixtape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22802-the-yunahon-mixtape/ | The Yunahon Mixtape | Jade Lilitri’s latest project has “mixtape” in the title, but it is pretty much the opposite of super-mutant strains like Coloring Book or If You’re Reading This It's Too Late—expensive-sounding, heavily publicized albums that have as much in common with an audiobook or an app as they do a mixtape. Oso Oso’s second LP is advertised as an album about a mixtape, in the old rewind-and-record, Maxell-cassette sense. More accurately, it’s a tribute to the emotional state of mixtape-making: being dumbstruck in love, or simply being dumbstruck by the concept of love, daydreaming the lifespan of an entire relationship and actualizing it within a span of 40 minutes.
For ’00s indie rock fans, Yunahon Mixtape can be heard as a seamless Since I Left You-style collage borne from college radio crate digging between 2001-2004. It’s a veritable Easter egg hunt for brisk, Barsuk-era Death Cab for Cutie melodies, and the appropriately titled and panoramic “Great Big Beaches” stages a misty-eyed, full-hearted reshoot of “Cath…” Elsewhere, Lilitri steps outside of classic emo to practice the fastidious, ship-in-a-bottle complexity of the Shins (“The Secret Spot”), Built to Spill’s anxious prog-pop (“The Bearer of the Truths”) and the walking-wounded blues of Spoon (“The Slope”).
But prior to starting Oso Oso, Lilitri played as State Lines, a Long Island emo outfit that demonstrated an endearingly fervent dedication to bringing a certain kind of late-90s New York back in the 2010s. Oso Oso’s 2015 debut sounded like someone trying to deconstruct pop-punk, but it appears in its purest form on The Yunahon Mixtape, as a secret weapon: when things threaten to get too fastidious on “The Walk,” the second half breaks into a mad dash, while “Shoes (The Sneaker Song)” follows “Great Big Beaches” with a four-minute mile.
Lilitri is as much of a student of his influences as he is a fan, understanding the exact methods that make the sound of this music hit a certain way at a certain age and linger in the years to come. This is music that reflects a mood more often than it sets one, and the coherence of Oso Oso’s influences allows the emotional tenor to shift wildly without upsetting the flow, from drumming up the confidence to act on a crush, putting feelings out in the open, and the subsequent vertigo of awaiting reciprocation. Lilitri played everything but drums here, and the stacked harmonies and call-and-response actually enhance its insularity in a meaningful way: most mixtapes are conceptualized long before they hit the reels.
Whereas State Lines or even the first Oso Oso album had the pinched sound of teen melodrama, The Yunahon Mixtape is pure romantic comedy: meet-cutes, playful misunderstandings, inside jokes and the acoustic midpoint where three minutes apart feels like an eternity. And like most entries in this realm, Yunahon allows itself cliché as an indulgence; the very first line plays on “falling in love” as a physical pratfall and “Shoes (The Sneaker Song)” proudly wields its uber-emo sentiments.
There’s enough acidity to keep it from getting too cloying, enough specifics to keep it grounded, enough humor to make everyone feel like co-conspirators playing hooky from realistic interactions. All of this makes The Yunahon Mixtape a realization of its ambitions and completely out of step on numerous fronts. It’s understandable if the current state of affairs has completely sapped your ambition to have your head in the clouds, but damn if The Yunahon Mixtape doesn’t make a good argument for getting on Lilitri’s level. | 2017-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | February 6, 2017 | 7.8 | 1624e617-1e30-410f-857c-6ff3f3521354 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Three discs' worth of new Prince material-- one credited to his new protégé Bria Valente-- sold only online or through Target. Yikes. | Three discs' worth of new Prince material-- one credited to his new protégé Bria Valente-- sold only online or through Target. Yikes. | Prince / Bria Valente: Lotusflow3r / MPLSound / Elixer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12911-lotusflow3r-mplsound-elixer/ | Lotusflow3r / MPLSound / Elixer | For several days, Lotusflow3r/MPLSound sat on my hard drive, daring me to click play. I finally acquiesced, knowing this review was due, and suddenly realized how much my relationship with Prince has changed over the past 20 years. His rise to success, beginning with 1979's Prince, pretty much mirrored my pre-adolescent development as a music fan. By 1987's Sign O' the Times, I was ripping the cellophane off the cassingles when barely out of the store, hoping to soak up a little of that Princely aura even if it would be hours before I'd be near my tape deck.
Like many who came of age when each new Prince album expanded our conception of pop, I've already struggled through plenty of self-cannibalized sketches and ever-more-mawkish ballads and unsuccessful experiments to locate the canon-worthy songs lurking in his decade-plus of hubristic over-production. I know a jumble of decent tunes, lackluster jams, and outright dreck invariably awaits on any Tuesday morning bearing a new Prince album. This time around, and in several key ways, we get a partial throwback to the Prince records I greedily inhaled as a tween. (For one thing I bought a physical copy at a chain department store, something I haven't regularly done since I could drive.) That added a little twist to my distress when I realized that, at age 31, I was actually kind of dreading my first play of a new Prince album. It's a future the 12-year-old me would not have wanted to reach.
Assessing a new Prince album all but demands forced objectivity and willfully ignoring his first decade as a recording artist. Want to look like an idiot? Write a screed lamenting the fact that an artist has failed to consistently entertain, let alone surprise or enlighten, for over 30 years. But what's left, once you choose the road of sane detachment, other than a review that can be summed up as "predictably imperfect, your mileage may vary"? Hence my low-level dread. So here's my hardly original thesis, which many could have guessed even before clicking: Don't buy this album unless you're willing to do the work of winnowing it down to the tracks you find enjoyable/passable. Two new Prince albums (plus a third disc we'll get to in a minute) for the price of one might as well come with a giant sparkly sticker that reads "For Obsessive Amateur Editors Only." Filler on a 21st century Prince album? Do purple pontiffs leave paisley piles in the Minnesota woods?
Lotusflow3r is mostly neutral funk-rock. When I say "funk-rock," I don't mean the taut, digitally enhanced amalgam Prince invented/perfected in the 1980s. I mean the looser variety, amenable to extended onstage takes, that friend and foe alike would describe as "organic," albeit with very different inflections. It's a sound that works best when he observes three important guidelines: 1) He restrains the stock guitar heroics (has anyone's instrumental creativity been more effectively hampered by being repeatedly declared the last great virtuoso?), 2) He keeps the tempos club-friendly (or at least friendly in the context of old-school weekend at the 40-and-over spot), and 3) He remembers his faux rivalry with fellow funkateer Morris Day was more productive than his imagined rivalry with musically ignorant young folks.
But when I say "neutral," unfortunately I mean pretty much exactly what you probably think I mean. The only track with an immediately memorable hook is his cover of "Crimson and Clover", which would be sadder if he hadn't been obscuring his preternatural catchiness for some time now. On Lotusflow3r, as on all of his albums since he became a classicist by intent and a live workhorse out of necessity, Prince mistakenly assumes instrumental prowess to be of primary importance to anyone other than online guitar-tab traders, while also displaying an unflattering and near-constant need to prove he can hang with the multi-cultural heroes who shaped his worldview. There's no need to genuflect when you've long since been admitted to the pantheon.
If Lotusflow3r is generic and too-reverential modern day muso Prince, then MPLSound is either crass or delusional. It's crass if it's a conceptual cash-grab, Prince bald-facedly pastiching his own 80s sound as a profitable parlor game. Times being vice-tight, presumably even for those with the renewable resource of a deep catalog of hall-of-fame hits, dusting off the drum machine makes a certain sad sense, and a by-numbers ballad like "Here" sounds undeniably better backed by its twee little keyboard hook than, like, a flute. It's delusional if he's serious, because it means he thinks these flimsy self-homages wouldn't sound anemic next to tunes from Purple Rain or Parade, which you can at least write off as the kind of perception-free baloney we expect from geniuses of his stripe.
Either way, MPLSound is (surprise) momentarily enjoyable and completely inessential, happy to provoke Palovian responses since the hard work of honestly juicing your head, heart, or hips is antithetical to the whole idea. Sure, you can still sieve off a few decent tracks for your "Prince in the Aughts" playlist; the Camille redux of "Dance 4 Me" is my personal choice, if only because he tries to shoehorn in all of the sex/religion/androgyne clichés. But while I'd pick electro-funk Prince over jazz-funk Prince every day of the week, the proximity of Lotusflow3r makes the pleasures of MPLSound feel even more hollow, like it's merely a spoonful of synth-driven sugar designed to sell naysayers on the non-electronic new stuff Prince wants you to cherish as much as the old faves.
Elixer, the aforemetioned third disc, is actually by newcomer Bria Valente, who should at least be happy she's been able to piggyback her way to bad reviews in national publications, rather than languishing in the promo bin purgatory to which she'd be consigned if her producer was a cousin with a copy of Pro Tools. Elixer runs the gamut of bland-but-classy R&B, from antiseptic slow jams to rote dance-pop, slick as you'd expect and completely failing to suggest what bunched Prince's panties when he initially discovered Valente. Many of Prince's pet projects have been little more than ventriloquist's dummies-- excepting skilled musicians like Sheila E. or irrepressible lunatics like Morris Day, the master hasn't had much patience for personality-driven showboats-- but any trace of weirdness or wit or actual eroticism has seemingly been purged from Valente's performance at Jehovah's request, which reflects worse on egomaniacal producer than nominal artiste in this case. Like some depressing footnote to the whole Lotusflow3r/MPLSound experience, Elixer sparked my final sad realization about my current relationship with Prince and his product: Who knew I'd one day get wistful for the vacuous but honestly carnal fluff of "Sex Shooter"? | 2009-04-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-04-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | null | April 13, 2009 | 4.9 | 162709cb-2806-4be9-bb63-717b8e98bbe2 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
With a playful sound incorporating surreal vocals and mallet instruments, the electronic duo captures a spirit of childlike wonder. | With a playful sound incorporating surreal vocals and mallet instruments, the electronic duo captures a spirit of childlike wonder. | Salamanda: Ashbalkum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/salamanda-ashbalkum/ | Ashbalkum | Ever since the Seoul-based electronic musicians Uman Therma (aka Sala) and Yetsuby (aka Manda) were introduced by a mutual friend in 2018, the two—known collectively as Salamanda—have been crafting a finely detailed world together. Their name comes from a drawing of a salamander that Therma made, and they titled their 2019 debut single “Our Lair”—a gentle sketch for pulsing pads and synthesized pan flute—as a nod to the imaginary amphibian’s home. They released eight more singles in their first year, fleshing out the atmospheric contours of their musical universe with elements of ambient, classical minimalism, and Japanese kankyō ongaku, and their world-building has gotten more fanciful from there. They framed their first EP, 2020’s Glass Cage, which they released in the early months of the pandemic, as an allegory of a bird in an invisible cage; their 2021 album Sphere was inspired by bulbous shapes—“like boiled tomatoes or planet Earth, or maybe bubbles,” Sala has said.
The common threads running through all their music so far have been its playful spirit, whimsical mood, and faintly psychedelic air, and ashbalkum, released on the New York/Mexico City label Human Pitch, makes good on all those qualities. Its 10 tracks are built around mallet instruments, pitter-pat drums, and softly rounded synths, as luminous and smooth to the touch as a handful of beach glass. Hiroshi Yoshimura’s meditative soundscaping is an obvious touchstone; so are the lilting, dancefloor-adjacent rhythms of ambient-techno fellow travelers like Leif and Human Pitch co-founder Tristan Arp.
Salamanda have a simple sound that they twist into a pleasing array of configurations. The opening “Overdose” is minimalist dub techno stitched together out of raindrops and sighs; “Melting Hazard” spins vibraphones and cooing voices into cotton candy-like tufts; “Rumble Bumble” loops thrumming hand drum and what might be a vocal sample from a vintage ethnographic record into a loosely woven funk. There are no major shifts from the sound of their previous recordings, but they’ve emphasized their pointillistic tendencies in subtle but important ways: They favor crisp, cleanly delineated sounds that are suggestive of sticks hitting small, hard objects—woodblocks, chimes, xylophone—and every sound seems to float in a bubble of negative space.
The most noticeable difference between ashbalkum and its predecessors lies in the album’s use of vocals. Virtually every track features some kind of voice, though there’s not a single identifiable word uttered on the whole record; instead, track after track is festooned with ribbons of cooing and chirping: the trim oohs of “Melting Hazard”; the sped-up hiccups of “Coconut Warrior,” which suggests a Boards of Canada cover band helmed by highly intelligent rodents; the pastel curlicues of “Living Hazard,” which might be an a cappella choir rubbing wineglass rims. All these curiously treated voices—plus the feline meow of “Mad Cat Party (feat. Ringo the Cat)”—help reinforce a naive sensibility that culminates in the children’s voices and music-box plunk of the closing “Catching Tails.” Like Aphex Twin and Nobukazu Takemura, Salamanda intuit the ways that electronic music’s lysergic tendencies can be re-routed to capture a spirit of childlike wonder. The album’s title is an invented word riffing on a Korean phrase meaning, roughly, “Ah, fuck, it’s a dream.” But in ashbalkum’s world, there are no rude awakenings; every track leads deeper into a state of surrealistic bliss. | 2022-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Human Pitch | June 9, 2022 | 7.3 | 162ad1ad-1dc4-415a-8555-c19e5acc40f6 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Dave Portner’s latest solo excursion stakes out a middle ground between the exterior and interior, between direct melodies and the oblique music they float on. | Dave Portner’s latest solo excursion stakes out a middle ground between the exterior and interior, between direct melodies and the oblique music they float on. | Avey Tare: Cows on Hourglass Pond | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/avey-tare-cows-on-hourglass-pond/ | Cows on Hourglass Pond | Dave Portner’s music swings between extremes. On the one hand, there’s the kinetic overload of Animal Collective records like Strawberry Jam, Merriweather Post Pavilion, and Centipede Hz—fast, colorful cars on a curvy road, their windshields bug-spattered Rorschach blots. On the other, an array of murkier, more mysterious sounds and moods, like the reverent hush of Campfire Songs or the ruminant narcosis of Down There, Portner’s first solo album as Avey Tare. His work can sometimes be so private that it borders on the indecipherable: One early album was meant to be played backward.
This fundamental opposition translates to a tension between his extroverted tendencies and more resolutely interior modes. Avey Tare’s last solo album, 2017’s Eucalyptus, was keyed to nature yet felt claustrophobic, a world away from the sun-baked hillsides that inspired it: If it was a hike, it was a mountain path at dusk, when the trail markers begin disappearing into darkness. Last year, Animal Collective’s Tangerine Reef, an audiovisual album about coral ecosystems, was even more amorphous. But with Cows on Hourglass Pond, Portner comes back up for air and stakes out a middle position.
The album begins on an unexpected note: “What’s the Goodside?” is built around an honest-to-goodness dub-techno beat, the kind of thing you might have expected to hear back when Portner and his bandmate Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear, were talking up their fondness for Kompakt and Basic Channel. Nothing in Animal Collective’s songs ever came all that close to the actual sound of their German inspirations, but the synth-heavy shuffle of “What’s the Goodside?” sure does, with a moody sub-bass wallop that’s a dead ringer for the pulse of Berlin basement clubs circa 1993. But “What’s the Goodside?” isn’t only dub techno; the song’s muddy electronic loops are overlaid with multitracked guitars and lilting vocal melodies, yielding a strange amalgam of ambient and folk. “We’re getting old now,” Portner sings, his voice garbled with effects, but, despite the subdued pace, this is the opposite of slowing down in middle age. With an arrangement that bushwhacks its way from shadowy thickets to startling clarity, “What’s the Goodside?” feels like a statement of purpose, a way of announcing that he still has new terrain to explore.
The rest of the album largely follows the template established on the opening song, with strummy, jangly guitars wreathed in soft synths and electronic effects. This is far from Avey Tare at his most outgoing, but the melodies are more direct than they were on Eucalyptus, even when the underlying chords scrape at oblique angles. The dissonant guitars of “Eyes on Eyes” might be surf music transposed for an unfamiliar tonal system, yet Portner’s rising-and-falling vocal melody has a bewitching immediacy. The electric/acoustic mixture of “K.C. Yours” evokes the hazy tones of vintage Flying Saucer Attack, but it’s one of the straight-up catchiest songs that Portner has written in ages. The relative tunefulness of these songs gives Portner plenty to work with as a singer, too: He whispers more often than he bellows, and he broadly explores a wide range of timbres along with the nuances of his registers. Whether yelping or mumbling, Avey Tare occasionally gets stuck on autopilot, but here he sounds like he’s trying out new things and, crucially, having fun.
The album sags a little toward the end. Slow and relatively beatless, “Our Little Chapter” and “Taken Boy” don’t so much drift as simply hang there, like fog that stubbornly refuses to burn off; “Remember Mayan,” which follows, is more sprightly, but its ad-hoc spiritualism (“Remember Mayan?/Future is being right now/Angels came pouring down”) feels hokey. These lyrical lapses dog the album when it gestures at profundity without quite getting there (or, conversely, toys with the nonsensical without fully committing). Portner is better when he zeroes in on more specific imagery. “Saturdays (Again),” a hooky song about nostalgia and ritual, rattles off tokens of domesticity like a Norman Rockwell fever dream, while “K.C. Yours” is a sci-fi premonition whose premise (“That was the year/I slept with the robot/And so I thought that was the worst we’d seen yet”) it’s practically begging for its own Netflix series.
“K.C. Yours” points up one of Cows on Hourglass Pond’s best qualities: its sense of humor. Portner doesn’t always get a lot of credit for his wit, but it’s in ample supply here. Just take the closing “HORS_,” an equine-themed song whose title is ostensibly inspired by the two-person basketball game. As Portner strums his acoustic and reels off free-associative lyrics about four-legged beasts, he’s accompanied by an unmistakable clip-clop rhythm. It’s part classic-rock chestnut, part novelty song, and once it reaches its ambiguous climax—“I am old story,” or maybe “I am horse story,” or maybe even both—the song steadily breaks apart, falsetto vocal harmonies and rhythmic loops dissolving into a spray of white noise. Even—especially?—on an album where Portner pursues a middle path between his opposing instincts, the disappearing act feels perfectly in character. | 2019-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | March 27, 2019 | 7 | 162fbcee-ed9a-4a22-ab3c-7476a9cfbcc4 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Hailu Mergia was once the keyboardist for Walias Band, whose 1977 recording "Muziqawi Silt" is a defining piece of Ethiopia's musical history. Walias broke up in the early 80s after a trip to the U.S., where Mergia stayed. A few years later, he made this album, merging the sounds of his youth with modern technology, making for striking, unusual results. | Hailu Mergia was once the keyboardist for Walias Band, whose 1977 recording "Muziqawi Silt" is a defining piece of Ethiopia's musical history. Walias broke up in the early 80s after a trip to the U.S., where Mergia stayed. A few years later, he made this album, merging the sounds of his youth with modern technology, making for striking, unusual results. | Hailu Mergia: Hailu Mergia and His Classical Instrument | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18162-hailu-mergia-hailu-mergia-and-his-classical-instrument/ | Hailu Mergia and His Classical Instrument | In 1977, Walias Band recorded a darkly bobbing funk instrumental with an ominous horn theme called “Muziqawi Silt”. It was a couple years after the overthrow of Haile Selassie by Mengistu Haile Mariam, and Mengistu’s Derg government had applied the brakes to Addis Ababa’s nightlife, making it much harder for a working band to make a living. Music was still being made in abundance, though, and cassettes ultimately made it a lot easier to duplicate and distribute it. “Muziqawi Silt” surfaced in collector circles in the U.S. and Europe in the 90s and was canonized by a 2003 Ethiopiques volume, and it’s since become one of the tiny handful of songs that non-Ethiopians use as a gateway into the country’s music. Antibalas even covered it.
Hailu Mergia was the keyboardist for Walias Band. His organ playing is one of the only things a lot of people know about Ethiopian music. Walias Band was more important than just that one track, though. When the band arrived on the scene, the typical arrangement was for the venue-- usually a hotel-- to provide a band with instruments. Walias broke that mold by buying their own and working out contracts with the venues they played. In the early 80s, during a tour of the United States, Mergia and a few other members decided not to return home. That was the end of the band, but they’d made their mark back home.
A few years after moving to the U.S., Mergia decided to record an album that merged the sounds of his youth with modern technology. Working alone, he assembled a drum machine, a Rhodes piano, a Yamaha DX7, and his accordion, and got to work arranging old Ethiopian songs for this mostly modern palette. The results are striking and unusual. If Cluster had been from Ethiopia instead of Germany, this is probably about what they would have sounded like. Mergia uses the Yamaha to make his buzzy bass lines, fills in chords and texture with the Rhodes, and then solos over the top, alternately on the accordion or the Yamaha DX7, in an inimitably Ethiopian style. The sound is spare and unaffected, the drum programming never deviating during any song, though he sometimes augments the rhythmic push with vocals halfway between beatboxing and chanting.
In addition to the fluttering modal melodies, there are other distinctly Ethiopian signatures running through the music, particularly in the triple meters and three-against-four rhythms of the songs. “Belew Beduby” stomps along on a swaying polyrhythm on a par with anything you’ll hear from early 70s Addis, while “Hebo Lale” modifies that beat a bit for more of a boogie feel, aided by a faster tempo. At the other end of the spectrum, “Sewnetuwa” drifts along on an almost eight-bit-sounding bass line, with Yamaha DX7 and accordion dueling on top.
The overall effect of the album is difficult to describe. The music is simple and straightforward, accomplished but not showy. It feels at once rural, nostalgic, and futuristic. Replace the drum machine with people clapping, and you’d be a hair’s breadth from an ethnographic recording. Drum machines and synthesizers are common ingredients of Ethiopian pop music today, but not in the same way they’re used here. Perhaps one of the things that sets this apart from other Ethiopian pop music is the fact that it was made in solitude, and specifically out of longing for a vanished past. It’s introverted in a way very little other music from the country is. It’s also not quite like anything else you’ve ever heard. | 2013-06-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-06-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Global | Awesome Tapes From Africa | June 28, 2013 | 7.4 | 1630be6c-d5c7-4070-992c-fc7b77faefd0 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Equally indebted to no wave and dance, the Manchester, England-based trio’s debut EP walks a fine line between violent and groovy. | Equally indebted to no wave and dance, the Manchester, England-based trio’s debut EP walks a fine line between violent and groovy. | Mandy, Indiana: ... EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mandy-indiana-ep/ | ... EP | The music of Mandy, Indiana is war all the time. Bullets fly on “Bottle Episode” and daggers are stared on “Nike of Samothrace.” Frontperson Valentine Caulfield snarls her French-language lyrics with a tone of pent-up rage that sounds like your unnervingly quiet goth cousin finally letting loose; Scott Fair’s noisy yet melodic industrial-pop production carries the percussive heft of Battles and the ear-splitting drone of HEALTH. Drummer Liam Stewart, a former touring member of LoneLady, rounds out the band, and his percussion walks the same line between violent and groovy. The resulting … EP is a deft balance of harsh and playful, danceable and transfixing.
Much of Mandy, Indiana’s power lies in Caulfield’s shapeshifting, hammer-to-the-head vocals. Amid the formless noise and swelling synths of “Nike of Samothrace,” her adrenaline skyrockets as she attempts to dissuade a second, silent character—maybe a creepy man at last call—from following her home at night. “J’suis une grande fille, je sais où je vais, j’me perdrai pas” (“I’m a big girl, I know where I’m going, I won’t get lost”), she says, speaking in fits and starts, as if running out of time to choose between fight or flight. Her rapid cadence ricochets off the music to emphasize the situational terror. Atop the sixteenth-note, coldwave throb of “Alien 3,” Caulfield describes unburdening herself of someone else’s apathy: “Tu t’en fous/J’ai plus envie d’être à genoux” (“You don’t care/I won’t live on my knees anymore”). Delivering her incantations in a high, barbed register with hardly any lilt to her voice, she sounds like a lower-fidelity Florence Shaw of Dry Cleaning. When the music briefly explodes with rubbery percussion and flayed drones, Mandy, Indiana wordlessly suggest freedom.
The trio’s music is combative in its dissonance and just-above-midtempo stomp, but there’s liberation in the arrangements. These songs are even-keeled yet ramshackle, equally indebted to no wave and dance, bound to get your heart rate up to mosh pace. The slight hiss on the recordings emphasizes these strengths, especially on highlight “Bottle Episode,” where Caulfield’s voice gnashes through descriptions of bullets tearing apart soldiers’ bodies. The imagery is horrifying, but Caulfield’s snippy growl and Fair’s white-hot synths make the song oddly fun. “Sous le feu et sous les balles/Les hommes dansent quasiment” (“As the bullets hit them, the men dance, almost”), Caulfield snaps over the garish howls and sinister pulse. The darkest end comes with deliverance.
The EP ends with two remixes that fall near-perfectly in line with the trio’s scything musical vision. Daniel Avery locates a drone that’s just a minor element of “Alien 3” and makes it a key focus, pushing the track’s noise-to-melody ratio in the harsher direction of “Bottle Episode” and “Nike of Samothrace” while sussing out its dance undercurrents. Club Eat puts the pedal to the metal on “Nike of Samothrace” and reimagines it as “Blue Monday” for the Working Class Woman crowd, speeding up the tempo to adapt Mandy, Indiana’s militaristic percussion for steely, nameless warehouse raves. As Caulfield’s manipulated vocals zip by, they retain their anxious energy right up to her parting blow: “Tu fais le malin à emmerder les filles dans la rue (You think you’re so clever harassing girls on the street),” she snaps. “Mais tu t’attends pas à ce qu’elles aient une lame dans leur poche, c’est ça? (But you don’t expect them to have a knife in their pocket, do you?)”
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Fire Talk | November 22, 2021 | 7.6 | 16344e7a-22c2-42d1-9da1-79c5918d432d | Max Freedman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-freedman/ | |
Stepping away from the overt historicism of previous recordings, the guitarist opts for a subtler—but just as expressive—investigation of folk and blues. | Stepping away from the overt historicism of previous recordings, the guitarist opts for a subtler—but just as expressive—investigation of folk and blues. | Bill Orcutt: Odds Against Tomorrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-orcutt-odds-against-tomorrow/ | Odds Against Tomorrow | Malleability is built into the character of American traditional music. Rooted in oral storytelling, foundational songs like the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Oh Shenandoah” have been known by several names and attached to various meanings and ideologies over the decades. The former has had multiple lives since it emerged as a popular tune in the mid 1800s: Pete Seeger anthemized it as “Solidarity Forever,” which guitarist Bill Orcutt recorded on his 2013 album A History of Every One, offering one of the most radical takes on the melody in its nearly two-century lifespan. Orcutt takes the elasticity inherent in folk music and augments it with avant-garde jazz and free improvisation, two other distinctly American forms. A dialogue between these traditions has formed the basis of Orcutt’s solo albums over the past decade, as he has recorded lacerated versions of “Star Spangled Banner,” “Nearer My God to Thee,” “Black Betty,” and other well-worn songs.
Odds Against Tomorrow, Orcutt’s latest solo LP, steps away from overt renditions of popular melodies and returns to a subtler investigation of folk and blues. The raw melancholy lurking in the shadows of recordings by pioneers like Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Charley Patton also hangs heavy over Orcutt’s original compositions. On his early solo releases, most notably A New Way to Pay Old Debts, from 2009, and the follow-up EP Way Down South, his mournful themes were punctuated by spasms of pentatonic runs and extemporaneous howling, giving the music a wild, unrestrained nature. By contrast, Orcutt’s playing on Odds Against Tomorrow is notably restrained and frequently threatens beauty. While earlier LPs felt like spontaneous outpourings, this album feels worked over, informed by lessons learned from the iconic composers he has spent the past half-decade recontextualizing.
One of the most notable indicators of this approach is Orcutt’s use of multitracking on three songs, a first in his solo career. On the title track, he traces an understated chord progression in the left channel, allowing the song’s fractured melodic line to dissolve and reconstitute itself in the right, peaking in a wailing, single-note outburst. Rather than boxing the songs into a distinctive harmonic path, the technique allows Orcutt to indulge in more intricately crafted solos, dexterously flying up and down the neck of his four-string electric guitar. If his early work channeled Ornette Coleman in its ability to imply complex changes without their constant, explicit presence, this new technique brings him closer to the conventional electric blues pantheon.
Despite these increasingly polyphonic excursions, Odds Against Tomorrow is defined largely by a considered quietude. The one cover on the album, an arrangement of Henry Mancini’s “Moon River,” feels enveloped by negative space, serenely picked with a slight tremolo effect. Album closer “Man Dies” is two minutes of a sentimental, unadorned melody that ends with the buzz of an amplifier decaying into nothingness. Orcutt’s slow transformation from antagonistic abstractionist to wistful minimalist has had many detours, and he continues to explore torrential exuberance in his collaborative work, especially with free-jazz drummer Chris Corsano. But on Odds Against Tomorrow he has found a way to settle down without settling into complacency. The album retains the core elements of his best work, and his restless, postmodern exploration of the American lexicon, while refining what makes those qualities potent. Refusing to repeat himself, he takes tradition as a living thing, blazing new trails to familiar vistas. | 2019-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Palilalia | October 11, 2019 | 7.8 | 1638ad36-0021-4aa6-aa38-a8afebf7daca | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
Soundwalk Collective is an electronic group featuring vocals by Patti Smith and percussion by her daughter, Jesse. Here, they use field-recordings from Ibiza to rework the poetry of Nico. | Soundwalk Collective is an electronic group featuring vocals by Patti Smith and percussion by her daughter, Jesse. Here, they use field-recordings from Ibiza to rework the poetry of Nico. | Soundwalk Collective / Patti Smith / Jesse Paris Smith: Killer Road | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22341-killer-road/ | Killer Road | Christa Päffgen—the singer, songwriter, actress, poet, model, and proto-goth icon known as Nico—died in 1988 on a grassy mountain road in Ibiza, on a bicycle ride into a nearby town to buy weed. After an accident, she died of a massive brain hemorrhage. It’s the type of event that spurs reflection on the nature of mortality. And now it has inspired a dense new work by New York and Berlin-based electronic group Soundwalk Collective, featuring vocals by Patti Smith, and found and self-constructed percussion from her daughter, Jesse Paris Smith.
To create field recordings, Soundwalk’s Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli, and Kamran Sadeghi actually visited Ibiza, which is not particularly surprising. The group is known for finding the sounds they use the hard way; a 2012 work took them on a journey through the Amazon to collect source material from Peruvian shamans, for example. Their uncanny, intimate naturescapes on Killer Road create a sense of reality heightened enough to come back around to seeming artificial. Their source material—rustling tall grass, birds clustering and bickering in the trees, flies beginning to swarm, crickets humming—are smudged with delay, reverb, and crackling overdrive. The effect is the aural equivalent of a hazy, mirage-like film flashback. It feels like an appropriate methodology for a work which is attempting to re-enact a lost moment—to create something living and mutable from hearsay and police reports.
If it’s not already apparent, this is, in no way, a covers album or even standard-issue “tribute,” to its great credit. Patti detaches Nico’s poems—the reason the German actress became involved in music in the first place—from their original musical settings. The words are sourced from throughout Nico’s discography, from 1968’s formative The Marble Index to two potent texts off her final, industrial-tinged album, 1985’s Camera Obscura. “Fearfully in Danger” is the only moment where Smith slips into full-bodied song, but even then, her melody is not Nico’s. Her vocals—glottal, pitchy, with an assertive, bluesy twang—are swallowed up by the album’s fitting centerpiece: a long blare from Nico’s own trademark harmonium. (The instrument was the first direct connection between Smith and Nico: Smith rescued it from on a pawn shop in 1978).
In a 2013 interview discussing the forthcoming Killer Road, Smith pinpointed the common theme she senses in Nico’s writing, and what appealed to her about the project: the focus on the idea of “the inner voice.” There are, throughout this work, dominant phrases—“A true story wants to be mine/The story is telling a true lie,” “The honesty that lies to you,” “The hours since I saw you last/Have left me in an unknown past”—which suggest that the narrator’s deepest feelings and impressions are often not manifested in direct thought. Rather, they emanate in unpredictable, often destructive ways. In murder ballad “My Heart Is Empty,” Nico’s narrator and victim maintain a relationship of surface-level declarations, before the former’s true feelings arise in one culminating, brutal act. The rumbling drone chording of Soundwalk’s modular synth arsenal boils over, threatening to drown everything out. Smith compellingly exploits the peculiarities of her larynx, sliding between a sibilant whisper and quiet, foreboding speech as the narrator’s thoughts flit in and out of clarity.
It’s moments like these that work best, when the project ceases to be what many news headlines framed it as—Patti Smith reciting Nico poems over ambient music—and becomes a unified piece, where every part interacts with the text in a meaningful, just-less-than-literal way. The effect can be sonically absorbing, if not as emotionally compelling as its creators might have hoped. It comes across like a chilling ASMR experiment mixed with something by Robert Ashley or Steven “Jesse” Bernstein. When Smith detaches from the scenery (“Fearfully in Danger,” the gothic nursery rhyming of “I Will Be Seven,” the more straightforward “My Only Child”) the effect is more similar to Nico’s own vocal performances, but makes for less cohesive music overall. One can imagine the project’s subject would have ultimately preferred the more understated tracks, concerted in their muted menace—focused on the task of creating a cinematic impression of the unknowable. | 2016-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock / Experimental | Bella Union / Sacred Bones | September 1, 2016 | 6.6 | 1638d869-369f-4da4-bf30-96b256acfecc | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
Though they work in the field of doom metal, this Rhode Island-based duo add gospel choirs, harsh noise, and industrial rock to their terrific second LP. | Though they work in the field of doom metal, this Rhode Island-based duo add gospel choirs, harsh noise, and industrial rock to their terrific second LP. | The Body: All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14512-all-the-waters-of-the-earth-turn-to-blood/ | All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood | The Body are drummer Lee Buford and guitarist Chip King, two robust, bearded Arkansas boys living in Providence, R.I. In press photos, they brandish automatic weapons, some of which are triumphantly splayed on the table that stretches across the gatefold package of their second album, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood. Buford and King cite Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara, and Charles Manson as influences, and, in 2005, they turned Body Count's "Copkiller" and M.D.C.'s "Dead Cops" into sludgy voids on a 7" single. They've appeared on stage wearing potato sacks and nooses, and the cover of All the Waters showcases the pair dressed like ancient hooded Chinese soldiers.
This is probably where you roll your eyes and check out, figuring that these would-be metal/ hardcore/ noise/ whatever tough guys will never sound as bothered on tape as they might appear on paper. Well, you're wrong: Like the best of Eyehategod or Bastard Noise, All the Waters is the rare album that feels truly dangerous. As it crushes and collides doom metal, harsh noise, industrial rock, and gospel singing into one mean mess, it seems to obey no rules but its own. The result is a singular, explosive masterpiece and one of the year's essential heavy exploits-- even if, at turns, it sends you cowering.
All the Waters is an album of detours and surprises. You'll see the Body mostly referred to as a doom metal duo, but don't hang too many notions on that reductive nail. Rather, All the Waters is played by 32 people, including the 13-member Assembly of Light Choir and a score of folks who earn credit not only for keyboards, drums, and viola for but also for noise, sousaphone, and drum programming. Two of these seven tracks begin with slow, controlled, Earth-like riffs-- that is, quintessential, doom metal. Both evolve quickly. "Even Saints Knew Their Hour of Failure and Loss" corrodes its repetitive riff with a piercing din; the choir's gorgeous chant tugs upward against the low-hanging load. Everything disappears except for Buford's drums, a circle of snares and cymbals wrapping the distant chime of a church bell. King's lacerating squeal cuts in, quoting Yeats: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem, waiting to be born?" It's music that has more to do with Current 93 than Earth, more with provocation than perfection.
Indeed, after a few dozen listens, the Body's risks and adventures still shock me. Almost uniformly, they deliver songs into chaos. The album begins, after all, with four minutes of beautiful choral singing. The Assembly of Light Choir offers a wordless hymn, harmonies rising and falling, melodies wrapping around one another like the cotton strands of some imagined heaven. Eventually, a voice slips from the flock, her line dropping into a mournful gospel quaver. The rest of the choir follows, their voices dragging and slinking, as if covered with the shadow of an unnamed malice on the horizon. When that beast arrives-- noise swells, shattering drums, monolithic slabs of guitar-- it's the sound of something beautiful being obliterated. Similarly, "A Curse" starts as a ruptured dance number that, a few minutes later, is an arrhythmic, atonal wasteland. "Empty Hearth" begins with a sample of a church group (taken from the strange Sounds of American Doomsday Cults album) offering a prayer; by track's end, their recitation has been chopped and screwed until it sounds like strangles and gasps.
On paper, All the Waters is a grim record, as lyrics outline the failure of science, nature, man, gods, and prophets in pithy bursts. But unless you're reading along, you'll never know any of this. King's strained, unintelligible voice seems constantly at the brink of being swallowed by the sounds around him. Those sounds are troubling enough, recorded and mixed so that the guitars and drums always feel like they're too loud for the equipment and room meant to contain them. The record itself is a smartly designed simulacrum for the lyrics, recreating the sense of impending darkness by creating a sound that swallows itself. The young indie rock bands now using cheap microphones and analog hiss to shape their songs are often criticized for obscuring shabby songs with shabby sounds. The best of those bands, however, use production to reinforce their ideas and give them an extra bit of depth. The Body does just that here, letting rough-and-tumble production add even more anxiety and trouble to seven songs that were bothered as is. Smart choice: All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood is the seldom collapse-of-the-world record that's actually as disturbing as it wants to be. | 2010-08-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-08-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | At a Loss | August 10, 2010 | 8.5 | 163c6328-3195-48d2-b24b-b4f7ca2f97bc | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Following 2016’s archival dives into early electronic music, the UK duo marries eerie abstraction to the club-ready rhythms of their Testpressing series with newfound fury. | Following 2016’s archival dives into early electronic music, the UK duo marries eerie abstraction to the club-ready rhythms of their Testpressing series with newfound fury. | Demdike Stare: Passion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/demdike-stare-passion/ | Passion | In 2018, what else can possibly be done to those six seconds of the “Amen” break? Since it already powers thousands of songs, Demdike Stare have gone right ahead and plunged it into a white-noise hell of punishing frequencies and speaker-blistering bass. When that instantly recognizable, indefatigable snare rush comes in on “At It Again,” bubbling up like something out of Loveless’ pool of lava, it truly feels like an amen moment.
