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The new Majical Cloudz album picks up where Impersonator left off: Stark, ethereal instrumentals buoyed by frontman Devon Welsh's unflinching voice. His counterpart, Matthew Otto, doesn't try and approximate backing musicians so much as create vapor trails where backing musicians might've stood. Their music is kind of an emotional strip show: Welsh knows it's a performance but he still ends up naked. | The new Majical Cloudz album picks up where Impersonator left off: Stark, ethereal instrumentals buoyed by frontman Devon Welsh's unflinching voice. His counterpart, Matthew Otto, doesn't try and approximate backing musicians so much as create vapor trails where backing musicians might've stood. Their music is kind of an emotional strip show: Welsh knows it's a performance but he still ends up naked. | Majical Cloudz: Are You Alone? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21194-are-you-alone/ | Are You Alone? | Halfway through Majical Cloudz's set at the 2014 Pitchfork Music Festival, the music cut out, leaving singer Devon Welsh alone with a live microphone in front of 6,000 people. The scene put a new spin on an old bad dream: Not only had Welsh shown up to class without clothes on, but the classroom had become a baseball field and everyone on it was a little bit drunk.
After a couple of dumb jokes (the packing peanuts of any good showman), Welsh canvassed the audience for requests and ended up singing an a capella version of an already startlingly intimate song called "Bugs Don't Buzz" from the band's 2013 album Impersonator ("If life could be forever one instant/ Would it be the moment you met me? No, my love").
For some bands, the moment might've constituted disaster, but for Majical Cloudz it was a logical endpoint to their music, which functions as a kind of emotional strip show: Welsh knows it's a performance but he still ends up naked. When the song was over, the crowd clapped with embarrassed hesitation: Should we be watching this? And should Welsh be doing it?
The band's new album, Are You Alone?, picks up where Impersonator left off: Stark, ethereal instrumentals buoyed by Welsh's unflinching voice. Musically, their roots are in English romantics like Depeche Mode, themselves a moody electronic gloss on the lieder that composers like Franz Schubert were writing 150 years earlier. Philosophically, they chart a junction of new age and hardcore punk, both of which prize a radical scraping away of excess in their search for truth. Majical Cloudz want empathy and they want it now.
I call them a "band" but should note how they stretch the definition of the word. As a singer, Welsh performs with the confidence and intimacy of someone holding a hairbrush in front of their bedroom mirror—the music is mostly in his head. His counterpart, Matthew Otto, is less visible but equally important. A former student in an electroacoustic studies program that emphasized sound design as much as composition, Otto doesn't try and approximate backing musicians so much as create vapor trails where backing musicians might've stood. If the name Majical Cloudz has any bearing on their sound, it's because of him: He's the air Welsh breathes.
Alone is less stripped-down than Impersonator, but it feels less confrontational, too. The band recently went on tour opening for Lorde, and seem to have figured out how to broaden their sound while softening it at the same time, all without losing the detonating high that made Impersonator so remarkable. Songs like "So Blue" and "Downtown"—both standouts—are easy to imagine as more fully fleshed out pieces of music, conveying size without occupying space. Like photographic negatives, you can still see the image but the inversion of blacks and whites lends it a kind of alien melancholy.
Like Impersonator, Alone is a sad album, but its sadness is a kind of tall tale, the details of which are overblown for dramatic effect. At times its lyrics sound less like expressions of personal darkness than advertisements for darkness in general, written in lettering so big you could read it from the highway. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, he professed his admiration for Andy Kaufman, an artist usually classified as a comedian but whose work tends to function more like social performance art. The connection makes sense: Like Kaufman, Welsh tends to scramble performance and sincerity, laying himself bare in a way that seems more honest when he's onstage than it might in so-called real life. At peak he becomes a kind of Puberty Incarnate, bearer of feelings so awkward and yet so incandescent that they seem like a joke and a dare at the same time.
A few weeks ago, I blew off part of an afternoon to see the Pixar movie Inside Out, which follows the inner life of a young girl named Riley as personified by five fundamental emotions: joy, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. The emotions—characters unto themselves—run around Riley's head jockeying for control, turning each new experience into a color-coded orb later filed away in Riley's labyrinthine memory.
Early on, Sadness—a dumpy, self-effacing Midwestern woman—is portrayed as a kind of negative-force King Midas, unwittingly ruining Riley's memories by turning them a cool, melancholy blue. The movie's revelation is when Joy—cannily represented as part-Tinkerbell, part passive-aggressive control freak—starts to realize that Sadness isn't a threat to Riley but a necessary catalyst for her growth, not a barrier to Joy but a bridge. Toward the end, a new feeling pops out of Riley's psychological conveyor belt: The yellow of Joy and the blue of Sadness, swirled together like ribbons inside a marble.
The moral is simple, but in a culture obsessed by happiness, it seems surprising, too: Maybe sadness isn't just an O.K. feeling to have, but an essential part of our emotional balance. Without it, we live in monochrome.
I kept thinking of Majical Cloudz, whose music—like *Inside Out—*seems to recast sadness as a feeling that doesn't damage the self but helps keep it whole. Now, when I see that album title (Are You Alone?), it seems less like a grim rhetorical question than an invitation—the kind of thing you might ask someone who is alone but looks like they could use a little company. | 2015-10-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | October 13, 2015 | 8 | 1950de17-5931-4262-a234-28930543ed5d | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Madonna’s first album of the new millennium, a maximalist dance-pop experiment that made the people come together. | 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 Madonna’s first album of the new millennium, a maximalist dance-pop experiment that made the people come together. | Madonna: Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madonna-music/ | Music | By the year 2000, there were no more pages in the pop star rulebook for Madonna to rip up. At no point in her nearly two-decade career had her star begun to dull; 1992’s Erotica was, by Madonna standards, a flop, but it still peaked at No. 2 and spawned two top 10 hits. She followed it up with 1994’s R&B-influenced Bedtime Stories and its single “Take a Bow,” which stayed atop the Hot 100 for seven weeks. With 1998’s Ray of Light, she claimed to be stepping away from the trappings of pop star life—and still, somehow, wound up more famous and more influential than ever.
Madonna’s pivot on Ray of Light was wildly successful, her Britpop-suffused entry into the world of Eastern spirituality and clean living cannily marrying the tastes of a culture as interested in Pure Moods as Oasis. As a rebrand—from the bratty transgression of her early career to a serene, anti-individualist earth mother—it was almost too successful. For the first time, Madonna was up in the clouds, presiding over her pop kingdom from afar, seemingly uninterested in the vagaries of the modern landscape. Although Ray of Light produced three undeniable hits—its title track, the steely, lovelorn “Frozen,” and all-timer power ballad “The Power of Good-Bye”—the reserved persona necessitated by Madonna’s more self-serious music had also stamped out some of her sense of fun.
No matter: As ever, Madonna had more cards to play. On 2000’s Music, the wise, newly magnanimous superstar came back down to earth and, naturally, the club. Capitalizing on the gargantuan success of Ray of Light, Music managed to maintain Madonna’s newly mature image while reinjecting her sound with fun and freedom. It wasn’t a reinvention, exactly. Instead, Madonna proved that she could be a 42-year-old mother of two and still be as sexy, silly, and provocative as she’d always been. “There’s nothing sexier than a mother—Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, I mean, those women are sexy,” she told People in March 2000. “I’m in better shape than I was at 20.”
On Music, Madonna presented her vision of global heartland music. The cowboy getup she wore throughout this era isn’t tied to any overarching country influence; instead, think of it as a (slightly gaudy) symbol of humility, an indication that this record is something real and vital. This was an album designed to unite the disparate tastes of America and Europe, to act as a bridge between teen pop and sophisti-pop, the mainstream and the underground. Across Music, Madonna infused French touch with the sleazy grind of R&B, reinterpreted Americana through the lens of Timbaland and Aaliyah’s warped pop experiments, and put her spin on the clean, heartfelt ballads that the Titanic soundtrack had pulled to the top of the charts. An album comprised entirely of earnest balladry and heaving club tracks, it became one of Madonna’s final world-beating successes—a flexing of artistic muscle that holds its own alongside her most electrifying, epoch-defining records. “The world is in the doldrums musically. It’s all so generic and homogenized,” she told Billboard at the time. “If this record happens, it might mean that people are ready for something different.”
The success of Ray of Light had energized Madonna, but a tight filming schedule for her 2000 rom-com flop The Next Best Thing put plans for a tour on hold. In the interim, she fell in love with the British director Guy Ritchie and by early 2000 was pregnant and living in the UK part-time to be closer to him. London’s voracious paparazzi overwhelmed her, but she felt inspired by the city’s “cool, creative vibe” and decided to retreat to the studio.
Initially, Madonna had planned to work once again with William Orbit, the British producer whose dual interest in Britpop and frosty underground electronic music colored Ray of Light. But as was the case with Babyface after Bedtime Stories, she found that her new music with Orbit was too reminiscent of what had come before. “I knew that I didn’t want to repeat myself,” she told an interviewer. “After I wrote about nine songs, I decided that there was too much of a similarity to the last record, so I threw out everything and started all over again.”
Her salvation came in the form of a relative unknown: Mirwais Ahmadzaï, a French producer whom Guy Oseary, Madonna’s manager and chairman of her Maverick label imprint, was considering signing. Mirwais’ demo tracks were funky and hypnotic, descendants of Daft Punk’s club squelch with a grungier edge. Madonna was so enamored with them that two songs—“Paradise (Not for Me)” and “Impressive Instant”—made their way onto Music practically wholesale. With Mirwais’ manager acting as translator, the pair began work together at Notting Hill’s Sarm Studios. Mirwais ended up producing six of Music’s 10 songs, with Orbit working on another three.
Aside from pulling her back into the underground, Mirwais solved another problem for Madonna. By 2000, teen pop had fully taken hold of the charts. Artists like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and the Backstreet Boys were now fixtures of the same tabloids and TV stations that had fixated on Madonna; the embodied, self-made brand of womanhood she had been selling in the ’80s had given way to music that was sugary-sweet and unashamedly infantile in its presentation. Madonna hated teen pop—she complained to Rolling Stone how “depressing” it was that teenagers were the only people buying records, leaving artists like “Massive Attack, or Tricky, or Goldie” with “no outlet for any of their music”—and, to her, Mirwais presented an electrifying, grown-up alternative to the treble-heavy confections populating the radio.
“Music,” the album’s opener and lead single, provides an instant palate cleanser. Its opening line—a pitched-down Madonna cooing, “Hey Mr. DJ, put a record on. I wanna dance with my baby”—sets the terms: These songs are for dancing with people, not for them. “...Baby One More Time” may have been perfect for practiced choreography, but it lacked groove and grit. Here, Madonna announced, was something to make you move.
Music is a wonky, maximalist record—a far cry from the sleek and limpid techno of Ray of Light. For the first time in her career, Madonna told Tatler, she had given herself license to relax: “OK, you don’t have to win any races.” The absence of internal pressure opened space to experiment and get downright strange. Mirwais filled the songs on Music with bizarre, avant-garde touches: On “Music,” Madonna’s vocal is frequently stacked out of time, as if the song is playing over itself; a vocodered voice asking “Do you like to boogie-woogie?” is as present as Madonna herself. “I like to singy-singy-singy/Like a bird on a wingy-wingy-wingy,” she trills deliriously on “Impressive Instant.” Unlike the records she made before or after, Music is absent concept; it feels guided by first thought, and is often intentionally ridiculous in a way few (or no) other Madonna records are.
Mirwais, more than any producer Madonna had worked with before, was interested in the voice as an instrument to be manipulated and remolded. On “Impressive Instant” and “Paradise (Not for Me),” his vocoder makes Madonna sound like an alien diva, alternately nasal and mischievous and disturbingly disembodied. She had heard Mirwais’ Auto-Tune work—he claims his 2000 solo cut “Naïve Song” was the “1st electro track with Auto-Tune FX on vocals”—and asked to use the effect on Music; the resulting ballad, “Nobody’s Perfect,” is ghostly and forlorn, its self-lacerating lyrics made more piercing by the vocal processing. At the time, Auto-Tune was best known as the “Cher effect” and synonymous with euphoric dance pop. Its inverted application on “Nobody’s Perfect” presaged Radiohead’s use of the technique on 2001’s Amnesiac and the wounded android pop ballads of the 2010s. But Mirwais also recognized when to hold back, and on the steadfast and optimistic “I Deserve It,” the vocals are totally dry. Madonna has never been a particularly soul-baring lyricist, and Mirwais’ detail-oriented production allowed for clean emotional delineation between each song: one alienated and upsetting, the other expressing personal affirmation.
Other songs feel like the perfect synthesis of dozens of disparate strands of ’90s pop. “Don’t Tell Me,” the album’s most indelible song and one of Madonna’s best-ever singles, plays like Sheryl Crow’s “Strong Enough” as remixed by Timbaland. A guitar part loops and rewinds, occasionally halting to give way to a grand, glacial string break, à la Moby’s Play. (Madonna had hoped to work with Moby on what would become Music, but plans never came to fruition.) “Don’t Tell Me” began as a demo by Joe Henry, a cult singer-songwriter married to Madonna’s sister Melanie. Henry had written the song “in 25 minutes” in order to test the gear in his new studio; when he played the demo for his wife, she told him she could hear Madonna singing it. Madonna overhauled the track completely, turning it from a noirish, Tom Waits-style tango into something rhythmic, defiant, and contemporary. Although she barely changed Henry’s original lyrics, they play like commentary on her reception in popular culture at the turn of the century. From the moment she turned 40, the media had hungered for signs of Madonna’s imminent irrelevance, but in the song’s simple terms, she refuted any idea that she should be going into middle age quietly: “Don’t tell me to stop/Tell the rain not to drop/Tell the wind not to blow.”
She was rebellious as ever, but the shift that had occurred on Ray of Light wasn’t just a pose: Madonna was a more benevolent figure now than she had been in the early part of her career. Although she occasionally rolled her eyes at the mention of Britney, she saw her younger self reflected in the new generation of female pop stars, and recognized an opportunity to support them. While promoting Music, she sometimes wore T-shirts that read “Britney Spears” in rhinestones, and used interviews to decry Spears’ treatment in the media. While recording, Madonna said, she’d thought about her own place in the world, at one point realizing that, as she put it to Interview, “Smart, sassy girls who accomplish a lot and have their own cash and are independent are really frightening to men. I felt like ‘Why didn’t somebody tell me? Why didn’t somebody warn me?’”
Music codifies that warning. Although much of the record is about love and hedonism, another thread runs through songs such as “Amazing” and “Runaway Lover”: the idea that women will often be left high and dry by men, and by the world at large. The apotheosis of this theme arrives during “What It Feels Like for a Girl,” Music’s emotional climax. Produced by Guy Sigsworth, “What It Feels Like for a Girl” is something like Madonna’s take on a Dido ballad, with plush synths wrapped around the album’s purest, most traditional hook. It is a beautiful yet slightly baffling song: For every lyric that’s cutting and totally earnest (“When you open up your mouth to speak/Could you be a little weak?”) there’s a mention of “tight blue jeans” or “lips as sweet as candy.” Then again, it’s not a song of empowerment so much as a plea. Madonna wrote it while in the process of moving to London and hiding her pregnancy, fed up with the fact that she was the one having to make accommodations in her relationship. The lyrics are universal, but still hard to separate from the memory of the brazen, armored pop star who debuted in 1982, so consciously invulnerable to the standards of the world around her.
On Music, along with Ray of Light and Music’s maligned, arguably misunderstood follow-up American Life, Madonna was at her most analytical and most reflective. She has never written a memoir; these three records do as good a job as any book would, exploring her relationship with her parents, her children, and American culture at large. On “Gone,” Music’s final track, she seemingly makes a pact for the future: “Selling out is not my thing,” she sings. “Turn to stone/Lose my faith/I’ll be gone before it happens.” It was a promise she couldn’t keep. Twenty-three years later, she’s only rarely reached the same artistic heights (2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor being a notable exception) and was never again as commercially successful: Music sold 4 million copies in its first 10 days of release, and its title track became Madonna’s final Hot 100 No. 1 to date. As the definitive end of an imperial phase, though, Music stands as a document of Madonna’s artistry at its wildest and most free. | 2023-03-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner | March 12, 2023 | 8 | 195c7762-3a67-4f79-b203-8b7aa20233e0 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
On his second release of 2012, the young singer-songwriter writes about life-- both the heavy moments and the mundane ones-- with economy and newfound grace. He has a knack for building songs where the realness of his subject matter lies just below the surface. | On his second release of 2012, the young singer-songwriter writes about life-- both the heavy moments and the mundane ones-- with economy and newfound grace. He has a knack for building songs where the realness of his subject matter lies just below the surface. | Mac DeMarco: 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17182-mac-demarco-2/ | 2 | Making honest art can be terrifying; with 2, Montreal-based Mac DeMarco's second release this year, it feels like he's jumping into the deep end. On DeMarco's other 2012 record, the EP Rock and Roll Night Club, he tinkered with yacht rock, AM radio gold, and Bowie-like glam. The mixture injected an unsettling sleaziness into a funny, occasionally creepy collection of songs that walked the line between irony and sincerity.
In contrast, 2 goes right for the gut. DeMarco writes about life-- both the heavy moments and the mundane ones-- with economy and newfound grace. He's still not entirely upfront, but he has a knack for building songs where the realness of his subject matter lies just below the surface. In a Pitchfork guest list from earlier in October, DeMarco cites Jonathan Richman as a role model, mostly because he felt that Richman had "a very enjoyable time his whole life." Richman is an expert at writing entire worlds into his songs, an approach that DeMarco nails on 2.
Opening track "Cooking Up Something Good" is a strong example of his approach. A loose instrumental vamp slides into a greasy guitar line, as his laconic, sleepy voice delivers subtly heartbreaking observations. "Mommy's in the kitchen, cooking up something good/ And daddy's on the sofa, pride of the neighborhood". When the chorus comes in ("Oh, when life moves this slowly/ Oh, just try and let it go"), it's blindsiding, and his sense of defeat is palpable.
As the song progresses it becomes clear that what initially felt like an ode to the frustrating teenage days of struggling against your suburban surroundings is actually about a father figure manufacturing drugs in the basement. "Cooking Up Something Good" is about boredom and sadness and our skewed perception of time, but it's also about family secrets and how we construct emotional escape hatches to get away from the inescapable realities of blood ties. This careful world-building continues across the entire album, sometimes with a lighter touch. DeMarco's thinly veiled honesty shows up prominently on "Ode to Viceroy" where, over an unsettling guitar flange that fizzles into a flat shimmer, he sings about how much he loves smoking cigarettes. His voice skirts the edge of disinterest, but never quite gets there.
After spending time with 2, DeMarco's vocal deadpan starts to sound weary and wise. On "My Kind of Woman", he effectively makes a prom love song that will never get played at any actual prom-- it oozes beautifully simple and direct sentiment: "You're my kind of woman/ And I'm down on my hands and knees begging you please, baby, show me your world." That last line, "show me your world," returns to the concept that DeMarco and the people he sings about are all living, breathing entities, not blank slates to project emotion on. When they're gone from DeMarco's life, they still exist. It doesn't really get more honest than that. | 2012-10-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-10-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | October 31, 2012 | 8.2 | 196a7cee-90c7-4c1f-b8a2-bb6afb71e9df | Sam Hockley-Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-hockley-smith/ | null |
Teeming with revved-up riffs and apocalyptic imagery, the post-hardcore group’s first album since 2005 reasserts their status as the most merciless band in their scene. | Teeming with revved-up riffs and apocalyptic imagery, the post-hardcore group’s first album since 2005 reasserts their status as the most merciless band in their scene. | Hot Snakes: Jericho Sirens | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hot-snakes-jericho-sirens/ | Jericho Sirens | During their initial 1999 to 2005 tenure, Hot Snakes were indie rock’s greatest and most rewarding consolation prize. After Rick Froberg and John Reis’ previous band, Drive Like Jehu, unceremoniously disbanded following their 1994 prog-punk masterpiece, Yank Crime, and as Reis’ concurrent group—brass-knuckled garage-rockers Rocket From the Crypt—started exhibiting more of an Interscope-sanctioned pop polish, Hot Snakes emerged to reassert the deadliest twin-guitar attack in post-hardcore. For long-time followers of Froberg and Reis, the new band represented the best of both worlds: all the contorted discord of prime Jehu, delivered with the street-gang swagger and participatory appeal of early RFTC.
But like Jehu before them and RFTC just after, Hot Snakes came to a sudden, screeching halt in 2005, as the principal duo disentangled to pursue more streamlined takes on what had come before (Froberg in Obits, Reis with the Night Marchers), among others. Of course, there’s no such thing as a true break-up anymore: within a decade, RFTC, Jehu, and Hot Snakes were all hitting the reunion-tour circuits, with attendant reissue campaigns to further court a new generation that was losing their shit to spiritual successors like Metz and Pissed Jeans. Now, we finally get the first new music to result from all those reboots. And while Jehu may seem like the band with the most unfinished business to tend to, Hot Snakes have gamely stepped up to become the true flagship act from this bunch.
Jericho Sirens is a reunion in the high-school sense of the term, corralling everyone who’s ever called themselves a Hot Snake. Where the band’s first two records featured former Delta 72 drummer Jason Kourkounis and their third replaced him with RFTC stickman Mario Rubalcaba (later of OFF! and Earthless), the new album features appearances from both. No matter who’s behind the kit, Jericho Sirens’ unwavering thwack attack and chain-whipped tambourine rattle soundly reassert Hot Snakes’ status as the most merciless band in the Froberg/Reis nexus. Even at their fiercest, Rocket From the Crypt songs were always fueled by a classic rock’n’roll abandon, while Jehu’s art-punk epics balanced the visceral with the cerebral. But on this LP, each of Reis’ and Froberg’s revved-up riffs feels like a nasty sucker-punched elbow to the ribs, each piercing staccato guitar line a finger poking at the bruise.
Jericho Sirens releases the pause button as if Hot Snakes had been locked in freeze-frame for the past 14 years, instantly thrusting them back into action on the frenzied “I Need a Doctor.” With its manic expressions of helplessness and desperation (“I need to be near a toilet!”), the song seemingly invites interpretations tied to America’s current political crisis and ongoing healthcare nightmare. And certainly, the marauding “Death of a Sportsman,” with its graphic depiction of a doomed big-game hunter (“What is left of him ain’t worth sending home!”), works as an unsubtle eat-the-rich metaphor. But Froberg has been the very embodiment of wiry agitation and tinfoil-chewing tension for the past quarter century, no matter who’s running the country. All that pleading for medical attention you hear on “I Need a Doctor”? If you take the band at their word, it’s a simply a request for an MD’s note to skip out of an office Christmas function.
Hot Snakes always sounded like Froberg and Reis eagerly getting a head-start on their cranky-old-man years; this is a band, after all, whose most potent, clear-eyed mission statement was called “I Hate the Kids.” On this album, it sounds like they’re already bracing for the end of their lives, if not the world. No fewer than three songs feature the word “death” in their titles, and even its most intimate scenes are rendered in apocalyptic terms. The closest thing to a love song here, Jericho Sirens’ arresting title track, finds Froberg seeking solace in his partner from the tinnitus piercing his brain, evoked vividly by the song’s bulldozer swing and ominous melodica refrain.
As that track’s rousing shout-along chorus illustrates, Hot Snakes are still refining the melodic sensibility they flashed on “Plenty for All,” the song that brought 2004’s Audit in Progress to a surprisingly congenial conclusion. On Jericho Sirens, an 80-second hardcore strike like “Why Don’t It Sink in” is immediately answered by a steady-pulsed rocker like “Six Wave Hold-Down,” where the tense guitar strums loosen into a resonant jangle, and Froberg’s seething bark assumes a more plaintive tone. And for all its perpetual discontent, Jericho Sirens is not without its moments of joy—even if they’re delivered through a song called “Death Camp Fantasy.” Atop a brisk motorik punk backbeat, Froberg rhetorically asks, “Have I been preyed upon?” before inviting the whole band—and, no doubt you, at home—to sing along to those words, transforming a moment of private anguish into celebratory group therapy. Panic and paranoia may be the default mental state of our times, but, to quote an old hardcore koan, maybe partying will help. | 2018-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | March 19, 2018 | 7.7 | 196da616-2c24-40bc-b64a-5f79649e502e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On Tyler’s sincere and most accomplished album, he gets to the essence of what he's been chiseling at: the angst of a missed connection, the pain of unrequited love, and navigating youthful ennui. | On Tyler’s sincere and most accomplished album, he gets to the essence of what he's been chiseling at: the angst of a missed connection, the pain of unrequited love, and navigating youthful ennui. | Tyler, the Creator: Flower Boy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tyler-the-creator-flower-boy/ | Flower Boy | Tyler, the Creator’s music has often been defined by exclusion. He was furious when rap blogs refused to post Odd Future songs. He has gleefully responded to being banned from countries. His songs attempted to reconcile with a divided fanbase. The subtext of Odd Future was that pearl-clutching moralists simply weren’t in on the (obscene) joke—the whole point of being radicals is to be “apart from.” He has also done his fair share of exclusion, too: marginalizing and upsetting women and queer people with violently misogynistic and homophobic lyrics. It has been asked how to reconcile the genius with the foul-mouthed punk.
Flower Boy (promoted as Scum Fuck Flower Boy) is Tyler’s course-correction, surprisingly meditative and beautifully colored, a collage of memories and daydreams that trades bratty subversion for reflection and self-improvement. He probes the things that shaped his psyche—loneliness, isolation, and disorientation—and focuses on outgrowing friendships, balancing the pull of nostalgia and the necessity for growth. Not only is Flower Boy Tyler’s most trenchant work, it’s his most inclusive: “Find Your Wings”: The Album, gentle and liberating. “Tell these black kids they can be who they are,” he raps on “Where This Flower Blooms,” as he grows into the artist he’s always longed to be, and perhaps always was.
While trying to recreate an N.E.R.D. album, Cherry Bomb more or less imploded. But it didn't completely shed Tyler’s old skin, enlisting a host of colorful collaborators (Roy Ayers, Leon Ware, Charlie Wilson, Chaz Bundick, and Dâm-Funk) for songs about jerking off and underage relationships. His raps were regularly empty games of juvenile one-upmanship, snooty hand-wringing aimed at homebodies and the working class, and vitriolic rant raps aimed at no one in particular. There were love songs, but they were immature and sometimes flat-out creepy. Time had rendered his shock raps pretty toothless, and it was all sloppy. Conversely, Flower Boy is transformational, lovestruck and penetrating. Finally, Tyler gets to the essence of ideas he’s been chiseling at all along: the angst of a missed connection, the pain of unrequited love, navigating youthful ennui. These are hopeful and sincere songs about finding yourself and trying to find someone who values you completely.
Tyler spends much of Flower Boy chasing his “‘95 Leo,” coming out in the process. On “Foreword,” he raps, “Shoutout to the girls that I lead on/For occasional head and always keeping my bed warm/And trying they hardest to keep my head on straight/And keeping me up enough till I had thought I was airborne.” He later writes, “Next line will have ‘em like ‘Whoa’: I’ve been kissing white boys since 2004.” The album’s literal and figurative centerpiece is “Garden Shed,” an inward-looking sexual awakening turning an extended metaphor into a watershed moment. Flower Boy unfurls from this revelation and the subsequent romance. He pens songs for his lover (“See You Again”), leaves him voicemails (“Glitter”), and seeks comfort through contact.
Much will be (and has already been) made of what exactly this means for a rapper who once responded to an open letter from Sara Quin criticizing his homophobic words and actions and those who support them by crudely saying, “If Tegan And Sara Need Some Hard Dick, Hit Me Up!” Pivotal moments in his catalog are largely dependent on his often shameless and unapologetic use of gay slurs, and while these admissions don’t absolve him of past hate speech, they do paint a portrait of a confused and tactless young introvert in crisis. However listeners choose to interpret this conflict, Tyler doesn’t seem to be rapping to make amends but to be understood. This is not an apology or even an explanation. Flower Boy gingerly disentangles a knot of personal and complicated thoughts and feelings through the lens of flashbacks and love songs.
So subdued, wistful, permissive, and relatable, are these songs—they are Tyler’s most refined to date. Collectively, they’re a kaleidoscopic sonic wonder. Though still obviously taking influence from the Neptunes, his production remains unlike anything else right now—glowing oddball orchestrations with unpredictable chord progressions, adorned by choruses of sweet voices. “Garden Shed” and “Glitter” are among his prettiest creations. He cedes “Droppin’ Seeds” to an in-form Lil Wayne, content to show off his peculiar ear for sound. “Enjoy Right Now, Today” takes it a step further, going lyric-free, accented by light Pharrell vocals. The title and the warm soul interior seem to usher the listener outside. For those chasing a Bastard-esque, punchy rap fix, there’s “Who Dat Boy” and “Pothole.”
