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There is so much depth to Faye Webster’s dazzling fourth album. It strikes a perfect balance between classic country stoicism and the sound of the saddest person you follow on social media. | There is so much depth to Faye Webster’s dazzling fourth album. It strikes a perfect balance between classic country stoicism and the sound of the saddest person you follow on social media. | Faye Webster: I Know I’m Funny haha | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/faye-webster-i-know-im-funny-haha/ | I Know I’m Funny haha | I was listening to Faye Webster speak from her home in Atlanta on the “How Long Gone” podcast about how she used to be something of a youth tennis star, how she doesn’t smoke weed but loves canned gin cocktails, how she practices yo-yo tricks while listening to EDM from a video game soundtrack. It was frothy and off-the-cuff, sketching a portrait of a down-home 23-year-old singer-songwriter whose rise to indie notoriety was boosted when her song “Better Distractions” landed on Barack Obama’s annual year-end playlist. (She sounded more concerned about a shipment of Pokémon cards that needed to arrive before she went on tour.) And then, during the interview, she would occasionally say, “I’m crying.” She’d say it when something was funny, the same way people type “I’m crying” when something is funny. But Webster said it dryly, with a kind of clinical detachment. She was neither laughing nor crying.
This really captures the way Webster approaches her songwriting. Laughter and tears, boredom and loneliness, scummy landlords and Linkin Park, they all have the same density in her songs. Every moment on her fourth album, I Know I’m Funny haha, floats by at the same meaningless speed, the air so thick and humid that lines don’t land, they just slowly disappear. In the world of Webster’s lolling indie country and twangy R&B, comedy and tragedy are indistinguishable. Saying “I’m crying” out loud could scan as a wry adoption of online argot, winking at a feeling but a little afraid of it, how if you text a friend something really honest you might take out a little “haha” as an insurance policy.
But because Webster is such a wise and interesting lyricist, and because she peppers her songs with five-word phrases that could plot an entire novel, there’s so much more to I Know I’m Funny haha than its wan title might suggest. Scenes and feelings are rendered so simply and matter-of-factly that sometimes it’s like Webster is singing back the minutes of a meeting. Good days bleed into bad and back into good—she’s crying in a good way, she’s laughing because she’s just been hurt, and honestly who can tell the difference anymore? With Webster’s downy voice and a pedal-steel player named Matt “Pistol” Stoessel who almost steals the show, the album strikes a perfect balance between classic country stoicism and the sound of the saddest person you follow on social media.
All of the same pieces were in place on 2019’s Atlanta Millionaires Club, an album as glacially paced and melancholy as this. But there’s a brighter twinkle to the songs, a looser grip on where they go and how they work, more space for the band and the orchestration. “In a Good Way” takes a minute-and-a-half walk in the middle just to simmer in a ’90s nu-soul groove; the title track doesn’t even have a chorus; “Kind Of” ends on a three-minute vamp with the precise vibe of a Key West bar band playing a bossa nova tune at sunset. Webster nods to fellow Atlantan Rich Homie Quan, singing on the chorus about feeling some type of way, but, again, taking out a little “kind of” as insurance. It’s a song that’s speechless, trepidatious, almost incredulous about falling in love, and still it stretches out as if she never wants whatever feeling this is to end.
Webster is an assassin who comes out of the shadows with something witheringly funny or totally devastating. And because this album comes pre-packaged with a hammock and warm breeze, it’s hard to do anything but smile when she delivers the blow. On the title track, Webster talks to her partner about his pretty sister in that loving but condescending way couples talk about each other’s siblings. “I made her laugh one time at dinner,” she sings. “She said I’m funny and then I thanked her/But I know I’m funny haha.” You see the whole spectrum of her personality in that one line—polite, sensitive, arrogant, actually funny—especially in the staccato way she sings “haha.” She elevates a forgettable phrase we all type all of the time into a moment that defines her character as a songwriter.
There is, in fact, a great deal of crying on the record. There is one good cry (“In a Good Way”) but for the most part, it’s rough. She cries so much it hurts, asks herself if she’ll stop crying for once, cries for no reason, thinks that she might just sit around and cry. None of those lines are sad in and of themselves, but they create the vulnerable atmosphere for Webster to detail the absurd magnitude of her sadness: “There’s a difference between lonely and lonesome/But I’m both all the time,” she sings, ever the grammarian. But Webster’s great gift as a young saint of the bummer jam is how she captures emptiness. She absolutely owns the void that swallows all feeling, that nothingness through which all emotion must travel. One line from “A Stranger” says it all: “You know, I used to love getting bored/But now, without you, I have so much time to think there’s nothing to think about anymore.”
Yet the record never sinks into a dirge or sounds anemic. It is full and stoned and beautiful the entire time. The mood reminds me of smoky old Billie Holiday tunes, or the sunny stroll of a João Gilberto record, or the twilight magic of classic pedal-steel-driven songs like “Harvest Moon” or “Sleep Walk.” The band does a remarkable job of giving subtle little flourishes just a second or two to shine. The way Webster trills between two notes on the chorus of “Sometimes” and the strings follow her in unison; the way the piano ascends and the pedal steel descends at the end of “Better Distractions”; the way Webster drops the line, “There’s so much going on/My grandmother’s dead” in “A Dream With a Baseball Player,” a song about a teenage crush on Atlanta Braves outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr. I Know I’m Funny haha is full of this delicious texture. It might come off a little shallow, but it reveals its great depth at its own unconcerned pace. It’s probably one of the best records of the year lol.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Secretly Canadian | June 25, 2021 | 8.4 | 16f849e2-ff27-49f2-95e5-88a20df36314 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
The Detroit producer and vocalist leads a brief, unvarnished tour of his home city, allowing sounds and samples to function as landmarks in a woozy deep-house landscape. | The Detroit producer and vocalist leads a brief, unvarnished tour of his home city, allowing sounds and samples to function as landmarks in a woozy deep-house landscape. | John FM: American Spirit EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-fm-american-spirit-ep/ | American Spirit EP | John FM recognizes what’s come before him. As a protégé of the enigmatic Omar S, the Detroit-based producer and vocalist is well aware of his city’s triumphs and tribulations, and keen to preserve the spirit of self-reliance and community that animates its techno. “There’s a clear divide between those from ‘new Detroit’ and ‘old Detroit,’” he told Resident Advisor in 2016. “This is a gritty place that’s getting an involuntary facelift.” By documenting life in the city, John FM records the concrete presence of the places and people that made him. Starting with an incantatory sample of a man singing (“We have the wisdom and the knowledge to take you high-yuh/We burn the wicked with a real hot, hot, hot hot, hot hot fi-yuh”), his American Spirit EP might seem as if it’s here to cleanse souls, but it simply wants to observe them, uniting fractured points of view through John FM’s own distinct voice. Originally self-released on Bandcamp in 2020 and reissued this year by XL, American Spirit provides a brief tour of a changing city in minor key, letting sounds and samples function as landmarks. By fragmenting his influences, John FM creates possible futures out of present difficulties.
Though the EP is rooted in deep house, its dancefloor-ready beats are augmented by hints of club clatter and reverb’d vocalizations. Over the synth swells and blown-out low-end bass of “Lockjaw (7 Deadly Winnin’),” John FM and collaborator L trade verses about casual sex and drugs, each outdoing the other’s nonchalance. It’s self-aware sin talk played for comedy. Album opener “February” comes closest to a straight deep house song: Transitioning smoothly from rain-drenched a cappella to throbbing bass, it creates heat through the friction of its interlocking parts. Beneath the drums, John FM ponders a romantic dilemma: “Say you got it together but you’re in a bind/Can’t imagine the perfect pairing/But trifectas won’t do.” It’s an ironic sentiment sung with the earnestness of someone who’s been waiting for their lover to make a decision.
John FM records what he sees and refuses to look away. “Holster” starts off with a horn solo slowly surrounded by shaky percussion, until John FM’s voice comes in, capturing the moment that a shooting occurs at a party. As the ground beneath him rumbles, John FM doubles his vocals, creating an apocalyptic-sounding choir: “Say your prayers tonight/But say your prayers outside,” he sings. When the horn returns, blasting back and forth until it’s incinerated at the last moment, you feel as if the camera is zooming out to reveal a scene of people grieving. On the astonishing “Forever,” strings enter and disappear as John FM pleads for the world’s destruction, chronicling a succession of tragedies that have led him to deep depression: the death of a friend, time spent locked up, feelings of insanity. But once the strings drop out of the mix, he sings, “I don’t wanna die/I wanna live forever.” His voice is gently altered, and he sounds both vulnerable and resilient. It’s at moments like these where the project makes complete sense and you feel the overwhelming nature of his fight.
American Spirit takes on problems at human scale. Throughout, John FM looks at the ways individuals try to escape domination. Even when he is dejected, he is resolute. The forces of economic underdevelopment, state oppression, and personal animus are present, but they exist in tandem with the power of community, a force that can be heard in the music. Without engaging in pastiche, John FM pays homage to past music formed out of these tensions, while also seeking new pathways of expression. Through his music, he demonstrates that though we are molded by forces out of our control, we can continuously reshape our experiences. He may be exhausted, but he’s not resigned.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | April 21, 2021 | 7.2 | 16fc587d-8161-4676-ba62-dd1437c22e79 | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
The excellent debut of Soundcloud superstar Kaytranada features many collaborators (Syd! Anderson .Paak!) and many drums. He excels at chopping samples, but his colorful sound is never derivative. | The excellent debut of Soundcloud superstar Kaytranada features many collaborators (Syd! Anderson .Paak!) and many drums. He excels at chopping samples, but his colorful sound is never derivative. | Kaytranada: 99.9% | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21899-999/ | 99.9% | There’s a particularly touching moment in a recent FADER profile of the Montreal-based producer Kaytranada. Kay, whose real name is Louis Kevin Celestin, moved from Haiti to Canada with his family when he was an infant, and his father retains a strong sense of national pride. When Kaytranada plays his dad a song from his debut album, 99.9%, the music sparks a rush of patriotic excitement. “Now I understand that he didn’t forget Haiti!” his father exclaims. “You can feel it!”
It’s possible to guess at the characteristics Kay’s father had in mind. Among Haitian music’s distinct features is an insistent focus on complex rhythms, many of them imported from African music and Dominican merengue, as well as a more general willingness to incorporate various countries’ homegrown styles into a cohesive whole. The genre-defying stew of funk, soul, R&B, and beat and dance music that Kaytranada has cooked up on 99.9% nods back at that heritage of percussion-driven synthesis.
Kay first made his name as a Soundcloud standout and dance DJ, but he has the mentality of a musico-archaeologist, digging past yesterday’s obvious pop gems to unearth the overlooked. In its sonic diversity, his album is reminiscent of Madlib’s crate-digging dynamism, but unlike a lot of instrumental hip-hop (or the house artists he’s sometimes grouped with), Kay’s beats are not at all rigid or predictable. His drums are configured strangely, bending, shifting, doubling back. With those rhythms, and his own custom-made synths, the 23-year-old shows himself to be a strong-willed studio auteur on a mix of instrumental and lyric-based tracks.
Several standout drummers were recruited for the record, including Karriem Riggins and Alexander Sowinski of the Toronto jazz outfit BADBADNOTGOOD, but even the tracks that don’t feature a guest percussionist are studded with polyrhythms. The chillwave synths that kick off the album opener, “Track Uno,” prop up restless rhythms that morph several times throughout the song. They drive it forward into the Riggins feature “Bus Ride,” and the momentum never lets up.
Kay’s inventive percussion keeps the album upbeat, but it’s often a dreamy, mellow listen, perhaps a result of the producer’s effort to broaden perceptions of his capabilities. Many of the featured collaborators, including Phonte, Syd, and Anderson .Paak, are hip-hop adjacent artists who have refused to be constrained by the dogmas of the genre, something that seems to have inspired Kay. Syd and Phonte in particular, have helped to define a contemporary, melodic take on funk, combining soul, R&B, and a dash of electronica. Their features, “One Too Many” and “You’re the One,” on which Kay showcases his love for warmly shimmering synths, are two of the album’s strongest.
Only four of the album’s fifteen tracks do not feature a guest, but even without any company, Kaytranada displays plenty of range. His most impressive solo cut is “Lite Spots,” a rework of the Brazilian singer Gal Costa’s 1973 track, “Pontos De Luz.” Kay takes advantage of the abrupt shifts in tempo in Costa’s original vocal, assembling a circle of handclaps and other percussive quirks to maximize the song’s potential as a house party special.
Even on his collaborations with more traditional hip-hop and R&B artists, Kaytranada rarely reaches for the radio, avoiding formulaic structures. His track with AlunaGeorge, “Together,” is almost all hook, with an energized central verse from the D.C. rapper GoldLink. On the Vic Mensa feature, “Drive Me Crazy,” the outro takes up almost half the track’s running time. It’s long been clear that Kay thinks of vocals as just another musical element, which helps him to make even the most unmemorable guest performances function as dependable instruments. (Also clear: his lack of interest in lyrics, the only generic aspect of 99.9%, and the one element that doesn’t bear traces of his close attention.)
There are two other features on 99.9% that should not escape mention. Anderson .Paak’s contribution, “Glowed Up,” is a two-part suite that make use of the Oxnard artist’s skills as a rapper and a singer respectively, emphasizing just how much Kay can accomplish with a similarly creative collaborator. The other is extra-musical: The album’s cover, painted by the globetrotting Spanish artist Ricardo Cavolo, is warm, colorful and psychedelic, as perfect a match for the record’s sound as any of its tracks. (Cavolo also contributed animated sketches for each track, which can be found on Instagram.)
Kaytranada picked Cavolo out personally, of course, just one more example of his painstaking focus on nearly every detail. Though his credentials are those of an artist who came of age in a digital era, his album is replete with the qualities that we associate with the analogue. It echoes the warm, melodic funk of golden*-*era Stevie Wonder far more closely than, say, the flatscreen sheen of Drake’s VIEWS, revealing the increasing uselessness of the word “digital” as a descriptor. There’s certainly nothing programmed about Kaytranada’s approach. His record’s name is meant to suggest a certain sense of incompleteness, but it’s one of the most well-edited, coherent debuts to emerge in recent memory. | 2016-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | XL | May 13, 2016 | 8 | 16fc93b5-3aa3-4c7f-a435-8f4190a1d654 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The South London producer/singer's latest album is consistently, deceptively understated. But its juxtaposition of complex drum patterns, slow-motion melodies, and heavily floating basslines makes it feel completely immersive. | The South London producer/singer's latest album is consistently, deceptively understated. But its juxtaposition of complex drum patterns, slow-motion melodies, and heavily floating basslines makes it feel completely immersive. | Cooly G: Playin' Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16866-playin-me/ | Playin' Me | When Cooly G released "Narst" b/w "Love Dub", her first single for Hyperdub back in 2009, there was an intriguing what-next dichotomy between the A and B sides. "Narst" was a banger, UK funky's rhythms strongarmed into grimier territory, where dense kicks steamrolled the snares and digital strings ratcheted up the pull between tension and exhilaration. "Love Dub Refix" found a wildly different use for that bass/percussion interplay: the drums clicked into delicate but elaborate motion beneath that wall of low-end, and it was topped off with a fluid, phased Fender Rhodes and Cooly G's own voice intoning declarations of heart-struck disconnect a'la neo-soul ("must be love… without you"). Either way, she was headed towards something that would take advantage of bass music's increasing genre flexibility, and do it in ways that rewarded close listening and dancefloor physicality at the same time.
Playin' Me is the culmination of a couple of years' work since that '09 single, and what the lead-up singles hinted at-- the '86 Prince-via-Kode9 flourishes of 2010's "Up in My Head"; the slow-boiling crest of the following year's microhouse-tinged "Landscapes"-- is elaborated on even further. When she goes back through the lineage of her sound, from funky to dubstep to garage to drum'n'bass, she digs all the way back to the groundswell of synthesized, post-disco R&B to give it a common thread. The first notes on the album belong to the sort of watery funk guitar lick that could've belonged to the solo on a '77 Brothers Johnson record, isolated as an emphatic refrain that would fit well on the intro of a '95 Faith Evans single, and then built around for a dramatic, looming melodic theme that is as good as anything else this year for idealizing what post-dubstep is capable of in a pop-friendly sense. "He Said I Said" is the track in question, and it's bristling with intimacy and anxiety alike-- but it also sets a precedent for how rhythm is deployed on Playin' Me, vividly developing the tense euphoria and spacious fluidity of that first single.
The vibe of the album is consistently, deceptively understated, intricacy taking priority over immediacy. But by the halfway point, the juxtaposition of complex drum patterns, slow-motion melodies, and heavily floating basslines makes this album's woozy intensity feel completely immersive. The way it passes through all sorts of different stylistic contexts makes it one of those records where its personality's better defined by its moods than any genre affiliations. "Sunshine" scans a bit like the more reggae and 2 Tone-indebted elements that made Skream! one of dubstep's biggest early crossover LPs, and its lovers-rock swoon fits well. Pushing things closer to a denser rhythmic focus lets her approach house and funky from multiple angles simultaneously, to invigorating effect; check the frenetic but clockwork-smooth collaboration with Baltimore house vet Karizma on "It's Serious" for proof. And when she lets minor-key menace creep in like it does on "What Airtime", it's bracing to hear her use those billowy atmospheric flourishes for something that rides on concentrated unease. The big trick in a lot of these tracks is this sly dynamic at work with the way she mixes her songs: if you want to really get a good sense of how she lets the snares play against each other, you need to push the volume up into the red. At that point, the bass will flood even more of your ear-space, while still sounding more warm than abrasive-- it doesn't rattle subwoofers, it melts them.
Fittingly enough, her vocals match the nuances of her production-- melodic but not really melismatic, evocative without shutting out the possibility of some elusive subtext. In a few of the songs-- "Trying", "It's Serious", "Playin' Me"-- her voice is scarce enough to pass for the skeletal remnants of stripped-away vocals in vintage dub versions, allusive flashes of context overwhelmed by the sound system. In others, she's more direct: the deliveries of "anticipation, waiting… explosiooooon" in "Sunshine" and "you want me, I want yoooooou" in "Come Into My Room" are unashamedly sensual, but in a way that feels more like a deep internal monologue than a performance for an audience. She also somehow pulls off covering Coldplay's 2000 single "Trouble" by siphoning out all the maudlin Britpop grandeur and replacing it with a vocal that scans a lot more like genuine regret-- though those glitchy, skittering drums have nearly as much to do with it. It's the damnedest thing: Cooly G's music is spare, subtle, often quiet, filled with breathable patches of between-the-beats negative space, and yet there's so much happening beneath the surface that it doesn't really scan as sedate. This is music that knocks you over with a feather. | 2012-07-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-07-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Hyperdub | July 27, 2012 | 8 | 16fdbbaf-35cc-4975-a47b-43138714c2e2 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | 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 a 1980s rock blockbuster: the bold, brilliant, and misunderstood apex of Bruce Springsteen’s imperial era. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 1980s rock blockbuster: the bold, brilliant, and misunderstood apex of Bruce Springsteen’s imperial era. | Bruce Springsteen: Born in the U.S.A. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruce-springsteen-born-in-the-usa/ | Born in the U.S.A. | As the release of Born in the U.S.A. approached in spring 1984—and with it, one of the greatest commercial ascents in the history of popular music—Bruce Springsteen was feeling apprehensive. It wasn’t because of “Dancing in the Dark,” which he added last-minute after his manager convinced him to write one more surefire attempt at a hit. It wasn’t because of the title track, a booming anthem whose chorus could be misinterpreted as a rallying cry for Reagan-era jingoism. And it wasn’t because of the cover art, a photograph by Annie Leibovitz that could be mistaken for a man urinating on an American flag. It was because of a song called “No Surrender,” and, in particular, its final verse:
Now on the street tonight the lights grow dim
The walls of my room are closing in
There’s a war outside still raging
You say it ain’t ours anymore to win
I want to sleep beneath peaceful skies in my lover’s bed
With a wide open country in my eyes
And these romantic dreams in my head
Something felt off as he sang these words. Who could be so blindly optimistic? During the tour for Born in the U.S.A., which spanned 16 months and brought the E Street Band to the biggest audiences they had ever played, Springsteen tried retooling the driving arrangement as a tender acoustic ballad; he rewrote the verse and changed his delivery. By the end of the run, it only appeared sporadically in setlists. “It was a song I was uncomfortable with,” he wrote years later. “You don’t hold out and triumph all the time in life. You compromise, you suffer defeat; you slip into life’s gray areas.”
So how did it wind up on the album? It wasn’t for a lack of material. Most casual fans know that as Springsteen was in the process of piecing together this full-band masterpiece, he first recorded an entirely different one: 1982’s solo acoustic Nebraska, originally intended as demos for the follow-up to 1980’s The River. But there was more where that came from. Before he landed on the dozen songs that would comprise his bestselling album, Springsteen continued down Nebraska’s folky path with story-song outtakes like “Shut Out the Light”; he worked with the band on epics like “This Hard Land” and straight-ahead rockers like “Murder Incorporated.” He wrote a goofy song about having his story told in a TV movie and a strange, apocalyptic one about the KKK. He is estimated to have recorded somewhere between 50 and 100 songs, hoping to amass enough material for one cohesive record.
In his early 30s, and a decade into his recording career, this was a period of introspection and desperate searching. For the first time after an album release, Springsteen didn’t go on tour for Nebraska. Instead, he went on vacation, taking a cross-country road trip with a friend. The type of open-road escape he sang about so convincingly, however, ended up being an emotional breaking point. As the trip took him from Jersey, through the South, and eventually to a new home he had purchased in the Hollywood Hills, Springsteen found himself crushed by waves of hopelessness and debilitating depression: collapsing in tears, feeling isolated, losing touch with whatever momentum had kept him burning down the road all this time.
In response, he sought therapy. He also went to the gym. A lot. “I was a big fan of meaningless, repetitive behavior,” he reflected in Peter Ames Carlin’s biography Bruce. “And what’s more meaningless than lifting a heavy object and then putting it down in the same place that you found it?” Weightlifting suited him, and gradually, the scrawny, scruffy misfit from the Jersey boardwalk started looking a bit more like the lead in an action film—someone who could feasibly play a hunky car mechanic in a music video, and, you know, have his ass photographed on an album cover.
The culture around Springsteen’s music was also shifting. MTV had evolved into a legitimate arm of the music industry, and Springsteen’s new look helped him gain traction in an image-centric medium. Meanwhile, vinyl had given way to cassettes, which were now ceding to compact discs. (Upon release, Born in the U.S.A. was advertised as the first CD manufactured in the United States; previous releases were mostly Japanese imports.) Adapting to the new technology, pop radio gravitated toward electronic strands of dance music, an innovation that Springsteen found inspiring. One song on the album, “Cover Me,” was something he originally wrote for Donna Summer, and you can hear her influence in his fiery, percussive delivery. (“She could really sing,” he wrote, “and I disliked the veiled racism of the anti-disco movement.”)
Because of its monocultural success, the ’80s gloss of Born in the U.S.A. can be somewhat overstated. It is a pristine and precise record whose synth pads, massive drums, and front-and-center vocals represent the defining qualities of the decade’s mainstream rock production. But listening to it now, I am struck by how physical, how alive the music sounds. Most of the songs were recorded live by the band in just a few takes, with Springsteen shouting cues, whooping and hollering off mic. And the writing, which blends the detailed narratives of Nebraska with the tighter pop structures of The River, is as thoughtful and emotional as any of his less polished material.
It is the sound of the E Street Band, then, that makes this feel uniquely like pop music. Roy Bittan’s synth is particularly effective—a thick humidity against the train-track momentum of “I’m on Fire,” and a taught fuse serving as a secondary bass line in “Dancing in the Dark.” Drummer Max Weinberg often takes center stage, calling the shots during the turnarounds in “Glory Days” and the title track with snare hits that match the energy of Springsteen’s prolonged runner’s high. He leads the band with such a locked-in sense of motion that, in the fadeout codas to songs like “Cover Me” and “Dancing in the Dark,” their backing tracks can feel a little like electronic music. It’s a sound that 21st-century bands like the War on Drugs would reinterpret as a kind of psychedelia, and that dance producer Arthur Baker capitalized on at the time with a fascinating series of club remixes.
After the willfully unmarketable Nebraska, Springsteen’s commercial reinvention thrilled the label executives, who are reported to have risen from their seats to dance during the playback sessions. (One said—upon hearing single after single, each better than the last and all mixed by Bob Clearmountain to sound tailor-made for radio—he might have actually pissed his pants.) It was also a windfall for Jon Landau, the music critic-turned-manager whose career-long belief in the life-saving power of rock music was gratified by these aspirational songs, some of which were actually about the life-saving power of rock music. Springsteen himself, already viewing his career with the analytic lens of a critic, couldn’t help but notice what this shift represented. “I was fascinated by people who had become a voice for their moment,” he would later say. “I don’t know if I felt I had a capacity for it or just willed my way in that direction, but it was something I was interested in.”
There was one person who wasn’t so interested. It was E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt, a man with rare access to the inner workings of the artist’s brain. The pair united as like-minded outcasts growing up in New Jersey, where they bonded at battles of the bands and spent countless nights in each other’s homes, side-stepping their intimidating fathers and evangelizing the records they loved. As they embarked on their careers together, Van Zandt is often credited with helping his pal lighten up a little: arranging the ecstatic horn parts on Born to Run, suggesting the title track’s iconic riff be transposed into a major key, and helming the party-in-my-garage production on The River.
A co-producer on Born in the U.S.A., Van Zandt brings the same sense of uplift to these songs. The most joyful moment comes in “Darlington County.” When Van Zandt honks his way through the vocal harmonies—“He don’t work and he don’t get paid”—Springsteen starts to laugh: Boy, does that sound ugly, you hear him think, it’s perfect. Same goes for the mandolin part in “Glory Days,” which Van Zandt recorded impromptu into a vocal mic so that it couldn’t be edited out without scrapping the entire take.
Fitting for an album that buries its anxiety beneath a bright veneer, these moments coincided with a new tension between the two. Recording under the name Little Steven, Van Zandt was completing his own album, ambitiously titled Voice of America, and its raw sound and spirit of protest felt at odds with the commercial intent of Springsteen’s latest music. Van Zandt floated the idea of promoting their albums together on a joint tour—I love imagining the response to this proposition—and confessed to feeling a bit undervalued. Sensing a crossroads, and by now well-acquainted with his friend’s stubborn self-reliance, Van Zandt quit the band.
While Springsteen stood his ground, he wasn’t as confident as he might have seemed. With an overabundance of material, he extended his creative process beyond the inner circle, inviting friends into his home to pore over the multitude of tapes and piece together a tracklist while he went out for runs or waited patiently at the kitchen table. His engineer, Chuck Plotkin, went so far as to present an acetate copy of the record he envisioned. Landau wrote a five-page letter justifying his preferred sequence. Eventually, Springsteen took some of their advice, ignored a lot of it, and turned in his completed album.
He played it for Van Zandt, who was not a fan of “Dancing in the Dark.” The lyrics—so self-conscious, so vulnerable—were anathema to his image of rock’n’roll heaven, where everyone’s young and beautiful, forever strutting. And don’t get him started on the production. Still, his main concern was “No Surrender,” his favorite song, which was nowhere to be found. The hope, the romance, the guitars—that’s the whole point of what we do! At the eleventh hour, Springsteen slotted the song back into the tracklist, right at the start of Side B.
If this operation sounds haphazard for a noted perfectionist like Springsteen, it kind of was. To this day, he speaks about Born in the U.S.A. with a sense of discomfort. The bookending songs—the title track and “My Hometown,” the only explicitly political material that made the cut—are what he’s proudest of. “The rest of the album,” he writes, “contains a group of songs about which I’ve always had some ambivalence…. [It] really didn’t flesh out like I had hoped it would.”
But while the recordings span several years of sessions, plagued with interpersonal struggle and self-doubt, bouncing between genre and mood, built on creative compromise and commercial aspiration, overexposed and eternally misunderstood, there’s really not a dull moment. With its grab-bag nature, the whole thing explodes like an encore run—when the lights are up and there’s nothing left to play but the hits; when fatigue converts into a kind of euphoria and the energy builds until it seems a little dangerous.
That’s how “No Surrender” earns its place; the optimism is hard-won, doomed to be short-lived. “You say you’re tired and you just want to close your eyes,” he sings against the rhythm, “and follow your dreams down.” But down where? If you were to place a compass in the wide open country of this album, down is where the arrow would constantly point. It’s in the opening lyric (“Born down in a dead man’s town”), and it’s the next move for the couple in the closing “My Hometown,” who plan on packing up the family, “maybe heading south.” It’s where all the signposts of security—work, marriage, community—send the narrator of “Downbound Train,” and it’s a syllable that gets stretched into a slapstick, rockabilly hiccup in the chorus of “I’m Goin’ Down.” For many of the characters in these songs, down becomes homebase: the direction you’re cautioned to ignore when you’re at the top; the inevitable crash after any high.
The momentary bliss of “No Surrender” is followed on the tracklist by “Bobby Jean,” and while Springsteen has never explicitly confirmed its inspiration, fans have long seen it as his farewell to Van Zandt. Like all his writing about friendship, “Bobby Jean” flirts with the language of love songs—the gender is intentionally ambiguous—and, paired with a bittersweet piano melody, the sentiment is so heartbroken and earnest that it feels almost childlike. The crucial lyric arrives just before the last verse, and it’s a simple but effective choice of words: “Now there ain’t nobody, nowhere, nohow/Gonna ever understand me the way you did.” Not love me, not know me, but understand me. It’s a rare quality in a companion—especially in adulthood—and it’s a hard thing to let go of when you find it.
There would be more goodbyes to come. Within the next five years, Springsteen would file for divorce from his first wife, the actress Julianne Phillips; fire the E Street Band after the tour for 1987’s mostly solo Tunnel of Love; leave his home in New Jersey to raise a family in Los Angeles with bandmate Patti Scialfa; and ultimately attempt to shed his celebrity identity, retreating from the mainstream and confessing to feeling “‘Bruced’ out” after the attention and mania that Born in the U.S.A. introduced to his life.
Little Steven’s Voice of America, meanwhile, released a month before Born in the U.S.A., was a flop. It instantly became a footnote to an album that has now gone 15 times platinum in the U.S., prominently featured on lists of the bestselling releases of all time. But that didn’t deter Van Zandt. He kept touring, recording solo music, and making a few sizable contributions to radio, television, and world politics before eventually rejoining the E Street Band in the ’90s. “It seems that what keeps people human is their ability to keep dreaming about things,” Springsteen whispered from the stage during a show in Toronto, early in the tour for Born in the U.S.A. “It seems like when you lose that...” His voice trails off. “This is for Little Steven.... He’s one of my best dreaming partners.” The band leaves the stage and Springsteen plays the opening notes of “No Surrender.” Alone and at the apex of his fame, he gazes toward the massive crowd and dreams of where he’s been.
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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. | 2021-08-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | August 8, 2021 | 10 | 16ff03e2-15a3-4e5e-8cfc-f2533bdfbd79 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
In an engrossing 87-minute piece in which cello and percussion circle each other through passages of sweetness and strife, the American composer explores the daily experience of intimacy. | In an engrossing 87-minute piece in which cello and percussion circle each other through passages of sweetness and strife, the American composer explores the daily experience of intimacy. | Sarah Hennies: The Reinvention of Romance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-hennies-the-reinvention-of-romance/ | The Reinvention of Romance | Love can be overpowering. That’s the side of it we most frequently hear in song—less so the slow process of building trust, or the gentle practice of persistent gratitude. Grand statements supersede the steady work of maintenance, with its more intricate drama. Percussionist Sarah Hennies offers a different perspective on The Reinvention of Romance, a new composition for cello and percussion that elegantly represents the give and take of two individuals in a relationship. The players cyclically find each other and drift apart over the course of the piece’s 87 minutes, moving through passages of sweetness, awkwardness, and unity.
Hennies’ music is intimate, immersive, and often unusually empathetic. One of her most impactful works, Contralto, features trans women speaking and singing in lower registers. It is a moving account of dysphoria, making connections between sound and experiences of gender and self. Often Hennies’ recordings feature instruments and other sound sources captured at extremely close range, placing the listener next to or inside of them in the sonic landscape. The Reinvention of Romance does this to powerful effect; you can hear the granularity of the bow on cello strings, the clarity of a mallet hitting the xylophone. The crispness of the recording has the effect of personifying the instrumental parts, turning them into characters in Hennies’ carefully plotted drama.
Listening to The Reinvention of Romance requires a great amount of patience. Its narrative arc is slow to unfold; the tonal palette is limited to plucked or bowed cello, rounded mallet tones, the screech of bowed metal, and a smattering of percussive clatter. The musicians trade off playing drones and pulses across a series of repetitive patterns, each lasting between 15 to 20 minutes, separated by stretches of silence. At times metallic percussive tones dance nimbly around stretches of grinding cello, and at others the thrum of sporadic low-end cello pizzicato punctuates the biting ring of horse hair on steel. Some configurations cause strife, yet even in the piece’s most disorienting moments, the instruments seem to be closely attuned to one another, playful and mimetic.
Seeing the contours of an intimate relationship in the way these unadorned sounds push and pull against each other requires an imaginative leap, and a fair amount of trust in the composer, but Hennies has a talent for making the abstract approachable. Once the romantic frame is in place, it becomes easy to see the core tenets of the piece—patience, the inexorable meshing of difficulty and beauty, the power of circumstance and change—as commentary on the daily experience of intimacy. Hennies utilizes space and silence to conjure a sense of intensity; it’s as if the two voices are drawn together instinctively, returning to one another again and again after periods of separation, searching for common ground. She draws the ear to the dynamic between the two players by emphasizing minute differences in tone. When those two voices are the only sonic elements for an hour and a half, each change in how they relate to one another becomes monumental.
In the final 15 minutes of the composition, the cello and mallet percussion finally meet, ringing out simultaneous long tones. They are not in unison, however, or even in consonant harmony, and just as the passage seems to reach a climax, they begin to fade very slowly. There is no satisfying ending, and no real resolution. As the final, lonely silence sets in after the piece’s conclusion, we’re left with the poignancy of the struggle to find one another and the inherent value in that journey. | 2020-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Astral Spirits | September 25, 2020 | 7.6 | 170602d9-5683-470c-90af-e8ffe29fe686 | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
The Los Angeles-based harpist’s songs remain characteristically serene and steeped in nostalgia, though guests like the Cure’s Lol Tolhurst and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell add nuance to her sound. | The Los Angeles-based harpist’s songs remain characteristically serene and steeped in nostalgia, though guests like the Cure’s Lol Tolhurst and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell add nuance to her sound. | Mary Lattimore: Goodbye, Hotel Arkada | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-lattimore-goodbye-hotel-arkada/ | Goodbye, Hotel Arkada | Listening to a Mary Lattimore album is like flipping through a scrapbook full of yellowing photographs. For the Los Angeles-based harpist, no moment is too trivial to capture in music: the lone deer she saw in the woods during a residency stay, the Wawa from a road trip. On albums like 2017’s Collected Pieces and 2020’s Silver Ladders she codified her style, transforming stories from her travels into wistful odes meant to evoke the feeling of a resurfaced memory. With Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, she invites an array of collaborators to help craft pensive songs that grow out of moments past. While her instrument’s luminous tone remains the music’s defining characteristic, she embraces a darker mood than before.
Goodbye, Hotel Arkada takes its name from a formerly grand hotel on the Croatian island of Hvar where Lattimore once roamed the empty hallways, imagining the majesty of its glory days. She later learned from a friend that the place had been gutted and modernized, and the news prompted this album-length tribute to faded grace. Not all her inspirations are as somber as her often stately music might suggest, however: “And Then He Wrapped His Wings Around Me” was inspired by a childhood encounter with an actor in a life-sized Big Bird costume, while “Music for Applying Shimmering Eye Shadow,” which she wrote as pre-show music for green-room rituals, grew out of an investigation in the theoretical sound of space.
Despite the range of her inspirations, Lattimore’s music is uniformly moody and slightly ambiguous. She plays at a leisurely pace and cloaks each pluck in reverb, giving the feeling that her music is floating. Her melodies often favor the high, twinkling pitches of her instrument; they sway rather than leap, transmitting a feeling of reverence. And as they repeat, they expand, crescendoing with each reiteration. On “Arrivederci,” which Lattimore wrote after being fired from a gig, former Cure keyboardist Lol Tolhurst’s synths add murkiness, bass notes swelling underneath Lattimore’s slow lament. The lilting phrases of closer “Yesterday’s Parties” feel dreamy at first, but as the song grows, Samara Lubelski’s flickering violin riffs cut across airy vocals from Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, stirring a little bit of chaos into the soothing lullaby.
Yet even in moments where a melody becomes turbulent, Lattimore’s compositions can feel relentlessly pretty. Her music avoids disorder; she carefully weaves sweet passages together and always ends with an upbeat tone. But with “Blender in a Blender,” Lattimore allows for some frayed edges. When writing the track, she recalled a conversation in which she and a friend wondered what sorts of physical objects could be put in a blender. Glow sticks, iPhones; could even a blender be blended? Her harp feels its featheriest here, soaring above Roy Montgomery’s hazy guitar. But then, after a moment of silence, Montgomery’s guitar returns with force, churning in a distorted blur. It’s a refreshing reminder that despite her music’s nostalgic cast, it doesn’t have to be bogged down by it. It can make room for humor, too. | 2023-10-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Ghostly International | October 10, 2023 | 6.9 | 1706de05-9993-4813-965e-6f74576b569a | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
On his sepia-toned second album, the Buffalo rapper looks back on a troubled upbringing while sometimes dipping into cliche. | On his sepia-toned second album, the Buffalo rapper looks back on a troubled upbringing while sometimes dipping into cliche. | Heem: From the Cradle to the Game | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/heem-from-the-cradle-to-the-game/ | From the Cradle to the Game | Westside Gunn’s activities as a rapper, A&R, fashionista, and wrestling fan are well-documented, but within the Griselda family, Conway the Machine and Benny the Butcher have quietly been putting in work. Since its founding in 2016, Benny’s Black Soprano Family label has ballooned into a seven-man unit. The collective’s standout has always been Buffalo rapper Heem, a straightforward storyteller with a nimble and commanding voice. He’s more of a parallel to artists like Boldy James or Styles P than Benny: a street soldier with eyes in the back of his head, preoccupied with stark details that put you in the thick of the action.
His second album From the Cradle to the Game works from some of the oldest templates in rap history: rags to riches, make momma proud, put on for the homies, never forget where you came from. Heem spent his youth in one of Buffalo’s roughest areas, and every song on From the Cradle looks back at grisly moments from his teenage years. Take opener “Reasonable Doubt,” where he reflects on a crime that almost ended his career before it began, or “Cocaine County” which details his experience at the mixing bowl with unnerving specificity, from the sound the fork makes to the flip phones used to make the deal. “I’m the one who went to war, you never shot nothin’/BSF stand for: ‘you’d better stop frontin’,” he raps on the thumping “Radio Raheem, judging anyone who’d fake hardship for attention. Heem can be a guarded and tough presence, but any time spent above ground is a blessing; he seems grateful for the possibility of one day being able to swap “crack money for some real estate and businesses.”
Some songs—like the Tyrie Hames-produced “Picture Me Rollin” and the Marc Spano-produced “Same Ole G”—fall into bland Roc-A-Fella worship, while others deploy the same crunchy mid-tempo stomp that you hear from most Griselda affiliates. Specific flourishes keep the album from lulling: Take the mandolin strings and vocal sample Hames adds to “Mamie Lee” or the soulful minimalism of Jansport J’s work on “Long Way Home,” both of which suit Heem’s traditionalist style.
What Heem brings to the table, and what From the Cradle excels at more than anything, is highlighting the conflicting emotions he’s felt while on the road from nothing to something. He seamlessly shifts between remorseless and wounded, hard-nosed and contemplative, and the cracks in his voice naturally emphasize his struggles. Having money, jewelry, and drop-tops is all well and good, but is it worth the sleepless nights and memories of lost friends he describes on “Tears of Blood”? The more he leans into this dichotomy, the more potent his music becomes. Even at his most familiar, it’s easy to see why Heem has become the Black Soprano Family’s right-hand man. | 2023-05-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Black Soprano Family / MNRK Music Group | May 25, 2023 | 6.7 | 1717551f-54a1-461a-809b-ad752a3a8601 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The Black Keys' seventh album features Danger Mouse's strongest production work for the group and a mood that's frivolous, fun, and unabashedly corny. | The Black Keys' seventh album features Danger Mouse's strongest production work for the group and a mood that's frivolous, fun, and unabashedly corny. | The Black Keys: El Camino | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16098-el-camino/ | El Camino | It behooves us to take 90 seconds here and figure out how this band got so popular and enduring. The Black Keys were born in the teeth of the early-aughts "Rock Is Back!" movement, wherein a cadre of uncouth garage-y bands all named The ______s saved us from the terrorists and/or the Backstreet Boys. Eventual result: deserved ignominy (the Vines), undeserved ignominy (the Hives), bewildered near-implosion (the Strokes), and bewildering total implosion (the White Stripes). The years have not been kind.
You didn't figure the Keys as sole survivors and mainstream lifers when The Big Come Up emerged in 2002 and offered a walking rockist orgasm: two gawky white dudes from Akron, Ohio, drums and surly guitar and burning-oatmeal-mouthed yawps of not terribly articulate romantic frustration, all powering cartoonishly virile garage-blues jams of prison-phone-call fidelity and sentiment. Ridiculous and kind of awesome. (This assumes racially uneasy cultural appropriation is no longer an issue for you, but if so, feel free to evoke the Blueshammer scene in the Ghost World movie and the hell with it.)
And so. They named their second album Thickfreakness; they recorded their third album in an abandoned tire factory and named it Rubber Factory. For a while there, they always did confoundingly well in critics' polls, as though they were every single rock scribe's seventh-favorite band. They evolved incredibly slowly-- you can enjoy their early work tremendously and never retain five consecutive seconds of it beyond their cover of "Have Love Will Travel". Danger Mouse got involved as a producer, to the immediately evident benefit of no one. Coupla daffy side projects in there somewhere. (BlakRoc!) Ah yes, and they got their music in a shitload of ads, from Victoria's Secret to Zales to American Express to Subaru, like just so much capitalism, to the extent that they went on The Colbert Report with Vampire Weekend and clowned themselves about it.
By which time they'd broken through. Last year's Brothers, their sixth album, had wit and pop charm and a minor hit in "Tighten Up" (and unremitting bloat, but ah), and thus came the Spin cover, the Saturday Night Live appearances, the Grammys. And now we greet El Camino, their best and (not coincidentally) goofiest album, a veritable frat-worthy "Pimp 'n' Ho" party in which T. Rex has somehow been tricked into serving as house band. The riffs are glam-nasty, the lyrics sublimely knuckleheaded, the basslines nimble and bombastic, the mood frivolous and fun and unabashedly corny. It's way shorter than Brothers, too. Sweet cars, witchy women, "Gold on the Ceiling." A bizarre attempt to philosophically combine the videos for "Sabotage" and "Legs". The fine line between a tricked-out GTO and "GTFO."
Danger Mouse figured it out, for one thing. He unnecessarily arted up 2008's Attack & Release (plus the hit off Brothers), and his angelic-choir/space-glockenspiel Super Mario Galaxy fantasias still distract-- everything's a goddamn spaghetti western with this guy. But Camino's sonic frills are mercifully few, content to stick your head right in Patrick Carney's bass drum as he stomps through the caveman jam "Hell of a Season" with virtuosic anti-virtuosity, or revel in the machine-gun surge of Dan Auerbach's gong-banging guitar on surging opener "Lonely Boy". It's a shame Rock Band is no longer a thing. "Gold on the Ceiling" is just filthy, like George Thorogood scoring porn, all raunchy organ and licentious handclaps and chorus help from ladies attempting to sound like the sorts of ladies Steely Dan loved to write songs about. "I wanna buy some time/ But don't have a dime," goes the raucous one called "Money Maker". Better cash some Subaru checks.
The lyrics! The lyrics are hilarious. Great advice, via Brothers: "Well, you can watch her strut/ But keep your mouth shut." God bless Auerbach for ignoring it, and, amid the keening/crunching stomp of "Run Right Back", dropping some serious knowledge: "Well she's a special thing/ She doesn't read too much, oh/ But there's no doubt/ She's written about." Which is really just a prelude to the miraculous five-word sequence that is "Finest exterior/ She's so superior," which, Jesus. Show me the CARFAX, Romeo. Your emotional climax is "Little Black Submarines", which starts acoustic and pathos-ridden: "A broken heart is blind," goes the biologically suspect refrain. But then, hosanna, the distortion kicks in, the riff from "Mary Jane's Last Dance" is lifted wholesale, and suddenly we are rocking, Carney and Auerbach in call-and-response/attack-and-release napalm mode, back in the rubber factory in spirit if not tax bracket.
Yes, well. Consider El Camino the aural equivalent of one of those Chrysler "Imported from Detroit" ads where a $47,000 car slowly rolls through one of the most devastated cities in America, a sign for 8 Mile Road glimpsed through tinted windows: the finest in luxury grit. Seedy, escapist camp, crass but expert, so expert. That they're the true victors of the 2000s garage explosion is no shock at all. Rock came back. Commerce never left. | 2011-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | December 2, 2011 | 7.4 | 1717cf3b-06bc-4ac9-92f7-77363c142081 | Rob Harvilla | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-harvilla/ | null |
The Brooklyn indie-pop duo’s second LP plays like the cloud-covered foil to an endless California summer. | The Brooklyn indie-pop duo’s second LP plays like the cloud-covered foil to an endless California summer. | Jeanines: Don’t Wait for a Sign | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeanines-dont-wait-for-a-sign/ | Don’t Wait for a Sign | Like Sarah, Factory, or Sacred Bones, Oakland’s Slumberland is the sort of boutique record label that assumes its own persona. Each entry, usually no longer than half an hour, is sewn into its patchwork gestalt, producing its own variant on the Slumberland formula: cute, fuzzy, and young at heart. As the label enters its 33rd year, founder Mike Schulman has ushered in a recent surge of activity, tapping the Bay Area’s wellspring of indie-pop talent to press a steady stream of revived acts, pseudo-supergroups, and scene veterans. New York City duo Jeanines are the odd band out among this latest batch of releases. Their second album, Don’t Wait for a Sign, is Slumberland’s lone East Coast offering of 2022 thus far, and they’re relative newcomers to the imprint’s inner circle. Bassist, guitarist, and drummer Jed Smith has performed in a few bands like My Teenage Stride over the past two decades, but Jeanines is the first serious project for singer and guitarist Alicia Hyman.
Speaking to Chickfactor, Hyman offered a brief summary of the band’s two-step creative process: She writes “sad folk songs” in her apartment, and sends them over to Smith, who “turns them into indie pop gems.” Since their self-titled 2019 debut, each party has refined their respective craft. Hyman’s chord progressions have grown more complex, providing a sturdier framework to drive her ruminative vocals into higher registers, while Smith has mostly shelved the trebly twee-punk timbres in favor of flower-power pastiche. On a macro level, the band’s vision is realized and tasteful, but its individual elements blur where they once blended. Like an impressionist painting, it’s most impressive as an aesthetic statement—pay too close attention and the album fractures into a collection of textured brushstrokes, some brilliant, some less so.
Both devout students of 1960s pop, Hyman and Smith are acutely aware of the effect echo can have on a song’s emotional resonance. The new record is shrouded in damp clouds of reverb, with faint impressions of its jangling guitars sneaking through like the sun behind an overcast sky. The same muggy treatment that elevated the Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” from catchy folk-rock strummer to bittersweet anthem is slathered across the album like sunblock.
Don’t Wait for a Sign gels when the instrumentals take a step back, putting emphasis on the rubbery qualities of Hyman’s voice. Though delivered with a detached sigh, the chorus of “Any Day Now” bounces off of its minor chord progression like a rubber ball, stretching and warping in midair before concluding with a droll “la la la la la” cribbed from the Magnetic Fields’ playbook. Each verse on “Who’s in the Dark” sounds like its own hook, extracting pure pop syrup from a gloomy British folk palette. It’s not as punky and peppy as many of the band’s labelmates, but it works as the cloud-covered East Coast foil to Slumberland’s endless California summer.
Jeanines falter when they attempt to fit in with their peers. Fueled by clean, shimmery rhythm guitar, the record’s title track is an invitation to “wash away those worry lines, you still have a lot of time”—an encouraging sentiment, but one that sounds more Archies than Another Sunny Day. The song turns out undercooked compared to its neighbors, bound to a simpler instrumental that stifles Hyman’s usual melodic zeal. “Gotta Go” suffers an oversaturation of charm, repeating its title over staccato chords and metronomic snares. It’s the peak of Smith’s retromania, generously layering Hyman’s vocals atop an instrumental that wouldn’t feel out of place in the intro to a vintage cartoon variety show. Though under a minute long, it feels like dead weight on an otherwise succinct album.
Like many of the Sarah Records bands and ’60s bubblegum pop artists they look to for guidance, Jeanines are distinguished by towering peaks surrounded by pleasant but interchangeable filler. When confined to a 7" record like 2020’s Things Change EP, they thrive, urgently cramming as many hooks, harmonies, and symphonic flourishes as they can fit. There’s nothing on Don’t Wait for a Sign that quite holds up to immaculate slivers of pop like “Everyone Should Be Warned” or “Been in the Dark,” which benefit from baroque touches like Smith’s Mellotron or a Hyman violin solo. The solid foundation of moody songcraft on their two LPs is ripe for development. Shaking their minimalist DIY ethos in favor of more lavish impulses may be just what Jeanines need to truly transcend their influences. | 2022-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Slumberland | April 25, 2022 | 6.8 | 1717fdf9-ff8e-44ee-b45d-1685628f7db1 | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
Long Live the Pimp is the worst of Pimp C's posthumous output. The production hews too closely to modern trends for Pimp's voice, and the posthumous verses here sound uncharacteristically sleepy and subdued. Maybe it's time to leave well enough alone. | Long Live the Pimp is the worst of Pimp C's posthumous output. The production hews too closely to modern trends for Pimp's voice, and the posthumous verses here sound uncharacteristically sleepy and subdued. Maybe it's time to leave well enough alone. | Pimp C: Long Live The Pimp | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21308-long-live-the-pimp/ | Long Live The Pimp | Pimp C was far from one-dimensional as an artist, but through a tortuous life, and now death, he's been reduced to a cred signpost. Drake showed up on the first posthumous Pimp C release, 2010's The Naked Soul of Sweet Jones, seemingly just to name-check Houston strip clubs*.* "RIP Pimp C" is now as much a given as a hip-hop salutation as "RIP Biggie" or "RIP 2 Pac" or "Free Max B". Almost a decade after he passed, we're on posthumous record #3, and you start to wonder if we're officially scraping the barrel.
Compared to The Naked Soul of Sweet Jones, which at least featured producers Pimp C worked with in life and was rooted in the country-rap sound, 2011's lesser Still Pimping, Long Live the Pimp is the worst of his posthumous output. This is partly due to the uncharacteristically sleepy and subdued verses from Chad Butler himself, but it's not helped out by the production either. Instead of the country-inspired bounce of Pimp's own productions, a lot of Long Live the Pimp works a dank, marching-band percussion rhythm associated with Juicy J's late-career resurgence, more "Bandz a Make Her Dance" than "Sippin on Some Syrup".
In fact, Juicy J oversaw production on several of these songs, and his fingerprints are all over the album. "Payday" sounds like something from this year's 100% Juice. The two collaborated often and were representatives for their own regional scenes, but the songs here are discomfiting because they sound too obviously inspired by current trends, an ill fit for a voice so closely aligned with a singular aesthetic. Ty Dolla $ign is a great artist, but you can't pair one of his hooks with a Pimp C verse any more than you can digitally insert John Candy into Krampus.
And the overt tributes to Pimp's sound—church organs and wah-wah guitars—sound flimsy as well, the Diet Coke version of country rap tunes. "Trill" is nice enough, with three professional verses from three signature Houston voices—Slim Thug, ESG, and Lil Keke. But everyone sounds careful and reverent, on their best behavior. The Lil Wayne, A$AP Rocky, Juicy J, and Nas features fall predictably flat (though "Friends" works a TLC-inspired hook as well as it can), but something like "Bitch Get Down" with Bun B and 8 Ball & MJG or "Twerk Something" with T.I. should have been home runs. They all feel too tasteful to really be essential, not at all a proper tribute to Pimp's spirit.
Pre-release hype pegs Long Live the Pimp as the culmination of what Pimp C was working on toward the end of his life. But it makes you wonder—why did it take eight years for this stuff to see the light of day? Maybe the best verses he left behind have already been used on UGK's final album, 2009's UGK 4 Life, and two other posthumous solo records. Pimp C's work is in good hands (I don't see any Duets: The Final Chapter-type fiascos in the future) but maybe it's time to leave well enough alone. | 2015-12-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-12-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | Mass Appeal | December 10, 2015 | 5 | 17198e87-39c9-4695-b9aa-537d08379176 | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
The third album from Detroit post-punk outfit Protomartyr ups the ante considerably from the first two. Their grim but compelling songs highlight a place where violence hovers constantly at the periphery, where peace and hope gradually curdle and turn ugly, and the desperate people who once clung to them eventually fall prey to their worst impulses. | The third album from Detroit post-punk outfit Protomartyr ups the ante considerably from the first two. Their grim but compelling songs highlight a place where violence hovers constantly at the periphery, where peace and hope gradually curdle and turn ugly, and the desperate people who once clung to them eventually fall prey to their worst impulses. | Protomartyr: The Agent Intellect | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20966-the-agent-intellect/ | The Agent Intellect | In what feels like an odd moment of prescience, roughly halfway through The Agent Intellect, the harrowing third album from the Detroit band Protomartyr, the Pope pays a visit. It’s 1987 in Pontiac, Mich., and Pope John Paul II is visiting the Silverdome, delivering Mass to the 100,000 faithful who’d come to hear him speak. Among them was a young Joe Casey who, 25 years later, would grow up to become Protomartyr’s frontman. The event was historic—it set an attendance record at the arena—but what Casey remembers about it in "Pontiac 87" isn’t the beauty of the sermon or the spectacle in the ceremony, but the ugliness boiling just beneath the surface. On his way into the arena, he sees "money changing between hands," and on his way out, a riot, where "Old folks turn brutish/ Trampling their way out the gates towards heaven."
This is the universe Protomartyr inhabits, one where violence hovers constantly at the periphery, where peace and hope gradually curdle and turn ugly, and the desperate people who once clung to them eventually fall prey to their worst impulses. The emotionally brutal Under Color of Official Right from 2014 took place against the crumbling skyline of Detroit, where deadbeat fathers disappeared into bars while their children planned revenge at home and politicians made backwards deals that benefited no one but themselves. On Intellect, Casey’s got bigger matters on his mind. The first character we meet on the record is, literally, the Devil, but he doesn’t have red horns and a trident, and he’s not cackling in a smoldering cavern. He’s a teenager in his bedroom at home, full of promise and almost dewy-eyed naiveté until his peers shun him and all of his grand plans fail, and he’s left at the end of the song vowing, "I will make them feel the way I do/ I’ll corrupt them ‘til they think the way I do." If Right was about the evil that men do, Intellect goes one bigger and asks why they do it. The answer, again and again, is rooted in hurt, pain, neglect, and disappointment.
Intellect draws its energy from the panic of mortality. Casey lost his father to a heart attack and his mother to Alzheimer’s disease as he was writing the record, and their presence on Intellect provides some of its most wrenching emotional moments. His mother arrives strong and determined on the grim, booming "Why Does It Shake?", swearing, "Lithe in thought and pumping blood…I’m never gonna lose it," but suddenly the song collapses and decays. It concludes with the chilling appearance of "the stranger" who, in Casey’s words, always wins—"He enters the temple/ It falls/ It always falls." The song’s title comes from something Casey’s mother said, noticing the tremors of old age in her hands. That sound of the ticking clock makes all of the violence and drunkenness on Intellect seem that much more desperate, that much more futile.
Throughout the album, the band rises to meet the weighty subject matter. On Right, songs arrived in brute slashes, but on Intellect they’re textured and spacious. Guitarist Greg Ahee cloaks "Cowards Starve" in a Morricone-like cowboy flange, gradually gathering tension until the song detonates in the chorus. "Dope Cloud" rides a razor-wire post-punk guitar line as its protagonists accumulate treasure only to be met with Casey’s bleak reminder, "That’s not gonna save you, man." And in "Ellen", a love song written from the perspective of Casey’s father to his mother, they beautifully underplay, supporting the song’s sweet sentiment in feathery chords.
But it is Casey who has undergone the greatest evolution. Casey has described his stage demeanor as "30 minutes of a fat guy yelling at you," but on Intellect, he’s more measured, and his writing has developed an almost Joycean grasp of detail and narrative. The second verse of "Pontiac 87" feels like something that could have turned up in "The Dead": a crowd of regulars pile into the Detroit bar Jumbo’s (familiar to Protomartyr fans from its appearance on No Passion All Technique) the day after Christmas. Casey describes the scene with such stunning narrative economy you can almost see the lines on their faces: "Remembering a Jumbo’s night, December 26th/ Weird faces filled up the bar, half sober/ Outside, a steady snow—all new white." He’s also become a powerful, passionate singer. His delivery throughout Intellect has gravity and nuance; he’s able to make a sing-along out of the line "Social pressures exist/ And if you think about them all of the time/ You’re gonna find that your head’s been kicked in." He goes from baleful and bereft to nasty and snarling, commanding “Destroy the gateway, bind them up, break the circuit, cast them out.”
And what he’s driving at, again and again, is that we do all of those things when we feel like trapped animals, when we’ve thrown our full bodies into life and it’s given us nothing back but loneliness and poverty and emptiness, and each advancing year is less time we have to do something of substance. It’s a profound and uncomfortable truth, and it’s one that The Agent Intellect unflinchingly stares down.
All of this is highlighted to shattering effect in "Uncle Mother’s". At first, it seems like another in a long line of Protomartyr bar tableaus, the battered working class piling into a dive to suck down Old Styles until the world seems bearable again. The revelation of the song’s true meaning comes in what at first feels like a throwaway detail. At the start of the song, Casey advises, "Welcome to Uncle Mother’s/ Leave your children in the car." From there the carousing begins, and the usual boxes are checked: there’s a drug deal in the kitchen and bad doings in the back corner. But at the end of the song, Casey repeats himself, and turns a declarative into a question: "Welcome to Uncle Mother’s/ Are your children still in the car?" In that moment it becomes clear that the subject of the song isn’t the drunks—it’s the children. That subtle shift is what gives the record its almost palpable sense of humanity, of sorrow, of compassion. On The Agent Intellect, we are all the children, shivering alone in an empty station wagon in a bitter Detroit night, waiting in vain for someone to come and take us home. | 2015-10-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | October 7, 2015 | 8.2 | 171a6cf1-c293-4df0-b247-72c0f65fa368 | J. Edward Keyes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/j.-edward keyes/ | null |
With his scrappy indie rock project Turtlenecked, Harrison Smith pens witty lyrics that riff on social media and scene politics. But his second album is often insufferable. | With his scrappy indie rock project Turtlenecked, Harrison Smith pens witty lyrics that riff on social media and scene politics. But his second album is often insufferable. | Turtlenecked: Vulture | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/turtlenecked-vulture/ | Vulture | Minutes into his second album as Turtlenecked in as many years, Harrison Smith puts his audience on notice: “Reality TV!/I’m not here to make friends!” Do not misinterpret this as Smith saying that he doesn’t care what you think about him or his scrappy indie rock project. At 20 years old, Smith has come of age at a time where it’s completely normal to use every moment as an opportunity to publicly manipulate your personality. “I don’t need no goddamn life/When I’ve got 100 likes” isn’t an original sentiment, but like every lyric on Vulture, it’s striving for the validation of any response, whether it’s smashing that like, RT, or the mute button. While Smith is capable of penning witty, voice-of-a-generation quotables, he’s just as enamored with Tumblr snark. It’s as if Vulture was put on earth at this very moment for people who just can’t bring themselves to pick sides in the very particular Car Seat Headrest/Ricky Eat Acid beef.
In fact, Smith’s entire M.O. is playing both sides—it’s unclear whether he’s mocking the actions of his peers, the Twitter and scene politics that dictate those actions, or just mocking those who do the mocking. That’s where Vulture’s problems start. In its very first lines, Smith shouts and shudders like Ian Curtis resurrected as a woke male feminist: “Someone tell these boys that I’m a feminist!/Someone tell these girls that I’m effeminate!” This is a song called “Boys Club,” and one would assume he’s presenting himself as an outspoken ally. But his heel turn happens less than two minutes into Vulture: The most genuine emotion of “Boys Club” is an all-consuming cynicism rather than indignation for the patriarchal power structure. Even if Smith calls his scene a “pale indie bro trash pile,” he then boasts that he’s going to be the king of that hill.
Vulture does occasionally back up that bluster, particularly when it’s perfumed by the beery piss and vinegar of Archers of Loaf circa Vee Vee on “Pangloss.” Yet for the most part, even though Turtlenecked’s verbal dialect is very 2017, the sound is mostly 2006-style blog-rock. Divorced from its unfortunate historical baggage, there was something to that style, which bridged the gap between the early 2000s post-punk revival and the Urban Outfitters takeover of the late 2000s. And these tics—jittery vocals, fractured rhythms, oddly shaped song structures—lend themselves well to Smith’s antic mind.
But when the choruses aren’t there, Vulture recalls those “Simpsons” Hullabalooza punks, who couldn’t even tell if they were being sarcastic anymore. “Human Veal” muddles the neurotic neediness of Xiu Xiu, Drake, and Taking Back Sunday into a toxic Long Island cocktail of emo self-awareness: “I’ve said LOL in every sentence/I want to show I meant it as a self-aware, half-ironic deprecating empty vessel for the remnants of my heart.” As someone who’s absorbed the near entirety of Saddle Creek’s output, I’ll admit this is the kind of thing that can feel revelatory and even empowering to hear within the context of a snappy indie rock song rather than an inner monologue.
