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Dark Energy, the first release from the Indiana footwork producer Jlin, contains all the hallmarks of the heart-racing house music subgenre—frenzied pacing, arrhythmic kick drums, a graphic command of blank space—but executed with a clear-eyed self-determination. The music's happy/scary tension taps into the thrill and release in activating anger. | Dark Energy, the first release from the Indiana footwork producer Jlin, contains all the hallmarks of the heart-racing house music subgenre—frenzied pacing, arrhythmic kick drums, a graphic command of blank space—but executed with a clear-eyed self-determination. The music's happy/scary tension taps into the thrill and release in activating anger. | Jlin: Dark Energy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20450-dark-energy/ | Dark Energy | Menace is a sensation endemic to footwork, the Chicago-borne genre of heart-racing house music that is predicated on going harder and better than anyone else on the floor. Dark Energy, the first album from Gary, Ind. producer Jlin, hints at this idea of combativeness, bending all matter of percussion, vocal clips and pre-existing ideas about footwork into submission. Jlin’s talked about the mediocrity that can result from working from a happy place, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some joy at work in her music—it’s found in the process of creating and, for listeners, in the release of the dancefloor. That sly flip—the thrill and release in activating anger—is the emotional ingenuity in Jlin’s music. It’s a certain mindfulness she has in common with Rick Owens, who used her music—and that of pioneering footworker RP Boo—for his FW 2014/15 Paris Fashion Week show. Grim, monochrome upper; mind-altering interior.
Dark Energy has all the hallmarks of footwork—its frenzied pacing, arrhythmic kick drums, a graphic command of blank space—executed with clear-eyed self-determination. This gives the album an opaque, thoughtful quality. It's Jlin’s first release, centered around a track that first went live in 2010 ("Erotic Heart"), which means she’s had time to think about what she’s doing and, more importantly, what she is not doing. While working shifts at one of Gary’s many large steel mills, Jlin spent months perfecting the music, including songs like "Guantanamo", which cleaves hair-raising dialogue from The Ring with a grip of pin-sharp synths. Her tenacity feels even more significant when you consider that she’s a woman working in the man-saturated field of electronic production, and footwork in particular. For women, producer’s anonymity is both gift and curse.
A bunch of these song titles also invite loose contemplation on narratives of blackness, and/or racialized peoples. "Black Diamond" and “Black Ballet” scan more literally, whereas songs like “Guantanamo,” “Ra” and “Mansa Musa” prompt ideas about history, mythology, imprisonment, culture wars and a clash of civilizations. Jlin doesn’t editorialize, and this record isn’t specifically about identity politics. But she’s from Gary, a blue collar, black-majority city, making a record within a genre created for and by African-Americans at a time when the non-white citizenry is growing increasingly restless and hella loud about owning its art and likeness, its safety and life expectancy. Dark Energy has absorbed some of the shock. It has knowledge of self. Throw it onto the list of recent albums, like Heems’ Eat Pray Thug and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, that take personal, political and temporal stock of our lives and refuse to be one-dimensional in chronicling these experiences.
This sense of brooding becomes music that feels venomous. "Mansa Musa"—the name of a prominent ruler and cultural benefactor of the Mali Empire—clarifies Dark Energy’s happy-scary tension best. Halfway through the album, its fizzy, midtempo gait feels like a break from the intensity. But it’s a feint. Effervescent synths and skeletal drums lift the song up only to have a descending bassline and stiff snares prick its rise, sending it flopping to its death like a deflated balloon.
With the exception of vocal snippets, which appear frequently, Jlin doesn’t bother with traditional sampling. She’s generated her own instrumentation: from the winding, symphonic piano loop that opens the album on "Black Ballet" and the atonal moan of a Chinese erhu violin on "Unknown Tongues" to the guttural synths that skim the bottom of "Ra". Like Jlin it’s unconventional, particularly within footwork. Her homespun mutation of the genre feels like she’s staging an interrogation, and there’s the sense of threat: What do you feel when you hear the hollowed-out militant stomp and shiver of "Black Diamond"? What physical realm does this song slip into and out of as pinched, tweaked-out synths whirr ecstatically to life then stop? Are you having fun yet? | 2015-04-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | April 2, 2015 | 8.5 | 182bf9d6-bd7d-48b0-8412-4dde851f0f46 | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | null |
On Dear, the Japanese trio Boris hone in on their most essential quality—the ability to wrest subtlety from thick layers of distortion and amplifier volume. | On Dear, the Japanese trio Boris hone in on their most essential quality—the ability to wrest subtlety from thick layers of distortion and amplifier volume. | Boris: Dear | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boris-dear/ | Dear | For all the much-deserved praise Boris get for their endless experimenting, the Japanese trio has never been afraid of using the types of melodies that hardline noise fans tend to curl their noses at. At times throughout Boris’ prolific career—during any given live performance, even—you sometimes get the impression that there’s a hair band trying to get out from under the rolling waves of feedback and guitar distortion. It is, in fact, this willingness to toss aside stylistic rules that, for better or worse, has defined Boris’ zig-zagging trajectory since 1992.
In the past, Boris have taken shape-shifting to such an extreme that they’ve even released drastically different versions of the same album, including 2005/6’s Pink, 2006’s Vein, and 2008’s Smile. The band has put out so many versions of its myriad releases that Henry Rollins once referred to its discography as “a heaven and hell” for record collectors. It comes as no great shock, then, that Dear started out in a different form.
Originally conceived in 2015 as the album Boris would end their 25-year career with, the writing sessions for Dear “yielded three albums’ worth of material.” Then the band went on tour in 2016 performing Pink, one of their most overtly poppy albums, in full. On returning, drummer/vocalist Atsuo, guitarist/vocalist Wata, and bassist/vocalist Takeshi wrote more songs and whittled the entire pool down to a single record. Oddly, playing the Pink material prompted a shift back towards the heavier style the band is best-known for, but the band issued a press statement saying “we don’t feel comfortable calling Dear a return to our slow and heavy style.” Fair enough, but that’s pretty much what the new album is.
Titled Dear as a musical thank-you letter to fans, the new album finds Boris honing in on their most essential quality: their ability to wrest a kind of endless subtlety from thick layers of distortion and volume. When we look back on Boris’ legacy, what will likely stand out is that, along with the most artful of their drone/sludge peers, Wata and Takeshi made it possible for audiences to discern color and detail within the fabric of guitar tones that had once been thought of as blunt instruments of force.
Again, Boris marry heaviness with melodic vocal lines that fall slightly askew of the cleaving attack of the guitars. It sounds as if they were still seeking to reconcile a relationship between two clashing parties that might be ill-suited for one another after all, but where the odd-couple dynamic becomes the draw. At times, Takeshi has no qualms about exaggerating his inflections to sound like the third-generation grunge singers whose voices rule over modern rock radio. You can easily imagine the straight-ahead riff-rocker “Absolutego,” for example, as an early demo by Alice in Chains, when they were still grooming themselves in the image of ’80s metal.
All three members also counterbalance that approach with less stagey singing that gives the music a sense of reserve to match Takeshi's flamboyance. Dear features a substantial amount of chanting as well. When any of the three members’ voices are treated with heavy reverb—on “Kagero,” “Deadsong,” and “D.O.W.N. (Domination of Waiting Noise.),” for example—the effect is both serene and haunting, as if the band were performing a funeral ceremony for itself. (The noncommittal wording of the band’s official press release suggests that it’s still hedging on whether or not to retire.)
Meanwhile, on “Kagero” and “Deadsong,” demonic, throat-curdling whispers over molasses-slow doom riffs recall Thomas Gabriel Fischer’s tortured lamentations on Celtic Frost’s 2006 doomy comeback Monotheist. Both of these songs, as well as others on the album, contain delicate ambient elements, such as single guitar strings plucked with a certain resonance to resemble piano keys off in the distance. None of these choices reveal anything new about Boris, but the execution is especially discreet—about what you’d expect from a band that’s been exploring for a quarter century and no longer feels the need to force anything. Even the intentionally choppy edits don’t disrupt the album’s graceful flow.
You can read certain lyrics on Dear as the band’s self-reflection on its current position: “It looks like it’s our destiny/It looks like I’ve seen it before” (“Biotope”) or “Nobody wants to pick up that nostalgia/An appalling sight” (“Memento Mori”). But that would probably be a stretch. In truth, Dear doesn’t make any grand, final gestures. It does, however, compel you to wonder again how much more there is to express in the overlap between sludge, drone, doom, and shoegaze—areas that Boris have returned to time after time. After all this time, the answer still isn’t clear. And maybe that’s the beauty of Boris’ story if it does in fact end here. | 2017-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Sargent House | July 13, 2017 | 7.3 | 182e894a-e270-4a1d-9f44-c4d2b22b0d2e | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The Berlin-based producer’s fourth full-length trades his customary techno for 78 minutes of grimly beautiful music. It’s a long, bleak, challenging album that envelops the listener in darkness and fog. | The Berlin-based producer’s fourth full-length trades his customary techno for 78 minutes of grimly beautiful music. It’s a long, bleak, challenging album that envelops the listener in darkness and fog. | Levon Vincent: Silent Cities | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/levon-vincent-silent-cities/ | Silent Cities | With his last album, 2019’s World Order Music, Levon Vincent found a home for both the cavernous techno he’s best known for and the synth-based minimalism that has cropped up from time to time on his releases. But one track indicated a third, unforeseen direction that Vincent’s music might take. “She Likes to Wave at Passing Boats” consisted of little more than a rudimentary house beat and an incredible wall of string synths, yet Vincent highlighted it as a “surprise favorite” on the album, and no wonder. There’s always been something urban and dystopian about Vincent’s music, and “Passing Boats” presented Vincent as Vangelis, lighting up his subterranean sound world with a flash of Blade Runner blues. This sound suited him, and it made for one of the most powerful productions of his career.
Vincent’s fourth album, Silent Cities, expands on the basic idea of “Passing Boats” across 78 minutes of grim, architectural, often astonishingly beautiful music. Though titles like “Birds,” “Tigers,” and “Mother Amazon” suggest lushness and greenery, the album’s simple construction and sheer scale make it hard to picture anything other than urban vastness and desolation. Among electronic music’s evocations of cities, it’s comparable to Burial’s Untrue, 2814’s Birth of a New Day, Deepchord Presents Echospace’s Liumin, and DJ Sprinkles’ Midtown 120 Blues in its depth, scope, and imagination. You want to soar over this city, explore its hidden streets and back alleys, discover what every pinprick of light on the horizon belongs to.
While most sonic cityscapes suggest hustle and bustle, Silent Cities is minimal and streamlined in its construction, with tracks that move glacially over long run times. This isn’t a crowded thoroughfare but a sleepy industrial hinterland or empty parking garage. It’s easy to connect this sparseness to the depopulation of city streets during COVID-19 lockdown; in fact, though Vincent recorded the bulk of the album pre-pandemic, he finalized it in 2020 while looking out at the emptiness of his adopted home of Berlin. But while the cover features Berlin’s Fernsehturm TV tower, it also incorporates the Empire State Building from his hometown of New York. Like the city in Babe: Pig in the City, which cribs landmarks from all over the world in its skyline, Silent Cities is all cities, distilled into one grander and more mysterious than any that could exist in reality.
Four-on-the-floor techno beats are largely absent. Instead, we hear irregular kick drums accompanied by a near-constant tattoo of eighth-note or 16th-note hi-hats. Synth strings meander slowly above a yawning void of bass, accompanied on a few tracks by a tinny artificial piano that sounds like it was ripped out of a Chicago house track and jettisoned in a back alley. Effects are sparse aside from a chilly pall of reverb and the intrusion of dubby chords on “Birds” and “Mother Amazon.” Sometimes this music sounds like trap, as on “Gattaca.” At other times, it sounds like early-2010s producers like Cooly G, CFCF, and Kuedo, who preferred pretty chords and simple synth patches to side-chains and sub-bass. What it certainly does not sound like is dance music—nor does it sound like ambient music, as you’ll learn when “Birds” bleeds into the red in its final moments.
Silent Cities boasts a sly melodicism that makes it much more interesting than if Vincent was simply holding down minor chords on synth pads. Counterintuitively, it also makes the music sound creepier; so does his use of just intonation, which unlocks weird, microtonal harmonies. The melody of “Everlasting Joy” lingers slightly too long on one note until it sounds less like a hook than an unwholesome guffaw. “Gattaca,” “Sunrise,” and “Wolves” are based on the robust chord progressions and bright synths associated with anthems, but they circle endlessly instead of building to anything. On “Moonlight,” a single synth lead is backed by bass and drums, and it’s hilarious how the hi-hats race madly to the finish line while the melody chases its own tail in circles. We get a sense of grandeur and triumph with no release or climax, contributing to the album’s consistent feeling of being awed by your surroundings but still hopelessly lost.
It’s remarkable how much Silent Cities diverges from the trajectory of Vincent’s full-lengths while still feeling like his prior work. This is a long, bleak, challenging album that envelops the listener in darkness and fog, and that’s also true of World Order Music and his stunning self-titled album from 2015 (and, to a lesser extent, 2017’s For Paris). Vincent says this is the first album he made with no expectations of dancefloor play, instead optimizing it for listening on headphones, preferably while navigating a city. The parts of his music most alluring to the casual listener—dimly lit atmospheres, evocative synth sounds—are at the fore of Silent Cities, but that doesn’t make his music easier to get a grip on. Instead, the mystery deepens with each listen, until it expands in your head into a world bigger and more sprawling than even Vincent himself could imagine. | 2022-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Novel Sounds | June 14, 2022 | 8 | 182eae83-390e-4f75-a48c-49d60fd43bf1 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Tom Jenkinson of Squarepusher gathers a live band to play fast-and-busy jazz fusion, including versions of some of his early classics. The chops are there, but the broader point is less clear. | Tom Jenkinson of Squarepusher gathers a live band to play fast-and-busy jazz fusion, including versions of some of his early classics. The chops are there, but the broader point is less clear. | Shobaleader One: Elektrac | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22995-elektrac/ | Elektrac | Squarepusher’s Tom Jenkinson is not a man prone to inertia. Since his breakout in the mid-’90s with the frenetic avant drum’n’bass of Feed Me Weird Things and Hard Normal Daddy, his career has assumed a sort of pinball trajectory, bouncing from prettified electroacoustic music to solo bass noodling to a period spent composing for a robotic band (see 2014 EP Music for Robots), clinging to instrumental virtuosity as a guiding precept. In this respect, the live-band project Shobaleader One is simultaneously a clean break and business as usual, being both the start of a new phase and the point at which a few older ideas fully germinate.
The Shobaleader One concept came to life in 2010, with an album titled Squarepusher Presents Shobaleader One: d’Demonstrator. Incorporating elements of R&B, heavy metal, and Jenkinson’s own treated vocals, it purported to be the work of a live band, but was probably just the work of Jenkinson himself. But d’Demonstrator did attract some fellow travelers, and early in 2016, Shobaleader One emerged as a genuine touring entity—Jenkinson on bass, plus three musicians going by the names Strobe Nazard, Company Laser, and Arg Nution, taking on keyboards, drums, and guitar, respectively. At their gigs, this “space-pop” quartet set about reworking a number of Squarepusher standards through the medium of hyperspeed jazz-funk, their identities concealed by masks that look like malfunctioning Tenori-on.
While not explicitly presented as a live album, Elektrac seems to be taken in part from concert recordings, though were it not for the light applause that punctuates each track you might not notice. The recordings are crystal-clear, and there is no doubting the chops of the band themselves, who handle their task with virtuoso ease. Some tracks here feel well suited to a Shobaleader overhaul. A sprint through “Coopers World” from 1997’s Hard Normal Daddy imagines it as the score to some hardboiled ’70s cop-drama, all sticky wah-wah guitar and limber-fingered keyboard runs. “E8 Boogie” is pretty much a showcase for Jenkinson’s genuinely startling warp-speed bass plucking. Elsewhere, there’s some entertainment in watching the outfit stretch to cover distant corners of Squarepusher’s artistic mien. Company Laser nearly blows a circuit trying to replicate the drill’n’bass flurries of “Journey to Reedham,” while the ensemble show impressive restraint on a blissfully centered take on “Iambic 5 Poetry,” the pretty, vibes-laden standout from 1999’s Budakhan Mindphone.
These enjoyable moments are balanced by stretches where you realize you’re not so much enjoying Elektrac as being subjected to it. “Don’t Go Plastic” and “Squarepusher Theme” solo interminably, while a mid-album turn towards the heavy turns out low points like “Megazine”—Daft Punk gone metal gone wrong—and a rather cold and lifeless technical riffer called “Delta-V.” Jenkinson has explained he wants Shobaleader One to sound like “an insane band.” But nothing here verges on the elemental extremity or deranged humor displayed by earlier groups fusing jazz and metal—Lightning Bolt, for instance, or John Zorn’s Naked City. Instead, these tracks balance loudness with a rather fussy and joyless quality; fun to play, probably, not so much to listen to.
In a 2016 interview with Q magazine, Jenkinson described Shobaleader One as a reaction to the current state of electronic music production. “Software companies, partly in order to further their business aims, have made it so easy to make electronic music that the format in general is beginning to assume a troubling air of painting-by-numbers pointlessness,” he said. Look closer at Shobaleader’s gleaming metal carapace—can you see the jazz snob poking through? The idea that an album of finicky jazz-funk covers is the answer to anything in 2017 is a little rich. But more broadly, I’d say Jenkinson’s assessment is flawed. The increasing availability of production software has enabled the rise of music-makers otherwise marginalized for geographic or economic reasons—think localized sounds like grime, or gqom, or, if you want to go back further, those early jungle productions that gave Squarepusher its initial impetus. As ever, it’s not so much about the tools, but what you do with them. And while it’s laudable that Jenkinson is always moving, never resting, Elektrac feels a bit of a sideshow: a flexing of technique with little to display but its own shiny spectacle. | 2017-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | March 17, 2017 | 5.7 | 182f193c-5827-4da9-a719-d6dc6cf3f6e0 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
Like the two Caveman albums before it, Otero War could be an accessory to a generic and fictionalized network-tv retelling of “indie rock in the 2010s.” | Like the two Caveman albums before it, Otero War could be an accessory to a generic and fictionalized network-tv retelling of “indie rock in the 2010s.” | Caveman: Otero War | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22068-otero-war/ | Otero War | *Otero War *exists in two alternate universes: the first is a sci-fi dystopia helpfully described by Caveman on their website and illustrated by Marc Ericksen, the guy behind the cover of *Mega Man 2 and, more importantly, Twitter cult favorite Bad Dudes. But that’s not the real story here. Like the two Caveman albums before it, Otero War could be an accessory to a generic and fictionalized network-tv retelling of “indie rock in the 2010s.” And as with the soundtracks from any season of “Nashville,” “Empire,” or “Vinyl,” Otero War *is a collection of interchangeable, time-stamped simulacra that’s enjoyable on a superficial level, but mostly exists for the greater discussion of “who is this one based on?”
The timetable for making an indie rock album dictates that Caveman will always be playing catch up. Their debut *CoCo Beware boasted folk harmonies, candy-coated keyboards and chillwave’s ironic referentiality; in other words, Caveman were a quintessential 2009 band in 2011. Meanwhile, the best song on 2013’s Caveman *shared its title with Chromatics’ best song. Given this pattern, *Otero War *should logistically be cribbing off 2014’s year-end lists.
And yes, to the degree that Volkswagen’s ad agency were once influenced by Beach House, singles “Never Going Back” and “80 West” are influenced by the War on Drugs and the non-singles are actually styled after Singles. Being a knockoff brand isn't all bad, though: Sure, you have to get rid of the guitar solos, the engrossing ambient interludes and Adam Granduciel’s compelling battle with emotional devastation and perfectionism; but if you don’t the time to get Lost in the Dream**, Caveman offers a decent smoke break of Boss-gaze in nearly half the time.
Matthew Iwanusa certainly can't be said to lack commitment: He puts his back into this, foregrounding his brassy, sterling vocals amid a polished, flawless-sounding mix. If Iwanusa wanted to front an arena-ready Coldplay acolyte, or appear on The Voice as the “edgy” rock guy, he probably could. Or, he could just as easily be a jingle writer or the new Billy Joel for all we know, as the broad melody of “80 West” immediately triggers the thought of an impending Bosom Buddies* *reboot.
Which, right—that sci-fi plotline. The lyrics of Otero War are so damn vague (“it’s just the way I am, what a feeling”) they could retrofitted into basically any kind of hero’s journey*.* For the most part, Caveman songs embody the kind of implacable, but manageable discontent that mostly drives people to buy stuff to snuff it out. Call it “sync-indie” or “montage-core” or, more accurately, corporate rock.
None of this makes *Otero War *bad music; Caveman have developed their craft, and all of those 3 PM slots at summer festivals aren’t gonna fill themselves. And yeah, Phil Collins, Billy Joel, Brooooce—every generation tends to advocate for music they may have uncritically absorbed as a captive audience. Catch a snippet of “Never Going Back” or “Life or Just Living” in the wild and it’ll be worth a Shazam search. But how often is anyone a member of a captive audience in 2016?Otero War is a centrist indie rock record at a time when a center doesn’t really exist and there are vastly more interesting and inclusive things going on just outside the frame. But if you happen to miss out on all of these bands at the moment, not to worry: the next Caveman album will probably sound just like them. | 2016-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Cinematic | June 28, 2016 | 5.2 | 183c6ab2-116c-46cd-bcd6-66e27b2b545a | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
At first blush, it's tempting to refer to the third album from Hannes Norrvide's coldwave project Lust for Youth as "pop"—but his ideas of pop are strictly filtered through post-punk, so the newly minted trio's International is more a logical step forward from his no-fi previous recordings than a giant leap. | At first blush, it's tempting to refer to the third album from Hannes Norrvide's coldwave project Lust for Youth as "pop"—but his ideas of pop are strictly filtered through post-punk, so the newly minted trio's International is more a logical step forward from his no-fi previous recordings than a giant leap. | Lust for Youth: International | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19424-lust-for-youth-international/ | International | Minds typically go to dark, severe places when describing Lust for Youth: the blackest winters of Hannes Norrvide’s native Sweden, mental and physical prisons, Joy Division songs. So when a Lust for Youth song is built on Norrvide singing “this time he crossed the line” with typical, Teutonic austerity, you figure it's not going to end well for whoever he's talking about. And you’d be right—the song's about disgraced Tour de France champion and lawsuit magnet Lance Armstrong (“He spins the wheels down Champs-Élysées to acquire his seventh title for his people to admire”) and takes its title (“Epoetin Alfa”) from a drug frequently abused in the cycling world. But little else about International’s shimmering opening track resembles Norrvide’s past work, allowing you to hear that lyric in a meta sense. Lightness, melody, quality production, collaboration —these were forbidden zones on Perfect View and Growing Seeds, and on International, Norrvide is stepping over boundaries with no plans to go back.
If the word “international” instantly triggers a word association with “jet set”, you’re on the same wavelength as Norrvide here. It’s enough of a surprise that a guest spot from Iceage’s Elias Bender Rønnenfelt on “Epoetin Alfa” results in plangent, pinging guitars more reminiscent of Studio than his own band; the subsequent “Illume” confirms Norrvide’s alignment with Scandinavians fascinated by tropical locales, but he does so without the signifiers. “New Boys” and “Running” conjure the buoyancy of Air France and Tough Alliance without the birdcall and bongos, or the subversive playacting.
Norrvide isn’t quite ready to cross the line into the 1990s, though—his ideas of pop are strictly filtered through post-punk, so International is more a logical step forward from his no-fi previous recordings than a giant leap. Incorporating live member Loke Rahbek and producer Malthe Fischer, Lust for Youth are a trio now, and the arrangements of International are at least three times as sophisticated and accomplished; what were previously one or two-note synth figures are now one-bar riffs and full chords.
The crystalline, retro-futurist synths and spotless production could allow for comparisons to Depeche Mode, Human League, and Pet Shop Boys, but that’s if we’re being generous. Norrvide’s not really a lyricist or a personality; he's more of a moaner than a crooner, one who traces the longing melodic lines and placeholder verbiage typical of Bernard Sumner. Though the sound’s more open and inviting, Lust for Youth still remain a mostly unknowable act—the chorused guitars of waltz-timed ballad “After Touch” bear more than a passing resemblance to Def Leppard’s “Hysteria” and render Norrvide’s stiff vocals an afterthought. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the highlight of International is “Armida”, when Norrvide passes the mic to Danish electro-pop singer Soho Rezanejad; it’s still a Lust for Youth song in that it’s centered around the idea of control, but Rezanejad can sing about losing it, letting go, and moving her feet in a way that would be unconvincing had Norrvide said the same things.
And even if the cold storage atmosphere no longer defines Lust for Youth, Norrvide’s still got his defense mechanisms. “Ultras” and “Basorexia” are perfectly serviceable instrumentals, but they don’t function as interstitials—they just kill whatever momentum Lust for Youth attain with their pop songs, to say nothing of the five-minute spoken-word cut “Lungomare”. Rather than lending International depth, it shrinks the album into an admittedly accurate recapture of top-heavy, single-centered records of Norrvide’s preferred influences. Still, International is Lust for Youth’s third full-length in just two years, so it isn’t likely to be an endpoint, but an indication that they might truly cross the line into pure pop at some point—just, not yet. | 2014-06-09T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-06-09T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Sacred Bones | June 9, 2014 | 6.7 | 1843357a-d1bf-4c1b-bef0-d495fd8c012e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
These Australians became radio mainstays at home after missing the grunge gold rush, but their debut EP remains a potent encapsulation of alternative rock in the early 1990s. | These Australians became radio mainstays at home after missing the grunge gold rush, but their debut EP remains a potent encapsulation of alternative rock in the early 1990s. | Magic Dirt: Signs of Satanic Youth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/magic-dirt-signs-of-satanic-youth/ | Signs of Satanic Youth | Despite the best efforts of satellite-radio stations and CNN documentaries, trying to distill an entire era of music into a tidy package inevitably yields myopic results. However, if you needed to provide a new listener with an instant snapshot of how alternative rock really sounded during the early 1990s in all its stringy-haired, secondhand-flannel glory, you could do far worse than Signs of Satanic Youth, the recently reissued 1993 debut EP from Australia’s Magic Dirt.
North American readers of a certain vintage might recognize the band as laggards of the post-Nevermind feeding frenzy; their first proper full-length, 1996’s Friends in Danger, had the misfortune of coming out on Warner Bros. in the U.S. at the moment when major labels stopped caring about finding the next Nirvana. But like fellow Aussie hopefuls You Am I and Spiderbait, Magic Dirt rebounded from their stateside failure by becoming an alternative institution back home, where their increasingly polished garage-rock maintained a recurring presence on the Australian charts and festival circuit.
In their infancy, though, Magic Dirt were a much gnarlier proposition, one that pulled various strains of scabrous ’90s guitar rock—from the apocalyptic screech of Sonic Youth and the constant unrest of early PJ Harvey to the grooving grunge of the Singles soundtrack—into their vortex. With Signs of Satanic Youth, we hear a band taking the tentative first steps out of the murky underground only to get pulled right back in, a tug-of-war that would arguably make Magic Dirt the only band in the ’90s who felt at home opening shows for Pavement and Silverchair.
This reissue marks the EP’s 25th anniversary, but it’s a bittersweet celebration. Magic Dirt’s bassist and co-founder, Dean Turner, passed away in 2009 from a rare form of tissue cancer, a devastating loss that seemingly spelled the end of the band until the announcement of a short upcoming tour. But getting Signs of Satanic Youth back in print was a long-standing wish of Turner’s, and it’s an especially fitting way to commemorate him, given that his ominous low-end was so integral to this formative phase.
Grunge was the product of fusing 1970s hard rock and 1980s hardcore; on Signs of Satanic Youth, Magic Dirt prefered to ricochet between the extremes, with Turner manning the gear shift that sends songs like “Eat Your Blud,” “Supertear,” and “Choker” careening between psychedelic sludge and mosh-pit mayhem. But if all that wah-wah splatter and bassline grime instantly fossilize the EP, the restless performances of singer and guitarist Adalita liberate it. Her tinfoil-chewing sneer and visceral lyricism (“Why do you always have to bleed on me?”) anticipate the raw-throat catharsis of Karen O and White Lung’s Mish Way. Moreover, her sing-outside-the-lines style on the raging “Touch That Space” and conversational candor on the yearning fuzz-pop reprieve “Redhead” point the way to the disorderly oration of Courtney Barnett, who admitted she had Magic Dirt on her mind when she wrote “Pedestrian at Best.”
Signs of Satanic Youth dissolves into a haze of backward-looping effects that blissfully undulates for nine minutes (and went on for another 25 on the original CD). It’s an early display of the latent experimental streak that Magic Dirt would periodically indulge on their subsequent path to Aussie-rock sainthood. But if the untitled piece’s initial function was to provide a moment of serenity after five caterwauling songs, it serves an even greater therapeutic purpose today—as a salve for a band still grieving the loss of a crucial member, extending the halcyon days of a life cut short too soon. | 2019-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Emergency / Remote Control | January 2, 2019 | 7.2 | 1845eb2e-2b30-459d-8cad-48100e5a2aaa | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Following an unlikely breakthrough, the Connecticut quintet known for its euphoric live shows delivers a solid LP that avoids some major pitfalls of jam bands in the studio. | Following an unlikely breakthrough, the Connecticut quintet known for its euphoric live shows delivers a solid LP that avoids some major pitfalls of jam bands in the studio. | Goose: Dripfield | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/goose-dripfield/ | Dripfield | Even if you don’t like jam bands, Goose might win you over. Since forming in 2014, the Norwalk, Connecticut quintet has grown into a live force with buzz far beyond the sometimes insular jam band ecosystem. (How many jam bands get hired by Ezra Koenig to officially remix a Vampire Weekend song?) Watching their viral set at Peach Fest 2019—which, like many Goose sets, you can stream in full on YouTube—I thought wow, these guys can play. But it wasn’t just their virtuosic performances: Between the sprawling solos, they had actual songs that I walked away humming. Then, in March 2020, while the world was trying to stay afloat during COVID, Goose made headlines—and actual money—from their well-produced virtual events and tours, becoming industry news.
While their first two studio albums were good-enough collections of songs written to sound even better live, Dripfield is being positioned as Goose’s first real album: an introductory statement to coincide with their relentless touring and mainstream breakthrough. Right away, you can hear what makes Goose different from their contemporaries. Unlike other jam albums that go straight into showing off, this hour-long LP takes its time to unfold, opening with the slow and lush “Borne.” Guitarist Rick Mitarotonda is an unusually smooth vocalist, using his voice more as a melodic instrument than a megaphone for any ego or brand. There’s also multi-instrumentalist Peter Anspach, who plays most of the album’s keys and finds a way to make his contributions a highlight of every song.
Most of Dripfield was written between Mitarotonda and Anspach, who now seem to understand that a studio album can be a separate entity from their live show, showcasing different skills and atmospheres. The testing of the studio’s potential with “Borne” continues with a seamless transition into “Hungersite,” which features the album’s best riffs and a guitar solo you can sing along to, all propelled by the stellar rhythm section that help this album sound the way this band could once manage only on stage: big.
Dripfield marks the first time Goose have worked with an executive producer, and they made a fitting choice with D. James Goodwin, who has recorded Bob Weir as well as jam-friendly indie acts such as Kevin Morby, Bonny Light Horseman, and Whitney. While he seems to have been chosen to bring some indie cred and help curb the jam excess, he could have used his power to veto “Slow Ready,” a midtempo slog with no payoff, and “Honeybee,” which is a fine Fleet Foxes imitation and little else. Luckily, the album bounces back with “The Whales,” a welcome change of pace that goes for “Touch of Grey” jangle. This is the tempo best suited for Goose in the studio, and it carries through the live highlight “Arrow” and the joyful “Hot Tea,” both succeeding with delightful weirdness in their horn parts, courtesy of Stuart Bogie.
All of this helps make Dripfield the rare jam studio album that doesn’t have to be heard live to be understood. Just because it doesn’t suck, however, doesn’t make it outstanding. Many of the songs have been a part of Goose’s set for years, and those performances remain the best way to experience them. And like most albums in the genre, each song could benefit from some actual hooks and could be cut down a verse or two. Yet Dripfield accomplishes something that is hard to do in the studio. Goose jams are carefully constructed to pull us into the grooves slowly yet surely; often I found myself getting lost and forgetting what song I was even on, content to let the music ride out. The same way we rarely remember the beginnings of our dreams, stumbling into the action and following the loose threads, Goose have a distinct ability to put listeners in a trance, even stopping time for a little bit. It’s one of the defining powers of jam bands, and Dripfield has enough humble peaks and valleys to bring us into their world. | 2022-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | No Coincidence | June 24, 2022 | 6.7 | 1847f820-d192-44a2-9ada-2b0ea29d14e5 | Brady Gerber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-gerber/ | |
The New Jersey-based indie-rock underdogs, more popular than ever before, embrace synths on their sixth studio album. | The New Jersey-based indie-rock underdogs, more popular than ever before, embrace synths on their sixth studio album. | The Front Bottoms: Going Grey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-front-bottoms-going-grey/ | Going Grey | Over the past five years, the Front Bottoms have called the bluff of every guitar band that’s complained about how they need the right look, the right sound, the right press or the right connections to make it in the depressed market of 2010s indie rock. Early on, the New Jersey duo were typically described as folk-punk—even after they went electric on 2015’s Back on Top and subsequently crashed the Billboard top 50, “Late Night With David Letterman” and Coachella. But while artists in that eternally uncool genre often use strident politics to stake some claim to credibility, Front Bottoms were chatty and chummy instead, writing songs about swimming pools and drug addiction that brimmed with the beery bonhomie of a dorm-room bull session. Though their touring partners and point-and-shout-along shows suggest a tangential relationship with emo’s fourth wave, they’ve eluded any clear scene, releasing albums on both ’80s/’90s college-rock mainstay Bar/None and ’00s pop-punk juggernaut Fueled By Ramen. Front Bottoms have nothing to prove to people who’ve only recently heard of them, and yet whenever a grassroots success story starts to get mainstream attention, there’s the assumption that any alteration to their sound is trying to do just that. This is especially applicable in the case of Going Grey, which defies its title by dipping into the same fountain of youth as so many of the band’s Alt Press peers: ’80s pop.
It’s worked for Paramore, Now, Now, and Dreamcar, but in an extremely loose way, Front Bottoms’ trajectory can be best paralleled to that of Tegan and Sara—another duo that cemented their rep with brisk, loquacious dispatches from anxious twenty-something existence, then upgraded to a pastelled sheen shortly after making it to a major label. But Greg Kurstin and Jack Antonoff are nowhere to be found on Going Grey. Instead, singer-guitarist Brian Sella and drummer Mat Uychich self-produce with the help of Nicholas “RAS” Furlong, an Avicii collaborator who has written for Blink-182, Papa Roach and All Time Low in the past year. And though there’s nothing necessarily cynical or opportunistic about the sound they land on, the Front Bottoms approach synthesizers and Auto-Tune like guys who’d likely be just as happy playing as an acoustic duo, should it come to that. “Trampoline” and “Grand Finale” take the path of least resistance toward a sonic evolution by tacking on pitch-corrected vocals and puffy-paint synth leads; they end up sounding like demos for a "listens to Chvrches once" remix of what would otherwise be some of this band's least inspired writing.
Even if the retreat from guitar results in the most stylistically diverse Front Bottoms album, none of that really matters. Nor does Sella’s ability to ensure that every song on Going Grey is both hummable and quotable. We could talk all day about how “Don’t Fill Up on Chips” has an exquisite percussive arrangement, or how its chorus is one of their stickiest. It all comes down to how good words like “Feel most complete when we’re asleep/My head even with your hips, I’ll hug your knees” taste in your mouth before singing them back at Sella.
This is where the dividing line lies with Front Bottoms. It’s a relief, maybe even a revelation, for a guitar band to speak in this vernacular, to write about sex and friendship with an unpretentious candor that most avoid in favor of poetry or obscurity. The very same quality ensures that many will never make it to a song of theirs named “Bae,” let alone one that begins with an equally slangy, “When you realize the crew you roll with/Is actually what makes you anxious.” But a casual line on the chorus—“I gotta move my car/I gotta move your couch”—justifies the title. This isn’t a song about trying to act cool, but about how relationships rest on the essential, unglamorous terms of endearment that go unnoticed by everyone besides the ones who share them.
At its best, Going Grey brings little moments like these to light, tempering their exuberance with an embrace of adult obligation or a recognition of nostalgia’s futility. But too much of Going Grey seems oddly unwilling to risk offense—the concepts of “Far Drive,” “Everyone But You,” and “Grand Finale,” songs about various lovelorn states, could be the work of any pop-punker with a passing AP English grade, feeling as perfunctory and indistinct as the hyper-compressed, airless music surrounding them. Stella’s still got his tics, but by this point, they can feel like shtick. “You Used to Say (Holy Fuck)” exists mostly for its chorus, but it’s memorable for its profanity rather than its emotional payload. Elsewhere, he trips over stilted rhymes (“She started talking backwards/But nothing good it brings her/So next time that she sees him/It’ll be peace sign, middle finger”) or forced pop-culture nuggets (“You be Rachel and I’ll be bong rips”) with the indiscriminate, self-assured enthusiasm of a mid-level battle rapper or a “Weekend Update” host. Long-time fans will still hear it all as work of the Front Bottoms; newcomers may hear it in a Banana Republic. People over the age of 35 may possibly misremember some Barenaked Ladies song from their college years.
Whether it’s in ten years or even sooner, mark my words, the popularity of the Front Bottoms will no longer be treated as a shocking development. The day will come when we’ll hear about how their early live shows became the stuff of local legend, or how Talon of the Hawk defined someone’s entire 2013, or how “Twin Sized Mattress” inspired them to pick up a guitar. There are stories to be told about how Front Bottoms became one of the most successful indie rock bands to emerge in the past decade, but they won’t likely include Going Grey. | 2017-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fueled by Ramen | October 24, 2017 | 5.8 | 18484aa6-d603-494d-b805-2e7f0f89e30d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
On Car Seat Headrest's first proper new album for Matador, frontman Will Toledo reaffirms that he is ahead of the pack as an imaginative singer-songwriter, capable of crafting dynamic indie rock. | On Car Seat Headrest's first proper new album for Matador, frontman Will Toledo reaffirms that he is ahead of the pack as an imaginative singer-songwriter, capable of crafting dynamic indie rock. | Car Seat Headrest: Teens of Denial | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21673-teens-of-denial/ | Teens of Denial | Sometimes, drugs are no fun. The rad night you imagined, watching 2001: A Space Odyssey and brushing against the outer boundaries of your consciousness, becomes a six-hour hell of wondering Did I leave the oven on? or Did I look weird when I said that thing to that one person or Do I just think I looked weird but was I probably not that weird despite the person obviously thinking I was? and so on. But I’ve never heard someone sum it up as succinctly as Will Toledo does: “Last Friday, I took acid and mushrooms/I did not transcend, I felt like a walking piece of shit/in a stupid-looking jacket.”
That’s from an eminently quotable song called “(Joe Gets Kicked Out of School For Using) Drugs With Friends (But Says This Isn't a Problem)” on Car Seat Headrest’s new record, Teens of Denial, wherein Toledo feels both boundless and deeply, deeply lame as he tries to sort out his life and shake off the chemicals. He doesn’t transcend, but he sees Jesus. He coins a perfect phrase for emotionally distraught, image-conscious young hedonists—“teens of style”—and becomes sort of disgusted by them, even though he knows he and them are all one and the same. He says “Mmmhmm” a lot, which is all you can do during a gnarly trip. Built around some delicate chord changes, Toledo’s pensive singing voice, and a backing band that slowly comes in as the trip gets worse, it actually sounds like a guy walking around town while sifting beautiful thoughts from the bad ones—a perfect pairing of form and content.
It’s the best song about being a confused, chemically dependent 20-something I’ve heard in years. Its appearance on Teens of Denial, Toledo’s first properly recorded album of new material for Matador, is the moment you realize he’s running ahead of the pack as an incredibly imaginative, insightful singer-songwriter who’s also capable of crafting a dynamic rock song. Teens of Denial follows last year’s Teens of Style, a collection of re-recorded tracks taken from his prolific Bandcamp output. *Teens of Style *presented Toledo as a promising young voice, but maybe anyone would sound promising if given the chance to curate and improve upon their best moments over the last five years. Teens of Style was already great, but *Teens of Denial *is such a leap forward that it still manages to surprise. Recorded in a studio with a real band, it’s a continuation of Toledo's every-Matador-band-in-a-blender sound: Yo La Tengo’s soft-loud dynamics, Guided By Voices’ jagged pop iridescence, late-period Malkmus’ guitar theatrics, all bundled with emotive, immersive lyrics detailing a frazzled state of mind.
Thanks to Andrew Katz’s propulsive drumming, some cleaner production, and Toledo’s increasing ambition, it sounds more expansive—a firm declaration of talent, rather than a tease. He packs more ideas into “Vincent”'s paranoia, “Unforgiving Girl (She's Not An)”'s romantic euphoria, and the allusive, epic “The Ballad of the Costa Concordia” than some bands put into entire albums. On “Concordia,” an almost 12-minute track about navigating one’s inadequacies after a life of substance abuse that slowly builds to a towering release, Toledo seamlessly drops a whole Dido verse in the middle. It comes out from nowhere, but it works. (An earlier version of the album included an excellent song “Just What I Wanted/Not Just What I Needed,” which daringly interpolated the Cars’ “Just What I Needed,” but a copyright snafu led to its cutting. The revised version, “Not What I Needed,” sounds fine, though the censored mp3s making their way around the internet must be heard.)
Even with the bigger budget and brighter environs, Toledo's underriding DIY sensibility comes through. You can hear it in the margin-scrawl messiness of his lyrics, which forego neat-and-tidy narratives for abstractions, like he's snatching flitting images that run through his brain. More important than this deft lyrical touch, though, is his ability to display it within a musically engaging song. Unlike some indie-rock songwriters, Toledo's lyrics don't just sit on the page. The choruses don't arrive at the expected moments or follow traditional shapes, but they hit hard nonetheless: The high harmonies on “Joe Gets Kicked Out” and “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” are destined for festival singalongs, while “Fill in the Blank” is a burly, driving rock song that might even drive Car Seat’s sensitive listeners to mosh a little.
Teens of Denial is guitar-driven music filled with booksmart lyrics concerned largely with depression, which naturally means that Toledo has been championed in some circles as an “indie rock savior,” whatever that means. It comes at the same time as a widespread feeling that the idea of “indie rock” itself on the wane. These arguments are often folded into an increased irritation at what might be called “white male ennui,” the root cause of so much stylishly produced music over the last however many years. But depression is colorblind, and Toledo treats sadness not as a stopping point, but as transformative. (At any rate, he’s also multiracial.) There’s an honest reckoning with what his wallowing has led to, and rapturous exhortation when logic alone cannot solve a problem. “I’ve got a right to be depressed,” he yells on “Fill in the Blank,” moments after calling himself out as a little whiner. It’s an emotional conclusion that comes at the beginning of the album, a neat reminder that even after a moment of clarity, there’s always farther to go. | 2016-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | May 20, 2016 | 8.5 | 184883c6-5b32-4e3f-8852-75070d06bb3b | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
West Coast pop-punks' first release in four years is the political concept album you didn't know they had in them. While never very lyrically insightful or poetic, American Idiot is certainly the band's most ambitious record to date, with a consistent narrative spun throughout its 13 tracks-- two of which boast runtimes in excess of nine minutes. Life-changing? Not a bit, but there's something to be said for having the balls. | West Coast pop-punks' first release in four years is the political concept album you didn't know they had in them. While never very lyrically insightful or poetic, American Idiot is certainly the band's most ambitious record to date, with a consistent narrative spun throughout its 13 tracks-- two of which boast runtimes in excess of nine minutes. Life-changing? Not a bit, but there's something to be said for having the balls. | Green Day: American Idiot | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3568-american-idiot/ | American Idiot | Green Day were always innately suburban. THC and apathy themed their 1994 single "Longview"; their breakthrough album, Dookie, was a precocious jumble of power chords and smart aleck prurience, a blend of The Descendents and flinty Buzzcockian spark. They didn't have any answers-- they just wanted weed and entitlement. That cul de sac selfishness and bratty pose carried through to the sugar-pap mallpunks Green Day spawned on the backslide of the 90s; unfortunately, the trio's undeniable early flair for songcraft did not.
In 1999, pop-punk exploded with the arrival of Blink-182's Enema of the State, and the brand gleefully deteriorated from there, bottoming out in the young and hopeless days of a dollar-store post-millennium, where the suburban trash culture that Billie Joe Armstrong once dismissively skewered has blended dangerously with a shifty political climate, causing volatile upheavals in blue collar comedy and bicameral nimrods. Now Green Day are back to pull the pin on the grenade.
2000's Warning only scored the band two modern rock hits, and in contrast to the million-selling marks of previous records, was something of a commercial flop. By this point, their hit-making, image-cultivating offspring had bid them good riddance, and those disillusioned by Green Day's populist stature were no longer listening. If they had been, they'd have heard some of the grit and dynamics that gave birth to a much wider sonic palette on American Idiot, the band's first album since, and unquestionably their most ambitious to date.
As a songwriter, Armstrong's penchant for economy is still present-- he'll never be a wordsmith or a magic melody maker. But Idiot's slicing power chordage reaches to Green Day's old English and Cali punk influences with tingling fingers, adds acoustic instruments without sounding forced or contrived, and lyrically grapples with the cultural predicaments and awkward shittiness of "subliminal mind-fuck America," circa 2004: "Now everybody do the propaganda/ And sing along in the age of paranoia." Armstrong delivers the title track couplet like a command at the revolution day sock-hop, and its instrumental viciousness is enough to shatter punchbowl glass.
Like Bad Religion, whose recent The Empire Strikes First was not only a reaction to U.S. politics and culture post-9/11, but a powerful return to cynical form, Green Day's dissent and frustration has inspired a new strength of craft in them as well. Armstrong's frustration comes out in seething anger: The ragged, rousing "Letterbomb" is both a melodic powder keg and a blaring bullhorn promoting the destruction of complacency, while the album's title track is energizing and provoking in the way effective punk revivalism should be.
"Nobody cares," Armstrong screams shrilly in "Homecoming", one of the album's two extended set pieces, and the line gets at American Idiot's greatest feat, besides its revitalization of Green Day's songwriting. Rather than preach, it digs out the fuse buried under mountains of 7-Eleven styrofoam trash, the cultural livewire that's grown cold in the shadow of strip-mall economics. Armstrong's characters are just misunderstood and disaffected individuals, told to get lost by a nation of fair and balanced sitcom watchers. They're apathetic suburbanite kids, grown up to find that life in the longview sucks.
"Jesus of Suburbia" and the accompanying epic "Homecoming" are American Idiot's summarizing ideological and musical statements. Bookends, they respectively establish and bitterly conclude the record's storyline. Musically, they roll rapid-fire through vignettes of enormous drum fill rock, plaintive piano, Johnny Rotten impressions, and surprisingly strong harmonies. "Suburbia" references the melodies of "All the Young Dudes" and "Ring of Fire"; "Homecoming" surveys both the Ramones and the Police's "Born in the 50s"; and both songs owe their form and pacing to The Who. The album does drag on occasion-- the labored pacing of "Wake Me Up When September Ends" is a little too much, the price of ambition. But then there's "She's a Rebel", a simplistically perfect anthem of the sort the band's vapid followers (or their handlers) would likely muck up with string sections.
For all its grandiosity, American Idiot keeps its mood and method deliberately, tenaciously, and angrily on point. Music in 2004 is full of well-meaning but pan-flashing sloganeers whose tirades against the government-- whether right or wrong-- are ultimately flat, with an overarching sense that what they're saying comes packaged with a spoil date of November '04. Though they do fling their share of surface insults, Green Day frequently look deeper here, not just railing against the political climate, but also striving to show how that climate has negatively impacted American culture. Ultimately, American Idiot screams at us to do something, anything-- a wake-up call from those were once shared our apathy. | 2004-09-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-09-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | September 23, 2004 | 7.2 | 18574cfe-17e3-4e53-961e-7454ea3e025f | Johnny Loftus | https://pitchfork.com/staff/johnny-loftus/ | null |
The offbeat Chicago rapper’s knowing, laconic vocal style fits into the spare beats on his latest mixtape. It is deceptively cool and unpredictable. | The offbeat Chicago rapper’s knowing, laconic vocal style fits into the spare beats on his latest mixtape. It is deceptively cool and unpredictable. | Valee / ChaseTheMoney: VTM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/valee-vtm/ | VTM | Chicago rapper Valee’s latest mixtape VTM is a low-key, understated project, which is exactly where he shines. Produced entirely by frequent collaborator ChaseTheMoney, whose spare beats carve an enigmatic space with plenty of crevices, VTM is a record whose star raps with demure, evasive style, sticking to the shadows, floating across a tonally ambiguous canvas. Though it builds on the sound of contemporary Midwest street rap with a Southern influence, Valee’s style is unique, sidling up to the listener and working his charms with understated delicacy. Catching his wavelength can require an adjustment; VTM captures an offbeat artist who knows what he’s doing and is just waiting for everyone else to catch up.
Valee is quiet and of slight build, not the type typically pegged as a star. His personality in concert comes less through in-your-face energy than quirky side-steps. He’s known for pulling his pet yorkie, Firarri, out of his backpack on stage. He has a knowing, laconic vocal style, which emerges casually, a self-effacing cloud of smoke. That his often blunt lyrics often play with familiar steal-your-girl subject matter only draws attention to how unorthodox his light-touch vocals and sly flows really are. The way he banks on the familiar in service of the novel extends to his lyrical approach, too, which can suddenly veer quirkily, coolly comic. (“OG Gas so loud it sounded like we gettin’ yelled at,” goes one particularly vivid line on “Vtl.”) There’s something Zen-like about how his focus remains on the here-and-now, on tangible objects rather than the abstract.
His unembellished lyrics find their power enhanced in the way Valee's words drip-drip-drop from rapper to record, delivered as they are with a naturalistic, intuitive sense for flow. His fluid verses often seem less like they were rapped than splashed onto paper. Though his voice is faintly reminiscent of Gucci Mane’s at its most whispery, Gucci has a fairly regimented sense of rhythm. Valee’s style, particularly on the airy “Diamonds,” seems to drift, to slip into its own capricious pocket above the beat’s strict rhythmic demands.
Though they tend to clock in around two minutes, his best songs are unusually sophisticated compositions, thanks to his love for style’s understated ostentatiousness. (Towards the back half, “Dat Way” and “Sketchy,” despite the latter's strong concept, veer towards the generic, sleepy versions of popular Atlanta rap styles, but you’d hope these throwaways won’t make up much of his future.) On “Started Off My Day (Hey),” over a creaking beat that channels the feeling of picking sleep from your eyes while stumbling to the kitchen, Valee sketches a sing-song flow pattern, then disrupts it, taking a long pause for effect: “Sip syrup, sip syrup, that’s twice a four today/And yesterday.../A eight.” This phrasing—the deliberate use of shrinking lines to a lackadaisical poetic effect—feels central to understanding his unpredictable style.
This artful composition and the perplexing mood of the production come together to create a tone of total uncertainty. This contrasts with Valee’s casual sense of control, his placid recounting of objects and images, often of conspicuous consumption: “Tempurpedic mattress, sheets were satin.” When subjects fall outside this range, they’re glossed over, immaterial to him. In “Vtl,” he recounts what could be a dramatic story before dismissing it with a typically unbothered shrug, one which could be taken literally or in the meta sense, about his rapping: “Police pulled over me and I switched topics.” The police are reduced to an irritation on a level slightly below being stuck in an aisle seat on an airplane.
Throughout his work, this seemingly superficial focus on surfaces, on the tactile and material, set against a musical tone of confusion, simultaneously draws attention to what isn't discussed, to what's happened beyond the trivial. In each instance, what would have been the focal point of other, more “serious” artists’ work is relegated to the background, to loom large in our imaginations. Which of course makes enjoying the experiences and lighthearted wit of Valee’s day-to-day that much more alluring. His focus on quiet humor and the here-and-now is an anchor of confidence in a troubled world. One compact couplet captures the dynamic of his delightfully, deceptively deep approach to coolly delivered quips in two succinct lines. The order of the two lines reinforce their hierarchical importance to his world: “Did some pretty fucked up stuff, I don’t know why I ain’t in hell yet/I bought my bitch a yorkie pup and she ain’t even clip her nails yet.” | 2017-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | VTM | September 30, 2017 | 7.3 | 185b444b-07fa-4428-a929-15a9380d8313 | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | |
On his 10th album, Marilyn Manson embraces the tropes that made him a menace and a rock star and a stalwart of goth. This is his turf, and rather than expand it, he seeks to defend it. | On his 10th album, Marilyn Manson embraces the tropes that made him a menace and a rock star and a stalwart of goth. This is his turf, and rather than expand it, he seeks to defend it. | Marilyn Manson: Heaven Upside Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marilyn-manson-heaven-upside-down/ | Heaven Upside Down | There’s something quaint, in retrospect, about how Marilyn Manson’s early albums were once considered so dangerous they were blamed for the Columbine High School massacre—as if one man smearing on eyeliner and screaming about the antichrist could alone move a couple of teenagers to deadly violence. Manson made for a convenient scapegoat in 1999. Given how sunny the rest of the country looked on the surface, he stood out like an infected sore on a CoverGirl model, embracing nihilism and evil, cutting himself onstage, baiting transphobes with his drag performance as effortlessly as he baited Christians with his purported cahoots with the devil. Twenty years on, it’s easier to see that Manson was merely processing the same cultural toxicity that might have moved Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, not encouraging it and certainly not engendering it. In some ways, he’s a herald of the nightmare we’re in now, the original American edgelord, the man whose rumored surgically-enabled autofellatio dominated lunchroom conversations in elementary schools across the country.
On Heaven Upside Down, his 10th album, Manson embraces the tropes that made him a menace and a rock star and a stalwart of goth. Songs called “SAY10” and “JE$U$ CRI$I$” sound like someone making fun of witch house band Salem—it’s telling that, in 2017, Manson doesn’t come off like a parody of himself but of his musical descendants. Unlike 2015’s The Pale Emperor, which had buckets of bass-heavy glam rock decadence coursing through its veins, Heaven Upside Down adopts a serrated industrial tone more reminiscent of 1998’s Mechanical Animals, with a smattering of juicy guitar licks that harken back to Manson’s 1994 debut Portrait of an American Family. A tinny ‘90s guitar tone powers “WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE,” whose chorus, naturally, comprises Manson screaming the title twice over a power chord riff. “KILL4ME” similarly sees him asking his lover for a blood pact as eagerly as a blue-balled teen might beg for a first handjob. If nothing else, the God of Fuck is reliable.