This isn’t the first time that the duo of Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker has taken something well worn and borderline cliché, stripped it for parts, and cast it into a visceral new light. The last entry in their Testpressing series saw them set Soul II Soul’s chestnut “Back to Life” against a backdrop of industrial clamor and metatarsal-snapping 2-step on “Patchwork.” That series of 12”s unified the group’s central dichotomy, bringing the horror-film ambience of their early albums in parallel with the cutting edge of modern dance music. And those combined sensibilities carried over to 2016’s thrilling Wonderland, proving they could bring dance and dread together for a devastating new amalgam.
Passion continues along that same trajectory, though it feels less like an album and more like a DJ double-pack perfect for a club that’s in the midst of being bulldozed. It veers between rubble-strewn breakbeats and outright noise, between overwhelming distortion and Bluetooth headphones flickering on and off. Shards of grime, garage, jungle, and batida can be found amid the debris, but never in sizable chunks, so thoroughly do Demdike mince their rhythms.
There’s a killer house kick underneath the many layers of “Cracked,” only it’s scattered like spilled mercury, futile to try and get a steady grip on. “Caps Have Gone” bears the gunshot bass of Equiknoxx (themselves signed to their DDS label) before the track dissolves into a shimmering mist at the midway point. The dancehall beat soon whiplashes back into earshot, with Canty and Whittaker playing jai alai with the drums. “Know Where to Start” taps the iciness of early ’00s grime and the sickly glow of fluorescent lights.
Between Wonderland and Passion, Canty and Whittaker were granted access to the archives of France’s pioneering INA-GRM studio and those of the Italian collective Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Like those early explorers of the nascent possibilities of electronic sound, Demdike know that the results can be both dreamy and nightmarish, ethereal and dense. For all of the kinetic drum programming on Passion, the duo still make plenty of room for eerie abstraction. Nearing the four-minute mark of “Pile Up,” astral noise overtakes the stuttering steppers riddim, shooting the track towards the nearest pulsar. “Dilation” is downright dreamy, an orchestral theme in search of a film. And the garbled voices, queasy sine waves, and pinging static of “You People Are Fucked” feel both human and alien. Even without a heavyweight beat in earshot, Demdike Stare can still haunt the club. | 2018-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Modern Love | November 15, 2018 | 8 | 163c6f46-95a4-43aa-95c9-26d5ada0ad48 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The Chicago rapper’s latest project as his alter-ego named Swervo is all velocity. He delivers some of his starkest verses like a steamroller, almost completely desensitized. | The Chicago rapper’s latest project as his alter-ego named Swervo is all velocity. He delivers some of his starkest verses like a steamroller, almost completely desensitized. | G Herbo / Southside : Swervo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/g-herbo-southside-swervo/ | Swervo | G Herbo is always riding with a gun. The reasons vary—he may be worried about getting caught slipping at a stoplight, or he may be pulling up, firing into a crowd of his enemies, and clearing the scene as a first strike—but it is his ultimate deterrent: an opening salvo and a last line of defense.
Guns have also left him feeling vulnerable and paranoid, and this contradiction is something his rawest music mines for emotional depth with great effect. His burly voice and surly disposition can be easily betrayed by a haunting memory welling up from beneath all that bravado. His debut album, 2017’s Humble Beast, carved soul-wrenching admissions out from inside of intense gunfights, considering the various ramifications of gun violence. The follow-up, a collaboration with 808 Mafia co-founder Southside called Swervo, is far less interested in weighing the cost of taking a life on the soul or how lingering impulses gradually evolve into learned behaviors. It speeds into action with little regard for consequences. Rapped from the perspective of an alter ego described as “the opposite of G Herbo,” Swervo is a turn away from his more writerly work. (“I’m kind of dumbing it down a bit as an artist,” he’s said.) Herbo has never really been one for nuance, but these are among his starkest verses, almost completely desensitized. “Give a fuck ‘bout where you from/All them trill niggas with us/Everybody got a gun, pussies still will get hit up,” he summarizes on “Huh.” This time around, as Swervo, he’s driving fast and shooting first and worrying about the rest later.
This daredevil approach to gunplay and cadences makes him seem unbreakable, but the longer the album goes on, the more it wears on you. Where Humble Beast was measured, its pacing merely an impetus for its dynamic, narrative-focused city surveying, Swervo is all velocity. He delivers high-powered, stampeding stanzas looking to bum-rush you before you even know what happened. There are no characters as lived-in as Malcolm; no ruinous portraits of inner-city life as penetrating as those on “Red Snow.” The flows hurtle forward with Herbo bobbing so hard that he sometimes ends up riding against the grain. Even inward-looking deliberations of personal motivation like “Some Nights” and a headstone-counting troop salute like “That’s How I Grew Up” are handled in haste.
G Herbo is a rapper of great consistency and limited range—his greatest strengths are also some of his most glaring weaknesses: He is clear in his writing and constant in his intensity. When functioning on all cylinders he can be a tank, but when he’s not careful, he can steamroll the listener and flatten out his ideas. But here, despite the sometimes careening ahead without finesse, he’s effective. The songs on Swervo are largely of the same genealogy as the exhilarating “Who Run It?” a viral Three 6 Mafia radio freestyle turned street hit single, repurposed into the album’s closer. In those three minutes, he’s irrepressible, springing forth from the triumphant horns, a scene with all the pomp of an explosive walk away after an action sequence. “FoReal,” “Huh,” and the title track each take their own interpretations of the freestyle’s breathless tremors and charged jounce. None match it but all utilize his force.
As his (deliberately) least thoughtful work, Swervo is strongest when Herbo plays up the heel turn and tinkers with his bulldozing flows. He trades declarations with fellow drill architect Chief Keef on the obvious standout “Catch Up,” staggering his cadences and building with each exchange. His raps start out decompressed on “Pac n Dre” then inflate, then explode. One of the benefits of playing a role is you playing against type, and on a song like the Juice WRLD-featuring “Honestly,” he ventures into droning singsong, relishing this freedom. These rousing tracks very much seem like repercussion-free, risk-seeking joyrides.
But even on Swervo, the real-life violence still persists. On the touching “Letter,” penned for his unborn son, he vows that his children will never have to “thug to survive”; they won’t worry about death lurking around every corner, an attempt to rectify the anxieties of his own childhood, as told in the album’s opening seconds: “Scared I wasn’t gon’ make it home some nights/Wondering am I gon’ be a homicide.” In his songs, shadows are cast over the entire city, a darkness through which unfeeling men creep and rob others of loved ones. “Long live that nigga Zack TV, heard he had a daughter/The police here ain’t solving murders, this ain’t Law & Order,” he raps to close out “Bonjour,” remembering a local vlogger who was shot and killed in Chicago. It’s no wonder Herbo can’t stop moving, and why he won’t put the gun down. | 2018-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Machine Entertainment Group | August 1, 2018 | 7.3 | 163f4d83-6977-4311-9596-421f82151fbe | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
A trilogy of reissues tells the story of a brilliant, unconventional, yet luckless British Invasion band let down by an industry that didn’t know what to do with them. | A trilogy of reissues tells the story of a brilliant, unconventional, yet luckless British Invasion band let down by an industry that didn’t know what to do with them. | The Zombies: *The Zombies / I Love You / R.I.P. * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-zombies-i-love-you-rip-the-zombies/ | The Zombies / I Love You / R.I.P. | At the peak of British Invasion fever, a quintet of bookish St. Albans teens intimated that the future of the UK “beat music” craze might sound less like the hyperactive R&B that made screaming Beatles fans so ecstatic and more like the stuff entrancing hipsters at the coffee shop. The Zombies’ first two singles, the noirish jazz-fusion psychodramas “She’s Not There” and “Tell Her No,” hit the Billboard top 10, making them instant stars—even bigger in the U.S. than the UK. “The Beatles had just broken America wide open, and there we were to trot along behind,” lead songwriter Rod Argent recalled. But lasting fame was not to be: After spending the next two years trying and failing to duplicate that success with little support from their label, Decca (the same company that infamously declined to sign the Beatles), they took an advance from CBS and holed up in Abbey Road Studios—in the hours that the Beatles weren’t recording Sgt. Pepper—to record their magnum opus, 1968’s Odessey and Oracle. Poorly promoted, the album tanked on both sides of the Atlantic, and Argent dissolved the band.
A year later, when Odessey single “Time of the Season” shot surprisingly up the American charts, Zombies lead singer Colin Blunstone was back in England selling insurance, and Argent had formed a new band, simply called Argent. Americans who tried to see the band on tour in 1969 came away even more addled when a dodgy American company sent two impostor bands on the road to perform as the Zombies, one of which included two future members of ZZ Top. Meanwhile, UK music fans were treated to a newly recorded version of “She’s Not There” by someone called Neil MacArthur, who was actually Blunstone. The Zombies were the band that wasn’t there: too far ahead of the curve at the start of their career, and too far behind it four years later.
For two decades after their dissolution, the Zombies’ were remembered mostly for their three classic singles: The first were two key historical markers of the British Invasion, the last a groovy reminder of the 1960s’ hippie-dominated denouement. The record industry’s non-stop cycles of reissues and remasters patched together the band’s legacy: Rhino’s 1987 CD reissue of Odessey and Oracle helped solidify the album’s rightful status as a psych-pop classic—Rolling Stone called it “a dazzling pop fantasia ripe for rediscovery” —and the 4xCD 1997 box set Zombie Heaven provided a long overdue and illuminating career retrospective for the rest of the band’s output. In 2019, Varese Sarabande re-compiled their recordings into a 5xLP vinyl set, and the same company has now repackaged much of the same material as individual albums—their self-titled 1965 debut, 1966’s I Love You, and R.I.P., which was recorded by Argent and White in late 1968 and soon shelved. Those who already own Zombie Heaven or the vinyl set, or anyone seeking new information about the band or alternate takes, will be disappointed in these spartan, low-budget reissues, each of which has already been re-released as Record Store Day exclusives. Essential they are not, but they do offer an opportunity to re-approach one of the strangest trajectories in rock history: the singles-and-filler first album, the second LP sold only in Europe and Japan, and the unreleased final album, recorded mostly without the lead singer in the wake of the group’s dissolution. Together, they trace the arc of an incredibly talented group that was done a significant disservice by an industry that could’ve made them stars in their own time.
The Zombies were formed in 1961 by Argent, who’d grown up listening to Stravinsky and Bartok before being bowled over by Elvis Presley and then jazz pianists Bill Evans and Jimmy Smith. Keen on the electric piano, Argent recruited some St. Albans pals—White, Blunstone, drummer Hugh Grundy, and guitarist Paul Atkinson—to start playing R&B covers at art schools and music halls around the city. Argent’s classical and jazz-informed piano approach instantly distinguished them, and Blunstone’s downy tenor—discovered during an early practice, when Argent pushed him to the front—proved the group’s secret weapon, capable of grinding out a cover of Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say,” then slipping into George Gershwin’s tranquil “Summertime.” In April 1964, the same month that the Beatles held down the top 5 spots on the Billboard Hot 100, the Zombies won a local songwriting competition, which led to a Decca contract and the opportunity to cut “Summertime” and three originals: White’s Beatles-influenced “You Make Me Feel Good” and rumbling surf-rocker “It’s Alright With Me,” and a new Argent-penned track called “She’s Not There.” The band considered “Summertime” for their lead single, but wisely settled on Argent’s composition as their public debut.
George Harrison was an early fan, raving about “She’s Not There” on the British music show Juke Box Jury, and with good reason. Like the rest of the British Invasion groups, the Zombies started with the blues—Argent borrowed a key lyric from John Lee Hooker’s “No One Told Me”—but added several twists. First, there was Blunstone’s calm, Chet Baker-esque croon, which seemed to belie the anxieties of Argent’s lyrics: was a woman merely ghosting him, or might she actually be a ghost? As Argent winds his Hohner pianet through White’s deep bassline and Grundy’s stilted drumming, which reels toward a hard hit on the fourth beat of each measure like a detective drugged by an evasive suspect, “She’s Not There” dials in on the uncanny unknown. The pre-chorus shifts into major-key panic mode and Grundy locks into a 4/4, setting the stage for Blunstone to soar up to a high A for the shrieking, unresolved climax.
Immediately, Decca sent the group off on a UK tour opening for Dionne Warwick, whose magnificent 1964 Bacharach/David collaboration inspired the band’s follow-up single, “Tell Her No.” Dialing back the dynamic extremes of “She’s Not There,” Argent created a song that brought rock ’n’ roll into dialogue with the moment’s most bewitching pop tunes: Warwick’s “Walk on By” and “A House Is Not A Home,” along with 1965’s Grammy-winning Record of the Year, “The Girl From Ipanema.” Blunstone’s vocal is at its most lustrous and vulnerable on “Tell Her No,” especially when he emerges out of the staccato chorus to coo, “Don’t hurt me now”—aimed not toward the woman of his dreams, but anyone else who might submit to her numinous charms. Few bands have ever started a career with as much out-of-the-box success—they were a rock band, first and foremost, but their skill with rueful, spooky melodrama suggested that they were destined for something much stranger.
Decca packaged the two originals with their version of “Summertime” onto 1965’s The Zombies (issued as Begin Here in the UK, with a different tracklist), along with White’s “Alright,” a few lesser originals and a handful of covers. A good version of the Miracles’ live medley connecting “You Really Got a Hold on Me” to Sam Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me” is balanced out by serviceable takes on Muddy Waters’ “Got My Mojo Workin’” and Solomon Burke’s “Can’t Nobody Love You.” From the moment that “She’s Not There” hit #3 on Billboard, Decca shot the band out of a touring cannon, and they wouldn’t land for another two and a half years. When they weren’t recording sets for American music shows like “Hullabaloo” and “Shindig,” they were shlepping their own gear into and out of venues on city-to-city package tours like Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars. They followed “Tell Her No” with four singles in 1965 alone, each of which peaked at a lower spot on the Hot 100 than its predecessor. The circular logic of the record business took over from there: Without a hit single, Decca wouldn’t foot the bill for album recording sessions.
Perhaps because they assumed that the Zombies had outlived their profitability in the States, Decca released the 1966 singles and B-sides compilation I Love You only through the label’s Dutch and Japanese divisions. This is a shame, because I Love You actually holds together quite well as an album, and shows that the Zombies had grown significantly as songwriters and instrumentalists. It opens with the short, mostly a cappella “The Way I Feel Inside,” a lovely showcase for Blunstone’s maturing voice, which segues into the singer’s first self-penned recording, the lush and dreamy ballad “How We Were Before.” White was coming into his own as well: His “You Make Me Feel Good” and “Don’t Go Away” are no less intoxicating for their obvious Beatles influence—he even nods directly to John Lennon with a few languid “ohhhhh” phrasings on the former. The Motown-flavored rave-up “Is This the Dream” and “Whenever You’re Ready,” which contains a potent Blunstone vocal and Argent solo, fizzled commercially in the U.S., as did the buttoned-up garage rock of Argent’s “Indication,” which Argent ended with a quasi-psychedelic organ solo—a major no-no for Top 40 DJs with quick trigger fingers. Perhaps Argent was ready to hop aboard the psych-rock train, if given the chance—or maybe he and the band were finished trying to meet the market on its own terms.
By mid 1967, the Zombies had come to realize just how much touring revenue they were losing to their management, and how little they’d been able to grow as recording artists by working with the same producer on every single. Finished with their Decca contract, Argent and White were eager to test their mettle in a heady new post-Revolver era, and they signed a one-off contract with CBS to record and produce Odessey and Oracle at Abbey Road. Argent and White’s songs were magnificent, but Blunstone had soured on the music business—Argent had to coax him through “Time of the Season” measure by measure—and when the band learned that the Odessey songs were nearly impossible to pull off live, they called it quits, playing their last show in December 1967.
While Blunstone went back to hawking insurance, Grundy took a job at a car lot, and Atkinson started training to become a computer programmer, Argent and White formed their own production company and recruited a few other players—the core of what would become Argent—to join them in the studio. Sessions from mid-December 1968 yielded the final single billed to the Zombies, the stately White composition “Imagine the Swan.” Revealing the prog-rock bedrock underlying Odessey, “Swan” borrows the chord sequence from Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” and the intricate harmonies of the Mamas and the Papas, topped with a mannered-yet-brassy Argent vocal that, in retrospect, sounds a lot like a young Freddie Mercury. Backed with the rococo instrumental “Conversation Off Floral Street,” the single hit the market and flopped. The Zombies were dead.
Or were they? Fittingly for a band that seemed to haunt the rock establishment even while it was a going concern, Argent and White concocted a post-mortem Zombies LP titled R.I.P. that would not see the light of day for decades. During the same December sessions that produced the final Zombies single, they cut Argent’s jaunty “She Loves the Way They Love Her,” White’s flute-and-harpsichord-haunted “Smokey Day,” and Argent’s mid-tempo ballad “I Could Spend the Day,” with a stately ascending melody anticipating the sound of British arena prog. Along with the new recordings, the duo resurrected a handful of tracks from a few years earlier, adding vocal and string overdubs to Argent’s “If It Don’t Work Out” (given to Dusty Springfield in 1965) and White’s magnificent “I’ll Call You Mine,” perhaps the band’s most flawless pure pop single, which had been collecting dust on a studio shelf for more than two years. Toward the end of Side A came the band’s other great lost work, the gothic acoustic “Girl Help Me,” with a stuttering rhythm and perfectly arranged harmonies that suggested the band knew exactly how to build on the foundation of “She’s Not There” and “Tell Her No,” but never got the chance. While the newer recordings occupied Side A of R.I.P., the polished-up early tracks were saved for Side B, giving the album a strange Benjamin Button vibe—as you listened, the band aged backwards. By all accounts, R.I.P. was ready for retail, but Argent shelved it to focus on his new band, which released its first album in 1970. Cold comfort for sure, but R.I.P. is one of the era’s great lost albums.
The Zombies got their official industry due in 2019, when the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs inducted the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The choice of Hoffs—who started out in L.A.’s Paisley Underground scene in the ’80s—was a commemoration of Odessey and Oracle’s impact on multiple generations of psychedelic pop bands. But such institutions are, by their very nature, bound to misrepresent careers like the Zombies’, focusing on the high points instead of the truth of a frustrating, mismanaged five-year existence. In their time and beyond, the Zombies are the rare Hall of Fame inductees who were viewed as a cult band for the majority of their time together. In a way, that makes this latest crop of reissues, which wrongly presents them as an album-centric band for their entire career, as strangely appropriate as it is inessential.
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Buy:
The Zombies: Rough Trade
I Love You: Rough Trade
R.I.P: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | August 3, 2020 | 7.2 | 16456209-4974-494d-9198-76ba1039e8ad | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
Though best remembered for its biggest hit, the UK singer’s eponymous 2006 debut remains unmatched in the weighty simplicity of its stories of love pursued and lost. | Though best remembered for its biggest hit, the UK singer’s eponymous 2006 debut remains unmatched in the weighty simplicity of its stories of love pursued and lost. | Corinne Bailey Rae: Corinne Bailey Rae | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/corinne-bailey-rae-corinne-bailey-rae/ | Corinne Bailey Rae | In another life, Corinne Bailey Rae would have been the type of artist whom Berry Gordy’s Motown committed to honing and presenting to the world—a luminescent talent and disciplined artist deeply aware of what moved her. This artistic confidence is unmistakable on the singer-songwriter’s eponymous 2006 debut, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year with a reissue and a bonus track, “Another Rainy Day.” Across the pond, far from the musical hub of Detroit, Rae took melodies reminiscent of Tammi Terrell and the simmering passion of Florence Ballard to spin the tales of a Black girl from Leeds. Over a decade later, Corinne Bailey Rae remains unmatched in the weighty simplicity of its stories of love pursued and lost, of a person adrift but hopeful.
With 12 smooth jams that do double time as ballads depending on the mood, the album showcased Rae not only as a vocalist, but also as an enviably candid writer. The sparse strings of lead single “Like a Star” weave in effortlessly as Rae confesses what new love has done to her. “Just like a song in my heart/Just like oil on my hands,” she sings, evoking the inexplicable bliss of attraction while making tangible love’s capacity to leave marks on our bodies. If the character Janie from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God had a soundtrack for her early days loving and seducing Tea Cake—the man she’d later run away with—it would be this song. The video, with its soft close-ups of Rae’s face interspersed with clips of a lapping river and bucolic forest, shows that often when falling, the only thing that can bring you down to earth is nature, a gift more overwhelming than your own growing emotions.
“Put Your Records On,” with its sun-kissed biking girls and endless, tree-lined roads, made a lullaby out of wellness long before it became a billion-dollar industry. Frolicking through fields and chasing ribbons, Rae was at its center, telling Black women it was not only worth it to escape, but that it was a kind of bliss, attainable for a sisterhood or a party of one. The smash hit didn’t just suggest stepping back and unplugging; it lightly commanded that listeners dwell in simple pleasures for their own spiritual health. Rae once again displayed her knack for adding color and texture to her universe, recalling a summer that “came like cinnamon,” and which met travellers dressed in “sapphire and faded jeans.”
This was the track that catapulted Rae to fame, and the song that continues to be the most beloved and well-known in her oeuvre, but there are other equally captivating and detailed songs on her debut, including the solemn “Till It Happens to You.” In contrast to the rest of the album, this track wallows in moody reflection as she ponders a relationship broken beyond repair. “Used to feel like May/I used to hear those violins playing our strings like a symphony,” she croons, sounding like a blues veteran who’s been through the ringer. “Ooo, love, I’m a fool to believe in you/’Cause I don’t know/No, I don’t know/Anymore.” A heartbreak is painful, but sometimes what hurts most is not knowing what comes after the split. Where do you put the love? A part of that answer lies in “Choux Pastry Heart,” where heartache folds into itself and becomes something that moves as you do. Rae projects the persona of someone who is weathered and resigned, a hopeless romantic who leaned further into love even as the hurt made her “cry so much I had to leave.”
The misty-eyed haze lifts on songs like “Call Me When You Get This,” “Breathless,” and “I’d Like To,” which are filled with promise and tentative new beginnings. Rae’s voice skips and twirls through relationships in bloom, but it’s when she veers from the fully formed worlds in her storytelling to broad observations that the album falters. “Don’t you know that patience is a virtue/And life is a waiting game,” from “Seasons Change,” are hollow beatitudes. “Butterfly” attempts to harness the metamorphosis that occurs as we grow from childhood to adulthood, but relies too heavily on clichés of rebirth. Though Rae occasionally leans on such well-worn phrases, her own insight remains the crux of the record. The fullness of her musical vision vibrates in the tenderly crafted moments, making the stumbles feel more like stopovers than interruptions.
Many artists chase timelessness, looking to nostalgia as a peg on which to hang their contemporary work. Corinne Bailey Rae offered a different way forward. Black women artists in the mid-2000s were often siloed into pop and expected to engineer endless chart-toppers; the artistic range of singers like Macy Gray, India.Arie, and Kelis did little to quell those expectations. Rae built on their hard-won autonomy, and set a model for a new generation of performers like Cleo Sol and Mahalia. Like the ride she took on “Put Your Records On,” Corinne Bailey Rae was a trip through the trails of her own life. If others tagged along that was fine by her—so long as the music still soothed her own soul.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | August 26, 2021 | 8 | 164a8bdd-21f5-45b7-92f2-afe665725b76 | Tarisai Ngangura | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tarisai-ngangura/ | |
The Atlanta legend’s latest continues his consistent streak of mostly-good, sometimes-awkward new material. | The Atlanta legend’s latest continues his consistent streak of mostly-good, sometimes-awkward new material. | Gucci Mane: Woptober II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gucci-mane-woptober-ii/ | Woptober II | Since re-emerging transformed from prison as a chiseled, healthy-living Adonis, Gucci Mane’s major projects have included an extra layer of gloss and a few unlikely commercial compromises. In the last year he’s teamed up with Bruno Mars and Justin Bieber on songs that boxed Gucci into a pillow-soft style that predictably didn’t showcase his strengths. It’s easy to envision the conference call with label executives that led to these cuts: “You present like a star now, Gucci. It’s time to get out in front with those radio singles.”
But these cuddly aberrations aside, Gucci has largely stayed loyal to his established sound. Woptober II is no more a natural sequel to the original 2016 mixtape than any other Gucci project; the title probably just means it happened to drop this month. Like most of his recent records, it’s another collection of mostly very good Gucci Mane songs, marred by occasional awkward bits.
Though still relentlessly paced (this is his second album of the year, following Delusions of Grandeur), Gucci’s output has come a long way from the low-quality data dumps he delivered while he was away, presumably just to keep new music flowing. His trademark swollen southern drawl has been remodeled as something more precise. On “Time to Move,” he moves effortlessly from a menacing whisper to a spiky flow as he recalls tales of waking up in new Bugatti and lies told on the witness stand.
Woptober II’s best moments are when Gucci has company. On “Bucking the System,” his voice is slow and hypnotic before Kevin Gates blows through the track, the yin-and-yang flows accentuating the duo’s chemistry. And on “Richer Than Errybody,” Gucci teams up with rising players YoungBoy Never Broke Again and DaBaby, sounding just as fit and uncompromising as his youthful collaborators.
There are silly moments. “Big Booty,” featuring Megan Thee Stallion, summons the spirit of 2 Live Crew. It’s a track that would have fallen flat even five years ago, when Nicki Minaj and Jennifer Lopez were causing a mini-revival in these kind of Miami bass-inspired ass anthems. And sleazy raps aside, it’s fair to say that Gucci regularly underperforms lyrically on Woptober II. The low point comes on “Tootsies,” when he tosses off a poorly considered jab at Kanye West’s mental health issues.
As for the beats, Gucci’s go-to team of star producers (London on da Track, Zaytoven, Southside, Da Honorable C.N.O.T.E, and more) mostly serve up archetypal Trap God instrumentals without ever distinguishing themselves. J. White Did It (of “Bodak Yellow” fame) encapsulates the malaise on “Move Me,” which leans on the old Dragnet theme tune like an out-of-shape distance runner sagging against a wall. It’s a reminder that one of Gucci’s stronger recent projects, Droptopwop, benefitted from being overseen by producer Metro Boomin, who tied everything together while keeping the rapper’s worst proclivities in check. | 2019-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | October 24, 2019 | 6.1 | 164e6d35-755b-46cb-b8e7-dca9bf61dd0a | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
On her second solo album, the former Destiny's Child singer mostly eschews balladry, melisma, and clean pop, instead delivering a tight, energetic set heavy on upbeat numbers and funk affectations. | On her second solo album, the former Destiny's Child singer mostly eschews balladry, melisma, and clean pop, instead delivering a tight, energetic set heavy on upbeat numbers and funk affectations. | Beyoncé: B’Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9378-bday/ | B’Day | According to most reasonable criteria, Beyoncé's second album B'Day is a success, outpacing her solo debut Dangerously in Love. Here, Beyoncé delivers precisely what many listeners have always wanted from her: a short, tight, and energetic set that's heavy on upbeat numbers and funk affectations, and light on the balladry and melisma.
B'Day captures the r&b singer at her warmest and most in-the-moment: There's a certain ramshackle messiness to these grooves, elliptically orbiting the classic pop song in a manner more reminiscent of Amerie's "1 Thing" than Beyoncé's sonically similar "Crazy in Love". Beyoncé sounds more relaxed as a singer, expanding on the Tina Turner resemblances she's been toying with recently, her performances growing ever-more instinctive and unpredictable in their appropriations of soul hollering. Most radically, the siren-assisted caterwaul of second single "Ring the Alarm" sounds genuinely (and marvelously) incoherent, her voice thrillingly sharp with anxiety and paranoia.
Remaining in soul mama character throughout, her newfound expressiveness fits so hand-in-glove with Richcraft or Neptunes-style funk drum patterns and surging horns that even when she departs from this style sonically-- such as on the percussive, Diwali-esque jam "Get Me Bodied", or the stiffly blaring "Upgrade U"-- the shift feels negligible, and you can still hear the ghosts of horn sections. Beyoncé's lyrics are also funnier and more idiosyncratic than ever: "I can do for you what Martin did for the people," she boasts on "Upgrade U"'s extreme makeover hard-sell, and I suspect she knows she's the only r&b singer who could deliver the line with a straight face.
So far so good, but what prevents this from being the classic pop album the above would suggest is that, well, Beyoncé simply isn't making classic pop anymore. By resolving the criticisms of her earlier work (too strident, too deliberate, too driven) Beyoncé has weakened her perfect pop technique. B'Day lacks the precision with which her earlier hits were crafted-- the alluring poise of "Baby Boy" is nowhere in evidence, and the glittering impregnability of the great Destiny's Child singles feels even more distant. B'Day sounds like an entire album of third and fourth singles, which is still better than an album of filler, but in a genre so overwhelmingly defined by its hit singles, a "Crazy in Love" or a "Baby Boy" can punch above its weight-- the consistency of "Déjà Vu" in this regard becomes a double-edged sword.
Most of all, though, Beyoncé just sounds too real here: It was her pitch-perfect plasticity which gave much of her earlier work its majestic aura, as if she had transcended ordinary goals in a narcissistic drive for perfection. Having voluntarily stepped down from her pedestal, she now struggles to inspire the same sense of awe: Her songs emote as intensely as before, but their emotions are all too human.
Ironically perhaps, this switch delivers its biggest pay-off, and B'Day's best song, with the ballad-of-sorts "Irreplaceable". It's as if, having lost the Midas touch of gleaming pop perfection, Beyoncé has opened up the possibility of stumbling on brilliance by accident. "You must not know 'bout me/ I can have another you in a minute/ Matter-fact he'll be here in a minute," she boasts to a swiftly exiting lover, in a hopelessly unconvincing attempt at callous indifference. Before, Beyoncé's approach to heartbreak was always literal, her voice and her words declaiming her feelings with a studied earnestness that at times was difficult to believe, let alone connect with. "Irreplaceable" is the first song in which Beyoncé lies to herself, and the way her voice perfectly betrays that lie (revealing a giveaway tremble in the stiff upper lip of the lyrics) simultaneously renders it her most sophisticated and her most honest performance to date. | 2006-09-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-09-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Pop/R&B | Sony | September 7, 2006 | 7.2 | 1652f3ab-acd5-4af1-be21-2d5a92205a77 | Tim Finney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tim-finney/ | |
The Philadelphia musician’s first record under her own name eschews the blown-out euphoria of her band Hop Along, but her voice remains an instrument of rare expressive power. | The Philadelphia musician’s first record under her own name eschews the blown-out euphoria of her band Hop Along, but her voice remains an instrument of rare expressive power. | Frances Quinlan: Likewise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/frances-quinlan-likewise/ | Likewise | Frances Quinlan has spent the past 10 years unleashing an indie-rock shout so ecstatic and alive that it seems to tear into the limits of singing whenever it appears. You will never hear someone holler with such grace and exactitude as Quinlan, in 2012, exploding the final moments of her band Hop Along’s second album, Get Disowned, as if her life, and perhaps the lives of countless others, depended on it. Scratching at the reaches of her power on a syllabic level—“Me-te-or, MAKE me YOUNG”—her rave-up crests and falls like the chart of a haywire heart monitor, as if she is wishing on a star not for herself, but for all of us. Her empathy is delivered with so much force that it could induce vertigo.
Quinlan started Hop Along solo as a teenager in 2004. As a child, she dreamed of writing short stories; she learned to sing from a woman in a castle in New Jersey. Behind the mic, Quinlan summons the high-and-wild electricity of freak folk à la Joanna Newsom, if powered by the shout-along catharsis of emo and grounded by the every-person storytelling of folk in general. When Hop Along solidified into a loud Philadelphia rock band in 2010, Quinlan’s voice scaled with it, perhaps to be heard above such maximal volume. She composed her first record under her own name, Likewise, with the intention of keeping her songs—which, in Hop Along, are arranged collectively—“closer to their original forms.”
Likewise is more minimal and elegant than any Hop Along record. There’s a lightness to the instrumentation as Quinlan broadens her sound to include synthesizers, strings, jaunty piano, the glittery clack of programmed beats, and harp from Mary Lattimore. Its highlights are two songs that Quinlan has said were first recorded but not used for Hop Along’s 2018 album Bark Your Head Off, Dog, called “A Secret” and “Went to LA”; she wrote Likewise around them. In both, you can hear the brittle surfaces of her acoustic strumming—like the cover art she painted, it feels unusually tactile—as well as unsentimental jolts of resilience. Her melodies wander inquisitively and move forward in unconventional ways. Quinlan also finds original nuances in her voice, like the sense of flight in how she sings an elongated “aaa” in “A Secret,” or the cleverly sputtered “no” that hangs off the edge of a chorus to “Your Reply.” Where previously her performances felt breathless, here there’s room to breathe.
Quinlan’s Hop Along lyrics typically narrate the possibly unheard stories of regular people (a waitress, an abused child, a huge family inhabiting a tiny apartment) in near-journalistic detail. Her project can feel like an exercise in exploding the ego, in effacing the “I” in favor of selfless curiosity and compassion for the world. This writerly flair lives on here: “I know it isn’t fair/Stories struggle for air,” she sings on the solemn “Lean,” and on “Now That I’m Back,” she details the gnarly profile of a woman who had a roach surgically removed from the inside of her skull, “and one night, ate Raid-seasoned spaghetti.”
But on Likewise, Quinlan more often presents these observations as fragments. The death of Czech author Bohumil Hrabal, who fell from a window (the details vary, she sings, “depending on the website”), makes its way into “Your Reply,” like a stray reflection in a diary before she continues on towards the personal. Filled with words that shouldn’t make sense in pop music—“wheelbarrow,” “orangutan,” “lemmings,” “cannibal” and “cannibalistic” both—her songs marvel in the obliqueness of language. “Somebody wrote ‘tender’/In the novel’s margins,” she sings on “Your Reply,” which really is peak Frances Quinlan.
It can be difficult to pinpoint just what Quinlan’s songs on Likewise might be about in a linear or narrative sense. But through her Dylanesque collages of dialogue, literary references, interiority, and mundanity, these central frictions emerge: between a scream and a lull, confession and abstraction, the poetic and the colloquial—ultimately, between people failing to communicate. “There just doesn’t seem to be much room for a reply,” she sings on “Your Reply.” “You were mid-sentence when I had to interrupt you in order to relate,” goes “Detroit Lake.” There’s something profound in how the album starts with “Piltdown Man,” a clinical reflection on an archaeologist, and concludes with an open-hearted appeal: “Now that I’m back/We should try again to talk.” The whole of Likewise—maybe of Quinlan’s catalogue—seems to probe this universal dilemma: our struggle to reach each other, to speak honestly and unguardedly.
Likewise’s nine songs often eschew the blown-out euphoria of Hop Along—even its synth-pop cover of Built to Spill’s eternally arresting “Carry the Zero” sounds a bit tempered. But the album draws you close with repeat listens. At its center is the miraculous, ferociously strummed “Went to LA,” which contains enough spark and awe to power a record twice as long. In her lyrics, Quinlan again negotiates the private and the public, pivoting from statements of personal desperation to pure exposition (“The owner of the laundromat gave me a ride home/She said she saw me come in alone”). As she carves, line by line, into the exquisite breaks of her singing, she finds clarity. “Oh the humiliation of having been/Perfectly understood,” she intones, giving way to a transcendent refrain—“Heaven is a second chance”—and clenching her words into screams before letting them free. These are felt lessons in vulnerability, and perhaps in the “self-preservation” she also sings of. In telling the stories of other people, Quinlan created one for herself; in the cracks of her colossal voice, it’s already a legend.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | February 5, 2020 | 7.7 | 165da914-834b-4445-9c1e-7d5b9fd65197 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The second album from the pop crooner uses the same method that made his debut such a commercial success. His spectacular voice doles out feelings in terms everyone can understand. | The second album from the pop crooner uses the same method that made his debut such a commercial success. His spectacular voice doles out feelings in terms everyone can understand. | Sam Smith: The Thrill of It All | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-smith-the-thrill-of-it-all/ | The Thrill of It All | Sam Smith is an old soul with an easily bruised heart. He’s looking for radiant, cinematic love, the kind that springs from a meet-cute at the supermarket when you reach for a can of soup and happen to bump into the man of your dreams. He knows what it’s like to yearn for someone who barely notices you’re alive. He’s well acquainted with romantic desperation, the kind of pitiable state where you betray everything you believe in because you’re just so lonely. And he became one of this decade’s biggest pop stars because he was willing to take all of those desires, no matter how embarrassing, and lay them out in terms everyone can understand.
When you become this successful this fast—2014’s In the Lonely Hour has moved over four million units in the U.S. alone—there’s no sense in reinventing the wheel. His new album, The Thrill of It All, leans on the same strengths that made In the Lonely Hour one of this decade’s most successful debuts. His voice is an ocean liner that can turn on a dime; his ballads are built around mournful piano melodies and fleshed out with choral arrangements; he doles out feelings in bushels.
It’s a formula that remains commercially unimpeachable—lead single “Too Good at Goodbyes” has lingered around the Billboard Top 10 since its release—but it can be exhausting, especially over the course of an entire album. His specific brand of sadness is dark and sticky like molasses, and decent songs get snared. One of two collaborations with the writer/producer Malay, “Say It First” deftly apes the moody, spacey sound of the xx but drags itself down with hopeless neediness. And while “Midnight Train” sounds a little—OK, a lot—like a slow-motion version of Radiohead’s “Creep,” Smith ruins it by agonizing over leaving a relationship that isn’t working: “Am I a monster? What will your family think of me?” You wish the characters in these songs would show themselves a little more respect.
There are a few welcome beams of light. Smith is an Amy Winehouse devotee—he was tweeting context-free lines from “Wake Up Alone” just a few weeks ago, so you know it’s real—and you get the feeling he’d love to make an album as frank and true as Back to Black. Spare bonus track “Nothing Left for You” summons the same genuine rage that made the pissy “I’ve Told You Now” a highlight on In the Lonely Hour. And you can actually imagine Winehouse rolling like a thunderstorm over songs like “One Last Song” and “Baby, You Make Me Crazy,” which leans on a slice of Kool & the Gang’s sunny instrumental “Breeze & Soul.” These aren’t happy songs by any stretch of the imagination: “One Last Song” is a kiss-off to the man who haunted In the Lonely Hour, and Smith hammers “Baby, You Make Me Crazy” home by mewling in that dusky falsetto: “Why’d you have to fill my heart with sorrow?” “I call them ’dance and cry’ songs,” Smith told Rolling Stone. “I love songs like that.” Call them whatever you want; these are the warmest, most radiant songs in his catalog. There’s joy in them, or at the very least a light at the end of the tunnel.