Other times, this kind of mental jousting is just as exhausting to hear as it is to experience. On “Meeting You in the Hospital,” Smith boasts that he wants a romance like one from a movie or a novel, not some “patriarchal white male bullshit” or “pixie dream to save my life.” The effect of this lyric is entirely predicated on listener projection. If you assume Smith realizes all four things are basically the same—and that’s a big assumption—then it’s a clever lyric. If not, it’s just as insufferable as anyone else trying their damnedest to sound virtuous. Vulture occasionally hints at what Smith could accomplish as a writer if his scope matched his ambition. But for now, it’s a lesson that if you keep your head up your ass long enough, of course the world looks like it’s full of shit. | 2017-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Good Cheer | June 30, 2017 | 6 | 171b2afc-8ff9-4b9a-80e5-285401135436 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Daniel Lopatin accentuates the Safdie Brothers’ character studies with his hyper-real music. Instead of pursuing moments of trance-like calm or humor, here he metes out anxiety measure by measure. | Daniel Lopatin accentuates the Safdie Brothers’ character studies with his hyper-real music. Instead of pursuing moments of trance-like calm or humor, here he metes out anxiety measure by measure. | Oneohtrix Point Never: Good Time (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oneohtrix-point-never-good-time-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Good Time (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | The Safdie Brothers’ crime drama Good Time opens with a helicopter shot of New York City, a gamble for any film but especially one this strange, cloistered, and intimate. It’s one of the most photographed places in the world, an easy harbor for cliché and forced sentiment, and yet in the brothers’ lens, the setting looks novel and uneasy, like a threatening frontier you’re staring down for the very first time. That effect—of seeing one of the most recognizable places on earth as though it’s brand new—is cemented by the music permeating the shot, an anxious drone perforated by synthesizer arpeggios that sound both retro and bizarrely out of time.
As Oneohtrix Point Never, New York-based electronic composer Daniel Lopatin has often focused on the grotesque and unplaceable. He’s mined vintage advertising, TV documentaries, and corny ’80s pop hits for his alien environments, often juxtaposing barely recognizable melodies with obliterative walls of static. From the ambient waves of Russian Mind to the hard rock-adjacent Garden of Delete, Lopatin’s work has a tendency to displace the listener—to envelop them in a world that looks a lot like the one they’re used to, but threatens to fall apart at the slightest touch.
Lopatin’s body of work makes him uniquely suited to the Safdie Brothers’ filmmaking style, which opts for a deep pathos and an intense humanization of its characters over flashy action sequences. Good Time is ostensibly a crime movie, but it’s full of close-ups on characters’ faces shot with handheld cameras. Its characters aren’t hard-talking badasses, but flawed, pained people scrambling for survival the only way they know how. The story centers on Connie, played by Robert Pattinson, who’s trying to get his brother Nicky, played by director Benny Safdie, out of Rikers Island after a bank robbery goes south. Nicky has unspecified disabilities—he wears hearing aids, and the first time we see him, he’s struggling to complete some kind of psychiatric evaluation—so Connie’s especially protective of him despite leading him directly into danger. The film’s narrative rests on this contradiction. Connie wants nothing more than for his brother to have a good life, even if it means ruining everything on his path to get there.
Lopatin accentuates the Safdie Brothers’ character studies with a palette that will sound familiar to anyone who’s followed the Oneohtrix Point Never discography so far. But the score moves differently from his album work; instead of pursuing moments of trance-like calm or humor, he metes out anxiety measure by measure. Until the final scene, the film is all anxiety—the characters are always in situations where everything could go wrong, and the score teeters on a parallel brink.
Arpeggios run over peals of white noise on “Good Time” and “Hospital Escape/Access-A-Ride”; drum sounds echo into an elevator shaft on “6th Floor” and “Ray Wakes Up.” “The Acid Hits” runs on slippery percussion that echoes the sound of bloodied fists breaking skin. Lopatin weaves dialogue from the movie into the score, creating an effect that’s disarming even before you see the scenes it’s sourced from. Jennifer Jason Leigh screams into the music on “Bail Bonds,” a piece accompanying a scene where her character—an ad hoc girlfriend that Connie manipulates for her family’s money—tries to put a $10,000 charge on her mother’s credit card. “Ray Wakes Up” samples a conversation between a teenage girl and her grandmother that takes place while Connie’s on their couch plotting his next move. Connie’s voice rarely appears in the score; Lopatin instead focuses on the characters that he tricks, coerces, and actively harms on his quest to post bail for his brother.
The score ends with “The Pure and the Damned,” a ballad featuring Iggy Pop that’s unlike anything Lopatin’s produced before (save for an alternate take of the 2010 track “Returnal” with Anohni and Fennesz). In the film, the song plays during the closing credits, which roll not over a black screen but over the story’s ambiguous epilogue. Pop’s lyrics paint a strange heaven, a place where the skies are frozen blue and you can “pet the crocodiles.” “I ain’t going to get there, but it’s a nice dream,” he says between verses. “It’s a nice dream.” He’s accompanied by little more than a piano, a few distant beats, and some muted synth pads. Singing in an alien setting, he sounds like he’s struggling to get the notes out. His vibrato snags here and there, his tone eroded by time. A broken song closes a broken story. Like the best of OPN’s work—and the best soundtrack work in general—the track is heavy with affect without ever telling its listeners exactly how to feel. Good Time invites emotional confusion along multiple vectors. Lopatin’s score opens fissures that let its beauty and ambivalences burrow deep under your skin. | 2017-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp | August 14, 2017 | 7.7 | 171cc249-c2a6-47bb-9b2f-0914f26c37bc | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
Who remembers blog rock? Well, the long-time-coming debut from Ra Ra Riot is the sort of album that got people excited about the stuff in the first place. | Who remembers blog rock? Well, the long-time-coming debut from Ra Ra Riot is the sort of album that got people excited about the stuff in the first place. | Ra Ra Riot: The Rhumb Line | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12099-the-rhumb-line/ | The Rhumb Line | It's hard to believe that, up until now, Ra Ra Riot had only one EP to their name. The Syracuse-based chamber pop crew has garnered plenty of attention over its two-year existence, despite a limited recorded output. Such attention came, at first, in the form of breathless reviews of early festival appearances and accounts of their tireless slogs across the country, but most of the headlines since have focused on the inter-band tribulations: losing their frontman during their first year of existence and then suffering an even bigger setback when drummer/co-founder John Ryan Pike was found dead early last summer after a show in Providence, Rhode Island. But finally, with the release of their full-length debut, Ra Ra Riot are placing the emphasis firmly back on musical matters.
Nautically named and themed, The Rhumb Line reminds us why we cared about this band in the first place. Its mournful cellos and haunting violins are dissonantly (if pleasingly) matched with triumphant rhythms and exultant melodies, resulting in a record that is at once grand and intimate. With moments of pop savvy reminiscent of their pals in Vampire Weekend and the emotional subtlety of the Shins, Ra Ra Riot's songs inhabit a space that is both bubbly and bittersweet. To wit, swirling album opener "Ghost Under Rocks" blooms from a melancholic cello line into skittering, propulsive post-punk percussion. And their excellent cover of Kate Bush's "Suspended in Gaffa" finds the appropriate whimsy in the bounce of the melody, but makes the song safe for those who are uncomfortable with Bush's theatrical trilling.
But Ra Ra Riot, as their name implies, are not only capable of autumnal, Arcade Fire hymns. "St. Peter's Day Festival" and "Can You Tell" represent the breezier, brighter side of the band, taking perky melodies and swelling them with luscious string arrangements. Those strings prove to be the secret to Ra Ra Riot's success; "Too Too Too Fast", on which they lean on synths rather than the organic warmth of a cello or violin, is the flattest of the bunch.
Much of The Rhumb Line sounds like an elegy-- though Pike co-wrote roughly half of this album's songs before his passing. "Dying Is Fine", with its ee cummings-borrowed lyrics ("Death, oh baby/ You know that dying is fine/ But maybe/ I wouldn't like death, if death was good") is sadly apropos, but it eventually explodes into an anthemic, cheery chorus. "Winter '05", set before Pike's death, is more mournful: You can hear the band's loss in the elegant, weeping strings, the descriptions of lonely cemeteries, and Wesley Miles' vocals as he sings, "If you were here/ Winter wouldn't pass quite so slow." It's rare for a band to survive the death of a key member, but Ra Ra Riot are actually thriving, turning The Rhumb Line from a potential "what could've been" record into a rousing, poignant testament to Pike's life and his former bandmates' resilience. | 2008-08-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-08-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Barsuk | August 14, 2008 | 7.5 | 172080d8-d289-4ca6-a464-2b7b03c5fe4b | Pitchfork | null |
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The rap duo’s latest project fits neatly into the stately traditionalism currently dominating the independent scene. | The rap duo’s latest project fits neatly into the stately traditionalism currently dominating the independent scene. | Bronze Nazareth / Roc Marciano: Ekphrasis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bronze-nazareth-roc-marciano-ekphrasis/ | Ekphrasis | There is a long history of rappers and producers treating their work like fine art, investments in pop culture set to appreciate in value. This fascination goes beyond simply describing a Basquiat painting sitting on a wall or claiming the paper you wrote your verse on belongs in the Louvre. It manifests in different ways, like New Jersey rapper Mach-Hommy selling physical albums for thousands of dollars; or rappers like A$AP Rocky curating their own art exhibits; or artists removing their discographies from major streaming services to funnel access (and profits) directly to the supplier. Fine art and rap music have been intertwined since the genre’s inception, but the modern era has seen an influx of talent claiming the title of high art the genre is continuously denied.
Michigan rapper-producer Bronze Nazareth has long seen himself within this lineage. A Wu-Tang Clan affiliate and RZA mentee, Nazareth got his start producing for RZA and other Wu members before releasing his debut solo album The Great Migration in 2006. Over the last 15 years, Nazareth formed his own group called the Wisemen, contributed beats to Samsung commercials, and worked to refine the painterly details of his raps and production. He’s seen his share of independent and mainstream success, but his latest album Ekphrasis—produced mainly by similarly art-minded rapper-producer Roc Marciano—is Nazareth’s attempt to slot himself into a world newly interested in the traditionalist East Coast sound he’s favored for nearly two decades.
Ekphrasis isn’t the first time the duo have worked together. Marciano once rapped over a Nazareth beat on 2005’s Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture, where then-prominent indie rappers took a crack at unused songs from the Wu archives. In the years since, Marciano has been at the forefront of the neoclassical boom-bap revival of the 2010s and has taken to producing full-lengths for other rappers, from Queens rapper Flee Lord to Syracuse’s Stove God Cooks. Marciano producing for Nazareth is a full-circle moment, and though the production on Ekphrasis is split evenly—Marciano and Nazareth each handle six of the beats—the sound remains holistic and fluid. They both favor bare-bones loops; sometimes grounded by psychedelic guitars (“The Precipice”); sometimes by a stray synth (“Brass Jehova”) or a ghostly choir (“Survivor’s Vow”). It’s par for the course without any real innovations and occasionally so uniform it becomes indistinct, but Nazareth is clearly relishing the chance to flex for a new audience.
As a rapper, Nazareth’s flows are rigid, but his words are measured and descriptive, as if they were recited from stone tablets. There are plenty of references to artists like Marcelo Gandhi and sticky images of his own in his writing (“Chandeliers dancing on my ceiling, rich as Lionel,” from “Crazy Horse”), and Ekphrasis is content to stew in this brand of wordplay for its own sake. He’s so accurate with his gun that he can “write [his] name in cursive” and just wants some “space like Bezos” while planning out his next conquests. As fun as the word games are, Nazareth’s raps are most intriguing when their stakes match the vivid melodrama of the beats. Hearing a rap veteran talk about climbing even higher over the dramatic strings of “Kettle Black” and wax poetic about early days chopping loops and remembering his late brother on “Survivor’s Vow” are thrilling bits of personal memory that paint a fuller picture of the man behind the mic. It’s the kind of selective soul-bearing Marciano dots across his projects often, and Ekphrasis would have benefitted from a slightly more personal touch.
Most rappers in Nazareth’s position—a 20-year veteran co-signed by the founder of one of the most important rap groups of all time virtually from the jump—would use an album helmed by one of the modern underground’s premier rapper-producers to project their worth from the mountaintops. But outside of a handful of explicit mentions, Nazareth prefers to let his art speak for itself. For better or worse, Ekphrasis fits neatly into the stately traditionalism currently dominating the independent scene, another chance for a legend to further refine their art.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Fat Beats | October 14, 2021 | 6.8 | 17251915-9c9a-4b0e-9988-7fba82c7c2f1 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The debut album from the Pacific Northwest country songwriter showcases her distinct personality with vivid lyrics and lovely, thoughtful arrangements. | The debut album from the Pacific Northwest country songwriter showcases her distinct personality with vivid lyrics and lovely, thoughtful arrangements. | Margo Cilker: Pohorylle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/margo-cilker-pohorylle/ | Pohorylle | On the very first line of the first song of her first album, Oregon singer-songwriter Margo Cilker describes a frozen and treacherous patch of ice. “That river in the winter, it could fuck me up,” she sings on “That River,” drawing out that f-bomb until it sounds like a bruise. “Crack my ribs, bust my lips, it could do enough.” It’s a vivid introduction to this country artist, who pushes against conventions of the genre that don’t fit her perspective. Simply describing a river as malevolent contradicts depictions of those winding bodies of water as sites for baptism and rebirth or as vehicles for escape from the hardships of the world. Cilker sounds like she’s thinking hard about what it means to express herself in this particular musical form, and as a result, Pohorylle conveys a distinct and lively personality.
Cilker recorded these songs far from the country mainstream, which allows her to put her own stamp on the music. Instead of traipsing down to Nashville, she stayed put in the Pacific Northwest, seeking out as a mentor Sera Cahoone, a veteran of that region’s indie scene both as part of the autocorrect-challenging band Carissa’s Wierd and as a solo artist. With a small band of Portland indie lifers, including Jenny Conlee-Drizos (Decemberists) on keys and Rebecca Young (Jesse Sykes) on bass, Cilker and Cahoone create a palette that’s both austere and weirdly lush, thoughtful and easygoing, full of lovely, subtle flourishes like the start-stop rhythms of “Brother, Taxman, Preacher” and the sympathetic New Orleans horns that light up “Tehachapi” like a strand of Christmas lights at a backyard party.
Folding in enough places, names, and plainspoken observations to warrant comparisons to Lucinda Williams, Cilker is a sly presence on Pohorylle (whose title refers to both a backpack company and a photojournalist who died during the Spanish Civil War). She can break a syllable to break your heart, as she does on “Flood Plain,” stretching out a sad ultimatum during the chorus. But she can also bring home the reality of what the world withholds from women, whether it’s the benefit of the doubt or basic security. On “Broken Arm in Oregon,” she sings about a woman recovering from an assault, painting the scene with a directness that underscores her trauma: “Now every room she sleeps in, she’s gotta map out her escape plan,” Cilker explains matter-of-factly. But she grows more animated when she tells you what that experience took from her: “Imagine all those hours devoted to bigger things.”
There’s also a little humor in Cilker’s voice, and she delivers some lines with an arched eyebrow—like she knows some secret that lies just beyond the lyrics. “Will you think of me on your way back to Tehachapi?,” she asks a departing lover, turning a simple goodbye into a kiss-off. She delivers the question like a taunt because she’s happy where she is: struggling but struggling toward something. Yearning is the album’s animating theme, and what Cilker yearns for most, even more than somebody who’ll stick around, is a few more hours in the day, a few more chances for happiness. “It’s my life,” she sings on closer “Wine in the World.” “I just wish I had more time.” It’s a little unsettling to hear an artist so fixated with death on her debut, but on Pohorylle, such gravity feels earned, even natural.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Fluff and Gravy / Loose | November 4, 2021 | 7.7 | 17280e0c-e79f-4c6a-a501-60352cb42b99 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Matt Berninger and co. follow their 2005 grower Alligator-- an excellent album that we initially underrated-- with another patient record full of clever turns of phrase and dramatic intensity, here even more restrained and controlled. | Matt Berninger and co. follow their 2005 grower Alligator-- an excellent album that we initially underrated-- with another patient record full of clever turns of phrase and dramatic intensity, here even more restrained and controlled. | The National: Boxer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10242-boxer/ | Boxer | Among critics and fans, the National's third album Alligator has become synonymous with the term grower. Released to minor acclaim early in 2005, the album has since quietly and steadily built up a large, avid listenership. Matt Berninger's lyrics-- initially off-putting and seemingly obtuse in their non sequiturs and stray details-- proved unpretentiously poetic over time. His sober baritone and dogged repetition of phrases and passages made it sound like he was trying to figure the songs out in tandem with the listener. The band, meanwhile, played around the hooks instead of hard-selling them, so that in a sense, despite two previous albums and a killer EP, we all pretty much learned how to listen to the National on Alligator, eventually finding deeper shades of meanings in the words, sympathizing with Berninger's anxieties, laughing at his grim jokes, and tapping out the band's complex rhythms on desktops and steering wheels.
It's a testament to the good will engendered by Alligator that fans are now likewise calling the National's follow-up, Boxer, a grower. Despite the scrutiny greeting its release (brought on by the inevitable leaks), many listeners seem to be approaching these songs patiently, giving Boxer the space and time to reveal its dark, asymmetrical passageways. In a sense, the album demands it. The same elements that kept listeners returning to Alligator (Berninger's clever turns of phrase, the band's dramatic intensity) are present on Boxer, but are now more restrained and controlled.
From the first piano chords on opener "Fake Empire", the National create a late-night, empty-city-street mood, slightly menacing but mostly isolated. The 10 tracks that follow sustain and even amplify that feeling, revealing the band's range as they play close to the vest. Aaron and Bryce Dessner's twin guitars don't so much battle one another as create a unified layer that acts as a full backdrop for the other instruments, while touring member Padma Newsome's string and horn arrangements infuse songs like "Mistaken for Strangers" and the stand-out "Ada" (featuring Sufjan Stevens on piano) with subtle drama. But Boxer is a drummer's album: Bryan Devendorf becomes a main player here, never merely keeping time but actively pushing the songs around. With machine precision, his fluttering tom rhythms add a heartbeat to "Squalor Victoria" and give "Brainy" its stalker tension. In fact, the title Boxer could conceivably be a reference to the way his rhythms casually spar with Berninger's vocal melodies, jabbing and swinging at the singer's empathies and emotions.
Despite this implied violence, Boxer doesn't have the same aggressive self-reckoning and psychological damage assessment of Alligator. Here, Berninger sounds like he's able to look outward from that mental space instead of further inward. He observes the people around him-- friends, lovers, passersby-- alternately addressing them directly and imagining himself in their minds. Or, as he sings on "Green Gloves", "Get inside their clothes with my green gloves/ Watch their videos, in their chairs." He sounds more genuinely empathetic than previously (the accusatory you from the first two albums is thankfully absent), toying with ambiguity and backing away from outright satire. Certain themes continue to prevail: He maintains a fear of white-collar assimilation, addressing "Squalor Victoria" and "Racing Like a Pro" to upwardly mobile hipster-yuppies ("Underline everything/ I'm a professional/ In my beloved white shirt"), and clings to his American angst ("We're half awake in a fake empire"), as though recognizing the world's craziness makes him more sane.
Better even than these songs are the three mid-album tracks that toy with a love = war metaphor that miraculously avoids the obviousness that implies. On "Slow Show", over background guitar drones and a piano theme that echoes U2's "New Year's Day", he daydreams, "I want to hurry home to you/ Put on a slow dumb show for you/ Crack you up." But the capper is in the coda: "You know I dreamed about you for 29 years before I saw you." That hard-won contentment begins to crumble in "Apartment Story", in which the world invades the couple's shared space, and in "Start a War", where the possibility of loss looms threateningly. "Walk away now and you're gonna start a war," Berninger sings against the band's simple, uncomfortably insistent rhythm, his concrete fears giving the song the extra heft of the personal.
Obviously, it's pretty easy to read a lot into the National's music and especially into Berninger's lyrics, but that shouldn't imply that Boxer is a willfully difficult or overly academic work. Like those on their last album, these songs reveal themselves gradually but surely, building to the inevitable moment when they hit you in the gut. It's the rare album that gives back whatever you put into it. | 2007-05-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-05-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Beggars Banquet | May 21, 2007 | 8.6 | 172955c4-fe69-4b90-96fb-ea98629d1dc8 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Calling back to the insurgent sociopolitical jazz from another era of national unrest, these ecstatic instrumentals are urgent and purposeful. | Calling back to the insurgent sociopolitical jazz from another era of national unrest, these ecstatic instrumentals are urgent and purposeful. | Sunwatchers: Illegal Moves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sunwatchers-illegal-moves/ | Illegal Moves | Before digging into Illegal Moves, the third LP from explosive New York quartet Sunwatchers, you first have to deal with its cover. The image is so bracing, it will probably stay with you the entire time you listen to Illegal Moves. In Scott Lenhardt’s garish, Mad Magazine-style drawing, a demented Kool-Aid Man stands over the bloodied body of Uncle Sam. A crowd of characters—from Margaret Thatcher and Ronald McDonald to Sunwatchers themselves—looks on in horror or glee.
But what does a brash political cartoon have to do with Sunwatchers’ boisterous instrumental meld of jazz, psych, and prog? The connection is partly visceral: Like the cover, Sunwatchers songs are loud and bold, spilling their ecstatic sounds into a euphoric blare. Take the winding “Psychic Driving,” which warms up noisily before exploding into a delirious swirl of riffs and honks. Though not devoid of subtlety, Illegal Moves is mostly about that kind of collective energy and momentum. But Sunwatchers have always had strong political stances, too. Their albums usually include a manifesto—“Sunwatchers stand in solidarity with the dispossessed, impoverished, and embattled people of the world”—and their proceeds benefit prison abolition. As guitarist Jim McHugh once put it, “...to actually become the hammer that falls on capitalism is our goal.”
In that sense, Illegal Moves recalls a cultural heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, when raucous instrumental sounds, particularly the free jazz that Archie Shepp called “Fire Music,” were key to a sociopolitical groundswell that sought uprising through artistic engagement. (Sunwatchers took their name from a song by one of the most boundary-pushing artists of the time, Albert Ayler.) But Sunwatchers’ music isn’t exactly a treatise; it’s as rough and primal as it is aware. Still, a historical strain of rebellion radiates through Illegal Moves’ best moments, and they’re hell-bent on carrying it forward. That goal now feels more urgent and purposeful than ever before.
Sunwatchers’ compositional approach is pretty simple: Pick a melodic figure to repeat, then surround it with a fervent swirl of sound. On catchy jams like the triumphant “New Dad Blues” and the high-velocity “Beautiful Crystals,” the quartet picks out a hummable hook and blasts it with rising rhythm, sprinting guitars, and the triumphant urgency of Jeff Tobias’ horns and keyboards. In the process, basic songs become hectic sprints, with dizzying amounts of sound splattered along the way. During a cover of Alice Coltrane’s “Ptah, the El Daoud,” Sunwatchers honor the original’s thoughtfulness while giving it a delirious sensibility.
Honoring musical ancestors is a Sunwatchers specialty. Last year, in perhaps the most straightforward example of their political leanings yet, they teamed with Eugene Chadbourne for an album featuring covers of the politically charged trio Minutemen. But Illegal Moves is just as powerful a statement about the urgency of the times and the reactions we should all be having, because being entertained doesn’t have to mean being disengaged. That Sunwatchers make their calls to arms sound so fun doesn’t diminish that power—in fact, it just might be the most important part. | 2019-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Trouble in Mind | February 22, 2019 | 7.7 | 172a484c-bdc2-4193-9981-fadfa7dc8d66 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
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 legendary singer’s 1963 debut, whose career-making collaborations with Burt Bacharach and Hal David transformed pop music into something more symphonic, boundless, and idiosyncratic. | 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 legendary singer’s 1963 debut, whose career-making collaborations with Burt Bacharach and Hal David transformed pop music into something more symphonic, boundless, and idiosyncratic. | Dionne Warwick: Presenting Dionne Warwick | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dionne-warwick-presenting-dionne-warwick/ | Presenting Dionne Warwick | Warwick. It was a misprint on the label of her first single. In 1962, the 22-year-old Dionne Warrick was on her way to becoming one of the greatest singers in American history. But her record label was treating her as another cog in the machine, just as the industry treated most artists, especially those who were Black. Scepter Records promised they’d correct the error for her next single, but that one said Warwick, too. Perhaps it was because “Don’t Make Me Over,” the single’s B-side, had been a breakout hit. Listeners now recognized that second w, which meant there was money riding on it. Dionne Warwick she remained.
Burt Bacharach’s name was also misspelled on that first single. It said Bert, which was his father’s name. (His mother gave him the u because she felt, for reasons lost to time, that it would protect him from the teasing his dad had apparently endured as a child.) By that point, the songwriter and his lyricist partner, Hal David, had a track record as hitmakers, which gave Bacharach a certain sway among executive types. Also, he was white. The e never showed up on a label again.
At first blush, “Don’t Make Me Over” may seem typical of the girl-group sound that was all the rage in the early ’60s, with a swooning string section and a chorus of female background singers punctuating Warwick’s lines. But its musical underpinnings are idiosyncratic: The verses pivot on a chord that most songwriters wouldn’t go near, and the vocal phrases are five bars long rather than the standard four, with a time signature change thrown in for good measure. Warwick makes an extraordinarily difficult melody sound intuitive and relaxed, a trick that could only come through her combination of innate talent and rigorous discipline. The arrangement is ornate but not stuffy, revealing a delightful new instrumental voice with practically every bar. Bacharach’s contemporary Phil Spector liked to compare his productions to little symphonies, but this was a lot closer to the real deal. Spector draped simple pop compositions in lushly symphonic instrumentation; Bacharach’s songs are ingenious in their bones, whether performed by an orchestra or a soloist.
Coincidentally, “Don’t Make Me Over” arrived in stores a few months before the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique helped to kickstart feminism’s second wave. David’s lyrics, written at a time when pop songs were far more likely to uphold gender hierarchies than upend them, were a plea from a woman to a man to stop trying to control her. In the bridge, it becomes more like a demand: “Accept me for what I am!/Accept me for the things that I do!” The rhythm and harmony simplify, and Warwick starts to really belt, moving from her restrained early delivery into one more clearly inflected with her lifelong background as a gospel singer. It was the world’s introduction to her one-of-a-kind voice, with a dynamic range encompassing utmost delicacy on one end and walloping force on the other, her deep sensitivity to a song’s emotional contour matched by her virtuosic technical control. The song is a lesson in music theory and performance as well as a shot straight to the heart. When the intricacy of the verses gives way to the feeling of the bridge, it’s like exiting a series of switchbacks and taking in the view from the mountaintop.
Presenting Dionne Warwick, her first album, released the following year, is an imperfect lens through which to examine her artistry. But then so is her second album, and her third, and any other album after that. No one album tells the story in full, in part because Warwick’s career has been so long and fruitful—56 singles in the Billboard Hot 100 across three decades, with dozens more on the R&B and adult contemporary charts—and in part because she rose to fame just before the album took its place as pop’s dominant format in the commercial market and the popular imagination.
Like most pop and R&B labels operating at the time, Scepter was primarily concerned with hit singles. The album was an ancillary product, a different format for selling songs that had already proven themselves as hits. 1963 was the twilight of the Brill Building era, a sort of nether zone in pop history, bookended roughly on one side by the drafting of Elvis Presley into the U.S. Army in 1958 and on the other by the arrival of the Beatles in America in 1964. As Ken Emerson puts it in Always Magic in the Air, his indispensable history of the era, it was a time when the industry “routinized the creation and production of rock’n’roll,” with the help of professional songwriters like Bacharach and David, many of whom had offices in the midtown Manhattan building that gives the period its name.
Rock’s first boom, in the mid-’50s, had dramatically expanded the market for recorded music, but it hadn’t been planned from the top down, having arisen from upstart labels like Memphis’ Sun Records rather than corporate offices in New York or Los Angeles. Its early stars were unpredictable and sometimes unruly personalities. By the decade’s end, Elvis was serving in Germany, and other key performers were either dead (Buddy Holly) or embroiled in controversy (Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis). The industry, in order to control the money pouring in from the newfound teen market, established a model in which performers were relatively interchangeable, bound by contracts that enforced the label’s authority over their output. One particularly egregious case involved the pioneering Black vocal group the Drifters, whose members were swapped in and out at will by a manager who owned the rights to the group’s name, and who paid them in an arrangement that the Brill Building songwriter Mike Stoller, in There’s Always Magic in the Air, likened to slave labor.
Warwick and Bacharach were odd fits for the rock’n’roll assembly line. Both were conservatory-trained: she a young gospel devotee who could sing opera, jazz, or any other style if she wanted; he a 30-something aesthete and tinkerer who spent his adolescence sneaking into Manhattan bebop clubs and once wrote that he might enjoy Bill Haley and His Comets more if they used a few major-seventh chords. The music they made together with David sounds only occasionally like R&B, and almost never like rock. Suffused with jazz and classical harmony, set to rhythms influenced by the Brazilian music that Bacharach encountered in his years as a touring conductor, and with Warwick’s vocals emphasizing clarity and precision as much as fervor and abandon, it’s not the first thing a DJ might reach for to set the sock hop on fire. It is adult music, barely masquerading as kid stuff. These three were not the only people making personal and unconventional music within the strictures of the Brill Building model, which encouraged frivolity and homogeneity, but theirs went the furthest out from the expected forms.
The brass at Scepter apparently had their doubts that the singles the trio created had any potential as hits, and it’s hard to blame them for that. “This Empty Place,” Presenting Dionne Warwick’s opener and Warwick’s second single, spends its verses flipping between minor and major versions of the same chord, a strange move in rock’n’roll or any other genre. But its complexity, like that of “Don’t Make Me Over,” is never ostentatious. Unusual harmonies and meters are a means to an end: heightening the feeling in a particular lyric, giving a melody more space to breathe, bringing the phrasing of a vocal line more closely to the natural patterns of speech. The music, despite its difficulty to perform, is unfailingly inviting and emotionally present. Warwick and her collaborators used their extraordinary skills to better reach listeners, not to talk past them or show off.
As the chords ascend through the chorus of “This Empty Place,” so does the searing heat of Warwick’s vocal, delivering a David lyric about the aftermath of a breakup. Then, suddenly, the backing singers drop out, the rhythm section cools off, and she’s all alone to sing the kicker: “Now there’s not a star left in the sky/And if you don’t come back to me I’ll die,” with a flippant melodic curlicue on the last word. Another singer might read that couplet as if it were a literal matter of life and death. From Warwick, it comes across more like a taunt. Her breakneck shift between emotional registers provides a thrill that no amount of tinkering with harmonies could approach on its own.
Given the realities of the era’s music industry, it is understandable that Warwick approached her early dealings with Scepter and Bacharach-David with some caution. In her telling, “Don’t Make Me Over” is a direct result of that tension. Bacharach, after encountering Warwick as a background singer on a session for the Drifters, first hired her to provide vocals on the demo recordings he made to shop his songs around to labels. Impressed by her musical ability and easy charisma, he and David soon encouraged her to pursue a solo career, with the two of them writing and producing. She was still a conservatory student, commuting to New York from her Connecticut campus for session work. In order to convince her mother that the shot at stardom wouldn’t interfere with her studies, she told the songwriters that she could only record on weekends.
Warwick claims that Bacharach and David had promised her “Make It Easy on Yourself,” a song that she particularly loved and had recorded as a demo for her first single. She was on her way to a session with the pair when she heard another singer’s rendition of “Make It Easy on Yourself” on the radio. When she arrived, she says, she admonished them not to go behind her back, or tamper with her vision of herself as an artist. “I felt Burt and Hal had given my songs away and they felt they hadn’t and that maybe I was being a bit unreasonable,” she said in 1997. “Well, one word led to another… and I finally said, ‘Don’t make me over, man!’ and I walked out.”
In Bacharach’s version, he and David came up with “Don’t Make Me Over” without that bit of verbal inspiration from Warwick. There was never any promise about “Make It Easy on Yourself,” he claims in his 2013 memoir, and the subsequent shouting match never happened. His insistence on writing Warwick out of the song’s creation, given its content and the historical context, is ironic.
Also ironic: On Presenting Dionne Warwick’s tracklist, alongside “Don’t Make Me Over,” a song with a message of women’s strength and agency rarely heard in pop music at the time, sits “Wishin’ and Hopin’” a sweet little ditty about how women can only find real love through subservience to their men. Musically, it is among the album’s most distinctive tracks, with a melody like a multicolored bouncy ball. But the words: “Show him that you care just for him/Do the things he likes to do/Wear your hair just for him,” and so on.
It’s possible that the lyric of “Wishin’ and Hopin’” had less to do with David’s latent misogyny (and, for that matter, “Don’t Make Me Over” with his feminist streak) than with the mechanics of the Brill Building model, in which songs were not expected to be expressions of deeply held individual sentiment so much as practical attempts to resonate with the attitudes and desires of the listening public. Women’s independence was in the air in 1963, and so was the reaction against it. David wrote songs about both. “Wishin’ and Hopin’” didn’t gain any chart foothold when it was released as the B-side to “This Empty Place,” but a nearly identical cover version by Dusty Springfield hit the Top 10 when it came out a year later. (Incidentally, the detachment from the personal perspective—along with the fact that the Brill Building was full of men writing for women performers and vice versa—also meant that their lyrics were broadly interpretable. There are many versions of Bacharach-David songs that have been gender-flipped from their original recordings, including a charming rendition of “Wishin’” by British Invasion also-rans the Merseybeats, in which frontman Billy Kinsley advises his fellow guys to wear their hair in just the way their girls like.)
Outside of the singles, much of the material on Presenting consists of Bacharach-David songs that Warwick had previously cut as demo recordings for other artists. Why spend time and money on making new album tracks when they could just repurpose these recordings they already had sitting around, tack on the hits, and call it a day? But the ghostly minimalism of the demos doesn’t take much away from Presenting as a listening experience. Often, it enhances it, providing contrast to the grandeur of the singles and reflecting the often lovelorn mood of David’s lyrics. Bacharach was meticulous even with these preliminary takes, a habit he picked up in hopes of conveying ideas about instrumentation to a producer when he was greener in the industry and did not yet have license to oversee the recording sessions for his songs. Though the arrangements lack the elaborate orchestration of his final versions, they make up for it in small-scale ingenuity. A backing singer might deliver a wordless countermelody that Bacharach intended ultimately for a string section. Because the studio where he made demos had a good-sounding reverb unit, he slathered everything in lonely, atmospheric echo.
In most cases, Warwick’s performances are superior to those of the artists for whom she was ostensibly providing a throwaway guide vocal. Take “Make It Easy on Yourself,” the song whose release ignited the argument that led to “Don’t Make Me Over.” With the nuanced view of relationships that characterizes David’s best work, its narrator addresses a lover who has begun to stray, imploring them to make a clean break so that they can at least enjoy their own life while the narrator deals with the heartbreak. The first publicly released version, the one that Warwick heard on the radio that day, was performed by Jerry Butler, whose reading is expressive bordering on maudlin, flattening the layered sentiment of the words until self-pity is the only legible feeling. Warwick’s original demo, which appears near the end of Presenting, holds back from emoting, drawing out a certain matter-of-factness in the melody and lyric, and preserving the protagonist’s dignity in the process.
Three newly recorded songs by writers other than Bacharach-David round out the tracklist. The most powerful of these, by far, is Warwick’s rendition of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” There’s no record I can find of whose decision it was to include it on the album, or of Warwick’s feelings about having recorded it. I imagine they are complicated. Taken from the soundtrack to a Disney film about the Reconstruction-era South so prejudiced and ahistorical it was the target of picketing even upon its release in 1946, and based on a 19th-century minstrel song whose lyrics mocked the freedom of formerly enslaved Black people, its very existence as a piece of music is inextricable from abject racism. And yet Warwick’s delivery is joyful, electrifying, proud, alternating stylish insouciance with unbridled exuberance. Whether or not she intended it as such, it takes on the character of sly rebellion, of using the oppressor’s own clumsy weapons against him. When she sings “Plenty of sunshine coming my way,” you can practically hear the smile on her face. It sounds like protest music.
When “This Empty Place” was issued as a single in Europe, it featured an image of a white woman on the cover. “Wishin’ and Hopin’” is one of multiple songs first recorded by Warwick and later released in a near-identical cover version by a white artist that charted higher than her original. On her first tour, which took her through the American South, she faced racial harassment the likes of which she had never imagined as a kid in New Jersey, growing up on a block she likes to compare to the United Nations for all its commingled ethnicities. The backing band was used to playing straight R&B, and had difficulty performing the complicated changes in Warwick’s music. Southern Black audiences didn’t always like it at first either. She took to opening her sets with Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say,” which helped to win them over. Sometimes, she changed one of Charles’ lyrics to “Tell your mama, tell your pa/We’re gonna integrate Arkansas.” Audiences liked that, but the cops didn’t.
Warwick was not the first Black artist whose music was played on both Black and white radio stations, but she found a level of success among pop audiences that was still rare in the ’60s. As her star grew, she began appearing on television programs like Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, which, she writes in her memoir, “let everybody across America know that I was African American.” “Ironically,” she continues, “my crossover success in pop prompted something that came as a big surprise: the decline of airplay for my records on African American radio. In fact, when I asked one of New York’s premier jocks, Rocky G…why he was not playing my records on his show, he told me I was ‘too white.’” The racial dynamics at play in that sentiment are almost too complicated to untangle, especially considering that the radical intricacy of Warwick’s music—the element that most obviously set it apart from the more straightforward R&B records Rocky G would have been playing—was drawn in large part from Bacharach’s love of Black music like bebop.
For nearly a decade after Presenting, Warwick was Bacharach and David’s premiere artist, to whom they gave their most exciting material; and they were her exclusive producers and primary writers. There was still tension between them: In the early 1970s, when Bacharach and David broke up their professional partnership and ceased working with Warwick, she sued them for breach of contract, launching a legal battle that itself lasted for nearly a decade. In the various accounts of their history, there are stories of Bacharach asking Warwick to record dozens of takes, and then deciding that the second one had been perfect all along; or of him pushing her to record a song she didn’t like (the spectacular “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?”), and her crying “all the way to the bank” when it became a hit. In Warwick’s memoir, she refers to David as “the levelheaded one of the trio,” without elaborating on what about Bacharach’s or her own behavior would earn the lyricist that title by comparison.
On the whole, it seems that they loved each other. Bacharach credits Warwick with showing him, through her boundless vocal ability, how much more was possible in songwriting than he’d understood before he met her: “She can go that high, and she can sing that low. She is that flexible. She can sing that strong and that loud, and be delicate and soft too…The more I was exposed to that musically, the more chances, the more risks, I could take.” Warwick writes effusively in her memoir about the beauty and challenge of Bacharach’s compositions, and about Bacharach the man. It’s easy to see why all three collaborators bonded, and why they clashed. David would spend hours agonizing over the placement of a single syllable, Bacharach would wake in the middle of the night in a panic about the mic placement at that day’s session, Warwick would show up at concerts by artists she admired (Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra), sit in the back, and take notes on their performances. All three were nearly fanatical in their pursuit of excellence, and all three had their own ideas about how it might be achieved.
Warwick worked with other writers, and Bacharach-David with other performers, but their collaboration brought out the best in all of them. Bacharach and David supplied Warwick with material worthy of her ability as a singer, and Warwick gave that material humor, style, and human stakes through her performances, elevating it beyond pure elegance of craft into a deeper and more mysterious realm. They may have seen each other as equals, but the industry didn’t, at least not at the time of Presenting: Bacharach got to keep his name, and Warwick got stuck with the w. Inevitably, the friction of these racial, gender, and professional hierarchies left its imprint on the album. It’s there in the spectral quality of those demo recordings, in the tracklist’s inclusion of songs whose lyrics seem to actively belittle Warwick as a woman and a Black person, and maybe even in the way she delivers the bridge of “Don’t Make Me Over,” directing some of her electric defiance at the two men who wrote it for her.
Fortunately for us, Warwick was too big a talent and a personality for the pop music machine to repress. In a recent documentary on Warwick, Bacharach laughs as he recalls a time when, after he’d badgered her to stop smoking cigarettes in the studio, she showed up to a session in a T-shirt with the words “Don’t tell me to stop smoking” printed on it. No one could make her over. | 2023-07-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Scepter | July 23, 2023 | 8.5 | 172bdbf3-5007-49d3-a771-08f7064c55b0 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
For their latest “mixtape” release, Baltimore band Horse Lords honor composer Julius Eastman, covering his early 1970s disco-meets-minimalist piece “Stay On It.” The rapper Abdu Ali contributes. | For their latest “mixtape” release, Baltimore band Horse Lords honor composer Julius Eastman, covering his early 1970s disco-meets-minimalist piece “Stay On It.” The rapper Abdu Ali contributes. | Horse Lords: Mixtape IV | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23227-mixtape-iv/ | Mixtape IV | As the work of composer Julius Eastman continues to gain its belated and rightful due, musicians who are inspired by his example struggle with the fact that he didn’t leave behind much written material. Jazz-informed improvisation, minimalist pulses, disco, and post-Cagean “chance” music could swirl about during an Eastman-led performance. But the composer often transmitted ideas to his collaborators orally, while providing only a few notated phrases on paper.
Regarding “Stay On It”—an early 1970s composition famous for its embrace of pop harmony—onetime Eastman saxophonist Jon Gibson told the musicologist Matthew Mendez, “that piece does not exist without Julius.” In his lifetime, the composer would play piano or vibraphone during the piece, and offer stray vocalizations; he also presented a related poem in the concert’s program notes. Still, it has been seen as too fine a piece not to play, even without him. (A 2005 archival release devoted to Eastman’s music had to rely on a 1973 performance of “Stay on It” that didn’t include the composer’s participation.)
Now Baltimore’s Horse Lords have taken up the challenge of recreating the disco-meets-minimalist “Stay on It” on the first side of their latest “mixtape.” They invite local emcee Abdu Ali to recite Eastman’s poem; he succeeds at giving the text a contemporary, rap-influenced cadence, just before the full group launches into the opening riff.
By allowing a thumping percussive groove to take greater prominence, compared with the 1973 take, this 20-minute arrangement successfully calls to mind Eastman’s appreciation for dance music. Though because Horse Lords elect to do without a consistent vocalization of the title (as heard on the ’73 recording), they lose out on some of the piece’s seductive pop sheen. For the first few minutes, the beat is so insistent that this vision of “Stay on It” seems born from a stuck vinyl groove. Though over time, as guitarist and clavinet player Owen Gardner’s lines snake around drummer Sam Haberman’s playing, there’s an occasional rhythmic ambiguity that channels the fluid Eastman aesthetic.
Gradually, members of the ensemble venture short solos over the continued vamp. In the fourth minute, a keyboard line steps out in front—insisting on a single note for a bit, before withdrawing back into the aggregate sound. A more audacious solo comes in minute eight, when Andrew Bernstein contributes arcing lines of saxophone squall. (The densest parts of this performance can make “Stay on It” sound like a precursor to New York’s No Wave era.) The take closes poetically, as softly strummed guitar and electronics move in and out of sync. The harmony is familiar, but the expression has changed—and it makes for a fitting realization of some of Eastman’s compositional concerns.
Mixtape IV’s second half is devoted to a side-length studio collage, “Remember the Future.” Incorporated within are live performance clips, shards of unfamiliar tunes, as well as spoken parts contributed by fans (who called in to a hotline that the band advertised on Twitter). It seems minor by design—and listeners who are new to Horse Lords might consider proceeding directly to the more traditionally impressive jams on 2016’s excellent Interventions. But since a willingness to play around is part of this group’s regular practice, even their intentional ephemera can carry unexpected jolts of excitement. | 2017-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Northern Spy | May 8, 2017 | 7 | 172c5f26-f393-4c07-ba01-5671a743d7c5 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Carefully parsing the nuances of shoegaze, dream pop, and alt rock, the Chicago quintet’s second album amounts to a rigorous study of 1990s guitar sounds. | Carefully parsing the nuances of shoegaze, dream pop, and alt rock, the Chicago quintet’s second album amounts to a rigorous study of 1990s guitar sounds. | Smut: *How the Light Felt * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/smut-how-the-light-felt/ | How the Light Felt | Smut releases are so few and far between that each new entry in the Chicago quintet’s discography feels like an informal re-introduction. If you were familiar with them in their embryonic stage in their native Cincinnati, you might associate Smut with the dense sludginess of their early demos: gothic garage rock interred under a thick layer of fast-setting distortion, à la Perfect Pussy. Arriving three years later, their proper debut, End of Sam-soon, preserved the band’s gravelly timbre but molded it into explosive choruses and searing riffs: a brief checkpoint in their oeuvre that hinted at broader ambitions. After another three years, which included a move to Chicago, Smut debuted on Bayonet Records in 2020 with a bite-sized EP that once again captured the band in a liminal stage, peeling off exterior fuzz to make room for trip-hop breaks and 4AD-esque gothic intrigue. The band’s sophomore album, How the Light Felt, is the first Smut release to end with a period rather than a comma. Building around Power Fantasy’s college-rock scaffolding, the LP is a rigorous, decade-spanning study of the band’s favorite 1990s guitar tones—derivative, but cleverly arranged to avoid rote nostalgia.
The rough-and-ready edge of Smut’s earlier work makes it tempting to draw comparisons to jangle-pop touchstones of the earlier half of the decade—bands like Blake Babies, Teenage Fanclub, or the Ocean Blue—but on How the Light Felt, they eagerly borrow from the sleek, commercially viable wave of shimmery guitar pop that flourished soon after Velocity Girl and Radiohead shared space on the Clueless soundtrack. The difference is subtle, but a song like “Person of Interest,” for instance, takes more aesthetic cues from the Sundays’ third and final album, Static & Silence, than their better-known debut. Though the song juxtaposes twee romance with the grisly details of a murder investigation, its polish allows subtle quirks to surface. A slightly sour keyboard arpeggio imbues folksy acoustic chords with an air of mystery as Bell Cenower’s basslines wriggle anxiously.
The band enlisted Stephen Street, best known for producing for the Cranberries and Blur, to mix “Let Me Hate,” a tribute to frontwoman Tay Roebuck’s late sister that channels nebulous chord changes reminiscent of Slowdive’s “Alison” into the anthemic structure of Street’s best work. Opening with airy arpeggios and the fleeting recollection of a dream, the song builds from uncertainty to an assertive coda in which Roebuck repeats the titular phrase, letting syllables lilt and contort like Dolores O'Riordan before her. Though one of the more musically straightforward tracks on How the Light Felt, it’s perfectly sequenced for emotional impact.
The band sounds the most assured, however, when it fully embraces the sleek studio panache of Y2K alt-rock. How the Light Felt’s first and best track, “Soft Engine,” opens with a barrage of tremolo effects that is oddly reminiscent of Jakalope’s Degrassi: The Next Generation theme song, riding kitschy breakbeats, carefully deployed feedback squalls, and woozy dream-pop chord changes. The other bookend, “Unbroken Thought,” uses a cozy bit of Sixpence None the Richer-esque folk as a test subject on which to experiment with trip-hop scratching and intense EQ filters.
Smut have developed two distinct and satisfying sounds in tandem: a well-oiled spin on late-’80s guitar pop and a more laid-back riff on the adult-contemporary trends of their childhoods. Though they have the chops to convincingly recreate classic sounds without making them seem like cheap imitations, a lot of the appeal on How the Light Felt lies in its unabashed fan service. Initial listens can feel like leafing through an aural I Spy book, searching for the winking trope or nod that confirms your own historical savvy. It’s a fun concept, albeit one that occasionally works too well for its own good: Tunes like the title track may remind you so much of Mazzy Star that you’re unconsciously reaching for So Tonight That I Might See before Smut’s song fades out.
On the record’s penultimate track, “Morningstar,” Smut land on a combination of ideas that elicit a hazy sense of nostalgia, but one that feels less explicit than the retromania that pervades the rest of the band’s work. Blending industrial drum fills, knotty guitar riffs, and blurred synths, the song stands out for good reason: It eludes comparison to anyone else. Though it warps and crackles like a degraded VHS tape, the track points to a possible future for Smut that integrates their vintage rock preferences into a more electronic context. For now, How the Light Felt takes a successful swing at shoegaze-y alt-rock revivalism. The hooks hit hard, the mix is immersive, and, most importantly, their arsenal of late-20th-century references is too deep to run dry just yet. | 2022-11-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Bayonet | November 15, 2022 | 7.1 | 172db419-df0d-4a46-8eda-3f1c93a0a49a | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
The Feelies' first LP in 20 years finds them with nothing to prove as they mine the pastoral power-pop of their post-Crazy Rhythms career. | The Feelies' first LP in 20 years finds them with nothing to prove as they mine the pastoral power-pop of their post-Crazy Rhythms career. | The Feelies: Here Before | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15313-here-before/ | Here Before | Whenever a groundbreaking post-punk band reforms to release new material, there's the inevitable tendency to compare it to their earliest, trailblazing efforts. In the best-case scenario-- say, Mission of Burma or Wire-- we may marvel that artists in their fifties muster the same intensity as their twentysomething selves. But for the recently reunited Feelies, such considerations don't apply. The Feelies' 1980 debut, Crazy Rhythms, is undoubtedly their most revered record, but it's also the outlier in their discography, a singular and still exhilarating blur of minimalist guitar jabbing and percussive propulsion that the band would never try to recapture again. When Crazy Rhythms' follow-up, The Good Earth, appeared six long years later, the Feelies were a very different band both in terms of personnel and purpose. By then, they'd swapped out their rhythm section and tempered their debut's hypno-rock clatter into a more relaxed, jangly groove that they would ride out for two more albums before disbanding in 1991.
It's this second-wave iteration of the Feelies that resurfaced in 2008. And though the band acknowledged Crazy Rhythms' 30th anniversary by reissuing the album and performing it in its entirety at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival, the experience has had little rub-off effect on Here Before. Rather than try to reconnect with their formative inspirations, the Feelies sound remarkably comfortable in the middle-aged skin on Here Before, which exudes the casual grace of old friends who greatly enjoy playing together and have long stopped caring about proving themselves to anyone. Here, the Feelies simply dig up The Good Earth's pastoral, post-Velvets power-pop-- a sound that ruled college radio airwaves in the mid-80s but which boasts few notable contemporary adherents-- and blissfully strum away as if they were performing in hammocks. And there's good reason to believe that, if we were to pay them a visit in another 20 years, they'd still be doing the exact same thing.
Despite the myriad, knowing references to "start[ing] again" and "do[ing] it some more," there's little sense of a band striving to make the most of a new opportunity to be heard, or trying to prove their relevance to a younger generation. The nerviest track here, "Time Is Right", seems to mock this very idea, with Glenn Mercer sardonically declaring, "Gotta do something/ Get in with the crowd." But even if the Feelies aren't exactly challenging themselves on Here Before, they still prove themselves masters of arrangement, strategically positioning key elements to give these seemingly simple songs a greater dynamic impact. Examples include the glorious guitar solo that pushes the accelerator on "Should Be Gone", the stop/start snare-drum triggers on "Later On", or the strange, swirling static in "When You Know" that marks a rare moment of discord in these otherwise serene surroundings. Perhaps the most sublime turn on the entire album comes deep into the deceptively downcast title track, which blossoms suddenly into a swooning chorus at the 2:40 mark and venerates the moment by featuring it only once. And in that instance you realize why the Feelies are still necessary in totally wired 2011: to reassert the virtue of patience. | 2011-04-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-04-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Bar/None | April 12, 2011 | 7.5 | 1731c27a-d04e-469e-ba98-bfbc2b244e96 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Aarhus punks Yung take the austere vibe of their big-brother bands like Iceage and shoot it through with some old-fashioned American-fuck-up energy, a la Paul Westerberg and Jay Reatard. | Aarhus punks Yung take the austere vibe of their big-brother bands like Iceage and shoot it through with some old-fashioned American-fuck-up energy, a la Paul Westerberg and Jay Reatard. | Yung: A Youthful Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21884-a-youthful-dream/ | A Youthful Dream | At the turn of the decade, the youthful dream of Copenhagen’s punk scene probably scared the shit out of most adults. Iceage, Lust For Youth, VÅR and Lower were barely out of their teens and gaining international attention with abrasive, often violent music and bloody shows that were a throwback to a time before punk broke (right down to the unfortunate taste in iconography). Five years later, those bands have become elder statesmen, playing festivals, starting experimental side projects and shifting towards more refined sounds. Hailing from Denmark’s “second city” of Aarhus, the appropriately named Yung aspires to lead the new brigade. However, their youthful dream is more sonically and emotionally conventional: they want to love and to be loved.
*A Youthful Dream is literal post-punk for Mikkel Holm Silkjær. He spent his teen years in hardcore bands with names like Urban Achievers, in part to piss off his father, who also happened to be a musician. In the short time since their 2015 Alter and These Thoughts are Like Mandatory Chores EPs, Yung have added pianos and horns and harmonies, the sort of thing most of their peers needed two albums to start embracing: the droning, metronomic “A Black Incident” could pass for a Lost in the Dream *cover, while Yung tap into shuffling Britpop for “Morning View.” These moments add dimension and depth to the frigid, metallic production, which makes Yung often sound like they’re trying to generate warmth in a meat locker.
At least sonically, Yung has embraced beer-fueled, sanctified American fuck-ups like Paul Westerberg and Jay Reatard. Silkjær’s anti-authoritative streak isn’t quite as nihilistic and self-centered, however. Mostly, *A Youthful Dream *rails against the way “they” prevent “you” from getting what you need to get by. Silkjær longs to help a depressed friend on early highlight “Uncombed Hair,” but sees this situation as indicative of societal ills; he offers the kids a “stiff upper lip” pep talk on “A Black Incident” (“don’t cry out for help, they’ll say you’re weak”), worries they will get stuck in arrested development (“The Child”) with pharmaceutical control the only hope (“Pills”). So, maybe America and Denmark aren't all that different.
Yung’s passion is never in question throughout A Youthful Dream; but at times, it’s all they’ve got. When Silkjær traces his vocals over the lead guitars, it’s enough to make “Uncombed Hair” and “Pills” stick. Otherwise, *A Youthful Dream *can only push through its weaker melodies and reverb through self-will. Taken together, Yung’s expanse and Silkjær’s yearning, belting vocals can actually evoke the early version of U2 that was considered post-punk. There *is *a messianic streak in Silkjær’s quest to save the youth from themselves and his distrust of whatever constitutes selling out (“Commercial”). Perhaps he’s only beginning to realize it: “I’m not quite sure if I am blessed,” he belts on “Mortal Sin”, and the important part is that he’s not *quite *sure. (Maybe he's somewhat sure.) And you can sense his increased willingness to dream big when he later sees himself as part of, “Two precious souls leaning against the idea of being in love”. For an anti-romantic punk band, it might as well be “two hearts beat as one!!!” | 2016-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | June 18, 2016 | 6.5 | 17346ac7-6be2-4510-b30b-e5f62a2c4ca6 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On her sophomore album, the singer examines good and evil through a series of spare, cryptic parables. | On her sophomore album, the singer examines good and evil through a series of spare, cryptic parables. | Sevdaliza: Shabrang | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sevdaliza-shabrang/ | Shabrang | Sevdaliza approaches her sophomore album Shabrang like a lounge singer fresh off a marathon reading of Paradise Lost, the complexities of a fallen state of grace heavy on her mind. The record’s title comes from a mythical Persian horse, Shabrang Behzād, the “night-colored purebred” of the hero Siyâvash, and its project is in part a reflex to the impossibility of translation. To demonstrate the depth of meaning contained in the Farsi phrase “shabrang,” Sevdaliza names as many shades of night that she can. What results is a work of emotional maximalism, an album that grades exclusively from dark to darker through parable-like songs populated with devils and tangerine-selling women, whose opening word “evil” proves to be not only a condemnation but the concept at its heart.
As with her 2018 debut Ison and her most recent EP The Calling, Sevdaliza co-produced Shabrang with Netherlands-based Mucky and enlisted Mihai Puscoiu to construct the album’s spine of film noir strings. The album maintains the spare economy of its predecessors. Apart from the strings (a dulcimer melody on opener “Joanna” starts the album off on an epic course), each track consists mostly of music box piano riffs, gothic synths, and the rogue leaden beat. Trip-hop, the label used to classify her music in the past, feels less than helpful now. The straightforward Farsi ballad “Gole Bi Goldoon,” apocalyptic club track “Darkest Hour,” and cyborgian grunge “Rhode,” all linked by Sevdaliza’s dextrous voice, feel essential over the course of the record. Her carnivorous approach bears resemblance to that of another album based around the concept of darkness: Grimes’ Miss Anthropocene, whose songs were held together less by genre than the strength of a singular creative vision.
Shabrang’s fifteen tracks are preoccupied with emotional extremes and the prospect of self-understanding gained through testing those extremes, territory not new to Sevdaliza’s writing. The possibilities and limitations of self-construction loosely framed Ison. On “Human,” she dissected herself over little more than a skittish beat, turning her humanity into a list of essential parts: skin, bones, veins, sweat, scars, and soul. On Shabrang, Sevdaliza aims to identify exactly where she ends and everything else begins; to do so, she refracts herself through pain like white light through quartz, separating out knots of dependency and power. Despite its runtime of over an hour, the album feels lithe in a way Ison does not.
Seductive evil requires an opposite state like purity or goodness, a definite binary suggested in the pleading “Joanna.” But Sevdaliza quickly proves herself more interested in the inseparability of evil from good. On the title track, she allows herself the melodrama of divinity to speak to someone who’s harmed her: “I refer to you as my holy suffering.” Throughout the album, love and hate are one, with pain showing itself to be preordained and innocence shading quickly into culpability. Sevdaliza’s incisive use of Auto-Tune helps her straddle those emotional and moral divides. On “Habibi” (the Arabic word for “my love”), she achieves a startling bleakness by warping the question “is there anyone out there to get me out of my head?”; this skillful manipulation transforms a request into a moment of surrender and makes the song’s sampled crack of thunder seem understated.
Even the album’s lightest moments position themselves as opportunities for existential meditation. “All Rivers At Once” is a song like a slow walk, underpinned by reverbed acoustic guitar. A mundane image of romance beside a river expands into an address to “children of the light” and the desperate refrain “I don’t want to feel pain” over rolling drums and probing synths. At its best, Sevdaliza’s all-in commitment to philosophical musing lends a parable-like quality to her writing, with essential questions of being and form couched in spare images. Other tracks, like “Wallflower,” with its spoken word chorus about whispered melodies and the promise that “all is meant to be,” don’t quite escape the feeling of smoked-out corniness.
The racing “Eden” folds Sevdaliza’s interest in subjugation as it relates to self-formation into one phrase. “I want to be your secret, or at least its keeper,” she sings, then repeats herself, replacing the central word pairing each time. Secret and keeper become pearl and shell, army and trojan horse, well and source, muse and mistress, bible and witness. Selfhood, the song implies, is a process based at its core on capitulation, so long as it means getting closer to your object of desire. The song also holds one of the album’s most memorable hooks. “If I can’t be the song/At least have mercy/Let me hear her.” Self-referential, it refocuses Shabrang’s mission. The album is not solely about darkness, but also what we’re willing to give up trying to escape it.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Twisted Elegance | August 28, 2020 | 7.8 | 1738bf70-4e5b-4e6c-838a-32a0de293ae4 | Colin Lodewick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-lodewick/ | |
Kurt Wagner's shapeshifting group offers its 10th album, this one featuring the contributions and influence of Nashville-based laptop group Hands Off Cuba. | Kurt Wagner's shapeshifting group offers its 10th album, this one featuring the contributions and influence of Nashville-based laptop group Hands Off Cuba. | Lambchop: Damaged | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9354-damaged/ | Damaged | Lambchop seem to roll around the Middle Tennessee countryside like a giant blob, absorbing every musician in their path. Their line-up regularly tops double digits, and on 10th album Damaged, the total comes to 14, including Ryan Norris and Scott Martin of Nashville-based laptop group Hands Off Cuba, who hooked up with the band for last year's CoLab EP. Just as gospel singers gave Nixon its trippy joyousness in 2000, and Tony Crow's elegant piano lent 2004's Is a Woman its studied grace, Hands Off Cuba's contributions, while limited, seem to have determined the shape of this album.
The duo stand out most on the opening track, "Paperback Bible", which was inspired by Swap Shop, an East Tennessee radio program where people can sell anything from tractors to appliances to farmland-- sort of like an Appalachian eBay. Commissioned by Long Haul Productions for a short documentary segment broadcast on Chicago Public Radio, Lambchop's head songwriter Kurt Wagner took the lyrics directly from the show, and the opportunity allows him to consider pie safes and prom dresses as if they're poor Yorick's skull. Hands Off Cuba provide the shimmering intro and coda, a patient fade-in and unraveling fade-out that mimic radio waves but evoke rural dusks.
Unfortunately, the band's work with Hands Off Cuba is limited to just a few songs, defusing the promising potential of combining Lambchop's organic sound with Norris and Martin's synthetic aesthetic. The duo is largely absent from the nine songs that follow "Paperback Bible", aside from one or two brief, superfluous interludes. However, Lambchop does absorb a lesson from Hands Off Cuba: Damaged emphasizes ambience above all else, setting a mood redolent of empty rooms and dusty sills on "Prepared [2]" and rarely deviating from that space. It's a nice setting for Wagner's household poetry, which explores the mundane vagaries of family life. These songs generally depict the everyday tensions that pervade a home following a disagreement or argument, although he rarely specifies the event that inspires each track. Instead he focuses on the fallouts and the small epiphanies that follow, which range from the mundane ("It's been a lousy day," he concludes on "I Would Have Waited All Day") to the apologetically oddball ("I am the most undisciplined of man," he acknowledges ambiguously on "Prepared [2]").
But Wagner is a very disciplined songwriter, and Lambchop are a very disciplined blob, which makes Damaged sound repressed. The music is all pristine veneer, stripped of any trace of the country or soul that marked their earlier material and made them sound like the most involved pick-up band ever. So Damaged is lovely but dull in spots, lacking the fuck-all adventurousness of previous albums. It's not until the final song that Wagner and Lambchop really cut loose. "The Decline of Country & Western Civilization" is a fire-and-brimstone rant against contemporary music that makes Dylan seem like a regular pop enthusiast. Wagner name-checks Nathan Bedford Forrest in the first line (perhaps as a condemnation of Southern rock?), laments that people still think Lambchop peaked with How I Quit Smoking, and remarks that he prefers Jim Nabors to anything this site covers. Lyrically and musically, the song is thunderous and over the top, but after so much restraint, such spirited hostility is a salve. | 2006-08-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2006-08-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 28, 2006 | 6.8 | 173e7121-db98-44fe-ace2-a69d5aa8a691 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On his third mixtape this year, the young Baton Rouge rapper continues to upend the fear and survivalism that he carries with him. | On his third mixtape this year, the young Baton Rouge rapper continues to upend the fear and survivalism that he carries with him. | YoungBoy Never Broke Again: Ain’t Too Long | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/youngboy-never-broke-again-aint-too-long/ | Ain’t Too Long | Just after he turned 17, the Baton Rouge emcee YoungBoy Never Broke Again put out 38 Baby, a breakout mixtape that featured direct and local influences Kevin Gates and Boosie BadAzz but set him apart as his own star. He’s spent the last year elegantly traversing this new spotlight—releasing an even more formidable mixtape in August after signing to Atlantic—and living in the aftermath of pleading guilty for aggravated assault earlier this year, a diminished charge from the attempted murder charges initially on his plate.