That’s not to say there aren’t grooves here. While the lyrics to “Tattooed in Reverse” might trot out clumsily—it starts with “fuck your bible” and then Manson rhymes “showhorse” with “of course” right after making a “stable” pun—the song boasts a chorus as catchy as anything since “The Dope Show.” “Blood Honey,” meanwhile, is a visceral ode to kink that, like good sex, saves its most explosive moments for last. Even “SAY10,” with its absurd refrain of “You say God, I say Satan” that echoes nothing so much as Cake’s “Sheep Go to Heaven,” kicks hard enough to keep the Halloween party going. After all, the only reason anyone ever panicked about this guy is that he had a good enough grasp on pop to sneak his satanic earworms into the brains of the youth. No one would care if he couldn’t write hooks, and hooks he’s still got—dressed up, as ever, like the Babadook at a wine party.
Many of these songs rehash some of Manson’s earlier and even recent musical ideas. “Saturnalia” begins with a vocal riff almost indistinguishable from the hummed pre-chorus to Pale Emperor standout “Third Day of a Seven Day Binge,” while “KILL4ME” courses atop the Gary Glitter stomp-clap that’s boned up plenty of his songs over the years. But Manson has always seemed most comfortable deeply within the confines of his genre, repetitive as he may have become. This is his turf, and rather than expand it, he seeks to defend it, to reiterate his idiosyncratic spot in popular culture so no one forgets it’s his.
The shock value of his work long worn off, Manson now occupies a curiously nostalgic space among rock lifers. To listen to his albums is to indulge the same impulse that’s tacked “666” to the end of so many Twitter handles. It’s a gesture of affection for the kid you used to be, back when the number of the beast (or the weed number or the sex number) held the power to freak out your parents, your classmates, your teachers. It’s funny now because of how serious it once seemed. In 2017, the open horror of the world easily eclipses anything Manson’s recorded in years. Whatever value his music still holds derives from what you remember of him, and how sweet the memory of your thrill or disgust now rings. | 2017-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Loma Vista | October 11, 2017 | 5.9 | 185bc66d-7e0b-4e46-8e62-48056f3ef675 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Dave Grohl’s lawful-good lifestyle presents an eternal conflict between being unable to hate the guy and being unable to enjoy the music he continues to make. | Dave Grohl’s lawful-good lifestyle presents an eternal conflict between being unable to hate the guy and being unable to enjoy the music he continues to make. | Foo Fighters: Medicine at Midnight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foo-fighters-medicine-at-midnight/ | Medicine at Midnight | A quarter-century after they rose from the ashes of grunge, climbed Billboard pop charts, vacuumed up Grammys, and conquered stadiums worldwide, the Foo Fighters return with another album of inconsequential music. When you’re a band of this size and tenure, new albums aren’t necessarily born of personal inspiration but out of a fraternal pledge to those around you: your band, your fanbase, your road crew, a new line of Ram trucks. The guys of the Foo Fighters—who have this wonderful shabby chic Venice Beach dad look now—continue to plow through albums with one thankless goal in mind: to keep the dying institution of rock alive. And with his cheerful indefatigability and his commitment to the primacy of guitars, Dave Grohl is the generational rock spokesperson the future deserves, Bruce Springsteen without the tunes.
Influence, legacy, and musical quality aside, Bruce and Dave might be the last two musicians still living inside of the remaining slipstream of monocultural rock’n’roll. They are both performers and entertainers above all, both icons of endurance; both give an outsized amount of themselves to their fans, on stage and off. Bruce performs four-hour shows and pulls a beaming crowd member up on stage every time; Grohl tours with a broken leg on a throne made of guitars and drum battles a 10-year-old. They both possess the innate ability to charm anyone who heaves into their view. And—as if by providence—both Bruce and the Foo Fighters played the inauguration afterparty of President Joe Biden, whose broad call for healing and unity was epitomized by two artists who call for healing and unity in the broadest possible terms.
Grohl’s lawful-good lifestyle presents an eternal conflict between being unable to hate the guy and being unable to enjoy the music he continues to make. Foo Fighters seem to approach their formative rock, hardcore, and punk influences with the prompt, “What would be fun to play on Guitar Hero?” If the Guitar Hero reference feels dated, wait until you hear their new music. Their 10th album, Medicine at Midnight, adds very little to their extensive catalog of interchangeable power pop and hard-rock sing-alongs. But you can’t hang them on their own music, because Foo Fighters would never dare to give you enough rope to do it.
A Foo Fighters record rolls out in the same way Taco Bell rolls out a new menu item: A nominal twist on the same five or so ingredients. Produced once again by pop impresario Greg Kurstin, Medicine at Midnight is supposed to be the band’s party record, their dance record, their Bowie’s Let’s Dance record, even. Charitably, they could be talking about “Shame Shame,” a creeping acoustic number that signals a slinky new direction until Grohl rampages all over the chorus. Maybe they are referring to the title track, a geriatric, leathery blues anthem for men who love the feeling of a new John Varvatos jacket. Because every generation gets the “Miss You” it deserves, the song has a starchy groove and background chorus of women singing about “rain on the dancefloor.” You can try to fit Dave Grohl into a sparkly white suit, but underneath he’s always just wearing jeans and a T-shirt.
This is the issue with half-heartedly trying on a different costume every few years: All Foo Fighters songs exist in the same empty universe. There are no backdrops or scenes, no people, no roads, no cars—just a blank slate for anthemic oratory and rights-free guitar riffs. And because this blank slate is so predictable, and because there’s no dimension or interiority to any of Grohl’s songwriting, the songs become line items: ones you imagine working pretty good at their live show or ones that have no real reason to exist. Grohl has an expressive, agile voice, but it has only ever worked in the rock idiom, which should give “Waiting on a War,” “Love Dies Young,” and possible highlight “Holding Poison” a spot on setlists for the rest of the band’s time on Earth. The rest, truly, who cares?
When Bruce entered his mid-career doldrums in the early ’90s, he was off with his “Other Band,” not exactly minting hits or critically revered music—even going so far as to admit he was making “generic” songs to pad out his setlists. Grohl has ended up in a similar spot without ever leaving the comfort of the Foo Fighters. And while Bruce ranges freely and embraces darkness and doubt, Grohl keeps his rictus smile, holding on to the hand fate dealt him. “I just want to stay alive and play music, especially after Nirvana,” Grohl said in a recent interview with the New York Times. “When Kurt died, I truly woke up the next day and felt so lucky to be alive, and so heartbroken that someone can just disappear. I decided to take advantage of that, for the rest of my life.”
On the other side of every Foo Fighters song is a darker, wilder, more interesting world that Grohl has cordoned off out of self-preservation. Instead, he writes music out of a sense of duty and fear, knowing that choosing the wrong path could end the healthy, inspiring enterprise he has worked tirelessly to create. As the Foo Fighters’ legacy becomes tied with epic and communal live shows steeped in their long and narrow canon, it feels like a bellwether for rock’n’roll itself. Where rock once held limitless sway over pop culture, now the fate of traditional arena rock rests in a band whose music suggests they are terrified of seeing it die, gripping their songs so tight that they are strangling the life out of them. Foo Fighters’ greatest achievement, “Everlong,” still outshines every other song in their catalog, because it is their guiding principle: to remain in perpetual motion, to never stop feeling this good, to sing along with you forever. But everything dies, baby, that’s a fact.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Roswell / RCA | February 8, 2021 | 4.7 | 18612534-4f5c-4ede-8a96-04436e7b7f85 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
Like a crooner in outer space, Dent May makes glum sounds that sound happy, with old-fashioned panache. But the production of his latest collection is dense and muddled. | Like a crooner in outer space, Dent May makes glum sounds that sound happy, with old-fashioned panache. But the production of his latest collection is dense and muddled. | Dent May: Across the Multiverse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dent-may-across-the-multiverse/ | Across the Multiverse | The Mississippi-born, L.A.-based musician Dent May is many things: ambitious singer-songwriter, gifted multi-instrumentalist, self-styled virtuoso with old-fashioned panache. He has a voice like Brian Wilson’s, which is certainly appealing. He affects a winsome persona—intergalactic lounge singer, spaceship yacht-rock star—and remains committed with conviction to the bit. He prizes breezy, irrepressible melodies, songs in a quaint and cheerful key—and then likes to playfully, even mordantly, undermine them. He cuts an endearing figure in his thrift-store tuxedos and his horn-rimmed glasses: there’s something of the young Harold Lloyd about him, winning smile and all. May’s charm is seductive, but his music doesn’t quite stand up to his likable character.
On Across the Multiverse, May’s overarching conceptual trick is making glum songs that sound happy. “Hello Cruel World,” the sprightly opener, bounds forth like a buoyant showtune, as May greets misery with a wry grin. “Hello cruel world/Are you real or just a dream?” Dent croons, his high spirits belying the melancholy. “And will I ever find some meaning/Like them pretty folks on TV?” The sentiment is of course ironic: May is hardly looking to television for truth in earnest, while the archaic idiom (“them pretty folks”) seals the joke with a wink. In other words, the song is deliberately trite and facile; that doesn’t make it interesting.
He continues to smirk through the hit parade. “Picture on a Screen” develops an unoriginal image: the distance between virtual longing and the analog world, which it may surprise you to learn can be vast. (Sample revelation: “Imagining you look at me/Pretending this is reality.”) On the blithe, bouncy “Dream 4 Me,” May tells of a night during which he has “Wandered the streets to rid [his] head/Of looming existential dread,” a crisis disguised, yet again, by an upbeat melody that exaggerates a touch of mirth to bitterly comic effect. “Take Me to Heaven,” meanwhile, awash in a riot of sparkling synths, puts a fine point on the record’s thesis: “Visions are haunting me/Like every night and day,” May confesses. “No more letting them sink in/There’s no need to get heavy.” And if there’s no need, why bother? “No more teary-eyed midnights,” he insists. So he braves despair and plinks contentedly away at his piano.
The anguish May strains to repress throughout Across the Multiverse would stand a better chance of affecting the listener were it articulated with style or wit—or with specificity. May’s shtick, one feels, obliges him to write in sardonic platitudes and tongue-in-cheek banalities, when the dramatic tension he’s after—sunny melodies, overcast man—would almost surely be better served by sentiments more genuine, unfamiliar, and sincere. “I’m running out of words/That make sense to you lately,” May sings toward the end of the album. “I’m choking on cliches.” That he is: Across the Multiverse is inundated with them. His writing clangs; there’s scarcely a compelling lyric on here.
Musically, May has taken his multihyphenate fervor too far. The musician once satisfied with building an album around a single instrument is beleaguered by instrumentation; we’ve come a long way since the era of The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele. But here, the wall of sound is strangely, stultifyingly uniform, a thick slab of piano-led clangour—like the din of a bustling room overwhelming a lounge singer’s best efforts. Dense and muddled, the production is such a mess that song after song sounds the same. May could afford to simplify, strip down, and refine. Talent and charm of his caliber could only benefit from a renewed focus on the fundamentals. | 2017-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Carpark | August 18, 2017 | 6.1 | 1865efa8-4b65-475e-a0b4-feca2f8e47d2 | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | null |
Perhaps familiar from her time in Okkervil River, the multi-instrumentalist builds fascinating webs of sound around skeletal songs on her solo debut. | Perhaps familiar from her time in Okkervil River, the multi-instrumentalist builds fascinating webs of sound around skeletal songs on her solo debut. | Lip Talk: D A Y S | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lip-talk-d-a-y-s/ | D A Y S | For an artist only now releasing her solo debut, Sarah K. Pedinotti sports an impressive résumé. The New York multi-instrumentalist is a member of Okkervil River, led the twitchy pop act Railbird, played live in the Secret Machines, and worked as a songwriter with the chamber-pop outfit Cuddle Magic. She’s made versatility a calling card, playing keyboards in an audacious indie folk outfit and bass in a florid psych-rock band during the same span. It’s no surprise, then, that Pedinotti’s interests as a solo artist are broad. On D A Y S, her debut as Lip Talk, she draws freely from indie pop, psych, R&B, and electronic music. The claustrophobic sound evokes late nights spent tinkering in the studio, busy hours squirreled away while the rest of the world is sleeping.
For all their adventurousness, the songs on D A Y S do share some elements: fuzzed-out guitars, leaden minor chords, swaddling synths, reedy vocals. As an arranger, Pedinotti values texture and weight over fidelity, her layers of instrumentation shaping complex cocoons of sound. The interlocking rhythms on songs like “Ad Junkie” and “Disneyland” reach toward the maximalism of Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief. Soulful numbers such as “After All” tilt toward Frank Ocean’s songcraft, while “Gold ^ Pink” and “w i n n e r s” feel like sketches for Lorde songs, wrapped in wool. They collectively suggest Pedinotti as a sort of meticulous set designer, producing rich and varied environments for her words, from the siren-like synths and booming drums of “Artemis” to the subterranean noise and syncopated percussion bubbling beneath “Fuk It Up.”
As interesting as much of D A Y S sounds, though, the underlying songs can feel flimsy, like a lean-to carefully decorated with Christmas lights. The bones of these tunes feel half-formed, like sketches or demos rushed out the door. The melodies are often far more forgettable than the atmospheres they inhabit, and the lyrics don’t reinforce them. “I imagined characters in the songs like scenes in a movie, emotion expressed like colors on a canvas,” Pedinotti has said of her songs. But these vague platitudes feel like placeholders left on reference tracks. Generic nonsense undercuts the otherwise sticky chorus of “Lemon Drop,” while the soulful vocals of “After All” belie lyrics that don’t bare much soul at all: “I don’t know what to do with myself,” she offers in the chorus.
But during the delicate and minimal “Doublethink,” one of D A Y S’ strongest songs, all these elements do come together. Pedinotti begins alone at the piano, hammering out staccato chords before judiciously adding embellishments like synth flutes and plaintive saxophone. Her voice traces lilting, lullaby-like melodies, her nuance bringing her complex character into focus—not just melancholic but bemused, weary but also wiser. Pedinotti manages to communicate a knotty set of emotions and build a memorable song in the process. This refinement is what’s missing from so much of D A Y S, a record that, for all its richness, feels largely devoid of coherent songcraft or a singular vision. If these songs are indeed like scenes in a movie, they could benefit from a tighter script and better dialog, meant to match the impressive cinematography. | 2019-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Northern Spy | January 31, 2019 | 6.1 | 1867aac1-ebd5-4eba-a0c0-f0d62463853d | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
In light of David Bowie’s passing, Pitchfork commissioned reviews of several of his classic albums. David Bowie’s third consecutive UK chart-topper and U.S. Top 5 breakthrough, 1974’s Diamond Dogs, is a bummer, a bad trip, “No Fun”–a sustained work of decadence and dread that transforms corrosion into celebration. | In light of David Bowie’s passing, Pitchfork commissioned reviews of several of his classic albums. David Bowie’s third consecutive UK chart-topper and U.S. Top 5 breakthrough, 1974’s Diamond Dogs, is a bummer, a bad trip, “No Fun”–a sustained work of decadence and dread that transforms corrosion into celebration. | David Bowie: Diamond Dogs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21477-diamond-dogs/ | Diamond Dogs | After a 1977 performance that still ranks among the wildest, most manic musical performances to ever hit daytime TV, Iggy Pop chats with talk show host Dinah Shore, the top-charting female singer of the ’40s, with his collaborator pal David Bowie by his side; jazz vet Rosemary Clooney flanks Shore. Their interview is mutually respectful and endearingly sincere even as the host tries to navigate Pop’s nihilistic answers. Aiming to steer the conversation in a positive direction, she asks her guest if he’s influenced anybody, and the punk pioneer—much to everyone’s delight—nonchalantly replies, “I think I helped wipe out the ’60s.”
Great quote, but here’s the thing: Pop never sold enough to do that directly. Instead, it was Bowie, his most ambitious student, who revolutionized ’70s music and style by uncovering the discomfort and despair of urban life that hippie idealism denied. His third consecutive UK chart-topper and U.S. Top 5 breakthrough, 1974’s Diamond Dogs—Bowie’s first record of original material since killing off the Ziggy Stardust character that made him an instant superstar back home—remains rooted in his still-reigning glam scene that knocked most utopian ’60s rockers off the UK charts with glistening shards of pansexuality, sci-fi fantasy, and bespangled spectacle. His bleakest album until recent swan song Blackstar, Diamond Dogs is a bummer, a bad trip, “No Fun”—a sustained work of decadence and dread that transforms corrosion into celebration. Whereas Ziggy features its titular messiah, Diamond Dogs has jackals that live on corpses the way Bowie fed off rotting urban culture and reckless rock’n’roll.
The last glam gasp of Bowie’s English years, Dogs also sprawls toward Bowie’s forthcoming Thin White Duke persona, embracing Blaxploitation funk and soul, rock opera, European art song, and Broadway. The album cracked FM radio with “Rebel Rebel,” an Iggy Pop–like blast aimed at America’s teenage wasteland. Recapitulating his earlier achievements while raising their stakes, it stomped on whatever good vibes remained in British rock, and cleared the stage for punk and goth. As Bowie noted decades later, the tribal “peoploids” that rummage through the album’s fantastically bleak Hunger City like the orphaned pickpockets of Oliver Twist presaged a generation of Johnny Rottens and Sid Viciouses. Dogs envisioned a no-future future just before the next breed of pop stars lived it.
As befitting a post-apocalyptic work, Dogs was born from the frustration of failed opportunities. Bowie initially endeavored to create a TV musical adaptation of George Orwell’s totalitarian milestone 1984—until the social critic’s widow refused permission. Around the same time, Rolling Stone’s London bureau arranged for Bowie and William S. Burroughs to interview each other, which introduced the singer to the author’s Nova Express. Immediately thereafter, Bowie began penning lyrical non sequiturs via that novel’s cut-up technique, and planned a Ziggy musical to be similarly shuffled each night. This, too, faltered, although it inspired new tunes. These two projects, sharing dystopian themes, fused together to form the mutant Dogs.
While all this was happening, Bowie shed the Spiders From Mars, who enabled his transformation from folky space oddity to eclectic, hard-rocking freak. The biggest break was with guitarist Mick Ronson, whose biting, formally schooled style and arrangements had redefined Bowie. Rather than replacing his sidekick, the singer handles most guitar parts himself, as well as contributing sax and electronic keyboards while solely producing this emphatically solo project. Tony Visconti—who oversaw 1970’s metallic The Man Who Sold the World while providing bass guitar—returns only to assist the final mix and fulfill the singer’s request for “Barry White strings” on “1984”; he’d later co-produce much of Bowie’s output. If you measure his albums by how much he calls the shots and actually plays, Diamond Dogs is the Bowie-est one of all.
He sets the scene with “Future Legend,” a spoken-word intro soundtracked by synths evoking dripping Dalí clocks, buzzing bee guitars quoting “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and other experimental studio scuzz. This slides into the bonking backward cowbell of the title track, which filters the Stones’ slam-bam boogie through a woozy mix. “As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent/You asked for the latest party,” it begins—a line Bowie later admitted as self-descriptive. Set in forthcoming years yet capturing the squalor of then-contemporary London, New York, and the Eastern Bloc nations through which Bowie recently passed, the lurid lyrics flash with gang violence: “The Diamond Dogs are poachers and they hide behind trees/Hunt you to the ground they will/Mannequins with kill appeal.” The vibe is celebratory despite the menace, if unstable—right down to the track’s note-bending central riff. Contemporary critics mourned Ronson’s absence, but Bowie’s guitar here and throughout the album is thrillingly off-kilter with unconventional chord fragments that the Edge, Sonic Youth, shoegazers, and dream-poppers alike would draw from for decades to come.
Because Bowie so convincingly portrayed decay, it went often unacknowledged how far he advanced his compositional and arrangement skills in just a few post–“Space Oddity” years. Their showcase, “Sweet Thing” / “Candidate” / “Sweet Thing (Reprise),” begins with Bowie growling at the bottom of his register, but even before the chorus hits, he’s wailing near the top of his tenor while Mike Garson’s tinkling jazz keys supply the sophistication Bowie’s squawking guitars deny. Topically shifting from a hustler turning tricks to a politician spewing empty promises to cocaine’s brain-freezing bliss, the suite’s interconnected segments assert that all three demand submission to all-conquering power—this concept album’s central theme. The tempo accelerates as his poetry gains density, then subsides again as the melody soars before surrendering to guitars that grind with metronomic precision until sputtering out on the root note of the opening chord on the album’s masterstroke.
As melodically constricted as that suite was expansive, “Rebel Rebel” is Bowie’s answer to all those deliciously dumb Sweet, Slade, Mud, Gary Glitter, Suzi Quatro, and T. Rex hits he indirectly enabled during glam’s peak. Androgyny is subtext to these acts, but the main man, per usual, pushes it to the forefront: “You’ve got yer mother in a whirl/She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl,” goes the opening line, but he never definitively assigns gender: Bowie’s dissident has torn [their] dress, but wants to “be there when they count up the dudes.” Yet there’s nothing ambiguous about that glorious guitar groove, the track’s stomping beat, the “hot tramp” pause between both, and their return. If Bowie often drifted above listeners’ heads, here he shoots straight at their solar plexus and scores with what ranks among the greatest, most insistent riffs of the ’70s. Rockers who’d dismissed Bowie as a dandy now gave the dude a pass.
Aside from a stray super-Bowie line about lizards crying in the heat, Side 2’s opening track, “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me,” is even more forthright—a ballad of appreciation for his fans that provides reprieve from the sleaze and offers further proof that Bowie could belt. It’s stagey to be sure, but so is it sincere. “I’ve found the door that lets me out,” he positively roars; performance sets him free.
The album is queasy soul music signifying soullessness; on the Shaft-like tableau “1984,” he rewrites Orwell’s authoritarian state as a worldwide ghetto populated by junkies overseen by surgeon thugs who manipulate thoughts and misguide identities, all set to wah-wah guitars. The album culminates perversely, joyfully, as “Big Brother” segues into “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family,” a fuzzed-out danse macabre where irregular time signatures alternate every few measures and the percussion keeps changing accents; there’s no center, just brief, blissful release before a stuttering loop of Bowie yelping in distress fades as if to black.
All this hopelessness and annihilation would be suffocating if it weren’t for Bowie’s exuberance. He throws himself into Orwell’s draconian hell as if strutting around in Kansai Yamamoto’s Aladdin Sane–era bodysuit; it fits his skeletal contours. Determined to reaffirm his relevance in spite of his setbacks, the singer sparkled so brightly that he offset the darkness of his material. Just as Watergate was coming to a boil, singer-songwriters and prog-rockers were glutting the charts, and ’60s resistance was morphing into ’70s complacency, this sweet rebel (rebel) made revolution strangely sexy again. Glaring at you from Dogs’ cover with canine hindquarters and emaciated features like the circus sideshow Freaks he footnotes in the title cut, he served notice that rock’s outsiders remained more compelling than the softies who increasingly occupied its center, even as his ever-growing popularity chipped away at it. You can bet Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Television sat up and took notes. | 2016-01-22T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-22T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | RCA | January 22, 2016 | 9 | 1868f325-3305-499f-a013-ddbca2faefc3 | Barry Walters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/barry-walters/ | |
One of a handful of new artists making exquisitely crafted, ear-opening forays into drone collects his limited-run output onto a 2xCD set. | One of a handful of new artists making exquisitely crafted, ear-opening forays into drone collects his limited-run output onto a 2xCD set. | Oneohtrix Point Never: Rifts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13896-rifts/ | Rifts | Though it sometimes feels like drone music will be forever relegated to the fringes of the indie world, an impressive batch of bands and labels have sprung up recently to counter that idea. Alongside bigger acts such as Sunn O))) and Grouper (not true drone, but plenty drone-y), artists like Emeralds, Black to Comm, and Yellow Swans are each tugging the style into intriguing directions. Daniel Lopatin, who records as Oneohtrix Point Never and shares a label with Emeralds, could plausibly be lumped into this group but also exists outside of it. Where others bring to bear a wide range of instrumentation in creating these glistening, open-ended sounds, Lopatin does so using only electronics (synthesizers and arpeggiators, primarily) and as a result, his music is arguably more distinctive and often more difficult to pin down.
Because he's worked outside the label structure and released albums on limited-run cassette and CD-R until now, Lopatin's music also hasn't been easy to find. But Rifts, a 2xCD collection of his material since 2003 (including all three Oneohtrix Point Never full-lengths-- Betrayed in the Octagon, Zones Without People, and Russian Mind), seeks to correct that by compiling just about everything he's recorded as OPN to date. At two and a half hours long, it's a dizzying amount of music and virtually impossible to absorb in one sitting but for anyone with a passing interest in drone or ambient music, it's worth setting aside the time.
Part of the reason Rifts feels like a crucial listen is that Lopatin's approach is so thoroughly his own, to the point that trying to attach it to one genre doesn't really work. At turns icy and serene, at others frenetic and twisted, it feels like a modern sci-fi remake of minimalism and kosmiche-- there are long, repetitious builds with big openings between notes that suggest vast space and long drift. Intricate synth arrangements unfurl over long stretches in tracks like "Immanence" and "Ships Without Meaning" to create a sense of endless glide. In this capacity, Lopatin proves he can reconstruct drone on his own terms, but on Rifts' more forceful, tech-y songs he shows that's not the only trick up his sleeve.
The three LPs joined together in Rifts were supposedly intended as a trilogy, and while they do work as a unified whole, it seems wisest to approach the record as a compilation. The sheer size of it is daunting and you don't lose much by listening to its separate movements individually. Within these smaller pieces, Lopatin oscillates between the long-form mechanized whir described above and shorter tracks that push the album forward and draw back your attention after lengthy drifts. More Blade Runner than 2001: A Space Odyssey, "Computer Vision" and "Betrayed in the Octagon" use chopped-up, rapid-fire synths for propulsion and quick tonal shifts to add color. This is precisely the kind of music some would criticize as robotic and unfeeling, but for such heavily computerized sounds, Lopatin also shows a way with mood-- a song like "A Pact Between Strangers" is dark and threatening, like walking into a strange home with all the lights off.
But maybe what's most impressive about Rifts is that Lopatin creates a singular kind of noise-- there just aren't many albums out there that sound like this-- and rides it for nearly three hours without repeating himself very often. In this sense, the recent LP it reminds me of is Dâm-Funk's Toeachizown, in that the vibe is inseparable from the artist, clearly the work of one person with a novel agenda and the chops to see it through to the finish. And like Dâm-Funk's, it's the type of music that doesn't knock you over the head at first, but sort of seeps into your pores over time, uncovering new pleasures when you inevitably come back for more. | 2010-02-02T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2010-02-02T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental | No Fun | February 2, 2010 | 8 | 186a95fa-8b99-49a3-a736-a63fb0387b67 | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
This newly-reissued 1982 dub reggae album carries historical heft as one of the last times three of the form’s titans would work together. There’s a halcyon sweetness to its 10 mellow grooves. | This newly-reissued 1982 dub reggae album carries historical heft as one of the last times three of the form’s titans would work together. There’s a halcyon sweetness to its 10 mellow grooves. | King Tubby & the Aggrovators: Dubbing in the Backyard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23272-king-tubby-the-aggrovators-dubbing-in-the-backyard/ | Dubbing in the Backyard | At this point, there are an exhaustive amount of dub reggae reissues on the market, though 1982’s Dubbing in the Backyard has a bit more historical significance. Featuring three titans of the form—producer Bunny “Striker” Lee, engineer Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock, and mixer Lloyd “Prince Jammy” James—the trio had worked on numerous tracks throughout the 1970s. But soon after these sessions, Tubby would learn that his right hand man Jammy was using the famed studio to cut dubplates for other clients on the sly, and overnight he changed the locks on his doors. In 1989, Tubby would be murdered outside his home. This obscure album was one of the last occasions their names would all appear on the same sleeve.
Just don’t let the cover image of three gents in repose on a front lawn fool you. The photo was taken in England, not in Jamaica. And it doesn’t correspond to the disc’s main men, as only Bunny Lee appears in the photo, elbow on his briefcase. While the dubs were made at Tubbys studio, Jammy is the one turning the knobs. And rather than Lee’s house band the Aggrovators, most of the instrumentals here were laid down by the High Times Band, who had just a bit of overlap with the Aggrovators. But the photo is truthful in some way, in that this album indeed makes for ideal outdoor, sunstruck listening; there’s a halcyon sweetness to the 10 mellow yet sneaky grooves that comprise this set.
Three of the tracks are dubs from the corresponding ’82 Delroy Wilson album Go Away Dream (which the Pressure Sounds label includes as part of a two-disc set, though both albums are available separately on vinyl and digitally). And there are also dubs of tracks from the likes of Cornell Campbell, Jackie Edwards, and Johnny Clarke. Jammy keeps the rhythms crisp, striking the perfect balance between spaciness and proximity in the kit on “Adventure”; the snares crack an inch from your nose and then careen outwards towards deep space. The reverb and delay that opens “Hot Weather” piles up like a rockslide before Jammy spaces everything out to a more languid pace.
For most of the set, the instrumentals don’t flash their dub effects, and the sudden turns into abstraction are all the more thrilling for of it. Nod along to the loping pulse of “Relaxing Mood” and you might notice, nearly three minutes in, that strange bloops and whirrs spring around the track now. The tiny echo of keys at the start of “Natural Glow” suggests crickets (though with a vinyl transfer, there’s a fair amount of surface noise to be heard on the quieter parts here) before the bass gets to rumbling and a toy whistle whirls in the upper register. An organ lick ripples outwards, making the track feel like it might just drift away from the surface of the earth. “Hideaway” dribbles hand drum, plinky piano, and a gliding guitar figure across the rhythm, Jammy deftly yanking open chasms of space via the high pass filter of the board. As the notes tell it, soon after Tubby locked Jammy out, that high pass filter on Tubby’s board broke down and certain effects were never possible again.
In fact, this iteration of dub would soon vanish completely. Jammy might have been locked out of Tubby’s studio, but he soon set up shop for himself. Thanks to a demo presented to him by high tenor vocalist Wayne Smith, plunked out on a Casiotone MT40 keyboard, Jammy slowed the cheap digital sound down to a more reggae-friendly pace. The track they ultimately released in 1985, “Under Mi Sleng Teng,” dropped like an atomic bomb, introducing the era of digital dancehall in Jamaica. Nearly overnight, it rendered dub reggae as fashioned by a real band obsolete. Much as the title suggests, Dubbing in the Backyard is a perfect dub showcase for soundtracking those temporal summer afternoons, before the season irrevocably shifts. | 2017-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Pressure Sounds | June 9, 2017 | 7.4 | 186aa0c0-1f90-4f5f-9fe4-254b995304e0 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
On his first solo album in four years, Will Oldham dispenses the wisdom of his life and the anxiety of his present into some of his most intimate and compelling musical settings. | On his first solo album in four years, Will Oldham dispenses the wisdom of his life and the anxiety of his present into some of his most intimate and compelling musical settings. | Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bonnie-prince-billy-keeping-secrets-will-destroy-you/ | Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You | Will Oldham, now 53, has not sounded young for a quarter-century. Perhaps he last did in the waning days of Palace Music, back when he sang about wanting to “fuck a mountain” with unmistakable élan or fretted about wasting his life beneath the dim bar light, back when he was “younger folk as we.” But at least since I See a Darkness, his career-affirming 1999 debut as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Oldham has suggested the shellshocked canary emerging from some Kentucky coal mine, sharing the news of what he’d seen down below—death and sex, love and rejection, doom and wonder—in a prematurely aged warble. As a singer, Oldham has always seemed an anachronism against our perennial advance. As a bandleader, however, he has long been dubious of conventions, bending the folk, country, and blues forms he understood so deeply into radical, intuitive shapes. There have been ginger acoustic exceptions, of course, but from his ramshackle start to the gilded surrealism of 2019’s I Made a Place, Oldham has sought new settings for his antediluvian tone.
Drummer-less and devoid of electric instruments, Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You—as stinging as a switch, as soft as a parent’s embrace—feels as if Oldham is finally facing both his age and place, reconciling them through quiet songs that speak loudly. He is the longtime troubadour and relatively new father loading whatever insights, aggravations, and ambitions he has gathered into songs that are close to the marrow, mostly clear of sinew. These dozen songs move as if written at a kitchen table as his family sleeps nearby, with quiet dawns illuminating anthems of perseverance and joy and rustling darkness supplying moments of apocalyptic vision. They sound domestic, too, like some friends with fiddles and horns simply swung by on a Sunday afternoon to try out some new stuff in the living room. “Usually I can be found with my family,” Oldham sings at one point with measured warmth, “courageous and careful and loving our now, and wow.”
As ever, Oldham does not shy from darkness. Just seconds after he hits the one-minute mark of opener “Like It or Not,” where a jaunty jangle is a Trojan horse for certain oblivion, he reminds us that “everyone dies in the end, so there’s nothing to hide.” There are goodbyes and losses, acts of vengeance and moments of scorn. Hand upon hand, his family marches into slaughter, and, at some inevitable point, the “grueling death bell knells.”
But Oldham wields these facts not as lamentations but as tools for better living. By and large, these songs are emphatic instruction manuals for a more robust existence because we’re always in the shadows of all kinds of ends—divorce, death, annihilation, whatever. Where he once famously wrote of his drive to live and not let go, not having the option of eternity now empowers him. He sings of that death bell, for instance, during the delightful “Behold! Be Held!,” his guileless paean to making music, to rendering life’s lessons in songs we can share. “Bananas” continues the esteemed tradition of Oldham’s funny and sweet songs about sex, as he fills “every hole with something warmer than the dawn.” And though it is just Oldham and a carefully picked guitar, “Rise and Rule (She Was Born in Honolulu)” is an anthem of rising above, its protagonist building a world of which she can be proud against impossible odds. It’s so stirring you may feel like shouting along, even while Oldham almost whispers.
Meanwhile, the tender mid-album tandem, “Sing Them Down Together” and “Kentucky Is Water,” encourages us to discard what we think we know, or to remain open to the certainty that none of us actually know very much at all. “Never try to deny a wind its blowing,” he sings during the latter, a Buddha-informed lullaby for other parents or anyone open to more empathy and experience. “The moment you do, your heart will be lost to eternity.” These are Oldham’s little lectures on learning and loving, musically stripped of the need to be anything other than efficient and memorable. They just are.
Oldham’s real gifts come in songs about standing up not necessarily for yourself but for the things that give your world shape and meaning. It is clear in “Willow, Pine and Oak,” where he deploys arboreal observations to extol his dearest virtues, like the oak’s strength, patience, and usefulness. So canny and rich with folk knowledge, the beauty feels like some Seeger family standard. That sense is just as clear from its successor and seeming antagonist, “Trees of Hell,” a timorous and Tolkien-like scene where the peaceful organisms we’ve defiled for our every need finally have their revenge. “We saw inherent harmony, assumed it was our gift,” he sings over a strangling string drone and mandolin plucks that intimate the tick-tock of a doomsday clock. Early in the album, Oldham avers that the sight of justice makes us grin; however sinister this scenario may seem, then, there is a gratifying righteousness at its core.
Two years ago, I called Oldham to talk about Michael Hurley, the inveterate trickster and songwriter who has served as a sort of spiritual forebear for his music and mythology. He wanted to know if I’d seen the photograph of Hurley and Merle Haggard meeting in Ohio, the mischievous Snock extending his skinny hand to the outlaw country legend. “One of the greatest photographs—M.H. squared, my biggest heroes,” he said, still gobsmacked. “Seeing those two together is so much.” More than any other Oldham album, Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You represents that unlikely nexus. The songs are homespun and simple and ineffably strange, like the best of Hurley. But they deliver the well-earned and incisive takeaways that was Haggard at his best, too. It is a rare combination from anyone, and Oldham is the vanishingly rare songwriter who has become both more emotionally generous and lyrically efficient as he’s aged. Oldham long sounded like he had wisdom to share, and he sometimes did. Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You overflows with it. | 2023-08-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Drag City | August 14, 2023 | 7.7 | 186ab6be-8295-49cf-ad55-6877ce868b48 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Despite a crowded field, Public Memory's Robert Toher mostly succeeds in creating a dark electronic landscape that is his own—and slightly claustrophobic at that. | Despite a crowded field, Public Memory's Robert Toher mostly succeeds in creating a dark electronic landscape that is his own—and slightly claustrophobic at that. | Public Memory: Wuthering Drum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21746-wuthering-drum/ | Wuthering Drum | Public Memory is the solo nom de plume of Robert Toher, a Brooklyn-based musician who formerly served time as a member of Eraas and Apse. While those projects blurred the edges of rambling space rock and synthy post-punk, Public Memory dives headlong down the electronic darkwave rabbit hole, exploring a Korg-constructed sonic palette that weaves together a variety of primitive beats, delicately employed samples (bells, chimes, the weeping of ghosts), and woozy electronics that sound as if they might have been recorded at the bottom of a lake. Created over the course of a year while Toher was temporarily decamped in Los Angeles, Wuthering Drum is a work of restrained gloom—a remarkably textured electronic record whose minimalist tendencies keep it from collapsing under the weight of its own moribund aesthetic.
One of the problems with making dark electronic music has to do with the fact that so much of it already exists. Music that is already so immediately in thrall to its influences often comes off as pale imitation, a weird facsimile of something we’ve heard again and again and again. It’s to Toher’s credit that Wuthering Drum largely avoids goth pastiche. The ten tracks offered here rarely stray too far past the three-minute mark, which means there isn’t much time for the songs to meander or overstay their welcome. While it’s easy to play spot the influences with the songs on Wuthering Drum—there are nods to krautrock, as well as songs that conjure the ghosts of Fad Gadget, Suspiria-era Goblin and early Cabaret Voltaire—Toher largely succeeds in creating an electronic landscape that is wholly his own.
Rather than provide a series of peaks and valleys, Wuthering Drum is mostly one sustained valley in which the predominant vibe is dirge. “Mirror” moves with all the percussive relentlessness of a chain gang—a chugging beat offset by the sound of shakers, tambourine and celestial bells. Elsewhere, “Ringleader” and “As You Wish” unspool in largely the same manner—somber, elegantly plodding, chorus-free–with Toher’s disembodied vocals floating throughout. It’s only in the album's second half that the inertia finally breaks. “Zig Zag” is the record’s closest flirtation with a pop moment (via a finger-snap of a drum beat and a spooky synth hook) while “Earwig” breaks the sustained tension by introducing just a hint of what sounds like sampled steel drums and the faintest crack of what could be the lazer beam sound effect from an old Atari game. It’s hard to know, actually, since these sounds flitter into and out of the songs so quickly and quietly that they sometimes barely register; it’s only after repeated listens that subtle layering in these compositions start to make sense.
If there’s a problem with Wuthering Drum it might just be a lack of dynamics. All the songs are definitely of a piece and the album provides no shortage of sustained atmosphere, but there is a stifling sameness to these songs that makes them hard to differentiate. Adding to that are Toher’s vocals—a kind of warbly falsetto that brings to mind the warped new wave of an old Blank Dogs record, or something like the sound of a very tremulous apparition anxiously singing to you from another room. As a result, the vocals hover at the edges of these songs with a kind of hopeless disaffection that eventually becomes numbing, you keep wishing for a howl or a yelp or a scream that might punctuate the airless, suffocating universe in which these songs seem to exist. That is not to say that the record is not often quite beautiful—in fact, the record sounds amazing—but you can’t help but wish that Toher might let his hair down a little more. Too often these songs pull back just when you want them to crack open—rather than build to some sort of satisfying conclusion, they simply end.
While lots of ostensibly “dark” music suffers lyrically from the cliché of sounding like tortured teenage poetry, the songs on Wuthering Drum eschew hackneyed doom-and-gloom in favor of near incomprehensibility. When Toher sings about “an alleged near disaster / long toothed man that runs” on album-opener “Heir” it’s all but impossible to know what/who he’s talking about, but ultimately that’s also part of the record’s charm. The evocative, fractured nature of Toher’s lyrics—paired with the austere sonic landscapes and willful ambiguity of these songs—is what sets Public Memory apart from so many other like-minded electronic acts mining similar territory. When the elements all come together in the right way—as they do on the record’s centerpiece, “Cul de Sac”–the results can be stunning. Over a funereal beat and a lilting piano melody that could serve as a long lost sonic cousin to Joy Division’s "The Eternal," Toher articulates the profound isolation at the album’s core: “I live in small room with all my things in place,” he sings, “I see no reason to pretend / lock the front door / shut the curtains / it’s a matter of dissent.” Wuthering Drum is a work seemingly unconcerned about giving you what you want, but what it does provide is almost enough. | 2016-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Felte | March 28, 2016 | 6.9 | 186b014b-c15c-4546-9bf7-76959da1f959 | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
The Cincinnati synth-punk trio dials up the energy on a zippy new album. | The Cincinnati synth-punk trio dials up the energy on a zippy new album. | The Serfs: Half Eaten by Dogs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-serfs-half-eaten-by-dogs/ | Half Eaten by Dogs | The Serfs’ 2020 debut, Sounds of Serfdom, seemed tailor-made to the tastes of the goth YouTube algorithm, where success scales with how '80s to-the-letter your band sounds—see the frictionless coldwave of Molchat Doma. The Cincinnati trio’s early releases scanned as little more than lo-fi imitations of their influences, nervy, bare-bones cartridges of minimal wave that played like Oppenheimer Analysis B-sides with less variation. But on their third album Half Eaten by Dogs, the Serfs up the ante, imbuing their once-pallid synth-punk with color and velocity.
Opener “Order Imposing Sentence” hurtles forward like a car on the brink of falling apart, stringing together clanking percussion, a spirited guitar riff, and shouted, Gun Club-style vocals. “Suspension Bridge Collapse” and “Cheap Chrome” have a similar liveliness. Like Sextile and Mandy, Indiana, the Serfs charge gritty post-punk with glitter of dance music, adding more gleam while retaining their own rough, spirited voice. “Club Deuce” is the serpentine gem at the album’s center: Bright, lucid synths pingpong across cavernous claps as keyboardist Andie Luman whispers cryptic nothings. The effect is intoxicating. While McCartney's vocals for The Serfs sometimes lend a soporific effect to the songs, distorted and flat, Luman’s ghostly presence elevates the intrigue.
Half Eaten by Dogs is noticeably frontloaded, slowing down in the back half. While these songs are mostly satisfying, they can start to feel like a drag. The dreamy glissade of “The Dice Man Will Become” lasts so long that it starts to feel immaterial; the closer “Mocking Laughter” peters into static, a disappointing ending to an album that’s so dynamic. But there’s still a strong spirit to the Serf’s songwriting, and they have stoked a remarkable fire beneath their sound, pushing themselves in a zippy and promising new direction. | 2023-11-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-11-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Trouble in Mind | November 2, 2023 | 7 | 1870008c-6bd9-4cc6-87ab-f0c5b9274b9a | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
Amsterdam label Music From Memory continues its revival of late-20th-century Mediterranean sounds with this collection of works by Spanish multi-instrumentalist Suso Sáiz's eclectic ’80s new age trio. | Amsterdam label Music From Memory continues its revival of late-20th-century Mediterranean sounds with this collection of works by Spanish multi-instrumentalist Suso Sáiz's eclectic ’80s new age trio. | Orquesta De Las Nubes: The Order of Change | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/orquesta-de-las-nubes-the-order-of-change/ | The Order of Change | It’s only in the past few years that the exquisite music that emanated from seemingly idyllic Mediterranean climes in the 1980s and ’90s has garnered appreciation beyond its native region and era. Thanks to timely reissues of albums by Portuguese composer Nuno Canavarro, Italians like Gigi Masin and Roberto Musci, and Spaniards Javier Bergia, Joan Bibiloni, Pep Llopis, and Suso Sáiz, these musicians’ graceful blending of new age, ambient, minimalism, jazz fusion, experimental, and world music have found resonance with a new generation. Amsterdam’s Music From Memory has been responsible for many of these reassessments—and the label continues to find novel dimensions in the work of multi-instrumentalist Sáiz, from its 2016 overview Odisea to last year’s moving new album, Rainworks.
The Order of Change finds Music From Memory revisiting Sáiz’s first group from the ’80s, Orquesta De Las Nubes, a rare new age ensemble. (In early 2019, the label will reissue Sáiz’s other revered project, Musica Esporádica.) These releases contain fascinating insight into post-Franco Spain. After four decades of an autocratic dictatorship that banned cultural products seen as non-Spanish and only ended with Franco’s death in 1975, the young Sáiz’s work evinces a hunger for new sounds from beyond his country’s borders. As he put it in one interview: “The end of the ’70s and the beginning of the ’80s was a time of great openness in every way. Spain and fundamentally Madrid became centers of curiosity, interest, and respect for difference and, therefore, a breeding ground for personal expressions.” With percussionist Pedro Estevan and soprano Mária Villa also captivated by the new music they were hearing from abroad, Sáiz’s trio ranged far and wide.
Sáiz is framed as a new age pioneer in Spain, but as this ten-track set plays, certain Western influences waft into view: Brian Eno’s ambient experiments; the crystalline, contemplative sound of ECM Records; the tribal-tinged improv of Art Ensemble of Chicago; the new age landscapes of future Sáiz collaborator Steve Roach. And Sáiz’s deep debt to Steve Reich’s minimalism is evident in the pulsing marimbas, guitar, and Villa’s wordless vocals that thrum across “El Orden del Azar.” The gravity-free serenity of “Tiempo de Espera” also gestures toward Reich, but with some new wrinkles that distance it from the likes of Music for 18 Musicians. As Villa’s airy “ahhhs” slide across the volume-pedal swells of Sáiz’s guitar and Estevan’s steadfast metallophone patterns for eight majestic minutes, the music exhibits a looseness, a shape-shifting openness, and a sense of collaborative interplay that Reich’s own work lacked. It’s a fitting approach for a band whose name translates as “Orchestra of Clouds.”
The Order of Change is not all amorphous floating, though. The album’s second half traces the trio’s evolution to tribal rhythms and sleeker ’80s electronics. Estevan’s African percussion and distant vocal chants nudge these gauzy sounds forward on “Cama Diarmónica,” and digital processing gnarls his drums to create the impression of an imminent thunderstorm on “Como Un Guante.” Only the closer, “Ella no Lleva Gafas,” feels out of place. Its whammy-bar fireworks do add a bit of rock to the mix, but not without rupturing the record’s spell. Eager as they were to incorporate new influences, Orquesta De Las Nubes excelled most when dissolving those sounds into their otherwise pleasant drift. | 2018-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Music From Memory | July 24, 2018 | 7.8 | 18706694-bf69-4192-b416-63be13029bcc | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The former G-Unit rapper is not as dynamic or adventurous as many of his contemporaries, but his wisdom and skill make it hard not to get caught up in his second act. | The former G-Unit rapper is not as dynamic or adventurous as many of his contemporaries, but his wisdom and skill make it hard not to get caught up in his second act. | Lloyd Banks: The Course of the Inevitable 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lloyd-banks-the-course-of-the-inevitable-2/ | The Course of the Inevitable 2 | Not many rappers get second winds like Lloyd Banks. His come-up as a part of 50 Cent’s G-Unit is well-documented, and his punchline-heavy raps were once called “underrated” by Kanye West, a one-time rival of 50. On songs like G-Unit’s “Stunt 101” or Diddy’s “Victory 2004,” Banks’ clever wordplay and gruff monotone made him a sturdy foil for the more animated personalities of 50 and Young Buck. Eventually, his mix of gaudy flex raps and vivid storytelling led to his own solo albums and hits, peaking in the late 2000s, just before the era of swag rap took hold.
As he recently told GQ, creative “stagnation” after his 2010 album The Hunger for More 2 and the birth of his children in the mid-2010s led to an extended break from solo recording. Then, in 2021, he emerged with a new lease on hip-hop and The Course of the Inevitable, his first proper studio album in over a decade. Banks is an analog to roughneck workhorses like Roc Marciano and Griselda, so hearing him rap over that kind of production—with a new Beanie Sigel-esque grumble to his voice—was a full-circle moment for a strain of East Coast rap currently basking in the sun. Inevitable was a solid return to form, with Banks’ ice-cold reflections on street life slotting well into an era of Instagram stunting and renewed vigor for independent artists. The Course of the Inevitable 2, his latest project, is more of the same but without the extra benefit of his grand return to music. For better and for worse, he sinks deeper into his comfort zone.
Banks’ raps have always toed the line between the spoils he’s earned and the struggles it took to get them. He weaves between past and present—Louis Vuitton linens and close calls on the corner—so effortlessly his life comes across like an anthology series. Take the beginning of “No Reward,” where he wrings the drama out of his rags-to-riches story: “Too cerebral, off leader horses, the coupe’s medieval/Stayed to myself ’cause it’s hard for me to get used to people.” On “Menace,” he doesn’t just have thick skin—it’s “tough as Bacardi glass.” The whiplash of pain and pleasure continues to be his sweet spot, but it hits harder when he uses his years of experience for teachable moments. Standout track “Dead Roses” might as well be called “Free Game,” each line a terse nugget of wisdom (“Niggas gotta see your bloodstream to make your streams go up,” “Bangin’ on rumors, damn, I miss hanging up with my flip phone”). His role as a weathered rap veteran gives added weight to the Brazilian marble round tables and weed smoke blowing out of Ferraris he raps about on other songs.
While his writing can be vivid and compelling, the technical aspects of his bars aren’t as distinctive. Banks’ flows are as rigid and predictable as his subject matter, which adds a level of consistency but tends to make the 14-track project blur together. Only so many references to COVID and cancel culture can help make a song sound fresh. There are lyrical gems and occasional flow switches throughout songs like “Living Proof” and “Trapped,” but their production would barely pass muster on a “real hip-hop type beat 2022” YouTube search. In fact, most of the beats on Inevitable 2 skew generic, drawing from the same palette of muted drum patterns, piano stabs, and warbling synths. Producer Cartune, who handles eight songs, is particularly guilty, offering faceless boom-bap on “Menace” and “Traffic.” Attempts to switch things up lead to mixed results: Producer Mr. Authentic’s stagger-stepping beat on “Power Steering” give Banks’ words some room to breathe, but the hi-hats and warped sample of Fortnoxx’s “Fell in Love” sound like something Drake or Tyga would’ve rapped on four years ago. His stories are harder to invest in when the beats feel culled from discarded Elcamino or Estee Nack folders.
And that’s what’s most frustrating about The Course of the Inevitable 2—it works at a fundamental level but doesn’t leave an impression. Banks’ combination of above-it-all cool and rawness has inspired rappers from Griselda’s Benny the Butcher and Conway the Machine—both of whom appear on this project—to the madcap gonzo attitude of Papo2oo4. His influence is widespread, and his commitment to straight-edged bars is both a blessing and a curse, depending on the beat. He’s not as dynamic or adventurous as many of his contemporaries, but his wisdom and skill make it hard not to get caught up in his second act. “Mе and adversity cruise togethеr/Counted me out again? Yes, who do I owe the pleasure?” he raps on “Living Proof.” Banks is done proving himself—his only goal now is to stay the course. | 2022-07-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Money by Any Means Inc. / Empire | July 22, 2022 | 6.5 | 1873f006-d7c7-453b-b3a6-2fd911a3d00d | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Cohesive, focused, and flat-out fun, Guilty Simpson and Madlib have crafted one of the best hip-hop records of the year. | Cohesive, focused, and flat-out fun, Guilty Simpson and Madlib have crafted one of the best hip-hop records of the year. | Guilty Simpson: OJ Simpson | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14259-oj-simpson/ | OJ Simpson | To be perfectly blunt, I was disappointed in Guilty Simpson's debut, Ode to the Ghetto. I mean, roughneck rhyming over J Dilla, Black Milk, and Oh No beats-- how could this fail? But for the most part, I felt like I stumbled upon an indie version of Memphis Bleek's M.A.D.E., where an embarrassment of production riches were squandered on someone who had no problem portraying himself as a token street soldier. A lot of people told me I'd underrated it, and listening to OJ Simpson, I'm inclined to go back and find out if they're right. Guilty Simpson's second record is so cohesive, so focused, and so flat-out fun, I'm amazed it's the work of the same guy.
What's at first striking is that two tracks of erratically paced skits and assorted chatter totaling about four minutes pass by before we actually hear Simpson rap. OJ Simpson is entirely produced by Madlib, so if that structure puts you in the mindset of either Madvillainy or Lord Quas, it's for good reason. Though it lacks the bottled-lightning brilliance and brevity of the former and the bugged-out demeanor of the latter, Madlib still tailors it to Simpson's individual talents. Through a haze of stand-up routines, half-remembered conversations, and fake news broadcasts, OJ feels like the work of someone equal parts class clown and playground bully, daydreaming about his next lay, next high, or, most often, next chance to knock some sucker out.
But while Madlib clearly plays a large role in determining the album's vision, it would be a mistake to overlook how Guilty Simpson rises to the occasion. While Simpson maintains his bullish, no-frills cadences, he's exponentially more playful and humane than he was on Ode to the Ghetto's gangsta to-do checklist. It's a pleasure to hear him spitball multi-layered rhymes that never call attention to their own ingenuity; you get something of a Simpson synopsis in a line like, "I go at your street with aggression/ The same way I go at a beat and wreck sessions/ Then shoot a load on your freak at Best Western."
But while OJ mostly stays within a zone of gunplay and battle rap, when Simpson delves into something other than his ability to hold his own on a mic or a barstool, he provides crucial insight to his surroundings. The rise-and-fall narrative of "Karma of a Kingpin" is a statement of the universality of the selectively scrupulous drug dealer that would justify his destructive trade by occasionally paying his customer's electric bill. Meanwhile, his J Dilla tribute "Cali Hills" reminds me of what Raekwon's "Ason Jones" did for Ol' Dirty Bastard, brave in its willingness to explore an occasional mundane humanity rather than legend or caricature. The only spot where OJ really falls flat is "Back on the Road Again", where Madlib's pitched-up sampling plays it a little too straight, and Simpson's wearied tour lament does the same.
But as highlights crop up throughout the sprawl-- Madlib's zombie funk on "Coroner's Music", the cyclical, effortless hooks of "Hood Sentence" and "New Heights"-- the temptation arises to strip OJ Simpson for parts. Yet, beyond providing important pivots for mood ("Something Bad" and "Something Good" in particular), a three-track run toward the end of the album that lacks any sort of interlude is strong, but a bit ordinary. If OJ Simpson really were just a quantum leap for Guilty Simpson as a rapper, it would already be one of the year's best surprises, but strange digressions and all, it's something that honors his legacy by sounding like it could hold its own within Stones Throw's impeccable mid-00s run. | 2010-05-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-05-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | May 19, 2010 | 8 | 1878970c-380d-4834-84b8-ad3526ccf96d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The versatile Pittsburgh quartet polishes their scrappy, shoegaze-inspired indie rock on an album studded with references to local favorites and ’90s classics. | The versatile Pittsburgh quartet polishes their scrappy, shoegaze-inspired indie rock on an album studded with references to local favorites and ’90s classics. | Gaadge: Somewhere Down Below | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gaadge-somewhere-down-below/ | Somewhere Down Below | Gaadge’s cavernous sound and charismatic live performances in basements and bars have made them legends for a generation of Pittsburgh college students, and they’ve already served as mentors to another local breakout, feeble little horse. They won a cult following on the charm and warmth of DIY albums Gaadge and Yeah?, both full of addictive riffs and winning melodic hooks. On the quartet’s new album, Somewhere Down Below, Gaadge leave behind the noise of home recordings in favor of crisp production that opens the door to a wider audience.