The Thrill of It All even features a few songs that leave heartbreak in the rear-view mirror. They aren’t all successful, but they’re interesting experiments for someone whose bread and butter is romantic dissatisfaction. “Too Good at Goodbyes” may sound like a goopier version of Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain,” but it’s a snapshot of someone who’s grown up enough to step past hopeless wallowing. Learning to harden your heart doesn’t feel good, but it’s a necessary move in a cruel world. “Pray” is a limp collaboration with a past-his-prime Timbaland, but its premise is fascinating given its singer’s notorious naivete: Where do you turn when you just can’t ignore what’s going on in the world around you? (Smith wrote the song after spending five days in Mosul, Iraq with the charity War Child.) And “HIM,” on which Smith inhabits the shoes of a gay child in the South struggling to reconcile his religious upbringing and his sexual orientation, is even more intriguing. It’s an explicit coming-out song, and that’s a surprising choice for someone who consciously avoided gender pronouns on In the Lonely Hour so straight people could find themselves in his songs too. It may come off a little like Costco-brand Perfume Genius, but it’s a start.
That’s a fair way to describe The Thrill of It All as a whole: it’s a start, or at least a fresh one. The last few years haven’t been kind to Smith from a PR perspective; he’s developed a nasty habit of jamming his foot into his mouth. He said apps like Tinder and Grindr are “ruining romance,” alienating fans who use them because they’re anxious or don’t feel safe trying to meet people; he discovered racism one night in London and couldn’t believe how unhelpful the police were; he drank too much at the Oscars, misspoke, and got raked over the coals the next day. In short, he seems like a well-meaning, guileless person, one whose music reconciles with being held as a person of prominence and one of the most famous gay people on the planet. “I’m not the most eloquent person,” said Smith in an empathetic profile in The New York Times. “I didn’t get the best grades in school. I mean, I’m just good at singing.” | 2017-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | November 7, 2017 | 5.8 | 165e7aed-acfd-4566-b06d-91de3f2eef5b | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
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 subversive 1984 debut from the UK synth-pop group, an exquisite-sounding album that snuck an ode to amyl nitrate and orgasms onto pop charts around the world. | 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 subversive 1984 debut from the UK synth-pop group, an exquisite-sounding album that snuck an ode to amyl nitrate and orgasms onto pop charts around the world. | Frankie Goes to Hollywood: Welcome to the Pleasuredome | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/frankie-goes-to-hollywood-welcome-to-the-pleasuredome/ | Welcome to the Pleasuredome | Think of the flush that must have crept over Mike Read’s face the moment he realized that when Frankie sang “come,” they meant cum. Pupils and capillaries dilated, he must have scanned the lyrics printed on the sleeve of “Relax” and read the word “suck” as if for the first time in his life. By the time the BBC 1 Radio DJ declared the song “obscene” on air, “Relax” had already become a mainstay on his station—contemporary estimates say it played 70 to 100 times in six weeks—extolling the pleasures of gay sex to some thousands of unsuspecting listeners. Eleven days into 1984, “Relax” fluttered to No. 6 on the UK charts. Yanked from airplay, it soared to the top by the end of the month.
The tale of Read’s sudden panic quickly grew. Before long, he hadn’t just declined to play the single on his hit countdown show; he had dragged the needle off the disc halfway through its runtime and banned it on the spot. Depending on who’s telling the story, he also either flung the record against the wall or snapped it over his knee. For his part, Read claims he wasn’t all that bothered; he simply ran out of airtime. But he will concede that he noticed some “vile words” and a “simulated phallus” printed on the cover, and he did indeed pronounce the whole thing obscene.
While he didn’t have the authority to ban “Relax” from broadcast himself, Read’s declaration made its way up the chain, scandalizing BBC executives as it went. Apparently, it had never occurred to them that “come” meant anything other than showing up. “The group seemed to confirm [the lyrics] as referring to fellatio and ejaculation, which are not exactly subjects which I think are appropriate for broadcasting on the radio,” said Derek Chinnery, BBC 1 Controller, two weeks after Read’s proclamation. “We could have said there is a dual meaning to this song, that it was a kind of nonsense lyric about relaxing. But when the performers themselves confirmed that it was referring to these sexual aberrations then it didn’t seem to me appropriate that we should play it at all.” That day, the BBC learned a key lesson: If you don’t know what a song is about, it’s probably about sex. And if you’re certain a song is about nothing, it’s definitely about sex.
“Relax,” the crown jewel in Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s debut album, Welcome to the Pleasuredome, went largely unnoticed for the first three months after its release in the fall of 1983. An irresistible performance on the Top of the Pops’ 20th-anniversary show catapulted the single into public consciousness: Lead singer Holly Johnson vamped along to its pre-recorded studio glitz dressed in leather and flagging piss, while his co-vocalist Paul Rutherford—the handsome clone to Johnson’s charismatic scamp—danced as if he had just stumbled into the eighth discotheque of the night. The BBC fracas cemented the song’s illicit appeal. Everything that was supposed to nip a music career in the bud—politics, overproduction, overt homosexuality, censorship—only poured fuel on Frankie’s fire.
The band spent months frothing up clubs in their native Liverpool, cultivating a leather-and-chains look they swore owed more to Mad Max’s road warriors than any particular fetish scene. “We really had to hit hard to get off the streets … to create a reaction, especially in Liverpool because there’s so many bands,” Johnson told NME. “To stand out we had to give it loads, loads of sex because that was the easiest and quickest shocker to get attention.” They revved into gear in February 1983, when they snagged a slot on the music TV program The Tube. Wearing mesh crop tops, they banged out an embryonic rendition of “Relax,” then a bare-bones funk ditty that interpolated the Lady in the Radiator song from Eraserhead.
Among their viewers was producer Trevor Horn, the studio wizard behind era-defining hits like the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” and Yes’ “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” He had just launched a new label called Zang Tuum Tumb with his wife Jill Sinclair, former NME writer Paul Morley, and fellow producer Gary Langan. A few weeks later, Horn heard a more developed version of “Relax” on David “Kid” Jensen’s Radio 1 show. Impressed, he started calling around to sign Frankie. They had the spark; he had the finesse that could coax it into an inferno.
ZTT’s parent company, Island Records, had previously passed up a chance to add Frankie to their roster, claiming, ambiguously, “They don’t have the right image.” Horn and Morley, meanwhile, saw a path to the promised land paved in leather. On both sides of the Atlantic, listeners hungered for an electronic sound that overpowered the senses. In the first few years of the decade, New York acts like Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel, and Afrika Bambaataa dreamed up electro tracks that heralded cyborg futures, while in San Francisco, Sylvester and Patrick Cowley pitched disco into a new, accelerated lane. Aesthetically glamorous, sexually ambiguous bands like Culture Club, Soft Cell, and Eurythmics were taking the new audiovisual arena of MTV by storm, ushering in what would be dubbed the second British Invasion. But where Boy George and Marc Almond tended to dodge direct questions about their personal sexualities, Frankie’s two vocalists left the closet far behind. (The rest of the band—Brian Nash, Peter Gill, and Mark O’Toole, collectively known as “the lads”—were straight.)
”[Horn] thought the gay thing was the most dangerous thing about us, but he loved that,” said Rutherford. Morley agreed it was ZTT’s job to inflame Frankie’s most scandalous appeal: “What a record company should do is exaggerate the raw material of its artists; most companies remove or reduce it.”
For months, Frankie and Horn worked “Relax” from a libidinal sketch into an erotic phantasmagoria. Horn had at his disposal a Fairlight CMI, the nascent digital audio workstation newly favored by Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, and Peter Gabriel. “He was one of about three people in England who owned and knew how to use a Fairlight computer synthesizer,” said Rutherford. The machine enabled precise visual sequencing; you could etch melodies and rhythmic patterns directly on the screen with a light pen. It was also the first commercially available digital sampler that could record sounds directly into the machine and play them back at any pitch on the keyboard.
Working with a slew of session musicians, Horn teased layers and layers of outré sound out of the Fairlight—a deliciously sleazy three-note bass strut, candied digital horns, a constellation of syncopated percussion—all building toward a crescendo he called “the orgasm effect.” “I imagined it was dawn, Holly had climbed to the top of a mosque, held his arms in the air and called all of these hordes forward to have sex with him,” he said. “I put a huge orgasm in the middle, the biggest orgasm anybody had ever been had by anybody.”
It worked. “Relax” satisfied listeners starving for sound that walloped them more than it washed over them. It also sent the competition scrambling. Early synth advocate Gary Numan said the single “plunged me into a pit of despair. The production was so good, the sounds so classy, that it seemed to move the entire recording business up a gear—we were all left floundering, trying to catch up.”
While Horn and the band toiled away on Frankie’s sound, Morley began crafting an equally infectious media campaign. Riffing on Katharine Hamnett’s “Choose Life” design (a reference to Buddhism, not abortion), he penned a sequence of enigmatic slogans and printed them on blank white T-shirts in big, black letters: Frankie say relax. Frankie say war! Hide yourself. Frankie say arm the unemployed. Morley himself liked to wear a T-shirt that said, “Propaganda will give you the truth.” In interviews, he was equally prone to sloganeering: “I condemned [manipulation] when it was done badly. Great manipulation I adore.” By the summer of ’84, the shirts were everywhere—a fad, sure, but also a prescient bit of agitprop. Ubiquitous directives with no clear authority behind them might make you wonder about your susceptibility to authority’s tools in general.
Frankie’s second single, the anti-war rumble “Two Tribes,” debuted at No. 1 in June 1984. With Frankiemania at a fever pitch, the natural next step was to let the band play across an album’s length—and with their prefab grandiosity, it only made sense that their debut LP would sprawl across two discs, an opulent oasis in the midst of Thatcherite austerity. Despite their cultural hold, Frankie still had a lot to prove. Naysayers claimed they were too polished, too glossy; all style, no substance; industry puppets lending their pretty faces to Horn’s studio indulgence.
“We get a lot of interviews where people say, ‘We hear that you can’t play your instruments and that you were totally created by Trevor Horn,’” complained Johnson. “It’s so tedious for us, and it makes us resent the record company, which is not a healthy situation. ZTT didn’t go out of their way to deny the rumors, because it’s to their advantage for people to believe that they are wondrous Svengalis.”
Welcome to the Pleasuredome would only further polarize their reception. Released at the end of October 1984, it boasted tauter versions of “Relax” and “Two Tribes” than the luxuriant 12" mixes that had been ringing out in clubs all summer. Its title track, meanwhile, swelled to a tumescent 14 minutes, rooted in a shuddering bass groove: a glimmering showcase of Horn’s studio prowess and a hearty welcome indeed.
A clutch of cover songs deepened the band’s complex love affair with the United States. They had never visited the country, but its cultural stranglehold fascinated them; they named themselves after an advertisement for Frank Sinatra’s first film role, while Johnson took his given name from Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn. Frankie raced through Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” at 157 BPM, faithfully took on Dionne Warwick’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” and sprawled across a hi-NRG version of Edwin Starr’s “War,” where they tasked a Ronald Reagan impressionist with reading both a Hitler quote about beauty and a meditation on revolutionary love by Marxist thinker David Cooper. (Cooper also wrote the mock-posh dissection of what an orgasm really is on the footnote track “Tag.”) Rather than a direct protest against imperial brutality, Frankie’s “War” seemed to blare a warning about the evolving nature of power in an era where cable television advertised both the threat of nuclear armageddon and a spread of convenient options for escaping its attendant stress. A seasoned actor sat in the White House and the news became just another product for the masses to consume.
While some were quick to label Pleasuredome an instant masterpiece, for certain critics, the glaze over Frankie’s political and literary convictions cracked on impact. Creem pronounced it a “put-on and a con, a flim-flam scam of a sham, a hip hype calculated solely to separate as much money as possible from as many people as possible as fast as possible before all the young rubes wake up and realize they’ve been fleeced.” Record called it “stagey and sophomoric,” reiterating the suspicion that Frankie were no more than “puppets for ZTT masterminds.” They had a right to be skeptical; half the sounds on the album poured out of a machine that had only been on the market for five years, and Horn was one of only a few producers who knew how to deploy it to its full potential. If you took the measure of a band by how long they spent wrangling their own gear, Frankie fell short—no more than a handful of pinballs bouncing around ZTT’s brilliant machine.
It’s true that there are oceans between that first scrappy Tube performance and the sumptuous opera that unfurled inside Pleasuredome. But Johnson’s electricity—his knowing poise, the twinkle in his eye, the ripples in his voice—surges through Pleasuredome’s entire lifespan, from demo to marquee. He’s as much in love with the camera on the Tube spot as he is in the first Bacchanalian video for “Relax,” which, among other delights, shows him soaking up a golden shower in a subterranean fetish club. (Naturally, the clip was also banned from the BBC and never cleared to air on MTV.) Listen to the way he trills his Rs on the word “erect” in “Welcome to the Pleasuredome,” or the vibrato he relishes for measures on end on “Black Night White Light,” and any thought of his emptiness shrivels up. Only a music press that discounted the power of performance itself—that shunted voice, presence, and attitude off to the side in favor of technical dexterity—would dare call him a puppet.
The same media preoccupied with who played which instruments in the studio also harbored a phobia of pleasure itself, especially in combination with politics. But against a dreary backdrop of privatization, plague, deprivation, and shame, what choice did Frankie have but to dazzle? Their politics were in their citations of revolutionary figures and also gleamed across “Krisco Kisses,” a paean to fisting: “You fit me like a glove, my love/You fit me like a glove!”
Pleasuredome rang out into the years that followed, emblematizing the ’80s and loosening the way for bands like Erasure, who would carry a similar torch into the rave years. The album turned out to be the apex of Frankie’s short-lived career. They followed it in 1986 with Liverpool, which flopped, and disbanded in the wake of intra-band aesthetic conflict and legal scuffles with ZTT—a by-the-books demise. But for a season, Frankie Goes to Hollywood pierced through the clouds on the back of the most thunderous orgasm anyone had ever heard.
It didn’t take long for the sex and the thrill of the music to evaporate from collective memory. By the fall of ’84, parody T-shirts poked fun at the sheer ubiquity of Morley’s originals: Who give a Sh!t what Frankie say?, they read. By 1997, a Frankie Say Relax shirt prompted uproarious canned laughter all by itself on an episode of Friends—a symbol of a bygone media obsession. Four years later, Zoolander laundered “Relax” into a gag of its own. Once a scandal and a threat, the song deflated into the non-referential gibberish the BBC had first assumed it to be. Frankie’s eroticism, formerly a tidal force, trickled away into sterile nostalgia.
But this story isn’t only about sex. Pleasuredome culminates in Frankie’s left-turn third single, an undanceable ballad the label marketed as a Christmas song, complete with a Nativity pageant video. On “The Power of Love,” the band swan-dives into total, unblemished sincerity: no cheek, no wink. From the depths, Johnson sings of real, obliterating love, the kind of love that atomizes and rearranges reality, the kind of love that has nothing to do with property, propriety, or ownership, and everything to do with surrender. He calls it “death-defying.” What a gift that “The Power of Love” came about more than a full decade before the dawn of Auto-Tune. You can hear Johnson striving for these notes; landing flat, hearing his failure, and correcting; hoisting himself up microtone by microtone to each sublime plateau.
Frankie arrived in a splash of scandal, pressurizing dancefloors with euphoric club mixes. With “The Power of Love,” they also insisted that sexual and spiritual ecstasies need not be mutually exclusive. Far from it—they feed each other. Slipping a fist into your beloved could be a more fervent act of love than slipping on a ring before God. Instances of mind-wiping abandon crystallize into the highest devotion: love unbound by time or space. Pleasure, from music or sex or both, didn’t trivialize true feeling. It bored a hole into the heart of it.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan. | 2024-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ZTT | June 23, 2024 | 8.7 | 16616422-348e-45fc-9623-886dbbbca5f2 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
A deluxe reissue of the band’s 1976 live fantasia highlights its charms and absurdities. It remains a messy, psychedelic document of Zeppelin in their imperial era. | A deluxe reissue of the band’s 1976 live fantasia highlights its charms and absurdities. It remains a messy, psychedelic document of Zeppelin in their imperial era. | Led Zeppelin: The Song Remains the Same | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/led-zeppelin-the-song-remains-the-same/ | The Song Remains the Same | The witching hour approaches. A full moon peeks through the thick, English fog. Jimmy Page, hair curled like a hobbit’s, crawls up the slopes of a jagged mountainside. At the summit, he encounters a Gandalf figure in a white, hooded robe, lamp in hand. The mountain wizard raises his head and fixes Page with a serene look. But this is no passive observer—the wizard’s wrinkled visage ages in reverse to reveal Page himself, first as a man, then a boy, a baby, a fetus bathed in starlight. Somewhere, in the distance, we hear the atonal skronk of a violin bow slapping against guitar strings. The wizard re-ages. Lightning crashes. Then, he pulls out a sword.
Maybe it was never publicly acceptable to be a nerd until the internet made everyone a nerd. But the historical record does not quite account for the world-breaking popularity of Led Zeppelin, who married a musical synthesis of blues, rock, and cock with a deep love of all things occult and fantastical, and more specifically, The Lord of the Rings. They worked from the midpoint between the jocks and dungeon masters, singing metaphorical allusions to anal sex and literal references to Gollum. The critics thought they were hacks, but the fans regarded them as golden gods, and for a decade they expanded and crystallized the myth of rock’n’roll as portal to primordial consciousness.
Stoned longhairs will blast “Dazed and Confused” out of parking lots for the rest of time, but to see what Zeppelin were all about you have to watch Robert Plant perform. A newly remastered reissue of The Song Remains the Same, the band’s 1976 concert film, provides a technicolor document of the band at its extravagant, excessive powers. Filmed during a three-night stint at Madison Square Garden in 1973, The Song Remains the Same is not the best music the band ever played or the best they ever sounded live. But it is a faithful portrayal of Led Zeppelin during their imperial era, as they rode an unbroken streak of creative genius and shattered sales records all over the world. (This reissue follows a previous remaster from 2007; the new one is louder and available on more formats, if that’s your thing, and switches up the sequencing to allow a nearly half-hour long version of “Dazed and Confused” to live on its own side of vinyl.)
The Song Remains the Same was stitched together from those three shows (in part because the band was partying too much to nail it every night), and the film footage was fleshed out with new material shot at a sound stage the next year, where the passage of time required bassist John Paul Jones to wear a wig. In When Giants Walked the Earth, a highly subjective and salacious biography, Jimmy Page said the soundtrack “wasn’t necessarily the best live material we had but it was the live material that went with the footage so it had to be used. So, you know, it wasn’t like A Magical Night. But it wasn’t a poor night. It was an honest sort of mediocre night.” The soundtrack is made more relevant by the accompanying movie, which comes as part of a “super deluxe boxed set” including assorted memorabilia associated with the film and an essay from Cameron Crowe.
The movie combines the traditional concert film with a few backstage vignettes (mostly starring band manager Peter Grant, a notoriously bombastic and protective figure) and, most infamously, a series of narrative sequences featuring symbolic representations of the band’s members. That’s how we get Jimmy Page climbing up the mountaintop, and somehow more absurdly, Robert Plant sailing a skiff toward a beach where he buries a flaming sword in the sand and battles through several knights to save a fair maiden. These cornball scenes were dated even then—the movie, which blew through its deadline by 18 months and required two directors to finish, was savaged by critics—but they do give you a sense of the magnified egos at play. The performances do the rest: the defiantly open-shirted Plant cradling his microphone against his sweaty chest; Page’s sparkly epaulets and double-necked guitar dramatics; the entirety of “Moby Dick,” a technically astounding drum solo nonetheless so alienating as a visual experience that the rest of the band would literally leave the stage to refresh their drinks.
Zeppelin hadn’t yet lost the thread—that would happen a few years later, when heroin entered the picture—but they still sounded a little haggard. Plant’s quadruple-octave range was starting to go, evidenced by the high notes he doesn’t even attempt on the notably restrained “Rock and Roll” and “Over the Hills and Far Away.” (The latter, which features a wildly meandering solo, was left off the initial film release.) But even a haggard Led Zeppelin was an elemental example of what a rock band could sound like at its most kickass. John Bonham hits his drums like he’s tunneling a hole through space and time; Page’s sleazy, psychedelic guitar tone would launch a million imitators. Playing this loud is a mandate, not a suggestion.
To avoid overthinking it: It’s Zeppelin in their near-primes performing nearly two hours of some of the heaviest music ever made. If you’ve ever enjoyed their music, or rock music in general, you’re going to find something to enjoy. You have the paleosexual grooves of “Whole Lotta Love,” the cosmic frippery of “Dazed and Confused” (the violin bow, however pretentious, still sounds great), the head-kicking riffage of “The Ocean” and “Black Dog.” That they pull off the tempo and coordination required on the title track is a kind of magic trick, and though Plant has disavowed his “Does anybody remember laughter?” ad lib during “Stairway to Heaven,” it’s still a sweetly earnest moment in a song that, to many ears, has calcified into a hokey sigil of the whole classic rock era. Rock stars would soon age out of presenting themselves like this without irony, or self-consciousness. Why not giggle about bustles and hedgerows, if that’s what it took to have a good time?
Despite his fraying vocals, Plant is the star of the film due to his sun-god looks, a driving force of the band’s appeal. (”They thought it was my fault Robert Plant had such a big cock,” said director Joe Massot, who was eventually replaced, of an early screening the band hated.) Not long after, he’d break his leg in a car accident, signaling a chaotic period where Page got deeper into drugs and Bonham got deeper into the alcohol addiction that made him an occasionally violent terror. Most tragically, Plant’s five-year-old son would die suddenly in 1977, creating an emotional chasm between him and the band that never healed, not before Bonham’s death in 1980. They were a transcendent group for only a short while, a function of their era and talent.
Because they never stayed together like the Rolling Stones, or became public-facing cultural ambassadors like the solo Beatles, it can feel a little tricky to place Led Zeppelin in a modern context. Maybe it’s banal to suggest yet again that the popularity of rock music has diminished since the 1970s, but it’s frankly mind-blowing to watch this and remember that millions of people once wanted to watch Robert Plant pretend to sword fight and Jimmy Page encounter a fictional wizard version of himself, wrapped around scruffy solos and vocal runs meant to ignite stoned minds. It feels like a true documentary, in that it locates and explains this particular moment in time. Unlike some other concert films, there’s plenty of audience shots. Two fans, seen during “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” stick out to me: A woman in some kind of embroidered robe, who sits with her hands folded as though she’s watching a play. Next to her, a man in a mustache stares ahead, mouth open, totally slack-jawed and transfixed. Slowly, he begins to smile. | 2018-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic / Swan Song | September 8, 2018 | 7.3 | 166c411a-1642-4096-8416-4f79c8927bb7 | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | |
On his third album, the antics of Mac DeMarco are muted in favor of his impeccable songwriting, which shines through more than ever with warmth and precision. | On his third album, the antics of Mac DeMarco are muted in favor of his impeccable songwriting, which shines through more than ever with warmth and precision. | Mac DeMarco: This Old Dog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23125-this-old-dog/ | This Old Dog | The thing people love about Mac DeMarco is also the thing people hate about Mac DeMarco. To fans, he’s a decidedly unpretentious singer-songwriter with a wacky sense of humor. His extracurricular gross-out antics—getting naked in videos, sticking a drumstick up his ass onstage—are evidence that he doesn’t take himself or the world too seriously, and is someone who rightly thinks rock music has room for the fun and silly. To his detractors, these stunts are at the very least an annoying mark of an archetype—the lazy, mugging, unshaven, drifting-through-life slob à la Bill Murray in Stripes—that has worn out its welcome in the 2010s. DeMarco’s actual music is chill, loping, slightly goofy, slightly druggy, and sometimes seemingly half-asleep, which is to say, it has such a clear relationship to his persona that it amplifies the reaction to his persona. You have to take the whole thing—the guy who shows up in videos and onstage, and the person singing these songs—together.
At this point, a radical change-up for DeMarco would be weird—he’s got his style, it works, and he’s sticking with it. But This Old Dog, DeMarco’s third album, does show some signs of growth. Compared to the two records before it, the new album is less cluttered, never using two words when one will do, and generally going easy on the woozy guitar effects. There’s more acoustic guitar and less processing, which frees it from the post-chillwave context of his earlier music. For a guy who seems to live life off the cuff and in the moment, his music feels more timeless.
This approach brings to mind singer-songwriters of an earlier era, particularly iconoclasts like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, and JJ Cale. The title track brings to mind Little Joy in its unhurried and confident sense of swing, and DeMarco’s natural warmth and weariness shine through. “Baby You’re Out” tumbles beautifully through its chord changes like a soccer ball falling down a stairwell that manages to hit every fourth step. “One Another” twinkles like an earlier generation’s soda jingle, with a little slouch that invites finger snaps with every backbeat. If 2 brought to mind a dank basement, the best songs here throw open the windows and let in the sunshine.
The move to a more “classic” sound suits DeMarco’s music, and it’s also a reminder that what at first glance seems like laziness might actually be brutal efficiency. On a casual listen, DeMarco seems to kick back and let everything fall into place, but his music demonstrates a relentless devotion to craft, with all the fundamentals intact. Each melodic shift, every turnaround on the chords during the choruses, every bridge—all are exactly where they should be. Even though they are not derivative, you swear you’ve heard them before because they show such a proficiency for songwriting structure.
By now, DeMarco has mastered the art of recording, at least within the parameters he’s established for himself. In addition to playing every instrument, he produced and engineered This Old Dog, and the arrangements are minimal and impeccable. His voice is recorded bone-dry to enhance his conversational tone—he sounds like he’s never more than a barstool away. The bass and drums are so locked-in they seem like a single instrument. Every brush of acoustic guitar sounds like it’s coming from right in front of you, and when he cuts loose on his electric and gets spacier, as he does during a gnarly freak-out that serves as the coda to the lengthy “Moonlight on the River,” the textures are both rich and thematically appropriate.
There’s a longstanding idea in pop songwriting that, depending on how the words are delivered, you can say a great deal with clichés, and DeMarco’s approach to lyrics has always been disarming in its simplicity. A great deal of what has been called “indie rock” thrives on being elliptical and obtuse—think Stephen Malkmus, a slacker guitar hero from an earlier generation who has some surface-level similarity with DeMarco, but never wanted to give too much away. You never knew exactly what Malkmus was singing about; Mac’s approach to words is more akin to a highway billboard, short and sweet enough to be heard when driving by at 75 MPH. A song like “My Old Man” takes a common sentiment (“Looks like I’m seeing more of my old man in me”) but DeMarco’s unvarnished approach helps these mundane observations land, and those who know something about his life and his troubled relationship with his father get an extra layer of meaning. Sometimes the words are pure boilerplate (“My heart still beats for you,” “A wolf who wears sheep’s clothes”) but since low-key craft is the order of the day, “mechanical” isn’t such a damning adjective.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with This Old Dog, it’s more that DeMarco is keeping his sights low. Some people might appreciate this record more than his last two, with the extra refinement of the sound, others may prefer the earlier stuff, which had a bit more humor and with lyrics that painted more colorful pictures. It’s a push. DeMarco’s problem, if you can call it that, is a good one to have—he owns his sound and continues to write songs that fit within it. For DeMarco and his audience both, all joy depends on this comfort. | 2017-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | May 4, 2017 | 7.9 | 166d2f7b-d28f-48c0-b44a-5f9d8ebdd515 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The producer also known as Mincemeat or Tenspeed collides the feverish energy of contemporary noise and techno for his shortest and most potent release yet. | The producer also known as Mincemeat or Tenspeed collides the feverish energy of contemporary noise and techno for his shortest and most potent release yet. | Davey Harms: World War | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/davey-harms-world-war/ | World War | When Providence producer Davey Harms began releasing music, originally under the name Mincemeat or Tenspeed, he was a beat-driven outlier in the 2000s noise scene. Armed with only a looper and a phalanx of distortion pedals, Harms triggered pugilistic flurries of locked-groove beats. Dan Deacon was an early champion, telling Pitchfork in 2007 that Harms is “my favorite performer right now.” But when Zum Records boss George Chen spoke to the site in 2010 about releasing Mincemeat’s breakthrough, Strange Gods, he admitted that “hardcore noise people might not be inclined to include [it], because it’s fun and has a beat to it.” A decade later, Harms hasn’t changed his approach, but the noise landscape has undergone a tectonic shift towards club music. With his new album, World War, Harms taps into both contemporary noise and techno, combining their feverish energy in a thrilling, off-the-rails collision.
Like Providence contemporaries Lightning Bolt and Container, Harms’ music is built on aggressive repetitions that amplify subtle variations. This quality intensified after Harms began releasing music on Hausu Mountain, the genre-melting Chicago label whose founders Maxwell Allison and Doug Kaplan were among Mincemeat’s early fans. On 2016’s Cables, released under his own name, Harms loosened his pedal-only set-up without compromising that barreling intensity. On Soundsystem, a 2017 follow-up credited to World War, Harms broke further from his comfort zone with dynamic rhythms to compliment his expanding instrumentation. Appropriate for an album named after one moniker and credited to his other, World War takes the best qualities from each release and produces a leaner, meaner fusion. At under 28 minutes, it’s Harms’ shortest and most potent release yet.
World War snakes and soars over six tracks like the strange creature on its cover, half B-52 bomber and half Beetlejuice sandworm. “Dealer’s Choice” kicks into gear with thudding bass notes and an onslaught of drums, until a whining synth slithers into the frame. Harms’ favorite method of gradually piling on noise and polyrhythms persists, but with a small adjustment of trajectory, he manages to land in new destinations. “Position True” reaches in-the-red altitude only to navigate new peaks and valleys: Rattling drum loops and noise hit early, but by the halfway point the song reorients around a spartan synth rhythm as focused and insistent as minimal techno pioneer Robert Hood. Still, there’s nothing wrong with hammering a beat into oblivion, and on “March of the Hoopleheads,” every brittle drum hit and grinding synth only provides more gas for the 4/4 juggernaut. In spite of the harshness, it sounds designed to tear through a techno set.
Harms compliments World War’s bracing first half by entering his spaciest territory yet on its B-side. “Knowing Hand” adds trembling, tabla-like percussion and hovering synths that sound like a swarm of UFOs, while “Little Brother” builds to a loping techno groove that’s pleasantly loose compared to its tightly wound neighbors. The best surprise is closer “Survival,” a polyrhythmic swirl of spindly synths made all the more dramatic by its lack of momentum. After building pressure its entire run, World War finds a surprising payoff in this delicate final flourish. Harms’ cult classics hinged on endlessly ratcheting up the tension; World War shows he can refine his style while still searching for a new extreme. | 2020-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hausu Mountain | March 5, 2020 | 6.9 | 166df1ee-5ae0-40ac-8d53-dc705095ab12 | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
The Fresno, California veteran stakes a claim to his legacy by continuing to do what he does best: rolling out boasts, anecdotes, and smack talk like he’s working over a speed bag. | The Fresno, California veteran stakes a claim to his legacy by continuing to do what he does best: rolling out boasts, anecdotes, and smack talk like he’s working over a speed bag. | Planet Asia: Medallions Monarchy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/planet-asia-medallions-monarchy/ | Medallions Monarchy | The term “stalwart” was made for rappers like Planet Asia. Listen to any of the Fresno, California native’s music and you’ll see patterns of slick-tongued braggadocio blended with Five Percenter teachings, a delicate balance of the spiritual and the profane as inspired by string theory as it is by Wu-Tang Clan and Too $hort. Unlike fellow West Coast spitter Ras Kass, who raps like a rhyming world history textbook, Asia mostly uses the metaphysical as wallpaper for the lifestyle raps, drug dealing, and hood reporting he’s made his name on since 1997. In that time, he’s racked up a short-lived deal with Interscope, founded his own label Gold Chain Music, and released enough independent mixtapes, collaborations, and one-offs to make Curren$y blush. In a modern rap underground defined by warping the old-school boom-bap ethos, Planet Asia fits like a jewel into a pendant.
As a luminary of traditionalist hip-hop with two and a half decades worth of experience, Planet Asia is anything but humble. “I refuse to be over 40 and bitter,” he says plainly on “Everyday Victory,” a song near the end of his latest project Medallions Monarchy. Over blaring horns and organ stabs supplied by New Jersey producer Brainorchestra, he stakes a claim to his legacy by continuing to do what he does best: rolling out boasts, anecdotes, and smack talk like he’s working over a speed bag.
Asia prides himself on providing the same kind of life advice you’d expect to hear from a fly uncle draped in gold, techwear, and incense. It doesn’t matter if he’s recalling dirty macking stories of “I’m a Drug” and “Soundbwoy Homicide” or times when bullets tore through his car seat during a drug deal on “Marvelous Merchant”—he sells it all with a smooth growl. His cadence and syllable placements on “Marvelous Merchant” catch the ear almost as much as the image of a city where Asia walks around with “hyenas on a chain without the muzzle.” He’s grateful to still be breathing after seeing drugs moved and bodies go cold and, as he says near the end of “Clap Ya Hands,” he still gets a kick out of translating self-knowledge into rhyme: “Trials attributed to my upbringing/I was born understanding like the sun beaming.”
His lyrical style may not have changed much, but Asia’s been keeping his ear to the street when it comes to beats. Medallions boasts a solid range of fuzzy loops and drum breaks that spans generations. Veteran producers Eto and Chong Wizard offer ominous lilting marches on “F.Y.P.M.” and closing track “The Scenery,” respectively. But the album’s best beats come from its two youngest producers—Brainorchestra and Griselda affiliate Camouflage Monk, with two apiece. The wonky drum patterning on “Marvelous Merchant” and the stately shuffle of “Floating to the Max” challenge Asia’s agility, forcing him to find unique pockets.
That isn’t to say Planet Asia is showing his age on the mic. On the contrary—he’s been preparing his group Gold Chain Military’s debut album and has dropped no less than six projects in the past 18 months, hard work that’s aligned his ethos and release strategy with prolific modern outfits like Griselda and the members of Mutant Academy. Medallions Monarchy may not be a revelation like 2006’s The Medicine or 2017’s Apollo Brown team-up Anchovies, but it’s breezy and hard-hitting, another link in Asia’s ever-extending chain.
Correction: As of October 18, this review has been updated to restore the final paragraph, which was inadvertently omitted on original publication. | 2022-07-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Gold Chain Music | July 7, 2022 | 7 | 1674fcac-3b93-45ca-acb4-84fb6a2e1909 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The curious, sometimes effective, sometimes bizarre music collected here features contributions from Beck, El-P, Patti Smith, DJ Shadow, Billie Eilish, and more. | The curious, sometimes effective, sometimes bizarre music collected here features contributions from Beck, El-P, Patti Smith, DJ Shadow, Billie Eilish, and more. | Various Artists: Music Inspired by the Film Roma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-music-inspired-by-the-film-roma/ | Music Inspired by the Film Roma | Music is integral to the world of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, but it is also incidental, experienced only as part of the action. The remarkable 2018 film contains only diegetic uses of music; no song is ever superimposed over the deliberately paced action that takes place in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma neighborhood at the dawn of the 1970s. Of the 41 songs identified in IMDB’s soundtrack credits, most viewers won’t notice more than a handful. A wistful Leo Dan lament plays tinnily on the radio as Cleo, the film’s housekeeper protagonist, tidies up; a Berlioz symphony shakes the paterfamilias’ Ford Galaxie as he stubs out his cigarette in its overflowing ashtray; a garage band rehearses a shambling cover of “House of the Rising Sun” outside a corrugated shack in the muddy slum of Nezahualcóyotl. It’s all part of Cuarón’s naturalistic touch.
In fact, there is no difference between those moments and any of the other sounds so meticulously captured in the film’s sound design: the knife-sharpener’s whistle as he trundles his whetstone down the street, the cries of women in a crowded maternity ward, the three unbroken minutes of footsteps and mop sploshing that provide the film’s meditative opening scene. All these sounds are inextricable from the delicate shading of Cuarón’s black-and-white tone poem, as much a part of the setting as the period costumes, the middle-class furniture, the indigenous characters’ Mixteca dialogue.
But this album—Music Inspired by the Film Roma—is not that soundtrack. The actual original motion picture soundtrack, featuring not just Leo Dan and Berlioz but also mambo giant Pérez Prado and the coastal sound of Acapulco Tropical, is a fine complement to the film—an interactive volume of CliffsNotes, perhaps, a chance to duck inside Roma’s hidden corners. This album is an altogether different proposition. Overseen by Cuarón and music supervisor Lynn Fainchtein, it’s billed as Cuarón’s favorite artists making music inspired by his film. It would be an unusual grouping by virtually any standard, gathering together proto-punk royal Patti Smith, post-millennial icon Billie Eilish, British folk singer Laura Marling, and turntablist DJ Shadow, among others. To apply such an eclectic roster to Roma’s meticulous work of reconstruction is even more confounding.
Following Cuarón’s field-recorded introduction, “Tepeji 21 (The Sounds of Roma),” the album begins with a double dose of déjà vu. First Patti Smith reprises her 1996 song “Wing”; then Beck and his father, the Canadian arranger and composer David Campbell, tackle “Tarantula,” a 1982 song by the 4AD band Colourbox. Both are lovely renditions—the pedal steel of “Wing” is liquid and narcotic; Beck’s “Tarantula” blows wide the proportions of This Mortal Coil’s 1986 cover of the song—and, if you squint, you can kind of see how “Wing,” at least, might reflect back on Cleo. But Beck’s song would seem to have only the most tenuous connection to Roma, and its bilious lyrics (“My world’s under a sentence of death, I was born underground/But when the pressure gets too much for me, I bite”) feel out of step with the story’s quietude, and even its brief moments of violence.
The best songs here connect more firmly back to the narrative. Billie Eilish’s “When I Was Older” takes its premise from Pépe, the film’s youngest character, who has a habit of fantasizing about his past lives. It’s a gorgeous song, with diaphanous synths rippling atop snub-nosed synth bass and tough trap snares, and even though the sound couldn’t be further from Mexico City of the 1970s, it makes for a fitting contemporary extrapolation. At the other end of the spectrum, the Mexico City group Sonido Gallo Negro’s “Cumbia del Borras” pays tribute to the movie’s canine character with a giddy psychedelic cumbia whose slipperiness may or may not have something to do with the dog’s penchant for befouling the family’s carport.
A number of artists avail themselves of sounds from the film—the knife-sharpener’s whistle recurs again and again—while others deliver appropriately cinematic mood pieces. El-P and Wilder Zoby’s instrumental “Marooned” is a nice surprise; UNKLE’s mopey “On My Knees,” not so much. A few selections are simply great songs, no matter the context: The Colombian-Canadian singer Jessie Reyez’ largely acoustic, cumbia-flavored “Con el Viento” has a certain timelessness that lends itself to a project like this; it’s also a fine introduction to the rising singer’s expressive voice. There’s another introduction here, in the form of “PSYCHO,” by Bu Cuarón—the director’s 16-year-old daughter. She also has a strong voice, but, like so much contemporary pop, it’s been overproduced—processed and equalized to a fault—and the song’s big-budget pop runs against the grain of the rest of the album.