Released a couple weeks before his 18th birthday, Ain’t Too Long is YoungBoy’s latest mixtape, an eight-track YouTube playlist that continues to upend the fear and survivalism that he carries with him. Despite the occasion to bask in his new stardom, YoungBoy’s legal troubles and his constant anxiety of his hometown’s violence continues to drench his music—the threat of gunfire in both directions seems to dominate his every moment. Even an outright love song like “You the One” has a tinge of paranoia: teenage romance as radical escapism. Of course, sometimes he sounds like a brash instigator himself, shouting out promissory threats on thumping songs like “Red Rum” and “War With Us.” Still, he’s never cold-hearted or detached. YoungBoy runs hot with revenge and remains obsessed with safeguarding his family at home and in the streets.
His music remains a vital coping mechanism in his life. YoungBoy’s raps run the gamut from fast-paced and percussive shouts to an almost metallic croon when the rasp of his voice is touched by AutoTune. He rarely stretches in either direction past his nasal midrange, but Ain’t Too Long finds him a better singer and songwriter than ever before, putting all of this over the bluesy palette of trap beats YoungBoy’s familiar collaborator Dubba-AA has whipped up for him.
The electric guitar and choral “ahhs” of “Pour One” sound dramatically wistful and YoungBoy raps a gutting confessional about his friend-turned-rival and fellow Baton Rouge rapper Gee Money, who was shot and killed last month. Filtered through the recent beef, his nostalgia rots into resentment as he lays out a years-long friendship drama in a few cutting lines: “You did some foul shit and had sex with my sister/Then threw it in my face in front the people on Insta/I ain’t gon’ speak on that disease that y’all gave to each other.” The verse tumbles forward through YoungBoy’s time behind bars, where he hears about his cousin’s death over the phone and is spurred into “getting out”—of jail, of the violence that landed him there—before his street pragmatism sinks him back to earth. It’s a startlingly crystal story of his angst.
“Thug Alibi” is the bookend sitting opposite the blood-curdling opener “Red Rum.” YoungBoy’s final statement takes a reflective turn, floating over a jumpy harpsichord loop slinking into the woozy backdrop of snares and guitar. It’s an apology without remorse. “Mama I’m sorry from the way that I live/Gotta go hard, yeah you know how it is,” he wails on the chorus. Later, he doesn’t shrug off her concern so much as tersely cast it aside. “They steppin’ ma, we steppin’ too.”
There’s a more powerful apology earlier on the mixtape, and it’s not in a chorus or in a verse: “Lord, please forgive me, for all the thing things that I done did.” YoungBoy recites this atonement at the end of “Pour One,” after airing out dirty laundry with as much vulnerability as icy spite. And then he offers a jolting reminder of his age, his voice almost sheepish for the first and last time on the tape. “Mom, I’m sorry for being a bad kid,” he says. When you consider just how much he’s lived and accomplished as a kid, it makes the elegance of his music and survivalism all the more dire and tragic. In a now-deleted post, YoungBoy recently tweeted about his upcoming birthday, writing, “I’m not turning #18 I’m forever #17.” Up to this point in his life, his pain and deaths and fears have been doled out over days and weeks and sustained for all his years. Even at this pivotal, accelerated moment in his career, it makes sense he’d want time to stand still for a little while. | 2017-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | October 18, 2017 | 7.4 | 174163ca-0b06-421d-b065-bb3c43abf424 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
Banjo player Nathan Bowles, double bassist Casey Toll, and drummer Rex McMurray reunite for a spacious jam session informed by Appalachian folk and modern minimalism. | Banjo player Nathan Bowles, double bassist Casey Toll, and drummer Rex McMurray reunite for a spacious jam session informed by Appalachian folk and modern minimalism. | Nathan Bowles Trio: Are Possible | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nathan-bowles-trio-are-possible/ | Are Possible | What constitutes a jam band? Do you need guitar solos that last the length of an Adult Swim show? Do you need concert attendees huffing balloons and taking LSD? Do you need to hire a lighting designer so sick that Justin Bieber steals him? Not to sound like the old hippie approaching hour five of the campfire lecture, but it’s all about the groove, man. The Nathan Bowles Trio’s Are Possible renders these questions moot by stripping this music of all frills and signifiers. This is three people in a room, conversing through instrumental mastery.
Bowles, who plays banjo, doesn’t need squawking solos or balloons or drugs or a light show. He doesn’t need vocals—hell, he doesn’t even need a guitarist, though sometimes the instrument adds a nice flavor. On Are Possible, Bowles reunites with double bassist Casey Toll and drummer Rex McMurry (of CAVE) for the first time since 2018’s Plainly Mistaken, and though the sound is more direct now, the message remains the same. Plainly Mistaken foregrounded experimentation, pushing further into free improvisation. Here, the group digs deeper into the core melodies from which the songs are built. Great jams need not be heady or flashy: These exercises are live-time encapsulations of the awe invoked when one idea perfectly informs the next.
Despite the spontaneity that exists between Bowles and his bandmates, the trio relies on a few tricks to move its songs from one section to the next. Opener “Dappled” immediately sets Appalachian folk music in conversation with jazz and modern minimalism. The song’s groove is contoured by Toll’s dexterous bass. Throughout the album, Toll, who plays with Jake Xerxes Fussell and Mount Moriah, serves as a counterpoint to the music’s mesmerizing repetitions. He provides the rhythmic and melodic tension, as he does on “Dappled,” where he riffs off Bowles’ banjo progression and dips between the pockets of McMurry’s groove.
This practice is best illustrated on the album’s emotional centerpiece, “Gimme My Shit,” which stands out thanks to the joyous nature of the hook. A bouncing banjo riff contrasts with the comforting warmth of snare drum clicks; rhythmic chords occasionally give way to a shining melody, like sun slowly emerging from clouds. As the song marches along in 6/8 time, Toll provides the steady anchor, allowing Bowles to hint at the main refrain before finally landing on it. The eventual release is all the more powerful, as the duo engage in a descending phrase highlighted by a cymbal crash that creates the album’s most powerful musical motif.
Banjo-led instrumentals that pay homage to Appalachian folk music is a hyper-specific niche, but Bowles and his band never allow their preferred sounds to hem in their experiments. This music leads in all directions, unfurling with patience and reserve to reveal the balance between repetition and deviation. Are Possible shows that rural folk, cosmic new age music, and hard-charging rock aren’t only relatable, but can be inextricably linked. The jam is only the beginning. | 2024-07-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Drag City | July 31, 2024 | 7.3 | 1743696a-aefc-4018-989a-483059a758c2 | Will Schube | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-schube/ | |
The Toronto indie rock quartet Weaves' self-titled debut is an impressive album about incapacitating infatuation. | The Toronto indie rock quartet Weaves' self-titled debut is an impressive album about incapacitating infatuation. | Weaves: Weaves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21883-weaves/ | Weaves | Any new rock band that’s being honest with themselves about their place in the current musical landscape probably comes to the same conclusion as Weaves guitarist Morgan Waters: “Sometimes it feels like bands aren’t necessary, like they’re not the ones pushing music forward.” For many, it’s an excuse for retrenchment, whereas Weaves' self-titled debut is driven by a palpable ambition to make a guitar/bass/drum set up sound as fluid and inventive as anything else out there. And yet, for all of Weaves’ admirable attempts to poke and prod indie rock towards progress, the irony is that they still sound like a throwback.
To wit: Just about every relevant and accurate comparison for the Toronto quartet released an album to critical acclaim around 2009. This was probably the last time you could piece together a discernible, popular vanguard of guitar-based indie rock. It all could be grouped into “art rock,” a self-evident term indicative of acts going to great lengths to deconstruct the form while elevating it.
Weaves would likely have been overshadowed at the time, though—they don’t boast the conservatorial chops of Dirty Projectors or St. Vincent, the inventiveness of tUnE-yArDs or Micachu and the Shapes, the splatter-paint approach of Deerhoof or the magnetism of *truly *post-punk Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But like most promising artists of any stripe, they’ve internalized their influences and present them in a novel context. In Weaves’ case, it’s art-rock that is played like actual rock: big riffs, big drums and loud vocals. The riffs are full of wide fretboard leaps, flatted fifths and pedal warping that makes everything sound slightly sharp and very frayed. Meanwhile, Jasmyn Burke’s vocals are confidently projected and erratically enunciated, the rhythms stretching into oblong forms. On singles like “Tick,” the effect is similar to gourmet ice creams that incorporate fish sauce or miso—the atypical flavoring is the immediate draw for adventurous tastes, yet there’s still the expectation of being sweet and conventionally satisfying.
This is not a cerebral record—*Weaves *was mixed by a guy who’s worked with Melvins and At the Drive-In, so for all of its high-minded reference points, it hits like wallop upside your head. As with their equally referential citymates Dilly Dally, Weaves' foremost quality is creating music that pulsates with desire, and Burke is damn-near hedonistic about her own: "I just want your biological clock,” Burke brays on “Tick,” one of her many hot blooded come-ons: “I’ll dream of the birds and the bees/And get til I’m good and I'm clean,” “I’m gonna get you to the sugar-coated land.” Or most succinctly: “Feel my needs.”
*Weaves *is most compelling when it’s thrashing right along with Burke, giving into the urgent hunger for connection. It grates when the band is more intent on pleasing itself with quirk for quirk’s sake—the chintzy breakdowns of “Candy,” try-hard juxtaposition of vulgarity and twee (“You’re looking sweet with your slices of pizza and your fucking”), and melodies that evoke the “limbs flailing, arms akimbo” image of Elaine Benes.
“Coo Coo” shows all of the pros and cons to Weaves’ approach at once: It’s a song meant to probe the inscrutability of being blindsided by love, yet it smacks of effort, of trying to will that feeling into existence. The frictional polyrhythms are enough to signify a body at war with its own impulses, but Burke’s breathless hiccupping and finicky internal rhyming feel like affectations. While *Weaves *is an impressive album about incapacitating infatuation, it’s not always served by giving its ADD and OCD impulses equal say—after all, no one will ever write a song called “Clever in Love.” | 2016-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Buzz | July 6, 2016 | 6.8 | 1746c767-0139-4c5f-bddc-e561222aa76c | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Jamming and overdubbing on top of band member Holger Zapf’s experiments with self-constructed drum machines, Cavern of Anti-Matter deliver their most rhythmically intensive record yet. | Jamming and overdubbing on top of band member Holger Zapf’s experiments with self-constructed drum machines, Cavern of Anti-Matter deliver their most rhythmically intensive record yet. | Cavern of Anti-Matter: Hormone Lemonade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cavern-of-anti-matter-hormone-lemonade/ | Hormone Lemonade | After 19 years in Stereolab, it is understandable if Tim Gane views the process of releasing new music with a certain reluctance. Blood-Drums, the 2013 debut album from his band Cavern of Anti-Matter, was written and recorded in a month at the behest of Berlin label Grautag and originally limited to 500 copies; Hormone Lemonade, the band’s third long player, was born of band member Holger Zapf tinkering with self-constructed rhythm machines—the kind of origin story that does little to suggest Gane is ready to unleash his eternal masterpiece.
In a way, you can understand Gane’s reticence to blow the doors off. Stereolab’s reputation has only grown since they split in 2009—they’ve been referenced by everyone from Tyler, the Creator to Pharrell—and Gane has spoken of his desire to escape from the shadows of his illustrious past. That might be impossible, but on Hormone Lemonade, Gane and his bandmates try something new: They composed the music from the beats up, fleshing out Zapf’s work on synths, sequencers, drums, and guitar to produce music whose intensive rhythmic focus stands at some remove from Stereolab’s melodic signature.
The most distinctive moments on the album come when rhythm takes a leading role. “Solarised Sound” is not so much a song as a percussive maze, the chord sequence a relish to the rhythmic dish. The basic elements are straightforward enough—a mechanical bass-drum thump, layers of circular synth, and a simple guitar and drum pattern—but everything sounds as if it has been bathed in reverb, creating a disorienting effect where the notes seem to double back upon themselves like a sonic trompe-l’œil. “Motion Flow” is similarly hypnotic, unfurling mesmeric percussive layers that bring to mind rhythmically focused My Bloody Valentine tracks like “If I Am”.
However, even within the depths of such exploration, Gane’s compositional gifts keep drifting to the fore. The former Stereolab man is such a brilliant melodicist, and his loungey, jazz-influenced chord sequences so distinctive, that you half expect Stereolab singer Laetitia Sadier to turn up and start crooning about Marxism, even as Cavern of Anti-Matter float off into the musical ether. On the one hand, this means Hormone Lemonade will attract the kind of Stereolab comparisons Gane would doubtlessly rather avoid. On the other, the music’s weightless melodic rush frequently elevates the band’s shifting and often rather obtuse constructions into something altogether more palatable.
The brilliant mid-album pairing of “Automatic Morning” and “Feed Me Magnetic Rain” best illustrate this dichotomy. “Automatic Morning” is a movement in three parts: A motorik synth lead gives way to a mid section whose clipped bass riff and tight live drums nod to Dr. Dre circa The Chronic, and the closing three minutes take an improbable turn into Detroit techno, riding a synth riff that bobbles like a paper boat on a ruffled pond.
“Feed Me Magnetic Rain,” meanwhile, is an excursion into the glassy electronica that Autechre perfected on their earlier records, pairing a haunting keyboard melody with a pattering electro beat. This is not quite virgin territory for Cavern of Anti-Matter—“Pantechnicon,” on the band’s second album, Void Beats / Invocation Trex, hinted at electro influences—but “Feed Me Magnetic Rain” sees the band edge further down the electronic rabbit hole than ever before. On paper, neither song should be a particularly easy listen, but the group’s lilting chord sequences and melodic grace transform these adventures in sonic bricolage into something that sails deliciously close to pop music, much like Stereolab’s own fusion of avant-garde and easy listening.
Tim Gane may not appreciate the comparison, but he shouldn’t be dismayed. Hormone Lemonade is the work of a band who couldn’t write a bad chord sequence if they tried, allying rare melodic nous to dazzling rhythmic instincts. Rather than being trapped by his past, on Hormone Lemonade Gane draws upon it in brilliant new ways. | 2018-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Duophonic | March 24, 2018 | 7.7 | 17508ea8-0563-4940-b4d9-0920b11d97c8 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Flanked by a close circle of collaborators, hip-hop experimentalist Ishmael Butler takes a brief, mysterious trip through rap aesthetics past and future. | Flanked by a close circle of collaborators, hip-hop experimentalist Ishmael Butler takes a brief, mysterious trip through rap aesthetics past and future. | Shabazz Palaces: Robed in Rareness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shabazz-palaces-robed-in-rareness/ | Robed in Rareness | Ishmael Butler once likened influence to a vortex. Time, he said, doesn’t move linearly like an arrow, but “goes around like a whirlpool, where things are picked up and moved around but they may appear in the same place that they appeared earlier or later.” He pointed to Lil B, who championed hip-hop fundamentals like freestyling and dancing around the same time Butler and Tendai Maraire formed Shabazz Palaces, as an example of this coiling chronology. But it applies to Butler as well. The futurism of Shabazz Palaces has always been interwoven with the past and present, their songs scintillating tapestries of old-school shit talk, proggy psychedelia, and melodic flossing. Robed in Rareness is draped in this multiplicity as Butler and a team of close collaborators swagger across eras of rap.
The seven-song record is the third Shabazz Palaces project without Maraire, who left the group sometime before 2020’s The Don of Diamond Dreams. The production, helmed entirely by Butler, is icier and more metallic without Maraire’s rhythmic touch; the arrangements don’t swell, contract, and glow as intensely as those on Lese Majesty or the Quazarz albums. But that muted palette fits the cool, nocturnal mood. Though there’s still plenty of Shabazz Palaces’ signature chaos percolating within the beats, from the distorted moans drifting through “Binoculars” to the spacey sound effects stardusted across “Scarface Mace,” the music largely brings to mind the calm of a club’s backroom. There’s a party happening a few feet away, but this particular crowd is happy to kick it in private.
Butler rolls deep, tapping features for all but one song. Geechi Suede of Camp Lo, Colorado Springs’ O Finess, and Butler’s mysterious signee Lavarr the Starr, with whom he co-released an album in April, are among the guests, their disparate styles reflecting the music’s eclectic mix of punchlines, flexes, and cosmology. Butler leads the pack, gamboling through his verses like a hurdler. “I’m in my smooth phase/The L’s, they L me like Cool J/How could I fugaze?/The gangsters they hear me and shoe gaze,” he raps on opener “Binoculars,” his voice compressed into a fizzy warble. “Of the jiggy OGs, I’m the president,” he says with pride on “Woke Up in a Dream,” a collaboration with his son Lil Tracy. Butler charmingly calls Tracy his “idol,” a nod to their familial bond, and to his multidirectional understanding of time.
He really is a rap time traveler. There’s no parasitism or trend-chasing desperation to the trap hi-hats and Auto-Tune vocals on “Cinnamon Bun,” on which his cadences strangely evoke Father and Chavo. The haunted beat of “Scarface Mace” brings to mind the cinematic loops of Roc Marciano and Alchemist, and could easily slot into a Griselda release. I doubt these are conscious reference points, though. Butler is a true lifer, the pursuit of new sounds as intrinsic to his style as sounding fly. The ease with which he shifts directions and shuffles through time keeps the album engrossing, even though the guest verses lag Butler in terms of skill. Robed in Rareness is ultimately a less significant Shabazz Palaces release, but there’s something fitting about a casually adventurous album by a vet dropping in the year of hip-hop’s 50th birthday. As the doomsayers look backward, Butler turns his gaze everywhere. | 2023-10-31T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-31T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Sub Pop | October 31, 2023 | 7.1 | 1751119c-a2ac-4da2-bf3f-da2c8b12bb82 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The teenage South African duo build the lean rhythms and jazzy melodies of amapiano into a sprawling debut suffused with dynamic energy and tantalizing uncertainty. | The teenage South African duo build the lean rhythms and jazzy melodies of amapiano into a sprawling debut suffused with dynamic energy and tantalizing uncertainty. | Native Soul: Teenage Dreams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/native-soul-teenage-dreams/ | Teenage Dreams | Near the beginning of the documentary SHAYA!, the filmmakers note that amapiano “was born in the soil of the streets of South Africa, therefore it belongs to all of us.” The sentiment reflects the organic, bottom-up growth of the genre; before its massive popularity across South Africa, it was an underground sensation ignored by almost every local radio station. It’s also emblematic of the music’s accessible, welcoming aura: In the past few years, rappers and producers who’ve focused on other South African styles have tried their hand at amapiano. It just sounds irresistible.
Amapiano’s winning formula is relatively straightforward: log-drum loops, jazzy piano melodies, and soulful vocals in a deep-house shell. The tempo hovers around 110 bpm, a crucial sweet spot: Poppier tracks find a comfortable range to luxuriate in sunlit grooves, while moodier songs prove hypnotic thanks to the slow, hard punches of syncopated drums that burrow deeper than the high-tempo frenzies of gqom. Native Soul, the Pretoria-based teenage duo of Kgothatso Solomon Tshabalala and Alfred Zakhele Mhlanga, work primarily in the latter mode, and their debut Teenage Dreams places refreshing emphasis on production. Amapiano has incorporated vocals since 2018 and the most lush tracks, especially of late, have placed them at the forefront, but Teenage Dreams is largely vocalless; that it’s among the most cohesive, invigorating amapiano albums to date is no small feat.
Economic pacing is Teenage Dreams’ core tenet, and “The Beginning” kicks off the album with a familiar setting: sparse log drums and periodic synth blips. Soon, it eases into a brooding atmosphere, and as the musical elements compound, the track maintains an airy, cautious mood. It’s a clever maneuver: Just as the song risks dissolving into fog, vocal flourishes and percussive strikes erupt to suffuse it with dynamic energy and tantalizing uncertainty. Much of Teenage Dreams feels similarly sprawling; with each song exceeding five minutes, Native Soul allow ample time to ease into a headspace before injecting the mix with surprise. “The Journey,” for example, begins by folding piano-house chords over an agile bassline and flute, only for scratchy, processed vocals to arrive for brief but thrilling passages.
These small details make Teenage Dreams captivating. Gloomy synth pads cast a darkness across “Long Lasting,” while thin keyboard plinks bolster its sci-fi mystique. As an assortment of splash cymbals, handclaps, and synth pulses interlock and shift rhythms, they run through a similarly granular array of emotions: cryptic at one moment, strange at others, and then, for a short flash, outwardly dramatic. But Native Soul can do bangers too. “Burning Desire” is all about the massive propulsion felt in its drums and flagellating synths, and while it’s one of the more riotous tracks, it’s still deliberately reserved, projecting both finesse and masterful control over the proceedings.
As impressive as Native Soul’s work is, they clearly understand that they’re building on a foundation set by others. “Letter to Kabza De Small” namechecks one of amapiano’s most influential producers as it sets laser-like synths dancing alongside piano melodies in a grandiose spectacle—a worthy tribute to the “king of amapiano.” The title “Dead Sangoma” refers to the South African traditional healers who, during a ceremony, channel an ancestral spirit and dance along to drums. While the drumming patterns aren’t the same here, there’s a deference to music as something that can take hold and leave you in a trance-like state. Native Soul accomplish this very goal throughout Teenage Dreams: They ensure you’re transfixed.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Awesome Tapes From Africa | September 24, 2021 | 7.4 | 175178c6-77b1-4c0f-abb4-34d59404842f | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
Leeds-based quartet Adult Jazz's debut album is full of formally convoluted songs which seldom run shy of five minutes, and feature plenty of brisk, ponderous guitar figures and difficult-to-parse drumbeats. It's full of clever turns of musical and lyrical phrase which will dispel possible accusations of self-indulgence and pretention, and yet somehow, with a few listens, it's easy to enjoy this unusually paced album. | Leeds-based quartet Adult Jazz's debut album is full of formally convoluted songs which seldom run shy of five minutes, and feature plenty of brisk, ponderous guitar figures and difficult-to-parse drumbeats. It's full of clever turns of musical and lyrical phrase which will dispel possible accusations of self-indulgence and pretention, and yet somehow, with a few listens, it's easy to enjoy this unusually paced album. | Adult Jazz: Gist Is | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19555-adult-jazz-gist-is/ | Gist Is | In the early-to-mid 2000s, unconventional, long-form song structures became something of a trend in North American indie rock, which created resonances with the flashy, epic-poetic progressive rock of the 1970s. The music of Leeds-based quartet Adult Jazz recalls this (now somewhat unfashionable) approach; their debut album, Gist Is, is full of formally convoluted songs which seldom run shy of five minutes, and feature plenty of brisk, ponderous guitar figures and difficult-to-parse drumbeats. However, the album’s complexity is the brushwork rather than the subject described; a gentle flow of melismatic, often beautiful melody takes center stage and provides the band's compositions with a necessary unifying element.
It’s often easy to discern Adult Jazz's base of contemporary influences. Opener "Hum", with its blue-eyed soul aspirations and vocal processing, recalls Bon Iver's most recent album, while the histrionic vocalizations on more angular and dissonant tracks ("Donne Tongue", "Be A Girl") invites comparisons to like-minded British iconoclasts Wild Beasts. However, the band eventually refract and re-contextualize even their most familiar-sounding gestures, leaving room to showcase plenty of their own signature tics. Lead singer Harry Burgess usually doubles or extends his meandering, plainchant-like vocal melodies on guitar rather than providing them with chordal support (on "Am Gone," the technique closely resembles the signature scat-alongs of adult-contemporary jazz favorite George Benson). Meanwhile, the sporadic, acerbic percussion remains affectively detached from the slickness of the rest of the ensemble, and compellingly dense.
There are also jarring interjections from sampled, electro-or-acoustic reeds, horns, strings, harp and vocals—their processed quality sometimes evokes the pitch-shifted trumpet work of Eno/David Sylvian collaborator and avant-New Ager Jon Hassell. However, these gestures provide mere coloration; the base arrangement is always skeletal. Frequently, there are passages of just two or three instruments playing at once, and the full force of the entire ensemble is used sparingly. This allows Adult Jazz to maintain powerfully restrained dynamics when desired, as on the muted “Pigeon Skulls,” which mixes deft, Richard Thompson-esque acoustic guitar picking with disconnected wisps of vocal melody.
For the most part, Adult Jazz avoid the typical gambits of the post-Funeral Indie Rock Song; songs end abruptly, like their allotted time is up, without heavy-handed catharsis or blaring, tacked-on codas. The one exception to this is ten-minute album centerpiece “Spook”, which closes with an extended section attempting unsuccessfully to deliver some tom-heavy, Peter Gabriel-esque gravitas. The song’s three or four movements mix somewhat pat chord structures with nondescript vocal licks, and ultimately the track comes across like a jambalaya of undeveloped sketches—juxtaposed without meaningful connective tissue.
Another element of Gist Is that may be initially difficult to stomach is its lyrics__,__ which read something like a collection of Gertrude Stein poems (“Bold claim to taste a feel in felt/ To ham it up, the heart’s a sore/ For babies sake and nothing more”). Sentences sometimes go unfinished, devolving into nonsense and half-words. However, the gibberish often proves to be just as expressive as the cogent language: colorful, motormouth ululations represent Burgess’ addressee “going on and on” in “Am Gone,” and the vocal tracks on “Idiot Mantra” are cleverly scrambled, reversed, or crudely cut off mid-phrase to evoke its eponymous sound. One of Burgess’ discernible themes is the fundamental difficulty and ineffectuality of communication (“It’s all in aphorisms/ I was just believing myself slowly/ And the feeling changed”), so when the band engages in this type of onomatopoeia and word painting, it seems appropriate and makes for some of the album’s most memorable moments.
Ultimately, the primary appeal of Adult Jazz’s music is in its unique and playful syntax, which is neither indulgently collage-like or remotely predictable. Their sound is not revolutionary, but nonetheless wholly distinctive—and nowadays, this seems a hard bargain for any rock band to strike. Gist Is is full of clever turns of musical and lyrical phrase which will dispel possible accusations of self-indulgence and pretension, and somehow, within just a few listens, it becomes easy to enjoy this unusually paced album of so few easy hooks, and so many seemingly insignificant words. | 2014-08-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-08-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Spare Thought | August 6, 2014 | 7.4 | 17518331-e826-48cb-99aa-676728508b73 | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
Based on the paintings of Thilo Heinzmann and recorded by Brussels-based Echo Collective, this is the late Icelandic composer’s first proper work for string quartet alone. | Based on the paintings of Thilo Heinzmann and recorded by Brussels-based Echo Collective, this is the late Icelandic composer’s first proper work for string quartet alone. | Jóhann Jóhannsson: 12 Conversations With Thilo Heinzmann | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/johann-johannsson-12-conversations-with-thilo-heinzmann/ | 12 Conversations With Thilo Heinzmann | Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson was prolific, a fact made clear in the months since his tragic passing in 2018. Five scores completed just before his death have since been released, and there’s a reissue in the works for Jóhannsson’s ’90s synth-pop duo Dip, with Sugarcubes drummer Siggi Baldursson. And that’s before the second part of the massive Retrospective box set series arrives next year. 12 Conversations with Thilo Heinzmann accentuates Jóhannsson’s creative restlessness. Originally premiered three years ago in London, it’s based on the works of Berlin painter Thilo Heinzmann. In accordance with the composer’s wishes, these pieces were recorded by the Brussels-based Echo Collective.
If you ever found yourself swayed by Jóhannsson’s first major work, 2001’s exquisite Englabörn, you’ll know that from the start, he exhibited a heightened sensibility to the timbre of a string quartet. Subsequent works bore that out, even when he deployed brass ensembles or a full orchestra. Surprisingly, 12 Conversations marks his first proper work for string quartet alone. Jóhannsson often eschewed such formalities in his compositions, weaving in piano, electronics, vocal samples, and rumbling drones to give his work grit, chasmic depth, and emotional range. His genius lay in part in his ability to invert expectations of classical instrumentation to give rise to new sonorities, as when he deployed 12 double basses for Sicario. How else to explain the immense foreboding and dread he conjures on “The Beast,” perhaps his defining movie theme?
This means that 12 Conversations can sound like Jóhannsson at his purest, most deferential, and—in the scope of his body of work—perhaps slightly unfinished. “Manifest” stuns with its beautiful theme, moving from a somber opening to something more sweeping and teasing a gorgeous line from the cello that stays just this side of a drone. It’s Jóhannsson totally unadorned, and it feels all the more lovely because of it. “Shell” might resemble a Bach suite, but it moves achingly slowly, evocative because of its deliberateness. The stately “Lacrimosa” sounds like a subtle homage to the likes of Vivaldi. But the gestures of “Stuk” and “Zurich” feel oddly disconnected and unresolved, like thematic sketches awaiting delivery of a rough cut of a film before being fully fleshed out.
Originally commissioned by British philanthropist and art collector Richard Thomas to convey the communal transfer of artistic ideas beyond borders, the set projects an underlying theme about the European Union. Or rather, a British patron connected with an Icelandic composer to convey the visual aesthetic of a German painter with help from a Belgian musical ensemble. At such a precarious time on the continent, it’s a noble pursuit. Only, many moments on 12 Conversations feel more like an ambient backdrop than a focal point. A piece like “Danse” is the kind of classical music you put on when you want it to be totally unobtrusive. But when the high frequencies of “Form” strafe across the stereo field on the latter half of the album, it startles you to attention. In that moment, one pines for Jóhannsson himself—for his willingness to sully and scuff up the most pristine and stuffy of Western musical traditions in a true expression of the collective spirit of the 21st century.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Deutsche Grammophon | September 24, 2019 | 6.9 | 175515ec-d311-4f20-a692-61d260254f55 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The mischief-making duo is up to its usual tricks on this three-song, six-minute EP, but it fails to deliver the thrills of the group’s debut. | The mischief-making duo is up to its usual tricks on this three-song, six-minute EP, but it fails to deliver the thrills of the group’s debut. | 100 gecs: Snake Eyes EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/100-gecs-snake-eyes-ep/ | Snake Eyes EP | 100 gecs’ brilliance lies in their ability to recontextualize established sounds through cheeky juxtapositions. In a year when blink-182 dropped their insipid ninth studio album, “stupid horse” was a miracle, like Laura Les and Dylan Brady were dictating what puckish pop-punk could sound like if filtered through the sensibilities of the terminally online; that its vocal melody felt like a riff on the California trio’s “Roller Coaster” was the cherry on top. More recently, “mememe” brought back the guitar skanks but with a Crazy Frog hook, recalling other songs rooted in the internet. (“Numa Numa” and “DotA,” anyone?) Even “Doritos & Fritos” largely benefits from sounding like a prankster’s take on the current crop of UK post-punk bands. As in the tradition of jesters, 100 gecs are expert observers of culture, treating humor as a conduit for enlightenment as much as entertainment.
Snake Eyes, a surprise three-song EP dropped in advance of their forthcoming second album, 10000 gecs, doesn’t capture the spark of 1000 gecs or anything thereafter. Not only does this release barely breach six minutes, its ideas are so bereft of creativity and nuance that it’s hard to view it as anything but a slapdash stopgap for fans awaiting their new record. Beginning with its titular declaration, “Hey Big Man” repeats a familiar formula, but it sounds far less engaging than “money machine” and its “hey you lil’ piss baby” opener. The braggadocio on the latter was surreal, heightened by a sticky hook and blistering sonics; the music here sounds like a timid retread of Brady’s 2017 material with a Sleigh Bells filter, stymieing any heft their smack-talk could have. There are four seconds of hardcore dance music about halfway through that add momentary suspense, but it’s lazily shoehorned in instead of cleverly embedded.
If 100 gecs’ appeal was contingent on shocking listeners, they’d be playing a losing game, but they’ve always had adroit songwriting to back up their mischief. Its absence is palpable on “Runaway,” a drab ballad whose soft piano melodies build into a recycled hook. Its vocal melody sounds like a lackluster version of “hand crushed by a mallet,” and misunderstands what made that song indelible. When I saw 100 gecs perform it in 2019, there was palpable catharsis as a sold-out crowd shouted “oh my god, what the fuck” in unison, bolstered by other pithy one-liners embodying current malaise (“Feel like I’m not good enough” and “I might go and throw my phone into the lake” were two other howlers). Here, Les and Brady prattle on with lyrics that are characteristic of a traditional breakup song, the only consolation being Les’ frustrated acceptance of the circumstances: “I understand/I just think it’s fucking gay!”
The grimmest signpost for 100 gecs’ future is “Torture Me,” a song whose Skrillex feature is antithetical to their shtick. When 1000 gecs & the Tree of Clues came out in 2020, its litany of guests felt like a victory lap and celebration of intersecting scenes—only 100 gecs could’ve brought them together. But to have another artist on one of their own non-remixed songs is an unnecessary shortcut to revealing the superficial nature of genre boundaries. On paper it looks bad, but in practice it’s worse: Skrillex provides his characteristic EDM wobbles, and the beat is overwhelmingly familiar and plodding. Les sounds convincingly like she’s on the verge of tears, but the song’s banalities make it feel like she’s the featured artist, not the other way around. Much of this brief, inconsequential EP repeatedly comes up short in this way, as if 100 gecs have become hucksters selling knock-offs of their wares. | 2022-12-12T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-12T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Dog Show / Atlantic | December 12, 2022 | 5.6 | 175ab85c-1497-4f8d-9fd6-d3567628c62c | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
A sprawling piano opera starring Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger's grandmother, Olga Sarantos, this record is every bit as terrible and fantastic as it sounds: A convoluted tangle of spoken word and keyboard gurgles, RMC is an experiment in oral history-as-pop, an extraordinarily detailed portrait of mid-century Chicago, and a magnificent failure. | A sprawling piano opera starring Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger's grandmother, Olga Sarantos, this record is every bit as terrible and fantastic as it sounds: A convoluted tangle of spoken word and keyboard gurgles, RMC is an experiment in oral history-as-pop, an extraordinarily detailed portrait of mid-century Chicago, and a magnificent failure. | The Fiery Furnaces: Rehearsing My Choir | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3274-rehearsing-my-choir/ | Rehearsing My Choir | Just a few years into their career, and the Fiery Furnaces are already one of rock's most restless, unpredictable bands. The sibling duo launched in 2003 with an addictively quirky debut (Gallowsbird's Bark), promptly rolled out an elaborate follow-up (2004's epic Blueberry Boat), released a collection of UK singles and B-sides (the full-length EP), and are now about to dump their grandest opus to date on poised-and-perplexed ears: Rehearsing My Choir is a sprawling piano opera starring Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger's grandmother, Olga Sarantos, and it's every bit as terrible and fantastic as it sounds.
If you can swallow Rehearsing My Choir as oral history, in the vein of NPR's National Story Project or Tom Russell's Kerouac-slurping poetry, the album offers an extraordinarily detailed portrait of mid-century Chicago, all rickety old Fords, crinkling photographs of Robert Mitchum, excessive drinking, gabbing about the war, working on the railroad. The sequencing isn't chronological-- if you trace the map Matthew includes in the record's press kit, the album moves from the present to the 40s, 20s, 30s, 50s, back to the 40s, into the 60s, and then the 90s-- though it doesn't much matter, as the narrative instead follows the kind of internal timeline that makes sense only to its tellers. Ultimately, it's the story of Sarantos' love of her late husband, the heft of her grief, and all the stuff that happened between first kiss and funeral march-- from the condolence cards of opener "The Garfield El" to the graveyard of closer "Does It Remind You of When?", Rehearsing My Choir is a weird testament to the inevitable passage of time, and the casualties of inertia.
As a think piece, Rehearsing My Choir is enormously engaging, but as a pop record, it's exhausting and fruitless. Narrative supersedes melody time after time; there are no real songs, just cacophonous noodling and stacks and stacks of polysyllabic words. The majority of the record plays like amateur musical theater, steeped in prog-rock dementia and in love with the sound of its own voice. Unsurprisingly, the chief exception is the predominantly grandma-free (and essentially irrelevant, at least story-wise) "The Wayward Granddaughter": The song features drum machine boinks and zip-zapping synths and Matthew's disco whirls bouncing off Eleanor's (comparatively) silky pipes, as she embodies "Connie," a popular, Greek-American teenager who bites it (metaphorically, and possibly literally) at the hands of one of two boyfriends named Kevin. When Sarantos eventually does appear, it's as Connie's grandmother-- and delivers some of the record's most telling couplets, lamenting the capriciousness of age ("Her gorgeous red-brown hair black/ When she turned 15 behind my back") and, to an extent, explaining the impetus behind the entire enterprise ("Well, we could talk about it, Connie/ But often, memories are better off sung/ Remember when I was young?").
Sarantos' voice is weird and spectacular, dripping with dramatic flair, richer than Eleanor's determinably flat intones, and more obviously enthralled with the material. Deep and vaguely creaky, with just enough quake to emphasize the gravity of her story, Sarantos' pipes are thick and androgynous, heavy with the weight of hindsight-- appropriately, they age as the record plods onward, and by the closing track, Sarantos sounds exhausted and beaten. Eleanor's role, vocally, is less clear: For the most part, she embodies her grandmother's younger self-- the self-ascribed voice-of-the-moment-- but she does so without immediacy or aplomb, leaving the two vocal lines too distinct to convincingly articulate the same story.
Meanwhile, the band does its best to incorporate Matthew's instrumental diddles, with varying success. "We Wrote Letters Everyday" uses upright piano to recreate long-lost love letters; it's a coy, earnest device, protecting the sanctity of the form. "Who knows what we wrote/ And what they said/ But this is probably how they read," Sarantos muses, followed by alternating bits of dark, longing piano and sprightly keyboards. Later, breaking down the voices of the priests at her wedding ("They all had fine voices/ But, and I mean this respectfully, they didn't match pitch," Eleanor clucks), Sarantos commands, "Listen!"-- and we're rewarded with an off-key, disharmonious keyboard mess that's perfectly logical in the context of the story, but, taken independently, makes for supremely crappy listening. So goes the whole of the record-- the music is sharp and grating, too reliant on narrative nuance, and unsure of its own role.
Thus, the central problem of Rehearsing My Choir: It's a spectacular experiment, groundbreaking and perverse, bloated with possibilities and prime for parsing. But its practical function is unclear. No matter how open your mind, how welcome to art-without-directions you may be, it's difficult to consume Rehearsing My Choir without taking some kind of quasi-academic, cultural studies stance, reachable only after hours of careful, dedicated, uninterrupted listening: The emotional components are in place, but willfully (and successfully) obscured behind obtuse instrumentation and overdone wordplay. You can pick it apart, but can you dance to it, roll around on the floor with it, weep to it under your favorite blanket? This is not to say that art should be easy or instant or utilitarian-- but it should be penetrable, purposeful. And somewhere along the way, the Friedbergers got all chewed up and swallowed by their own experiment. | 2005-10-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-10-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | October 24, 2005 | 4 | 1764ca60-48a1-486a-9cba-0ef4251b2357 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
Met with confusion back in 2001, just nine months after the landmark Kid A, Amnesiac can take its rightful place among Radiohead's classics. | Met with confusion back in 2001, just nine months after the landmark Kid A, Amnesiac can take its rightful place among Radiohead's classics. | Radiohead: Amnesiac: Special Collectors Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13407-amnesiac-special-collectors-edition/ | Amnesiac: Special Collectors Edition | You've released a series of masterpieces in a row, each more challenging and rewarding than the last. You're being called the greatest band in the world, and many want you to become the biggest. You've been charged with uniting and possibly leading a large group of listeners who spent the late-1990s exploring some combination of the outré genres of post-rock, IDM, exotica, Tropicália, and French house; the emotionally resonant yet textural sounds of artists like Björk, the Verve, Beck, Stereolab, and Spiritualized; and the once-potent but now flagging spheres of rave, jungle, and techno. In short, there's a hell of a lot of pressure on you.
Whether prescient or just fortunate, Radiohead never had to create a new set of songs under the weight of these expectations. Instead, they followed the instant-classic Kid A with what they had planned to do from the start: Relatively quickly issue another set of songs recorded at the same time, a lengthy studio-bound period that ate up much of 2000.
Appearing nine months after Kid A, Amnesiac faced an uphill climb as steep as the icy mountains that adorned the earlier record's cover. And so it was that the record was met with derisive "Kid B" jokes, sniffed at as pretentious, or considered the work of a band that had moved a little too far to the left. In the face of choosing between the forward-looking sounds of Radiohead and the revivalism hailed as the New Rock Revolution, a lot of listeners and critics chose the easy way out. Eventually, later in the decade, artists like the Knife, Animal Collective, Liars, and LCD Soundsystem would carry the mantle of blending genres and upsetting listener expectations in rewarding ways. But in 2001, in an era when the radio and MTV were still the primary delivery systems for new music-- and after the majors felt burned by electronica, or by U2 and Smashing Pumpkins' ahead-of-the-game attempts to experiment with electronics in a stadium-rock setting-- creatively ambitious guitar music was still considered a commercial misstep.
Amnesiac was in some ways another leap beyond Kid A, an album that already was heavily influenced by experimental electronic music, 20th century classical, and ambient music, and often featured the manipulation of singer Thom Yorke's voice and found Jonny Greenwood ditching his guitar for a compositional electronic instrument called the Ondes Martenot. To a generation raised on Pearl Jam and Oasis, it wasn't always easy listening.
Three other things handicapped the record from the go: First, the belief that, because these songs were released after those on Kid A, the band felt they were inferior, which has never been the case. Second, in order to ensure Amnesiac's summer 2001 release, Kid A wasn't promoted in a traditional manner: No singles were officially pulled from the record, and no videos were created. The band commissioned a series of online "blips," short films that preceded the record's release, but because the LP wasn't being milked for extra product it appeared to be a unique, complete piece unsullied by scrupulous promotion or overexposure. If you wanted to listen to Kid A, you listened to the CD, at a time of your choosing, generally front to back. As Rob Mitchum said in his review yesterday, for many, it was virtually the last record they engaged with in this way.
Amnesiac, by contrast, was promoted with singles, which gave it an aura of both ordinariness compared to Kid A and gave the impression that the band itself, threatening even then to dismantle the received wisdom about how to record, promote, and release music in the digital age, had caved to the wishes of their label.
More than all that, however, Amnesiac is the first album I can remember most everyone I know getting online in bits and pieces. In the slipstream between encoding mp3s and records leaking in full, songs would tend to dribble out one by one. For a record like Amnesiac, this was particularly disadvantageous. The word on Kid A was already that it flowed so perfectly as an album (which is half-true: Like Daft Punk's Discovery, also out that year, its first half does. But then each CD featured a palate-cleansing instrumental and a more traditional second half which, other than their respective finales, could have been arranged in arguably any order.)
For Amnesiac, the tracklisting is important because of the tension it creates rather than the comfortable way in which it flows. As a result, there are a number of songs that work as experiments or filling between more traditional pieces, and these tracks' power is heightened when you listen to the record straight through. When you've spent 30 minutes to download a song, you don't want to hear something like Robert Fripp homage "Hunting Bears" or leftfield excursions like "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" or "Like Spinning Plates". They work just fine as standalone songs to my mind, but many in 2001, upon first encountering them, felt cheated. No more so than with the band's decision to release a second version of Kid A's "Morning Bell". At the peak of the bloated CD era, when a record is already a "mere" 44 minutes long, spending three of those precious minutes re-working a song from your previous album wasn't a popular move.
Yet despite the supposed arm's-length coldness of Amnesiac, it's an emotionally resonant and often very warm record. When the group aims for rich, tonal undercurrents of sound beneath swelling, heart-lifting arrangements, on Amnesiac the songs are less likely to be buffered by electronic crackles and pops or swirling strings. The difference is most notable in that second version of "Morning Bell", but pick any of the album's more glacial, atmospheric songs and you have the blueprint for the band today. "Pyramid Song" and "You and Whose Army?" surely, but even rhythmic, vibrant songs like "I Might Be Wrong" and "Dollars & Cents" sound like the itchy, impatient way in which Radiohead today balance their rock and electronic impulses.
As a whole, the friction within a song like "I Might Be Wrong" is played out on a grand scale, heightened by some of Yorke's more aggressive lyrics. After the evocative, often lonesome and disconnected lyrics of Kid A, Amnesiac's snap more clearly into place and often are pointed or defensive. "You and Whose Army?" and "Knives Out" on their surface carry tinges of violence, while elsewhere Yorke pleads for people "to get off [his] case" or threatens to "crack your little souls."
The strains of paranoia that had run throughout Yorke's songs for a half-decade came most sharply into view on album closer, "Life in a Glasshouse", which oddly seems to predict the post-9/11 Bush administration's misguided warmongering (in Iraq), belief that patriotism is equated with obedience, and willingness to trade liberty if they believe it will bring security. The only song on Amnesiac recorded after the release of Kid A, it would also have been the only song recorded after the election of Bush, and with its stately, funereal New Orleans jazz arrangement it provides an earthy, traditional close to the forward-looking Kid A/Amnesiac.
Released again, with its grab bag of B-sides-- some more interesting than lovable, but all worth hearing-- and a few songs recorded in a Paris studio (all reconstructed enough to make them worthwhile, if a bit sterile at times in this environment), Amnesiac can ideally take its rightful place among Radiohead's acknowledged classics. More than Kid A-- and maybe more than any other LP of its time-- Amnesiac is the kickoff of a messy, rewarding era in which rather than owning records that were of a piece, we listen and engage with a wide variety of sounds in jumbled, sometimes confusing ways. And Amnesiac sounds like what the dawn of the mp3 era sounded like: disconnected, self-aware, tense, eclectic, head-turning-- an overload of good ideas inhibited by rules, restrictions, and conventional wisdom. | 2009-08-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-08-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | August 26, 2009 | 9.5 | 176e55ff-cc1b-463f-8455-8179d5c4d9cb | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
When Low emerged from snowy Duluth, Minnesota with their 1994 Kramer-produced debut, I Could Live in Hope, their trudging funeral ... | When Low emerged from snowy Duluth, Minnesota with their 1994 Kramer-produced debut, I Could Live in Hope, their trudging funeral ... | Low: Things We Lost in the Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4892-things-we-lost-in-the-fire/ | Things We Lost in the Fire | When Low emerged from snowy Duluth, Minnesota with their 1994 Kramer-produced debut, I Could Live in Hope, their trudging funeral marches, sparse instrumentation, and Royal Albert Hall production values were strikingly fresh. Though they were preceded in the slowcore movement by earlier innovators like Galaxie 500 and Codeine, it was Low that defined the genre's sound.
Of course, by their third album, 1996's The Curtain Hits the Cast, the formula began to wear thin. New producer Steve Fisk brought little to the trio's sound, which remained virtually unchanged. While Low turned out a few great songs on the record-- namely, "Anon," "Over the Ocean," and "Lust"-- the near-Canadians failed to branch out, save for the 15-minute jam session "Do You Know How to Waltz?"
Low began loosely experimenting on 1998's Songs for a Dead Pilot EP, but returned to less adventurous songwriting the following year with the full-length Secret Name. The album sported crisper, less dramatic production, but failed to deviate from the concept the band had begun with five years earlier. Regardless, the songs were of a similar caliber to those on previous outings, and a whole legion of new fans sprung up.
Most newcomers haven't grown tired of Low's penchant for lethargy, since, to this day, few bands have attempted what the three have already perfected. The closest runners-up may be New York's Ida; the two bands are often considered contemporaries within the same genre. But this comparison belies one simple backbone fact: Low rarely force themselves to sound beautiful. Instead, they focus on building tension and atmosphere around sloth-paced pop songs, while Ida witlessly water down their own country/folk influences with syrupy strings and gaudy "prettiness." Vanity has never been Low's concern, and on Things We Lost in the Fire, their humility has never been so affecting.
The opening track features a double-timed, pounding snare, a basic descending chord structure, and the gratingly "nice" refrain, "You bought some sweet/ Sweet/ Sweet/ Sweet Sunflowers." But a more attentive listen reveals a new lyrical direction. They've toned down the ambiguity and opted for creepy surrealism: "When they found your body/ Giant x's on your eyes/ And with your half of the ransom/ You bought some sweet sunflowers/ And gave in to the night."
Even if the British EP hadn't been available since last year, "Dinosaur Act" would stand out as the obvious single. Mimi Parker's tiny snare drum is squashed beneath pummeling tympani like the song's prehistoric namesake, as frontman Alan Sparhawk closes the song's final chorus with a shouted "Dinosaur!"
But Things We Lost in the Fire's finest moments come just as the album draws to a close. On "Like a Forest," the band dig themselves out of their somber rut to briefly uplift; the track is paced at nearly twice the speed of their other pieces, and seems generally optimistic, if lyrically vague. "Like a Forest" is filled out with an economy-size string section produced to sound incredibly dense. But rather than overwhelming the song with soaring drama, the strings are incorporated conservatively low in the mix, and generate a warm hum for the sake of ambience. Meanwhile, a lone plinking piano note keeps pace alongside Parker's snapping percussion. Were "Like a Forest" the only Low song you'd ever heard, it's unlikely you'd suspect its somewhat psychedelic chord structure and absolutely engaging, see-sawing vocals were the product of the progenitors of slowcore.
"In Metal" is a simply crushing Parker-sung ode to she and Sparhawk's new baby, Hollis. Parker's chilling voice, as she confesses her hopeless longing for the child to stay small forever, simultaneously attains both heartbreakingly desperation and jubilance: "Partly hate to see you grow/ And just like your baby shoes/ Wish I could keep your little body/ In metal." There's a bizarre David Lynch quality to the concept of immortalizing a baby in some kind of Han Solo freeze that prevents the song from crossing over into blatant sentimentalism. But Parker's affection for the child, who can be heard squeaking at low levels during the song's first verse, is not feigned. The song serves as a flawless finale, to the point that it can alter your view of the album as a whole.
In truth, the whole of Things We Lost in the Fire rarely equals the impact of "In Metal," and at many points, even floats out of immediate consciousness to dwell in pits of mediocrity. "Whitetail," despite spectacular brushed cymbal loops and effects, flounders aimlessly for more than five dragging minutes; "Laser Beam" is beyond minimal, with just Parker singing quietly over pausing guitar; "Embrace" is painfully melodramatic as Parker spouts such ridiculousness as "I fell down the stairs/ I wished I were dead"; and the 49 second-long untitled track that precedes "In Metal" plays like a manufacturing error that accidentally caught a portion of labelmates Windy & Carl's Consciousness.
Still, Things We Lost in the Fire's high points are, without question, the best they've done. An endless list of studio guests-- including ex-Soul Cougher Mark D'Gli Antoni on piano and sampler, trumpeting by Bob Weston, and impeccable production by one Steve Albini-- certainly add to the enjoyment. But above all else, it's Low's willingness to finally live up to their Kranky cohorts by experimenting with ambient textures, eerie tension, and advanced songwriting methods that saves this from being yet another I Could Live in Hope. Here's hoping they get even weirder. | 2001-01-21T01:01:40.000-05:00 | 2001-01-21T01:01:40.000-05:00 | Rock | Kranky | January 21, 2001 | 8.7 | 17711da4-b044-400f-9e69-5df69f16c4e7 | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
The chatter surrounding Myrkur, the once-mysterious one-woman black metal act that was recently revealed to be Ex-Cops co-leader Amalie Bruun, has roared and raged in the heavy music community before a lick of her debut EP was heard by most. So: how does it sound? | The chatter surrounding Myrkur, the once-mysterious one-woman black metal act that was recently revealed to be Ex-Cops co-leader Amalie Bruun, has roared and raged in the heavy music community before a lick of her debut EP was heard by most. So: how does it sound? | Myrkur: Myrkur | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19808-myrkur-myrkur/ | Myrkur | Sorry, Soused, Blake, and Inquisition: With only one song, the one-woman black metal band Myrkur became the flashpoint for extreme metal in 2014. Even before the release of “Nattens Barn,” a six-minute slide between celestial vocals, blast beats, and a coda that combines the two, onlookers began speculating about the identity of Relapse’s new signee. She was named after the Icelandic word for “darkness” (and possibly an early Sigur Rós song?) and had roots in Denmark, but little else seemed certain. She was a model from Los Angeles, some insisted, a mere marketing ploy from one of metal’s major labels to create the heavy world’s Lana Del Rey; others maintained, though, that Relapse was right—that, as their press releases asserted, she had indeed “emerg[ed] from the darkness of Scandinavia” and did possess “a distinct sense of Nordic isolation.” The debate fomented controversy on message boards, music blogs, and their itinerant comment threads. People lodged researched guesses as to Myrkur’s identity, extoled her as black metal’s possible popular savior, and said inordinately hateful things about her label, her gender, and her heritage—all, of course, without hearing very much of her fastidiously rudimentary seven-song, self-titled debut EP.
As many have suggested, Myrkur is indeed Amalie Bruun, a successful Danish model who has lived and worked in America for many years and co-leads Brooklyn buzz-pop band Ex-Cops. She’s made pleasant solo singles and albums and worked for Chanel and Scorsese, appeared in that Lonely Island music video alongside Michael Bolton and led Elle on a shopping tour of Brooklyn—all things omitted from the project's initial reveal. After months of conjecture, Myrkur’s publicist finally confirmed the bandleader’s identity a week before the release of the EP, information that went public only the day the record was issued.
“I don’t think any record label prefers an artist who doesn’t want to do any press,” Bruun said in the interview that revealed her identity. “But it was my requirement or I didn’t wish to release the EP at all.” Maybe that’s right, but doesn’t it seem suspect that months of careful, chatter-inducing concealment ended on the targeted date—a break in the dam of discussion, meant to lift the once-mysterious project into circulation again? This perfect scenario feels more like good marketing than pedestrian coincidence.
But the dust-up and release plan, turns out, are much ado about very little, at least for now. Myrkur isn’t a masterful release full of grand visions and endless intrigue; rather, it’s an occasionally charged listen that is, at best, more confident in its promise than its purpose. Bruun’s underlying approach is a rather simple one—bait and lace primitive black metal with pretty textures featuring a multi-tracked choir of one. Opener “Ravnens Banner” unfurls dreamy harmonies, stretched by echo that suggests the granite walls of a great cathedral. After a minute, her flat-toned electric guitar—a manipulated sheet of sheer static—hangs atop racing drums, credited to Swedish friend Rex Myrnur. The pace staggers, speeds and, at one point, stops altogether, returning for a mid-tempo climax where Bruun’s own lofty tone hangs like drapes over the livid arrangement.
There’s variation, of course, like the placid acoustic-and-electric waltz of “Frosne” and the brief, vocals-only postlude “Ulvesangen.” During the tempestuous “Må Du Brænde i Helvede,” Bruun even screams, bellows, and grunts, imploring a sort of dark sorcery that she most often leaves to the instruments. But by and large, Bruun looks for compulsion in contrast and, ultimately, the consolidation of these disparate elements. That’s epitomized by “Latvian Fegurð”, which flips between an angelic introduction, a bruising body, and a noisy onslaught—moves that comingle in the song’s final minute. She even adds a bit of alt-rock melancholy (or Mellon Collie, as it were) during “Dybt i Skoven.”
This combination of madness and majesty in black metal is nothing new; Bruun cites Ulver as a touchstone, and that’s something they’ve always done well. Bruun dutifully touts and embraces the form’s longstanding roots in and fascination with classical composers, too. More recently, pillow-topped acts like Wolves in the Throne Room, Deafheaven, and Alcest have attained relative popularity by overwhelming the listener on simultaneous fronts. The real frustration with Myrkur, then, is not the whiff of marketing chicanery or publicity deception; it’s that these songs offer skeletal suggestions of what’s come before them, with the barest of bones doing nothing to support the spirit and vigor that gives the best of this ilk its strength. You get the sense that, lifelong metal fan or not, Bruun is simply trying on these ideas as a musician. She’s yet to commit to living in them. The only thing overwhelming about Bruun’s black metal is the prevailing sense of being underwhelmed.
Remember, though, this is a debut EP in a crowded, active, contentious field, and there are moments here that peak beyond only promise. Yes, Bruun is a professional musician and model, and her premature hype has been powered by a large PR campaign and record label. And no, these seven songs don’t warrant the hubbub they’ve created. But moments of Myrkur move beyond narrative intrigue, hinting at more than this start can deliver. Let’s hope Bruun’s sudden exposure, intentional or not, won’t prevent her from pursuing them. | 2014-09-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-09-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | September 19, 2014 | 5.9 | 1774465f-fc86-4c55-a73f-9cb53f112ed3 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
After experiments in free jazz and psychedelia, the UK producer reckons with the rave music of his youth. It’s a utopian project that melds dance music’s forms with an organic sensibility. | After experiments in free jazz and psychedelia, the UK producer reckons with the rave music of his youth. It’s a utopian project that melds dance music’s forms with an organic sensibility. | James Holden: Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/james-holden-imagine-this-is-a-high-dimensional-space-of-all-possibilities/ | Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities | Drop the needle at any given point on James Holden’s fourth album, and you might think the music is building toward carefully orchestrated catharsis: the moment when the big melody finally drops in, or the various rhythms cohere into a single body-moving lockstep, and the crowd loses its collective mind. There were plenty of those moments in Holden’s earlier work, when he was a young DJ making sweeping trance and progressive techno anthems. But time and time again on Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities, the climax turns out to be an illusion. A filter sweep reaches its apex to reveal the full glowing resonance of a particular synth, and you realize the pulse of its chord progression has been working at cross purposes with the rest of the track, pulling you away from its patient groove rather than toward it. A strobe-lit rave piano arrives just in time for the drums to drop out entirely.
Holden has said that the album is his attempt to recreate the sense of hearing, as a teenager, far-off pirate radio broadcasts of early UK dance music, the soundtracks to a woolly and utopian rave scene that had largely dried up by the time he was old enough to make music professionally and had to settle for more slickly commercial sounds. Thematically, this is not so different from the territory where Burial has made his career, summoning the atmospheres of emptied-out warehouse parties and solitary walks home. Rather than mourning a paradise lost, Holden instead focuses on the joy and freedom his younger self imagined those ravers must have been feeling. Every individual sound is as bright and welcoming as can be. It’s the way that these sounds cohere—or more often, refuse to—that suggests a certain distance. The album’s new-agey title may provoke eye rolls in some listeners, but the first word poignantly grounds it. If we have to imagine that this is a place where everything is possible, it probably isn’t in reality.
By the time of Holden’s first album, 2006’s The Idiots Are Winning, he was already dislodging himself from the club; his third, 2017’s The Animal Spirits, looked like a final break, with Holden leading a full live band on excursions into free jazz and Terry Riley-ish minimalism. His full-lengths have also reflected a growing interest in oblique, free-flowing rhythms, seemingly inspired by the unpredictable complexity of the natural world rather than the mechanistic precision of much dance music. While High Dimensional Space on one level represents a return to the timbres of clubland, it retains this organic sensibility. Acoustic instruments like saxophone and tabla punctuate “Common Land” and “Contains Multitudes,” respectively. The latter also plays with your expectation that the sounds of electronic dance music will stick to their own narrowly defined bands of the frequency range and roles in the larger arrangement. One particular keyboard ostinato begins in the middle, and traverses down to sub-bass depths and up to piercing heights over the course of the track. Listening closely is like watching a time lapse of a tree’s roots bursting through the sidewalk.
The quality of the rhythms across the album, each developing concurrently at its own pace rather than in strict alignment, mirrors the fragmentary timelines of nature as well. “Trust Your Feet” comes tantalizingly close to ecstatic release, its arpeggios percolating onward past the juncture where they might have locked in with the other instruments to deliver a satisfying payoff. Witnessing waterfalls and sunsets, there’s no single perfect moment when all the elements come together and make their mysterious relationships clear; this music works similarly, absorbing you in the whole of its trajectory rather than any specific waypoint.
The lack of definitive resolutions can make the album at times difficult to really love, rather than just appreciate or admire, despite the music’s unflagging optimism. The rare moments when everything does come together are the ones that move me the most: the tumbling snare drum and burbling modular synth of “Continuous Revolution,” rushing together toward a horizon we never quite glimpse; the droning violins and unexpectedly funky bass guitar of “Worlds Collide, Mountains Form,” which sound a bit like what might happen if the ancient architects of Stonehenge decided to form a jam band. In between these set pieces, the full enjoyment of Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities requires some imagination of your own, a sort of listening past the vaporous surface of the music. Like teenage Holden at the radio, you may sense a magical world there, just beyond what you can hear. | 2023-04-06T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-06T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Border Community | April 6, 2023 | 7.8 | 1775fc3c-1f1d-496f-9fff-6c8f8f0bfd0e | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The Australian producer built his career on pop accessibility, but his latest EP—featuring Pusha T and Moses Sumney—lacks the spark to make his pop music memorable. | The Australian producer built his career on pop accessibility, but his latest EP—featuring Pusha T and Moses Sumney—lacks the spark to make his pop music memorable. | Flume: Skin Companion EP II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22965-flume-skin-companion-ep-ii/ | Skin Companion EP II | The chasm that once separated mainstream electronic music and Top 40 has all but vanished. A few years ago, a captive festival goer might have been a producer's target audience; now the casual radio listener is the true prize. It's the difference between Skrillex, one of electronic music's most prominent artists, making “Bangarang,” a 2x-platinum-certified single from 2012 that didn't register with the average commuter, and forging “Where Are Ü Now?” a Justin Bieber number that guaranteed a primo spot in the great hall of pop.
The Australian producer Flume (born Harley Edward Streten), built his career on a different type of accessibility. His songs can be easy to fall into, but they don't usually lasso listeners and ensnare them like an undeniable airwave triumph. Flume's 2012 self-titled debut, an oasis of lite house and loungeable hip-hop, offered refuge from the fusillade of trap beats sweeping through electronic music at the time. His second full-length, Skin, released four years later, set aside big-room lullabies to emphasize big-name collaborations, but there was a reticent quality to it. Flume worked with rappers on the declarative, bruising end of the spectrum—Vic Mensa, Vince Staples—but didn't make the kind of songs that really knocked you on your ass. He enlisted singers—Beck, Tove Lo—to create pop songs that were neither sugary nor off-kilter. He spoke of “mak[ing] experimental music accessible” and “fus[sing] the abrasive and the beautiful,” but seemed to sell both sides short.