In the past, Tyler’s albums have been bloated and messy. Flower Boy is 17-minutes shorter than the average Tyler album with more understated transitions and less disorder and chaos. He has been known to overthink things or get too cute with compositions, tagging on eight-minute posse cuts, piecing together mismatched songs, adding attachments and embellishments where they aren’t needed. These songs here carry in them his tinkerer’s spirit without becoming overwrought. His ambition is a driving force in his work, but he curtails it for a more enjoyable and streamlined listen. The standouts, “911 / Mr. Lonely” and “I Ain’t Got Time!,” are carefully assembled arrangements made of gorgeous parts that fasten together seamlessly. There are several neat aesthetic choices, like playing “See You Again” as a radio request or pitching the halves of “Glitter” at opposing frequencies. There’s the juxtaposition of “Boredom” with “I Ain’t Got Time!”—a song about finding time with one about not having enough—then ending the latter abruptly to take a phone call. Where previous outings were tangled, Tyler’s adds a new elegance to his work.
Though it’s probably an overstatement to call Flower Boy penitent, the album is certainly aware of past wrongs, and Tyler pursues integration through confession. Onlookers have wondered aloud when Tyler would “grow up,” and while “mature” still feels imprecise when describing the rapper-producer, there is certainly an evolution taking place. But this isn’t about the strides taken to make sense of a complicated past; Flower Boy shows thoughtfulness can be freeing. As Tyler, the Creator embarks on a journey of self-discovery, he becomes close to whole. | 2017-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | July 21, 2017 | 8.5 | 196dec1a-8239-43e6-a90f-b6b4e287381c | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The latest from the experimental rap trio is chaotic but sleek, a streamlined presentation of the singular style Young Fathers have crafted. | The latest from the experimental rap trio is chaotic but sleek, a streamlined presentation of the singular style Young Fathers have crafted. | Young Fathers: Cocoa Sugar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-fathers-cocoa-sugar/ | Cocoa Sugar | Young Fathers albums have raps on them but they’re not “rap albums.” Calling the Scottish trio “rappers” is equally imprecise. Their use of rap, just like their use of rhythm in general, only broadens the depth of their textural palette, which includes club, dub, industrial, R&B, and pop music. They have been given all manner of hybrid genre tags as a result ever since their Mercury Prize win for the 2014 album Dead. Now that “weird” is their normal, they’re breaking from convention again by making something more standard but no more ordinary. Their new album, the sleek Cocoa Sugar, is not necessarily less genre-curious but it is more streamlined and far easier to process.
Much of their music considers classification—whiteness and blackness, otherness and outsiderness—and is rooted in their diasporic origin story. Alloysious Massaquoi was born in Liberia then moved to Edinburgh as a child. Kayus Bankole was born in Edinburgh to Nigerian parents but lived in both the U.S. and Nigeria before moving back to Scotland in his teens). Graham “G” Hastings, the only white member, was born and raised in Edinburgh. They met at a hip-hop night as teenagers, finding each other as kindred spirits pushing back against traditional rap expectations. As the title suggests, Cocoa Sugar subtly explores the duality of light and dark, bitter and sweet, a contrast Massaquoi says is an amalgamation of the way they see the world. In these songs, they embrace their polarities without forcing them.
With 2015’s White Men Are Black Men Too, Young Fathers were clearly trying to say something, but it was unclear what, exactly. Lost in their musical obfuscation was meaning or purpose. “I’m tired of blaming the white man/His indiscretions don’t betray him/A black man can play him/Some white men are black men too,” Massaquoi rapped on “Old Rock n Roll.” There wasn’t much to the idea other than funneling this pent-up anxiety and exasperation. Cocoa Sugar is less preoccupied with veiled statements and more interested in concepts and impressions, moving more on impulse. “Turn” even offers a bit of a correction to “Old Rock n Roll.” “Don’t you turn my brown eyes blue,” it demands. “I’m nothing like you.”
The songs on Cocoa Sugar are unquestionably Young Fathers’ most accessible. They have a sense of a narrative flow and an overarching theme, but they’re still knotty and confounding. Much of the writing is symbolic, at times biblical and political, but more about feeling than anything. It’s full of bravado, cynicism, and wonder in equal measure. There are broader allusions to the current social and civic moments, but they are intentionally left obscure. What separates this album from previous ones is their willingness to present powerful images without imposing their will. “Not here to drown ya; I’m only here to cleanse ya,” Bankole raps. It is at once rousing, illusive, and inviting.
“G” Hastings, the group’s primary producer, is tasked with curating the whole Young Fathers experience, and on Cocoa Sugar he stages some striking and imaginative scenes. The muffled, half-sung vocals on “Turn” bleed into coiling 8-bit synth progressions that tuck in and out of one another. “Fee Fi” is a maelstrom, all fidgety drums, minor-key piano plunks, and vocals of varying frequencies. “Lord,” which is almost a gospel song with its choir and piano accompaniment, suddenly surges into a guitar riff that beams like light through a stained glass window.
There are some obvious religious overtones throughout Cocoa Sugar, which is as fascinated with holiness and heresy as idol worship, and these moments color the album’s tone and worldview. On “Picking You,” a loss of faith becomes a non sequitur for establishing virtue: “I said the only time I go to church is when someone’s in the casket/Good men are strange, bad men are obvious.” The wordy incantation “Holy Ghost” is even more cynical: “You can tell your deity I’m alright/Wake up from the dead, call me Jesus Christ.” Delilah is used as a signifier for sin on “In My View,” and on “See How” they embrace a cruel reality about morality: “I’ve never seen wicked ones face their fears/I’ve always seen brave men filled with tears/The older you get, the colder you get.” Massaquoi has said that they see the world as “aesthetically pleasing, but fucked up,” beautiful but broken and godless. On Cocoa Sugar, it shows, in their gorgeous meditations on chaos. | 2018-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic / Pop/R&B | Ninja Tune | March 16, 2018 | 7.3 | 196e31f6-5c30-41bd-92ee-cae430d0d364 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The Austin indie-pop duo’s music conjures a steady, gentle longing. Foggy, warm, and wistful, it sounds like faded time. | The Austin indie-pop duo’s music conjures a steady, gentle longing. Foggy, warm, and wistful, it sounds like faded time. | Hovvdy: Cranberry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hovvdy-cranberry/ | Cranberry | If there’s anything you’re nostalgic for, Hovvdy’s second album, Cranberry, is likely to dredge it up. It’s not that the Austin duo invokes a particular time or place—Will Taylor and Charlie Martin aren’t revivalists, and they don’t seem to hold any sentiment for a mythical suburban teenhood. It’s more that their music simulates the mysterious function of memory itself. Foggy, warm, and wistful, it sounds like faded time. With two drummers who now take up the guitar and synthesizer as needed, Hovvdy share an instinctual melodic sensibility with the duo Girlpool and an indefatigable calm with their Double Double Whammy labelmate Yowler. While their debut, 2016’s Taster, itched a little with a distortion-shrouded anxiety, sounding occasionally like a desaturated Weezer album, Cranberry focuses the act’s emotional palette to a steady, gentle longing. Hovvdy sound surer of themselves than before, and that confidence gives them more room to be vulnerable.
While a sheet of fuzz tends to obscure much of what Taylor and Martin are actually singing, the lines that do come through manage a poignant simplicity. “Yesterday I woke up outside/Saw you for the very first time,” goes the album’s opening couplet on “Brave,” conjuring up the delightfully surreal image of someone coming to in a clearing and falling for the first stranger they see. On “Truck,” Hovvdy build a swaying chorus out of a little self-effacement: “If there’s trouble, I will run from it/All the time.” It’s a little strange: Here’s a song about shirking responsibility, and maybe feeling guilty about your failure to be there for someone else, and yet the vocals fall over the guitars as gently as ash from a distant forest fire. Hovvdy pull this trick a lot. They write lyrics that hint at some kind of danger or urgency, then sing them as languidly as possible. That dissonance gives their songs a magnetic pull: You’ll want to go back to them to see what you’ve missed, to try to read more deeply between the lines.
A similar ambiguity hovers around the album’s instrumentation. “Truck” weaves slide guitars into the mix so subtly they barely register on the first few listens, and the relatively upbeat “In the Sun” boasts a flute sound that definitely came from a keyboard but at points could almost pass for the real thing. On “Float,” the repeating sound of a cymbal bleeds into the song’s grain; “Thru” confuses guitars and synthesizers so readily it’s difficult to tell where the strum of an electric six-string ends and the wash of a digital instrument begins. All the details another band might tease out, Hovvdy subsume into their music’s overall texture. This isn’t a band that wants to direct your attention to specific techniques, necessarily. They don’t need you to witness all the microscopic decisions that go into making a record. They just want you along for the ride.
In a 2016 interview, Taylor relayed a brief anecdote about his friendship with Martin. “One time we got lost in the woods and had to stick together to make it out,” he said. “It ended up being really fun. That’s pretty close to how things are with us always.” That kind of relationship, where a potentially terrifying mishap turns into a fond memory thanks to mutual support and a shared sense of playfulness, drives Hovvdy’s songwriting ethos. They don’t panic when they lose sight of the path; they just keep going, sure that whatever happens, they’ll remember it well. | 2018-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | February 14, 2018 | 7.5 | 19709915-3fc3-4c99-8183-e840c62f8216 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
This 2xCD collection pares down the L.A. producer's 5xCD debut album series, intended as a mission statement for what he calls "modern funk." | This 2xCD collection pares down the L.A. producer's 5xCD debut album series, intended as a mission statement for what he calls "modern funk." | Dām Funk: Toeachizown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13634-toeachizown/ | Toeachizown | Imagine there's nothing funny about the 1980s. Block out your referential nostalgia, your tendency to make punchlines out of Cazals and keytars. Unlearn everything you know about Stock-Aitken-Waterman and gated drums and the synthesizers in "The Final Countdown". Try to think about how the music of the era might've sounded to you if you were experiencing it for the first time, without any knowledge of where or when it was made.
Now you're ready to listen to Dâm-Funk. One of Stones Throw's recent breakthrough stars, L.A.'s Damon Riddick spent the 90s as a session keyboardist for assorted New Jack Swing and hip-hop acts (most prominently on the soundtrack to Master P's I Got the Hook-Up), and lately has parlayed his love for music into a popular 80s boogie/funk DJ night, Funkmosphere, at the Venice Boulevard club Carbon. His recent work reflects a confluence of these two bullet points on his résumé, as he jumps from retro-novel intrigue (2008's "Burgundy City" b/w "Galactic Fun") to indie-crossover remix buzz (his incredible transformation of Animal Collective's "Summertime Clothes") to the ambitious sprawl of a five-part debut album series, intended as a mission statement for what he calls "modern funk."
That series has been pared down to the 2xCD, 140-minute collection Toeachizown, which shares the name of the collection from which it draws. It's your call how best to experience this stuff; each individual volume of the original Toeachizown series has its own thematic undercurrent ("Hood", "Life", "Sky", etc.) and its own strengths, but this condensed aggregation pares it down to a manageable, cohesive 24-track introduction at the cost of editing down a couple of the songs. Either way, you've got a thorough rundown of Dâm-Funk's repertoire this year, which, even in its pared-down form, is an absurdly prolific output-- apparently it would've come out sooner, but the man couldn't stop recording new tracks for it.
Anyone with a thing for g-funk should find instant geek-out recognition in this music, a garage-bound DIY love letter to the post-Worrell musical diaspora that covers everything from Roger Troutman's eternal bounce to the cosmic jazz crossover of the Clarke/Duke Project. In between, you get slow-ride R&B jams ("One Less Day"; "I Wanna Thank You For [Steppin Into My Life]"), grooves that toy with the more prog- and fusion-influenced corners of funk ("Flying V Ride"), post-disco dance music ("Candy Dancin'"), proto-electro ("Keep Lookin' 2 the Sky"), and just about anything else you might've heard on the SOLAR label 25 years ago. There are nods to the retrofitting treatment that the cream of late-70s/early-80s Moog funk underwent once DJ Quik and Dr. Dre got ahold of it; "Killdat aka Killdatmuthafu*ka" actually sounds a bit more like 1992 than 1983, all sinister chords and bop-gun percussion.
But calling Dâm-Funk's music straight-up throwback nostalgia only skirts what's really appealing about it. For the first minute or so, you might dredge up some roller-rink memories, but once that groove sets in-- granite-thick Moog bass coupled with drum machine breaks so propulsive their physical impetus overrides their mechanicalness-- it starts transcending historical allusions and becomes all about structure and groove, about how just plain fucking great fat Roland basslines and Oberheim kick drums sound together. That's about when you get waylaid by one of Riddick's solos-- fluttering and unpredictable, often flowing more like something that might come out of a free jazz sax or an acid rock guitar than a funk synthesizer. It's the secret weapon that underscores how seriously he takes this stuff, the catalyst that should provoke listeners to realize this music isn't just a fun update of a classic sound-- it's a work of real transcendence.
This isn't a comedic tribute to talkboxes and widebrims; there's no Snoop Dogg descending a foggy staircase through a faded VHS haze here. Toeachizown is a deep, astute collection that feels like a natural resuscitation and progression of funk as it stood just before hip hop usurped it. Much in the same way that Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings transform from a reenactment of a circa '66 soul revue to a distinct set of musical personalities the more you listen to them, Dâm-Funk uses all his vintage equipment as a medium to express his own voice, tucking a lot of stealthy forward progress and experimental tendencies between the notes. Chortle at that keytar all you want-- he can still make it sound like the future. | 2009-12-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-12-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Stones Throw | December 2, 2009 | 8.2 | 1974630d-f523-4e77-98d6-f4b28c8e3f9f | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Inside songs that capture the body-moving pulse of nightlife and the post-club comedown, the Long Island quartet follow the danceable lead of their last album. | Inside songs that capture the body-moving pulse of nightlife and the post-club comedown, the Long Island quartet follow the danceable lead of their last album. | Mr Twin Sister: Salt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mr-twin-sister-salt/ | Salt | The genre fluidity and playfulness of Mr Twin Sister evoke nostalgia for the CD era of indie. Since the Long Island quartet emerged near the end of the last decade with the charmingly lo-fi indie rock of Vampires With Dreaming Kids, they have pursued a number of alternate avenues—squishy synth-pop, stiff funk, starry disco. You could imagine plucking their eclectic, softly strange 2011 LP, In Heaven, from the aisles of Tower circa 1996, the disc alphabetically and musically lodged between Cibo Matto and Stereolab. Their self-titled 2014 album pushed their dance-oriented tendencies, flipping the way “dream pop” had often been used to describe their hard-to-classify stuff.
Mr Twin Sister’s third full-length, Salt, adds new flourishes to that electrified approach— moonlit jazz-pop reminiscent of the increasingly influential British act the Blue Nile, the placid environs of chillout, slinking R&B, Auto-Tuned outré-pop. There’s a distinct downtown New York City vibe that runs throughout these songs. Sure, Salt elicits imagery of rain hitting a cab window after a night out. More important, Mr Twin Sister, like city contemporaries Yaeji and House of Feelings, tap into a distinctly urban vein through gentle mutations of house and techno, their sound reflecting the cosmopolitan, body-moving pulse of the nightlife and the post-club comedown.
Salt’s highest points happen when the band’s impressive textures shape tuneful, easy-to-grasp songs, providing a lovely counterpoint to lead vocalist Andrea Estella’s millennial musings on digital desensitization, the melting pot of global culture, and the ills of consumerism. “Jaipur” thrums steadily beneath Estella’s commanding voice, fluttering woodwinds creating a fine mist around her. “Tops and Bottoms” pairs her introspective musings on fashion, body image, and the pressures of existing in public over a bed of brittle rhythms and luscious keyboards, while propulsive opener “Keep on Mixing” fashions hyperspeed pop from a skipping beat that suggests UK Garage and 2step.
Such conventions have become the reference points of copyists during the last decade, but Mr Twin Sister synthesize them differently, crafting distinct moods around them in a manner that feels out-of-step with indie trendspotting. The production throughout is astounding, especially when considering Mr Twin Sister’s modest beginnings. The details are vivid in the mix, like the saxophone curlicue that rolls into the piano-and-drums arrangement of “Alien FM” or the horns that burst forth in “Taste in Movies.”
Although Mr Twin Sister’s first release preceded chillwave, they gained prominence around the time the micro-movement took hold through the likes of Toro Y Moi and Neon Indian. Mr Twin Sister were briefly but incorrectly tagged this way, too, which made less sense as the band established their own genre-amorphous identity. But Mr Twin Sister have always been more than capable in establishing vibes, the essential quality of chillwave’s otherwise-nebulous form. On Salt, they’re sometimes too good at mood-setting music. The rippling, Vocalcity-like textures of slow-burning tracks such as “Deseo” and “Set Me Free” are just two of several instances that sound immaculate but offer little melodically except wispy atmospherics. But over-scrutinizing Mr Twin Sister’s capacity for vibe-setting feels like witnessing a rare bird in its natural habitat: attempting to examine them any closer risks disrupting the simple joy of watching them exist. | 2018-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Twin Group | November 2, 2018 | 7 | 197ee6e3-d215-4fe3-b47e-3a7b65d823a3 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
The latest project from the rising UK rapper is unsettling but addictive, enormous in scope, and plays front to back like the ultimate hybrid mixtape. | The latest project from the rising UK rapper is unsettling but addictive, enormous in scope, and plays front to back like the ultimate hybrid mixtape. | Octavian : SPACEMAN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/octavian-spaceman/ | SPACEMAN | In its daring eclecticism, fusing delicate inner-thought with materialistic swagger, the music of Octavian achieves a galactic variety of scale. After dropping out of London’s prestigious BRIT School, attended by the likes of King Krule and Amy Winehouse, living between France and England, and becoming homeless as a teenager, the young rapper’s new project, SPACEMAN, is an attempt to write, co-produce, and curate his way down to our planet from somewhere alien and fascinating. Its careful manipulation of genres and provocative lyricism—threats to steal your partner or to “shoot you in your face” as he says in the flawless “Revenge”—are laid out alongside spoken-word philosophy about loyalty and self-fulfillment. We are given the feeling of an epic journey while being invited to decipher the troubled psyche of hedonistic talent. The result is unsettling but addictive, and can’t be too far from the ultimate hybrid mixtape.
From one angle, SPACEMAN can be taken as an intoxicated tour of South-East London (hence the name of his creative crew “Essie Gang” : “S-E”). The area of Camberwell, where Octavian grew up, is where arty students, young professionals, and hipsters converge with the poverty of long-standing social housing estates and the spill out from one of the city’s major trauma hospitals. A slew of fatal stabbings took place there this summer, sending shockwaves across the atmosphere of local life. “I told my guy put the suttin’ down/Everyday man get bad karma/Still runnin’ round,” Octavian blurts on the blue-sky reflection “This Is My World.” In instructing his friend to put a weapon down, he confronts the dilemma faced by an increasing number of boys and young men who feel the need to arm themselves in high-risk parts of Britain’s major cities. This sensitivity to what people ought to do and say ebbs and flows on unexpected ethical shores throughout this body of work.
But while Octavian dabbles in introversion and aggression, he does so by making himself refreshingly available with his emotions. He is confused about the contradictions of his unstable past, being seen as “the evil kid” despite his older brother being the drug-dealer. He references his mother on multiple occasions: “Guess what, Mummy, I said, guess what?” are his first words on the mixtape, rooting the whole project close to home, and heart, in a way that is rarely heard in a UK rap scene saturated with bravado and closed-book masculinity.
Then he zooms out, into the stratosphere, and beyond. Because Octavian wants you to get a good view of him living that life. He’s a “rockstar”; he doesn’t meet his label, he just gets his check in writing; he drops £500 on sunglasses, but is so waved he can’t even see. The flex raps are backed up with the real celebrity status he’s experienced recently, having been invited to perform at the forthcoming launch of Tokyo’s flagship Stone Island store, modeling for Louis Vuitton, and tapping de rigueur art and fashion mogul Virgil Abloh to design SPACEMAN’s cover. It endows the music with a galactic cool, his versatile, cigarette-scorched voice slurring and singing over a spectrum of pop melodies, house synths, and crisp trap beats.
At times, like in the ethereal “Stand Down,” the production can sound uncannily similar to producer Noah “40” Shebib’s catalog. Does this dilute Octavian’s polite dismissal of Drake’s cosign earlier this year? It doesn’t really matter, because the style is just as effective while employed by the Londoner. In this cold, neon-trap lane, Octavian brings up producers like teenage soundscaper Elevated, who produces eight glistening tracks here to cement his name. The trap aesthetic packages SPACEMAN’s otherwise challenging, experimental character in more accessible wrapping. It’s there for frowning British teenagers, excitable European music nerds, and the North American masses, alike.
Octavian is willing to stretch himself further afield than most artists do in their entire careers; to be undefinable in so many directions, without looking slightly phased or unnatural. He knows that everyone is watching him. This intense self-consciousness provides the binding glue to SPACEMAN. It isn’t often that we as listeners are required to work so hard to keep up, and straddle an artist’s multitudinous lanes all at once. Whether it’s tapping our feet on the wet curb to gritty, unstable British realism, or gazing from a height over the glossy cross-pollination of world music, making sense of this outrageously talented pioneer is a challenging but deeply rewarding task. | 2018-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Black Butter | September 13, 2018 | 8 | 19807c1b-2c30-4547-b286-be48120e8e3b | Ciaran Thapar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ciaran-thapar/ | |
Approaching the rich Latinx musical tradition from intriguing new angles, the Chicago quintet’s album evokes the crisp air, soft color, and enveloping warmth of a greenhouse. | Approaching the rich Latinx musical tradition from intriguing new angles, the Chicago quintet’s album evokes the crisp air, soft color, and enveloping warmth of a greenhouse. | Dos Santos: City of Mirrors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dos-santos-city-of-mirrors/ | City of Mirrors | When Alex Chávez is not performing huapango music with his trio or crafting Latin psychedelia with his five-piece band Dos Santos, he is Dr. Alex E. Chávez, PhD, an ethnographer and assistant professor of anthropology at Notre Dame. In 2017, Chávez authored a book on huapango arribeño music, a type of huapango specific to the mountains of north-central Mexico. Sounds of Crossing examines the links between the poeticism of the dialogue-based Mexican folk genre and political commentary, especially about the evolving tensions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Chávez’s writing style is rigorously academic yet naturally agile. You get the sense that he might not see such a wide gap between the stage and the classroom, either.
The new album from Dos Santos, City of Mirrors, also reflects a band convinced that artistic ideas and political ones are not necessarily at odds, but different sides of the same truth. A relentlessly kaleidoscopic mosaic of novel sound pairings propelled by Latin rhythms, the album evokes the crisp air, soft color, and enveloping warmth of a greenhouse. Between lyrics on starry nights and cinnamon skin, Chávez also sings of the real consequences befalling real people in front of him. On the title track, a love song to Puerto Rico, he narrates flooded streets and houses collapsed by natural disaster, while a baritone sax and clarinet duel toe-to-toe like hope and grief.
City of Mirrors is easily Dos Santos’ most expansive album, partially a result of the band’s decision to hire its first outside producer (Elliot Bergman of Wild Belle). The first thing you hear on opener “A Shot in the Dark” is a community of voices: high, chopped nasal shouts that chime over a lilting bassline, adding a chromatic tint to Chávez’s falsetto when he cuts in—the stained glass to his beam of light. It’s an inviting and original first impression, opening up the ingenious possibilities of the studio as an instrument, and one of the band’s best songs to date.
The album offers a handful of such excitingly fresh moments (among the best, the backtracked sounds that blend into rippling puddles of keys on the instrumental coda to “Crown Me”) and plenty more where traditional sounds are approached at intriguing angles (like the cumbia beats of “Glorieta” and “Soledad” twisted by programmed-drum accents or spoken word, respectively). There are also a few that sound slightly overloaded with flourishes when a more naked version of the song might have landed better and provided some welcome contrast. “Ghost. Me.” strains a bit to fit into its frame, a slow, heavy arrangement on what is already perhaps the album’s heaviest song: a slow waltz reflecting on untimely death, which has been finding Latinx people in tragic disproportion since 2020.
One particular lyric, from “A Tu Lado,” feels designed to stick. It punctuates the song’s verses, and the band drops the beat completely to isolate Chávez’s delivery: “Futuros que no han llegados,” he sings. (“Plurality is key,” he has said about this lyric, which translates to “futures that have yet to arrive.”) In the context of the song, it could be about family and lineage, or about community and traditions, or maybe about Chávez’s huapanguero grandfather, whom he took after. But it’s the forward-pressing sounds surrounding those words that really make the line pop. In its finest moments, City of Mirrors sounds like those futures arriving.
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. | 2021-10-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | International Anthem | October 22, 2021 | 7.4 | 19814e8a-6fed-4a41-bb05-136f8432986a | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
The cool, disaffected Welsh avant-pop chanteuse's second album is more playful and irreverent than her debut, a 2009 collection released by collaborator/mentor Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals. | The cool, disaffected Welsh avant-pop chanteuse's second album is more playful and irreverent than her debut, a 2009 collection released by collaborator/mentor Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals. | Cate Le Bon: CYRK | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16179-cate-le-bon/ | CYRK | In a 2009 interview with Pitchfork, Super Furry Animals' frontman Gruff Rhys admitted he was first drawn to the Velvet Underground because he thought they were fellow Welshman, having noticed John Cale's familiarly regional accent on White Light/White Heat's "The Gift". In light of this anecdote, his ongoing mentorship of Penboyr-raised/Cardiff-based avant-pop chanteuse Cate Le Bon amounts to more than just an elder statesman lending support to the next great Welsh hope; rather, in Le Bon, he presumably hears the genuine realization of that mistaken assumption. While Le Bon's cool, disaffected voice was a natural fit for Rhys' electro-fied side project, Neon Neon, the music she creates under her own name more closely resembles The Velvet Underground & Nico relocated from Warhol's Factory to a Welsh farmhouse, displaying an equal affinity for narcotic melodies and jangle-riff repetition, but with the East Village grime replaced by a certain lambswool coziness.
Like many debut albums by folk-schooled solo artists trying to assert their identity, Le Bon's Me Oh My (released in 2009 on Rhys' Irony Bored Records label), could come off as both whimsically precious ("Sad Sad Feet") and state-of-the-world serious ("Terror of the Man"), but showed a willingness to disrupt its serene surroundings with cutting lyrical barbs and well-timed blasts of psychedelicized guitar fuzz. The follow-up, CYRK, does little to upset Le Bon's pastoral, turn-of-the-1970s prog-pop alchemy (as she sang on Me Oh My, "I like what I like and I like what I know"), but as its title-- the Polish word for "circus"-- indicates, it's several degrees more playful and irreverent.
Where Me Oh My tended to reveal its charms and idiosyncrasies gradually, CYRK lets its guard down almost immediately with "Falcon Eyed", a scrappy, start-stop gallop that suggests Le Bon has been trading pen-pal notes with the Fiery Furnaces' Eleanor Friedberger. The song's punkish drive proves anomalous to what follows, but its mischievous energy carries through to CYRK's statelier turns as, much more so than on Me Oh My, Le Bon uses her deadpan delivery to droll effect. She takes particular delight in infusing innocent, golden-oldies-radio sounds with decidedly unromantic sentiment: "Puts Me to Work" is an ode to domestic unrest and ennui that nonetheless boasts all the sweetness and grace of the first-dance selection at a wedding, while "The Man I Wanted" finds her communicating desire for her one and only through a catatonic stare, before opportunistically asking him, "Where is the payout?"
But more than just chart her progression as a singer and songwriter, CYRK also sees Le Bon and her four-piece band developing into a crack psych-rock outfit that consistently leads the songs into unexpected places, from the wiggy guitar jams that overtake the title track and "Fold the Cloth", to the piano-rolled clamor on "Through the Mill" that sounds like a haunted house coming alive after dark. Tellingly, the closing two-part suite "Ploughing Out" serves as an autobiographical testament to LeBon's personal and musical evolution, beginning as low-key lullaby referencing her country roots and then yielding to an anthemic, acid-rockin' celebration of escape ("we'll be on the last boat out of here," she repeats excitedly) that spirals into joyous, saxophone-fired cacophony. Le Bon's days as a farmgirl in northern Wales may be long behind her, but she's clearly held on to certain agricultural principles: namely, that the right amounts of patience and nurturing can produce glorious yields. | 2012-01-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-01-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Control Group | January 18, 2012 | 7.6 | 198d1bd6-e639-4c57-bf34-2bd971ddcac9 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Travis Stewart has bobbed and wove through many styles du jour, but his latest closes the gap between glitch and pop by using Dawn Richard, MeLo-X, and Jesse Boykins III on his euphoric compositions. | Travis Stewart has bobbed and wove through many styles du jour, but his latest closes the gap between glitch and pop by using Dawn Richard, MeLo-X, and Jesse Boykins III on his euphoric compositions. | Machinedrum: Human Energy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22387-human-energy/ | Human Energy | Let’s bow our heads for the phrase “going pop,” a now-archaic term meant to note an underground artist compromising themselves to make gobs of money and perch themselves on top of the charts. “Gobs of money” no longer applies to industry hopefuls, in a splintered post-monoculture there’s nobody to compromise to, and with postmodern retromaniacal flailing still a top priority, anything that might otherwise skew “trendy” still sounds like a future that’s dragging its ass on actually getting here. Travis Stewart’s had one of the more typical internet-era careers in that context: as Machinedrum, he spent nearly ten years being underrated for working in the margins of glitch-hop, then was pulled into the post-dubstep orbit to find a cult audience that felt bigger than it actually was. He went on to find equal renown (and more resilient praise) in a team-up with Praveen Sharma as Sepalcure. And then, because this is what happens now, he started putting out the amount of work one typically needs to do to support himself, only to find out that people expect you to keep reinventing yourself, which, whoops.