Gaadge has been a project for vocalist and guitarist Mitch DeLong for nearly a decade, but the current lineup—drummer Ethan Oliva, guitarist Andy Yadeski, and bassist Nick Boston—solidified around the release of 2021’s Yeah?. Somewhere Down Below is the group’s third full-length, but it’s the first time this iteration of the project has entered a proper studio, working with engineer Matt Schimelfenig (Spirit of the Beehive, the War on Drugs) at the Bunk. Instead of bedroom fuzz, the clean, thoughtful production reveals the core of Gaadge’s songwriting: memorable hooks rooted in the tradition of ’90s indie rock, interspersed with shoegaze and punky rippers.
The adventurous terrain makes sense for a band whose members have been involved in a wide variety of projects. Members of Gaadge also perform with Oliva’s lo-fi rock band Ex Pilots, while Yadeski drums with hardcore punks Little Angels; Oliva and Yadeski also make psychedelic dream-pop in the group Sober Clones. The hard-hitting energy Olvia brings to the kit might have been honed while he played in the blistering punk act Living World. Beyond the internal reference points, Somewhere Down Below is full of nods to legends like Lilys and Swirlies, as well as the electronic-tinged post-punk of Autolux. The lo-fi blur of “Don’t Go There” not only feels like a love letter to Guided by Voices, but it also sounds like it could be an Ex Pilots song, suggesting a shared sensibility between all their disparate projects.
Gaadge synthesize these sounds into something charming and fresh thanks in large part to DeLong’s warm vocals. Departing from the casual delivery of Stephen Malkmus or the airy restraint of Swirlies’ Damon Tutunjian, DeLong takes on the melodic qualities of a self-assured Ben Gibbard. “I said you can’t go that way/You said in here I can’t stay,” he sings briskly against the frenetic guitar and crashing cymbal of “Nanty Glo.” Gaadge’s grasp on pop songwriting also helps distinguish their sound. This strength is especially evident in the sweet hook of “Candy-Coloured,” a standout track where high-energy group vocals carry a carefree melody that feels like running through the streets with sparklers in hand.
While songs like “Sputter” bridge the gap between Gaadge’s shiny new production tools and the DIY sound they’ve become known for, the most memorable songs show off an entirely new side of the band. On “No Go,” gated drums meet chiming, bending chords, and as DeLong’s voice dips into a lower range, the band reveals a sleek edge. The title track is the most compelling of these explorations, incorporating drum machines and shouted vocals. The moments of hero worship and cozy references give Somewhere Down Below a quiet familiarity, but the newfound clarity proves that Gaadge are far bigger than mere ’90s nostalgia.
Correction: Damon Tutunjian sang with Swirlies, not Lilys. This review has been updated. | 2023-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Crafted Sounds / Michi Tapes | August 3, 2023 | 7 | 187aa490-af38-4b83-937c-fafff7359b7d | Meg Fair | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meg-fair/ | |
Great though Sally Shapiro's Disco Romance is, we're not sure how many people were clamoring for two volumes of remixes from it. Still, here's the second one of the year, and it encouragingly features works from top-notch producers such as Dntel, the Russian Futurists, and Alexander Robotnick. | Great though Sally Shapiro's Disco Romance is, we're not sure how many people were clamoring for two volumes of remixes from it. Still, here's the second one of the year, and it encouragingly features works from top-notch producers such as Dntel, the Russian Futurists, and Alexander Robotnick. | Sally Shapiro: Remix Romance Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11925-remix-romance-vol-2/ | Remix Romance Vol. 2 | Strike while the fire is hot. David Cook from American Idol had 11 singles in the Hot 100 shortly after his big win. Lil Wayne put up seven Hot 100 singles the week of Tha Carter III. On a much more intimate scale, Sally Shapiro-- the pseudonymous Swedish chanteuse whose Disco Romance debut LP has been bewitching audiences with its fragile mix of warm-hearted synth-pop and icy Italo disco since its original European release in 2006-- has now released her second remix album of 2008. Artistically if not commercially, it's a better idea than Wayne's godawful guest verse on the latest Mariah Carey remix.
Great though Disco Romance is, I'm not sure how many people were clamoring for two volumes of remixes from it. Of the people who might be inclined to check out Remix Romance Vol. 2, though, I can't imagine too many will feel their 10 bucks (or, sigh, torrent ratio) were completely wasted. Remix Romance Vol. 1 came as the famously reticent Shapiro was stepping out with her first interviews and DJ gigs, and its 10 tracks turned her shy bedroom disco into disco-disco, putting her wispy vocals and sugar-frosted melodies through the club-friendlier paces of top-notch remixers such as Lindstrøm, Junior Boys, and Juan MacLean. It was a surprisingly successful reconfiguration of the sound Shapiro and producer Johan Agebjörn conceived for Disco Romance, and Remix Romance Vol. 2 is, despite a slight overall drop in quality, refreshingly of a piece with its predecessor.
With so many versions of the same Shapiro material already floating around on the world's luckier hard drives, Remix Romance Vol. 2's best tracks tend to rework their originals rather dramatically. Much as Norway's Lindstrøm did "Time to Let Go" as epic psychedelic disco, Canada's the Russian Futurists make Shapiro's signature internet hit, "I'll Be By Your Side", into a Russian Futurists song. Considering the Russian Futurists are, like Shapiro, synth-pop romantics who tend to send critics scrambling for snowflake-flimsy metaphors, their "Side" keeps plenty of Shapiro's spirit even while adding bouncy lo-fi beats, thrumming guitar-like synths, and lead vocals by the group's Matthew Adam Hart. The Postal Service half Dntel puts sparse, glitchy beats reminiscent of his other group's "Against All Odds" cover behind "Find My Soul", with wobbly vocal effects that perhaps explain why the song has been retitled "Find My Ghost". An Italo disco original, Alexander Robotnick, shifts the Roger Gunnarsson-written "Anorak Christmas" from synth-driven twee carol to beat-heavier Eurovision contestant.
Newer artists also find plenty to say through Shapiro's songs. Montreal's CFCF-- whose remixing credits include Crystal Castles, HEALTH, the Teenagers, and Apache Beat-- kicks off the compilation with a version of "Time to Let Go" that sounds like Justice if their steez were 1980s adult-contemporary rather than heavy metal, as cheesed-out keyboards float across muscular bass lines and thumping beats. Closer to a proper Ed Banger banger is a remix of the same song by Spitzer, a buzzy French brother duo who also recently remixed Kylie Minogue; they chop up Shapiro's vocals and use them as wordless accompaniment for their aggressive filter-disco. Two contributions by fellow Frenchman Dyylan may be excessive, but his takes on "Hold Me So Tight" and U.S. Disco Romance bonus track "Jackie Jackie" could hardly be more different-- the first lush and upbeat, the second spaced-out and beatless, a pleasant-enough comedown to finish the album.
Remix Romance Vol. 2 isn't going to be anybody's favorite album of 2008, but it doesn't have to be. Aside from unnecessarily reprising Agebjörn's "Norwegian electrojazz" remix of "Find My Soul", which much of Shapiro's Web-savvy fanbase will probably have already heard from the original Swedish Disco Romance, the second compilation of Shapiro remixes continues to put enough new touches on Shapiro's slight if solid songbook to offer the diehards (for whom this release is presumably intended) a few fresh twinges of romance. New listeners should still head straight for the proper LP, but in a time when remixes have come to function more like blog-oriented marketing tools than something fans or DJs might actually spend money on, Remix Romance Vol 2. sounds less like a case of striking while the fire is hot than a breath of fresh air. And with global warming working its magic on my air-conditioning bills lately, even the slightest breeze is welcome. | 2008-06-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-06-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Paper Bag | June 25, 2008 | 6.4 | 187c0015-d481-4cf5-ba4a-f3ebe1ef4a18 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
With cosmos-filling drones and blazing noise, the third album from Madeline Johnston’s experimental pop project feels ambitious and communal. | With cosmos-filling drones and blazing noise, the third album from Madeline Johnston’s experimental pop project feels ambitious and communal. | Midwife: Luminol | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/midwife-luminol/ | Luminol | A silhouetted figure stares eyelessly on the cover of Luminol, Madeline Johnston’s third album as Midwife. It’s an old photograph of the artist’s mother in front of a body of water, her unique features erased, so that she becomes a shadow in the landscape, indiscernible from her daughter in the present day. This is the album’s first act of dissolution: the blending of mother and daughter, landscape and body.
Johnston has described her musical output, which includes the somber experimental pop of Midwife and the ambient drone project Sister Grotto, as “heaven metal,” a categorization that taps into her ability to wrench ecstasy from devastation, to make romance out of abject pain, and to transmute specific feelings into an ineffable longing. In 2015, while residing at Denver’s artist- and DIY-led venue Rhinoceropolis, she began channelling these ideas into Midwife, whose most obvious comparison can be found in Liz Harris’ work as Grouper. Now based in New Mexico, where she was raised by her mother, Johnston has enlisted Zachary Cole Smith and Colin Caulfield of DIIV and fellow Flenser signee Dan Barrett of Have a Nice Life for an extra padding of guitar and drums on her third record. The result puts a new focus on the “metal” in “heaven metal.”
Written and recorded during the pandemic, these songs have a new sense of universality, speaking to a year of civil unrest. Luminol is an extension of common themes in Midwife’s music: guilt and an internalized sense of incarceration, a perpetual search for home, a desire to self-obliterate. While the music further explores the magical loneliness at the heart of Johnston’s previous records, it also points outwards toward a wider community of pain. As her collaborators sing and play alongside her, the music feels larger than anything she has made before. This is the sound of Johnston’s world expanding beyond herself.
The compositions on Luminol are precarious balancing acts, perched somewhere between the locating sensation of pain and the dislocation of trauma. Often, their tension is wrought from a sense of fragility. The opening “God Is a Cop” begins with a hushed sense of urgency: tiny taps of piano that feel as though they could fall apart at any moment, like raindrops slowly disentangling the strings of a spiderweb. The gentleness is soon contrasted with dense waves of pressure and blazing guitar noise. It sounds strangely enervated.
This introduction is a moment of restraint before the ferocious outpourings in highlights like “2020” and “Promise Ring,” bolstered with cosmos-filling drones, distorted power chords, and anthemic slowcore riffs that grab you by the throat, letting go just as you start to turn blue. Instead of structuring her songs around hooks, Johnston gives equal weight to each passing moment; every press of the piano or stroke of the guitar seems to experience its own lifetime before decaying into her paroxysm of destruction.
As a songwriter, Johnston favors repetition, with lyrics and riffs that spin over and around themselves like whorls on a mollusk shell, until each movement is made to unwind and dissolve. It’s a motion that mirrors the self-diffusing impulse she describes in her lyrics. “My body is the police,” Johnston sings numbly on “Enemy,” a lyric specific enough for us to imagine her pain but sweeping enough for us to luxuriate in our own. The album is buttressed by this kind of negative affectivity. “Love will only break your heart,” she sings on “Promise Ring.” “Heaven is so far away,” goes a lyric in “2020.”
Despite the hopelessness in her lyrics, Johnston gives her music a kind of Dionysian ecstasy, a release from its unassailable longing. “Show me the way,” she sings with increasing desperation in “Caroline’s World,” the final track, which takes its title and inspiration from American pastoralist Andrew Wyeth’s most famous work: the image of a body, ensnared in pain, gazing toward home. Imagining herself the figure in the painting—“crawling up the hill, towards the house”—Johnston commits a final act of dissolution. She is a spirit without a host, longing to find a way back in, or to dissolve completely.
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. | 2021-07-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | The Flenser | July 19, 2021 | 7.6 | 187c34cb-49b0-467a-be0a-abf0304d9412 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
Highlighting a new corner of Michigan rap, this mixtape from the Grand Rapids rapper is a sustained rush of adrenaline that rarely loses steam. | Highlighting a new corner of Michigan rap, this mixtape from the Grand Rapids rapper is a sustained rush of adrenaline that rarely loses steam. | AK Bandamont: Soul Controller | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ak-bandamont-soul-controller/ | Soul Controller | At the end of 2020, if someone asked you to explain to them what was so great about the Michigan rap scene, you could shoot them links to “Free Joe Exotic,” “Wack Jumper,” “Coochie,” and “Movie,” and they would have a pretty good idea. While the Michigan sound continues to trickle outside of its borders, things have splintered within, making the prospect of isolating specific sounds more difficult. However, there are now new scenes within the state that have made it exciting in a whole new way.
This is true of AK Bandamont, a rapper who does not reside in hotspots like Detroit or Flint; he is based in Grand Rapids, and patience is not in his vocabulary. He is a shit talker in a rush, stumbling over his words yet powering through anyway. He raps like he snuck into the recording studio, and he only has a couple of minutes to speak before security drags him out. It’s a freewheeling style that is reminiscent of instant Michigan rap classics like Teejayx6 and Kasher Quon’s “Dynamic Duo” and Rio Da Yung OG’s “Legendary,” except that Bandamont brings this energy every time he finds a working mic.
However, this ferocity can easily lead to burn out, and by the end of an AK Bandamont single, you might be bent over with your hands on your hips as if you just completed a 5K. This made his previous mixtapes so exhausting and one-note that they were hard to get through. However, his newest, Soul Controller, is a sustained rush of adrenaline. Produced by Enrgy, the 10 tracks here will make you sweatier than an ’80s action movie hero; the drums pound like heart palpitations and the incessantly ringing church bells seem calibrated to bring about headaches.
Backdropped by Enrgy’s pummeling 808s, Bandamont’s stories, which I take with a grain of salt, feel almost cinematic. According to him, life in Grand Rapids is a lot like a season of Narcos: Girlfriends smuggle drugs across state lines, dope deals end in shootouts, and there are extremely detailed heists. On “More Then Paper,” he runs through memories of doing business in the school hallways and going on the run from the cops. He chases a dude through the mall and comes up with about a dozen different ways to say he’s selling white on “Heat Out.” He’s funny, too. “My white boy say, ‘Bro your music hard I go fishing to it,’” he raps on “Heavy Metal,” and though that definitely never happened, the image of someone fishing to his music is hilarious.
When Bandamont’s energy takes a slight dip, the songs lose steam. This happens on “Gretzky,” which is a shame because it features a few of the mixtape’s most fun moments—he accuses this dude of only wearing an outfit once, and then returning it back to the store (maybe it just didn’t fit right.) Similarly, he sounds bored on “Stick Wit Me,” and it’s not helped by the uninteresting Enrgy beat. The only time slowing down the pace works is on “Tragic,” and that’s because the tone is more somber; as a string sample swells in the background, Bandamont strips away relentlessness of his tales, replacing the action movie intensity with a sense of desperation.
No song or mixtape is definitive of the year in Michigan rap, and any fan of the state’s street rap wave will likely point you in a different direction. AK Bandamont’s Soul Controller is not a snapshot of the moment nor is it indicative of the bigger picture. It’s a fun and messy mixtape from a rapper in his sweet spot.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | MoneyGettingBrothers | November 3, 2021 | 7.4 | 187e1578-1bf2-4678-b077-e2bbd10c8e54 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The veteran trip-hoppers once stood out by virtue of their idiosyncratic sound, but two decades later, they’ve resorted to playing things frustratingly straight. | The veteran trip-hoppers once stood out by virtue of their idiosyncratic sound, but two decades later, they’ve resorted to playing things frustratingly straight. | Lamb: The Secret of Letting Go | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lamb-the-secret-of-letting-go/ | The Secret of Letting Go | There is something so indelibly 1990s about Lamb that you half expect their new album to arrive via dial-up internet to the sound of Lance Ito summing up the OJ trial. The Manchester duo—bloke-ish beat maker Andy Barlow and folky singer songwriter Lou Rhodes—were, for a few months in 1996, the fanciest thing going for British beat heads, their modish sound pushing the trip-hop template into artfully twisted new places. That Lamb never really crossed over was perhaps to be expected. The band’s raison d’être—deviant beats that nodded to the fractured rhythms of ’90s drum’n’bass alongside awkwardly intense vocal delivery—proved their commercial Achilles’ heel.
The Secret of Letting Go is Lamb’s third studio album since reforming in 2009. You could argue that it arrives at a fortuitous time for the duo, with new albums from Billie Eilish and Karen O and Danger Mouse echoing the woozy trip-hop sound of 20 years ago, while the twisted breaks that they once used to spice their pot are all the rage in clubs. So it’s a pain to report that The Secret of Letting Go plays things frustratingly straight.
When Lamb first started out they sounded ever so slightly wrong: There was something gawky about the duo, as if their nerdish instincts couldn’t let a song go without messing it up a little. The Secret of Letting Go, on the other hand, is incredibly smooth, with the jagged edges that once made Lamb so interesting sacrificed for a buttery consistency. The second half of the album, especially, is dominated by gilded piano chords, softly rousing strings, and gently humming synths, which lay a lazy bed for Rhodes’ increasingly conventional vocals.
While there is nothing particularly distasteful about these frappuccino-y torch songs, the cumulative effect is soporific and slightly sickly, like cream on your ice cream at the end of a long dinner. “Silence Inbetween,” one of the worst offenders, is almost shockingly conventional in its approach, the muted piano loops, vibrato vocal and tasteful string bed slipping by with the ease of a feather duster on a waxed grand piano.
Things pick up when Lamb give rein to their more experimental tendencies. “Moonshine” has a swampy bass lurch and diwali-esque dancehall clap; “Armageddon Waits” uses an unconventional 7/4 rhythm and touches of creeping electronic menace; “Bulletproof” suggests a residual interest in dance-music trends, with its jittery dubstep beat and swooping synth line. Best of all is “The Secret of Letting Go,” which pairs a defiant, unwieldy vocal, reminiscent of the Lou Rhodes of old, with a series of angry electronic splotches that shouldn’t work together but do. But even here, the sound is still a shade too pastel to inspire genuine emotional release.
What’s frustrating is that modern audiences have proved themselves more open to the kind of pop experimentation and rhythmic handbrake turns that Lamb perfected on songs like 1996’s “Gold.” Billie Eilish’s recent No. 1 album took generic norms more as barriers to be hurdled than musical starting points, while Kanye West has hardly suffered from a tendency to assimilate avant-garde artistic trends. Lamb, sadly, seem to have lived their career in reverse: too awkwardly experimental when radio craved smoothness; too polished for a modern world that demands idiosyncrasy of our musical stars.
The seeds of a half-decent album are buried among The Secret of Letting Go’s more experimental tracks. But, in the immortal words of another extremely ’90s act, that don’t impress me much. Modern audiences with no notion of the band’s unusual history are unlikely to be moved by this album’s velvety shrug. | 2019-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Jazz / Pop/R&B | Cooking Vinyl | April 27, 2019 | 5.6 | 18806096-351a-470d-a15b-7a016671ec4f | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Beach House remain masters of the indefinable and their seventh album is their heaviest and most immersive-sounding of their career. | Beach House remain masters of the indefinable and their seventh album is their heaviest and most immersive-sounding of their career. | Beach House: 7 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beach-house-7/ | 7 | Over six albums, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally of Beach House have offered the same enticement: There’s a place I want to take you; help me to name it. The implicit promise has always been that if you opened up entirely, gave enough of yourself, the nameless sensation they evoke would finally come into focus, and the shapes moving beneath the surface of their music would resolve. You would finally understand if you came closer, stayed longer, looked deeper.
You could sense the now-venerable Baltimore duo playing this game in advance of their seventh album, simply called 7. The first single, Scally noted slyly to Pitchfork, came out on February 14—2/14, or two plus one plus four equals seven. The album brought their catalog to 77 songs, and the record’s initial issue number was 777. What did all this mystical numerology amount to when you squinted at it? Nothing of course, except to set the stage, light the incense. It’s the magician’s pre-trick pantomime, where he turns up his palms and rolls up his sleeves, for no other purpose than to make you lean in closer and grin harder. “We spend a lot of time creatively making mountains out of nothingness,” Scally added.
Inducing indefinable yearnings, tracing patterns in the air—this is the essence of Beach House’s art. They usher us repeatedly into familiar territory and encourage us to notice the same things within it: the way a dim glow never surges or abates, how sensations burrow into the mind and color our memories. But with each album, they somehow render this terrain alien again, allowing us to run our hands over the same irregularities in fresh astonishment.
With 7, they’ve parted ways with longtime producer Chris Coady and teamed with Panda Bear and MGMT producer and former Spacemen 3 member Peter Kember, who goes by Sonic Boom. The result is their heaviest and most immersive-sounding album. It’s darker, thicker, set at a deeper spot in the woods. The gentle drum programming of earlier records has been swept aside for thunderous crashes: The drums on opener “Dark Spring” have the resounding weight of My Bloody Valentine’s “Only Shallow,” and the mix has a smeared, heat-sick quality that brings all of Loveless to mind. Low-end sounds, like the thrumming guitar that pierces “Dive” have real menace: The insistent thud inside “Drunk in LA” is like a hand tapping your solar plexus. This is the first Beach House record that, in headphones, will make you feel buffeted.
You are never quite sure about the size of the sounds on a Beach House song; intimate moments are massive, and vice versa. Most of the record feels recorded and mixed from a low spot gazing up, with sounds looming above, but then grass-blade details resolve themselves in the foreground. Legrand’s voice doubles on the chorus of “Pay No Mind,” transforming her from wisp to leviathan in an instant. On “Dive,” she sounds as imposing as the thumping drums, but a humming synth the size of a music box runs alongside her, confusing your sense of scale. On “L’Inconnue,” her vocal lines pan from left to right and pool in on themselves. Her breath fills every corner of space. When the track fills out—some guitars, resonant drums, a choral patch—they appear as if from inside her rib cage. She’s never sounded bigger, or less mortal, than she does here.
These perspective tricks are the tools of film-making as much as of music, and Beach House’s music is full of cuts, dissolves, fades, super-imposures. You enter their records the way you settle into a movie seat, asking to be subsumed and bathed in light. Even Legrand’s lyrics function like rapturous, lingering takes. “Rolling clouds over cement,” she sings on “Drunk in LA” Like Stevie Nicks, to whom she is often compared, or Orson Welles, to whom she is never compared, she grasps how readily we latch onto rich, intoning voices, how we can’t help but find ourselves believing in what they say. A voice like hers is its own kind of authority, and she luxuriates in the sound of words leaving her mouth.
Measuring Beach House albums against one another is tricky—how do you compare daydreams? But on a sensory level, you feel whether the spell is working, and how potent it remains. On 7, all the contrasts that mark their music are dialed up to blinding; you are plunged into darkness and then showered in light. The experience is so enveloping that you find yourself contending, once again, with that familiar itch to locate meaning. The secret at the heart of Beach House’s evocative music remains the same—there is no specific place Legrand wants to take you. But there will always be… someplace you’d rather be. Beach House will always help you dream of it. | 2018-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | May 11, 2018 | 8.9 | 18860768-4f47-441e-b332-cb55dad2a68f | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Built from recordings of his 2013 tour as Mister Lies, Nick Zanca’s debut under his own name is sparse experimentation in clamor and free-form percussion. | Built from recordings of his 2013 tour as Mister Lies, Nick Zanca’s debut under his own name is sparse experimentation in clamor and free-form percussion. | Nick Zanca: Cacerolazo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nick-zanca-cacerolazo/ | Cacerolazo | What a trip it must have been to be Nick Zanca in 2013. One moment you’re a teen playing in punk bands; the next you’re Mister Lies, signed to the label responsible for one of the most catalyzing albums of the chillwave movement and shuttling across Europe to play gigs with other beat-scene upstarts like Slow Magic, XXYYXX, and Giraffage. The late 2000s through the early 2010s was a mythical time for Myspace strivers and bedroom producers, many of whom ended up on big labels and bigger tours with barely any material to show for it. The deadlines for Zanca’s first album, Mowgli, were set before the young producer even had a record’s worth of material on his hard drive, and in interviews at the time, Zanca barely seemed to know how to deal with his sudden rush of success.
Cacerolazo, Zanca’s first album under his birth name, is based on recordings of that European tour. But its two side-long pieces strip away any outward vestige of his past as a beatmaker, reintroducing him as part of a rising faction of young American avant-gardists who fold recordings of their lives into tender, diaristic, intensely personal music; L’Rain, Lucy Liyou, More Eaze, and claire rousay all receive thanks in the liner notes. Cacerolazo is devoted to sparse experimentation in clamor and free-form percussion, with long stretches devoted to field recordings and electroacoustic interference and only the occasional curlicue of harpsichord or guitar to make things pretty. Zanca hinted just slightly in this direction by threading environmental sounds into 2019’s Mister Lies, but Cacerolazo feels like he stuffed dynamite into the Mister Lies persona and held a microphone up to the smoldering remains.
The first side is devoted to the three-part title track, which climaxes with the “white whale” of Zanca’s European tour recordings: a cacerolazo, a form of protest in which participants bang pots and pans together en masse. Zanca found himself caught in one such event in Istanbul at the height of the 2013 Gezi Park protests, spurred when a sit-in protesting the removal of one of the city center’s last green spaces was dispersed by police with water cannons, plastic bullets, and tear gas. This would be a tipping point for unrest in Turkey in reaction to the rising authoritarianism of Prime Minister and soon-to-be-President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. But Zanca remembers the tour mostly as “an apolitical fog of train travel, hostel stays, and hedonism,” and he claims to have been only vaguely aware of Turkey’s political situation. Cacerolazo can be loosely described as a meditation on this dissociation.
“Cacerolazo” opens with the resonance of struck percussion instruments, then belatedly introduces their impacts, as if to exaggerate Zanca’s own experiential disconnect from the righteous clamor of the Istanbul protest. The second side, meanwhile, is occupied by “Boy Abroad,” which features hardly any music and is mostly a collage of moments from his time in Europe. It’s similar to fellow field-recordist Flora Yin-Wong’s “Loci” from last year’s Holy Palm, which likewise chronicled her jaunts around the world. But by incorporating Zanca’s own voice and those of his tourmates, “Boy Abroad” portrays travel as a reciprocal experience, a process of interacting with people and places but not always understanding them. At one point, a promoter describes his experience of being tear-gassed in painful detail. “Whoa,” the tourmates murmur, as if someone’s played them a sick beat.
Zanca and crew sound like a bunch of kids in way over their heads, and it takes guts to present your younger self on record in this way. But why he’s so eager to call his own bluff isn’t always clear. Zanca considers this record only “obliquely political,” but there’s still the fact that he named it after a form of protest, and it’s hard to determine whether he’s protesting authoritarianism or just his own hedonistic past. Cacerolazo juggles a lot of themes, thoughts, impulses, and sounds across just four tracks, but it’s less impressive as a statement than as a stylistic reinvention: proof that Zanca can work magic with field recordings, even if they don’t always speak louder than words.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Full Spectrum | October 8, 2021 | 6.9 | 18868f56-541b-49d8-bfd8-bcfed5e517dd | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
The soundtrack to the superstar boy band’s mobile app game is the most inessential BTS-affiliated project to date. | The soundtrack to the superstar boy band’s mobile app game is the most inessential BTS-affiliated project to date. | Various Artists: BTS World: Original Soundtrack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-bts-world-original-soundtrack/ | BTS World: Original Soundtrack | Early in the decade, Akon, Snoop Dogg, and Kanye West all featured on woefully misguided K-pop songs, emblematic of how K-pop collaborations with Western artists weren’t always well thought through. There’s been marked improvement in the past couple years, and BTS have been crucial in making these cross-continental pairings—like their songs with Steve Aoki, Nicki Minaj, and Halsey—feel more sensible. Ahead of BTS WORLD, the group released a new collaboration every week. Those tracks are the most noteworthy ones here by a considerable margin.
Despite its title, BTS WORLD isn’t really a BTS album: It’s the soundtrack to a freemium mobile app game of the same name. Less than a third of the record’s 50-minute runtime is devoted to the boy band, and one would be hard-pressed to consider these four tracks among their best. Three collaborations only contain a few BTS members each, mixing and matching the group’s singers and rappers with suitable Western counterparts. While they aren’t as embarrassing as collaborations from K-pop’s yesteryear, they still fail to showcase the strengths of their respective artists.
On “Dream Glow,” Jin, Jimin, and Jungkook team up with Charli XCX for a diaphanous EDM song that’s in constant search of a satisfying climax. Its muted nature is intentional—the track is meant to serve as a mantra about following your dreams—but in the absence of any cathartic bombast, the vocal hook and lethargic production are a chore. At last, a song that embodies the tedious labor involved in reaching one’s goals.
The spacious and vaguely tropical “A Brand New Day,” featuring Zara Larsson, doesn’t fare much better. Producer Mura Masa throws in a daegeum—a Korean bamboo flute—but since it functions the same as any other flute loop we’ve heard in the past few years, it’s little more than a cute gesture. J-Hope’s shouted vocals are the only thing providing a semblance of personality. Juice WRLD exudes a fair amount of charm on “All Night,” ditching his lugubriousness for some slurred lines that pine for a girl. The relative sloppiness of his delivery proves a welcome contrast to RM and Suga’s prim rapping. Suga in particular is in prime form: He switches up his flow in meaningful ways, bringing to mind K-pop star Zico’s verse on “Oasis,” the very first time a Korean idol rapper adopted overtly ATL flows in a pop-rap single.
BTS WORLD’s main attraction is “Heartbeat,” the only song here to have a music video and all seven of the group’s members. It’s an emotive, stadium-ready ballad that recalls fan favorite single “Spring Day,” but its banal instrumentation renders it overwrought. With staid guitar strums, plodding drums, and a line like “My heart’s on fire for your love,” “Heartbeat” could easily be mistaken for Hillsong United’s tepid contemporary Christian music, albeit with a generous number of awkward percussive blips.
The rest of BTS World is wholly disposable. Seven instrumentals serve as theme music for the group’s different members, and while a few are charming—Jimin’s theme, the quaint “Cake Waltz,” could soundtrack a Disney film—every track unwisely exceeds three minutes, and each eventually reveals itself as uninspired stock music. A twee folk song from indie-pop duo Okdal and an overly dramatic ballad by Big Hit Entertainment label-mate Lee Hyun round out the soundtrack. They’re a good sampling of the music that gains traction in Korea but not among international fans. Unfortunately, they’re as innocuous and frustratingly nondescript as the seven themes that precede them.
If you spend any time with the BTS WORLD game, you’ll quickly notice that it’s meant for a particular subset of fans. Players simulate life as the band’s manager, and the visual novel-style gameplay and aesthetics feel a lot like BTS fan fiction. While it’s never outright erotic, it’s meant to elicit some, well, affectionate reactions: In the first few levels of the game, RM “glistens with sweat,” you “lock eyes with a radiantly smiling Seok Jin,” and you can “feel the warmth of Yunki’s hand on [your] wrist.” (The game refers to the player only with she/her pronouns.) Like the game, the accompanying soundtrack is for die-hards only. But wherever you land on the BTS fan spectrum, BTS WORLD is the most inessential BTS-affiliated project to date. | 2019-07-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Big Hit Entertainment | July 4, 2019 | 4.6 | 1886b36b-77bf-4e4b-8e1f-2d33d80c7aca | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
Yes Lawd! is another accomplishment in Anderson .Paak’s continued rise, a beautiful beat tape made with the producer Knxwledge that nods to classic Stones Throw duos. | Yes Lawd! is another accomplishment in Anderson .Paak’s continued rise, a beautiful beat tape made with the producer Knxwledge that nods to classic Stones Throw duos. | NxWorries: Yes Lawd! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22389-yes-lawd/ | Yes Lawd! | Imagine it: You grew up in Oxnard, Calif. Your dad went to prison for beating your mom. You had a kid with your second wife. You lost your job, and a place to live. You were homeless.
Your friends looked out for you. You slowly picked yourself up. You changed your name: Breezy Lovejoy became Anderson .Paak. You gained some traction, partly by redoubling your focus on your vocals, leaving the beatmaking to producers you trusted. Some Soundcloud hits followed, some friendships with well-connected rappers, a sophomore album, Venice, on which your voice had gone from a blunt instrument to a swiss army knife, able to do 15 different things at once.
And then you got the call. From Aftermath, Dr. Dre’s label. A representative was checking to see if you were interested in the American dream, California rap edition—in working with an icon you’d been listening to since you were six years old. You made it.
Channel that experience, .Paak’s own recent past, into a single song, and you might come up with something like “Livvin,” the first proper song off Yes Lawd!, his new joint album with the beatmaker Knxwledge. “Livvin” is triumph incarnate, a new entry in the tradition of “ashy-to-classy” tracks like “Juicy” and “Touch the Sky.” .Paak preaches the gospel of success in between rolling drums, mellow horns, and a church choir. His voice’s inextricability from the music is a testament to his chemistry with a producer steeped in the tradition of the beat scene godheads, Dilla and Madlib. (.Paak and Knx, whose real name is Glen Boothe, have merged their names into NxWorries, an apparent nod to the definitive Stones Throw duos, Jaylib and Madvillain.)
.Paak’s sudden stardom, largely due to his work with Dre and to this year’s Malibu, his extraordinary third album, might tempt listeners to give him the credit for Yes Lawd!’s many successes. But the record, which includes tracks recorded between early 2015 and March 2016, is first and foremost a beat tape, stacked with beautiful little donuts, most of which don’t pass the three-minute mark. Knx was raised on church music, hip-hop radio, and J Dilla, and the rich instrumentals here are loaded with tributes to all three. “Sidepiece” offers .Paak a chance to sing the lyrics of “Won’t Do” from Dilla’s posthumous album The Shining: “One won’t do and two is not enough for me, no,” while “Can’t Stop” is a zoned-out moment of musical reverie that intimately recalls Jay Dee. The beats are the soul of the album, and .Paak serves as a faithful instrument, the organ at their core.
Producers have fallen hard for .Paak and here, he shows several reasons why his stock has risen so quickly. He’s uniquely aware of the flexibility of his voice as an instrument and is one of the more emotive rappers I can remember hearing, on a level with DMX or Young Thug. On “Best One,” even as he expresses gratitude for a woman who’s taken him in, you can hear urgency, and empathy, in his voice: “You know I could be leaving in a moment’s notice/You telling me to stay to the morning/You know a nigga homeless.” On “Lyk Dis,” he channels no one so much as Erykah Badu, riding the beat with gravelly, percussive verses delivered in short bursts.
In the past, Knxwledge has had trouble focusing on a particular sound for too long, but it’s his focus that holds the record together through 19 tracks, even as he shows off his range. On “What More Can I Say,” one of the prettiest songs here, mournful violin strings engage in a duet with a quiet bass rumble, and their interchange makes for some of the most moving music on the album, particularly when the horns arrive. (If you pride yourself on recognizing samples, this album will offer up a form of exquisite torture at least a couple of times, as you attempt to track down lovely little fragments.) The shuffling beat on “Link Up” is one of the more subtle offerings here, but its winding rhythms and muted sample make .Paak sound as if he’s singing from the middle of the dancefloor, appropriate for a song about nocturnal pursuits.
Many of .Paak’s songs are about going out, and particularly about women, and it’s in their lyrics that Yes Lawd! reveals one of its only issues, a lack of lyrical substance. While an artist like Drake comfortably straddles the line between rapper and R&B singer, .Paak is more of a crooner than a rhymer. There are too few moments like the clever little lyrical elaboration on “Best One”: “I could leave it at a drop of a fedora/But damn it girl I want you.”
And what we get instead can be ugly. On “Livvin,” .Paak sings about the feeling of ascending the ladder, but on some songs, it seems like he’s pulling it up behind him. The sentiment toward other strivers on “H.A.N.” is stingy, and .Paak’s portraits of his relationships are often shallow—a fact that the final track “Fkku” seems to acknowledge, giving a woman’s voice the record’s final kiss-off. The worrisome thing here is not that .Paak can be sexist. It’s that there’s nothing to counter or contextualize his attitude. On “Suede,” .Paak makes an explicit effort to justify the slurs he frequently uses: “If I call you a bitch/It’s cause you’re my bitch/And as long as no one else call you a bitch/Then there won’t be no problems.”
The records that .Paak and Boothe admire, the classic Stones Throw collaborations, found two artists working at the absolute height of their talents. Madvillainy, in particular, was a perfect match between an internal rhyme genius in Doom and a beatmaking savant in Madlib. That album, released in 2004, remains a high water mark in Stones Throw’s history. .Paak and Knx are both so talented that it seems fair to hold them to that standard. And what’s astonishing here is the way they manage to forge a sound nearly as rich and original as that of America’s most blunted. One of the few disappointing things about the largely terrific Yes Lawd! is the way that Knx outdoes .Paak, but the rapper/singer is at the beginning of a bright career in which he’s already demonstrated his ability to write rich lyrics—this record, which includes some of the most beautiful songs he’s made yet, has far more to be proud of than not. It’s another major accomplishment in .Paak’s continued rise. | 2016-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Stones Throw | October 18, 2016 | 8.2 | 18870929-c038-4f2a-9e11-0cea9942be22 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The pseudonymous London producer’s new album is a radiant, elastic, nearly four-hour celebration of the transportive possibilities of dance music. | The pseudonymous London producer’s new album is a radiant, elastic, nearly four-hour celebration of the transportive possibilities of dance music. | DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ: Destiny | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-sabrina-the-teenage-dj-destiny/ | Destiny | Somewhere between a brain massage and a 1990s basement rave, a memory and a dream, lies the curious and sparkling realm of DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. Since her 2017 debut Makin’ Magick, the prolific, pseudonymous London producer (who sometimes works with a collaborator, Salem) has built out a world of lush deep house that interweaves disco, synth funk, and Radio Disney pop with breakbeats, dialogue samples, and power-ballad vocals. At nearly four hours long, her new album Destiny is her most intricate project yet, a radiant and elastic celebration of the transportive possibilities of dance music.
DJ Sabrina’s name and much of her cheeky 64-bit promotional imagery draw from the comic-book-turned-’90s-sitcom Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which followed 16-year-old Sabrina Spellman’s earnest attempts to balance life as a powerful sorceress and a Britney Spears-loving high schooler. DJ Sabrina chose her namesake because she felt it conveyed a certain melancholy aesthetic, like a “warped TV movie that makes you cry in a way no mainstream movie would be able to,” she explained to Bandcamp in 2021. Her 2020 album, Charmed, won over pandemic-weary online fans, some of whom swore that Sabrina’s music had eased their depression. Porter Robinson, the similarly pop-minded American producer, started spinning her tracks between sets. In 2022, a demo that she’d sent to the 1975 became the basis for the band’s song “Happiness.”
Since then, Sabrina has remained semi-anonymous and cooking. She dropped two albums on the same day in 2021: the darker, more industrial The Other Realm, and a sequel to Makin’ Magick. 2022’s Bewitched, which sounds crafted by a plucky teen cyborg, further established her signature sound. Instead of taking wider attention as a cue to package her output for ease of mass consumption, Sabrina has pushed its limits: Why not dabble in witch house while also taking inspiration from The Marshall Mathers LP 2? Why not rerelease each new project in a “singles” edition—which presents individual tracks rather than a continuous mix—and encourage fans to exploit the structural and stylistic flexibility of playlisting?
That eagerness to experiment with form is abundantly evident in the vast medley of genres Sabrina incorporates into Destiny: smooth jazz, 2010s EDM, country, crunk. Standout “Invincible (Something to Hold on To)” blends clanging synths and vocoder samples into a dreamy, menacing club thumper that brings an electric tingle to Destiny’s sometimes impenetrable-seeming digital sheen. You like “In the Air Tonight”? Sabrina does too, and proudly alerts us by letting loose a waterfall of Phil Collins-inspired drums near the end of “Vibrations.” Even the bouncy rock-rap on “For Now and Forever” works, indicating the generous breadth of Sabrina’s internal playlist of raw material. In her universe, Prince and Barenaked Ladies are both permitted to rock.
The album’s various vocal samples are subplots of a story painted in the hues of all Sabrina’s favorite jams. Before these voices disappear into cascades of synth or saxophone, they serve up glimpses of bittersweet, often sanguine scenes that feel plucked from a ’00s weeknight slot on the late CW network: choosing to bet on long-distance love, pushing through “nights that end in heartache,” taking on the vulnerable work of “figuring it out.” Like conversations overheard outside the uncanny valley’s hottest club, personal dramas sharpen into view and then fade, a blurry but poignant cinema of everyday life.
The word “nostalgia” has often been used to pinpoint the effect of Sabrina’s evocative blends. But her varied influences—from the obvious (The Avalanches, Daft Punk, ABBA) to the less so (Bon Iver, Reba McEntire)—and surreal imagery don’t reflect a wistfulness exclusive to any particular decade or scene. Less than a sense of time, Sabrina’s nostalgia revels in the word’s emotional connotations: the ambient sense of sadness that is the grand condition of experiencing joy. She understands profoundly that sometimes the best party is just the first one in a while that’s truly fun.
This nostalgia associated with no one time or place is the fulcrum of Destiny, the achievement that earns the album its spot in the “crying on the dancefloor” bracket. In Sabrina’s amorphous, melodramatic world, compositions unfold like sunsets, vivid and impermanent—even a four-hour album doesn’t last forever. Daunting as its length may appear, Destiny is less an Odyssey than a “most romantic moments” YouTube compilation: easy to dip in and out of, because the payoffs just keep coming. Let it wash over you, and Destiny conjures a rare kind of immediate, cup-filling catharsis. | 2023-09-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Spells on the Telly | September 20, 2023 | 7.9 | 1888ce49-41c5-4cf1-af47-46c2fd5569a7 | Hattie Lindert | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hattie-lindert/ | |
Mixing a deep knowledge of regional folk traditions with a delight in modern composition, the banjo player and his exploratory new trio are delightfully suspended between earth and outer space | Mixing a deep knowledge of regional folk traditions with a delight in modern composition, the banjo player and his exploratory new trio are delightfully suspended between earth and outer space | Nathan Bowles: Plainly Mistaken | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nathan-bowles-plainly-mistaken/ | Plainly Mistaken | The daring banjo player and singer Nathan Bowles opens his fourth album with a cover of “Now If You Remember,” written by the seven-year-old Jessica Constable and first recorded 40 years ago by popstar-turned-folkie Julie Tippetts. It’s an interlude on Tippetts’ Sunset Glow, but for Bowles, it is an overture, almost like a last-week-on recap that runs before your favorite TV show. “Now if you remember, we were talking about God and you,” Bowles sings in a hushed monotone, his words buttressed by a prismatic riff split by piano and banjo. The cover slyly summarizes his first three albums in order to prepare us for Plainly Mistaken’s departure while reframing his catalog (and maybe even a century of American roots music?): God and you might just be the true subjects of every folk song that Bowles or anyone else has ever played.
Though Plainly Mistaken is rooted in specific musical traditions, these nine songs are deeply irreverent toward those traditions, too. As a banjo player, Bowles eschews the rocket-fueled runs of bluegrass players like Earl Scruggs in favor of a modified clawhammer technique that stylistically and spiritually pulls from the likes of John Fahey and Billy Faier. Rather than pluck and strum, Bowles hammers and pounds. The banjo is “a drum with strings on it. I tend to play everything percussively,” as he told Bandcamp. (Bowles has long played drums for Steve Gunn.) That’s most evident on romps like “Elk River Blues” (originally by West Virginia fiddler Ernie Carpenter) and the Bowles original “Fresh & Fairly So,” both of which move with the loping energy of a walk down a deserted gravel road.
That’s due in part to the rhythm section of Bowles’ new trio, featuring drummer Rex McMurry of Cave and bassist Casey Toll of Mount Moriah. Loose and versatile, more interested in breaking the songs down rather than keeping time, they constantly reshape and reshade Bowles’ banjo themes. They lend a rambling fervor to the winding “The Road Reversed,” as though the point of the trip were to get lost. Similarly, they infuse the bluegrass staple “Ruby” with loopy abandon, pushing Bowles to sing and play at an ever-faster gait. Based closely on the Silver Apples’ 1969 rendering of the tune, this performance sounds like it might disintegrate at any moment. Bowles seems to relish in the danger, that sense he might faceplant on his own record.
As that moment makes clear, Bowles draws just as much inspiration from avant-garde composers like Harry Partch and Terry Riley as he does from folk artists. He favors the natural drone of the banjo, the sustain of the notes over that drumhead, which he supplements with bowed cymbal and bowed bass. (Bowles also plays in the Black Twig Pickers and Pelt, bands that respectively honor old-time music and then smear it into infinite acoustic drone.) “In Kind II” sets those various hums against each other in a kind of narcotic dissonance. “Umbra” begins with Bowles slowly picking a stargazing banjo theme, then doubling and tripling it with peculiar mutations—one steady in its repetition, another that bends the notes as though Bowles were playing a sitar. The effect is quietly meditative, a bit of calm between two upbeat tracks, but there’s something slightly mysterious under the surface, as though you’re watching him astral-project.
Bowles is not the first to bridge the traditions of folk and avant garde; in fact, bridging them has become its own tradition, especially among fellow North Carolina musicians like House and Land, Jake Xerxes Fussell, and the late Megafaun. But there is something thrilling about the way Bowles lays them side by side, approaching regional folk idioms with the same curiosity he applies to contemporary composition. That pursuit allows Bowles to wring an array of sounds from his banjo, to use it as a means of getting closer to God and you. The result is his best album to date—his most mystical and earthbound, all at once. | 2018-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | October 9, 2018 | 7.7 | 188c3492-c4fe-447c-a61e-35ca5b3de1bf | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The sophomore album from indie-rock traditionalists Speedy Ortiz is more ferocious and visceral than their debut, with leader Sadie Dupuis honing her talent for turning her sour experiences into anthems about clawing your way out of self-doubt. | The sophomore album from indie-rock traditionalists Speedy Ortiz is more ferocious and visceral than their debut, with leader Sadie Dupuis honing her talent for turning her sour experiences into anthems about clawing your way out of self-doubt. | Speedy Ortiz: Foil Deer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20351-foil-deer/ | Foil Deer | On Speedy Ortiz’s 2013 debut Major Arcana, Sadie Dupuis crafted her barbed-wire wordplay into wounded callouts of those who had hurt her. Now, she's wielding it like a weapon. Foil Deer, the Massachusetts indie rock traditionalists' sophomore full-length, opens with Dupuis noting on "Good Neck" that she's good with a knife and she knows when to use it. She takes a lap around the block to cool down—like all good bosses should—before coming back with a world-beating declaration of autonomy on “Raising the Skate”: “I'm chief, not the overthrown/ Captain, not a crony/So if you wanna row, you better have an awfully big boat.”
With Foil Deer, Dupuis doesn't scold; she warns. The album is ferocious and visceral, the lyrics gleaming with threats involving sharp blades both literal and figurative ("Don't ever touch my blade, you fool/ You'll be cursed for a lifetime," she taunts knowingly on "Dot X"). As Dupuis grows more self-possessed, she and her bandmates veer into their most ambitious compositions to date. Knotty melodies shift gears in an instant, giving Foil Deer a jumpy, enthralling energy. God bless ‘em, Speedy believe that every song ideally should have three or four musical ideas.
For its first 47 seconds, "Zig" scans like vintage folk-pop until the song abruptly steers into a thorny chunk of dissonance led by Dupuis’ contrasting falsetto. A minute passes and it sounds like yet another song—a much more melodic thing this time—before a nightmarish jumble of riffs and cymbals grinds the pace to a halt. A defeated Dupuis wonders aloud "How many laps does it take to decide you’re back at the start?" as she and her bandmates double back on the the song’s original theme. It’s a clever construction, representing just how much thought went into crafting each of these songs.
In Speedy Ortiz, both the music and lyrics work overtime, bringing a surplus of conflicting ideas to the table that they somehow manage to cram into tight spaces. The magic is that they never sound overworked, and in fact when they go more straighforward—"Puffer", for instance, in which they try the pleather sleaze of '90s industrial rock on for size—it feels like not quite enough by comparison. Despite its clever kiss-offs ("Take me off your list or elect a lobotomy"), the chipper pop-punk of "Swell Content" would have sufficed on last year’s Real Hair EP, but here it feels like filler. It goes to show that the members of Speedy Ortiz can barely keep up with their own progress.
Dupuis, a recent MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Amherst, is among the most talented lyricists of her musical class. She writes vivid-yet-mysterious scenes that require interpretive work on the listeners' behalf—such as "My Dead Girl", a cryptic tale about living fast and risking becoming a missing face on a milk carton. But Dupuis’ greatest strength as a lyricist is her ability to turn her sour experiences into anthems about clawing back from self-doubt. On Foil Deer, Dupuis makes standing up for yourself—in the face of double standards, struggles with addiction, and the general carelessness of youth—sound like a no-brainer, but she also never tries to hide how complicated everything can be. As the band continues to evolve around and with her, Speedy Ortiz’s music finally sounds as complex as its leader dares to be. | 2015-04-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Carpark | April 20, 2015 | 7.9 | 188c7626-a289-4fe4-baef-6c0ba4b08a52 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
With pianist Johan Lindvall and cellist Judith Hamann, saxophonist and composer Mette Henriette presents hushed, repetitive meditations unbounded by the pressures of time. | With pianist Johan Lindvall and cellist Judith Hamann, saxophonist and composer Mette Henriette presents hushed, repetitive meditations unbounded by the pressures of time. | Mette Henriette: Drifting | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mette-henriette-drifting/ | Drifting | In the eight years since her debut album, saxophonist and composer Mette Henriette has kept busy: She’s held residencies at Southbank Centre and Edvard Munch’s Ekely, performed at the opening night of the Berlin Jazz Festival, been commissioned by the Oslo Philharmonic and Cikada, and collaborated with conceptual artist Marina Abramović. Now, with her second LP, Drifting, the Sámi-Norwegian musician introduces a new degree of subtlety and serendipity to her work.
Henriette’s debut was expansive, spanning 35 tracks with the help of a 13-person ensemble. Drifting is also structured around short vignettes interspersed with longer pieces, but this time there are just 15 songs, and the lineup has shrunk to a trio. Stripping down her approach imparts a greater sense of intimacy. Each musician in this group—Johan Lindvall on piano, Judith Hamann on cello, and Henriette herself on saxophone—seems to have a distinct purpose, yet their playing is uniformly soft, lyrical, and emotionally resonant. Recorded at the Munch Museum in Oslo and produced by ECM founder Manfred Eicher, Drifting feels self-contained, yet unbounded by the pressures of time.
A grounded, meditative air pervades the music, despite its improvisatory character. Lindvall’s playing is central to this temperament: In most tracks, he lays down a simple repeated motif, either melodic or rhythmic, which Henriette and Hamann punctuate with saxophone and cello. His stable anchor provides the security that allows the other two players to wander. In “Across the Floor,” Lindvall’s chords establish a slow, somber waltz as Hamann bows longing strokes and Henriette’s saxophone twirls capriciously. The piece conjures an image of two bodies swaying together—one with deliberate movements, the other with whimsy—to the pulse of a piano sitting in the corner of a dusty dance studio.
Henriette continues to show an interest in pushing instruments past their usual roles, using extended techniques to add unexpected sounds and textures. In the barren interlude “0°,” she manipulates the air of the saxophone to create the effect of a cool, hollow wind, as though she had recorded in a walk-in freezer. This palette carries over into “Solsnu,” which adds ornaments of crackling wood from the cello, complemented by grave, patient piano figures that go in and out of unison with the sax, as though the two were passing trains.
Drifting invites the curious sense that time has paused. But there are instances in which repetition threatens to become monotonous, and music feels stuck in its own cyclicality. For over half of the six-plus minutes of “Oversoar,” dissonant piano reiterates hiccupping outbursts over droning cello; the whirling piano figures of “I villvind” are reminiscent of passages in Debussy’s “Voiles,” but their relentlessness grows tiresome. Even in the album’s comparatively stagnant moments, though, Henriette’s musical curiosity remains evident. There is a certain comfort to be found in the passive energy of the album, which subtly unfolds according to its own timekeeping. It’s clear that Henriette’s pieces ask not for attention—merely patience and an open mind. | 2023-01-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Experimental | ECM | January 24, 2023 | 7.1 | 188d978c-d04e-410e-89d2-9c923174e9d5 | Jane Bua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jane-bua/ | |
Björk's fifth post-Sugarcubes solo studio album is constructed almost entirely from vocals, including multitracked voices (courtesy Björk herself, Mike Patton, and singer/songwriter Robert Wyatt), plenty of beatboxing (from Rahzel and Dokaka), and various other mouth-sounds. It's an outrageous conceit from Iceland's most notorious experimental export, and a huge risk for her career after the relatively conventional, diehard-pleasing Vespertine. | Björk's fifth post-Sugarcubes solo studio album is constructed almost entirely from vocals, including multitracked voices (courtesy Björk herself, Mike Patton, and singer/songwriter Robert Wyatt), plenty of beatboxing (from Rahzel and Dokaka), and various other mouth-sounds. It's an outrageous conceit from Iceland's most notorious experimental export, and a huge risk for her career after the relatively conventional, diehard-pleasing Vespertine. | Björk: Medulla | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/737-medulla/ | Medulla | The Artist takes her point of view for granted, to the extent that she annoys or confounds anyone caught up in chasing the "truth." Or, she fascinates us in the same way we're drawn to religious and other mystical figures. Yet, despite the cultural roles of artists as spiritual alchemists and conduits to where all of our trials and errors are given spectacular treatments and endearing portraits, we balk when they appear to have indulged themselves. Why is this? I understand that indulgence is supposed to be a sin, a crime against humanity and nature, but artists are among the very few whose responsibility for discovery supercedes an obligation to personal restraint. After all, don't they usually pay for this by existing in a perpetually tortured state? Most artists toil in obscurity, driven by nothing more than a vague compulsion to "create," so self-indulgence is the least I can grant them in exchange for a few bits of divinity.
And then there's Björk. She seems pretty indulgent, and despite the enigmatic, moderately antisocial persona, I've never quite understood why I called her an artist. As artistic qualifiers go, eccentricity is beyond superficial; it's downright misleading in most cases, and no matter the number of interesting musical concepts with which she aligns herself, I always figured "real" artists had to deliver a few concrete answers now and then. Answers, if not about my world, then about Björk's. I watched her sing "Oceania" (the first single from Medulla, though don’t try buying it, it's not for sale-- the artist strikes again!) at the Olympics, and it occurred to me that beyond the usual promotional gears at work, somebody must really feel she's important. They could have had anyone-- say, a reassuring Celine Dion or a physically ideal Beyonce-- but they chose a prickly, decidedly uncomfortable Icelandic woman. On aesthetic grounds, I can't argue with their choice, but I continue to wonder about Björk's significance.