Flume patrols the same liminal zone on Skin Companion EP II. He leads with an uppercut, a track that's supposed to slug its way into your subconscious: “Enough” features rapping from the stolid veteran Pusha T, and the beat shovels a stream of noises—hollow wood tones, staticky crumbles—at the listener to stimulate a fight-or-flight response. But the song plays as an attempt to redo Lil Uzi Vert's “Uzi” and extract the magic from its alluring rumble. The central riffs of the two tracks are similar, as are the liquidating blots of bass and the drum breaks that “Uzi”-producer Charlie Heat also inserted into Kanye West's “All Day.” “Enough” never surges beyond emulation, any abrasiveness blunted by the feeling that this is an academic beat-making exercise.
The rest of Skin Companion II veers away from the rough stuff to return to the modes Flume explored on his first album. “Depth Charge” will do fine as a bridge towards the more peaceful side of a live set. “Fantastic,” a collaboration with Dave Bayley of Glass Animals, is a colorless mid-tempo number with a clomping drum pattern designed to make heads bob. The most promising tune on the EP is “Weekend,” a reverie with extended beat-less portions. Though Moses Sumney's presence only registers as the song begins to wind down, his soothing tone is enough to summon the floating, comatose feeling. Flume doesn't want to be pinned down, and he's intent on proving his ability to make functional music for multiple scenarios. But malleability is only really powerful when it's accompanied by memorability, and the latter remains out of reach for Flume. | 2017-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mom+Pop / Future Classic | February 28, 2017 | 5.8 | 17770cf7-535e-485e-b037-7c0354a3776c | Elias Leight | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elias-leight/ | null |
Rhino continues its expansion of the Nuggets brand with a 4xCD look at the fertile Sunset Strip and other SoCal musical locales of 1965-68. | Rhino continues its expansion of the Nuggets brand with a 4xCD look at the fertile Sunset Strip and other SoCal musical locales of 1965-68. | Various Artists: Where the Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13532-where-the-action-is-los-angeles-nuggets-1965-1968/ | Where the Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968 | At some point in the mid 1960s, the kids started hanging around on Sunset Strip, which at the time was still home to many of the restaurants that once boasted famous Hollywood patrons. To curtail the invading counterculture, the city imposed a strict curfew, and cops clashed with longhairs in a series of small riots that galvanized the hippies rather than dispersed them. The skirmishes inspired Buffalo Springfield to write "For What It's Worth" and Four-Leaf Productions to bankroll the teensploitation flick Riot on Sunset Strip, featuring a theme song by local group the Standells. It begins mundanely enough: "I'm going down to the Strip tonight, I'm not on a stay-home trip tonight," sings drummer Dick Dodd over Tony Valentino's snarling guitar lick. But the song's hard beat is more of a billy-club swing than a hip shake, and the lyrics become increasingly serious, as he laments the Strip has become "just a place for black-and-white cars to race. It's causin' a riot!" More pointed and angry than the square film that bears it title, the song depicts Los Angeles as a tensed city on the brink of chaos and violence, and the Standells could just as well have been singing about Watts or any of the race riots that made the curfew clashes seem polite and placid by comparison.
"Riot on Sunset Strip" kicks off Rhino's 4xCD set Where the Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968, setting the scene for the 100 tracks that follow. Local bands were drawing inspiration from the sights all around them, whether it was sirens on a cop car or sirens dancing in the clubs. For them, L.A. was the center of the universe, if not the entire universe itself, and these groups-- some of whom, in true Nuggets fashion, lasted no more than a 45 or two-- established a particular dialogue with the city that projected well beyond Sunset Strip and reverberated around the Valley. Arthur Lee details just such a trippy travelogue on "You I'll Be Following", a bouncy number from Love's debut with killer harmonies and his electric vocal. Kim Fowley's hysteric "Underground Lady" tries to capture the scene in the surreal slang of the times, and on "Los Angeles", one-time Byrd Gene Clark calls it the "city of the doomed," although you might swear he's singing "city of the dunes."
Despite its appearance of insularity, the scene was not a closed circuit. In 1965, the Byrds charted a hit with a cover of "Mr. Tambourine Man", and their then-new folk-rock not only energized local musicians, inspiring scores of imitators and innovators, but attracted the attention of listeners, DJs, and suits across the country. Where the Action Is! picks up around this time, introducing the Byrds with "You Movin'", a sophisticated throwaway from their early "preflyte" sessions. You can hear their influence throughout the box set, as other musicians put their stamp on the sound, mixing it with go-go rhythms, psychedelic mindmelts, art-rock excursions, canyon folk, and pretty much anything else that came to hand. Including bagpipes.
A diverse collection of tunes that have little else in common beyond geography, Where the Action Is! depicts the L.A. scene as impossibly busy and variegated. The first two discs collect songs from some of the progenitors of the sound, who played frequently in the clubs and taverns that eventually took over the Strip. The desert eccentricities of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band's "Zig Zag Wanderer" jostle with the proto-flower-power sounds of the Seeds' "Tripmaker" and the southwestern flair of the Bobby Fuller Four's "Baby, My Heart". The Rising Sons' "Take a Giant Step" sounds self-propelled and gritty, at distinct odds with the Palace Guard's "All Night Long" and Sonny & Cher's "It's Gonna Rain", which sound stuffy by comparison. The Strip found room for all these disparate acts, who honed their distinctive sounds through live performance before demanding audiences.
As the second disc moves beyond those clubs to document the bands around the Valley and throughout the Inland Empire, Where the Action Is! grows even heavier, more adventurous, and more diverse: There's a considerable Latino presence here, such as Thee Midniters rumbling through their energetic "Jump, Jive & Harmonize" and the Premiers begging you to "Get on This Plane". Acts like the Chymes and Penny Arkade offer very different takes on the Strip beat, suggesting the vast difference between the artists there and elsewhere. If the first half of the set emphasizes performance, the third and fourth discs examine the evolution of the studio as an instrument, whether as an agent for Thorinshield's psychedelic exploration on "Daydreaming" or as a tool for beefing up rock songs like Keith Allison's "Action, Action, Action". There's an even wider range of sounds, obviously, although the songs typically lack the hard-edged grooves of the Strip bands: Jan and Dean's "Fan Tan" and the Yellow Balloon's "Yellow Balloon" even sound like commercial jingles, and Rick Nelson's kitschy "Marshmallow Skies" comes across as a targeted cred grab, despite his avowed advocacy of the new folk rock.
But there's an even larger narrative traced by these discs, which show how the sounds that developed in clubs and bars were adopted by more ambitious and at times already established artists. There are familiar, sometimes unexpected names on the fourth disc: Tim Buckley and Randy Newman were both influenced by this scene, and their songs show little-heard aspects of their work. Peter Fonda and Hugh Masekela collaborated to record Gram Parsons' "November Night" (which Parsons himself never recorded), and Where the Action Is! persuasively argues for the Strip's impact on the Beach Boys by including an alternate take of "Heroes and Villains", whose menacing sound bite-- "You're under arrest!"-- sounds especially loaded in this context. Together, these four discs give the sense of an exciting rock underground arising and mutating and interacting with and changing the mainstream-- not just locally but nationally and internationally. It'd be 10 years before L.A.'s scene would regain this level of excitement and punk purpose, but that's another box set altogether. | 2009-10-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2009-10-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Rhino | October 6, 2009 | 7.8 | 177758c9-62ad-4296-93ef-8d244708e6b5 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Atlanta rapper does not go pop on this release, choosing instead to dive deep into his unique blend of horror tales and unsettling production. | The Atlanta rapper does not go pop on this release, choosing instead to dive deep into his unique blend of horror tales and unsettling production. | Young Nudy: DR. EV4L | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-nudy-dr-ev4l/ | DR. EV4L | DR. EV4L could have been the Young Nudy album where he decided it was time to find a comfy spot on those Spotify playlists and aim for the big bucks. Who would have blamed him? He’s had critical acclaim; he’s got a loyal fanbase; he has the support of both a major label and his hometown Atlanta, the most powerful city in all of rap. Because of his laid-back flow, his cruel lyrics could have worked on beats that were a bit brighter, maybe even with a hook sung by one of the many pop rap stars his city has birthed. Both his cousin 21 Savage and his inspiration Gucci Mane did this without completely sacrificing the menace that laced their early records. Ultimately, Young Nudy gives that pathway a fat middle finger, and if his older mixtapes felt like slasher movies, this one is The Shining.
That tone is set by the production, which is almost entirely done by Nudy’s in-house Atlanta producer Coupe. On “Revenge,” the combination of the ominous piano melody and slowly thudding hi-hats is less traditionally scary than it is tense and uncomfortable. It sounds like what would play right before everything went to shit, which happens to be Young Nudy’s sweet spot. His enjoyment of the pain and punishment of others would be disturbing if it wasn’t so fun. And yes, Nudy almost gleeful rapping about home invasions, chain snatchings, and chasing down helpless enemies like he’s Liam Neeson is messed up, but if you’re looking for upstanding morals, a Young Nudy tape is the wrong place to search.
In comparison to Nudy’s more popular work with the superproducer Pi’erre Bourne, this is entirely different. The appeal of their work was the clash between Nudy’s maniacally laughing supervillain persona and Pi’erre’s murky, yet airy Nintendo 64 beats. Nothing is sugar-coated when Nudy and Coupe are together; it’s pure wickedness. “And I’m tryna catch a body, kill a bitch nigga with no feelings,” he raps leisurely on “Walking Dead,” where the beat would suit an exorcism.
If anything, he suffers from not detailing the brutality enough. He repeatedly shouts, “Murder!” “Kill!” and “Rob!,” to the point where the words almost become meaningless. When he’s opposite G Herbo on “2Face,” it’s easy to notice Nudy’s one-dimensional lyricism. The Chicago rapper expertly weaves between wisely worded punchlines and short tales, while Nudy sort of monologues over the beat. It turns out fine since the album is kept tight, and Nudy excels in that one dimension. But there is one moment where Nudy reveals what turned him into this particular madman. “Always sayin’, ‘Go to school,’ but I got kicked out/Now I’m stuck in the street and my momma kicked me out,” he says on “Colombian Necktie.” That may sound like the typical rapper plight, but it does add a subtle layer to him.
The fear with Nudy’s course is that one day the repetitiveness of his raps will make them lose their luster, but today is not that day. DR. EV4L thrives because it embraces the sinister spirit of his music instead of making it accessible. You’re not going to find anything on Rap Caviar quite like it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | RCA / PDE | May 25, 2021 | 7.7 | 17797497-157f-4fdf-a68e-2204fe93be99 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Suede's first two albums, key documents of the music of 1990s Britain, are reissued with a generous helping of bonus material. | Suede's first two albums, key documents of the music of 1990s Britain, are reissued with a generous helping of bonus material. | Suede: Suede [Deluxe Edition] / Dog Man Star [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15493-suede-deluxe-edition-dog-man-star-deluxe-edition/ | Suede [Deluxe Edition] / Dog Man Star [Deluxe Edition] | There is music on these albums. Obviously. The reason I'm saying that up front is that discussion of the first two Suede albums is invariably framed in a discussion of the bigger picture, both in terms of what was happening in British rock in the early 1990s and in terms of the discord within the band, particularly during 1994. There are good reasons for this. Suede were at the center of the conversation that gave us the Britpop narrative that so dominated the UK in the mid-90s. They were the band on the cover of the issue of Select that invented Britpop as a concept, they were massively hyped before they even released anything, and their debut album was the fastest-selling in British history. They were ignored in the United States and ridiculously had to change their name in this country to the London Suede after a lawsuit by an obscure lounge singer.
This stuff is all important to understanding who Suede were-- the music they made, especially on their first three albums, is tied closely to their story as a band-- but I really want to make sure that as I make my way through that story, the music doesn't slip to the side of the conversation. Stories and meta-cultural narratives aside, the music is what we have to listen to now, and there is a lot of great music spread over these elaborate reissues. The whole band, including once-estranged original guitarist Bernard Butler, was involved in putting together these packages, each of them a 2xCD/DVD featuring the original album, demos, unreleased outtakes, every contemporary B-side (plus one non-album A-side), music videos, interviews and live performances. The band's entire output, with the notable exception of three early unreleased tracks, "Be My God", "Art", and "Wonderful Sometimes", is now available on five very well-done reissues that include all of the original artwork for both the albums and the singles. They have curated their past well.
Consider the arena this band was entering when it debuted in May, 1992 with "The Drowners". The British rock world was dominated by two waning trends, shoegaze and Madchester, both of which emphasized sound and vibe over personality and pomp. And here Suede were, with a very bold, direct, and sexually charged song that had the swagger of glam rock and was focused on the voice of Brett Anderson, who was powerful and distinctive. Anderson's vocals had a little of Bowie and a little of Morrissey, but there was a lot more there than a simple swirling of influences. Here was a guy who could sing frankly about drug abuse and rough sex without plasticizing it or stylizing it-- actions had consequences in the world he created, and wild nights had mornings after, but he was careful not to tell you the moral of the story.
It wouldn't always be like that, but during the brief years Butler was still in the band, Anderson was at his best as both lyricist and vocalist. The band had a good rhythm section, too. Bassist Mat Osman is a subtle force in the band, playing melodic lines that keep the songs light on their feet, even when Simon Gilbert's drumming locks in on a stomping and otherwise heavy beat. When they matched up with Butler's guitar, they were nearly as charismatic as a trio as the guy who was singing for them. "The Drowners"-- which for all the early hype around the band (they were on the cover of Melody Maker a month before its release under the headline "The Best New Band in Britain") only charted at #49-- has a destructive energy to it that I can understand hearing as a clarion call in the musical climate of Britain in the early 90s. The opening drum stomp, soon joined by Butler's crunching, metallic riff, seems to announce the band as something different and exciting. It drips with sex before Anderson even opens his mouth.
"The Drowners" is joined by three other excellent singles on the band's self-titled debut. "Metal Mickey" was the band's only song to chart in the U.S. top 10, and it is one of their best-- Butler didn't play much conventional rhythm guitar, and this song is a good early example of how his shifting lead style complemented Anderson's vocal melodies. The singles reinforced the idea that Suede were a breath of fresh air, and even though they are fairly basic rock, the band still didn't sound quite like any of their contemporaries. And there are the album tracks as well, which showed them to be a band with considerable range. The interplay between Anderson's vocal and Butler's lead guitar on "Sleeping Pills" is like some sort of dance, and the band makes a convincing modern murder ballad on "She's Not Dead". And Mat Osman's bass does as much to drive the quieter songs as Butler's guitar.
Between albums, the band released a non-album single, "Stay Together", that signaled a shift in direction. By this point, Britpop was a real thing, at least as far as the UK music press was concerned, and Suede were being lumped in with Oasis, Blur, Cast, and a host of other bands that were being championed as the saviors of British rock. This horrified Anderson, who felt his band had very little to do with the laddish groups he was being mentioned in the same breath with, and it strengthened his resolve to move the band further away from conventional rock. Butler's relationship with the rest of the group was deteriorating; on the band's messy American tour in late 1993, he sometimes left the stage mid-gig, having a member of the Cranberries, who were opening, fill in for him. Anderson sequestered himself to write, and the songs he came up with were much darker and more introverted than anything on their mostly demonstrative debut.
By all accounts, the recording sessions for Dog Man Star, the band's masterpiece, were fraught with tension, and Butler often recorded separately, ultimately leaving the band before the album was completed. Whether that tension helped or hurt the album is debatable, but what's not in dispute is that the album is the band's very best work, completely transcending the Britpop wave they'd supposedly helped launch. In many ways, it's more like an album that might have been released in the 70s than in the 90s, and not just because of its heavy glam riffs and towering vocals. It does everything to its extreme, is unafraid of excess or bombast, and is well-structured to play as a cohesive work. From its eerily throbbing, weightless opener, "Introducing the Band", to the orchestral overload of its sweeping closer, "Still Life", there's not a moment on the album that doesn't feel in danger of breaking down, flying apart, or disappearing entirely.
It's a thrilling record. I can't think of anything that's been released since that has quite the same balance of elements. It was enormously risky, but the risk paid off with big returns. Where Butler did play, he played his most inspired parts. "New Generation", "We Are the Pigs", "Heroine", and "This Hollywood Life" thrash and churn; "The Asphalt World" caps its slow burn with a wild and lengthy instrumental coda; and "The Wild Ones" might be Suede's best single, its sweeping orchestration, vocals, and guitar parts coming together in fragile but perfect balance. The quieter songs are stunning. "Daddy's Speeding" ends in a torrent of static and sampled engine noises that sounds like the earth tearing open, and "The 2 of Us" is simply gorgeous, a devastatingly sad song that doesn't feel forced or morose.
The reissue appends full-length versions of "The Wild Ones" and "The Asphalt World" that are significantly longer, and they're worth hearing, as are most of the other outtakes. The demos that fill out the first discs after the albums are marginally interesting, but the essential inclusion on these sets is the B-sides, all of them, from every single the band released through early 1994 (some recorded after Butler left are on the Coming Up reissue). Suede made B-sides that a lot of bands would die to release as lead singles-- their Sci-Fi Lullabies compilation, now redundant, has long been considered an essential part of their discography, and for good reason. Here, you get the elastic snap of "Whipsnade", the stomp of "Killing of a Flash Boy", the breezy swagger of "Modern Boys", the majesty of "My Dark Star", the crystalline sadness of "The Living Dead", and the shimmer of "To the Birds" right alongside the albums, and they alone make these sets worth the price. Anderson even makes alternate tracklists in his liner notes for each album, which often swap out weaker album tracks for B-sides, and I can't really argue with any of his substitutions (dropping "The Power" for "My Dark Star" and "Black or Blue" for "The Living Dead" might have been the only way to make Dog Man Star better).
The DVDs are full of good stuff-- Suede comes with all of its charmingly dated music videos, and Dog Man Star has the concert projections for the band's 1994 tour, though that album's videos are oddly absent. Each set has two live performances-- and strangely, all but one appear to have been shot by audience members rather than professionally, though the sound is acceptable. They were a very good live band, but honestly, as with most bonus DVDs, these are likely to be watched a few times and shelved. It's not bad to have this stuff available, though. More importantly, the band's discography has been consolidated, and their first two albums feel more complete with the contemporary B-sides in tow. Suede were an important band, pivotal to what the 90s came to sound like in Britain, even if they distanced themselves from it. But Suede were also a great band, and these records still sound vital all these years later. | 2011-06-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-06-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | June 7, 2011 | 8.4 | 177be9d4-ebf2-41bb-b42f-91d217e3a284 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The prepared-piano specialist abandons the meticulous compositions of her previous albums, editing down improvisations and bejeweling them with layers of synthesizers and effects. | The prepared-piano specialist abandons the meticulous compositions of her previous albums, editing down improvisations and bejeweling them with layers of synthesizers and effects. | Kelly Moran: Ultraviolet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kelly-moran-ultraviolet/ | Ultraviolet | Musicians can be their own worst critics. Look no further than New York pianist and composer Kelly Moran, who, since 2010, has doggedly pursued her idiosyncratic vision of post-classical piano music through modern-dance soundtracks, concert recordings, and fusions of prepared piano and electronics. Her last album, 2017’s Bloodroot, was her most intensive study of the prepared piano’s mercurial sonics yet, earning acclaim from The New York Times as one of last year’s best classical pieces. But speaking to Pitchfork recently, she bemoaned its premeditated and belabored qualities. Composed “sitting at the piano with staff paper, writing every note down,” she said, it was “very much about how the harmonies and melodies sounded, not so much about how it felt to play the music.” Then she dealt the death blow: “It sounds like I’m trying really, really hard.”
On Ultraviolet, Moran puts down the pencil and goes with her gut. If Bloodroot was an exercise in cartography—plotting points, measuring distances—Ultraviolet is pure flow. Where Bloodroot bristled with bright, dissonant clusters, Ultraviolet is consonant and warm, with steady rhythms and reassuring harmonies. It is a spring rain rather than a freak hailstorm.
The album began taking shape during a bout of writer’s block last year. Putting notes on paper just wasn’t working, so “Fuck it,” she decided. She took the day off, headed for the woods, swam in the ocean. Taking a page from John Cage, she even got down on her haunches and listened, trying to key in to the rhythms and frequencies of nature. Something clicked. As Cage might have put it, her ears were now in excellent condition, and so, apparently, were here hands, because she headed back to her grand piano and spent the rest of the day improvising. The recordings felt refreshingly “unbridled and joyous.” She began paring them down, building collages, and painting on layers of synthesizer for atmosphere.
Given their shared origins, it makes sense that many of these seven tracks follow a similar trajectory. They mostly begin with a tentative, repetitive melodic figure in the right hand. A synthesized buzz begins to grow underneath. Brighter, hard-hammered sounds with the tone of a copper bell may flood into the mix. There are elements of Philip Glass in her cyclic motions and hints of Tim Hecker in the foggy glow. Her melodies do most of the work, moving in circles but frequently deviating from their path, carving new courses and seeking out new terrain. It’s a thoroughly Romantic take on minimalism, emphasizing not just the hypnotic nature of the patterns but also their restlessly expressive character.
Part of the pleasure of the prepared piano—an instrument that’s been treated by placing bits of metal, wood, or paper among the strings and hammers to create phantom rattles and clangs—is its unpredictability. A clarion note may lead to another that buzzes like a broken doorbell. Moran's compositions make the most of those contrasts, feeling them out and subtly emphasizing the muted overtones and inharmonics that are thrown off like soft sparks. The effect is particularly pronounced on “In Parallel,” where a crisp click occasionally leaps from one of the speakers, quietly interrupting the lulling reverie established by the synths or reverb or whatever that is swelling up from below like a deep black pool.
Leaping versus lulling: That’s the music’s motivating contradiction. “In Parallel” is one of the album’s most successful tracks because it exploits the tension between concord and discord. Moran’s playing here challenges the dominance of the overarching key as the sound becomes steam, notes trickling back down in rivulets of dissonance. In the 10-minute epic “Nereid,” an even more engrossing song that ventures further into atonality, the liquidity of her playing finally overwhelms the containers she’s created for it, spilling over and splashing out. The excess is thrilling. It’s here where Moran feels the most unfettered and uninhibited—not just balancing opposing forces, but reveling in their collision and savoring the way the frequencies fly, like raindrops buffeted by gusts of wind. | 2018-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Warp | November 5, 2018 | 7.6 | 177dc317-6bd4-400f-9e73-2a5850b8e7fc | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The music of ’70s Swedish group Träd, Gräs och Stenar (Trees, Grass, and Stones) emerged from a chemical reaction between two basic elements: rock'n'roll and Terry Riley. | The music of ’70s Swedish group Träd, Gräs och Stenar (Trees, Grass, and Stones) emerged from a chemical reaction between two basic elements: rock'n'roll and Terry Riley. | Träd, Gräs och Stenar: Djungelns Lag/Mors Mors/Kom Tillsammans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21704-trad-gras-stenar-djungelns-lagmors-morskom-tillsammans/ | Djungelns Lag/Mors Mors/Kom Tillsammans | The music of ’70s Swedish group Träd, Gräs och Stenar (Trees, Grass, and Stones) emerged from a chemical reaction between two basic elements: rock'n'roll and Terry Riley. The latter influence came first: when Riley visited Stockholm in the mid 60’s to perform his groundbreaking In C, it blew the mind of an art-school student named Bo Anders Persson. Inspired by Riley’s repetitive, long-form minimalism, Persson experimented with drones and tape manipulations, eventually bringing those ideas to a group he formed with fellow classmates called Pärson Sound.
It turned out Persson and his comrades were as interested in rock and roll as they were in the avant-garde. As they evolved through lineups and band names, that interest escalated. Morphing into Träd, Gräs och Stenar in 1969, they became a full-fledged rock band, with most of the artier experimentation stripped away in favor of lengthy, guitar-heavy jams. But the group’s extended, open-ended playing still carried the spirit of Riley’s “all-night flights.” Their songs might not have sounded like In C, but they could be just as expansive, indeterminant, and mind-blowing.
That expansiveness is essential to Träd, Gräs och Stenar’s magic. Though their sky-seeking grooves also work in small doses, they usually need lots of time and space to fully explore and develop their ideas. In that sense, this new set of reissues is the best way so far to experience their work. Two live releases from the early 70’s have been expanded into double albums, while a third double album comprises previously-unreleased live material rescued from the attic of band member Jakob Sjöholm. In its biggest version—a six LP box set plus digital download— Anthology’s series offers nearly five hours of music in total, with 12 of the 27 tracks lasting over 10 minutes.
Those numbers may seem like a formula for tedium, but Träd, Gräs och Stenar’s music is never a slog. It’s usually easy to enter, and often downright breezy and relaxed. The band was confident enough not to force epiphanies, trusting that euphoria could grow from steady, upbeat swing. This has led some to call them Sweden’s Grateful Dead, but Träd, Gräs och Stenar were more free-form, and more interested in sonic chaos. In that way, along with their status as communal outsiders, they were more like Father Yod’s primitive psych-rock pioneers YaHoWha 13. The latter’s delirious 3am trips share an aura with the Träd, Gräs och Stenar songs that feature raw, seemingly-possessed singing and chanting.
One crucial difference between Träd, Gräs och Stenar and other communal collectives of the time (YaHoWha 13, Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, the Sun Ra Arkestra) was their leaderless nature. With no particular member in charge, their music has a refreshing lack of ego; it feels like the only thing steering the ship is the momentum created by playing together. Though some guitar parts resemble solos, they rarely dominate. All the riffs merge into a mutli-colored swirl, and the band digs into each repetition like coal miners chipping away in unison. Over 40 years later, this all-for-one approach still resonates in the far-flung forays of collectives such as No-Neck Blues Band, Bardo Pond, Acid Mothers Temple, and Eternal Tapestry.
Since such emergent music is all about the moment, Träd, Gräs och Stenar’s best work came in live performance. Though they debuted with a self-titled 1970 studio album, their subsequent two live records cemented their legend. The music on 1971’s Djungelns Lag (The Law of the Jungle*)* and 1972’s Mors Mors (Hi, How Are You?**) was captured in locales as diverse as an airfield, an autonomous Denmark commune, and a meadow next to the Vindeln river. Some tunes have studio-level clarity, revealing acoustic strums, rhythmic handclaps, and vocal chatter, while others are as murky as bootlegs. Both of those styles fit the band’s vibe, which could be simultaneously precise and unruly, bold and mysterious. That vibe is strongest on Djungelns Lag, which feels as open and diverse as the universe, and as big too (see the consistently-compelling, 34-minute “Amithaba In Kommer Gösta”). But Mors Mors is nearly as good, rhyming shorter, poppier gems with masterful extended journeys.
The unreleased material Anthology has collected on Kom Tillsammans (Come Together) comes from the same 1972 recordings as Mors Mors, and works in similar ways. As a whole it’s not as compelling as either preceding album, but it does show how deftly Träd, Gräs och Stenar could continually reinvent themselves. Take their covers of the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time”: on Mors Mors, they build a relaxed riff into something monumental over nine minutes. On Kom Tillsammans, they completely rethink their attack, grafting in a riff from the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and doubling the length to 17 minutes without losing a second of interest.
It’s hard to think of many bands who could imagine such interpretations, and this eternal openness might be Träd, Gräs och Stenar’s most enduring legacy. There’s a political aspect to it too; as band member Torbjörn Abelli put it in liner notes,“our music was a sort of ritualistic battle cry, a call for people to be free, follow their own rhythm, their own harmony.” Yet that cry would be unconvincing if the results weren’t inspiring. Träd, Gräs och Stenar delivered on the promise of freedom, finding moments that couldn’t be achieved by any other means. | 2016-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | April 8, 2016 | 8.5 | 177eb79b-9668-4c92-ba44-e1e328c40165 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The cosmic fusion group skewers the jazz-trio format as it’s typically understood, flipping the minimalist palette into an electrifying, apocalyptic sound. | The cosmic fusion group skewers the jazz-trio format as it’s typically understood, flipping the minimalist palette into an electrifying, apocalyptic sound. | The Comet Is Coming: The Afterlife | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-comet-is-coming-the-afterlife/ | The Afterlife | Since their debut was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize in 2016, the Comet is Coming’s saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings has become a formidable presence in the international jazz scene in his own right, making fans of Beyoncé and Virgil Abloh along the way. Hutchings landed not just one but three different bands on the Impulse label in the process. From the Afro-Caribbean stomp of his Sons of Kemet to the South African spiritual jazz of Shabaka and the Ancestors, his music is simultaneously rooted in the traditional, broadly international in scope, and thoroughly of the moment.
But there’s something in the way the Comet Is Coming skewers the typical jazz trio that stands apart from his other projects. Its surface speaks to the cosmic sounds of Sun Ra, but there’s something raw and earthy at the core. Comet draw from the minimal, restrained palette of the trio format to make something that’s electrifying and apocalyptic all at once, able to tear the roof of jazz—as well as rock, jam band, and EDM—festivals. A companion piece to this year’s Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery, The Afterlife continues to hover over that album’s scorched earth, not replicating the rush of “Summon the Fire” but instead exploring in greater detail that set’s most somber moments. It’s concise yet also shows the trio’s depth in just over 30 minutes.
Whereas Trust in the Lifeforce’s centerpiece featured the poet Kate Tempest speaking vitriolically of capitalism and “the blood of the past,” here the band welcomes back to the fold Joshua Idehen. Idehen appeared on Sons of Kemet’s Impulse debut and previous Comet albums, most tellingly on “The Final Days of the Apocalypse.” His dystopian demeanor remains unchanged on opener “All That Matters Is the Moments,” spitting lines of “daydreaming of a world I won’t live to see” against a slow roil of drums and widening oscillations. There are glints of clarity, at least, if not hope, as he speaks of holding onto the memories of friendships in trying times.
No matter the cosmic jazz or sci-fi backdrop conjured, Hutchings knows when to ride the carefully controlled swells of drummer Max “Betamax” Hallett and synth player Dan “Danalogue” Leavers and when to rove on his own. He lays in the cut on the beautiful “The Softness of the Present,” basking in warm chords laid down by Leavers and the chunky beat of Hallett, adding just enough vibrato to keep the piece from drifting off into downtempo territory. Instead, the songs drifts into the title track, which strikes a deft balance between menacing sine waves and the kind of gurgling ostinatos that Alice Coltrane would throw down on her organ. “The Seven Planetary Heavens” deftly blends the breathy air of spiritual jazz with the pinging of techno to make something that, instead of reaching the point of combustion, maintains a radiant glow.
Divorced from the flickering electronics and rolling drums, Hutchings’ burnished horn would sound merely soulful, as it is on the two-part “Lifeforce.” But combined with the arpeggios and simmering cymbals, his tone veers towards the melancholic, as if moving over a planet’s surface in search of life. In the song’s second half, as Hallett’s chunky breaks transition towards something more uplifting, Hutchings’ horn picks up enough velocity that the trio achieves liftoff, no doubt to some other unexplored corner of the cosmos. | 2019-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Impulse! | October 3, 2019 | 7.6 | 177f4af5-8252-4cf3-9ccb-317005d2f4c7 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
At its best, this short, punchy album feels like a distillation of everything that has made British producer Lone's work great so far. | At its best, this short, punchy album feels like a distillation of everything that has made British producer Lone's work great so far. | Lone: Levitate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21938-levitate/ | Levitate | At this point, we probably have enough albums dedicated to rave nostalgia. And the British producer Matt Cutler should feel OK about that, because as Lone, he's responsible for quite a few of them. His new one, Levitate doesn't really break any new ground; it reprises ideas (and in some cases, specific synthesizer patches) that he has been using since 2010's Emerald Fantasy Tracks. Yet, to its credit, it doesn't feel redundant. At its best, this short, punchy album feels like a distillation of everything that has made Lone's work great so far.
Historically, Lone's music has tended to toggle between two modes. On the one hand, there's drowsy, lysergic downbeat in the tradition of Boards of Canada and Dilla; on the other, a kind of exaggerated rave revivalism, which takes tropes from early-'90s UK dance music and blows them up to gargantuan proportions. Lemurian and Ecstasy & Friends, his first two albums, kept to hip-hop tempos, woozy moods, but the Red Bull kicked in with 2010's Emerald Fantasy Tracks, and he threw himself into house tempos with gusto. The intensity built on 2012's vertiginous Galaxy Garden, and then, since everything that comes up must come down—an adage many ravers know all too well—2014's Reality Testing slunk back under the covers, balancing hip-hop beats with slow, starry-eyed house and boogie in the vein of Floating Points' early singles.
From a title like Levitate, you can guess where Cutler's taking us this time: right back up to the top. It might be Lone's most intense album to date—dancing like a downed electrical wire, with its hooks as immediate as anything he's ever done. Album opener “Alpha Wheel” brings us hurtling up to speed with fat, loud, practically diamond-encrusted breakbeats and a chord progression that sets off tiny serotonin bombs with every syncopated stab. “Backtail Was Heavy” inhabits similar terrain, balancing rough-cut breaks and detuned horn stabs with a sparkly, Aphex-indebted synth melody. In a curious case of double déjà vu, it's a hardcore throwback through-and-through, and it also uses an uncannily similar synth sound from Emerald Fantasy Tracks’ “Moon Beam Harp.”
The shuddering “Triple Helix” and the smooth drum'n'bass roller “Sea of Tranquility” keep the energy levels soaring; even the Boards of Canada pastiche “Sleepwalkers” musters a kind of rhythmic force that the Scottish duo themselves have rarely achieved. Levitate is the shortest album Lone has ever made—just 33 minutes in all, and two of its nine songs are sketch-like ambient interludes. Functionally, it's more like an EP than an album, but that extreme sense of focus works in its favor: There's no wasted effort, and his craft has never sounded better—his beats are Jaws-of-Life strong, his melodies buffed to a blinding sheen. His ingenious way of flipping, chopping and reversing breakbeats recalls Squarepusher’s first two albums, made when the drill'n'bass producer's goofy grin hadn't yet hardened into a smirk. And Cutler manages to find subtle ways to surprise. Both “Alpha Wheel” and “Sleepwalkers” build to their climax and then just drop away.
It all comes together in “Triple Helix”: the sound design, the energy, the optimism. It's wild, disorienting, sugary, hyper-sensory stuff, and it's no wonder that my 11-month-old daughter loves it. Rave has always had an infantilizing aspect, from songs like Smart E's “Sesame's Treet” to accoutrements like pacifiers and Mickey Mouse gloves. Levitate leverages rave nostalgia to get to a deeper truth: Free your inner child, and your ass and mind will follow. | 2016-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | R&S | June 7, 2016 | 7.6 | 1781253e-5b90-486f-9c3d-b144b90c668e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Big Thief’s ambitious yet unburdened fifth album is a 20-song epic of kaleidoscopic invention, striking beauty, and wigged-out humor, rambling far beyond the bounds of their previous work. | Big Thief’s ambitious yet unburdened fifth album is a 20-song epic of kaleidoscopic invention, striking beauty, and wigged-out humor, rambling far beyond the bounds of their previous work. | Big Thief: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-thief-dragon-new-warm-mountain-i-believe-in-you/ | Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You | “What should we do now?” someone asks off-mic at the end of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. “Blue Lightning,” the last song, has just ended, its homey folk-rock atmosphere made briefly uncanny by the entrance of cheap synthetic brass in the final minute, punching out a two-note fanfare that an ordinary band would have assigned to an actual horn section. The speaker—presumably one of the three men in Big Thief who orbit singer-guitarist Adrianne Lenker—sounds dazed but satisfied. Clearly, they have nailed the take. So what next?
As punctuation for Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, an album as gleefully overstuffed as its title, this moment of studio chatter feels deliberate despite its offhandedness. In 20 songs, Big Thief have rambled far beyond the bounds of their previous catalog. There is trip-hop that flickers like busted neon and a couple of country tunes so saturated with fiddle and close harmony that they seem at first like jokes. You might check the liner notes to divine the source of the strangely expressive clicking you hear in the background of a particular instrumental passage and find that someone has been credited with playing icicles.
Lenker’s subject matter, stated as briefly as possible, is everything: internet signals and falling leaves, vape pens and wild hairdos, the wounds we inflict on the planet and each other, the Book of Genesis, the mystery of consciousness, and yes, the humble potato. Dragon is as heavy in its lyrical concerns as any previous Big Thief record, and more ambitious in its musical ideas than all of them. But it also sounds unburdened, animated by a newfound sense of childlike exploration and play. Twenty times, it asks “What should we do now?”, and twenty times it finds a new answer.
By design, Dragon lacks the near-perfect holism of U.F.O.F. and Two Hands, Big Thief’s twin 2019 achievements, records with compact tracklists and particular aims, one eerie and diffuse, the other gritty and earthbound. Recorded in four locations across the U.S. over the course of several months, it feels more like Big Thief’s Tusk, or White Album, or Wowee Zowee: a sprawling statement with little concern for outward cohesion, offering some combination of kaleidoscopic invention, striking beauty, and wigged-out humor at any given moment, but not a particularly clear path from one song to the next. Like those albums, it seems destined to become the favorite for a cult of hardcore fans, while inspiring others to wonder how someone could ride so hard for stuff like “Piggies.”
Or, in this case, stuff like “Spud Infinity,” a song that arrives early to unfurl Big Thief’s freak flag once and for all. Complementing the aforementioned fiddle and down-home harmony vocals—from Twain’s Mat Davidson, who appears on several songs—is the unmistakable boing of a jaw harp, boinging jubilantly and relentlessly, blissfully and diabolically, on every last beat. The cumulative effect is something like a full-band version of the goofy southern accent Mick Jagger puts on when he sings country songs, which seems, for him, like a way of putting genre in quotation marks, signaling his awareness of his own inauthenticity by amplifying the hokiest parts of the put-on. Though Big Thief have taken many approaches to their music over the years, this sort of winking magpie postmodernism has not been one of them, so it’s strange to hear them leaning into a schtick.
But the longer you sit with “Spud Infinity,” and “Red Moon,” its closest counterpart, the less their hillbilly trappings come across like winks. The settings seem to have a liberating effect on Lenker’s relationship to language, giving her access to a conversational new register where quotidian details reflect the big picture in miniature, and silliness is a route to profundity. In the third verse of “Spud Infinity,” she rhymes “finish” with “knish” and laments human inability to kiss our own elbows, joints that spend their time “rubbing up against the edges of experience.” The song’s good-natured stroll from the dirt to the cosmos recalls John Prine or Michael Hurley, songwriters whose breezy humor has never previously worked its way into Big Thief’s music.
Even when the band is hamming it up, their ensemble playing is quietly spectacular, with drummer James Krivchenia rising and falling to meet Lenker’s turns of phrase, and guitarist Buck Meek and bassist Max Oleartchik scribbling countermelodies at the edges of her strumming. Though they seem determined to find a different way to organize themselves as a band with nearly every song, this conversational weaving of their instruments holds the album together at an intuitive level across its wild leaps.
“Flower of Blood,” with pirouettes of feedback from Lenker and Meek’s guitars, and a lyric that blurs violence and intimacy in classic Big Thief fashion, might have fit in on Two Hands if not for its production, with drums filtered to sound like sampled breakbeats playing over a massive PA. There’s an intoxicating dissonance between the song’s internal heat and the sound’s steely distance, one that Big Thief might have successfully nurtured across the length of an entire album rather than this single track. “Heavy Bend” and “Blurred View,” its neighbors on the tracklist, take its gestures at electronic music even further. The former, setting a harplike arpeggiated figure from Lenker’s nylon-string guitar to patiently looping shakers and snare, reminds me of Four Tet’s meditative beat music. The latter, claustrophobic and menacing, initially resembles Portishead but soon finds its own wavelength. “One step closer and I’m real/Tell me everything you feel/And I will sing for you,” Lenker intones near a whisper; the harmonies ascend for a moment, then plummet back into darkness.
The hoedown of “Red Moon” is next, and if you’re listening digitally, the transition comes with comical quickness: It’s hard to imagine how a pair of songs by the same band could be more divergent than these two. Dragon seems particularly well-suited to the double-LP format, which necessitates a break between them, with “Blurred View” closing the first disc and “Red Moon” opening the second. The individual sides can be plenty scatterbrained on their own, but there is an obscure order to the tracklist’s organization. The bittersweet simplicity of “Change,” which opens the album, is reflected in “12,000 Lines,” which opens its final side. The sweeping stillness of the title track, at the end of side one, signals a close to the beatific opening stretch, and the side-two opener “Sparrow,” a baleful retelling of the Adam and Eve story, hints at darkness to come.
Lenker spoke in a recent interview with Pitchfork about learning to be “more fearless” in her writing: “more confident in myself and less worried about…how people will receive something.” Her heightened willingness to follow her impulses is evident throughout Dragon. At one point in “Sparrow,” she ends four successive lines with “apple,” an audacious disruption of her own rhyme scheme, unsettling your expectations and building tension toward a climax in which Adam rolls Eve under the bus: “She has the poison inside her/She talks to snakes and they guide her.” Her bailiwick as a writer has extended in two directions, reaching toward cosmic-religious significance on one side and unadorned observation on the other. “Sit on the phone/Watch TV/Romance, action, mystery,” she sings on “Certainty,” making the experience of unfocused screen time sound as timeless and universal as a sunset.
If Lenker has a central preoccupation on Dragon, it is the way these high and low poles of experience coexist and inform each other: the way an unassuming bunch of weeds can give you a flickering glimpse of the interconnectivity of all things, or a moment of heartbreak might be inexplicably magnified by the sudden apprehension of houseflies on the ceiling. Which is another way of saying that her great subject, as always, is love. What could be more profound, or more ordinary? “Change,” for its first two thirds, is concerned with elemental things: wind and water, life and death. Then something hard and tactile interrupts its litany of abysses: “Death/Like space/The deep sea/A suitcase.” A suitcase? From this germ grows a story about a departing lover, until Lenker is no longer asking about dying, but questions that may be even more painful: “Could I feel happy for you/When I hear you talk with her like we used to?/Could I set everything free/When I watch you holding her the way you once held me?”
“The Only Place,” the album’s penultimate song, is among the most beautiful in Big Thief’s discography. Lenker is alone at the acoustic guitar, fingerpicking with such astonishing dexterity that the weight of her words might escape you at first. After an album that has probed at loss and acceptance from every available angle, here is her vision of the apocalypse, presented as plainly as possible. “When all material scatters/And ashes amplify,” she sings, sounding unperturbed by her impending doom. “The only place that matters/Is by your side.”
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | February 10, 2022 | 9 | 17844b31-bf75-4013-8a18-2003202acf2d | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The Knife's first album in seven years is the Swedish duo's most political, ambitious, accomplished album, but in a strange way it also feels like its most personal, a musical manifesto advocating for a better, fairer, weirder world. | The Knife's first album in seven years is the Swedish duo's most political, ambitious, accomplished album, but in a strange way it also feels like its most personal, a musical manifesto advocating for a better, fairer, weirder world. | The Knife: Shaking the Habitual | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17847-the-knife-shaking-the-habitual/ | Shaking the Habitual | In the seven years since Silent Shout, the Knife's mythology has grown to the point where the Swedish duo seem like something other than a band. "Band” implies people banging on things widely agreed upon as instruments and making things that most people would recognize as "music"-- this feels like an inadequately pedestrian way to describe what Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer are. Perhaps even more so in their absence, the Knife have come to seem like a vibe, an ethic, a dark, not-entirely-scientifically-understood phenomena; other bands are to the Knife what matter is to anti-matter. When new artists say they’ve been influenced by the Knife-- and it’s a claim countless have made in the past few years-- they are at this point referencing not just a specific sound but an entire way of being in our information-glutted world: a desire to retain a tightly controlled, precisely evocative sense of mystery and mastery over their image. Even in the wake of such pollutants as international success, ubiquitous acclaim, and frequent imitation, the Knife have found a way to keep their name meaning something remarkably unique and pure.
This has something to do with the fact that Andersson and Dreijer have gone to great lengths to come off like they are something other than human. On stage, they were silhouettes glowing behind a translucent screen. They gave interviews and accepted awards in disguise (moving through a terrifying cycle of bird masks, Dystopian Blue Man Group masks, primate-inspired facepaint, and of course who could forget Andersson's infamous melting flesh mask?). And on the steely, electro-nightmare Silent Shout-- their first great record-- they found new ways to viscerally integrate these ideas into their sound, warping and pitch-shifting Andersson’s vocals until they grew androgynous and post-human. Somewhere in the past seven years, the Knife reached that Lynchian status where everything they do is their own, adjectivally specific kind of creepy. The early press photos for their new album, Shaking the Habitual, made an activity as innocent as swinging on playground swings feel forebodingly sinister.
But buying "post-human" mythology wholesale has always sold the Knife a little short. After all, what was their breakthrough hit "Heartbeats" if not a heavy-breathing declaration of vulnerability? Even Silent Shout cut through the abstraction and found a pulse-- whether it was the strobe-lit dancefloor rhythms of “We Share Our Mothers’ Health” and “Neverland” or the palpitating storytelling of a song like “Forest Families”. The driving force of their music is the interplay between the uncanny and the familiar, though in all the theatricality it's easy to forget the latter. But the early information that trickled out about Shaking the Habitual served as a reminder. We’re so used to experiencing the Knife at a cool, veiled distance that the most shocking things about their return were the ones that seemed uncharacteristically personable: their faces (on full display in the anarchic video for “Full of Fire”), their fingernails, their smiles (were they actually smiling in that photo?). For all their sinister, shadowy abstraction, the Knife are at their most disarming and affecting when you’re briefly reminded-- and you often are, over the course of their sprawling, magnificent fourth album Shaking the Habitual-- that Andersson and Dreijer are human after all.
Boundary-busting in content and in form, the 2xCD Shaking the Habitual challenges plenty of perceived notions-- about extreme wealth, the patriarchy, the monarchy, environmental degradation, decreasing attention spans (“It's nice to play with people's time these days,” Andersson says in explanation of the record's marathon length), and not the least of which the Knife's own identity as a band. The winding, unbridled song structures and industrial-tinged, organic sounds are such a departure from the rest of their output that they’ve said they initially considered releasing it under a different name. Shaking certainly pulls from a wider aesthetic palette than any of their previous records: found sound drones (they crafted the 19-minute “Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized” from editing hours of electronic feedback they'd recorded in a boiler room), zithers, an instrument they apparently made out of “an old bedspring” and “a microphone”-- all employed in the name of breaking their own habits. “We went temporarily acoustic,” they declared in the madcap manifesto that served as Shaking's press bio. “Electronic is just one place in the body.”
In plenty of ways, Shaking seems to have “inaccessible” etched into every fiber of its DNA. It is 98 minutes long (about double the length of the already-epic-seeming Silent Shout). Six of its thirteen songs exceed eight minutes. The official statements released with its music videos (“'A Tooth For An Eye' deconstructs images of maleness, power and leadership. Who are the people we trust as our leaders and why? What do we have to learn from those we consider inferior?”) read like museum placards. There are two long, dissonant drone pieces-- and one of them has the feel-good title “Fracking Fluid Injection”. But once you surrender to these facts and descend into Shaking the Habitual, its atmosphere is strangely, surprisingly inhabitable. Moving fluidly between potent bursts of electro-aggression (“A Tooth for an Eye”), seductively uncoiling, meditative grooves (“Raging Lung”) and ambient stretches, Shaking the Habitual-- like Swans’ recent and similarly mammoth The Seer-- doesn’t demand the same kind of attention the whole time. Many of the things that might seem off-putting in theory are what make it hang together so well as a front-to-back listen-- the drone pieces are sequenced such that they act as intermissions, though the kind where the air conditioner's at an uncomfortable full blast and the house lights remain, evocatively, dark. Put it on in a room and it snakes in and out of your consciousness, but on some level it’ll still have you in its chilling, atmospheric vice grip.
Following Andersson and Dreijer down such a labyrinthine rabbit hole would be difficult if they didn’t hook you from the start, but luckily the first three songs are among the most immediately arresting 25 minutes of music the Knife has ever made. “A Tooth for an Eye” almost feels like a belated, revisionist do-over of the band’s relatively unremarkable early work. While 2003's Deep Cuts sometimes struggled to find common ground between punk aggression and bright, calypso-tinged synths, “Tooth” ties these competing impulses together seamlessly as it also deftly weaves in a political message. The song’s refrain comes from the experimental British writer Jeanette Winterson’s book The Passion (the interstitials "Oryx" and "Crake" also reference a Margaret Atwood novel), but Andersson brings a physicality to her delivery that muscles the line right off the page: “I’m telling you stories,” she seethes, until you can almost see the vein bulging in her neck, “Trust meeeee.”
The polyrhythmic, polymorphously perverse industrial throb “Full of Fire” feeds off the heat kindled by the opening track and rides it for a magnificently maniacal nine minutes, while the creaking, evocative “A Cherry on Top” has got to be one most deliciously creepy Knife songs yet-- of course, that’s saying a lot. (At times it sounds like Animal Collective's “The Bees”, but makes that haunting track sound like a lullaby in comparison.) Built around the bone-curdling sound of a zither warping in and out of tune, Andersson sings of riches-- “Strawberry, melon, cherry on top…The Haga Castle evening cream”-- in a heavy, manipulated voice so overripe it basically wafts decay. She's clearly having fun inhabiting the role of the fat-with-power monarch here, but her roleplaying is also an act of resistance (the band has recently cited as an influence the gender theorist Judith Butler, who pioneered the notion of thinking about gender as performance), of cutting the omnipotent down to size and suggesting that the institution's expiration date has passed. As the instrument warbles in and out of tune, the castle walls-- and the confines of pop structure as we know it-- seem to be crumbling at her and Dreijer's feet.
Nothing else quite matches this opening run, but the second disc has its highlights: The frenetic, gargling instrumental “Networking” recalls the best of Dreijer's techno work as Oni Ayhun and proves he can still scramble the conventions of electronic music with an effortlessness that puts him miles ahead of the Knife's many imitators. Then there's “Raging Lung”, a dank, serpentine 10-minute groove that lifts its refrain ("what a difference a little difference would make") from Fugazi's classic 1990 debut Repeater. Tipping its hat to the ideologies of punk rock, gender outlaws, enviro-anarchists, and outsiders of any stripe, Shaking feels at time like a guided, international tour through the last quarter century of political resistance and radical thought-- or maybe an epic, authority-fucking mural painted in the part of town where all the squatters and crust punks have migrated. The most difficult part of making a record so ambitious and conceptual is, of course, bridging the gap between thinking and feeling-- a divide that even Shaking cannot always conquer. But all things considered, it's remarkable how seldom the Knife actually sound like they're guiding these songs with their brains rather than their hips or fists. Even at its most cerebreal, this record is palpably, poundingly alive.
Though not as challenging as their collaborative opera score Tomorrow in a Year, Shaking still knowingly, brazenly risks turning less adventurous listeners off-- and maybe those who dismiss the record for not trying to recreate the populist magic of "Heartbeats" or "We Share Our Mother's Health" have a point. The Knife would clearly like to use their music to incite the listener to rethink concepts taken for granted and challenge authority, but would a more effective method of shaking the habitual be, say, smuggling a subversive message into the greatest (and at press time, only) four-minute dancefloor anthem ever written about fracking? Regardless of the answer, that's a question the Knife are no longer interested in exploring. "The most commercial way would have been to stick with a formula," Andersson observed in a recent Pitchfork interview, but then dismissed that option entirely, saying she and her brother had now moved on to questioning conventions "on a structural level rather than a psychological level." And in the end, though, Shaking's unruly structure-- a perfect union of form and content-- feels like a noble choice. In interviews, they've spoken about "the importance of making your privileges transparent in order to say something political." And the great privilege of being the Knife in 2013 is having a platform-- they've earned a devoted audience ready to approach their wildest, most challenging and passionate vision with eager ears and an open mind.
Shaking the Habitual is, inarguably, an achievement. It is the Knife's most political, ambitious, accomplished album, but in a strange way it also feels like its most personal: It provides a glimpse into the desires, intellectual enthusiasms and (unsurprisingly dense) reading list guiding one of music's most shadowy duos. At its most mesmerizing, its conceptual rigor and occasional inscrutability are overpowered by a disarming earnestness: It is a musical manifesto advocating for a better, fairer, weirder world. Shaking the Habitual feels not post-human but profoundly humanist, fueled by an unfashionable but profoundly refreshing faith in music's ability to hypnotize, to agitate, and to liberate-- to become, in Winterson's words, "the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid." | 2013-04-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-04-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Rabid | April 8, 2013 | 8.4 | 1785f428-9804-4550-b51f-8fdd65f7cd90 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | |
Following last year's astounding debut, ƒIN, the Barcelona producer John Talabot offers an album-length stitchwork of euphoric moments and rich textures in his 75-minute DJ-Kicks isntallment. Amid his sharp selection of glistening melodic dance music, Talabot himself steals the show, including three new cuts he had a hand in. | Following last year's astounding debut, ƒIN, the Barcelona producer John Talabot offers an album-length stitchwork of euphoric moments and rich textures in his 75-minute DJ-Kicks isntallment. Amid his sharp selection of glistening melodic dance music, Talabot himself steals the show, including three new cuts he had a hand in. | John Talabot: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18749-john-talabot-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | It's not easy to establish a distinctive voice in the realm of house music, but since John Talabot's arrived on the scene, he's done just that. The Barcelona producer's spent the last four years crafting and refining his own prismatic take on the dance sub-genre, fusing psychedelic sprawl with a sense of pop-like pacing in a way that has established his position as a crossover artist in an area of music that is typically a niche concern. Interestingly, his headier work has gained just as much, if not more, attention than his more streamlined material: "Families", his 2011 single with Los Angeles electro-pop auteur and Glasser mastermind Cameron Mesirow, may be Talabot's most pop-refined cut to date, but it's "Sunshine", the hypnotizing 2009 single that served as his breakout moment, that still stands as one of his most widely beloved tracks.
Anchored around a sample of impassioned chanting that crests beautifully as tinkling bells swirl and lope around it, "Sunshine" bears resemblance to minimal techno legend Ricardo Villalobos' masterful 2008 single "Enfants (Chants)"—but that comparison could prove potentially misleading. What Talabot does isn't minimal, nor does he skew in the other, more boisterous direction; he's all about control, knowing when to let his vat of sounds gorgeously overflow and when to bring the pot down to a tight, focused simmer. Last year's astounding debut LP ƒIN, then, was a demonstration of his steady hand and mind, a jade-textured record that alternately—and sometimes, simultaneously—shimmered and pulsated with iridescent light.
Mixes don't always explicitly reflect a producer's artistic flair, but Talabot's entry in !K7's long-running DJ-Kicks series is different. An album-length stitchwork of euphoric moments and rich textures, the 75-minute mix proves that everything this guy touches can't help but turn mossy, earthy, groovy. Considering how much of this mix is other people's work reflected in Talabot's own visage, the overall continuation here of the sounds found on ƒIN is impressive and, for the impatient, quite handy. As Philip Sherburne noted in our review of that record, ƒIN was the result of Talabot undergoing a nearly decade-long transformation as an artist, so who knows when we'll get the follow-up to that record—dance artists typically work in the singles format, so long-players typically are not a priority—which makes this DJ-Kicks mix a capable, reflective stopgap release.
In terms of selection, the mix is not too surprising taste-wise, a balanced breakfast of deep-house pulsers and percolating techno jams that keep the mood nice and steady. One track in particular, though, is worth highlighting for its revelatory nature: Mancunian dub-techno crawler Andy Stott's uneasy remix of British shoegaze outfit Maps' "I Heard Them Say", the first arguable peak that appears early in this DJ-Kicks installment. When I first heard this remix upon initial release, I was unimpressed—possibly because endless replays of Stott's commanding 2012 LP Luxury Problems has raised expectations for Stott-branded material a little too highly—but Talabot breathes new life into the track here, as it slithers and leaves a trail of glowing slime that sticks to the mix's opening third. The remix's inclusion also draws a previously unseen analogue between Stott and Talabot, two artists working with distinctly different approaches that nonetheless share a love for dipping their own contractions in layers of drowsy, clattery haze.
Artists from Talabot's Hivern label make appearances throughout, providing seemingly unreleased cuts and showcasing the collective's ear for glistening melodic dance music: Danish producer Round's "Glass" provides a particular moment of bliss with a classic structure and a slight sweep of tones, while Franc Sayol's Mistakes Are Okay project offers up the moody "Night Watcher" to serve as a darkly shaded interstitial cut. In the end, though, Talabot himself steals the show, bounding past DJ-Kicks' tradition of the compiling artist offering up an exclusive track by putting forth three new cuts he had a hand in.
There's "Anagrama", the tropical, woozy track from his and Genius of Time member Alexander Berg's Tempel Rytmik project, and the slyly anthemic "Sideral", a result of Talabot's team-up with Swedish producer Axel Boman (as Talaboman). The true stunner of the three, though—as well as possibly the big highlight on the mix—is Talabot's own "Without You", a big-room jam that wraps layers of shiny, winsome synth work around a muted vocal line like a barbershop pole. The track's yet another pristine example of Talabot's sense of pacing, as he dampens the beat midway through before bringing it back again to reinforce "Without You"'s strong melodic backbone.
John Talabot's DJ-Kicks entry isn't the flashiest mix you'll encounter this year, and there's plenty of room for debate as to whether it ranks in the upper echelon of the series' many installments. Similar to ƒIN, though, it's an immersive experience that grows richer with every listen, as new details emerge from the throbbing green slurry that binds the tracks together. Talabot's ear for songs that walk the balance between trippiness and accessibility is his greatest gift, but this DJ-Kicks mix proves that his hidden strength is a keen sense of structure. The constant chug, a push-and-pull that gives as good as it gets, is not unlike pumping blood—and if you're in the right mindset, a deep listen to this solid collection will give you life, too. | 2013-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | !K7 | November 15, 2013 | 7.9 | 178b36dc-f2e7-46c9-96be-d40b214265d9 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Merging academic underpinnings with thoroughly listenable rap music, Wild Water Kingdom is the most substantial solo project full-length to be associated with Das Racist to date. | Merging academic underpinnings with thoroughly listenable rap music, Wild Water Kingdom is the most substantial solo project full-length to be associated with Das Racist to date. | Heems: Wild Water Kingdom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17251-wild-water-kingdom/ | Wild Water Kingdom | The Fader has a regular feature called "The Things I Carry" in which artists share what's in their pockets. A recent subject was Himanshu Suri, better known as Heems of Das Racist, the divisive, allusive, and pop culture savvy rap trio. Heems, along with the usual pocket regulars (keys, wallet) and an elephant totem from his girlfriend, was carrying a $30,000 check from Kmart, given to him in exchange for the rights to the Das Racist song "Girl" for use in a layaway commercial.
When I saw that check, I was annoyed. But while complaints about materialism in rap are common, it's easy to forget that rappers are character-creators, to whom flashiness is a way to promote an artistic brand. If I'm OK with other rappers' excess, why wasn't I willing to understand Heems from within the same context? Because of the way he looks, or where he went to school? At its best, Heems' music raises these sorts of questions, challenging the assumptions and double standards of rap fan groupthink. The question that has to be asked now that he's been playing these tricks for a couple years is simple: Can this philosophy make for compelling music?
In short, yes. His new mixtape Wild Water Kingdom is the most substantial solo project full-length associated with Das Racist to date, because it merges the academic underpinnings of Heems' ideas with thoroughly listenable rap music. Though he's still not the best rapper (his refusal to abide by traditional rhyme schemes will be frustrating to purists) he's made great strides here and is helped along by a NYC underground producer showcase.
Those beats, unfortunately, are forced to sustain the album's first quarter. Heems comes out swinging on "Cowabunga Gnarly", a banger from producer-of-the-year candidate Harry Fraud, but quickly loses steam, and resorts to his lazy reference overdrive, a trick which lost its novelty a couple years ago. Claiming, right after you declare your appreciation Junot Diaz, that you're "as smart as three SAT's," is fine, I guess, but the facts are unrelated. And the Crookers-produced "Third Thing" has a great singalong hook, but there's way too much nonsense in the amateurish verses.
Luckily, things do take a turn for the better. Around the halfway point of the title track, another Harry Fraud production (this one replete with gorgeous sitar strings), Heems decides to turns it on. "Freedom, put the heat up, who scheming for cheese/ believe in them please/ they need us to reach/ a piece with the place/ that's filled with the trees." These lines are rapped more fiercely and quickly than anything before, and they refer back to the family that Heems reps throughout the song, and the tape. And for the fans of the old Das Racist shtick, there's still an absurd Princess Diana line nestled a couple of bars later.
It used to be hard to tell if Heems wanted to be a rapper or if he wanted to make people who love rap angry. That's mostly gone now. This guy wants it, and his earnestness occasionally boils over, to the point of sappiness. Not sure if anyone realized that collaborator Safe sounds a lot like Dave Matthews, but the resemblance, and the resulting campfire vibe is enough to kill the otherwise tolerable "Medium Green Eyes".
More often, this newfound ability to speak plainly is a huge advantage for Heems. "Deepak Choppa", one of the best offerings here, is politically aware and seems truly angry, rather than bitter or sarcastic. "You know that we could send you back/ at any given time/ it ain't like money that you stack/ money for a lawyer/ that's the money that you lack," he raps from the perspective of an immigration agent, before transitioning into a different flow. On the second half of the song, he takes on race, repping his New York roots and his family and asking that you test his credentials: "I ain't black/ I ain't white/ I can't rap/ I can't write/ I ain't strapped/ I could fight." This isn't a sneer, it's a challenge.
In rap purist communities, the inability of some blog rappers to rap well is a well-documented gripe. Hearing a song like "Tell Me", in which two of the most disparaged targets wile out out over a huge beat from Earth 2's version of Just Blaze (producer Mike Finito), is some kind of head turner. Haters are still going to hate lines like Gambino's "Rush Limballin while I'm listening to tUne-yarDs" or Heems' spitting "Chamomile tea that we pour with splash." But those listeners will have to ask themselves-- would they hate these lines if they were coming from sources like Dipset, Roc Marciano, or Action Bronson?