But maybe what passes for “going pop” now is the very thing that’s actually snapped Machinedrum’s style into sharper focus. And it all clicks once you hear how geeked about contemporary R&B and dance music *Human Energy *is. This is the record where the guest features start pouring in, the scattered and shattered sampled-vocal loops receding in favor of live voices. There’s also some personal-life conceptual thinking about Stewart’s New Age holistic healing and meditation that went into this somewhere, and you can hear some signs of spiritually renewed energy in the music if you listen close enough. However, that could just be the arpeggios lining up in just the right sequence to hit that emotional/physical connection in that super crowd-pleasing way.
Those guest voices mesh well with Machinedrum’s enlightenment through repetition, bringing a bit more flexibility and unpredictability than your traditional diva loop. The neo-junglist rhythms of “Do It 4 U” might not sound as fresh as they did in 2011, but all it takes is Dawn Richard’s voice descending from the clouds to reintroduce the hazy uplift that makes the best of this stuff breathe. Like her best work with the similarly future-bass-inclined Kingdom, D∆WN’s voice gets pretty altered here—rebuilt into staccato waviness, flanged, and muffled—only to have it resonate high above the chattering melodies and give the track a weight before its weightlessness burns it up in the atmosphere. And both MeLo-X (growling “let the trumpets hit”-declarations on the Diplo-one-upping, dancehall-in-space anthem “Angel Speak”) and Jesse Boykins III (finding bliss in the crystalline glitch-soul cut “Celestial Levels”), earn the gravity they give to tracks that approach the boundaries of feel-too-happy euphoria.
There’s never been a sense in Machinedrum’s work, especially from Room(s)* *onwards, that this music is just a basic distillation of trends. I’m grateful that the drive-thru speaker fidelity and impenetrable wall of pre-drop clap buildups on “Dos Puertas” at least partially muffles Kevin Hussein’s disconnected art-but-not rap. But Stewart sounds renewed in channeling his posi-vibe mindstate into making the rest of his instruments soar. The glassy bells on “Morphogen” and the ’87 mall-pop distortions of “Isometrix” capture the idealized yet unfamiliar retro vibe that eludes most vaporwave composers, and he commands his dynamics to sequence a pixellated sugar rush (“White Crown”) right before an isolation-tank meditation (“Ocean of Thought”). Even the interlude-length sketches—the breathtaking “Lapis,” the organ-driven trance of “Etheric Body Temple,” the Boards of Canada-in-a-pastel-palm-tree-t-shirt zone-out of “Surfed Out”—fill in the blanks that the threats of diminishing returns left open. Maybe this is the album where Machinedrum breaks big. If it is, there’s even less to the glitch/pop divide than we ever suspected. | 2016-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | September 27, 2016 | 7.3 | 1995f22b-fdc4-40a3-9aa4-d2a75f637893 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The debut LP from Boise, Idaho's Trevor Powers has all the sonic hallmarks of a bedroom project-- lyrics that reference childhood, thin production, reverb-- but manages to stand out from its lo-fi peers thanks to a sense of wide-eyed adventure. | The debut LP from Boise, Idaho's Trevor Powers has all the sonic hallmarks of a bedroom project-- lyrics that reference childhood, thin production, reverb-- but manages to stand out from its lo-fi peers thanks to a sense of wide-eyed adventure. | Youth Lagoon: The Year of Hibernation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15873-the-year-of-hibernation/ | The Year of Hibernation | There are a few things we've come to expect from recent, home-recorded indie pop: thin production, lyrics that reference childhood and nostalgia, a vibe of hushed intimacy, lots of reverb. Youth Lagoon, the project of 22-year-old Boise, Idaho, musician Trevor Powers, ticks all of those boxes and sounds immediately familiar the first time you put it on. "Posters", the opening track on his debut LP, The Year of Hibernation, even starts with a warbly synth to evoke the fabled VHS glow that has become a touchstone for kids of his generation. When you hear so much of this stuff, it starts to bleed together-- almost as if by design-- and you start to wonder what it would take for an artist in this realm to stand out. Powers has a few ideas.
Some of the album's appeal is straightforward. Powers writes melodies you remember and has an excellent ear for arrangement, even if the songs are rendered crudely. They generally start as whispered laments and then twist and turn until they become huge "oh oh oh" sing-alongs. The album sounds like it was recorded in a bedroom, which feels right given the small and personal details of the songs, but it strains to break free of its technical limitations. Rare is the record in this sphere that works much better loud, but The Year of Hibernation wants to be cranked. Room-filling volume allows a song like "Afternoon" to grow from its delicate, whistle-and-electric-keyboard opening into its grand, swelling conclusion, with a 4/4 marching drum and wordless vocal refrain that envelopes you like a hug.
The title of the record describes its world. These are songs about alternately hunkering down and hiding, and heading out into the world to explore and report back on what you've found. Powers is very much an innocent here, a kid with an ear for poetry who mixes striking images with the occasional groaner. The music of the Pacific Northwest feels like a key touchstone, and in many ways Youth Lagoon seems like a shy, quiet, and more hermetic version of what Modest Mouse were doing before 1997's The Lonesome Crowded West. Small town claustrophobia bumps against the possibility of wide-open spaces. Two of the first three songs reference the late-night strobe of the television and beds and walls of posters, and these are mixed with campgrounds, woods, lakes, and watching fireworks from a roof. I don't want to strain the Modest Mouse comparison, since this record doesn't have a "band" feel, but the guitar breaks also show Isaac Brock's early flair for simple melodic embellishments that complement the songs perfectly.
Dean Wareham is another guitarist with an ear for elegant guitar leads, and the comparisons with Galaxie 500 extend to Powers' cracked guitar whine and way of building clattering and echo-laden arrangements to moments of grandeur (not to mention the G500-like song "July" that outlines a disintegrating relationship against the backdrop of a sky filled with explosions.) Powers is small-town through-and-through and doesn't have a hint of Wareham's cosmopolitan sophistication, but that works for this landscape. Hibernation is a record for pulling up the covers and dreaming and then venturing out to the town to see the strange and magical world of encroaching adulthood. The anthemic "Cannons" starts off with Powers singing, "Rolling up the windows of my '96 Buick so the rain can't get inside of it," and that pretty much sums it up: The record mixes feelings of protection and safety with the tug of adventure and wraps it in compulsively listenable music that explodes at just the right moments. | 2011-09-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-09-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum / Lefse | September 29, 2011 | 8.4 | 199d95c7-368e-4dcc-a3f7-0651db07929d | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Pairing songs rooted in classic Sufi poetry with electronic abstraction, the two experimentalists blur lines between cultures and eras in a moving tribute to the multiplicity of identity. | Pairing songs rooted in classic Sufi poetry with electronic abstraction, the two experimentalists blur lines between cultures and eras in a moving tribute to the multiplicity of identity. | Ali Sethi / Nicolás Jaar: Intiha | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ali-sethi-nicolas-jaar-intiha/ | Intiha | In the spring of 2020, locked down in his New York apartment, Ali Sethi decided to turn his Instagram into a digital rehearsal space. At the same time every day, the Pakistani American singer and composer would sit down with his harmonium and tanpura, hit Instagram’s “Live” button, and spend an hour in freewheeling musical practice. He’d riff on Hindustani classical ragas, perform playful covers of South Asian classics, invite musician friends to log on and jam with him. It was during these sessions that he first began experimenting with spliced loops from Nicolás Jaar’s 2020 album Telas, improvising alaps over the Chilean American producer’s Stygian ambient soundscapes. When a mutual friend shared a recording of one of these experiments with Jaar, the producer reached out to Sethi via email. That kicked off a conversation that continues on their collaborative album Intiha, which features Sethi singing Urdu ghazals over re-worked loops from Telas, as well as new improvised sections courtesy of Jaar.
On paper, the two seem unlikely collaborators. Sethi is best known for his experiments with the ghazal, a poetic-musical form that is the South Asian analog of the blues, with Sufi spiritual renegades singing songs steeped in metaphysical pathos. He may annoy Hindustani classical purists with his innovations—ragas re-imagined for piano accompaniment, Punjabi folk blended with synth-laden indie rock—but his music rarely strays far from mainstream-adjacent sounds. His 2022 breakthrough hit “Pasoori,” a collaboration with Pakistani singer Shae Gill, melds Punjabi folk, Turkish strings, and reggaeton beats into a thrilling romantic banger that would fit seamlessly on any Spotify pop playlist.
Jaar’s music, on the other hand, seems to pull away from anything so obviously conventional or recognizable. Since breaking out with the minimalist techno of 2011’s Space Is Only Noise, he has pushed ever further into ambient abstraction. Even Against All Logic—his most accessible, dancefloor-friendly side project—bristles with harsh noise and gritty industrial textures. His solo work, particularly on Telas, resembles a primordial universe, swirling clouds of nebulous sound coming together and drifting apart in accordance with arcane physical laws.
Yet somehow, maybe because both their practices are so deeply rooted in improvisation and recontextualisation, the meeting of these vastly divergent musical worlds isn’t as jarring as you might expect. When Sethi first sent Jaar voice notes with his vocal improvisations, Jaar realized that “it was what Telas had been missing.” Perhaps that’s why the record is called Intiha. The word translates as “limit” but can also refer to the point of “termination.” Having already released Telas in both “solid” (the four-track album) and “liquid” (an interactive website that allowed users to recombine the record’s sounds) configurations, Jaar may be signaling that this is the piece’s final, definitive form.
Sethi’s intervention—with his raw, intimate vocals and Urdu couplets about yearning for a beloved other—transforms Telas’ impersonal cosmological study, imbuing it with the very human emotions of melancholy, longing, and licentious ecstasy. He takes a record with no discernable message—the only lyrics on Telas translate as “Nothing what I see/Nothing what I am/ Nothing in what it is to be nothing (nothing in nothingness)/In nothingness what I give”—and wraps it in up multiple layers of subjective meaning, mediated through the presence of an intelligent consciousness. It’s the musical version of quantum mechanics’ observer effect, or a less terrifying version of Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex.
The eponymous opener paints an inky, sub-aquatic scene with warbling bass and reverb-drenched synths before Sethi’s powerful but restrained vocals cut through the murk like a high-wattage fog lamp. On the tear-stained “Nazar Se,” the percussion plinks like water dripping onto a tin roof as he sings of locking eyes with his beloved in a soft, mildly lustful croon. “Dard”—which takes its lyrics from a Mirza Ghalib poem—is a seven-minute long paean to pathos, Sethi’s rich tenor swirling in mantra-like counterpoint to Jaar’s droning synths and nautical burbles. The chromatic blips and quasi-organic bleeps of “Lagta Nahi” and closer “Dono Jahan” invoke an empty, cavernous space station adrift among the stars. Sethi’s voice sounds lost and melancholic in this vastness, like a lonely human explorer stumbling on the ruins of an alien civilization, confronted with the artifacts of a history they cannot access or understand.
The poets that Sethi quotes here are instructive, highlighting the social, political, and personal undercurrents of songs ostensibly about romantic love and a search for the divine. There’s poet-emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal sovereign, who died in exile, and his contemporary Mirza Ghalib, whose poetry captures the sense of loss and despair that accompanied the onset of British colonialism. He also borrows from 20th-century revolutionary poets like Allama Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose verses were forged in the nationalistic cauldron of anti-colonial struggle and the eventual tragedy of Partition. Within these cataclysmic historical threads—the death throes of the old world and the betrayals of the new—Sethi weaves in more intricate personal filaments, employing what he calls the “beautiful, deliberate ambiguities” of Sufi poetry to fully express his multiple overlapping identities: a queer Muslim immigrant to the U.S., a Hindustani classical musician who loves dance music and reggaeton, a globe-trotting progressive who finds inspiration in the syncretic traditions of pre-modern South Asia.
You can hear all these different influences on lead single “Muddat,” the one song on the album with a familiar structure and recognizable melody. Jaar layers bouncy syncopated bass over traditional Indian rhythms, while Sethi sings a 19th-century verse by Ghalib about missing his lover—and nights of drunken revelry at the Mughal court—in the slightly nasal twang common to North Indian folk music. Halfway through, the song transforms from desert folk to techno workout, before fading away to ambient sonics and a melancholy whisper. It brings to mind late-night raves I’ve attended on the rooftops of one of Rajasthan’s many palatial forts, old-world decadence meeting 21st-century hedonism, the past colliding with the future at 140 BPM under the starry desert sky. | 2023-11-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country / Electronic | Other People | November 17, 2023 | 7.2 | 199df454-1665-474d-a59d-f676f890cab0 | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
The singer and songwriter’s second album sung almost entirely in Cornish is a document of a revived linguistic heritage with a breezy, ethereal touch. | The singer and songwriter’s second album sung almost entirely in Cornish is a document of a revived linguistic heritage with a breezy, ethereal touch. | Gwenno: Tresor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gwenno-tresor/ | Tresor | Gwenno Saunders’ new album Tresor is her second record sung almost entirely in Cornish, a Celtic language that bloomed around 600 C.E., and which the mothers of Cornwall passed down to their daughters for over a thousand years before the English more or less forced them to stop. Dolly Pentreath, purportedly the last fluent native speaker, died in 1777. But in 2010, the United Nations upgraded the status of Cornish from “extinct” to merely “critically endangered,” reflecting the work of the Cornish Language Partnership in standardizing written and spoken grammar for a community of about 300 speakers. The CLP also contributed to the opening of a Cornish-language nursery school, where, according to a news report, toddlers learn “to share their tegennow and play nicely in the polltewas.” Tresor, says Gwenno, is a record about her experience of becoming a mother, as well as a follow-up to her 2018 LP Le Kov, lauded for bringing Cornish to wider attention. It’s as though, having turned to face the public and taught them all she knows of this new-old language, she is relishing the opportunity once denied to Dolly Pentreath: to pass her linguistic heritage to her child.
The daughter of a Welsh mother and a Cornish father, Gwenno rose from the ashes of the retro-pop girl group the Pipettes to become an esoteric experimentalist. Every lyric on her solo albums, even the ones that cite Jung or obscure science fiction authors, is written in Cornish or Welsh. She records with close friends in rustic seaside cottages, and her artistic and activist goals are one: “Nid yw Cymru ar werth,” she sings, which translates as “Wales is not for sale.”
But Gwenno is in the business of pop artistry, not broccoli-boiling, so Tresor’s touch is light and breezy, even as its songs dive into analytical psychology, the patriarchy, the colonizer lurking up and to the right. Her richly layered instrumentation in “Anima” calls to mind Cate Le Bon, with a few more chimes and woodwinds, and a bit more space for Gwenno’s ghostly backing vocal to linger behind her melody. The riffs of “N.Y.C.A.W.” would be at home on U2’s October, as would the righteous insistence of its militant chanting.
Other moments are gentler, and more tender. The beautiful, ethereal opener “An Stevel Nowydh” begins with Gwenno welcoming listeners into her home, and singing, in Cornish: “Welcome, sit down/Fancy a cuppa?/How are you?” What a rare thing, to be welcomed so warmly into a world one knows little about, and to be won over. “When will you hear me?” Gwenno sings, in “Ardamm,” in a language spoken by, at most, a few hundred people. “When will you understand me?” In technical terms, very few listeners can understand her—but on some more vital, human level, anyone who spends time with Tresor will require no translation at all. | 2022-07-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Heavenly / PIAS | July 14, 2022 | 7.3 | 19a3cd3d-71f5-4d64-9d19-e1f5b9e9de11 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Stefan Kozalla's first original solo album in nine years, featuring contributions from Caribou, Matthew Dear, and more, is uncommonly engrossing for a techno record. Blessed with the carefree spirit of lounge music and Quiet Storm, and dressed up in tiedye, the music on Amygdala glows with an easy confidence. | Stefan Kozalla's first original solo album in nine years, featuring contributions from Caribou, Matthew Dear, and more, is uncommonly engrossing for a techno record. Blessed with the carefree spirit of lounge music and Quiet Storm, and dressed up in tiedye, the music on Amygdala glows with an easy confidence. | DJ Koze: Amygdala | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17793-dj-koze-amygdala/ | Amygdala | Stefan Kozella is a whimsical guy. His music, from his early hip-hop moment through to his minimal techno heyday, has always been suffused with warm psychedelic colour. He brings that touch to his renowned remixes, where he reshapes the tracks of others in ways that would seem totally foreign to most. His first solo album in nine years, Amygdala appears after a quiet period that produced only 2009’s remix retrospective Reincarnations, and the founding of his own Pampa imprint. The German producer’s newest original work retains the quirky spirit of Reincarnations but settles into a kaleidoscopic landscape.
In a quote that’s been haunting Amygdala, Koze has apparently claimed the LP as his Sgt. Pepper’s. Hubris aside, that’s not such an unfair comparison. Both records rethink their respective genres from the ground-up, using elements and instruments that seem unusual on first glance but quietly lay the foundation for subtle reinvention. While it’s not likely to set the world on fire, dig beneath the pastel sheen and Amygdala is uncommonly engrossing for a techno album. Its visionary ambition recalls the fertile sprawl of Villalobos’ 2003 debut Alcachofa; baroque techno blessed with the carefree spirit of lounge music and Quiet Storm, dressed up in tie-dye, the music on Amygdala glows with an easy confidence.
Amygdala feels like a painting made up of delicate brushstrokes compared to techno’s laser-cut precision. Kozalla often chooses softly expressive horns or lolling organ over electronics, as on the plush spring overture of “Royal Asscher Cut”, and numerous vocal features only add to the effect. For an artist who has spoken on record how he hates collaborating, over half of Amygdala’s tracks have a “feature” credit as he brings out a cast of charismatic vocalists from Caribou's Dan Snaith to Matthew Dear. The dips into German balladry via his retouch of the classic Hildegard Knef lament “Ich Schreib’ Dir Ein Buch”, or his own heartworn slow-jam “Das Wort”, contribute to the the hallucinatory haze of styles and voices, like scrambling through a radio dial on mushrooms.
Koze has always had a predilection for looping microscopic vocal fragments as the chief anchor for his songs. But now these ghostly voices coexist with the fleshed-out songwriting; on “Das Wort” they provide a sugary counterpoint to Dirk Von Lowtzow’s gruff German consonants, and on “Ich Schreib’ Dir ein Buch 2013”, a Motown choir’s rendition of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” is twisted into a sickly tapestry of moans and screeches. Overstuffed and overfed, each track is an embarrassment of riches with a hook or melodic morsel everywhere you look, but Kozalla never loses the plot in the overflow of ideas.
That’s probably why Amygdala feels so accomplished: songwriting. It’s not something we often think too hard about in dance music. But Koze considers every aspect, from hummable melodies to pristine soundscapes to lyrics. Wisely leaning away from dance music cliches of love and desire, *Amygdala’*s subjects veer from everyday life to grappling with nostalgia and self-identity. Its most charming moment comes with Matthew Dear’s quirky vocal spot on “My Plans”. In a typically alien cadence, Dear addresses the anxiety of a world where everything seems to be going wrong with the cheeky line: “When I notice the world is falling apart/ I will run a bath/ And why does this make me laugh?” It’s a fine motto for Koze himself, never losing sight of his infectious sense of humour or complete resistance to trends. With Amygdala, he's created an album that invites obsession. | 2013-03-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-03-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pampa | March 27, 2013 | 8.6 | 19a75126-56bd-4e9c-9b66-9ee2ff3bd71b | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
Written amid a period of intra-band tumult, Dilly Dally’s thrilling second album foregrounds frontwoman Kate Monks’ singular voice as she riffs on themes of power, sex, confidence, and self-care. | Written amid a period of intra-band tumult, Dilly Dally’s thrilling second album foregrounds frontwoman Kate Monks’ singular voice as she riffs on themes of power, sex, confidence, and self-care. | Dilly Dally: Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dilly-dally-heaven/ | Heaven | In 2009, when high school pals Kate Monks and Liz Ball moved to Toronto to chase their rock’n’roll dreams, they got identical Dilly Dally tattoos even before properly starting the band. “The artist was like, ‘I really don’t think you should get these tattoos,’” Monks recently recalled in an interview. “And we were like, ‘We’re gonna be the biggest band in the world.’ We thought we were Oasis.” In pure feeling, if not quite fame, Dilly Dally’s ambition matches that conviction.
Every grain of Monks’ exhilarating voice tells a story: The singer, guitarist, and Dilly Dally’s primary songwriter is always bursting past a calculable edge; she is an amplifier turned to 11. Like a noise musician pushing power electronics into the red, Monks is an emotionally blown-out singer, and in her tattered voice she cracks, soars, gnarls, growls, drawls, slurs, rasps. Pain radiates through her and into the band’s songs, like the glow of burning charcoal.
Heaven is the quartet’s thrilling second album, and while Dilly Dally might still formally recall 1990s alt-rock à la Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, their songs are noisier, more metallic, deconstructed. Monks’ raw rapture sets the comparisons at some remove. With her unwavering pop sense and keen way with a chorus, you can tell she is a woman who learned guitar through a Beatles songbook. Dilly Dally once covered Drake’s “Know Yourself” to delightfully grotesque effect, and as their fellow 6 dweller has posited: It’s not about who did it first. It’s about who did it right.
Dilly Dally wrote Heaven amid a period of intra-band tumult, and even as the album breathes deeply, its best songs betray those struggles. Heaven riffs on themes of power and sex, of confidence and self-care. But self-care is not soft on Heaven; it’s shrill, life or death, a leaden riff. These complex songs exhibit the care as well as the bleak cause that necessitated it. The roiling early highlight “Doom” swings from hushed dream-pop singing to dread-laden, industrial metal; the lyrics spin ominous uncertainty into New Age affirmations. “Remember who you are/And where you’re gonna be/What’s inside you/Is sacred,” Monks sings, contorting the last word into a guttural growl. On “Sober Motel,” Dilly Dally capture the overwhelming, nearly transcendent clarity that sobriety can beget. “When I’m sober/My soul comes screechin’,” Monks hollers, riding along the final careening syllables as if they were the last roller coaster on Earth.
“Sober Motel” feels of a piece with “Marijuana,” a song whose vividness tears you apart. As Monks sings sublimely of “angels” who “got ripped and torn apart inside of me,” heaven is clearly a joint: This is a woman’s impassioned love song to weed and its anxiety-quelling properties. “Couldn’t believe/What I see,” Monks sings on the ecstatic chorus, just before it crashes. “Couldn’t believe/Nothing but what’s inside.” As the song breaks down gloriously, “Marijuana” adopts a destabilizing feeling that is patently gorgeous, as if attuned to a deeper sensitivity of sound. Monks has said, “If the band died and went to heaven, this is the album we would make,” and “Marijuana” is indeed its most heavenly moment.
Monks penned “Sober Motel” as a “celebration of sobriety,” she wrote in a statement, “in the midst of an industry that is anything but.” Her hope was that its lyrics would become a mantra of mindfulness for the group, whose members have struggled with alcohol on the road, and “create a sort of protective layer around the band” at every show. Much of Heaven feels restorative in that way. But with “Sober Motel” especially, Dilly Dally subtly chip back at the ways music is exploited under capitalism. Its greatest element, as ever, is Monks’ rare voice—jagged, on fire, intoxicating itself. | 2018-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | September 14, 2018 | 7.8 | 19adafff-06ca-498a-8497-1029fbf298b0 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The Turkish singer Gaye Su Akyol has emerged at the fore of her country’s revitalized music scene in recent years. Her new album mixes Turkish modes and scales with grunge, surf rock, and psychedelia. | The Turkish singer Gaye Su Akyol has emerged at the fore of her country’s revitalized music scene in recent years. Her new album mixes Turkish modes and scales with grunge, surf rock, and psychedelia. | Gaye Su Akyol: Hologram İmparatorluğu | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22662-hologram-imparatorlugu/ | Hologram İmparatorluğu | While Turkey boasted its own heady rock scene during the late 1960s, the Anatolian Invasion didn’t make much of a dent in the West. Were it not for the tireless digging and reissues from imprints like Andy Votel’s Finders Keepers, Pharaway Sounds, and Sublime Frequencies, we still might know little about Turkish rock. Sure, the searing strings of Erkin Koray, Muhlis Akarsu, and the like may have appealed to Woodstock-era rock fans, but the thundering drums underpinning them led to a Turkish revival of sorts decades later, with everyone from the Gaslamp Killer and the Weeknd to Timbaland sampling Turkish music.
But back home, a military coup in 1980 led to Turkey’s rock scene being repressed to the point of near-extinction. It’s only recently that it’s begun emanating beyond the borders, though with President Erdoğan’s new crackdowns on dissent, one fears it might be a short-lived renaissance. Ever since her 2014 debut, vocalist Gaye Su Akyol has emerged at the fore this revitalized music scene, alongside acts like Ayyuka and Büyük Ev Ablukada. The music is unmistakably Turkish in its heritage—the modes and scales to the guitars mimic the baglama and ud—but there are rock influences as well, from Nevermind and Nick Cave to “White Rabbit.” This confluence of East and West makes Hologram Ĭmparatorluğu an intriguing listen even to those who don’t speak Turkish.
A dizzying updraft of buzzing strings immediately makes “Hologram” soar. But while the music alludes to transcendence and the song, on the surface, is about love, it’s also about seeing through such an illusion (fitting for a group whose live shows often feature Akyol and band in masks and an album title that translates as “Hologram Empire”). “Thought I had a new world found/I was fooled,” Akyol sings, but listen closer and Akyol’s august voice also hints at capture and escape, which feels both surreal and real at once: “I am being seized/Two baby finches, let’s escape there/To Pluto.”
Akyol’s father is famous Turkish painter Muzaffer Akyol, and in his vivid, dreamlike canvases, there’s an antecedent for his daughter’s language. On the simmering, bandoneon-laced “Anlasana Sana Aşiğim,” Akyol’s lyrics on love are by-turns strange and tactile: “I’ve become a butterfly/Come and find me/Black holes are everywhere/Confessions all clandestine.” The Bad Seeds influence comes through on the noir-ish throb and reverb guitar riffs of “Dünya kaleska,” and Akyol’s lyrics convey bleakness worthy of Cave.
Snaking hand percussion and rattles gives “Eski tüfek” a driving pulse, matched by the surf guitars of her backing band, Bubituzak. Their guitars are as comfortable evoking the likes of Erkin Koray as they are Dick Dale and Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western themes, heightening the drama of Akyol’s songs. Closer “Berdus” rides a lashing guitar riff and percolating bassline that gives the song a steady building rhythm, as Akyol imagines herself lost in the woods like Little Red Riding Hood and conjures wolves and bears alike. Just don’t mistake it for a fairytale ending. For as the music fades away, Akyol’s last line leaves a pejorative image for her fellow countrymen, and, well, everyone: “Yesterday’s piece of shit has become king over our head.” | 2016-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Global | Glitterbeat | December 14, 2016 | 7.4 | 19aff208-88a7-40a2-922e-2317a0a86e8f | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Falling somewhere between Bill Frisell’s basement and the Mediterranean Sea, the debut from this instrumental Brooklyn trio marks a promising arrival. | Falling somewhere between Bill Frisell’s basement and the Mediterranean Sea, the debut from this instrumental Brooklyn trio marks a promising arrival. | Scree: *Jasmine on a Night in July * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/scree-jasmine-on-a-night-in-july/ | Jasmine on a Night in July | On a first spin, Brooklyn trio Scree’s debut, Jasmine on a Night in July, scans as a promising little electric guitar record. Ryan El-Solh’s subtle, trebly strings touch almost every corner, whether opening the fractured waltz “Beautiful Days” with stunted chords that curl like question marks or stepping out for a solo that, on the title track, suggests late jazz great Jim Hall winking back through the cosmos. At its best, El-Solh’s tone suggests the distorted gleam of an unpolished pearl; it also evokes that sense of distant longing the Germans call Weltschmerz, sweetness twinkling ever so slightly through the dusk. Chet Atkins and Omar Khorshid, Bill Frisell and Mary Halvorson: These players—each with individual, distinct senses of sound and timing—seem essential to El-Solh’s personal pantheon. He’s not there yet, but his playing on Jasmine makes you remember the name, search for the quizzical solo album, maybe bookmark the Bandcamp.
Listen again and again, and something deeper soon emerges through these nine tracks: Scree are a spellbinding and selfless new trio, with a chemistry that belies debut status. Double bassist Carmen Rothwell and drummer Jason Burger—ringers with their own songs and extensive folk-rock credits, respectively—work in conversation with El-Solh, whose instrument is simply the most vocal and pronounced here. It is telling that the 20-second collage that serves as the album’s invocation, assembled by producer Ari Chersky from Scree’s improvisational scree, is all long swirling tones and pointillist percussion, no guitar. When El-Solh’s arid Morricone melody spills suddenly through that din, the creation myth is clear: This wouldn’t exist without all of them, which is exactly what makes Jasmine on a Night in July much more than a promising little electric guitar record.