Even at its best, much of Music Inspired by the Film Roma feels unnecessary. Cuarón’s movie is such a singular, self-contained universe—right down to the furniture that he borrowed from his extended family, in order to recreate his boyhood home in meticulous detail—that a project like this runs counter to the spirit of the whole enterprise. When Cuarón repainted the surface of a Mexico City street to ensure that even the marks on the asphalt were historically accurate, what are we to make of unmistakably futuristic synths and trap drums? The album doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as smash it to pieces with a high-tech battering ram. The beauty of Roma comes down to its tone and its upending of narrative expectation. We expect big, tragic, pivotal things to happen, and for the most part, they don’t. It’s a quiet film about big ideas; a film about interior worlds that refuses to let viewers get too far inside its characters’ heads. But Music Inspired by the Film Roma is none of those things. It’s a reverse mood board, or at best, a kind of bizarre, sanctioned fanfic. | 2019-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Sony | February 6, 2019 | 6.7 | 167613c9-a6ab-42ef-8be8-b8c3fb3757bc | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The power once held by Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy, and Cypress Hill is spread far too thin and feels far too dated to sustain the momentum of the supergroup’s debut LP. | The power once held by Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy, and Cypress Hill is spread far too thin and feels far too dated to sustain the momentum of the supergroup’s debut LP. | Prophets of Rage: Prophets of Rage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prophets-of-rage-prophets-of-rage/ | Prophets of Rage | “Rep a stutter step then bomb a left upon the fascists,” sang Zack de la Rocha 25 years ago on Rage Against the Machine’s all-powerful debut. It bears mentioning that Prophets of Rage still think it’s cool to punch a Nazi. The rap-rock supergroup unites members of some of the most radically militant bands ever to claim regular rotation on MTV, including the rhythm section of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy’s Chuck D and DJ Lord, and Cypress Hill’s B-Real (who, while never as manifestly political as his bandmates, shares a certain street-fighting-man ethos.) There was a time when all of these artists felt genuinely dangerous, and on Prophets’ first album of original material, they set out to prove they haven’t lost that edge. “We goin’ Molotov,” raps Chuck D, in one of the album’s dozens of lines about resisting, fighting back, or weaponizing music. Prophets of Rage aren’t just a band, they insist. They’re a counteroffensive.
Prophets of Rage came together not because de la Rocha was disinterested and this new lineup might sell a lot of tickets, but because the times demanded it. “Here we had, sitting dormant in the garage, these 20 kilotons of explosive rock’n’roll music of the Rage Against the Machine catalog,” guitarist Tom Morello said in a recent interview. So they heeded the call: If they don’t play the old hits, and now new songs that sound an awful lot like those old hits, who will?
Between the battering-ram rhythms and Morello’s volatile guitars, Prophets of Rage’s originals land with the brute impact of the RATM classics. Without de la Rocha leading the charge, though, it’s harder to humor the fantasy of this lineup on the frontlines. Their physically demanding music needs a singer with stamina and titanic lung capacity—the kind of dynamo frontman you picture spending most of their concerts midair. Due respect to Chuck D, even in the prime of his youth he wouldn’t have fit that bill. Though his voice retains its hallmark boom and he acquaints himself better to these originals than the winded covers of the group’s debut EP, he stick-and-moves with all the dexterity of the Kool-Aid Man. Scorchers like “Radical Eyes” and “Unfuck the World” call for a singer with pipes. Prophets of Rage don’t have one.
For artists who’ve tightly woven politics with their identity, Prophets’ songs are bizarrely light on specifics. The lyrics read like they were pieced together from headlines they never bothered to click on. Even the album’s great gimmie, “Hail to the Chief,” a takedown of a president who gives his critics so much to work with every single day, is inexplicably vague. In his heyday, Chuck D didn’t just drop slogans; he gave dissertations—Public Enemy’s lyric sheets used to read like pamphlets or manifestos. Now he strains to maintain simple lines of thought. On “Legalize Me,” he rattles off enormities like Michael Stipe channel surfing through “It’s The End of the World As We Know It”: “Young widows candles lit/Teenagers blown to bits/Unfriendly radio hits…”
If nothing else, Prophets of Rage washes down the sour aftertaste of their opportunistic EP, which introduced a band seemingly less interested in justice than a quick buck. Here, there’s no questioning that their hearts are in it—hearing Chuck D snarl “We fucking matter!” on “Who Owns Who,” even if it is over Rebirth-caliber rawk riff, is the album’s great thrill. Good intentions are a low bar for an album, though. Activist music is less of a commodity today than it was during the formative years of Rage Against the Machine and Public Enemy. Good art doesn’t need the word “political” appended to it. Good art is dangerous, radical, and inherently political. It says something new, persuasive, or inspiring. It lays out an actual vision for unfucking the world.
Prophets of Rage don’t do any of that. Everything about the project’s packaging, from its Shepard Fairey artwork to its Michael Moore-directed music video, feels pat and past its expiration date, relics of a previous revolution copy-and-pasted onto the current one. The band hasn’t done themselves any favors by sticking so closely to the sounds of their youth, either—not that they were ever going to top the pipe-bomb intensity of their earliest recordings, anyway. Run the Jewels have proven it’s possible to make relevant political music after 40, but their music works because their ideas are fresh, and their anger is calibrated for now. It speaks volumes that Zack de la Rocha is more interested in moonlighting with RTJ than reliving past glories with his old bandmates. | 2017-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Concord Music Group | September 19, 2017 | 4.6 | 16785e4a-f091-4b62-b4cc-1969649ff465 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The Chicago psych-rock outfit lets loose with heavy krautrock-style repetition on their second full-length. | The Chicago psych-rock outfit lets loose with heavy krautrock-style repetition on their second full-length. | Disappears: Guider | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14988-guider/ | Guider | On their second full-length, Chicago's Disappears have gotten more Zen. Where their mix of Velvet Underground chug and krautrock groove on 2010 debut Lux was pretty melodic, on Guider they're more interested in being hypnotic. They've embraced repetition, using it as an end of its own rather than a way to find hooks. They do offer lots to latch onto-- memorable riffs abound, and revving tempos propel the tunes like a car stuck in 5th gear. But they sound more into straight lines than catchy arcs, more into the moment than what came before.
The recording details confirm that immediacy. According to Kranky's press release, all but one track is a first take. In fact, Disappears literally erased the past, recording over tapes originally used for the Lux sessions. Still, for an album so in-the-moment and so short-- it lasts only 30 minutes, and half is taken up by closer "Revisiting"-- Guider doesn't fly by. All the repetition distorts the sense of time, as if each groove had begun before tape rolled and continued to churn past the end.
That aligns Disappears with another band that can turn one riff into an eternal swing, San Francisco's Wooden Shjips. Both also draw openly on classic influences-- Disappears' twitter bio is "Music for Record Collectors"-- and this time around the common denominator is Spacemen 3. That group's rumbling bass, reflective guitar, and flattened vocals spring up in the quiet/loud drama of "Not Romantic", the stair-climbing "Superstition", and the shivering riffs of "Halo". But Spacemen 3 weren't unique-- they borrowed as much from Suicide and the MC5 as Disappears borrow from them-- and their influence on Guider produces something that can't simply be called a copy.
A more valid criticism would be that heavy influence makes Guider less able to transcend genre than the more openly catchy Lux. For me, the band makes up for that deficit in sheer magnetic energy, which isn't easy to wrangle from such a well-worn style. That energy is plentiful enough that Disappears may yet make a record that captures both true believers and recent converts equally. | 2011-01-18T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-01-18T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Kranky | January 18, 2011 | 7 | 167ded27-80aa-4f35-b683-ec4ab167561d | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
After 38 years of making music, Kim Gordon’s thrilling solo debut lives at the vanguard of sound and performance, shot through with the beautiful, unsparing noise that has always defined her art. | After 38 years of making music, Kim Gordon’s thrilling solo debut lives at the vanguard of sound and performance, shot through with the beautiful, unsparing noise that has always defined her art. | Kim Gordon: No Home Record | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kim-gordon-no-home-record/ | No Home Record | The last chapter of Kim Gordon’s 2015 memoir, Girl in a Band, is a kind of epilogue—a bridge to the next volume in the long life of the indie-rock icon. Sonic Youth is over, and so is Gordon’s marriage to bandmate Thurston Moore. Their daughter, Coco, is off at art school. Gordon has left the family’s brick homestead in Northampton, Massachusetts, but instead of returning to New York, where she was a paragon of Downtown cool since 1981, she heads out to Los Angeles, where she grew up. By the book’s final pages, she is wintering at a hilltop Airbnb in Echo Park—a temporary landing pad for the permanent business of starting over. She is making visual art again; she’s showing in L.A. and has gallery representation in New York. Then, as she sits in someone’s car outside her rental, making out, she turns to the reader to confess, “I know, it sounds like I’m someone else entirely now, and I guess I am.”
No Home Record—which, incredibly, is Gordon’s first solo album in 38 years of making music—offers evidence of her reinvention: Even longtime fans may find themselves thunderstruck by some of the turns she takes here. But the record also confirms the essence of her creative identity; it’s shot through with sounds and concepts that have defined her work over the years, just presented in a way we’ve never heard them before.
This isn’t the first music Gordon has made since Sonic Youth called it quits, in 2011. She and guitarist Bill Nace have three records under their belt as Body/Head, all recorded in the years since the band dissolved. But where the squall of Body/Head’s dual-guitar improv occupies a space not far from SY’s stomping grounds, No Home Record offers something radically new and, in places, almost shockingly contemporary.
It’s safe to assume that not many people expected an overdriven trap banger with an African thumb-piano melody as one of the highlights of Gordon’s solo debut—but here we are, and “Paprika Pony” is enthralling: druggy and hypnotic, the kick drum like a cross between a sheet of thunder and a crumpled paper bag. Over an ominous, skulking beat, Gordon half-mutters, half-whispers a free-associative path through the alleys of her mind.
As much as Sonic Youth’s whirlwind sound could feel like a self-contained entity, there were occasional glimpses of the world outside, like Gordon’s karaoke-booth Robert Palmer cover on 1989’s Ciccone Youth’s The Whitey Album, or her duet with Public Enemy’s Chuck D on 1990’s “Kool Thing.” No Home Record is clearly interested in getting the hell away from the strictures of noise and indie rock as they’re conventionally understood. The opening “Sketch Artist” might have been made by avant-rap groups like clipping. or Death Grips—an overwhelming bass blast that summons all the slow violence of an earth mover churning up everything in its path.
From interviews, it sounds like neither Gordon nor her co-producer, Justin Raisen—a Los Angeles producer who has worked with Yves Tumor and Charli XCX—expected the album to turn out quite like this. Gordon was fiddling around with an old drum machine, listening to the Stooges and footwork producer RP Boo; as inspiration, she sent Raisen an old Sonic Youth B-side called “Razor Blade,” a scrappy acoustic trifle. Then, three years ago, they made “Murdered Out,” a malevolent hurricane of a song, and the record’s direction was settled.
Some songs are more low-tech—“Air BnB” is a mammoth slab of bluesy, atonal rock, “Earthquake” is a shimmering drone-folk opus—but the most exciting moments are giddy with the sense of worlds colliding. Noise, techno, and post-punk; custom-tuned guitars and battered MPCs; 808s and overheated bass amps—multiple strains of underground music history pushing together like tectonic plates, building up extreme pressure under the surface. The album’s energy, too, suggests a fusion of New York and Los Angeles, equally suited for stomping down a crowded city sidewalk and sitting in traffic. Whether heard on headphones or car stereo, the crushing bass and battering-ram drums feel like a protective exoskeleton—ideal armor for the days you simply cannot abide another living soul getting in your fucking way.
Where Girl in a Band’s prose was was full of “a lot of read-between-the-lines stuff, which is how I am anyway,” as Gordon claims, No Home Record is similarly ambiguous, layering snapshots of an American culture in decline with lines it’s hard not to read as autobiographical. “Get Yr Life Back,” a smoldering, no-wave approximation of trip-hop, surveys the wreckage with an almost animal intensity. On the vulnerable “Earthquake,” she sings—really sings, in a way she almost never does—“This song is for you/If I could cry and shake for you,” before unleashing the hidden blade: “You want me to see you/Are you 12?” (It’s one of several jabs aimed at oblivious man-children.) And the brutally unsparing “Murdered Out” flips the image of customized cars with tinted windows into an unambiguous fuck you: “Murdered out of my heart/Covered in black matte spray/Will you see when I’m not there/…You didn’t even know who I became.”
Even at her most pointed, it’s the ambiguities that keep things interesting. Is the giddy chorus of “Air Bnb” (“Air BnB!/Gonna set me free!”) a sardonically peppy sendup of late-capitalist shibboleths, or a genuine celebration of second chances? Probably a little of both. Gordon’s most trenchant truths are not in her words, but in her voice. She has frequently demurred that she is not a singer, but “singer” is far too limiting a word for what she does anyway. In Sonic Youth, her voice could be a jagged knife, a lover’s confession, steam rising from a subway grate. On No Home Record, she takes advantage of a newfound sense of space in the music to explore the limits of her expressiveness, whispering in ASMR-grade tones, the mic so close you can hear her licking her lips between syllables.
The best exploration of her voice’s capabilities is “Cookie Butter.” Zoom out, and it’s clear that the song’s interwoven “I” and “you” statements are meant to underscore the way miscommunication is threaded through human relationships. Up close, though, her two-word statements take on a hypnotic minimalism, the force of repetition leaching meaning out of the actual words: “I saw/I’ve known/I remember/I liked/I met/I awaken/I wish/I have/I suck/I approach/I fucked…” On and on it goes, Gordon not so much speaking the words as carving out the syllables with her teeth, until the phrases come to seem almost sculptural, like a series of small statuettes lined up in a row. The song is an artful capstone to a thrilling debut album, one that is an ingenious fusion of sound and idea and a fearless celebration of second acts.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | October 14, 2019 | 8.4 | 167ec20e-e7a5-4804-a2fd-9c5c4d43e887 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The New Orleans-based punk artist crafts broad caricatures of chaos and destruction with giddy hooks, flashy musicianship, and self-mythologizing humor. | The New Orleans-based punk artist crafts broad caricatures of chaos and destruction with giddy hooks, flashy musicianship, and self-mythologizing humor. | Sick Thoughts: Heaven Is No Fun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sick-thoughts-heaven-is-no-fun/ | Heaven Is No Fun | Throughout his recording tenure as Sick Thoughts, Drew Owen has become a trusted craftsman of rabid, gleeful songs about violence. The Baltimore-raised, New Orleans-based one-man band is responsible for the all-time best punk song about chainsaws, and there are plenty of those. When he was an explosive short-haired teenager screaming for vengeance and blood on a hot streak of scrappy lo-fi garage punk 7-inches, Sick Thoughts had the captivating volatility of a firework accidents YouTube compilation. Heaven Is No Fun arrives after roughly a decade of Owen writing and recording this deep well of scuzz: He’s now a long-haired 25-year-old who doesn’t scream on record quite as much as he used to, but when he joyously sings that he hates you and is going to feed your severed nose to his fish, it’s clear that his overall formula is largely unchanged.
Heaven Is No Fun sits squarely in Owen’s creative comfort zone—broad caricatures of chaos and destruction with hooks that sound borderline giddy. Recorded at his home in New Orleans around the time Hurricane Ida raged, the music almost exclusively oozes sleaze and contempt. As his deep, disconcertingly casual voice promises that we’re all imminently going to suffer on “Horrible Death,” his guitar work is fast and ramshackle. For a clear sign of his progression as a musician, listen to the high flying hammer-on guitar solo at the outset of “Hole in the Wall”—his playing feels flashy and ambitious, a show-off ’70s hard rock performance that feels like completely new territory for a Sick Thoughts record. The song transitions quickly from its classic rock radio trappings to a brand of distorted and unsettling New Orleans power chord punk befitting a sticky, smoke-filled basement show. Owen’s words are clipped and staccato as he runs through the beats of a relationship-ending blowout argument, his catchy power-pop hook contrasting with his chorus about going full Adam Driver on his drywall.
The earworms and guitar solos do plenty of work to make all this misery sound like a blast, but the true joy of Owen’s records comes from how funny he can be. The title of the album is taken from a line in “Mother, I Love Satan,” an anti-hymn that defines the character behind this record’s fury. If Owen’s only point was “I’m never going back to church,” he’d sound like pretty much any god-fearing teenager who doesn’t want to wake up early on a weekend. Instead, Owen goes out of his way to ignite a new satanic panic as he talks shit about Sunday school, calls priests stupid, swears that he loves the devil, and shouts “I wanna go to hell!” Second to the Lord’s followers on his enemies list is an unnamed condescending “Rich Kid.” In the album’s closing moments, Owen drains this asshole’s bank account while delighting in their affluent tears. It’s not even just that these moments elicit laughter—Owen is growing the Sick Thoughts mythology on some comic book, professional wrestling, or action movie sequel shit.
His songs aren’t especially long, so when Owen calls for an E.M.P. attack in a tight 96 seconds, his belligerent young man gimmick never has much of a chance to wear thin. “Submachine Love” is one of the longest and most theatrical tracks, and it’s the rare point where the whole operation sags a bit. The high register chorus vocals are over-the-top ’70s bro metal vocals, reaching for the guitar-god rafters. It’s a police chase through the desert and an apparent breakup metaphor. For a moment, the album buckles just a bit under the weight of this one song’s aesthetic excesses.
Owen’s best instincts are his most straightforward, like how he boils down his feelings on the power-pop banger “No Life No Life”: “I really don’t know what I’m gonna do but I know it ain’t with you.” His cover of “Someone I Can Talk To” by UK punks the Limps follows this template. It’s an unambiguous plea for companionship, and it’s a nice reprieve from all the demolition. Whether Owen’s out here trying to steal a rich kid’s debit card, smash everything in sight, work through his emotions, or accept Satan into his heart, Heaven Is No Fun thrives when his chaotic hostility cuts straight to the point. | 2022-09-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | null | Total Punk | September 21, 2022 | 7.5 | 168756f8-8a97-4d99-971a-6c325e8f69d3 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | |
On their third full-length, More Faithful, Montreal shoegazers No Joy find subtle ways to deepen their sound. They recorded with Ariel Pink producer Jorge Elbrecht in Brooklyn and Costa Rica, and there's a little bit of the city and moments of the sea present on nearly every track. | On their third full-length, More Faithful, Montreal shoegazers No Joy find subtle ways to deepen their sound. They recorded with Ariel Pink producer Jorge Elbrecht in Brooklyn and Costa Rica, and there's a little bit of the city and moments of the sea present on nearly every track. | No Joy: More Faithful | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20673-more-faithful/ | More Faithful | On their third full-length, More Faithful, Montreal shoegazers No Joy make it clear that they're not afraid to shift their sights towards the sky once in awhile. Although their songs still possess the signature qualities of the genre—fuzzy guitars and repetitive, mantra-like refrains—there are hints that the band is trying to expand within it, breaking through the sometimes-monotonous din with moments of light. It's a hard album to pin down, at moments bright and tender, at times as dark and scuzzy, and the contrast helps mitigate the sameness that sometimes plagued their previous efforts.
Beginning with their second LP Wait to Pleasure and continuing through the 2013 EP Pastel and Pass Out, you could hear the band seeking ways to deepen their sound. More Faithful was recorded with Ariel Pink producer Jorge Elbrecht in Brooklyn and Costa Rica, and there's a little bit of the city and moments of the sea present on nearly every track. "Moon in My Mouth", a psyched-out, dreamy track with a swaying, beach-punk riff, showcases singer Jazamine White-Gluz's bright vocals and lulls the listener. It's punk rock taken poolside, city mice taking a break from the harsh squall. The sound is both massive and soft around its edges, layering elements of surf-rock and psychedelia into the harsh din of Laura Lloyd's guitars.
Light and dark are constantly at play across the album's surface, like shadows from moving clouds. Album opener "Remember Nothing" is a dissonant, clanging contrast to the mellow vibes of "Moon", opening with a fast, hi-hat-reliant drum beat and a muddy riff that wouldn't sound out of place on a Sonic Youth record. Then the vocals enter, and leaven the murk with a hint of tenderness. "Burial in Twos" starts out spacious and gorgeous, with a wide-open ringing riff and pinging synth hits, before some gristly electric guitars enter and grind their teeth.
There's a feeling that nothing on the album is accidental. The squealing, careening "Chalk Snake", which is so Jesus and Mary Chain-esque it veers into the realm of pastiche, ends by juxtaposing a high-pitched note of guitar squall with a piano line that almost sounds like Joni Mitchell. It's these subversive little moments that help No Joy avoid the diminishing returns that often plagues shoegazers. And although they're still obviously committed to noise, still praying at the fuzzy altar of My Bloody Valentine, they're a band that's still evolving, and letting a little bit of light in through the cracks has served them well. | 2015-06-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-06-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | June 16, 2015 | 7.6 | 16890f22-f948-4831-a25f-fce55787e91f | Maud Deitch | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maud-deitch/ | null |
There's an intimacy to Sam Beam's voice that makes it shamefully easy to imagine him curled up in ... | There's an intimacy to Sam Beam's voice that makes it shamefully easy to imagine him curled up in ... | Iron & Wine: Our Endless Numbered Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4127-our-endless-numbered-days/ | Our Endless Numbered Days | There's an intimacy to Sam Beam's voice that makes it shamefully easy to imagine him curled up in the corner of your futon, slurping tea from a chipped mug, absent-mindedly fiddling with an old acoustic guitar and scribbling words into a coverless notebook. He is always chewing on a pencil, and when he talks, his words come slow.
Shake it off. While the idea of Sam Beam tugging at your afghan might seem perfectly inviting, it's actually just dangerous: the traditions and artists of the American south have long been fetishized and vilified with equal fervor, and, perhaps appropriately, both the region and its inhabitants are starting to assume near-cartoonish proportions in print and onscreen. Unsurprisingly, Iron and Wine's grubby campfire hymns are subject to the very same kind of blind, moonlight-heavy romanticizing-- which might make swallowing a new, gently-buffed Iron and Wine album doubly difficult. Picture crisp, fuzz-free vocals and gently brushed snares shooting like darts, incisive and stinging, each chiseled tip dipped in hot studio poison: This is not the Iron and Wine of yesteryear.
When The Creek Drank the Cradle puttered quietly out of Sub Pop's warehouse in 2002, it was stupidly easy to be tugged into the quasi-escapist, heavily idealized portrait of Beam-as-basement-troubadour-- a bearded, southern, "down home" father of two with a cardboard box full of shitty equipment and an unassuming shoulder shrug. The whimsical inadvertence of Beam's debut-- and the vague sense that the composition and realization of Creek were just as profound and accidental as the record's eventual distribution-- lent Beam's work a dangerous edge of serendipity. Listening to The Creek Drank the Cradle felt like accidentally digging up a diamond, clutching it briefly in a soil-streaked palm, and then shoving it deep into your front pocket, eyes shooting around suspiciously. Nobody who found it ever wanted to give it up.
Last year's The Sea and the Rhythm EP, which featured five previously unreleased Creek tracks, saw Iron and Wine maintaining his four-track sigh, bringing his hissing home-studio work to a glorious, satisfying end. For Our Endless Numbered Days, Beam darted out of his basement and into Chicago's Engine Studios, and the resulting record sees Beam taking a satisfying break from air-conditioner-as-rhythm-section: Producer Brian Deck (Califone, Fruit Bats, Holopaw) folds in twittering percussive bits, while sister Sarah Beam coos sweet harmonies and bandmates Jonathan Bradley, EJ Holowicki, Jeff McGriff, and Patrick McKinney provide ample backing. Our Endless Numbered Days is cleaner, more diverse, and generally sparser than its predecessor, and, given the apparent limits of Beam's former setup, it's also an astoundingly progressive record: Beam has successfully transgressed his cultural pigeonhole without sacrificing any of his dusty allure.
Opener "On Your Wings" mixes Beam's pert guitar picks with rolling slide; scraps of percussion gradually fold in, vocals fall off, and the band somersaults into a comparably raucous mini-jam. In "Naked as We Came", Beam nods to the album's enigmatic title, softly lamenting mortality ("One of us will die inside these arms/ Eyes wide open, naked as we came/ One of us will spread our ashes around the yard") over Creek-ish acoustic strums, while Sarah whispers along, her barely audible murmurs more haunting for their delicacy. "Each Coming Night" is instantly moving, perfectly hinged on a bubblegum melody, while "Sodom, South Georgia" nails gothic disquiet both on and off the page ("All dead white boys say, 'God is good'/ White tongues hang out, 'God is good'").
Studio tweaking aside, there's another, more subtle tonal flip here: Beam's lyrics, once dribbling over with issues of faith and fidelity, are distinctly more guarded, a switch which seems inextricably linked to the relative (and unexpected) ubiquity of his debut. Creek was full of gently whispered secrets, each tiny, grinning confession or perverse admission only adding to the record's furtive charms. A sizable audience might not have been part of Beam's songwriting equation before, but it is now-- and while Our Endless Numbered Days' lacquered cuts might seem slightly more transparent at first, their lyrics are infinitely more obscured, heavy with their own predestined publicity. Now, Beam juggles bits of dialogue (over half of these tracks feature extra speakers; "Naked as We Came" and "Each Coming Night" both focus almost exclusively on clips of conversation), painstakingly easing himself out of the narrator's chair, and voicing what would otherwise be some wincingly maudlin bits (see "I want your flowers like babies want God's love").
Obviously, none of this makes Beam any less of a poet; if anything, Beam's freshly veiled lyrics have simply pushed Iron and Wine toward more subversive levels of storytelling. The song-as-poem critical course has been applied to Beam before, but the accuracy of the analogy never wanes: Beam and Deck toy with syntax and meter, using shaky bits of percussion, volume shifts, and tempo changes to mimic the twitchy movement of the best epic poetry. In the past, Beam's lyrics have proved his linguistic prowess, but it's the eerie lyricism of the instrumentation that ultimately pushes Our Endless Numbered Days deep into the canon of American verse.
Slavic poet Charles Simic talks about poetry as "a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph." And it's in this sense that Beam is, above all else, a poet: His tabletops are littered with gritty little snapshots of life well-lived, strewn with tender acoustic strums, pictures of the ocean, shaken maracas, mothers, fathers, arms. It's a beautiful display. | 2004-03-28T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2004-03-28T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | March 28, 2004 | 8.6 | 168b5f67-3a39-4da8-81d0-e19b3d1cb244 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
Despite being born of injustice, an air of victory hangs over Meek’s first full-length since he was released from prison. It captures an intensity that the Philadelphia rapper is known for and best at. | Despite being born of injustice, an air of victory hangs over Meek’s first full-length since he was released from prison. It captures an intensity that the Philadelphia rapper is known for and best at. | Meek Mill: Championships | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meek-mill-championships/ | Championships | Meek Mill is now saddled with something bigger than himself. From the moment he helicoptered out of Pennsylvania’s Graterford Correctional Facility in April of this year after being imprisoned for a parole violation, he embraced his role as a poster child for criminal justice reform. “It’s a shame that model probationers can be immediately put back behind bars simply for missing curfew, testing positive for marijuana, failing to pay fines on time or, in some cases, not following protocol when changing addresses,” he wrote last month in a New York Times op-ed, imploring lawmakers to pass legislation granting reductions in probation time for good behavior.
These concerns aren’t foreign to Meek’s music. All of his projects have told the story a man who, because of where he was raised, has never known true freedom. Yet he’s never made that case as passionately or comprehensively as he does on Championships, his first full-length since his release and the closest he’s come to sustaining the “1812 Overture”-intensity of his “Dreams and Nightmares (Intro)” for an entire album. “Invisible shackles on the king, ’cause shit, I’m on bail/I went from selling out arenas, now shit, I’m on sale,” he raps on “Trauma,” one of several righteously operatic numbers tying black incarceration to the legacy of slavery.
As always, Meek Mill raps with a level of buy-in that few of his peers could muster even in their imagination. On “What’s Free,” an impassioned flip of Biggie’s “What's Beef,” Meek launches a valiant defense of not only his character but his humanity. “Two-fifty a show and they still think I’m sellin’ crack,” he raps. “When you bring my name up to the judge, just tell him facts/Tell him how we fundin’ all these kids to go to college/Tell him how we ceasin’ all these wars, stoppin’ violence/Tryna fix the system and the way that they designed it.” Though the track is marred by Rick Ross, who muddles its message with a repulsive, sub-Eminem homophobic quip about 6ix9ine in prison, it closes with a grand finale: a bravado, 50-bar JAY-Z verse that stands among his meatiest ever.
Up until now, every Meek Mill album has been several shades less entertaining than it should have been, as the rapper’s fired-up screeds inevitably gave way to a dreary parade of grievances. Championships finally breaks that curse. Despite being born of injustice, an air of victory hangs over most of the record and that jovial spirit carries through many of its guest spots. Cardi B raps exclusively in flexes on “On Me,” a rowdy number cut from a distinctly “Bodak Yellow”-esque cloth, while Drake returns to bury the hatchet over a tipsy Wheezy beat on “Going Bad.” Meek lands an especially good feature from Puerto Rican rapper Anuel AA on “Uptown Vibes,” a reggaeton-spiked update of the cheery champagne rap of Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night.
The success of Championships is all the more impressive given the market pressure on Meek to make a very different kind of album. His last few radio hits have come not from locker-room-igniting anthems, but rather a string of soggy, sleepy R&B tracks that have been poorly matched with his human-megaphone routine. Thankfully, save for the limp “Almost Slipped” (where he shares the groaner “relationships turn into situationships”) and this summer’s hit “Dangerous,” redundantly reprised from his Legends of the Summer EP, Championships avoids that trap. Mostly the record commits to what he does best: substantial rap with clear stakes and an uncommon sense of purpose. After a career marked too often by botched opportunities and wasted potential, Meek Mill has finally risen to the moment. | 2018-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Maybach Music Group | December 4, 2018 | 7.7 | 168bae0c-138f-4ab3-bf9f-bfe42487f533 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
With his latest full-length, techno pioneer Robert Hood returns to his true-form minimal techno—a style the producer is often credited with inventing. | With his latest full-length, techno pioneer Robert Hood returns to his true-form minimal techno—a style the producer is often credited with inventing. | Robert Hood: Paradygm Shift | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23380-paradygm-shift/ | Paradygm Shift | Nearly twenty-five years after emerging as a pioneering techno artist, making his name as a central figure in Underground Resistance, Robert Hood remains one of the most in demand DJs in the world. He lives a double life: one, as an ordained minister in rural Alabama; another, as a strobe-lit, globe-trotting selector. Those identities converge in his project Floorplan, in which he makes stomping gospel-house alongside his daughter. (Hood once said with Floorplan, “God literally told me, ‘I want you to put a gospel message in the music.’”) But Hood’s signature arpeggiated techno loops play out in his work under his own name. The Detroit-bred producer has fine-tuned his recipe for making bodies move, and his touring schedule remains rigorous; he plays to packed clubs and thousands-strong festival crowds almost every weekend. It’s befuddling that Hood manages any studio time in between.
Paradygm Shift is the second full-length record from Hood in as many years, following 2016’s Floorplan record Victorious. As Robert Hood, his tracks are monochrome and more skeletal than the flashy, big-room house of Floorplan. Paradygm Shift is a return for Hood to his true-form minimal techno—a style the producer is often credited with inventing on his landmark 1994 album Minimal Nation. Cuts from that record, like “Acrylic,” “Ride,” and “Unix,” are masterworks of efficiency and bear the gold standard of stripped-down dance music. Then and now, Hood’s subtle tweaks and variations make the sequenced synthesizers come alive; the ever-present, pounding kick drum is a militant metronome that Hood abuses gracefully as his melodies slide into morphing grooves between the beats. This is capital-T Techno that’s psychedelic straight to its mechanical core.
“I Am” has a bouncing, hypnotic funk that hearkens back to Minimal Nation most directly. Gently rising chords are filtered down to their deepest, lowest frequencies. As Hood builds the track, the chords grow menacing, distorting and slipping between beats. There’s an illusory effect to these mutations, as micro-shifts between the interlocking rhythms keep the track in perpetual motion—simultaneously rising and falling.
“Nephesh” offers a dubbier, rounder sound, with a gentle two-chord progression quietly anchoring the spiraling stabs as Hood filters his synths nimbly. “Thought Process” is sharp and punchy, as a kick drum awkwardly tries to slink into the groove in the track’s final turn. “Pattern 8” has a slippery feel, and the clanking bell melody is locked to a 12-step sequence that is constantly shifting between measures. It’s a technique that is quintessential to his style, but relying on a workhorse sequencing method, “Pattern 8” feels like Hood is riding on auto pilot.
Hood’s enduring genius has been his ability to take listeners from Point A to Point B in his tracks without realizing how he took you there. On Paradygm Shift, he forgoes the lean machine of Minimal Nation for a more immediate and voracious, full-body sound. Hood said of this record that he wanted to “reiterate Robert Hood as an electronic music artist who is bringing minimalism back in the forefront, and not to get lost in the melody.” For Hood’s fans, this ambition is certainly welcome—but wanting to reinvent the wheel on Paradygm Shift, he falters with uninspired execution. Still, Hood’s dedication to precisely-crafted techno and transcendent DJ sets proves he still has plenty of gas left in the tank. | 2017-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dekmantel | June 10, 2017 | 6.9 | 168e1f96-2384-4237-9b31-b4421e6a299f | Jesse Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-weiss/ | null |
The newest installment in Fucked Up's series of songs for each year of the Chinese Zodiac is a pair of tracks that have been around for a while: a 15-minute song featuring Jim Jarmusch and a 22-minute instrumental paldindrome. | The newest installment in Fucked Up's series of songs for each year of the Chinese Zodiac is a pair of tracks that have been around for a while: a 15-minute song featuring Jim Jarmusch and a 22-minute instrumental paldindrome. | Fucked Up: Year of the Tiger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16267-fucked-up-year-of-the-tiger/ | Year of the Tiger | Total running time of Year of the Tiger: 37:35. Total running time of the Ramones' debut album: 29:04. Total running time of Nick Drake's Pink Moon: 28:22. Total running time of Fela Kuti's Expensive Shit: 24:13. Let's call this an album, OK? In any case, Fucked Up have been releasing long songs for each year of the Chinese Zodiac since 2006, although they're running a little behind at the moment. (The Year of the Tiger ended in February 2011; we've passed through the Rabbit Year and are now in the Dragon Year.)
Year of the Tiger is a pair of tracks that have been around for a while-- the band claimed to have finished the title song almost two years ago. It's the first music we've heard from the band in a while that doesn't have some formal connection to their David Comes to Life project. "Year of the Tiger" itself is a 15-minute song with a very long lyric (apparently by guitarist Mike Haliechuk) about an aging tiger approaching his death. Fucked Up's lead bellower Damian Abraham gets most of the words to himself, although he's also got some support: former Del-Byzanteens singer/keyboardist Jim Jarmusch-- yes, fine, he's a director, too-- intones a few verses, and either Annie-Claude Deschênes (of Duchess Says) or Katie Stelmanis (of Austra) or both add the pretty hey-I-can-actually-sing vocals that FU have been using for contrast with Abraham's voice over the past few years.
The marvelous thing about "Year of the Tiger" is that it's actually a fully constructed song, not a vamp-with-solos or a chain of vaguely related pieces segued together; it builds and builds and builds, with one new riff after another uncoiling itself and wrapping around the pillar of all the others. It's bombastic as hell, of course-- the keyboard part is the closest Fucked Up have ever come to Meat Loaf-- but this is the product of a band that thinks big. The song's weak point is its lyrics, which have lots of sharply observed images ("his castle of gristle and bone"), but also too many passages with dodgy or overwrought diction ("that deathly coddle of light"). Abraham's guttural howl is a great equalizer of lyrics, but the sung sections reveal the words' awkwardness: Lines such as, "Light drips like paint from heaven/ A shining pall on the horizon," are easier to get away with screamed than chirped.
Fucked Up's blog describes the second side of Year of the Tiger, "Onno", as "a weird rager," which is about right. It appears to be a full-on 22-minute instrumental palindrome, a pyramidal stack of drones and riffs with a crashing forward-and-backward beat-- the closest thing they've ever produced to Melvins' more extreme recordings, or to Hüsker Dü's "Dreams Reoccurring". For a "studio experiment," it's exceptionally listenable: Again, this band is great at arrangements, and every five-second segment of this record sounds almost but not quite like the one next to it. If it were in a movie soundtrack, it'd have to be in a sequence with a violently strobing red light. It's too much, too much, too much-- exactly what we rely on Fucked Up for, that is. Who would ask for anything less? | 2012-02-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-02-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock / Metal | Matador | February 10, 2012 | 7.5 | 16907928-436e-455f-8844-57c66bc70143 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
The South African indie pop trio returns from hiatus sounding wiser, softer, and as virtuosic as ever. | The South African indie pop trio returns from hiatus sounding wiser, softer, and as virtuosic as ever. | Beatenberg: *On the way to Beatenberg EP * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beatenberg-on-the-way-to-beatenberg-ep/ | On the way to Beatenberg EP | Since their 2011 debut, the South African trio Beatenberg have balanced syrupy melodies with sophisticated emotions and simple arrangements with elegant, perceptive writing. They’re well-versed in classical, jazz, and Afrobeats, and on their 2018 full-length 12 Views of Beatenberg, they scattered these touchstones across otherwise straightforward indie pop. Still, there were moments where their slick, happy-go-lucky shtick lacked substance. Though the album found success in South Africa, Beatenberg hadn’t achieved the international acclaim they desired, so they took a break. Bassist and lead producer Ross Dorkin went to London to earn a graduate degree and produce for other artists; drummer Robin Brink moved to Berlin to revel in his love for dance music; and lead singer and guitarist Matthew Field stayed in Cape Town, where he put out two terrific solo EPs that allowed him to experiment within the Beatenberg universe while also carving out a lane of his own.
On the trio’s first new release in four years, On the way to Beatenberg, they sound wiser, softer, and as virtuosic as ever. Dorkin’s production has evolved to favor subtle, organic textures, as if he’d purged every plug-in from his DAW and opted to go analog. Field, whose voice coasts over the focused, sunny compositions with an unassuming cool, sings some of the most memorable melodies and incisive lyrics of his career. With a soothing calm, he explores climate disaster, apathetic consumerism, and social media-provoked loneliness. Like the best beach reads, On the way to Beatenberg satisfies a sweet tooth while remaining agile, its big ideas buried beneath rhythmic guitars, colorful piano, and as many hand drums as one could possibly ask for.