Of course, those are the kinds of questions Heems has always provoked. Now that he's rapping well, that purpose is free to slide into focus. On Wild Water Kingdom, it's hard to argue with the beats. For the most part, it's hard to argue with the raps. You're going to have to ask yourself, if this guy is still bothering you, what exactly is it that you don't like? Because if it's the way he looks, or the references he's making, congratulations: you're now that guy who's too conservative to listen to rap music. | 2012-11-20T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2012-11-20T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Greedhead | November 20, 2012 | 7.2 | 17989a00-2a20-4bad-b836-26ab1089af08 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
L.A. rapper Schoolboy Q specializes in hairpin turns from cautionary street tales and remorseful reflection into wanton bacchanal. His Interscope debut Oxymoron is essentially a volleyball match between his warring proclivities. | L.A. rapper Schoolboy Q specializes in hairpin turns from cautionary street tales and remorseful reflection into wanton bacchanal. His Interscope debut Oxymoron is essentially a volleyball match between his warring proclivities. | Schoolboy Q: Oxymoron | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19043-schoolboy-q-oxymoron/ | Oxymoron | Two years into Black Hippy’s mainstream rap takeover the efficacy of TDE’s hit factory is still a marvel to watch. As a group, pensive Compton good guy Kendrick Lamar, gang-affiliated L.A. street rap classicist Jay Rock, suburban psychotropic-loving conspiracy theorist Ab-Soul and drug dealing party animal Schoolboy Q unite to offer a panoramic view of Southern Californian inner city rot. In-house production teams Digi+Phonics and THC buoy the rhymes in excitingly quirky sonics, while gifted recording engineer Mixed By Ali keeps it all sounding winningly crisp and plush. The team has crafted over half a dozen albums together in just four years, and at this juncture, you can almost tell ahead of time what you’re going to get coming into a new TDE project. Although Kendrick’s good kid, m.A.A.d city revealed a Dickensian eye for storytelling and a knack for radio-savvy singles that didn’t wander too far off the plot—and sold a million copies in the process—the mechanics of his sound didn’t change much. You could easily slide “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” somewhere into Q’s Habits and Contradictions or Soul’s Control System without a bumpy transition. Consistency breeds familiarity, but as Schoolboy Q releases his Interscope debut Oxymoron, the precarious followup to his brother-in-arms’ mainstream windfall, the axiom sometimes proves a liability.
Schoolboy Q specializes in hairpin turns from cautionary street tales and remorseful reflection into wanton bacchanal, and Oxymoron is essentially a volleyball match between his warring proclivities. Opener “Gangsta” kicks off with Q coldly admonishing a street worker for thinking pneumonia gets her the day off, but after the raucous set-repping “Los Awesome”, “Collard Greens” drags us to the club for elite liver putrefaction. Then it’s back to the block for a few until “Studio” pops up pining for affection after a stressful day of recording. Oxymoron punctuates its seriousness of purpose with stress-free jingles, like a rap game The Who Sell Out, but it skirts falling apart because Q has cut a figure that seems equally at home throwing back shots and bagging up rocks. His skill set is varied enough to sell a terse, hypnotic vamp like “Collard Greens” off of personality alone, effect a snarling menace bouncing crack dealer bromides off 2 Chainz on “What They Want”, and then methodically juggle cadences and syllables relating the story of an uncle’s drug-addled downfall on “Hoover Street”. Q’s wildman delivery does most of the heavy lifting on the slighter material here, but you see the true depth of his songwriting talents in detail obsessed verses on “Break the Bank”, where he lets slip where the pills were stashed back when he sold, and “Prescription/Oxymoron” where Q, holed up at home munching prescription pills, catalogs all the calls he ignores as he hurtles toward an overdose (“My phone rang, rang and rang and rang/ If you ain’t sellin’ drugs, then I don’t hear a thing”). Thing is, these crack storytelling twists are occasionally drowned in formalist gangsta rap boilerplate.
Oxymoron is painfully aware of its place in the pantheon of hardcore West Coast rap, from the guest list, which calls in vets like slick-tongued Oakland pimp Suga Free and Dogg Pound wordsmith Kurupt alongside Odd Future magnate Tyler, the Creator, New York mafioso rap architect Raekwon and Atlanta trap court jester 2 Chainz to accentuate the commonalities between two generations of drug trafficking goon rap, to its struggle to imbue druggy levity and horned-up bedroom dispatches with a hardened, streetwise edge. Q is never less than engaging in this juggling act (though the brattier numbers can grate, like “Los Awesome”, which sounds like mid-2000s T.I. getting his hands on some quality speed), but he can come off sounding more interested in ticking off his wiseguy bona fides than introducing the person underneath. His 2012 independent album Habits and Contradictions made a much better go of it, from “My Homie”’s wounded story of a friend who turned out to be an embedded undercover cop to “My Hatin’ Joint”, which pulled off the song-for-the-ladies trope with a comically petty air of vindictiveness, to “Oxy Music”, which blueprints Oxymoron’s drug using drug dealer conceit with much more gripping imagery. Oxymoron is gruff and goofy in all the right places, and enticingly lush as one could expect from a TDE project (for instance: the pogoing drums and plinking keys of “Collard Greens”, the perpetually melting synth Tyler suspends over Q and Kurupt on “The Purge”, Pharrell’s keys on “Los Awesome”, equal parts EDM debauchery and arcade overdrive). But a whiff of formula makes for an experience that coolly whisks along on rails where it should be bounding off them.
Q shines the most when he’s able to reconcile his hustler past with his rap star present rather than mining each separately. “Hell of a Night” showcases a trap-house hybrid from DJ Dahi, fresh off Drake’s “Worst Behaviour”, and Q cuts loose, partying hard because he’s lived hard enough to deserve it (“I ain’t minding if the world stops/ We been living up in hell’s shop”). “Break the Bank” and the Chromatics-sampling “Man of the Year” follow suit in affixing the happy ending to Oxymoron’s war stories while serving up the album’s most memorable hooks. The quality that sold the gangsta rap classics Q clearly studied in the process of making this album was an ability to tease triumph out of the mouth of adversity, and Oxymoron really takes off when the streak of songs that close the album proper stumbles onto the equation. Small wonder that the majority of its singles are culled from there.
Oxymoron is a victory in that Q’s sound has made the jump to the majors fully intact in an era where major label debuts often take a chop shop approach to assembly. Interscope’s trust in TDE saves the album from the awkward test tube collaborations that bog down many of its peers, but Oxymoron’s doubling down on a reliable formula makes for a relatively risk-averse listen. We don’t find out much about Q’s character or capabilities that we didn’t already know coming in, and a few of the tried and true song tropes here deliver diminishing returns. There isn’t a bad song in the bunch, but you get the sense that three albums in, Q’s readymade sense of what a Schoolboy Q album should sound like is as much a safety net prohibiting outright failure as it is a hindrance to true progression. | 2014-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Interscope / Top Dawg Entertainment | February 28, 2014 | 7.8 | 179f9115-4f4d-45d5-a1e1-949b318cfa35 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
On For All We Know, Nao autopsies various relationships—with friends, lovers, outgrown versions of herself—and, having decided what went wrong, calmly takes down the perpetrators. | On For All We Know, Nao autopsies various relationships—with friends, lovers, outgrown versions of herself—and, having decided what went wrong, calmly takes down the perpetrators. | Nao: For All We Know | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22163-for-all-we-know/ | For All We Know | Since penning her first song in 2013, Nao has come close to mastering a particular strand of funky, high-gloss R&B. Her A.K. Paul-featuring debut single, “So Good,” arrived within months of that first songwriting attempt, creating her template for emotionally precise pop that gives away little about its creator. Her empire has expanded—after the single, she formed Little Tokyo Recordings to release a handful of EPs—as has her songwriting. Recent single “Fool to Love,” which appears on her debut album For All We Know, opens at the flash point of a doomed relationship, then takes us back through the “mindless games” and slain insecurities that helped forge her escape. The details are vague—it’s possible the tormentor is her own self-doubt—but the sense of an inspired, forcible overcoming is unmistakeable.
In the absence of lyrical biography, Nao’s hook is her voice—she sings like a giddy angel sent to live out a dream of pop stardom—which puts her out of step with recent R&B permutations cultivated in England. Where others have found transcendence by rejecting slinky, summertime beats—FKA twigs’ alien ambiguity, Grace Acladna’s lucid soul nightmares, Night Slugs’ scatty dream-grime production for Kelela—Nao, while raised on grime and garage, owes little to any discernible London lineage. Her view of modern love, delivered in a tone that oscillates between euphoria and self-examination, feels like a rebuff to digital-era romance, where the possibilities of perma-communication (the mute, the de-friend, the ghosting) have fostered a banal revolution in breakup politics. Instead, her music inhabits the arena of high-stakes R&B, where women’s voices are dominant, acrobatic, and impossible for unsympathetic listeners to tune out.
On For All We Know, Nao autopsies various relationships—with friends, lovers, outgrown versions of herself—and, having decided what went wrong, calmly takes down the perpetrators. She sings with the weight of lessons learned: “I’m wise and I’m older,” a line from “Fool to Love,” is a rare instance of personal exposition, but the sentiment was already implied. On “In the Morning,” she acts the part of a lover too polite to say it’s over. “Buried all my feelings, I’m withholding,” she sings, fretfully. “I tried to leave him signs ... Are they hard to recognize?” Following track “Trophy,” a new A.K. Paul collaboration, reboots the theme of romantic redemption, firing out a feminist takedown in the dialect of funk expressionism.
Nao’s beseeching tones imbue every line with romantic defiance, even when, as on breakout single “Bad Blood,” the lost love under her microscope is platonic. On that song’s chorus, she accompanies an armada of synth blasts with heaving sighs, as if to hack up the offending memories—“a past that couldn’t last”—from her lungs, as well as her mind. These aren’t the shallow resolutions of a woman destined to repeat her mistakes.
There are few surprises in the music, but its crisp bombast complements the vocals, playing abrasive beats against silky seduction. Nao is unafraid to fall back on shmoozy late-’90s R&B melodies, allowing snarling, maximalist synths to drag the songs into 2016. “Get to Know Ya,” produced by Jungle, opens the record with elastic funk guitars and imploring, melismatic melodies, before the GRADES-produced “Inhale Exhale” bounces it up a notch with a raunchy bass strut that melts away as melodies zipwire across octaves. The music speaks in wonky Soulquarian grooves, playing into Nao’s jazz-vocal schooling: Album highlight “Feels Like (Perfume),” a Royce Wood Junior-produced ballad, ventilates D’Angelo’s polluted soul with sultry boudoir vibes and an improbably perfect George Harrison-style chorus.
At 54 minutes, the 18-track record begins to feel a little baggy, its uncharismatic drums and textural familiarity giving Nao’s paragliding voice one job too many. Even when overlong, though, the songs can impress with their breadth: “Blue Wine,” a moment of cosmic relief, winds down to slow-jam tempo, but blossoms into something exquisitely languid and sprawling, a distant cousin to Janelle Monáe’s elaborations on R&B balladry. Again, on “Blue Wine,” the music feels emotionally descriptive without the need for disclosure—“broken emotions” are the narrator’s ailment, we’re told. But when vagueness is a catalyst, rather than a stand-in for passion, its evasive profundity teaches you to look for what’s missing. | 2016-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA / Little Tokyo | August 2, 2016 | 7.9 | 17a0170a-f228-42aa-a70c-6860847c9dfb | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
Phil Elverum recently took an extended break from touring to record two albums in a studio he built in a deconsecrated church. The first of these albums makes a vast, cool sanctuary of itself and quietly beckons you into it. | Phil Elverum recently took an extended break from touring to record two albums in a studio he built in a deconsecrated church. The first of these albums makes a vast, cool sanctuary of itself and quietly beckons you into it. | Mount Eerie: Clear Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16657-clear-moon/ | Clear Moon | Phil Elverum, the force behind the Microphones and Mount Eerie, lives in Anacortes, Wash., a small town of just under 20,000 people about 64 miles outside of Seattle. As he told Brandon Stosuy in last week's Pitchfork interview, he recently took an extended break from touring to record two albums there, and he speaks of it as a calming, recentering time: "The songs and the ideas came from a more slowed-down attention to this particular place, this town, walking from my house to the studio and back every day," Elverum told him. The second album of the pair, to be called Ocean Roar, will be out later this year; Elverum calls it "more challenging and weird and darker and heavier." For now, however, he has given us Clear Moon, an album that makes a vast, cool sanctuary of itself and quietly beckons you in. Inscrutable and transfixing, plainspoken and unknowable, it feels like a collection of secrets Elverum has cupped in his palm to pour directly, and privately, into your ear alone, a rich meditation on the many meanings of the word "home."
"I go on describing this place/ And the way it feels to live and die" is how Elverum summarizes his task on Clear Moon in the album's opening song, "Through the Trees, Pt. 2". The line also neatly serves as any great writer's ultimate mission statement: Your backyard is a gateway to the universe, if you look hard enough. Note the song title's tricky numerology: We seem to be joining Elverum in the middle of an ongoing, possibly endless cataloging task. (Elverum, of course, has a documented fondness for "Pt. 2's".) The song names all have the quality of bullet points in some strange thesis: "The Place Lives", the second song, is followed by "The Place I Live", and it feels like Elverum is using these phrases to draw some obscure distinctions that are very important to him. "If I look/ Or if I don't look/ Clouds are always passing over," he sings on "The Place I Live". It's a statement that can read as perversely comforting or profoundly depressing-- the universe doesn't disappear when I blink, on the one hand, and the universe wouldn't blink if I disappeared, on the other. Elverum's sighed inflection cradles both of these meanings with equal gentleness.
The album's sound, meanwhile has the misty-but-tactile feeling of a sense memory. Every sound echoes from side to side of the mix, and the effect isn't so much "panning" as it is a shimmering omnipresence. Acoustic guitars, light keyboards, muted but persistent drums-- the sounds on Clear Moon feel like anxious, living beings that are trying to whisper something to you that you don't want to know. "Lone Bell" is the moment where Elverum's existential quandaries suddenly sprout fangs and grow frightening: Sharp horn blats and insistently hammering guitars evoke fight-or-flight dread, danger, encroaching panic. The bassline keeps crawling up a modal minor scale in the center of the song, posing the same uneasy question, over and over.
What that question is remains deliciously out of verbal range, but Clear Moon's brought a sharp memory into relief for me: It reminded me of standing outside of my house as a child, on a cold night. From the street, the house, broadcasting its fragile comfort out to me, looked a little unreal: Elverum calls a song on the album "House Shape". You know you will be allowed back in, but you stand for a prolonged moment, looking into the lit windows, and tasting something uneasy in your mouth. Clear Moon summons, inhabits, and distends this moment for 42 consecutive minutes. | 2012-05-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | P.W. Elverum & Sun | May 22, 2012 | 8.3 | 17a06f38-c1df-4673-b923-2adb2aaa880f | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The Finnish duo’s deconstructed club music grapples with life in the Anthropocene, drawing from nu-metal and hardcore in songs that feel burned out and overwhelmed. | The Finnish duo’s deconstructed club music grapples with life in the Anthropocene, drawing from nu-metal and hardcore in songs that feel burned out and overwhelmed. | Amnesia Scanner: Tearless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amnesia-scanner-tearless/ | Tearless | With a pandemic raging and the planet warming, it can feel like “we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we're writing together,” suggests Kim Stanley Robinson, a man who knows a thing or two about speculative fiction. In a widely shared New Yorker article from May, the writer confronted the possibility that our present-day scenario is every bit as strange as one of his Martian stories. The boundary between reality and fantasy has been breached. Finnish electronic duo Amnesia Scanner have been monitoring the situation for some time, and on their second LP, they sound less optimistic than ever.
Before their debut album came out in 2018, Amnesia Scanner were anonymous. The project left behind a breadcrumb trail of cryptic music videos and mixtapes, starting with 2014’s AS LIVE [][][][][], and helped sketch out the idea of “deconstructed club music”: harsh, angsty, and heavily compressed, with scraps of pop, techno, and dembow knotted into fractured melodies and nu-metal squall. With the release of Another Life, their air of mystery evaporated, but Amnesia Scanner have continued to be apocalyptic, above all else. Tearless, according to Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala, the Berlin-based musicians behind the project, is their “breakup album with the planet.” Along with recent work from Oneohtrix Point Never, ANOHNI, and Grimes, the record grapples with life in the Anthropocene era and the awareness of humanity’s irreversible impact on its only home.
Amnesia Scanner aren’t the kind of guys you’d find wearing “End Is Nigh” sandwich boards and shouting into megaphones about solar flares; until now, they could even have been accused of taking a perverse pleasure in watching the world burn, choosing to rave through chaos rather than fight to put out the flames. Now, though, the mood has soured. Where Another Life felt bright and alert, shimmying towards oblivion like lemmings in a conga line, Tearless is burned out and overwhelmed. This is ugly music, even at its most melodic. The shadow of nu-metal and hardcore hangs over tracks like “Flat,” a collaboration with metalcore act Code Orange, where busted electronic drums and shredded guitars recall Deftones and Nine Inch Nails. On “AS Tearless” a chant-along punk riff is torn to pieces by distortion. There’s no air, no light. A brief interlude, “Call of the Center,” informs us in crackling robotic tones that we’re “approaching the center of the labyrinth.”
Voices, including those of Brazilian DJ and producer Lyzza and Peruvian artist Lalita, are processed to sound steely and serrated, slicing through the mix like a logger’s chainsaw. These artists appear at the album’s poppiest peaks: Lalita bluffs her way through heartbreak on the operatic “AS Acá” (“I feel like the pain of losing you doesn’t affect me,” she sings in Spanish), and Lyzza’s voice is shattered into iron filings on “AS Going.” (Lyrically, there’s nothing more than hints at the end-of-days theme.) Aside from those sharply focused highlights, and a brief climax of power chords and blast beats on “AS Labyrinth,” the atmosphere is claggy and subdued. Tearless ends as it began, in slow, exhausted strides. “You will be fine if we can help you lose your mind,” sings a distorted, uncredited voice on the final track, a lighters-in-the-air lament for the party at the end of the world. What could be darker, and more euphoric?
With clubs and festivals on hold in the wake of the pandemic, Tearless will not be presented as the live audiovisual extravaganza that Amnesia Scanner had planned for it. That’s a shame, because their music is designed to be heard at a deafening volume, offloaded in huge slabs to trigger a seismic event on the dancefloor. But as a quiet killer scythes through populations, and as a dozen more undiscovered species disappear from the Earth forever, such an anticlimax is fitting. Kim Stanley Robinson might agree. His second novel, The Memory of Whiteness, promises a fantastical instrument which allows music to flow directly from a master player’s thoughts into reality, thereby cracking open the secrets of the universe. The novel is set in 3229. There’s something to look forward to.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Pan | June 20, 2020 | 7.2 | 17a13719-dd71-414d-b266-0cb7b5543020 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
Atlanta art-punks Warehouse build a tightly controlled chaos, relying on improvised collaboration to forge gems from dischord. | Atlanta art-punks Warehouse build a tightly controlled chaos, relying on improvised collaboration to forge gems from dischord. | Warehouse: super low | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22458-super-low/ | super low | Between Atlanta and Athens, Northern Georgia historically has a knack for churning out some truly freaky, funky acts that can create and innovate outside the claustrophobic East Coast hype bubble. Atlanta quintet Warehouse have existed in this world since first meeting in part at elementary school and then in full years later at Georgia State University. Less than a year after forming, they were receiving recognition from notable local Bradford Cox, who told Pitchfork that one of his best moments of 2013 was “Seeing the band Warehouse play live: They are a new cool young art-punk group from Atlanta. They evoke Pylon but are very much doing their own thing.” Those outside of Atlanta were able to hear what he meant once Warehouse quietly self-released their first album, Tesseract, in 2014. Tesseract’s complex-but-pleasing harmonies quickly caught the eye of blooming Brooklyn label Bayonet and in 2015 it was re-released as a cassette for the masses to consume.
super low is Warehouse’s sophomore effort, taking the strengths of its predecessor and building on them like the Robert Rauschenberg works they mention as inspiration. Like Rauschenberg’s thick collages, Warehouse’s reliance on improvised collaboration results in gems buried amongst their dischord. Ben Jackson and Alex Bailey are responsible for laying each track’s foundation with twisting, jangly guitars, then bassist Josh Hughes and drummer Doug Bleichner add subtle, but strong, flourishes. Finally, there’s the voice of Elaine Edenfield, which stretches and snaps like a rubber band, scratches like Janis Joplin’s howl, and, occasionally, sinks to a mournful murmur. It’s Edenfield’s voice that elevates Warehouse beyond that vague, empty label of “art-punk” and fills them with accessible emotion.
super low opener “Oscillator” kicks things off with a groovy reverie. Immediately after “Oscillator” ends, Edenfield rips into “Exit Only,” her voice seesawing between a commanding rasp and a disheartened mutter. All the while, the instruments are marathoning behind her, remaining in tight conversation that manages to sound effortless. “Audrey Horne,” a clear reference to the sassy “Twin Peaks” character, jumps back and forth between opposites, both in terms of the contrasting tight shredding and loose breaks and lyrically: “Like the prefix and the suffix/There is a before and an after/And it is not here nor there.” Penultimate track “Modifier Analog” chugs along in a similarly composed fashion as the rest of super low but its concluding Broadcast-like swirling breakdown destroys any feelings of monotony before the album gets too comfortable.
super low’s biggest banger is “Simultaneous Contrasts,” a growling track about disparities that surfs down the guitar neck to ride a quick riff. “You and I/We come from separate worlds,” Edenfield groans before hiccuping “The fevered eyes/They’re ruining my life.” The so-called “fevered eyes” float through super low like ghosts in addition to images of purgatory and fading away. The undercurrent of super low is that of loss, a supreme feeling of heartache. The title track reaches a place of resolution, “I can’t destroy the things/They keep me alive/And I can’t destroy the things/That lead to where you lie.” Shortly after, “Reservoir” continues to search for control in a relationship amidst tragedy. Originally intended to be a simple love song a la Belle and Sebastian, “Reservoir” instead results in a difficult embrace of reality—in its own way, it’s more romantic than any traditional ballad. Edenfield chokes through reassurances like “And when all your smoke and veils fall/I am with you/And never leaving” and “I can tell we’re heading towards the apex/Or the end/And either way/It will be fine.”
Warehouse surpass any art-punk labeling through careful, deliberate construction and vulnerability. While some might feel that their complex melodies become a little repetitive, I urge you to listen closer and find the devil in the details. They have planted many careful embellishments just below the surface, and if you find them, it will make glorious sense out of their chaos. | 2016-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bayonet | October 17, 2016 | 7.4 | 17a33284-bb37-4833-990a-bb91ccf4d49d | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
Having evolved from his early days as art rap’s cocky philosopher in chief, milo displays a newfound confidence alongside Elucid, a grittier and more seasoned lyricist. | Having evolved from his early days as art rap’s cocky philosopher in chief, milo displays a newfound confidence alongside Elucid, a grittier and more seasoned lyricist. | milo / Elucid: Nostrum Grocers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/milo-elucid-nostrum-grocers/ | Nostrum Grocers | Rory Ferreira, who records as milo, is at his best when his songs tilt and wobble between confident and cocky. milo has evolved from his early days as art rap’s philosopher in chief (the cocky), more recently sharpening his gaze on fatherhood and blackness in America (the confident). He’s saving the Schopenhauer bars for another day.
Last year’s who told you to think??!!?!?!?! oscillated between both ends of the spectrum, including both love letters written to rap and knotty digressions on metaphysics. At times, it’s too easy to see the gears of milo’s didactic rap style turning. This is why his work as Scallops Hotel has been more readily approachable than the milo discography. It’s free-associative, touching on and pulling from whatever avenues Ferreira feels like strolling down. In this informal setting, his greatest strength as a rapper—his wit—shines through. Freed from the self-imposed brilliance attached to the milo project, the pressure seems to disappear. This makes his new LP, Nostrum Grocers, with New York-based rapper Elucid, all the more exciting: With another rapper around to do some of the heavy lifting, milo’s able to slip in some of his smartest, brightest ideas without ever crumbling under the weight of his own intelligence.
Elucid and milo first linked up in 2014 as guests on the same online radio show and immediately began brainstorming ideas for an album together. It wasn’t until three years later, a month after the release of who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, that the rappers got together in Brooklyn to begin working on the album. Recorded mostly over two days, Nostrum Grocers is the sort of loose-but-serious gold both rappers have banked their careers on.
Elucid, about 10 years older than milo, is the guiding light for Nostrum Grocers’ thematic scope. Elucid’s stark depictions present him as a vessel into a broken world, one able to conjure up stories of poverty and institutional racism like a ghost of housing projects past, internalizing these ills and illuminating them so the rest of us can see. He often deploys a low growl, giving his delivery an air of desperation. On Nostrum Grocers, Elucid’s jab-jab-cross of a voice helps give the record its precise and rumbling aggression.
The LP is at its best when the electricity between milo and Elucid takes precedence over individual bars that sometimes flirt with excessive cleverness. On “circumcision is the first betrayal,” the two feed off each other’s verses over a hard-hitting drum groove and free-floating sirens pushed to the distance. Elucid raps, “I’m no fatalist/Real black/Like save the bacon grease,” before milo asks, “Would it be fitting to sing a requiem as the trap door closes/Redundant like Black Moses/Abomunist newscast/I’m watching wide-eyed eating a gallon on Moose Tracks.” It’s fascinating to watch these two stylists peel back the layers of each other’s words in executing their respective visions.
Elucid’s intuitive knack for blending dense lyricism with melody rubs off on milo, whose solo records have occasionally featured uniform flows that can veer toward stasis. Here, milo’s brought a sharpening stone for his weapon. On “’98 gewehr” his voice has a sardonic energy, and his effortlessly scathing delivery gives his lines a deadly menace. He goes after rappers past with a hunger and confidence he’s never displayed on other milo-related releases, shaping his previously laid-back flow into sharpened darts: “Greatness is to act with no security/Your whole span was a blur to me/Y’all rap with no urgency,” he snarls, and it’s easy to believe him.
Produced entirely by the two emcees, Nostrum Grocers is a collaboration between two rappers who occupy near-opposite ends of the art-rap spectrum. As each moves towards the middle, the happy medium becomes less a compromise than the best possible result—an impressive feat of interiority projected back out onto the world. | 2018-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Ruby Yacht | August 15, 2018 | 7.7 | 17a5b170-fcd1-49b1-b205-a83e0dcd3e24 | Will Schube | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-schube/ | |
On an album-length EP, Kurt Vile finds darker shades to his gold-hued worldview. | On an album-length EP, Kurt Vile finds darker shades to his gold-hued worldview. | Kurt Vile: Back to Moon Beach EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kurt-vile-back-to-moon-beach-ep/ | Back to Moon Beach EP | Kurt Vile’s time is slippery. Mondays melt unnoticed into Saturdays. The sun rises, sets again, then it all flows bassackwards. His lengthy records give the impression of a series of sunlit days, half-remembered in a haze. But if listening to Vile’s music can make one acutely aware of the transience of all things, the man at the center of these songs does not always seem conscious of this truth. He lives from moment to moment—often the moment of his songs’ creation, which he likes to narrate out loud, describing his writing process and shouting out his influences. He’s deeply self-aware, and if his new album-length EP, Back to Moon Beach, at first seems like a continuation of this thematic and sonic mindset, he has a ready-made response to anyone hoping for a mid-career switcheroo: “These recycled riffs ain’t goin’ anywhere anytime soon,” he sings on the title track.
Back to Moon Beach consists largely of gold-hued guitar jams with simple chord progressions and generous runtimes. One of the first lyrics on opener “Another good year for the roses” is “These days I do whatever I want,” and Moon Beach at first seems like a commitment to this credo. The songs are filled with slacker hedges like “man” and “whatever.” Sometimes he won’t bother to write any words if a “woo” suffices. The title track suggests that “Moon Beach” is the mental landscape he escapes to while making music, and its distance from the daily grind seems aligned with idioms like “head in the clouds.”
And yet the Vile character seems less content, less satisfied, less serene on these songs than on any he’s written since 2011’s Smoke Ring For My Halo. Some kind of dissatisfaction has set in, and it’s not so easy to just play it away. “Cup runneth over with lifeblood/Then it sprung a leak,” he sings on “Touched something (caught a virus),” before complaining about a migraine. “Like a wounded bird trying to fly” centers on a simile apparently written by his daughter Awilda. “Always did I love that line/But never did I apply it to myself ’til just then,” he sings. On “Blues come for some,” the sumptuous layers of guitar fall away, and we hear Vile alone at a piano, confessing: “Blues came to me in my dreams/And it stayed.” The cause of Vile’s blues is often ambiguous, though “Tom Petty’s gone (but tell him i asked for him)” suggests one answer. Vile wonders aloud what he might have said to his friend David Berman, or Tom Petty had he known him, before concluding that he might not have found anything to say: Bob Dylan is still alive, after all, and if Vile met him in person, he’d “melt down like a nuclear reactor.”
Much of this material was recorded in 2019 at Panoramic House in Marin County, the affluent expanse north of San Francisco whose almost Celtic landscapes have long attracted newly moneyed rock stars and inspired some of their most beautiful music. These sessions would be Vile’s last with multi-instrumentalist Rob Laakso, a member of his Violators since 2013, who passed away earlier this year from a rare form of cancer. Though Laakso was not diagnosed until the songs had been written and the sessions wrapped up, “Tom Petty’s gone” becomes even more gutting in this context, especially given how fantastic his contributions sound throughout the record. Laakso’s arrival in the band coincided with a shift toward a more expansive and texturally rich approach, and rarely has Vile’s music sounded more transportive than in Moon Beach’s best moments: the ragged fuzz-wah at the end of “Another good year for the roses,” or the phased-out guitars on the title track that sound like waves lapping against the shore.
At 52 minutes in most versions, Moon Beach is longer than some of Vile’s albums; label Verve admits this is an “EP by no one’s definition” but his. (And maybe Sufjan’s.) The six-track single-LP edition runs a respectable 39 minutes and gains something by ending with “Tom Petty’s gone” and fading into poignant silence. Yet the bonus tracks are delightful. While “Must Be Santa” is best-known through Bob Dylan’s raucous drinking-song interpretation, Vile’s is touchingly domestic, featuring his two daughters on backing vocals and the constant, reassuring twinkle of a windchime. There’s also a cover of “Passenger Side,” a tragicomic early Wilco song told from the perspective of a drunk driver who’s had his license revoked and now throws back beers in the passenger seat. The only song that feels like an afterthought is a marginally shorter single edit of “Cool Water” from last year’s (watch my moves). It’s hard to tell if Moon Beach is meant as a continuation of Vile’s past work or the start of something new, but that uncertainty is also what makes it feel so exciting.
Correction: A previous version of this review implied that Kurt Vile did not know David Berman. It has since been updated to reflect that they were friends. | 2023-11-20T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-20T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Verve | November 20, 2023 | 7.5 | 17a6cb1b-02a4-4ec9-9542-77f3cd7a616a | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Grinderman's final release is a collection of remixes by Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, Factory Floor, QOTSA's Josh Homme, UNKLE, and Robert Fripp, among others. | Grinderman's final release is a collection of remixes by Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, Factory Floor, QOTSA's Josh Homme, UNKLE, and Robert Fripp, among others. | Grinderman: 2 RMX | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16519-2-rmx/ | 2 RMX | The idea of Nick Cave as a remix-appropriate diva is such an excellent one that you might wonder why his hideous shrieks and cadaverous croon haven't been pillaged by DJs a hundred times over. House music, at least, has always had a taste for mixing religious ecstasy into worldly grooves, even if house producers have tended to draw more from the uplifting end of the gospel spectrum. But there's also been a side of house that's reveled in sampling hellfire condemnations and apocalyptic oratory from folks who probably wouldn't set foot in the secular houses of sin where dance music lives. With his pulpit-rocking cadences and brimstone tone, Nick Cave would fit perfectly in this tradition, even if no one's had the sense (or lack thereof) to take him to that particular river just yet.
One look at the tracklist for Grinderman's 2 RMX, eleven tweaks on the band's second (and supposedly final) album, 2010's Grinderman 2, should tell you that this isn't that kind of a remix project. The dream of Nick Cave as hectoring house music queen will have to wait a little while longer. Grinderman was Cave's noisiest and most truculent project in years, but also his wittiest and most sensual. Especially on Grinderman 2, the band had perfected a sound that was equal parts dirty-minded groove, ear-scourging feedback, and mordant-past-all-normal-measure wordplay. If much of Cave's love of blues had focused on the genre's vein-opening confessional side, Grinderman found him returning to its other roots, as a soundtrack for drunken house parties and semi-legal gatherings in sweaty speakeasies. It was a glorious (if often brutal) and physical sound, real body-moving stuff, as well as a cerebral one.
And so while this swan-song compilation is unsurprisingly helmed by peers young and old, from the noisier and more aggressive end of rock music with a few beat-minded ringers thrown in, the assembled musicians don't often seem to get what made Grinderman great (or simply don't care). These are not, for the most part, radical reconstructions, but the best are often the most simple. Or the most sympathetic, however far afield they get from Grinderman's world. Robert Fripp's "Super Heathen Child" is exactly what the name implies, not doing much to the original except cranking it a few notches, including (naturally) the guitars, with the blues raunch being eaten away at by Frippertronics excess. It's one of the few tracks on 2 RMX that I'd listen to over one of Grinderman's non-remixed songs. Not only because it makes the original "Heathen Child" bigger and badder and more swaggering, but because it does so without getting in the way of that too-hot groove.
The individual entries on Grinderman 2 are all over the map quality-wise, from inert and utterly ignorable (Factory Floor's mush-headed clichés when they take on "spooky" industrial ambiance) to half-brilliant reframings of pretty singular material (UNKLE slamming acid house silliness into chunky surf-rock pastiche until they come up with the perverse idea of Grinderman-goes-big-beat). But these remixes are undeniably at their weakest when they dull the band's get-down-get-dirty instincts, defang their attack, and/or smother Cave's self-lacerating humor under a ton of "atmospheric" murk. And even the like-minded remixers occasionally fall short. Queens of the Stone Age aren't musically a million miles from what Grinderman were attempting to do during their too-short career, but Josh Homme's tepid "Mickey Bloody Mouse" is a damn shame when you consider the kind of motorik monster he could have pulled off.
Still, occasionally someone strays from the Grinderman template and actually scores. For a glimpse at what a wholly beautiful Grinderman might have sounded like, look to Barry Adamson, who tarts up the already pretty swoony "Palaces of Montezuma" with his usual Bacharach-gone-badass bells and whistles. And while I've never been much taken by A Place to Bury Strangers' empty cacophony, maybe all they needed all along was a great singer: There's no sex in their rhythm, another JAMC-in-a-tsunami attack that's been bleached of all blues, but it's definitely a groove, however manic and relentlessly forward-charging. Plus Cave's voice adds an urgency and human grit that's almost always been missing from the band's original material. It's a shame that more acts here, given the platform, didn't choose to exercise Adamson's craft or APTBS' intensity. As a farewell-cum-summation, 2 RMX could have been worse. It's hardly as cynical or cover-your-ears bad as most rock remix albums. If nothing else, it proves how singular Grinderman were, and reinforces how much they'll be missed. | 2012-04-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-04-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Anti- | April 19, 2012 | 6 | 17af2054-2ce9-4be0-ba8b-c0f25329411d | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
A year after their onstage debut, the atmospheric black-metal artist WIFE and grime experimentalist Mumdance join again to fuse pummeling beats with sheets of noise into a kind of transcendent fury. | A year after their onstage debut, the atmospheric black-metal artist WIFE and grime experimentalist Mumdance join again to fuse pummeling beats with sheets of noise into a kind of transcendent fury. | Bliss Signal : Bliss Signal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bliss-signal-bliss-signal/ | Bliss Signal | At a moment when every midsize market seems to have at least one middling music festival, the most enduring events understand that mere stand-and-deliver sets from known quantities aren’t enough to jumpstart intrigue, let alone maintain it. If the question is how to stand out, the available answers are manifold: full-album performances, audacious premieres, unforeseen reunions, one-off collaborations, art installations in spectacular settings. During the last 15 years, Unsound—an especially adventurous experimental festival rooted in Poland but now with branches worldwide—has tried it all. For recent editions, they have helped propel a touring ballet and album by footwork disruptor Jlin and British choreographer Wayne McGregor and staged a Matmos performance of a Robert Ashley opera; in 2014, they even launched a line of perfumes created in concert with Tim Hecker, Ben Frost, and Kode9, and designed to accompany their music. In a landscape that is formulaic by industry design, Unsound epitomizes the idea that festivals can be about more than combining beers and bands to make money.
Bliss Signal are not the most shocking or unexpected project to stem from Unsound’s hallowed history, but the project’s 2017 Krakow debut did represent a reach across the aisles of distinct British niches. James Kelly emerged a decade ago as Altar of Plagues, an intoxicating atmospheric black-metal band that gave its complex song structures a slick electronic skin; Kelly soon inverted the idea as WIFE, a hard-edged electronic pop project built around a heavy-metal heart. As Mumdance, British producer Jack Adams has been a similarly brazen synthesist, grappling with harsh noise and hip-hop power above a stiffened electronic spine. His sense of repetitive propulsion and lurking melody has long suggested a spiritual kinship with heavy metal’s sweaty ecstasy. In retrospect, Kelly and Adams are nearby pieces of the same postmodern musical puzzle—fitting partners given the right circumstances, like an invitation and a stage at one of the world’s best festivals.
Their eight-track, full-length debut arrives almost exactly a year after that onstage premiere and systematically checks each of the duo’s requisite boxes: For “Floodlight,” a hangman riff frames a concussive beat before they merge into a racing industrial wallop. For “Surge,” pummeling techno becomes a blast-beat surrogate, the pulse furious beneath a sheer black-metal façade. There is a pensive intro that drops a sonar signal into subaqueous hum, an interlude of soft drone and whirring static, and an expansive outro that feels like a deep breath exhaled with eyes closed and chin skyward.
The best moments on Bliss Signal—when Adams’ circuits flip Kelly’s riff upside down during “Tranq,” or every time the beat recoils and releases during the title track—hinge more on force than finesse. In fact, these 30 minutes feel like a blaze of glory for one spin, maybe two, overwhelming you the way Salem’s King Night might have. But as with that largely forgotten crew, repeated listens don’t yield the depth of peers like, say, Tim Hecker, Andy Stott, or Maja Ratkje. Bliss Signal doesn’t produce the lasting despair of labelmate and clear predecessor Prurient (it does seem at times like his Cocaine Death, reimagined as a maze of locked grooves), the ascendant beauty of the Hafler Trio, or the transcendent motion of M83. You can hear traces of all that throughout Bliss Signal, and they are entirely tantalizing. But they never coalesce into a cohesive sound, never rising past fury into a singular identity.
Aside from the occasional deluge of gray-shaded deliverance, what’s best about Bliss Signal might be its keen sense of promise—the potential that remains in ideas left unfulfilled and detours left untaken. At less than five minutes, “Endless Rush” doesn’t pursue the implied infinity of its name. A fluorescent glow slowly rises, with Kelly and Adams pulling a steadily escalating beat taut beneath it. Listening feels like watching the pages of some massive flipbook fly by, knowingly waiting for an end you hope never comes. The song fades away too soon, the sad whimper at the end of an exciting life cut short. I want to hear them shape a piece like this over the course of an hour, teasing out its every nuance much like the Necks. And only for the exquisite finale, “Ambi Drift,” do Bliss Signal add vocals. They use Kelly’s arced falsetto as a sort of curved steel beam, the anchor around which they hang spiderwebbed distortion and noise that crackles like the embers of an eternal campfire. It recasts Sigur Rós, suddenly aiming for hell rather than heaven. The song lingers at album’s end like an alluring ellipsis, suggesting there’s more but not guaranteeing it. Here’s hoping there is. | 2018-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Metal | True Panther / Profound Lore | October 9, 2018 | 6.9 | 17b09044-2335-49f9-b3ad-6519e2dab173 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On her third LP, Seattle’s Shenandoah Davis turns breakups into pitch-perfect chamber pop, propelled by wise lyrics and her striking, classically-trained voice. | On her third LP, Seattle’s Shenandoah Davis turns breakups into pitch-perfect chamber pop, propelled by wise lyrics and her striking, classically-trained voice. | Shenandoah Davis: Souvenirs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shenandoah-davis-souvenirs/ | Souvenirs | Most love songs are about one of two stages in the life of a relationship: the beginning or the end. Either you’re meeting someone’s eyes across a crowded dance floor, or you’re watching them pack their stuff into cardboard boxes before closing your apartment door behind them. On the surface, Souvenirs, the third album by Seattle-based singer-songwriter Shenandoah Davis, is all about breakups—certainly, the love affairs chronicled on these 10 chamber pop songs are behind her. But Souvenirs doesn’t dwell on the bitterness, remorse, or even sadness conveyed by the typical breakup album. Instead, it focuses on the moments in relationships that are often overshadowed by the more dramatic episodes—the daily minutiae, the memories that fall between the cracks until they are retrieved, years later, like coins between the cushions of a beat-up couch. Davis seeks to serve those memories justice, and demonstrate that even when everything goes wrong, there can still be beauty that may alleviate the heartache, if only for the duration of a song.
Beyond its emotional dexterity, the sound of Souvenirs is astoundingly well-rounded, as Davis’ wise-beyond-her-years lyrics mesh seamlessly with lush orchestral instrumentation and a strikingly high-pitched, classically-trained voice that lies somewhere between Joanna Newsom, Joni Mitchell, and some shivering lovelorn aria (Davis graduated from the University of Northern Colorado with a degree in operatic performance). From the opening windswept strings of “The Wings,” Davis imprints every note of Souvenirs with a sense of deep purpose.
Her lyrics evoke detailed tableaus, stories within stories, and when she sings lines like “Sleep under the piano in your grandfather’s house/On the braided rug and lay his best suit out,” you can almost feel the carpet scratch against your cheek. Despite the violins, violas, oboes, horns, pianos, and multitudes of other instruments on these tracks, they don’t come off as heavy-handed, or trying to fill the songs with false importance. In their grandiose narrative songwriting, these could be songs by Petula Clark, or Ronnie Spector, or Françoise Hardy, and their pitch-perfect nod to the symphonic pop artists of the mid-20th century adds yet another meaty dimension to the album.
But the moments of romantic introspection end up taking center stage. On the highlight “East-Facing Window,” Davis visits a lover in New York City, unsure of how the trip will end or where she stands in the relationship. “Let’s hang up our artwork/In a borrowed apartment,” she suggests, “I mean all our friends have done it/And it’s not like they’re geniuses or anything.” Meanwhile, the person across from her has a simple question: “What did you come here for?” “East-Facing Window” begins with a simple arpeggiated piano melody, but as the song continues and Davis becomes more and more wrapped up in doubt and confusion, the music becomes stormier, the piano becoming faster and faster as violins whirl around. It’s a great example of how Davis can take one day out of her life and create a sonic narrative that transports you to its exact place and time.
There are other magical moments on Souvenirs: the piano ballad “Gold Coast,” which evokes the simple melodies and self-deprecating humor of Randy Newman; “Orbit,” which begins like a 1960s girl group waltz; and the lead single “Supernatural Powers,” which is perhaps the only song on Souvenirs that depicts the explosive passion of the beginning of a relationship. Each song on the album features some kind of window into Davis’ past, and each lyrical flourish, or well-placed baroque instrument, is a key to that remembrance. The record’s title serves it well: If life amounts to a collection of memories, the majority sitting idle on a shelf in our minds, Davis’ talent is in taking hers down, dusting them off, and presenting them to us as universal experiences. She learns from them, and so can we. | 2017-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Plume | September 15, 2017 | 7.6 | 17b3821a-bbfa-443a-b341-e1d91ae23c51 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
One of the greatest rock albums ever is reissued again, this time in two versions; both useful but less than ideal or definitive. | One of the greatest rock albums ever is reissued again, this time in two versions; both useful but less than ideal or definitive. | Iggy and the Stooges: Raw Power [Legacy Edition] / Raw Power [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14125-raw-power-legacy-edition-raw-power-deluxe-edition/ | Raw Power [Legacy Edition] / Raw Power [Deluxe Edition] | When Iggy Pop commanded a generation of glam-rock kids and biker-bar burnouts to "dance to the beat of the living dead" on Raw Power's totemic title track, he wasn't just talking B-movie nonsense-- he was heralding his band's back-from-the-grave resurrection. Because the Stooges heard on Raw Power were not the same band that produced 1969's self-titled debut or 1970's Funhouse, but rather some mutant, zombie version. With the Stooges dropped from Elektra, Iggy exploited a solo-artist deal with David Bowie's management to reassemble his band around new guitarist James Williamson, pushing Ron Asheton to bass and re-branding the Stooges as "Iggy & the Stooges". And in accordance with those changes, Bowie's infamously treble-heavy Raw Power mix thrust Iggy's vocals and Williamson's searing solos miles out in front of the rhythm section, to the point of practically writing Ron and drummer/brother Scott Asheton out of the set.
All of which has made Raw Power the most contentious release in the Stooges catalog, a fact that Iggy himself effectively owned up to in 1997 when he issued an exponentially louder and beefier new mix that took the album's title to literal extremes (and, in the process, horrified audiophiles with a distaste for digital distortion). It speaks volumes about the songs' pure immediacy and charisma that, even in its original mix, Raw Power became the album most responsible for giving the Stooges a life after death. Where the primordial caveman blues of The Stooges and the proto-metallic grind of Funhouse made them touchstones for future grunge, stoner-rock, and noise artists, Raw Power provided a mainline for first-generation punks and the 80s hard-rockers that followed in their wake. (Case in point: When J Mascis and Mike Watt hooked up with Ron Asheton for some 2001 dates, they only performed songs from the first two Stooges albums; when Guns N' Roses and the Red Hot Chili Peppers covered the Stooges, they did songs from Raw Power.)
There's no denying that the Raw Power era was the band's most prolific: the album's eight songs account for just a fraction of the music Iggy & the Stooges produced between their 1972 reformation and their unceremonious 1974 dissolution. Over the past three decades, the number of bootlegs that have attempted to collect all the unreleased material from this period-- from the Rough Power comp of de-Bowie-fied mixes to the notorious last-gig document Metallic K.O.-- have amounted to a mini-cottage industry that's been as vital to sustaining the band's legend as their four official releases.
So, for an album that runs a mere 33 minutes, Raw Power should provide ample fodder for deluxe-reissue treatment and an opportunity to streamline all that bootlegged ephemera into an official storehouse of all the songs the Stooges produced between 1972-74. However, this reissue-- available in a 2xCD, budget-priced Legacy Edtion set and as a more elaborate $60 4xCD Deluxe Edition-- doesn't attempt anything quite so ambitious. Instead, the main impetus is bringing a remastered version of the original Bowie mix back to market. This is understandable from an historical-preservation perspective, but then why not also include the '97 mix and allow fans to compare and contrast?
The new remaster certainly enhances the ambient details in the mix-- like the tense acoustic underpinning of "Gimme Danger", or the echoing beat in "I Need Somebody" that illustrates Bowie's intention of making Scott Asheton's drums sound like a lumberjack chopping wood. But, personally, after spending the past 13 years having my ears ravaged by the '97 Iggy mix, I find it difficult readjusting to the leaner, original version-- even with the remastering, the '97 version far outstrips it in fidelity and sheer brute force, and remains a better entry point for younger listeners seeking to understand the album's impact.
Still, even if you've already bought this album twice, the Legacy Edition's second disc offers a compelling reason to shell out again: an immensely entertaining, well-preserved 1973 Atlanta club set that was intended for a radio broadcast but later aborted. Recorded months after Raw Power had been released, ignored, and consigned to cut-out bins, the set sees the Stooges in another transitory state, further asserting *Raw Power'*s 50s-rock roots with the addition of jaunty pianist Scott Thurston, but also patiently stretching out new songs like "Head On" and "Heavy Liquid" into loose, exploratory, Who-style workouts. It also unintentionally redresses Raw Power's initial imbalance by smothering Williamson's leads in the Ashetons' thick low-end. Naturally, the combination of Iggy and a crowd of southerners results in some colorful exchanges ("You wanna get your little fucking face punched out, little cracker boy?"), and it's fun to revisit a moment when the Stooges' audience was sparse enough to make out individual conversations (says one spectator: "I don't think he likes us!"). But more than a document of Iggy in his audience-baiting element, the set serves as a great tribute to the late Ron Asheton, whose bass-playing is finally revealed to be every bit as fierce and inventive as his guitar-playing.
The live disc is appended with two Raw Power outtakes-- a more compact, studio version of "Head On" and the silly rumble-in-the-jungle jam "Doojiman"-- but anyone hoping for more vault-clearing revelations on the expanded 4xCD Deluxe Edition (available exclusively through www.iggyandthestoogesmusic.com) will be disappointed. The "Rarities, Outtakes and Alternates" disc seems especially ill-conceived, padding out its few genuine finds (an amusing, embryonic version of "Penetration" dubbed "I'm Hungry", and the Velvets-via-Hendrix goof "Hey Peter") with a random assemblage of alternate mixes (including a pair of 1997 representatives) and an incomplete sampling of the era's well-known outtakes ("I Got a Right" and "I'm Sick of You" are accounted for, so where the hell's "Gimme Some Skin"?).
Easy Action's 2005 bootleg box-set, Heavy Liquid, did a far more thorough job of compiling the Raw Power-era castaways, so Stooges completists investing in this Deluxe Edition will need to be satiated by the non-musical extras: a replica Japanese "Search and Destroy" b/w "Raw Power" seven-inch, 48-page book (filled with celebrity testimonials and Mick Rock's iconic period photography), five 5x7" photographic prints, and, most valuably, a DVD documentary about the album's creation by Morgan Neville. Comprising recent interviews with the surviving Stooges and famous fans like Johnny Marr, Chrissie Hynde, and Henry Rollins, the doc covers all the main album talking points and offers a memorable moment of candor when Iggy admits to feeling vindicated that the Stooges still have such vitality and relevance today. There was certainly no lack of irony and cheek when Iggy first sung "we're going down in history" on Raw Power's kamikaze closer "Death Trip", but watching the closing shots of Iggy & the Stooges performing for a Brazilian festival crowd last year, with Mike Watt inheriting Ron Asheton's mantle, those words now sound more assuredly prophetic than ever. | 2010-04-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-04-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | null | April 14, 2010 | 8.3 | 17b4b046-b2bd-4cd7-9e81-c8e1f51a94ad | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Rjd2 is in the very enviable position of being the hottest new artist on Def Jux, which is quickly establishing ... | Rjd2 is in the very enviable position of being the hottest new artist on Def Jux, which is quickly establishing ... | RJD2: Deadringer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6797-deadringer/ | Deadringer | Rjd2 is in the very enviable position of being the hottest new artist on Def Jux, which is quickly establishing itself as the epicenter of post-millennial hip hop. After Rjd2 dropped the superb I Really Like Your Def Jux Baby Tee earlier this year, a steady buzz began to build that Deadringer would be the next step in instrumental, sample-based hip-hop. Def Jux guru El-P even declared that this record will "change the motherfuckin' world." Heads began to salivate with expectations of a terse, discordant soundscape that mingled the cinematic glory of DJ Shadow with the decidedly subterranean grime of the other Def Jux releases. It seemed to be a marriage made in heaven, albeit a particularly dark and confusing corner of God's kingdom.
Perhaps you should brace yourself before sliding this particular slab of vinyl onto the decks. While the Shadow influence is evident throughout the album, Deadringer sounds absolutely nothing like anything else on Def Jux. It's funky, soulful and seems to draw more from The Beatles than it does Skinny Puppy. That's not to say that there aren't dark moments on Deadringer, but that Rjd2 maintains a stylistic consistency while oscillating emotions and moods at the drop of a hat, and that its ability to capture the various hues that comprise life's mosaic is a rare thing to find in today's music.
Opener "The Horror" kicks off with a jolting chorus of horns before quickly fading into a grandiose, cheeky sci-fi sample that sounds more playful than menacing. A flanged voice declares, "It's time, time, time to understand the horror... It's time, time, time to understand the monster." These light, almost teasing moments, which are liberally sprinkled throughout the album, keep Rjd2's soundscapes from veering too closely into Shadow territory and help this album overcome the generally monotony of most music being labeled 'cinematic.'
But if you think you've got this record's number already, think again: "Smoke and Mirrors" totally flips the script. It's bluesy, eerily reminiscent of the cold psychedelia laid out by early Pink Floyd. After a raucous intro, a throaty voice pops in and sings, "Who knows what tomorrow will bring, maybe sunshine, maybe rain... maybe it'll bring my love to me." And while the track initially comes across as simplistic and retro, the subtleties of its execution are complex, transcending the genres that inform it.
Other strains of psychedelia can be heard throughout this album. "Ghostwriter," with its light, shimmering guitar work, alternating samples of 'mmms' and 'ahhs,' and chorus of triumphant horns, recalls the joyful loopiness that defined the best psych-pop of the mid-60s. The song's final joyful burst is so sublime that it alone justifies purchasing this album.
"Final Frontier" and "F.F.H." prove that Rjd2, who got his start doing the production work for the MHZ crew, can still back up an emcee. Unlike other producer wunderkinds, Rjd2 never allows the production to overwhelm the vocalist, and as a result, both tracks are highly effective. But the symbiotic dynamic between producer and emcee is most evident in the incredible "June." The production seems understated and almost ordinary as Copywrite spits his verse, but in the long break between the first and second verses the hypnotic brilliance of the track crystallizes. The interplay between the flamenco guitar, ringing synth, and shuffling breakbeat is transporting. And how the music drops before Copywrite comes with his second verse is a minor but brilliant touch.
But Deadringer's real jewel comes after the album is officially over. While hidden tracks tend to be gimmicky clunkers, this is a diaphanous slab of soul. The brief, simple sample that anchors the track is both melancholic and resilient. A smoky yet smooth vocal sample declares, "You are gone, I'm so all alone... as I stare at the ceiling." It's a rare display of emotional transparency in hip-hop, although it would be a bit unfair to classify Deadringer as strictly hip-hop.
There are a few missteps. While Rjd2 inarguably brings the heat with "The Chicken Bone Circuit," the track's breakbeats-on-steroids drums and haunting, minimalist piano sample too closely approximate DJ Shadow. "The Proxy" might serve as a standout track for those who enjoyed Bundy K Brown and Jim O'Rourke's remixes on The Sea & Cake's Two Gentlemen EP, but it's a bit too lite for my tastes. Still, for every instance that the disc threatens to blatantly parody Shadow or descend into the impish, commercialized world of Moby, Rjd2 tweaks a sample and drops a beat that makes your heart palpitate. While it's doubtful that this album will "change the motherfucking world," or even the landscape of hip-hop, Rjd2 has managed to perfect his certain brand of sampling, making Deadringer an essential purchase for any fan of instrumental hip-hop. | 2002-07-25T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2002-07-25T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Definitive Jux | July 25, 2002 | 8.8 | 17b88ecd-3887-4e22-b859-216afb02347e | Pitchfork | null |
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Person Pitch and Sung Tongs producer Rusty Santos teams with members of Gang Gang Dance and White Magic to create a pair of art-rock records. | Person Pitch and Sung Tongs producer Rusty Santos teams with members of Gang Gang Dance and White Magic to create a pair of art-rock records. | The Present: World I See / The Way We Are | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13306-world-i-see-the-way-we-are/ | World I See / The Way We Are | As a producer, Rusty Santos has placed his hand in many, many jars. In addition to his work on game-changers like Animal Collective's Sung Tongs and Panda Bear's Person Pitch, Santos has also helped shaped sounds on record for Gang Gang Dance, fellow Paw Track clan member Dent May, as well as last year's much slept-upon Born Ruffians long-player Red Yellow & Blue. Trying to pick up on threads that run constant throughout a résumé that varied would make for some headphone headaches. Fortunately, Santos formed a band of his own.
The Present is Santos' recent collaboration with Japanese musician Mina and Jesse Lee of Gang Gang Dance and White Magic, a project in which Santos further experiments with fusing together much of the same gossamer textures and elements that galvanized the walls of sound he helped erect as a producer. In October of last year, the trio released World I See, a remarkably arranged spirit journey that, according to Santos, was written and recorded stream of consciousness, using just guitar, keys, and drums. But it never sounds that simple nor familiar-- the line between organic and synthetic remains ever blurred. In fact, the sharp divide between the Present's output and their straight-ahead setup is a gap still very much a part of what also makes the band's latest audiomosaic, The Way We Are, just as fascinating.
Opener "Heavens on Ice" spans 13 minutes of astral transmissions and vocal warp zones. Couched somewhere in all the synthetic chaos sits a short-lived stretch of breathtaking guitar melody and tribal rhythms totally unblemished. It's worth the mining, pretty yet inaccessible. Interlude "Love Melody" is equally beautiful, a chunk of magnetic oasis that sits between even more shards of manipulated sound, all of which clatter and skitter and morph into duo "Symbols on High" and "Africanized Beatniks". For better or worse, The Way We Are is more easily digested than its predecessor. Though the synth palette is less abrasive and the song lengths infinitely less intimidating (only "Saltwater Trails" comes close to flirting with the 10-minute mark), it's still very closely related in purpose. "Shapeshifter" sandwiches a grind of harsh screens and lunar-laundromat noise between cascades of keys. To close: "Press Play", a staunchly industrial jam that lets only a few slivers of light through before calling it a day. This is a difficult listening experience for certain, but check those album titles: Santos seems to be trying to transcend the idea of listening experience in particular. He's taken to finding a spectrum of sound that mirrors more than just a moment. | 2009-06-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-06-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | null | June 25, 2009 | 7.3 | 17c428d3-9443-4f79-a4f3-e796c1f52d34 | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
Silver Wilkinson junks the plasticine electro-pop that marred Mind Bokeh and returns to the warm splendor of 2009’s Ambivalence Avenue, the record which began Stephen Wilkinson's second, more rewarding phase as Bibio, investigating what it meant to be a producer with vision. | Silver Wilkinson junks the plasticine electro-pop that marred Mind Bokeh and returns to the warm splendor of 2009’s Ambivalence Avenue, the record which began Stephen Wilkinson's second, more rewarding phase as Bibio, investigating what it meant to be a producer with vision. | Bibio: Silver Wilkinson | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18006-bibio-silver-wilkinson/ | Silver Wilkinson | There’s a new Boards of Canada album coming out in a few weeks and Stephen Wilkinson is likely as excited as you are; after all, he's never turned down the chance to express his intense fandom of the band. Even better news for him is that his seventh album as Bibio, Silver Wilkinson, will not be rendered redundant by Tomorrow’s Harvest. That wasn’t the case last time BoC released new material; the two would namedrop each other in interviews, and when The Campfire Headphase finally allowed six-strings into the mix, they were modeled after the kind of gelatinous, wobbly guitars that defined Bibio’s early work on Mush. The presumptive show of mutual respect was the biggest thing Wilkinson had going for him at the time, but now, he shares not only a label with his heroes, but a similar quandary: after creating such a definitive document of his sound, he faces the redundancy that comes with competing with his own work.
He actively courts this problem on Silver Wilkinson, which junks the plasticine electro-pop that marred Mind Bokeh and returns to the warm splendor of 2009’s Ambivalence Avenue, the record which began his second, more rewarding phase. It was only then that he fully explored what it meant to be a producer with vision; he dabbled in songwriting, beatmaking, crate-digging and acoustic strumming, sometimes all at once, unifying it with an aesthetic that established an equilibrium between the pastoral and the digital (and proved perfect for selling Kindles). It’s a an all-inclusive, welcoming sound that puts a wide range of potential conflicts of interests-- wafting British folk, Dilla-fied hip-hop instrumentals, psychedelic light funk-- into the same frame, consistently providing pleasant surprises and never making a huge deal about how diverse it was.
In short, Bibio relies on an accumulative effect more than the strength of any individual songs. But when the ratios get thrown off even in the slightest, the results come off as alternately distracted or monotonous. The first four songs on Silver Wilkinson contain no sound you haven’t already heard from him: aqueous atmosphere, washed-out acoustics, Wilkinson’s haunted vocals. They’re just allotted in less satisfying proportions; instrumentals “The First Daffodils” and “Wulf” are too short to offer immersion, too long to qualify as interludes while “Dye the Water Green” and “Mirroring All” are humble folk songs burdened with too much found sound and drift to justify their five-minute lengths. Immediately after, "À tout à l'heure" establishes some kind of momentum with a nimble acoustic riff and a spirited, stomping rhythm, but by the time you get there, Silver Wilkinson has exhausted nearly one third of its run time.
And that gets to the mundane issue at the center of Silver Wilkinson, which is that it’s a layering of holding patterns. It either idles too long in genial background, or gets to relatively exciting productions which specifically recall his previous work. The combination of light, bumping funk and analog nerd synths on “Look At Orion!” is a canny move on Bibio’s part, establishing himself as the missing link between labelmates Boards of Canada and Flying Lotus, but it barely builds on that idea. “You” is sequenced as the literal centerpiece of Silver Wilkinson and the figurative one-- the hiccupping samples and percussive jump cuts remind you that his whole aesthetic is more hip-hop than anything. There’s something underhanded about it, though; it’s meant to be a gaudy display of Wilkinson’s range surrounded by the overt naturalism of “Sycamore Silhouetting” and “Raincoat”, when really it’s just a minor variation on Ambivalence Avenue’s “Fire Ant”.
None of the above makes Silver Wilkinson a bad album, far from it. It just questions what Bibio’s true strengths are; the melodies and arrangements are nice, but does he have a go-to skill besides curation? If it’s your first experience with Bibio, there’s a lot to like here and thankfully, Silver Wilkinson renders Mind Bokeh’s “Take Off Your Shirt” as distant and out of character as an embarrassing Spring Break memory. And yet, it can make someone who’s followed Bibio since the beginning nostalgic for the willingness to take that kind of risk. The problem is that while Ambivalence Avenue was a pleasant surprise in all forms, an astounding leap from an unexpected source that constantly offered new sounds, Silver Wilkinson provides the same thing without the surprises. And all that’s left is the pleasant part. | 2013-05-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-05-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | May 15, 2013 | 6.2 | 17caec62-ec71-48ae-8599-fc9c90299b65 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
John Ross leads his band through a richly detailed and expectedly sentimental album that wrestles with all the life and death that exists in the midst of a cancer diagnosis. | John Ross leads his band through a richly detailed and expectedly sentimental album that wrestles with all the life and death that exists in the midst of a cancer diagnosis. | Wild Pink: ILYSM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wild-pink-ilysm/ | ILYSM | John Ross, the lead singer of the New York-based Wild Pink, was writing songs for the follow-up to 2021’s A Billion Little Lights when his doctor told him he had cancer. He was only 34. Ross thought about pausing the project, but his doctor advised him to keep writing and recording: Better to focus on something other than the tumors clinging to his lymph nodes. Heeding the advice, Ross wrote through two surgeries, countless medical appointments, and what surely was a terrifying season of fear and instability. The effects of that decision reverberate through Wild Pink’s new album, ILYSM—a record that, in its sensitive yet raucous intensity, mimics the destabilizing experience of bodily demise.
Tragedies like an unexpected diagnosis or the loss of a loved one can rob you of all your confident and clever opinions about the world—the kind that Wild Pink’s early albums were chock-full of—and reduce you to big, simple emotions: sad, scared, grateful, awestruck. Ross is in the thick of these emotions on the opener, “Cahooting the Multiverse”—a twinkling, full-band ballad with lyrics that a high school senior might pick for his yearbook quote. “It’s not how hard you try, it’s what you’re all about,” sings Ross at his most bearably earnest. It’s a stark and sappy departure from earlier Wild Pink tracks like “Oversharers Anonymous,” in which Ross’ tender voice brilliantly contrasts with the song’s scathing critique of social media.