The key to this instrumental integration is Scree’s insistence in always slipping off the beat, as though every meter has a steep and slightly curving face, as hard to mount as El Cap. Rothwell, Burger, and El-Solh are collectively the rhythm section and a rhythm-less section, the haze emanating from the implied beat. “Fatigue” is the feat here. Lap-steel sighs, bittersweet piano plinks, and bowed bass that feels like both a shrug and a hug unspool beneath El-Solh’s rambling lead. Soon, Burger’s drums give momentary structure to these overlapping moans, the melody tightening around his rumble like a slowly contracting muscle. Just as quickly, it all relaxes, oozing back over the drums like a group sigh. Somewhere between ECM’s famous austerity and Windham Hill’s endless vibes, “Fatigue” packs a life of possibility and doubt into 145 seconds. What is the difference between sitting still or being pushed along, between absolute torpor and ceaseless anxiety? “Fatigue” never finds the answer.
As El-Solh penned the pieces that shape Jasmine on a Night in July, he was reading the work of Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian poet whose childhood home in Galilee was upended by Israeli forces. Though Darwish was an eventual political prisoner and enduring “resistance poet,” his work often mined a sentimental ambiguity, longing for a better past as it squinted at the wobbly future. “I am only my steps, and you are both my compass and my chasm,” he once wrote, loading a universe of equivocation into a single sentence. Scree thrive in those emotional interstices. The brief piano-and-percussion beauty “Wind and Sand” feels like an agitated daydream, the distant organ suggesting background unease you cannot escape. The organ is as playful as a carnival song during “Fresh Bread,” Burger’s drums almost peppy. But there is a lingering sadness, too, especially in El-Solh’s pinched electric notes and the way Burger drifts out of and races back into the meter. This is the memory of sustenance, of sated happiness, not the thing itself.
Almost four years ago, Scree debuted with Live at the Owl, a short set capturing a 2018 night in a small Brooklyn room. Listening back, the parts sound mostly the same—El-Solh’s guitar, suspended somewhere between the Mediterranean Sea and Frisell’s basement; Rothwell’s upright, lumbering and inquisitive like a grazing Quarter Horse; Burger’s drums, slowing and speeding the beat like he’s navigating hairpin turns. What’s not there, though, is the sense of synchronous feeling that makes their debut so enchanting, as if all three are singing the same wordless story in uncanny harmony. Not unlike Tortoise and Labradford in the mid ’90s, Jasmine on a Night in July feels like the proper introduction to a significant new piece of the American instrumental rock landscape, familiar threads woven into fabric that feels novel. | 2023-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Ruination | April 5, 2023 | 7.7 | 19b50868-a766-46f6-8af5-4a08950fe4fa | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The Odd Future project's 2010 album has been re-shuffled and remastered with two additional tracks for release on Fat Possum. | The Odd Future project's 2010 album has been re-shuffled and remastered with two additional tracks for release on Fat Possum. | MellowHype: BlackenedWhite [Reissue] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15686-blackenedwhite-reissue/ | BlackenedWhite [Reissue] | When MellowHype first released BlackenedWhite on Halloween of last year, the world was a very different place for Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. Events that would eventually cement the collective's budding stardom-- Tyler, the Creator's "Yonkers" becoming a viral sensation, their seminal performance on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon", Tyler inking a deal with XL-- were either weeks or months away. The group at large was still strictly a sensation in a small pocket of the Internet, somewhat mysterious, amorphous, confusing and-- as anyone who tried to grab an album from Odd Future's official blog only to be met with a broken download link could attest-- amateur.
Released after that initial rush of online hype, BlackenedWhite (along with Domo Genesis' Rolling Papers) was, if not an introduction point, at least the first new music released since many had initially heard of Odd Future. Described on the crew's Tumblr as "The Perfect Soundtrack For Mobbing On A Dark Halloween Night," and littered with references to dead cops, the album easily fit into the general perception of what Odd Future's music was about.
So here we are, some eight-and-a-half months later, and BlackenedWhite has now been remastered, rearranged, and re-released by Fat Possum into a market where Tyler easily coexists next to pop stars. And yet, oddly enough, MellowHype's role is almost precisely the same, again representing the first new release by Odd Future since being embraced again by a wider audience. But where in October 2010 it might've been hard to pinpoint exactly where MellowHype stood in relation to guys like Tyler or Domo or Earl Sweatshirt, time has allowed the different personas within Odd Future to distinguish themselves.
Hodgy Beats' wild-eyed glare can be seen next to Tyler on stage during Odd Future's shows, and it's easy to see how he could be thought of as Tyler's sidekick. And in fact, when people talk about Odd Future on a macro level, especially when that discussion is boiled down to the more controversial elements of the music, who they're really talking about is Tyler (and, to a lesser extent, Earl), oftentimes glossing over the individual members of the group. Part of that is by design, of course: Tyler has always been front and center, and not only is his star power blatantly obvious, but he feeds on being on a lightning rod. But lost in the shuffle is that the other arms of Odd Future are putting out music that is far from Tyler's trolling self-autopsies, which is both a good and bad thing.
As a rapper, Hodgy seems mostly concerned with stringing together words on the basis of their sound in rapid-fire fashion. This is seen most obviously in "Igotagun" and "64", the two new tracks added to Blackenedwhite for the reissue. He doesn't have Tyler's focus or imagination, but his garden-variety shit talking, combined with gleefully inhabited fables of drug pushing and cop killing, bring the sort of levity that you would expect from a group of skate-punk "Jackass" descendents, and in a way that's much less obnoxious than, say, Tyler's "Bitch Suck Dick". What can't be found here are all the things that upset people about Odd Future, namely Tyler's reliance on slurs and his elaborate rape fantasies. And though Hodgy doesn't possess Earl's effortless rapping skill (who does?), his penchant for tongue-twisting alliteration further separates him from the stoned flows of fellow Odd Future stoners Domo and Mike G.
The flipside of that is when Tyler storms through on "Fuck the Police" (now rebranded for Best Buys as "F666 the Police"), the effect is slightly jarring. While Hodgy's Flocka homage and producer Left Brain's turn as Timbaland circa "We Need a Resolution" work just fine, Tyler tells a strikingly vivid story of getting pulled over and murdering a cop in what is easily the most accomplished verse on the album. BlackenedWhite is the most fun Odd Future release (excepting, arguably, the collaborative mixtapes) and it's one of the easier to digest, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny in the way that Tyler's or Earl's work does.
This cleaned up version of the album also puts a stronger concentration on the Left Brain productions that lean heavy on Southern rap. Replacing the distinctly Tyler-esque "Chordaroy" and "Loco", as well as the trifles "Stripclub" and "Gram", are the aforementioned new tracks, both of which call back to the beats that the Neptunes used to give to Clipse. The result is both a more succinct and cohesive full-length. The catch-22 for MellowHype is that while their centrism certainly has its merits, their music is unlikely to convert anyone that has, at this point, already written off Odd Future. Which leaves them with a solid, fun rap album to satiate a feverish cult and a growing number of casual fans. Things, all told, could be worse. | 2011-07-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-07-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Fat Possum | July 29, 2011 | 8 | 19b6ccb6-532b-48a5-8207-79e1577a0f4f | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
The British experimental rock group Adult Jazz tackle themes of gender and the body's changing place in society on their sophomore outing. | The British experimental rock group Adult Jazz tackle themes of gender and the body's changing place in society on their sophomore outing. | Adult Jazz: Earrings Off! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21936-earrings-off/ | Earrings Off! | The British experimental rock group Adult Jazz has no problem cramming their music with ideas and lofty goals. In interviews describing their 2014 debut Gist Is, they name dropped Hermann Hesse, criticized religious institutions, and said that the album tackled everything from morality to empathy and the efficacy of communication itself. NPR even followed suit when reviewing the record, saying it was concerned with “the search for meaning in life.” Two years later they’ve released their sophomore follow-up, *Earrings Off! *a record that equally embraces the same theory-laden attitude. *Earrings Off! *is meant to analyze the complexities of gender and the body’s changing place in society. In descriptions of the album, the band has stressed the record’s interest in “the possibility of authenticity” in a society that rewards normative behavior.
It’s all very interesting to read about what an album is supposed to do, and there is precedent for the political thrust of a piece of music to affect the conversation it’s entering, but these intentions can so often backfire. (PJ Harvey’s *The Hope Six Demolition Project *being a case study for this fine line). The cleverness and unique playfulness of Adult Jazz's debut Gist Is helped steer it away from the cliff of self-indulgence and pretension. *Earrings Off! *edges much closer to that drop-off than its predecessor, burdened by often-silly lyrics and a sound that is a bit more derivative than their last record would suggest.
What still remains uniquely rewarding about Adult Jazz’s music is the construction of their sound. They use a trombone, cello, processed vocals, and a menagerie of sample to tread the line between acidic minimalism and bubbly exuberance in confoundingly expert ways. Of this album’s seven songs, three of them (“(Cry for Time Off,)” “(Cry for Coherence),” and “(Cry for Home)”) are short sonic sketches, serving as the most interesting moments in the otherwise slow pace of *Earrings Off!’s *24 minutes. These three songs mostly focus on single sounds—a helium-cracked vocal cry, dissonant string loops, and the bated breath of a brass instrument. These pared-down constructions generate more and more detail on repeated listens. The album’s four other songs attempt to mimic this but come off as overwrought and heavy handed at best.
The difficult six minutes of “Pumped From Above” exploits corrosive horn sounds and maddeningly uneven drumming for all their worth. It could almost sound like a facsimile of a Peter Brötzman composition, but the arrangement of the chaotic noises can be curiously predictable. The singing is usually so swaddled by the noises that Harry Burgess’ words are obscured, but when you look at what he’s saying on paper it can make the experience even more cringe-inducing. Take this passage: “God cannot be softening/He beats strong with iron wings/Kneeling sporty chest pumping/Before the Alpha-lord.” You can open up any book of poems by Hart Crane or Dylan Thomas and find a similar impenetrability. But these words and images have the feeling of being selected at random; their difficulty doesn't have a sense of clarity or deeper meaning and incomprehensibility isn't the same as seriousness.
This is a running thread through the album that detracts from where Earrings Off! improves upon their debut. They’ve learned how to create hooks without sacrificing from their outre sounds. This is best accomplished in the title track (which pleasantly confirms any of the Dirty Projectors comparisons) and “Eggshell.” But even the pleasure of craft can melt away when you figure out amidst the textures these words are ringing out: “And if he's 1940's/He whistles through a meadow.” It makes it impossible for the album to actually engage with the conversation it proposes, and often made me wish I could ignore the words and allow the singing to be another instrument. *Earrings Off! *is filled with these sorts of growing pains, ones that hopefully point to brighter pastures sometime soon for this promising band. | 2016-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tri Angle | May 26, 2016 | 6 | 19b7a034-08ba-44ea-afbc-f17ad20e79aa | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Smashing Pumpkins soundalikes from L.A. spin spiderweb-rock and scream a lot. | Smashing Pumpkins soundalikes from L.A. spin spiderweb-rock and scream a lot. | Silversun Pickups: Carnavas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9428-carnavas/ | Carnavas | Given Silver Lake's fashion-forwardness (also absurdity), it makes sense that recent grunge-on-the-runway anticipates a 1990s throwback band straight out of aforementioned L.A. hipster pocket. Silversun Pickups, named in homage to a Sunset/Silver Lake liquor store, spurn the Beach Boys and Thrills approach to California, channeling, instead, the weirder darkness of acts like Autolux. Carnavas, the band's first full-length, comes off as something of an aural spiderweb: glinty, silvery, and vaguely treacherous. Their spidery technique for entrapping listeners is this: wrap them up in familiar noises toward which they feel more-or-less favorably and count on imminent stupo
Carnavas scores points for constructing dreamlike aural shrouds. Those nostalgic for Smashing Pumpkins tunes of yesteryear will find them nestled inside the minutes (and there are so many minutes) of "Lazy Eye". Those desirous of music to play while gazing at Magic Eye pics will appreciate the record for its fuzzy blur; it's possible that they'll even find this album extremely rewarding, and find hidden, wonderful things in it, like crosses or hearts, or whatever it is Magic Eye creators are putting in their images these days.
Maybe it's a prereq for making this sort of racket, but Silversun Pickups too often teeter into melodrama. Consider "Future Foe Scenarios", which seems like it could be about a village raising fists to heaven after plagues of something (Locusts? Boils?), dissolving into screams of "I must stop drinking". And "Common Reactor", which also winds up a screaming, terrifying display of pathos.
Unfortunately, the music fails to justify the histrionics. Songs start out exciting, drag on for too long, and/or become screaming. Lyrics seem like they're poking fun at Corgan, or impersonating a high school version of him: compare "Rhinoceros" ("Open your eyes-- to these I must lie?") and "Tempo" ("She said don't open your eyes/ Don't open your eyes/ And said goodnight"). Words elsewhere are wholly incomprehensible ("What was that scar situated from afar/ What was that light integrated in your mind" on "Well Thought Out Twinkles"). Other times-- OK a lot of times-- Brian Aubert's emo-boy voice gets to be too much, worse than even Corgan's barely-tolerable nasal delivery. Girl parts, offered by bassist Nikki Monninger, are welcome respite; also, she's way cute. In the end, despite the band's valiant and respectable effort, Carnavas ends up too unfocused, too rambly, too boring to make any lasting impressions. | 2006-10-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2006-10-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Dangerbird | October 2, 2006 | 5 | 19bbab4f-752b-4a15-96a3-d21d7c3e1633 | Pitchfork | null |
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Since 2003's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez has created increasingly colossal records. His latest, a double album that serves as a framework to realize the marvelous capability of our dreams and daily lives, could be his best record yet. | Since 2003's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez has created increasingly colossal records. His latest, a double album that serves as a framework to realize the marvelous capability of our dreams and daily lives, could be his best record yet. | M83: Hurry Up, We're Dreaming | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15881-hurry-up-were-dreaming/ | Hurry Up, We're Dreaming | Late last year, Anthony Gonzalez announced his next album was almost complete and would be "very, very, very epic." With all due respect, consider the redundancy of that statement: Since 2003 breakthrough Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, every new and increasingly colossal M83 studio record has led to widespread crowdsourcing of synonyms for "epic." What exactly was he promising other than simply another album?
Well, throughout the past decade, the 30-year old Gonzalez has honored the tremendous impact of growing up during the golden age of CD buying by implicitly serving as a patron saint for those who treat the weekly trip to the record store as a pilgrimage and still covet the album as a physical proposition: His output always comes stylishly packaged, with cover art worth obsessing over and credits that need to be scoured in order to spot the guest appearances. Unsurprisingly, he ups the ante here by aspiring to what is still the paradigm of artistic permanence, both in terms of legacy and tactility: the double album, that occasionally ambitious, usually decadent, and almost always fascinatingly flawed endeavor of musicians convinced (rightfully or otherwise) that they're at the peak of their own powers. Hurry Up, We're Dreaming might be all of those things, but above all else, it's the best M83 record yet.
But let's talk about restraint for a moment: While each side of Hurry Up would be oddly slight for an M83 album, the demands of its 74-minute runtime are hardly daunting. It's actually the easiest M83 album to consume in one sitting, a reverse accumulation of past strengths that makes for Gonzalez's most compact and combustive music yet. He continues the path set by Saturdays=Youth by easing out of the mini-movie business in exchange for pop songcraft, while trading that LP's pretty-in-pink pastels for the urban neons and fluorescents of Before the Dawn Heals Us and embodying Dead Cities' mile-wide expansiveness.
But the most crucial change is how touring with the likes of Depeche Mode has inspired a newfound showmanship in his vocals: Previously, Gonzalez enlisted outside help, piped in plot-advancing narratives, or sang in a low, tentative murmur that submitted to its massive surroundings. But here, within the first minutes of "Intro", he's matching blows with the juggernaut bellow of Zola Jesus' Nika Danilova to the point where it's much tougher than you'd think to tell them apart. It's really not too different from the first chords of "Planet Telex" or Lil Wayne's "Tha Mobb" in terms of being an unmistakable sign that you're going to be listening to this familiar act differently.
M83 have never stood for half measures in any aspect, but Gonzalez is absolutely going for it here in a way that sheds new light on known tricks: The hair-triggered drum rolls of "New Map" recall Before the Dawn's searing car-crash fantasy "Don't Save Us From the Flames", but Gonzalez's nervy punctuation at the end of each line sells the idea that he's along for the ride this time rather than being a passive observer. Dead Cities' "In Church" was the sound of blissful acquiescence, but amidst the swaggering synth-metal of "Midnight City", Gonzalez hollers, "The city is my church!" empowered and present, finding a voice for the evangelical zeal always implicit in his work.
Gonzalez has stressed Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness as a major inspiration (and by extension, its forefather, The Wall), and its influence can be spotted in Hurry Up's power ballads "Wait" and "My Tears Are Becoming a Sea", sumptuously arranged tracks that could still be played solo on an acoustic guitar. Thankfully, he didn't retain much from "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" or "The Trial", and rather than one man lashing out at the world from the safety of his own thematic construct, you feel that Gonzalez is trying to connect with it.
As such, the moments of indulgence are in service of the album's most endearing and silly emotions: Some might consider "Raconte-Moi Une Histoire" a throwaway because it's "the one about a magic frog," but besides embodying the whiplash emotions of youth by following the magnificent melancholy of "Wait", its almost eerie brightness and Windows 95-era sound effects capture a technological optimism better than a lot of artists who are trying only to do that. Meanwhile, "Year One, One UFO" attempts to distill the percussion-mad, organic ecstasy of Vision Creation Newsun into three minutes, while on the opposite side, "Claudia Lewis" and "OK Pal" show a mastery of slapbass-poppin', corporate funk-rock comparable to Ford & Lopatin or Cut Copy without the twinge of pastiche.
As with any double album, there's a temptation to strip away the instrumental tracks or simply pick the best 50 minutes for your daily commute. But the interludes here are intended to be every bit as purposeful as the singles: The shorter the track, the more evocative its title ("Where the Boats Go", "Train to Pluton", "Another Wave From You"). While many of them stand as intriguing meditations on their own merits, they reinforce Hurry Up's intentions to be an immersive universe-- check in whenever you want, but the magic's in the exploratory phases. And why leave out what falls in between, like the thermite burst of the two-minute "This Bright Flash" or the stately "When Will You Come Home?"-to-"My Tears Are Becoming a Sea" triptych that serves as the connective transit between Side 1 and Side 2.
Then again, I can't blame anyone who takes shortcuts, since the traditionally structured songs here are some of the most thrilling pop music released this year. The heavily saturated synths Gonzalez favored early in his career invited plenty of My Bloody Valentine comparisons, but whereas pure shoegaze of that nature attempts to overwhelm and obliterate, Hurry Up is like a sonic planetarium, penetrable and totally geared toward enhancing the user experience. Few artists make more ingenious use of the sheer physics of rock to this extent-- defining which synth pads strike which emotional pressure points, using percussion as explosives rather than mere elements of timekeeping, coiling the tension of a verse to make every chorus feel phenomenally cathartic even without any words.
At this point in the year, you'd think a saxophone solo would have lost all the novelty it had accumulated over decades of disuse, yet when one pops up at the end of "Midnight City", it triumphantly squires the track out at the highest point possible. After a streak of staccato guitar chords and splashy cymbal hits rev up "Reunion", the shouts from its chorus could come from a soccer stadium or a speedboat chase. "Intro" is typical of Gonzalez's love for zero-gravity arrangements of massed choirs and cathedral reverb, but there's nothing buzzy or clouded about it-- as high as he takes things, you can still see everything underneath in crisp, butterflies-inducing depth and detail.
And then there's "Steve McQueen", which somehow makes the preceding hour of music feel like its prelude. Point blank, it's as close as most of us will get to being strapped inside a space shuttle, as midway through an almost unbearably tensile verse, you don't hear drums so much as afterburners kicking in. By the chorus, it simply cannot go further up, and it explodes at the perfect moment into hair-metal guitar chords and synth-led skywriting. And yet, because it's almost impossible to say what "Steve McQueen" is about (certainly not the actor), it's capable of glorifying anything you choose-- a slow motion shot of Kirk Gibson rounding the bases in the 1988 World Series, a holiday fireworks display, or getting into your car and simply celebrating the end of an exhausting day.
Is it a lot to handle? Of course, and those who have yet to connect with M83 may wonder if the sort of incapacitating longing expressed by "Wait" can possibly be experienced by anyone over the age of 16 or whether they'll ever be able to afford the stereo equipment seemingly required for its intended effect. But remember, it's called Hurry Up, We're Dreaming: It doesn't attempt to be a comprehensive or even realistic purview of the human experience, and lord knows there's plenty out there that's meant to capture small moments.
It's easy to mistrust something so irrepressibly optimistic about the affective possibilities of music and to attribute these feelings to the domain of some "other," whether it's the 1980s, teenhood, or a pop product. Does it share some sort of commonality with "Born This Way" or "Firework", or any other entry from 2011's chart music that attempts to convince you of your own superstardom? Surely, but Gonzalez never comes off like he's selling a brand, a lifestyle, or even himself-- his lyrics remain as opaque as ever. Hurry Up instead serves as a framework to realize the marvelous capability of our dreams and daily lives, should we be open to experiencing it. | 2011-10-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-10-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Mute | October 17, 2011 | 9.1 | 19bebc1d-8904-4214-9127-99d385fac218 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Now two decades into his career, the Huddersfield native balances the brashness of bassline house with the swing of 2-step, demonstrating his own quiet mastery of UK garage’s many strands. | Now two decades into his career, the Huddersfield native balances the brashness of bassline house with the swing of 2-step, demonstrating his own quiet mastery of UK garage’s many strands. | DJ Q: Est. 2003 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-q-est-2003/ | Est. 2003 | It doesn’t take much more than the slimmest crack of sunlight to breach England’s clouds each spring for the perennial revival of the sound of the summer to be pronounced. It's not the hum of lawnmowers, or the smatter of birdsong in the air. It's not even Drake. It is, of course, UK garage music. Without waver, it endures; and in its wake come the same debates. For every grizzled old raver pointing out (rightly enough) that garage actually never really went away, there’ll be a fresh upstart digging deep into Discogs lists and pulling out fistfuls of sweet, skippy, sticky (and Sticky) beats. DJ Q sits squarely, and humbly, between these extremes—plugging away.
Growing up in Huddersfield, a market town plonked roughly midway between Manchester, Leeds, and the bassline-house mecca of Sheffield, Q made his first production forays in the heady realms of speed garage and its rowdier, wompier cousin, bassline. A few years in, he switched tack and took on a slinky 2-step swing. He’s made tracks that have entered both canons. In one, there’s bassline chant-starter “You Wot!,” which sounds exactly as you might imagine from the title; in the other, the silky rumble and marimbas of “Brandy & Coke.” With TQD (a supergroup of sorts, alongside Flava D and Royal-T), he’s also helped catalyze a surging, self-sufficient jump-up bassline scene that leaves a trail of sweat and sore jaws across satellite towns and European festival tents alike. Now two decades into his career, on Est. 2003 DJ Q presents a survey not so much of his output to date—this is no retrospective—but of his own quiet mastery of UK garage’s many nebulous strands.
Most of the album—11 tight, spring-loaded cuts, three minutes and change apiece—was written during the months of COVID-19 lockdowns, when clubs were shut and DJs were left asking “Now what?” And while the resulting tracks aren’t defined by that lingering tension, it certainly seeps through on occasion: in the restrained 4x4 bounce of “It’s You” (which could barely be further from its rowdy mid-noughties bassline namesake), or in the distant, clanking keys and stretched, near-lethargic vocals of the Todd Edwards collab “Sweet Day.” Mostly, though, there’s little doubt about the staying power of the dancefloor. Tracks like “Speedy Gs” (with Finn) or the Shola Ama-assisted “I Can’t Stay” conjure memories of the club with exacting precision. The former is giddy with organ stabs and a rushing undertow of sub-bass and sirens, while the latter’s soulful curls cry out for a chorus of clubbers to belt them full-throated into the rafters.
The best moments come when Q offers a sideways glance; as in the final minute of opener “Pipe Dreams,” when the formerly warbling bassline ducks out and returns with a grating, gritty thump, or on the vocal gymnastics and doubled-up kicks of “All That I Could.” His ability to cross-pollinate styles—a dash of bassline squeal here, some hardcore wails there—with relatively little fanfare, and without ever sounding contrived, gives the whole thing a timeless quality. It sounds fun without sounding tired. It’s the same quality that, come next spring, will start the whole cycle off again. This time, with a few more DJ Q tunes in the canon to pick from. | 2022-09-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Local Action | September 27, 2022 | 7.1 | 19bfe926-1d82-4e02-8b4a-829f150f7319 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
Comprising members of Liturgy, Two Prong, and Eartheater, Guardian Alien's new LP builds one titanic, steady wall of sound over 37 minutes that never shifts dramatically. Instead, it thickens, lightens, surges, subsides; it's mantra music that commands the senses. | Comprising members of Liturgy, Two Prong, and Eartheater, Guardian Alien's new LP builds one titanic, steady wall of sound over 37 minutes that never shifts dramatically. Instead, it thickens, lightens, surges, subsides; it's mantra music that commands the senses. | Guardian Alien: See the World Given to a One Love Entity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16890-see-the-world-given-to-a-one-love-entity/ | See the World Given to a One Love Entity | The murky, primordial drone rock that Guardian Alien make is difficult to talk about directly, mostly because it wants to transport you somewhere ecstatically preverbal. At its best, it renders you glassy-eyed, interacting with its texture the way you would a particularly plush rug after multiple bong rips: pure, mindless feel. The band builds one titanic, steady wall of sound over 37 minutes that never shifts dramatically: It thickens, lightens, surges, subsides. It's mantra music, and if it succeeds, it commands your senses on a level that surpasses faculties of articulation entirely.
The band, which formed in 2010, has roots in several other heady, transcendence-focused efforts. Its main member is Greg Fox, the calmly superhuman drummer who departed from art-metal outfit Liturgy last year, dealing such a crippling blow to that band's DNA that they still appear to be sorting out how to continue existing. (They have currently opted for a brutal drum machine that almost works as a bleak meta-joke about his irreplaceability.) Lead singer and guitarist Alex Drewchin of the psych-pop band Eartheater claims heavy influence from Sufi mysticism. Turner Williams, Jr., performs on a woody, note-bending zither instrument called a shaahi baja. Other sometime members include guitarist Bernard Gann, still of Liturgy, and bassist Eli Winograd, who plays in a noise-folk band called Two Prong. Together, they produce a sweat-slicked, heavily perfumed chemistry, an opium den with ventilation problems.
The single composition that is See the World Given to a One Love Entity looks as aimless as a screensaver on the surface, but the outfit maintains a light-fingered grip on the music's pulse, steering it through extended soloing passages without slackening the album's basic through-line. The record glows with the intensity of their shared concentration. It is an experience to be taken whole or not at all: There is about as much use in noting the music's developments as there is in narrating the details of an acid trip. An upsetting asphyxiated baby-goat-like noise at about the 21:20 mark surfaces from the bottom of the music's texture, floats to the top, and sends a shiver up your spine. Then, it stops, the drone closes back in, and the music's serene bubble reforms.
If there is a single thing to take away from the totality of See the World, it is the sheer joy of hearing Greg Fox drumming again. If you think of drumming, somehow, as mechanically rhythmic, or purely muscular, or a bedrock function upon which more melodic and/or dynamic things are laid-- if you don't listen to a lot of other music outside rock, in other words-- Fox might be a good gateway drug out of this line of thinking. His drumming has a harp player's nuance and inner voicings. The album's pulse never overly complicates itself, but Fox's playing is its own lesson on how to keep time while dancing atop it. He is on a short list of drummers whose extended solos you could easily imagine listening to.
See the World belongs in a lineage of tribal guitar rock bands meant to shake loose titanic emotions: Oneida, Boredoms, Grails, Swans, Om. Of all of these groups, they have the least amount of dread and darkness: The music is heavy, and very impressive, but slightly monochromatic. There is none of the clammy, wide-eyed approaching-Gorgon horror of Swans, the quasi-religious release of Oneida or Om, the dark mystery of Grails. If they fall short in any way, it's in the somewhat limited range of third-eye-opening options they provide: Maybe over time, they can take on more colors. | 2012-08-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-08-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Thrill Jockey | August 16, 2012 | 7.2 | 19c18007-c2d4-49e1-ba57-2d8107b291b7 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Pianist Vijay Iyer returns to the trio format for a collaboration with Stephan Crump and Marcus Gilmore that includes jazz interpretations of Michael Jackson, Duke Ellington, and Flying Lotus. | Pianist Vijay Iyer returns to the trio format for a collaboration with Stephan Crump and Marcus Gilmore that includes jazz interpretations of Michael Jackson, Duke Ellington, and Flying Lotus. | Vijay Iyer Trio: Accelerando | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16483-accelerando/ | Accelerando | It's been three years since Stephan Crump, Marcus Gilmore, and Vijay Iyer made a record together, and in that time, the trio's headliner, Iyer, has clawed his way across the keyboard to a pretty exalted place within the jazz world. He's still working hard, but he's about done paying dues, and he makes magazine covers and the top of year-end lists routinely. The man is one of the best in the world at what he does, and he has one of the finest piano sounds, too, mixing big sheets of sound with blood-rush passages of intricate staccato patterns; he also frequently puts the real action in the left hand while the right holds down the harmonic fort, giving him a thundering, heavy sound when he wants it.