This tightrope walk between pleasure and profundity is on full display on the Msaki-assisted “White Shadow,” an uplifting song about externalizing one’s inner life. The plucky acoustic fingerpicking and subdued string arrangement give way to Msaki’s beautiful, booming chorus: “Don’t sail away in your mind/Have you always been like this?/Conspiring with lightning?” Field, meanwhile, describes wishing that someone would read his margin notes so that they could catch a glimpse inside his mind. The song affords multiple meanings—you can sway to the sun-drenched rhythms or settle into the stuffy isolation of Field’s writing.
This double valence is felt most when Field reflects on the sad state of the world. On “Le Pain Quotidien,” he depicts an existence fragmented by online neuroses: “See a bunch of photos/Life is somewhere else.” Field’s writing manages to maintain its understated wit, even if the use of Auto-Tune functions more as on-the-nose cultural commentary than a melodic device. The EP’s most affecting critiques emerge more poetically, like on “The Lighthouse of Alexandria,” when Field almost casually mentions eroding coastlines and incendiary profit obsessions.
As the lyrics oscillate from plain observations to thorny metaphors, the compositions morph from obvious to intricate. “The Lighthouse of Alexandria” begins with a Beethoven interpolation before transitioning into an upbeat, sparkly second act; the gentle keys and handclaps on “85” fade into a warm, ecstatic blend of guitars and bass. The most invigorating arrangement on On the way to Beatenberg arrives at the end, on “Symposium.” Cheery piano chords support Field as he croons about love, not as “a puzzle or a problem of logic” but as an intuitive, mysterious force. It’s a pleasant, straightforward thought. But when the hook arrives, the tone shifts. Field, for once, quiets his anxieties and finds solace in the sublime—he wants to love, to connect, to exist thoughtlessly alongside another, to write the most beautiful song he possibly can. | 2022-12-01T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-01T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Leafy Outlook | December 1, 2022 | 7.1 | 1692f4ac-45e5-49f1-9eee-8e44b593ee3b | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
In a twist, the Brownsville rapper projects the streetwise narratives of his youth through the lens of Greek mythology—an audacious move, but his hypnotic voice and evocative writing pull it off. | In a twist, the Brownsville rapper projects the streetwise narratives of his youth through the lens of Greek mythology—an audacious move, but his hypnotic voice and evocative writing pull it off. | Hermit and the Recluse: Orpheus vs. the Sirens | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hermit-and-the-recluse-orpheus-vs-the-sirens/ | Orpheus vs. the Sirens | History is likely to look kindlier upon Ka than contemporary audiences do. At a time when rap can seem overrun by teenaged goofballs with technicolor dreadlocks—each with their own signature ad-lib—Ka is an anachronism. He’s a 46-year-old New York City firefighter whose intricate lyrics can sound less like rap than arcane incantation. To enjoy his music is to feel like a member of a shrouded and especially dusty religious order; every year or two he emerges from his aerie (okay, it’s a fire station) to deliver an album to be pored over in the darkest hours. With Orpheus vs. the Sirens, he’s added another fascinating chapter to his nighttime grimoire.
There’s an epic (in the literary sense) quality to Ka’s storytelling. Because he’s decades removed from his roguish childhood, his recounting of Brownsville, Brooklyn has an aged aura—it’s all perspective, no immediacy. His late-life (for a rapper) discography, which began with 2008’s Iron Works, can feel akin to Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn”: Every Brownsville moment listeners hear is a small part of a mostly unrecorded story, with Ka doing his best to re-apprehend long-since-faded happiness and ambient, resonant trauma.
It makes sense, then, that Orpheus vs. the Sirens adds a patina of Greek mythology to his personal chronicles. If that concept sounds pretentious or overbearing, well, it would be for most other rappers. But Ka—who, along with producer Animoss, goes by the name of Hermit and the Recluse for this project—is less interested in a grand, public display of intellect than he is in altering the angle from which he views his life: What if, instead of leading his own (uniquely American) life, he’s lead a life of mythological struggle, selflessness, and triumph? He was raised in Brooklyn when it was fire-scarred and rubble-strewn and, in repurposing some of Western literature’s foundational motifs, he seizes some of that immense power for himself.
Orpheus vs. the Sirens opens with a succinct summation of Ka’s beliefs: “I think it’s fine, to relinquish mine, for the life of our seeds/For the weak moves these dudes eat your food like Harpies/Not just car thieves, large pleas, came home hardened murderers/By the death toll would’ve guessed the threshold was guarded by Cerberus” (“Sirens”). Later, on “Golden Fleece,” he compares the hot-blooded restlessness and violence of Brownsville to Jason and the Argonauts retrieving a winged ram’s hide from a tree guarded by a dragon. And, before Citizen Cope’s coda on “Hades,” Ka, world-weary to the bitter end, raps in a near-whisper, “Once empty bellies are full, it houses greed/Between you and me, every knock ain’t opportunity/I hate the maybes/So wake the ladies and take the babies, in case it’s Hades.”
When Ka produced for himself, as he did on Grief Pedigree and The Night’s Gambit, he made sparse, sepulchral instrumentals that utilized drums sparingly if at all. This became the cudgel with which his critics assailed him: His beats sometimes lacked drums, thus his music lacked momentum, thus he was boring. No such cudgel exists here. Orpheus vs. the Sirens was produced entirely by Animoss, whose instrumentals deftly complement the intricacy and tension of Ka’s narrative. His samples are full of vibrating guitars, sorrowful organs, and cascading drums. They’re rich without being busy, artful without being overbearing.
And the same is true for the whole of the album. Orpheus vs. the Sirens has an exceedingly rare artistic clarity which rings sharp and pure like a Tibetan singing bowl. Here, Ka’s age works in his favor: In a genre overflowing with intemperate youth, he is a wizened, patient sage burdened only by memories of a Brooklyn past and volumes of arcane incantations for his shrouded, dusty devout. | 2018-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Obol for Charon | August 23, 2018 | 8 | 16970488-7be9-45fa-8329-cdc66233f4ee | Torii MacAdams | https://pitchfork.com/staff/torii-macadams/ | |
Since her aggressive and experimental 2012 debut full-length, Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Princess, Blanco’s work has consistently been centered around identity and the struggles of claiming her own. That constant battle to avoid marginalization continues on Gay Dog Food. | Since her aggressive and experimental 2012 debut full-length, Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Princess, Blanco’s work has consistently been centered around identity and the struggles of claiming her own. That constant battle to avoid marginalization continues on Gay Dog Food. | Mykki Blanco: Gay Dog Food | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20002-mykki-blanco-gay-dog-food/ | Gay Dog Food | Mykki Blanco, a performance-art character created by Michael Quattlebaum, has gone through a few phases already in her short career. Since her aggressive and experimental 2012 debut full-length, Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Princess, Blanco’s work has consistently been centered around identity and the struggles of claiming her own. Right before the release of her follow-up EP, Betty Rubble: The Initiation, I interviewed her on the trials of being a multi-persona artist. She told me, "A lot of people want musicians to have one image. If I had chosen to do that in a gimmicky way, it may have made things easier at first, but I would’ve lost out in the end because I would be a prisoner of a persona." That constant battle to avoid marginalization continues, and arguably tips over, in Blanco’s latest project, the self-proclaimed "punk" album, Gay Dog Food.
One of the first things you notice here is that Blanco has scaled back on actual rapping. Some of the record's early songs ("For the Homey's", "Self-Destruction"), while maintaining Blanco’s penchant for adaptable cadence and stable charisma, feel like empty attempts at war-cry chants, but others fare better. On "Baby’s Got Big Plans", the spooky sounds that back Mykki’s ominous nobody’s-fucking-with-me lyricism call back to standouts from her catalog ("Virginia Beach", "Feeling Special", "YungRhymeAssassin"). The same goes for "Fulani", which features backing vocals by Ian Isiah.
Musically, Gay Dog Food is no more punk than any of her previous music. "A Moment With Kathleen", a collaboration with feminist punk pioneer Kathleen Hanna, is in line with the concept but fails to offer more than what’s on the surface. Mykki’s most spirited vocal delivery comes in the Cities Aviv-featuring "Moshin in the Front" which is another song that, distortion aside, feels like it could have fit on any Blanco project.
Mykki’s talent and continued willingness to strip away rap conventions keep Gay Dog Food from being a complete wash. She’s at her best when the desire to self-compartmentalize is absent. "Cyber Dog"’s harrowing pings, creepy "You’re my alien angel baby girl/boy" chant, and seesaw of monstrous indecipherable vocals is Gay Dog Food’s most entertaining track. The project’s least Mykki-centric moment, "Lukas", an outsider look at a man whose all-over-the-place quest for identity could place his story and the song a spot on the Shortbus soundtrack, is another standout.
Gay Dog Food sees Mykki Blanco at an understandable crossroads; in a recent conversation with Kathleen Hanna published by The Fader, Blanco spoke about her frustration with being grouped with other gay, black artists like Zebra Katz and Le1f for reasons other than the sound of their music. That, and her publicized disregard for a "straight man’s respect" in an interview with Paper Magazine shows her with a reasonable level of anger at being constantly shortchanged. But for the bulk of Gay Dog Food, the depth that comes so easily in Blanco’s interviews is in short supply. | 2014-11-14T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2014-11-14T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | UNO | November 14, 2014 | 6 | 1699c01a-b927-4e3b-9c29-34c7aa901064 | Lawrence Burney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lawrence-burney/ | null |
Alan Braxe’s iconic monograph of French house, originally released in 2005, channels livewire synths, sculpted drums, and tension-stoking filters into a steady succession of dopamine hits. | Alan Braxe’s iconic monograph of French house, originally released in 2005, channels livewire synths, sculpted drums, and tension-stoking filters into a steady succession of dopamine hits. | Alan Braxe / Fred Falke: The Upper Cuts (2023 Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alan-braxe-fred-falke-the-upper-cuts-2023-edition/ | The Upper Cuts (2023 Edition) | French house isn’t so much a style of music as a state of mind—an elusive feeling, an inimitable flavor, like saudade or saffron. You know it when you hear it. The genre’s characteristic chords exude color like a blush rising beneath the skin; its low-pass filters caress their drum loops like silk slips off a collarbone. Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo invented the sound with early singles like “Da Funk” and “Burnin’”; they shaped its dimensions and sparked its mischievous essence on their respective labels Roulé and Crydamore. But more than any other artist, their acolyte Alan Braxe—whose debut single, “Vertigo,” was Rolué’s third release—defined the style’s uniquely Gallic finesse: that rushing, rolling fusion of club tropes with easy-listening harmonies and rich, full-fat fromage. The secret of the French touch lies encoded in the creamy whorls and ridges of Braxe’s musical fingerprints.
The Upper Cuts, originally released in 2005, gathers the majority of Braxe’s early solo productions and collaborations, including the monumental “Music Sounds Better With You”—a filter-house unicorn created with Bangalter and Benjamin Diamond in the one-off trio Stardust—and his work with bassist and fellow producer Fred Falke. This new reissue, which follows Braxe’s recent triumphant return alongside his cousin DJ Falcon, makes a few changes—a stray hip-hop production is out, a 2002 remix for Britney Spears is in—and adds two tracks from Braxe’s 2013 EP Moments in Time, plus two brand-new songs, including a plush nu-disco collab with Annie. French house is neither particularly hot right now nor so outmoded that it’s poised for revival, which might make the timing seem curious. But the style’s influence weaves through decades of pop music, from the era recently retconned as “indie sleaze” through yacht rock and chillwave and on to the contemporary disco-pop revival; even the Weeknd got in on the action. The Upper Cuts is a reminder that, three decades after Daft Punk announced a new wave of French dance, the retro-futurist sound has achieved something like timelessness.
The chief lesson that Daft Punk took from the “teachers” of the house canon was the value of simplicity—that all you really need to achieve dance-music immortality is a whip-cracking snare and an acid line capable of melting steel. Braxe internalized that ethos. Broken down into their constituent parts, his tracks convey a wealth of emotion with just a few starkly delineated elements. Synths zap, drums crack. The mood vacillates between electrifying drama and sneaky deadpan. Jagged arpeggios resemble breaking-news alerts from the nascent days of cable TV; Falke’s basslines are oil-slicked and serpentine, virtuosic funk delivered with a slap and a wink.
The profound economy of Braxe’s production is apparent from the first song on The Upper Cuts, 2000’s “Most Wanted.” The track opens with a 16-bar loop of kick drum, laser chirp, and the faintest hint of conga, distilling the entire pantheon of disco into a three-syllable koan. When the song’s central synth riff finally drops, it’s shrouded by a band-pass filter, muting both the high and low frequencies, and setting up a delicious hit of dopamine every time he lets the full spectrum come flooding back in. That’s it. That’s the whole song.
Unlike Daft Punk, Braxe was not unduly influenced by Chicago—at least, not Chicago house. But Chicago the band? Feathery soft rock of their ilk is key to Braxe’s sentimentalist menagerie. “In Love With You” (the lone single credited to the Paradise, Braxe’s duo with singer Romuald Louverjon) is a starry-eyed homage to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” borne aloft on airy choral pads, chrome-plated electric piano, and full-throated ardor, while “You’ll Stay in My Heart” takes its stylistic cues from middle-school slow dances. Seventies AOR is a major touchstone: Braxe’s beats are blocky things, heavy on big, backbeat snares, thundering toms, and skull-thwacking cowbell so prominent that it verges on parody. “Arena” slathers a drum solo in gargantuan reverb, audience chants, and ersatz applause, a clever simulacrum of oversized stadium rock that is both slyly funny and slightly uncanny, like a concert in the metaverse.
“Arena” and the similarly hollowed-out “Intro,” which are mostly just drums, are outliers in their percussive, monochrome palettes; Braxe’s signature is his luxe, sensual use of harmony. His chords are opulent yet efficient machines for the delivery of emotion; he’s fond of unexpected modulations that catch you off guard, no matter how many times you’ve been through the changes’ slalom curves. Much like his teasing use of the filter, Braxe’s counterintuitive chord progressions—like the giddy twists and pivots of the new wave-flavored “Rubicon,” the album’s exuberant highlight co-written with Falke—deliver a concentrated burst of pleasure with every wrong-footing resolution.
But even when Braxe nods to rock or pop, these remain tracks rather than songs, anchored in the dance-music continuum. When there are lyrics, they’re a pithy hook. There are no verses or choruses or bridges; each track’s arrangement is reduced to a single set of changes cycling ’round until the cows come home. Even the Chaka Khan-sampling “Music Sounds Better With You,” which spent two weeks at No. 2 on the UK pop charts in 1998, entertains only the slightest variation to its endlessly repeated chords. The basic measure of unit in all these songs is the loop. The loop is fundamental, holy—honed to its essence and tweaked just enough to keep it alive. Braxe’s opening and closing filters give these rigidly repeating sequences the illusion of movement, the way dancing flames may once have allowed cavemen to “animate” static paintings. No wonder the joy he evokes feels so primal. | 2023-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Smugglers Way | April 8, 2023 | 8.2 | 169c4121-0fe8-4c13-ad63-6a881329449c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Steve Hauschildt was always the quietest member of Emeralds, standing stock-still behind a bank of synths as he spun out soothing electronic ambiance. His first solo album in three years is his most emotionally potent offering yet, taking the gentle ecstasy of previous records and drawing it into a deep, soul-cleansing reverie. | Steve Hauschildt was always the quietest member of Emeralds, standing stock-still behind a bank of synths as he spun out soothing electronic ambiance. His first solo album in three years is his most emotionally potent offering yet, taking the gentle ecstasy of previous records and drawing it into a deep, soul-cleansing reverie. | Steve Hauschildt: Where All Is Fled | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21095-where-all-is-fled/ | Where All Is Fled | Steve Hauschildt was always the quiet Emerald. While John Elliott was headbanging away to rhythms that only he could hear and Mark McGuire adopted the traditional grimace of rock'n'roll axemen since time immemorial, Hauschildt stood stock-still behind his synths, like a member of Kraftwerk who had strayed from the assembly line. Since the Cleveland synth-and-guitar trio's 2013 split, Elliott has poured his energies into his Spectrum Spools label's considerable output, and Mark McGuire has put out six or seven new records, some with a considerable shred quotient. Hauschildt, meanwhile, has mostly kept his head down. Last year he released S/H, a double-CD collection of studio experiments, live cuts, and CD-R favorites, but Where All Is Fled is his first album of new material since 2012's Sequitur. That album surprised many listeners, given the way that it balanced Hauschildt's customary ambient burble with pert drum-machine programming, vocoder, and synth-pop flourishes. But Where All Is Fled swings the pendulum back towards his sweet spot, musically speaking: gentle arpeggios, chiming leads, sunrise synths poised on the brink between sublimity and kitsch. It's his most emotionally potent offering yet, taking the gentle ecstasy of previous records and drawing it into a deep, soul-cleansing reverie.
Hauschildt lays all his cards out on the table with "Eyelids Gently Dreaming", a graceful piece built around a melodic chord progression, steady as an IV drip, that sounds a lot like Stars of the Lid—is the title a giveaway?—rendered with synthesizers instead of guitars and strings. "Anesthesia", a weightless shimmer that sounds like something off Cocteau Twins' Victorialand run through a very expensive reverb unit, suggests what you'd get if King Midas picked up an opiate habit. And the unabashedly sentimentalist title track wouldn't be out of place in an On Golden Pond reboot, what with its teary-eyed piano melody. Still, there's a strangeness to the overall sound—the piano pocked with stuttering artifacts, Fennesz-style distortion looming beneath—that sets it apart. Even when he's reaching for his hanky, he's careful to keep one hand on his synth, tweaking away in search of the perfect patch.
But it's not all so slow-moving; On tracks like "Vicinities", "Edgewater Prelude", and "The World Is Too Much With Us", Hauschildt channels his energy into arpeggios that spin like sparkling dynamos. "Arpeggiare" is particularly lively, with dizzying delay taps suggesting Frippertronics in zero-G. His newfound focus on pulse sometimes leads him to forms approaching a kind of drum-free dance music. The cosmic "Sundialed", with its wild, chromatic leaps, is not so far off from Lindstrom's super-saturated space disco, and "Caduceus" is reminiscent of John Beltran's Ten Days of Blue, Detroit Escalator Co.'s Black Buildings, and other examples of techno at its most yearning. And fans of Pub's "Summer", a now-obscure dub techno single from 2000, will be thrilled by how uncannily Hauschildt has recreated that song's watery bliss.
While it's true that much of the album represents a refinement of ideas and processes that Hauschildt has been playing with for years, at least one song, "Lifelike", points to possible avenues for further development. Like "Aqueuus", it's a wonderfully watery meditation on the kinetics of bubbles. Chimes and plucks peel off into rippling delay chains, and the shimmering melodic line suggests a lullaby for jellyfish; it's a picture of biology as rapture, of physics as ecstasy. We've always known that Hauschildt could make amazing sounds. The question, going into this album, was whether he could give them purpose and meaning—whether he could put his technical mastery into the service of music at once experimental and lyrical. Where All Is Fled answers resoundingly in the affirmative. | 2015-10-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kranky | October 8, 2015 | 7.5 | 169ed806-9136-461e-aee8-eee669861c97 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On his Mello Music debut For Mark, Your Son, the Chicago-born rapper, singer, and producer Lando Chill comes to grips with the death of his father. | On his Mello Music debut For Mark, Your Son, the Chicago-born rapper, singer, and producer Lando Chill comes to grips with the death of his father. | Lando Chill: For Mark, Your Son | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22232-for-mark-your-son/ | For Mark, Your Son | Lance Washington was four years old when a heart attack killed his father. Raised in Chicago, Washington moved to Arizona for college, where he planned to study film. He developed a dependency on Adderall and dealt with depression during his freshman year, something he helped counter by writing poetry. Poetry became songwriting, and Washington started making music under the name Lando Chillrissian, which he soon shortened to Lando Chill.
Late in 2014, Washington began to write the songs that would become the basis for his debut album on Mello Music Group, For Mark, Your Son. He’s referred to the album as “self-medication,” a means of treating a loss that he had yet to come to terms with. But if the record represents a document of extended grieving for a father barely known, it’s just as much an introduction to a young artist who, after writing songs partly for his own personal betterment, abruptly finds himself in front of an audience.
Piano-based boom-bap and chipmunk soul beats are sprinkled throughout the record, (courtesy of Duncan “D-Funk” Odea and David “Jetlag” Manin, two Arizona producers), and Washington raps more than he does anything else. But For Mark is not a traditional rap record; Washington was a fan of folk music in college, and his songs are rough-hewn and acoustic-sounding. Several of them feature his unaffected singing and though his voice is vaguely reminiscent of Kid Cudi’s, frequent comparisons between the two artists speak to their shared interested in a variety of genres (and the fact that Washington has mentioned him as an influence) more than anything else. They’re not all that much alike.
Lando Chill is a competent rapper, and a competent song-maker, but the concept of For Mark, Your Son is more promising than its execution. It’s difficult to learn much about Washington on scattered songs like “Early in the Morning,” a pleasant little ode to the pleasures of morning weed and morning sex without a single memorable line. And for the most part, we don’t get a good sense of how his grief has affected him, even on songs like “Proud,” which explicitly reference his father.
That’s not to say there aren’t interesting things going on here. They’re simply underdeveloped. In the two-minute song “Save Me,” Washington wrestles with bitterness and doubt, asking “Who’s gonna save me when this God ain’t enough?” In the next line, he blames the same God for taking his father. It’s the rawest and most moving moment on the album, and it hints at why Washington may not be particularly well-suited to rap. Most rappers thrive on verbosity, or at least the raw ability to do interesting things with language. But Washington’s music is strongest when his lyrics are most concise.
Washington is nothing if not ambitious. He is already eagerly discussing his next record, another concept album, this one based on Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist. It may be that writing about a less closely held topic will allow him the room to open up, and to experiment with a style that fits him better than much of the music on For Mark. In an interview with Respect Magazine, he declared that he didn’t have a definitive sound, saying that instead he had “a voice, a message.” But while there’s no reason why an artist should be wedded to any particular genre, for a largely unknown musician like Lando Chill, developing a comfortable musical approach might accentuate that message, and allow it to resonate. | 2016-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | August 16, 2016 | 6 | 16a2c92a-269b-4247-8721-92048198e15a | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The Australian songwriter’s empathetic, understated rock songs sift through a litany of relationships and beliefs, seeking a balance between thinking about life and actually living it. | The Australian songwriter’s empathetic, understated rock songs sift through a litany of relationships and beliefs, seeking a balance between thinking about life and actually living it. | Julia Jacklin: Pre Pleasure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/julia-jacklin-pre-pleasure/ | Pre Pleasure | On the cover of her third album, Pre Pleasure, Julia Jacklin paws a blown-up portrait of her own face. Back to the camera, the Australian songwriter’s outstretched hands press against a photograph that captures her in a moment of ecstasy, her blue eyes wide and red lips parted. The concept was inspired by one of Jacklin’s new songs, “I Was Neon,” in which she wonders if a version of herself has been lost to time. “I quite like the person that I am/Am I gonna lose myself again?” she repeats, voice roiling with equal parts anxiety and excitement. If she could reach through the photograph and make contact with that incarnation of herself, what would she say?
Change is a constant in Jacklin’s music. On her 2019 breakthrough Crushing, she fought for stability amid breakups and upheavals, finding strength in a renewed relationship with herself. Her third record, Pre Pleasure, again seeks a balance between thinking about life and actually living it. Co-produced alongside Marcus Paquin (the Weather Station, Arcade Fire), Pre Pleasure is an easygoing album from a mind that rarely stops racing. On the opener, “Lydia Wears a Cross,” Jacklin paints a vivid scene of parochial school days spent listening to the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack and praying for Princess Diana. Subscribing to the rituals of religion, she admits over a simple drum machine, was easier than real belief: “I felt pretty/In the shoes and the dress/Confused by the rest/Could He hear me?”
As on Crushing, Jacklin’s most compelling songwriting occurs when she explores her relationship with her own body; as she details on the swooning “Ignore Tenderness,” connecting with pleasure can be an uphill battle. The slow-burning “Magic” captures a delicate moment before intimacy when her desire for vulnerability struggles against shame and anxiety. “I will feel adored tonight/Ignore intrusive thoughts tonight/Unlock every door in sight,” she softly assures herself, each word delivered with a quiet determination atop a patient and understated melody. In between these incantations, she imagines a fantasy where she feels confident enough to stick to her own boundaries, a shift of belief suggested by a subtle swelling, a quickened heart.
It’s testament to Jacklin’s empathetic approach that her examinations of other people are equally nuanced. The barebones “Less of a Stranger” examines the complicated bond between mother and daughter, while on the subtly grungy “Be Careful With Yourself,” she implores a lover to quit smoking and stop repressing their feelings. It’s less a Goop-y self-care pitch than a modest declaration of commitment: “I’m making plans for my future and I plan on you being in it,” she reasons.
Closer “End of a Friendship” maintains a similarly measured perspective. The conflict described is hardly explosive—too much energy has already been expended supporting the illusion of congeniality—and Jacklin chooses to provide little of her own perspective. “All my words are caught up in a cloud/You know someday you’ll have to say them out loud,” she sings. For now, she lets a cinematic string arrangement convey the breadth of her feelings and memorialize the friend’s place in her life.
Pre Pleasure takes its time unwinding and occasionally leaves too much unsaid. Some songs drift away, setting a mood rather than communicating an idea. But when Jacklin allows the two to work in tandem, she excels. Nowhere is this more evident than on “Love, Try Not to Let Go,” which finds Jacklin wishing she could give her heart to “everyone somehow.” Love, she attests, is all she desires; atop a breezy, piano-driven melody, she lets the word luxuriate in her mouth, savoring its promise. But opening yourself to the world comes with risks: “I need you to believe me when I say I find it hard/To keep myself from floating away.” The titular chorus interrupts Jacklin’s reverie with a sudden roar of guitar like a train barrelling out of a tunnel, underlining the difficulty of holding on to a feeling. Love, without the complications, is worth freezing in time. | 2022-08-26T00:04:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-26T00:04:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | August 26, 2022 | 7.4 | 16a35dad-acb5-4cd1-a09f-bed059079805 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Composer/producer Nils Frahm's latest album with his childhood trio nonkeen highlights that Frahm is best when he's having fun: proposing limitations but then pushing back against them when the musical moment seems to call for it. | Composer/producer Nils Frahm's latest album with his childhood trio nonkeen highlights that Frahm is best when he's having fun: proposing limitations but then pushing back against them when the musical moment seems to call for it. | nonkeen: The Gamble | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21530-the-gamble/ | The Gamble | German keyboardist and composer Nils Frahm's music has always been, at its heart, instinctive—sometimes, to a degree where it seems like he's trying to get a rise out of people. He's been bold enough to release albums of spare, fully improvised solo piano material; last year, he decided to flout both copyright and John Cage-ian practice by performing a version of the notorious avant-garde composer's silent work, 4:33, with plenty of sound. Rules and guidelines have never been hard and fast things for Frahm, and his latest album with his childhood trio nonkeen highlights that Frahm is best when he's having fun: proposing limitations but then pushing back against them when the musical moment seems to call for it.
The Gamble loosely explores and repurposes old informal recordings Frahm made with fellow bandmates Frederic Gmeiner and Sebastian Singwald in Germany in the early '90s. The recently reunited nonkeen recorded over and sampled mixdowns from the original, often degenerated '90s 4-track tapes, and used the same type of primitive recorders to record their new parts. The complex and troubleshooting-filled process gives the record both a welcome warmth and oddly brittle quality. The drums sound hollow and far off, occasionally like toy models of themselves. However, there is a richness to the analog-plus-digital method which easily transcends the characterization of "lo-fi."
The short record's unusual production style is essential because it helps shape and enhance its raw musical building blocks. Some of these pieces might sound a touch too non-descript if they had been realized in a more polished way. It's the cleaner, more straighforward pieces which feel the most aimless. But when the band restricts themselves to dense, blurry rhythms and unidentifiable timbres, the album shines. On hyperactive jams like "Ceramic People," the source of sound becomes uncertain and dizzying, giving the music a constantly destabilized feel.
The use of bottom-shelf, my-first-recorder-type equipment isn't just an aesthetic choice. It's also a huge source of the music's elements of chance or spontaneity. The finicky materials result in feedback and odd bursts of incidentally rhythmic noise which often become the highlights of the songs. On "Pink Flirt"—featuring Frahm's electric piano and organ—the tape slows down suddenly to create a majestic sweep. It's the album's central, disruptive climax. It's no accident that rather than listing the instruments they played on their Bandcamp credits, nonkeen chose to list the various dated recording devices used in their album credits; these machines are The Gamble's most important soloists.
Despite all the preoccupation with recording technique, the album mainly succeeds because it sounds like the work of a small group of musicians, jamming and building off of one another's cues in real time. This is not "serious," process music, and it doesn't sound like it. The classical reference points of Frahm's work as a soloist are evident in the music—Cage, the minimalism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, the humor and plaintiveness of French turn-of-the-century composers like Erik Satie and Gabriel Fauré, and dignified, semi-New Agers like Keith Jarrett and George Winston. But in the context of the propulsive ensemble, points of inspiration are never pulled out and highlighted one by one; each of the three players seems to be culling from different places at once.
Influences that are new to Frahm's catalog crop up here to provide welcome reference points. Frahm's seething Rhodes piano, which recalls Joe Zawinul or Herbie Hancock, is a necessary arbiter of tension throughout the album, a playful element which helps to distinguish nonkeen from your average krautrock-indebted, experimental rock band. Centerpiece "This Beautiful Mess"—dominated by electric piano scare cues—sounds like something between Cluster, Mulatu Astake's noir world-jazz, and exotic slow-wax fusion that could have been pressed on ECM. Like all the best tracks on The Gamble, the live band sounds more and more unreal as the track builds.
Nonkeen's vocabulary is very familiar, sometimes verging on lackluster. But the band knows its own limitations, and charms across the record's duration. They quickly establish moods—appealing, slightly disparate shades of pensiveness, rueful theme music for some hypothetical arthouse drama—and then cut straight into the next well-realized idea. We aren't forced to listen to long pieces that are hoping to introduce hypnosis, as in the minimalist music or traditional krautrock that comes to bear on nonkeen's vocabulary; each song is simply a quick burst of energy. The Gamble sounds like the peek into a group of friends' private rituals that it is—as charmingly patched together and messy as it is well-paced and dynamic. | 2016-02-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | R&S | February 9, 2016 | 7.5 | 16a43806-1539-4d11-9949-7b6d850bad73 | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
Drawing on several decades of psychedelic music, the debut album from the Brooklyn project grapples with introspective feelings through expansive, transportive sounds. | Drawing on several decades of psychedelic music, the debut album from the Brooklyn project grapples with introspective feelings through expansive, transportive sounds. | GIFT: Momentary Presence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gift-momentary-presence/ | Momentary Presence | “When You Feel It Come Around,” the opening track of GIFT’s debut album Momentary Presence, is a familiar psychedelic mission statement. “You feel it come around/It’s time, it’s time/You leave it all alone/It’s love, it’s love,” TJ Freda gently sings over waves of flickering ambience. Far from the abstract zone-out it may initially seem, the song is about Freda learning to navigate years of anxiety attacks. From there, Momentary Presence offers an abundance of transporting sounds, exquisite layers of warped guitars and synths that suggest lose-yourself transcendence. Yet the album more directly depicts a journey of re-centering—not dismissing the value in venturing out into psychological seas, but also re-embracing the shore.
There are whole histories of psychedelic music collapsed into Momentary Presence: Creation Records-style coos and swirls, guitars phasing in and out like early Spiritualized, bold new wave synth melodies, the sonic immersion of shoegaze. Freda is the person behind almost every sound on the album, and he crafted much of it from his Brooklyn apartment. While the novelty of world-building from a bedroom and a laptop isn’t groundbreaking in 2022, it does speak to the interplay in Freda’s project—grappling with interior thoughts and emotions while seeking a balm in the most expansive sounds.
To get there, Freda went to therapy and dove into Ram Dass’ Be Here Now, a pivotal document adjacent to the original psych-rock heyday. Freda’s own title, Momentary Presence, conveys a similar prompt, with a good portion of his lyrics fixating on seizing or embracing the beauty of fleeting moments, being present with an experience whether euphoric or traumatic. Freda sings things like “Lost my head and found it on my face” in a song called “Share the Present”; the album concludes with the sentiment, “Here and now, the time floats by.”
Freda keeps the album in that present with sharp spins on recognizable sounds, grounding each mantra with hooks. “Gumball Garden,” a pre-pandemic vision of waking up in a world where everyone has suddenly disappeared, rips through about half a dozen addicting guitar lines, including one big fuzzed-out attack that’s like the best riff Tame Impala haven’t written in the 10 years since Lonerism. The similarly propulsive “Share the Present” sighs above a glimmering, cascading synth motif. While those and other rockers like “Stuck in a Dream” are often the highlights, the greatest achievement on Momentary Presence is “Feather,” an airy and patient reckoning with somebody who is struggling and can’t, or won’t, be helped. Inspired by a lucid dream, “Feather” plays like a melancholic watercolor recollection until the beat intensifies three-and-a-half minutes in, lending the song a new urgency.
None of these songs are reinventing the form, but that also doesn’t feel like the point. Across Momentary Presence, there are ’60s mind-expansion koans filtered through ’80s dream-pop; there are ’70s stoner riffs reframed in ’00s digital amber. While seeking a salve for his own anxiety, Freda revisited these fragments of the past for eternal answers and he learned to wield them with beauty. He makes them sound whole. | 2022-10-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dedstrange | October 21, 2022 | 7.2 | 16a69024-8797-49be-98c0-63a24abae7d3 | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | |
Beach Slang is a Philadelphia trio featuring Weston's James Snyder, Ex-Friends drummer JP Flexner, and NONA bassist Ed McNulty. Considering their pop-punk pedigree, you wouldn't be wrong to go into this four song EP expecting a little sunshine, but they've got something stormier to offer. | Beach Slang is a Philadelphia trio featuring Weston's James Snyder, Ex-Friends drummer JP Flexner, and NONA bassist Ed McNulty. Considering their pop-punk pedigree, you wouldn't be wrong to go into this four song EP expecting a little sunshine, but they've got something stormier to offer. | Beach Slang: Who Would Ever Want Anything So Broken? EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19261-beach-slang-who-would-ever-want-anything-so-broken-ep/ | Who Would Ever Want Anything So Broken? EP | "These books and bars and this honesty, they're all I've got," James Snyder concedes halfway through "Get Lost", the third of four heartbreakers from Beach Slang's debut EP Who Would Ever Want Anything So Broken? Snyder—a self-admitted "slave to fucking up"—spends most of Broken couching his confessions in a certain romance: "We're just some dumb kids getting wasted and knowing we're alive," he sings on "Kids." When the so-called "accidents, whores, and wrecks" that populate Broken aren't screeching it out with the cops, they're drinking down or snorting up anything they can get ahold of. Yet, when Snyder insists "the kids are still alright," he's onto something.
And Snyder knows a thing or two about "the kids": before Beach Slang, he spent the better part of the last 20 years co-fronting much-loved Bethlehem, Penn., punkers Weston. To a certain stripe of east-coast pop-punk fan, the Philadelphia-based Beach Slang must look something like a supergroup; Snyder's joined by Ex-Friends drummer JP Flexner and NONA bassist Ed McNulty. Between their pop-punk pedigree and their SPF-spackled moniker, you wouldn't be wrong to go into Broken expecting a little sunshine. But Beach Slang's got something stormier on offer: four self-described "sweaty prayers" set to hard-charging drums and heartbleed guitars.
"I watched your palm hug your guitar—it buzzes like a bomb," Snyder remembers most of the way through "Get Lost". There's a careening, about-to-explode urgency of the guitars on Who Would Ever Want Anything So Broken? that's every bit as crucial to these songs' emotional heft as Snyder's lyrics. Everywhere you turn, breathless rhythms crash headlong into blaring, yearning leads, a perfectly outsized complement to the widescreen, fucked-up-and-loving-it sentiments. What this sound lacks in subtlety, it more than makes up in desperation, and that tug between those darting leads and Snyder's whispered-in-your-ear vocalese is electrifying. "I gave you taste, and a spine," Snyder sings on "Filthy Luck". The music drops out just in time for Snyder to stage-whisper his kiss-off: "And I hope you drown." The guitars charge back in a second later, the perfect punctuation to his seething passion.
While it's tempting to try to position the wild-eyed desperation in Beach Slang's music somewhere between the fuckup glory of the Replacements and the finely tuned angst of Jawbreaker, there's a considerably less cred-compatible touchpoint towering above the rest: the Goo Goo Dolls. Believe it or not, the hardscrabble Buffalo rockers turned adult-contempo mainstays are all over Broken; not so much the soggy "Black Ballon"-era ballad-slinging Dolls, but the scrappy pre-"Iris" Goos of "Naked" or "Only One". The longing lead guitars, Snyder's closed-miced confessionals, those everything-is-riding-on-this-moment stakes? Textbook Rzeznik. Despite the current onslaught of 90s revivalism, few bands seemed less primed for cool-kid revivalism than the Goo Goo Dolls. But chasing coolness seems to be just about the last thing on Beach Slang's mind. They're an earnest bunch, and the things they sing about—outsized romances, youthful abandon, feeling pretty good about feeling pretty bad—deserve the kind of big, heartrending, leave-it-all-out-there drama this surging alterna-pop only amplifies. And, between you and me, "Long Way Down" still bangs.
Broken is tantalizingly brief: four songs, 10 minutes, and barely a wasted breath. Still, it's not without its flaws: you'd need to consult the dental records to tell the ripcord melodies of "Filthy Luck" and "Kids" apart, while the limp harmonies that pepper "Get Lost" don't quite generate the same kind of heat as the three songs that surround it. But even when their nuts-and-bolts songwriting concerns falter, their passion rarely does: these songs feel like they bounded out of these guys fully formed, brash and urgent and very much alive. The people in Snyder's songs aren't always so good to themselves, but Snyder's awfully good to them: he celebrates their flaws, toasts their smallest successes, holds back their hair after another rough night. It may stick pretty close to the down-and-out, but Broken's a fairly life-affirming record; these people aren't perfect, but they've got time to figure it out. For now, they're accruing scars, gathering stories, and getting by with a little help from their fucked-up friends. | 2014-04-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-04-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Broke | April 24, 2014 | 7.4 | 16ad76d8-f9b9-4e91-8a35-70ae8e0eedca | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The Deerhunter frontman and the cryptic singer-songwriter draw out each other’s playful sides on this one-off collaboration. | The Deerhunter frontman and the cryptic singer-songwriter draw out each other’s playful sides on this one-off collaboration. | Cate Le Bon / Bradford Cox: Myths 004 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cate-le-bon-bradford-cox-myths-004/ | Myths 004 | Every year at the Marfa Myths festival in Texas, a pair of musicians assemble to produce an off-the-cuff EP, which Mexican Summer then releases as part of its Myths series. Like Bon Iver and the Dessner brothers’ PEOPLE platform (now called 37d03d), it offers a low-key opportunity for well-known acts to try out new collaborations that might last, or might not. Either way, it quietly insists that process is important, and that low-stakes team-ups can sometimes yield beautiful results.