There’s an expected sentimental undercurrent on ILYSM, especially in the album’s many references to animal life. There’s a “deer underneath the apple tree,” a “lone wolf out in the Rockies,” a “dog that heard thunder, shaking in a crate” and lots of birds: “rare birds” that mate for life, birds that return with a song, a bird that Ross spotted “gliding through a wave that could kill her,” and the sound of birds chirping on album closer, “ICLYM.” (The acronym stands for “I couldn’t love you more.”) When one of these quaint creatures pops up alongside a heartfelt request for someone to “lay right here with me, because I love you so much,” what you get is an unsophisticated tribute like “Hold My Hand,” featuring Julien Baker. Lyrically speaking, the title track’s loving and detail-rich description about Ross’ wife heading out into the world after she tended to his needs all night is much more affecting.
Beyond the cloying optimism of the first couple songs is something much more gnarly and refreshing. “Hell Is Cold” is raw and sprawling, and its abrupt cut-off will leave you wondering if Ross simply flipped the power switch on the mixing board, perhaps choosing to dose ILYSM with a little bit of the unpredictability life had recently served him. The mid-album stunner, “See You Better Now,” is a galloping jam session that recalls the windswept melodies of A Billion Little Lights. And the six-minute “Sucking on the Birdshot” is a gutsy ride through anger, sadness, tenderness, and terror, led by a sinewy guitar solo from Dinasour Jr.’s J Mascis and accented with some of the dissonant fuzz heard on early tracks like “Broke On,” from Wild Pink’s self-titled debut.
Mascis is one of many incredible collaborators bringing an experimental edge to ILYSM. There’s also Yasmin Wiliams, who plays on “The Grass Widow” and Ryley Walker adds his playing to “Simple Glyphs.” Pianist David Moore’s elegant and versatile playing on “The Grass Widow in the Glass Window” is another highlight, even as it elegantly dissolves into the background to make room for another round of beautiful guitar solos.
Here, in all this gorgeous and complicated music, is the infinite wisdom Ross was aiming for in his songwriting. If only it were enough to counter some of the more schmaltzy production choices, like the upbeat, chanting chorus of “ILYSM,” which recalls Coldplay’s soaring hit “Fix You,” or the astral synths and echoey spoken-word intro of album closer “ICLYM,” which resembles any number of songs from U2’s sloganeering All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Both songs possess a sense of naivete and obviousness that simply wasn’t present on previous Wild Pink releases. It makes sense when you consider what Ross was going through while recording ILYSM; it’s a lot easier to swing for the fences with your chord progressions and pen cryptic lyrics when you aren’t dealing with something that strips the varnish off your life. But tragedy doesn’t necessarily beget subtlety, and the perspective you gain doesn’t always last. ILYSM isn’t a brilliant album, but it shines bright and it soothes an aching soul. In this case, that’s more than enough. | 2022-11-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-11-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Royal Mountain | November 2, 2022 | 7 | 17cd6426-195c-4187-9ed6-eadbed0b54c9 | Abigail Covington | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abigail-covington/ | |
New York’s Dylan Scheer, who DJs and produces as Via App, specializes in channeling noise, chaos, and discomfort into tracks that still work on the dancefloor. | New York’s Dylan Scheer, who DJs and produces as Via App, specializes in channeling noise, chaos, and discomfort into tracks that still work on the dancefloor. | Via App: Sixth Stitch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22597-via-app-sixth-stitch/ | Sixth Stitch | In the constellation of small clubs, one-off dancefloors, disused industrial structures, abandoned basements, strange apartments, and wonderfully forlorn spaces that compose and incubate the New York dance scene in the last half-decade, Dylan Scheer, who DJs and produces as Via App, has emerged as one of the city’s most prodigious talents. If you’ve seen her behind the ones and twos at, say, Bossa Nova Civic Club in Brooklyn or Trans-Pecos in Queens, you’ll notice immediately that she prefers caustic and uncomfortable music, and her style is defined by a jitter and mercurial mixing that delightfully defies the streamlined logic of by-the-book techno. It’s the kind of DJing that befits the protean and defiant nature of New York’s dance scene. On her third studio album, Sixth Stitch, Scheer presents an ominous and decidedly gothic vision of club music.
Sixth Stitch is composed of 16 tracks, divided between a series of short interstitial instrumental sketches and more “traditional” dance songs. On her past releases, Scheer made tunes that existed outside of genre, tracks that could be playful and angry, filled with crunching noises and slippery bass lines. Her production was as unexpected as it was seemingly unfocused. Now, she shows a tighter vision, a sharpened sense of what she wants her music to do. Across the music on Sixth Stitch, she creates a creeping tactile sensation that generates a sordid sense of time and place. It is music that imagines the parts of a club that reside behind closed doors and shadowy corners.
In the album’s opening track “Far She,” Scheer lays out the newfound physicality of her music. The piece is haunted by a churning drone that sounds like a malfunctioning white noise machine or a broken appliance. After the noise has become somewhat hypnotizing, Scheer inverts the mood and introduces a percussive element that mimics the sound and feeling of someone banging on a closed door. Seconds later, there is more banging, as if a crowd is forming outside your bedroom. If you’re listening to this on headphones, alone in your apartment, her mix of sounds generates a distinct feeling of horror.
It’s not as if her music is totally predicated on discomfort, but she deploys a series of anxious and claustrophobic moments to make this album’s joyful moments even more pronounced and triumphant. In tracks like “Get in Line” she uses a gurgling collection of noise that’s drippy, wet, and muffled. When percussion starts to stabilize and she adds in a loop of sharp synths, it’s a pure relief, as if you’ve climbed out of a manhole to see the rest of the world. After minutes of nervousness tracks can become downright goofy, and the release of energy is potent.
Elsewhere, Scheer experiments with more cinematic sounds that seem to borrow from Flying Lotus or John Carpenter. In “Viasabel,” she loops a glittering array of keyboard flicks into something that could easily soundtrack a scene in a galactic cantina on a backwater planet. “Con Artist” presents a back-breaking version of jungle that would be appropriate for the rave scene in the second Matrix movie. As daring as Scheer’s selection of sounds are, the sheer length of the album leads to long sections that seem shapeless or mired by wasted space. In songs like “Phantom Dictation,” about two minutes are spent playing around with all the different ways you could pass a simple drumline through a helium filter, and the momentum disappears.
Still, Sixth Stitch is a bit of a daredevil feat for this young producer. Few have her ability to turn bedlam into such an organized and effective music. Scheer has said in the past that she looks to DJs like Ashland Mines (aka Total Freedom) as aesthetic forebears. Arca once said that Mines was the “king of painting through chaos.” Scheer seems to be angling for a title of her own. | 2016-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Break World | November 28, 2016 | 7.4 | 17d1b53a-ff73-421e-acde-9343fed26c34 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
After 2018’s prickly IRISIRI, the Queens experimental musician narrates a personal and artistic rebirth in spare songwriting fleshed out with acoustic guitar, strings, and turbulent sound collages. | After 2018’s prickly IRISIRI, the Queens experimental musician narrates a personal and artistic rebirth in spare songwriting fleshed out with acoustic guitar, strings, and turbulent sound collages. | Eartheater: Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eartheater-phoenix-flames-are-dew-upon-my-skin/ | Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin | The most jarring moment of Eartheater’s fifth album comes during “Volcano,” a sunken lament for misguided love. Alexandra Drewchin’s voice—her most versatile resource, often pushed to ethereal or guttural extremes—cuts through to declare: “I’m obsessed with this grain of salt/I’m fixated on a grain of sand.” With her voice unaffected, grounded in the alto section of her three-octave range, Drewchin, who often appears otherworldly in her music, almost sounds like a woman you might know. Firmly bound to themes of renewal and rebirth, Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin is a winning experiment in economy and earthiness from an artist previously known for ornament and excess.
The Queens-based artist’s first two albums were a snug fit on freaky electronics label Hausu Mountain. In 2015, both Metalepsis and RIP Chrysalis emerged out of enchanted thickets of wyrd folk, fingerpicked guitar, softly throbbing synths, and Drewchin’s infinite cast of voices, from sighing banshee to vocal-fried mumble rapper. Coupled with an alluring backstory—a home-schooled musical prodigy raised on a horse farm, now ensconced in New York’s avant-garde art and dance scene—the whole package appeared sprinkled with psychoactive fairy dust. That version of Eartheater might have ended up making cerebral sideways pop for a label like 4AD or Sacred Bones, but three years later she joined Berlin’s PAN for the cold and prickly IRISIRI, a dissociative mix of techno, cloud rap, illbient beats, operatic wails, and post-Young Thug ad libs. In 2019 she strayed even further from the sylvan path as techno producers including New York’s AceMo pumped a dark electronic pulse through the self-released mixtape Trinity.
Each of those records extended Drewchin’s cinematic universe, her voice embodying an ever multiplying dramatis personae, her jump-cut arrangements catering to her infinite influences—a strategy that occasionally collapsed under its own ambition. On Phoenix, though, Drewchin forces the rainbow back in the prism, concentrating her vast range of identities and impulses into a unified beam. The songwriting is sharp and spare, and her lyrics are easier to decipher, less tangled in delirious wordplay. Acoustic guitar returns to the fore, sometimes fingerpicked in ripples, like an old Leonard Cohen ballad. Simple chord progressions are gilded by celestial strings from Spanish conservatory group Ensemble De Cámara, and harp and violin from Marilu Donovan and Adam Markiewicz of New York duo LEYA.
Some of the material was recorded last year for a theatrical collaboration with Brighton duo Semiconductor, whose audiovisual spectacle included stop-motion images of luminous crystals. Drewchin soundtracked the clips with shivering strings, heavy-metal bass blasts, the ching of an ice pick, and swings squeaking in the park; these turbulent sound collages act as interludes between the vocal-led songs on the album. The album itself came together during a 10-week stint at FUGA, an artist residency program in Zaragoza, Spain. The region’s rugged terrain finds its way into the strata of songs like “Volcano” and the logorrheic “Diamond in the Bedrock,” where Drewchin’s dense poetry is interrupted by Migos-ian syncopation (“Cut through the graves/Cut through the graves”), a technique she also employed on IRISIRI. But for the most part she eschews the proggy density of her earlier records in order to dig down to her core, open to whatever strange truths might be uncovered. “The meaning hasn’t come up yet,” she squeaks on “Below The Clavicle” over swelling strings; “it’s still under the surface.”
The phoenix is an ancient and familiar symbol of rebirth, a mythical creature born out of its own destruction. Drewchin adopts her new avatar with enthusiasm: She gets into character on the album’s sleeve with bony wings sprouting from her back and golden sparks shooting up to her ass cheeks—half thirst trap, half LARPer fantasy. The album’s opening lines, repeated on the final track, illuminate the theme: “The only way out of this is through/Cross my heart and hope to die beyond hope/I’ve seen the phoenix rise out of my ashes.”
What turmoil has spurred this renewal? Drewchin’s last few years have been dramatic: on top of the albums, tours, and commissions there’s been stolen gear, a hard drive failure, and the end of a long relationship. Moving on from the past is standard stuff for an album concept, but in her telling it sounds like she has cut the cord in order to commit herself totally to her art, happily self-partnered with her interior alter egos. Several songs seem to take place during a final tryst: “You and I don’t need to be more than just right now/But just right now could steal a lifetime/So I’m inclined to break away,” she warns. When she “falls into bed with you again” on “Fantasy Collision,” she likens the experience to a car crash–ouch–before “rising from the wreckage.”
Drewchin recently admitted to The Face that she thinks the album “teeters on corny,” acknowledging that getting too close to those delicate heartstrings tends to turn off the chin-stroking set: too simple, too emotional, too feminine, eww. But, she added, “I do also think that corny is adjacent to iconic.” The oldest, most elemental myths are often the most powerful, and the force of Phoenix, like its fiery namesake, stems from its simplicity.
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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. | 2020-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Pan | October 8, 2020 | 7.8 | 17d5fc79-71ee-455b-ba8d-6311725c6437 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
This collaboration between David Byrne and St. Vincent's Annie Clark is largely concerned with human transformation. On the surface, these two have quite a few commonalities, but collaborations aren't always as simple as pairing two smart artists cut from the same cloth. | This collaboration between David Byrne and St. Vincent's Annie Clark is largely concerned with human transformation. On the surface, these two have quite a few commonalities, but collaborations aren't always as simple as pairing two smart artists cut from the same cloth. | David Byrne / St. Vincent: Love This Giant | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17026-love-this-giant/ | Love This Giant | This past June, the first song we heard from David Byrne and St. Vincent's collaborative project was titled "Who". With its firm acoustic strumming, clear delineation of two vocal parts, and repetition of the word "who?" at the beginning of each line, it recalled one of Byrne's best duets: his collaboration with Tejano pop star Selena on the slinky, slow-burning 1995 song "God's Child". Though not quite as moving (or danceable) as "Child", "Who" was an encouraging sign for the duo's Love This Giant project. St. Vincent's Annie Clark fit well amidst a few of Byrne's favorite tricks: lyrics doubling as a series of philosophical questions, a croony curiosity about the wider world, and an arrangement loaded with the brazen brass blurts (Clark's idea, actually) that Byrne first fell for via his Knee Plays album. A few months later, "Who" opens the duo's full-length album, which falls short of both the single's early promise, and the on-paper perfection of the pairing.
You could argue that David Byrne and Annie Clark collaborating on an album in 2012 is better framed by the question immediately asked of any such high-profile pairing: "Why?" On the surface, the two have quite a few commonalities. Both Byrne and Clark are equally fascinated by the theatricality of everyday life: the scripts and performances that drive our days and raise the stakes of our mundane interactions to the level of high drama or (for this duo) dark comedy. Both performers are known for their thousand-yard stares (compare the covers of Byrne's Feelings with St. Vincent's Actor) that suggest a quiet intensity merged with a playful approach to self-presentation.
More generally, much of the power of Clark's and Byrne's music relies on the tension between being trapped and letting go. The primary narrative arc of Talking Heads' legendary live concert Stop Making Sense sees the reluctantly public shut-in character of the jittery "Psycho Killer" gradually learn to embrace his eccentricities, leading to the effusive gospel of closer "Take Me to the River". In her five-plus years as St. Vincent, Annie Clark has set and broken pre-determined molds from every conceivable direction-- at her best, she can go from "Psycho Killer" to "River" in a single song. It makes sense, then, that much of Love This Giant is taken with the idea of human transformation, as evidenced by the album's prosthetically-enhanced cover art. On "The One Who Broke Your Heart", we hear of "the beautiful people" who "did some work on your face." Clark sings of the hopeful revelations of a gradual thawing process on "Ice Age". On "I Am an Ape", Byrne playfully reverse-engineers evolution.
But at the same time, collaborations aren't always as simple as pairing two smart artists cut from the same cloth. Because they're so taken with the idiosyncrasies of others' behaviors and interactions, Byrne and Clark constantly run the risk of their music tipping over into obsessiveness, of living up to the lifeless caricatures they're ostensibly picking apart. Especially considering the expectations attending a project created by two kindred spirits with ideas and talent to spare, Love This Giant is a disappointment. With precious few exceptions, neither Clark nor Byrne seems willing to push the other into new musical territory that might contain revelations about either. The songs merely stand apart from life and dryly comment on its strangeness, while the arrangements-- most prominently featuring the work of several conservatory-level brass players-- are suffused with the sterility that always threatens long-distance collaborations.
"Dinner for Two" is representative in this regard. The narrator spends the song contemplating the sad fact that he's never able to enjoy a quiet, intimate time with his lover, because both are too busy with such nuisances as dinner parties with possibly famous authors milling about. The song's arid brass arrangement and bland percussion do it no favors (elsewhere on the album, John Congleton handles drum programming duties, and seems intent on dragging the music kicking and screaming into 2001). Later, there's "I Should Watch TV", which whooshes Byrne right past the clever engagement with popular culture that made a song like "Found a Job" such a quirky joy, and plops him straight into a self-important deconstruction of his own silly impulses. He's admitting that he really should watch more TV, because it would offer him insight into the minds of the nameless bodies he sees moving around himself everyday. But he resists, and instead sets off quoting Whitman's "Song of Myself" as if to convince himself of his own uniqueness.
As for St. Vincent, it's hard to imagine too many people discovering her through this collaboration, but either way, she's responsible for Giant's best moments. In her own way, she's downright soulful on the refrains of "Weekend in the Dust", a style that serves as a compelling counterpoint to the icy, aristocratic lilt she inhabits on the verses. Though "Ice Age" may not count among the highlights of Actor or Strange Mercy, it shows Clark's skill at shifting gears mid-song without disturbing the cargo, and at employing elements strategically-- here, *Giant'*s omnipresent (and stiflingly monochromatic) brass is mostly reduced to subtle color and minimalist chorus additions, until blooming during the song's well-earned coda. It's not exactly high praise, I know: Here are the two best songs on a strange flop of a high-profile collaboration. In retrospect, it seems Giant will function less as a career highpoint for either artist, and more as a historical marker of the career trajectories of each participant. Byrne plays the wandering dilettante, content to transform his old ideas anew, while Clark upstages her mentor, convinced she still has a lot more to prove. | 2012-09-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-09-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD / Todo Mundo | September 11, 2012 | 5.9 | 17d64964-5ae0-49dd-a8c3-ae094a5f1bba | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
Manchester singer/guitarist Julie Campbell proves the post-punk revival isn't a spent force on this, her debut LP for Warp. | Manchester singer/guitarist Julie Campbell proves the post-punk revival isn't a spent force on this, her debut LP for Warp. | LoneLady: Nerve Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14006-nerve-up/ | Nerve Up | It's one thing, in 2010, to release an album that owes a college-loan-sized debt to all sorts of post-punk touchstones; it's a totally different thing, however, when such an album-- a debut, no less-- earns the breathless praise of famed UK music journalist Paul Morley for that very quality. It takes something extraordinary to inspire someone that was there for the birth and ascendancy of Gang of Four and Wire and Public Image Limited and Joy Division and any other notable group from that scene to pen something like, "she might have been Fac 17/or she might have sung two shows with Section 25 and once met Blue Orchids around the back of a cinema showing Existenz." In other words, Morley's not just saying that LoneLady does a fine job mimicking her musical idols, but actually positions herself as a worthy peer to those very same groups.
Nerve Up is primarily the creation of singer/guitarist Julie Campbell, a native of Manchester who shows an uncanny ability to reinvigorate a sound that was seemingly beyond saving. When she slashes a pick across her guitar strings, there's no way to avoid using a word like "sharp" and "angular" in describing what emerges, and the way she sings-- agitated, clipped, in terse fragments-- perfectly complements those sounds. Campbell also employs a drum machine; it's presumably out of necessity, but the unerring precision of the backbeat does help maintain the sharpness of Nerve Up's edges. The combination of these elements gives the album a nervous, contagious energy that's evident the moment "If Not Now" starts, with Campbell furiously cycling through a two-note pattern on her guitar.
Most of the songs on Nerve Up follow the same template-- guitar chords are fired off, cryptic phrases are aired out ("sun threaten the horizon like a black sign"; "said a ghost is more solid than that"), and the drum machine hits it marks. Thankfully, Campbell finds enough wiggle room in this formula to keep things from stagnating-- where "If Not Now" and "Early the Haste Comes" hit the ground running, "Intuition" ass [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| umes a cocky and confident swagger [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| .
Thanks should also be directed to co-producer and former Laika member Guy Fixsen (My Bloody Valentine, Pixies, Stereolab). Fixsen adds the right amount of polish to these proceedings without overwhelming the songs-- accentuating the pish of a faux-cymbal here, adding some reverb to Campbell's voice there. These touches are so slight as to seem inconsequential, yet they prove to be invaluable. And sometimes the touches aren't so subtle-- a song like "Immaterial" with its charming lope and Campbell's keening vocals, would probably sound like a long lost 4AD gem (from the days of Throwing Muses and This Mortal Coil) without much trouble. The gauzy sheen that the track is given, however, is so reminiscent of that sound, it'd be hard for folks of a certain age (cough cough) to not imagine the accompanying (and undoubtedly awkward yet charming) video. I don't doubt that Fixsen also had a hand in giving the title track-- a funky pop earworm that lets Campbell stand toe-to-toe with Goldfrapp and Róisín Murphy-- a little something extra to make it truly pop.
And then, after nine tracks of this wonderful wall-to-wall skittishness, comes the album finale-- "Fear No More", a complete departure from what preceded it. It's a stark, spacious song that fills the void with a sepulchral guitar line, haunting background moans, what sounds like violin and balalaika, and Campbell singing about "the furious winter" and dreams of "fields, lonely and sweet, like Montana or Idaho." "Fear No More"'s pensive yearning, however, is of a piece with the more up-front restlessness that permeates the majority of Nerve Up. Hopefully, this type of maneuver is proof that LoneLady, having shown an astonishing ability to express her voice using the sounds of others, will work extra hard to make sure she doesn't repeat herself. | 2010-03-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2010-03-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Warp | March 8, 2010 | 7.7 | 17d67f5d-f601-4891-b3af-2f956034eb0e | David Raposa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-raposa/ | null |
In a new archival collection, Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs have polished and stitched together every scrap and forgotten rarity into one final album, a fitting final chapter for an indescribably great band. | In a new archival collection, Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs have polished and stitched together every scrap and forgotten rarity into one final album, a fitting final chapter for an indescribably great band. | Gastr del Sol: We Have Dozens of Titles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gastr-del-sol-we-have-dozens-of-titles/ | We Have Dozens of Titles | In a 1998 interview, David Grubbs once perfectly described the mysterious, impossible-sounding music he and Jim O’Rourke briefly conjured as Gastr Del Sol. “Every record saw us determined to create a different group with each song,” he said, capturing an amorphous quality running through their trio of perception-shattering albums, as well as the project’s initial debut as an entirely different group.
Grubbs started Gastr Del Sol in 1991 with Bundy K. Brown and John McEntire as an acoustic shift from their hardcore trio Bastro. Meanwhile, O’Rourke, emerging from the avant-garde music world, joined after one album just as Brown and McEntire were focusing on their own project Tortoise. Each album the duo made together—1994’s Crookt, Crackt or Fly, 1996’s Upgrade & Afterlife, and 1998’s swan song Camoufleur—feels like a classic of its era, but what many miss is how exciting, disorienting, and bizarre Gastr Del Sol could get on just a single, compilation track or the rare live performance. In the remarkable archival collection, We Have Dozens of Titles, Grubbs and O’Rourke shine a light on those obscure songs and oddities forming the shadow of an album that feels as rewarding as their main ones. Paired with recently discovered recordings of their final performance, it captures how this duo could feel so alive and unpredictable, across the span of a song or an entire discography, from a first rehearsal to a final show.
Listening to Gastr Del Sol’s music is like trying to grasp smoke. A soft piano chord, the hum of a harmonium, or a fingerpicked knot of John Fahey-inspired guitar might cast a sprawling shadow of musique concrète, erupt in guitar feedback by noise artist Kevin Drumm, or swoon into an orchestral sample from a ’50s monster movie like The Incredible Shrinking Man. In one breathtaking moment on “The Sea Uncertain,” from Upgrade & Afterlife, a whistling tea kettle and a screaming internet modem form a quiet duet.
Dozens begins with a work-in-progress, a live version of “The Seasons Reverse” found on unearthed recordings of the band’s final performance at the 1997 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in Québec. While the version that would appear a year later on Camoufleur adds McEntire’s hypnotic polyrhythms, glitchy electronics from Oval’s Markus Popp, flourishes of steel drum, elastic cornet, and Grubbs’ jubilantly surreal wordplay, the song’s most miraculous twist is already fully formed live. Its dense guitar work spirals endlessly deeper until the pop of Grubbs’ strings is as big as exploding fireworks. And then, as O’Rourke sneaks a field recording into the mix, you realize there are fireworks. It’s a humbling, beautiful climax that’s suddenly interrupted by an inquisitive French voice, then O’Rourke’s stammering “Don’t worry, keep doing it! It’s a microphone…I’m recording you blowing off firecrackers…” The moment simply blows up in O’Rourke’s face as he desperately tries to explain and salvage things with the perturbed stranger he’s been recording, only offering further apologies that he can’t speak French. As a field recording it’s a stroke of genius—while simultaneously roasting themselves and field recordings.
That concert offers more surprises like “Ursus Artcos Wonderfilis” from the 1991 debut The Serpentine Similar, the sprawling “Onion Orange” from Grubbs’ debut solo album, and another Camoufleur stunner, “Blues Subtitled No Sense of Wonder,” which leans even harder into its piercing organ melody. Grubbs’ tender vocal performance (including the lyrics where this collection takes its title) isn’t present yet, but a warped TV-sampling interlude that never made the final cut provides a jarring delight.
While the studio recordings on Dozens have all technically been released somewhere, they find a far better home here together. “Quietly Approaching”—which initially appeared on a Red Hot charity release—shines as one of Gastr’s most mysterious pieces. Its ominous textures and chords hang in the air before a brass ensemble erupts midway. “At Night and At Night” is a highlight not only of the Grubbs/Brown/McEntire era, but of the nascent days of the legendary Chicago label, Drag City—its angular peaks originally fitting comfortably on the Hey Drag City comp alongside early Smog and Pavement.
It feels true to the project’s time-bending spirit that Dozens’ shortest and longest studio tracks are its two most memorable. “The Japanese Room at La Pagode,” off a split with the late Tony Conrad, captures two minutes of the duo’s most precise and fractured sounds, from the single-second crack of percussion and Grubbs’ soft piano leading to a cold vacuum of humming electronics. It lingers just to the point of discomfort before a blast of digital noise signals Grubbs’ gentle coda. Meanwhile, the 17-minute epic “The Harp on Factory Street,” originally released as a standalone, functions even better here as an album-within-an-album. Gastr bloom into a 10-piece band, building a towering dirge in the first half before growing so quiet you can hear the chairs creak.
People often get to Gastr Del Sol looking for “more” of something and find a band that sounds like nothing else. It’s why people collected these rarities over the years, chasing any scrap of sound they could from this strange, mysterious project. And it’s why the notoriously self-critical O’Rourke also once perfectly described Gastr Del Sol in a 2018 interview with Stereogum: “This is gonna sound weird, but we were fucking great.” More than 25 years later, O’Rourke and Grubbs have polished and stitched together every scrap and forgotten rarity into one final album, closing off their beloved project as finely as a tape loop. | 2024-05-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | May 28, 2024 | 8.4 | 17db5ade-7aab-407d-be89-c5cd37f6dcbc | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
The Puerto Rican superproducer’s debut LP is a wellspring of new ideas for reggaeton. Even when the concepts don’t fully connect, he remains one of the genre’s most forward-thinking architects. | The Puerto Rican superproducer’s debut LP is a wellspring of new ideas for reggaeton. Even when the concepts don’t fully connect, he remains one of the genre’s most forward-thinking architects. | Tainy: Data | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tainy-data/ | Data | In the early 2000s, Luny Tunes had the future of reggaeton in the palm of their hands. Mas Flow 2, the Dominican American production duo’s 2005 compilation album, spawned a series of classics. The scandalizing drama of Daddy Yankee and Wisin y Yandel’s “Mayor Que Yo” became a bachatón standard; the latter’s massive hit “Rakata” later received the Arca experimental treatment. A reference to Alexis & Fido’s “El Tiburón” (“The Shark”) on Bad Bunny’s “Safaera” would lead concertgoers to don shark costumes, anticipating the precise moment to answer the original song’s refrain (“Que me lleve el tiburón”) with a hip-thrusting new response: “¡Aqui llego tu tiburón!” Mas Flow 2 cleaved through the weeds of a rising genre, forging a path for future Latin artists and offering an eager fledgling producer the opportunity to get his feet wet.
After a year of tinkering with production software, Marcos Efraín Masís Fernández, a rock-, rap-, and anime-obsessed 15-year-old from Puerto Rico, was introduced to Luny Tunes through Nely el Arma Secreta, another foundational beatmaker on the island. Trembling in the presence of his idols, the teenage Fernández previewed a smidgen of the colossal original production that would become the intro to Mas Flow 2. Those audacious 58 seconds, jam-packed with dramatic synthesizers, battle-ready drum rolls, and bombastic strings, crowned Fernández as Luny Tunes’ official protégé: Tainy Tunes. They signed him to their legendary in-house production team immediately.
Over the past two decades, Tainy’s ability to synthesize old-school nostalgia into modern-day bangers has been a secret ingredient in the resurgence of urbano Latino. Today he is the premiere perreo vibe dealer, pushing beyond cookie-cutter Anglo pop crossovers and staying true to the genre’s defiant DNA. He’s produced for contemporary Latin megastars like Ozuna, J Balvin, Don Omar, Cardi B, Kali Uchis, and Selena Gomez. Without Tainy, Bad Bunny classics like “Safaera,” “Callaíta,” and “Yo Perreo Sola” would not exist. But because he is quite literally the best in the business, Tainy’s studio debut, Data, struggles to distinguish itself in his trailblazing discography. Over 19 tracks, Tainy shows off his wide-ranging taste and appetite for experimentation but struggles to balance the search for the next step in urbano’s evolution within the conceptual framework of an album.
The best reggaeton is magnetic, demanding that you surrender to the careful emotional interplay between production and lyrics, the playful addition of a Jaws sound effect, or clever onomatopoeia that riffs on the intrinsic melodic quality of Spanish. But from the moment Myke Towers concludes his verse on opener “Obstáculo” with a brag about Bitcoin, the tone of Data feels tacky and forced. Cinematic production flourishes—a robot voice, ceremonial drums, hymnal humming—all come as left turns. The contrived energy dulls many songs on the album, which Tainy describes as a “series of uploads that ultimately bring a cyborg named Sena to life.” With or without context, that narrative isn’t apparent until the final 10 seconds of closer “Sacrificio,” a cheesy, Rebelde-ready no-hook rap track that concludes with the sound of a woman gasping like she’s just been resuscitated. It feels as if Tainy decided to tape on a concept after the album was already complete.
Futuristic themes and sounds pepper the tracklist, but without correspondingly consistent musical innovation, Data’s claims of changing the game weigh down its true stabs at evolution. “Sci-Fi,” featuring Rauw Alejandro, sounds exactly like what you’d expect from his chrome-plated Saturno aesthetic. The ’80s influences on “Paranormal” are lukewarm despite Álvaro Díaz’s “siempre main character nunca NPC” jab. On “Volver,” the album’s biggest trust fall, Tainy brings in Four Tet and Skrillex, fusing their meandering electronics and subdued drum’n’bass with a reggaeton beat that doesn’t entirely mesh with Rauw’s verse. Even bringing Daddy Yankee out of retirement for a Feid and Sech-assisted single doesn’t hit like it should. With incessant mentions of a girl who hits the gym and takes hella selfies, “La Baby” evokes the soundtrack to a “day in the life” from Latina Corporate Baddie TikTok.
On many songs, Tainy attempts to add nuance to basic pop reggaeton by tacking on string and piano-led outros. “Buenos Aires” is a radio-ready track about partying and baecation, capped by a string section like a superfluous sprig of parsley. “En Visto” slaps some mandolins at the end of an average Ozuna cut. Tainy finally remedies this offense on “Me Jodi...” Arcángel’s sunset melodies about getting his girl back keep the song light and frothy, and when the last 40 seconds switch to an orchestral outro, Tainy sets up a moment to be transported by the song’s emotions. When the next track starts, the electronic pulse and steel drum of “Volver” echo the breezy essence that’s just been cooked up. When Tainy strings together disparate tastes with finesse, his compositional compass feels decipherable.
Thanks to its sheer volume, Data does contain a handful of gems. The six-minute posse cut “Pasiempre” nods to Tainy’s foundational work on X 100PRE, coaxing out a reluctant Trap Bunny for a surprise verse. Co-producer Arca’s glitchy contributions bend Tainy’s beat into an elastic band for Jhayco, Myke Towers, and Omar Courtz to bounce off, and her siren song on the bridge is a splash of cold water that prefaces the truest line Bunny’s spit in a while: “Soy ma’ grande que el trap” (“I’m much bigger than trap”). With three prominent Conejo Malo features, Data revives the classic sound of an artist whose legacy is now fused with Tainy’s own. Bunny imagines them as the reggaeton Kobe and Shaq, as if the two players ditched their feud to dominate urbano airwaves. The ’80s synth pop of “Mobaji Ghost” feels like wind through your hair, and “Lo Siento BB :/” could’ve easily worked on Un Verano Sin Ti. On other standouts like Wisin y Yandel’s ode to old-school perreo “Todavía,” the Marias and Young Miko’s sugary “Mañana,” and Chencho Corleone’s slow-wining interlude, nothing feels forced.
Data is the work of a producer with nothing to prove playing with every toy he owns at once. Instead of aiming for the charts, Tainy pushes each featured artist to explore uncharted perreo territory, presenting urbano music for the emo fans (“11 y Once”), the TikTok girlies (“La Baby”), and the old heads (“Todavía”) all in one place. Despite Data’s unnecessary embellishments and absent android, Tainy remains one of reggaeton’s most imaginative producers, anticipating trends and attempting kickflips within a genre that other producers would rather dilute for crossovers’ sake. On his debut, Tainy’s reggaeton isn’t merely aimed at turning up the party: It’s an ambitious attempt at rewiring reggaeton from the roots. | 2023-07-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Neon16 | July 11, 2023 | 6.8 | 17e00f89-c752-4475-8c19-c12dd88efd5f | Tatiana Lee Rodriguez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tatiana-lee rodriguez/ | |
L.A. dream-punks' second LP matches a new, nuanced approach to their expansive noise with their sturdiest set of songs yet. | L.A. dream-punks' second LP matches a new, nuanced approach to their expansive noise with their sturdiest set of songs yet. | No Age: Everything in Between | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14688-everything-in-between/ | Everything in Between | Words like "accomplished" and "discipline" seem opposed to the very ideals on which punk was founded. But L.A. dream-punks No Age seek to straighten up and fly a little straighter on Everything in Between, tamping down their whiplash tempos, prying open their songs to let a little more air in, further settling into their frantic sound. Their songwriting's grown in leaps and bounds, evincing unexpected depth yet never shying from a satisfying detour. And their sound's become more balanced; hot blasts of dissonance have been turned into smoldering pockets of noise. Everything in Between is a grown-up, downright respectable record about the pitfalls of being a lifer with a 9 to 5, and the sound's matured along with their outlook. Less ferocious, more deliberate but in many ways more compelling, Everything in Between finds No Age matching a new, nuanced approach to their expansive noise.
By this point, you probably know what goes into a No Age song: A scuzzy intro jumps face-first into a thrashabout hook, either jumping again into another firestorm or swelling to a swift end. On 2008's Nouns, they cut these ripcords through with huge, gorgeous clouds of sound. It worked beautifully at the LP level, but the songs themselves felt shot out of a cannon. They didn't always leave room for nuance.
Everything in Between fiinds a little space for everything. Randy Randall's guitar now buzzes and howls throughout these songs, providing them with a backbone rather than simply standing behind them and shoving. Dean Spunt's drums go from a wet thwack to a wild carnival stomp as the situation dictates, seeming to take on new forms as the LP progresses. Every tone, from Randall's guitar squeals to Spunt's impassioned shouts, feels treated, scuffed up, warped. But the sounds are more spectral, less squalid, a product of Randall's varying his guitar tones and the duo's embracing a few more patient tempos. Rather than stepping to one huge precipice at the edge of every song, they've made them more jagged, played up the inter [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| nal [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| tensions, and traded in one big thrill for a seemingly self-propelled series of precision blasts.
Structurally, Everything in Between doesn't shy far from the Nouns formula: Several hook-forward numbers anchor the front half, the floatier stuff mostly shows up around the two-thirds mark, and they close the thing out with a total banger. But the tunes themselves are longer and slightly more traditional (they actually liked a couple of these choruses enough to sing them twice), and the punk rock urgency of their past work's been tempered slightly by a more deliberate pace and Randall's trickier, rustier, less world-beating guitar riffage. It all calls to mind less straight-up SoCal punk and more rangy, roughhewn indie rock; there's flecks of Dinosaur Jr.'s lazy crunch in "Valley Hump Crash", plenty of Hüsker Dü's pop urgency in "Common Heat", enough Sonic Youth to go around everywhere. They've opened up their tone palette so much here, it's as though just about anything could be around the corner. The drone bits feel especially purposeful this time around; "Positive Amputation" has all the skyward motion of an Explosions in the Sky tune, and nearly every time they pull back into these sonic curlicues, the record seems to breathe. They've long felt like a hardcore band with excellent noise instincts, but Everything in Between is where you realize they're mostly a rock band with a ridiculously good ear for sound.
Tuning into No Age for Dean Spunt's lyrics has always seemed a bit of a fool's errand; his tales of youthful malaise are accurately but rarely vividly rendered, and besides, it's not always been easy to make him out through the din. Spunt's voice, though still occasionally inaudible, sits far higher in the mix here on Everything in Between, sticking his lyrics-- and his thin, pleading voice-- at the center of some of these songs. Spunt's still not exactly a masterful singer, and he's just shy of the pitch a time or two here. He's putting his voice to better use though, with a batch of lyrics that underscore the motivational appeals to action that have long hovered around the No Age project. If the record's got a thesis statement, it's somewhere in its first line: "One time is all I need to know my job's complete," Spunt notes, before proceeding with his most detailed, deliberate record yet. Despite the obvious care that went into it, Everything in Between's hewn-from-pure-noise songwriting still feels more like a ridiculously good run of happy accidents than anything resembling hard work-- and it's shot through with an unassuming left coast attitude that makes the record all the more ingratiating.
Everything in Between begins with a series of hits from Spunts' drums; it ends with fireworks. Not the big crash-boom city-spanners, nah; strictly bodega-special bottle rockets, popping along behind Spunt's drums in the chorus of "Chem Trails". It's sort of perfect; this is no lavish, decadent affair, no grab at some greater glory. This is a pair of friends getting together to make a truly compelling racket, and while the wildly successful Everything in Between is certainly cause for celebration, making some big scene would throw its balance off completely. Everything in Between certainly doesn't feel like some huge statement of purpose, some radical reinvention, some big move toward the mainstream; simply a sonically chameleonic, musically generous, seriously compelling record from a couple guys who've once again got all their pedals in a row. | 2010-09-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-09-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | September 28, 2010 | 8.8 | 17e752f5-1715-49a4-91a1-27a5bb9b53ea | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Ryan Adams, part-time solo musician, full-time frontman of indie-country\n\ band Whiskeytown, is from North Carolina. As chance has it ... | Ryan Adams, part-time solo musician, full-time frontman of indie-country\n\ band Whiskeytown, is from North Carolina. As chance has it ... | Ryan Adams: Heartbreaker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/36-heartbreaker/ | Heartbreaker | Ryan Adams, part-time solo musician, full-time frontman of indie-country band Whiskeytown, is from North Carolina. As chance has it, I happen to be from North Carolina, too. Adams hails from a city you've probably never heard of, a little pit-stop on the way to the beach called Jacksonville. I've lived most of my life in a tin-shack of a town called Lumberton, only two hours from Jacksonville by highway. Both towns are small geographical afterthoughts, and about as "southern" as any place you're likely to find in modern-day America.
You have to understand, "southern" no longer means cotton fields, plantations and beautiful belles waiting to escort you to Big Daddy's formal ball. Still, despite all the changes history has brought us, three things remain true about the south:
It's boring here. There's nothing to do, nowhere to go.
The south is beautiful, all small towns and miles of lush, green fields.
It's where all the good music you've ever heard was born. Soul, rock, country, blues, all of 'em from south of the Mason-Dixon line.
In the south, the good music is like sunshine-- you just can't escape it. This is the place Ryan Adams and I both call home-- this boring, but melodic, pit of despair. So is it any wonder that Adams, a young man of only 27 years, is able to craft an album as stark and as enjoyably bleak as Heartbreaker?
Singing in a voice that's just filthy with despair, Adams delivers his first solo album with the practiced swagger and genuine hurt of a veteran country crooner. A startling 15-song masterpiece, Heartbreaker is a drinker's album, an ode to sadness that deals exclusively with all the dark and dirty corners of the human heart. It's music written in the language of loneliness, depression, and, above all, heartbreak, in all its varied forms. And it makes perfect sense that this should be Adams' first solo album, as-- aside from a couple of notable collaborations-- the material here is far too personal and focused to have been produced by anything but one man with one soul.
Heartbreaker shows Ryan Adams sweeping all of the clichés of mass- produced, "new country" under the rug and tapping into everything that makes genuine country music unique and beautiful: raw emotion, deep groove and clever storytelling. There are no simple, melodramatic, commercial-ready ballads here; the music is too deeply rooted in old-school country music, folk-rock songs and bluegrass jams to produce anything that predictable. With that musical philosophy firmly in place, it stands to reason that each track on the album is a gem, showcasing Adams' considerable songwriting ability and a way with words that most musicians would sell their spines to possess.
The record begins with the misleadingly upbeat "To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)," a swinging bluegrass number that wouldn't sound out of place in a honky-tonk. But Adams gets to the business of bringing us down soon enough. When Adams sings, "I just want to die without you," on "Call Me on Your Way Back Home," orphans run out into the street and weep. For "Damn, Sam (I Love a Woman That Rains)," Adams calls on the patron saints of sparse folk music and lyrical tomfoolery while channeling the troubadour vocals of early Bob Dylan to produce one of Heartbreaker's lighter, but better, tracks. Still, even this stylistic similarity is superficial, as the blood- and-guts of the song are all his own.
Adams continues his winning streak by making great use of a rare cameo by country-rock legend Emmylou Harris on "Oh My Sweet Carolina," as Harris' trademark falsetto blends beautifully with Adams' own rich vocals for a simple, affecting song about one man's longing to return home. "Come Pick Me Up," a track about a man struggling with a bad relationship and pining for his cheating girlfriend weighs in as the album's most affecting moment. Gluing crushing lyrics to undeniably catchy drum riffs, greasy guitar work and soulful harmonica playing, the song is five minutes and thirteen seconds of damn near perfect music.
There's nothing terribly complex or tricky about Heartbreaker. In fact, it's probably one of the simplest, most straightforward albums you'll hear all year. But this album wasn't written to be complex. It isn't electronica designed to tickle your cerebral cortex. It isn't music to figure out. It's music to feel to. It's music to drink alone to. And it's sadder than witnessing your grandmother's burial.
Heartbreaker is the soundtrack to the last ten minutes of any relationship you've ever watched crumble before your eyes. It's music for the ruined romantic in all of us. Usually, that little romantic simply sits quietly, tearfully watching everything disappear without so much as a single complaint. But on Heartbreaker, Ryan Adams has not only convinced that voice to speak, he's taught it to sing. The result is an album of astonishing musical proficiency, complete honesty and severe beauty. | 2000-09-05T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2000-09-05T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Bloodshot | September 5, 2000 | 9 | 17e7a731-276d-4e05-9c57-c71561c1da2f | Pitchfork | null |
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Even in its brevity, the Montreal four-piece art-rock band stage a foray into something more instinctive and assured. | Even in its brevity, the Montreal four-piece art-rock band stage a foray into something more instinctive and assured. | Suuns: FICTION EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/suuns-fiction-ep/ | FICTION EP | Suuns’ music sounds so twisted and squashed because it is usually the product of several competing influences. Guitars repeat like arpeggiated keyboards, crisp percussion jostles for space with drum machines, and vocals snarl and quaver like synthesizers. The frontman for the Montreal four-piece, Ben Shemie, once said, “I like this idea of pressure,” which is evident on their latest EP. Hyper-compressed lead vocals and instrumentation repel each other, with each element blooming and reducing like blobs of oil in water.
Fiction is clearly a direct descendent of Felt, Suuns’ 2018 studio album; “Death” even reuses part of “Moonbeams,” Felt’s penultimate song. However, the EP deepens and develops the band’s themes of dissociated helplessness introduced back in 2018. The songs here are underlaid with nervy, roiling sheets of babbling feedback. Austere arrangements are overlaid with warped electronics and distorted vocals, like if Gustav Klimt’s “Golden Phase” paintings were able to manufacture a car. Clearly defined, geometric images foreground muted backdrops in a way that gives a strange sense of physical perspective. Suuns tap into a specific mood: It’s not hazy, but faded.
With all but one song clocking in at around three minutes, the EP is, naturally, brief. However, it never feels insubstantial because the sound of the whole thing is so spectacular. The digitized vocal treatment is one of the most striking elements here. Though present on Felt, it’s now inescapable. Shemie’s melodies can feel improvisational to the point of being atonal, but occasionally a gorgeous pop cadence plops out. There’s such a focus on distorting the voice that the effects seem to direct Shemie’s voice rather than the other way round. It gives the feeling as if it has a life of its own.
Although the noisy, avant-rock EP feels dislocated from reality in a musical sense, Suuns end on a note of political anxiety. “Trouble Every Day” is a spoken-word piece lifted from a Frank Zappa lyric, backed by crashing jazz drums and a squalling guitar line. Originally written in 1965, the lyrics “I’m not Black but there’s a whole lots of times I wish I could say I’m not white” and references to “cops out on the street” are eerily prescient.
In the past, Suuns’ world has felt insular and meticulous. They make cold, brutal music with song titles like “Paralyser” and “Control.” Fiction disturbs this categorization. Of course, it’s tempting to want more, more clearly-defined songs, more beats, more aggression, more of that sublime bweebeebewboo guitar line; there are only two straight-up-and-down songs here while the rest feel like sketches. The abstract seethe of “Breathe” is barely more than one looped refrain, all ticker-tape snares and slack metallic string sounds. However, Fiction is still a marker for the noise-rock stalwarts: a foray into something more instinctive and assured.
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. | 2020-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | November 12, 2020 | 6.9 | 17e7f1d6-1896-4d95-83aa-fbcdd355703f | Will Ainsley | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-ainsley/ | |
The jazz drummer and producer’s hypnotic double album is culled from a year’s worth of gig tapes that he’s layered and spliced together into something wholly new and radically communal. | The jazz drummer and producer’s hypnotic double album is culled from a year’s worth of gig tapes that he’s layered and spliced together into something wholly new and radically communal. | Makaya McCraven: Universal Beings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/makaya-mccraven-universal-beings/ | Universal Beings | In the final moments of Universal Beings—at the end of a radiant hour and a half of polymorphic pulse and atmospheric shimmer—Makaya McCraven breaks a blissful silence with a practical question. “You guys got all that?” he asks, presumably addressing the mobile recording crew set up in a garage behind a house in Los Angeles.
McCraven, a drummer and producer with an alchemist’s touch, and Jeff Parker, a guitarist possessed of similar magic, have just glided through the impromptu dreamscape that will provide this album with a title track. They’re crowded into that garage with a handful of peers, including saxophonist Josh Johnson and violinist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. At face value, McCraven’s question feels like routine studio patter. By including it on the album, he extends his check-in to the listener, with a tone at once solicitous and roguish. You guys got all that?
There’s a lot to unpack in Universal Beings, the latest and most deeply assured in a series of releases under the rubric McCraven likes to call “organic beat music.” Recorded not only in Los Angeles but also in New York, Chicago, and London—four metro areas shaping the contour of improvised music, now as ever—the album transmits at a coolly utopian frequency. Informed by ambient and hip-hop protocols as well as state-of-the-art jazz hyperfluency, it suggests both the spark of discovery and the sheen of an obsessively sculptured art object.
McCraven, who has spent the last decade in Chicago, began developing this model several years ago. His second album—In the Moment, released on International Anthem in 2015—was its first proper manifestation. A hypnotic double album culled from a year’s worth of gig tapes, it took shape through a painstaking process of digital looping, layering and splicing, like an Ableton software-enabled successor to Teo Macero’s machinations with Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew.
There’s an ascendant generation of jazz drummers who understand hip-hop production from the inside, and have been working to melt the edges. Chris Dave, a D’Angelo confrere and emeritus member of the Robert Glasper Experiment, recently released a long-awaited album with his group the Drumhedz. Karriem Riggins has put out two albums of beat-driven instrumentals, including last year’s Headnod Suite; he’s a member of August Greene, alongside Glasper and Common. A brilliant array of other figures—from Eric Harland to Justin Brown to Jamire Williams to Louis Cole—marks this multiphase skillset as not just a vogue style but a new reality.
What sets McCraven apart is twofold. For one thing, he builds his tracks on the basis of live performance, typically with a bare minimum of premeditated music. In the Moment established this working method, which yielded two subsequent mixtapes: Highly Rare, in 2017, and Where We Come From (CHICAGOxLONDON Mixtape), earlier this year. The spontaneous-composition mode gives McCraven a wealth of raw material to work with, including the dimensions of a room. One reason these tracks never feel cold or sterile is because they exude a sense of place.
Which leads us to McCraven’s second insight: the lasting power of communion. Producing tracks, making beats—it can often be the most insular form of music-making, no more tactile or social than writing code. But the collaborative energies on Universal Beings are pervasive and tangible. Taking in this music, you get the impression that every contributor has a stake in the outcome, post-production tinkering or no. And with that stake comes a tacit understanding: This music subsumes even the boldest solo heroics within a collectivist whole.
McCraven convened a different crew in each of his four host cities, so it isn’t just the environs that change from one section to the next. (In the deluxe double-vinyl release, each session takes up one side of an LP: New York on side 1, Chicago on side 2, then London and L.A.) The shift from one locale to the next is subtle, because of a certain unity of purpose—and, surely, the careful work of streamlining all of this material into a coherent form.
The New York crew, recorded in Ridgewood, Queens last summer, features harpist Brandee Younger, cellist Tomeka Reid, vibraphonist Joel Ross, and bassist Dezron Douglas. On a track called “Young Genius,” they begin with the looking-through-a-smudged-glass feeling of a vintage J Dilla track, all loopy rhythm and harp twinkle, before the beat snaps into focus. Then, suddenly, McCraven and Douglas are swinging à la Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison, setting up one of the album’s few conventional solo turns, by Ross. It’s as if an entire range of rhythmic approaches has been compressed into a slippery five and a half minutes.
A few other pieces on the album feel similarly packed with incident. “Suite Haus,” from the London session, has Nubya Garcia on tenor saxophone, Ashley Henry on Fender Rhodes, and Daniel Casimir on bass. It feels like a fully formed composition, with an arc and mood and a set of motifs. As the title implies, it also gestures toward house music, with McCraven’s beat shapeshifting in subtle yet perceptible ways. Garcia is obviously deep in her element here, owning the track without ever pushing into the red.
Her fellow British tenor hero, Shabaka Hutchings, turns up on the Chicago side, alongside Tomeka Reid, and bassist Junius Paul. The scrappiest and most cathartic of the four sessions, it includes some flamethrower-expressive Hutchings in the middle of “Prosperity’s Fear,” the stretch on the album that veers closest to freeform abstraction. But this unit also foregrounds groove: “Inner Flight” serves notice that McCraven draws rhythmic mojo from Tony Allen as well as Tony Williams. And the concussive tumble of “Atlantic Black” maintains its sense of form largely because of Reid, one of this album’s MVPs.
This shouldn’t need to be said, but it probably does: Every one of McCraven’s bands finds a central place for a woman. This is notable mainly in light of a contemporary scene—at the convergence of jazz, R&B and hip-hop—that can still so often resemble a boy’s club. One track from the L.A. session, “Butterss’s,” is a showcase for bassist Anna Butterss, who exerts her authority from the ground up and the inside, rather than up top or out front.
That inner-workings ideal is central to any understanding of McCraven’s larger project, and one reason Universal Beings is likely to make more intuitive sense to a crate-digger than to a jazz loyalist. The tracks on this album coalesce and morph, more than they progress. They get more traction from a good drone than from an elegant harmonic resolution. There’s a process of real-time exchange and dynamic micro-attunement that only jazz musicians can achieve, but not many of the cathartic peaks you might expect from a jazz performance. What matters is a vibe.
And to that end, the occasional interpolation of musician banter feels deeper than filler. On “Brighter Days Beginning,” the penultimate track, McCraven and his L.A. cohort spend some time trading philosophical reflections—about the responsibility of the individual in a society, and the power of a collective, and the corrupting influence of corporate media. “We’re universal beings,” someone says, sparking appreciative laughter. It’s a quip with high-minded connotations, and McCraven makes sure the rest of the album sets it up as dawning truth. | 2018-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | International Anthem | October 29, 2018 | 8.1 | 17e97a9c-2cff-4f8e-ae99-7a9e24c430ff | Nate Chinen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-chinen/ | |
Live at Phoenix Public House Melbourne draws heavily from Sun Kil Moon's Among the Leaves, and underpins the conflict in Kozelek's gratitude toward his fans-- whose support has led him into a lonely life of touring. In that respect, Like Rats, a new set of covers, may be considered a peace offering. | Live at Phoenix Public House Melbourne draws heavily from Sun Kil Moon's Among the Leaves, and underpins the conflict in Kozelek's gratitude toward his fans-- whose support has led him into a lonely life of touring. In that respect, Like Rats, a new set of covers, may be considered a peace offering. | Mark Kozelek: Live at Phoenix Public House Melbourne/Like Rats | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17626-mark-kozelek-live-at-phoenix-public-house-melbournelike-rats/ | Live at Phoenix Public House Melbourne/Like Rats | "So I spent all yesterday hanging out by myself," says Mark Kozelek between songs on his new live album. "Went out last night... by myself. Spent today... by myself. It's alright. I spend a lot of time by myself." This might be one of the more revealing moments on any Kozelek/Sun Kil Moon/Red House Painters release: a complete and pointed dismissal of any romanticism that might still cling to the touring life. Rather than carouse around Melbourne or even see the sights, he admits, "I don't even know the name of the hotel I'm at. I just walked around the park, went to the 7-11, ate some nuts or something. I don't fucking know. I was bored out of my fucking mind."
That disappointment-- the unbridgeable rift between how you dream your life will go and how it actually turns out-- is the subject of Kozelek's most recent studio album, last year's harrowing, weirdly humorous Among the Leaves. Song after song bemoans the fate of a cult musician in his 40s, a songwriter's songwriter who has put 20 years into a career that has leveled out, who has won glowing reviews but has very little to show for it except his name on a marquee. 7-11s in Melbourne look just like 7-11s everywhere else; a bag of nuts can be the highlight of your day. Expressing his extreme weariness with the touring life, Kozelek sounds better than he has in years-- more engaged, more personable, more observant, and more willing to describe the world around him, even if it tends to end at the stage lights.
Live at Phoenix Public House Melbourne may be his most substantial live album in ages. It draws heavily from Among the Leaves, and makes a worthy addendum to the studio recording because it places these songs in what sounds like their natural setting: a small club sparsely filled with adoring fans clapping politely even after Kozelek laments the lop-sided male: female ratio. There's a sobering gravity here, a weird black humor accentuated by the relatively short run time: 12 tracks instead of Among the Leaves' 17, coming in at a reasonable 60 minutes instead of 80.
Kozelek's guitar playing is precise and lovely, especially during the solo on "Heron Blue", and his voice retains its hangdog eloquence, effortlessly evoking his workaday loneliness on "Broken Wing" and the brutally candid "Track Number 8". Perhaps the standout on Phoenix, however, is the stage banter. Several of his previous live albums, including last year's On Tour, have excised his between-song ramblings, but they sound crucial to this set, a revealing counterpart to the songs. He exercises a sly humor that's at once gracious (commiserating with the staff who will lose their jobs when the Phoenix Public House closes) and biting (dedicating "The Moderately Talented Young Woman" to an audience member who describes herself as a musician and waitress).
There's a great, weird, tense moment when Kozelek considers the irony of a fan who loves his music so much that he downloads it illegally. "I'm trying to understand. So you live in Melbourne, Australia, and you bought my music off a Russian web site. Why? Why'd you do that?" Kozelek sounds both touched and offended. That's the central conflict on Among the Leaves, but it's even more pronounced on Live at Phoenix Public House: Kozelek is grateful for his fans' dedication over the years, but on some level he resents them for leading him into such a lonely life.
So maybe Like Rats is a peace offering. His previous covers albums have been fan favorites, presenting his melancholy takes on songs by AC/DC, John Denver, Low, and Stephen Sondheim, but this new collection may be his most varied and adventurous. The tracklist portrays a man with broad listening habits, who not only translates these songs into his own particular style but erases the distinctions between genres. "Time is Love", a silly concept song by Josh Turner, has the same rhythmic thrust as Ted Nugent's "Free-for-All", and the Descendents' "Silly Girl" proves just as melodic as the snappy "Right Back Where We Started From", the 1976 hit by UK singer Maxine Nightingale.
Just as he brings these songs into his realm, they expand his realm, forcing him to rethink how he uses his voice and guitar. He opens Genesis' "Carpet Crawlers" in lush a cappella, layering his vocals in a way that expresses a profound, possibly narcotized wonder at the little creatures around him, and the one-two punch of Bad Brains' "I" and Godflesh's "Like Rats" redirects his signature low-key sound to express something like outrage and anger-- a wholly new mode for Kozelek. On the other hand, Bruno Mars' "Young Girls" wryly comments on all the tales of obsessive female fans on Among the Leaves, and Kozelek turns the hook into a wistfully descending melody.
Any record that emphasizes variety will have a few tracks that fall just outside the artist's reach; not everything works quite so well, although that has more to do with song choice than execution. Despite his attempts to alter the melody, Kozelek's version of Danzig's "13" recalls Johnny Cash's similarly acoustic yet superior version, and he awkwardly truncates the Dayglo Abortions' "I Killed Mommy", as if he can't bring himself to sing some of the more extreme lyrics. While it does sound like the ultraviolent companion to Kozelek's understated serial killer rumination "Glenn Tipton" (which he revives on Live at Phoenix Public House), it ultimately sounds pointless and self-indulgent, intended perhaps to entertain himself more than his audience. But after so many bland hotels and anonymous convenience stores, who can blame him for making his own fun? | 2013-02-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-02-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | null | February 19, 2013 | 6.7 | 17eb2db5-3c6c-45d8-8025-851414a7bc75 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Beach House's songwriting hasn't fundamentally changed on their second record; they've simply cleaned up their sound, resulting in crisper, brighter, bolder songs that retain the Baltimore dream-pop duo's melodic sense and vibe of elegant decay. | Beach House's songwriting hasn't fundamentally changed on their second record; they've simply cleaned up their sound, resulting in crisper, brighter, bolder songs that retain the Baltimore dream-pop duo's melodic sense and vibe of elegant decay. | Beach House: Devotion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11208-devotion/ | Devotion | Baltimore is as musically diverse as anywhere else, but in 2008, indie rockers associate the city with colorful, energetic music, from the expatriated Animal Collective to Dan Deacon's Wham City crew. The music of Beach House, the Baltimore-based duo of multi-instrumentalist Alex Scally and vocalist/organist Victoria Legrand, is a shadow narrative running parallel to this trend: Their delicate, lovelorn pop comes in the form of deathly waltzes and dark pastoral dirges on which Legrand sings about desire, loss, and dreams as if telling a ghost story, splitting the difference between lovely and creepy.
For pristine pop, Beach House's self-titled 2006 debut was awfully raw: Legrand downplayed her classical piano and voice training in a humble negation of virtuosity. The organs sounded like something thick and coarse being pulled through a small, jagged opening; chord structures were simply suggestions; imperfections were kept intact. That balance of beauty and imprecision made inspired songs like "Saltwater", "Tokyo Witch", "Apple Orchard", and "Master of None" easy to fall in love with.
The duo's songwriting hasn't fundamentally changed on Devotion; they've simply cleaned up their act. These are crisper, brighter, bolder songs, retaining Beach House's sense of elegant decay while sweeping up the debris. "Gila" is a funeral on a sunny day; its shimmering organs are controlled, never bleeding chaotically as they did on the debut, and are complemented by frilly but steadfast guitar. "Turtle Island" reaffirms Beach House's preference for simple, skeletal percussion, but its dense melody is a marked advancement. The result of this pre-spring cleaning is that Devotion lacks some of the immediate highs of the first album-- you no longer get the sense of rooting for an embattled underdog-- but winds up consistently stronger.
Even though it's tidier and more streamlined, the music surrenders none of its autumnal charm, and there's still a sense of eavesdropping on a private, ongoing dialogue between Legrand and a ghost. Of course, we only get to hear her side of the story. As on the first album, which began with the words "Love you all the time, even though you're not mine," she favors second-person assertions that speak of self-effacement, dependence, and sinister dream-world conversations. "Your wish is my command," she intones on "Wedding Bell", becoming a genie in a puff of smoke. And on "Gila", she sings in a world-weary wheeze, "Man, you've got a lot of jokes to tell." But instead of the punch line, we get the sort of jarring shift that characterizes dreams: "So you throw your baby's banners down the well."
"Invite your sister into the garden," she drones on the wind-up waltz "You Came to Me", concurrently inviting us into the murky depths of her romantic consciousness. There's a sense of latent danger in the invitation, like a siren song luring us toward sharp clusters of rock. Portals into mysterious spaces pockmark Devotion; none of them promise a way out. Perhaps this explains why an album that takes its title and concept from a superficially sweet concept has such a subtle bite: Legrand's devotion is a dungeon into which she tosses her own desires like coins into a wishing well, a one-way conduit from which only echoes return. | 2008-02-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-02-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Bella Union / Carpark | February 26, 2008 | 8.5 | 17ebb2f9-a0b6-4a76-a80f-263e4159a1a5 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The dazzling third album from the stalwarts of Midwestern emo does away with the band’s self-mythology and takes bleary, bold steps toward a new dawn. | The dazzling third album from the stalwarts of Midwestern emo does away with the band’s self-mythology and takes bleary, bold steps toward a new dawn. | American Football: American Football (LP3) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/american-football-american-football-lp3/ | American Football (LP3) | American Football have abandoned the dearly beloved house in Urbana, Ill. that graced the cover of their first two albums. That house became an avatar for youthful nostalgia, the band, and Midwest emo itself. Its replacement on the cover of the third American Football LP has an almost sinister beauty to it: a bloodshot sunrise, a creeping fog. The shot was taken about 10 minutes away in the town of Champaign and, from a certain vantage point, you might think it was the morning after the original house at 704 W. High Street was burnt to cinders. American Football might prefer it that way, as their dazzling third album does away with their self-mythology and takes bleary, bold steps toward a new dawn.