Iyer seems to like the trio format-- he cut a great trio record called Tirtha last year with two musicians originally from India, guitarist Prasanna and tablaist Nitin Mitta-- and he sounds very good in a small combo setting, where he gets to ride or at least hit back at a rhythm section, but also gets to handle the melody. Accelerando is his hardest-hitting trio album yet, loaded as it is with compact, forceful pieces of music. Iyer's own production gives a lot of stereo real estate to Gilmore's kick drum and Crump's bass, meaning that every fast, hard passage hits with a bang, and the quieter, sparser sections, such as the tumbling melodic hook of their version of Michael Jackson's "Human Nature" (which Iyer tackled on his own two years ago on Solo), feel lighter than air by comparison.
The closing interpretation of Duke Ellington's "The Village of the Virgins", which the group infuses with a sort of gospel energy, is one of those lighter moments, and when it arrives, it feels as though the band is dusting all those aggressive block chords and tone clouds off of itself and readying for the next challenge. That aggressive stuff is fantastic, though. "MmmHmm" (a Flying Lotus cover) hangs together loosely as it flies along, and it doesn't even bother with a bassline-- Crump instead plays arco, bowing patterns and melodic answering statements on his bass. The song features an accelerando in the true meaning of the musical term, beginning slow and moody and gradually speeding up until it sounds like even the piano is out of breath.
The word that keeps coming to mind as I listen to this album over and over again (and then again) is power. Everything about it projects power-- emotional power, the power of brute physical force, musical power. It runs on every available cylinder, and if you're out there looking for a path into modern jazz from the world of rock or hip-hop, this record speaks with a directness and verve that may make it an ideal introduction. From the first shudder of the keyboard and crack of drums to that last, celebratory walk through the village of the virgins, Iyer, Crump and Gilmore keep things spellbinding. | 2012-04-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-04-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | ACT Music + Vision | April 12, 2012 | 8.2 | 19c1d863-9a16-4a95-b9a3-3446c56e47cb | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Fusing ’80s-inspired hardcore with playful electronics, the Shears brothers’ bass-and-drums duo enlists a handful of high-profile collaborators in their mission for “total freedom of expression.” | Fusing ’80s-inspired hardcore with playful electronics, the Shears brothers’ bass-and-drums duo enlists a handful of high-profile collaborators in their mission for “total freedom of expression.” | The Garden: Kiss My Super Bowl Ring | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-garden-kiss-my-super-bowl-ring/ | Kiss My Super Bowl Ring | The Garden like to make a spectacle of themselves. At a release party celebrating their 2018 album Mirror Might Steal Your Charm, the striking rock duo made a French circus tent their stage; the band’s members, identical twins Wyatt and Fletcher Shears, performed the show’s first half in face paint and medieval jester garb, an image that’s replicated in many of their music videos. They’re not just a band, this campy aesthetic seems to claim—they’re entertainers. And whether it’s in their off-the-wall live performances, their side gigs modeling for designers like Saint Laurent, or their irreverent brand of experimental punk, the Garden want your attention. Convention has never been their intent, and their new album Kiss My Super Bowl Ring is their most unorthodox release to date.
The Shears brothers formed the Garden as teenagers in 2011, taking early inspiration from eclectic ’80s punk group the Minutemen. They’ve since operated by a method they call “vada vada”: “total freedom of expression without boundaries or guidelines of any sort.” Kiss My Super Bowl Ring abides by that process, implementing unexpected electronic influences and enlisting left-field producers Dylan Brady of 100 gecs and WHARFWHIT of Kero Kero Bonito. Blown-out bass and jungle breakbeats give the album’s more computerized moments a clubbier feel, while the occasional thrashing drums and searing shrieks recall the band’s hardcore roots. Sprinkle in features from Ariel Pink and flashy New York rapper Le1f, and Super Bowl Ring attempts to wear many hats at once, a frenetic collection of songs that grapple with existential woes and cathartic rage.
The Garden sound best at their most upbeat, on songs like the rip-roaring “AMPM Truck,” where Wyatt’s melodic basslines and Fletcher’s snappy drumming take the forefront. At the opposite end of the spectrum, “Sneaky Devil” is loaded with anxiety-ridden industrial elements to inspire freaky dancing and open mosh pits. Songs like these embody the restless anxiety the twins divulge in their lyrics: “A struggle, if you wanna call it that/Hate to burst your bubble, but it is that,” Wyatt sings in the bouncy chorus of “A Struggle,” as if to apologize for disconcerting themes to come. “Sneaky Devil” is just one name-drop away from a diss track: “Fuck you, kid, now I have your address/And in a second I could put your racist ass to bed,” he taunts, after unintelligibly listing things he’s “sick of”—politicians, carbon footprints—with a fury that makes you wonder how long he’s been keeping his anger concealed. “AMPM Truck” reckons with life’s futility after a near-fatal instance of nodding off behind the steering wheel. For a band whose earlier work has bordered on sheer absurdity, the distress and malevolence of Super Bowl Ring feels particularly unnerving.
At times, the album can feel erratic. Its first tracks, “Clench to Stay Awake” and “A Struggle,” vacillate between multiple opposing themes with whiplash-inducing suddenness that ultimately sounds haphazard. Slower tracks like “A Fool’s Expedition” and “Lurkin’” plod along in comparison, lacking the frenzy of the album’s brighter moments. However uneven, Kiss My Super Bowl Ring is proudly defiant; the title, Wyatt has clarified, essentially means “kiss my ass.” But where deviation from the norm has spawned countless artistic geniuses, Super Bowl Ring too often comes off as just a hodgepodge of ideas. “Vada vada,” it seems, has hurt the Garden as much as it’s helped them.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | March 16, 2020 | 6.4 | 19c375a1-93fc-45dc-bd2f-cef1f8f90d36 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Former Drive-By Truckers member releases another spotty set of songs aiming to capture the spirit and pace of life in the New New South. | Former Drive-By Truckers member releases another spotty set of songs aiming to capture the spirit and pace of life in the New New South. | Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: Here We Rest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15287-here-we-rest/ | Here We Rest | It's a hard truth, but so far Jason Isbell's solo career hasn't lived up to the promise he showed during his short tenure with Drive-By Truckers. When he left the group in 2007, he had held his own in a group full of top-shelf rock songwriters, displaying a flair for quiet drama and telling details. Out of the gate he started strong on Decoration Day in 2003 and owned The Dirty South the next year; "Outfit" may be his most quoted song, but "Danko/Manuel", ostensibly about the tragic Band members, was a better mission statement about saving a bit of yourself away from the gigs. A Blessing and a Curse sounded like rut in 2006, not just for Isbell but for the Truckers as a unit. The band immediately rebounded with one of the best albums of their formidable catalog, while Isbell, going solo, apparently took Blessing as a template, releasing solo albums with only a handful of memorable songs mixed in among rote southern rock.
Granted, that's pretty much what he was doing in the Truckers, but without company from Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, Isbell must now carry an entire album by himself. Three albums in, it might seem unfair to still compare his solo output to his Truckers material, but Isbell simply hasn't yet given us a reason to forget those years or to rethink that particular context. Here We Rest doesn't change that midline trajectory; as with Sirens of the Ditch in 2007 and the self-titled follow-up in 2009, his third album has some great songs that capture the spirit and pace of life in the New New South, that evoke real characters in real predicaments, that lodge into your brain alongside his best material. Unfortunately, it has many other songs that don't.
First, the good: Opener "Alabama Pines" is a soft-spoken lament about a man so lonely he says he doesn't even need a name, and Isbell makes the chorus-- which ushers the character back home through the Yellowhammer State wilderness-- sound quietly moving, as if such memories are all the man has anymore. Similarly, "Codeine" puts us immediately in a character's point of view, one so well drawn he feels comfortable, if not familiar. The song's a stand-out not just for the humor and peculiarity of the details, but for the way Isbell puts listeners right in the moment. Opening with a complaint about a bad cover band bumbling through "Castles Made of Sand", Isbell evokes an entire world through one sad man's eyes, with a sing-song chorus whose catchiness only underscores its tragedy.
The 400 Unit prove to be an agile backing band, able to move resourcefully from the loping melody of "Codeine" to the upbeat throwback country of "Never Could Believe" and the gentle reminiscence of "We've Met". Trying out various styles but never fully embracing them, they sound more slick than soulful, although that may be the fault of their too-crisp production, which rarely sounds live. At times, however, Isbell struggles to keep up. His voice possesses a distinctive rasp that easily evokes his character's dead-end struggles, whether it's their devotion to a drug-addicted woman or their allegiance to a disappearing way of life. The downside is that his vocal range is limited. He can't pull off the sentimental "Daisy Mae" at all, and struggles with tricky rhythms of "Never Could Believe" and the generic country-soul of "Heart on a String". Although he's now logged as much time as a solo artist as he did with his former band, Isbell sounds he's still finding his voice. | 2011-04-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-04-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Lightning Rod | April 11, 2011 | 6 | 19c6317d-4f2c-4be0-b5af-43e994eec5cb | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Sharing equal billing for the first time, longtime collaborators Noah Lennox and Peter Kember achieve an intoxicating mind meld over a sample-heavy tribute to 1960s pop. | Sharing equal billing for the first time, longtime collaborators Noah Lennox and Peter Kember achieve an intoxicating mind meld over a sample-heavy tribute to 1960s pop. | Panda Bear / Sonic Boom: Reset | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/panda-bear-sonic-boom-reset/ | Reset | We tend to think of creative influence as a one-way exchange from an older generation to a younger one. But that formulation is not only simplistic; it’s often flat-out wrong. Occasionally, a veteran musician vibes so hard with a younger peer that they seem to merge aesthetically, philosophically, even molecularly, sharing an artistic evolution over many years. In the remarkable case of Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear, and Peter Kember, aka Sonic Boom, the two have melded so completely that they sometimes seem like a single musical mind.
At first, Panda Bear was Sonic Boom’s acolyte. Kember’s sludgy, druggy band Spacemen 3, pioneers of late-’80s space rock, were a beacon when Lennox’s Animal Collective helped steer psychedelia into the 21st century. Panda Bear namechecked Spacemen 3 in the liner notes of his 2007 solo breakout, Person Pitch, which deftly employed electronic techniques to make earthy, acoustic-aping sounds. When the two artists met for the first time, it was because Kember—who has a similar knack for coaxing warmth from chilly waveforms—sent Lennox a fan note on MySpace.
Sitting in the producer’s chair, Kember introduced gurgling drones to Panda Bear’s next two records, 2011’s Tomboy and 2015’s Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, and Lennox lent his high tenor to 2020’s All Things Being Equal, Sonic Boom’s first solo LP in 30 years. A denizen of Lisbon since 2004, Lennox was among the reasons Kember moved to Portugal in 2016. In interviews, they speak about each other frequently and fondly, as amped about their friendship as their work together. The duo’s gradual stylistic convergence highlights an unusual collaborative mode: Dissolving hierarchy, they cohabitate common ground as artistic siblings.
Thanks to the sample-based compositions that they have mutually matured into making, this breakdown of influencer and influenced, master and admirer, seems particularly apt. On Reset, the first album to give both men equal billing, Panda Bear and Sonic Boom are students of the 1960s, spinning samples from Kennedy-era acts like Randy & the Rainbows and Eddie Cochran into layered, harmony-heavy arrangements that evoke the decade’s later years. The concept may feel familiar, particularly for Lennox. It might also seem heady and academic, a map of musical strains throughout history. But like the house mixes that both musicians love (which neither have ever, exactly, produced), Reset is simple, ecstatic, as elegant as a math formula. The most pleasurable release of either of their careers, the record aims consistently for gossamer melodies and propulsive rhythms and hits its targets again and again.
Essential to their take on the ’60s are subsequent decades’ interpretations and revivals of that pivotal era. Reset’s generous spirit encompasses the Elephant 6 collective and Cornershop’s gleeful ripostes to the skeptical ’90s; the radical inclusivity of the Avalanches and Daft Punk; and of course some of the echoey sweetness that both Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear found in the Beach Boys in the late ’00s. The record is a paean to the many eras of music lovers who have sifted through their stacks of vinyl and heard something surprising in sounds that have reverberated so long in the culture they threatened to turn trite. Kember and Lennox’s gear reflects this pan-generational perspective—a vintage harmonizer introduced in the mid ’70s, a lo-fi synth designed in the ’80s, the portable OP-1 that has become ubiquitous in the last decade. They incorporate analog filters, bass, güiro, sleigh bells, a dialed phone, and abundantly sampled acoustic guitar, which harkens back to the sunniness of Person Pitch highlight “Bros.” Reset is easily the most natural and intuitive Lennox has sounded since then.
However symbiotic he and Kember have become, the record’s surface is pure Panda Bear. He repeats “drown” on the terrific “Whirlpool” like some teen idol of the doo-wop era. The harmonically delectable “In My Body” builds to a descending refrain that numbers among the most gorgeous vocal hooks in a career brimming with them: “Stuck up on a branch,” Lennox sighs, “And I can’t get down.” This song initiates the album’s unexpectedly chilled-out core, a suite of tracks—“In My Body,” “Whirlpool,” and “Danger”—that will remind many of the slower, more relaxed songs on the back half of the epochal Merriweather Post Pavilion. Reset invites these lofty comparisons, and pulses with life both because and in spite of them.
The lyrics are opaque, impressionistic, and hallucinogenic. More than the content of his words, we notice the way Lennox wraps his mouth around them—“You take a swig and then you take a crack,” he chatters on the chipper, even humorous “Edge of the Edge,” emphasizing crack to coax out its tactile vowel—as well as the repetitive mantras that evoke Sonic Boom’s recent solo albums. “Give it to me,” chants Kember on “Go On” with the incidental charm of a kid messing around with a tape recorder for the first time. The irony is that the lyric is the title of a Troggs single he sampled for the song’s backbone: The demanding boy is just psyched about his record collection.
Reset slips from back-to-basics, handclap-laden pop to new peaks in the familiar range of Lennox’s music. It makes us wonder: Should we be bothered that the record’s best moments can feel cherry-picked from Person Pitch and Merriweather Post Pavilion? Those albums were both sprawling and deceptively formless, oozing out of their constraints like different varieties of colored foam. Reset is refined, concentrated, a focused burst of reggae-esque exultation. If it seems to lack ambition, Kember and Lennox compensate by carving away ideas in order to arrive at a sharp point. This tactic recalls a surprising touchstone: Is This It. But while the Strokes winnowed the rock and post-punk of their forebears, Panda Bear and Sonic Boom chisel at a vernacular shaped by their own prior work.
Their resilient positivity summons mid-’60s Jamaican ska and rocksteady, a connection the artists have made in interviews, although sonically, Reset locates us firmly in the post-Brian Wilson terrain that Animal Collective, Panda Bear, and Sonic Boom have tilled and cultivated. At points, such as the closer “Everything’s Been Leading to This,” we’re mesmerized into a techno-like trance, yet rather than harnessing the genre’s sound, Reset taps into dance music’s spirit, its sanguinity in spite of an unsympathetic society: “Well times are tough/And the draw is raw,” we hear on the final track, one of the few instances when an embedded sense of politics steps to the fore. “We’re skiddin’ through/A closin’ door.”
Reset addresses our own troubled zeitgeist by avoiding the ambient dread, blithe critique, and seething anger that often characterize records we consider to be topical today. “One dude’s sweat/Is another’s balm,” Panda Bear sings on “Go On.” He may be condemning an exploitative capitalist system, but Lennox is also describing his music’s uplift and the hard labor required to make such a salve. Less palliative than corrective, Reset is a dose of human lightness in the drudgery of the now. Conventional wisdom says that only younger performers have the unspoiled optimism and energy necessary to make such enthusiasm believable—the ardent songs Reset samples, after all, were sung by teens or twenty-somethings. But Panda Bear and Sonic Boom counter with the longevity of artists who have never compromised, and they give us the defiant Reset knowing that despair is a weapon in the hands of a present hell-bent on stamping out our souls. | 2022-08-11T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-11T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | August 11, 2022 | 8 | 19c6488f-5a36-42a3-998b-38fc9d21aa2b | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
As the New Orleans sludge-metal icons clean up their act, Mike IX Williams’ once-indecipherable howls and Jimmy Bower’s detuned blues riffs come to the surface. | As the New Orleans sludge-metal icons clean up their act, Mike IX Williams’ once-indecipherable howls and Jimmy Bower’s detuned blues riffs come to the surface. | Eyehategod: A History of Nomadic Behavior | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eyehategod-a-history-of-nomadic-behavior/ | A History of Nomadic Behavior | Take a moment to appreciate a few small miracles—Mike IX Williams is alive, he’s sober, and he’s singing on a new Eyehategod album. Five or six years ago, none of those outcomes would have seemed likely. “My whole agenda was getting wasted until the day I die,” Williams told Decibel’s Greg Pratt in 2017, shortly after receiving the liver transplant that saved his life. Post-transplant, Williams had to figure out a new way to live, and just as importantly, a new way to front one of the world’s most famously self-destructive metal bands. On A History of Nomadic Behavior, the first document of that effort, the New Orleans masters shift into a new, more sustainable mode.
Even when Eyehategod was essentially inventing sludge metal on feedback-drenched early albums like 1990’s In the Name of Suffering and 1993’s Take as Needed for Pain, they were fundamentally a blues band. A History of Nomadic Behavior emphasizes that fact more directly than any Eyehategod record to date. Though they’ve historically buried their songs in enough filth to leave you nauseous, the production on History is crisp and clear. Williams has honed his formerly indecipherable howl into a pointed weapon; he wants you to hear every word he’s singing. Jimmy Bower’s detuned blues riffs stand front and center alongside Williams, still full of his trademark bends and vibrato but now with far fewer deliberate feedback squalls to drown out the notes. If 1996’s Dopesick sounded like overhearing an entire band going through heroin withdrawals together, History sounds like those same dudes reuniting years later to jam at the local VFW hall on a Wednesday night.
Sadly, not everyone made it to the jam session. Drummer and founding member Joey LaCaze passed away shortly before the release of 2014’s Eyehategod, and longtime guitarist Brian Patton left the fold in 2018. History is the first Eyehategod full-length to feature Aaron Hill on drums; Patton wasn’t replaced, making the band a four-piece for the first time. That puts the spotlight even more squarely on Williams and Bower, now the only two original members remaining.
Williams’s newfound sobriety is an undercurrent that runs through the album. On “High Risk Trigger,” he shrieks about being “deaf, jagged, and prowling,” like a man who is just barely outrunning his demons. “Anytime I’ve been to rehab or AA or NA, any of that stuff, they always talk about triggers, which can be anything that makes you want to use again,” he writes in the liner notes. “In that way it’s almost the same as a trigger on a gun, because it’s just as dangerous.” Sobriety aside, Williams hasn’t lost the piss-and-vinegar nihilism that made him a hero to dropouts and deadbeats in the early ’90s. On closing track and album highlight “Every Thing, Every Day,” he repurposes the titular refrain of the Take as Needed for Pain classic “Kill Your Boss” as a fuck-everything climax. Just because he got a new liver doesn’t mean he’s punching his ticket for square society.
On early Eyehategod records, the songs, production style, and real-life depravity within the band were intertwined to the point of being indistinguishable. Likewise, it’s impossible to listen to A History of Nomadic Behavior without noting that Williams’ cleaned-up life has coincided with his band’s cleaned-up sound. For those who were drawn primarily to Eyehategod’s apocalyptic self-annihilation, History’s unadorned blues riffs and fully legible lyrics might be a bridge too far. For those of us who want Eyehategod to keep doing this for a long time to come, it’s a welcome evolution.
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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. | 2021-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Century Media | March 24, 2021 | 7.2 | 19c696c9-05d6-44c6-91f6-50cc64937f72 | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
The rapper continues to explore identity and belonging on her second album. Recorded in her native Zambia, it folds together zamrock, polyrhythmic percussion, and choral harmonies. | The rapper continues to explore identity and belonging on her second album. Recorded in her native Zambia, it folds together zamrock, polyrhythmic percussion, and choral harmonies. | Sampa the Great: As Above, So Below | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sampa-the-great-as-above-so-below/ | As Above, So Below | When Sampa the Great became one of Australia’s most celebrated rap acts, the Zambia-born, Botswana-raised artist was determined to remind listeners of her African origins. Her response was The Return, a sprawling mix of jazz rap, earth-toned R&B, and self-affirming spoken word that used the displacement of diaspora to explore the meaning of home. Across the 77-minute album, Sampa took solace and found family in the collaborators that sustained her an ocean away from her homeland. That journey of self-acceptance continues on As Above, So Below, where Sampa folds zamrock, polyrhythmic percussion, and choral harmonies into her roving music. Though her rapping remains impersonal, she sounds renewed on these homegrown songs, the anxiety of her past music replaced with relief.
Sampa recorded the album in Zambia over a two-week period, working with local musicians and producers who understood and expanded her cultural reference points. In Australia, she often had to play translator when she wanted producers to incorporate Southern African elements into her music, a process that underscored the very remoteness from home she was trying to lessen. Her collaborators on As Above, So Below let her be a denizen rather than a liaison, allowing her to truly showcase the place and culture she loves, not just evoke it. She never unlocks the full potential of the change in setting, but the arrangements are inspired.
The album is leaner and punchier than its restless predecessor, trading winding verses and interludes for streamlined songs of celebration. Produced by gospel artist Mag44, along with Powers Pleasant and Solomon Moyo, the songs prioritize rhythm and groove with a mix of live instrumentation and buoyant drum programming. As Above, So Below isn’t a wall-to-wall transcontinental party like GoldLink’s Diaspora, WurlD’s My WorlD With U, or Amaarae’s The Angel You Don’t Know, but the mood is festive. “MaskOn” begins with a rhythmic Zambian nursery rhyme padded with bass kicks and shouts, then slinks into a swaying blend of hi-hats and blues guitar reminiscent of UGK’s country rap. “Can I Live,” a collaboration with one of the surviving members of pioneering zamrock band W.I.T.C.H., opens with gospel keys and percussion and builds to a psychedelic electric-guitar freakout. Sampa and crew seem hell-bent on packing the album with details and nods to Zambian music, every track a byway to some bustling hub.
Sampa’s limber singing and rapping fit snugly into all this motion. She performs in both English and the Zambian language Bemba over a pittering marimba arrangement on “Tilibobo.” The growled verses of “Can I Live” lean into the grit of her throaty voice, the strain conveying her irritation. On “Lo Rain,” which channels the lullaby rap of Noname, her double-time flows swing with the drums and keyboard melodies.
On a technical level, these songs offer the best performances of Sampa’s career, but in terms of style and emotion, they fall short. Despite the homecoming mood, Sampa often sounds distant, her rhymes functional and indistinct. The odes to African achievements on “Never Forget” are self-affirming but grayscale. “Who took fabric, made that shit classic/That shit aint average/We did,” Sampa boasts flatly. “Let Me Be Great,” in which Sampa declares herself a lion and a king while demanding respect, is just as generic. There’s no hunger to her delivery, no slap to her chest-thumping. Though heartfelt, her embrace of Zambian music fails to unlock new dimensions to her writing or sharpen her perspectives on home and herself. Sampa flies her flag, but never flaunts it. That anonymity doesn’t sink As Above, So Below, but it dampens the thrill of Sampa tapping into her roots, and underscores her shaky fundamentals as a rapper. Despite her dexterous flows, she lacks presence; her songs signify the many places she’s been and people she’s met, but rarely bring those connections to life. | 2022-09-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Loma Vista / Concord | September 12, 2022 | 6.8 | 19cbf6ba-19b2-44d5-a459-3affd6d88bd1 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
On this debut EP with new music group La Bagatelle Magique, formed with her keyboardist Markus Jägerstedt and the late producer and Swedish club music veteran Christian Falk, Robyn cuts to the chase with what she wants from you (and herself). What Love Is Free does so well, and so simply, is hone in on just the beauty of finally letting go, physically and mentally. | On this debut EP with new music group La Bagatelle Magique, formed with her keyboardist Markus Jägerstedt and the late producer and Swedish club music veteran Christian Falk, Robyn cuts to the chase with what she wants from you (and herself). What Love Is Free does so well, and so simply, is hone in on just the beauty of finally letting go, physically and mentally. | Robyn / La Bagatelle Magique: Love Is Free | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20902-love-is-free/ | Love Is Free | On last year's collaboration with Röyksopp, Do It Again, and 2010's Body Talk, Robyn made the dance floor her therapy couch, singing of breakups, feeling like a broken cyborg, and all the shit that was killing her over addictive electro-pop. It's exactly this bruised-but-headstrong expertise, built up over two decades as a writer and performer, that imbues Robyn's music with a sort of welcoming trust. So, when she takes a step back in the thumping opening track of Love Is Free, "Lose Control", to say, "Hey, tell me all about your mistakes/ Tell me 'bout the love and the pain/ I know somebody hurt you some way," you might believe her and give it all up.
On this debut EP with new music group La Bagatelle Magique, formed with her keyboardist Markus Jägerstedt and the late producer and Swedish club music veteran Christian Falk, Robyn cuts to the chase with what she wants from you (and herself). La Bagatelle Magique aren't trying to reinvent the wheel here. The group is meddling in music history, cranking out five familiar tracks that are too hard not to dance to.
"Got to Work It Out" plays like an amped up, big beat version of Debbie Deb's 1983 single "When I Hear Music", with a twinkling, childlike xylophone melody buried under the track's trance-y basslines and Vocodered, aggressive vocals. And the standout single featuring rising singer Maluca, "Love Is Free", is ballroom-ready, steeped in a yippy, acid house groove that finds Robyn asserting physical boundaries while preaching free love. "Imma give it to you baby/ Imma give it when I'm ready," she raps over the beat.
A charming, un-slick outlier here is "Tell You (Today)", an eccentric, sample-heavy Loose Joints cover that mashes together instrumentals of the genre (horns, Heatwave-approved harp, disco lasers, etc.) to dizzying effect. The song sounds like someone was smashing their hands against a well-stocked sampler, even when it comes to Robyn's vocals. They're a little stilted in their delivery, as if every word was programmed on its own and played back to form sentences, but the lyrics still reel with the excitement of finally telling someone how much you love them.
What Love Is Free does so well, and so simply, is hone in on just the beauty of finally letting go, physically and mentally. On "Set Me Free", there's a moment when the lyric "Free your body" repeats, getting clearer and clearer until it just hangs there in the middle of the track while the kick-drum pounds after it, punctuating it like a stream of trailing periods. For Robyn and La Bagatelle Magique*,* the simple request might not be the answer to all your problems, but it's sure as hell the start. | 2015-08-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-08-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope / Konichiwa / Cherrytree | August 6, 2015 | 7.2 | 19d3f100-46cf-41ba-a0e9-5837dc24350c | Hazel Cills | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hazel-cills/ | null |
Florence Welch’s pandemic album turns her intensity inward, interrogating her relationship to performance and public image. These are her most personal lyrics, and among her most poignant. | Florence Welch’s pandemic album turns her intensity inward, interrogating her relationship to performance and public image. These are her most personal lyrics, and among her most poignant. | Florence and the Machine: Dance Fever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/florence-and-the-machine-dance-fever/ | Dance Fever | Just before the pandemic, Florence Welch read about choreomania, the medieval European “dancing plague,” wherein hordes of people would flail and twitch until they reached exhaustion, injury, or death. Welch became obsessed with the concept. Entering her mid-30s, nearly 15 years into a career that began when she drunkenly sang to her future manager in a club bathroom, she wanted to prod at her relationship to performance. When she started releasing records, her stadium-shaking voice and songs that crescendoed to catharsis lifted her into the pop charts alongside Adele and Bruno Mars. Four albums in, though, Florence and the Machine is an institution, and Florence Welch, the person, seemed rattled by how much she relied on it. She conceived her fifth album, Dance Fever, as a “‘be careful for what you wish for’ fable,” she told the New York Times; as she read more about the dancing that spread like sickness, she thought about what it would be like to give up performing altogether. And then, a week after she started making the songs that would become Dance Fever alongside Jack Antonoff, lockdown hit.