Bradford Cox’s Myths release with Cate Le Bon captures the pair of tender oddballs affirming their commonality. While they hail from the disparate environments of working-class Atlanta and rural Wales, they share an aptitude for unshowy beauty, idiosyncratic freakouts, and surrealist punk humor. They invest themselves fully in each aspect of their craft, never treating the less-realized elements like a sideshow. Le Bon also co-produced Deerhunter’s eighth album Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? during those Marfa sessions, drawing out the poppiest side of the band in some time. Myths 004 has a woolier charm, running on antic, inventive rhythms that suggest a Rube Goldberg device.
Most impromptu collaborations have an air of “you had to be there.” But Myths 004 creates a magnetic and singular world from the beginning, aided by collaborators Stella Mozgawa, Stephen Black, Tim Presley, and Samur Khouja. “Come ride with me baby, I’m long in the tooth,” Cox croaks on “Canto,” while a rhythmic motif creaks like a bad rotator cuff; every time he sings “your eyes your eyes your eyes” (which is to say: many times), the hard “Z” of “eyes” pairs with the sharp scrape of a cabasa. The effect is unsettling and absorbing.
What’s missing from Myths 004 is the opportunity to hear Cox and Le Bon singing together. Other than barely-there backing vocals, their voices only share space on “Secretary,” and their parts don’t interlace, which is a shame given that the song seems like a quiet hymn to togetherness. At first Le Bon sounds distant, then she softens into a comforting refrain as she offers to “put you through to everyone or anyone”; the song concludes with Cox offering an oblique monologue full of arresting imagery (“mascara brushed across the planes”), like a Rushmore-style high-school savant staging a labored-over play comprehensible only to him.
Though their individual work doesn’t suggest people who need encouragement to get weird, there’s a freewheeling silliness to parts of Myths 004 that suggests two conspirators egging each other on (a quality also in evidence on Le Bon’s records with Tim Presley as DRINKS). “Fireman” is quite disturbing: they set a pitched-down sample of (presumably) an actual fireman narrating the story of a blaze that claimed a family but spared their puppy against jittery piano and Le Bon’s blank-eyed incantations (“fire in the kitchen … fire in my mind”).
And yet, it might be more disturbing to hear the distinctively poised Le Bon coming undone amid the queasy guitar of “What Is She Wearing” as she recounts a litany of daily indignities in a stilted tone that suggests pure improvisation and a unique comic eye. It’s a post-punk Falling Down: She rails about taking the bins out, forgetting to bring bags to the supermarket and having to pay 5p for a new one (a British environmental policy), wearing a shitty t-shirt under a sweater only for the hot weather to play “a cruel trick” on her, forcing her to remove her upper layer and reveal the shitty t-shirt underneath. Each offence is followed by the blunt exclamation: “THAT IS NOT NICE.” Then the neighbors chime in, commenting on her nest-like hair and affirming her suspicions that everyone is looking at her “as if I have committed a crime.”
It’s the last track on Myths 004, and after marinating in Le Bon and Cox’s headspace, it might strike you as the funniest song ever recorded. But it’s the friction in this fevered vignette that makes it as satisfying as a scratching post: a reminder of the unwieldy and neurotic glory of creativity, and of life.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | November 6, 2019 | 7.3 | 16ae28da-37d2-43d6-9858-808a1a1a8f4b | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
Nas and Hit-Boy cook up another collaboration, a low-stakes mid-career rap album to show that one of the genre’s icons is still in decent fighting shape. | Nas and Hit-Boy cook up another collaboration, a low-stakes mid-career rap album to show that one of the genre’s icons is still in decent fighting shape. | Nas: Magic 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nas-magic-2/ | Magic 2 | Hit-Boy has brought his ear for samples and synths to collaborations with several artists in the past, but in Nas, he’s found a kindred spirit interested in the interplay of old and new. With every new release, Nas and Hit move slightly further away from the stately bland boom-bap of the first King’s Disease in 2020, and Magic 2 features some of their most adventurous moments to date. “Abracadabra” and “Black Magic” embrace rhythms from Atlanta and Memphis, respectively, that give Nas space to explore new patterns and pockets. He said he’s inspired by the youth, and it shows. He rattles off triple-time couplets over pianos and 808s and catches a stutter-stop flow over sampled scratches and tinny horns and organ. On “Earvin Magic Johnson,” he bounces lyrics between a fanfare and speaker-shredding drums like a basketball between legs. Phonetically, the words pop and bounce around the production in a pleasing way, and he sounds more awake and engaged than he has in a while.
But more often than not, the spell comes undone when you home in on exactly what Nas is saying. When he spits lines with catchphrases and slogans like “Durag energy/I’m on a wave, you niggas cap” or ends a handful of others with “for real” on “Abracadabra,” it feels forced, like he’s cycling through Urban Dictionary tabs open on a laptop in the booth. Try-hard wordplay causes him to put his foot in his mouth multiple times and dull the effects of his words—“My scrotum is golden” sounds cringey coming out of his mouth, though it’s not clear who could make “My scrotum is golden” sound cool, either.
Nas and Hit clearly have a lot of fun putting these projects together—otherwise, why make five of them in three years?—but the punchlines and flexes are hit-or-miss, and it doesn’t help that Hit’s beats lose all of their luster once they default back into his dead-eyed retro-traditionalism. Ironically, Nas’ jokes and boasts land better when mixed in with his trademark eye for storytelling. Take the second verse of “What This All Really Means,” which converts his frustration about his double album I Am…The Autobiography leaking into fuel to keep making music on his own terms well into old age; or how, on “Earvin Magic Johnson,” he looks back on memories of fights at McDonald’s in Manhattan and playing stages in Australia with the same reverent eyes. He’s getting better at balancing aged reflections without trying too hard for the kids.
It’s difficult to get too worked up about these Nas and Hit-Boy projects because, at their core, it’s miraculous they even exist at all. Nas is flying high on a career third wind (or fourth, depending on who you ask) and having a ball just kicking rhymes and experimenting with flows and styles with a producer who’s on the same wavelength as him. But at the same time, Magic 2, just like the four projects that came before it, isn’t grand, sharp, or thoughtful enough to warrant the several adoring re-evaluations of Nas’ GOAT status it’s spawned. It’s the textbook definition of a low-stakes mid-career rap album, a place for one of the genre’s icons to show he’s still in decent fighting shape. | 2023-07-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mass Appeal | July 28, 2023 | 6.5 | 16ae4684-b776-4b86-8431-d0a7a7135bed | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
German producer and theoretician delivers a fractured but surprisingly thorough look at the blues-- what it means, where it has come from, and how it left its fingerprints. | German producer and theoretician delivers a fractured but surprisingly thorough look at the blues-- what it means, where it has come from, and how it left its fingerprints. | Ekkehard Ehlers: A Life Without Fear | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8967-a-life-without-fear/ | A Life Without Fear | From Captain Beefheart to Moby on down, blues lends itself to deconstruction. German producer and theoretician Ekkehard Ehlers referenced and sampled Robert Johnson for a single that wound up on his 2002 album Plays, weaving snippets of Johnson's voice and guitar into a minimal house. Loops and beats are one thing, but to engage with blues over an entire album, and to play it straight, seems a bit trickier. How might a guy like Ehlers, who dwells in the abstracted netherworld of Frankfurt School philosophy, fit into a style where authenticity is everything?
Pretty easily, it turns out. A Life Without Fear collects music originally written for a dance by choreographer Christoph Winkler, but no knowledge of that collaboration is needed to absorb this work. Working closely and writing with Cologne-based guitarist Joseph Suchy-- a shapeshifting player who can modify his style to fit numerous contexts-- Ehlers delivers a fractured but surprisingly thorough look at what blues means, where it has come from, and how it left its fingerprints. The overriding mood is heavy with doom-- returning often to death and apocalypse-- but even within this framework there's room for a huge range of expression.
The versatility of vocalist and harmonica player Howard Katz Fireheart is key. Katz is a U.S.-born and Berlin-based performance artist who leads a band called PostHolocaustPop; his singing here lends a sense of gravity and human frailty. He sounds brittle and haunted on the opening traditional "Ain't No Grave" and mean and strong-- and a lot like Captain Beefheart-- on the closing "O Death", made famous by Ralph Stanley. Suchy accompanies Katz's moaning with processed guitar that sound like it's bubbling up from a fissure in the earth; the way Suchy plays, there's no question where the singer is going when his last breath leaves him.
Typical for an Ehlers project, questions of authorship are completely up in the air and the record is difficult to fix in time. The guy who looped a few seconds of a Beatles recording for 10 minutes and called it his own work has no problem borrowing when it suits his purpose. On one track, a 78 of "Strange Things" from depression-era preacher Charles Haffer, Jr. is played with Suchy adding subtle guitar distortion and Ehlers adding bits of processed noise. The record is made more "modern," sort of, but simultaneously sounds even older than it actually is. The fidelity of the added instruments provides a "live" illusion, and it comes across like something recorded in a drafty old house in the early days of electricity.
My guess is that the Haffer track was chosen for its prescience, as the haunting lyrics have an almost creepy timelessness. The lines reach back to the Biblical John the Revelator, directly address the Great War, and then, by extension, move forward to our present-day insanity in a way Haffer never could have anticipated: "Now Wilson said to the Kaiser/ Please let our vessels be/ Kaiser said to Wilson/ 'Keep your vessels off of the sea/ If you put 'em on the stream/ They'll meet my submarines'/ Strange things happening in the land". Iran, anyone?
At the other end of the spectrum are the drifting, shapeless mood pieces that find Suchy spinning out crooked lines alongside trumpeter Franz Hautzinger, with electronics added by Ehlers (the trio recorded an album together for Staubgold in 2004). In a sense, these instrumental pieces serve to transport the record from one era or latitude to the next. While blues sits at the center of A Life Without Fear, the genre is sometimes hit sideways, by probing its roots and digressions.
During a mid-album stretch, the record covers 10,000 miles and several hundred years. "Die Sorge Geht Über Den Fluss" is jazz-- short, subtle, and lovely-- as Hautzinger's impressionistic melody seem to reflect the clear mid-range fluidity of Chet Baker. But nothing is fixed. In the track's closing seconds, another world pops out, as Suchy plucks his guitar in a manner referencing the West African kora. The exploration continues on "Nie Wieder Schnell Sagen", a drone played by Fireheart on harmonica, and "Misorodzi", a piece by West African professor Dumisani Maraire featuring Suchy on balafon and vocalist Fireheart singing lyrics in the regional Shona language.
So it's Blues (Not Blues), maybe. It looks chaotic on paper, but Ehlers has bound the disparate tracks tightly into a singular concept. In the end it's more about the possibilities inherent in a particular constellation of music's universe more than any one style. Ehlers turns the blues in its broadest sense inside-out, pulls it apart, and lays the shreds on the dissecting table while keeping the tissues very much alive. I can't imagine a better artist for the job. Ehlers is a true original who has never made the same record twice, and this is one of his very best. | 2006-05-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2006-05-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Staubgold | May 19, 2006 | 8.3 | 16b08847-c11f-47cd-92ed-45c5f8fd01b7 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Like the Strokes' Julian Casablancas before him, the Bloc Party singer explores electronic textures on his solo debut. | Like the Strokes' Julian Casablancas before him, the Bloc Party singer explores electronic textures on his solo debut. | Kele: The Boxer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14381-the-boxer/ | The Boxer | No one could accuse Bloc Party of being averse to the dancefloor, or electronic music in general. Having internalized the jerky rhythmic lessons of their post-punk influences, they've eagerly outfitted their songs with club-friendly accoutrements and commissioned two albums of remixes. Yet the band is also often considered a major caretaker of trad-rock's rapidly diminishing flame, largely owing to its anthemics and lead singer Kele Okereke's lyrical earnestness.
Now, possessed by the same restlessness that's also lately stricken the Strokes' Julian Casablancas, Kele (having professionally dropped his surname) has made a solo album, and it's widely being framed as a bracing electro-minded departure. Admittedly, The Boxer inhabits electronic music more intimately than any of Bloc Party's proper studio efforts. However, the album's real departure involves less a greater embrace of synths and beats than the abandonment of soaring, big-tent songcraft. Regrettably, the lyrical earnestness remains.
In place of huge choruses and bombast, Kele offers an album heavy on tone, mood, and texture. Unfortunately, his efforts fail to make you forget the absence of things like hooks. Intriguing elements are in place-- the dubstep-influenced beats of opening cut "Walk Tall" and "The Other Side"; the kinetic minute and a half of squelchy synths and seismic breaks on the outro to "Rise". But rarely do the piecemeal bells and whistles add up to a worthwhile song, as "The Other Side" haphazardly trots out guttural grunts and light tropicalia touches, while "Rise" spends most of its running time meandering through a chintzy, xylophone-led groove.
At least those songs give you something to hold onto, which can't be said for "The New Rules" or "All the Things I Could Never Say" (a song title only Bono could love). Kele is in full introspective flower here, which means we get treated in the former to the gripping admission that he's "learning to be laid-back about things" while in the latter we have to put up with a tedious quarter-life crisis caused by an untrustworthy lover who's "making me older."
"Everything You Wanted" is whiny too, but it's more than saved by containing the album's one truly transportive refrain. Alas, the music's rather lukewarm, especially when you set it next to the album's most Bloc Party-ish cut, the driving post-punker "Unholy Thoughts". Given Kele's unwillingness to play to his widescreen strengths, perhaps it makes sense that the best moment here happens when he disappears entirely, pitch-shifting his voice into a thinly soft, Michael Jackson-like register on "On the Lam". Of course, there's not really a hook there, either. | 2010-06-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-06-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Polydor / Wichita / Glassnote | June 24, 2010 | 5.1 | 16b4433d-6fdc-464d-b7ed-cddeaf0ff372 | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
Toronto folk-pop band explores sleep-deprivation, pain, and fear. | Toronto folk-pop band explores sleep-deprivation, pain, and fear. | Picastro: Metal Cares | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6570-metal-cares/ | Metal Cares | Often folk acts are as meek and delicate in person as their music would suggest, and Toronto four-piece Picastro are no exception. After L.A.-based Pehr Records released their 2002 debut, Red Your Blues, Picastro inexplicably left the label. Refusing to step on any toes, the band remained tight-lipped about the affair despite claiming how awful the experience was. Singer/guitarist Elizabeth Hysen immaculately personifies this innocuous, victimized pathos, suffering from hyperaesthesia-- a sensory condition in which victims suffer from increased sensitivity to stimuli (think Daredevil).
Appropriately, Metal Cares exudes a sound seemingly tormented by sleep-deprivation, pain, and-- most pressingly-- fear. Hysen's vocals are much more prominent in the mix than on Red Your Blues, allowing her every grief-stricken crack and murmur to resonate above the equally tortured instrument parts. The track list serves as a peek into Hysen's neuroticism with titles like "I Can't Fall Asleep", "Teeth and No Eyes", and "Sharks", named after one of Hysen's foremost phobias. However, Hysen, a straightforward, no gimmicks songwriter, keeps the lyrics short and cryptic, not to mention unintelligible. On the chorus of "Dramaman", Hysen wails indecipherably amidst shrieking strings, while the ballad "Sharks" builds to a muffled chant sounding like "bigger hunter, hello hunter". Good luck trying to decode "Ah Nyeh Nyeh."
With her garbled drawl, Hysen could pass for a German laptop pop artist, though her bandmates' instrumental workings borrow the most from that genre. Rather than adopting the punchy, infectious folk-pop of past tourmates Cat Power or Smog, Picastro are content with allowing their songs to methodically unfold. Opener "No Contest" patiently unfurls on a cyclical acoustic riff for two minutes before finally revealing the song's subtle yet gorgeous refrain. Despite this asceticism, the album still contains several beautiful, striking moments between the gossamer acoustic strumming and haunting strings .
Hysen's hushed, sparing vocals leave a lot of open space between verses, but she's hardly twiddling her thumbs during that time. For all the allure Hysen's voice generates, her acoustic/electric interplay with guitarist Zak Hanna is the true glue that holds the LP together. "I Can't Fall Asleep" builds to a jarring chorus that features Hanna's reverb-drenched electric against Hysen's dissonant, ringing acoustic. Closer "Blonde Fires" puts a warmer, more inviting spin on this interplay, allowing the guitars to intermittently carry the lead melody. It's a sound awkwardly caught between Elliott Smith and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, balancing pretty acoustic melodies with chillingly shrill clangs and screeches. But hey, that's the unapologetic, enigmatic Hysen for ya; for all we know, part of her probably wants to be "Miss Misery", but the other half simply can't stop freaking out over sharks. | 2005-05-08T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2005-05-08T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Polyvinyl | May 8, 2005 | 7.5 | 16b765ae-51b4-45c1-bb98-f334ffae3e76 | Adam Moerder | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adam-moerder/ | null |
A pleasant palate-cleanser after the nourishing Hug of Thunder, the Canadian collective’s latest EP tackles familiar modes in capable fashion, while offering moments of life-affirming beauty. | A pleasant palate-cleanser after the nourishing Hug of Thunder, the Canadian collective’s latest EP tackles familiar modes in capable fashion, while offering moments of life-affirming beauty. | Broken Social Scene: Let’s Try the After Vol. 1 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/broken-social-scene-lets-try-the-after-vol-1-ep/ | Let’s Try the After Vol. 1 EP | Given Broken Social Scene’s current status as the heroic sentimentalists of 2000s indie rock, it’s easy to forget that the group’s post-rock roots run deep. Similar to their Canadian colleagues Arcade Fire, the sprawling and ever-shifting collective counts members with established histories in bands that embraced post-rock’s nebulous, largely instrumental sonic ethos; whereas Win Butler and co.’s anthemic approach was fully formed upon first impact, however, Broken Social Scene’s early records—including 2002’s star-making You Forgot It in People—were marked by the electronic squiggles, languid arrangements, and the penchant for catharsis that typified so much post-rock in the early 2000s.
Even as the band’s songwriting has taken on a more explicitly uplifting and streamlined form, they’ve never quite forgotten where they came from; 2010’s lovely, shapeshifting Forgiveness Rock Record was produced by John McEntire of post-rock godheads Tortoise and featured the Sea and Cake’s Sam Prekop on a song that practically mirrored the tropical, wafting dreaminess of his main act. After a seven-year hiatus (there are few things more explicitly post-rock than taking forever between albums), Broken Social Scene returned with Hug of Thunder, their shortest record to date, which represented a full realization of the warm-embrace rock music they’ve leaned toward since the days when bandleader Kevin Drew turned live renditions of “It’s All Gonna Break” into a call-and-response anthem.
But amid the empathy and urgency streaked across Hug of Thunder was a band still unafraid to doodle moodily in the margins, from the instrumental ditherings in the midsection of “Victim Lover” to the sax-led breakdown in “Stay Happy,” the latter which practically and lovingly ripped from the playbook of BSS-adjacent post-rock act Do Make Say Think. Even by its own hazy standards, post-rock has taken on an unusually wide range of forms, from the jazzy and quixotic to pure, uncut, ascendant drama. Over the last 20 years, Broken Social Scene have proven themselves the rare act to fuse those opposite poles in a manner that’s emotionally nourishing even at their most obtuse. The subsequent EPs that have accompanied every album since 2005’s self-titled record have typically offered explorations of Broken Social Scene’s alternately tight and loose approaches, at times doling out a bit of self-mythologizing for good measure.
Broken Social Scene’s companion piece, EP to Be You and Me, featured a fast-paced take on the previously slow-burning “Major Label Debut” and a submerged reprise of the title track to Broken Social Scene’s largely ambient 2001 debut, Feel Good Lost. In a few respects, the band’s latest EP, Let’s Try the After Vol. 1, is no different; it’s a mix of surging mostly-instrumentals and fairly compact pop songs, arriving with a promise from Drew himself that he and his compatriots won’t vanish for so long again. “The point is to keep going. We have more to give,” he promised in a press release accompanying the EP’s announcement.
The weakest tune in this new crop is the EP’s first single and closing track, “All I Want,” with Apostle of Hustle frontman Andrew Whiteman taking lead vocals; after opening with a dirty bassline faintly reminiscent of the Killers’ macho 2017 single “The Man,” the song mutates into a vaguely post-punk-ish groove that ebbs and flows unsatisfyingly. Otherwise, Let’s Try the After is a pleasant Andes Creme de Menthe following the feast that was Hug of Thunder, as Broken Social Scene tackle a few of their distinct modes—propulsive and tricky instrumental rock, explosive guitar-hero theatrics, slow-burning balladry—in capable, familiar fashion.
That familiarity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially if you’re typically into what Broken Social Scene bring to the table. The Drew-led “Boyfriends” builds on Hug of Thunder’s skyscraping rock motifs as he effortlessly slides into the rousing chorus, “Let’s get you out of here,” a torrent of electric guitar and weighty piano chords arriving perfectly on cue. “1972” showcases the coolly delivered vocals of Broken Social Scene’s most recent convert, Ariel Engle, who previously provided the perfect counterbalance to the out-of-step chaos of “Stay Happy”; here, she vibes over a mid-tempo bass-and-drums combo vaguely reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk classic “Storms” before the rest of the band dives headlong into a mood-shifting orchestral outro.
Engle also appears on “Remember Me Young,” a compact mostly-instrumental that features her wordless vocals and also provides the album’s biggest surprise. It’s essentially “KC Accidental” turned inside out: The brief breakdowns that dot the track’s steady beat and fluttering guitar licks soothe rather than crashing through the scenery—they amount to a bed of vocal elisions and depth-charge piano stabs that feels like being smacked in the face with a downy pillow. Such forceful beauty—a sense of indefinable, life-affirming ecstasy—is practically woven into Broken Social Scene’s DNA at this point, and Let’s Try the After is proof that their genetic makeup is as complicatedly pure as ever. | 2019-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Arts & Crafts | February 15, 2019 | 7.2 | 16b83450-2509-4b3d-ac78-e6e9d59b9edf | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
After some big early singles and some unsteady mixtapes, Charlotte Aitchison’s debut album delievers on that initial promise. True Romance is an album of emotionally direct, bubblegum-catchy, off-kilter songs about falling in and out of love. | After some big early singles and some unsteady mixtapes, Charlotte Aitchison’s debut album delievers on that initial promise. True Romance is an album of emotionally direct, bubblegum-catchy, off-kilter songs about falling in and out of love. | Charli XCX: True Romance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17880-charli-xcx-true-romance/ | True Romance | Internet platforms aren't genres, and maybe it's time to call a moratorium on treating them like they are. In 2006, when Charlotte Aitchison turned 14, she started recording a later-shelved album she has more recently disowned as "fucking terrible MySpace music." Now, almost seven years later, her proper debut album as Charli XCX can hardly avoid comparisons to Tumblr, from fans and detractors alike.
A simple misreading of the UK singer and songwriter's biggest hit might explain this focus on technology-based shorthand. Swedish electro-pop duo Icona Pop's 2012 global smash "I Love It", co-written by Charli XCX but not on True Romance, emphasizes a generational divide: "You're from the 70s/ And I'm a 90s bitch." Sure, Aitchison was born in 1992, but her use of social-media formats also long frequented by droves of people born in the 1970s isn't exactly remarkable in 2013. As that catchy kiss-off's Republica-on-EDM wattage illuminates, Charli XCX is a would-be 90s pop star, too. And in only the best sense.
True Romance shares its title with an unbelievably well-cast 1993 movie written by Quentin Tarantino, who was reassembling cultural detritus way before mash-ups and microblogging. Charli XCX's approach to pop is similarly postmodern (how 90s does that sound?), pulling from moody 80s synth-pop, sassy turn-of-the-millennium girl groups, and state-of-the-art contemporary producers to create something distinctive and immediately memorable. She clearly understands the internet, having shared two original mixtapes and two influences mixtapes before her official full-length, but this carefully pruned set is no data dump. And there you'll see a glimmer of True Romance's most throwback aspect: its evident pop ambition, an overriding sense of an imagined mass audience for music that's radio-ready yet outsider-friendly. It's almost like Napster-- and the filler-crammed album sales model that preceded it-- never happened.
In fact, by the time Charli XCX was a teenage electro-house devotee, illegal file-sharing's early free-for-all had already given way to iTunes and other legal download services. Robyn had already released her self-titled comeback album. So it might be only natural that Charli XCX would keep the pre-bubble faith that people will pay for emotionally direct, bubblegum-catchy, yet stubbornly left-of-center songs about falling in and out of love. But the generous hooks on the previously released singles here, such as the gospel-kissed prechorus of the yearning "Stay Away" or the Santigold-savvy lilt of love-and-the-bomb brooder "Nuclear Seasons", are extraordinarily welcome just the same. Even better are newer singles such as the gorgeously bitter "You (Ha Ha Ha)", which inhabits its cloud-rappy Gold Panda sample like they were made for each other, and the almost-as-gorgeously blissful "What I Like", which recounts a still-young relationship with the cheeky frankness of Lily Allen or the Streets, and the sing-songy near-rapping of the Spice Girls.
The several songs on True Romance that hadn't previously surfaced in videos or other releases aren't quite as strong, but they're effective enough to suggest Charli XCX's best work might still be ahead of her. The Todd Rundgren-sampling "So Far Away", with the sun-dappled lushness of the Avalanches, is a clear highlight; Charli XCX's vocals are usually plain-spoken, but the anguished break-up plea "Set Me Free" proves she can reach for Jessie Ware–like dramatics when appropriate. The pitch-shifting "no one is forever" intro added at the start of opener "Nuclear Seasons" probably should've been given its own track-- and later on the album it is, when the same backing vocal forms the base of the cloudy, broken-hearted "Grins". Elsewhere, the haunted confession "How Can I", while solid enough, is a reminder that Charli XCX's lyrics so far tend to fall relatively flat; when, on swooning finale "Lock You Up", she sings, "It hits me like a ton of bricks," she leaves the cliché untweaked.
And then there's "Cloud Aura", a lovelorn, engagingly laid-back bit of groove that lets Grimes' "Genesis" video co-star Brooke Candy rap horribly about Chris Brown. Candy's guest verse previously appeared on 2012's uneven Super Ultra mixtape, and it was near-universally panned. It isn't any better now. But in an era when too many up-and-comers are all too eager to please, this stubborn refusal to back down displays another quality in short supply: genuine irreverence. The songwriting and production credits on True Romance include Usher's "Climax" co-conspirator Ariel Rechtshaid and "I Love It" collaborator Patrick Berger, among others, who also share some credit (and blame). But like 90s pop stars turned 10s pop sophisticates Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé, Charli XCX stamps her personality across the entire project, and True Romance suggests she'll be worth following for a while. On Tumblr, Instagram, and whatever comes next, sure, but musically most of all. | 2013-04-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-04-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Iamsound | April 25, 2013 | 8.3 | 16bfd11a-90c5-44e1-b4f4-94d8c2fde4cc | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Folk outfit Hurray for the Riff Raff's Small Town Heroes borrows liberally from old-time traditions, including Appalachian reels, Big Easy R&B, and Piedmont blues. Yet these songs put a fresh and wily spin on old sounds and ideas, thanks to the formidable presence of singer/songwriter Alynda Lee Segarra. | Folk outfit Hurray for the Riff Raff's Small Town Heroes borrows liberally from old-time traditions, including Appalachian reels, Big Easy R&B, and Piedmont blues. Yet these songs put a fresh and wily spin on old sounds and ideas, thanks to the formidable presence of singer/songwriter Alynda Lee Segarra. | Hurray for the Riff Raff: Small Town Heroes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19031-hurray-for-the-riff-raff-small-town-heroes/ | Small Town Heroes | “Delia’s gone, but I’m settling the score,” Alynda Lee Segarra sings on “The Body Electric,” the centerpiece of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s new album, Small Town Heroes. Over tense eddies of fiddle and sympathetic acoustic strums, her dry husk of a voice sounds more resigned than outraged, as she realizes she's too late to save Delia. Several decades too late, as the case may be: The Delia she’s singing about is the title character in the popular murder ballad "Delia's Gone", written by Dick Toops and Karl Silbersdorf and recorded by Bob Dylan, Harry Belafonte, Waylon Jennings, and multiple times by Johnny Cash. “The Body Electric” seeks to rescue Delia and so many other murder-ballad victims, offering an empathetic—and feminist—reading of an American folk tradition that lives on today in contemporary covers of “Banks of the Ohio” and “Knoxville Girl". Murder ballads allow us to act out dark urges, using history to guard us against accusations of sociopathy or misogyny. But Segarra laments our fascination with such abject subject matter: “Shoot me down, put my body in the river,” she sings, “while the whole world sings, sings it like a song/ The whole world sings like there’s nothing going wrong.”
For Segarra, a Bronx-born Puerto Rican who gravitated toward Bikini Kill before discovering Woody Guthrie, the past is not a thing to be revered. Rather, it must be endlessly, aggressively interrogated. Small Town Heroes borrows liberally from old-time traditions, including Appalachian reels, Big Easy R&B, and Piedmont blues, yet these songs put a fresh and wily spin on old sounds and ideas. Segarra rewrites Jesse Fuller’s “San Francisco Bay Blues”, retitling it “The New SF Bay Blues” and changing the subject from a wronged woman to a brokedown touring van: “You’ve been a good old wagon/ You got me there in style”). “Crash on the Highway” subtly rewrites Roy Acuff’s “Wreck on the Highway”, its two-step beat evoking the boredom and frustration of backed-up traffic. These are songs about touring as rambling; instead of hitchin’ rides and jumpin’ trains, Segarra and Hurray for the Riff Raff are gigging around the country in a cramped van.
Small Town Heroes may not sound like what you’d expect from a New Orleans album, yet it is anchored in that city’s sense of musical adventure. Segarra learned her trade playing in street bands and busking on corners, which has given her a broad musical vocabulary. She arranges and produces these songs as eloquently as she writes them, often using just a few instruments to convey a surprisingly full sound. “Blue Ridge Mountain” opens the album with her clawhammer banjo and what sounds like a clogger working together as a makeshift rhythm section, with Yosi Perlstein’s spry fiddle dancing around them. “No One Else” is built on a folk-rock foundation, yet it pitches and yaws on a rolling piano bassline that might have been learned from an old Fats Domino or Professor Longhair record.
With Small Town Heroes, Segarra proves herself one of the most compelling stylists in a folk revival full of suspicious acts either too beholden to tradition or too uncritical to make much of it. Perhaps the biggest difference between Hurray and its peers is attitude: Segarra understands that these styles don’t need to be revived, so she’s not playing dress-up and isn’t concerned with projecting any sense of rustic authenticity. Instead, she understands that these old sounds still thrum somewhere deep in the American subconscious, even if our relation to them changes with each passing year. With the whole country as its geographical and historical backdrop, Small Town Heroes is an album about how life and music intersect. Rather than play to her record collection, however, Segarra takes the records out of their sleeves, scratches them up, and makes the old music speak to new concerns. | 2014-02-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-02-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | ATO | February 18, 2014 | 7.8 | 16c0b155-904d-420b-ba21-5f18f7b755f4 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | 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 Mac Miller and Vince Staples’ 2013 mixtape, a fledgling but important document of freeform creativity. | 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 Mac Miller and Vince Staples’ 2013 mixtape, a fledgling but important document of freeform creativity. | Vince Staples / Larry Fisherman: Stolen Youth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vince-staples-larry-fisherman-stolen-youth/ | Stolen Youth | Mac Miller got the idea for rap camp from The Alchemist but he made it his own. A bunch of folks from all corners of his life, from fellow Pittsburgh acts like Hardo and Bill to old tourmates like the Cool Kids to his new circle of Los Angeles artists, would come in for freestyle sessions at his home recording studio, The Sanctuary. When Mac opened the doors to his mansion, anything could happen.
In 2012, accompanying Earl Sweatshirt, Vince Staples showed up to rap camp and Mac asked him why he didn’t rap more. Vince told him he was never offered beats, so Mac stepped in as Larry Fisherman, his producer alias. “We made a couple songs and it just went from there,” Vince once recalled with typical understatement.
At the time, Vince and Mac were both adjusting to the whiplash of growing up too fast. Mac was a surprise indie success living it up in his new home of L.A. Obsessed with being a rapper throughout his adolescence, he went from sneaking out of his house at 15 to attend cyphers, to headlining a tour at 19, to moving into a mansion at 20. By 21, he was so committed to music that, bizarrely, a reality show about his music career, Mac Miller and the Most Dope Family, was an escape. “I have been living in my studio for months working on my album, so the show kind of forced me to get out of that room and go do something entertaining,” he said.
Vince was trying to escape his reality. When he entered The Sanctuary he was a high school dropout and former Long Beach gangbanger whose relationship to music was transactional and tenuous. “I needed money, bruh. Ain’t nobody have no money around me,” he once reflected of that time period. “My mama needed some money. My sisters needed money. Somebody got to take care of my family.” By 18, he’d already weathered the deaths and incarcerations of multiple friends and relatives and was thoroughly jaded even as rap offered a way forward. He didn’t hide his cynicism. “Abraham Lincoln never kept none of my niggas safe/Only gave them prison dates and Church’s Chicken dinner plates,” he scoffed on his debut mixtape.
Stolen Youth emerged from Mac and Vince’s untested potential. At the time, Vince was defined by a show-stealing but narrow verse on Earl Sweatshirt’s “epar,” a rep that was intensified by Earl’s unknown enrollment at Samoa’s Coral Reef Academy. Vince was frequently asked about Earl’s whereabouts and pestered to release more music in the vile vein of Earl’s debut mixtape. He refused.
Meanwhile, Mac felt constrained by his most popular music in a different way. His success had made him the poster child for frat rap, a genre of trifling white-boy fantasia that he was adjacent to but quickly outpacing. If you listened closely, his music was shedding its kegger appeal and shifting into something foggier and more introspective—but he was still this grinning white kid who fit in well the frat pack he was lumped in with. As he insisted he was something more, it was easy to doubt him. “People weren’t really taking Mac seriously as a producer. It’s the same way they look at me as a rapper,” Vince once summarized. Despite their different backgrounds, Mac and Vince were united in their resolve to surpass what was expected of them.
Teaming up was formally Mac’s idea, but the ambient spontaneity of rap camp allowed Stolen Youth to take shape intuitively. With no particular direction, it blossomed into Vince’s first real self-portrait. Shedding the deadpan of his first two mixtapes, which were sharply written but withdrawn and cold, Vince emerges as a dramatist and storyteller. He remains jaded but begins to sound lucid, his grim outlook bolstered by his eye for detail. His rocky childhood isn’t some distant memory; its lessons and losses are embedded in his worldview.
What’s dazzling is that instead of a linear autobiography, Vince opts for a scattered personal history. His tales are specific and oblique, rejecting a bird’s eye view for a perspective that’s intimate and clipped. Gunshots are so common he can distinguish between the “cry” of a .357 and the “applause” of a Mac-10. His 9 millimeter is “chunky,” and his shotgun shells can be caught from 50 yards away like a Roddy White completion. The Buick LeSabre is black and lacks plates; you probably don’t want to drive it down Orizaba Avenue because that’s where the undercovers park. Vince uses these details less as markers of his authenticity and more as private recollections. He isn’t a Long Beach tour guide; he’s a resident whose inner life is reified in the physical world.
Within this whirlwind of memories, time and space melt away, blurring the line between kid Vince and adult Vince. In his “Heavens” verse, he evokes mall cops and real cops in the same breath; he ran from both. Other times, they were nowhere to be found. In the middle of matter-of-factly describing a driveby on “Intro,” he pivots to describing a dead friend lying in the street for hours: “First the Goodyears screech, then you hear that drum/Fuck 911, police don't come/Had Jabari on the streets till the sun came up.” On “Stuck in My Ways,” he questions religion by observing that he’s spent his life “sinning without a consequence,” but then flips that doubt into defiance: “We made the most out the nothing they give us.” It feels like both a sneer and a sigh. Like his memories, his cynicism and his resolve sit side by side.
While Vince raps in 4K, Larry goes Technicolor. Larry Fisherman was a persona Mac created because he felt the Mac Miller identity came with too many expectations. As Larry Fisherman, Mac is curious, fastidious, and semi-anonymous. He plays new instruments and embraces the toil of starting from scratch. “I know I’m not shit,” he once said of his burgeoning skill set as a producer. He clearly thought of that inexperience as an opportunity. For Stolen Youth, he pulls widely, drawing from trip-hop, cloud rap, and boom bap to produce beats that are feathery yet grim, woozy yet swingy. The drums kick, knock, flutter, and splat. Vocal samples, some of Mac himself (as on “Thought About You”), are stretched into dreamy yawns and clipped into gloomy loops. The flourishes and diversity of his composition profoundly outclass his rapping during this period. While an aimless Mac Miller rapped that he wanted to “make out with Foxy Brown,” Larry Fisherman was screwing Willie Hutch vocals from the Foxy Brown soundtrack. Mac’s rapping would eventually catch up with Larry’s production long before his death last year, but here the gap is instructive. Larry was who Mac wanted to be.
Larry’s versatility helps buoy Vince’s then-flat voice, which had yet to become the manic Swiss army knife it is today. The chorus of “Thought About You” features well-placed blasts of drumrolls that sound like a carburetor roaring to life. Vince’s hook comes alive, too. Similarly, the gusts of bass and distortion that shoot through the dancing minor keys on “Fantoms” hit like car collisions, giving Vince’s taunts a boost of intensity. These assists could turn corny—as on the goofy key-pounding of “Guns & Roses” and the shock waves of organ on “Sleep”—but they embody the spirit of Mac’s rap camp. The goal was to muddle the lines between work and play, collaborating and goofing off.
Vince had greater ambitions than rapping for fun. You can feel it on the posse cuts “Heaven” and “Sleep,” where Vince is joined by Da$h, Mac Miller, Ab-Soul, and Hardo for what are essentially cyphers. On both tracks, he goes last, wresting all the showboating into something more purposeful and sharp. This disconnect extended to the record as a whole. “Stolen Youth isn’t me,” he’s said, citing his manager, Corey Smyth, and Mac as the real masterminds. The Boondocks-esque cover art (and accompanying comic book) certainly don’t make this sound like a mere change of heart. He made the record that circumstance allowed.