Medulla suggests that if she is artistically important-- and I should preface all of this by stating I don't normally evaluate music or musicians based on my perception of their "importance"; Björk simply makes it difficult to do otherwise-- it's as a small scale model of the same individualist, mundane obsessions that dominate popular culture. Just as television networks bank on our interest in reality, Björk's emotional impact seems dependent on one's fascination with her. Medulla (her fifth album, and first since 2001's imperfect, introspective Vespertine) presents no set of ideas more compelling than those concerning its creator, her whims and impressions. That it's her a cappella record is just an interesting bonus, as it's no more or less "her" than any of her records.
Ironically, the sound of Björk "getting to the essence" of herself is more dependent on outside musicians than usual. In addition to producing collaborators Mark Bell, Matmos and Mark "Spike" Stent, Björk enlists the vocal talents of The Roots' Rahzel, Japanese beat-boxing wonder Dokaka, American freak-patron Mike Patton and English progressive pop icon Robert Wyatt, among others. Medulla is the result of concentrated efforts on behalf of the best and brightest Björk could round up, and in the spirit of her symbolic godfather Miles Davis, betrays her knack for using talent to her best advantage. Use of the human voice on this album will get the headlines, but the bulk of the story is rote Björk.
That said, Medulla is her most musically adventurous record since Post. "Where Is the Line?", featuring Patton's growl, an eerie choral arrangement and ingenious, jackhammer rhythm track powered by Rahzel and edited by Bell. Björk's melody doesn't seem particularly interesting until you try to follow along amidst the cut-up beats and falling, wailing choral voices. The machine-gun-precise percussive hits, accentuated by Patton's bullfrog squelch, hit harder than anything she's done since "Army of Me". "Pleasure Is All Mine" begins as seductive, wordless call and panting, before melting into lush, gorgeously arranged harmonies and Björk's dream-noir melody. She uses Patton's lower register to flesh out the arrangement, and her own singing is as powerfully resonant as anything I've heard from her. Throughout the album, Björk's commitment to bringing out the strength of her melodies, despite considerable opportunity to get lost in the wall of sound, is admirable and the mark of someone who understands the importance of serving her songs.
"Oceania" has been marketed as the "radio single," though with its bizarre, swooping soprano lines and cyclical chord progression outlined by a chorus of Wyatt vocal samples, is hardly the most obvious choice to sell Medulla. I'd have chosen the considerably more upbeat "Who Is It", which reminds me of "Alarm Call" from Homogenic in the way it applies Björk's idiosyncratic performances to a traditionally pleasant sounding template-- though "Who Is It" features a much more interesting chord progression during the verses, and an altogether incredible rhythm track, again provided by Rahzel. The only other song on the record that might conceivably work on the radio (sans remix) is the house-y closer "Triumph of a Heart", featuring Dokaka's mouth percussion.
The more atmospheric songs on Medulla are arguably its most evocative and powerful. "Vokuro" (or "Vigil") is one of two songs sung in Björk's native Icelandic, and is in fact an adaptation of a piano piece by Jorunn Vidar. Björk sings its plaintive strains accompanied by a solemn choir, and brings out its inherently hymn-like qualities. Wyatt overwhelms "Submarine" with his ghostly, striking vocals, thickly layered and overdubbed. Björk doesn't even enter with the melody for almost a minute-and-a-half, by which time Wyatt has already made his redoubtable mark. Not to be outdone, Björk's collage of sighs, whispers, cries and otherwise indescribable sounds on "Ancestors" might scare fans accustomed to a steady diet of actual songs. It reminds me of the work of American experimental vocalist and composer Meredith Monk (Björk has performed her "Gotham Lullaby" in concert several times), though some folks may just hear it as the "unlistenable" song on Medulla.
Medulla is an interesting record. It continues Björk's run of releases that sound nothing like their predecessors, yet is, as ever, particular to her. Furthermore, she's found a way to bathe her immediately distinctive melodies and vocal nuances in a solutions that cause me to reevaluate her voice and her craft. I shouldn't be surprised: She's made a career of making me interested in her world of sound. And that she doesn't appear to be short on ideas 25 years into her professional career should end all speculation. | 2004-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Elektra | August 30, 2004 | 8.4 | 188e3d20-d234-4f7d-a182-6775875740f0 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
On their latest EP, the misanthropic British duo Sleaford Mods allow some air into their sound and frontman Jason Williamson turns some of his acrid tirades towards himself. | On their latest EP, the misanthropic British duo Sleaford Mods allow some air into their sound and frontman Jason Williamson turns some of his acrid tirades towards himself. | Sleaford Mods: T.C.R. EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22529-tcr-ep/ | T.C.R. EP | Like Britain's answer to the late Wesley Willis, Sleaford Mods essentially adhere to one single-minded aesthetic and wring it for every last drop. In fact, frontman Jason Williamson's rants, torrential profanity, and insistent use of song titles as choruses all echo Willis. Ditto for Andrew Fearn's skeletal loops, which recall Willis' trademark use of crude Casiotone presets as background music.
However, Willis's mental illness tinged his music with uncomfortable hints of exploitation, where you can laugh at the Mods guilt-free: When they perform live, Fearn resigns himself to the role of stageprop, affecting stony nonchalance as he bops awkwardly, beer in hand, barely touching his laptop, almost as if to communicate that his presence isn't necessary. That couldn't be further from the truth, evinced perhaps more than ever on the new five-song EP T.C.R..
Since Fearn joined in time to construct the backing tracks for Sleaford Mods' fifth album, 2012's Wank, he's structured the songs so that each has but one part. Fearn throws in extra touches here and there to accent certain lyrics and create buildup, but the songs don't actually change. Williamson, meanwhile, has basically relied on one phrasing method all along: rapid-fire tirades depicting the most drearily mundane aspects of English life. The combined effect can give the impression that Sleaford Mods are little more than boneheaded street-corner provocateurs relying on shock, vulgarity, and name-calling.
Sleaford Mods actually stretch a bit for the first four of the five songs on T.C.R. After eight full-lengths and a handful of EPs, they are finally allowing their music to breathe somewhat. Not that Fearn has radically altered his formula, but the surprisingly upbeat synth figure and (relative) fullness of the arrangement on opening track “TCR” suggest that they are at least searching for new ways to color their songs. Throughout the EP, in fact, Fearn wears his new wave and post-punk influences on his sleeve, echoing the likes of Devo, the Fall, and others while managing to sound startlingly contemporary. Williamson once again comes to the table with a parade of people he deems worthy of hurling obscenities at. "Go and listen to some fuckin' garage punk, you pointy little tit!" he shouts at some poor soul on title track “TCR.” We've heard this before from Williamson, but he's still adept at balancing bite with humor and genuine observation.
Most shockingly, though, Williamson allows naked self-doubt to creep into the picture right off the bat, dedicating the very first verse to the twin pressures of parenthood and aging. His depiction of a father who feels harried at home and wants to go out, only to feel out of place once he gets there, verges on touching. “The wails of ya offspring behind ya cracking window,” he says, his spoken word delivery significantly slowed down, more weary than agitated. “It's hard, innit? When you plan to do something but at that moment you realize it's not quite right, not really something you should be doing tonight.” (The title “T.C.R.” is a reference to Total Control Racing, a failed brand of 1970s toy-car track sets, a reference Williamson makes as a metaphor for spinning one's wheels.)
As usual, Williamson contorts rapping and Beat poetry just enough to fit into neither category. And, like before, hearing him take-in huge gulps of air between verses in a dizzying flow of disconnected images and references is thrilling whether you understand the social context for them or not. And the gag still hasn't worn thin when Williamson double-tracks incredulous lines like “You're taking the fuckin' piss out of me, man?” In spots, Williamson even nods to his past life as a quote-unquote singer. But after directors Paul Sng and Nathan Hannawin positioned Sleaford Mods as the most vital voice of Brexit-bound England in their 2015 film Invisible Britain, T.C.R.'s lack of discernible commentary on the street-level impact of the Brexit vote is puzzling (especially now that Morrissey has weighed in).
Nevertheless, Williamson's shift towards looking at his own life rescues him from becoming the type of self-righteous caricature he might himself have railed on. When you slag on everything and view the world with nothing but disdain, it's inevitable that you're going to back yourself into a corner. As a result, it’s a welcome change even when Williamson resorts to the well-trodden path of bitching about touring life on “Dad's Corner.” And, though hearing him attack other people is still delicious fun—especially when he's got figures like Oasis in his crosshairs—it was only a matter of time before someone came along and pointed the finger back at him. On T.C.R., Williamson beats everyone to the punch.
A teaser of sorts for a full-length the band has planned for next year, T.C.R. doesn't contain anything as infectiously catchy—or even irreverent—as “Jobseeker,” “Mr. Jolly Fucker,” or “14 Day Court.” Still, the gurgling dark funk of “Dad's Corner,” the speedy dub groove of “Britain Thirst,” and other subtle signs of progress bode well for the future. And while T.C.R. raises questions about the energy level Fearn and Williamson will be able to sustain over a full-length album with a more tentative attack, even more than previous work it makes their artfulness hard to overlook.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review misidentified Jason Williamson as James Williamson in one instance. | 2016-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | October 26, 2016 | 6.7 | 18917cc6-5d6f-434f-8aea-d477ecde1665 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
In Colour, Jamie xx’s full-length solo debut, is the dazzling culmination of his last six years. On it, he gathers up elements of everything he’s done—moody ballads, floor-filling bangers, expansive and off-kilter collaborations with vocalists—and packs them tightly in a glittering ball that reflects fragments of feeling back at us. | In Colour, Jamie xx’s full-length solo debut, is the dazzling culmination of his last six years. On it, he gathers up elements of everything he’s done—moody ballads, floor-filling bangers, expansive and off-kilter collaborations with vocalists—and packs them tightly in a glittering ball that reflects fragments of feeling back at us. | Jamie xx: In Colour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20458-in-colour/ | In Colour | The sampler is a memory machine. This is true in both the literal sense—memory is one of the device’s key specs, measuring how much sonic information it can hold in its “mind” at once—but also as a metaphor. When you capture and play back a sound, transposing it to a new context, you are “playing” the memories that have attached themselves to the original piece of music as much as you are playing a particular piece of sound. The producer Jamie Smith, better known to the world as Jamie xx, is a sampling artist and a memory artist. He does things with the music he’s absorbed and with the associations that are embedded within it. So when we listen to his music, we aren’t just listening to music played by people in a room. We’re listening to his listening and hearing his hearing; he senses memories in certain sounds—some of which he was there to experience the first time, some of which have been handed down to him—and transforms them into something new and personal.
In Colour, Jamie xx’s full-length solo debut, has been a rumor for a few years now. In 2011, he followed his remix collaboration with Gil Scott-Heron, We’re New Here, with his debut single, “Far Nearer.” It was strikingly different from his work with the xx and, hearing it, it was possible to triangulate and imagine the broader and more varied sensibility that served as an umbrella over both. The emergence of Jamie xx as a producer’s voice is part of what made the xx’s follow-up, Coexist, disappointing. It’s a decent record, but once we had a better sense of Jamie xx’s range, it was hard to square that knowledge with the narrow aesthetic parameters of his main band, lovely as their music could be. All along, this one was coming together. One of the great things about him is he works slow and gets everything just so, treating each project as the one chance to get it right. In Colour gets there: It’s the dazzling culmination of Jamie xx’s last six years of work, gathering up elements of everything he’s done—moody ballads, floor-filling bangers, expansive and off-kilter collaborations with vocalists—and packing them tightly into a glittering ball that reflects spinning fragments of feeling back at us.
A key idea embedded in the notion of rave is it had something for everyone. Though rave was at one point very fashionable, it was also, early on and at its best, egalitarian. The platonic ideal of the dancefloor, which is obviously never quite fulfilled, is that the dancers meet as equals. Everyone is on their own journey and there is no judgement, and the right drugs at the right time have helped to bring this starry-eyed vision to life. Jamie xx’s music captures some of this spirit by being terribly hip and of-the-moment but also deeply emotional. It’s “cool” music designed to make you feel, and the mechanism is vulnerability.
There are passages on In Colour where the music is huge and anthemic while being simultaneously open and intimate. Opening track “Gosh” is the table-setter. It builds, one loop upon the next, each new brick of groove slotting into place, until it becomes a sky-scraping edifice whose call-to-motion is impossible to resist. And then, just as the last tightly-bound fixture is put into place, there comes a squelchy, slightly awkward synthesizer solo that sounds like it was knocked off in one hurried take by someone who approaches the instrument with the excitement of a newcomer. When the keyboard falls in, which is still exciting and surprising after many dozens of plays, it’s as if our tower of sound is suddenly crowned by a massive cluster of balloons that lifts it into the sky, Up style.
The view from this vantage point never flags. “Sleep Sound” takes a sample of the Four Freshmen’s “It’s a Blue World” and gently cuts it into pieces, the voice tumbling through time in a manner not unlike what the Field’s Axel Willner did to the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You,” but the whole thing is filtered and submerged, a dream of water that’s soothing even as it hints of drowning. “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)” features rapper Young Thug and dancehall vocalist Popcaan and while the combination of the three was iffy on paper, they wind up clicking. Thug is bursting with joy as he delivers profane couplets in his sing-song cadence, and Popcaan grounds the music and forms a bridge to the ragga of Jamie xx’s jungle heroes. As the album moves on, Jamie xx moves through styles and textures, everything unified by his highly attuned ear.
Three tunes find Jamie xx collaborating with his bandmates, and, like “Good Times,” they show how well he straddles the line between “song” and “track.” “Stranger in a Room,” featuring Oliver Sim, could be a (very good) xx song and is the only thing here that seems like it could have come from the band. Romy’s melody on “SeeSaw” is all hushed confession mixed with longing, but instead of spare guitar and drums, Jamie xx surrounds it with breakbeats and a pulsing synth that suggests the cosmos, merging the closest possible feelings with the vastness of the infinite. “Loud Places,” making brilliant use of a sample of jazz drummer Idris Muhammad’s “Could Heaven Ever Be Like This,” is a song of contrast in the manner of “SeeSaw.” But the sample on “Loud Places” is warmer and more inclusive, and it’s followed by a brilliantly simple lyric about club-going loneliness and desire that might make Morrissey jealous: “I go to loud places/To search for someone/To be quiet with.”
That clash of feeling, of being overwhelmed by everything at once while also wanting to zoom in on and live inside the tiniest detail, is the animating force of In Colour. Late in the album, the rush comes to a head on “The Rest Is Noise,” a track that functions as the flipside to “Gosh,” the party turned inside out, as shouting abandon gives way to a huge wash of yearning. There’s even a small nod to “Gosh”’s synth break as the album seems to return from where it started. It makes me think of a comment from Jamie xx regarding one of the record’s most modest tracks, “Obvs,” which is is driven by a steel drum lead. Jamie xx is fascinated by the instrument and has returned to it regularly, describing its appeal like this: “You can make it sound quite melancholy… but at the same time, it reminds me of paradise.” It’s not a bad description of how In Colour works. It’s the album as raucous party where the thrill of the moment never quite obliterates the wistful sadness that comes from knowing it will all end too soon. | 2015-06-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-06-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Young Turks | June 1, 2015 | 9.3 | 1893d001-5849-46d6-ad67-000ee680bb8c | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
Ash & Ice is The Kills’ first album in five years and they encompass everything they’ve done before, as well as bringing in boombox beats with Brazilian and Afro-pop influences. | Ash & Ice is The Kills’ first album in five years and they encompass everything they’ve done before, as well as bringing in boombox beats with Brazilian and Afro-pop influences. | The Kills: Ash & Ice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21962-ash-ice/ | Ash & Ice | When the Kills first emerged, Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince had a fire-and-water dynamic. Pitting her howls against his dead-cool guitar damage, the duo were like elemental forces locked in a symbiotic relationship of mutually assured destruction. Now, 15 years and five albums later, they’ve become Ash & Ice—refined byproducts of their original state, sapped of their frisson. When water hits fire, there’s sizzle and struggle and wreckage. When ash hits ice… well, you just wind up with a somewhat dirty piece of ice. And so it goes with this monolithic record, whose surface soot can’t disguise the fact it’s a little too chilled for its own good.
Since their delightfully deviant debut Keep on Your Mean Side, The Kills have managed to squeeze a lot of juice from their bare-bones blues roots. Sophomore album No Wow delivered a pop punch, Midnight Boom saw them go electro, Blood Pressures dabbled in dub and pastoral balladry. Ash & Ice is The Kills’ first album in five years—a delay partly attributed to chronic tendon problems Hince experienced after breaking a finger. And, as if making up for lost time, they’ve returned with an ambitious record that encompasses everything they’ve done before and further embellishes their boombox beats with Brazilian and Afro-pop influences. Clocking in at 50 minutes, it is by far the longest Kills album to date. But while Ash & Ice has the girth of a big statement record, it lacks the focus and purposeful sequencing of one.
The issue with Ash & Ice isn’t that The Kills are slowing down or going soft—the quietest tracks here actually resonate the most soundly. “Hum for Your Buzz” is a stripped-down gospelized serenade complete with organ drones and a steeple-shaking lead vocal from Mosshart—that’s destined to become a crowd-pleasing encore standard in the band’s setlist. By contrast, “That Love” is an affectingly unvarnished piano confessional that evokes the raw simplicity and bald lyricism of Plastic Ono Band-era John Lennon, while “Echo Home” is a gorgeously sullen duet whose slow-percolating dream-pop atmospherics and tick-tock beat mirror the doomed, dissolving romance playing out in the lyrics. For a band that once carefully cultivated its mystique through mugshot-style photos, mysterious aliases and sunglassed aloofness, The Kills have become remarkably adept at telegraphing intimacy and vulnerability. And with Hince's finger injury forcing him to rethink his slash-and-scrape guitar technique, his playing on these downcast songs displays a heretofore-untapped delicacy and sensitivity.
However, Ash & Ice is an album of quality comedown tracks surrounded by run-of-the-mill rockers that plateau instead of peak. It’s curious, since that the album actually boasts some of the band’s most candid and crushing lyrics to date—from the leash-fastening commitment pledge of “Heart of a Dog” (“I want strings attached/unnatural as that feels/I’m loyal!”) to the tawdry teases on “Siberian Nights” (“I could make you cum in threes/I’m halfway to my knees”) that are soon revealed to be the desperate entreaties of someone scared of enduring another night alone. (And according to Hince, that someone could very well be Vladimir Putin.) But the music rarely matches the feverish energy of those words, with the opening mid-tempo march of “Doing It to Death” setting a sluggish pace for the record that’s only compounded by the serviceable Stonesy struts (“Bitter Fruit,” “Black Tar”), drum-machined dirges (“Days of Why and How”), and deconstructed, broken-beat pop (“Let It Drop”). And the precious few shots of momentum—like the gritty glam of “Impossible Tracks” and the Primal Scream-like motorik throb of “Whirling Eye”—slam on the brakes just as they’re about achieve lift-off, or rein in Hince’s ray-gunned guitar blasts right when he’s on the verge of entering berserker mode (“Hard Habit to Break”).
The Kills enjoy a rarefied status in 2016. As one of the few active acts from the early-'00s garage-rock explosion, they’ve transcended their early standing as an MTV2-friendly version of Royal Trux to become icons in their own right for a new generation of transgressive rockers. But Ash & Ice betrays the challenge of sustaining fresh inspiration deep into your second decade. The blues may have brought Mosshart and Hince together, but Ash & Ice too readily embodies one of the genre’s favored tropes—the struggle to keep on keepin’ on. | 2016-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | June 7, 2016 | 6.2 | 18951139-cf0b-4db4-932b-5bf3675f07ac | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Downtown NYC fixture's first album in a decade is an exquisite state-of-the-union dispatch from a darkly comic conscience. | The Downtown NYC fixture's first album in a decade is an exquisite state-of-the-union dispatch from a darkly comic conscience. | Laurie Anderson: Homeland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14317-homeland/ | Homeland | Laurie Anderson's 40-year career bucks classification, incorporating performance art, music, spoken word, video, and more. To mention John Zorn, Lou Reed, and Philip Glass only glosses her collaborations with the American avant-garde. She's also crossed over in interesting and unexpected ways, whether voicing a singing tot in The Rugrats Movie*,* or hitting #2 on the 1981 UK Singles Chart with "O Superman (For Massenet)", a doomsday anthem combining the vocoder with an aria from Le Cid. That angelic, robotic voice is often reprised on Homeland, her first new album in a decade, which fans will welcome as an heir to her definitive performance piece, United States. It's also a perfect starting point; an exquisite state-of-the-union dispatch as only Anderson, America's darkly comic conscience, can provide.
A songful yet distressed Neo-Romantic mode anchors forays into techno, jazz, drone, and minimal electronics. Top-notch guests like Zorn, Antony, and Kieran Hebden add their unique perspectives to Anderson's probing keyboards and violins. The music is spacious, mercurial, and thoroughly conceived. Anderson's vocals hover between speech and song, polemics and poetry, apocalyptic and redemptive fervors. And that's as far as generalizations will go. Homeland teems with the same variety and sprit as the U.S. itself.
These songs have been developing live for years, so naturally, Iraq and Wall Street loom large. The persistence of those quandaries makes the material feel timely, even oracular, a quality for which Anderson is known. "O Superman" gained fresh attention after 9-11 for its images of American planes drawing ominously nearer. (On a lighter note, its vocals predicted everything from Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek" to the ongoing Auto-Tune craze.) She's still broadcasting from the day after tomorrow. The organic house track "Only an Expert" schematically details the hubris of authorities who consolidate power by creating problems only they can solve. Had the album been delayed a little longer, a verse about the BP oil leak would have fit perfectly alongside the global warming controversy and the banking bailout.
"Only an Expert" makes a pervasive, subtle theme momentarily explicit: How shared illusions about security and plenitude perpetuate a predictable cycle of cultural, environmental, and existential crises. But this threatens to make the album sound punitive, when somehow, Anderson's wrath feels compassionate. As "Falling" would have it, "Americans, unrooted, blow with the wind/ But they feel the truth if it touches them." It's confrontational and beautiful, the grim tidings leavened with empathetic portraiture. "Transitory Life" is haunting and cunningly crafted. When Anderson sings that her dead grandmother "made herself a bed inside my ear/ Every night I hear," the Tuvan throat singer from the song's intro reappears, the formless cries suddenly given a narrative role.
But the epic "Another Day in America" is the album's huge, dark heart. Anderson's voice is pitched down and slowed-- she becomes her character on the cover, a slapstick figure of male authority-- over lingering strings and keyboards. The oration is a vortex of visionary proclamations, pointed fables, downbeat jokes. It makes palpable not only all the pathos and superstition of the American psyche, but the weight of time passing away-- another diminishing resource. Every malfunction of the status quo, Anderson implies, is a chance to start over, instead of rushing to rebuild what always breaks down. Her pessimism might not be comforting, but as oil continues to poison the Gulf of Mexico, it feels awfully prescient. | 2010-06-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-06-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Nonesuch | June 21, 2010 | 8.3 | 1895a504-d660-41c4-9240-77570228f22e | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The experimental ambient musician's latest work is his most beatific and generous yet. It features a rotating cast of musicians, and feels like it is hovering off of the ground. | The experimental ambient musician's latest work is his most beatific and generous yet. It features a rotating cast of musicians, and feels like it is hovering off of the ground. | Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: Tracing Back the Radiance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jefre-cantu-ledesma-tracing-back-the-radiance/ | Tracing Back the Radiance | In the current gig economy, the job of “musician” feels more transitory and short-lived than ever. So it should come as no surprise that an experimental artist like Jefre Cantu-Ledesma returned to school a few years ago to further his education. He emerged with a Masters in Divinity in Buddhism and Interreligious Engagement, which seems less like a new path than a deeply empathetic shift in approach. At a time when some ambient music can feel like it’s drafted solely for inclusion on a “chill” playlist to anesthetize the overworked, Cantu-Ledesma’s explorations have been steering towards deeper waters. On Tracing Back the Radiance, his most profound work to date, he finds them.
Spiritual seeking was always at the root of Cantu-Ledesma’s work. His very first release was named after a breathing technique in yoga, and here he name-checks the writings of Chinul, a Korean Buddhist monk from the 12th century. It’s also the album in which his presence is hardest to place. His signature guitar work is nowhere to be found; he is instead credited with vibraphone and effects processing. Multiple players appear across the album’s three long compositions, with contributions from a veritable all-star cast: Bing & Ruth’s David Moore, harpist Mary Lattimore, pedal steel guitarist Chuck Johnson, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Fly Pan Am member Roger Tellier Craig, Forma’s John Also Bennett, and others. But even the deepest listen makes individuation nearly impossible, so skillfully does Cantu-Ledesma erase distinct instrumentation and egos. Instead, everyone and everything moves as one deep breath, and the music feels like it’s hovering inches off the ground.
The quietly glowing “Palace of Time” features flute, piano, synth, and violin and credits five performers. Not much happens, but not much needs to; its serene sound world is established from the hushed opening moments and you want nothing more than to reside within it. Ledesma has cited the works of ’70s Italian composers like Giusto Pio and Lino Capra Vaccina, but what first springs to mind is “He Loved Him Madly,” Miles Davis’ epic ambient piece from Get Up With It. That piece was a brooding, funereal meditation, almost nihilistic in its composition, never building upwards, but instead hovering in the void, a brushed snare drum fluttering about the sonic space like a bat. A similarly spare, rustling percussion appears here, but if anything, “Palace” is the photonegative of that iconic work, less Mark Rothko more like Agnes Martin, a nearly empty space suffused with gentle light.
“Tracing Back the Radiance” is similarly slow moving. Simply put, it’s ineffable, seemingly capable of lowering your heart rate and instilling calmness with every listen. Even on playback during a crowded commute, not always discernible amid the din, it seems to lessen tensions. Violin, synthesizer, voice, and Johnson’s drifting pedal steel are all listed, but attempting to trace the origins of such sounds feels futile, akin to painting a landscape while standing in a white mist. A previous review of Cantu-Ledesma’s work noted a fragility, suffering, and “anxiety-tinged optimism.” On Radiance, Cantu-Ledesma pushes beyond such dualities towards a space that unifies it all.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Mexican Summer | July 15, 2019 | 8 | 189d3194-6de9-405c-8aa5-92cf897bb4d5 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The new album from Oakland rapper G-Eazy is a boozy, minor-key, 74-minute slog, where he wonders if it’s possible to survive the corrupting influence of celebrity. | The new album from Oakland rapper G-Eazy is a boozy, minor-key, 74-minute slog, where he wonders if it’s possible to survive the corrupting influence of celebrity. | G-Eazy: The Beautiful & Damned | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/g-eazy-the-beautiful-and-damned/ | The Beautiful & Damned | F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 novel The Beautiful and Damned follows socialite Anthony Patch, the heir to a large fortune, through his courtship with aspiring actress Gloria Gilbert. As his prosperity leads to alcoholism, the book explores how hard it is to love selfishly, how partying and drug abuse become escapes from grappling with one’s own flaws. “Here’s to alcohol, the rose-colored glasses of life,” the story famously posits. G-Eazy’s The Beautiful & Damned has a nearly identical arc, with Eazy playing the same type of sad, rich playboy. He’s constantly searching for meaning in luxury. In intent and tone, G-Eazy’s self-indulgent downer raps about depravity and excess seem to embody another Fitzgerald line: “I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”
G-Eazy is a career hedonist flirting dangerously close to nihilism. As a wannabe greaser sampling doo-wop, he ascended quickly through the rap ranks, and now he doesn't quite know what to make of his newfound fame. His last album, 2015’s When It’s Dark Out, was humorless and self-serious, trying desperately to find purpose in stardom but coming up empty. The new one is even darker and more cynical. On the cover, his jet-black hair is disheveled, his shirt bloodied, his face bruised and half-covered in shadow. This is the reckoning of a Bad Boy. It becomes “Sad Boy”: The Album, where G-Eazy is his own worst enemy. “Gerald what the fuck is wrong, man?” he asks himself on that song. “Cheer the fuck up, you asshole.”
The Beautiful & Damned is a boozy, minor-key, 74-minute slog, where he wonders if it’s possible to survive the corrupting influence of celebrity. When everything is easy to get, does it all mean less? And does becoming numb to it all make you a bad person? The title track suggests yes: “This is everything that comes with celebrity/Criticism, ridicule and the scrutiny… And it’s none of y’alls business, truthfully/You don’t know ‘bout the fame, what it do to me/I’m talking to myself like every night: ‘You could try to be a better guy.’” It’s meant as a cautionary tale: Being famous isn’t all it seems, kids. But it’s hard to take G-Eazy as seriously as he takes himself when he’s earnestly rehashing every Hollywood cliché in the most basic way possible. His raps sound forced; the production is gloomy and monotonous. There are no insights to be found here about prestige, depression, or dependency. The whole thing is unbelievably dour and boring.
G-Eazy typically raps the simplest version of any given idea and he rarely looks beyond himself. All of his stories have the same destination: trashed hotel rooms mid come-down, women identified only as groupies strewn across unmade beds, silence his only companion. These are tales seeking sympathy for a lonely drunken womanizer. By the time Charlie Puth arrives for his turn on the carousel, on a song literally called “Sober,” the Oakland rapper has worn out every possible variation of his affectless shtick.
As the title implies, The Beautiful & Damned is supposed to explore a duality, G-Eazy’s status as a Gemini, “Angel, Devil, it's both him and I,” as he sees it. But in the process of painting himself as a conflicted man tortured by the same fame he craves, Eazy somehow only sees things as binary. Every thrill inevitably brings pain and nothing else. There are only saints and sinners, good girls and bad boys (“Mama Always Told Me”). On “Summer in December,” he associates winter with melancholy, rendering Los Angeles as a sunny year-round paradise where (surprise!) he can’t be sad: “The girls are pretty, the sun will shine 360 days/But I don’t always feel that way, today I need some gray.” Raging alcoholism, drug addiction, and lechery are cast against a Hollywood backdrop in a rap noir drama, where every moment of pleasure comes with an immediate consequence. But the only real tragedy is how flavorless his raps are and how lifeless and monochrome his perspective is. His writing is crude, and his lack of nuance makes the album sound short-sighted and self-absorbed.
A rambling monologist, G-Eazy uses his fame as an excuse to be selfish and thoughtless across The Beautiful & Damned. His characters are faceless and one-dimensional (“And I just broke up with my female/On tour, had to do it by email”), set pieces in an isolating relational crisis. Even on his Halsey duet, “Him & I,” he only thinks about his girlfriend as an extension of himself—the Bonnie to his Clyde, the only person that gets him, his soldier, willing to stand by him no matter what. There is no depth to his relations with the people around him. It isn’t just that he sounds so miserable rapping about flying women out and watching them do coke; he doesn’t even really know why he’s miserable, and he never tries to find out. Everything happens without purpose, as he puts it on “The Plan,” “I do this shit ‘cause I can.” His reaches are painful, obvious, and usually obnoxious. Only A$AP Rocky and Cardi B can save him, on the hit “No Limit.” He has so little to say about what it means to be famous and overwhelmed, or worse, famous and still hurting. And he knows even less about suffering from success than DJ Khaled. His is an extremely pessimistic outlook. Amid the myopia, the constant navel-gazing, and the show biz boilerplates, his contemptuous takes on stardom ultimately prove to be hollow. | 2017-12-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | RCA | December 21, 2017 | 5.1 | 189e8c1e-1fb8-4557-9c2a-7312a27cee9a | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Beach Slang's earnest angst still makes for an excellent group therapy session. | Beach Slang's earnest angst still makes for an excellent group therapy session. | Beach Slang: A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22370-a-loud-bash-of-teenage-feelings/ | A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings | If you're familiar with any Beach Slang song, you've pretty much already heard A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings. That's kind of the point of Beach Slang. James Alex speaks almost exclusively of being young, loud, and wild to reacquaint listeners with the dormant emotions they once felt were inextricable from formative moments: discovering the Replacements, playing in a high school band, making out on the filthy couch at your first punk rock show. He yells lyrics like, "The radio is loud and wild, but I'm too drunk to spin the dial,” one of the more *subtle *nods to the ’Mats. Meanwhile, the main riff of “Spin the Dial” is an almost verbatim recall of their own song “Punk or Lust.” It too has a glorious, defiant chorus that shouts down every impulse to think critically about a record called *A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings. *
This balance between my brain and my heart has been ongoing since Beach Slang’s debut single, “Filthy Luck.” It was one of modern indie rock’s most impressive declarations of intent and the resulting 2014 EP Who Would Ever Want Anything So Broken? was so fully-formed, it threatened to make any subsequent Beach Slang music redundant. They quickly turned out a darker, more diverse rendering of their pub-rock sound later that year with Cheap Thrills on a Dead End Street*, *and the exact same pattern is playing out with Beach Slang’s LPs. A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings follows the urgency and coherence of The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us by pushing Beach Slang towards opposite extremes: “Atom Bomb” and “Wasted Daze of Youth” are frenetic and chaotic ragers that stop short of expressing the actual rage that may have went into them. “All Fuzzed Out” is the template for the best songs here, the ones that are slower, longer and surprisingly autumnal. It taps into shoegaze and New Romantic influences that seem unexpected but were nonetheless telegraphed on their mixtape of cover songs.
But for all of their attempts to slightly expand their reach, Beach Slang’s blinkered perspective continues to draw a thick line around those who love this kind of rock‘n’roll and those who have no interest whatsoever. While Alex’s unyielding earnestness is a major part of their appeal, it’s also the most divisive aspect of Beach Slang and the mere decision to call this album *A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings—*even if it is earned—calls into question whether he’s truly operating without pretense. And if there’s even a sliver of doubt about it, Beach Slang are basically unlistenable.
Though Alex claims he’s telling the stories of his fans on *A Loud Bash, *the ones from “Young Hearts,” “Wasted Daze of Youth” and “Future Mixtape for the Art Kids” sure sound like his own stories told on “Young & Alive,” “Ride the Wild Haze” and “Bad Art and Weirdo Ideas.” Alex recently opened up about the deep adolescent trauma and abandonment issues at the root of “Punks in a Disco Bar,” but the lyrics barely hint at it. Despite Alex’s claims that his shoot-first songwriting style holds nothing back, it may actually have the opposite effect.
Yet, the impulse to question Alex’s sincerity is necessary to create an environment in which Beach Slang can thrive. Similar over-the-top acts like PUP and Pkew Pkew Pkew contrast their anthemic punk rock with an abject lyrical misery that makes it clear their shitty circumstances are a direct result of loving anthemic punk rock too much. But Beach Slang are incurable romantics and when their best songs hit their mark, as many of them do here, other forms of music seem woefully non-committal. This stuff isn’t just on the nose; the effect is more like what Prodigy described on “Shook Ones, Pt. 2”: “Rock you in ya’ face/Stab your brain with your nose bone.” Of course, that can only happen so much before you become numb to it. For all of its subtle improvements, the choruses don’t quite soar as high on A Loud Bash as before. And while their triumphant debut ended with “Dirty Lights,” perhaps the best song Beach Slang has ever written, this album’s closer “Warpaint” is almost certainly their worst, a “Save Your Generation” pastiche that confirms the wisdom of keeping Alex’s vocals lower in the mix throughout the record.
After all, it's difficult to resist the impulse to be embarrassed on Alex's behalf. In recent interviews, Alex name-checked John Hughes, Kerouac, and Bukowski as writing influences—a 42-year old man completely unaware that those three are often used as fodder for jokes about try-hard high school boyfriends. And yet, none of them really loom over A Loud Bash: there are none of the *Pretty in Pink *tropes that have sustained syncable faux-indie pop for decades, none of the misanthropic navel-gazing of Kerouac—and Alex certainly doesn’t share Bukowski’s attitudes towards women. Yes, there’s a song called “Hot Tramps,” but it’s likely a Guided By Voices homage. It contains one of Alex’s most genius lines: “Your arms are like a car crash I want to die in.”
For all of their punk rock advocacy, Beach Slang are really just an atypical twee band—how else to describe their glorification of clumsy, endearing adolescence? Everything about them should make a cynical music consumer wince: Alex getting onstage looking like Angus Young on prom night and yelling, “We’re here to punch you right in the heart!” and reading fan poetry and covering the most well-known songs of his most obvious influences. It’s certainly curative for Alex, being able to relive the best parts of his teen years without having to endure the abuse and loneliness. And there’s a poignancy to Beach Slang that courses through every second of A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings that explains why they might even be necessary: It works best as group therapy, a 30-minute reprieve from the pervasive judgment of adulthood. Is that lifestyle really sustainable or really any way to truly live? Here’s the first chorus on the album: “I hope I never die.” Simply believe that James Alex believes it and you might, too. | 2016-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | September 26, 2016 | 7.3 | 18a5db18-00b3-4b22-af55-861bd7e74b9d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
This fine album of early synthesizer music, originally released in 1980, is now reissued with a companion disc of reworkings by OPN, Arp, and more. | This fine album of early synthesizer music, originally released in 1980, is now reissued with a companion disc of reworkings by OPN, Arp, and more. | Harald Grosskopf: Synthesist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15165-synthesist/ | Synthesist | In summer 1979, Harald Grosskopf-- a drummer who lived in Berlin and had appeared on recordings by Klaus Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel, Cosmic Jokers, and others-- holed up in the apartment of a friend in Krefeld, Germany, to record his debut solo album. In the flat he had a Minimoog, a primitive sequencer, an 8-track reel-to-reel recorder, and a lot of time alone. Over the course of several weeks, Grosskopf wrote and recorded the material that wound up on Synthesist, which was eventually released on the venerable Hamburg-based kosmische imprint Sky. RVNG has reissued the album, which is held in high esteem among early synth enthusiasts but is not widely known, along with an additional disc of re-workings by some of the record's admirers (Oneohtrix Point Never, James Ferraro, Arp, etc.) Between the original record and the new versions, Synthesist offers an endlessly listenable introduction to Grosskopf's music that also serves a fascinating window into the sound of a specific time and place.
In the liner notes to the set, Grosskopf writes of how maintaining the Minimoog in the apartment was a nightmare, and that the pitch would go flat or sharp depending on warm and cold it was in the space. He eventually figured out that if he placed a 60-watt light bulb near the synth, he could regulate the temperature enough to keep the instrument sounding good. This image-- of new breakthroughs in sound-making technology having difficulty being used because of the of their surroundings-- is a nice snapshot of where music technology was in the days of analog electronics. These were the sounds of the future, but they still existed in the physical world, where things like air temperature mattered. Sounds hadn't yet been broken down into 1s and 0s, where they could be endlessly manipulated without degradation. So Grosskopf's future music was confronting the same problems that had vexed instrumentalists for centuries-- how to keep the damn things in tune.
The music on Synthesist hovers in an intriguing middle ground between instrumental synth-pop in the vein of early Kraftwerk and more free-form space-drone explorations popularized by Schulze and Tangerine Dream. The tracks are mostly compact and tend to hum along to a pop-friendly electronic pulse, but they aren't tied into any sort of verse/chorus structure. Because of this, the music has a floating, airy quality, always in motion but untethered by song, which puts even more focus on the glorious analog textures.
The record is divided neatly into two distinct halves. On the first side are the more tuneful tracks. "So Weit, So Gut" hovers in a space between Giorgio Moroder's theme from "Midnight Express" and a Jan Hammer interlude for a montage on "Miami Vice"-- there's a dark undercurrent pulling the bubbly keyboard percolations into some kind of nocturnal dread. "B. Aldrian" in contrast twinkles with nostalgia, with gently shifting keyboard drones that seem designed to soundtrack a narrative about the benevolent wonder of outer space. The title track, with its "Popcorn" bass sequence and overlapping melodies, overwhelms with its simple beauty and naive charm. There's a sense of lightness and optimism permeating the tracks on the first side, which forms a sort of argument that the electronic future was going to be a wonderful place.
The second side shades that outlook and delves more in the realm of dystopian sci-fi. "1847 - Earth" is built around a metallic drone that establishes a sense of anxiety that is furthered when percussive keyboard sequences come in signaling something tense, almost frantic, while "Trauma" sounds like something fizzing up from an underground cavern, the reverb on the synths bringing to mind the dark ambient spaces Robert Rich and Steve Roach would explore a couple of years later. Between the two halves of the record, Synthesist offers a complex array of feelings and settings, but it flows together and feels complete. Throughout, is a sense of joy, wonder, and playful exploration, even when the music leans dark, as it often does on side two.
The various versions on Re-Synthesist ask a simple question-- what happens when we translate these textures and ideas into the present? The biggest differences have to do with the presence of steady 4/4 kicks and a tendency to favor his moodier material. So Brooklyn duo Blondes take "Synthesist", give it a steady beat, and add a harsh alloy to the keyboards. Oneohtrix Point Never's "Trauma 2010" has a dramatic drone encircled by orbiting clusters of static and noise. JD Twitch from Optimo locks the synths into tight little phrases that border on the techno that would come a few years after Synthesist's release. And James Ferraro's hypnotic "Wishmaster (Transcendental Overdrive Zone)" strikes an imaginative balance between repetition and small, incremental change.
For the most part these versions are reverent, which gives the record a nice flow for a disc from various artists set. It's almost hard to imagine a more coherent and logical remix/re-work companion, since nearly all of these artists are already drawing heavily from the world Grosskopf inhabited in 1979. And while I can't imagine reaching for Re-Synthesist very often when Synthesist is handy (Grosskopf's drumming is especially missed), I am glad it exists. It's a bunch of artists celebrating a fantastic record that was a direct precursor of where they are now. They should be celebrating the original record, given how much their music now owes to it and work like it, and so should anyone else interested in the sound of the electronic music that ushered in the 80s. | 2011-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Rvng Intl. | March 2, 2011 | 8.6 | 18a9b685-eed5-46e6-9481-530b025ec09a | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Parisian rapper, born to Senegalese and Guinean immigrants, is determined to do with music what Kylian Mbappé did with soccer: change the national perception of who and what a Frenchman can be. | The Parisian rapper, born to Senegalese and Guinean immigrants, is determined to do with music what Kylian Mbappé did with soccer: change the national perception of who and what a Frenchman can be. | MHD: 19 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mhd-19/ | 19 | A person researching the best places to stay in Paris might come away from a Google search with a mixed impression of the city’s 19th arrondissement. The 19th has one of the city’s largest concentrations of North African immigrants, including one of Paris’ fastest-rising musical stars. The rapper MHD, born to Senegalese and Guinean immigrants, has become a platinum-selling artist over the last several years, thanks to an ear for infectious, melodic beats and a talent for branding. On his second album, 19, the rapper born Mohamed Sylla attempts to demystify his home and proclaim his pride in it, joining the soccer player Kylian Mbappé as a young star hoping to change the national perception of what a Frenchman looks like.
MHD has cannily labeled his music Afro-trap, linking it to the dominant strain of hip-hop in the world’s cultural superpower, but for the most part it bears little resemblance to the Atlanta sound. The songs on 19 rarely convey menace or even ennui; they are joyous, accessible, and highly melodic, making use of analog instruments, including more guitar than I’ve heard on a rap album in quite some time. The opening track features a lovely passage from Mali’s Salif Keita, a legend of Afropop—a sound that MHD raps over on the next song, “Encore,” claiming all the city’s neighborhood for himself and his crew.
“Encore” is the first of many highlights, but it leads into a somewhat generic set of songs. 19 truly hits its stride on its sixth track, “Papalé,” which kicks off a series of infectious melodies that runs all the way through to “Bella,” another five tracks later. (The record is 19 tracks long; MHD is somewhat overcommitted to the concept.) He’s a more than competent rapper but what sets his songs apart is the same pleasurable eclecticism that made the fusion group the Very Best so exciting when they first emerged in 2008. MHD’s music has a similar rough, happy energy, as if cheer is a natural byproduct when two cultural styles speak on equal terms. He doesn’t always match his raps to the the beat—on “Papalé,” for instance, he’s in double time, ignoring the more moderate tempo of the drums—but his excellent ear for original, highly engaging instrumental work saves him any serious criticism on that front.
He is at his strongest when displaying his softer side, often in collaboration with singers. “Bébé,” which features the Congolese-French singer Dadju, is filled with sweet nothings, but the breezy clicking beat comes alive during the hook, with a flute backing a powerful earworm of a hook. “Bella,” the song that features Wizkid, is similarly catchy, and MHD displays some narrative strength on the first verse, telling the story of a forbidden love. That Wizkid’s verse, delivered in English, is no more compelling than MHD’s underscores the charisma of the young Frenchman, who only uses a few English cognates, ones that generally belie his abilities on the mic. (“One two three for the money”; “Artist, businessman.”) Even when MHD adopts a tougher posture, some element of the music always betrays him as the fun-loving 20-something that he is. “Afro Trap Pt. 10,” part of a long-running series, may sound a touch more aggy, but a playful beat and hook make it clear that the track just represents a slightly different flavor of party music.
Production on the record was mostly handled by Parisian producers including DSK on the Beat, Dany Synthé, and S2Keyz. But Diplo, who helped market MHD to an international audience with a series of Mad Decent remixes, steps in to Diplo things up on “Fuego.” It’s a strong song that nonetheless does a disservice to MHD, its jaded professionalism lacking the spirit that characterizes the best tracks on 19. The way MHD’s raps are grafted onto Malian, Nigerian, and other North African sounds on other tracks speaks to something more original than Diplo can offer at this point in his career: a specificity of place and taste. It’s what’s refreshing about 19 more generally. Though many may slot it under the meaningless term “world music,” the lyrics and the beats have a character that evokes not a world but a locale. The sound is not trap as we know it. But as the writer and academic Jesse McCarthy recently argued, “Trap is the only music that sounds like what living in contemporary America feels like.” 19 has that same truth in representation: It’s the sound of MHD’s life as lived—the perspective of a young man eager to take his story into his own hands.
Correction: A previous version of this article included a misleading aside about the 19th arrondissement. | 2018-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Motown / Artside / Polydor | September 25, 2018 | 7.5 | 18adff69-580c-4c19-872e-3e36cb95e165 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
On their latter-day emo classic Home, Like NoPlace Is There, the Hotelier took excruciating stock of the darkness. On their newest, the band is pushing with white-hot intensity toward the light. | On their latter-day emo classic Home, Like NoPlace Is There, the Hotelier took excruciating stock of the darkness. On their newest, the band is pushing with white-hot intensity toward the light. | The Hotelier: Goodness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21675-goodness/ | Goodness | Christian Holden is fighting like hell to stand in the sun. The Hotelier singer is coming off a dramatized retelling of a tragedy-ridden early adulthood, in the form of the fourth-wave emo classic Home, Like NoPlace Is There, and now it’s time to really start rebuilding. That’s a lot to expect of a record, but it’s not like the Hotelier can’t handle the pressure. The Massachusetts trio are angling for that rare genre-rock to general-rock crossover space, and Goodness is their most concerted bid yet. Home, Like NoPlace Is There—the Hotelier’s second album, released in 2014—suggested their appeal to listeners outside of emo revival’s grasp (alongside the likes of the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am Not Afraid to Die and Modern Baseball), and it’s hype that’s only reaffirmed by Goodness. At this point, however, it might not even be accurate to call them emo, so let’s just have it out now: The Hotelier is a great rock band, however you classify them.
This is not to say Goodness doesn't have its share of histrionics, though to be fair they are more like affirmations. The album flirts with transcendentalism, the 19th-century philosophical movement favored by Emerson and Thoreau, which recognized the inherent goodness of humanity and the natural world while also placing a high value on fierce individuality. And so Goodness finds itself out in the fields of New England, stripping back to the essentials—trying to love and trust again, and finally moving the fuck on. Anyone who has attempted these things understands that they can rank among the most difficult emotional tasks, depending on how bad other humans have messed you up. Home, Like NoPlace Is There took often-excruciating stock of that damage: It opened with a suicide, lingered uncomfortably on a funeral scene, and reckoned with the psychological ravages of a lifetime of abuse. At times Goodness pushes towards positivity with this same level of intensity, but it’s fraught with its own kind of tension: You can really hear the trying.
Sometimes it’s grating, how hard Goodness tries to find the light. The album is broken up with campfire-y interludes of peaceful chants atop acoustic guitar, which were “sung under a total lunar eclipse in Plymouth, Vermont” according to official credits. We are also treated to a recitation of the lullaby “I See the Moon,” Holden’s spoken-word introduction to the album, and “a sound collage recorded of morning birds in Charlton, Massachusetts.”
Other times, it’s the trying that draws you in. The percussion is so relentless, the guitars so urgent, the voice so direct, that songs like “Goodness Pt. 2” and “Piano Player” feel like something that could get you out of bed in the morning. For much of the latter, Holden can be heard—in either the foreground or in the background amid utter sonic chaos—screaming what may be the most realistic mantra ever chanted: the word “sustain.” That said, this same sort of trick is not as profound the second time Holden pulls it, spending a fair chunk of “Sun” simply repeating its title. At least that underwhelming passage results in Holden’s most indelible punk vocal on the entire album, and it's a throaty blow that stands in stark contrast to the calmer, Stipe-like tone Holden employs here more than ever.
For as riotous as it can sound, Goodness is remarkably precise in how it plays with dynamics and layers. This manifests in myriad ways: the music cutting out to emphasize Holden’s poetic pleas to feel alive, the disregard for traditional song structures, the way the two guitars have a near-constant interplay that adds dimensions (and hooks), and the slow and tense introduction of more instruments over the course of a song, like on the mortality-obsessed standout “Opening Mail for My Grandmother.”
Simply put, the playing is more ambitious and varied on Goodness than on Home, Like NoPlace Is There, an album where the narrative drama manifests into some of the rawest anthems of unhinged youth and crippling self-loathing recorded this decade. But Goodness’ judicious sense editing clips the band’s wings just a little, keeping the music from feeling as boundless as Holden’s emotions. Still, it’s admirable, all this searching for the good and appreciating the simple. At the end of Home highlight “The Scope of All This Rebuilding,” the singer had found himself defeated, admitting, “I can’t find my way around this.” Goodness is proof that somehow, Christian Holden did. | 2016-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | May 27, 2016 | 8 | 18b60c92-47e2-4737-97ab-e09c9d91f9b3 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
Already more than a quarter-century into his career, guitarist Sir Richard Bishop issues his first record on Drag City and it's his widest-ranging one yet, a joyful trip through his many styles, influences, and obsessions. | Already more than a quarter-century into his career, guitarist Sir Richard Bishop issues his first record on Drag City and it's his widest-ranging one yet, a joyful trip through his many styles, influences, and obsessions. | Sir Richard Bishop: Polytheistic Fragments | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10701-polytheistic-fragments/ | Polytheistic Fragments | He played around the world with the Sun City Girls for 26 years, and has released six solo albums in the last decade, but Polytheistic Fragments still feels like guitarist Sir Richard Bishop's international debut. It's his first record on Drag City, but more importantly, it's his widest-ranging one yet, a joyful trip through his many styles, influences, and obsessions. Most of Bishop's previous albums have had a stricter range, be it the improvised acoustics of Improvika, the electronic atmospheres of Elektronika Demonika, or the long-form experiments of While My Guitar Gently Bleeds, released earlier this year.
But Fragments is a spectacular showcase of Bishop's multi-dimensional talents. Here we get fast-picked folk, Django Reinhardt-worthy gypsy tunes, Chet Atkins-style ditties, Hindi-influenced melodies, and a lode of other, less classifiable stuff. Interestingly, this catholic approach is closest in tone to Bishop's actual solo debut, 1998's Salvador Kali, which also freely rolled his polygonal sonic dice. But even compared to that stellar release, Fragments is remarkably kaleidoscopic.
It's also Bishop's most ear-catching work so far. His playing is still open and exploratory, but nearly every track is also hummable. Opener "Cross My Palm With Silver" begins with typical Reinhardt-ish sketches, but halfway in coalesces into a sneaky rolling hook. "Elysium Number Five" matches that with a snake-like lead line, and "Free Masonic Guitar", made almost solely of ringing strums, builds melody from sheer momentum. Bishop has always been a stunning player, picking through blinding runs in a flash. But here his ability to think fast and play even faster is employed solely in service of songcraft. The album's centerpiece, the ten-minute piano meditation "Saraswati", might seem like an exception to Fragments' melodicism, with its searching tones and chilly drone. But as writer Grayson Currin recently pointed out, listen closely and the track seems to nick the melody from the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows", stretching it into revelatory slow motion.
One would imagine that "Saraswati" would be too daunting an achievement to follow, but in fact, Polytheistic Fragments' three final tracks are the album's best. "Tennessee Porch Swing" is an unabashed country-road stroll, while "Canned Goods & Firearms" channels the bounce of Chet Atkins. And "Ecstasies in the Open Air" is the record's ultimate charmer, a denouement whose halting acoustics melt perfectly into a soaring flute line. It's probably the softest, dreamiest thing you'll ever hear Bishop play, but like the rest of Polytheistic Fragments, its gentle bliss fits perfectly inside this sound-painter's rainbow palette. | 2007-10-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2007-10-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | October 1, 2007 | 8.2 | 18b6583f-cb73-494d-9958-a8cb3908a990 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Newly reissued and remastered, the group’s first two albums find Jeff Tweedy and his Chicago band transforming themselves from alt-country also-rans into a formidable rock‘n’roll outfit. | Newly reissued and remastered, the group’s first two albums find Jeff Tweedy and his Chicago band transforming themselves from alt-country also-rans into a formidable rock‘n’roll outfit. | Wilco: A.M./Being There | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wilco-ambeing-there/ | A.M./Being There | The nuclear detonation of Uncle Tupelo launched an alt-country arms race, with the band’s two chief singer-songwriters mutating from old friends into bitter enemies trying to outdo each other with their follow-up records. Jay Farrar started Son Volt with Tupelo’s drummer, Mike Heidorn, and released Trace, which yielded the radio hit “Drown” and found him greeted as a visionary. Jeff Tweedy, on the other hand, rushed into the studio to record a set of demos with his new band, Wilco, barely a couple months after his old band had played its final show. Nearly a year later they released their first album, A.M., which was greeted with a big shrug from critics and fans alike.
Tweedy had managed to retain almost every member of Uncle Tupelo’s expanded line-up: multi-instrumentalist Max Johnston, guitarist John Stirratt, drummer Ken Coomer, even guitarist Brian Henneman, of the Bottle Rockets. In fact, the group briefly flirted with the idea of keeping the Uncle Tupelo name, although wiser heads prevailed and they rechristened themselves after trucker lingo for “will comply.” Still, despite their familiarity and camaraderie, Wilco were still trying to figure out who they were when they wrote and recorded A.M.—a necessary step for any band, but especially for one whose de facto frontman had spent the last decade-plus in the shadow of the more forceful Farrar.