American Football (known colloquially as LP3, as all the band’s studio albums are self-titled) awakens with microscopic bell chimes and shudders of vibraphone as the seven minutes of “Silhouettes” swaddle the band’s guitar lattices in reverb and glitter-gray exhaust. It’s Steve Reich reincarnated as a tinny iPhone alarm on lead singer Mike Kinsella’s nightstand, going off after a sleepless night. “Oh, the muscle memory it must take to stay,” Kinsella sings, a sharp turn from the typical American Football song where ex-lovers wistfully stare into a Midwestern autumn sunset, or his work with the band Owen, where he’s staring down an Old Style at last call. And yet, a line like, “Tell me again what’s the allure of inconsequential love,” speaks to the pull of having at least felt something, an escape from the mundanity that creeps into any love of consequence.
LP3 explores the old emo adage “nothing feels good” and turns it into a kind of middle-age anhedonia. “Sensitivity deprived/I can’t feel a thing inside,” Kinsella sighs over skittering percussion and glossed harmonics. LP2, from 2016, was littered with first-thought-best-thought lyrics like these, Kinsella using his persona as Quintessential Emo Dad as a justification for his self-pity. But the title of “Uncomfortably Numb” is indicative of Kinsella’s newfound ability to wink and cry at the same time. He uses aging into his 40s to conceal a pathology so deep-rooted and repressed, it can only be understood as genetic: “I blamed my father in my youth/Now as a father, I blame the booze.”
This isn’t the only example of late-’90s Midwestern emo heroes gracefully transitioning themselves to fatherhood, but few can match the sonic evolution of American Football—with unheralded producer Jason Cupp once again rendering American Football in brilliant topographic detail, the album is an idealized form of music to test hi-fi speakers. Emo’s fractious rhythms and plaintive, untrained vocals are completely severed from its hardcore roots and bleed into shoegaze, post-rock, and minimalist jazz—genres that do vibes more than feelings.
Nearly every track on LP3 pushes out toward the five-minute mark, and where previous American Football songs were internal journeys, this album’s travel to new vistas in all directions. The flow of “Every Wave to Ever Rise” is languorous and asymmetrical like a tide pool before its outro descends into the same deep water as the Cure’s Disintegration, whereas the intro of “Doom in Full Bloom” dares to toe the vast oceans of Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. The impact of recently inducted multi-instrumentalist Nate Kinsella is most noticeable on the rubbery backbone of “Every Wave to Ever Rise” and “I Can’t Feel You”’s thrumming motorik, but the wealth of textures he brings to LP3 warrants alternative superlative titles like the ones they used back in the late ’90s: The One With the Mellotron Flutes and Children’s Choir (“Heir Apparent”), The One With French Vocals (“Every Wave to Ever Rise”), The One With the Bass Breakdown and a 12-String (“I Can’t Feel You”).
The emo diplomacy of “Uncomfortably Numb,” featuring Paramore’s Hayley Williams, is the biggest bombshell, as basically every emo band in 2019 sounds at least somewhat like American Football and/or Paramore. Williams would shatter the song immediately if she brought the wattage of Paramore’s best-known songs. Instead, she slowly and imperceptibly weaves into the second verse, a voice of conscience as Kinsella sinks deeper into despair. She tenderly tries to buoy him up during the bridge and takes over the third verse in a lower, dusky register completely unrecognizable as that of Hayley Williams, turning a duet between emo icons into a humble, heartbreaking exchange between lapsed lovers.
For the 15 years during which LP1 was the only American Football album, it was indie rock’s equivalent of Richard Linklater’s 1995 film Before Sunrise—a humble masterpiece of mixed emotions that offered affirmation to hopeless and skeptical romantics, believing in love at first sight while questioning whether it has to last forever to have meaning—did it really matter if they got back together again? And like Before Sunset, 2016’s LP2 capitalized on the sleeper success of its original with an outright sequel that traced the charming awkwardness of recoupling and trying to hit the familiar beats. Though hardly redundant or unnecessary, it felt a bit indulgent, too dictated by its relationship with its predecessor to establish a new narrative; Mike Kinsella himself admits it was basically fan service.
And the third act of each, LP3 and Linklater’s wonderful 2013 film Before Midnight, finds their leads in unexpectedly traditional roles: Jesse and Celine married with children, American Football as a regularly touring band that makes albums every three years instead of 17, all accessing a darker, deeper resonance than they ever envisioned during their immaculate conception. “I just want you home,” Williams pleads towards the end of “Uncomfortably Numb.” Maybe it’s a couple struggling in vain to believe their love is worth fighting for, maybe a wish for the kind of inconsequential, unforgettable romances of “Never Meant” or “The Summer Ends”? The latter is the reason fans make the pilgrimage to the house at 704 W. High Street, but American Football is clear about its intent from the beginning—they can go back home, but they’d rather trudge forward with the heaviest of hearts. | 2019-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | March 21, 2019 | 8.1 | 17ebf533-2b75-4773-95f0-264253521b7c | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
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 explore Johnny Cash’s 1994 comeback American Recordings. | 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 explore Johnny Cash’s 1994 comeback American Recordings. | Johnny Cash: American Recordings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/johnny-cash-american-recordings/ | American Recordings | When people ask where my grandpa is from, he doesn’t name a town. He says he was born “across the river from Johnny Cash.”
There’s only one story my grandpa ever tells about his childhood. It’s 1955, in Arkansas, and he’s standing on his motorcycle, prying a bathroom window off the wall with a pocket knife and a screwdriver. He never got more than a fifth-grade education, but he’s breaking into a high school. He’s doing this because “I ain’t paying no two dollars for a concert.” The concert? Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. Elvis, he’s pretty good, my grandpa recalls. He’s alright except for the foolish hip movements. But Johnny, he’s got presence.
He was there from day one, from the first day “Cry, Cry, Cry” got played on the radio. He bought every record. He knew every producer Johnny ever worked with, every sideman he ever played with, every man down and woman gone. He saw in Johnny not just the Southern man to emulate, but something close to a holy figure. Johnny Cash was the only infallible man on earth. Until 1994.
The popular story goes like this: It’s 1994 and Johnny Cash’s career is all but dead. It’s a ghost haunting Billy Graham crusades and the dinner theaters of Branson, Missouri. He spent the 1980s a lost soul, recording bad music (“The Chicken in Black”) and watching the embers of his career fly away into the night. But then Rick Rubin, a bearded and inscrutable mystic, a man known for producing hard rock and hip-hop, brings him back to life in a house overlooking the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, California with a brilliant idea that no one had ever thought of before—put Johnny Cash in a living room, hand him a guitar, set up a microphone, ask him to play the songs he loves, not for anybody else, just for him.
Cash’s face lights up. He sings gutbucket songs about sin and redemption, and in the blink of an eye, Johnny Cash is himself again. He snaps out of his coma. He makes American Recordings, and all the critics love it. Hell, everybody loves it. He’s playing South by Southwest and Glastonbury and he’s on the road to becoming an eternal symbol of punk rock and anything that’s real, man, you know, authentic. Rubin is a miracle worker and he encourages Johnny Cash to make the best music of his life. This is the door Johnny Cash walks through to dethrone Hank Williams as the king of country music.
But the true story of American Recordings is messier than that. It’s true that Johnny Cash had it rough in the ’80s. Columbia didn’t know what to do with a legacy act from 1955 and reluctantly dropped him, then the label he went with afterward, Mercury, treated him like he didn’t exist. Nobody was hearing his albums. One possible reason is that the country music business in the ’80s was making some historically terrible shit because of Urban Cowboy, a John Travolta vehicle easily summarized as Saturday Night Fever in cowboy boots. For the first half of the decade, the prevailing style bent toward the slick, the saccharine, the easy-listening. This was an environment that had little room for Johnny Cash, who came from the pill-guzzling highway to hell that Sun Records paved.
But he had also been recording for decades, and his operating expenses were enormous. His distractibility was enormous. He was on and off pills, he had to play shows with the country supergroup the Highwaymen and he starred in a remake of the John Ford film Stagecoach and he was in his fifties and he had this thing going on with his jaw and, well, it happens.
Despite all this, and in defiance of conventional wisdom, his material in the ’80s wasn’t all bad. “The Chicken in Black” is the sound of a brain breaking, but if you dig a little, you find that he also sang songs by some of country and folk’s best songwriters, from Billy Joe Shaver to John Prine and Guy Clark. In 1983, one year after it came out, he covered Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman,” one of the toughest Springsteen songs to cover because of its ambiguous morality. It became one of the most artistically successful and satisfying covers of Cash’s entire career.
More accurately, the problem with his ’80s work was the lack of a rudder. His shows weren’t great, he had gotten corny, and nobody in the business was really advocating for him. He needed somebody to say, “You’re great, and your best work is ahead of you.” A Rocky without a Mickey, he spent too much time looking at his rearview mirror.
Luckily, new people were taking notice of Cash in the ’80s. New scenes, far away from Nashville. Nick Cave covered him on two albums in ’85 and ’86. In ’88, a British punk tribute to Cash called ’Til Things Are Brighter was released. It featured Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks, Marc Almond of Soft Cell, and Jon Langford of the Mekons. It caught the critical eye of NME and Cash loved it.
And in 1992, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, one of only a handful of country singers ever invited. And then in 1993, Bono asked him to record lead vocals for a song on the new U2 album. Fucking U2. Six-years-after-Joshua-Tree U2. And it wasn’t just any song, it was album closer “The Wanderer,” pure Johnny Cash fan fiction, a post-apocalyptic Christian epic that had only-Johnny-Cash-could-even-attempt-this lines like “I went out walking with a Bible and a gun.”
A Johnny Cash comeback felt like a very real possibility. One problem. Branson. Poor Johnny got entangled in a deal to build a $35 million tourist trap in Branson called “Cash Country” and a theater with his name on it that would be his home base for live shows. The deal went bust, construction problems, new investors came in, and it became the Wayne Newton Theatre. Cash still had to play a bunch of dates there even though he was off the project. He had no choice. The money was too good.
All this is in the back of his head when he plays the Rhythm Café in Santa Ana, California in February ’93, the last show before he heads back to Missouri. He can hear Branson, and it’s the sound of wolves. There’s only one relief, and it’s that Rick Rubin, Def Jam co-founder, producer of the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, wants to meet him after the show to make an album.
Cash is listening. He thinks Rubin wears clothes that “would have done a wino proud,” but he likes his individualism, and he knows that his own back is against the wall. So he goes to the hills above the Sunset Strip. He sits down in Rubin’s living room and plays songs that mean something to him, just him and his guitar, and Rubin rolls the tape. In three days, they’ve got north of 30 songs. Cowboy songs, folk songs, and old songs figure heavily. You know, songs about God, murder, trains, and everything else that makes America.
Some of these songs are originals that Cash has been protecting from the black hole down which Mercury sent his music. These lock-and-key songs are the best. “Drive On” is a look at the inhumanity of Vietnam, about the soldiers who see their buddies die and have to walk on anyway. The strong vocal performance and catchy melody sound subversive in a way Cash hadn’t in a long time, as though they’re covering up brutality and PTSD. “Like a Soldier,” a song about a man trying to find salvation and forgiveness after a hard journey and a lot of mistakes, has beautiful lyrics Cash was wise to hide from Mercury.
There are faces that come to me
In my darkest secret memory
Faces that I wish would not come back at all.
Rubin’s excited by all this, but he’s still looking for the Johnny Cash who committed a murder in Nevada just to see the life drain from an innocent man’s eyes. When Cash plays an updated version of the murder ballad “Delia’s Gone,” he finds him. It’s based on an old folk song, he’d recorded it before, but there’s new life in it now. The protagonist is not terribly penitent, and he describes his crime in vivid detail, how much he hated Delia, how he tied her up and grabbed his “sub-mo-sheen.” It’s a murder ballad where the sinner finds pleasure in his sin. It’s Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, not Johnny Cash at a Billy Graham crusade.
It’s a huge breakthrough, but Cash can’t stay because he has to do 40 dates at the Wayne Newton Theatre. Not even Edward Hopper could capture the alienation of Johnny Cash at seeing the buses of tourists and retirees showing up strictly for photo opportunities and trinkets, all while having to weather half-empty matinee shows and fight constant physical pain. This is the hell he’s trying to escape.
So when he comes back to L.A. in the summer of ’93, naturally he slams out two dozen more songs in a few days, because no way in hell is he going back to Branson. He does Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire” and another Cash original, the salvation from the sin, “Redemption.” It’s a sanctified song about the power of the blood of Christ, and it grounds the album with an earnest devotion to God that every good Cash album needs. The story of sin cannot be told without the story of salvation.
You’d think this was conceived as an acoustic album, but after Cash finishes recording, Rubin experiments with adding instrumentation from Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers and Flea and Chad Smith of the Chili Peppers. It doesn’t really take, and he decides he prefers the iconic idea of Johnny Cash alone with his guitar. He sends Cash off to the Viper Room to play an insanely exclusive solo show for approximately zero people who deserve to be there, gets a couple live cuts to finish off the sucker, and names the finished album after his own record label, American Recordings. Cash preferred Late and Alone. Too bad.
It doesn’t storm any charts after its release on April 26th, 1994, but Rolling Stone gives it five stars and raves about it. This is the mythic Johnny Cash, the tortured cowboy out on the prairie picking out “Oh Bury Me Not” in front of a campfire and seeing God on the horizon. Meanwhile, Nick Cave and U2 cohort Anton Corbijn makes a video for “Delia’s Gone” that gets actual MTV play. It stars Kate Moss and imagines Johnny Cash as Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter. You don’t need to see “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed on his knuckles because you know it’s there.
While all this makes him seem cool, it doesn’t translate to sales. The album peaks at a humble No. 23 on the Billboard country charts, though it does reintroduce Johnny Cash to rock audiences, to people who may conceivably own a Nirvana album. And it works, and leads to better, and better-selling, music later.
Half the fun of American Recordings is knowing that it’s not the end of something, but the start of something. It sends him down a road that ends with him writing some of the best songs he’ll ever write and it nets him an immortality-cementing hit in 2002 with “Hurt.” Which, by the way, is unthinkable. To begin your career in 1955 and have a hit in 2002 is like starting out in 1971 and having a hit in 2018. Who the hell could even do that?
Well, Johnny Cash, but not Johnny Cash without Rick Rubin. The album is good, but more importantly, it’s a shrewd marketing idea. The triumphant rebirth of the man in black, a tortured soul who sings about killing and being forgiven for killing. It’s showbizzy, of course. No man can be as “authentic” as Johnny Cash without a pretty firm grasp of how to work his audience. He had to stare at the grimy lights of the Sunset Strip to be the ancient voice of the dirt he’s known as now. A mythic American artist must be created and curated and rebranded, and Rick Rubin was in the right place at the right time to help Cash get there. And Cash knew he had a choice between giving this his best shot or withering in Branson. It’s hard to deny he chose wisely.
In hindsight, the album is not the unqualified success it was made out to be in 1994. I firmly believe people wanted Johnny Cash to come back so bad that they willed this album into being what they wanted it to be. While “Delia’s Gone” captures the sinful giddiness of “Cocaine Blues,” while his original compositions are truly great Johnny Cash songs, and while the general mood of a frontier campfire is cool and transportive, there are weaknesses.
There’s the Danzig song, “Thirteen,” the first of many gimmicky alt-rock collaborations Rubin would prod Cash into doing. The lyrics read like they were written in 20 minutes, which they were. And Cash has a booming, powerful voice but one thing he doesn’t have is a lot of vocal nuance. So when he tries out Loudon Wainwright III’s satiric “The Man Who Couldn’t Cry,” the smartassery those lyrics demand never shows up. And “Down There by the Train,” a beautiful Tom Waits composition written specifically for Cash, a Baptist epic of redemption where even John Wilkes Booth can feel God’s grace, doesn’t quite work either. Maybe because it’s too long. Maybe he could have sung it quieter. Maybe it needs an organ.
The album’s real overarching problem is having Johnny Cash play guitar by himself with no accompaniment. While the man did innovative things with the guitar (the paper trick is cool, come on) and kept good rhythm, the fact is that he couldn’t play. This is an acoustic guitar album with almost no acoustic guitar on it. It sounds a cappella in places if you’re not paying close enough attention. His vocal power has to carry him wherever he goes, and there are some songs where that’s just not possible.
It’s a problem Cash and Rubin eventually solved by recruiting the Heartbreakers to play on pretty much every subsequent song Cash recorded, to lend momentum, dramatic shading, and emphasis to prop up Cash’s delivery. This album has no such fix, so it occasionally drags when you divorce it from its story, that Johnny Cash is back. It’s good, but now that Cash is gone, it’s no starting place to understand his work. If you want to understand his appeal, there’s still only one definitive starting place, and that’s the prison albums, where country, gospel and rockabilly get soaked in ethanol.
My grandpa never bought a Johnny Cash album after American Recordings. He didn’t like this album because it was the first time he ever heard Johnny Cash sound weak, and he didn’t want to hear that. It was a Johnny Cash my grandpa didn’t want to know existed, a Johnny Cash who could die soon. It sounded to him like a man revealing himself too much, being too vulnerable.
That generational divide is important. I have problems with every Johnny Cash album Rick Rubin produced, though I like all of them. Rick Rubin is a savvy marketer and a sporadically excellent producer but his cover suggestions were never as smart as he thought they were, and I don’t think the world needed to hear Johnny Cash cover Depeche Mode. But that mistake is probably the reason we have “Hurt” and “The Man Comes Around,” Cash’s definitive song about God, so on balance I look the other way.
American Recordings is flawed, and it’s not a masterpiece. Nearly a quarter-century on, it’s just a good Johnny Cash album. But it brought him back to the ground, and that was necessary. He was no longer Johnny Cash, towering celebrity. He was Johnny Cash, human being. His vulnerability, his fallibility, was relatable. He didn’t sound perfect, but he sounded like himself again. And he was comfortable being himself again. There are two dogs on the album cover. He named them Sin and Redemption. | 2018-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | American Recordings | April 8, 2018 | 8.2 | 17f3ddbf-afdb-4c61-931c-2c6c33f7b133 | Kaleb Horton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kaleb-horton/ | |
Finally released in the U.S., this psych-folk 60s throwback is expanded to two disc with the addition of five previously unreleased tracks. | Finally released in the U.S., this psych-folk 60s throwback is expanded to two disc with the addition of five previously unreleased tracks. | Dungen: Ta Det Lugnt [Expanded Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2575-ta-det-lugnt-expanded/ | Ta Det Lugnt [Expanded Edition] | Despite the constant influx of catchphrase-coordinated marketing campaigns that would lead you to believe that life-affirming records are released daily, it's forever rare to stumble upon one as consistently mind-blowing and aesthetically far-reaching as Dungen's Ta Det Lugnt. Because of this scarcity, when such an unexpected (and immediate) discovery does take place, it's like being struck by indescribable melodic lightning: Unlike discs that warrant facile disses or mediocre passing grades, the countless reasons for its boundless successes remain ineffable and shadowy despite repeat late-night close-listening sessions.
Simply put, Dungen exhibit all the signs of legitimate, hard-won staying power. Ta Det Lugnt is an exceedingly triumphant psych-pop oddity that evokes Keith Moon's drum fills on The Who Sell Out, the wraiths of unsung bedroom psyche celebrants, and the acoustic sustain and harmonizing of The Byrds' Younger Than Yesterday. Ta Det Lugnt feels less like a new release than some ancient tome, a fully formed masterpiece dropped unexpectedly on corduroy laps from some blue-brown sky. It's so aesthetically tight that even carbon dating insists that it could not be post-millennial.
To be sure, there's a major difference between retro and somehow embodying your parents' vintage zeitgeist: It's damn-near impossible to believe that the humming tubes, crackling drums, smoky backdrop, and complexly interwoven melodies on Ta Det Lugnt were birthed in a quick-fix iPod age. But perhaps even more impressive is that, despite the music's headiness and intricacy, its anachronistic results feel unusually effortless, earnest, and unpretentious: Dungen seem driven to this sound not for bloodless cred points, but out of a very sincere devotion to the music from a bygone era.
Accomplished beyond his years, 26-year-old Swedish multi-instrumentalist Gustav Ejstes is the pin-up mastermind behind Dungen's vibrant polish. For the full duration of his third album's 13 bracing tracks, he perfectly inhabits-- and then expands upon-- his homeland's late-60s/early-70s acid-rock scene. Ta Det Lugnt particularly taps into the expansiveness of his Swedish psych predecessors, Parson Sound, while maintaining a murky rocker edge: Imagine that band colliding with The Kinks, or Amon Dl II with Olivia Tremor Control, or Comets on Fire with The Zombies on their way to Terrastock.
Interested in pushing pop glitter to its limits, Ejstes doesn't go as far afield into psych-pop cliches like chirping birds and hippie atmospherics as his elder brethren, but his equally vintage garage sound allows a definite space for ethereality in the form of funereal dew-drop strings, free jazz breakdowns, brief whiffs of AM radio tuning, flute minuets, lushly cascading pianos, prog time changes, florid medieval chimes, sky-melting freak outs, church organs, fuzz-guitar jousts, doubled mountain-top whistles, roaring six-string solos, and autumnal instrumental interludes. It's obvious his songs are painstakingly arranged with a sense of depth, gradations, and tonal three-dimensionality redolent of something as off the charts as Pet Sounds.
I said all of the above and more last year, and it still holds true. Hindsight and new layers of hype included, Ta Det Lugnt remains a consistently amazing album. Since my initial tongue-wagging Dungen's deservedly gone from limited distribution and whispered word-of-mouth to NME hyperbole and glowing write-ups in just about every community newspaper from the Philadelphia Daily News to San Francisco Weekly (and beyond). There's also been a rush to offer more sounds: A few months back came the generally misunderstood compilation 1999-2001, wherein Ejstes re-stitched early material into three lengthy soundscapes instead of presenting them in their original form, and now, of course, comes the U.S. re-release of the fire starter, Ta Det Lugnt.
Repackaged by NYC's Kemado Records (home of Elefant, Diamond Nights, and goofy Brooklyn loft crashers Cheeseburger), the album is as it was, but comes with an extra CD that includes five previously unreleased tracks, which will also eventually appear on Subliminal Sounds as a vinyl 12". As might be expected, the add-ons aren't as amazingly ordered or cohesive as the album proper, but they do pleasingly expand the Dungen oeuvre.
Of the five tracks, four are instrumental. Only the opener, "Tyst Minut", an outtake from the Ta Det Lugnt sessions, offers a new taste of Ejstes' Swedish. The sleepy mid-tempo four minutes open with crystalline strums, Nyquil vocalizations and chordal rings, then turn back into a semi-smoking singsong. The chorus picks things up a bit with accompanying guitar noodle and the bridge is a molasses solo that shifts into florid piano cascades. It's followed by "Jamna Plagor", an instrumental from 2003, notable for its interesting percussion sound (tinny, echoed hand drums?) and mid-song dissolve into a brief metagalactic interstices. Though enjoyable, it's nothing special.
More interesting are the three new recordings, "Sjutton", "Christopher", and "Badsang" ("Bathing Song"), which give a taste of Dungen yet-to-come. There's a free, loose feel honing in at points on improvisational jazz and/or Can's galvanic sweep. "Sjutton"'s pronounced flute and cocky shaker keep time while the rest of the band swaggers and staggers alongside cymbal crashes. The blistering "Christopher" is a two-minute showcase of sweaty, Hendrixian psychedelia, as well as a nod to dark-minded LSD trips everywhere. Closer "Badsang" sounds very much like something you and yours would plug into while frolicking with water nymphs in a sunny, dusky forest, though the vibrational Dr. Who halfway point does grow a little lizard-king creepy.
As increasingly de rigueur reviews cloud the water, it should be interesting to see if Dungen can one day top Ta Det Lugnt, or if album three proves a magically brilliant and unrepeatable accomplishment. Regardless, they seem to be taking the success in stride, showcasing more than a few positive-growth indicators including their emergence as a solid live band (and not simply an elaborate studio project), the decision to continue recording in Swedish, Ejstes' folk fiddle mastery, and the well-grounded, astute experimentation suggested in their newer work. | 2005-08-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-08-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Kemado | August 1, 2005 | 9.3 | 17fb6690-ab12-4bba-a6a8-225ce4b421de | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore follows his band's return to tunefulness, Rather Ripped, with his first formal LP since 1995's Psychic Hearts. Here he takes up an interesting challenge: What can a guy like Moore do with the bare and noiseless architecture of an acoustic guitar and a verse-chorus-verse set-up? | Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore follows his band's return to tunefulness, Rather Ripped, with his first formal LP since 1995's Psychic Hearts. Here he takes up an interesting challenge: What can a guy like Moore do with the bare and noiseless architecture of an acoustic guitar and a verse-chorus-verse set-up? | Thurston Moore: Trees Outside the Academy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10681-trees-outside-the-academy/ | Trees Outside the Academy | In 2006, the release of Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped brought a lot of the band's ex-fans-- people who'd either gotten over them with the help of 2000's NYC Ghosts & Flowers, or just thought they'd finally aged out-- back to the fold. The more tuneful record was different from anything they'd done this decade, re-establishing the direct line many of us had to the Sonic Youth of our teenage years. At the Pitchfork Music Festival this summer, Sonic Youth played a well-received Daydream Nation, but a bunch of people I talked to after their set thought the group sounded even better during the encore, when they tore through a handful of newer songs.
As a separate entity from Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore's reputation as a basement icon precedes him. Where it was once surprising to find him at Connecticut noise shows, Brooklyn No Fun fests, and Western Massachusetts DIY open mic nights, his recent role as mentor to (and collaborator with) young rock dynamos has since made his presence in the underground a constant. Given these feedback showdowns-- not to mention the solo work of his distant past-- it came as a mild shock when his Ecstatic Peace label recently announced that not only was there a new Thurston Moore solo album in the works (his first formal LP since 1995's Psychic Hearts), but that it would also feature actual songs.
Trees Outside the Academy is, in fact, a song-based album-- and they're good songs, too. Rather Ripped had whistle-clean guitar lines and minimal melodies-- the noise had lifted to reveal Sonic Youth still picking out sharp hooks, with songcraft as sparkling as ever. Those pop songs were a good place for them to return to for inspiration-- they gave the band a form (rather than void) to play around with-- and Trees takes up a similar challenge: What can a guy like Thurston Moore do with the bare, noiseless architecture of an acoustic guitar and verse-chorus-verse structures?
Try "Honest James", a chiming, slippery duet with Charalambides' Christina Carter that holds back on vocals until two minutes in, giving that delayed entrance an immediate kick. Or "Fri/End", an archetypal spoken-sung Moore track that begins with cranky feedback, then something more upbeat and jaunty before settling into a melancholy Sonic Youth groove. Add experimental folk artist Samara Lubelski's violin punctuation, which augments every song here, and Steve Shelley's solid drumming, and you begin to understand how much this guy can do with relatively little-- especially after growing accustomed to hearing him work for so long with so much more.
Those listening for Sonic Youth demos might be surprised to hear how much more there is to Moore's songwriting when it's comparatively unadorned. What would be burners in his band's hands are instead spare and introspective: "The Shape Is in a Trance" is weary; "Wonderful Witches + Language Meanies" begins emphatically and then strips down, a kind of reverse-momentum rock song. And then, just to prove he can do it, "Never Light" is a guileless twilight-type ballad about "beat-up copies of old satellites, messages beaming."
Spare hints of Moore's more revved up ways show up here and there on Trees, but with the same relaxed and dusty cast: "American Coffin"'s out-of-tune piano, "Free Noise Among Friends"' homemade analog noise, and "Thurston@13", a self-explanatory archival tape that begins like this: "What you are about to hear is me taking off the cap of a Lysol spray disinfectant can...[pop]...there. What you are about to hear is me spraying Lysol spraying disinfectant around...the room...I am in...[spray sound]... there."
It's no coincidence that Moore chooses to end Trees on this note. That his 13-year-old self was a huge theatrical weirdo won't surprise anyone, nor will the fact that the track ends with a young Thurston saying, "What you have heard is me wasting time again, asking myself deep inside, why the fuck I am doing this?" Of course, he's already answered this question, and he knows he has. What he's hinting at is a different question: How many different ways will he do it before he's done? | 2007-09-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-09-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Ecstatic Peace | September 19, 2007 | 7.9 | 18004262-cede-4edc-a797-e03ec40faa2c | Pitchfork | null |
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Homogenic embraced all of Björk’s most provocative contradictions. The main theme is the wish to rush headlong into a life lived to the fullest—an unbridled yearning for the sublime. | Homogenic embraced all of Björk’s most provocative contradictions. The main theme is the wish to rush headlong into a life lived to the fullest—an unbridled yearning for the sublime. | Björk: Homogenic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22835-homogenic/ | Homogenic | Robed in silver satin, luminous against iridescent grey, Björk stares out as us from the cover of Homogenic. Filigreed flowers crawl across the background like frost crystals, mimicking the embroidery on her gown. The Alexander McQueen-designed garment looks vaguely Japanese, with a kimono-like sash; her elongated neck is wrapped in rings reminiscent of those worn by tribes in Burma and South Africa, while her pursed, painted lips smack of Pierrot. Behind narrowed lids, her eyes glaze like camera lenses. The longer you stare into those enormous black pupils, the more adrift you begin to feel. Beneath two tombstone-shaped slabs of hair, she appraises us coldly, her expression unreadable. She might as well be made of wax—or marble.
After the dewy naturalism of Debut’s sepia-toned portrait and the bullet-train rush of Post’s blurry postcard from the edge, McQueen and Nick Knight’s Homogenic cover showed Björk in a way viewers had never seen her before: at once ancient and futuristic, elegant and severe, part warrior queen and part cyborg—a picture of near-perfect symmetry rendered in colors of ice and obsidian and blood. The album followed suit. Trading the playful eclecticism of Debut and Post for distorted, hardscrabble electronic drums and warm, melancholy strings, it showcased a newly focused side of the musician while embracing all of her most provocative contradictions.
By 1997, when she released Homogenic, Björk had been a familiar face to pop fans for a decade. The Icelandic singer and composer had first appeared on many listeners’ radars in 1987, when the Sugarcubes’ surprise hit “Birthday” made actual stars out of a quintet whose entire raison d'être had been to lampoon pop. (Her countrymen, meanwhile, had been listening to her since 1977, when she recorded her debut album—a collection of covers translated into Icelandic along with a few original songs, including an instrumental written by Björk herself— at the tender age of 11.)
After a few whirlwind years with the band, she struck out on her own with 1993’s Debut, enlisting Nellee Hooper of Soul II Soul and Massive Attack to co-produce the album. It was a clean break, trading the Sugarcubes’ jangly alt-rock for the electronic sounds then coming out of the UK: house beats and basslines, trip-hop atmospheres, and the rippling textures of experimental techno, which she fleshed out with orchestral strings, big-band jazz, and a smattering of world music. Surprising even her record label, which scrambled to manufacture enough records to keep up with demand, it went all the way to No. 3 on the UK albums chart. On this side of the pond, some listeners were less thrilled with her new, electronic direction: Rolling Stone carped that Hooper had “sabotaged a
ferociously iconoclastic talent with a phalanx of cheap electronic gimmickry,” adding, “Björk’s singular skills cry out for genuine band chemistry, and instead she gets Hooper’s Euro art-school schlock.”
Björk paid no heed to critics (including fellow Sugarcube Þór Eldon, now also her ex-husband) who were dismissive of her burgeoning interest in electronic music. Moving from Iceland to London, she threw herself into UK dance music, soaking up its club culture and collaborating with 808 State’s Graham Massey, Tricky, Howie B, and Talvin Singh, among others. She may have come to electronic music as an outsider, but she had good instincts: For remixes, she avoided the usual suspects in favor of some of the most adventurous artists on the scene: the Black Dog, Andrew Weatherall’s Sabres of Paradise, the junglist Dillinja, even Mika Vainio, aka Ø, of Finland’s scorched-earth analog noiseniks Pan Sonic. Today, the material gathered on her early remix collections—1996’s Telegram and also the lesser-known, cleverly (if not at all succinctly) titled The Best Mixes From the Album Debut for All the People Who Don't Buy White-Labels—holds up far better than the vast majority of remixes from that era, keenly balancing the songs’ essences with a restless experimental spirit.
Part of that is because Björk never saw remixes as a simple marketing gimmick: Her youthful study of classical music had taught her to think of remixes as a contemporary iteration of the longstanding concept of theme-and-variations. “When I think of that word remix, it’s recycled, like trash,” she told Rolling Stone. “But for me, the word remix means ‘alternative version.’ It is just another word… for a variation. It’s like Bach—his symphonies were not completely written out so every time he played them, they would be different.”
Björk’s unconventional instincts and her keen understanding of the hidden links between classical and experimental electronic music—she had interviewed Stockhausen the year before, in fact—guided her on Homogenic, as strange and uncompromising an album as pop music has produced. From the album’s opening bars, it’s clear that she’s on to something new. Björk’s approach to electronic music had never been conventional, but it had generally been tuneful, and her beats tended to keep one foot tapping in time to house music’s reassuring thump. Not so “Hunter,” which bobs atop fluttering, fibrillating kicks and snares, its reversed accordion glistening like an oil slick. Aphex Twin had toured as Björk’s opener after Post, and you can hear his rhythmic influence across the album: in the filtered breakbeats of “Jóga,” “Bachelorette,” and “5 Years”; the resonant zaps of “All Neon Like”; and the buzzing, headlong stomp of “Pluto.” (The engineer Markus Dravs assisted in the beat-making, as did LFO’s Mark Bell, who co-produced much of the album.) Throughout, drums crunch and sizzle, throwing up little clouds of dust with every impact. And with the exception of the relatively frictionless skip of “Alarm Call,” her beats are far more kinetic than most programmed rhythms, twitching and flexing like fistfuls of cellophane curling open.
After the stylistic zigzags of her first two albums, Björk was determined to create something more focused. “This is more like one flavor,” she told SPIN of the album. “Me in one state of mind. One period of obsessions. That’s why I called it Homogenic.” The working title, in fact, was Homogenous. The Icelandic String Octet, performing Eumir Deodato’s arrangements along with string parts she had written herself, was the glue that held it all together. The result is a strange, captivating mix of impulses, with seesawing drones exploding into lush, neo-classical passages. You can hear the influence of the Estonian minimalist Arvo Pärt, whom Björk had interviewed for the BBC the year before, on the slow, elegiac string harmonies of “Unravel”; conversely, the cut-up harp and strings of “All Is Full of Love” faintly mimic the burbling pulses of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. “Even though my arrangements are quite experimental, I’m very conservative when it comes to song structure,” she told SPIN. “So it’s this beautiful relationship between complete discipline and complete freedom."
Many artists have attempted to fuse dance music’s rhythms with classical instrumentation; recently, between events like Haçienda Classical (a pops take on the hallowed Manchester dance-music institution) and Pete Tong and the Heritage Orchestra’s Ibiza Classics, the concept seems resurgent. But endeavors like those, and even Jeff Mills’ more highbrow attempts at orchestral techno, nearly always fail; it turns out that DIY electronic dance music and classical orchestras, a format that has barely evolved in over 100 years, are largely incompatible. Björk succeeded where so many others have failed by weaving the two inextricably together into an undulating fabric as flexible and as durable as Kevlar, processing the strings until it’s impossible to tell where the silicon ends and the catgut begins. You can hear the influence she exerted upon a young Alejandro Ghersi, aka Arca, who would go on to collaborate with her on 2015’s Vulnicura; his own music’s viscous textures and mutating forms would be unthinkable without the example set by Homogenic.
Blanketing the album’s electronic elements like a heavy layer of snow, Homogenic’s strings give the album a somewhat monochrome palette; it’s a dense listen, and in songs like “Jóga” and “Bachelorette” there’s not a lot of breathing room. But those rolling, subtly shaded contours periodically give way to jagged crags and extreme contrasts. This was not accidental: The album was meant as a kind of sound-portrait of her native Iceland. Björk envisioned beats “like rough volcanoes with soft moss growing all over it,” recalls Markus Dravs, whose percussive sketches formed the rhythmic foundation for her songwriting. “I wanted Homogenic to reflect where I’m from, what I’m about,” Björk told MTV. “Imagine if there was Icelandic techno! Iceland is one of the youngest countries geographically—it’s still in the making, so the sounds would be still in the making.”
Many of Björk’s collaborators over the years have discussed her tendency to describe music in unusually synaesthetic terms: Despite her intensive formal schooling in music—she began studying music at five, and was introduced to the work of modernist composers like Messiaen and Cage while still very young—her studio vocabulary, when she’s trying to get a point across, leans toward terms like “more angular” or “pink and fluffy.” So it’s hardly surprising that she would take formal inspiration from Iceland’s steaming geysers, igneous formations, and other geological features that lend themselves especially well to the visceral textures and rhythms of late-’90s electronica.
But there were also more personal reasons for her shift of focus. After years in London, she had become homesick for the land of her birth. She had traded a country with a population of fewer than 265,000 people for a city of some six million; not only that, she had been through hell and back in the years leading up to the album’s creation. A string of relationships with high-profile artists—the photographer Stephane Sednaoui, Tricky, jungle producer Goldie—had all fizzled. A physical altercation with a journalist outside Bangkok’s international airport had landed her in tabloids all around the world. And in September, 1996, a 21-year-old Miami pest control worker named Ricardo Lopez, furious about her relationship with Goldie—unbeknownst to him, they had actually broken up just days before—assembled a sulfuric acid bomb in a hollowed-out book and mailed it to Björk’s management before locking himself in his apartment, putting a loaded revolver in his mouth, and pulling the trigger, all in front of a video camera while Björk’s “I Remember You” played in the background. Police managed to intercept the device with no further casualties, but Björk was left shaken—concerned for her ability to protect those closest to her, including her son, and conflicted about her own openness with her fans. Returning to Iceland for the Christmas holidays, as she did every year, she fell under the island’s sway. Inspired by the country’s landscape, she became determined to make music that expressed a geological essence that was as raw as her own nerves.
You don’t need to know any of these details to connect with Homogenic, however; its emotional impact far transcends the biographical footnotes of its making. Lyrically, the record picks up themes she had already explored on her previous two albums—loneliness; sexual desire; desperate, even defiant love; the feeling of being a fish out of water—but her writing is more vivid than ever before. “I’m a fountain of blood/In the shape of a girl,” she bellows in “Bachelorette,” and later, “I’m a path of cinders/Burning under your feet.” The song is a kind of epic saga, and Björk has explained that it forms the third part of a loose trilogy with “Human Behaviour” and “Isobel”—a sort of Bildungsroman about Björk’s own adventures in the wider world.
Many lyrics take place as internal monologues grappling with her own contradictions. “How Scandinavian of me!” she yelps on “Hunter,” a desperate ode to self-empowerment, chiding herself for having believed she could “organize freedom.” (To Icelandic people, she later explained, Swedes and Danes are hopelessly regimented.) The distorted, minor-key “5 Years” is lovelorn and angry—for anyone who has ever been stuck in a dysfunctional relationship, is there a more relatable lyric than “You can’t handle love”?—while “Immature” channels broken-heartedness into a kind of empowering self-reprimand (“How could I be so immature/To think he could replace/The missing elements in me?/How extremely lazy of me!”). Despite the self-flagellation, it’s a quiet, tender song, with a beat carved out of a sigh; its twinkling arpeggios sound like a dry run for Vespertine.
When love turns up on this album, it is almost always something that is over or absent—a missed signal, a sailed ship. But she makes real poetry out of these small, bitter tragedies, and she occasionally even finds hope in them. In the soft, delicate “Unravel,” she sings of her heart unraveling like a ball of yarn while her lover is away. The Devil promptly steals it: “He’ll never return it/So when you come back/We’ll have to make new love,” she sings, in a strangely affecting conceit about the fickleness and resilience of love.
But the main theme running through the album is the wish to rush headlong into a life lived to the fullest—an unbridled yearning for the sublime. “State of emergency/Is where I want to be” she sings on “Jóga,” a song dedicated to her close friend and tour masseuse, in which churning breakbeats and slowly bowed strings mediate between lava flows and Björk’s own musculature—a kind of Rosetta Stone linking geology and the heart. “Alarm Call,” the closest thing on the album to a club hit (the Alan Braxe and Ben Diamond remix, in fact, is a storming breakbeat house anthem) shouts down doubt with the indomitable line, “You can’t say no to hope/Can’t say no to happiness,” as Björk professes her desire to climb a mountain “with a radio and good batteries” and “Free the human race/ From suffering.”
If you’re looking for catharsis, you won’t find better than the album’s final, three-song stretch: Following “Alarm Call” comes the incensed “Pluto”: “Excuse me/But I just have to/Explode/Explode this body off me,” she sings, launching into an ascending procession of wordless howls as buzzing synthesizers flash like emergency beacons. Finally, the quiet after the storm: The soft, beatless “All Is Full of Love,” a downy bed of harp and processed strings. The title is self-explanatory, the lyrics wide-eyed, nearly liturgical. It is a song about ecstasy, about oneness, about infinite possibility—and about letting go.
Björk’s voice is, without question, the life force of this music. You can hear her finding a new confidence on “Unravel”: The edge of her voice is as jagged as the lid of a tin can, her held tones as slick as black ice. A diligent student could try to transcribe her vocals the way jazz obsessives used to notate Charlie Parker’s solos, and you’d still come up short; the physical heft and malleability of her voice outstrips language.
Videos had long been an important part of Björk’s work, but they became especially crucial in building out the world of Homogenic. Compared to the sprawling list of collaborators on her first two records, she had pared down to a skeleton crew for this album; working with an array of different directors, though, allowed her to amplify her creative vision.
Chris Cunningham used “All Is Full of Love” as the springboard for a tender, and erotic, look at robot love. Michel Gondry turned “Bachelorette” into a meta-narrative about Björk’s own conflicted relationship with fame—an epic saga turned into a set of Russian nesting dolls. Another Gondry video, for “Jóga,” used CGI to force apart tectonic plates and reveal the earth’s glowing mantle below. At the end of the video, Björk stands on a rock promontory, prying open a hole in her chest—a pre-echo of the vulvic opening she will wear on the cover of Vulnicura—to reveal the Icelandic landscape dwelling inside her. In Paul White’s video for “Hunter,” a shaven-headed Björk sprouts strange, digital appendages, eventually turning into an armored polar bear, as she flutters her lids and wildly contorts her expression—a vision of human emotion as liquid mercury. Her use of different versions of her songs for several of these videos also contributed to the idea that the work was larger than any one recording—that these songs were boundless.
Björk’s initial idea for Homogenic was to be an unusual experiment in stereo panning. She imagined using just strings and beats and voice—strings in the left channel, beats in the right channel, and the voice in the middle.
It’s kind of a genius idea: an interactive, self-remixable album, a sort of one-disc Zaireeka, that goes to the heart of the dichotomies that have always made Björk—theorist and dreamer, daughter of a hippie activist and a union electrician—such a dynamic character. And while it’s easy to see why the concept never came to fruition—there’s no way such a gimmick could have yielded an album as richly layered as Homogenic turned out to be—it turns out to have been a prescient idea: the direct antecedent to Vulnicura Strings, which excised the drums and electronic elements of Vulnicura and focused on voice and strings alone.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see the way that Homogenic paves the way for later career triumphs like Vespertine and Vulnicura: In its formal audacity and sustained emotional intensity, it represents a phase shift from Debut and Post, fine though they were. Björk’s personality has seen her seesaw between extremes throughout her catalog, and after the shadowy intensity of Homogenic, Vespertine would end up a softer, gentler record. (Björk has said that she envisions “All Is Full of Love” as “the first song on Vespertine.”) Created in the glow of her nascent relationship with Matthew Barney, it is the domestic album, the comfort album, the beach-house-weekend album. But Homogenic is the one that complicated the picture of Björk, that threw aside big-time sensuality in favor of more volatile forces, revealed a glimpse of her deepest self for the first time. | 2017-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Elektra | February 5, 2017 | 10 | 1802dd1e-0177-475d-aa0b-8b469bf49f6e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Pavo Pavo's debut LP sounds like a dispatch from what people in the mid-20th century thought the future would be like: jetpacks, Mars landings and dehydrated Thanksgiving dinners. | Pavo Pavo's debut LP sounds like a dispatch from what people in the mid-20th century thought the future would be like: jetpacks, Mars landings and dehydrated Thanksgiving dinners. | Pavo Pavo: Young Narrator in the Breakers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22633-pavo-pavo-young-narrator-in-the-breakers/ | Young Narrator in the Breakers | The last track on Pavo Pavo's debut album, Young Narrator in the Breakers, is called “2020, We'll Have Nothing Going On,” which seems strikingly ominous now given the state of current American politics. However, the Brooklyn-based five-piece consider themselves optimists—a fact mirrored in their music and their aesthetic. The album's artwork features two women holding hands, walking into a metallic horizon like a 1950s advertisement, and this type of imagery informs the album. Young Narrator in the Breakers sounds like a ’70s soft-rock dispatch from what people in the mid-20th century thought the future would be like: jetpacks, Mars landings, and dehydrated Thanksgiving dinners. Their music embraces space-age retro-futurism, but with some gentle touches from the last 10 years of indie rock (Fleet Foxes' angelic harmonies; Grizzly Bear's urban folk; Arcade Fire's wide-eyed chamber pop) to keep them from being stuck in nostalgic pastiche.
All five members of Pavo Pavo are classically trained musicians as well as songwriters—and instead of seeming like disparate entities all vying for your attention, each person contributes just enough in their respective area that every drum fill, handclap and keyboard stab falls perfectly into place. “Time is a hole in my waterbed,” sings vocalist/keyboardist Eliza Bagg in her soothing soprano on the album opener “Ran Ran Run,” exactly the sort of softly loopy line that gives Pavo Pavo their off-beat color. As the chorus kicks in, the song shifts gears from downtempo to upbeat, jaunty pop, illustrating the band's knack for unconventional arrangements, another factor that keeps their somewhat typical setup from falling into conventionality.
It seems that 2016 had brought on a miniature, unexpected ’70s soft-rock revival (think the Lemon Twigs' mellow glam or Drugdealer's woozy folk). Down to their soft focus press photos in color-coordinated turtlenecks, this is a style Pavo Pavo make no qualms about embracing, and “Wiserway,” another highlight, is the closest they get to realizing it. Supported by off-kilter synthesizers that plod along like the theme to a forgotten after-school special, vocalist/guitarist Oliver Hill's voice, somewhere between a confession and plea, coasts effortlessly across his bandmates' three-part harmonies. Pavo Pavo may have formed in Brooklyn, but everything about this song conjures up images of Laurel Canyon, midnight beach bonfires and lazy coastal car rides.
The album is not without the occasional misstep: The title track interlude is a one-minute-long burst of space rock that aches to be given a full song treatment. But more often than not, Pavo Pavo redress those imperfections within a matter of seconds—“No Mind,” an uptempo number that at times sounds like Mark Mothersbaugh fronting the Flaming Lips, glues the second half of the album together, and “John (a Little Time)” makes the best use of Bagg's haunting vocals in a whisper of a ballad, like a lovelorn alien reaching out from the farthest reaches of the galaxy. By the time you do finally reach the closing sigh of “2020, We'll Have Nothing Going On,” the song's driving, mid-era Beach Boys wish to “Take me to the country/Seriously, Christine” does begin to feel like a promise of a better tomorrow, building a rocket to the future with childlike wonder. Whatever the actual year 2020 will hold, for now, Pavo Pavo's escapism feels cozy, uplifting, and wholly appropriate. | 2016-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Bella Union | November 28, 2016 | 7.2 | 1804a36d-a234-4767-be5c-f9def4edc1b5 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
An album about and of solitude may not seem like an appealing listen, but Doe Paoro comes through the other side strong and clear. Recorded at Bon Iver's April Base studio, she soaks up the sound inherent in that space, while more than capably carving one of her own. | An album about and of solitude may not seem like an appealing listen, but Doe Paoro comes through the other side strong and clear. Recorded at Bon Iver's April Base studio, she soaks up the sound inherent in that space, while more than capably carving one of her own. | Doe Paoro: After | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21065-after/ | After | It was bound to happen. As more and more bands in the extended Bon Iver family have made use of Justin Vernon’s April Base studio in the tiny village of Fall Creek, Wis., the location and the sensibilities of the musicians who overlap on these releases (and sleep there in bunk beds while recording) have begun to create a distinct sound. April Base seems like a place you’d find locally made art on the walls, Bruce Hornsby on the turntable, and half-eaten bags of trail mix on the counters. In the same way Matthew E. White's Spacebomb house band stamps its records with vintage-horn-section grandiosity, April Base recordings tend to have a liquid, woodsy aura like the one Vernon debuted on Bon Iver in 2011.
Enter Doe Paoro, who turned heads with her smoky, soulful voice on 2012 debut Slow to Love, which she wrote on a Vernon-esque cabin retreat outside Syracuse, N.Y. Though she didn’t know Vernon, when it came time to record a new batch of songs, she reached out to him, and he ended up producing her single "The Wind" and also introduced her to the production team of S. Carey and BJ Burton, who has produced, engineered, or mixed several others in the extended family (Carey, Volcano Choir, Colin Stetson, Megafaun). Burton, who also produced Low’s recent Ones and Sixes in Wisconsin, wisely realized it wouldn’t make sense to give Low the heavy duty cycle of April Base’s sonic wash, which can be dialed up (Repave) or down (Range of Light). For After, Doe Paoro gets the full-on Wilson Phillips-in-the-woods treatment. It fits her just right.
A lot of the conversation surrounding Paoro (real name Sonia Kreitzer) has focused on her time in Tibet and her study of Lhamo, an ancient form of Tibetan folk opera. But rather than a direct influence on her sound, Lhamo seems to represent one of the many ways Doe experiments with form. On After, she’s not tied to a specific song structure or genre just as she’s not easily described by one type of vocal tradition. Vintage and modern R&B, soul, Fiona Apple, and '80s synth-pop all commingle.
When Paoro originally released "Traveling", it was a minimalist performance video with just Paoro on vocals and Guy Blakeslee of the Entrance Band on guitar, but on After, the guitar is subbed for coughing woodwinds, muted synths, and processed keys. "Silence can be so loud, it’s abrasive," she sings, countering any preconceived, romantic notion of isolation. Holing up in a cabin can block out the din of humanity, but that withdrawal can also amplify your own thoughts, making them louder than you ever imagined. "I wanted solitude and that’s what I got/ Now I’m a living island with only one thought: Maybe I was wrong," she sings as organ and the April Base horn section swell and those "In the Air Tonight" drums kick in.
Either version of "Traveling" is a winner, and that malleability makes Doe Paoro something special. While there’s a familiarity to the production of Carey and Burton, the backdrops they create for Paoro are experimental and filled with surprises. Drums disappear as quickly as they appear. Pulsing bass drives "Nostalgia", while the patiently paced "Outlines" finds Paoro alone with a piano, pausing between bluesy phrases and relishing her chance to take center stage as a damaged but defiant torch singer.
As much as the producers and collection of studio musicians imprint After, their influence wouldn’t allow just any songwriter to shine. Paoro, alongside co-writers like Peter Morén and Adam Rhodes, uses the album to reckon with loss and all of its implications, especially as it relates to time—knowing that you’re knee-deep in the aftermath, but not yet on the precipice of something else. The future is a bunch of white space, neither something to get excited about nor dread. So what do you do with the present? Well, for one, you don’t dwell on the past. "Nostalgia is killing us," Paoro sings. And on "Hypotheticals", she realizes questions like "What’s fair?" aren’t even worth answering. "I won’t indulge in hypotheticals," she spits out in a blast, turning something that could be a tossed-off sound bite from an Aaron Sorkin drama into a charged, anthemic refusal to let someone else change her story. Making peace with something as painful as loss is a messy task. After is a confident, beautiful, clear-eyed testament to that mess. | 2015-09-30T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-09-30T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | September 30, 2015 | 7.4 | 1805781c-c4d0-4b26-86c1-b30319f848fe | Joel Oliphint | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joel-oliphint/ | null |
On his latest album, the former Cymbals Eat Guitars frontman takes an imagistic, detail-driven look at the dark corners of America. | On his latest album, the former Cymbals Eat Guitars frontman takes an imagistic, detail-driven look at the dark corners of America. | Empty Country: Empty Country II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/empty-country-empty-country-ii/ | Empty Country II | A song by Joseph D’Agostino can spin in a dozen different directions. Take “Erlking,” an early standout from his second album as Empty Country. Named after a murderous elf from European folklore, it opens with a sobering thought about the victims of Sandy Hook: “Those 20 kids should be visiting colleges.” From there, D’Agostino alludes to Calvinists sailing across the Atlantic on wooden ships, glimpses terror in a “dented metal restroom mirror,” and sarcastically imitates dudes who brush away their buddies’ assault allegations: “Forget who he molests/He’s a hell of a guy.” Locating a linear narrative is difficult, but both the song and the album that surrounds it casts a shadow of doom, best summed up by one lyric: “We’re well and truly fucked, my dear.”
D’Agostino, the former Cymbals Eat Guitars frontman, started Empty Country after his arty, emo-inflected band broke up in 2017. His second album under the moniker continues the bleak imagining of America of his 2020 debut. Accompanied by one-time CEG drummer Charlotte Anne Dole and her twin brother Patrick on bass, D’Agostino tells tales of lost innocence, societal decline, and rampant violence, venturing further into the corroded recesses of this country’s past and present. Empty Country II is the purest distillation of his songwriting yet, and it could be packaged with a map: He name-checks everything from Tennessee’s Cumberland Caverns to New York City’s dreaded Port Authority Bus Terminal to the Glen Road Silver Bridge in Southwestern Connecticut. Often, the locations are the only solid ground D’Agostino offers. His tales are fictionalized, unreliably narrated, and interwoven across centuries.
“Bootsie,” which veers between claustrophobic verses and anthemic choruses, tells of a young girl who takes a Greyhound from West Virginia to the “Biblically filthy” New York of the early ‘80s, finding community (but also chemical dependency) within the disco era’s drag queen culture. Closing epic “Cool S”—named after that Cool S—is sung from the perspective of a teenage murderer who is now living out his days behind bars. “FLA” traces trauma across decades in its namesake state, spiritually linked by hurricanes in 1935 and 1992. While Empty Country II can feel like a short story collection whose thematic connections become more apparent with every page turn—and indeed, D’Agostino did write a companion short story to lead single “Pearl”—ECII is more masterful as an album than a lyric booklet, invoking the depressive blues of Neil Young’s Ditch Trilogy and the sweeping, scraggly landscapes of Modest Mouse’s The Lonesome Crowded West.
Whether accompanied by little more than a piano on “FLA” or guiding full-band climaxes with his falsetto on “Pearl,” D’Agostino’s adenoidal voice cuts against the grain of the music, ensuring that we hear every word. The prickly compositions stray from Empty Country’s folk and country overtones. Even on the jazzy David Berman tribute “David,” knotty solos and seedy atmospherics lurk in the background. Seek out the most uplifting lyric and you’re left with D’Agostino reflecting on Berman’s suicide: “I’m scared to die/But I’m not scared of death.” This is a dark, disheartening listen. And yet, Empty Country’s detail-driven writing shows there’s strength to be found in dredging all this up, that there’s beauty in the margins.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review misstated the location of the Glen Road Silver Bridge. | 2023-11-10T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-10T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Get Better | November 10, 2023 | 7.7 | 1805f8fb-3ee6-4e76-830a-4b80be23ef82 | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
Expanded to a trio, Scott Herren's S&S moves to Stones Throw, thickens his music's mix, and revels in the sounds from the melting pot of 1970s Brazil. | Expanded to a trio, Scott Herren's S&S moves to Stones Throw, thickens his music's mix, and revels in the sounds from the melting pot of 1970s Brazil. | Savath y Savalas: La Llama | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13028-la-llama/ | La Llama | What does it mean to say that you are a Scott Herren fan? In over a decade of painterly sonic experiment, bouncing from name to name, style to style, he has fashioned such a colorful body of work that even the artist himself warns against drawing connections and comparisons. Because he doesn't want to diminish his collaborators' roles, he approaches each project-- there are no "side projects" to him-- on its own terms and asks listeners to follow suit. This year alone, Herren's mark can be found on three new records: one under his high-tech Prefuse 73 moniker, another that pairs him up with Zach Hill, and, here, a return to his kindler, gentler early work as Savath y Savalas. A partnership with Eva Puyuelo Muns since 2004, the outfit has recently welcomed beat-sculptor Roberto Carlos Lange, the son of Ecuadorean immigrants, into the fold.
And the result is La Llama. Expanded to a trio, S&S have changed in ways you might not expect. Of course, there is a thickening of the mix, but it owes more to the group's new methods than to the adding of a third voice or instrument. Swirls of psychedelic haze, and not only the crisp folk heard on Apropa't (2004), lend La Llama its grainy-footage aura, a sort of blissful density that fogs up each track. While part of that creamier texture is rooted in South American acid-folk-- more on that later-- another part comes from the ragtag recording. Warmly hued, dust-flecked, intimate, it isn't hard to believe the trio put this record together in a downtown apartment. The opener, which seems to cut and paste strips of the everyday ambiance seeping into his window, hints at the warm DIY production to follow. Tinny collisions of sound, the stalled construction projects around the Bowery may serve as metaphors, depending on your mood, for the faceplanting of high finance or simply for the relentless self-fashioning of Scott Herren. Certainly its collage-like quality reflects the melting pots that, over the years, he has labored to embody in musical form, from the Iberian diaspora's origin point, to the African enclaves of northern Brazil, back to his room in the immigrant mecca of New York.
Not only is this the group's first non-studio effort, but it also serves as its debut on Stones Throw. With their yen for leftfield tunes that fall within, or just beyond, the bounds of hip hop, the label that has housed both upstarts like Koushik and stalwarts like J Dilla makes a neat fit for the soulful adventurousness of Savath y Savalas. In fact, it seemed to be a match made in crate-digger heaven. The general manager at Stones Throw, the NPR funk archeologist Egon, shares Herren's love for the scene in Recife, Brazil in the mid-1970s. For many, that may not ring a bell. Luckily, reissues-- most by the vital Time-Lag Records-- have helped to reassemble a crude picture of this cauldron of psychedelia, with three records standing out as the towering documents of the subculture that gathered around Lula Cortes. There is the summery acousticism of Flaviola E O Bando Do Sol's self-titled record, the overdriven hymn to the four elements, Paêbiru, and Satwa's suite of starlit protest ragas. But apart from the ubiquitous guitar-- strummed and picked here, sliced and diced there-- the outsize personality of Recife is tough to spot. Herren has explicitly said that the region exerts a "direct and indirect influence," just one ingredient among many, but as the record beats on, one wishes that Brazilian muscle, verve, and eccentricity left a bigger mark on La Llama's mostly safe and Starbucks-ready aesthetic.
Instead of a jolt of funky Brazilian mysticism, what we witness in the record is a simpler and surprisingly fluid evolution: a handful of strands from Herren's past work woven together. Not every strand was worth his effort, though. For one, the shift in Apropa't, the sophomore effort that hipped devotees to Muns' feather-light delivery, continues here with the chanteuse's return to the fore. But her contributions add little color to the songs, as her airy monotone tends to stick to a mechanical, lullaby delivery, revealing her razor-thin range on "Barceloneta" and amid the sleepy strums of "Pavo Real". On the other hand, that record's often soothing blend of Catalan folk and Chicago post-rock lives on, far more vividly, in the billowing "Me Voy" and the brooding guitars of "No Despierta".
Though La Llama never plants itself on a bed of breakbeats, at its best, it does revisit the hopscotch editing of Herren's Prefuse 73 work. It is an attitude toward composing that also guided his essentially instrumental Savath debut as well as 2004's Mañana. And this persistence of the adventurous, anxious side of Herren (arrayed against his rustically downtempo Apropa't/Golden Pollen side) seems to coincide with the arrival of Roberto Carlos Lange, a musician who cut his teeth in the late-night peñas of Miami before crafting backcloths to gallery installations, and whose avant-garde spirit can be felt on the best tracks. From the flutter and fuzz of "Carajillo", the Verocai-via-Varese frenzy of "Una Cura", or the spooky animalism of "Pajaros en Cadaques", one thing is clear. A good deal more Lange and a good deal less Muns would have brought out the best in Scott Herren. | 2009-05-22T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-05-22T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Stones Throw | May 22, 2009 | 6.1 | 18061bbc-31cd-42f7-a1a4-f555a6c49dad | Pitchfork | null |
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An 80-minute epic blending screamo, jazz, prog rock, IDM, and more, the latest from producer Angel Marcloid offers some of her most focused and welcoming material amid the chaos. | An 80-minute epic blending screamo, jazz, prog rock, IDM, and more, the latest from producer Angel Marcloid offers some of her most focused and welcoming material amid the chaos. | Fire-Toolz: Eternal Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fire-toolz-eternal-home/ | Eternal Home | Fire-Toolz’s work has always felt designed for life indoors. Listening to Chicago producer Angel Marcloid’s psychedelic splatters of new age, prog metal, vaporwave, and digital noise captures the distinct feeling of growing up online, with the entire history of recorded music just a keyboard click away. As with similarly minded artists like Galen Tipton and 100 gecs, Marcloid depicts the internet as a place where leaping between genres is as easy as switching tabs, the line between “good” and “bad” taste is all but meaningless, and you can let your personal soundtrack get as weird as you want from the safety of your headphones. The internet often acts as an incubator for our hyper-specific tastes to develop unfettered, a place for personal expression to take on wild new forms as we find our own niche communities that accept us. Marcloid’s music incorporates that boundless freedom and unleashes it like a modern take on an epic, confessional GeoCities blog post, full of typos and spinning unicorn clipart.
The fantastical world-building of prog rock has always figured in Marcloid’s personal mythos, and bands like Rush and Dream Theater act as a guiding light for the Fire-Toolz project with their arcane sci-fi lore, highly technical compositions, and shamelessly excessive approach to songwriting. On Eternal Home, Marcloid offers her own take on the prog-rock epic: an 80-minute purging of ideas that melds screamo, smooth jazz, and IDM as if they were always meant to be together. This long-form project is a dense proposition from an artist whose music was already overwhelming to begin with, and parsing through the album requires dedication. However amid the chaos lies some of Marcloid’s most focused, welcoming material yet.
Although following the themes of Eternal Home will require a lyric sheet to comprehend Marcloid’s distorted shrieks, a close listen reveals the album to be a search for self-fulfillment and purpose, narrated from the isolated confines of the house. From the first moments of opener “≈ In The Pinewaves ≈,” chintzy synth chords clash in all directions as Marcloid muses about mundane tasks like doing the dishes, shouting pissed off affirmations like, “I’m owed strength now” and “I’m not paying for a mantra.” In Marcloid’s hands, being a stay-at-home stoner is a journey of self-discovery. “Lellow< “Birbs<” contrasts suburban imagery of neighborhood puppies and “macho sports dad-isms” with a gradually intensifying blastbeat, culminating in a simple, spoken-word declaration: “It’s always a nice day when we can be nice together.” It feels absurd, and yet Marcloid has a way of making these words sound completely earnest, like a kid screaming for peace from the cruelty of the playground.