When everyone else retires to their cabins and it’s just Vince and Mac and the music, the tape shines. “On Outro,” backed by twinkly chords, splashes of kick drum, and a purr of bass, Vince’s rapping is effortless and graceful, flitting between images, memories, and taunts. The hookless, free-flowing song has no centerpiece, but it does have this striking vignette: “Mama playing Stevie Wonder while she in the kitchen cooking/Pigs knocking on my door to take my dad to central booking/Reading books up in my room cause she won’t let me go and play/Scared her youngest son will run around and go pick up a K.” The scene is vivid and compact and dense, a cross-section of life that’s as personal as it is panoramic.
That kind of piercing clarity is what makes Stolen Youth so enduring despite its shortcomings. Though Vince has outgrown the tape, his life fills it crags, his experiences guide its voice, his temerity forges something from nothing. He went on to take the raw talent on display here and become an aesthete, but even without the gloss and resources, his perspective is fully formed and resonant. At a wizened 19, Vince sees the abusers of power and privilege and is poised to confront them, already unconvinced of their authority. He’s not a rebel with a middle finger and an attitude, nor some kid prodigy with a god complex. He’s not a gangster rapper, nor is he a reformed gangster. He’s just Vince Staples, the griot of Long Beach, and Mac Miller is his friend. | 2019-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Blacksmith / A.G. | May 12, 2019 | 7.6 | 16c11bfa-1d7c-4f84-bc99-05c6bc822a10 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The debut from the young Michigan rock band is stiff, hackneyed, overly precious retro-fetishism. | The debut from the young Michigan rock band is stiff, hackneyed, overly precious retro-fetishism. | Greta Van Fleet: Anthem of the Peaceful Army | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/greta-van-fleet-anthem-of-the-peaceful-army/ | Anthem of the Peaceful Army | Greta Van Fleet sound like they did weed exactly once, called the cops, and tried to record a Led Zeppelin album before they arrested themselves. The poor kids from Frankenmuth, Michigan, don’t even realize they’re more of an algorithmic fever dream than an actual rock band. While they’re selling out shows all over the world, somewhere in a boardroom, a half-dozen people are figuring out just how, exactly, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant are supposed to fit into the SUV with the rest of the Greta Van Fleet boys on “Carpool Karaoke.”
Just look at this photo: Brothers Jake and Sam Kiszka, on guitar and bass, are both wearing hippie costumes they 3D-printed off the internet. The singer, the wretched and caterwauling third brother, Josh, is in dangly feather earrings and vinyl pants, like he was dressed by a problematic Santa Fe palm reader with a gift certificate to Chico’s. It’s a costume—Greta Van Fleet is all costume. And if things that look like another thing is your thing, get ready to throw your lighters up for a band whose guiding principle seems to be reading the worst Grand Funk Railroad songs as if they were a religious text.
Though their debut album, Anthem of the Peaceful Army, sounds like a bona fide classic rock record—with its fuzzy bass, electric sitar solos, and lyrics featuring the kind of self-actualized transcendence brought on by a few too many multivitamins—it is not actually classic rock. They are a new kind of vampiric band who’s there to catch the runoff of original classic rock using streaming services’ data-driven business model. Greta Van Fleet exist to be swallowed into the algorithm’s churn and rack up plays, of which they already have hundreds of millions. They make music that sounds exactly like Led Zeppelin and demand very little other than forgetting how good Led Zeppelin often were.
It’s possible to be an exceptional classic rock vampire act but it requires something more than the major label money and vaguely Native American accoutrements. It’s why Greta Van Fleet can’t compete with, say, the Darkness circa 2003’s “I Believe in a Thing Called Love.” The Darkness—who aped big rock warhorses like Queen and Aerosmith and Van Halen—were so outrageous that they had to be credulous. They had a song that went, “Get your hands off of my woman, mother fucker,” and did a power metal cover of Radiohead’s “Street Spirit (Fade Out).” Who would do such garish things? They dared you, tongue in cheek, to take this impossibly foolish thing very seriously.
Greta Van Fleet do no such thing. They care so deeply and are so precious with their half-baked boomer fetishism, they mollycoddled every impulse of late-’60s rock’n’roll into an interminable 49-minute drag. Each song here could be written or played by any of a thousand classic rock cover bands that have standing gigs at sports bars and biker joints across America (the same venues where Greta Van Fleet cut their teeth when they were kids). So why should Greta Van Fleet be the ones signed to Republic and William Morris, because they don’t have bald spots yet? Tons of people in those cover bands play their instruments better than Greta Van Fleet, who are, currently, proficient at best. No one in this band offers anything in the way of personality that doesn’t sound like your average YouTube tutorial for a Jimmy Page–type pentatonic solo or a John Bonham–type shuffle.
And at least Zeppelin knew to separate their sweet-lady-I’m-horny songs from their howling-about-literary-fantasy songs. Hilariously, Greta Van Fleet combine them into one on “The Cold Wind,” where the narrator (who is dying) begs his “sweet mama” to take the family ox (I guess) to town to sell it, when, mid-ox-transaction, this happens: “The Yankee peddler bargains with you on his way/Whoa sweet mama’s gotten herself a new dress.”
That’s funny, but it’s not supposed to be funny, because Greta Van Fleet do not possess self-awareness—at all. When asked about a characteristically ugh lyric (“All my brothers who stand up/For the peace of the land”), Jake responded, in part, “I guess it’s subject to interpretation. But I think the initial idea with that was that, as brothers, we stand for the peace of land. And that was for the good of the Earth, and for man.” Ignoring that this is basically a gag in Spinal Tap, a much better answer that would speak to the spirit of the music they are trying to capture would be: “I don’t know, who gives a shit.”
What they lack in self-awareness they more than make up for in rigid self-consciousness, failing to make any fun or campy choices to lift these songs out of a morass of the worst impulses of Rush and Cream. The back half of the album alternates between the ignorable and unforgivable, from what is (a somewhat fun stomper “Mountain of the Sun”) to what should never be: “The New Day” features Josh singing about watching a child grow in a garden, seeing her bloom so she can “be a woman soon.” None of this lysergic-sexual thinking is within the band’s grasp, they are just swatting at crusty platitudes and copy-pasting old mythos hoping no one notices that they are too small, too inept to even put forth one meaningful, specific, original idea.
But for as retro as Anthem of the Peaceful Army may seem, in actuality, it is the future. It’s proof of concept that in the streaming and algorithm economy, a band doesn’t need to really capture the past, it just needs to come close enough so that a computer can assign it to its definite article. The more unique it sounds, the less chance it has to be placed alongside what you already love. So when the Greta Van Fleet of your favorite artist finally lands on your morning playlist, spark up a bowl of nostalgia and enjoy the self-satisfied buzz of recognizing something you already know. It’s the cheapest high in music. | 2018-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Lava / Republic | October 23, 2018 | 1.6 | 16c341fb-87e6-4d2d-b98f-464b063a2e3f | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
The Miami rapper is still bringing you into his world of opulence and hustlers’ theme music, but the view is more refined. | The Miami rapper is still bringing you into his world of opulence and hustlers’ theme music, but the view is more refined. | Rick Ross: Richer Than I Ever Been | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rick-ross-richer-than-i-ever-been/ | Richer Than I Ever Been | Fifteen years into his career, Rick Ross has etched out a space in rap where he sounds comfortable without being complacent. The rhythms of the average Rozay song are pleasantly predictable: allusions to a drug-dealing past at odds with his history as a corrections officer, the occasional rags-to-riches stories, and descriptions of designer loungewear and weed strains that would make Wiz Khalifa blush, all set to beats that are either as deluxe and elegant as tailored suits or as sweaty and bouncy as the clubs in his Miami hometown. His gruff voice lends theatricality to his music, rendering even his most emotionally detached songs as opera-ready tales. He’s certainly the only rapper who can count Jazmine Sullivan and former Cocaine Cowboy Willie Falcon as album guests, as he does on his eleventh project, Richer Than I Ever Been.
Ross is as capable and self-aware as ever, serving familiar scenarios with a zeal largely missing from 2019’s Port of Miami 2. Richer features little of the chest-thumping bravado of Teflon Don or the rap insider score-settling of Rather You Than Me. There’s no event song or hidden adversary to put a finer point on Ross’ progress since his last album or his latest book; all we get is the progress, theme music to hustle and motivate. In this way, the album is standard Ross fare—the kind he’s released since 2014’s Hood Billionaire—with a milder bite. He’s still bringing you into his world, but the view is more refined, mahogany paneling and cigars in easy chairs instead of bottle service.
While Ross’ voice is a powerful instrument, his delivery is often more malleable than he gets credit for. The pomp of his music can mask the overt left turns in his narratives: Take the second verse of “The Pulitzer,” which starts with a funny throwaway line (“They say that the floor is facetious/Fat boy just keep fillin’ the bleachers”), then dives into stories about friends serving prison sentences and his own habit of self-medicating with Percocet before ending in the same money pit the song started in (“Gettin’ money, it’s still Boobie gang/No colors, no flags, just let the toolie bang”). Ross can go from smirking about owning 100 cars on “Rapper Estates” to the hushed delivery of “Marathon,” where he raps, “First I had to teach myself, then I started teaching wealth/No longer am I seeking shelter,” like a therapy patient after a critical breakthrough. He rarely sounds like he’s reading a list of accomplishments from a teleprompter, even when that’s exactly what he’s doing.
The sense of familiarity throughout Richer ensures that no song is bad, but there are also fewer standouts. It’s not autopilot, but we’ve seen these locales before. Thankfully, the production and guests keep things lively enough. Producer Bink! offers up a minimalist mid-tempo shaker on “Warm Words in a Cold World,” which teases out Future’s most elastic guest verse since Young Thug’s “Sup Mate.” Timbaland’s wailing shuffle on “The Pulitzer”—and Lyle Leduff and Don Cannon’s skipping drums on “Wiggle”—put some strategic pep in the album’s step. The rest of the project’s energy comes from Ross’ newfound eye for rising talent, with verses from DreamDoll (“Wiggle”), Yungeen Ace (“Can’t Be Broke”), and Blxst (“Made It Out Alive”) accenting the legacy-building in his lyrics.
A big part of Ross’ appeal lies in how he makes his luxe lifestyle feel attainable. He’s already proven it doesn’t matter if he’s lived out the stories he tells or not; he’s perfected the art of selling Rick Ross in the way that only the world’s most renowned Wingstop franchisee could. Richer Than I Ever Been is far from Ross’ most vital album, but few rappers can make what amounts to a status update feel like you’re right next to him, living out the story brick by brick.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Epic | December 17, 2021 | 6.7 | 16c8d859-b51c-4233-adb2-f9627e7dc275 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
After the crushing intensity of Hospice, the Antlers return with a more refined and sophisticated LP that still forges a powerful emotional connection. | After the crushing intensity of Hospice, the Antlers return with a more refined and sophisticated LP that still forges a powerful emotional connection. | The Antlers: Burst Apart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15411-burst-apart/ | Burst Apart | Brooklyn's indie scene can feel like a series of bands each trying to be hipper than the next, but thankfully nobody told Pete Silberman. In the dog days of 2009's deadbeat summer, the Antlers frontman emerged from his bedroom with his third LP, Hospice. On it, he unfashionably embraced hackles-raising choruses and concept-album ambition, and he pushed the button on emotional nuclear options: abortion, cancer, death, all that fun stuff. Now a trio, the Antlers have claimed the influence of "electronic music" for Burst Apart, a typical omen for a typically "difficult follow-up album." But while Burst Apart sheds the PR-bait bio and Arcade Fire aspirations that made its predecessor a word-of-mouth success, it's still tethered to a magnanimity and expressive clarity that makes it almost every bit as devastating.
Lead single "Parentheses" didn't do much to show their hand; it's pretty misleading out of context. Sounding like a higher-BPM "Climbing Up the Walls", the knockabout electronic percussion and tweaked piano ripples rightfully marked some connection to the post-OK Computer, pre-Kid A application of Mo' Wax and Warp textures to alt-rock song structures. But the aggression in Silberman's falsetto and the gnarly guitar distortion are revealed as total outliers, and Burst Apart can actually be seen as Hospice turned inside out: Where before, long swathes of calm white noise linked emotive outcries, Burst Apart moves patiently through luxurious downtempo tones belying some serious romantic disturbance.
Those well-versed in dream journal interpretation could gather that from the mere title of "Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out" (a common symbolic manifestation of sexual frustration). After all, Burst Apart does open with "I Don't Want Love", a heartbreaking wallow in a numbing hangover from a singer who previously seemed doomed to feel too much. Its glistening melody at least helps it scan as pop, but "Parentheses" and "Every Night" feel cut from the same cloth as the Walkmen's "The Rat", holding onto sanity with white knuckles, sexual congress seen as mutually assured destruction.
Aside from those, Burst Apart's atmosphere is nocturnal and desolate. Foreboding death-crawl "No Widows" fears for vehicular disaster; brief flickers of light are allowed full exposure on the gorgeous, incantatory centerpiece "Rolled Together", whose brushed drum work and silvery guitars could be heard as a studiously completed homework assignment on Agaetis Byrjun. Meanwhile, the tender, nearly beatless balladry of "Hounds" and "Corsicana" are wholly the Antlers' own and painfully pretty to behold-- however depressive Silberman's lyrics, one can simply revel in the zero-gravity synth and vocal moans and feel some sort of uplift.
Shame that it makes Burst Apart's missteps all too egregious. This isn't the sort of record that calls for a show-stopping power ballad, but we get one anyway with "Putting the Dog to Sleep", where needlessly histrionic vocals and an overwrought doo-wop progression come off more like last call karaoke than a fitting closer. If nothing else, "Putting the Dog to Sleep" helps point toward the Antlers successfully making Burst Apart more about their growth as a band than a gripping backstory-- for all of Hospice's raw power, it didn't leave much to the imagination, and it either hit you right in the gut or not at all. The Antlers won't hold your hand through Burst Apart, which will inevitably make it more of a grower, but stick around-- it's all the more affecting for how it allows you to pick your own stumbling, lonely path. | 2011-05-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-05-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Frenchkiss / Transgressive | May 12, 2011 | 8.2 | 16cf24fc-7981-45a5-85ab-28f87f245856 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The career of Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita seems, at times, to represent a rebuke to the notion of vibraphone as a supporting instrument. On Apologues he's joined by a cast whose massed whorls act as painterly, accommodating foils or accents to Fujita. | The career of Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita seems, at times, to represent a rebuke to the notion of vibraphone as a supporting instrument. On Apologues he's joined by a cast whose massed whorls act as painterly, accommodating foils or accents to Fujita. | Masayoshi Fujita: Apologues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20931-apologues/ | Apologues | Think of Lionel Hampton’s bright streaks enlivening Charles Mingus’ late 1970s vamps, the sly warmth Teddy Charles brought to Miles Davis’ Blue Moods, the titillating sonic vertebrae various members of Tortoise added to albums like TNT and Millions Now Living Will Never Die. Such is the lot of the vibraphone, that of a supporting instrument regularly submerged by voices, guitars, strings, horns, and drums. The career of Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita seems, at times, to represent a rebuke to this notion. While collaborative releases with German experimentalist Jan Jelinek and from his El Fog solo project filtered his lithe performance through a sieve of effects, the two albums Fujita has issued under his own name—2013’s Stories and 2015’s Apologues—promote a soaring classical purity, as though by rejecting electronic interference, he’s learning how to stay out of his own way.
By turns jaunty, shrill, and subdued, Stories found cellist Arturo Martínez Steele and Tangerine Dream violinist Hoshiko Yamane accompanying Fujita. The pair return for Apologues, joined by accordion player Motomitsu Maehara, snare drummer Masaya Hijikata, French horn player Tomonobu Odai, clarinetist Yoko Ozawa, and flautist Mio Suzuki. The collaborators’ massed whorls—tender, nuanced—act as painterly, accommodating foils or accents to Fujita’s playing, which invariably conveys a startled, improvisatory sense of wonder.
Awe and sorrow wash through opener "Tears of Unicorn" in equal, alternating measure, as strings saw-circle a series of melodic constellations so impeccably gorgeous that they ache; blink and you’ll miss the fleeting quote of "London Bridge Is Falling Down". As Fujita metes out tight, teasing trills on "Moonlight", strings yawn as woodwinds pipe along in harmony. "Puppet’s Strange Dream Circus Band" and "Flag" introduce perceptible jolts of urgency, with the former favoring a courtly, in-the-round gait and the latter’s sleeting tones and orchestral sweep midwifing a thrilling friction. An outlier, "Beautiful Shimmer" swaddles a spare Fujita motif in waves of reverb.
A pristine dream magic seems to inform Apologues—the fluid serenity of the music projects a lulling, murmured unreality that suggests that the album is a figment of the listener’s imagination even while it is in play. It’s not whimsy exactly, but an anesthetizing innocence primed for comfort and nostalgia alike—savvier, music-box sweetness summoned into being by a vibraphonist. | 2015-09-07T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-09-07T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Erased Tapes | September 7, 2015 | 8.2 | 16cf8056-5895-4f8f-8b05-858033ed0d5a | Raymond Cummings | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raymond-cummings/ | null |
Merge's remastered reissues of Bob Mould's early-1990s post-Hüsker Dü records Copper Blue, Beaster, and FU:EL are wonderfully presented documents of a punk legend starting over creatively and emotionally and succeeding beyond his and anyone's expectations. | Merge's remastered reissues of Bob Mould's early-1990s post-Hüsker Dü records Copper Blue, Beaster, and FU:EL are wonderfully presented documents of a punk legend starting over creatively and emotionally and succeeding beyond his and anyone's expectations. | Sugar: Sugar Reissues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16862-sugar-reissues/ | Sugar Reissues | The first time Bob Mould heard My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, he was touring the UK as a solo act in late 1991. He'd walked out on a Virgin contract that had paid for two very good solo albums, and booted a management team that had, unbeknownst to him, traded his publishing rights for tour support money. While in the UK, he'd played some new demos for Alan McGee, who'd loved Mould's prior band Hüsker Dü since first hearing their blistering speed-punk cover of "Eight Miles High" about six years earlier. McGee ran Creation Records, which had just released Loveless. Abbo, the tour manager of Mould's opening act, played it for Mould while driving between gigs in a rental car. "I couldn't believe what I was hearing. This was the record I thought was never going to be made," Mould remembers. "I was still wet from performing, we were racing to get back to London, and the whole thing was a religious experience. No one spoke a word for the entirety of the record."
Loveless reimagined the sort of fearsome, sustain-heavy guitar squall that Mould had plumbed from the depths of his righteous soul with Hüsker Dü. Suddenly, ear-splitting walls of guitar were cool again, and Mould quickly formed a new band (bassist David Barbe and drummer Malcolm Travis), and found himself with a record deal. Creation put out Copper Blue in September 1992 (Ryko handled the U.S. release) to great sales and universal acclaim. NME (who along with Melody Maker had started calling the music of MBV's myriad spawn "shoegazing") voted it their album of the year. It finished seventh in that year's Pazz & Jop poll, on its way to selling 300,000 copies.
It makes sense that it would take something as game-changing as Loveless to push Mould back into the three-piece DIY-punk lane. With his first band, he'd helped invent the American stuff that was eventually labeled "alternative." The difference in rock music between 1987 and 1992 might have seemed infinitely vast at the time, but Mould was one of several solid links between the two moments. Punk had "broken" in 1991 (Mould is in the documentary, and was in the running to produce Nevermind), and "Smells Like Teen Spirit", made by a band whose drummer worshipped Hüsker Dü, had more or less invented the Modern Rock radio format that Sugar would soon slot into. One branch down on the family tree is the Copper track "A Good Idea", which Mould calls "an unconscious homage" to the Pixies' "Debaser". The Pixies, whose "Gouge Away" provided the template for "Teen Spirit", and who had in 1984 recruited its own bassist by running an ad for someone whose influences combined "Hüsker Dü and Peter Paul & Mary." It was as if Mould had never left. He was right in the thick of the musical legacy he'd helped build, dialoguing with his peer/descendents not by virtue of the instant nostalgia model of current vintage, but because one of the most prolific songwriters of his generation had a bunch of new ideas.
They were very good ideas. Copper is as impressive as any post-Zen Arcade Hüsker Dü album, adapting the approach he took with "Makes No Sense at All", "I Don't Know For Sure", and "Could You Be the One?" for the Alternative Nation, many of whom (myself at 15 included) were completely unaware of his prior band. (I remember a Hüsker/Sugar version of the classic "did you know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?" joke going around at the time.) A ferocious power-pop record, Copper is guided by Mould's unerring ear for melody and unrivaled nasal yelp that gives his lyrics an extra bit of acidic punch. The purest Sugar comes here via "The Act We Act" and "Helpless", two huge pop-rock anthems in the mold of Cheap Trick's "Surrender", but slowed down a beat, drenched in murky grunge fury, and bathed in a hiss of sustain and ride cymbal. "Helpless" rides its giddily ascending verse melody without need for a chorus, and "Act" opens the album with an impossibly dark riff that wouldn't have sounded out of place on an early Sub Pop compilation.
Thing is, I'd estimate about half of Sugar's fan base would argue that Copper's best two songs-- "Hoover Dam" and "If I Can't Change Your Mind"-- haven't even been mentioned yet. With its jangly chords and lyrics devoted to attempting to get inside someone else's head, "Change" could've fit fine on Rubber Soul with only a few slight alterations. On the expansive "Hoover", Mould pays reverence to the pristine 60s pop of the Beach Boys and the Left Banke, and the studio trickery of Revolver, with a lyric that begins by considering the vastness of the universe, and ends with him spinning down to the center of the earth, which he admits "keeps me feeling warm at night." The recorded version is built with synths and harpsichords, but the song sounds just as good as pure punk, evidenced by two fierce versions on the 1992 and 1994 live sets included in the reissue package.
During the recording sessions for Copper, Mould kept some songs aside, labeling these darker, unfinished cuts "B" songs to Copper's pop-driven "A" material. They would become the Beaster EP, released seven months after Copper to capitalize on what had become a groundswell of hype around Sugar, abetted by MTV playing "Mind" in semi-regular rotation. Far from leftovers, these tracks were more like transmissions from Mould's id rather than his ego. Or, as Mould said: "I was out of my fucking mind with white-hate-light-energy-noise." Uniformly gloomy, even grim at points, Beaster marks Mould's return to his Black Sheets of Rain approach, with a fierceness he'd not shown since New Day Rising. The album is bookended by the woozy, MBV-influenced "Come Around" and "Walking Away", and peaks with the titanic 12-minute midsection punch of "Judas Cradle" and "JC Auto". Those last two rank with anything on In Utero in terms of sheer force-- Travis' opening drums for "Auto" sound like nothing less than Bill Rieflin's booming trapwork for Ministry-- and of course sacrilegious content (the album was titled as a nod to Easter and released to coincide with the holiday. No one's ever accused Mould of not having a sense of humor). Beaster is the one recording that the fantastic Merge remasters do the most justice-- it's louder, deeper, and better than ever.
By early 1994, Sugar was the most successful band Mould had ever been involved with: "two or three times bigger than the highest points of Husker Du," he estimates. Copper was selling like crazy, and the band had just finished an exhausting world tour. The band was now subject to hype, and the recording, release, and publicity for FU:EL were a tumultuous process, to put it lightly. Mould remembers watching coverage of Kurt Cobain's suicide on CNN during the initial sessions. Depressed and unable to get the right sound, he scrapped everything and started over. On top of this, leading up to the release of the album, Spin ran a feature on Mould centered around his homosexuality-- something that had been an open secret since his early Hüsker days, but which now gave him entirely new sets of questions to answer.
With "Gift", "Gee Angel", and "Your Favorite Thing", FU:EL contains three of Sugar's best songs. "Favorite" in particular is as wonderfully evocative of modern rock radio in 1994 as R.E.M.'s "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?", Liz Phair's "Supernova", or Pavement's "Cut Your Hair". (Though at the other end of the spectrum, the album's retro-kitsch cover art is redolent of that period's unfortunate postmodern pastiche fashion trends.) On the whole, though, FU:EL sounds a bit tired, if not grumpy. "Panama City Motel" is a weary tour narrative (which bites its acoustic chord progression straight from "Jane Says"), and "Granny Cool" is just plain bitchy. The band wouldn't make it through the subsequent tour in one piece.
In his biography, Mould confesses that his life and health were rejuvenated in the early 2000s through his public immersion in San Fransisco's "bear" subculture, and DJing Blowoff-- "this sexy gay dance party"-- in his adopted hometown of Washington, D.C. In the broader scope of his career, however, it's one of a few such moments when Mould's artistic muse, impulsiveness, and pride took him in a productive new direction. The acrimonious break from Hüsker Dü was the first, and leaving Virgin to form Sugar was second. There have been few more critically and commercially successful relaunches than Mould's. The Merge reissues of Copper, Beaster, and FU:EL (which contain two live sets and all B-sides from the era, plus oral histories of all three releases) gain a little extra shine in this context. They're a wonderfully presented document of a punk legend, starting over creatively and emotionally in a brief window he helped open, and succeeding beyond his and anyone's expectations. | 2012-07-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-07-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | July 30, 2012 | 8.9 | 16cfd741-e8be-401e-bd63-bcc845a317d0 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | 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 Adele’s earth-shattering 2011 album, granting the British torch singer entrée into the pantheon of iconic pop vocalists. | 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 Adele’s earth-shattering 2011 album, granting the British torch singer entrée into the pantheon of iconic pop vocalists. | Adele: 21 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adele-21/ | 21 | The green room was full of Adeles, nails all long and painted, hairdos puffed into the singer’s signature beehive. The BBC had corralled a cluster of impersonators into an experiment; they thought they were at an audition. But the real Adele was among them, disguised, plastered in a fake nose and chin, joining in on their jokes about how long it was taking her to release a new album.
It was 2015, and for years, Adele had been everywhere. Signed to the British label XL at age 18, after a track her friend uploaded to MySpace gained attention, she released her debut album, 19, two years after graduating from the lauded BRIT School. It went triple platinum in the U.S. and catalyzed an almost feverish mass adoration. She pouted on the cover of Vogue, she belted on SNL, she swept the Grammys, she soundtracked James Bond. Adele never seemed to cast herself as an archetypal pop star—in interviews, she was giggly and crass, and often deployed what critics and fans called a “cackle.” In one of the few declarations of her pop supremacy, she held out on releasing her 2015 album, 25, to streaming services, a move then only wielded by artists like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. The gamble worked: People bought her physical records in droves, with such a fervor that some thought maybe Adele had single-handedly saved the industry.
While her first album garnered Adele international attention, her 2011 follow-up, 21 catapulted her into the Guinness Book of World Records—21 is reportedly the longest-running No. 1 album by a female solo artist in the history of U.S. and UK charts. The album cemented her legacy as an artist who could make once-in-a-generation milestones out of her music. 21 is filled with colossal songs, elegant and glistening, bending but never breaking under the heft of Adele’s voice, which sounds like Amy Winehouse mashed with opera. (Adele said that she owed “90%” of her career to Amy Winehouse, before a concert on what would have been Winehouse’s 33rd birthday.)
Beyond the similarities to Winehouse, though—the gritty, growled vocals that could stretch into big belted notes, often over jazzy piano—Adele seemed like a pop star flung out of social or temporal context. She swirled together soul and pop and jazz; Adele said she turned to country while writing the record. She revered Etta James as a kid. The first concert she went to was the Cure, with her mom, and her cover of “Lovesong” on 21 quivers and crawls, hovers above a scratch, one of the more subdued tracks on the album. “She takes you to places other artists don’t go to anymore—the way they did in the 70s,” Beyoncé said about her. Adele crafted her songs intentionally to be timeless—“I want to sing these songs when I’m 70 fuckin’ years old,” she told Vanity Fair.
Maybe too much credit has been given to Adele for ushering in a resurgence of the ballad—Bruno Mars’ grating “Grenade” had been climbing the charts around the same time—but there was something baffling about hearing her on the radio slotted between the hyperactive neon rush of the Black Eyed Peas and Katy Perry. A year before 21, Kesha released her glitter torpedo of an album full of breakups, blackouts, and tirades over texts. The trope of slickly calibrated female self-destruction, almost always conveyed through performative partying, would radiate throughout pop over the next decade, but never breach Adele’s songs. This is also what differentiated her from Winehouse: on 21 especially, she is desperate to tear down so much, but always protects herself.
21 isn’t exactly a concept album, but it collects the songs Adele wrote at that age, centering around the dissolution of what she would call a “rubbish relationship.” She wrote 21 over a three month period, usually when she was wasted— “I was completely off my face writing that album,” she told Vanity Fair, “and a drunk tongue is an honest one.” She would go through two bottles of wine and chain-smoke while writing the lyrics, then look back at what she’d scrawled down in the morning. The emotional intensity scarred her. “How I felt when I wrote 21, I wouldn’t want to feel again,” she told The New York Times a few years later “I was miserable, I was lonely, I was sad, I was angry, I was bitter. I thought I was going to be single for the rest of my life. I thought I was never going to love again.”
If there’s an inflection of melodrama in these songs, it’s because of those high stakes. She sings in absolutes, then rushes to fill in the nuance. Adele wrote “Set Fire to the Rain” to be a camp anthem for a queer audience, but its sonic surcharge and all-or-nothing lyrics (“I was over/Until you kissed my lips, and you saved me”) are at home on the album, nestled between titanic high notes that roar over cinematic piano and pleas about love dying. Listening to the album in one go can feel a bit draining, the weight of all these grandiose melodies slumped atop each other. Adele aims to disarm; you’re left clutching at the wisps of synths that sometimes close out a ballad.
But the maudlin elements of the album also feel essential: they enable Adele to capture the specific sinusoidal hell of being 21, the emotional velocity that follows a first, serious love. There are refractions of her across the album—Adele Enraged, Adele In Love, Adele Avenging—as she tries to articulate identity through the shape of a lover’s absence. “I’ll be somebody different,” she begs on “I’ll Be Waiting,” “I’ll be better to you.” Much of the album shows Adele calibrating a relationship she’s experiencing with an inherited ideal of what love means. “If this ain’t love, then what is?” she moans on “He Won’t Go,” the question genuine, the prodding laid bare. She wrote “One and Only” as a fictional exercise, trying to imagine the conversation she’d want to have with a lover down the line, and it radiates with hope and expectation. “You’ll never know if you never try/To forget your past and simply be mine,” she belts.
To some critics, 21 was a “bitter” album, a “vengeful” one. What I hear more pressingly is a woman trying to form agency out of the murk of devastation.”I won't let you close enough to hurt me,” she sings on “Turning Tables.” Adele said that she wrote the haunting “Someone Like You'” “because I was exhausted from being such a bitch” with other songs on the record—but while “Someone Like You” is beautiful and clear and stirring, Adele’s at her most fun when she lashes out. The winkingly vindictive “Rumour Has It” shimmies and shivers under the smoke in her voice. I’d heard “Rolling in the Deep” maybe forty times over the years before it came on shuffle one day and cut me, the sting and curdled rage. “Go ahead and sell me out, and I’ll lay your shit bare,” she murmurs. The ferocity of these songs isn’t dulled or disguised or smuggled in through tidy pop formulas. She continuously wrestles for control and reaches for a vision of herself across time—before she waded into her lover’s life, or decades later when they’re old—and that device is less about her trying on someone’s vantage point and more about her trying to narrow down who she actually is.
On 21, she constantly moves between phases of a relationship, between dimensions of grief. “Only yesterday was the time of our lives,” she breathes in “Someone Like You,” a song about reaching out to an ex years after the end of their relationship and finding that he’s now married and content without her. “I lose myself in time just thinking of your face,” she sighs on “One and Only,” what she called the first happy track she wrote for the record. Her portraits of despair also involve surging between the past and present. “When was the last time you thought of me, or have you completely erased me from memory?” she demands on “Don’t You Remember.” Throughout the song, she struggles to cast herself as someone worthy of recollection, the last remaining way she can become a permanent fixture of her ex’s mind and life. Love is hitched to precarity in Adele’s world, always needing to be stated or defended or mourned.
Part of this, perhaps, stems from the broad narratives in Adele’s songs. The other forces of breakup tracks at the time, Drake and Taylor Swift, filled their songs with details: a red scarf left at an ex’s sister’s house, an apology for having sex four times in one week. Adele’s writing is allusive. She sings in generalities — hearts melting, last goodbyes, pleas to forgive unnamed sins. 21 asks for your participation. You’re meant to summon your mottled heartbreak to fill in some of the blanks, and tap into the sorrow and rage and remorse that quakes through these songs. “21 isn’t even my record,” Adele told Zane Lowe in 2015. “It belongs to people.”
Adele knew 21 would loom over her for the rest of her career. “My thing was, how do I follow up 21?” she said. “But I can’t, because it was so big, so many people took it into their lives. I can never live up to that again.” In the video of the BBC experiment, she watches as person after person tries on the character of Adele. She feigns nervousness—“I’m going to be sick,” she murmurs at one point, maybe a nod to her history of stage fright. But when it’s her turn to sing, it’s only an instant before the row of impersonators realize who she is. Their mouths flop open, cartoonish, and they touch each other’s arms. They join in and sing her words back to her, some starting to cry. Adele beams at them from behind the mic and stares at all these refractions of herself. She keeps watching them, transfixed.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | XL / Columbia | September 27, 2020 | 8.2 | 16d52524-2f33-4d6a-96d5-1f0ff80f49b8 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Yo La Tengo capture the feeling of post-traumatic calm on their latest album, assuring their status as a wry and comforting cornerstone of indie rock. | Yo La Tengo capture the feeling of post-traumatic calm on their latest album, assuring their status as a wry and comforting cornerstone of indie rock. | Yo La Tengo: There’s a Riot Going On | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yo-la-tengo-theres-a-riot-going-on/ | There’s a Riot Going On | Ira Kaplan witnessed the rock era from a close vantage: He watched the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan”; was picked up hitchhiking in the early 1970s by Arlo Guthrie; was a regular at punk institutions CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City; wrote for pioneering zine the New York Rocker; and with his wife Georgia Hubley as Yo La Tengo, he witnessed indie rock slowly coalesce and eventually corporatize. Since adding James McNew in the early 1990s, Yo La Tengo have singularly defined American indie rock, merging their sui generis suburban psychedelia with a record collector’s urge to re-animate rock history and a mordant sense of humor about the inherently silly nature of their chosen profession. So when an interviewer recently asked Kaplan why the band named their 15th album after Sly and the Family Stone’s epochal, deeply political 1971 LP, Kaplan’s droll reply was perfectly on-brand: “To run away from your question as fast as possible, I think a lot of the things we do just feel right and don’t get articulated.”
Such is the gestalt of Yo La Tengo, a band that, almost in spite of its members’ encyclopedic knowledge of 20th-century music and penchant for irony, operates most effectively at the level of feel. Self-aware enough to know the innate arbitrariness of album titles while simultaneously acknowledging the subtle power of words and names to shape the rituals of listening, Yo La Tengo’s reticence to divulge it all is less rockstar mystique than generosity of spirit. Like so many of the band’s lyrics, words function as decontextualized mantras, short phrases to roll around in your mind while the music gradually cocoons you. There’s a Riot Going On is full of meditative lyrical repetition: “Blow on the fire/Ashes blow away,” “She may/She might,” “Sound asleep/Counting sheep/Dream away.” At a time when musicians are pushed to unpack and explain every last syllable they produce, it’s a relief for one to insist on the potency of musical affects over literal definitions.
The album’s release comes in the wake of some of most volatile street-fighting since Sly’s own heyday, with no guarantee that future flare-ups won’t rage on for longer, at greater cost. This fact is certainly not lost on the band, but, if this is your chosen interpretation, you know better than to expect Riot to respond in kind—what they offer is closer to a balm. Consider “Above the Sound,” in which Kaplan’s voice emerges following three-and-a-half minutes of buzzing tribal rumble to ask, in his characteristic philosopher’s whisper, “What if we’re too black and blue/To spot our latest bruise?” After a year-plus of low-level fear generated by push-notification trigger warnings, the trio suggests in the song’s title—repeated over and again—a form of sonic self-care. This specific post-traumatic calm is reminiscent of a recent episode of HBO’s “High Maintenance,” in which an enterprising weed deliverer and his network of New York clients consistently express shock about some recent calamity that goes unnamed. Maybe it’s the outcome of the 2016 election, maybe it’s another mass shooting—it’s never explained, we just see reactions, and then self-medication. Riot also evokes this feeling.
In his review of the band’s eclectic 2015 covers collection Stuff Like That There, Pitchfork’s Stuart Berman winkingly claimed that “Yo La Tengo were essentially the first on-demand music-streaming service,” due to their capacity to seemingly cover any song on a second’s notice. There’s more to the streaming metaphor than eclecticism, though: Such services are also used as mood-generating machines, trained to to facilitate calmness and sedation. In this view, Riot is possibly the moodiest Yo La Tengo album yet. It’s the least song-oriented and most monochromatic LP in the band’s catalog, without a Kaplan whammy-bar wild-out or a pop palate cleanser to be heard. In the center of the album is a 12-minute block of largely wordless ambience—the two-part rumination “Dream Dream Away” and the fluttering organ drone and staticky radio transmissions of “Shortwave”—that seems equally informed by their recent conceptual and soundtrack side-hustles. On Riot, Yo La Tengo sound more brooding than ever, which is saying something coming from the band that gave the world the 77-minute tone-poem, 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out.
Though it can feel a bit too calm and sedate, the album also reflects the group’s greatest and most instantly recognizable strengths. Their sound might suggest that they’re wound up in nostalgia, but that’s never been the case: They are able to tap into a performative naïvete. Whether through their coy reluctance to talk about themselves or their legacy, their self-mocking covers of a record store’s full of 45s, an unironic innocence distinguishes Yo La Tengo from their peers or predecessors, and it’s in full display on the album’s first quarter. There’s “Shades of Blue,” a sweet Georgia lullaby about the fugue state of romantic longing, “She May, She Might,” which recalls the frozen recognition that you may never really know the person you spend your life with, and the evergreen pleasures of endless courtship on “For You Too.”