The original mix of A.M. was, reportedly, much grittier and more akin to Uncle Tupelo’s early material than to the cleaner, more polished version that finally made its way into CD stores in March 1995. The final version is fine, although A.M. is the very definition of 1990s alt-country: as conservative as punk rock, with flourishes of pedal steel and a gentle twang to frame Tweedy’s hard-luck tales of casino losing streaks, suspended licenses, and custody battles over record collections. “I Must Be High” nods toward the sunny pop of Summerteeth and beyond, and “Box Full of Letters” and “Passenger Side” hint at the melancholy melodicism that would become Tweedy’s stock in trade.
He wanted Wilco to be a collaborative and democratic unit rather than a glorified solo project, though only one of his bandmates’ songs made the final cut: the gently loping “It’s Just That Simple,” courtesy of Stirratt (who pens the new liner notes for this expanded edition). Otherwise, the MVP of the album is Henneman, who was a fine foil for Tweedy. There’s real wit and warmth in his guitar riffs, even if he was merely a rental rather than a full band member. According to Learning How to Die, Greg Kot’s 2004 biography of the band, Henneman recorded his part for the raucous throwaway “Casino Queen” while nursing a broken heart; he downed two bottles of gin before the tape started rolling, and he plays like he’s holding on for dear life.
A.M. is an album persistently defined by unfavorable comparisons, first to Son Volt’s Trace and later to every other Wilco album. And certainly there’s a timidity here that must have been discouraging after Tweedy’s strong contributions to Uncle Tupelo’s final pair of albums. But there’s also a lot of humor and sadness to these songs, which are circumscribed and local in their scope. That’s the charm of this modest reissue, which includes only a handful of bonus tracks (including the final Uncle Tupelo recording and a Blue Mountain cover) but treats A.M. as something more than a footnote to Wilco’s long career. In 2017, the album plays like a band setting its terms, striving to keep everything perfectly human-size. As much as the band was compared to that other Uncle Tupelo offshoot, Wilco’s biggest rivals were themselves.
Tweedy, meanwhile, was struggling to grow up. Then in his late 20s, he quit smoking pot, a vice he’d adopted after quitting drinking a few years before. He married his girlfriend and prepared to become a father. And he made some painful adjustments to his expectations once A.M. floundered and ticket sales cratered. If he hadn’t turned those setbacks into songs, you probably wouldn’t be reading a review of any Wilco reissues. Being There is every bit as confident as their debut was shaky: a double album tied together by a loose theme of what it means to be in a rock‘n’roll band. It opens with a big blast of lurching, serrating guitar distortion, sinewy and visceral and violent, which sounds like they’re tearing up A.M. so they can start over again.
What’s amazing is how well it works. After the grinding din that begins and ends opener “Misunderstood,” Tweedy’s songs have a brand new context. “Far, Far Away” and “I Got You (At the End of the Century)” aren’t actually that different from A.M., but they sound heavier, riskier, the stakes so much greater that it could be a different band altogether. There are some country flourishes, specifically the pedal steel courtesy of Freakwater’s Bob Egan, but Wilco had managed to transform itself from an alt-country also-ran into a real rock band: noise rock, classic rock, folk rock, heartland rock, every kind of rock.
A conceptually knotty record, Being There contains barely veiled references to a breakup, but most listeners at the time would have understood them as references to Uncle Tupelo rather than a romantic partner. “Monday,” with its Stonesy brass stomp, is about a guy in “a plenty good band” who can only watch as others get all the glory, and you can guess what might have inspired Tweedy’s wry observations about fame and futility. There are a few pulled punches (“I know you’re just a mama’s boy” doesn’t have much sting), but thankfully, these aren’t dis tracks or bitter recriminations. Jay Farrar’s only a minor concern; these songs are first and foremost about Jeff Tweedy and his misgivings about his own talent. That had been a detriment on A.M.; on Being There it’s the band’s greatest strength and truest subject.
Rock‘n’roll is a sucker’s bet on these songs, something you pour your heart and soul and money and labor and dreams into and for what? Creative and financial frustration? “We’ve got solid-state technology,” Tweedy sings on “Red-Eyed and Blue”; “Tapes on the floor/Some songs we can’t afford to play.” So, why were they even doing it? That’s what Wilco are trying to figure out on Being There, and they need your help. It’s useful to imagine each of these songs being sung from the stage directly and explicitly to the audience who has paid to see Wilco. As Tweedy sings on “I Got You (At the End of the Century),” “I got you and I still believe that you’re all that I will ever need/It’s you.” That “you” means us. Are we enough for them? Is our applause really that valuable?
Being There flirts with cynicism, but really the mood is sober, world-weary, adult. “There is no sunken treasure/Rumored to be wrapped inside my ribs,” Tweedy sings on “Sunken Treasure,” the slow-burn epic that anchors the second disc of this double album. “Music is my savior/I was maimed by rock and roll.” If rock had once been a liberating medium, after Nirvana it had become an albatross around the neck of every dreamer with a guitar. But Tweedy finds his way in the end: Closer “Dreamer in My Dreams” may be the most unflinchingly personal song on the record, but it’s also the wildest, the wooliest, maybe the most raucous Wilco have ever sounded. “Well I know I’ve made mistakes,” he sings; “I’m passing them on.” Just when you think the song is ending, the band kicks it up again, as though reluctant to stop playing. Only when the song ends do they have to face real life again.
At the heart of this bruised and tender record is the frazzled relationship between artist and audience, which makes this reissue more powerful and essential than your typical album repackaging. Digital media means we as an audience have less and less to give an artist, and rock‘n’roll may be even more of a fool’s errand now than it was in 1996, when people bought CDs by the handful and even a mid-level band like pre-Foxtrot Wilco could make a comfortable living driving around the country in a van. Being There sounds even direr and more desperate than it once did, and the bonus material expands upon its themes. The “Party Horn” mix of “Monday” actually sounds richer and more excitable than the studio version, especially with its screeching sax solo. Most of the outtakes and alternate takes still have studio chatter attached to them, showing the band goofing around in the studio or half-assing the demos. “I think that was good enough,” Tweedy deadpans after a beautifully understated version of “Dynamite My Soul.”
All of Tweedy’s big ideas about his vocation sound even more volatile on the two full live sets included on the 5xCD version, with “Sunken Treasure” and “Hotel Arizona” making the most of Tweedy’s rapport with the audience (“This is a true story. Sorta.”) and the noise of the crowd. Maybe that’s where the album’s title comes from. It is, of course, a reference to the 1979 Peter Sellers film, but it’s also a twist on the old adage about concerts and concert films: I guess you had to be there. We’ve always been a crucial part of Being There, always an unseen force motivating Wilco from one show to the next, but these live cuts make it explicit. It’s as though Tweedy played the long game on this sucker’s bet, waiting 21 years to make the ultimate version of Being There. | 2017-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | December 6, 2017 | 7 | 18ba534d-5e68-4255-ae93-4921a54ad082 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The debut EP from the rising hyperpop artist is exhilarating and unabashedly silly but falters when adhering to genre conventions and trends. | The debut EP from the rising hyperpop artist is exhilarating and unabashedly silly but falters when adhering to genre conventions and trends. | Alice Longyu Gao: High Dragon and Universe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alice-longyu-gao-high-dragon-and-universe/ | High Dragon and Universe | Before 2019, Alice Longyu Gao was known in downtown Manhattan clubs for her Harajuku-inspired fashion sense, energetic DJ sets, and, occasionally, releasing music that sought to translate her jester-like personality into well-written pop songs. Then, her song “Rich Bitch Juice,” produced by 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady, raised the stakes. Its menacing synths sounded like a demented nursery toy. Gao’s delivery, like an irritated heiress—“Some people say I look very sad/I’m just having my resting bitch face”—was comically relatable. Most importantly, its chanted hook was hypnotically catchy.
Suddenly, Gao’s absurdist take on pop music was in line with a freshly popular hyperpop scene, characterized by heavily autotuned vocals, trap beats, mechanical clanks, and an electro-maximalist production. But after the initial sugar rush, things quickly became more angsty, and the next generation of artists like Glaive and ericdoa doubled down on moody subject matter and emotive singing, far from the campy rapping and simple melodic hooks of Gao’s early material. Her first standalone EP, High Dragon and Universe, including none of her early singles, reintroduces Gao as a chaotic party starter. In a scene mostly built by teenagers holed up in bedroom studios, she made her name yelling on top of the DJ booth in an assless rococo dress, which is the same attitude she brings to her music. It is exhilarating and unabashedly silly. Highlights like “DTM” and “Bleeding in the Studio”—the latter co-produced by Gao, who normally outsources beats—smooth out her rougher edges without sacrificing her eccentric personality.
“Kanpai,” which means cheers in Japanese, is her strongest song yet. Sugary to the point of being grating, its childlike chorus brings to mind SOPHIE’s “Bipp.” But “Kanpai” sets a benchmark the rest of the release can’t live up to. For the first time, Gao sounds like she is glomming onto trends: Chugging guitars lifted from the 2000s pop-punk bands like Sum 41? Straight from the 100 gecs playbook. Trap hi-hats and bass? Check. High BPMs borrowed from nightcore edits? Textbook.
What saves Gao’s music from being formulaic is her confidence and humor. “I’m your teacher, you’re suspended!” she yells on “100 Boyfriends.” She raps and sings with a madcap twinkle in her eyes as she takes aim at her peers at the Soho House or at the rave: “Pretty white boy got hella issues,” she mocks in a baby voice on “Never Coming Back.” Before the dubstep-esque breakdown on “DTM,” she shouts, “Skrillex!”
High Dragon and Universe is a good translation of Gao’s personality but falters when it tampers her star power and hooks with the angst of the moment. “Underrated Popstar” is Gao’s entry in the time-honored tradition of songs about internet trolls. “Shut up! Keep streaming my song,” Gao barks before spiraling on the bridge: “What do I do if I never pop off? Fold tacky sock at the local Walmart?” It’s a jokey send up of stan culture and the pressure on young artists. But even as she mocks these expectations and genre conventions, Gao still hasn’t quite found a way to move beyond them.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | null | October 19, 2021 | 6.3 | 18bae2f3-253d-4bc8-9f48-49d98c36b4ab | Mo Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mo-wilson/ | |
The 40th installment of the prolific producer and composer’s Steamroom series is a highlight, one long, meditative piece of synth overtones, slowly rising arpeggios, and pure drift. | The 40th installment of the prolific producer and composer’s Steamroom series is a highlight, one long, meditative piece of synth overtones, slowly rising arpeggios, and pure drift. | Jim O’Rourke: Steamroom 40 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jim-orourke-steamroom-40/ | Steamroom 40 | Most of Jim O’Rourke’s music is not made for you or me. Some of it is: the Wilco and Sonic Youth records he’s played on or produced were certainly meant to have an audience. His collaborative output—scores of releases, many improvised, alongside players like Oren Ambarchi, Keiji Haino, Fennesz—is part of a greater conversation encompassing both players and listeners. And his “rock” albums for Drag City, a loose series stretching from 1997’s Bad Timing through 2015’s Simple Songs: No matter what the Chicago native, long a resident of Japan, may say, those are surely meant for ears beyond his own. They’re too meticulous—and too joyous—not to be. But then there are the Steamroom releases, and those truly are a private, paging-through-his-journals affair. Not because they’re particularly unguarded or revealing; it’s simply that he would be making those recordings whether anybody listened or not. “I just have to make them,” he told Bandcamp, the artist-to-fan retail platform where he hosts the series. “It’s like my oxygen.”
Named after his studio, the Steamroom series amounts to a curated archive of his daily practice. Since 2013, when the series launched, it has included reissued early work, film soundtracks, and tour-only releases, but the bulk of it comprises previously unreleased recordings made in his Tokyo workspace. O’Rourke spends a good chunk of his day holed up with a Serge synthesizer and a drawer full of field recordings, massaging sounds into a shape that feels right to him. It’s less about composition or songwriting—there’s nothing approaching a song on these albums—and more like painting or throwing pots, only with duration itself in place of pigment or clay. “I like longform music that isn’t necessarily about structure,” he says. “It’s just a long period of something happening.” The Steamroom releases amount to a kind sculpted air.
For the most part, that means drones. Steamroom 20’s “Silent Night” is an inky hour colored the semi-matte black of a fogged-up window on a moonless night. Steamroom 27’s “Long Night Part One,” 47 minutes long, brandishes tight clusters of needling tones that feel like they’re trying to crowd their way into your ear canal. Not all the material is so shapeless; Steamroom 29’s “from here to there” sets playful, almost circus-like synth chords against insect chirps and shortwave chatter. Whether sinister or bucolic, what all the releases share in common is an almost total absence of discernable structure in favor of pure drift.
But if the austerity of many Steamroom releases means they’re likely to appeal mainly to confirmed fans of dark ambient music, Steamroom 40 stands out, even though it clearly occupies the same continuum as its predecessors. For one thing, as drones go, it captures a brighter, airier mood, and its consonant tonal field is instantly recognizable. Plenty of this kind of music can sound largely interchangeable even to its fans, but Steamroom 40’s lone, 41-minute track, “Improper Release,” can’t easily be mistaken for anything else in the series—or anyone else’s work, either. Its gentleness is reminiscent of Kevin Drumm’s 2009 album Imperial Horizon, but O’Rourke’s materials are less muted, more clear-cut. It’s hard to say how he made it, but it feels like all the notes in a major scale are fading softly (and perhaps randomly) in and out of earshot, overlapping in such a way that creates a perpetually shifting moiré of cottony harmonies.
The bulk of its frequencies occupy a moderate range, smack in the center of the spectrum—you imagine a cat curled up in the middle of the keyboard—and slowly cycling arpeggios gradually conduct the energy upward in waves. There’s almost no dissonance; the rare off note flashes like a blade of grass showing its underside before the wind whips it around again. It’s easily among the most placid, peaceful music O’Rourke has ever made—perhaps the only thing in Steamroom’s catalog you could conceivably call “pretty.”
But despite its outward simplicity, there’s more going on here than meets the ear: frequencies cascading just out of earshot, microtones extending like a hall of mirrors. Funny things start to happen the longer you listen; you may begin hearing melodies that aren’t there. I tend to hear echoes of New Order’s “Procession,” which shares its key, and its palette of smeared analog synthesizers, with O’Rourke’s piece. And if you listen loud and on good speakers, the occasional rumble of bass will feel like there’s a truck idling outside your house. This is not music for laptop speakers or lossy compression. O’Rourke entreats his fans to download his music in the “best possible quality,” and like everything in the series, Steamroom 40 both wants and deserves a high-fidelity experience. That’s not just an issue of audio fetishism; it’s almost a philosophical question. This is music that proceeds according to its own logic and its own time scale, music that offers a stern rebuke to the anthropocentrism of the old tree-falling-in-a-forest maxim. Whether or not there’s anyone there to hear it is irrelevant, this music seems to say. The sound itself is self-sufficient, self-sustaining, and maybe even self-aware. It does not need us, which makes us all the luckier to have it. | 2018-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | steamroom | May 24, 2018 | 8 | 18bcd03b-8129-40cd-81da-05d30029d964 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On their sophomore effort, Art Brut have wisely managed to incrementally expand their sonic palette while singer Eddie Argos evinces a slightly more grown-up perspective-- and yet, the group never strays too far from its original M.O. | On their sophomore effort, Art Brut have wisely managed to incrementally expand their sonic palette while singer Eddie Argos evinces a slightly more grown-up perspective-- and yet, the group never strays too far from its original M.O. | Art Brut: It's a Bit Complicated | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10336-its-a-bit-complicated/ | It's a Bit Complicated | If ever there was a group sensitive to the dreaded sophomore slump, it'd be Art Brut. For a group who made their entrance with the autobiographical origin story "Formed a Band", the pledge that "it's not irony, it's not rock'n'roll," and a humble and brash sound meant more to buttress singer Eddie Argos' wry observations than draw attention, landmines for a "mature" follow-up are everywhere. Change the lyrical approach to sober up the honest and clever self-indulgence, and you forfeit the angle that makes Art Brut unique and lovable. Pretty up the music too much, and you distract from and compromise Argos' regular-dude frontman bit. Merely remake Bang Bang Rock N' Roll, and risk the accusation that the band's concept was only good for one 30-minute shot, sentencing the group to the cult-band one-and-done footnotes. No wonder the second album is called It's a Bit Complicated.
Perhaps aware of this foreboding obstacle course, Art Brut have wisely managed to somehow make all of these mistakes and none of them, incrementally expanding their sonic palette while Argos evinces a slightly more grown-up perspective, yet never straying too far from the band's original M.O. Sure, there's a more muscular lead-guitar on most tracks here, they've discovered the joys of audible backing vocals, and a horn section even turns up on "Late Sunday Evening", but there aren't any ill-advised dalliances with laptop beats or orchestration or even, god forbid, ballads. Meanwhile, Argos' muse has perceptibly changed from "gee-golly, I'm in a band!" and bedroom performance anxiety to domestic living and the simple joy of music-listening without blunting his wit or giving in to the temptation to talk about fame and touring.
The subtle shift is apparent from the very start, as "Pump Up the Volume" hangs on a lead riff and an almost-solo more upfront than anything on Bang Bang, albeit far too slowly played to register as overly flashy. Meanwhile, the vocal is classic Argos, amplifying the dilemma of mid-makeout radio adjustment to epic proportions, interrupting a kiss to tentatively ask "have you heard this song before?" Sexxing is, in fact, on Argos' mind throughout the record, from the courtship drama of "Direct Hit" to stay-in-bed-baby pleadings of "Blame It on the Trains". "Jealous Guy" is even the polar opposite of the last record's slightly uncomfortable impotence trilogy, finding the singer pleading with his sleepy girlfriend to stay up and frolic while torturing himself with paranoia about her exes.
But more effective than these romantic ruminations are the tracks where Art Brut switches up their meta-aware music-about-music tendencies for the better, progressing from songs about making songs to songs about the irresistible urge to build a soundtrack to one's own life. In a way, "Pump Up the Volume" fits this category as well; if nothing else, it's about wanting to enhance an already, er, stimulating experience with the proper audio accompaniment. "Sound of Summer" is even more direct, fetishizing the process of creating the perfect mixtape in painstaking detail, right down to breaking the tabs "so you can't tape over it ever." The zenith of this subject is clearly reached on "Nag Nag Nag Nag", the band's between-albums single that amps up the central riff and sun-bleached backing vocals to make the song's dead-on coming-of-age headphones drama properly triumphant.
The upgrades in production values aren't always an improvement, however, as it occasionally comes at the sacrifice of the band's scrupulous spontaneity. Argos' self-aware humor is still present-- pronouncing "here comes the really good bit!" in the breakdown of "Direct Hit" or apologizing for his Germ-glish ("punk rock is nicht tot") in "St. Pauli"-- but doesn't produce as many banner-waving one-liners. Moments like "People in Love" and "Post Soothing Out" are more demure than anything found on the group's debut, and embellishments like the horn breakdown of "Late Sunday Evening" are a poor substitute for the homegrown fist-pump peaks of older tracks like "Emily Kane" and "Modern Art".
These missteps are testament to Art Brut's hidden element: the band itself. While Argos draws the spotlight of most reviews (this one included), the rest of the band quietly adds its own crucial element, which at its best is a simple, raucous sound perfect for underscoring melodramatic tales of sex and rock. As "St. Pauli" nervously reflects, Art Brut are at heart a throwback punk band-- albeit one with a frontman that is far more charming, thoughtful, and witty than your typical three-chord bashers-- and two albums down, they're already bumping up against the constraints of that genre. By only gently nudging the musical formula on It's a Bit Complicated, Art Brut have succeeded in crafting a satisfying half-mature sequel, but may have only delayed, rather than thwarted, the sophomore jinx. | 2007-06-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-06-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Downtown | June 20, 2007 | 7.4 | 18c3a471-0b84-4435-bc52-23544b9fdeaa | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
On her marvelous second album, Phoebe Bridgers defines her songwriting: candid, multi-dimensional, slyly psychedelic, and full of heart. Her music has become a world unto itself. | On her marvelous second album, Phoebe Bridgers defines her songwriting: candid, multi-dimensional, slyly psychedelic, and full of heart. Her music has become a world unto itself. | Phoebe Bridgers: Punisher | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phoebe-bridgers-punisher/ | Punisher | Phoebe Bridgers is a master of collapse. The 25-year-old California native writes songs for those moments when things fall apart, when language fails, when you long for so much distance that you need a spaceship to reach it. From there, she is able to find a sense of purpose, or at least make a plan. “When I get back I’ll lay around/Then I’ll get up and lay back down,” goes a couplet in “I Know the End,” the closing track of her stunning new album Punisher. Across the song’s two halves, she tethers the anxiety of leaving home to a vivid depiction of an actual apocalypse: lightning crashes, fire rises, people scream. “Yeah, I guess the end is here,” she deadpans. Her delivery is light, insistent—the casual tone you use to convey passing thoughts to the closest person in the room.
While Punisher is only her second full-length collection as a solo artist, Bridgers has already established a distinct worldview. Her songs can be autobiographical—2017’s “Motion Sickness” bluntly described an emotionally abusive relationship with a since-spurned, one-time mentor—but her writing is too self-aware and wide-ranging to feel confessional. It can be sad, but she is also the first to call bullshit on letting one emotion consume her. It’s why she will infuse a track like this album’s “Moon Song,” an otherwise wistful ballad that takes place at a birthday party, with a banal detail (“It’s nautical themed”) or an outright dismissal of art born from tragedy. “We hate ‘Tears in Heaven,’” she sings of Eric Clapton’s autobiographical, once-inescapable ballad. Then she concedes, “But it’s sad that his baby died.”
This impulse toward the candid, the multi-dimensional, has also come to define the sound of Bridgers’ music. Self-produced with Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, these songs are starkly drawn and colorfully embellished, produced in service of each individual story. Punisher’s first single, “Garden Song,” is a marvel not only for how seamlessly its lyrics bind fantasies and nightmares, burning houses and blooming flowers, but also for how each element of its slyly psychedelic arrangement travels along with her words. The fingerpicked riff is played on a guitar that seems to be dissolving; a low, male voice comes in like a record playing at the wrong speed; a steady pulse seems to rise from somewhere deep in your headphones.
Bridgers also writes about this very sensation: the way we hear music, how we devote ourselves to it and form identities around it. On Punisher, these relationships are mostly fraught, from a fan being murdered outside Dodger Stadium to a couple channeling deeper issues through a fight about John Lennon. If music was a pathway toward spiritual catharsis in earlier songs like “Smoke Signals” and “Me & My Dog,” the same drugs don’t work here. Ironically, the most upbeat songs house her bleakest thoughts. “Chinese Satellite,” buoyed by a rushing string arrangement, finds her adrift, desperate for a sign, singing the “same three songs over and over.” And in “Kyoto,” she undercuts a breezy horn section and her most festival-ready chorus by refusing to play along: “I’m a liar,” she sings in its closing line, holding out the syllables so she can’t be misunderstood.
Along with her double-tracked vocals and graceful, winding melodies, these conversational refrains bring to mind the work of Elliott Smith, one of Bridgers’ clearest influences. He also happens to be the subject of this album’s heartbreaking title track. Like his classic “St. Ides Heaven,” “Punisher” begins with its narrator wandering around the city after dark: “When the speed kicks in,” she sings, “I go to the store for nothing.” Backed by piano and occasional waves of digital vocal harmony, she contemplates the facts of Smith’s life: the house where he died, his kindness toward fans, the way his songs still bring people together. “If someone doesn’t like his music, I actually feel like I’m not going to agree with them about anything,” she mentioned earlier this year. “It informs everything I like.” It makes sense that she sees in Smith not just a kindred spirit but also an ideology.
You can sense Bridgers building a community through her work, and it’s evident in Punisher’s credits list, featuring her tour manager (Jeroen Vrijhoef, the deep voice in “Garden Song”) and her bandmates in other projects (Conor Oberst from Better Oblivion Community Center, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker from Boygenius). She also worked with Blake Mills, Christian Lee Hutson, whose album she produced earlier this year, and Marshall Vore, her drummer and frequent writing partner. Hers is the rare voice that grows more singular through each collaboration, lending her discography the feeling of a continuous narrative—one with increasing depth and a growing cast. While the songs on Punisher might detail the lonesome drudgery of touring (“Why would somebody do this on purpose?”) or the awkwardness of being approached by strangers at bars (“I swear I’m not angry/That’s just my face”), her music never sounds alone.
The record glows with this strange self-sufficiency, an instinct to push forward against bad odds. It’s what brings together the depressive homebodies in “Halloween,” the dreamworld romance of “Garden Song,” and the country travelogue of “Graceland Too,” one of her greatest songs yet. Accompanied by banjo and fiddle and her Boygenius bandmates, Bridgers sings about a woman re-entering a world that feels unfamiliar, full of horror and possibility. As she gets in the car and turns on the radio, the thought hits her: “She can do anything she wants to.” It’s a daunting proposition, and before she knows where she’s going, she’s on her way. | 2020-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Dead Oceans | June 22, 2020 | 8.7 | 18c53a96-33c2-4f16-a2e7-0992f6e046b8 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Versatile producer infuses his tricky beats with in-vogue vocal samples, which turns out to be both good and bad. | Versatile producer infuses his tricky beats with in-vogue vocal samples, which turns out to be both good and bad. | Machinedrum: Room(s) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15621-rooms/ | Room(s) | Rarely does a moment pass on Machinedrum's Room(s) during which a human voice isn't present. This wouldn't be noteworthy save for the fact that Room(s) is an electronic album, one (presumably) devoid of its creators voice. Instead, it is stuffed to the gills with harping, distended vocal samples deployed in hypnotic, overlapping curlicues. This style of sample, popularized by UK bass music, at this point has become prevalent enough that it represents modernity-- the sound of contemporary electronic music-- more than any one genre. Still, Machinedrum's Travis Stewart approaches this trend like a glutton. Where peers like Four Tet and Jacques Greene apply these samples in precise, painterly strokes, Stewart gloms them onto the canvas with abandon. In doing so, he seems to suggest that their accumulation, more than their placement or timbre, provides the necessary weight and mysticism.
Stewart enjoys these kind of tactful reactions. He's spent 10 years releasing music under the Machinedrum moniker, much of it worthwhile, much of it in widely varying styles of electronic composition, from IDM to deep house and back. Bass music is Stewart's current muse: Earlier this year he released the excellent Fleur 12" as half of Sepalcure (whose other half, Praveen Sharma, released one of the better bass singles of the year, "The Year 3000", as Braille). On Room(s) he takes bass music's vocal samples and strips them of their candor, the sense that they are disassociated from the tech-y fray. They become globs of sound, the primary element around which these tracks are constructed.
A collection of active, grazing drum patterns and warm keyboards holds these gobs together. Stewart manages a fair range of styles-- from the pounding, piano-house of "Come1" to the opiate shadows of "Youniverse"-- though nothing escapes those contorted yelps. Those samples-- ululating, detuned, hypnotic-- normalize everything on Room(s), to the point where vastly different tracks are tonally similar. Sometimes, such as on "GBYE", he succeeds using short, eager samples, colliding two or three voices together dozens of times in quick succession. The tracks that stray furthest from dance music fare the best: "Sacred Frequency" (itself a single, with excellent B-sides, for the record) veers into the gleaming psychedelia of Caribou, while "Now U Know the Deal 4 Real" touches on cold, assertive R&B.
I want to stress how many listens it takes to suss out even these differences. It's not that they're not real, it's that the shivering vocal timbres dominate the mix to the point where large shifts in tempo and style are obscured. It's during these moments when I think that Room(s) and its elevation of the vocal sample was perhaps a better idea than an album. Still, if you're the type of person who feel hard for Greene's "Another Girl" or Burial's shaky ghosts, there's enough hyper-melodic, mush-mouthed whir on Room(s) to reward your time. | 2011-07-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-07-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | July 25, 2011 | 6.6 | 18c72bff-8356-4838-811d-1e0e392cc0fb | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The duo offers a tight, cohesive project that binds Gud’s experienced pop precision with Papi’s uncontrolled intensity. | The duo offers a tight, cohesive project that binds Gud’s experienced pop precision with Papi’s uncontrolled intensity. | Rx Papi / Gud: Foreign Exchange | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rx-papi-gud-foreign-exchange/ | Foreign Exchange | When baby-faced Swedish rappers like Yung Lean and Bladee first started racking up views in the United States, their viral success was owed as much to the beats as it was the bars. The cooing vocal samples, angelic synths, and crystal shards of sound synonymous with Sad Boys and Drain Gang were and are frequently the product of producer Micke Berlander, better known as Gud. Despite the now substantial influence and imitation of his sound, Gud has been relatively selective in the artists he works with: a beat on Halsey’s debut album here, a co-production credit on Travis Scott and Quavo’s Huncho Jack there. It’s especially noteworthy, then, that the aptly named Foreign Exchange came about not because of A&R or a phoned-in business negotiation, but because Gud was so taken with Rx Papi’s work that he reached out to the New York rapper directly about collaborating.
It’s a partnership that, at first glance, seems unexpected—the Swedish rap universe flirts with hyper-pop, and it’s hard to imagine Rx Papi ever working with Charli XCX—but it also makes a strange kind of sense. Sad Boys and the loose Rx collective alike conjure very specific stylistic universes with devoted cult followings, each group re-interpreting familiar trap beats and lyrical tropes into new languages of rap, uncanny but also familiar. Though the delivery might differ, both scenes have pushed the envelope in terms of vulnerability in rap, one with a kind of sensitive poetry and the other with unsparing detail.
The collective Rx discography is a veritable torrent that not even Noah could tread. Unlike the projects of the galaxy-brained Rxk Nephew, whose treatises still function best as YouTube loosies more than full-length records, Foreign Exchange is tight and cohesive, benefiting from Gud’s experienced pop precision. The Sad Boys affect was undoubtedly genuine—the lives of Lean and his collaborators have been marked by a number of tragedies since their explosion of success—but being an “emotional boy” is as much an aesthetic as it is a sincere expression, the Arizona-sipping, athleisure-wearing equivalent of goths from bygone eras. There is humor to Papi’s bars: a track like “Still in Da Hood” drops pop culture references from cartoons to wrestling (“Drako sound like Boomhauer,” “Spike Dudley with the leg drop”) with no irony or quotation marks, just small comforts in a world marked by the ever-present expectations of looming death or heat around the corner.
It’s not just the lack of accent or language barrier that makes this collaboration even more direct than Gud’s work with Sad Boys, but also Papi’s flow itself. Where the voices of Gud’s usual muses are ethereal and distant, sometimes verging on dissociative, Papi is immediate and unrestrained from the opening bars of “12 Stout Street.”’ His tone is somewhere between howling at the moon and crying out for help, a jagged blade sharpened by a lifetime of heartbreak: imagine “Dreams and Nightmares” filtered through Michigan rap, Lil B, and a thousand blunts. Like his comrade-in-arms Rx Nephew, Papi’s lyricism gives a swift middle finger to the concept of hooks, verses, or conventional structure—what he gives us instead is a relentless direct address, unsparing in its breathless stream of consciousness, the very definition of no holds barred.
Though the pair might make for dissonant bedfellows, it’s not hard to see why a rapper who’s flipped Pet Shop Boys would be attracted to synthesizer-driven melodies like “Split Decision.” Gud’s smoothest beats only accentuate the painfulness of Papi’s lived experience: as a piano line that could belong to a New Edition or Ready for the World ballad glistens on “N.L.M.B,” Papi screams: “I grew up around fucking dead bodies!” The Swedish producer’s work is often compared to trance, but his composition here is somewhere between neoclassical and quiet storm, grounded in piano and ambient textures more than bass drum and hi-hat. Where the bass in previous Papi recordings was so fat as to almost capsize the beat, here it can be conspicuously absent, merely a beating pulse within a body of sound. When Papi’s lyrics aren’t transparently emotional, Gud’s production enhances and emphasizes the grit and pain inherent in his voice.
That tension between voice and instrumentation magnifies both the unique beauty of Gud’s beats and Papi’s uncontrolled intensity. The more times you hear Papi say who he feels like when he walks into a room, the more it seems less like a boast and more like a coping mechanism, an ironic armor to fend off life’s daggers. The album’s final line, on “Liar,” reveals what he’s been keeping inside the whole time: “I walked in this bitch, I don’t want to.” When drums and bass are decentralized, as they so often are in Gud’s beats, there’s no steel or strength left to defend, just the raw skin of Rx Papi’s emotions.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Electronic | Year0001 | December 6, 2021 | 7.4 | 18c82198-3e60-44e5-b75f-0a0de97636e1 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Chicago violinist and songwriter follows his breakthrough album, The Mysterious Production of Eggs, by adding more guitars and deeper textures to his production, tricks he's been employing live for the past couple of years. | Chicago violinist and songwriter follows his breakthrough album, The Mysterious Production of Eggs, by adding more guitars and deeper textures to his production, tricks he's been employing live for the past couple of years. | Andrew Bird: Armchair Apocrypha | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10016-armchair-apocrypha/ | Armchair Apocrypha | At first blush, this record is not nearly as captivating as Andrew Bird's previous three albums, but in his inimitable and subtle way, the Chicago singer-songwriter has here made yet another intricately detailed collection of songs. While Weather Systems and The Mysterious Production of Eggs found him discovering and exploring new territory, this is the album where he's built his house and now settles in and gets comfortable.
In a subgenre stuffed full with mediocrity, Bird has developed a singular style that frees him to add or subtract anything he likes from it-- no matter what he does at this point, chances are you're never going to mistake his music for anyone else's. On Bird's latest album, Armchair Apocrypha, guitar is far more prominent than it once was-- something Bird has been working toward in concert for a couple of years now. This addition deepens the texture created by his core instruments-- pedal-controlled loops of pizzicato violin, drums, and glockenspiel. With the addition of overdubs-- waves of multi-tracked violin, eerie whistling, and dizzying violin cadenzas-- and heavy layering, it all becomes nearly symphonic in scope.
The only thing that tosses and turns more than the music is Bird-- his lyrics are drawn from the kinds of thoughts that keep one up at night: "Do you wonder where the self resides/ Is it in your head or between your sides?/ Who will be the one who decides/ Its true location?" he sings on "Darkmatter", pondering the unknowable without resorting to pedestrian uses of the words "soul" and "God." His wordplay is in top form and serves as a perfect foil for the tension and release of arrangements like that on "Armchairs", where a piano pushes around chunks of listless violin.
Oddly, Bird revisits a song from 2003's Weather Systems, his first album without former band the Bowl of Fire: "Imitosis" is built around a much faster version of the violin parts and vocal hook of Weather Systems' "I", but apart from those ingredients it's completely different-- and much better. The song takes a spiraling dive into Bird's interest in science and psychology and his distrust of the ways in which we use them in our world, spinning into an examination of the nature vs. nurture debate.
These trips through a conflicted superego may not work quite as well without Bird's sonic stamp, or his voice. His singing can leap from a low deadpan to a flying falsetto in a heartbeat, and he varies his verses and choruses to throw you slightly off balance before serving his precisely delivered hooks. Bird never takes a melody where you expect it to go, as on the chorus of "Plasticities", which is practically power pop with its snappy guitar hook and massive vocal melody, but the way it's recorded and arranged it gets under your skin more than it gets into your head.
"Scythian Empires" is one of the most subtle and elegant songs about the futility of battle and conquest written during the current Iraq War, linking brief mentions of Halliburton attaché cases and talk of "exiting empires" to an ancient, extinct civilization. The Scythians controlled vast swaths of modern-day Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan for around eight centuries but now are all but forgotten-- Bird's indirect connection of them to the imagery of the last four years shows the sweep of history that speedily ushers most of our endeavors to the dustbin, and he does it without beating us over the head.
If there's a disappointing moment on the record, it's when "Heretics" pulls back from the drama of its swirling intro and slips into a mixture of spoken and sung lines instead of just going hell-for-leather to a big chorus. Otherwise, the biggest criticism you could level at it is that it's not better than the three albums that came before it-- but that scarcely matters when you're actually listening to it, because Armchair Apocrypha is ultimately another object of strange and unique beauty from this inventive songwriter and performer. | 2007-03-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-03-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | March 23, 2007 | 7.7 | 18cd33aa-88e5-4b1b-ab36-dfd0b150a304 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Trust Fund's sophomore album Seems Unfair is an indie rock record with the bright, shaggy-dog qualities of early Superchunk, and it often recalls early Los Campesinos! minus the hyperactive streak. They are at their best when they throw in a soured note or stall the pace just as a song threatens to get too comforting. | Trust Fund's sophomore album Seems Unfair is an indie rock record with the bright, shaggy-dog qualities of early Superchunk, and it often recalls early Los Campesinos! minus the hyperactive streak. They are at their best when they throw in a soured note or stall the pace just as a song threatens to get too comforting. | Trust Fund: Seems Unfair | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21188-seems-unfair/ | Seems Unfair | Trust Fund is essentially Bristol-based songwriter Ellis Jones, whose records and tours are rounded out by a rotating cast of musician friends from around the UK. Seems Unfair is his second album of 2015. Back in February, Jones released Trust Fund's debut No One's Coming for Us, which he broke down in a track-by-track feature with unusually transparent remarks on his inspirations. He says, "I wanted this song to sound like Radiator Hospital" about three different tracks, and then repeats that line about Swearin', Mount Eerie, Tony Molina, Waxahatchee, the Field Mice, Weezer, and Elliott Smith.
Some bands bristle when asked about their influences, as if disclosing them will reveal the shocking truth that they are not original to the world. Jones often frets about people continuing to refer to Trust Fund as a DIY outfit since he signed to Welsh indie Turnstile and received a small advance to make Seems Unfair in a studio rather than his bedroom. Although he's hardly breached intervention-worthy excess, his openness about his artistic debts reads as a very deliberate way of keeping the audience-facing aspect of the DIY ethos foregrounded: this is what made me do this; no form of inspiration is too new to be legitimate.
Even without the handy birdspotters' guide, Seems Unfair makes its references overt: It's an indie rock record with the bright, shaggy-dog qualities of early Superchunk, and it often recalls early Los Campesinos! minus the hyperactive streak. You could isolate patches that sound like Pavement or Dinosaur Jr., too, but Seems Unfair is much more distinct than its predecessor, thanks in part to the precise production of MJ from Hookworms. Jones' extremely polarizing voice also helps matters (in a way): He sings in a chalky adenoidal tone that cuts through its surrounds like wax through watercolor.
Hooks only occasionally pierced the fog of Trust Fund's debut; here, strange and beautiful boy-girl harmonies cut through the careening fuzz, giving extra shape to these songs. There are folky vocal touches in the breakdown of "4th August" and on the title track, where the band cuts through Jones' hushed words with formal choral chants. That song's enjoyably odd beginnings are wasted on a generic, puppyish end, although other tracks on Seems Unfair bring an almost prog sensibility to indie pop: "Scared II" starts full tilt, hangs a while in a highly strung, one-note guitar barrage, and ends on a triumphal cascade of vocals interlaced with a careening solo.
The relentlessly peppy pace carries along Jones' lyrics, which are as guileless as his approach to interviews. He writes about immediate fears but also the fear of change, often with a similarly simple pathos to Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield. "Michal's Plan" outlines someone's failed intentions to swim every day; instead, their bathing suit is "wet and festering in a Tesco bag at the foot of [their] bed." Seems Unfair is full of characters who seem to struggle with everyday minutiae, but Jones throws a magnifying glass on what may seem to more worldly observers like small stakes. Supermarkets crop up a lot in his lyrics, their shiny floors the sites of emotional reconciliation ("Big Asda") and the stages for great triumphs: "Baby, we walk like dreamers do/ Skating through the Free-From to world foods," Jones sings on "Dreamers".
Sometimes his plainspoken quality is too much. The driving "Scared II" is about Jones' fear of his partner dying: "Do a wee, brush my teeth, and you'll be gone forever," he sings. Twee is a worn-out, gendered term that's best retired, but Jones' self-effacing use of the word "wee" kind of makes you long for a good shower of territorial pissings. Maybe it's intentional though: Toward the end of the song, he asks his reluctant lover if they "still want to freeze my verrucas?" It's not appetizing, but then Trust Fund are at their best when they throw in a soured note or stall the pace just as a song threatens to get too comforting. Their tussle between coziness and dissonance betrays a surfeit of ambitious ideas, which isn't often a problem with modern indie rock acolytes. | 2015-11-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-11-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Turnstile | November 10, 2015 | 6.8 | 18cf7908-4779-44bf-90db-fb53860a0542 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Whether making black metal as Altar of Plagues or electronic music as WIFE, James Kelley has a taste for subversion, and his new WIFE EP surprises again by sounding downright joyful in spots. | Whether making black metal as Altar of Plagues or electronic music as WIFE, James Kelley has a taste for subversion, and his new WIFE EP surprises again by sounding downright joyful in spots. | WIFE: Standard Nature | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22504-standard-nature/ | Standard Nature | Whether making black metal under the name Altar of Plagues or electronic music as WIFE, multi-instrumentalist/producer James Kelly has consistently asserted himself as an artist who forges his own path. With both projects, Kelly has actually worked within established genre boundaries, but he’s also introduced unorthodox touches that place his work in a category by itself. His take on black metal, for example, captures the primal savagery of early pioneers like Darkthrone and Emperor while simultaneously drawing from a much broader emotional and musical palette.
In a rare best-of-both-worlds scenario, Altar of Plagues has managed to convey Kelly’s love for classic black metal and still exude a sense of freedom to explore goth, shoegaze, and—perhaps most crucially—a sensitive disposition that even the most high-minded black metal auteurs still tend to avoid. If Kelly’s recent shift away from Altar of Plagues’ blast-furnace tonality shocked any of his fanbase, it really shouldn't have. By that point, his penchant for tasteful subversion was well established.
WIFE’s 2014 debut full length What’s Between consisted of lacy electronic music draped around a singer-songwriter frame. Even more drastically, Kelly wore his R&B/soul vocal influences on his sleeve. But when you strip away the surface distinctions, What’s Between is cut from the same moodiness as all of James’ previous work. The new WIFE EP Standard Nature is arguably James’ most truly shocking move to date, not so much because he’s shifted stylistically again, but because this time his music sounds downright joyful in spots.
The differences between Standard Nature and What’s Between jump out within seconds. Opening instrumental “Wide Nine” establishes the beat-driven format that Kelly sticks to throughout the EP’s five songs. But again, Kelly makes his left-of-center approach clear almost as quickly. “Wide Nine,” for example, starts out as if it’s going to sustain its initial club-bound direction and even suggests that it might turn into a dance number. It doesn’t, the beat melting by the 1-minute mark into a hollowed-out scaffolding of its own shape, the remainder of the song playing almost like the morning-after memory of a night of revelry.
Moreover, while each of the five songs abounds with jaw-rattling drops, Kelly shows his versatility by underlaying the rhythmic boom with an array of disparate elements. On second track “Standard Nature,” for instance, Kelly sings in a style that recalls a church choir performing hymns on a high holiday. And on “Lovelock,” Kelly uses a vocoder to channel his inner Tobacco. Meanwhile, “Glass Interruption” features strings that eventually swallow the song’s glitchy first half, only to be swallowed in turn.
On “Native Trade,” Kelly takes soft keyboard swells—the kind we often hear in heartstring-tugging film scores—and scoops them out with intervals of silence, so that the tune stutters while evoking puffy clouds of drama. As always, Kelly weaves different shades of solemnity into a rich meshwork. And as time goes on, Kelly’s music gets more and more refined, so that it evades simple descriptors like “somber” and “dark.” But, where Kelly has utilized myriad shades of gray up to this point, on Standard Nature he expands beyond gray tones and demonstrates a rare ability to make overcast music that bursts with color.
At this point, we can probably bet that Kelly will change his approach again next time. Which means that Standard Nature’s pleasures are likely to be fleeting—like the songs themselves, a suggestion of an idea that’s over before it gets a chance to fully develop. But if nothing else, as Kelly’s body of work has shown, his need for constant evolution is one of his defining characteristics. On Standard Nature, he stays true to that and leaves enticing hints of more twists and turns to come. | 2016-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Profound Lore | October 19, 2016 | 7 | 18d0b436-1611-4a3a-93b0-103f9aebcb53 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Merge offers a deluxe reissue of Superchunk's excellent mid-90s record. The album proper has worn very well, and the inclusion of a live set from the period and rehearsal tapes is welcome. | Merge offers a deluxe reissue of Superchunk's excellent mid-90s record. The album proper has worn very well, and the inclusion of a live set from the period and rehearsal tapes is welcome. | Superchunk: Foolish | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15889-foolish/ | Foolish | In certain key ways, Superchunk's Foolish perfectly sums up what made so much early-1990s indie rock so great. It was rambunctious enough for kids who craved the caffeinated buzz of punk rock at its catchiest. It was also tender enough for kids who loved hearing their own human-sized romantic foibles reflected in indie's everyperson approach to the love song. Foolish can be plenty fast and plenty noisy, but it skips the meathead aggression that's a nasty side effect of so much fast and noisy music. It's unafraid of getting down to personal angst, but smart enough not to get all gross and mawkish about it. It was made by a group who could have walked off stage and gone to their day jobs without having to change out of their Rock Band costumes. These are the kind of songs about bad breakups, worse parties, and lonely walks home that you and three of your friends might have written.
Except you probably wouldn't have, or couldn't have. Like a lot of early-90s indie music, Foolish still projects a D.I.Y. spirit, a welcoming vibe of accessibility, community, small-scale ingenuity. But there's nothing about the album that really says "anyone can do this." In fact, it still sounds like a major statement, albeit one from a self-effacing band. You knew from "Slack Motherfucker" that Superchunk would not be destined to play college-town gigs for a couple of years and then disappear. They were just more driven than the bulk of their contemporaries, a work ethic that's pretty obvious from at least album no. 2 onward. You don't come up with that many intense and memorable choruses, or play that tight, thanks to luck. And while they had an anti-pretentious streak that was a godsend in the messianic years of grunge, Foolish is where the band's ambition really blossomed for the first (but not the last) time, a dozen songs that turned small-town heartbreak into loud and weirdly triumphant anthems.
A big part of that is the sound of Foolish, and how that sound perfectly complements the more adventurous songs. But then, despite their rep as a smoking live act who do their best to simply translate that vibe in the studio, Superchunk have always had a real knack for picking the right producer for a specific set of songs, almost from the start. Steve Albini's typically unembellished recording on 1991's No Pocky For Kitty accentuated the wiriness of its very frantic tunes. John Reis added an almost claustrophobic, garage-rock intensity to the rawer set that would make up 1993's On the Mouth. Those albums weren't exactly static, though they did get a lot of mileage out of punk's joyful bashing. But Foolish is very much a big-canvas album, full of stark, quiet-loud shifts, songs with more breathing room, and grander peaks.
Given that producer Brian Paulson's the guy who recorded Spiderland, he seems to have been the perfect choice to give Foolish the appropriate weight and ferocity. Mac McCaughan and Jim Wilbur's guitars on "The First Part" clang and scrape as fiercely as any of the post-hardcore bands coming out of D.C. at the same time. But there's also a real bottom-end under all that trebly attack, the kind missing from most classic indie albums of the period, give or take the similarly minded Archers of Loaf. Paulson keeps things crisp and booming in the low-key moments, going full-tilt when the band decides to get loud. Painful examinations of an exhausted relationship, like "Keeping Track" and "Revelations", start out at a slow-burn and build to a thrilling climax or three, the wave of feedback coming almost as a relief after all that pensive tension. Foolish is a heavy album, musically and emotionally. But it's also never a drag. That controlled sense of pacing extends not just across the songs but the whole album. There's still plenty of that old joyful bashing, the caustic moments balanced by speed and sweetness. Heart-punching breakup songs like "Driveway to Driveway" are also bright shout-alongs.
This remaster sounds just fine to me, maybe a little louder in the top end as usual, though my much-played and more-than-a-decade-old CD copy also sounds plenty fine. The real benefit is that Foolish is once again available on vinyl; while clearly aimed at longtime fans, the newly appended live set and handful of other bonuses are still largesse on the part of Merge, one the few labels that actually bothers to include something of value if you're going to repurchase an album you've already owned in multiple formats. But the original album remains the main draw, especially if you just came onboard with last year's swift and colorful and totally fun Majesty Shredding. This is probably the darkest album Superchunk ever made, but however serious Foolish gets, there's always more of the giddy thrill of hearing a group friends who sound like they're having a blast playing together, even if they're also pushing themselves to go further, giving the songs that much more all-or-nothing intensity than everyone else around them. | 2011-10-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-10-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | October 4, 2011 | 8.8 | 18d60282-3df7-407c-9cad-601e09a29723 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The Chicago singer/rapper known for her diaristic, relationship-dissecting R&B builds her new mixtape around inherently private and frequently drama-filled voice messages. | The Chicago singer/rapper known for her diaristic, relationship-dissecting R&B builds her new mixtape around inherently private and frequently drama-filled voice messages. | Tink: Voicemails | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tink-voicemails/ | Voicemails | Whether providing the wisdom of an elder (Solange’s “Tina Taught Me”), a representation of the song’s subject (Drake’s “Marvin’s Room”), or just some comedic relief (Frank Ocean’s “Be Yourself”), voicemails are long-established as a versatile storytelling device in hip-hop and R&B. So it’s no surprise that Tink, the Chicago singer/rapper known for her diaristic, relationship-dissecting R&B, has chosen to build her new mixtape around a method of communication that’s inherently private and frequently drama-filled. On Voicemails, her first full-length since leaving Timbaland’s Epic Records imprint in 2017, Tink tells her latest romance saga more vividly than ever before.
Voicemails follows a woman named KeKe, with occasional interjections from two men in her life, DeShawn and Chris. As KeKe, Tink sings about struggling to decide whether to stay with the unreliable DeShawn or to pursue a new beau, Chris. It’s an extension of themes already well explored in Tink’s Winter’s Diary mixtape series; teasing out the emotional highs and lows of a relationship is her bread and butter. But Tink remains gripping as she highlights the tension between devotion and deception, longing and heartbreak. “I don't wanna throw this away, but boy, sometimes,” she sings on “I Need Ur Love,” her sweet and airy voice twisting in anguish.
Throughout Voicemails, Tink explores the spectrum of emotions that make KeKe a complex and captivating character. On “Stabbed in the Back,” Tink flexes her equally punchy and melodic rapping, flowing over an electric guitar-sampling trap beat with finesse. She’s distrustful of her man and paranoid over past betrayals, yet resolved in her strength: “I ain't work this hard just to turn around and quit,” she says with urgency. The standout “Ride It” puts Tink’s sensuality on display; her voice oozes through a snaking melody like a slow-motion version of Rihanna’s “Needed Me.” She’s earnest and romantic (“Having sex like I’m your woman”), while guest Dej Loaf is more brazen (“Might just fuck him on the interstate”). Each track further opens up KeKe’s shifting emotional landscape, illustrating the case both for and against leaving DeShawn.
Tink’s songwriting is vibrant, but it’s the album’s voicemail interludes that really propel the telenovela-scale dramatics. “Bad Side” finds an enraged KeKe stuck at home with DeShawn’s baby for four days, while on “DeShawn’s Interlude,” the hapless dad insists that he only missed her calls because his phone fell in the toilet. By the time Voicemails comes to a close, you’re waiting at the edge of your seat to see if KeKe will ditch him. “I done fell in love with the real thing/Even though you make me mad, I could never leave,” Tink raps on the tape’s closer, “Falling in Love,” keeping things open-ended. (Later, on Twitter, she all but confirmed that KeKe ends up with Chris.) By presenting Voicemails as a work of autofiction, blurring the lines between herself and her character, Tink revitalizes the tried-and-true confessional R&B she’s served up for years now. In Tink’s world, voicemails aren’t dead, and neither is love. | 2019-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Winter’s Diary / Empire | May 7, 2019 | 7.2 | 18d642cd-dfee-4ad8-9a25-5c795574b307 | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
The SAULT vocalist’s new album explores faith and self-love through warm, lustrous neo-soul. | The SAULT vocalist’s new album explores faith and self-love through warm, lustrous neo-soul. | Cleo Sol: Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cleo-sol-heaven/ | Heaven | Cleo Sol named herself after the sun. The UK singer is a vocalist for the enigmatic collective SAULT, which makes experimental R&B, funk, and disco-inspired music that speaks to the complexity of the Black experience. Over the past few years, she’s also released three balmy neo-soul albums that are in the lineage of Stevie Wonder and Erykah Badu and suffused with warm optimism: She sings about following your dreams, finding salvation in love, and honoring a higher purpose. Her music is radiant like a blooming peony, tender like butter left out on the counter. Sol’s latest project, Heaven, explores her usual themes of faith and self-love with a newfound ease and confidence.
The piano-driven pop arrangements of her 2021 album Mother left a lot of room for Sol’s storytelling to take the stage. Heaven is a warmer, funkier, and more sonically diverse album, prioritizing the interplay between slick bass and synth and Sol’s voice as much as the lyrical messaging. Throughout, her falsetto is beautiful, floating over the production like fog drifting across a snow-capped mountain range. On “Go Baby,” she repeats the titular phrase over a meandering piano and gentle backing vocals, turning the directive into a twinkling meditation. And on “Nothing on Me,” Sol luxuriates in a fleet-footed bossa nova groove, occasionally weaving in her voice as a wisp of texture.
Sol’s work cultivates inner joy that she then extends outwards. Released after the birth of her child, Mother was an empathetic project that demonstrated understanding toward her mother while also holding her accountable for the harm she caused. A similar sense of compassion guides Heaven; Sol examines relationships with friends, lovers, herself with sensitivity and care. “Miss Romantic” is a plea to a friend—or perhaps to herself—to stop humoring a man who continues to disrespect her. Sol is firm and direct as she lists the man’s many offenses, but ends the song on a string of sweet affirmations that underscore her deep affection for the other party: “You are brave, you are true, you won’t lose, trust in you” she croons, her voice echoing across a gentle guitar line and squiggly synth.
Throughout the album, Sol keeps her storytelling diffuse and open-ended. On “Golden Child, (Jealous),” a breezy track with bird song and flitting drums, she repeats, “They’re just jealous of your mind/They’re just jealous ‘cause you’re kind,” leaving who “they” are unanswered. She is similarly vague on “Old Friends” as she expresses sadness about a relationship that ended, with lyrics like, “Distance and pain/Made my life feel smaller” and “Years have gone by, tears still stain my pillow/You played games with my emotions.” She always delivers her lines with poise and intention, but sometimes her writing can seem emotionally flat.