One new development on Eternal Home is Marcloid’s use of clean vocals as opposed to her usual black metal howls, with the best moments finding ways to make the two styles work together. "Thick_flowy_glowy_sparkly_stingy_pain.mpeg'' opens with an absolutely decimating shriek before launching into an unholy nu-metal blast of Deftones by way of Cocteau Twins, layering glistening harmonies over pounding guitar riffs. “Where on EARTH Is My Sacchidānanda?” is even more accessible (at least by Fire-Toolz’s standards), leading a triumphant shoegaze charge as Marcloid sings and screams about having “sampled everything there is to learn” in her quest to find bliss. It feels like an anthem for the Fire-Toolz project as a whole, the melodic vocals making her trademark growls feel all the more powerful.
Moments like these manage to fold Marcloid’s far-reaching ambition into surprisingly sharp songwriting, but it’s hard for the more wandering material to sound quite as exciting in comparison. For every stunner like “I Am a Cloud,” an uncanny valley acoustic power ballad recalling Oneohtrix Point Never’s work post-Garden of Delete, there are oceans of head-scrambling glitch collages that end up coming across like sonic vomit. It’s fun to get lost in the delirium of it all, but the album works best on a choose-your-own-adventure basis, dipping from one batch of tracks to the next like switching between Discord channels.
In the spirit of prog rock, Eternal Home is as ambitious and cerebral as it is self-indulgent; but unpacking these strange, messy depths has always felt like the whole point of Marcloid’s music. All of her searching yields some dazzling results—the thrashing blackgaze climax of “Odd Cat Sanctuary,” the lo-fi emo serenade “To Make Home, Be Home,” the playful MIDI sound that rolls through “Window 2 Window 2 Window 2 Window.” As the album winds down with “To Make Whole, Be Whole,” Marcloid confronts the ways that happiness can alway seems out of reach, running off a checklist of taxes to pay, medical work to be done, and distant places to eventually settle down. For Marcloid, home is an ever-changing state. As uncomfortable as it may be, there’s beauty in the way Fire-Toolz embraces this turbulent state of flux as the real destination.
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. | 2021-10-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hausu Mountain | October 20, 2021 | 7.6 | 18095aae-5f35-47bd-8771-1aa6622c6167 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
On their lusty new album, the L.A. singer and songwriter leapfrogs across trap-inflected R&B, countryfied ballads, and bassy pop confections. | On their lusty new album, the L.A. singer and songwriter leapfrogs across trap-inflected R&B, countryfied ballads, and bassy pop confections. | Kehlani: Crash | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kehlani-crash/ | Crash | On Kehlani’s last album, 2022’s blue water road, the L.A.-based singer-songwriter dove into the comforts of love via airy guitar pop. It was a slight adjustment to their formula following albums rife with heated R&B and moody atmosphere, a new wrinkle reflecting a maturing sensitivity to tales of love lost and won. On Crash, Kehlani’s fourth studio album, they turn once again, this time toward a grab bag of genres that reflect the dizzying ups and downs of desire and self-examination. While it often sounds like Kehlani is trying on a series of flashy outfits to see which one fits best, it’s still exhilarating when Crash dials up their signature swagger.
For Kehlani, the titular crash symbolizes a sudden, brief spike of emotion. The album evokes that intensity through freewheeling music that roves between styles, occasionally within the same song: buoyant dancehall, trap-inflected R&B, and country-tinged ballads are just a few of the flavors Kehlani whips up. Halfway through opener “GrooveTheory,” they switch from girl-group croons to stomping come-ons with the click of a radio dial. “Let’s make a movie/Then come and show me the sequel,” they purr, offering an easy inroad to Crash’s frisky point of view. On the similarly slow-burning “Sucia,” Kehlani gets an assist from Jill Scott, who shows up in sultry spoken-word mode, and Puerto Rican rapper Young Miko, who slides on the song’s beat with slinky ease. It’s a moody highlight that depicts Kehlani in the depths of lust: “I don’t want Miami, I want Medellín/Take you from the party to the trampoline,” they urge.
That focus on desire courses throughout most of Crash, lending its best songs a flirty levity. On “What I Want,” Kehlani threads a chip-tuned Christina Aguilera sample with trap hi-hats and thundering bass, giving it a darkened glower that ratchets up the bravado. It’s one of the stronger, more deliberate sample choices on Crash, fresher than much of the nostalgia bait that runs rampant in contemporary pop and R&B. “After Hours” achieves a similar flex, rewiring the riddim popularized by Nina Sky’s classic “Move Ya Body” into a breezy plea for a longer night with a lover; it’s a featherlight, upbeat reinterpretation that doubles as an expert showcase for Kehlani’s vocals, which across Crash sound more syrupy and relaxed than ever.
When Crash slows down, the results are more mixed. On the pared-back ballad “Better Not,” Kehlani reaches for a country-tuned wistfulness that treads too close to faceless folk-rock. “Vegas,” with its keening, ’80s-nodding guitar solos, suffers a similar fate and simultaneously falls into cliched songwriting (“What happens here stays here”) that winds up sounding like a marketing campaign. It’s emblematic of some of Crash’s less imaginative songs, like the “crying in the club” motif that runs through the chorus of the dancehall-tinged, Omah Lay-featuring “Tears.” The lyrics can feel like an afterthought, even when Kehlani’s sheer charisma and honey-smooth delivery makes them go down easy.
Kehlani recovers on “Deep,” a highlight that unfurls a spread of bass-heavy psych-rock to take stock of their tumultuous life story. Featuring background vocals from family including their daughter, the song recalls Rihanna’s cathartic, conflicted ANTI, with a careening chorus that rides on Kehlani’s trilling, emotive delivery and heavy, skull-rattling beats. Tracing an arc from sleeping on a concrete floor to present-day success, it’s the kind of sharp, introspective work that colors Kehlani’s best music: a welcome counter to some of Crash’s excesses. | 2024-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | July 1, 2024 | 6.8 | 1809858c-ceef-4be5-a493-c6f8d42fa948 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
After a tumultuous few years, the TDE rapper gets personal and sounds reinvigorated, but his worst tendencies as a rapper consistently hold him back. | After a tumultuous few years, the TDE rapper gets personal and sounds reinvigorated, but his worst tendencies as a rapper consistently hold him back. | Ab-Soul: Herbert | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ab-soul-herbert/ | Herbert | Note: This article contains references to suicide.
On “The Book of Soul,” the penultimate song from Ab-Soul’s 2012 breakout album Control System, his life flashes before his eyes. What starts as an abridged telling of his childhood battle with the rare skin disease Stevens-Johnson syndrome gives way to a recollection of his relationship with singer Alori Joh, who died by suicide months before the album’s release. The song corralled Soul’s fascination with religion, conspiracy theories, and traditionalist wordplay into a bracingly personal story that’s more unsettling a decade later—if only because of how prescient it turned out to be.
In 2016, Do What Thou Wilt. marked a turning point in the life and music of Herbert Stevens IV: drug addiction and a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories figured heavily into his songs, isolated him from his family and, during the creation of his latest album, Herbert, led to a suicide attempt of his own last year. Though the video for single “Do Better” features an alleged reenactment of that attempt, Soul says the song—and most of the album—was written beforehand. Herbert is framed as his most personal project, the one most reflective of his government name in its title. And while he sounds reinvigorated, his worst tendencies as a rapper consistently hold him back.
During the peak of Top Dawg Entertainment’s popularity in the first half of the 2010s, Soul was known for breaking down complex spiritual, political, and historical ideas into smoothly rapped, if occasionally overwrought, forms. His best songs painted him as more than just Ras Kass with access to BearShare: He was inquisitive and sly, funneling historical texts and philosophies into jokes and bouts of self-discovery. Herbert is Soul’s first album devoid of the encyclopedic deep-dives that have been a hallmark of his work for the last decade. When he locks in on specific moments, like examining his public image on opening track “Message in a Bottle” or reminiscing about friends who kept him away from street life on “Hollandaise,” his elastic flows and storytelling bring the corners of his block and his mind to life. On “Do Better,” he grapples with survivor’s guilt while interpolating lyrics by his late friend Mac Miller; and on the title track, he describes the sickness breaking his body down (“Eye doc said I need new corneas/I’d rather need those than a coroner”) while confiding in the family he has left. These flashes of his personal life are nothing short of harrowing.
But Soul’s penchant for forced wordplay and over-commitment to Real Hip-Hop spoils the mood. He may have left the amateur philosopher schtick behind, but this is a man who grew up idolizing battle rappers like Canibus, and old habits die hard. The funniest and most shocking bars walk the line between the realest shit you’ve ever heard and quips from a book of dad jokes, and several of Herbert’s songs lean dangerously toward the latter. There are at least one or two clunkers on nearly every song, lines meant to be clever that, in reality, wouldn’t cut it in an episode of Epic Rap Battles of History. Some are word games that yield boring prizes (“Knew I might be on BET/Now I think I might be E.T.”); some are bouts of dated braggadocio (“You very venereal, I’ma set you men straight”); some are nonsensical (“Would a honey stay when the money goes?/I dunno, ask Winnie the Pooh”) or just straight up corny (“Just keeping it a buck, I’m on one, George Washington.”) Soul’s love for hip-hop is evident in his delivery and his academic commitment to interpolations of Grandmaster Flash and Lauryn Hill songs, but these tryhard raps—and the “what happened to hip-hop?” screed that opens “Moonshooter”—detract from both the serious and fun songs across Herbert.
That’s a shame because Soul is working with the lushest beats of his career. Production on earlier projects took a darker bent, but the beats on Herbert skew bleach-white with brighter sounds and clearer perspective. The jazzy boom-bap of “Message in a Bottle” blends well with the peppy production on songs like “FOMF,” and Soul is game for all of it: He sounds as comfortable dipping through the grooves of Jacob Rochester and Beach Noise’s gleaming boom-bap on “Bucket” as he is over the synthetic rush of DJ Dahi’s “Church on the Move.” Awkward sex raps aside, Soul’s performance on “Go Off” is fluid and exciting, his voice booming like it never has before. He’s branching out and taking chances, but he sounds especially proud stomping his way through DJ Premier’s triumphant horns and scratches on the closing-track-as-mission-statement “Gotta Rap.” Throwaway songs (“The Wild Side,” “Positive Vibes Only”) and the imbalance between quality and silly bars disrupt the tone and effect of what would otherwise be a well-sequenced album.
It’s undeniably a good thing that Ab-Soul is feeling better these days. Herbert is proof of his progress: his voice sounds fuller, his vocal runs sharper, his love for the craft rejuvenated. He opens up the book of his life story, but this isn’t some 180-degree shift in personality. For all the deeper soul-searching, vestiges of the man who once rapped “lemme put my mouth where you potty, boo” still surface frequently enough to shatter the reality he’s trying to convey. Maybe that’s the ultimate takeaway from Herbert—for better and for worse, this shit is in his blood.
If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts or know someone who is, call 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or visit the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. | 2022-12-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Top Dawg Entertainment | December 16, 2022 | 6 | 180d5fc8-a08c-4b6e-897e-071fffb852d4 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
null | Remember Teenage Fanclub's *Bandwagonesque*? In 1991, it was *Spin*'s album of the year, besting Nirvana's *Nevermind*, a release that would later be hailed by the same publication as the greatest LP of the 90s. Such contradictions are a testament to the cerebral oddity that, even though stories are told forward, they're formed backward-- events, or works of art, that occur at a certain time can take on greater importance when subsequent events lend them meaning. The then-present may have deemed *Bandwagonesque* just as compelling as *Nevermind*, but the future rendered Nirvana's record far more important.
This bothersome epistemological fact has led | Brian Eno / Harold Budd: Discreet Music / Ambient 1: Music for Airports / Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror / Ambient 4: On Land | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11731-discreet-musicambient-1-music-for-airportsambient-2-the-plateaux-of-mirror-with-harold-buddambient-4-on-land/ | Discreet Music / Ambient 1: Music for Airports / Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror / Ambient 4: On Land | Remember Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque? In 1991, it was Spin's album of the year, besting Nirvana's Nevermind, a release that would later be hailed by the same publication as the greatest LP of the 90s. Such contradictions are a testament to the cerebral oddity that, even though stories are told forward, they're formed backward-- events, or works of art, that occur at a certain time can take on greater importance when subsequent events lend them meaning. The then-present may have deemed Bandwagonesque just as compelling as Nevermind, but the future rendered Nirvana's record far more important.
This bothersome epistemological fact has led the world of academic art in the 20th century-- ever concerned with securing historical posterity-- to adopt a curious mindset. Artists have had to learn to speak a language of continuous self-analysis, regarding themselves in historical and present contexts so as to constantly reaffirm and even force their relevance within such stories. In modern art, it's been widely complained, the justification of a piece can be more important than its content. The artist learns a craft, but also a thought process that demonstrates a constant awareness of his or her continuity with the past, importance in the present, and meaning for the future-- every artist is equal parts analyst, critic, and salesperson.
Brian Eno has gradually been placed-- and has placed himself-- at the beginning of a growing number of stories regarding contemporary music; needless to say, the man went to art school. His historical-analytical mindset has angered some when it's led him to make sweeping claims such as, "I invented ambient music." Of course, much music has both ideologically and aesthetically predated Eno's (an issue explored in Mark Pendergast's The Ambient Century). The sense in which Eno invented ambient music is that he was able to identify its parts and impact, and thus hone a thesis stated through his Ambient 1-4 series. He took a loose collection of artistic impressions that were somehow related and defined their connection and import, creating-- as John Dewey's Art as Experience would've called it-- a unified, qualitative aesthetic experience. He "discovered" ambient music in the same way that most countries have been "discovered"-- when a Westerner finds it, names it, and gives it borders. His works are breathtaking, but the polemics that accompany them are of equal parts accomplishment and influence.
Eno's ambient ideal was formed in 1975 during months of lying in a hospital bed recovering from a car accident, forced to listen to too-quiet 18th century harp music that his body cast prevented him from turning up. This alerted him to the way that recorded sound can effectively merge with the environment in which it's played, appealing to "many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular." He aimed to create a cocoon for thought and reflection through a music that could be used with utilitarian purpose. He has described the process as a painter taking the human figure out of a landscape. In music, this figure took the form of his own voice, a cohesive melody, and other evidence of human intervention-- by eliminating these, he created a sense of space where there was once an object.
Brian Eno's affinity with composer John Cage is strong, in both their shared conception of environment as music and use of chance operations to illustrate this effect. The difference is that John Cage saw even musical basics like tonality and harmony-- the things that lend music emotional content-- as subject to his own theoretical rigidity, making some of his work ultimately uninviting to an average listener. But Eno's ambient works subvert themselves to the standards of musical beauty even in the farthest absence of humanity. Thus, in the same way that the most nihilistic of literary resolutions can somehow offer transcendence of meaning if the writing is beautiful, the ambient albums embody a duality of emotional distance and deep affection within that detachment.
As in a dream, such music has the power to make one nostalgic for places either never visited or nonexistent. And to many modern listeners, the melancholic nostalgia in these works has become twofold; it's both inherent in the music itself, and in the now-datedness of the recording style, which evokes a world of 1970s and 80s synthesizer music. One thinks of, for example, the soundtracks to grainy science-fiction movies such as Vangelis' score to Blade Runner, or that of Dune (the theme of which Eno contributed). Eno's sound appeals today to the ideal worlds both of abstract perfection and to the media of our own younger lives.
The most direct outgrowth of Eno's epiphanal experience was the Discreet Music, released in the same year as his accident; indeed, he recommended that it be played over hospital speakers to create an environment soothing to patients (it has, in fact, become a popular piece for expecting mothers). The 30-minute title track is one of the most pure realizations of Eno's original vision, a gentle immersion in slow, warm waves of sound. It's intended to be played at low volumes "even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility." The piece is an analog version of several theories that Eno would explore fully through computer software in the 90s. It's based in a sort of musical systems theory-- self-organizing works in a free-roaming environment of musical parameters predetermined by the composer. Thus, the actual execution of the music requires "little to no intervention" on the musician's part. Such systems create pieces that could go on forever, static in terms of musical movement yet never repeating exactly. In this case, Eno hooked his synth up to a tape delay system that allowed two melodic lines to linger and evolve with minimal input on his behalf. The result remains one of the greatest single ambient pieces that Eno has produced.
The album also includes three smaller works, variations upon Johann Pachelbel's "The Canon in D Major" derived by applying chance procedures to the original score and performed by a group of musicians conducted by Gavin Bryars-- composer of the beautiful The Sinking of the Titanic. If the piece "Discreet Music" is an aural statement of what ambient sounds like, then these are the term's ideological distillations. By building swirling drones upon a staple of the classical repertoire, Eno representationally strips music of its functionality-- the classic tension and resolution of one chord moving toward the next. Pachelbel's "Canon", in its circle-of-fifths progression, is a textbook piece of functional harmony; Eno's deconstruction, conversely, makes any expectation of musical movement impossible. Thus, though not the most enveloping or appealing of Eno's works, these variations gently force the listener to switch fundamental modes of hearing.
Eno's first official statement of larger intent came three years later with Ambient 1: Music for Airports. The dispassionate title reflects the smooth, sterile, modernist surfaces that the music evokes. Eno picked a building similar to a hospital, the location of ambient music's conception. Both hospitals and airports are centered on mechanized rituals that are simultaneously in the service of, and often numb to, basic human needs. Eno thus aimed to make a music that would "get rid of people's nervousness." The music comes in four sparse sections-- some of them solo piano, some synthesized voices and other tones, all altered through subtle tape manipulation. In long, disintegrating notes that echo the work of Morton Feldman, Music for Airports gives the listener nothing to hold onto, remaining as transitory as its location.
In describing this album, Eno said, "One of the things music can do is change your sense of time so you don't really mind if things slip away or alter in some way." In Music for Airports' meeting of place and sound, Eno realizes music's capacity to unify contrasting conceptions of time. The imagery of airports implies constant movement-- passengers rushing to catch a flight, planes taking off, lines of people and conveyor belts moving forward. Yet Eno's work is composed of placid, sustained tones that connote stillness. This contrast evokes both the inherent transcendent suspension in speed and the sense of "rushing forward" within a warm drone, and it's why many have likened the emotional content of Eno's work to the barrage of sixteenth notes found in minimalist pieces. Though opposite in rhythmic conceits, both seem to warp one's sense of movement through space.
Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror (1980) is Eno's collaboration with pianist Harold Budd, a late bloomer of a musician who became a master of playing his instrument at barely audible volumes. In the Grand Unified Story of Music, it's definitely the ambient album that most directly leads to much of the Windham Hill label's output-- a connection Eno would care to forget, as he's complained that new age mimics his aesthetic universe while divesting it of deeper meaning. Budd's placid, Satie-like melodies on reverbed piano are backed by hushed tones from Eno. The Plateaux matches Eno's other ambient albums in its moments of deep beauty, though it does little to mute the human presence. One gets the feeling that Harold Budd was after something slightly different from Eno, as his playing seems a bit busy under the concept at hand. Still, left on in the background, Plateaux is a light-filled album that accomplishes the goal of transforming its environment. It can turn any room into a place of fragile reverence, and it can offer poignancy to the most mundane of actions.
Ambient 4: On Land (1982) has been cited by both Eno and many fans as his best work. It's a complete realization of several artistic aims, and of all his albums it remains the most distinctive-- there are hardly any successful imitators of its unique universe. As Discreet Music foretold the manner by which Eno would realize self-contained musical environments, On Land presages the sound of several musical elements acting independently, coinciding only by chance yet remaining cohesive. The tracks of On Land, all fairly unchanging environments in this way, seem to similarly extend infinitely past the boundaries of their beginnings and ends.
Eno has talked of finding his inspiration for On Land in Ghana, when he used a microphone and headphones to hear the conflated sounds of his surrounding radius. "The effect of this simple technological system was to cluster all the disparate sounds into one aural frame; they became music." (For a demonstration of this effect, just walk around outside with a microphone amplified into a pair of headphones: It really is striking to hear the world flattened into two dimensions upon one's ears.) The result was an attempt to make dense "worlds" of sound using the same sense of disparate yet spatially connected elements. The album is both more varied than his other ambient works and more foreboding. The atmospheres in many of On Land's pieces are so dense as to leave one staring down a chasm of sound, with no visible bottom apparent. Eno used several nonmusical objects and field recordings to contribute to On Land's thick aural web, the album being a testament to Eno's use of the studio as an instrument. On Land intensifies the most subtle and indescribable of emotions, and it stands at the forefront of the transformative possibilities inherent in non-rhythmic, non-melodic music.
Brian Eno's ambient works received criticism similar to minimalist music of the time. About Steve Reich, a critic once sniped that listening to his pieces was like watching waves roll upon the shore-- pretty but meaningless. About Eno, guitarist Lydia Lunch once complained that all ambient did was "flow and weave," that its emotional ambiguity was oppressive and vapid. Both criticisms assumed a certain way of perceiving sound to be the only valid conceits under which to compose. But as time progresses, we find more and more artists influenced by Eno's expansion of sonic possibility, rendering earlier criticisms inherently moot. Some may find Eno's constant analysis aggrandizing, but it's that very mode of thought that allowed him to identify "ambient" as a coherent idea in the first place. He both verbalized and demonstrated a concept that perfectly fit its time and place, and that has visibly shifted the landscape of musical thought. For that, Eno gets to join the ranks of those who have accomplished such sea changes throughout history-- a shift in thought we often attribute to "genius." | 2004-10-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-10-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | October 7, 2004 | 8.8 | 1819ce4a-117c-4002-82c6-db658c5a789c | Pitchfork | null |
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Playing spacey techno sounds off breakbeats and inventive percussion, the Australian producer’s debut album has a psychedelic undercurrent that’s more Burning Man than Berghain. | Playing spacey techno sounds off breakbeats and inventive percussion, the Australian producer’s debut album has a psychedelic undercurrent that’s more Burning Man than Berghain. | Roza Terenzi: Modern Bliss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roza-terenzi-modern-bliss/ | Modern Bliss | Outside of Australia, most people don’t know what a bush doof is, but they’re essential to understanding Roza Terenzi’s music. For a teenager growing up in Perth, a place often described as the most isolated city in the world, clubbing wasn’t a particularly attractive option, but bush doofs—that’s Aussie slang for outdoor parties in remote or rural areas—offered the chance to take a proper plunge into the trippy depths of electronic music.
Terenzi recently located to Berlin after spending a few years in Melbourne, but Modern Bliss, her debut album, is rife with what sound like subconscious echoes of the nights she spent dancing in the wilds of Western Australia. (Some of those echoes might also be linked to her father, a percussionist who’s been part of an electronic dub project called Beatworld since the late 1990s.) Words like “sci-fi” and “extra-terrestrial” are often used to describe Terenzi’s production—and lines can absolutely be drawn between her work and the spacey sounds of vintage Detroit techno and electro, as well as the Motor City-inspired output of Dutch outposts like Clone and Crème Organization—but Modern Bliss also has a hippieish, psychedelic undercurrent that’s more Burning Man than Berghain.
This vibe is most evident on “Modern Bliss,” which pairs a self-actualization mantra (“Exactly where I need to be/My thoughts create reality”) from Barcelona’s Ivy Barkakati with a floaty techno-trance framework reminiscent of Paul van Dyk’s 1996 anthem “Words.” Back then, ponderous self-empowerment monologues were a staple of trance and progressive house, and there’s something familiar and comforting about the track’s warm pads and subtle synth wiggles. “Total Eclipse” is another throwback, its blunted breakbeats and twirling acid lines forming a perfect soundtrack for blithely zoning out in the chillout room. The shambling, sun-soaked “Spiral” is an even headier trip, yet it’s “Jungle in the City” that provides the album’s most blissful moment. A cosmic chugger that cleverly nods to Terenzi’s father (it shares a title with the first Beatworld album), the song’s astral melodies glide atop gently tumbling tropical drum sounds.
Warm and fuzzy flourishes aside, inventive percussion is at the heart of Terenzi’s appeal. A skilled shapeshifter, she’s flirted with a variety of styles and tempos across her previous releases, but her forays into electro and breakbeat have become a calling card. Those crooked rhythms play a role in Modern Bliss as well, albeit a less prominent one. With its robotic beats and thick, rolling bassline, “Yo-Yo” is one of the album’s sturdiest cuts, with bright melodic stabs that tip the song into euphoria. Album closer “My Reality Cheque Bounced”—a playful collaboration with Planet Euphorique founder DJ Zozi (aka D. Tiffany)—isn’t a straight-up breakbeat track, but its snappy, stop-and-start drum pattern and rubbery bounce make it one of the LP’s most obvious party tunes.
Straight lines are in short supply on Modern Bliss, but “That Track (Rewired Mix)” is one of the few instances in which Terenzi adheres to dance music’s standard four-on-the-floor grid. With its squiggly melody and sassy vocal refrain, the thumping house tune jettisons the rave nostalgia, opting instead for something closer to the perky sounds of classic Chicago labels like Dance Mania. It’s one of the album’s most streamlined productions, but it’s also one of its most effective. Moreover, it’s proof that even when she deviates from what’s expected, Terenzi can still be devastatingly effective. The heart of Modern Bliss may reside in the bush doof, but its creator is capable of thriving just about anywhere. | 2020-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Euphorique | May 1, 2020 | 7 | 181ae844-1272-4064-a38b-61b864a2ed07 | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
An essential new vinyl box set collects all of the trailblazing Olympia band’s records. It is a monument to the spartan trio’s music and their seismic influence on the indie rock that followed in their wake. | An essential new vinyl box set collects all of the trailblazing Olympia band’s records. It is a monument to the spartan trio’s music and their seismic influence on the indie rock that followed in their wake. | Beat Happening: We Are Beat Happening | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beat-happening-we-are-beat-happening/ | We Are Beat Happening | In 1979, a 17-year-old music nerd named Calvin Johnson made a revelatory discovery. “I know the secret: rock‘n’roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages—they could be 15, 25, or 35,” he wrote in a letter to the punk magazine New York Rocker. “It all boils down to whether they’ve got the love in their hearts, that beautiful teenage spirit.” As a preternaturally music-savvy high schooler in Olympia, Washington, Johnson had a show on KAOS-FM, a community radio station hosted by Evergreen State College which had a strict rule that at least 80% of all records played on-air must be independent. He filled his slot with bands that prioritized idiosyncratic passion over technical ability such as Young Marble Giants, the Raincoats, and the Slits. In 1980, Johnson enrolled at Evergreen, a small public liberal arts school with no majors or grades that attracted the kind of inquisitive minds who created and collaborated nonstop.
Johnson’s upstairs neighbor during his freshman year at Evergreen was Heather Lewis, an aspiring artist from affluent Westchester County in New York. Lewis—who had never played in a band before—accepted an offer to play drums in a group called the Supreme Cool Beings in the summer of 1982. Inspired by fellow Evergreen student Bruce Pavitt’s Subterranean Pop fanzine and cassette imprint, Johnson had founded a home record label called K (Johnson has said that K stands for knowledge, but also that it’s “unclear why the name is K”). The Supreme Cool Beings’ 1982 Survival of the Coolest cassette—recorded live on Johnson’s KAOS show—was K’s first release. The following year, Lewis and Johnson started playing together and after a few lineup changes, Johnson invited recent Olympia transplant Bret Lunsford—who had never played guitar before—to join the band that would be renamed Beat Happening.
The punk and underground music Johnson discovered as a teenager was driven by independence, egalitarianism, and an urge to destroy life’s rulebook. Beat Happening stripped away these philosophies until only the most elemental parts remained. They used yogurt containers for a drum kit, a thrift store guitar with no amp, and rebuffed the bass entirely. At live shows, they frequently switched instruments, if they had them at all. “Our attitude was if people don’t let us borrow drums then we can go grab a garbage can or a cardboard box and that will do,” Lunsford says in Micahel Azerrad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life. While punk was presumably loud, fast, and aggressive, Beat Happening, with their instrumental amateurism, unintimidating appearance, and unabashedly sentimental lyrics, were provocative by simply existing. It was an unintentional sort of defiance. “We just didn’t have a choice,” Johnson said years later. “We made music that we made—and that’s just the way it is. We were always working to the edge of our abilities.” Beat Happening was music at its purest.
We Are Beat Happening, a new vinyl box set that collects all of the bands’ records in one place for the first time since 2002, is a crucial step in recognizing the trio’s seismic influence. Though Beat Happening are frequently written off as cloyingly twee (which, to be clear, should not be an insult), in truth, the band created a crucial link between the minimalist experimentations of post-punk and Riot Grrrls’ demystification of perfection. By disrupting the status quo concept that music must be polished, practiced, and public, Beat Happening helped crack open a world for new voices.
In 1985, Beat Happening released their self-titled debut, a declaration of their undefined, instinctive, and fearless nature. As Johnson sings on “Youth,” one of the group’s earliest recorded songs, “When you’re young you can afford to be bold.” Drifting between barely-there lo-fi ballads and ’60s jangle-pop ditties, Beat Happening is unconsciously rule-free. The band’s name, which originated from an Evergreen student film called Beatnik Happening, could not have been more appropriate: In Beat Happening songs, a rhythm organically materializes. Vocal responsibilities bounce between Johnson’s booming, buffoonishly sexy baritone—which more than makes up for the lack of an actual bass—and Lewis’ unaffected candor, which propels the band’s more hook-driven songs. As she implores listeners to “open up your eyes and speak your mind” on the opening song “Foggy Eyes,” Lewis crashes through walls of hesitancy with every word.
The record’s bright yellow cover with a stick-figure cat riding a rocketship indicates that the music inside is childish. And sure, there’s plenty of wide-eyed whimsy throughout Beat Happening: the beachside dance party and picnic hosted by Mr. Fish in “Down At the Sea”; the singsongy “Fourteen” where Johnson struggles to speak while he and his crush feed a pet rabbit some cabbage; the tambourine-driven “Our Secret” where forbidden lovers express their undying devotion over cups of tea. The charming activities outlined in the band’s music were reflective of their lives in Olympia. They had slumber parties, made Super 8 films, and lived simply.
In many ways, Beat Happening was three twentysomethings performing the affectations of innocence. But for all their pseudo-naivete, the band’s music can be strangely sexual, like a teenager caught between the mysteries of adulthood and the comforts of childhood. The nearly a capella “In Love With You Thing” begins with Johnson lamenting an unrequited romance and kicking himself over his bashfulness. Suddenly his creaky wooden voice softens and he admits a hankering to touch a woman’s “parted lips” and “swinging little hips.” On the barebones “Look Around,” Johnson stares down a girl before deciding to “come between her thighs.” The most overtly sexual moment arrives on “Christmas,” a bumpy little track which appeared on a 1996 expanded edition of Beat Happening. It starts with a deadpan admission: “I had sex on Christmas/I had sex three times today/Three different women taught me how to be bored/In their own separate sweet little ways.” These moments of carnal desire stand in stark contrast with the record’s prevailing sense of polite swooning. While Bruce Springsteen was on the radio likening his desire to being set aflame, Beat Happening preferred small and private pleasures of all sorts.
Beat Happening’s debut was initially just a drop in the ocean, adored mostly by their small but supportive community in Olympia. But through Johnson’s connections in the fanzine world, the record eventually caught the ear of Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis, who would release Beat Happening in Europe in 1986. While this led to a swell of positive foreign press, the re-release also exposed the band to like-minded indie-pop contemporaries like the Pastels, Talulah Gosh, and the Vaselines.
Three years later, they made their darker and more abrasive second album, Jamboree. It opens with Johnson spellbound by a woman whose heart is “black as tar” to the point of single-minded delusion. His almost-frightening obsession marks a drastic change from Beat Happening’s debut, where Johnson was more likely to accept rejection with his tail between his legs than pursue romance so doggedly. On the caustic closer “The This Many Boyfriends Club,” he implores a young woman to ditch the dudes who fawn over her; he’s indignant that they think of her as an object rather than a person in her own right.
But for all its grit and angst, Jamboree is still driven by an underdog’s romanticism. The record’s most beloved track, the lethargic, wistful “Indian Summer,” clings to the promise of forever in the face of looming heartache. “Breakfast in cemetery/Boy tasting wild cherry/Touch girl, apple blossom/Just a boy playing possum,” Johnson murmurs, letting the delicate romance of each image melt in his mouth. Though Lewis’ vocal role here is more understated than on Beat Happening, her scrappiness leads to one of the record’s highlights. “In Between” is a charged blast of three-chord pop and it offers one of the most profound, utterances in Beat Happening’s catalogue: “And I remember when my parents met/It was years before my birth/And I can see them years from now/Their ghosts fly above the earth.”
While Jamboree was delayed by time off and physical distance between the bandmates, Beat Happening went on to release a steady stream of records for the next four years. Their third, 1989’s Black Candy, is undeniably the band’s spookiest and most sexually-charged album. While things begin pleasantly enough with the chipper Johnson-Lewis duet “Other Side,” their dreams of running away to a cozy shack and living off “bread crusts and lemon rind” are quickly extinguished by the ominous title track. “Jackhammer, can’t stand her/Can’t live unless I have her/Sin dribbling down my chin,” Johnson darkly intones. “Pajama Party in a Haunted Hive” is not the innocent bumblebee sleepover the title suggests. Over Lunsford’s spiky guitar, Johnson unleashes a horrifying Kama Sutra of insect innuendo: “Yellowjacket buzz let’s honey do/I’ll lie down on top of you/Gonna split this womb in two.” Even its most warm-hearted track, “Cast a Shadow,” is sullied by a dark specter of a lover who can only be seen in dreams.
Following the release of Black Candy, Beat Happening headed out on tour with punk heroes Fugazi; Johnson had befriended the band’s founder Ian MacKaye years before in Washington D.C. and the two artists regarded each other as contemporaries who shared ethics about DIY culture, independent labels, and affordable, all-ages shows. Beat Happening’s rejection of macho aggression as a core tenet of punk was bewildering and infuriating to some Fugazi fans, who wanted to crash into each other in the pit, not watch an awkward crooner squiggle his hips, rub his tummy, and sway like a drunk puppet. But the backing of Beat Happening by scene authorities like MacKaye signaled that punk is not a sound or a style, but a spirit of rebellion against norms of all sorts.
In 1991, Beat Happening released their fourth record, Dreamy, with Sub Pop, who were riding high off the grunge explosion. After the B-movie pulp spookiness of Jamboree and Black Candy, Dreamy returns to the vulnerability of the trio’s debut. But after six years playing together, Beat Happening’s technical ability had de facto improved in almost every way. Paired with Steve Fisk’s polished production, Dreamy is Beat Happening’s most cohesive record and their best-kept secret. Opener “Me Untamed” confronts a similar drunk in love sentiment as Jamboree opener “Bewitched” but this time Johnson chooses smoldering earnestness instead of force. “Who’s gonna love me the way that I am,” he solemnly asks on the gentle “I’ve Lost You.” Lewis’ songs are equally introspective and tender, especially “Left Behind” in which she summarizes romantic differences with serene precision: “You want more things, I got my own way.” Dreamy’s easygoing harmony confirms that Beat Happening’s creative puzzle pieces had found their proper places.
Several months after the release of Dreamy, Johnson and his K Records partner Candice Pedersen organized the International Pop Underground Convention, a six-day gathering in Olympia that celebrated self-invention and underground music. While the convention featured a hodgepodge of activities from performances by Beat Happening and Bikini Kill to screenings of Planet of the Apes, its most influential offering was Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now, aka “Girl Night.” This opening night showcase featured Heavens to Besty, Tobi Vail, Bratmobile, a pre-Tiger Trap Rose Melberg, and more. While women like Vail, Lois Maffeo, and Kathleen Hanna were already mighty voices in the Olympia underground, “Girl Night” galvanized a younger generation and the burgeoning Riot Grrrl revolution transformed Beat Happening and K’s DIY ethos into a worldwide call to arms.
Though they continued to write songs about the mysteries of love and death, Beat Happening’s fifth and final record, 1992’s You Turn Me On, feels removed from their ramshackle beginnings. Produced by Fisk and Young Marble Giants’ Stuart Moxham, the trio wander into dream-pop territory and idle in the drowsy glow of someone just awakened from an afternoon nap (one track is literally called “Sleepy Head”). The nearly-seven minute opener “Tiger Trap” is a slow-burning opus in the vein of Galaxie 500. “Godsend” burrows into a lush daze with Lewis’ multi-tracked murmur repeating “It’s just the things you do/You make it true/You’re a godsend” over and over across nine-and-a-half minutes. Perhaps Beat Happening fans who only listen to their 1985 debut assume that the trio never surpassed their unsophisticated beginnings, but You Turn Me On proves that by their end, the band evolved into something far more refined than anyone would have expected.
Technically, Beat Happening never broke up. They simply went separate ways and focused on other projects. Johnson continued building K into a beloved indie mainstay and released music under the monikers Dub Narcotic Sound, the Halo Benders, and his own name. Lewis continued to pursue visual art; her minimalist sketches appear on a majority of Beat Happening’s album covers and her naturalistic paintings of rabbits adorn the We Are Beat Happening packaging. For a decade Lunsford owned the beloved Anacortes record shop The Business and encouraged a new generation of artists, including Phil Elverum, to create art and community through whatever means were available. In 2003 they released Music to Climb the Apple Tree By, a collection of b-sides and rarities recorded between 1984 and 2000, but since 1992, Beat Happening’s music has been left to quietly inspire.
Over the past two decades, Beat Happening helped provide a blueprint for countless musicians looking to pave their own path. Kurt Cobain, who listed Jamboree as one of his favorite records of all time, got a K tattoo as a reminder “to stay a child.” Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker were individually blown away by the band’s simple set up and felt empowered to start a two-guitar-one-drum band. As Bandcamp became a tool for anyone looking to share their bedroom musical doodles, there was an outburst of young musicians inspired by Beat Happening. The most prominent of these modest yet singular voices Frankie Cosmos, who has said that listening to Beat Happening helped catalyze her to begin writing music. “Beat Happening will never get old,” she told Pitchfork in 2015. “It’s similar to Frank O’Hara—you can hear the voice so strong in the writing.” The teenage spirit Calvin Johnson once unearthed springs eternal.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | December 9, 2019 | 8.5 | 181f119e-8624-49e1-9301-8598362a5c8e | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
After circulating underground for five years, the rapper’s new project recaptures the magic of his late 2010s glory. | After circulating underground for five years, the rapper’s new project recaptures the magic of his late 2010s glory. | 03 Greedo: Project T-Pain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/03-greedo-project-t-pain/ | Project T-Pain | In July of 2018, 03 Greedo reported to a Texas prison to begin serving a 20-year sentence related to drug and firearm charges incurred during a 2016 traffic stop. The Watts, California rapper had always been prolific: From the start of 2016 through the beginning of his sentence, he released seven LPs, three of which clocked in around 90 minutes, while two more ran two hours apiece. But in the weeks leading up to his incarceration, he recorded at an even more astonishing pace, summoning collaborators from around Los Angeles to various studios at all hours of the day and night.
Many of the songs written during this period have since been released, usually on projects helmed by a single producer. These records occasionally recall Greedo at his elastic best, folding and stretching into ridiculous shapes to accommodate the disparate sounds he loves to synthesize: bounce from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, warbled singing from Atlanta, scuttling claps from his city’s own strip clubs. Still, they all rest on a shelf below his pre-prison material, perhaps because it often feels like there are too many people in the room. Though he has turned in scorched-earth guest verses on other rappers’ songs, Greedo’s music is strongest when it hermetically seals you inside his psyche—when each interpolation or irrupting confession feels unmediated, unedited, and raw. Of all the music he’s released since he began serving his sentence, Project T-Pain comes closest to recapturing the sorcery of his 2016-18 run.
Created during that period—and circulated subterraneously as a .zip file for more than five years now—the finally released album also pairs him with a single producer, this time LA’s Dnyc3. But whether it’s due to the more considered sequencing, more wrenching writing, or a less idiosyncratic collaborator (for better or worse, it is impossible to hear a Mustard beat and think of anyone else), the comparatively brief set feels like it flows directly from one man’s hyperactive brain.
On the second song from 2017’s Purple Summer 03: Purple Hearted Soldier, Greedo noted his trips in and out of lockup with a sly joke. “I might freestyle this whole album,” he teases, “‘cause I hate the pen.” But Project T-Pain opens with a much starker vision of the incarceration he faced at the time he wrote it. “You ever rode inside a bucket van?” he asks on the sweeping “Stronger,” where he invites the listener to imagine being “shackled from your hands and your feet.” A few bars later—before Dnyc3’s drums have even kicked in—Greedo laments experiencing homelessness before finding success, only to realize that he won’t beat the case in front of him. It’s the sort of bloodletting that would usually be reserved for an album’s end; by slotting it at the very front, the stakes of every encounter with an enemy or squad car that follows feel impossibly high.
It can be a thrill to witness Greedo’s unbridled energy as a rapper. On “Going Back,” he melts into a cascading flow—his third cadence in a single verse—that at first seems to break free from Dnyc3’s beat, only to be revealed as the anticipation of a thumping drum change. The album’s title is an advertising gambit; Greedo has always rapped and sung in nearly equal measure, and few beats here approximate the high-gloss playfulness of peak T-Pain. But the two artists do share a baseline unpredictability: On “Project Nigga,” which marries the turn-of-the-century Cash Money sound to the less quantized mutation of it that dominated LA during the Trump years, Greedo spends much of the song buried deep in the pocket only to emerge with a tossed-off coda. In it, he notes that his role model is not someone from his own life, but rather “Boosie—and [he] never met the nigga.”
The accents Dnyc3 adds to this school of production are subtle but delightfully eccentric: It sounds like there’s a chirping cricket trapped within the defiantly synthetic beat for “She Got It.” Greedo responds by couching his most overtly pop ideas inside songs too plaintive or violent for radio or by burying them at a track’s end.
The signature song on Project T-Pain—and one of the best distillations of the artist’s mission in Greedo’s entire catalog—is “Jordan Downs,” an urgent riff on Juvenile’s “Ha.” Greedo is one of the only rappers from the past quarter-century expressive enough to convincingly sell the original’s taunting-question structure; he has populated the Watts of his imagination with sufficient detail to stand alongside Juve’s Magnolia Projects. True to form, Greedo finds a way to pivot the song into a reflection on the hollow left by gang violence. “You ain’t no OG just ‘cause you 25/You ain’t no killer,” he raps. “You just still alive.”
It can be difficult to revisit Los Angeles hip-hop from this era without feeling a tinge of sorrow. Despite a handful of artists’ persistence, the exhilarating wave from the late 2010s has ebbed, ending too soon as a result of murder and imprisonment. But Greedo’s finest work exists somehow outside of time: He mines the past for component parts he can warp until they’re unrecognizable—until they sound, oddly, like the future. | 2024-01-11T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-11T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Bag Dat Money | January 11, 2024 | 8 | 18203121-b739-4bb1-a2b9-3af3f1ddc97a | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Karen O leads an all-star team (including members of YYYs, Liars, and Deerhunter) on the OST for Spike Jonze's film version of the Maurice Sendak classic. | Karen O leads an all-star team (including members of YYYs, Liars, and Deerhunter) on the OST for Spike Jonze's film version of the Maurice Sendak classic. | Karen O and the Kids: Where the Wild Things Are OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13550-where-the-wild-things-are-ost/ | Where the Wild Things Are OST | Sure, you could look at Karen O's name on the soundtrack to the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are and chalk it up to a convenient byproduct of her close relationship with the film's director, Spike Jonze. But really, there's no one better qualified for the job of translating Maurice Sendak's bedtime-story classic into song. Like Wild Things' young protagonist Max, Karen understands the power of imagination in transforming your mundane surroundings into something spectacular; witness the former Oberlin College student trying to make her way as a folksinger in Unitard, before refashioning herself into the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' beer-spitting, mascara-smeared mouthpiece. Unlike most lead singers with a reputation for physically extreme performances, Karen O's onstage behavior is never really subjected to psychoanalytic interpretation, nor should it be: That giddy, childlike smile she routinely flashes lets us in on the make-believe fantasy of it all, reminding us once again that rock'n'roll is really just the grown-up version of building a fort or playing with dolls.
So for Karen O, Where the Wild Things Are isn't just a soundtrack gig; it's a vessel through which she can again redraft her surroundings. This time, she plays the head mistress of a freak-folk dream-team (christened the Kids) that includes fellow Yeah Yeah Yeahs Nick Zinner, Brian Chase, and Imaad Wasif; Deerhunter's Bradford Cox; Aaron Hemphill of Liars; and Dean Fertita and Jack Lawrence of the Dead Weather. Strangely, the Wild Things trailer that's been burning up YouTube for the past month features not a note of music from this soundtrack album, instead luring us into the movie's magic animal kingdom through the choral grandeur of Arcade Fire's "Wake Up". But that track provides a cue for what Karen O and her Kids are aiming for here: a balance of the folky and fantastical, with immediate, all-together-now hooks designed for maximal campfire communalism.
Children's music, in other words-- though, barring the forced simplicity of lead single "All Is Love" (presented in a simple sing-along and a more dramatic, Funeral-ready form), it's music that's direct and participatory enough to engage the kids without aggressively pandering to them; it won't be hard to get your young'un to shout along to the gleeful, wordless hollers on "Rumpus", but the forceful stomps on which they're delivered serves to remind us that, for all their cheek-pinching cuteness, kids can be nasty, destructive little buggers. While the song titles reference the movie's events and characters, the lyrics rarely do; strip away the requisite film-dialogue snippets, and this set could've been a bonus acoustic companion disc packaged with It's Blitz!. In a sense, this soundtrack serves a similar function for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as the "MTV Unplugged" series did for grunge acts in the mid-90s-- an opportunity to strip down, but also get more elaborate and pile on the vibes, woodwinds, and other acoustic textures.
However, while the spell-it-out chant "Capsize" and the dust-up jam "Animal" tap into the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' feral energy, they ultimately feel like alternate, restrained versions of songs that would sound more effective and natural in amplified form. And, inevitably, there are a handful of incidental acoustic instrumentals that probably sound better when paired with Jonze's widescreen imagery. But the Wild Things soundtrack boasts enough illuminating, atypical turns from Karen O that make it worth experiencing independent of its source. The languorous lullaby "Hideaway" may be the least kid-friendly song here-- both in its strung-out, hazy-headed performance and my-baby's-gone subject matter-- but is a marvel nonetheless, a come-down sequel to "Maps" that the broken-hearted can comfort themselves with after the tears have dried. And it's no discredit to Karen's efforts to say that the soundtrack's most affecting moment is its lone cover-- for a film concerned with the complicated, conflicted relationship between childish whimsy and the real world, there's no better representative than Daniel Johnston, whose beautifully bruised ballad "Worried Shoes" is given a lovely, touching treatment by Karen. Like Johnston, Karen O has used music to access a fantasy world more exciting than the everyday one. The former's eccentricities put him in a mental hospital; the latter's got her on magazine covers. But the appearance of "Worried Shoes" on this soundtrack underscores the fact that, while our wildest fantasies are uniquely personal, the insecurities that inspire them are universal. | 2009-10-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-10-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | DGC / Interscope | October 8, 2009 | 6.8 | 1822c7f6-5e5b-4a5e-8dab-7c358ae1f3f8 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Elvis Costello releases his first Imposters album in a while, and it's the best of all that would imply-- a fiercely melodic record that sinks or swims on the dynamics of his band. Jenny Lewis guests. | Elvis Costello releases his first Imposters album in a while, and it's the best of all that would imply-- a fiercely melodic record that sinks or swims on the dynamics of his band. Jenny Lewis guests. | Elvis Costello: Momofuku | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11484-momofuku/ | Momofuku | Elvis Costello's career has taken so many left turns since his new-wave beginnings that it's nearly more surprising to hear him record a rock record these days than one of his many excursions in other genres. But Momofuku returns him to his band the Imposters-- their first in a while, and likely the sort of record most of his fans have been waiting for. Fortunately, it's the best of all that would imply: a fiercely melodic record that sinks or swims on the dynamics of his band, much in the vein of his relative comeback album When I Was Cruel and at times even Blood and Chocolate. The songs are raw and unfussy, and they show off what must come naturally to Costello: tracks stitched together from several disparate and equally unforgettable hooks, and lyrics filled with deft wordplay and plenty of seething and unsatisfied characters.
Most of all the record's songs are wrested from guitar and organ, whether it's the irrepressible pop of "American Gangster Time", the hushed, percussive groove of "Drum and Bone", or the distorted stomp of "Stella Hurt". Extra flourishes are kept to a minimum, with the exception of copious amounts of backing vocals. Costello fears no overdub on "American Gangster Time" or "Pardon Me Madam, My Name is Eve", while he gets help from a vocal "supergroup" bolstered by Jenny Lewis and several others on many of the record's tracks, be their contributions manically layered on "Drum and Bone" or just subtle coloring from Lewis on "Song With Rose".
From the album's opener, Costello is already aiming at critics in "No Hiding Place" who have grown more anonymous as his career has gone on (while taking note of "The very near future/ When everything will be free"), has no kind words for corruption across the pond in "American Gangster Time" ("It's a drag saluting that starry rag"), and finds even finds strife in, depending on your beliefs, the world's first coupling ("Pardon Me Madam, My Name Is Eve"). Yet while Costello is known for his pith, there's a certain amount of gentleness and grown-ass-man maturity present elsewhere: The honking jazz guitar of "Harry Worth" almost mocks Costello's previous ballroom pretensions, while the lyrics are like an answer to embittered earlier songs like "Almost Blue" or "The Long Honeymoon" as the narrator seeks to bring together dueling newlyweds, assuring them, "it's not very far between tears and mirth." Later, the placid ballad "My Three Sons" is a hopeful ode to estranged parents and finds glimmers of acceptance in growing old.
Even a meat-and-potatoes rock record from Costello would be nothing to complain about, but Momofuku finds small, but significant ways to diversify. Aside from the welcome downshift of "Harry Worth", there's a distinctive country twang (no stranger to his catalog) behind the prideful grand piano banging in "Song for Rose", while "Mr. Feathers" walks the middle ground between woozy Beatlesque melodies and the trashcan symphonies of Tom Waits. There's some percussive feats of wonder as well, from the chaotic clatter that closes out "Stella Hurt" to some of the man/machine editing that marked the material from When I Was Cruel on "Turpentine", one of two songs where the Imposters swelled to nine musicians, including Pete Thomas' daughter Tennessee from the Like on additional drums.
It's a remarkably consistent album, but what unifies these songs is how they were recorded, and how Costello and company play to their particular strengths. Even with all these extra musicians-- all valuable players who acquit themselves beautifully, of course-- it goes to show that Costello's songwriting voice is indelible, no matter who is or how many people are playing. While his omnivorous ears and musical appetite should be lauded, perhaps this is why records like these feel like more natural contexts for him. It lacks any standout single to rally around or champion, but maybe it's better that Momofuku's no-nonsense mood is unbroken. It's the longtime fans who'll be happiest with Momofuku, as the traditional four-piece "American Gangster Time" and closing track "Go Away", with its harsh vocal echo and buzzing organ, might be as close to vintage Costello as we may ever hear again. | 2008-05-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-05-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Lost Highway | May 12, 2008 | 7.5 | 1823a9ed-6819-4287-aa4e-4c427166e547 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
Reuniting the Memphis lineup of his long-running band, former Oblivian Greg Cartwright reveals the depth of his appreciation for classic American rock and soul sounds. | Reuniting the Memphis lineup of his long-running band, former Oblivian Greg Cartwright reveals the depth of his appreciation for classic American rock and soul sounds. | Reigning Sound: A Little More Time With Reigning Sound | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/reigning-sound-a-little-more-time-with-reigning-sound/ | A Little More Time With Reigning Sound | On their 1995 album Soul Food, which sounds like it was recorded in a deep fryer, Greg Cartwright’s old band the Oblivians released a song with an n-bomb in its title. The Oblivians were Memphis garage-punk kingpins, and Soul Food sums up their scene: white edgelords aping the boundary-pushing rebelliousness of Little Richard and Ike Turner without considering the racist conditions that gave early rock’n’roll its sense of desperation. So what’s a garage rocker to do when he outgrows the need to push people’s buttons? With Reigning Sound, Cartwright has spent the years focusing on craft instead of provocation: slowing down and fashioning songs that tend to sound like well-chosen covers of obscure garage, soul, and girl-group gems.
On the warm, thoughtfully arranged new album A Little More Time With Reigning Sound, Cartwright reunites with Jeremy Scott, Greg Roberson, and Alex Greene—Reigning Sound’s “Memphis lineup,” which helped jumpstart the band’s growth by layering singer-songwriter wistfulness into Cartwright’s customarily hectic garage rock on 2005’s Home for Orphans. In the decade and a half after that album, Cartwright worked in different studios with a fluctuating lineup. In 2011, Abdication... For Your Love was produced in part by the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, and Reigning Sound’s most recent album, 2014’s Shattered, was recorded at the Daptone studios. Like Reigning Sound’s best work, the Daptone/Auerbach assembly line traffics in a kind of amalgamated American music, and the results should have been a match made in cool-dad heaven, but on those albums, Cartwright’s typically clever songs and heartfelt voice were lost in the overwrought production.
A Little More Time is a culmination of a long process of maturation. The seasoned songwriter brings his well-honed gifts back home to Memphis, gathers old friends, and records on 8-track, making a record that feels more like a band standing close together in a room than a guy renting time in a studio with Serious American Music presets on the gear. As on Home for Orphans, the ruminative, slower songs are the ones that really shine, living in the sweet spot between pomade-slick rock’n’roll, festive ’60s soul, and glowing country gold. Cartwright wrote a lot of this album at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown last year, and the songs feel made for staring out the window while cigarette smoke twists into your coffee’s steam. On single “Oh Christine,” Cartwright ditches the wounded Foghorn Leghorn howl that blew through the band’s early albums for a warbly ’70s Dylan croon. A lyrical, Muscle Shoals-style guitar lead guides the band through the verse and pre-chorus before laying down the hook on a bed of keys. Other highlights include the swirling strings and organ that buoy “I’ll Be Your Man,” and the constant build and swell of “Just Say When,” a duet with Cartwright’s old Parting Gifts bandmate Coco Hames.
At its beginning, A Little More Time feels like one of those “back to our roots” attempts that bands make when they’re out of ideas and energy. The opening is a cheeky boogie called “Let’s Do It Again” that winks more than it rocks. Before the title track’s intricate vocal melody kicks in, the juicy organ of the intro echoes a version of “Stop and Think It Over” that Reigning Sound recorded with former Shangri-La’s singer Mary Weiss. The handclaps on the searing cover of Adam Faith’s “I Don’t Need That Kind of Lovin’” call back to the band’s 2002 cover of “Stormy Weather.” Luckily, the rest of the record is an achievement in craftsmanship, featuring some of Reigning Sound’s most layered songs yet. The pastiche of classic American sounds is still present, but Scott Bomar’s production gives the music an unstudied, authentic feel. Keys swell under choruses, strings drop in but don’t overstay their welcome, and Cartwright’s quieter croon has even more hurt and pathos than the sweaty shout he perfected in the 2000s. A Little More Time sounds like a record made by someone who has internalized the old music that they love and is now letting it flow out naturally.
Doing press for the Oblivians’ 2013 reunion album, Cartwright tried to excuse the band’s ’90s antics as “tongue-in-cheek,” and told Memphis Flyer, “I just couldn’t write the nihilistic rock anthem anymore.” Luckily, he stopped trying. That old racial slur still can’t quite be unheard, but on this rewarding album, it is clear that he now has way better things to say.
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. | 2021-05-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Merge | May 21, 2021 | 6.8 | 182467c6-01fc-4620-8df5-27e49eea0cfe | Chris L. Terry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-l. terry/ | |
On The Night Took Us in Like Family, producer, rapper, and Flying Lotus collaborator Jeremiah Jae relinquishes his production know-how to L’Orange so he can focus on rapping. It's an aesthetic concept record that teasingly ponders the idea of gangster rap from another era. | On The Night Took Us in Like Family, producer, rapper, and Flying Lotus collaborator Jeremiah Jae relinquishes his production know-how to L’Orange so he can focus on rapping. It's an aesthetic concept record that teasingly ponders the idea of gangster rap from another era. | Jeremiah Jae / L'Orange: The Night Took Us in Like Family | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20456-jeremiah-jae-lorange-the-night-took-us-in-like-family/ | The Night Took Us in Like Family | The chemistry innate to a rapper-producer duo is something worthy of respect, whether the fruits of the dynamic are successful or not. It’s evidence of mirroring, an essential element of identity formation, relationship building, and confidence: I see something of myself in you/your work—let’s try a thing. Ultimately, the best collaboration is about ceding control, which is rare amongst the alpha personalities that dominate rap. But the truth is, most of the best rap isn’t made in a vacuum with just a Dropbox of raw, outsourced beats, but from a certain collaborative dance duet. Take Guru and DJ Premier, Dr. Dre and Eminem, Madlib and MF DOOM, Clipse and the Neptunes, DJ Mustard and YG, Killer Mike and El-P.
What makes this dynamic even more interesting is when one of the partners is multi-talented. Like Madlib or Kanye West before him, on The Night Took Us in Like Family producer and rapper Jeremiah Jae relinquishes his own production know-how to focus on rapping. Jae’s production work on Flying Lotus’ hallucinatory Captain Murphy project and his own projects for Brainfeeder and Warp are often abrasive and off kilter; unlike his partner L’Orange’s production work on The Night, it is hardly ever obviously soulful. Even when Jae tweaks a classic it always sounds a little foreboding, like macerating the hot sugar of Aretha Franklin’s voice by boring into the downbeat and detuning her on his 2010 flip of her "One Step Ahead" (best known as the sample for Mos Def’s "Ms. Fat Booty"). The ghost of that song can be heard on The Night in the smoky, soulful, sped-up swing of "Part Two: God Complex", which one of a handful of short instrumental interludes that helps set the album’s Bogart-soused, B&W tone.
If the clips of film dialogue don’t give it away then the mid-century camp will, from jazz and lounge samples, down to the fingersnaps ("The Lineup"). This is an aesthetic concept record (billed, cringingly, as "noir hop") that teasingly ponders the idea of gangster rap from another era—pre-Scarface, for once. It’s an interesting approach, especially for illuminating the way popular culture has nefariously oversimplified the image of the "gangster"—a phrase often used as a contemptuous shorthand for rappers in particular, and black men more broadly—throughout time.
Like the swarthy-voiced Bogart, Jae’s distinctive mumble—mumblier, even, than Earl Sweatshirt—plays unreliable narrator over these 18 tracks. Call it method rapping. One minute he’s confident and smug (on the fast-slow bop of "The Lineup") and the next he lurks ("Invisible in a drop, invisible you cannot see me, don't let the cops see"). But he’s mostly paranoid, dogged by frauds and foes, and concerned with getting "down like James Brown when them rounds go off." L’Orange builds a gilded stage from a clutter of film, soul, and synth samples, refurbishing the worn 9th Wonder/early-Kanye warped soul template. It’s a pretty seamless pairing; these two have similar ideas about the completeness of a piece of music. | 2015-04-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-04-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | April 24, 2015 | 7.1 | 1825d913-fe76-43e0-a91c-48e02b14e382 | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | null |
Big Grams is a collaboration between Big Boi of Outkast and the indie-pop duo Phantogram. The two worked together on Big Boi's last solo record, and the project is further evidence that Big Boi doesn’t care so much about being the lead as he is interested in being in the middle of something new and different. | Big Grams is a collaboration between Big Boi of Outkast and the indie-pop duo Phantogram. The two worked together on Big Boi's last solo record, and the project is further evidence that Big Boi doesn’t care so much about being the lead as he is interested in being in the middle of something new and different. | Big Grams: Big Grams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21166-big-grams/ | Big Grams | As a solo rapper, Big Boi has been pushing steadily against the old preconception that he was the less-daring half of Outkast. On all three of his solo albums—Speakerboxxx counts— he happily explored his quirks, establishing himself as someone more than just Andre 3000's more stolid counterpart. With Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty, he pulled off an incredible, boisterously funky reintroduction. Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors paired him with Wavves, Little Dragon and Phantogram among others, and if the results were mixed, it was further evidence of Antwan Patton's voracious ear.
Vicious Lies paved the way for this full Phantogram collaboration. The indie-pop duo featured on three of the songs on Vicious, but on Big Grams they hit a bit more of a stride. This isn't a Big Boi-on-Phantogram beats project, and Phantogram's Sarah Barthel is nearly as central as the OutKast rapper as a lead vocalist. The two trade spots as lead vocalists playfully and Barthel's hooks are integral throughout. Barthel tries some rapping, and the results aren't actively embarrassing.
"Run for Your Life", the lead track, is sparse and spacey, and the synth sounds lifted from Stevie Wonder's Moog on "Boogie On Reggae Woman". Big Boi's raps aren't deep on Big Grams, but they are captivating: His strategically fluttering drawl, doled out in pitter-patter bursts, is a trademark as recognizable as it is versatile. On "Fell in the Sun" he punches quickly with a staccato: "I whip the yellow Cadillac, I like my seats way back / I bust the sunroof open, beams hit the Braves cap." This track, the lead single, is the obvious standout, and it's here that the collaboration clicks fully. Phantogram's Josh Carter builds up a throbbing wall of synths atop a snappy drum loop, and like elsewhere, horn stabs punctuates: proof, perhaps, that everything Big Boi does deserves a little funk.
"Put It On Her" is one of two tracks on the outing not produced by Carter, and it's certainly the better and more natural of them. (That soulful pump fake of an intro turns out to be a subtle 9th Wonder calling card.) The Skrillex-featuring "Drum Machine", however, sticks out like a sore thumb and bogs down the end of the album. For a record that's so smoothly collaborative elsewhere, "Drum Machine" sounds contrived and clunky. Luckily it is tacked on the end, making it entirely skippable.
The Run the Jewels feature on "Born to Shine" fares better, and not just because of Big Boi's pivotal role in Killer Mike's career. Mike's verse steals the show—"Ric Flair'in' / Long fur coat wearin' / Rolex rockin' / Silk shirt wearin'"—while Big Boi happily takes a backseat. This may be a hallmark of Patton's career: He's continually building up evidence that he doesn't care so much about being the lead as he is interested in being in the middle of something new and different. Given Atlanta's persistent vitality as a hotbed for innovative hip-hop, it's nice to know that one of the city's elder statesmen is off doing his own thing, carving out another little path for himself long after he helped pave the main road. | 2015-10-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic | October 1, 2015 | 6.4 | 182b6e3c-0479-4f66-a2d2-4f4835631b5a | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
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