From those uncanny origins, the new album arrives as a sweeping, grandiose statement, no less outsized than Welch’s past releases but more internal and lyrically cohesive. The songs concern devils and angels and life and death, but Dance Fever is more fascinating as a self-interrogation—these are Welch’s most personal lyrics, and among her most poignant. “Every song I wrote became an escape rope tied around my neck to pull me up to heaven,” she rasps at the end of “Heaven Is Here,” and that horror at her own compulsions reverberates throughout the album. On Dance Fever, Welch stays trapped indoors, sobbing into bowls of cereal at midnight, trying to comfort herself with the crumbs of her own image. She built her public persona by beaming the grandest, fiercest emotions out to a crowd; left alone, she turns that intensity inward.
Unlike another Antonoff-produced pandemic reverie, Lorde’s Solar Power, Welch struggles against the wisdom she seeks to impart; we hear her wrestling with the knowledge she’s acquired, not merely delivering it. She sees herself as a projection, not a person, and she’s terrified by her impulse to self-mythologize. In the spoken-word section that opens “Choreomania,” she traces the contours of an anxiety attack: “I am freaking out in the middle of the street with the complete conviction of someone who has never had anything actually really bad happen to them,” she says in a crisp monotone. The pandemic is a constant presence: She sings about her friends getting sick, about the joy and futility of the mundane. The stakes are high, but too often, she tries to convey the album’s scary-movie sensibilities by contorting her voice into a howl or a croak. The theatrics distract from the more satisfying drama, as the image of an auteur who equates work with worth collides with Welch’s attempts at intimacy.
She examines this tension most strikingly on “King,” the album’s opener. The track chugs along over subdued percussion before it swells into classic, titanic Welch, belting over harp. She argues with a lover about the endpoints of her ambition, whether art is useless, if she can build a version of motherhood that would mesh into her own mythology. “I am no mother/I am no bride/I am king,” she howls. Welch’s ambivalence about motherhood is a central theme. “I feel like to have a child and to let that amount of love in.… I’ve spent my life trying to run away from these big feelings,” she told Vogue. “Big feelings” are practically Welch’s brand, but on Dance Fever, she bristles at them. “What a thing to admit,” she starts off the lilting, Maggie Rogers-assisted “Girls Against God,” “but when someone looks at me with real love, I don’t like it very much.” Welch stamps these stark admissions throughout the album, little lacerations tucked into the bass and trumpets. At times, she reaches for profundity and stumbles into hyperbole. “If I was free to love you, you wouldn’t want me, would you,” she laments on “The Bomb,” comparing love to literal destruction: collapsing buildings, burning skin.
The album sags when it attempts its stated purpose: to celebrate dance itself. Partly this is because of just how disparate these tracks feel, likely as a result of their bifurcated production. Antonoff produced most of the first half of the album, and he shares a writing credit on many of those tracks; the latter half is largely produced by Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley. Dance Fever is as propulsive as any Florence and the Machine album, but its momentum sometimes feels unearned. Bayley twists “My Love” into a schmaltzy club track, kicking off with what seems like a trite Hamilton reference: “I was always able to write my way out,” Welch coos over finger snaps. Her past EDM collaborations sparkled—none more than the Calvin Harris-produced “Sweet Nothing”—but “My Love” is too stilted to open up a dancefloor. Even “Free,” perhaps the most buoyant song on the album, eventually becomes flimsy. It’s an ode to the power of dance, the freedom in movement—well-worn concepts that Welch treats like novel ideas.
But there’s a moment when the cello slows to a sputter and the frenetic drums ease up, and she seems to think out loud. “Is this how it’s always been,” she muses, “to exist in the face of suffering and death, and somehow still keep singing?” On another album, where the stakes were anything less than life and death, this question might be overwrought. But Dance Fever works best when Welch asks questions, when she’s a witness to terror and absurdity, marveling at her own ability to make it through. | 2022-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Polydor | May 13, 2022 | 7.1 | 19db112e-d397-4d96-83a4-01df910ff7ff | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Sunn O)))'s latest album may be their best, as dozens of collaborators join on four epic tracks that run from slow metal to shimmering orchestral drone. | Sunn O)))'s latest album may be their best, as dozens of collaborators join on four epic tracks that run from slow metal to shimmering orchestral drone. | Sunn O))): Monoliths & Dimensions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13195-monoliths-dimensions/ | Monoliths & Dimensions | If your interest in Sunn O))) stems primarily from the band's patient employment of tone and time as channeled through electric bass, electric guitar, and stacks of amplifiers, you might hate "Alice", the brilliant closing track of its seventh and arguably best album, Monoliths & Dimensions. Sure, these 17 minutes are loud and torpid, easing from one note to another, distortion dripping from each new intonation. But "Alice" finds Sunn O))) exploiting a newfound spaciousness and elegance. As its founders, Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley, crawl across a loose blues progression that mirrors those of slow metal fountainhead Earth, a swell of French and English horns, violin and viola, harp and light percussion rises. Surrounding the guitars, they're like the perfect summer haze, refracting and softening the season's relentless sunlight. "Alice" ends with a fanfare of sorts for this small orchestra. Its long tones are light and lifting, a little like Stars of the Lid commissioning Igor Stravinsky. More Fluorescent One than Black Two, it's completely unexpected, mesmerizing, and beautiful.
Well, not completely unexpected: Like the rest of Monoliths & Dimensions, "Alice" offers a culmination of most everything Sunn O))) have done right during their decade of volume-based plunder. Anderson and O'Malley have long rendered rock riffs with painstaking deliberation, consistently adding the ideas of elite collaborators and occasional no-explanation experiments. The Grimm Robe Demos took to early Earth, while Black One ground an Immortal black metal burst into one 10-minute tectonic motion. Merzbow, Xasthur's Malefic, Thrones' Joe Preston, and Mayhem's Attila Csihar stood among high-ranking contributors. Pieces like "bassALIENS" (23 minutes of electric bass tone exploration) and "My Wall" (25 minutes of Julian Cope verbiage battered by cascades of amplifier hum) ensured that Sunn O))) was doing more than swapping chords for feedback.
Monoliths & Dimensions takes the idea even further, gathering collaborators-- from Csihar and Earth's Dylan Carlson to Australian drone master Oren Ambarchi and vocalist Jessika Kenney, who sang so well on Wolves in the Throne Room's Two Hunters-- for four tracks that push Sunn O))) in directions unforeseen: Riffs come wrapped in strings. Conch shells share space with upright bass fleets. Both an operatic female choir and Portland noise nut Daniel Menche sing opposite the Mayhem frontman. All told, as on 2007's revelatory Black One, Monoliths & Dimensions indicates that Sunn O))) and the possibilities of its slow music stretch beyond what we imagined.
About three-dozen people contribute to Monoliths' four cuts. Two of these tracks exceed 16 minutes, while their counterparts either approach or encroach on the 10-minute mark. It might seem that only size matters for Sunn O))) here, but that's just the surface. None of these pieces are big for bigness' sake. Rather, they all bear intricacies that erode them from within. A given piece's size becomes its fatal flaw. The strings and synthesizers ascend through the gaps in the sluggish riffs of "Alice", for instance, composer Eyvind Kang arranging the parts to crack and cover their host. By track's end, the guitars are gone, ruins eviscerated by a new growth of ivy.
Then there's "Big Church". The female choir led by Kinney, a four-guitar army including Ambarchi and Carlson, and the manipulated Middle Earth incantations of Csihar clash during three three-minute sections. The guitars or the voices invoke each third, and their parts slip by one another like the pieces of an amoeboid jigsaw puzzle. Csihar always overruns them, though, pushing each section into a chaotic climax. On "Hunting and Gathering (Cydonia)", Csihar cloaks some of the album's most literal lyrics-- "They take the world and the earth, breathing fire on the endless oil seas"-- in his native Hungarian, but the music makes the message clear. Each time Csihar finishes a set of imprecations, a triumph of vocals and horns rises and exalts while the electric riff subsides. This is a new battle hymn.
And there's the album's other giant, opener "Aghartha". As close as Monoliths gets to the classic drone of Sunn O)))'s past, O'Malley and Anderson paw at chords on perfectly engineered electric bass and guitar. Again, a de facto chamber ensemble joins, as a droning Tibetan horn (the two-player Dung Chen) displaces the air beneath the guitars and sharp piano chords splinter whatever they encounter. These sounds sublimate into one drone, forcing the guitars out of the frame before fading into silence themselves. Only the sound of rushing water washes beneath Csihar's daunting voice, as he speaks of "a tunnel [that] gouges in the shapes of the stream in the great abyss of the sky" in booming, broken English. He's looking for new sparks to destroy the old order, for fresh energy to upset the established form. And that's exactly what Monoliths & Dimensions does: It takes one of the world's most lauded loud bands and rearranges its game with an inspiring cycle of risk and reward.
Perhaps Black One came with a caveat emptor or two. You'd better like your music dark and relentless, and contextual understandings of Sunn O))) and black metal and drone helped. Lacking those things, perhaps you suspended your disbelief enough to appreciate Malfeic's scorched voice or, unfortunately, dismissed it outright as two self-serious dudes and their fucked-up friends dicking around with darkness. Incorrect, I think, but understandable. Monoliths & Dimensions requires no such warnings. Per Sunn O)))'s long-standing dogma, "Maximum volume [still] yields maximum results." But this time, there's enough musical range and temperance to usher even the most resolute naysayer into this intricate wonderland. | 2009-05-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-05-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Metal | Southern Lord | May 29, 2009 | 8.5 | 19db4f78-7a34-431e-beea-a4c888499259 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Capitol follows its excavation of Radiohead's 1990s work with new version of the band's first three 2000s LPs, including the landmark Kid A. | Capitol follows its excavation of Radiohead's 1990s work with new version of the band's first three 2000s LPs, including the landmark Kid A. | Radiohead: Kid A: Special Collectors Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13385-kid-a-special-collectors-edition/ | Kid A: Special Collectors Edition | We used to listen to music in an entirely different way. There was once a time when music was organized into 45- to 75-minute chunks-- often a few standout tracks padded with a lot of mediocre filler, but occasionally designed so that the parts built up a larger structure. Used to be, people would sit down and listen to that lengthy piece of music from front to back in one sitting, resisting the urge to jump to their favorite parts or skip over the instrumental interlude that served as grout between two fuller compositions. These antiques were called CDs. Here's a story about the last of its kind.
When Kid A came out in October 2000, it sounded like the future. Unless you were a Napster whiz-kid, the record was one of the last to arrive unspoiled and complete, a physical object, the disquieting Stanley Donwood art reinforcing its dark mystery. It's arguably two-and-a-half minutes into "How to Disappear Completely"-- more than a third of the way through the album-- until anything sounds like a "Radiohead Song," even with how far the elastic of that term was stretched on OK Computer. And while Radiohead were far from the first to glitch-up their vocals with a computer or drown their compositions in ambient washes, it was still a thrilling experimental gamble for a band that could've profitably re-made "Karma Police" 100 times over with minimal reputational damage.
But simply flirting with new technology wasn't enough; even in 2000, the idea of a band "going electronic" was a laughable marketing gimmick from an era that spawned the term "electronica." But the samples, loops, and beats of Kid A were more than just the patronizing dalliance of a bored band, they were tools used to service the album's even deeper exploration of OK Computer's thesis on identity loss in computerized society. It was, unashamedly, a complete album, one where everything from production to arrangements to lyrics to album art were carefully crafted towards a unified purpose.
It's also a contoured album without clear highlights, best experienced in one sitting rather than cherrypicking the best parts. (It's telling that the band famously quarreled over the sequencing of tracks.) The biggest stylistic coup was the corruption of Thom Yorke's vocals-- arguably the band's most singular feature up to that point-- and the detuned-radio effects of the album's opening couplet: "Everything in Its Right Place" and "Kid A" threw listeners expecting that signature "Fake Plastic Trees" falsetto immediately into the deep end. On "The National Anthem", Yorke is shouted down by horn section mayhem, and when he finally gets in an unfiltered word in on "How to Disappear Completely", it's the album's most haunted (and revealing) line: "That there, that's not me."
There's no storyline to pick out from Yorke's lyrics, but a unified thread moves through the album nonetheless: Basically, Kid A is scary as hell. It might be the paranoid, nearly subliminal, unbroken undercurrent of haunted drone, courtesy of a Rhodes or a tape loop or Jonny Greenwood's Ondes-Martenot, a instrument for nightmares if there ever was one. Or it might be Yorke's terrifying one-line, Chicken Soup for the Agoraphobic Soul mantras that alternate between honeyed violence ("cut the kids in half") and clichés and hum-drum observations twisted into panic attacks ("where'd you park the car?").
(A brief intermission to talk about the bonus tracks included with this reissue. Capitol's in a tough spot with finding Kid A outtakes, because they already released such a thing-- it's called Amnesiac...rimshot. So instead the bonus-disc padding is all live tracks, culled from British and French radio or TV shows. In keeping with the album's isolation fixation, the empty studio of the four-track BBC session is the most fitting environment for the band's performance, the vocal manipulations of "Everything in Its Right Place" ricocheting off egg-crate walls. Contrast that with the clap-along crowd on an "Idioteque" from France, which neuters the song's sinister undercurrent and turns it into an inappropriate party jam.)
Every great album needs a great resolution, and Kid A has two: the angelic choir and harps of "Motion Picture Soundtrack" which serve as a much-needed (if fragile and a bit suspicious) uplift needed after such unrelenting bleakness, and a brief ambient coda that justifies the hidden-track gimmick. The silence that surrounds that final flash of hazy analog hiss is almost as rich, conferring a eerie feeling of weightlessness upon anyone who's completed the journey with a proper headphones listen.
But that's where the twist ending comes in. Kid A turned out not be the music of the future, but a relic of the past, more in line with dinosaurs like Dark Side of the Moon or Loveless as try-out-your-new-speakers, listen-with-the-lights-off suites. By the time Amnesiac officially arrived, it had been served up piecemeal on the internet, handicapping the final product from reproducing its predecessor's cohesive structure. From then on, albums have persisted, sure, but they're increasingly marginalized or stripped for parts-- release Kid A today, and many might choose to save or stream "Idioteque" and Recycle-Bin the rest, missing the contextual build and release that makes the album's demented-disco centerpiece all the more effective.
That's not a qualitative judgment: The way things are now isn't better or worse, just different. Technology, of course, is a selection pressure, digital music eroding the arbitrary 45ish-minute barrier that once was dictated by vinyl's finite diameter. But while a single song will often do, there's a talent to building and a pleasure in experiencing a dozen songs weaved together into a 40 minutes that's richer than each individual track, a 12-course meal for special occasions between microwave snacks. Like calligraphy, it's a fading art, as even Radiohead themselves seem to be disinterested in the format, perpetually threatening to dribble tracks out in ones or fours when the spirit takes them. In the end, one of the many ghosts that haunt the corridors of Kid A is The Album itself, it's death throes an unsettling funeral for a format that, like so much else, was out of time. | 2009-08-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-08-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | August 25, 2009 | 10 | 19e170cc-5696-4942-a21e-a02bde5c6705 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
The new LP from revived emo band Rainer Maria presents a slower, heavier, and more methodical version of the group. It’s a reunion album that stacks up well against their most cherished work. | The new LP from revived emo band Rainer Maria presents a slower, heavier, and more methodical version of the group. It’s a reunion album that stacks up well against their most cherished work. | Rainer Maria: S/T | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rainer-maria-st/ | S/T | During its formative years around the turn of the millennium, the Polyvinyl label was filled to capacity with Midwestern, post-rock-tinged emo bands, most of them high on talent but low on star power. That was never a problem for Rainer Maria. In an emo scene that was somehow even more male-dominated than today’s, singer Caithlin De Marrais stood out for both her poetic flair and her fearless range. She could sound at once bashful and vicious, equally convincing as a sensitive soul or an agent of unadulterated rage. There weren’t many truly dynamic presences in Rainer Maria’s niche corner of indie-rock. De Marrais was one of them.
The band’s original run ended if not quite on a bum note, then with a whiff of defeat. Bankrolled by the short-lived startup label Grunion Records, 2006’s Catastrophe Keeps Us Together smoothed the band’s rough edges in hopes of porting their act to alternative radio and capitalizing on the market Death Cab for Cutie created with Plans. The album failed on launch, but it did finally put to rest a question that had circled Rainer Maria for much of their career: With a real push, could this band be big? Apparently not. The trio played their farewell show later that year.
After their breakup, the band scattered. De Marrais went the singer/songwriter route on a couple of soft-hued solo records. Guitarist Kaia Fischer released a 2008 solo album, then devoted herself to Buddhism, while drummer William Kuehn took on gigs all over the world. Those different paths, and the very different lives the trio has led over the last decade, may account for why the band’s nails-tough reunion album S/T (not self-titled, just S/T) sounds as unbridled by the past as it does. Unlike so many reunion records, it makes no pretenses of capturing the band as they used to be. Rainer Maria are in their 40s now, and they aren’t so naïve as to think they could recreate the sprightly innocence of their first records, let alone improve on that youthful version of themselves.
They aren’t interested in picking up where they left off, either. Instead, S/T corrects the great miscalculation of their final albums, which largely recast the band as a showcase for their frontwoman—a shift that paid off for the band’s one-time tourmates Rilo Kiley, but cost Rainer Maria something essential. De Marrais may have been the band’s main draw, but it was their group interplay that gave the trio their edge. They were never able to muster the same intensity once they phased Fischer out of backing vocals on 2003’s Long Knives Drawn. What a thrill it is, then, to hear Fischer back behind the microphone of S/T’s thundering opener “Broke Open Love,” finishing De Marrais’ thoughts again. The dynamic isn’t quite like it was before, but nothing about this version of the band is.
The new Rainer Maria is slower, heavier, and more methodical than the old one. They swing less but land more blows. Early-album highlights “Suicides and Lazy Eyes” and “Lower Worlds” each lock into a beefy riff with an ever-tightening grip. The latter song has the album’s single greatest thrill: Fischer’s drill-sergeant injections (“SLAM SHUT/THE DOORS!”), set against snarling guitars and a nasty rumble. (Kuehn produced the album, and it’s far and away the most bottom-heavy thing they’ve ever recorded.)
Everything about their sound has calcified, including De Marrais’ voice. She still sings of physical intimacy as an ongoing negotiation, but time has worn the sweet veneer off of her titanic howl. “I need you bigger/I need you honest/I need to hear you call for me,” she huffs on “Possession,” laying out her demands with an authoritative bite that lays clear her upper hand. De Marrais must have put in work to sound this fierce.
Rainer Maria will almost certainly be remembered as they were in their earliest incarnation: wide-eyed literary buffs, singing with an air of optimism about achy hearts and making out. That version of Rainer Maria was important for a lot of people. But should they be remembered as the hardened power trio they’ve grown into, Rainer Maria can be proud of that, too. There aren’t many groups that have repackaged themselves so successfully this late in the game, and fewer still with a reunion album that stacks up this well against their most cherished work. | 2017-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | August 23, 2017 | 7.6 | 19ea88cd-2e84-42a6-b98a-3beac6eb371f | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The Sigur Rós singer fights huge with huger on his solo debut, matching the uplift of his full-time band at their most dramatic. | The Sigur Rós singer fights huge with huger on his solo debut, matching the uplift of his full-time band at their most dramatic. | Jónsi: Go | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14098-go/ | Go | Jónsi Birgisson doesn't do small. As the lead singer of Sigur Rós, he's starred in several of this century's most epic songs; with their penchant for instrumental swells, feedback, and weight-of-humanity wails, the Icelandic band has practically set a new, near unreachable height for melodramatic art rock. But after perfecting this style on 2005's Takk, Jónsi and his mates have had some trouble finding a way out from beneath the burden of big. Their last album, 2008's Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, tried to temper the bombast but occasionally got bogged down in aimless balladry. Jónsi's subsequent Riceboy Sleeps LP with Alex Somers offered largely voiceless ambiance, akin to Quentin Tarantino directing a silent chamber drama. But with his solo debut, Jónsi fights huge with huger.
Helping to realize the mini symphonies in the singer's head are two key collaborators: pianist, composer, and arranger Nico Muhly-- who has become the de facto solution for artists like Grizzly Bear and Antony and the Johnsons when in need of unique, showy flourishes-- and Finnish percussionist Samuli Kosminen, who can be seen literally banging on old suitcases in an in-studio video on Jónsi's website. The conspirators balance well; though Muhly's manicured arrangements could have come off stiff in this context, their combination with Kosminen's unbridled wallops brings the orchestration dizzily whirling forth. But what truly elevates Go is Jónsi's voice, which still has the ability to stun a decade after Agætis Byrjun introduced most listeners to his alien bleats.
Along with Jeff Buckley and Thom Yorke, Jónsi's pipes have set the standard for modern eunuch-like crooning. And on Go, he makes up for the lack of vocals on Riceboy Sleeps by working overtime, backing himself up to create a Jónsi choir, offering skyrocketing counter-melodies, and even making the occasional bird sound. He beams ecstatically on "Go Do", cracks hearts on the string-laden "Sinking Friendships", and comes as close as he probably ever will to rapping on "Animal Arithmetic". He may lack Buckley's soulfulness or Yorke's infinite melancholy, but Jónsi's distinguishing trait is an innocence that helps make emotions sound fresh. This child-like view is more apparent on Go because it finds the singer mostly expressing himself in plain English rather than his usual combination of heavenly vowel sounds and Icelandic.
On the surface, the language breakthrough is irrelevant; whatever you thought he was singing about before is probably close to what he's singing about in English here. For instance, the hook on "Go Do" goes, "We should always know that we can do anything." Of course it's corny, but Jónsi's sincere intent makes the feel-good anthem feel good. Images of nature come up often, which makes sense considering his gale force lungs. Even when he comes close to "Legend of Zelda" territory, like when he sings of "a treasure chest full of labyrinths" on "Around Us", his committment and wide-eyed naivety go a long way. In Jónsi's universe, cynicism has yet to be invented.
Much of Go matches the uplift of Sigur Rós at their most dramatic. There's more sonic density here than ever-- Go's cacophony of flutes, piano, horns, strings, and bird calls beg for a 5.1 mix. At the same time, the songwriting is pruned down. The usual crescendos spring up in condensed bursts, rather than being spread out over seven minutes. And Jónsi seems to be getting less murky and moody as he collects years. Still, Go isn't pure escapist Peter Pan theater. "No one knows you 'til it's over," he yowls on "Sinking Friendships", "you know no one true 'til it's over." For Jónsi, life and death are spoken in mythic, uncompromising terms. There's not much room for the little things, which is partly why he's able to strike hard around the world; whether singing in English or jibberish, the message is clear. Go means go. | 2010-04-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-04-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | XL | April 5, 2010 | 8.1 | 19eb546f-d17f-4cfe-b8e3-142395b38e95 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Austin musician Chris Ulsh’s longest-running band returns with a revitalized lineup and a new commitment to death metal intensity. | Austin musician Chris Ulsh’s longest-running band returns with a revitalized lineup and a new commitment to death metal intensity. | Mammoth Grinder: Cosmic Crypt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mammoth-grinder-cosmic-crypt/ | Cosmic Crypt | Best known as the drummer and sometime guitarist in Dallas thrash band Power Trip, Austin’s Chris Ulsh has spent the last decade or so exploring variations on a simple truth: metal and punk are forces that work best in league with each other. He is efficient, deadly, and never starving for riffs, whether working with pit-ready thrash, noisy punk, chugging powerviolence or good ol’ Venom-esque raunch. If it’s fast and loud, he’ll make gold. The longest-running of Ulsh’s many projects, Mammoth Grinder, hits the sweet spot between death metal and hardcore, particularly the tougher American varieties of both. The band was on ice for a while due to Power Trip’s intense touring commitments, but Ulsh has revived it for Cosmic Crypt, their fourth LP and first with two members of Iron Reagan, guitarist Mark Bronzino and drummer Ryan Parrish. Even with two-thirds of the band based in Richmond, the new album is an object lesson in exactly how Ulsh earned his reverence in Texas and beyond.
The biggest change to Mammoth Grinder’s approach this time is that Ulsh has switched to bass, leaving Bronzino to handle guitars. Perhaps as a result, Crypt doesn’t show much of the Swedish influence heard on 2009’s Extinction of Humanity or 2013’s Underworlds; they’ve exchanged buzzsaw guitar tones reminiscent of Entombed and Dismember for a more bass-heavy sound and deeper vocal delivery from Ulsh. That singing style, in turn, tips the LP further toward death metal, compared to past efforts where the group’s hardcore lineage was more noticeable. “Human Is Obsolete” and “Rotting Robes” are Mammoth Grinder at their most death metal yet, hitting with the force of an impenetrable phalanx. Elsewhere, “Molotov” opens with a floor-punching riff that would sound equally fitting coming from a bludgeoning death metal crew like Acephalix as it would a lean New York hardcore crew like Judge, ripping with a immediate cross-genre lizard-brain appeal.
The blown-out crust sound of Discharge’s foundational 1980s work remains another key spiritual influence on Mammoth Grinder. “Blazing Burst” feels as war-torn as that UK group’s nuclear-ravaged worlds; “Superior Firepower” combines crust’s noisier side with a feedback intro that immediately transitions into a relentless stomp. Ulsh’s spacey bass dive in “Blazing Burst” suggests another of his side projects, Impalers—it’s a lush flirtation in the middle of a minefield. Throughout the album, Bronzino prioritizes noise over technique in soloing, and his explosive entrances give Mammoth Grinder an unexpected dramatic flair.
One reason Crypt fits so effortlessly into the Mammoth Grinder canon is that the new lineup isn’t entirely new: Bronzino and Parrish were touring members in 2014, before Ulsh turned his focus to Power Trip. They’re ideal partners for Ulsh, as their background in Iron Reagan, a crossover thrash band, means they also value economy. Like the slew of new American death metal acts that came out starting at the beginning of this decade, this version of Mammoth Grinder takes from death metal’s faster and more brutish end, but it doesn’t fully fit into that or any stylistic niche. The simplicity heard here draws from Master; the ugliness brings to mind Autopsy; and none of the influences feel like they’re being hastily grafted together. Coincidentally, Crypt arrives not long after Slayer announced its “final” tour. Like those thrash greats’ classic Reign in Blood, this album presents a complete vision in a short running time, stirring metal and hardcore together into one giant, boiling cauldron. | 2018-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | February 3, 2018 | 7.6 | 19edbeff-cb62-474b-ac29-9ee52739ddf6 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
A new box set documents the riveting story of Toronto soul singer and transgender music pioneer Jackie Shane. Hers are songs laced with pain but emboldened by a remarkable sense of self-possession. | A new box set documents the riveting story of Toronto soul singer and transgender music pioneer Jackie Shane. Hers are songs laced with pain but emboldened by a remarkable sense of self-possession. | Jackie Shane: Any Other Way | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jackie-shane-any-other-way/ | Any Other Way | Jackie Shane was born in Nashville in 1940, where she grew up with her mother, grandfather, and a grandmother who sang “moaning” sad songs as she cleaned the house. Spirituals and blues poured out of their radio by day; at night Jackie tried on her mother’s lipstick and rouge. A pre-puberty Jackie sang high soprano in the choir but later tuned into the ragged, brokenhearted lament of B.B. King’s “Worry, Worry, Worry.” By age 13, she stopped wiping off her mother’s rouge before she walked out the door. As she’d later declare, “I was born a woman in this body.”
By the mid-1960s, in her adopted city of Toronto, the singer had amassed her own following of Jackie Shane wannabes: impeccably made-up transvestites outfitted in glam suits who lined up around the block to see her shows. On posters and fliers, the adjective that would most frequently precede Jackie Shane’s name was “fabulous.” It is this period that is captured—with the raw, vital crackle of a performer at her peak—on Any Other Way, a 25-song double-album set just out from Numero Group. Shane cut the best material of her life in a scorching live 1967 session allegedly inspired by James Brown: Live at the Apollo, included here, that features some of her transformative covers of now-classic soul songs. Any Other Way also includes a half-dozen 45s, a handful of unearthed tracks, and extensive liner notes by Canadian music writer Rob Bowman, who contributes a riveting biography. It’s a worthy treatment for the resurrection of the voice of a trans woman who the world perhaps wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge on her own terms the first time around.
Akin to the recently departed Charles Bradley, Jackie’s songs are laced with an acknowledgment of suffering but emboldened by a remarkable sense of self-possession. Hers is a story stoked by years of deep communion with music and an adventurous adolescence consorting with gamblers, hucksters, and performing in a traveling carnival. Like James Brown, her music is irrefutably dance-inducing. Like Tina Turner, she channeled trauma into triumph. Like Little Richard, she grew up multiple kinds of other in the Jim Crow South: black and gay—for both of them, a fluid, evolving term—and in her case, trans. Little Richard is Shane’s true kindred spirit. One of the first songs Shane sang as a teenager was his “Lucille,” winning a talent show for her rendition of the singer’s cathartic yowl. Shane would eventually study under Little Richard and his band the Upsetters.
But in the early ’70s, at a point in her career when most singers of her talent would have catapulted into fame, Shane disappeared from the public eye. She refused an offer to work with Funkadelic and previously turned down potential deals with Motown and Atlantic. In fact, she retired from music completely, stirring up rumors among her fans of her whereabouts and her possible demise. Fifty years later, Shane is living in Nashville, a recluse from the music world. But she was coaxed out of hiding for this first Jackie Shane–sanctioned release.