Despite a few trite lyrics, there are many transcendent moments on Heaven. Sol is able to pivot between multiple emotional states—gratitude, calm, yearning—within the space of a single vocal run, like on album standout, “Heaven.” Her voice descends from an ethereal falsetto to a lower, golden-toned vibrato like red wine cascading from a glass carafe. The song establishes a mood so engrossing that notes seem to suspend in the air and reverberate around you even after the music stops, its beauty lingering like heat on your skin after a long day in the sun. | 2023-09-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Forever Living Originals | September 29, 2023 | 7.4 | 18e305f6-6ee3-417a-b790-be447c4576ce | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
Produced by Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos, the multi-national group fuses Argentine cumbia, Peruvian chicha, and Turkish psych into a giddy sound that leans unabashedly retro. | Produced by Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos, the multi-national group fuses Argentine cumbia, Peruvian chicha, and Turkish psych into a giddy sound that leans unabashedly retro. | Los Bitchos: Let The Festivities Begin! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/los-bitchos-let-the-festivities-begin/ | Let The Festivities Begin! | Los Bitchos’ Let the Festivities Begin! is retro, wide-reaching, and as festive as the title promises. The London group’s debut, produced by Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos, resembles the soundtrack to an early-’70s gap year, an amalgam of influences and instruments that runs decidedly groovy. Here, we coast on vibes and guitar licks, navigating a surf-rock odyssey by way of Argentine cumbia, Peruvian chicha, and Turkish psych. Happily, its disparate parts turn out to be as cohesive as they are giddy. And if it never amounts to much more than that, so what? Better a good trip than a navel-gazing one; better a quick romp than a slog through the cerebral.
The eddying guitar on this entirely instrumental album leads easily into daydreams. This is a record predicated on fantasy—its accompanying press release references Tarantino films, cowgirls “swaggering into a saloon,” and panthers “prowling through a desert.” Its wordlessness makes the album a screen, something on which to project yourself or your preferred alternate reality. Opener “The Link Is About to Die” is a sleek, muscular saunter: Someone’s ordering a whiskey shot in a Nudie suit. “Pista (A Fresh Start)” feels like arriving by Camaro to a small mountain village wearing sunglasses, toting a pistol, and harboring a dark secret.
These unapologetically backward-facing songs’ main ambition is to excavate a vibe. Standout “Las Panteras” alternates between trotting and running, steadily ticking cymbals and sinuous guitar toggling between restraint and effervescence. It whips itself into a frothy psychedelic frenzy and sweeps the listener up in the process. “Good to Go” lassoes a Morricone opener into ’80s synth pop, where “Tropico,” another highlight, fuses the same dancey synth with propulsive cumbia and further embellishes with Anatolian guitar. Rather than feeling forced, Los Bitchos’ stylistic marriages are balanced and delightful. Even the most unexpected element never feels tacked on.
It’s difficult to separate the music from the band’s image. Los Bitchos’ members—with ties to Sweden, Australia, Turkey, and Uruguay—all boast Jane Birkin bangs and ’60s wardrobes, and in videos like the one for “Pista,” they lean fully into the cheeky schtick of a retro B-movie. There are captions in bubbly mustard-yellow serif fonts, pinafores, berets, and menace in the woods. Where the production can feel overpolished, it’s also easy to imagine these songs given further room to roam in a live setting (this relatively sedate KEXP set features a keytar). Where the packaging leans twee, it’s also the opposite of self-serious or pretentious—Los Bitchos promise neither more nor less than a good time, as easy and palatable as the champagne of beers. And that’s just what they achieve, for better or for worse. Let the Festivities Begin! is music to dance to, to roll a joint to, to solve a decades-old mystery to, but it isn’t a masterwork that unfolds with multiple listens. It’s exactly what it promises, and that’s a party.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | City Slang | February 7, 2022 | 5.9 | 18e46a8c-40ea-400e-a356-5916641f7cb6 | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
The Chicago multi-instrumentalist and composer’s second album crisscrosses genres and eras, sprawling in its ambition and surprisingly precise in its attack. | The Chicago multi-instrumentalist and composer’s second album crisscrosses genres and eras, sprawling in its ambition and surprisingly precise in its attack. | Ben LaMar Gay: Open Arms to Open Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ben-lamar-gay-open-arms-to-open-us/ | Open Arms to Open Us | In an illuminating prologue to his second full-length album, Chicago instrumentalist, composer, and vocalist Ben LaMar Gay writes of his doubts as to what he could leave behind for “the young people in my life” when faced with “the crumbling of societal facades.” He finds the answer in rhythm, “the one trueness that travels great distances and constantly survives the crumbling of facades.”
Rhythm, it turns out, is also a potent tool for opening up what could be a borderline fearsome work of experimental music to the popular ear. Open Arms to Open Us sounds simultaneously like everything and nothing, bringing to mind Bitches Brew, hip-hop, New York experimental math rockers Battles, Kid A, raga, samba, free jazz, D’Angelo, and the chipmunk-ed vocals employed by rave producers. But in its conglomerate totality, the album is too multifarious to bear more than a passing resemblance to any of the above. It’s a remarkable piece of musical pathfinding, sprawling in its ambition and surprisingly precise in its attack, an album where a zither jam (“Nyuzura,” featuring British-Rwandan singer Dorothée Munyaneza) gives way to triangle-assisted drone (“Slightly Before the Dawn”), which then cedes the floor to hip-hop tuba bounce (“Dress Me in New Love”).
LaMar Gay’s vision of musical “Pan-Americana”—reaching beyond the sawdust and spit image of classical Americana to include North and South American culture—binds the project together. In addition to rich baritone vocals, organ, balafon, cornet, zither, and a host of percussion instruments, LaMar Gay also contributes some fantastically sharp songwriting on Open Arms, such as the gorgeously gloomy, minor-key dread of “Oh Great Be the Lake” and the grandiloquent “Aunt Lola and the Quail,” a wealth of ideas never coming at the expense of brevity.
For all this, Open Arms is very much a collective work. Chicago rock band Ohmme apply vocal textures to “Sometimes I Forget How Summer Looks on You.,” Dorothée Munyaneza sounds fantastically acute against the tightly-sketched zither of “Nyuzura,” and A.Martinez’s poetry brings an earthy clarity to “I Once Carried a Blossom.” Matthew Davis’ tuba playing is a low-end highlight, while Adam Zanolini’s soprano saxophone brings an unsettling ambience to “Slightly Before the Dawn.”
Inevitably, in an album about the possibilities of rhythm, it is the drums that drive great swaths of Open Arms, their muscular embrace reaching out to bring us back to a place of deceptive familiarity. To believe in rhythm is to trust Tommaso Moretti’s pulsating beat to sweep the listener beyond the obtuse chord sequences of “Sometimes I Forget How Summer Looks on You.” with the grace of a good museum guide; it is to have faith that Moretti’s masterful hi-hat and snare skip on “Bang Melodically Bang” will transform a gnarled musical base into an unlikely tail shaker, and his caterpillar shuffle will make “Lean Back. Try Igbo” into an unlikely earworm.
To trust in rhythm, in other words, is to believe in the power of music to reach beyond generic boundaries to new—and surprisingly welcoming—worlds of opportunity and sound, where the traditional logic comes second to the philosophy of the beat. Open Arms to Open Us is adventure writ large, a rhythmical hymn to boundless possibility.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | International Anthem / Nonesuch | December 1, 2021 | 7.5 | 18e5c501-9568-4a23-89fb-55d6385641b0 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The Mobile, Alabama rapper’s debut album is weighed down by streaming bait, but thankfully it does include a handful of his highest highs. | The Mobile, Alabama rapper’s debut album is weighed down by streaming bait, but thankfully it does include a handful of his highest highs. | Yung Bleu: Moon Boy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yung-bleu-moon-boy/ | Moon Boy | There are a shit ton of rappers from the collection of thriving rap scenes in the Deep South solemnly singing about their grief, heartbreak, and tough upbringing over melancholy guitar and piano loops—I understand if you’re overwhelmed. Mobile, Alabama’s Yung Bleu is yet another, but he’s found a sweet spot amid the trendy sound. A deep dive into his catalog of mixtapes (see: the Investments series and Bleu Vandross trilogy) reveals that Bleu has built on a foundation laid by staples of the last decade or so of introspective Southern hip-hop: Like Starlito, his writing is often a self-examination of the fears, trauma, and racism he wishes he could forget; his ability to convey warmth when singing about violence might bring to mind Kevin Gates; he can craft a hook with the careful precision of his mentor Boosie. These layers have turned Bleu into one of the scene’s most obvious stars, so much so that at the end of last year, Drake hopped on the remix to Bleu’s take-me-back-anthem “You’re Mines Still,” which has been on an endless radio loop for months.
Bleu’s debut album Moon Boy is complicated, though. He’s a talented rapper who merges the confessional-like detail of his rap inspirations with soulful melodies that sound like he should join his local church’s choir, but also, he really wants to be a streaming juggernaut. With that, comes an uneven listening experience. Moon Boy is a reflection of the current popular rap landscape, where albums aren’t made to be consumed as a whole but instead for fans to sort through and playlist their favorites. This thought process has been amplified by streaming: Just ignore the songs that you don’t like, it’s not as if you paid 20 dollars for it. But I can’t quite do that. Am I supposed to pretend that “Unforgiving,” an extremely dull collaboration with Davido that feels more like a business deal than anything else, doesn’t exist? Or what about the whiny love drunk coos of “Ghetto Love Birds” alongside A Boogie Wit da Hoodie? Or the flat-sounding piano beats of “Dark Clouds” and “Angels Never Cry” designed to melt into any playlist? Or Chris Brown continuing to torment the music world with hooks that sound like they were recorded in the AIM away message era?
Moon Boy is weighed down by streaming bait, but thankfully it does include a handful of Bleu’s highest highs. It’s compelling how easily he can switch between tones, as the project seesaws between old war stories filled with agony and intimate ballads about love and the pain love brings. It works because Bleu is equally comfortable on both sides of that spectrum. He can carry sweet-sounding duets with H.E.R. and Kehlani and then use a weathered delivery to contemplate his past over a downbeat instrumental. He lilts, “And we come from duckin’ hundred round drums/And the school system treat us like we dumb/That’s why I’m in the hallway/Eighth grade, I was trappin’ in the hallway,” on the intensely personal yet self-effacing “Die Under the Moon.” Similarly, on the Jeezy-assisted “Shoe Box,” his writing is concise, emotional, and somehow still catchy.
Yet it’s not enough. I know, it’s hard to argue with success, and Moon Boy will inevitably rake in more numbers than Bleu ever has, but this is not a review of financial achievements; it’s of an entire project. Albums should be more than playlist fodder, but complete bodies of work that make you want to soak in and live with them. Yung Bleu is one of the premier voices of an exciting regional rap scene. To want him to live up to that is okay.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Vandross / Empire | July 29, 2021 | 5.9 | 18e8fca3-6e6d-4fad-a1ea-63cb2e0c6320 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Bowie issues a new version of his most immaculately constructed album, the most important tactical transition in a career built upon aesthetic reinvention. | Bowie issues a new version of his most immaculately constructed album, the most important tactical transition in a career built upon aesthetic reinvention. | David Bowie: Station to Station [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14687-station-to-station-deluxe-edition/ | Station to Station [Deluxe Edition] | When rock stars do too much cocaine, they tend to do ridiculous things, like drive cars into motel swimming pools, or hire hit men to snuff out their bassist, or make Be Here Now. David Bowie, on the other hand, produced Station to Station, an album he allegedly doesn't remember making, but which, ironically, stands as his most immaculately constructed album, and the most important tactical transition in a career built upon aesthetic reinvention.
Arriving in the wake of 1975's glam-rock-shunning, Philly-soul-fetishizing Young Americans, Station to Station offered proof that Bowie's fascination with American funk and disco was no one-off lark. But if Young Americans often felt like a studied genre exercise, Station to Station filtered that rhythmic influence through some of Bowie's other obsessions at the time: the austere Krautrock of Neu! and Kraftwerk, the occult, Nazism, and, yes, a whole lotta blow. And yet, for all the tales of late-night black-majick ceremonies and Hitler-salute scandals that surrounded its release, perhaps the most bizarre thing about Station to Station is that an album of such sinister orgin would turn out to be Bowie's highest charting album ever in the U.S., peaking at No. 3.
By the mid-70s, it was customary for pop stars to sing of their disillusionment with fame (see: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Neil Young's On the Beach) but they usually did so in an insular, introspective fashion, after they had gained some distance from the storm. By contrast, Station to Station finds Bowie expressing his weariness while the party was still rages on around him; even in the midst of his "Golden Years", he's yearning to "run for the shadows." In essence, the album is a cry for help from the champagne room: On the hymn-like piano-ballad "Word on a Wing", the career chameleon decries this "age of grand illusion" (tellingly, this LP's Thin White Duke persona would be the last character Bowie introduced), while the title track's momentous prog-disco suite-- with references to Aleister Crowley and Kabbalism-- charts a course from spiritual void toward ecstatic religious reawakening. "It's not the side effects of the cocaine," Bowie declares as the song hits its funky, 4/4 stride, "I'm thinking that it must be love." Rarely have delusions been rendered with such grandeur.
This repackaged 3xCD Station to Station arrives as part of an ongoing campaign of deluxe Bowie reissues, and this one's primary selling point-- a remastered version cut from the original analog tapes-- should pique the interest of more than just ardent audiophiles. For all its futurist intimations, Station to Station's most integral elements are acoustic-- E Street Band member Roy Bittan's luxuriant piano rolls, drummer Dennis Davis' dexterous grooves, and Bowie's sax-squawking, which meld to glorious, otherworldly effect on "TVC15". The new master perfectly mediates between the album's surface elegance and underlying menace.
And in lieu of any studio outtakes or rarities, we get a complete, two-disc version of Bowie's famed March '76 Nassau Coliseum concert, a long-time bootleg that also provided bonus-track fodder for Rykodisc's 1991 Station to Station issue. The need for another mid-70s Bowie live album may seem minimal given the relatively recent reissues of David Live (1974) and Stage (1978), but the Nassau concert is a rousing document of the Station to Station-era line-up (with Yes keyboardist Tony Kaye subbing in for Bittan and Stacey Hayden in the place of Earl Slick) eagerly applying its slick, polyrhythmic panache to glam-rock warhorses like "Suffragette City" and "Panic in Detroit", and compacting "Life on Mars?" and "Five Years" into Broadway-scaled medleys. In retrospect, the Nassau show represents something of a last lap around the arena for Bowie as the show-stopping, populist entertainer, before he laid his early-70s material to rest for a while and delved into the more experimental terrain of Low, "Heroes", and Lodger. To paraphrase another enigmatic pop icon who had a conflicted relationship with stardom: first he took Long Island, then he took Berlin. | 2010-09-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-09-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Virgin | September 29, 2010 | 9.5 | 18f31326-a473-477e-a52c-1a45fc6edab0 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On her second solo album, the trailblazing punk and Chicana icon sketches a new route forward from her 1970s roots, with contributions by Kathleen Hanna, Alison Wolfe, and more. | On her second solo album, the trailblazing punk and Chicana icon sketches a new route forward from her 1970s roots, with contributions by Kathleen Hanna, Alison Wolfe, and more. | Alice Bag: Blueprint | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alice-bag-blueprint/ | Blueprint | Of all the titles held by Alice Bag, the lead singer of the 1970s punk band the Bags—Chicana icon, trailblazing musician, memoirist, public speaker, mother—one of the most important and least touted is her role as a feminist archivist. Since launching her own website in 2004, she’s used it as a platform to track protests, events, and key figures in the Los Angeles punk scene. This project has led her to champion rising Latinx bands like Downtown Boys and Trap Girl, only some of whom are based in L.A., in the name of creating a more inclusive and representative history of punk—helping to evolve the kinds of communities she dreamed of as a kid. On her second solo album, Blueprint, Bag expands that sentiment by sketching a new route forward from her traditional punk roots and encouraging her collaborators and listeners alike to color it in.
The guest list on Blueprint makes the contours of Bag’s vision clear. Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile add high-pitched wails meant to dramatize the plight of working women on “77,” a battle cry for equal pay (as of 2012, American women earned an estimated 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man). A more exciting touch comes from Spanish singer Martin Sorrondeguy of queercore groups Los Crudos and Limp Wrist, Mexican-American musician Lysa Flores, and American-Chilean singer and poet Francisca Valenzuela, all of whom join Bag as backing vocalists throughout the album, giving poppier punk songs like “Turn It Up” an exuberant touch. Bag has said that she re-recorded some of her vocals to match her guests’ energy, suggesting that collaboration and solidarity can yield stronger results, in the recording studio as on the streets.
Instead of rapid-fire punk percussion or aggressive guitars, this album largely revels in upbeat rock and ambling ballads. “Adrift,” the slowest song on the record, uses a piano waltz to play into Bag’s story about a broken relationship. On “Invisible,” she sings instead of shouting, each romantic croon about disappearing from sight accented by plucked violin and deep cello. She sounds comfortable refuting the angry feminist trope, even when that means using ska-like trumpet and saxophone on “Stranger” or “Blueprint” to get her point across. Bag knows punk is about spirit more than sound, and she hides nuggets of wisdom throughout to remind listeners of those responsibilities: “In this life you’ve gotta amplify/What you want multiplied,” “She won’t need to check her compact/’Cause her actions are her mirror,” “Having enough is a state of mind.” Her respected-elder status saves the lyrical lessons from sounding like cheeky preschool lessons (though “Shame Game” veers close with its finger-wagging chorus). Challenging punk stereotypes isn’t new territory for Bag—she invented the genre “punkchera,” a blend of punk and ranchera music, through live performances years ago—and she makes the variety of sounds on Blueprint come across as both flippant and authoritative.
This year marks 40 years since the Bags released “Survive,” their first and only single issued while they were together. It is, essentially, a song about resilience. If Alice Bag was wondering back then whether her Chicana resilience could last, then Blueprint is proof that she’s only grown more powerful. On “Se Cree Joven,” the only song on this album sung entirely in Spanish, she reclaims her age from men who scoff at her. She’s been a crucial force in punk in many ways, and while her 2016 solo debut showed she’s still got lessons worth sharing, it’s the accessible, open-ended, and inclusive music on Blueprint that underlines how essential Alice Bag’s work still is. | 2018-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Don Giovanni | March 27, 2018 | 7.4 | 18f4259e-2465-4749-864e-e20a0c13aa6b | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
I Love You, Honeybear, Josh Tillman's second full-length as Father John Misty, is by turns passionate and disillusioned, tender and angry, so cynical it's repulsive and so openhearted it hurts. | I Love You, Honeybear, Josh Tillman's second full-length as Father John Misty, is by turns passionate and disillusioned, tender and angry, so cynical it's repulsive and so openhearted it hurts. | Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20131-i-love-you-honeybear/ | I Love You, Honeybear | Early last November, a handsome, bearded songwriter going by the name Father John Misty appeared on "Letterman" to perform a ballad called "Bored in the USA". Blazer pressed, shirt-collar open and eyes shut tight in concentration, Misty, whose birth name is Josh Tillman, sat at his grand piano, that great totem of solitude and opulence, wringing out lyrics so alienated you wondered how he made it out of his yurt, let alone to the spotlit world of late-night TV.
After a line about his own irrelevance ("By this afternoon I'll live in debt/ By tomorrow, be replaced by children"), Tillman turned away from the piano and took center stage. Magically, the piano played on without him. Strings swelled, lights glowed with multicolored gels, Tillman put one fist to his hip and pouted like a glam doll—it was all an act, and why should we have expected anything else? As the song plowed into its bridge—"They gave me a useless education/ And a subprime loan/ On a craftsman home!"—laughter filled the room. Canned, of course: How could anyone laugh at someone so miserable, and about such shallow, middle-class problems? The audience took a second to decide whether or not they should clap.
"Bored" is one of 11 songs on I Love You, Honeybear, an album by turns passionate and disillusioned, tender and angry, so cynical it's repulsive and so openhearted it hurts. Misty is at root a folksinger: Someone who uses natural-sounding arrangements and first-person songwriting to give the audience the impression that he's revealing the depths of his soul, which in a fucked-up way, he is. Because he sings sweetly, you imagine him to be sensitive; because he plays the acoustic guitar, you imagine him to be closer to a naked, more old-fashioned way of life, one in which we might frolic in the grass unafraid. This is an artist whose origin story starts on top of a literal mountain, abetted by psilocybin mushrooms—the story of a seeker in earnest, the kind that sounds even more credible when told by someone who has a beard or used to be in Fleet Foxes. Tillman is both.
Not all the jokes on Honeybear are as funny as "Bored in the USA" and several don't even register as jokes. Tillman often seems to play a failed, bitter version of what you might expect him to be from his headshots—an Andy Kaufmanesque hustler whose seams don't just show, but are constantly in danger of splitting. What should be the sweet story of a one-night stand ("The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment") turns into a vicious, nitpicky list of his conquest’s faults, while a bar night ("Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow") becomes a tirade against a guy trying to hit on Tillman’s wife. "Why the long face, jerkoff?" he spits. "Your chance has been taken/ Good one." For someone fond of glockenspiels, Tillman says the word "fuck" a lot.
Tillman is a wordy writer. At times, the music on Honeybear almost acts as a palliative to his lyrics, blunting the edges and keeping the mood friendly enough to get you from one excoriating piece of satire to the next. Fans of the Beatles and Sufjan Stevens will find that songs from Honeybear sit comfortably in their Spotify "Mountain Drive" playlists; fans of stand-up comedy will find the album as thorough, sad and bitterly cathartic as any good hour-long special. For all his poetic undercurrents, Tillman is a showman that way: He knows how to get his message across in a form people can clap to.
Honeybear is conflicted music that leaves me with conflicted feelings. Tillman is funny, but his humor is driven by meanness and self-loathing; he’s sweet, but he can’t manage to say anything nice without smothering it in jokes, like a dog compulsively trying to cover up its own shit. He opens the album by forecasting the apocalypse but most of the time comes off as the kind of mystic who gives up and embraces the debauchery, the patrician in some yoga sex ring, a bimbo Nero who fiddles while Los Angeles burns and occasionally gets sidetracked gloating about how hot his wife is. Yes, he gets high, but he never really leaves the dirty, dirty ground.
In the end, his sincerity is a sharper weapon than his humor. Honeybear’s last couple of songs in particular—"Holy Shit" and "I Went to the Store One Day"—arrive at the strange clarity people sometimes feel in the wake of drug trips, where life’s simplest lessons are suddenly presented to you, quiet and nude: Love people, stay open, be real. Admittedly there are an infinite number of barriers to these ideas, not least of which nobody seems to agree what the words "love," "open," and "real" actually mean, but my guess is that Tillman would acknowledge that failing isn’t as important as never trying at all.
Despite attempts to draw lines between himself and his persona, the story of Honeybear is at least in part a story of Tillman’s own recent marriage, which seems to have slowed his pace and made him reconsider questions of intimacy and closeness, the way marriage can do. The album ends with what were apparently his first words to his wife: "Seen you around. What’s your name?"—a question asked without editorializing. A few lines earlier, he had us at the brink of their deaths. "Insert here," he sings plaintively, "a sentiment re: Our golden years." I’ve chewed on that moment for a while now, feeling alternately as though it was a cop out and as though his point might be that trying to compress his and his wife's future into one line would be corny and disrespectful. At least I know he means it when he says he isn’t sure what to say. | 2015-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Bella Union / Sub Pop | February 9, 2015 | 8.8 | 18f57c02-ffca-4fd6-98cc-90016868bd53 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Three CDs clocking in at over an hour a piece, 36 different artists from all over the world-- how could ... | Three CDs clocking in at over an hour a piece, 36 different artists from all over the world-- how could ... | Various Artists: Clicks + Cuts 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1934-clicks-cuts-2/ | Clicks + Cuts 2 | Three CDs clocking in at over an hour a piece, 36 different artists from all over the world-- how could I possibly sum up Clicks & Cuts 2 in just 700 short words? There is no way, hombre. But I have an idea; let me just take a suitably minimal approach and sum it up in two:
It's excellent.
Notice I didn't say, "It's fantastic." I reserve that two-word review for Mille Plateaux's Modulation and Transformation 4. That 3-CD set, released in 1999, turned my head all the way 'round when I heard it. This was back when Mille Plateaux had a roster that ranged from the sine wave tones of Ryoji Ikeda to the comparatively thick drill-n-bass of Panacea, from the vast spaciousness of Terre Thaemlitz to the microscopic fixations of Curd Duca. What an incredibly varied field of music that comp contained, something for the curious in every subgenre of experimental electronics. No, Clicks and Cuts 2 can't quite compare to that.
Notice also that I didn't say, "It's okay." That was my two-word assessment of the first Clicks + Cuts compilation, released at the time that Mille Plateaux realized there was a revolution afoot, and that it had done as much as any other single label (if you include their associated Force Inc and Force Trax imprints) to set it in motion. That compilation was not a statement about the label per se, but a presentation about a very narrowly defined permutation: the world of glitch techno. The variety the label is known for wasn't relevant to that particular statement, which explains why artists who'd released brilliant work on Mille Plateaux (Gas, Thaemlitz, Oval), but didn't fit in with this aesthetic were omitted.
Clicks & Cuts 2 far surpasses its predecessor, primarily because this compilation is open to a much greater variety of sounds. The focus here, in both the music and the MP-standard expository liner notes, is on making music from botched transmissions. A fine image from the liner notes comes from Philip Sherburne, who says, "The pearl is an error, a glitch in response to impurity." He's right, of course. A shard of something winds up inside the shell of an oyster and the creature goes to work on it, smoothing out the harsh edges to avoid irritation of its muscle. To my ears, it's not so far from this image to the music of Jan Jelinek (who chips in here with an incredible track called "The Videoage [re-edit]," possibly a remix of "Rock in the Video Age," though it sounds new to me).
Unlike the first volume, not all the tracks are minimal; in fact, the rhythms and styles are all over the place. Hell, to my ears, a good percentage of the music here even borders on pop, with relatively conventional melodies and instrumentation. Here is a true blueprint for one possible music future, not the dry, academic lecture that was the first Clicks + Cuts compilation. In addition to summing up the glitch genre thus far for the acolytes, Clicks & Cuts 2 also serves as a perfect introduction to this world. It's accessible, and yes, even fun (you just know if Matmos is invited to the symposium there are going to be a few giggles). I have to think anyone with open ears would find something here to love.
Take Frank Bretschneider's "Walking on Ice," for example. Though it does indeed have a few snaps and pops, this track is, in fact, a dead ringer for Boards of Canada! It would be impossible to imagine such a warm, snaking synth melody and hip-hop inspired beats fitting in with earlier incarnations of the Mille Plateaux theory. It's applying the glitch to the song, which seems a natural progression.
Coming from another sphere completely is Austrian guitar genius Fennesz, who contributes "Menthol," a jittery dissection of processed harmonics with gurgling melody bubbling beneath. It's the kind of track that seems completely random at first blush, but reveals careful, intricate patterning upon closer listening, and it makes me salivate for his latest Endless Summer. Of course, there's not a 4/4 rhythm in sight.
The ever-mischievous DAT Politics offers the distorted, fucked up (but funky!) bubblegum tune, "Hardwai." It's like a fax of Alvin the Chipmunk stuck in a blender with Alan Sutherland and uploaded to a Linux server. And Rude Solo gets all toyland electro with the fantastic "Tight," complete with a killer vocal sample, not at all far from the best of Two Lone Swordsman's Tiny Reminders.
There are, of course, a fair number of 4/4 techno bits with clicks and so forth-- this isn't a complete departure from the first collection. But these tracks, which can seem ho-hum when stacked back to back, blend nicely with the more experimental work (the choppy beat static by Thomas Brinkmann on "0100" is particularly striking) and the aforementioned poppier material. The sequencing is exceptional, the tracks first rate, and the working thesis of the label is becoming clearer. Clicks & Cuts 2 is a vital compilation that shows where this strand of electronic music has been and where it might go. | 2001-04-07T02:01:40.000-04:00 | 2001-04-07T02:01:40.000-04:00 | null | Mille Plateaux | April 7, 2001 | 8.3 | 18fcafff-6759-4e50-8cf1-004eb02f79eb | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
After a decade-plus of singles, collaborations, and live sets, the leftfield German electronic producer releases a debut LP under his given name. Fatty Folders stands as the most accessible and robust barometer of his work to date. | After a decade-plus of singles, collaborations, and live sets, the leftfield German electronic producer releases a debut LP under his given name. Fatty Folders stands as the most accessible and robust barometer of his work to date. | Roman Flügel: Fatty Folders | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15983-fatty-folders/ | Fatty Folders | Techno thrives on agendas. Whether innovation, futurism, rebellion, or austerity, such creative constraints help rein in the limitless possibilities of synthesizers and samplers. Roman Flügel is not exempt from this. A veteran of leftfield electronic production, Flügel has released professional DJ mixes and collaborated on a jazz/techno hybrid; he works under different aliases (Soylent Green, with collaborator Jörn Wuttke in Acid Jesus and Holy Garage) for varying styles. (Several years ago he made waves with his "Dirty Dutch" anthem, "Geht's Noch?".) Many of his releases are 12" singles, utilitarian in purpose if not sound. So naturally one of the greatest aspects of Flügel's debut LP under his given name, Fatty Folders, is how untethered and adrift it is. This is not to say that Folders is experimental, just that it's difficult to place. As best I can tell, Flügel has no overriding purpose other than to produce gummy techno, the kind that sticks to the roof of your mouth (and the kind you happily leave up there).
Flügel has seen a decade-plus of singles, collaborations, and live sets receive near-unanimous praise. His 12"s, while diverse, have tended toward the mechanistic and throbbing, though he's always been slightly out of step with his contemporaries in the German scene, eschewing the severe austerity of Ostgut Ton and the lush minimalism of Traum. (Dial, a Hamburg-based label whose releases often seem rote and plain before revealing intricacies, is as good a home as any for Flügel.) Folders collects a handful of tracks from recent EPs and singles but offers mostly new material and, as such, stands as the most accessible and robust barometer of his work to date.
Folders doesn't offer any kind of narrative-- not of Flügel's career, not of a broader music scene, not even intra-album. On display instead is the sheer variety of sounds Flügel conjures, and how vibrant they seem in his arrangements. If Flügel has a trick-- though he is not really the type of producer who relies on them-- it's saving his tiniest, most erudite melodies for his bangers and getting big-eyed and starry during his softer moments. "The Improviser" falls into the former category, its rude, burping bass barely ceding any ground to the dubby vibraphone sounds that sneak in. On the other end of the spectrum, the panning, glowing sunrays of "Krautus" would be at home on any Field record, and "Don't Break My Heart" sounds like a pleasant Saturday morning in a clock repair shop.
If there's one true monster track on Folders, it's the previously released "How to Spread Lies", a patient, autumnal mid-tempo caress that relies equally on a descending piano melody and a subtle, four-note bassline. That it's been out for over a year won't matter to anyone but the most vigilant Flügel fans. (Considering both "Lies" and "Geht's Noch?", it would be somewhat ironic if the versatile, understated Flügel were remembered mostly for a few standout tracks.) Fatty Folders is a summation of Flügel's career not in sound but in scope: It's multifaceted, rich, and cagey. He's worth the investment for casual techno fans, even if you only have time for the CliffsNotes. | 2011-11-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-11-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dial | November 3, 2011 | 8 | 19016d1e-3e3d-4d54-933d-3c38503c265c | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Tegan and Sara are celebrating the 10th anniversary of their vanguard fifth album with a compilation of covers from Hayley Williams, Chvrches, Bleachers, Grimes, Kelly Lee Owens, and more. | Tegan and Sara are celebrating the 10th anniversary of their vanguard fifth album with a compilation of covers from Hayley Williams, Chvrches, Bleachers, Grimes, Kelly Lee Owens, and more. | Tegan and Sara: The Con X: Covers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tegan-and-sara-the-con-x-covers/ | The Con X: Covers | Tegan and Sara released their fifth album, The Con, on July 24, 2007, but the original reviews read more like misogynist clippings from the 1970s. NME called the sisters “little more than twin airbags.” This website offered a confusing and offensive attempt at a compliment stating that “Tegan and Sara should no longer be mistaken for tampon rock.” The press could only see the siblings, then 26, through the lens of their queerness. Writing for Rolling Stone, Robert Christgau, the self-styled “dean of American rock critics,” was confused that this wasn’t, in fact, the focus of their music. “As lesbians who never reference their oppression or even their sexuality,” he wrote, “Tegan and Sara don’t have men to lash out at, put up with or gripe about.” So he gave them something to gripe about: The idea that music made by queer artists should inherently contain shame and struggle is gross, and also overlooks the loathing that oozes from within on The Con.
Besides, they reference those qualities on the record’s very first song. “I Was Married” is a landmark piece of music about gay rights, written by Sara about the civil ceremony she undertook with her American partner so that they could live together in the Quins’ native Canada. It’s practically an a capella song, underpinned only by a small piano motif that turns with clockwork’s ornate simplicity. Sara sounds awed by the sense of ceremony, but equally defiant about her right to it, her voice catching on its distinctive sour, saturated edges. “They seem so very scared of us,” she sings. “I look into the mirror/For evil that just does not exist/I don’t see what they see/Tell them that, tell them that.”
The album starts with these solid institutions, but then The Con falls apart, a profound mutual depression (induced by dying relatives and relationships) obliterating any certainty of self. Longing and self-sabotage chase each other around the void, bodies fracture, senses muddle, time slackens and speeds erratically, and reason slips out of bounds. “I can’t untangle what I feel and what would matter most,” Sara rues on “Relief Next to Me.” On The Con, Tegan and Sara excelled at capturing the shipwrecked upheaval of depression.
Produced by Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla, The Con backs up this profound unease with artful invention, and lurches frequently between brittle acoustic-electric melancholy and manic power pop. Sara’s half of the record comprises small, strange, coiled pop songs with spidery arrangements. Tegan’s punkier material seems more straightforward on the surface, but is unhinged by her manic longing, like the breathless momentum at the end of “The Con,” and the chorus of “Nineteen,” where she grits her teeth so hard they could shatter in her jaw. The Con was vanguard, released a decade before pop punk would get its artistic dues and anxious, DIY pop (Sky Ferreira, Chairlift, Waxahatchee) became the sound of a generation. It’s become a touchstone for a wealth of diverse young artists who grew up with a healthy disregard for genre.
To honor its 10th anniversary, the Quins are celebrating themselves with a covers album that highlights the work of these young acts (plus some older affiliates), and benefits their LGBTQIA foundation. Both its triumphs and failures enhance what was so special about the original. Given that compact vocal earworms are Tegan and Sara’s stock in trade, the project might have made more sense as a remix album, though a few artists bring that spirit of reinvention to their covers.
Welsh producer Kelly Lee Owens’ version of “Soil Soil” takes just one lyric and steadily inflates it through a luminous glacial wash. Chvrches’ “Call It Off” and Shura’s “The Con” pull a similar trick, effervescing into the ether. Artists like MUNA (“Relief Next to Me”) and Mykki Blanco (on a brilliant, haunted “Knife Going In”) intuitively use anaesthetized, monstrous vocal tones to key into The Con’s sense of psychological dislocation, as do Grimes and HANA (under the name Trashique) on a disappointingly defanged version of “Dark Come Soon.” The best cover on the whole record is relegated to a bonus track: Cyndi Lauper’s version of “Back in Your Head” is manic, chattering, and exuberant, and easily trumps Ryan Adams’ rasping punk interpretation. (The Quins toured with both artists early in their career.)
But Adams’ straightforward cover, like others here, shines a light on the enduring strength of the Quins’ songwriting away from their knotty arrangements (something evident as far back as 2002’s If It Was You, another record that deserves revisiting). There’s a ceremonial beauty to both Bleachers and Paramore’s Hayley Williams’ plainspoken contributions. For “Burn Your Life Down,” Jack Antonoff (who would collaborate with the band on 2013 pop breakthrough Heartthrob) sings close to the microphone, muffled and conciliatory over silvery, treated piano. Tender vocal wibbles and orchestral glints fidget in the background, almost Sufjan-like, but vanish rather than peak. Williams, a long term T&S champion, strips away the white-knuckle guitar chaos of “Nineteen,” a song about teen melodrama, and taps into the innocent side of its romantic youthful delusion. Both versions have a kind of candlelit intimacy to them, acting as votive offerings to the originals.
Other covers show how Tegan and Sara could have tamped down their experimental tendencies and attempted to follow “Walking With a Ghost,” their one radio hit from 2004’s So Jealous, into the mainstream. Canadian Vine star Ruth B (“I Was Married”), Sara Bareilles (“Floorplan”), and City and Color (on a quite horrible “Hop a Plane”) give their songs a saccharine, vocal-oriented sheen that might have seen them taken up as pop-leaning a capella group standards, while PVRIS make “Are You Ten Years Ago” into serviceably overwrought, haunted goth pop, though their slickness steamrollers the original’s panic.
Tegan and Sara could have pursued these simpler routes, but they didn’t, taking an artistic gamble in an industry where the odds were already stacked against their success. Thank god artists like Paramore, Against Me!, and AFI could see in them what critics couldn’t, taking them on the road and noisily singing their praises while the indie press were too cool to take the twins seriously, and that artists like Antonoff, Chvrches, and MUNA picked up their mantle and ran with it. Although shameful to reflect on how crassly The Con was dismissed in 2007, it’s remarkable how much has changed in a decade, and how much credit Tegan and Sara can take for that. | 2017-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | October 19, 2017 | 6.5 | 19019ec9-a764-4adc-860f-0d084f4bdaaa | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The Buffalo rapper continues his unlikely ascent into hip-hop stardom with an album of feverish excess and the best raps of his career. | The Buffalo rapper continues his unlikely ascent into hip-hop stardom with an album of feverish excess and the best raps of his career. | Westside Gunn: Pray for Paris | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/westside-gunn-pray-for-paris/ | Pray for Paris | There was a time when Westside Gunn and his Griselda cohorts Conway and Benny the Butcher were just some Buffalo rappers warming themselves on the flame sparked by Roc Marciano’s Marcberg. To rap fans who longed for the days of Mobb Deep, Griselda were refreshing, a no-frills trio that recaptured an old-school spirit without being ’90s revivalists. Despite the harsh grayscale atmosphere of their production, the bars had the colorful touch of mid-’00s Atlanta trap, and their swagger felt timeless. Steadily the energy behind Griselda has grown, and now it’s at an apex that nobody saw coming.
Earlier this year, at Virgil Abloh’s Off-White fashion show, the designer and influencer played Westside Gunn’s gutter rap while models strutted down the runway and a man tap-danced. Virgil’s message with the tap dancer didn’t connect, but the cosign gave Griselda an unlikely path into fashion and art spaces typically not welcoming to gritty artists like them. It’s a space that Westside Gunn is obsessed with, and his new album, Pray for Paris is an attempt to leave his crew’s past as a niche underground act behind. His new vision is of going high-art: The album cover was designed by Virgil; the intro is a clip from the record-breaking sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi; and a recent Instagram caption included the obligatory Kanye-style spiel about how he’s not a rapper, he’s an artist making misunderstood “Rare ART.”
Yes, this all sounds like an unbearable pivot. But Pray for Paris is one of the best albums to come out of the Griselda camp so far, good enough to help you forgive the obnoxiousness and make you understand why the crew now have a cultural cachet that rap legends are dying to be attached to: Eminem signed them to his imprint, Jay-Z has become their unofficial mentor, and Kanye West has been seen floating around the three.
To Westside Gunn’s credit, the more overblown his personality becomes, the better his raps get. He blurs the lines between reality and fiction to the point where the streets of Buffalo come off like City of God’s favelas, and his lifestyle raps make him out as the Great Gatsby of Upstate New York. The beat to “Euro Step” sounds refined enough to play during a sit-down dinner in a castle while he describes some snapshots from his life: purchasing a Goyard leash for his Saint Bernard, drinking wine in France with a specialist, and whipping coke with an Avian watch on his wrist. Pray for Paris is consistently this insane, all while switching flows on a dime and rapping on pristine beats. “Bulletproof Bentleys parked outside the Whitney,” he raps on the second track’s graceful DJ Muggs production.
Westside Gunn’s revolving door of guests thrive in this space, though it means he’s sometimes outshined. Gunn wastes a spiritual Alchemist beat with a pitch-lowered misstep on “Claiborne Kick,” but he’s saved by Boldy James’ unmatched precision. But Gunn doesn’t fumble frequently; usually he tosses his guests into the fold and let’s them sink or swim. Tyler, the Creator can’t keep up “327,” but who could when Gunn talks about cooking dope like watching flowers bloom? Tyler makes up for it with his soulful “Party Wit Pop Smoke” production, while Gunn goes on the album’s most unhinged three bar stretch: “Blood on the Salavator Mundi, we rock cocaine/Tie-dye Dior floss, stickin’ niggas up at Christie’s/Eugène Delacroixs for half price, leather strings and Rickys.”
But even with all of the decadence, Pray for Paris is at its best when Westside Gunn just raps over a grimy beat alongside his Griselda crew. On “Allah Sent Me,” they all share a verse, and their chemistry shines. On “George Bondo,” all three fight for the moment: Westside Gunn prays on a Persian rug, Conway hits the Roc Nation brunch and intimately mingles with an R&B singer, and Benny the Butcher orders a hit at the Venetian. It all feels like a part of Westside Gunn’s vision for Griselda, which may be deranged, but only a mind that determined could take a crew that was destined to exist in a corner of underground rap to having their own ecosystem. | 2020-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Griselda | April 21, 2020 | 8 | 19033e3c-e424-4bfc-9700-fab08325510e | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The reformed "classic-era" GBV have produced an album with the collagist careen of Bee Thousand and Propeller and but it ultimately comes up short in the songs department. The best moments come courtesy of Tobin Sprout. | The reformed "classic-era" GBV have produced an album with the collagist careen of Bee Thousand and Propeller and but it ultimately comes up short in the songs department. The best moments come courtesy of Tobin Sprout. | Guided by Voices: Let's Go Eat the Factory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16131-lets-go-eat-the-factory/ | Let's Go Eat the Factory | Over the years, there were many Guided by Voices: the R.E.M.-obsessed, fidelity-be-damned early GBV; the high-kicking, hard-drinking, marathon-showing GBV; the Ric Ocasek-produced GBV with those misguided commercial ambitions. But, seven years after the band's 2004 bow-out and a decade and a half on from the peak of their powers, it's the Guided by Voices of the mid-1990s from which their legend truly springs-- all those long, beery Dayton nights with little more than a four-track, a couple 30-racks, and an endless supply of inebriant inspiration. Those few years saw those five knockaround guys wrenching every good idea they'd ever had into some of indie rock's most enduring music: Propeller, Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, Under the Bushes Under the Stars, and countless singles, EPs and one-offs. That Guided by Voices? They're back.
When frontman Bob Pollard retired the Guided by Voices name in 2004, any and all cries of "why?" were cut with a strong undercurrent of "what's it matter?" At that point, roughly a dozen dudes had passed through the band's ranks, with the Fading Captain himself serving as its only constant. Pollard, in a rare display of predictability, went on to make a mess of solo records with a gang of late-era GBVers; the rock-solid Boston Spaceships, with whom he produced his best hiatus music, found pre-breakup bassist Chris Slusarenko in the passenger seat. But when this so-called classic era band of Pollard, Tobin Sprout, Greg Demos, Mitch Mitchell, and Kevin Fennell splintered sometime around 1996, Guided by Voices changed irrevocably: Pollard's songs grew knottier, flashier, and more professional, with would-be rock star Pollard making what sometimes felt like a last-ditch effort to make music that would place him in the arenas and over the airwaves that his old band had been too rough around the edges to attract. A reunion of that late-era Guided by Voices would've been nice, but it wouldn't have meant much. And, while watching the classic band run through "14 Cheerleader Coldfront" to a sea of upraised fists was a thrill, it's that GBV-- with their scrappy, song-a-minute, attention deficient charm intact-- you'd hoped for another album from.
That album, Let's Go Eat the Factory, couldn't have come from any other Guided by Voices. Spotty, strange, all short songs and shitty sound, it's got the collagist careen of Bee Thousand and Propeller and the tumbling tunecraft of Alien Lanes and Under the Bushes Under the Stars. Recorded at the homes of Tobin Sprout, Greg Demos, and Mitch Mitchell, there's an off-the-cuff, fuck-around charm to many of its best moments that's very much in keeping with those classic-era records. The songs Pollard brings to Factory hew closer toward his leaner, odder, mid-90s songwriting than just about anything he's done since, and Tobin Sprout has clearly been saving some of his best material. Demos, Mitchell, and Fennell are, as ever, playing with more spirit than proficiency, which, like so much about Factory, is as it should be. Factory, with its one-and-done hooks and jumpy construction, just feels like a Guided by Voices record. For the diehards, little else could matter more.
Of the now five GBV LPs from this classic-era band, though, Factory comes up shortest in the song department. Over the years, Pollard's worked most of the lousy melodies out of his system, and though his contributions here vary wildly in tone and texture, he's gotten pretty consistent when it comes to tunefulness. Constancy proves a bit of a hobgoblin here; the more straightaway power-poppers like muscular lead single "The Unsinkable Fats Domino" zip by quickly and not unpleasantly, but they feel just a little overcooked, never quite hanging around in one's head the way some of his stranger contributions do. Throughout Factory, though, he seems more comfortable with his refound surroundings than genuinely inspired by them, and his contributions here, while uniformly solid, display only flashes of the one-man hit-parading of his glory days. Peppy lead single "The Unsinkable Fats Domino" hearkens back beautifully to the shoot-from-the-hip power-popping of old, while soused singalong "My Europa" and stacked-to-the-sky rockers "Imperial Racehorsing" and "We Won't Apologize for the Human Race" bring the trickiness of his later-era compositions down to the basement-level.
But for every sign of life, there's some shrugworthy stuff like the stormy, stuttering "Either Nelson" or the pretty but slight "Chocolate Boy" to match. And, where the classic-era GBV would stitch together bits of different songs to create a 90-second patchwork of pure pop, those seams are better concealed here, to their detriment. The farty flute kickoff to "Doughnut for a Snowman" nods to those sputtering constructions of old, but it feels a bit perfunctory, a sound effect where a fleck of dumbass brilliance like Alien Lanes' "Hit" might've otherwise gone. One gets the sense Bob hadn't been shoring away the best stuff like his old pal Toby, and while he's fully engaged with the proceedings in a way he sometimes hasn't been on his hiatus-era solo records, he doesn't come away from Factory with a single tune that can hang with the dozens of enduring toss-offs that populate the beloved mid-90s records.
While Bob seems to be re-acclimating himself, Factory finds Tobin Sprout more ready to get back into it. Much has been made of how little Pollard's voice has changed over the years, but then again, he's been practicing. Sprout-- whose sweeter-than-honey pipes and breezy songwriting proved Pollard's best-ever foil. The collection finds him sounding younger than ever, his voice cutting through the din of his six striking contributions. "God Loves Us"-- by some distance, the set's best-- finds him flipping a Ben Franklin quote over an effortless guitar chug that proves the album's one true glass-raiser; he seems positively energized by the proceedings, turning in fat-free power-poppers and late-Lennon pin-drop balladry and, in the case of the bifurcated "Spiderfighter", both in the same song. Pollard, to his credit, never seems to treat Factory like a solo LP with a few old friends in tow, but Sprout saw an opportunity and seized it, quietly stepping out of the shadows and stealing the show. Mitchell, Demos, and Fennell's contributions amount more to vibe than dazzle here; then as now, they'd never dream of stepping out in front of the song, and while Mitchell does get some shine on the Beefhearty "The Big Hat and Toy Show"-- his guitar snarling around a loopy Pollard vocal-- they mostly just seem happy to be there, glad to rediscover the collaborative chemistry that comes from playing with the same old guys for years.
A month or so back, a rumor spread that GBV had once again called it quits. The truth of the matter was actually quite a bit more promising-- they'd cancelled all upcoming tour dates, presumably to work on new recordings-- but going by the breathless reaction to the initial news on Twitter, you'd have thought it was 2004 all over again. If nothing else, all the "what's it really matter who Pollard's playing with?" talk finds its definitive answer in the frustratingly satisfying Factory, a record that, if not quite up to snuff with what came before it on a song-by-song basis, still gets along on the enduring brotherhood of its boozy creators. "It's all taking shape in the room," Pollard sings on Factory's penultimate song, and for a guy who's made his fair share of records through the mail, that's the kind of statement of purpose you want him to be shouting. They may never hit upon a run as good as they did 15 years back-- few bands have-- but Factory's a better, weirder shot at it than anybody could've possibly expected. "We are not the way we used to be," Sprout once sang. For now-- and with more on the way-- Factory's close enough for comfort. | 2012-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fire / Guided by Voices Inc. | January 4, 2012 | 6.9 | 1907cc2e-14f2-4bf0-b18d-6343ebd95d00 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Across its 40 minutes, the Los Angeles artist builds a modular synth album that is enveloping and cohesive. What initially sounds static may, upon closer examination, reveal a wealth of movement. | Across its 40 minutes, the Los Angeles artist builds a modular synth album that is enveloping and cohesive. What initially sounds static may, upon closer examination, reveal a wealth of movement. | Emily A. Sprague: Water Memory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emily-a-sprague-water-memory/ | Water Memory | There’s a joke that synthesizer fanatics ruefully share: What’s the best way to get a musician to stop making records? Get them hooked on modular synths. Part building block, part bar puzzle, modular synths are small, often arcane electronic gizmos that, when chained together, are capable of creating soundscapes of incredible complexity. They’re notorious for both their steep learning curve and their status as fetish objects, hence the joke: Synth heads can get so lost in trying to sculpt the perfect waveform, they forget how to write actual songs. But making music on a modular synthesizer can be so absorbing, the act of creation is its own reward. The process eclipses the need for a final product.
You get that sense from watching the videos that document Emily A. Sprague’s own evolving modular setup. Take a clip like “Modular ‘Piano’ Music ~ Eurorack Ambient”: A metal box brimming with knobs, tangled wires, and multi-colored LEDs sits on a desk, spilling forth a soft, burbling sequence of tones. The sound is too organized to scan as totally random, but it’s too random to be properly composed. Every now and then, Sprague briefly enters the frame to twist a knob, though the effect on the sound is often imperceptible. The sound (the “patch”) could conceivably keep doing what it’s doing until the power grid goes down, and it’s so pleasant you could listen for almost as long. Like Eno said of ambient music, it’s the perfect combination of ignorable and interesting, and much of its generative magic would be lost in the translation to a finished recording.
Fortunately, after a year’s worth of exploratory videos and SoundCloud sketches, Sprague, who recently relocated from New York to Los Angeles, finally steps away from the workbench bearing her debut solo synthesizer album. It was worth the wait. Water Memory is more than just a collection of experiments; its 40-minute run is both enveloping and cohesive, with all five tracks building off one another, each developing upon the album’s pastoral and aquatic themes. Sprague’s compositional style stakes out a middle ground between approaches adopted by her peers. It’s not as melodically or rhythmically active as someone like Qasim Naqvi, yet it’s not as austere as Sarah Davachi. What initially sounds static may, upon closer examination, reveal a wealth of movement. At first, the opening “A Lake” sounds like a single held chord. But as you ease into its 13-minute expanse, its elements gradually reveal themselves: Slowly moving bass tones underpin a more mercurial middle layer, and on top, the dazzling high-end dances like the surface of a sunlit body of water.
She’s not always so minimalist. “Water Memory 1,” perhaps the album’s most engaging track, coasts atop a gently cycling sequence of tones, shifting subtly all the while. The short, wistful “Dock” ruminates on a set of tone clusters with a harmonium-like sound, making gingerly stabs at melody. The closing “Your Pond,” the album’s emotional highlight, also hovers in the balance between repetition and actual song form, with a melody that moves like creeping vines, reaching out and then doubling back upon itself. The nine-minute “Water Memory 2” comes closest to resembling her exploratory videos, a clear descendant of Eno’s aleatory approach to setting up a handful of variables and then stepping out of the way.
Throughout, the outward simplicity of the music masks the deep complexity of her sounds. It took me a dozen or more listens to realize that the cadence of “Water Memory 1” is both relatively straightforward and rather strange. Parsed one way, it’s a standard eight-note progression, but once you hone in on its particulars, it sways with an uneven sense of motion, like a pendulum on a planet with two suns.
As it happens, in addition to her synthesizer music and her work producing and recording other musicians in her own studio, Sprague also plays in the indie-folk group Florist, whose acoustic instrumentation and hushed vocals couldn’t seem further from her solo electronic endeavors. Her writing there has tackled some big ideas—a brush with death, an extended convalescence, the loss of her mother—with understated grace. Here, she sets aside those existential themes, but one constant carries over: her eye for detail. Whereas in Florist, it is attuned to trenchant imagery (“What is love if not violet/A beam of light on an autumn afternoon”), here it refocuses on the surface of sound itself. It is hypnotic to behold. | 2018-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | self-released | January 6, 2018 | 7.6 | 1907ce9d-ac95-4b6b-8fa8-3cd0d615037a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
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 shining jewel of ’90s pop-rock, an album full of melodies, amphetamines, and hubris. | 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 shining jewel of ’90s pop-rock, an album full of melodies, amphetamines, and hubris. | Third Eye Blind: Third Eye Blind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/third-eye-blind-third-eye-blind/ | Third Eye Blind | At their first New York label showcase in 1996, in front of music mogul and Arista label head Clive Davis, Third Eye Blind performed songs from their catalog of demos as frontman Stephan Jenkins whacked at a piñata. When it finally broke, live crickets rained down on the industry executives in the audience. At the time, Third Eye Blind were fielding a half-dozen inquiries from major labels and had a rockstar mentality to match, demanding Anchor Steam beer at meetings as a performative signifier of hometown San Francisco pride. Jenkins, never one to pass up an opportunity to put smug superiority over success, intended the stunt to symbolize a Biblical plague (crickets were the closest he could find to locusts on short notice) but it’s doubtful the insects or the suits picked up on his deeper meaning before they scrambled out of the room. “Everybody was upset, including the crickets,” Jenkins said later. The band left without a record deal.
Third Eye Blind built their reputation on these imperfect metaphors. The cricket legend fit a band with a built-in God complex, a band who would walk into an opening slot for Oasis a few days after the piñata incident simply because they told another label, Epic, that they deserved it. That a barely known, unsigned quartet got an encore as openers spoke to their natural fit alongside the great melodicism and even greater egos of the Gallagher brothers.
The level of attention Third Eye Blind received from labels without even an EP to their name reflected the bullish state of the music industry in the pre-Napster peak of the 1990s: CD sales continued to rise, growing by a billion dollars or more year over year. After months of courtship, the band finally signed with Elektra for $1.2 million, a deal reported at the time as the biggest ever for an unsigned act. The band accepted after the label agreed to let Jenkins produce the debut. “I really felt like they gave us their trust,” he later explained.