Yo La Tengo’s gift for waxing on the indeterminacies of interpersonal relationships is their greatest gift as musicians, but there’s something about Riot that makes it feel like cold comfort. On Riot’s closer “Here You Are,” a message of resistance has petrified into something more menacing. “We are out of words/We’re out of time/Believe the worst,” they chant. Then, perhaps, an omen: “We had our run, we’re gone.” Is Yo La Tengo suggesting we’re past the point of healing? Or is the sentiment more autobiographical—does the 34-year-old band see the end of their own line coming sooner than later? I bet if you ask them, they’ll stare down at their hands and deflect the question, or crack a wry joke. Firm answers aren’t their thing. | 2018-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | March 20, 2018 | 7.6 | 16d6a3b1-5dcd-4fbd-89a5-e42043d46314 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | |
After a tumultuous label break-up, Valerie Teicher shakes off resentment and disappointment with an upbeat set of light, breezy dance pop. | After a tumultuous label break-up, Valerie Teicher shakes off resentment and disappointment with an upbeat set of light, breezy dance pop. | Tei Shi: Die 4 Ur Love EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tei-shi-die-4-ur-love-ep/ | Die 4 Ur Love EP | Tei Shi’s Valerie Teicher was having a rough 2020 even before the pandemic hit. She began the year still smarting from the November release of her sophomore album La Linda, a beguiling but doomed effort that underperformed whatever expectations she might have once held for it, the casualty of delays and her crumbling relationship with her former label. The album’s release was so botched that, for unclear reasons, its best single disappeared from its track list within weeks of its release, a reminder of how impermanent albums can be in the streaming age. Her last best chance at finding a wide audience for the record might have been a tour with occasional collaborator Blood Orange planned for this spring, but it was canceled in the wake of COVID-19.
Tei Shi’s new self-released EP Die 4 Ur Love, which she wrote over six days this January, simmers in heartache, abandonment, and resentment at her former label. “I was feeling really sad and pessimistic, and the music all came from this place,” Teicher explained. “I was feeling a sort of impending doom, and out of that came an EP loosely based around apocalypse.” That she wrote these songs just months before that sense of impending doom became global was just an unhappy accident—Teicher had even initially titled the EP Apocalypse, but after the world went into lockdown that seemed “too on the nose.”
Those are dark origins for an EP that turns out to be a very light listen. In the spirit of Robyn, Tei Shi’s preferred prescription for pain and disappointment is to dance her way through it, and even when she’s idealizing death—on “Disappear” she longs for “a pill that could make me feel nothing”—Die 4 Ur Love is far and away the breeziest, most upbeat project she’s ever recorded, a gleaming disco ball compared to the darkly shadowed, R&B-steeped art-pop of her 2017 debut Crawl Space.
Unfortunately, that pop-forward makeover doesn’t play to her gifts for mystique building. Teicher always scanned as worldly and sophisticated, cut from cloth closer to that of an actual pop star than the indie auteurs with whom she shares playlists. But that star quality isn’t nearly so novel when she’s playing on Top 40’s turf, and on Die 4 Ur Love she’s boxed in by the predictable rhythms of pop in its most down-the-middle iterations.
These five songs never sound anything less than polished—if nothing else, they prove she can create a decent facsimile of big-budget pop with a DIY artist’s pocketbook—but they never excite, either. Even the standout title track succumbs to anonymity; it’s the kind of easy dance song that Lady Gaga retreats to whenever her last project underperforms, all bombast and no risk. Every song is too obvious, devoid of the surprises and reveals that made her previous albums such enticing labyrinths. The peppy synth-pop shuffle “OK Crazy” and the Ryan Tedder-style ballad “Goodbye” both cloy in their sweetness.
Maybe these songs were just too rushed. Teicher said she worked quickly on the EP, out of an understandable drive to begin her fresh start after splitting from her label (the most personable moment on the EP is a shot at Downtown Records: “Got my freedom/Also I’m making a hit,” she smirks on closer “Goodbye”). And there’s some recent precedent for artists regaining their footing after creative missteps and industry mismanagement. After years adrift, Tinashe reclaimed control of her career and rebounded last year with her best album yet, Songs for You, a showcase for what a natural talent can do when left to their own devices. Teicher could make a record that good. She’s got the voice and the presence to do it, and now she’s got her freedom, too. But it’s going to require material a lot more ambitious than this.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | July 23, 2020 | 6.2 | 16dc888d-ed31-4889-8262-c3b2a6b3fe9d | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Equal parts shimmering disco and dingy pub, with frequent surprisingly coherent stylistic asides, Nick Lowe's clever, fierce, and far-reaching 1978 album is re-released with a handful of well-chosen bonus tracks and some exquisite packaging. | Equal parts shimmering disco and dingy pub, with frequent surprisingly coherent stylistic asides, Nick Lowe's clever, fierce, and far-reaching 1978 album is re-released with a handful of well-chosen bonus tracks and some exquisite packaging. | Nick Lowe: Jesus of Cool | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11183-jesus-of-cool/ | Jesus of Cool | In Jesus of Cool's iconic cover image, Nick Lowe appears decked out in a smorgasbord of over-the-top rockstar getups. These images are perfectly considered, down to the facial hair stylings and thematically appropriate guitars-- but Lowe comes off goofy and unconvincing in every guise. The cover images are apt not for their evocation of "cool," but rather for their combination of impeccable artifice and raw, gawkish charm. Indeed, Jesus of Cool sounds more like the work of a crafty fan than that of a self-serious auteur.
Thankfully, Lowe's fandom was quite broad; Jesus of Cool is equal parts shimmering disco and dingy pub, with frequent surprisingly coherent stylistic asides. That this record came out in 1978 is nothing short of a small miracle; while punk rock and disco were battling it out in an all-too-familiar dialogue of authenticity and reactionism, Lowe cut the crap and made a clever, fierce, and far-reaching record. Chalk it up, perhaps, to the degree and nature of Lowe's experience; by the time he set about recording Jesus of Cool, Lowe was already a veteran of the decidedly more populist pub rock scene.
Though Jesus of Cool is technically his debut, Lowe was already the elder statesman and in-house producer for the fledgling Stiff Label, positioning himself as the clever and detached pop craftsman to protégé Elvis Costello's angsty, spittle-flecked firebrand. Fans of Costello's early records, or those of the Damned, will find the sonics of Jesus of Cool immediately familiar. Recorded largely on borrowed studio time at a variety of locations, Jesus of Cool covers a lot of ground fidelity-wise, but is aptly produced throughout. The album's more polished cuts are studio-immaculate, and its rockers are gritty and packed full of energy, demonstrating the production style that earned Lowe the nickname "Basher".
Lowe certainly knew well enough to avoid trying to make a straight-up pandering pop record, and his experience in the record business is written all over Jesus of Cool, in the words of songs like "Music for Money" and "Shake and Pop", and in the album's overall feel and conceit. These flip-offs at the record industry underscore the album's unerring ease and strength. Perhaps Lowe's deep familiarity with the ins and outs of the business cured him of the something-to-prove overzealousness that kills many records this ambitious. Indeed, Jesus of Cool comes across with little to no agenda; it draws from a wide and diverse pool of influences, but never in a way that seems showy or forced.
Backed by an all-star cast of friends and contemporaries, many of whom shared time with Lowe in pub rock legends Brinsley Schwarz, Lowe tries on many different vocal personas on Jesus, cooing the ballad "Tonight" and barking the new wave stomper "Music for Money". Early singles "So It Goes" and "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass" are highlights, remarkable for both their strength and for their disparity. "So It Goes" is driving, chiming melodic rock, while "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass" is piano-tickled disco-pop. The diversity of Jesus of Cool helps keep even its weaker tracks sounding unique and interesting; the slightly reggae-toned "No Reason" and dark, synthesized "36 Inches High" would be distracting detours on a more myopic record, but make perfect sense in this context.
Jesus of Cool has been sadly out of print for years, and Yep Roc's reissue is impeccable. The complex digipak fold-out is beautiful, and Will Birch's liner notes do a great job of explaining the record's origins without falling into hyperbole. The bonus tracks here are generally quite good as well, not surprising considering the singles-y feel of the album itself. "Rollers Show" and "They Called It Rock" (a reworking of "Shake and Pop" that lacks the album cut's gritty force) were both included on the U.S. release of Jesus of Cool (retitled Pure Pop for Now People for more sensitive U.S. audiences), and their inclusion here is welcome. Other highlights include an early version of Lowe's sole U.S. hit "Cruel to be Kind", the hilarious "I Love My Label", and a cover of Martha Sharp's "Born a Woman" from 1977's The Bowi EP.
As guitar pop music comes back into fashion among indie rockers, more and more albums are sounding like awkward and self-aware approximations of the very thing that Jesus of Cool does so effortlessly. In a sense, Lowe's unpretentious inclusiveness may have stopped Jesus of Cool just short of becoming a huge record in any one world; the album is far too unabashedly admiring of pop music to be seen as a punk rock classic, but too gritty and ramshackle to be considered a seminal new wave pop record. Thankfully, Jesus of Cool is a rarer thing still: a timeless and bullshit-free masterpiece. | 2008-02-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-02-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Yep Roc / Radar | February 18, 2008 | 9.3 | 16dcc070-f569-4ca8-8185-6231bccb7605 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Chairlift's second full-length album is a major creative leap from their first, but it doesn't so much reinvent their sound as refine it. | Chairlift's second full-length album is a major creative leap from their first, but it doesn't so much reinvent their sound as refine it. | Chairlift: Something | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16183-something/ | Something | Chairlift's second full-length, Something, is a major creative leap, but on a superficial level, it's not that different from their debut. They're still mining uncool and untapped corners of 1980s pop for inspiration, and singer Caroline Polachek has doubled down on a vocal style that alternates between joyfully expressive and charmingly deadpan. But the melodies are bolder, the arrangements have more snap and sparkle, and Polachek has thankfully moved beyond the first album's overly cerebral lyrics to embrace emotionally potent lines that explore the subtler dynamics of romantic relationships and the evolution of character.
Of course, Chairlift aren't exactly the same group that broke into the outskirts of the mainstream when their 2008 hit "Bruises" found its way into an Apple ad. Founding member Aaron Pfenning split with the group after his romantic relationship with Polachek ended. (He now has an atmospheric disco project called Rewards.) Now a duo, Polachek and multi-instrumentalist Patrick Wimberly have a different chemistry. Wimberly, a producer on several Das Racist tracks, excels at composing slick music that retains force and physicality, which suits Polachek's voice and melodies. As a result, Something is cleaner and more elegant, buffing their crisp electronic pop to an immaculate sheen.
Polachek's presence fades when the music gets too inert, but Chairlift turn that potential liability into a strength on two of Something's most beautiful tracks: On "Frigid Spring" and "Turning", she pushes her voice to a breathy, ethereal extreme. More often, though, her voice is lucid and assertive. She's excellent with subtle phrasing, selling wry lyrics without getting too smirky, and conveying infatuation without sounding overly elated. She's especially fond of Robert Smith-like exclamations, sometimes ending a key line with excited verbal punctuation. Her voice is technically proficient-- she sometimes recalls Fleetwood Mac's Christine McVie-- but her main strength lies in how clearly her personality comes across in these songs. Whether she's giving voice to a maniac in "Sidewalk Safari" or gushing with love in "I Belong in Your Arms", Polachek sounds totally comfortable and in control.
Though it's obvious that Polachek is often singing from the vantage point of characters (we'd obviously have heard about it if she actually ran someone down in her car), the emphasis on emotion and relationships is key to Something's success. It's notable that their debut's best song, "Bruises", was a straight-up love song, while the clunkiest tracks belabored conceits that felt self-consciously imposed on the music. The most resonant lines on Something are disarmingly direct: "If I gave you what you're asking for, you know you wouldn't want it anymore," "Does my love only count if it's proved?," "My heart is beating fast and I wish that I knew why." Polachek still indulges in high concept, but with more grace and nuance, as on "Amanaemonesia", where she meditates on the cultural and psychological power of healing rituals. She's even more successful on "Guilty as Charged", in which her verses lay out an elaborate trial metaphor that contrasts nicely with her cutting to the core of her character's emotional dilemma on the chorus.
The song on Something that gets me in the gut is "I Belong in Your Arms", a declaration of uncomplicated affection that makes the most of the band's embrace of faster tempos and open-hearted lyrics. Chairlift couldn't have pulled off a track like this back when they made pop music with scare quotes, footnotes, and caveats. But now that they've backed away from those defense mechanisms, they've allowed themselves to go all the way in expressing a powerful sentiment. There are many songs out there that echo the tone and message of "I Belong in Your Arms", but this one is no less joyous or affecting for lacking a unique concept. In cutting away their baggage and hang-ups, Chairlift have opened themselves up to writing truly great pop. | 2012-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia / Young Turks | January 20, 2012 | 8 | 16de0b31-d60b-4ee1-a7b5-4588b3419493 | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
Having collaborated with the likes of Dev Hynes and Princess Nokia—and teaming with streetwear brand Supreme—the New York jazz ensemble Onyx Collective honor their city on these latest releases. | Having collaborated with the likes of Dev Hynes and Princess Nokia—and teaming with streetwear brand Supreme—the New York jazz ensemble Onyx Collective honor their city on these latest releases. | Onyx Collective : Lower East Suite Part One/Lower East Suite Part Two | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/onyx-collective-lower-east-suite-part-onelower-east-suite-part-two/ | Lower East Suite Part One/Lower East Suite Part Two | Not long ago, Isaiah Barr met fellow musicians Austin Williamson and Josh Benitez in a jazz band program at York College in Jamaica, Queens. Like the rest of their bandmates, the saxophonist, drummer, and keyboardist came from different New York City high schools, and the York College Blue Notes band was offered to them as a networking platform and artistic incubator—an opportunity for serious, guided jamming. They ran with it. By 2014, with Williamson, Benitez, and others at his side, Barr founded Onyx Collective as a fluid and open-door ensemble of his own.
In the time since, the group has plastered themselves across the city as a ubiquitous and modular live jazz band. They’ve worked alongside rappers like Wiki and Princess Nokia and lent music to singers Dev Hynes and Nick Hakim. As a live act especially, Onyx Collective—sometimes as spare as that original trio, but often hovering around a half dozen—has become many things to many scenes. Now, a group of musicians that can’t sit still seem to be figuring out what it means to be a recorded band.
In 2016, teaming with the online radio platform KNOW-WAVE and the streetwear brand Supreme, Onyx Collective released a full-length debut of live recordings called Second Avenue Rundown. Their follow-up, their first music available digitally, is a series of three releases destined for the British label Big Dada, and so far they too have been conduits for the band’s traveling live act. The first two EPs, Lower East Suite Part One and Part Two, stitch together tracks recorded at a variety of locations across the city. The sleepily psychedelic “172 Forsyth St.” is named after the former KNOW-WAVE storefront radio station where Barr concretized and catalyzed the formation of Onyx Collective, and also where many of the Lower East Suite Part One songs were recorded. As a result, the first Lower East Suite EP—the better of the two—feels like a tributary time capsule to the band’s recent formation. Williamson’s drums sound tucked away in a corner, Barr’s guttural saxophone runs thicken the air and seem to bounce off the walls the louder he blows.
Many of the songs on both Lower East Suite EPs are referential pin drops somewhere or sometime specific in Manhattan. “97 Allen St.,” a shifty bebop track from Part Two, is representative of Onyx Collective’s free-flowing improvisation and named for the LES shop the Good Company, a space that sounds noisy and features moments of sidebar conversation, Barr’s frantic riffing reduced to background rambling. “Rush Hour,” recorded in the same room, is the most conceptually on-the-nose: honking sax stabs and an awkwardly gaiting rhythm effectively conjure the abrupt start-and-stop swelter of city traffic. For both better and worse, this stretch of tracks in particular—the first five from the second EP—feels especially like being in the room with the band. Even when he’s holding back, Williamson’s kit crashes over every song at this location, sometimes just so, but too often overzealously. On both “Steam Rooms” and “Skate Park,” you can almost hear him loosen his grip, and the space between strikes is both funky and refreshingly breathable, like someone has opened the door to allow the room some outside air. On the first EP, his drums have a lighter and less imposing touch.
Whether shaped by their location or permitted by it, Onyx Collective’s lasting charm is in their jam band fluidity. They often adopt an aggressive but playful bebop stance, whirling through changes with Williamson’s taps and splashes urging them forward. They can also channel their surroundings into serene cityscapes or quiet meditations, like on the final tracks of Part Two. (“Eyes Closed” sounds like closed-door respite, Barr finally tucking away from the city bustle into silence so that he can breathe deep and longingly into his sax, alone except for the faint, growing hum of a background bassline.) Elsewhere, they lean into funky jam sessions. “Mambo Pancakes” is a swampy salsa burner that juts out of the tracklist, Barr’s saxophone relegated not to solo duties as much as rhythmic core. “Fruit Stand” sounds like a dainty free jazz romp, a half volume lullaby next to some of the more boisterous jams.
Through it all, these tracklists feel less invested in fleshing out a linear live experience as they are in bottling up vignettes from the field. In that way, Onyx Collective sound like a group in motion, seeping into and out of spaces, self-leveling into place each time. For both better and worse, some of the tracks on the Lower East Suite EPs sound as much like the room as the band, the city as muse and canvas at once. | 2018-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | null | January 2, 2018 | 7.4 | 16dff95c-2703-475f-aa20-d7712c849e58 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
The 22-year old producer's promising sample-heavy EP features fuzzy beats drenched in colorful noise and is another reminder of the way hip-hop and electronic dance music continue to aggressively flirt with each other. | The 22-year old producer's promising sample-heavy EP features fuzzy beats drenched in colorful noise and is another reminder of the way hip-hop and electronic dance music continue to aggressively flirt with each other. | Ryan Hemsworth: Last Words | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17138-last-words/ | Last Words | The incessant, excellent juvenilia of the WEDIDIT collective (on their website the call number is 911-420-6969) is accompanied in their music by the tolerant millenial's standard answer to which genres he likes. These guys-- producers Shlohmo, R.L. Grime, and Jonwayne, amongst others-- dig (nearly) everything, from chart pop to the Seattle sigh of Elliott Smith, from Timbaland's early aughts production to the agro-rap of Three 6 Mafia and Waka Flocka Flame.
The 22-year old producer Ryan Hemsworth's new EP, Last Words, is another sterling release from the collective, and while it's too scattered to be considered truly excellent, it's another reminder of the way hip-hop and electronic dance music continue to flirt with each other aggressively, like two high school freshmen who have the whole talking-to-each-other thing down and are just starting to reach that exalted next level.
Hemsworth has a history of making beats for such offbeat rap acts as Deniro Farrar and Main Attraktionz, and his work on Last Words skews close to the sounds he's employed in the past. Though firmly influenced by the fuzzy, webby thud of Clams Casino, Hemsworth has a welcome tendency to drench his soundscapes in rainbow noise like his idol Hudson Mohawke, colorful bits of sound engaging the listener like a light show for purp-heads in a narcotic stupor.
Second track "Colour & Movement", though it's the least danceable of everything here, is particularly impressive. Building around a sample from the German band Notwist, Hemsworth sets up a droning masterpiece, punctuated by schizoid drum machines and followed by an ominous minor keyboard loop which sounds a hell of a lot like "Black and Yellow".
"The Happy Mask Shop", starts in the same drone sphere as "Colour & Movement", but takes off quickly when Timbaland-like drum machines are added, and drops sound out two-thirds of the way through to make way for the eerie harmonizing of a chorus of lady phantoms. It's haunting, elegant, and heavy, a song to be played in a cathedral that was converted into a nightclub and still hasn't been fully exorcized.
Every so often, Hemsworth gets overly enthusiastic and flips a sample unnecessarily. Even if opener "Charly Wingate" is clearly a tribute to the now forever-incarcerated Max B, the song's use of his ad-libs distracts from what would otherwise be a perfect dance track. But for the most part, the allusions are seamless, as on "Slurring", where Waka's offhand comment on his less-than-sober state from "15th and the 1st" becomes the basis for a maximalist, warped club track, which builds expertly, reaching a peak without ever becoming exhausting or frantic. This is perhaps Hemsworth's principal skill: managing tracks all the way through and avoiding tedium and redundancy.
A set of uniformly solid beats like these also serves as a base upon which other producers can build. The strongest showing comes from Supreme Cuts, whose heady version of "Overthinking" stuffs the original with a whole new set of sounds, obscenely amplifying the highs to create the best club track on the album. But don't count out Baauer, whose already rapidly ascending profile should be boosted even further by his work on "Slurring", as he too converts something that was sitting on the rap-dance margins into a full-on rave track, with massive drum cycles and the undeniable shudder of uncut adrenaline.
The cloudy, purple sound that Hemsworth is working with here has graduated in the past year, as laid-back producers like Shlohmo and more aggressive ones like Rustie compete for the same space. Hemsworth, though not quite in the same category as those guys, marries the two mindsets. In the process he produces an EP that that gives the impression of being greedily, beautifully excessive, while in actuality remains more poised and controlled than something this fun has any right to be. | 2012-09-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-09-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Wedidit | September 6, 2012 | 7.7 | 16e3ff37-0b67-4220-90fa-ccb67bad4abc | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
Paris-based composer and experimental music legend Rhys Chatham's second 3xCD box set for Table of the Elements, Guitar Trio is My Life!, collects 10 live performances of various ensembles performing his most famous work. Among those featured are members of Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Hüsker Dü, as well as Fog and Final Fantasy. | Paris-based composer and experimental music legend Rhys Chatham's second 3xCD box set for Table of the Elements, Guitar Trio is My Life!, collects 10 live performances of various ensembles performing his most famous work. Among those featured are members of Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Hüsker Dü, as well as Fog and Final Fantasy. | Rhys Chatham & His Guitar Trio All-Stars: Guitar Trio Is My Life! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11263-guitar-trio-is-my-life/ | Guitar Trio Is My Life! | If the most pure rock'n'roll is all about excess, emancipation, and sexuality, then 55-year-old Parisian composer Rhys Chatham makes Mick Jagger seem like a Sunday school teacher: Chatham's second 3xCD box set for Table of the Elements, Guitar Trio is My Life!, collects 10 performances from Chatham's 2007 14-city North American tour. Every night, Chatham and a different ensemble of musicians performed his most famous work, 1977's "Guitar Trio", twice. It's about time: For too long, Chatham's massed guitars have been a footnote to those of the more famous Glenn Branca. But Branca--- like Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore, Swans' Michael Gira and Jonathan Kane, and the Modern Lovers' Ernie Brooks, many of whom appear here-- was an early student of and member in Chatham's New York ensembles. This exhausting, exhilarating collection, though, should confirm both Chatham and "Guitar Trio" as staples in the rock and 20th cenury composition canons. At the very least, from the first E note to the last E chord three hours later, it proves that Chatham-- also significant for his curatorial role at New York's The Kitchen in the 70s and in the establishment of No Wave later that decade-- fucking rocks.
The "Guitar Trio" score is deceptively simple: "In this century, it has never taken more than an hour to teach 'Guitar Trio' to everyone's satisfaction and comfort level," Chatham wrote in the score notes circulated for the 2007 tour documented by Guitar Trio Is My Life! "So please don't worry about anything." Several guitar players gather around a drummer and an electric bassist. Their amps are clean, loud, and high on treble. The drummer counts off, and Chatham strums an open low E string, his rhythm a bit like a jumpy 60s Brit Invasion tune. The drummer plays a cantering, steady rhythm restricted to the hi-hat. One by one, Chatham signals each guitarist to join. The bassist enters. After several minutes, Chatham begins strumming the top three strings and then signals each guitarist to do the same. Later, Chatham begins strumming all six strings, fretting only the second string to B. Eventually everyone stops playing except the drummer, still using only hi-hat, and Chatham, again playing one string. The entire process repeats, and it's generally a bit briefer the second time around. The music fades out with a final chord played on a conclusive downbeat. Chatham announces the ensemble, bows, turns to his band, and starts again in the exact same way. Except this time, the drummer is given use of his full kit, especially the snare and kick drums. The only previous version of "Guitar Trio" (available on the long-since out-of-print 2002 box set An Angel Moves Too Fast to See and on the 2006 disc Die Donnergötter) was eight minutes long (first cycle only). The shortest take on Guitar Trio Is My Life! is the second Brooklyn cycle, which ends after 16 driving minutes.
But the "Guitar Trio" sound is surprisingly dynamic: Chatham does not specify when any given player should play above any given fret or for what length of time. Such inherent indeterminacy means that what begins as a stately, strummed guitar pattern begins to mutate and grow into surprising shapes. This variety of sounds builds cumulatively into a thick swath of high and low overtones bouncing off of each other like long-lost kin at a crowded family reunion. All of the sounds are made from the same E string or E chord, but none of them are exactly the same. By the time "Guitar Trio" hits its six-string segment, it's as thick as a furious blizzard. When the notes really come down, it's beautiful and overwhelming.
Still, 10 versions of the same 16-to-30 minute piece of music? Boring, right? Perhaps were it not for the musicians included here-- from members of Tortoise, Sonic Youth, and Thee Silver Mt. Zion to an unknown but incredible Buffalo drummer named Jim Abramson, who gloriously mauls his 21 minutes of Table of the Elements time on Disc One. "Guitar Trio" ingests individual talents and funnels them into a composition loose enough for new ideas but tough enough to test physical and mental limits: On the full-drum version from Toronto, then, you get a six-piece string section (including Final Fantasy's Owen Pallet), thickening the guitar sound into a viscous smear. But after the one-string turnaround, it sounds like Chatham's worn them out. Same for Tortoise's John McEntire, who turns in the best brass-only drumming with his Chicago performance, riding his hi-hat with impeccable time and finesse. But he gets lost inside the nine-guitar storm on the full-kit version, unlike improvisational heavyweight and Collections of Colonies of Bees drummer Jon Mueller. Like he does on this year's solo drum Table of the Elements release Metals, Mueller rattles speakers from the frame. His kick drum and heavy snare slap fearlessly. They lash at the six guitars like the only way out is revenge. Same for Ernie Brooks' bristling bass pops on the second set from Brooklyn: With a rhythmic sense that sounds like whiplash must feel, he folds his own aesthetic beneath Chatham's masterful umbrella work.
When considered alongside Chatham's statement that he can teach anyone this piece in an hour, such variety is exhilarating. "Guitar Trio" was composed after Chatham, then a New York composer taking a somewhat academic approach to minimalism, saw the Ramones play CBGB. Their music shocked him into redirecting his sonic approach within his own pre-existing ideas. The result is glorious, one-chord, electro-orchestral, garage-band minimalism. Anyone can learn this music. Anyone can play this music. Anyone can enjoy this music, rhythmically and tonally electrified as it is. This is a popular inroad for both understanding and participating in sound fields generally relegated to academia. "Guitar Trio" suggests infinite possibilities for this music, for all music, really: If you can combine basic "punk" ideas with basic "classical" ideas to create something that will forever alter the shape of both memes (see Sonic Youth and Glenn Branca), what can't you do? | 2008-03-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-03-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Table of the Elements | March 11, 2008 | 8.7 | 16e5cffb-85fe-4c89-a372-4497969df109 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The third album from the Detroit collective is an exceptional melding of hardcore, noise, and pop. Abstract concepts aside, the Armed makes thunderous and discordant music move with great finesse. | The third album from the Detroit collective is an exceptional melding of hardcore, noise, and pop. Abstract concepts aside, the Armed makes thunderous and discordant music move with great finesse. | The Armed: ULTRAPOP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-armed-ultrapop/ | ULTRAPOP | Attending one of the Armed’s shows has meant reckoning with a giant swamp man lugging a card table through the pit. The Detroit-based heavy music brigade got Tommy Wiseau for a music video; their audition tape to become the new lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots featured a shocking amount of hammered dulcimer. When they put out a song called “FT. FRANK TURNER,” the UK singer-songwriter was left wondering how the band got its hands on his unreleased and uncleared vocals. When the Armed did give interviews, they offered the full performance-art treatment—vague identities, elaborately staged locations, an apparently accidental claim that Kurt Ballou of Converge was their puppet master. The questions piled high, concrete answers remained elusive, and—if the performative antics didn’t threaten to overshadow the music—their records were largely left to speak for themselves.
The band avoided transparent authorship on 2018’s Only Love, which married screaming hardcore with synthesizers and melodic pop hooks. Their new album ULTRAPOP is once again filled with maximal and muscular pop bruisers, but this time, the Armed inch away from concept-driven anonymity. The exhilarating lead single “All Futures” arrived with a video that shows how their music comes to sound so impossibly massive: There they are, eight of the members credited as the current lineup, immaculately shredded and sweating it out in a recording studio as they perform their best song to date. Adam Vallely stands front and center, singing about glad-handing capitalist “sacks of shit” before two of his guitar-wielding bandmates start screaming “all futures—destruction” alongside him. Cara Drolshagen shrieks an affirmative and chaotic “yeah yeah yeah yeah,” just across from Clark Huge, a professional bodybuilder whose keyboard-mashing injects a twee melodic hook into the chaotic whorl. Urian Hackney, drummer and descendant of the family Death, is the pummeling centerpiece, making manifest the song’s omen of destruction with force and dexterity.
It takes a village to create ULTRAPOP’s barrage of feedback, guitar solos, twinkling synthesizers, overwhelming percussion, and screams, and the eight-person lineup in that video isn’t even everyone who goes here. At least 19 musicians contributed to the album and its countless layers of noise; melodic and textural details are crammed into every nook. You’ll have to strain to pick out performances by prominent contributors, but it’s undeniable that their work elevates ULTRAPOP. Guitarist Chris Slorach of METZ, now a full-on member of the Armed, is in the mix throughout, and you could swear that the signature jagged and distorted METZ guitar sound introduces “A Life So Wonderful.” Ballou’s guitar lends an explosive, trudging outro to the otherwise fast-paced and nimble “Where Man Knows Want.” Queens of the Stone Age’s Troy Van Leeuwen plays lead guitar amid the cascading synthesizer breakdown of “Real Folk Blues,” and the album’s final song, “The Music Becomes a Skull,” is defined by the typically imposing voice of Mark Lanegan.
That final track is a bookend counterpart to album opener “Ultrapop,” mirroring its equal parts delicate dream-pop synth melody and harsh blasts of noise. That’s the band’s consistent secret weapon: Like a heavyweight gracefully sailing off the top rope, the Armed’s gift is how they can make such thunderous and discordant music move with finesse. When their sound is at its most excessive—like Converge drummer Ben Koller’s relentless, suffocating percussion on “A Life So Wonderful,” or the full-on shriek that opens “Real Folk Blues”—the band knows how to pull back and find balance and patience elsewhere. Even on songs like “Bad Selection” that lean harder on restraint and coldness, they eventually land an explosive outro and deliver a sing-along “hallelujah.” If ULTRAPOP’s feedback and belligerence are the window dressing, the album’s value appears when they build tension around a hook that ratchets up the adrenaline. It’s the moment when the entire band stops playing for a second on “An Iteration” so they can emphasize that the song’s “young white savior” bro “did it again, did it again, did it again.”
Lyrics like these reveal the general conceptual thrust behind ULTRAPOP—references to unchecked entitlement, greed, digital facades, and being the “actor,” for example. Some hardbound “scripture” came with 100 limited-edition copies of the album, and maybe if you shell out enough money on Discogs, you can attempt to parse their intentions more deeply. When asked about the term “ultrapop” on writer Dan Ozzi’s Substack podcast, Vallely explained the band’s frustration with the “cosplay” and “stagnation” of heavy music. Technology, he claimed, has democratized previously subversive music to the point where everything ought to just be called pop. “Maybe you’re not as hardcore or edgy as you think you are because you can get a Black Flag T-shirt at Target,” he said.
In a pandemic that’s killed off cramped basement shows, hardcore is a subculture with no physical real estate. It’s an awkward moment to be attempting to reach new audiences by circumventing the formula, or calling out these supposed “cosplayers” who have no place to play (or shove or spit). That Black Flag example also hits a little different coming from dudes who, like Henry Rollins before them, have published their fitness routines. ULTRAPOP was spurred by the impulse to critique, but it doesn’t feel antagonistic of the greater canon of heavy music. Their elaborate and very loud efforts to build tension, achieve overwhelming catharsis, and write their most memorable melodies yet feels more like a conversation with a medium they love. It doesn’t hurt that their newfound transparency makes the music feel refreshingly human and relatable. Gains-obsessed beefcakes prodding the tropes and social expectations of heavy music by making an extremely heavy album is the Armed doing what the Armed do best—leading with their performative instincts. That’s commitment to the bit.
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. | 2021-04-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sargent House | April 16, 2021 | 8.2 | 16eb5b1e-d144-4e78-81d9-c14051a8898a | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | |
The Belgian-Caribbean musician’s breakout EP, co-produced by Soulwax, channels Guadeloupean influences into striking, playful electro pop with a sly sense of humor. | The Belgian-Caribbean musician’s breakout EP, co-produced by Soulwax, channels Guadeloupean influences into striking, playful electro pop with a sly sense of humor. | Charlotte Adigéry: Zandoli EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charlotte-adigery-zandoli-ep/ | Zandoli EP | The Belgium-based French-Caribbean musician Charlotte Adigéry often records using the moniker WWWater, stripping conventional song structures for parts to form a dizzying, minimalist take on electropop. Anchored by her soft, mutable voice, Adigéry’s music can assume blue shades one moment and fiery passion the next, whether delivered in English or her native French. On Zandoli, Adigéry’s second EP under her given name, she takes the same vitalizing qualities of those early, exploratory song sketches as WWWater and buffs them into high gloss. Co-produced with perennial indie-dance duo Soulwax and shot through with a global sensibility, Zandoli is an energizing and uncompromising EP that draws on electronica, dance music, and pop while existing entirely within its own frisky, curious world.
Adigéry said last year that the opening “Paténipat,” the EP’s first single, is a rhythmic call to arms for finding strength in despair, a way to “throw off all the ballast, all the stuff that in the end don’t matter.” The charging backdrop reflects that essence: At a winding and wiry six minutes, the track is a glowering, house-infused exercise in tension control. The chorus, derived from the Caribbean mnemonic “zandoli pa té ni pat” (“the gecko didn’t have any legs”), is crafted to evoke the call-and-response style of the Guadeloupean gwo ka music of Adigéry’s ancestors. The result is equal parts jarring and captivating in its curves and stop-and-start composition, with Adigéry’s coolly collected deadpan vocals keeping listeners both mentally transported and physically moving.
Soulwax’s production throughout Zandoli is in lockstep with the quirks and strengths of Adigéry’s voice, recalling the Belgian producers’ remix work pulling apart songs by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Warpaint. The pop-minded “High Lights” particularly fits the Soulwax mold: It’s a danceable, playful treatise on hair care and loving wigs that doubles as an artful indictment of those who would shame Adigéry for it. Her voice floats along in a dulcet tone until the chorus, in which she lets loose in plain, joyous terms, like she’s arrived at her own surprise birthday party: “I know I shouldn’t do it but/I love synthetic wigs a lot!”
Elsewhere, Zandoli engages with a full spectrum of sexual activities and attitudes. “Cursed and Cussed” explores kink over trip-hop breakbeats: “Squeaking leather/Skin on skin/Latex singing songs of sin,” she sings in a terse spoken-word delivery. Adigéry’s liquid, singsong affectations contradict the song’s masochistic core: “God punishes/I beg for more.” “B B C,” meanwhile, uses a Goldfrapp-indebted synth line and layered chants in service of barbed commentary on racial fetishism and sex tourism. “Takes two to tango/Fetish untangled/Libido gigolo,” she intones over a pattering drum machine: “If you’re good, I’ll take you home.” The song captures the perspective of both jane and gigolo in an unnerving power play that Adigéry pulls off with menacing poise.
A diverse spread of influences runs through Zandoli’s club-minded sphere: the Knife’s razor-sharp precision and mathy electronica; Neneh Cherry’s convention-smashing electro; Santigold’s forward-thinking, global pop. (In an example of perfect synergy, Cherry tapped Adigéry for an opening slot on her tour this year.) But Adigéry processes the music of her inspirations, collaborators, and ancestors on Zandoli from a unique point of view, delivered in a hypnotizing voice that can’t and won’t be easily shaken. | 2019-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | DEEWEE / PIAS | February 13, 2019 | 7.8 | 16f32058-f688-44cc-9cfc-627362911aee | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
M. Ward's More Rain is the kind of record you put on when the day is soaked with gloom and dimness, the one you listen to when you’re loafing so hard that you can barely bring yourself to flip the record, much less leave the house and brave the elements. | M. Ward's More Rain is the kind of record you put on when the day is soaked with gloom and dimness, the one you listen to when you’re loafing so hard that you can barely bring yourself to flip the record, much less leave the house and brave the elements. | M. Ward: More Rain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21644-more-rain/ | More Rain | M. Ward has admitted that the whole point of More Rain was to be the sort of thing to listen to when the weather is shit. As such, he's made a collection that attempts to persistently and gently wash away the negativity from, well, everything. The opening minute of pattering rain sets the mood as Ward dives headfirst into a collection of songs trying to square the big-picture ugliness of the world with its tiny details of everyday beauty.
The album works best when he leans all the way into his sleepy, slouchy songs. These songs might be the result of hours of careful, precise attention, but they feel magnificent in their decadent laziness: It is indeed the kind of record you put on when the day is soaked in gloom and dimness; you listen to when you’re loafing so hard that you can barely bring yourself to flip the record, much less leave the house and brave the elements.
More Rain can’t reasonably be called a folk record, even with its acoustic underpinnings, but Ward does wield some folk elements to his benefit. Pedal steel—forever underrated and unfairly dismissed as a pop-country prop—occasionally lilts into the mix, with mandolin popping up, too. Album opener "Pirate Dial" is a mellow, patient folk-pop number that serves as the album’s high point. On "Girl from Conejo Valley," those eight strings stand in contrast with a sliding synth line, making for an unexpected complement.
There are moments, though, when these textures become overwhelming. More Rain feels smothering in its intimacy at times, like a thick down pillow pressed to your face. The mixes are so close, the reverb so heavy, and the tones so richly warm, that Ward leaves little breathing room within his songs. Staying inside on a rainy day usually starts out pleasant and slowly grows claustrophobic, and so it goes with More Rain.
And while the instrumentation can often feel like too much, Ward’s flat lyrics feel like too little. "Slow Driving Man" starts with "This is a song about a slow driving man/And I’m about to sing it just as slow as I can." He proceeds to do just that. The cloying pattern of "Doo wop"s, "sha la la la"s, and "yip yip"'s on "Little Baby" don’t do much good, either.
Ward rallies for the closing track "I’m Going Higher," which slides in at the end of More Rain as a gospel tune disguised as a rock song. It’s solid, but resounds with the album’s over-arching theme of being a little too on the nose. The rain is gone and now there’s sunshine, praise the Lord! Though it’s mostly a pleasant record, there’s not much from it that sticks around long after listening—for all the talk of deluge, More Rain manages to wash itself away.
Correction: The original version of this review failed to identify the song "You're So Good To Me" as a Beach Boys cover. | 2016-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | March 11, 2016 | 5.9 | 16f7b7af-0644-4662-b0f4-08749f2a65df | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | null |
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