“Sticks and Stones,” the opening cut on the album, is an uproarious rebuttal ostensibly delivered to small-minded bullies “tryin’ to break us up.” “I’ve been abused! Deep down in my hearrrrrrrrttt,” Shane sings, punctuating her delivery with a miniature James Brown caterwaul. By the song’s end, she’s already transformed that pain into an unabashed declaration: “I’ve been abused!/...But I love ya.” A couple of songs into Any Other Way, you will very likely have begun to push your furniture to the edges of the room to clear space for a dance floor—to move to the dark, downbeat groove of “Comin’ Down,” or her powerhouse covers of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “You Are My Sunshine,” and “Money (That’s What I Want).”
It is impossible not to wonder why we are just hearing these songs in 2017. Was Jackie right to hide them until now? Would Atlantic and Motown have steered her in Top-40-engineered, watered-down ways? Her poppier tunes, like the eminently catchy “In My Tenement,” have the instant, infectious grab of a classic Ronettes or Shangri-Las hit—but they feel thinner, by comparison, to the full-hearted, soul-bearing weight of songs like “Cruel Cruel World.” As Jackie told it, she didn’t even know what a tenement was. Shane’s talents are better given over to her rendition of “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied),” most famously recorded by Ben E. King and Aretha Franklin; in her hands it’s a ruthless, ruminative, chill-inducing song, summoning sorrow and strength.
Any Other Way’s title song was written by Stax Records musician William Bell, and it feels of a piece with the Memphis label. Lyrically, “Any Other Way” is a song about a broken heart trying to seem tough: “But when you see my baby/Here is what you say/Tell her I wouldn't have it /Any other way.” When it roars out of Shane’s throat, the tune becomes larger still, a fearless song about being true to yourself. “Tell her that I’m happy, tell her that I’m gay,” Shane sang, without needing to add emphasis. On its own terms, “Any Other Way” is Shane’s “I’m Coming Out”—her “Express Yourself,” her “Born This Way”—without the pop or torchy histrionics that prop up latter-day anthems. It draws instead from the pain embedded in its narrative, on the power of its horn line and chorus of backup singers. Released on Sue Records, best known for early-’60s albums by Ike and Tina Turner, “Any Other Way” was a hit on Shane’s home turf, reaching #124 on Billboard’s “Bubbling Under the Hot 100” listing.
Onstage, Jackie didn’t have the flash and swivel of Tina Turner or James Brown. Her own moves, to hear her bandmates tell it, were subtle, nuanced, a perfect foil to the frenetic charge of her music and a reminder of the deeper places from which it originated. Meanwhile, Jackie went into a kind of trance, perhaps called back to the inner pull of the gospel songs on her grandparents’ radio.
But the discovery of these Jackie Shane recordings now feels electric—the sound of a singer who explores the full range of both male and female expression, a transformative definition of what it means to make soul music. Shot through with seemingly innate bravado and the experience of a childhood spent near the pulpit, Shane had a pitch-perfect sense of when to stir up the dance floor, when to bring things down, and when to bring them up again. She teases out the midsection of “Money” with an extended sermon that culminates in yet another galvanizing affirmation that could bend to sexuality, race, or otherness in general: “You know what my slogan is? Baby, do what you want, just know what you’re doing. As long as you don’t force your will and your way on anybody else, live your life because ain’t nobody sanctified and holy.” Preach. | 2017-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Numero Group | October 25, 2017 | 8.5 | 19f44d0f-3330-447e-adf7-3ca1ffa91bd2 | Rebecca Bengal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca-bengal/ | |
Scarcely free of his teenage years, Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst has attempted to create a mature, cohesive concept album of ... | Scarcely free of his teenage years, Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst has attempted to create a mature, cohesive concept album of ... | Bright Eyes: Fevers and Mirrors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/941-fevers-and-mirrors/ | Fevers and Mirrors | Scarcely free of his teenage years, Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst has attempted to create a mature, cohesive concept album of sorts. He has shot for the moon, but skids to a halt on the ground, hindered by young wings. Granted, I'm 20. He's 20. Far be it from me to criticize the efforts of those my age based solely on our greenness, but as my grandmother would say, Oberst's eyes are a lot bigger than his stomach.
Fevers and Mirrors is home to the sophomoric musical meanderings of a young songwriter who seems to take himself far too seriously. This doesn't mean that the music is that bad, only that it's marred by its own overzealous nature. Quite the contrary, there are a few gems hidden in the niches of this album. "The Calendar Hung Itself..." is an intense piece which grinds along to an addictive Latin guitar strumming pattern. On "Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh," Oberst makes an old chord progression seem new with a strong acoustic hook and nicely executed instrumentation from a vibraphone and slide guitar. However, the album as a whole fails in several departments.
What in particular are these fatal flaws that plague Bright Eyes? Let's begin with Oberst's voice. Initially, he seems wracked with intense emotion. But listen closer. His voice has one setting: unsteady quaver. He sounds hypothermic. Nowhere is this more apparent than on "When the Curious Girl Realizes She is Under Glass," where the effect is so extreme that it becomes absolutely ridiculous, not to mention unnerving.
So much of what passes for emotional and intellectual depth on this album is blatantly contrived nonsense. This would never have been so terribly obvious had he not placed a gut-wrenchingly ludicrous staged radio interview with himself at the end of "An Attempt to Tip the Scales." I simply cannot stress enough what a maddeningly self-indulgent mass of pseudo-depth this section of the album falls into. In this sickening chunk of narcissism, Oberst makes a laughable attempt to prove to his listeners that he is of a penetratingly deep intelligence by spouting strings of stale aphorisms that pass for rich understanding amongst those reluctant to have original thought. Not only this, but the mock interviewer actually interrupts Oberst to tell him how brilliant the album is. On the actual record he says this. I hate to sound haughty, but I have honestly never witnessed such tasteless, ostentatious self-promotion on an album by anyone. It must be heard to be believed.
On a strictly musical level, Bright Eyes has his definitive moments but struggles with originality for the majority of the record. "Something Vague" showcases one of the most abused chord progressions in existence with little variation on what's already been done. "The Movement of a Hand" sounds suspiciously like an Eels song. And in a sign of lackluster songwriting, far too many of the songs on Fevers and Mirrors fall victim to the predictability problem of vocals following the bassline at all times. "A Scale, A Mirror, and Those Indifferent Clocks," "Arienette," and "The Center of the World" are all paradigm cases of this trait despite being pleasant enough songs.
In most places, Fevers and Mirrors makes for an interesting listen considering its flaws. The instrumentation is diverse and tastefully orchestrated by the large cast, and it's clear that a great deal of thought and talent has been contributed to its making. Unfortunately, the album is also contrived and makes too blatant an effort to convince the listener of Oberst's tragic wisdom. It's a record that can be enjoyable in select places and definitely shows signs of potential, yet falls victim to mediocrity when held against the work of truly developed musicians. Oberst is in the early stages of developing a talent that will likely take some years to fully mature. When it does, I look forward eagerly to the result. For the time being, he's a far cry from excellent. | 2000-05-30T02:01:40.000-04:00 | 2000-05-30T02:01:40.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | May 30, 2000 | 5.4 | 19f944be-fb08-4814-9e55-955aff156d16 | Pitchfork | null |
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Ramona Gonzalez digs back into the ’90s to find the right R&B moods for her latest album as Nite Jewel, her most focused work yet with many nods to new jack swing and Janet Jackson. | Ramona Gonzalez digs back into the ’90s to find the right R&B moods for her latest album as Nite Jewel, her most focused work yet with many nods to new jack swing and Janet Jackson. | Nite Jewel: Real High | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23152-real-high/ | Real High | It’s easy enough to figure out dates and events from the distant past, but it’s near impossible to understand what it felt like to be alive then. Geographer David Lowenthal has a succinct way of describing this: “The past is a foreign country.” In her work under the nom de pop Nite Jewel, Ramona Gonzalez has always explored the past like a sensory historian, writing songs that use the familiar elements of sweet-as-acid synth-pop and late-night infomercial house without directly imitating them. On Real High, her latest album, she asks a pressing question: Does it actually seem like the world is getting worse, or did the ’90s just feel fun because the club hits were so damn good?
Gonzalez’s previous albums walked the line between sweet-as-acid pop and late-night infomercial house, as seen through the fog of memory. On last year’s Liquid Cool, she returned to hazy throwback lo-fi after a label-led foray into more direct pop and a multi-year hiatus. This time, her sights are set on a specific cultural touchstone: Janet Jackson’s 1993 album janet. She’s not the first to mine Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ new jack swing for modern inspiration, but she has the chops to back it up.
The tracks on Real High tend to start with a Mooged-out bass line and layer keys and tinkling drum fills on top—the basic new jack swing template that took over R&B in the late ’80s and early ’90s. But Gonzalez uses the repetition to circumvent expectations for how pop songs are supposed to work. The songs have verses and choruses, but rarely bridges. “Had to Let Me Go,” one of many variations on the theme of exploring what a real high should feel like, does this to great effect. Her croon is very Janet, but the song gets its momentum and emotional arc from the development of different keyboards and the deployment of percussive effects. A less generous reading of this song—and much of Nite Jewel’s oeuvre—is that they sound like demos a producer would shop around before he got a star attached. But this album makes the case that the architecture of this style of songwriting is strong enough that it should stand on its own.
The marquee tracks are the ones that move away from these genre experiments into a more idiosyncratic approach. Danceable cuts like “The Answer” and “I Don’t Know” feel contemporary because production stretches beyond ’90s touchpoints. A guest appearance from Bay Area rapper (and E-40’s son) Droop-E transforms “R We Talking Long” into trap music. On the title track, she tries to take the prototypical R&B ballad and using her tools to make it feel vital. Even though the emotional stakes are pretty low—“I’m looking for a real high and a real low/Isn’t that the way love goes?,” in another nod to Janet—it’s profound enough in its obvious simplicity to keep your attention on why you’re actually listening to the song: a druggy, lugubrious dance, not a life lesson.
The word “nostalgia” was originally coined to describe the mental ailment of extreme homesickness in the 17th century. After immigrating to a new country, a person would become lethargic and waste away. In the era before planes, trains, and automobiles, once you left home, you were probably never going back. Now that the past can be accessed fairly easily, that sad nostalgia doesn’t make as much sense to us. By putting old sounds into different contexts, Nite Jewel’s albums work as an exploration of a happier nostalgia. Because she takes a specific sound as her point of departure this time around, Real High is her most focused work yet. | 2017-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Gloriette | May 10, 2017 | 7.5 | 19fbe21f-9b14-4446-81c1-53b48c973e15 | Erin Vanderhoof | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-vanderhoof/ | null |
The Australian quartet both epitomizes and transcends the indie-pop aesthetic on an album that balances lighthearted wordplay with serious political commentary. | The Australian quartet both epitomizes and transcends the indie-pop aesthetic on an album that balances lighthearted wordplay with serious political commentary. | Terry: I’m Terry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/terry-im-terry/ | I’m Terry | Good indie pop is tricky to pull off. Go in too hard and the music can turn precious or juvenile, but keep your distance and you risk coming off cynical, as if you’re making fun of your own music. To sound breezy and effortless, you have to strike a delicate balance—and Australian quartet Terry have become highly adept at threading that needle. Throughout the ten songs on their third album, I’m Terry, they display a healthy sense of humor without ever undermining themselves.
Terry’s way of avoiding excessive earnestness is more about absurdity than apology. Take “The Whip,” whose lyrics read as pure wordplay: “The whip of wealth/The whipper wheels/The whipper feels it’s fine.” But the music is so sharp and energetic, the song ends up sounding more like an exhilarating workout than a Lewis Carroll verse. Even more invigorating is “For the Field,” a punk-leaning sprint in which singers Al Montfort and Amy Hill indulge a fondness for alliteration: “Filthy neds fill the field/Filthy frames for the fakes/Filth for phonies filth for filth.”
For all its playfulness, I’m Terry steers clear of cartoonish inanity. Many songs touch on serious themes, but without flattening the band’s ideas into slogans. “Crimes” plays with repetitive rhymes and rhythmic consonance to make a case against the penal system. Terry find an ever bigger target on “Under Reign”: their home country. Over a climbing melody, Hill and Xanthe Waite proclaim, “This is bleak/This is A-U-S.”
Terry’s ability to balance humor and seriousness matches their openness to just about every kind of sound associated with homemade indie pop. They’re equally comfortable opening I’m Terry with the nursery rhyme feel of “Carpe Diem,” pushing out jangly guitars on “Jane Roe,” and melting a retro, doo-wop-style chorus into the austere jaunt of “Oh Helen.” Even though their songs are pretty simple, Terry have keen ears for texture, layering in a range of tones and tempos that make the album unpredictable enough to encourage multiple listens. The deftness with which they subtly shift sounds from track to track is an object lesson in the undersung richness and diversity of the indie pop aesthetic.
As familiar as the music on I’m Terry will sound to anyone who’s followed indie music over the past three decades, they pull together so many different strands from that era that the result is too distinctive to simply be filed away with a particular genre. They also have a knack for making their idiosyncratic songs so catchy as to feel universal, a rare talent they share with global comrades including New York’s Palberta and London’s Shopping. Even the band’s own conspicuously generic self-presentation (their first two albums are titled Terry HQ and Remember Terry) suggests a disinclination to subsume their music to any larger label. From now on, we can call their style simply “Terry pop.” | 2018-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Upset the Rhythm | August 31, 2018 | 7.3 | 19fd66e6-d5e0-4141-afa1-f3852d17b49c | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The Pope of Mope moves to Rome and becomes revitalized; with help from producer Tony Visconti, he explores rapturous self-torment with more passion and power than he's possessed in years. | The Pope of Mope moves to Rome and becomes revitalized; with help from producer Tony Visconti, he explores rapturous self-torment with more passion and power than he's possessed in years. | Morrissey: Ringleader of the Tormentors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5439-ringleader-of-the-tormentors/ | Ringleader of the Tormentors | "I am a living sign," Morrissey sings on "Vicar in a Tutu", from the Smiths' 1986 apex, The Queen Is Dead. If the words evoke Morrissey's dual personae as myth and mythmaker, their religious overtones are a subtle reminder that he's also a never-quite-recovering Catholic. Though his 1990s relocation to Los Angeles, the sunny center of 20th century glamour, elicited little surprise, his recent move to Rome seems even more natural: There, the Pope of Mope can reel around the fountain of both Occidental culture and inexpiable guilt.
From humdrum towns to giddy London, from Sunset Boulevard to the Eternal City, this living sign signifies, first and foremost, himself. Ringleader of the Tormentors is a new Morrissey album, not a new Morrissey; attempts to wring autobiographical revelations from its lyrics are easy, but ultimately futile. Accusations of self-parody, after losing their sting sometime around "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now", remain apt but, in Morrissey's case, often irrelevant. On his eighth solo album, the enigmatic warbler again sounds contradictory notes on love, death, the divine, and the despised. All that's really changed are his collaborators-- Ennio Morricone, T. Rex/Bowie producer Tony Visconti, guitarist/co-songwriter Jesse Tobias-- who trade the televised-car-chase production of 2004 comeback You Are The Quarry for a sound more akin to the glam-rock crunch of Your Arsenal.
Rapturous self-torment-- particularly the chasm between love's possibility and its unrealized fulfillment-- was always the defining condition of the Morrissey experience. For Morrissey's narrators, love and death are two levels of the same double-decker bus-- a theme made explicit on lead single "You Have Killed Me", a strapping rocker reminiscent of "Irish Blood, English Heart". With Hammond organ syncope and Morricone strings, trembling ballad "Dear God, Please Help Me" likens lust to "explosive kegs between my legs," while decorous torch song "I'll Never Be Anyone's Hero Now" places "my one true love...under the ground." As Moz idol Oscar Wilde put it, "Each man kills the thing he loves." Moz's interests were eloquently foreshadowed by another Catholic artist, Jean Genet, whose 1943 novel Our Lady of the Flowers laces its gay protagonist's exaltation of a beautiful male murderer with references to the Church. Likewise, Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ isn't just about homoerotic S&M.
The famous mind/body dichotomy from "Still Ill" tellingly neglects the soul, but Morrissey still can't escape what he's called "inbuilt guilt." Even "Dear God, Please Help Me", Moz's most emotionally beguiling song in years, grows ambivalent at the moment inattentive critics have cited as the singer's coming-out: When Morrissey sings, "Dear God, did this kind of thing happen to you?/ Now I'm spreading your legs/ With mine in between/ Dear God, if I could I would help you," is he addressing a lover, or a loving deity? On "You Have Killed Me", which contains some of this infamous celibate's most candidly sexual lines since Meat Is Murder-era B-side "Stretch Out and Wait" (or at least YATQ's "Come Back to Camden"), the man who ostentatiously forgave Jesus two years ago "for all the desire He placed in me" slyly concludes, "There is no point saying this again/ But I forgive you."
Even when contemplating mortality, Morrissey remains enamored of youth. A children's choir guests on multiple tracks, including fast-paced single candidate "The Youngest Was the Most Loved". Their immature voices bestow hair-raising pathos upon a refrain almost too self-evidently jejune for the middle-aged Moz to sing alone: "There is no such thing in life as normal." The choir returns for "The Father Who Must Be Killed", an equally energetic knife-attack on a stern stepfather, which ends in eerie laughter. Elsewhere, Morrissey marks the passing of time more keenly, with even more overt auto-plagiarisms. "It's the same old S.O.S.," he concedes amid the Roman rain, midtempo groove, and orchestral crescendos of the epic "Life Is a Pigsty". "Even now in the final hour of my life/ I'm falling in love again," he adds, subtly acknowledging that love is not as new to his music as recent press has implied.
Morrissey's poignancy, in his best solo work as in his vivid Smiths prime-- what critic Simon Reynolds once called "a piercing beauty, or a sweet ache"-- often inflames the exhilarating terror of loneliness just as it elevates the sensations of love through comparison with Moz's unrequitable romantic perfections. The complicated gender roles, the ubiquitous allusions, the games of irony, art, and style serve equally to ignite a listener's curiosity. Ringleader of the Tormentors is, rather than the now-anticipated letdown, another fitting heir to that legacy. The living sign again: "This one is different, because it's us." | 2006-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2006-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sanctuary / Attack | April 3, 2006 | 8 | 19fe213b-9636-4a76-9bb0-079f332a47fc | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The manic, unclassifiable Glasgow producer's overstuffed, expertly curated contribution to the BBC's Essential Mix program pulls together threads from across the musical spectrum. | The manic, unclassifiable Glasgow producer's overstuffed, expertly curated contribution to the BBC's Essential Mix program pulls together threads from across the musical spectrum. | Rustie: Essential Mix | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16498-essential-mix/ | Essential Mix | Many young producers are ditching the minimalistic beats and hollow, gray dub textures that dominated dance trends for much of the last decade in favor of something bigger, brighter, louder, greater, and all around more, more, more. For these maximalist-minded artists, traditional melodic structures are never enough: Why not have six synths playing three melodies out of step with each other, and throw a cluster of guitar and drum solos in there, too? It's a trend that parallels rapid advancements for both digital production and consumption. It's also the perfect soundtrack for a current generation who live (and, sometimes, dance) on the internet. In terms of scope and notability, these producers run the gamut from big-box (Skrillex, Rusko, Dillon Francis) and small-scale (Lunice, Damu, the cross-continental Night Slugs/Fade to Mind crew).
Over the last year, Glasgow's Russell Whyte, aka Rustie, has been a key figure in this loose movement due to his ingenuity and raw talent. While likeminded fellow Glaswegian and Warp labelmate Hudson Mohawke offers a colorful take on disparate strains of hip-hop and R&B, Rustie's manic, overstuffed work defies categorization. It's dubstep, it's hair metal, it's jazz fusion, it's pop played at 140 bpm, it's the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack, it's classical music filtered through the bombast of Southern hip-hop's grandest moments-- all of which could be happening either separately or all at once.
Both of his official releases for Warp, 2010's Sunburst EP and last year's singular Glass Swords, sound something like being locked inside an arcade that's harnessing its electricity from the sun. Glass Swords is way too much fun to listen to, like overdosing on sugar-- but it's a lot to take in, too, and perhaps best enjoyed in controlled doses for potential motion-sickness victims.
That potential for sonic overload might make some listeners feel trepidation when approaching Rustie's contribution to the BBC's long-running Essential Mix program. As is Essential Mix protocol, Rustie's mix runs just a little under two hours, which will prove a mind-boggler of a listen for many. But though it nearly triples Glass Swords' running time, it's also, weirdly, more compulsively listenable. If you have two hours to spare, take the plunge and find choon after gob-smacking choon. And if you got shit to do, that's fine-- just jump to any random point, listen for a bit, and leave wherever you like.
Though it seems like all his fingers are on 10 different buttons at once, Rustie's Essential Mix is several cuts above because of how expertly paced and curated it is. The wide variety of material culled for this mix-- much of it unreleased-- can be divided into three large categories: dreamy, gold-glistened synth bangers, the type of bass-rattling beat workouts that shake fillings out of teeth, and a selection of R&B and hip-hop both new and not-too-new that's accompanied by Rustie's distinctive production touch.
He drops a ton of his own new material too, work ranging from a-thousand-sunsets gorgeous ("Reflector") to the type of flaming-keyboard workouts that he seemingly pulls off in his sleep ("Cat Nip", "Frazzle", "Ooompa"). Rustie's stuff wows, but he's willing to cede the floor to other euphoric up-and-comers, from Dorian Concept's fat, juicy synth-walloped remix of Cid Rim's "JazzJazzJazz", to Lone's latest slice of beatific rave revivalism, "Dream Ache", to "R U Ready", a cooking dance-worthy slice of head-fuckery courtesy of Hudson Mohawke and Lunice's promising TNGHT project.
Tracks arrive with the expected chaotic abandon but the flow is what makes the set work, from the gorgeous, sighing "VIP" version of Rustie's own Glass Swords cut "City Star" that breaks up a particularly dark and clubby run, to Rick Ross's titanic "The World Is Ours" steamrolling through the mix's opening minutes, flattening the awesome ostentatiousness that preceded it. The whole thing breathes evenly, which gives Rustie plenty of space to go wild elsewhere. Everything's a sound effect with this guy-- wolf noises, stoned exhortations, 8-bit video game samples, creepy helium vocal samples, Trapaholics mixtape drops, creepy giggling, and Kanye West, whose presence on this thing is exactly as "HANH?!?"-filled and fitting as you'd expect it to be.
Kanye shows up twice on Rustie's Essential Mix: once in vocal form, on your favorite weed carrier's weed carrier Big Sean's "Marvin Gaye and Chardonnay", and once behind the decks on his recently circulated remix of Cassie's "King of Hearts". Both sound better here than they do isolated-- the latter's aided greatly when paired up with the Glass Swords highlight "Hover Traps", but the former's low-end oddball charm is given new life here, a previously mediocre tune that's finally found a home. Within 24 hours of when this Essential Mix went to air, Kanye's new single with 2 Chainz, Pusha-T, and Big Sean, "Mercy", also dropped-- which featured an "additional instruments" credit given to Hudson Mohawke. Kanye's interest in this new maximal wave of electronic music makes a lot of sense-- why wouldn't the guy who loves The Biggest Things want to work with young guns that are just as sonically greedy?
On a more genre-wide level, though, Rustie's Essential Mix draws a line tying electro-maximalism's pilled-up attitude and modern hip-hop's own druggy eccentricities. The yo-yo hook behind A$AP Twelvy's "Our World" fits in so perfectly that the line between where it ends and Rustie's own "Eyezz" begins to blur, while Wiz Khalifa's "Guilty Conscience", which appears in the middle of the mix's closing third of Rustie-contributed explosives, provides one of the set's more glassy-eyed moments. Perhaps the biggest surprise here is the appearance of Destiny's Child's 1999 single "Get on the Bus", featuring a start-snap production job from Timbaland that sounds so "now," it serves as a bittersweet reminder of how ahead of the game this guy was at his prime. The fact that almost all of the hip-hop and R&B cuts that appear on this mix remain untouched, yet still contribute greatly to its uniformity, speaks greatly to the texturally varied sonic patchwork that Rustie's weaved here, comparable to DJ /rupture's Uproot in its functionality as a primer for different sounds existent and being made all over the world-- as well as a killer party playlist, too.
Rustie clearly values an off-the-moment sort of chaos, the idea that it's possible to travel from point A to point B and make a thousand zig-zag pinball-machine detours along the way. That's how a lot of people live these days. As a snapshot of a young artist seizing a moment to offer an overview of a scene, Rustie's Essential Mix is the most perfectly taken picture. As a pure, positive, party-hardy mega-statement on digital (and music) culture's total stimulus overload, it's a joyously fun trip. | 2012-04-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-04-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | BBC | April 19, 2012 | 8.1 | 1a003570-3fd7-4ebc-9617-ddba8637e711 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
On Interpol's first album in four years—and first without Carlos D—there’s nothing that touches the band’s creative peak, but it's still a step up from their 2010 self-titled record. El Pintor’s best songs could hang with Interpol’s strongest deep cuts. | On Interpol's first album in four years—and first without Carlos D—there’s nothing that touches the band’s creative peak, but it's still a step up from their 2010 self-titled record. El Pintor’s best songs could hang with Interpol’s strongest deep cuts. | Interpol: El Pintor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19693-interpol-el-pintor/ | El Pintor | When Interpol went out on their first tour behind their 2002 album Turn on the Bright Lights, Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard imparted some prophetic advice for drummer Sam Fogarino at an Ohio stop: “Don’t sell more than 50,000 records or you’re in trouble.” Nine years later, the album was certified Gold by the RIAA—that’s 500,000 units sold in the U.S.—and trouble has, indeed, followed the band since their star-making debut. Look past the questionable lyrics and behind-the-scenes debauchery, and it becomes clear that Interpol have been victims of unreasonable expectations. As with many pop cultural events that have taken place in the last 13 years, 9/11 plays a role, as Turn on the Bright Lights’ dark, impeccably styled catharsis took on an accidental resonance, despite being written before that cataclysmic day. With its iridescent glow and empathetic hook (“New York cares”), album centerpiece “NYC” carried a specific weight; around 9/11's tenth anniversary, Suede’s Brett Anderson professed a love for the song, and Michael Stipe covered it with R.E.M. in 2003, all of which suggested that Interpol should be considered a Serious Band.
The 12 years following Turn on the Bright Lights’ release, however, have only proven that looking to Interpol for profundity makes as much sense as installing a diving board in a kiddie pool. If we’re being real, the band’s ankle-deep tendencies started with Bright Lights, and that’s not necessarily an insult: like many bands surfing the new-rock wave at the time, Interpol turned shallowness into a kind of goofy virtue, the sonic equivalent of wearing sunglasses indoors. There was, and still is, nothing inherently original about what they were doing—Peter Hook cheekily applied to be the band’s bassist in 2010, only to be rejected—but in a musical climate jam-packed with call-backs to rock’s past, Interpol were, in their own way, innovators. They took the sonic template for one of the most serious bands of all time and applied it to tales of white lines, late nights, and hetero-male woes that made “Entourage” look like The Joy Luck Club. In 2014, this is called “trolling”; in 2002, it simply sounded like a good time.
The years passed, and it became clear that Interpol’s talents could be listed on one hand, which was, again, not initially a bad thing. Antics from 2004 lacked the enveloping, cohesive atmosphere that made Turn on the Bright Lights such a striking debut, but the songs were definitely there. In 2007, Interpol did away away with the pesky, ill-fitting notions of “indie” (which the band only represented in sound, similar to how the term is still occasionally bandied about in the UK music press) by sensibly, and briefly, making the major-label leap to Capitol; the resulting record from that partnership, Our Love to Admire, is typically pinpointed as the moment Interpol started their steep, steady decline.
The chilly reception Our Love to Admire received at the time now seems a little unfair, and possibly the result of cultural fatigue; 2007, after all, was certainly not 2002, and Interpol’s stubborn refusal to show any progress after five years of visibility was a sign to many that the band’s slavish unoriginality was growing stale. In reality, Our Love to Admire represents Interpol at their most Interpol-iest—streamlined songwriting, crystal-clear production, lyrics directly referencing cocaine, a song called “No I in Threesome”—and if it’s not their best album, it’s certainly a hell of a lot better than what followed. The swaggering melodrama and shiny-suit dark pop of Our Love to Admire was, more so than ever for Interpol, redolent of bands from the ‘80s; this time, though, they approached the modern-day equivalent of Duran Duran’s empty-headed brilliance, a fitting full-circle since Carlos Dengler was known to wear a Duran Duran T-shirt during rehearsals for Bright Lights.