The outsized label interest also signaled growing demand for Third Eye Blind’s specific sound. Their hooks and clean vocals stood in contrast to the prevailing sound of grunge, which had reached peak cultural saturation by the middle of the decade. Acts like Bush and Stone Temple Pilots had taken the sound of the downtrodden and down-tuned and plastered it over magazine covers and Billboard charts, while Naomi Campbell modeled beanies and flannel for Vogue. In response, a slow but steady reemergence of earnest pop-rock—and a broader return of the brighter sounds and styles of the ’70s—was already well underway when Third Eye Blind made their debut: The Wallflowers, Goo Goo Dolls, and Counting Crows paved the way for a melodic revival with the softest of edges. Jenkins, with a passionate if pitchy falsetto, was a perfect foil to grunge, which he declared too “safe” for his taste: “Nobody really makes a statement,” he lamented. “It’s this self-imposed angst and you’re playing this raw way, but you’re not trying to play well.”
Though the music press painted Third Eye Blind as an overnight success, their path to a debut album began several years prior, in the Bay Area scene of the early ’90s. Jenkins, the son of a political science professor, graduated with top honors from UC Berkeley in 1988. He grew up on the Sugarhill Gang and early hip-hop, and by 1992, he formed the rap duo Puck and Natty with Detroit rapper Herman Anthony Chunn. They managed to get one perfectly raunchy song, “Just Wanna Be Your Friend,” onto the Beverly Hills, 90210 soundtrack and attracted interest from Capitol. Jenkins sought creative control above all else, even the possibility of a record deal, and the duo broke up over production disagreements with the label. But before they disbanded, Chunn wrote the guitar riff that would grow into Third Eye Blind’s inescapable hit “Semi-Charmed Life.” In a move that foreshadowed his own beliefs about song ownership and creative control, Jenkins bought his use of the tune from Chunn for $10,000.
“Semi-Charmed Life” sounds like feeling the sun on your skin after a long winter. The opening snap of the drums, the ringing power chords, and the wordless refrain seem to beam down from some impossibly halcyon era, as if Cheap Trick suddenly became the house band for Schoolhouse Rock. But even a cursory listen to the lyrics reveals a much darker story about addiction, sex, and desperation—“I took the hit that I was given and I bumped again” is pretty straightforward. The song’s popularity may have been slightly surprising to the band: “It’s about crystal meth and oral sex,” Jenkins commented. “We can’t even believe it got onto the radio.” But his rap-singing, a carryover from his Puck and Natty days, fit comfortably next to similar syncopation from other bands on MTV and alternative radio playlists, like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sublime, and Cake.
Those opening “doot doot doots” were a reference to another wayward tale, Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” Where Reed was enmeshed with the downtown New York junkies, Jenkins found himself witness to a crippling speed epidemic among his peers in the Lower Haight neighborhood of San Francisco. “I thought of my life at the time, I thought of Lou Reed and how I thought Lou Reed had nothing on the way that we were living,” he later said. And just as John Cale’s viola embodied the grim embrace of heroin, the unrelenting hooks of “Semi-Charmed Life” were meant to sound like amphetamines—“bright and shiny on the surface, and then it just pulls you down in this lockjawed mess,” Jenkins explained. As he described it, the song was his brainchild—the result of years toiling away in the open mic scene, tinkering with it, even performing an early version for 4 Non Blondes singer Linda Perry when they were both down-on-their-luck musicians. Newly purchased riff notwithstanding, Jenkins couldn’t nail the crux of the song on his own; with an ironic band name and sensationalist lyrics in hand, he went looking for the people who would help him grow it into a hit.
Jenkins tried to build out Third Eye Blind with a few guitarists before eventually meeting Kevin Cadogan at one of Jenkins’ shows. The two began to flesh out their first demos across studios in the Bay Area over the next three years. If Jenkins had the relentless ambition and unctuous wit, Cadogan brought the musical heft and compositional wizardry. He’d trained with instrumental rock legend Joe Satriani from a young age, then left the world of classical guitar for the local ska and punk scene as a teen. For a while, Cadogan and Jenkins wrote and performed as an acoustic duo, fleshing out Jenkins’ rap-singing with bigger chords and a stronger groove. Their bassist, Arion Salazar, had carved out a similarly modest reputation as a member of Fungo Mungo, a major-label funk metal band. After cycling through a cast of drummers, Third Eye Blind rounded out their lineup with jazz percussionist Brad Hargreaves. Together, Cadogan estimated that the band wrote “80 percent” of its self-titled debut before they even signed to Elektra.
Third Eye Blind opens with a single arpeggiated guitar, a deceptively quiet start to an album of wailing breakdowns and breathless choruses. It’s not the most complicated or even most well-known passage on the album—on a record with so many standout riffs, there are more than a few contenders—but those four measures on “Losing a Whole Year” were the first of many battles between Jenkins’ hoarse yelps and Cadogan’s whirring reverb. The final note in the solo is swallowed by a wave of feedback and falsettos, before Jenkins’ voice, moody and gnarled, crashes onto the scene: “I remember you and me used to spend/The whole goddamn day in bed.” Like equal but opposite forces, they keep the record in balance, never tipping too far into the indulgences of the guitar hero or the self-aggrandizing troubadour.
Cadogan, with his decade of formal guitar training, added nimble melodies that seemingly multiplied the band’s lead guitarists. With his penchant for non-standard tuning and flexible pinkies, he wrote “Narcolepsy” to be played as one part, but it’s hard to believe it from the twinkling harmonies in the intro. For the opening chords of “How’s It Going to Be,” Cadogan uses an autoharp, a small 36-string zither that adds an essential, almost imperceptible chime to his strumming. There is hardly a wasted moment of melody—even deeper cuts like “The Background” spin every instrumental into wispy wonders. It was this obsessive experimentation on a familiar format, balanced by a healthy dose of distorted snot rock, that elevated Third Eye Blind above a crowded field of bands in rimless sunglasses whining about loneliness. In an increasingly electronic alternative landscape, it was a reminder of the slightly transcendent qualities of a well-played, well-recorded guitar solo. Sure, crystal meth will lift you up—but Cadogan’s dulcet strumming was a steadier kind of high.
But open tunings and intricate noodling alone couldn’t turn Third Eye Blind into an international sensation. It was Jenkins’ accidentally profound simplicity—a directness that could only come from total confidence in one’s own brilliance—that carried their tunes into the dorm rooms, minivan CD changers, and mixtapes of the masses. While his ego made him more than a few enemies, it made even well-worn emotions feel pressing and huge. It’s not so much that Jenkins was a relatable lyricist—“Jumper,” about talking a friend down from suicide, reads objectively like it was written by someone who has never experienced depression. But with his slight lisp and awkward enunciation, he was heartbreakingly present, like a youth pastor who genuinely thinks a guitar and a good heart is all it takes to reach Jesus. When he belts out “I would understand,” Jenkins really believes his words can save a life—and isn’t it a little cathartic to bask in that hope with him?
Jenkins’ lyrics fought, kicking and screaming, against anxiety and alienation. Third Eye Blind was an antidote to cynicism or numbness in the face of crisis. The band would often cover “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want” in concert, and by all reports it was a total massacre of the Smiths. This seems, in hindsight, like an obvious mismatch—Jenkins is incapable of Morrissey’s all-consuming self-loathing. When Jenkins sang “Let me get what I want,” it was with the belief that he’d actually get it. His lyrics are unrelentingly lucid; they imply that the only way out is through. “When you start talking I hear the Prozac,” Jenkins sneers on “Losing a Whole Year,” as if he felt personally betrayed that his ex would seek pharmaceutical solutions to existential despair. “Want to get myself back in again,” Jenkins cries out on “How’s It Going to Be,” a post-adolescent battle cry for identity wrapped up in a song about a breakup. In a world hurtling towards cold abstraction, Third Eye Blind wanted to feel “the soft dive of oblivion.”
Third Eye Blind was a hit almost as soon as it was released in April 1997: “Semi-Charmed Life,” “Graduate,” and “How’s It Going to Be” topped the rock charts, and the album entered into the Billboard 100 by the following month. Soon enough, they would book tours opening for the Rolling Stones and U2, fitting gigs for a band built as much on the showmanship of its singer as the deftness of its lead guitarist. Jenkins, for his part, instantly took to the role of megalomaniacal frontman with his first taste of fame. “We want to be the biggest band in the world,” he told the Los Angeles Times that year. “But it has to be on my own terms.”
Unfortunately, as Cadogan would realize during the production of their follow-up, 1999’s Blue, he meant that literally: Jenkins was given all the shares of the newly incorporated Third Eye Blind Inc., making him the sole owner of Third Eye Blind’s assets. The band then effectively fired their guitarist before he could quit, abandoning Cadogan after a tour date in Utah and continuing on to play The Tonight Show with a suspiciously similar-looking replacement the next night.
In the end, entitlement won out: Critics noted, in 1997, that “Jenkins and crew have an arrogance that outweighs their talent,” and Jenkins’ alienating business practices didn’t help. Blue never reached the commercial or critical success of their rapturous debut, and without Cadogan to guide their melodies along, no subsequent Third Eye Blind record even came close. The same tenacity that made his debut so vital turned Jenkins’ band into a relic of the ’90s; he is remembered fondly alongside one-hit wonders though, quietly and truthfully, an unsung cornerstone of the power-pop canon.
Third Eye Blind has a mascot, something like a band icon—a pixelated image of a man, falling towards the ground. Jenkins has said that it’s meant to represent the Greek myth of Icarus, whose own hubris led to his downfall. It is, finally, the perfect metaphor for his band.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2022-01-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Elektra | January 23, 2022 | 8.3 | 1908ad28-3619-4bd8-ab0b-9790790ac5d7 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
In 1985, the esteemed novelist worked with composer Todd Barton to create an album of unheard language and instruments. The reissue highlights the rich, totally immersive art Ursula K. Le Guin sought to create. | In 1985, the esteemed novelist worked with composer Todd Barton to create an album of unheard language and instruments. The reissue highlights the rich, totally immersive art Ursula K. Le Guin sought to create. | Ursula K. Le Guin / Todd Barton: Music and Poetry of the Kesh | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ursula-k-le-guin-todd-barton-music-and-poetry-of-the-kesh/ | Music and Poetry of the Kesh | Ursula K. Le Guin, the master writer who died in January at the age of 88, was best known for her novels The Dispossessed, her Earthsea series, and the best-selling The Left Hand of Darkness, which imagined a planet whose inhabitants have no fixed gender identity. After Darkness was published in 1969, it became a classic of both science fiction and of feminist science fiction, a genre Le Guin helped bore into existence.
“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope,” Le Guin said in a fiery speech at the 2014 National Book Awards. “We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”
In her final months, she was preparing the re-release of a 1985 work that had largely flown under the radar. Music and Poetry of the Kesh, her collaborative album with composer and analog synthesist Todd Barton, was first issued on cassette in 1985, bundled with Le Guin’s novel Always Coming Home, a dark-horse favorite among her readers. It’s an expansive, 523-page portrayal of a future tribe of indigenous people living an anti-colonial existence 500 years from now, their lives ruled by nature and the seasons, their story told by Le Guin in fiction, poetry, plays, recipes, ethnography, a glossary, and hand-drawn maps. Even given those wildly melding genres, Le Guin claimed she needed to “hear the music,” too. She enlisted Barton and began an elaborate and carefully considered process that yielded the deceptively verisimilar Music and Poetry of the Kesh.
“Heron Dance,” the first song is one of the more evocative pieces on the album—wordless, electronic, and organic, with synthesizer, handmade instruments, percussion and what appears to be a dulcimer-like instrument. Like the novel, Music and Poetry of the Kesh pulls freely and weirdly and somehow unobtrusively from multiple genres—sacred, choral, poetry, avant-garde, minimalist, and downright New Age. In its original packaging, it resembles some lost Terry Riley collaboration, or a bootleg of John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s first Happening—something forested and futuristic. Barton visited Le Guin on her Napa Valley ranch, the ostensible setting for Always Coming Home, where he collected field recordings. The ambient sounds of creek and crickets feature on “Twilight Song”; campfire and coyotes filter into the female chorus of “Yes—Singing,” the woods encroaching on the studio.
The songs of the Kesh speak to an earth-based spirituality, referencing ceremonies of actual Native Americans: “Sun Dance Poem,” “A River Song,”; there are songs for willow trees, dragonflies, herons, and quail. The titles alone are risky; are these cultural appropriations? In the wrong hands, they could be, of course, particularly if Le Guin and Barton had opted to base them on actual sacred or ceremonial songs. But Le Guin resolved instead to listen not so much to other music but to the land itself, as she had done since childhood.
Le Guin is the daughter of two prominent cultural anthropologists who focused their work on Native American tribes of Northern California, especially the Yahi, a California tribe decimated by genocide. In the early 20th century, Alfred Kroeber made wax cylinder recordings of Ishi, the last known member of the Yahi, speaking and singing in the language that would largely die with him. Theodora Kroeber wrote Ishi in Two Worlds, as well as another, partly fictionalized book based on Ishi’s story.
Undoubtedly, Le Guin grew up hearing Ishi’s recordings and the music of other indigenous people. Native American friends were frequent houseguests at her parents’ “rundown, easy-going” Napa Valley ranch. Her Kesh songs honor the simplicity of hymns and sacred music, but they feel distinct, true to the world of the characters Le Guin created. Barton built instruments that he and Le Guin imagined the Kesh people would have played—a seven-foot-long horn, a flute made out of bone—and then taught himself and ostensibly the other musicians on the album, to play them. When he asked Le Guin if the Kesh spoke English, she responded, “Drat!” and then spent months making up an alphabet, included in the back of the novel, and vocabulary for her lyrics.
You don’t need to “speak Kesh,” or to have read the book, in order to appreciate the idiosyncrasies of this album, but one heightens the understanding of the other. Think of The Music and Poetry of the Kesh as an open invitation to entering another, other-world of Le Guin’s. The album moves through a series of a cappella or sparsely accompanied songs with entrancing choral arrangements of female voices, male ones, and the harmonizing of both. “A Teaching Poem,” delivered at normal speed, will sound most deceptively familiar to listeners of indigenous music; the slowed-down “Sun Dance Poem” casts it in an otherworldly, monastic tone. Listen outdoors and the creek water you hear in Le Guin and Barton’s songs may sync up to the muddy river you’re passing; listen during a city’s winter and the percussive rhythm and bell-like tones will commune with your apartment radiator. These are sounds that seek to speak from then and beyond, to right now.
“The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California,” Le Guin writes in the opening pages of Always Coming Home. “They are translations from a literature of the (or a) future.” The Kesh’s music and poems, too, are modern and archaic at once—they reach back to ancient hymns for the earth to repair the toxic damage wrought on their own. Pulling from the long ago past to address the people of the not-so-distant past, these songs are celebratory and a clarion call at once. | 2018-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Freedom to Spend | March 23, 2018 | 8.3 | 1908b233-ea3b-4a19-8e5c-e4211233b55c | Rebecca Bengal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca-bengal/ | |
Jay Mitta adds an incredible amount of detail to the frenetic and kinetic sound of singeli, a blisteringly quick style of dance music from Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. | Jay Mitta adds an incredible amount of detail to the frenetic and kinetic sound of singeli, a blisteringly quick style of dance music from Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. | Jay Mitta: Tatizo Pesa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jay-mitta-tatizo-pesa/ | Tatizo Pesa | Since its founding in 2016, Kampala, Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes label has been a steadfast advocate for underground music from across East Africa, the kind that doesn’t often find its way to Western record labels. Its rapidly growing catalog encompasses a range of styles, from traditional ceremonial drumming and virtuoso mbira performances to hybrids like Otim Alpha’s electro acholi, a digital update of Northern Ugandan Larakaraka wedding songs, or Jako Maron’s electronic experiments with the traditional Maloya music of Réunion Island. Nyege Nyege is no stranger to the ultra-modern and ultra-globalized: Its sublabel Hakuna Kulala is a showcase for jarringly dissonant, heavily abstracted club music more in keeping with outlets like PAN or Príncipe. But one of the wildest sounds Nyege Nyege has showcased so far is singeli, a blisteringly quick style of dance music from Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.
To the uninitiated, singeli might sound a little like Latin American merengue played on a cassette deck whose fast-forward button has gotten wedged in place. Tightly syncopated loops of sampled and synthesized drums spin at dizzying speeds while glassy keyboards pump away like the needles of an industrial sewing machine. It’s at once giddy and disorienting, and on Jay Mitta’s Tatizo Pesa, the surprises come fast and thick into something approaching a state of meditative grace.
Nyege Nyege first introduced singeli on 2017’s Sounds of Sisso compilation, a showcase for Sisso Records, a Dar Es Salaam outfit whose unvarnished style is a world away from the glossier strains that can be heard on Tanzanian pop radio. Sisso affiliate Bamba Pana delivered an especially erratic version of singeli with last year’s Poaa, where tempos sometimes reached 200 BPM or more. Some listeners heard an accidental echo of gabber, a pile-driving Dutch strain of trance music, but where gabber’s breakneck cadence telegraphs an unmistakable menace, Bamba Pana’s tones were less violent—less a brick to the face than the prickle of a foot that has fallen asleep.
The fellow Sisso member Jay Mitta’s Tatizo Pesa is less frenetic—the tempo swings between a mere 180 and 190 BPM—but perhaps even more kinetic, given the elasticity of his sounds. Where Bamba Pana’s loops can sound tinny and lo-fi, Mitta’s layers of percussion samples and stabbing synth leads have a hi-def sheen. Early singeli tended to sample taarab, a style popular in Zanzibar that sometimes has the sticky-sweet flavor of keyboard presets, but Mitta’s production is more nuanced: Once your eyes adjust to the glare, there are shadows lurking just outside the perimeter of the neon glow. On “Dura,” synth pads reminiscent of 1980s quiet-storm R&B are buffeted by ping-pong balls and punctuated by declarative acoustic drum fills; on the title track, the 14-year-old rapper Dogo Janja’s rapid-fire chat trails off into an unexpected explosion of dub delay. The staccato “Mpya Singeri” is virtually nothing but drums and a plunging bass synth, suggesting unexpected echoes of UK club music.
Its true pleasure lies in the details. A meowing cat lends slapstick energy to one song, and in another, a melody briefly lands on the refrain from Stevie Wonder’s “Part Time Lover.” Over the course of its 40-minute run, songs don’t go much beyond the three-minute mark, but “Don Bet” stretches to nearly eight minutes, the patterns switching up every few bars: earsplitting synth stabs, dissonant counterpoints, major-key piano chords, all set to that tireless, mechanized hand-drum bounce. That kind of variety plays out across the album as a whole: From track to track, the subtle shifts in tempo and timbre are enough to make each song feel like a whole new world, even though the elements are roughly the same. Every twist of the kaleidoscope brings a fresh surprise. | 2019-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Nyege Nyege Tapes | February 2, 2019 | 7.5 | 190a2144-06af-42e8-9f36-843b3787b403 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Making free, internet-giveaway mixtapes suits Charli XCX's image: the dance music association, her debt to M.I.A., and her overall rebellious, anti-authoritarian streak. Super Ultra is her second of 2012, and it's an interesting, if not always successful experiment. | Making free, internet-giveaway mixtapes suits Charli XCX's image: the dance music association, her debt to M.I.A., and her overall rebellious, anti-authoritarian streak. Super Ultra is her second of 2012, and it's an interesting, if not always successful experiment. | Charli XCX: Super Ultra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17457-super-ultra/ | Super Ultra | British electro pop singer Charli XCX's embrace of the mixtape makes perfect sense: It fits her association with dance music acts (a genre that's well suited to the format), her obvious debt to M.I.A. (who released her debut mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism all the way back in 2004), and the importance of a rebellious, anti-authoritarian streak to her overall image. The free mixtape's direct line of communication from artist to listener, unimpeded by A&R execs, and the anarchic, genre-smashing creative approach that it engenders feel very compatible with the times, and with XCX's internet-mashing creative hybrids. Super Ultra is the second one she's released this year, after spring's Heartbreaks and Earthquakes, and it's an interesting experiment, if far from flawless.
The eight-track EP opens on a low note-- probably its lowest-- with a track featuring internet personality Brooke Candy, who is best known for appearing in Grimes' music video for "Genesis" and has a sideline in being a terrible rapper. The beat has a pleasing blunted feel and a catchy hook driven by a funky keyboard riff, but Candy's contribution sounds like the female half of a discarded turn-of-the-millennium Ja Rule duet, down to the outdated slang and submissive-chick role she plays in her lyrics. With her nasal voice and awkwardly-fitting accent she comes off like the female Mickey Avalon who, much like Mickey Avalon, no-one who actually likes rap music could possibly enjoy in any unironic way. "Heatwave" offers a convincing recreation of a brand of 80s electroclash that's been redone a vast number of times since the genre's heyday, while the droopy "Moments in Love" suggests that Charli might be better off with a supervisory eye looking over her shoulder. (If there wasn't one-- the presence of a link to Atlantic's UK division at the bottom of the page that homes Super Ultra suggests that it's not entirely free of label ties.)
But there are a few bright moments on Super Ultra. "Velvet Dreaming (Luv)" is spacey and ravey in a way that bears more than a passing resemblance to the Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds", and the ecstatic synthesizer crescendo accompanied by an extended sample of dialogue from True Romance that pops up 30 seconds in would likely have gotten it the axe if she'd tried placing it on an album for a label. The same goes for "Glow", which has a beat that sounds like Clams Casino and a weary, dissipated vocal that doesn't fit the established outlines of a pop star personality.
And then there's the record-closing "Forgiveness", which is legitimately gorgeous and weird. It begins as a plaintive piano ballad before waves of strings and drums sweep over and it transforms into a minor-key dirge. It's awash in vocal effects that suggest some sort of emotional breakdown, along with an insistent cowbell that somehow feels vaguely maniacal and menacing in the context of everything that's going on. Charli's vocals show off all of her star-worthy talents, but the lyrics go deeper than self-doubt, all the way down to self-loathing and a raw, unembellished portrait of a dark psychic space. After listening a dozen times I realized that it most reminded me of of Montreal's epic meltdown "The Past is a Grotesque Animal". "Forgiveness" is a fascinatingly strange song, and who knows if it would have made it onto Super Ultra if it had been intended to shift units on a pop star level. In any case, it's a compelling argument for letting these kind of pop stars off the leash. | 2012-12-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-12-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | December 3, 2012 | 5 | 190c0b48-66ad-48ae-95d5-ec978b83d7cc | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Full-length debut by Baltimore area group comes at hip-hop from an oblique angle, with the rapping holding down the rhythmic pulse while producer Ricky Rabbit's noisy and diverse beats fly all over the place. | Full-length debut by Baltimore area group comes at hip-hop from an oblique angle, with the rapping holding down the rhythmic pulse while producer Ricky Rabbit's noisy and diverse beats fly all over the place. | Food for Animals: Belly | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11134-belly/ | Belly | Food for Animals come at hip-hop from an oblique angle. Or, to put it less gently, they do it ass-backwards, inverting the traditional roles of beats and rhymes. MCs Vulture Voltaire (aka Andrew Field-Pickering) and Hy (aka Sterling Warren) hold down the rhythmic pulse with their flows, while the beats-- well, the beats just fly all over the fucking place. Producer Ricky Rabbit's loops sound like a Stan Brakhage Nintendo game-- P.A.-pulverizing fits of chopped and screwed digital squalor that mash up lo-bit Pita-style electronics with breakcore, Baltimore club, dubstep, and techno. But the topsy-turvy ethos and gurgling electronics hardly make Belly-- the group's first full-length-- a headache-inducing mess. Rather, Belly is a giant step forward for the trio in just about every regard. The hooks are stronger, the verses are tighter, the noise is, well, better.
In 2004 Food for Animals were loud and messy. Rickey Rabbit used to perform live by routing his iTunes into a smorgasbord of pedals while Vulture rapped through a delay and a now absent guitarist plucked out circuit-bent Atari sounds. They produced a formidable speaker-cone-busting racket, which-- more often than not-- soundsystems weren't quite up to. Likewise the Scavengers EP-- the group's overlooked first release-- was structurally loose and sonically raw. Ricky Rabbit regularly made use of frequencies so severe that it often felt like your hearing was shutting on and off in time to the music.
On Belly, Food for Animals haven't gone smooth-- the record is still loud enough to shorten the lifespan of your high-range hearing-- but they have tightened up. "Shhhy"'s shattered synth-loop bursts from of a cloud of murmurs and chopped piano samples, with Vulture's rapping anchored by coarse bass thuds. But the tight chorus-- with its layered vocal samples and psyched-out chipmunk octave chant-- is where "Shhhy" will make you lose it like a 14-year-old at a Rage Against the Machine show. "Yeah my generation got clowned and still my surroundings can't even make a sound," raps Vulture. "You look at me nervous with your finger on your mouth-- but you don't have to be so shy."
Vulture's lyrics have also come up a notch since Scavengers. Where old songs might have found the imposing 6-foot-plus beardo rapping about "elephants humpin' in your trunk," on Belly he delivers tighter and deeper rhymes about everything from hot days spent with Arthur Russell records to his mother's untimely death. "Every time I hear the word cancer I need a cigarette/ I'm not sure I get it yet," he raps in a poignant moment on the unexpectedly heavy album closer "Grapes". The arrival of Hy also adds a little more flavor to the proceedings by giving the songs the fuel of another personality.
But it's producer Ricky Rabbit who really pushes Belly's game forward. Despite Vulture and Hy's ample charisma, without the upside-down rhythm, skull scraping buzzes, and stereo-bong samples, Belly might struggle to stand out at a Takoma Park open-mic night. Instrumentals like the gentle and trippy synth-blips of "Grapes (Preprise)" or "Virgogo"-- a slanted pass at Baltimore Club-- show off his talent for taking the navel-gazing sounds of digital minimalism and making them bounce.
Belly may be a weird and noisy hip-hop album, but it's still a hip-hop album, and by that measure it's more 3 Feet High and Rising than Death Certificate. Food for Animals bring the noise, but they don't want to bludgeon you with it. On Belly, they drop some incomprehensible beats, make sounds that recall a box of light bulbs rolling down a flight of stairs, and put down some pretty heavy lyrics-- the name is after all a reference to the belly of the beast, to being pulverized and digested-- but it's not a some head-grinding avant-deathtrip. "I get nice and fuzzy with my buddies cause they funny and I love y'all/ We chuckling and coughing and laugh for no reason while we talkin'," raps Vulture on "Swampy (Summer Jam)", a song that's as much about healing as it is about murky underpants. Belly may be all about getting turned upside down and inside out, but when it's over, all that tumult will leave you feeling pretty good. | 2008-03-03T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2008-03-03T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | HOSS | March 3, 2008 | 8.1 | 191261bc-7df5-4546-a4bf-8b8ae90ee612 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
The saxophone-and-drum duo’s muscular, distorted, freeform tracks connect the London post-punk and jazz scenes like an arcane new subplot. | The saxophone-and-drum duo’s muscular, distorted, freeform tracks connect the London post-punk and jazz scenes like an arcane new subplot. | O.: WeirdOs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/o-weirdos/ | WeirdOs | After cutting their teeth playing around London, saxophonist Joe Henwood and drummer Tash Keary linked up to jam during pandemic lockdowns. As gigs returned, O. became an official duo, taking up residence at Windmill Brixton—the South London venue now famous as the incubator for acts like Shame, Squid, black midi, and Black Country, New Road. They caught the ear of Dan Carey, the prolific producer linked to almost everyone in the current UK post-punk boom, and recorded the charmingly titled WeirdOs for his Speedy Wunderground label. But if “post-punk” quickly became a reductive umbrella for the host of adventurous bands percolating in South London, O. represent a particularly arcane new subplot.
While Henwood and Keary came up in London’s equally vibrant and of-the-moment jazz scene, O. are not jazz. They aren’t any one thing, but a collision of Henwood and Keary’s disparate interests, name-checking everything from dub to Deftones, noise to A Tribe Called Quest. The two boast jazz technicality, but perform with the viscerality of punk and metal, while favoring textures and colors more akin to bug-eyed electronic music. Their style is muscular, high intensity, and a little gonzo. Keary’s drumming is typically furious yet precise, Henwood’s baritone sax riffs heaving and monolithic. This was the energy that producer Carey sought to capture: WeirdOs was cut live to tape in two weeks, seeking to replicate the urgency of O.’s gigs.
Everything in O. is about mutation as the duo chase freeform ideas far into the ether. Much of this experimentation is achieved by Henwood’s extensive manipulation of his sax, filtered through an array of effects pedals. On penultimate standout “Sugarfish,” you can feel the bodily heft in his distorted lead, before it turns into something more closely resembling aqueous synths, only to resurface sounding almost like a guitar.
O. pull off similar tricks across WeirdOs. “Micro” sounds like a smeared electronic track, melting Keary’s jungle breakbeats and Henwood’s sax nearly beyond recognition. O.’s fascination with metal shines through in the foreboding rhythms of “Cosmo” and “Slap Juice.” On “Whammy,” Keary switches from blitzkrieg propulsion to suggestive tumbles, Henwood from the natural guttural strength of the bari to more otherworldly and sinuous lines, before the whole thing erupts again in its final act.
While hooks abound, WeirdOs also plays as one big, roiling piece. Like the live jams from which it emerged, the album has peaks and valleys, passages of unrelenting intensity followed by space-out cooldowns that offer the slightest moment to breathe. Those with jazz predilections might hear it as a violent deconstruction of the genre, while followers of London’s rock scene might perceive O. as the most eccentric wanderers to yet grace the Windmill’s stage. No matter how WeirdsOs reveals itself to you, O.’s debut is a testament to Keary and Henwood’s fearlessness and dexterity. They take the limitations of two players and two common instruments, and tell the story in a way never heard before. | 2024-06-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Speedy Wunderground | June 24, 2024 | 7.3 | 1913d93f-0026-44fc-81d0-d963764e6bd7 | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | |
The UK band goes from teenage post-punk acolytes to Nick Drake- and John Martyn-loving folkies in one move. | The UK band goes from teenage post-punk acolytes to Nick Drake- and John Martyn-loving folkies in one move. | Bombay Bicycle Club: Flaws | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14466-flaws/ | Flaws | Bombay Bicycle Club's debut album, last year's I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose, posited the group as imitative but energetic post-punk revivalists, doling out artily precise pop-rockers with liveliness and strong chops. The band now follows that effort with its all-acoustic sophomore long-player, Flaws.
Wait, did I miss a few steps? Since when does a boisterous young rock group make a full-on introspective acoustic move on its second freaking album? This may come as a shock, but Bombay Bicycle Club didn't exactly master its initial sound on its debut (most bands don't manage that feat in just one album). The group's members are barely out of their teens, so perhaps the fickleness of youth explains their inconstancy. In any event, it seems that between records someone fell hard for the pretty folk of Nick Drake, John Martyn, and Joanna Newsom. And by "someone" I mean "probably lead singer Jack Steadman," given the extent to which his words and voice now dominate the proceedings. Kind of makes you wonder how on-board the rest of the band were with this abrupt stylistic shift.
Taking a folkier turn might make sense on paper considering Steadman's voice possesses a nicely quavering element that isn't far off from Devendra Banhart's. Yet the lyrics and arrangments here aren't a fraction as bold or as singular. Flaws is well-produced, many of its songs nicely augmented by fleet drumming and intricate guitar figures, but Steadman's lack of having anything interesting to say and inability to say it distinctively ultimately sinks the endeavor. Sure, the guitars on "Rinse Me Down" evoke Out of Time-era R.E.M. while "Many Ways" offers pleasant Sufjan-ish banjos, but Steadman replaces the incision of those artists with empty floridity and moody romanticism. The group covers Martyn here, and it's telling that they choose the juvenilia of "Fairytale Lullaby". If Steadman and his mates are really so dead-set on being sober young [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| men, someone needs to buy them a copy of Grace & Danger, stat.
Listening to Flaws and knowing what a spirited racket these kids are capable of making, I want to grab all of them by the cheeks like Adam Sandler does to his chubby third-grade classmate in Billy Madison and yell, "For the love of God, you have to cherish it!" There will be plenty of time to become pussies later on down the road. | 2010-07-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2010-07-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Island | July 20, 2010 | 4 | 191838e7-3e1d-4a18-87e3-3cacf0fcfb26 | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
On the third album from the bedroom-pop duo, Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion turn their faces toward the sun with songs fuller and brighter than ever before. | On the third album from the bedroom-pop duo, Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion turn their faces toward the sun with songs fuller and brighter than ever before. | Cults: Offering | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cults-offering/ | Offering | Toward the beginning of Cults’ 2011 self-titled debut, singer Madeline Follin made a revealing confession: “I am afraid of the light.” That lyric alone speaks volumes about the group’s music. On the debut and 2013’s Static, the duo of Follin and guitarist Brian Oblivion has crafted vibrant pop songs flecked with bits of darkness. Their inescapable breakout hit “Go Outside” is a buoyant track that wouldn’t seem out of place piping through speakers at the Gap, despite the fact that it opens with a sample of infamous cult leader Jim Jones. Other standouts from Cults’ back catalog include a song that likens falling in love to bleeding out, and one titled “No Hope” whose message is every bit as pessimistic as you’d expect.
This time around, Cults have started to turn their faces toward the sun. The songs on Offering are fuller and brighter than they’ve ever been, leaving behind sinister samples and moribund imagery and making good on the promise of uptempo revelry that “Go Outside” offered. The album’s tone is set by the opening title track, which rumbles to life with a warbly synth hook and anthemic stadium-rock drums. Follin’s offering of love is made from atop a mound of plush synthetic sound, plucky guitar strums, and breathy descants. Sheer magnitude makes “Offering” one of the album’s most memorable tracks, and it’s followed by another: “I Took Your Picture,” which features a buzzing earworm of a bassline and is populated by dozens of Madelines, multi-tracked into a cloying choir. On late highlight “Nothing Is Written,” the celestial “ooh” of the chorus is backed by a galaxy of synth. Gone is the hollow echo that sometimes engulfed earlier Cults music—the eleven tracks on Offering are rendered in high fidelity and bursting with sound.
Songs this lush don’t necessarily demand lyrical complexity. In fact, the pop songs that stick often work with simple premises expanded to monumental dimensions by heady production. This is what makes, for example, Carly Rae Jepsen’s songs so satisfying and memorable—they hone in on a single feeling, a stable concept that gives you something to hang onto when its soundtrack surges through the roof. Cults’ lyrics here aren’t so focused. They sprawl, painting in broad strokes but avoiding specific imagery, like on “Recovery,” where opaque metaphor abounds (“You learned to swim/Before you had learned to sink/And that’s not as easy as you’d think”), or “Natural State,” where Follin imagines escape or victory (“Closed your eyes and thought we’d won/Blind believing that we’d never be outrun”), but offers no details that indicate from or over what.
Follin’s vocal style doesn’t help matters. She sings, as she always has, in a tone that’s youthful and pure but relatively undynamic. Before, this level delivery acted as a tool for pointing out the grim humor of Cults’ music—a sort of vocal deadpan that accentuated the irony of fizzy songs containing such darkness. Now that the band has mostly retired edge from their playbook, the modicum of range and intensity in Follin’s voice feels more like a shortcoming than a stylistic choice, and makes it hard to trace the emotional trajectory of Offering. Combine all of this with the fact that the lyrics are sometimes entirely unintelligible, as on “I Took Your Picture” (I cycled through several nonsensical interpretations before learning that the lyric is actually, “Close to someone’s reject/Long play is the enemy”), and the meaning of these songs fades from view, dissolving into something both undeniably catchy and impermanent. | 2017-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sinderlyn | October 14, 2017 | 6.6 | 191e1eba-8ec6-46ab-a70a-18f6506d3c73 | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
The solo debut from one of the Dublin rap group NUXSENSE’s core emcees, backed by ghostly beats from producer Sivv, represents the clearest iteration of the group’s aesthetic yet. | The solo debut from one of the Dublin rap group NUXSENSE’s core emcees, backed by ghostly beats from producer Sivv, represents the clearest iteration of the group’s aesthetic yet. | Luthorist: Hueco Mundo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/luthorist-hueco-mundo/ | Hueco Mundo | Has a rap group ever boasted broader geographical roots than NUXSENSE? The collective’s various origin stories cover more terrain than a Mission: Impossible movie—four continents, at least. Living and thriving in Dublin, a bunch of school kids drawn together by their shared immigrant experiences and a love of hip-hop became a defining force in the Irish capital’s youth culture. Recent years have seen the city progress into a more multicultural arena, and a group like NUXSENSE—with their blend of region-neutral sounds, gloriously garish street fashion, belligerent live shows, and diverse backgrounds—represent a diamond-clear expression of the cultural exchange that’s happening in the city’s small venues and homemade studios.
Highly visible in Dublin’s local rap scene NUXSENSE may be, but as recording artists, the group—emcees Luthorist, Jehnova, Prophet Goon, Rem$ (fka Yung Pe$o), Bogzy, and Al-i, plus beatmaker Sivv—has been content to drop loose tracks here and there. (See the easily chantable crew-rap tune “Reign,” or Jehnova’s journey down an Earl-esque rabbit hole, “Striped Pyjamas”). Luthorist’s solo album represents the clearest iteration of the group’s cracked sonic philosophy. Hueco Mundo is 24 minutes of bugged-out bars and soil-noir production that rings with its own languid kind of beauty. And though the hooks may be softer than the material in NUXSENSE’s Adidas track pants, they do stick.
The record opens with a next-station announcement familiar to anyone who rides Dublin’s tram network, the Luas. It’s about the only evidence of the record’s true birthplace. On Hueco Mundo, the sound of public transit snatches you into Luthorist’s alternate vision of the city. In the Manga series Bleach, Hueco Mundo is an alternate dimension of infinite nights and never-ending white deserts. Similarly, Luthorist’s world is one of eternal twilight, but his stoned stylings evoke images of a hazy, 4 a.m. stumble down a shadowy street of smoky gutters and neon lights.
Much of the warped atmosphere comes down to producer Sivv, who blesses all the beats with his hushed, trance-inducing synths and eerie electronica. On “Astral,” Luthorist sips on juice and gin, that classic rap nectar. But Sivv’s swirling sci-fi keys sound like the bar is on one of Neptune’s moons. “Wafer” features a spooky synth flutter that’s reminiscent of Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop,” but it’s matched with music-box plinks and familiar cellphone bleeps (one of Sivv’s signatures). Bringing together so many odd, potentially incompatible elements into one of the album’s cheeriest beats encapsulates his mean ear for loops and instinct for assembling them.
On the mic, Luthorist proves a brilliant foil for Sivv’s languid vibes. The rapper, who is of Brazilian descent, has an penchant for listless vocals, slowing his voice to a deliberate crawl, sometimes seeming to opt out of all consonants to let his flow run like liquid metal around the beats. See how he twins his speech with a screwed-down vocal on “Prism” for maximum druggy effect. Over the twinkling keys of “Tokio,” Luthorist name-drops to a certain friendly phantom: “Moving like a ghost, I’m feeling like Casper.” When he tunes his voice to its most wavy, Luthorist really does sound a specter: translucent, like he’s disappearing into the walls. It’s a voguish sound, delivered by very young men who are channeling juvenile energy and borderless creativity into a new age of Irish art unlike anything before it. That’s something worth celebrating. Let the new generation of kids reign. | 2019-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | NUXSENSE | February 1, 2019 | 7.4 | 191e3664-97b9-459b-83ec-6f990fef7a93 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Broken Social Scene associates Stars return for a third set of beautiful, eloquent indie pop. | Broken Social Scene associates Stars return for a third set of beautiful, eloquent indie pop. | Stars: Set Yourself on Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7472-set-yourself-on-fire/ | Set Yourself on Fire | Stars are a pop band who sound best on a rock equalizer setting. They aren't loud and don't need to be-- their third and best album, Set Yourself on Fire, is a great example of sonic efficiency. Its songs are packed like a Geo Tracker for a cross-country road trip, yet nothing gets crushed or stuffed or buried. It might be the best orchestral pop album of the past year, only it doesn't sound orchestral, at least not according to the outsize string-and-reverb model favored by bands like Oasis or Spiritualized. If you find me a recent album that towers higher with fodder so virtuosically managed and manipulated, I'll give you 20 dollars and jump in a foreboding body of water from a height.
It took me two months to plow through Heart, Stars' 2003 sophomore effort. Two songs, "What the Snowman Learned About Love" and "Elevator Love Letter", sailed so high above the rest, I demurred at the possibility of imperfection. The album relied on standout riffs and jags of cathexis; it was, in essence, a collection of rifftastic one-liners, and one-liners sometimes fall face first. Set Yourself on Fire is more full-bodied; nothing is so singular it isn't worth fleshing out or adding to, which bolsters the weaker songs without watering down the cream.
The album opens with a disquieting epigram: "When there's nothing left to burn, you must set yourself on fire." A procession of lugubrious strings gives "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" the hugely premonitory feel of Heart opener "What the Snowman Learned About Love" without its flimsy grandiloquence. Amy Millan may whisper the refrain, "live through this and you won't look back," but the song is no chore; in fact, it's an apt segue into the astonishing title track.
"Set Yourself on Fire" takes Millan's mandate and soars with it. A lo-res synth arpeggio carries the song alongside a propulsive drumbeat and cascading strings. The song performs a nimble time change in its bridge before staking a final salvo-- "20 years asleep before we sleep... forever"-- over an icy coda. You might hear it on a Peter Pan bus, north of New Haven all industrial barrens, sunny cold mid-December afternoon after leaving your girlfriend, and you might cry.
The subsequent two tracks defibrillate the heartbroken. "Ageless Beauty" will sell Arts & Crafts' first ringtone, just watch. Its simple changes are dusted with zippy auxiliary lines playing peek-a-boo. "Reunion"'s chorus is so bathetic it's entrancing: "All I want is one more chance," sings Torquil Campbell, "to be young and wild and free." Rather than a second refrain, they give us a spry guitar lick that could make its chorus and secede if it wished.
Set Yourself on Fire is about breaking up and breaking down, and as such the album feels wontedly cathartic, like the moments right after you hit your emotional nadir and start getting your shit together. Stars handle the mood delicately with few slip-ups; my only complaint is that they never handle much of anything else. Save "The Big Fight"-- which is tame, slow and lounged-out-- there's no controversy, only half-smiles and the soggy aftermath. But even the dearest numbers have faint, nagging undercurrents. The band make no effort to avoid the inevitable charges of over-sentimentality; in fact, they indulge the calls: "The cold is a vindictive bride," reads their website bio, "she'll trap you between her thighs and turn your heart to ice if you're not careful." Despite overblown romanticism run rampant, Stars somehow remain understated. It's the "Soft Revolution", as the terrific penultimate track declaims. Hop aboard. | 2004-07-18T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-07-18T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Arts & Crafts | July 18, 2004 | 8.4 | 191f57d5-3691-4b28-b204-eabe232f5dfc | Pitchfork | null |
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With poignant writing and irreverent humor, Sarah Tudzin’s second album as Illuminati Hotties plays like a demonstration in the art of persistence. | With poignant writing and irreverent humor, Sarah Tudzin’s second album as Illuminati Hotties plays like a demonstration in the art of persistence. | Illuminati Hotties: Let Me Do One More | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/illuminati-hotties-let-me-do-one-more/ | Let Me Do One More | Sarah Tudzin opens her fantastic second album by ribbing herself mercilessly for underperforming. “In every life there is a bell,” the Illuminati Hotties wiz sings in “Pool Hopping,” the opening track of Let Me Do One More. “One rounded curve of time or tell/I’m on the left half looking over.” Soon enough, she hints at what’s got her feeling so insecure: She’s mid-breakup, just at the point where everything is up in the air. But the way Tudzin tells it, she’s ready to let the melancholy roll off her back, romping through a night of clandestine hookups, ice cream dates, and hotel pools. In other words, her life finally feels like her own again.
Reclaiming one’s own authority is a central topic for Let Me Do One More. The album follows last year’s FREE I.H.: This Is Not the One You’ve Been Waiting For, a mixtape Tudzin self-released in order to buy her way out of a frustrating label contract. FREE I.H. was scattered with pointed barbs about the music business (“Hold onto your masters, folks!”), and while Let Me Do One More doesn’t home in on that theme so explicitly, Tudzin’s sharp tongue and rebellious tendencies remain in full force. “You think I wanna be a part of every self-appointed startup?” she hollers on the blistering “MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA,” shapeshifting her voice like she’s playing five characters in a single Cartoon Network show. The songs on Let Me Do One More were written prior to FREE I.H., so with the understanding that this album is the one you’ve been waiting for, the brasher moments become triumphant.
Since her promising debut, 2018’s Kiss Yr Frenemies, Tudzin has affectionately described her clever, scrappy style as “tenderpunk.” Though her punkiest moments can be politically relevant (“The DNC is playing dirty!” she warns on “MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA”), her tender side is more prominent than ever. FREE I.H. was supposed to set her free—but on the eve of its release, Tudzin’s mother died of cancer, rendering the task of poring over hard drives to finally assemble the real album debilitating. Though the songs on Let Me Do One More predate Tudzin’s loss, her poignant, self-aware writing is keenly aware of life’s curveballs and unanticipated traumas. More importantly, it feels like a demonstration in the art of persistence.
Let Me Do One More is full of high highs and low lows, but thanks to Tudzin’s extensive experience as an engineer and producer (Pom Pom Squad, Weyes Blood), the two extremes—and they are often extreme—are meticulously balanced. The mid-tempo chug of “Knead” bridges the gap between the fired-up “MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA” and a bittersweet, socially conscious love song called “Threatening Each Other re: Capitalism.” (“But if you’re not too embarrassed of how I go out in public/Do you think that we could make a deli run?” goes one of the album’s most endearing lines.) A tongue-in-cheek monologue from Big Thief’s Buck Meek leads the surfy rocker “u v v p” into “Protector,” a dreamy, wandering ballad in which Tudzin questions a relationship’s staying power: “I am not sure that you’re my nightly news,” she coos. Then, just when you think she’s toned it down, she crashes into the ferocious barnburner “Joni: LA’s No. 1 Health Goth,” a “Rebel Girl”-esque ode to California’s contemporary social elite: too trendy and health-conscious to honor you with a passing glance. Paced like the year’s quippiest, most rewatchable rom-com, Let Me Do One More pivots through moods and musical palettes with irreverent sincerity.
On the final track, the spare, acoustic “Growth,” Tudzin’s voice drops to a near-whisper as she describes grieving for previous phases of life. “I guess being an adult is just being alone,” she sings, voice wavering. In the final seconds, you hear her mutter the album’s title, seemingly dissatisfied with the take. It’s her final sleight of hand: turning a phrase that suggests the eager anticipation of tequila shots or diving board jumps into a soft acknowledgement of perceived inadequacy. Presumably the next take wasn’t any better—but Let Me Do One More isn’t preoccupied with perfection. Tudzin knows how deep the pit of insecurity goes, which is why her record seems to say: Imagine what could happen once you get back on your feet.
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. | 2021-10-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Hopeless / Snack Shack Tracks | October 4, 2021 | 8 | 192296e0-a70e-4ec3-a1a8-7ea1b1924e17 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Silence Yourself is one of rock’s most commanding and ferociously poised debuts in recent years, the work of a new band with an outsized confidence and sharp clarity of vision. | Silence Yourself is one of rock’s most commanding and ferociously poised debuts in recent years, the work of a new band with an outsized confidence and sharp clarity of vision. | Savages: Silence Yourself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17977-savages-silence-yourself/ | Silence Yourself | Before their show in Seattle last month, London four-piece Savages posted a sign around the venue that laid out a couple of ground rules: no Instagramming, no video, no tweets-- in short, "SILENCE YOUR PHONES." This could be seen as a part of a growing trend of bands pointing out how sick they are of looking out into a sea of smartphones rather than human faces (the Yeah Yeah Yeahs posted a similar missive at their recent New York homecoming show), but it felt more like an extension of Savages’ overall manifesto. And no, “manifesto” is not too dramatic a word; especially in contrast with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ sign, which tempered its message with chatty humor (“PUT THAT SHIT AWAY!...MUCH LOVE AND MANY THANKS!”), Savages’ fiery imperative read like something hammered onto a door. "OUR GOAL IS TO DISCOVER BETTER WAYS OF LIVING AND EXPERIENCING MUSIC,” they wrote (caps theirs). “WE BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF PHONES DURING A GIG PREVENTS ALL OF US FROM TOTALLY IMMERSING OURSELVES." Ironically, their ability to see the value of silence in a world of noise might make Savages the most web-savvy band of the year. People have been tweeting and tumbling about their live shows the way that people used to talk about live shows: something you just have to see for yourself.
If you've paid even the slightest attention to Savages in the year leading up to their debut Silence Yourself, you know that this is how they do things-- in fact, it's very likely you knew something about their philosophy before you heard a note of their music. Whether you find it profoundly refreshing or a little tedious that Savages draw lines in the sand, none of this would be worth mentioning if the music didn’t live up to the force of the message. Silence Yourself proves that Savages are more than just talk. It's one of rock’s most commanding and ferociously poised debuts in recent years, the work of a band whose outsized confidence and sharp clarity of vision doesn’t correlate with the short amount of time it’s been together.
Savages' music feels out of step with current trends-- which I'm sure they'd take as a compliment. With its tumbling, tom-heavy percussion, singer Jehnny Beth's Siouxsie-summoning battle cries, and the compositional emphasis placed on Ayse Hassan’s bass (in the moments when Beth is silent, the bass feels like Savages’ lead singer), post-punk is Silence Yourself’s most obvious sonic reference point. And it doesn’t matter that they missed the post-punk revival by about a decade. While the bands that dominated indie rock in the early aughts looked to Joy Division and Gang of Four for reasons that had mostly to do with rhythm, Savages’ music finds kinship with post-punk’s oppositional politics, thematic darkness, and anxiety about the dehumanizing effects of technology-- the spirit is the same, but it’s been adjusted to reflect the times. Savages’ distaste for experiencing life through a screen comes from the same place as, say, Wire’s sardonic take on viewers whose idea of adventure was living vicariously through “the Lone Ranger”; after all, if “Ex Lion Tamer” were written today, it’d probably go, “Stay glued to your iPhone.”
Which is not to say that Savages are writing scathing songs about shitty service providers; their lyrics are boldly stark, elemental, and timeless. (The titles alone hit with a blunt force: “She Will”, “Hit Me”, “No Face”, “Shut Up.”) Beth has said that the band’s writing process is less about addition than subtraction, paring each song down to its most essential shape. All of the best songs on Silence Yourself derive their power from this kind of focused intensity, from the driving, dissonant “City’s Full” to the creeping, percussive lurch of “I Am Here”. The chorus of “Husbands”, a phenomenal single first released last year, sharpens that focus down to a single word. “I woke up and saw the face of a guy/ I don’t know who he is,” Beth sings in the song’s paranoia-inducing opening moments. A Savages song is about challenging the ideas, words and desires we consider “normal”, and they’ve found that repetition is an effective way to get that point across. “Husbands, husbands, husbands, husbands, husbands, husbands,” Beth chants in a manic whisper; with each intonation, the meaning erodes from a word that’s ostensibly meant to evoke comfort, protection and familiarity until it feels faceless.
Savages really show promise and range on the slow-burners. The moody dirge "Waiting for a Sign" and goth-cabaret closer "Marshall Dear" aren't the most immediate songs on the record, but over repeated listens, they bloom. If Hassan and Faye Milton's punishing rhythm section takes the helm on the more frantic numbers, Savages' downtempo moments allow Gemma Thompson and her scuzzy Fender to shine. On the excellent "Strife," she holds back as often as she strikes, underscoring Beth's most brutal lines with perfectly timed jolts and filling the song's winding corriders with thick plumes of distortion.
The mix allows each band member’s contribution to smolder with equal intensity and lends a palpable physicality to Savages’ sound. Milton handles her toms and bass drum like a boxer going at a punching bag; Hassan’s bass strings pulsate like a throbbing tendons; Thompson’s guitar cuts with a goosebump-inducing tone that recalls a chainsaw, and Beth shrieks like she’s resetting her own bones. Combining in a constant pendulum swing between tension and release, it all provides the perfect atmosphere for the darkly sensual themes that Silence Yourself explores.
As a lyricist, Beth says she’s inspired by the “awkward places” from which “twisted, original desires” spring. “Hit Me”, a sub-two-minute tornado of squalling noise, isn’t about domestic abuse, as some people assume, but is instead about a consensual encounter described by the porn star Belladonna. (Beth: “I hate it when women are turned into victims.”) Savages might make political pronouncements in interviews and on album covers, but their songs come from a lived-in perspective as Beth inhabits her different characters’ states of mind-- and forces the listener to do the same.
"How old are you, really?" a voice asks in the opening seconds of the album; it hovers in the air without an answer. It might be a knowing sneer at critics who think Savages are just recycling post-punk’s signature sound, but ostensibly it’s also a salute to an artistic kindred spirit. The line is from Opening Night, a 1977 movie by John Cassavetes-- a filmmaker who also saw a kind of beauty in emotional brutality and was prone to spouting off humanist manifestos. “My films are expressive of a culture that has had the possibility of attaining material fulfillment while at the same time finding itself unable to accomplish the simple business of conducting human lives,” he said. “What is needed is reassurance in human emotions; a re-evaluation of our emotional capacities.” Substitute “films” for “songs” and those words could almost be lifted off the cover of Silence Yourself. The album cuts through a world of chatter and distraction because it practices what it preaches, transmitting its message directly through the primal, bone-rattling force of its songs. | 2013-05-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-05-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador / Pop Noire | May 6, 2013 | 8.7 | 1925596d-12f5-4990-a9b1-80e1a80fb863 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The eighth album from the wildly experimental Brooklyn metal group doesn't quite blaze trails on par with the band's classic catalog, but they are still genuinely searching for new expressions. | The eighth album from the wildly experimental Brooklyn metal group doesn't quite blaze trails on par with the band's classic catalog, but they are still genuinely searching for new expressions. | Candiria: While They Were Sleeping | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22439-while-they-were-sleeping/ | While They Were Sleeping | Of all the heavy bands that get credit for having “jazzy” tendencies, few have legitimately ventured into jazz as deeply as Candiria. More than two decades ago, the Brooklyn quintet forged a remarkably cohesive blend of metal and hardcore with post-bop, fusion, hip-hop, and ambient noise. The timing is key, as Candiria emerged during an especially fertile period for metal, when the genre was being throttled into a kind of creative hyperdrive by musicians eager to find new angles on heaviness. It speaks volumes that Candiria’s twists on the form stood out so much given the climate—and that the band was able to sustain its hunger for exploration over a deliriously inventive five-album run from 1995–2002 .
On While They Were Sleeping, Candiria’s first album in six years, the transitions between chunky deathcore riffs and toe-tapping swing parts with horn arrangements may feel less dazzling than they once did, but that's only because the band performed them so flawlessly in the past. The execution remains as seamless as ever. Tellingly, Candiria only ever come off as dilettantes not when they resemble Mahavishnu Orchestra or Converge, but when they veer close to the radio-friendly melodies the Deftones have come to rely on far too much lately.
Like on their last two albums, 2004’s What Doesn't Kill You... and 2009’s Kiss the Lie, guitarist/songwriter John LaMacchia and frontman Carley Coma at times risk vocal cliches that are diametrically opposed to the death metal and hardcore grunts upon which Candiria staked a reputation. Thankfully, several distinguishing features guarantee that the songs on While They Were Sleeping will not end up on Active Rock radio anytime soon.
First, the new riffs don't have the polished sheen of the last two albums, hearkening instead to the slashing tones favored by the band's one-time contemporaries in street-tough hardcore acts like Madball, Merauder, and Biohazard. Likewise, subtle trimmings in the arrangements and mix ensure a richness that belies the music’s outer accessibility. The quintessentially anthemic “Mereya,” for example has not one but two jazz-flavored bridge sections with horns—each distinct from the other in the way the horns are first mixed up-front and then smeared to the outer edges of the stereo field to create a dreamlike atmosphere.
And even if While They Were Sleeping doesn’t quite blaze trails on par with the band’s classic catalog, the flute on “Wandering Light” and the radio static on “The Cause” show that Candiria aren’t merely reaching for novel sounds but genuinely searching for new expressions. Given how many times they’ve sculpted songs out of ambient noise in the past, the fact that “The Cause” breaks new ground in spite of its pedestrian ingredients—sound effect, riff, distorted screams, drum beat—shows what an achievement Candiria’s song structures truly are.
Lastly, there’s Coma’s breathtaking range, his voice essentially pulling the weight of half a dozen singers. And yet, even with Coma’s fluidity, the band makes room for vocalist Andrea Horne, whose backing vocals give the music that one extra push away from convention and towards transcendence—a critical ingredient in the album’s emotional impact given the insularity of its lyrical concept.
If you find Coma’s lyrics about a character named Mereya hard to fathom, you’re not alone: Even LaMacchia and longtime bassist Michael MacIvor have openly expressed their resistance to writing music to fit Coma’s storyline about a failed musician who rebels against New York City’s ruling monarchy. Inspired by current events like the Ferguson riots, Coma clearly intended for the concept to work on a metaphorical level. But Coma’s vision of New York isn’t as universally relatable as the substance underlying his central idea.
Sure, the riffs on this album recall the distinctly urban vibe of ’90s-era New York hardcore. But the fact is that Candiria have too much to offer to pin themselves to the mythology of the five boroughs. That said, the concept doesn’t intrude as much as Coma’s bandmates feared. When Coma sings, “No way I’ll go back to a beggar/So pay it up to hear me sing/Melodic waterfalls/Get with the protocol” on “Mereya,” it’s a fairly transparent indictment of the music industry. It’s also deliciously ironic that he’s doing so on a song where he and the band flirt with the commercialism they’re decrying.
Candiria has built up more than enough credibility to strike this kind of balance without stumbling. But after two albums where the band came close to losing touch with its essence, While They Were Sleeping goes a long way towards restoring its reputation as one of the most convincingly flexible acts that metal and hardcore have ever seen. | 2016-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Metal Blade | October 10, 2016 | 7.2 | 1925fc52-ae57-4a14-9736-a80de997105b | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
While her work has always had a kind of horizontal drift, the Danish composer’s latest is more song-like and elaborate. It is the most intricate and ambitious music she has released. | While her work has always had a kind of horizontal drift, the Danish composer’s latest is more song-like and elaborate. It is the most intricate and ambitious music she has released. | Sofie Birch: Holotropica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sofie-birch-holotropica/ | Holotropica | Listening to Sofie Birch’s music can be like lying supine on a grassy hilltop, watching clouds drift across a cerulean summer sky. The boundaries between tones are porous; nothing keeps its shape for long. A held chord might turn inside out; an icy arpeggio might melt into liquid; distant birdsong might harden into bright, clear chimes. If at any given time you pause to consider the panorama arrayed before you, you may vaguely realize that it is not the same as it was the last time you checked, yet find yourself at pains to explain what is different, or why.
Most of the Danish composer’s work over the past five years has fallen toward the gentlest end of the ambient spectrum. Across a handful of albums, both solo and in collaboration, Birch has experimented with ASMR, collaged field recordings from her travels into an “audio postcard,” and improvised on a country-house piano at daybreak, inadvertently capturing the clucking of hens in the background. Like its predecessors, Holotropica is marked by a sense of horizontal drift. But where before it was easy to imagine Birch’s music as something naturally occurring, emerging unbidden from the interplay of the elements, Holotropica is more song-like, elaborate, and labored over. It is the most intricate and ambitious music she has released.
This is still ambient music, but where much of Birch’s previous work was loosely minimalist, Holotropica thrums with detail. Her chords have thickened and grown more complex; they modulate in new ways, taking on richly iridescent hues. Her use of acoustic instruments in places evokes the fluid lines and timbres of Nala Sinephro’s 2021 album Space 1.8. On the opening “Observatory,” Nana Pi’s saxophone tentatively seeks out a melody, then falls into a swaying lockstep with a muted synth bass figure. On “Hypnogogia,” clarinet gives way to a slow, pumping pulse, like half-speed dub techno, which falls away to reveal Dolphin Midwives’ harp, glistening like a dewy spiderweb.
What Birch carries over from previous recordings are her instincts for shape-shifting evolution and lateral sprawl. Take “Humidity”: The title is well chosen, as the chords suggest the fecund scent of tropical flowers in bloom. It begins, as so many of these tracks do, with soft, shimmering chords, then blossoms into a lilting arpeggio. Shakers and birdsong flesh out the margins, while a ghostly hint of saxophone gives way to rhythmic bleats and, finally, freeform squeals. Where most ambient music maintains a steady burble, “Humidity” crests to an enormous climax that cuts off with violent abruptness. It's a rare moment of drama for a musician typically given to understatement. “Tide Rose” is subtler but just as mutable. It emerges from a matrix of deeply reassuring cyclical pulses—foghorn peals, chirping frogs, the echo of an alarm clock ringing from the other side of a dream—but an oddly timed arpeggio tilts the axis of this imaginary world, throwing everything gently out of whack and depositing you at a point far from the one where you began.
Birch, a student of meditation, has spoken of her belief in sound’s therapeutic effects. Here as before, her music tends to instill a sense of calm; you suspect she would not be upset if someone discovered it via a self-care playlist. But Holotropica isn’t saccharine—the more you listen, the more nuances you discover. Even at its quietest, there’s a sense that dynamic systems are spinning away, just out of earshot. Tiny, quivering movements jostle in the shadows of each note, and burnished surfaces gradually reveal a world of vibrating detail. It is placid but never numbing; meditative, yet not afraid to linger on a dissonant frequency or uncomfortable thought.
Birch describes her vision of Holotropica—which derives its title from a term meaning “moving toward wholeness”—as “a point behind closed eyes… where nothing happens and everything is.” She began work on these pieces several albums ago, in 2018, when a friend’s pregnancy inspired a two-week retreat in the forest, where the Danish composer meditated and laid down sketches for the record. Birch herself became pregnant in 2021, as she was finishing work on the album. Given that background, it becomes easy to understand Holotropica as a meditation on gestation—on the way that things and ideas come into being, both through our actions and also in ways impervious to them. In the music’s nexus of intent and accident, Birch lays bare the delicate balance between the events we can control and those we cannot. What makes art vital, she suggests, is what happens when opposing forces—singularity and interconnectedness, or stasis and change—collide. | 2022-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | interCourse | June 1, 2022 | 8 | 19287b05-35aa-4aec-bcb5-d29928c889c7 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Merchandise's latest and first for new label home 4AD is so determinedly mild-mannered, it essentially amounts to a declaration of war: against dominant notions of cool, the act of hiding your feelings behind a wall of noise, and the idea that anti-pop experimentation is inherently more noble and challenging a practice than writing a simple, emotionally direct love song. | Merchandise's latest and first for new label home 4AD is so determinedly mild-mannered, it essentially amounts to a declaration of war: against dominant notions of cool, the act of hiding your feelings behind a wall of noise, and the idea that anti-pop experimentation is inherently more noble and challenging a practice than writing a simple, emotionally direct love song. | Merchandise: After the End | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19663-merchandise-after-the-end/ | After the End | We tend to measure the speed of 21st-century living by the furious rate of cultural output, but an even more accurate gauge is how quickly once-entrenched ideals can change. To wit, in a July 2012 interview with Pitchfork, Carson Cox of Tampa post-punk outfit Merchandise offered up this definition of success: “There’s a new warehouse space called Cyborg City, where we just played an amazing show. There were a ton of fucking people there. There were, like, 70 fucking people.” Fast forward two years, and that same guy has just released an album that sounds like it was designed for stadium crowds of 70,000.
Of course, Merchandise are hardly the first punk-schooled band to eventually pursue loftier aspirations. But where many big-label debuts from former indie darlings often amount to putting lipstick on a pig, Merchandise are using their promotion to 4AD to, as Cox recently put it to the NME, “start a new band with basically the same name.” And he’s not just talking about the group’s expansion from a drum-machined trio to a proper five-piece. Rather than nudge themselves toward the center by subtly sanding away the edges of their texturally dense art-pop epics, on After the End, Merchandise catapult themselves to the rightmost reaches of the dial, and, in the process, transform into their idea of what the archetypal mainstream rock band should be—which is actually so far off the mark from what mainstream rock actually is in 2014 that it positions Merchandise as far away from centrist pop-culture as they were when they were playing gigs in storage units.
Merchandise’s continually surprising evolution and capacity for challenging their core assumptions have mirrored those of another band of once-evasive hardcore exiles who have grappled with growing up and out of punk (and who are led by an outspoken frontman with a penchant for endlessly scrollable interviews): Fucked Up. Except instead of embracing 1970s rock-operatics, Merchandise have become greatly enamored with the Big Music of the mid-’80s and the buttoned-up college-rock of the early ’90s. (In retrospect, last year’s debut single for 4AD—the unwieldy 14-minute Spiritualized-scaled behemoth “Begging for Your Life/In the City Light”—now feels like a last-gasp exorcism of their arty eccentricities.) On After the End, the band downplay their perennially fashionable Smiths/Cure/New Order influences and tether themselves to more unabashedly populist signposts that have, thus far, proven resistant to hipster reclamation: Post-I.R.S. R.E.M., pre-Spirit of Eden Talk Talk, the more meditative end of the Pearl Jam canon.
After the End is a record that is so determinedly mild-mannered, it essentially amounts to a declaration of war: against dominant notions of cool, the act of hiding your feelings behind a wall of noise, and the idea that anti-pop experimentation is inherently more noble and challenging a practice than writing a simple, emotionally direct love song. If the preceding Children of Desire and Totale Nite saw Merchandise concealing their ever-irrepressible new-romantic hearts under thick layers of squawking saxophones, wailing harmonicas, and droning repetition, here they are laid bare and encased in brightly lit glass boxes like a gallery installation.
An album this guileless is bound to be polarizing, for the very fact that it resolutely resists the urge to provoke. (The tranquil opening instrumental “Corridor”—featuring, no shit, wind chimes—essentially functions as a citronella candle to ward off any indie ideologues lingering about from proceeding further.) But whether or not you accept Merchandise’s makeover, one thing is indisputable: This album sounds fucking fantastic. And remarkably, just like Merchandise’s previous releases, it’s a home recording. (Most of the band live together in the same house, Monkees-style.) But if much of After the End was laid down in Cox’s bedroom, it sounds like the band are performing a concert on the roof, absorbing the twinkle of the stars, the hum of crickets, the vapor trails of planes flying overhead, and the endless expanse of the sky above. The shimmering acoustic guitars sound like they have dew collecting on the strings; the smooth synth textures reflect the warm nocturnal glow of the city at night.
But like the War on Drugs’ recent Lost in the Dream, After the End chisels through the surface pleasures of baby-boomer-baiting soft-rock to coax out a deep-seated distress. When a once-volatile band slows down and cleans up its sound, it tends to signify that a certain degree of contentment has entered their lives—that past pressures and stressors have been cast aside and the ease into middle age has begun. After the End, however, highlights just how messy and painful that process can be, that severing ties with one’s past—whether it’s romantic partners, local music scenes, or entire belief systems—inevitably results in broken skin and frayed nerves.
Cox isn’t merely singing in a lower register for sexy-crooner effect; he sounds positively beaten down, as if a drowsy drawl is all he has the strength to muster after dealing with the fallout of his decisions. (As he sings on the lush and languorous “Looking Glass Waltz”: “Won’t someone please help me/ I’m too young to feel this old.”) And unlike previous Merchandise albums, he doesn’t allow himself the luxury of working out his frustrations through extended, cathartic hypno-rock jams: the seemingly easy-going jangle pop of “Enemy” fades out mid-verse, as if to suggest the tensions simmering within remain unresolved; the tightly wound “Little Killer” sounds the alarm for when the light that’s never supposed to go out starts to flicker.
At times, the disconnect between therapeutic function and clinical form is too vast to reconcile—the chipper, snap-along saunter of "Telephone" doesn't so much ease the anguish of waiting for an important call that never comes as conjure the dad-rock muzak you hear when your dentist's office puts you on hold. And the weight of all this anxiety and self-doubt starts to drag down the band—and the album—by the time we reach the penultimate title track, whose melodramatic, piano-pounded lurch neither erupts into chaos nor yields to ecstatic release. (“The sky is falling all around us,” Cox sings in his best Mark Hollis-ian moan, and the forecast doesn’t improve from thereon out.) But the beatific closing serenade “Exile and Ego” suggests Cox has found, if not inner peace, then at least the resolve to move on. “I ain’t no cowboy, I got no six guns,” Cox sighs, rejecting the outlaw mythology of another slick acoustic ballad about going it alone. Because as After the End reminds us, the best way to disarm your adversaries isn’t with weapons—it’s by staring them right in the eye. | 2014-08-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-08-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | August 28, 2014 | 7 | 192f1d76-fdf8-4f3d-9710-e857bec2b711 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
To date, Dave "Avey Tare" Portner’s projects outside of Animal Collective have leaned toward the intensely introspective. His new band, Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks, resemble Animal Collective in stripped-down, garage-band, power-trio formation: not quite as densely textured and sonically adventurous, but more than capable of generating the same sense of euphoric abandon. | To date, Dave "Avey Tare" Portner’s projects outside of Animal Collective have leaned toward the intensely introspective. His new band, Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks, resemble Animal Collective in stripped-down, garage-band, power-trio formation: not quite as densely textured and sonically adventurous, but more than capable of generating the same sense of euphoric abandon. | Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks: Enter the Slasher House | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19200-avey-tares-slasher-flicks-enter-the-slasher-house/ | Enter the Slasher House | Centipede Hz may have been Animal Collective’s response to unwittingly becoming a Top 20*-*charting act, but the subsequent tours behind the record revealed there was, in fact, a limit to their perpetual game of playing hard-to-get. Where the quartet has traditionally treated concerts as public practice sessions to air out works-in-progress, their 2012-13 setlists charitably balanced out the Hz with the hits (meaning that the band’s newer fans no longer had to dial up YouTube clips from 2007 to experience “My Girls” in a live setting). This generous spirit seems to have carried over to primary vocalist Dave “Avey Tare” Portner’s current interim pursuit, which offers a glimpse of the kind of band Animal Collective could be if they gave into populist demand more often.
To date, Portner’s projects outside of Animal Collective have leaned toward the intensely introspective, whether he was making blissed-out, backward-looped soundscapes with then-wife Kría Brekkan (2007’s Pullhair Rubeye) or fractious, click ‘n’ cut digi-dirges to address their subsequent separation, the death of his grandmother, and his sister’s struggles with cancer (2010’s Down There). His new band, Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks, was born of a similarly stressful circumstance—Portner was sidelined by strep throat for a long stretch last year—but it also serves as a therapeutic, adrenalized antidote.
Supported by ex-Dirty Projector Angel Deradoorian and former Ponytail drummer Jeremy Hyman, Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks effectively resemble Animal Collective in stripped-down, garage-band, power-trio formation. They're not quite as densely textured and sonically adventurous, but more than capable of generating the same sense of euphoric abandon: the bouncing-ball momentum of opening track “A Sender” follows in the foot-stomps of two totemic AC openers—Feels’ “Did You See the Words” and Strawberry Jam’s “Peacebone”—while “Duplex Trip” packs the woozy tropical punch of Centipede Hz's more mango-flavored material. (The sporadic flashes of high-beam harmonies from Deradoorian likewise yield a potent I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-Panda Bear effect.) But Slasher Flicks gradually develop their own peculiar personality, most notably on “Little Fang”, the album’s lead single and the most atypical track here.
In contrast to the rhythmic clatter and electro squiggles that usually accompany Portner’s voice, the Slasher Flicks position "Little Fang"’s engaging call-and-response hook atop a silken 70s soft-rock groove that resembles a bygone ELO hit refracted through a funhouse mirror (while also betraying Portner’s debt to the phantasmagoric pop of Pure Guava-era Ween). And in their most concise, frenetically funky moments— “Blind Babe”, “Modern Days E”, “Strange Colores”—Slasher Flicks pump out better Jane’s Addiction songs than anything that band has come up since reuniting (an outcome that doesn’t seem so ridiculous when you consider Portner and Perry Farrell’s mutual appreciation of tribal-percussion, rapid-fire wordplay, and the Grateful Dead—heck, the Jane’s cover of “Ripple” could practically pass for a dry run for "Fireworks").
As Portner admitted in a recent Pitchfork interview, the Slasher Flicks concept was born of a desire to mess around with the sort of 60s garage-rock and horror-movie tropes that yielded novelty hits like “Monster Mash.” (For more on this phenomenon, watch this disturbing documentary.) On Enter the Slasher House, that influence proves to be mostly implicit. You won’t find any ditties here about ghouls and ghosts hosting graveyard soirees, but the songs craftily split the difference between cheeky and creepy, pitting innocent nursery-rhyme-like melodies against mutating, hallucinogenic backdrops. (The ecstatic Afro-pop of “Catchy (Was Contagious)” even serves as a reminder of how the terminology used to describe a song’s likability factor can also be applied to communicable diseases.)
Slasher House actually becomes a lot less inviting in those moments where it lays on the carnivalistic clamor and shock tactics too thick; when would-be centerpiece tracks like “That It Won’t Grow” and “The Outlaw” start bashing their half-baked choruses into submission with all the subtlety of an oversized cartoon mallet, the album threatens to just turn into Millipede Hz. Compared to the revelatory melodicism on display in songs like “Little Fang”, it’s a bit wearying to hear Portner revert to an esophagus-shredding yelp as his default mechanism whenever the songs seem to be running out of gas. Perhaps the act of screaming himself hoarse is Portner’s way of saying “fuck you” to strep throat, but Enter works best when it's not begging for an ENT. | 2014-04-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-04-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Domino | April 8, 2014 | 7.3 | 192f4a14-d665-4e9a-b3b9-6aebe1ddc6f6 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Sleater-Kinney/Helium/Minders supergroup's self-titled debut invokes first-wave punk, post-hardcore indie rock, and other styles, but Wild Flag aren't so much trying to relive a particular era or movement as re-stoke the kind of passion, commitment, and fandom in listeners that allowed those movements to coalesce and flourish in the first place. | The Sleater-Kinney/Helium/Minders supergroup's self-titled debut invokes first-wave punk, post-hardcore indie rock, and other styles, but Wild Flag aren't so much trying to relive a particular era or movement as re-stoke the kind of passion, commitment, and fandom in listeners that allowed those movements to coalesce and flourish in the first place. | Wild Flag: Wild Flag | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15798-wild-flag/ | Wild Flag | On Sleater-Kinney's 2005 single "Entertain", Carrie Brownstein summed up her dissatisfaction with pop-cultural stagnation and new-wave nostalgia by asking, "Where's the black and blue?" She repeats the question three times in succession, each one increasingly maniacal, as if to illustrate her own point: Art can evolve only when it pushes forward, provokes, and leaves bruises. Alas, in the five years since Sleater-Kinney fell silent, nostalgia has become such a pervasive condition in pop culture that entire books are now devoted to analyzing the phenomenon. But Brownstein has not relented in demanding her black-and-blue, whether using her NPR Monitor Mix blog to lament the preponderance of sensitive, soft-rockin' beardos in contemporary indie, or skewering hipster fauxhemia alongside SNL's Fred Armisen on the IFC comedy show Portlandia. So for a vocal cultural critic-- and shit-hot guitar player-- like Brownstein, the act of forming a new band isn't a simple matter of course; it's a declaration of war. But rather than point fingers from the sidelines, with Wild Flag she's leading by example.
The name Wild Flag amounts to more than just a distant echo of similarly imposing Black and Pink varieties; it represents something to rally around, at a time when the internet has broken down traditional musical allegiances in favor of all-you-can-eat consumption. As per its members' pedigrees (Brownstein is joined by fellow S-K veteran Janet Weiss on drums, ex-Helium front-woman Mary Timony on second guitar, and Rebecca Cole of Elephant Six affiliates the Minders on organ), Wild Flag variously invoke first-wave punk, post-hardcore indie rock, 1960s girl-group pop, Nuggets-vintage garage, Stonesy FM-radio raunch, and even flashes of proggy psychedelia. But Wild Flag aren't so much trying to relive a particular era or movement as re-stoke the kind of passion, commitment, and fandom in listeners that allowed those movements to coalesce and flourish in the first place.
Brownstein and Timony previously collaborated in late-1990s side project the Spells, but where their voices tended to blend together within that band's lo-tech indie-rock sound, here their personalities are much more pronounced and distinct. For much of Sleater-Kinney's existence, Brownstein played the more mild-mannered foil to lead shrieker Corin Tucker, before asserting herself more forcefully on 2002's One Beat and 2005's The Woods; on Wild Flag, she essentially picks up right where she left off on "Entertain", pushing her voice toward more brash, flamboyant extremes. Timony, meanwhile, sounds as if she's still immersed in the fantastical reveries of Helium's 1997 swan song The Magic City, her familiarly conversational tone having an infectiously calming effect on the band.
But in their own peculiar ways, both singers strive to express their irrepressible awe for the power of music and the effect it has on them-- nearly every song here hinges on the connection between sound and movement, and the relationship between what happens between the ears and below the belt. Brownstein's "Romance" and "Boom" are impassioned testaments to rock'n'roll's sensuous allure, translating inner desire into public manifesto; Timony sings of music's essence in more mythic terms, equating it to a magical artifact (the psychedelic set piece "Glass Tambourine") or cult ritual ("Electric Band", as in: "Come on, join our…") as if she were the friendly fairy godmother on some subversively trippy Saturday-morning kids' TV show.
The considerable contrast between the two singers gives Wild Flag a somewhat predictable ebb and flow, with a song-by-song trade-off between Brownstein's rambunctious, locomotive rockers and Timony's more quirky, complex compositions. Credit Weiss and Cole for effectively mediating between these disparate sensibilities: Wild Flag never sound more together than when they're being led off the rails by Weiss' Keith Moon-worthy breakdowns and Cole's wandering "Sister Ray"-style organ lines, as they push the wiry "Short Version" and charmingly cheeky "Racehorse" into joyous full-band jams and sing-along chants. For all the ideological intent fuelling the Wild Flag mission, the band rarely sacrifices the rock'n'roll fun-- they no doubt deliver that elusive black-and-blue, but it's a hit that feels like a kiss. | 2011-09-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-09-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Merge | September 14, 2011 | 8 | 192f5615-2c56-4a9b-ab57-5536ed445865 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Aztec Camera's 1983 album High Land, Hard Rain showcases frontman Roddy Frame at his most blissfully unaware, creating soulful post-punk with pieces that weren’t neccessarily supposed to fit together. This 30th Anniversary Reissue includes B-sides, remixes and live radio sessions from the period. | Aztec Camera's 1983 album High Land, Hard Rain showcases frontman Roddy Frame at his most blissfully unaware, creating soulful post-punk with pieces that weren’t neccessarily supposed to fit together. This 30th Anniversary Reissue includes B-sides, remixes and live radio sessions from the period. | Aztec Camera: High Land, Hard Rain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18867-aztec-camera-high-land-hard-rain/ | High Land, Hard Rain | In a BBC interview conducted last year in honor of the 30th anniversary of Aztec Camera’s High Land, Hard Rain, the band’s frontman Roddy Frame talked about how “Walk Out to Winter,” his favorite song on the album, drew from an odd jumble of influences. A fan of the 1977 punk explosion, the aspiring singer-guitarist was inspired by the spirit of the Slits and the Fall even as he began picking up on the clean-toned intricacy of jazz guitarists Wes Montgomery and Django Reinhardt. He also loved soul. In fact, as he confesses in the BBC interview, the silky chord progression of “Walk Out to Winter” was swiped from the Motown classic “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough". Seeing as how Frame was 15 when he began writing High Land and 18 when he recorded it, “precocious” is a word that gets thrown around a lot. But the title of album’s opening track, “Oblivious,” could be read as equally telling. Flush with youth, Frame seemed blissfully unaware that these pieces weren’t supposed to fit together. Either that or he didn’t know it was supposed to make a difference.
Frame wasn’t entirely alone. Orange Juice—Aztec Camera’s close comrades on the Glasgow indie label Postcard Records—had already combined some of these same elements before Frame made his Postcard debut, the 1981 single “Just Like Gold.” And the NME’s famous C81 cassette compilation included, alongside Aztec Camera and Orange Juice, Scritti Politti’s “The ‘Sweetest Girl’”, Green Gartside’s first foray into post-punk soulfulness. Rather than an outgrowth of grayish post-punk, though, Aztec Camera was a negative afterimage rendered in pastels. By the time “Pillar to Post,” the group’s first single for Rough Trade, came out in 1982, Frame and crew had become labelmates with another young quartet that featured jangling guitars, crooned vocals, and a snappy rhythm section: the Smiths.
“Pillar to Post”, “Oblivious”, and “Walk Out to Winter” comprise the trio singles released off of 1983’s High Land, newly reissued in an expanded, 30th-anniversary edition. Even if they were the only good songs, the album would still be a milestone. But every track is stellar. Buoyant and joyous, yet italicized with clever melancholy, “Oblivious” is the most punchy of the three. Frame’s jazzy guitar runs and jubilant arpeggios add a jittery energy to his teenage angst. Unlike Morrissey, he doesn’t have a mean moan in his body. He doesn’t have Morrissey’s depth, either, but that’s easily overlooked when “Pillar to Post” saunters up with funk-pop hook and plants the thoroughly Smithsian sentiment “Once I was happy in happy extremes” on the lips like a stolen kiss. “Walk Out to Winter” is the most sophisticated of High Land’s singles. A whirling, bitterly cheery paean to the death of punk, as Frame explains in his recent BBC interview), it wonders where all the young miserablists of his generation will go now. Singing like a pimply, gum-chewing Glenn Tilbrook, Frame answers his own question.
Singles aside, standouts abound. From the pastoral-folk guitars and jogging bass line to the saucy handclaps and modified Richard Hell line (“Love comes in slurs”), “The Boy Wonders” is more barely coded speculation about what happens when adulthood leaves a child-shaped void in one’s soul. Same goes for the pensive “The Bugle Sounds Again” and even the album’s naked, acoustic closer, “Down the Dip,” a pub-busker anthem that slides a hint of Frame’s leftist, Red Wedge politics—never very pronounced in his songs—in among an atmosphere of spilled pints. The reissue of High Land comes with copious bonus tracks, including the original single version of “Pillar to Post”, which sounds raw and robust compared to the album version’s clean, sharp shimmer. Of the three single B-sides included, “Queen’s Tattoo” is the most intriguing, a twangy, galloping romp that predates Morrissey’s first flirtation with rockabilly, the Smiths’ “Rusholme Ruffians”, by three years. On the other end of the spectrum are the 12” dance mixes of “Walk Out to Winter” and “Oblivious”. As curiosities go, they demonstrate just how pliable Aztec Camera’s riffs and rhythms were; as new-wave floor-fillers, they don’t hold a candle to any given album track by, say, Spandau Ballet. The handful of live radio sessions, on the other hand, capture a barely-legal Frame at his immaculate, brassy best.
Following the success of High Land, Frame had to grow up quickly. He did so, but always in a good way. For the rest of the 80s, Aztec Camera became a more calculated concern, with a rotating cast of session musicians that would include everyone from members of Dire Straits to—perhaps inevitably—a future (if fleeting) guitarist of the Smiths, Craig Gannon. By 1986, the Postcard-inspired C86 movement was splitting the difference between Aztec Camera and the buzzsaw punks that preceded them. Frame responded by removing his own guitar almost entirely from the equation with Aztec Camera’s biggest hit, 1988’s “Somewhere in My Heart.” Despite a back-to-basics rally in the 90s, Aztec Camera folded in 1995; Frame, now fifty, still enjoys a respectable solo career. High Land is not only his first statement of intent as a songwriter, it’s his most innovative, his most influential, and his most timelessly vivid. Peaking early can be bittersweet, but the album is all the better for it. | 2014-02-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2014-02-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Domino | February 4, 2014 | 8.3 | 192fc824-c33a-4d3a-aa58-15f1734bcd4c | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
On her first official EP since leaving Crystal Castles, Alice Glass clears more room for her voice and words, softening the jagged edges that had characterized her previous work. | On her first official EP since leaving Crystal Castles, Alice Glass clears more room for her voice and words, softening the jagged edges that had characterized her previous work. | Alice Glass: Alice Glass EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alice-glass-alice-glass-ep/ | Alice Glass EP | Throughout Crystal Castles’ first three albums, Alice Glass sang like a woman drowning. On songs like “Love and Caring” and “Doe Deer,” she whipped syllables around like they were weapons, fighting to be heard. It’s strange, now, to hear how deeply her vocals are buried in the mix, how distorted they are and how few words come through, even on her last LP with the group, 2012’s lyrically minded (III). About nine months after announcing her departure from the electroclash band in 2014, Glass released the standalone single “Stillbirth,” whose pummeling electronics buoyed her vocals rather than smothered them. “I want to start again,” she sang then in one of the first instantly discernible lines she’d ever laid to tape. Co-produced by former HEALTH member Jupiter Keyes, Glass’ self-titled debut EP clears even more room for her voice and words, softening the jagged edges that had characterized her previous work.
Upon releasing “Stillbirth,” Glass also disclosed that she had survived an abusive relationship for years, and much of her debut EP reckons with the dynamic of loving the one person who hurts you most. She addresses that person directly on multiple songs, like the lead single “Without Love,” where she asks, “How are you going to lie about me now?” and, “Was I a stray just waiting to be found?” In the end, she decides to retreat entirely—if love is the equivalent of being caged like an animal, she’d rather do without it. “Got to be without love,” she repeats at the chorus, as though if she can just sing it enough times, it’ll make her isolation bearable.
While the melody of “Without Love” pads around a square pop chord structure, “Natural Selection” shatters into abrasive noise. “Get the fuck off of me,” Glass screams between detuned slabs of bass. Her voice here is as corroded as it was in Crystal Castles, but more present; her words are unmistakable even as they’re being slashed apart. The EP’s strongest track “White Lies” contrasts her breathy, clean singing with a thorny pulse of garbled vocals, often layering both on top of each other at the same time. Glass sounds simultaneously vulnerable and aggressive here, like she’s trying to let you in but can’t help reflexively lashing out.
Almost three years after leaving her old band, Glass responds directly to her years as its frontwoman on her first solo release. “Tell me what to spit/Don’t tell me what to swallow,” she sings in an especially pointed moment on “Without Love”—a direct reference to the hazy closer of Crystal Castles’ self-titled debut album, “Tell Me What to Swallow,” whose lyrics, in retrospect, scan as a transmission from the inside of an abusive relationship: “Through the wall he threw me/I know he’d never hurt me.” Alice Glass can feel more like an exorcism than an evolution, a digestion of past trauma rather than a new chapter. But processing this stuff takes years, and sometimes a six-song “fuck you” is exactly the catharsis you need to start anew. | 2017-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Loma Vista | August 22, 2017 | 6.8 | 19370d09-0640-4980-bab0-e28c9e9fac7e | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
The girl-group’s brisk, club-inflected pop songs cement them as one of the most interesting K-pop acts working today. | The girl-group’s brisk, club-inflected pop songs cement them as one of the most interesting K-pop acts working today. | NewJeans: Get Up EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/newjeans-get-up-ep/ | Get Up EP | NewJeans arrived on the K-pop scene last year unannounced, a bold move in an industry obsessed with drawn-out lead-ups to artist launches. The day after releasing “Attention,” their breezy, ’90s R&B-indebted debut single, the K-pop quintet unveiled four music videos for their ebullient future-bass follow-up “Hype Boy”; the heartfelt ballad “Hurt” came 48 hours later. This was the first taste the world had of the Korean girl group, guided by industry veteran Min Hee-jin. Their music is noticeably laid-back, defined by gauzy sonics and diaristic talk-singing; their music videos and choreography eschew aggressive cuteness and imperial pomp—the K-pop standards—for down-home bonhomie.
On their second EP, Get Up, NewJeans channel the ecstasy of self-love and infatuation through lively dance music. “Look it’s a new me, switched it up who’s this,” they sing on the opener “New Jeans,” and later the skipping 2-step rhythm morphs into pounding kicks and fluttering harps. “Super Shy” is an iridescent liquid drum’n’bass song about faraway yearning that transitions into Jersey club stutters. The energetic, genre-blending production mirrors the nervousness and giddiness of longing—like Carly Rae Jepsen, the girls are eager to feel. When they repeat “You don’t even know my name, do ya?”, the line transforms from a dejected accusation to the reason they’re so compelled by their crush in the first place.
R&B singer-songwriter Erika de Casier has writing credits across Get Up, and her effortless melodies and unfussy interiority come through especially on the shimmering UK garage number “Cool With You.” NewJeans convey feelings towards a lover in direct, plainspoken language, affirming them with playful ad-libs: “You know me like no other, see me like no other.” They talk through a friend’s relationship problems on “ETA,” the EP’s brilliant highlight. It takes horns from the Baltimore club classic “Samir’s Theme,” throws in something akin to a Think break, and adds a bed of cozy synths. It feels like NewJeans’ interest in club music—the Jersey club kicks on “Cookie,” the Baltimore club balladry of “Ditto”—has been leading to this moment.
“ETA” is a song about telling someone you love to dump their boyfriend, delivered with the congeniality of a lifelong pal. It’s this cozy intimacy that makes NewJeans thrilling; their music lowers your guard. Such is the case on Get Up’s sweet closing track “ASAP.” The girls sing about crushing in all its woozy delight, hanging up the phone only to call again, as glistening synths usher the song into fantastical realms. “So much to do and lots to see,” the girl gently sing, as if reminding us to savor all of life’s small joys. | 2023-07-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | ADOR | July 24, 2023 | 7.6 | 19392ff4-f88e-49cc-a15f-ffef6c989fb8 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
The Brazilian psych band transition from the oft-playful homage and stage-ready jams of previous releases to a serious attempt at tight, kaleidoscopic grooves. | The Brazilian psych band transition from the oft-playful homage and stage-ready jams of previous releases to a serious attempt at tight, kaleidoscopic grooves. | Boogarins: Sombrou Dúvida | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boogarins-sombrou-duvida/ | Sombrou Dúvida | The word psychedelia originates from the Greek “the animating principle of the universe”— or whatever one calls that metaphysical sum greater than the total of its parts. Boogarins, hugely popular in their native Brazil, are one of several modern torch-bearers of psych music, playing a strain that sounds of tropicália and musicians who unselfconsciously noodle. On their latest album Sombrou Dùvida, they transition from the oft-playful homage and stage-ready jams of previous releases to a serious attempt at tight, kaleidoscopic grooves, and the results are akin to a pleasant, cerebral trip—a little more potent than the edibles sold from wagons in Dolores Park, but nothing quite Leary-caliber.
Lyrically, many of the songs (translated here from Portuguese) reference subversion, engulfment, and trance, coupling with seamless, driving instrumentation that mimics a hallucinogenic trip. “There is a dazzle of the fools/Fake and splendid/It is that which already engulfs you/I am suspect of the habits/I only trust the avidly living,” sings Dino Almeida at the end of the title track, whose name means “shadow or doubt.” These liminal spaces—shadows, doubts, and states of mind—are the record’s main concern, and its instrumentation is often an interplay between sunny, jangling melodies and synths that border the abrasive. This toggle between poles also extends to the band’s sensibilities, and at its best, Sombrou Dùvida toes the line between accessible pop and sonic experimentation, gussying up standout tracks like “Dislexia ou Transe” with wobbly distortion and a menagerie of interwoven riffs.
But where “Dislexia ou Transe’s” ratcheting build and oddball flourishes deliver on the promise of a trance, tracks like “A Tradição” travel at a sleepier pace. It covers well-tread psychedelic terrain without much novelty, and if anything, it dilutes the impact of the songs that bookend it, driving as they are. “Nós,” which immediately follows, is a clinic in layered sounds, a pastiche of discord that flirts with outright noise but rests just inside the confines of a brooding pop song.
Boogarins aren’t reinventing the genre, but like 2013’s As Plantas Que Curam or 2017’s home-recorded Lá Vem a Morte (which translates to “here comes death,” more straightforward than shadowy), this album expresses the group’s devotion to this particular wall of sound, pioneered by fellow countrymen Tom Zé, Os Mutantes, and others embroiled in Brazil’s late-’60s political tumult. On standout tracks, like “Passeio” and “Dislexia ou Transe,” they’re modernizing this quintessential 20th-century style with contemporary embroideries that feels distinctly in the spirit of their musical forebears. Played outrageously loud, as it ought to be, with the windows open and a joint rolled, Sombrou Dùvida is transportive, even if the only place you’re going is to an appreciation of a righteous shred under dissolving synths. | 2019-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | OAR | May 17, 2019 | 6.6 | 193e5aeb-f92a-464e-89e7-2d6a2a26ffb9 | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
The 25th anniversary reissue of Paul Simon's Graceland shows how the album gave a human face to the perception of South Africa during apartheid by synthesizing geographically disparate musical strains that turned out to be remarkably complementary. | The 25th anniversary reissue of Paul Simon's Graceland shows how the album gave a human face to the perception of South Africa during apartheid by synthesizing geographically disparate musical strains that turned out to be remarkably complementary. | Paul Simon: Graceland: 25th Anniversary Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16843-graceland-25th-anniversary-edition/ | Graceland: 25th Anniversary Edition | As I prepared to review the 25th Anniversary Edition of Paul Simon's Graceland, I thought a lot about what the album means to me. It's a more complicated question than it seems. This is an album that's sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and was vigorously protested in certain quarters on its release. It has sat at the center of arguments about cultural exchange, cultural imperialism, and whether Simon was right to skirt the United Nations' cultural boycott of South Africa in order to record with black musicians from that country-- arguments that remain part of the record's story even as the tragedy of apartheid fades further from the headlines.
As unignorable as the context of the record is, there's no doubt in my mind that its songs transcend the context as listening experiences. These songs are astute and exciting, spit-shined with the gloss of production that bears a lot of hallmarks of the era but somehow has refused to age. Taken as a whole, the album offers tremendous insight into how we live in our world and how that changes as we get older.
The stories Simon tells on Graceland wouldn't have been told without the collaboration of the mostly South African musicians he worked with on the record. Their music sparked Simon's imagination after the commercial disappointment of 1983's Hearts and Bones, and the jam sessions he recorded with them in South Africa gave rise to all but a few of these songs. Simon learned to write differently by homing in on the ways guitarist Chikapa "Ray" Phiri varied his playing from verse to verse, and by grounding his vocal melodies on the basslines of Bagithi Khumalo. Khumalo's playing has such fluency and personality that, at least on the five songs he's a part of, this is nearly as much his record as anyone else's. On the brief disc of outtakes included in this set, there's a version of "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" that's stripped down to just vocals and bass, and his line so completely frames the song (rhythmically, harmonically, and melodically) that the other elements of the album version's arrangement are barely missed.
So we get songs where the groove came first, and the lyrics long after. Simon considered writing political songs about apartheid but quickly concluded that he wasn't very good at it and owed it to the other musicians involved to stick to his strengths. Still, the album's opening song, "The Boy in the Bubble", is a thriller that ties together threads of technological progress, medicine, terrorism, surveillance, pop music, inequality, and superstition with little more than a series of sentence fragments, all tossed off in the same deadpan delivery. The song sets a monumental stage on which the small dramas and comedies of the other songs can play out, and it also establishes the record's unsettled tone-- out of all these songs, only "That Was Your Mother" is sung from a settled place, and even that one is a reminiscence about itinerant life.
To have Simon's songs mingling with mbaqanga, township jive, shangaan music, zydeco and chicano rock, all played by their real practitioners, complemented the themes of dislocation, misplaced identity, and the meeting of worlds. "You Can Call Me Al" traces Simon's own arc on his trip to South Africa, beginning in confusion and ending in ecstatic realization-- he goes from"far away, in my well-lit home" to, "He sees angels in the architecture, spinning in infinity/ He says 'amen' and 'hallelujah.'"
Graceland was the first many of Simon's fans had heard of South Africa's black music. When I saw that this set included a two-hour documentary on the album, I wondered whether it would shy away from the issue of Simon's violation of the cultural boycott on South Africa, but to its credit, it doesn't. In fact, director Joe Berlinger uses a one-on-one conversation between Simon and Dali Tambo, the founder of Artists Against Apartheid and a one-time vocal critic of Simon, as a framing device for his story.
But more than Simon's single-minded devotion to his art and Tambo's ideological politics, the experience surrounding this album is best conveyed by the musicians who made it. They were violating the boycott, too, just by participating in a dialogue with non-South African musicians, and there's a moment where Ray Phiri describes a meeting he was called to in London with African National Congress officials while touring to support the album that speaks volumes. The ANC officials told Phiri that he was violating the boycott and had to go home, and his response was that he was already a victim of apartheid, and to force him to go home would make him a victim twice. In the end, Simon's assertion that Graceland helped put an emotional, human face on black South Africans for millions of people around the world doesn't seem off the mark. This set also comes with a DVD of the concert Simon and these musicians played with South African exiles Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1987, and the joy visible on stage and in the audience certainly speaks to that.
It's easy to overstate what Graceland was. It wasn't the first world-music album, as some critics claim. But it was unique in its total, and totally natural, synthesis of musical strains that turned out to be not nearly as different from each other as its listeners might have expected, and the result resonated strongly around the world and across generations. | 2012-08-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-08-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Legacy | August 1, 2012 | 9.2 | 1940fb9d-3e38-43e2-8350-687380d3db65 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Loretta Lynn's first album since 2004's Jack White-produced Van Lear Rose reflects poignantly on her past. She makes a grab-bag late-late-career album feel not only emotionally grounded, but like a powerful choice. | Loretta Lynn's first album since 2004's Jack White-produced Van Lear Rose reflects poignantly on her past. She makes a grab-bag late-late-career album feel not only emotionally grounded, but like a powerful choice. | Loretta Lynn: Full Circle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21561-full-circle/ | Full Circle | It shouldn't come as a surprise that Loretta Lynn, even over half a century into her musical career, has made another strong album. There are few to zero significant aberrations in the Kentucky-born country singer's 55-strong discography; no arranger or producer (admittedly, she mostly stuck with the same one) has ever managed to obfuscate her deeply ingrained musical personality, which is always a little bigger than the specific song she is singing. Most of her albums—her last, 2004's Jack White-produced Van Lear Rose, being the primary outlier—only feature three or four of her much-remarked-upon originals, and her latest, Full Circle, is no exception. As always, the unmistakable, self-assured perspective of her original music is present in her delivery of others' material, making her able to breathe new life into songs country fans have heard dozens of times.
There are countless popular-music legacy figures out there who continue to tour and record every five years, even though they are millionaires several times over, seemingly out of habit or because they don't know what else to do. Sometimes they do so in flagrant opposition to doctor's orders, and we're left with trails of YouTube documentation of vocal deterioration. The situation couldn't be more different for the equally persistent 83-year-old Lynn, whose voice remains miraculously well-preserved. Its slight fluctuations are commensurate with her age and a lifetime of ardent performing, relatively untouched by overexertion or hard living (Lynn has always prided herself on staying well away from that). Throughout Full Circle, she often hovers in the airier middle range on her voice, choosing her throaty power notes wisely.
This elegant and tenuous note in her singing provides a new poignance. Her slight, ribboning strains of vibrato make the revisits of earlier hits included here—"Fist City" and "Whispering Sea," the B-side from her first single—feel like meaningful recastings rather than retreads. Stripped of golden-era Nashville glitz, they affectionately and winkingly recall of the attitude that made Lynn an instant anomaly and sensation when her first records hit radio circulation at the dawn of the 1960s.
Full Circle's covers also reflect back on Lynn's past. "Always On My Mind" was a cross-genre hit for soul-disco diva Gwen McCrae before it became a standard for Elvis and Willie Nelson; here, Lynn presents the malleable song—a wistful portrait of a troubled-but-passionate relationship that ended as suddenly as it began—in the guise of country-gospel. Lynn's controversial amour fou relationship with her husband Oliver, or "Doo," has been widely documented—most notoriously by Tommy Lee Jones in the popular 1980 film adaptation of Lynn's first memoir, *Coal Miner's Daughter—*and one can't help but recall Lynn's many bittersweet descriptions of the marriage while listening. The ballad is the most affecting of several songs on Full Circle which find the narrator, with an air of finality, reflecting back on a life they lived as best they knew how. Others, like the distinctly modern Nelson duet "Lay Me Down," directly contemplate mortality—in the context of this record, somewhat discomfitingly.
If Van Lear Rose found Loretta making a bid at updating her sound, Full Circle finds her assembling a time capsule. The album is a snapshot, intimate and largely acoustic, and made to sound out of time. It's fitting that the record was realized with the assistance of a Carter Family relative (co-producer John Carter Cash, son of June and Johnny), since the record marks the first time Lynn has recorded early Appalachian folk and country music. '50s and '60s Singer Kitty Wells is often cited, even by Lynn herself, as the direct inspiration for Lynn's combination of traditional "mountain"-style singing and "honky tonk" C&W; however, it's clear from listening to the two Carter Family tunes Lynn covers here the easy command she has on their more austere, folksong-influenced style. Lynn sounds just as natural singing these centuries-old melodies as her own. The upbeat "Black Jack David," recorded by the Carters in 1940, turns out to be one of Full Circle's most spirited vocal performances, and the lovelorn, Autoharp-driven "I Never Will Marry" its most moving.
However, you don't need to appreciate the lineage of the music, or know anything about Lynn's life or career, to sense the breadth of time and musical tradition reflected here. Lynn's deft phrasing and bold delivery, which has influenced several generations of country-pop singers from Linda Ronstadt to Reba McEntire to Miranda Lambert, is sustenance enough. Only a interpreter as shrewd and tasteful as Loretta Lynn could find the inherent commonalities in these songs, and make a grab-bag late-late-career album like this feel not only emotionally grounded, but like a powerful choice. | 2016-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Legacy | March 3, 2016 | 8 | 19417b56-e7ff-4a7d-aeee-c109f5c04c12 | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
Fresh off a thrilling collaboration with Joy Orbison, the British saxophonist teams with Mica Levi, Rupert Clervaux, and others on an audacious solo album that feels like another team effort. | Fresh off a thrilling collaboration with Joy Orbison, the British saxophonist teams with Mica Levi, Rupert Clervaux, and others on an audacious solo album that feels like another team effort. | Ben Vince: Assimilation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ben-vince-assimilation/ | Assimilation | Does any other form of music have the same existential resonance as solo saxophone? While a single musician on piano or guitar can fill up every sonic space, a saxophonist’s mission is to strike a careful balance between music and silence. Whenever they need to draw a breath, the void comes rushing in with it. There are sax players who find other ways to create the illusion of wall-to-wall sound, like Colin Stetson with his Herculean circular breathing, and the many artists who rely on electronics and loops. But beneath those embellishments, something elemental remains; the saxophone flickers like a brief flame against eternal blackness.
British saxophonist Ben Vince belongs to the latter camp, using loops to thicken his sound. His first few solo releases took a contemplative, layered approach to free improvisation that felt close in spirit to Terry Riley’s soprano saxophone and “time-lag” accumulator experiments. Then, in May, Vince teamed with adventurous dubstep producer Joy Orbison for a 12" of agit-techno explorations that demonstrated just how well he could play with others. Assimilation is another team effort, featuring four collaborative pieces (and one solo track) that venture to the furthest reaches of experimental song, free jazz, uneasy ambience, and bristling techno. He has called his new role a “demotion from creator to vector,” but Vince’s unflashy saxophone work binds it all together into an audacious whole.
“Alive & Ready,” his collaboration with outré vocalist Merlin Nova, throws listeners in at the deep end of this unfamiliar pool. Vince opens with a mournful, echoing phrase, his vibrato resonating against Nova’s operatic cries. Amid doom-laden percussion, the tortured squeals of Vince’s sax leave an unbearable amount of empty space around each sound and Nova voices all manner of screams, gurgles, and slurps. Spare, dramatic, and skin-prickling at once, this din brings to mind Scott Walker’s late work.
Just as adeptly as he followed the dizzying peaks and plunging valleys of Nova’s dynamic voice, he next shadows the subtler shifts in vocals from singer-songwriter and composer Mica Levi (aka Micachu). Liquid and ephemeral, “What I Can See” is a different kind of art song from “Alive & Ready,” one that—like Levi’s collaborations with Oliver Coates and Mount Kimbie—sounds as though it’s been imported from Arthur Russell’s World of Echo. Looped, echo-laden, and treated with electronic effects, Vince’s saxophone mimics both the fricative buzz of horsehair pulled across cello strings and the ethereal rumble of whale song. Levi’s Russell-like vocals are murmured yet deeply resonant. In tandem, they create an impressionistic reverie.
Vince’s saxophone playing is short on melodic phrases, to say nothing of long lines. He prefers staccato bursts and noisy jabs, delivering shifting rhythms that add texture and a steady pulse in any context. As Data Quack, his group with This Heat drummer Charles Hayward, suggests, Vince pairs well with percussionists—and that makes the second half of Assimilation all the more thrilling. On the album’s 10-minute centerpiece, “Tower of Cells,” Vince, Raime drummer Valentina Magaletti, and Death of the Rave artist Cam Deas work as a trio, making a dense, roiling cloud of toms, shaker, sax blips, and electronic spumes.
Paired with percussionist and Sian Alice Group alum Rupert Clervaux on “Sensory Crossing,” Vince maps a heady terrain. It’s reminiscent of Clervaux’s crackling duo work with experimental electronic producer Beatrice Dillon, mining a rich vein between spontaneous improvisation and programming in much the same way their 2016 release Two Changes did. Vince’s horn leaps above Clervaux’s morphing, polyrhythmic patterns, then dives back into them and becomes a pulse swimming among many others. The musicians’ kinetic interplay conjures a swirling cauldron of shrieks and thumps, where the histories of free jazz, early experimental composition, and leftfield club music all cook down together.
Only the closing title track presents Vince in solo mode. Here, his horn splinters into layers of loops and shrieks, growing in complexity. The song matches the intensity of everything that comes before it, but as it slowly fades out, Vince pares down the music to a lone high frequency that lingers in space. His synergy with others thoroughly demonstrated, Vince’s final act of assimilation is to fade back into the silence that surrounds him. | 2018-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Where to Now? | June 5, 2018 | 7.6 | 19470a8b-e651-42d4-a89b-323f78f272f7 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Matthew Tyler Musto’s latest album feels like a time capsule for this cursed year, a nauseating sludge of every “Study Beats” playlist and every TikTok influencer’s attempt at writing a hit. | Matthew Tyler Musto’s latest album feels like a time capsule for this cursed year, a nauseating sludge of every “Study Beats” playlist and every TikTok influencer’s attempt at writing a hit. | blackbear: everything means nothing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blackbear-everything-means-nothing/ | everything means nothing | In Naoise Dolan’s recent novel Exciting Times, a noteworthy addition to the canon of millennial popular literature (think: Sally Rooney, lipsticked characters wielding laptops, plots about climate change and gender politics), Instagram Stories function as a narrative device. Dolan’s protagonist agonizes over whether to open a love interest’s story, worrying what it could signify if she’s seen viewing it. Technology is baked into the novel’s emotional framework, an extension of its characters’ brooding. It’s less an attempt to pander to a younger audience than it is an authentic representation of how it feels to live while anchored to at least two screens. In flickering moments, the rap-pop singer and producer blackbear reaches for that realism, too, narrating his relationships with the pulsing hyperactivity of the always-online. “Block my posts and my story,” he wails on the strum-heavy “queen of broken hearts.” “I’m sorry I can be annoying.” He doesn’t know what to do with a phone full of videos and photos of his ex. “Cracks in my heart/Got cracks in my phone,” he moans on the wincingly titled “sobbing in cabo.”
But blackbear’s latest album, everything means nothing, is also gracelessly Too Online, like a person explaining a meme, or verbalizing the words “heart emoji.” He speaks in hashtags. He regurgitates memes and stale tweets, slathering them in Auto-Tune and bleating them over beat drops. “Turn a big mood to a big mood swing,” he raps on “clown.” “You made me want to live, laugh, love, and now I want to die,” he howls on “i felt that,” as a diet trop-house beat shimmies under him. The album opens with “hot girl bummer,” a snarling bastardization of Megan Thee Stallion’s meme-turned-song released just two weeks after hers. In his version, women vomit into Birkins and sleep with strangers; they “buy [their] lips and buy [their] legs,” and, apparently, ignore blackbear.
The soggy self-pity gets old fast. “You’re so good/At making me feel bad,” he complains in the chorus of “i feel bad,” then clumsily doubles down: “You’re like a college grad that majored in the art of fucking over everything we had.” He moans about how he doesn’t want to have emotions; he yelps through Auto-Tune about how weak he feels, how the anonymous women haunting these songs are “punishing” him. All of it is rooted in a constant, stupefying misogyny. “Shoulda seen right through the gap between her thighs,” he rasps on the dubstep-flecked “half alive.” The plodding “why are girls?” doesn’t even attempt to disguise its inanity: “Why are girls so hot?/Take everything I’ve got,” he babbles. “Why are girls so cold? Why are girls so, why are girls so beautiful?”
everything means nothing feels like a time capsule for this awful, cursed year, a nauseating sludge of every “Study Beats” playlist on Spotify and every TikTok influencer-turned-pop-star’s attempt at writing a hit. Both Lauv, the 26-year-old pop singer who croons about loneliness, and Trevor Daniel, who scored a viral hit on TikTok in 2019, show up for guest spots; their slumped, algorithm-friendly pop, with its pitched vocals and skittery production flourishes, is the album’s dominant influence. blackbear’s songs aren’t trying to express an emotion, or even to come across as relatable—their main goal is to remind you of something else. “Oh, right,” you’re meant to think, listening to a meme from three months ago ooze into your headphones, “this again.”
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Beartrap / Alamo / Interscope | August 22, 2020 | 4.1 | 1950d6f1-ec04-4eb0-a7b1-74a6523ec4e1 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ |
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