Regardless, Our Love to Admire was not a commercial leap, and so Interpol entered a new decade with a return to their old bosses at Matador and their fourth, self-titled album. Easily the band’s worst record to date, Interpol was bereft of hooks, choruses, and other elements that make listening to music enjoyable. Four years later, they've all but disowned the record, judging by their set lists. So it’s understandable to approach the band’s fifth album in 12 years, El Pintor, with suspicion. The album’s title means “the painter” in Spanish, but it’s also an anagram for the band’s name, and the similarities to its predecessor don’t end there: as with Interpol, this new one’s 10 songs long, self-produced, with studio vet Alan Moulder handling mixing duties. The phrase “approach with caution” comes to mind.
El Pintor isn’t “more of the same” in one specific way: it’s Interpol’s first album without Dengler on bass, following his departure in 2010; although Dave Pajo served as his replacement on the tour promoting Interpol, the band’s a trio now, with frontman Paul Banks taking on four-string duties. Dengler’s absence is felt not least by the people in the band; Fogarino recently admitted to NME that Dengler’s talents were “a huge part of [Interpol’s] sound...You couldn’t take that away.” But El Pintor sounds like the work of a band revitalized, for the moment at least. There’s considerable energy in these songs, with just enough melodic smarts for El Pintor to rank as the fourth-best Interpol album—a dubious achievement, sure, but the failure of Interpol makes even that surprising.
There’s nothing here that touches the band’s creative peak, but any of El Pintor’s songs could hang with Interpol’s strongest deep cuts. With a red-herring of an opening that resembles the stately Antics opener “Next Exit”, “All the Rage Back Home” is the strongest up-tempo Interpol single since Our Love to Admire’s “The Heinrich Maneuver”, propelled by Fogarino’s jet-engine drumming and a chorus delivered by Banks, in his distinctive whine, that sounds as wistful as it does festival-ready. The tricky licks of “My Desire” fondly recall Our Love to Admire’s “All Fired Up”, while album highlight “Anywhere” cannily fuses the patient urgency of Bright Lights’ “Obstacle 1” and the proclamatory riffs of Antics’ “C’mere”.
If you’re starting to notice a trend here, then the ultimate failing of El Pintor is apparent: this is the sound of a band feeding on its past, a move that counters the bloodlessness of Interpol with a formula that is as moderately effective as it is uninspired. The slow, elegant majesty of “My Blue Supreme” is a re-trod of Our Love to Admire’s chiming “Rest My Chemistry”, the insistent throb of “Ancient Ways” essentially resembles Antics’ “Not Even Jail” rejiggered slightly, and so on.
The sole surprising moment arrives two-thirds of the way into “Ancient Ways”, when Banks breaks into a brief falsetto that shatters even Randy Jackson’s definition of “pitchy”; it’s quite possibly the most embarrassing thing Banks has ever done on record, and we’re talking about a guy who once sang the lyric “You’re so young/ Like a daisy in my lazy eye” with serious conviction. Lyrically, Banks has long been a punching bag, but his middle-school-poetry approach has grown endearing over time—and it’s also all but vanished from this decade of the band’s work. The most memorable lyric Interpol provided was when, in a bit of unintentional hilarity, Banks moaned “I’m a nice guy” on album opener “Success”; here, it’s on “My Blue Supreme”, in the form of the telling pre-chorus utterance “Only one in a hundred make it/ We fake until there’s nothing to fake.”
These lines could be interpreted a few ways—a commentary on the stylishness that Interpol once so exuded, a self-castigation of the band’s own derivative tendencies—but it could also be seen as a statement of survival. Circa Antics, the major-label-subsidiary market was flooded with Interpol soundalikes that ranged from not-bad to not-terrible to flat-out-awful; they sounded like copies of copies, and by the time the major-label system sunk their claws into the real thing, the whole thing resembled an endless series of funhouse mirrors. With El Pintor, Interpol don’t sound as much like Interpol as they do a band that really wants to be Interpol; it’s a sad notion for anyone who once held this band’s music dear to their hearts, but taking into account what came before, it’s a miracle that Interpol still exist in this capacity at all. | 2014-09-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-09-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | September 8, 2014 | 5.9 | 1a0127c8-ee83-4c3e-8ced-5f7cdbaba152 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Rangda is a trio composed of avant-garde guitarists Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny alongside drummer Chris Corsano. Each of their records features riff-heavy, tightly packed instrumental rock tunes with moments of abandon, and on The Heretic's Bargain they are as precise and wild as they've ever been. | Rangda is a trio composed of avant-garde guitarists Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny alongside drummer Chris Corsano. Each of their records features riff-heavy, tightly packed instrumental rock tunes with moments of abandon, and on The Heretic's Bargain they are as precise and wild as they've ever been. | Rangda: The Heretic's Bargain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21467-the-heretics-bargain/ | The Heretic's Bargain | Chaos and order are the poles that Rangda swings between, but order usually wins. On each of their three albums, the trio of guitarists Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny and drummer Chris Corsano have hewn to a basic pattern: several compact tunes combining riff-heavy instrumental rock with moments of abandon, plus one lengthier piece that ventures farther out. Their latest, The Heretic’s Bargain, begins laser-precise: "To Melt the Moon" is a gnarled coil of twisting guitar lines and shuffling rhythm, with Bishop threading needles and Chasny chasing him through rolling peaks and valleys. Two quicker tunes follow with more spot-on, tightrope-walking riffs, and you can hear them testing how short and sharp they can go without losing their chaos-around-the-corner edge. Much of that balance stems from Bishop’s guitar lines, which are equal parts surf-rock and Middle Eastern mysticism: Some of these tracks evoke Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet after a marathon Sublime Frequencies listening session.
The wheels loosen up toward the end of The Heretic’s Bargain, with two tracks that feel more improvised and impulsive. But these are not one-shot jams tossed off to fill an album’s length. The 19-minute closer "Mondays Are Free at the Hermetic Museum" is a thoughtful journey across a vast guitar-rock desert that’s as much about patience and deliberation as the rest of The Heretic’s Bargain is about speed and accuracy.
It’s interesting to compare "Mondays" to the long pieces on previous Rangda albums, "Plain of Jars" (from 2010’s False Flag) and "Silver Nile" (from 2013’s Formerly Extinct). There are big similarities: all three songs unfurl slowly and meditate on a melodic figure until it becomes its own universe. But the fleet and pointed riff at the center of "Mondays" would have easily fit onto one of the shorter tracks. As Bishop and Chasny lock together and push that riff into abstraction, they come close to fusing their two sides, precision and abandon. That makes The Heretic’s Bargain their most cohesive record to date, and suggests that it will likely be bested on that count by the next one. | 2016-02-19T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-19T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental | Drag City | February 19, 2016 | 7.5 | 1a02c8f1-7049-4028-9428-c2b0cfa18719 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Melodic sing-alongs, fuzz-guitar riffs-- Weezer are going back to basics, making music that sounds for (but also often by) 13-year-olds. | Melodic sing-alongs, fuzz-guitar riffs-- Weezer are going back to basics, making music that sounds for (but also often by) 13-year-olds. | Weezer: Raditude | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13656-raditude/ | Raditude | Right now, psychiatrists are feverishly debating over what to include in the next revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: the DSM-V, the psych bible. Among the syndromes those experts may decide whether to include in the latest edition is Peter Pan Syndrome, adults who long for youth so powerfully they begin to act like eternal children. Think Michael Jackson, who in naming his ranch Neverland, certainly invited the diagnosis.
But most people with Peter Pan Syndrome regress to pre-pubertal life, an age before the complications of responsibility and sexuality. So what do we call what Rivers Cuomo has? The Weezer frontman seems to be stuck in an eternal puberty, forever 13-- confused, horny, hyperbolic, obsessed with brand names. It's a characteristic that has always been at the heart of Weezer, from "In the Garage" onward. But it's never been more concentrated than on Raditude, which, from its goofy name and cover art to its Mountain Dew-jacked sound and melodramatic lyrics, is designed to hit 13-year-old boys directly on target.
And Cuomo is damned good at getting inside the frightening mind of a teenage boy. "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To" is a perfect title for a song about awkward courtship, and the fact that the narrator takes his date to Best Buy (teenage Mecca) before a home viewing of Titanic is pinpoint detail. Echoes of "In the Garage" turn up in, well, "In the Mall", written by drummer Patrick Wilson but sold by Cuomo emphatically chronicling the cruising circuit of elevator-to-escalator-to-elevator. Elsewhere on Raditude, Cuomo whines about going to work, pressures girls into third base, parrots hip-hop slang, escapes into ridiculous fantasy, and on bonus track "Get Me Some" portrays the teenage experience in four words: "Right now/ Everything sucks."
Of course, these journal scrawls are backed largely by power-pop-- what else could it be? Cuomo proved for all time with the first two Weezer records (and fleetingly since) that he's a master of the genre, popping out melodic sing-alongs and fuzz-guitar riffs, and Raditude largely goes back to those basics. "Let It All Hang Out" is a song about celebrating the weekend and forgetting your troubles and sounds like the song you would play to do exactly that. The peppy (if a bit on the creepy side) "I'm Your Daddy", made with Britney and Miley collaborator Dr. Luke, justly turns the table on rock-borrowing pop like "Since U Been Gone". All together, it sounds like the first record ever written with the goal expressly in mind of being kick-ass to play on Rock Band. The departures from that formula are harder to stomach, particularly the Bollywood-drenched Hallmark card "Love Is the Answer", which is absolutely awful.
I still get hate mail for saying Make Believe was so bad that it retroactively ruined the Blue Album and Pinkerton, and I still believe it-- "Beverly Hills" was the sound of a band that had learned to do as little as possible to write a hit. But Raditude doesn't have that stench of minimal calculation on it; if anything, it's as earnest as the famously confessional Pinkerton, just written by someone whose age doesn't match his POV. But the record's teen-boy empowerment message doesn't have much to offer anyone over 13 years old. Perhaps the proper fictional character to reference isn't Peter Pan, but Matthew McConaughey's Wooderson from Dazed and Confused-- we all get older, Rivers Cuomo stays the same age. | 2009-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Geffen | November 4, 2009 | 4.5 | 1a04ad0d-579b-46af-a85e-7652e3d0081a | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
On this sparkling reissue of an early career highlight, the act that billed itself as “the most fucked-up country band in Nashville” revels in the ecstasy of influence. | On this sparkling reissue of an early career highlight, the act that billed itself as “the most fucked-up country band in Nashville” revels in the ecstasy of influence. | Lambchop: What Another Man Spills | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lambchop-what-another-man-spills/ | What Another Man Spills | “Visit the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, TN.” That short, direct advertisement has appeared in the packaging of almost every Lambchop full-length, but it’s perhaps most prominent on 1998’s What Another Man Spills, where it appears on the front cover. Barely noticeable on the translucent vellum of the original CD, the words are unmissable on the new LP reissue. It’s an odd exhortation, as Lambchop do not sound much like any country band past or present. Frontman Kurt Wagner has said that the message was “a way of emphasizing that this was a band from Nashville and they are of this place and in a way it would remind people of our Nashville-ness and our ties of being from here.”
Lambchop have had a weird relationship with both the city and the country genre ever since they proclaimed themselves “the most fucked-up country band in Nashville.” They incorporate pedal steel, guitars that sound like Chet Atkins and Glen Campbell, even sophisticated string arrangements that look backwards to the more urbane Nashville Sound of the 1960s. But Wagner sings with no definable twang, and his subject matter only occasionally dovetails with that of mainstream country radio. So it sounds like a joke, the idea of Lambchop as a country band: If you lived in Nashville, what other kind of band could you possibly be?
Spills was released at a moment when Nashville represented something awful and fake and calculated to the roots-rock weirdos who subscribed to No Depression. (“Fuck this town!” goes the Robbie Fulks anthem from 1997.) Proudly identifying with the capital of country music was subversive and perhaps even self-deprecating in the late 1990s, never mind that Wagner evinced no knowledge of mainstream country. He genuinely loved those old, forgotten records, preferring Jim Nabors to your indie rock saviors and accepting how out of touch that made him look.
Building on the dense, lustrous, yet still punk-indebted sound of 1997’s Thriller, What Another Man Spills does two things that ought to be oppositional, if not downright irreconcilable: First, Lambchop set themselves up as something resembling a real band, as opposed to a loose assortment of day laborers, music-biz civilians, and whoever else happened to show up to record on a given day. Second, they blow that band to smithereens. “It was a big step toward our acting and sounding something more akin to a professional music entity in both sound recording and the approach to the songs we were making,” Wagner writes in the new liner notes. Loose and gangly, with an air of why-the-hell-not experimentation in every song, the album nonetheless sounds more determined, more focused, more professional than anything else they’d done so far.
Much of that has to do with Mark Nevers, a longtime band member who had stepped into the role of producer. He booked sessions around Nashville during studios’ weekend off-hours, securing a better rate to make a more expensive-sounding album. To say that Spills has a rich, lush, variegated sound would be an understatement: Especially on this new LP, remastered from the original DAT tapes, the music sounds so good that you get distracted by certain elements: that deep, lovely guitar that interrupts opener “Interrupted”; that tectonic bass saxophone on “King of Nothing Never”; the trembling marimba on “Scamper” (inspired, reportedly, by Wagner’s job as a floor sander). If this is indeed country music, then it’s built on the refined sounds associated with Owen Bradley and Chart Records, not the slick hat acts or even the alt-country insurgents of the era. It’s museum country rather than mainstream or alt.
Even as they settle into this newfound professionalism and cement the Lambchop sound, they work to explode that sound, constantly nudging at its boundaries and sometimes pushing aggressively against them. Along with the graceful smears of pedal steel, there are string arrangements all but quoted from old Blaxploitation soundtracks. The rhythm section is tight in its approximation of funk, and occasionally Wagner breaks into a laryngitic falsetto. As its title implies, this is a covers-heavy album, but instead of Little Jimmy Dickens or George Jones, Lambchop tackle Curtis Mayfield’s “Give Me Your Love (Lover Song)” and “I’ve Been Lonely for So Long” by the underrated Stax artist Frederick Knight. There’s none of the distance or detachment in these covers that, in the ’90s, could mask a fear of failure; Lambchop embrace these songs and the traditions they represent unreservedly, as though Mayfield’s superfly orchestrations were a big-city cousin to hillbilly music.
In fact, one of the best moments on Spills comes halfway through “I’ve Been Lonely for So Long,” when Wagner delivers Knight’s spoken-word overture: “Yes, I’ve been lonely. You never know the real meaning of peace and harmony. Yeah.” Perhaps because the cover was recorded during a decade so closely associated with irony, that interlude has the feel of a high-wire guitar solo, where one wrong note might bring everything to a screeching halt. But Wagner never betrays a smirk. This is an album about love—romantic love, sure, but mostly musical love. Lambchop emerge on this record as a band that reaches out into the world, that collects what another man spills and makes something new and warm out of it. This is an album about the joy of influence, not the burden.
As such, the music is encoded with the trappings of this phase in the band's history—not only what they were listening to in the late ’90s, but most of all who they were associating with. To repay Yo La Tengo for taking them out on tour, Lambchop cover “It’s Not Alright,” by James McNew’s side project Dump. The album art is courtesy of Vic Chesnutt, who also plays on a few songs; Lambchop had recently backed the Athens singer-songwriter on his sixth album, The Salesman & Bernadette. And they reinterpret two songs by F.M. Cornog, a.k.a. East River Pipe, who had just become their Merge labelmate. There’s a bleary majesty to “Life #2,” especially when the pedal steel scissors through the chorus, and “King of Nothing Never” brings rambunctious energy to match a self-loathing so fantastical that it becomes a kind of self-love. Together, they comprise an advertisement akin to the one for the Country Music Hall of Fame: Listen to East River Pipe.
In 2018, the closing track plays like an unintentional eulogy. “Theme to ’The Neil Miller Show,’” by bass player Marc Trovillion, has a boisterous party vibe similar to the Bar-Kays’ “Soul Finger.” Someone keeps shouting for the band to get their asses into the studio and play the song, enjoying it so much that he calls everybody back in for one last pass through the coda: “C’mon man, let’s get down!” Perhaps because of his songwriting credit, and definitely because of his prominent bassline, I always pictured Trovillion as that ringleader. It’s a lovely and lively moment, all the more poignant five years after Trovillion’s death, and it speaks to why all of these people are making music together in the first place: Call it country or fucked-up country or whatever, but there’s a invigorating sense of camaraderie in these songs, a palpable joy in creation, and an excitement to find out what’s over that next musical hill. | 2018-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 11, 2018 | 8.2 | 1a06c3f4-0b7d-458e-9100-50487adab255 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
For his latest psychedelic pop record, Michael Collins enlisted Ariel Pink, Weyes Blood, and members of the Mac DeMarco band, among others. It’s Collins’ most focused effort yet. | For his latest psychedelic pop record, Michael Collins enlisted Ariel Pink, Weyes Blood, and members of the Mac DeMarco band, among others. It’s Collins’ most focused effort yet. | Drugdealer: The End of Comedy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22290-the-end-of-comedy/ | The End of Comedy | The band names that Michael Collins chooses for his dazed pop projects function as tests of faith. He’s operated under the monikers Run DMT and Salvia Plath, made surreal soul and funk as half of Silk Rhodes, and his latest record comes as Drugdealer. Each choice has been a little goofy and somewhat dumb. But these words are also imbued with the pupil-dilated honesty that comes when you dabble with the sort of mind-expanding substances he’s nodding to. There’s always been more to it than just grinning jokes: the names are bellwethers that let you know if you’ll relate to Collins’ perspective, not indicators of the quality or content of the songs themselves. If people detest the names, Collins said in a 2013 interview, “they probably won’t really like the songs, and that’s just a-ok with me.”
Despite the name, Collins is framing this Drugdealer effort as a new beginning. The title—The End of Comedy—can be read as a way of buttoning up the past, moving onward to sweetness and sincerity. But that is, in a sense, what he’s been doing all along. Hidden underneath titles like Bong Voyage, One Hitter Wonders, and Get Ripped or Die Trying is a serious songwriter who’s more in touch with the world around him than his jokes suggest.
Now that Collins has a few extra sets of hands around, that’s highlighted even further. Ariel Pink, Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering, members of Mac DeMarco’s live band, and the Montreal freaks in Sheer Agony all turn up over the course of The End of Comedy’s 11 tracks. They smooth out some of Collins’ stranger—and occasionally, more grating—tendencies. There’s no rambly spoken word pieces about DMT trips or distended drone works. Instead, there’s things like “Suddenly,” a slowly unravelling pop song about joy, newness, and unexpected realizations. The lyrics—sung by Mering—are loose and abstract, but after meandering in the dark a bit, she sees the rise of the morning sun, and with it comes a wave of comfort: “Now I feel like I’m home again.” Even its lyrics are delirious and psychedelic. It’s the sort of song Collins has been writing, or trying to write, over his whole career, but delivered in a much more clear-headed way.
That lucidity becomes the defining characteristic of The End of Comedy. There’s a newfound focus that was missing even on Salvia Plath’s The Bardo Story and Silk Rhodes’ self-titled—two relatively hi-fi works by Collins’ standards. Previously, Collins has fogged his more produced recordings with dizzy arrangements, but now he’s able to turn even the lazily strummed acoustics and heavy-lidded slide work of “Easy to Forget” into something purposeful. Ariel Pink, also operating in his surprisingly sincere mode, pens an ode to confusion and amnesia, but Collins breathes life into it, stopping and starting the instrumental in ways that propel what should be a stoned, slippery song.
Comedy, in fact, is not necessarily gone. Collins still takes time to use a convoluted metaphor about rolling spliffs during the heatwave plod of “Sea of Nothing.” But what surrounds the peculiar humor is carefully considered in a way that few of his recordings have been. Collins’ work has always had this potential—the untamed electric energy of synapses pushed past their usual operating capacity. Now, with a little help from his friends, he’s finally able to shape and direct it. He’s taken a step back, and instead of aiming for a laugh, a smile will do. | 2016-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Weird World | September 9, 2016 | 7.4 | 1a099de2-360f-449c-ad5e-486b61e0626d | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
The NYC disco-house revival group Escort return with their sophomore effort. It's leaner, cleaner and less funky than their self-titled debut, with the full band lending weight and warmth to the perfect period synths. They also offer a sharp cover of St. Vincent's "Actor Out of Work". | The NYC disco-house revival group Escort return with their sophomore effort. It's leaner, cleaner and less funky than their self-titled debut, with the full band lending weight and warmth to the perfect period synths. They also offer a sharp cover of St. Vincent's "Actor Out of Work". | Escort: Animal Nature | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21273-animal-nature/ | Animal Nature | On their second studio record Animal Nature, Escort’s leaders Dan Balis and Eugene Cho continue the Studio 54-esque party that began with their 2011 self-titled debut. Back in the early 2000s, Balis and Cho met at Vassar College and began making house singles as a duo. Years later, they added vocalist Adeline Michèle, and a 17-piece live band to the mix at their shows. Animal Nature isn’t a huge departure from their debut; the production is cleaner, and there’s a bit less funk in the mix. This is a more polished, less-DIY affair than 2011’s debut, something you can see even in the cover artwork: on their self-titled, Michèle goofed off in a parking lot, but 2015 Escort seems to have found its brand identity, and it looks alluring in neon.
On Animal Nature’s ten new songs and nine remixes, Escort finds its footing in a post-disco phase. Title track "Animal Nature" doesn’t disprove the many allusions to Daft Punk the band has gotten over the years, but it also brings to mind parallels to LCD Soundsystem’s "Get Innocuous!" The lyrics don’t make sense—"Stand up, stand up bang your drum, we are the barbarians"Michèlechants throughout "Barbarians" like a Vietnam War song—but they don’t have to, because the production quality remains at the forefront for Escort. A cohesive, well-produced R&B-infused disco album is no easy or small feat, but Escort keep their focus sharp and momentum pumping, with the full band lending weight and warmth to the perfect period synths.
They’ve moved from funk disco into a late ‘70s disco/early ‘80s synth phase, blurring genre lines.They throw in a few welcome curveballs: covering St. Vincent’s Annie Clark is an ambitious gambit, but Michèle’s penchant for theatrical singing over scattered chiptune beats fit right in with Clark’s aesthetic on "Actor Out of Work." It keeps the brittle, plasticine quality of the original while scaling it up for club dancefloors. These moments are welcome, as there isn’t always a ton to distinguish them from other, similar acts working in the always-crowded ‘70s-saturated house and disco music field. By the end of Animal Nature, Escort proves it’s gotten craftier and has found a bit more clarity, and they hit a nostalgic sweet spot that will never grow old. | 2015-11-13T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-11-13T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | November 13, 2015 | 6.8 | 1a0beb3a-2d79-4787-9d78-8a7cb1ef6bac | Ilana Kaplan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ilana-kaplan/ | null |
The indie rock perennials return with yet another accomplished album, again reminding us why they're among the most consistently rewarding bands of our time. | The indie rock perennials return with yet another accomplished album, again reminding us why they're among the most consistently rewarding bands of our time. | Yo La Tengo: Popular Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13413-popular-songs/ | Popular Songs | Oh demon reliability! Oh demon longevity! These twin curses can plague any decades-old band in an age when careers are measured in months. Yo La Tengo can count themselves in the rare company of this group, elder statespeople operating in a genre where they're influence-grandparents. And alongside peers Sonic Youth and the Flaming Lips, YLT have to operate under the bane of their own consistency at a time when the new and a compelling narrative are over-celebrated. All three of those bands have reached a steady state where reinvention is unnecessary: They're so frequently good they don't even get a redemption story. Hell, Wavves already is set up for one of those.
Fortunately, as Yo La Tengo celebrate a quarter-century of existence with Popular Songs, their twelfth album, there's still plenty to like without a PR push. The Yo La Tengo repertoire has expanded steadily over the years, and the genre experiments of years past have slowly assimilated into their creative process until it's hard to remember the mere Velvets-jacking indie pop band they once were. The easy way to draw fickle attention to your dozenth album would be a drastic makeover, but Yo La Tengo are wise enough to choose continuity over the easy angle. And as far flung as these dozen Popular Songs may be, any Yo La Tengo scholar can easily trace their DNA back through their discography.
Now, forget I said all that for a moment, as the opening track and single, "Here to Fall", is the exception to the rule. Nearly guitarless, with a menacing electric piano and cinematic strings lifted from an Isaac Hayes soundtrack, it's an ear-catcher for anyone expecting the same old same old. If there's an antecedent here, it's the treasured "Autumn Sweater", but beaten and wary and a little dangerous, Ira Kaplan refusing to play the kindly, reassuring grandfather: "I know you're worried/ I'm worried too."
But it's a darkness that quickly lifts. "Avalon or Someone Very Similar" is upper-register psychedelia, dreamy and chipper. And when the drony keyboards and hazed-out Georgia Hubley vocals combine on "By Two's", we're safely back on familiar ground-- in this case the late-night dream cycle of And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, arguably the band's last unmitigated success.
Some will surely find the return trip to that well a welcome reprise, others a tired retread-- pick your side and know whether you will Enjoy This Album. Because there are more historical echoes here, particularly in how Yo La can crank out a fuzz-pop anthem ("Nothing to Hide") or fragile, vaguely-countrified indie pop ("When It's Dark", James McNew's "I'm on My Way") in their sleep. Fortunately, they don't phone it in on those tracks, and slip ‘em into I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One and most people wouldn't know the difference.
Elsewhere, the band indulges its expanded palette by riffing on Motown, funk, and organ-boogie (not sure how else to classify "Periodically Double or Triple"), as they've been doing off and on for most of the decade. For most bands, the costume-swapping would be a novelty act, but Yo La Tengo, who prove their cover-band chops every year on WFMU, have hung these sounds permanently in their closet by this point. "If It's True" is pure Funk Brothers karaoke complete with a spot-on bridge and AM-radio strings, but Hubley and Kaplan's back-and-forth duet is too adorable to nit-pick.
After nine tracks, the only thing missing would be the usual YLT epic, and well, the band doesn't disappoint. In an odd bit of sequencing, all the long tracks are clumped together at the end, forming a trilogy of nine-minute-plus jams with wildly varying results. "More Stars Than There Are in Heaven" is the only one that could have slipped into the front half of the album unnoticed, a gorgeously unspooling meditation that suits its ethereal title. But the stark acoustic riff that makes up most of "The Fireside" is interminable, and "And the Glitter Is Gone" is 16 minutes of the usual Kaplan noise-skronk that will tempt all but the most devoted YLT fans to cut the album short.
Thanks to whoever pushed them to the back, those missteps are easily ignored, leaving a 10-track record (of a more reasonable length) that can compete with anything since the band's heyday. It's easy to overlook the sound that's on display through the bulk of Popular Songs as more of the same, but it's also uniquely Yo La Tengo in a way that has taken 25 years to reach vintage status. Experience can be a crutch, an excuse to tread water in comfortable waters. But Popular Songs wears its age well, a calm but firm reminder of an indie rock perennial it's all too easy to take for granted. | 2009-09-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-09-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | September 1, 2009 | 7.9 | 1a104838-280b-4a6e-8ddc-3cbdc46793a4 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
When Porcelain Raft’s first singles started circulating in 2010, Mauro Remiddi distinguished himself with electronic pop that stood out for their craft as opposed to being mere conveyances of vibe. His new LP Permanent Signal presents a less resonant collection of similar ideas. | When Porcelain Raft’s first singles started circulating in 2010, Mauro Remiddi distinguished himself with electronic pop that stood out for their craft as opposed to being mere conveyances of vibe. His new LP Permanent Signal presents a less resonant collection of similar ideas. | Porcelain Raft: Permanent Signal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18381-porcelain-raft-permanent-signal/ | Permanent Signal | When Porcelain Raft’s first singles started circulating in 2010, Mauro Remiddi distinguished himself from the glut of similarly wavy electro-pop acts on numerous levels; for one thing, “Tip of Your Tongue” and "Dragonfly" stood out for their craft as opposed to being mere coneyances of vibe. You could also sense that he was a veteran songwriter and you’d be correct. While many of his peers were young men trying to cultivate mystery through anonymity, Remiddi was in his mid-30s and became more interesting with every revelation about his actual life experiences. A number of short-lived and far-flung musical projects took him around the globe and the Italian-born, London-based Remiddi created songs that were equally implaceable: they had shades of Swedish indie, UK bedsit and American lap-pop, and blurred the distinction between a guitar-toting singer/songwriter and a synth-pop artist. The inability to define Porcelain Raft contributed to the initial intrigue, but with his second LP in two years, Remiddi has cemented his sound; Permanent Signal is more or less more of the same, a mutual fatigue passed on from Porcelain Raft to the listener.
As Josh Love noted in our review of Porcelain Raft's 2012 debut Strange Weekend, Remiddi had a vocal connection-- if not a spiritual one-- with glam-rock space cadets of the past without overtly getting into interstellar role playing. Maybe we can chalk it up to the obligations that come with making a debut album and having to tour the thing, but Permanent Signal is more earthbound, Remiddi coming back down to terra firma but still communicating like a man slightly out of orbit. Members of the Antlers and Yuck contribute in ways that you can’t immediately spot without the credits, but you sense their presence in Permanent Signal’s overall demeanor, a sort of mundane, window-staring melancholy, even if highlight "The Way Out" was inspired by the incapacitating effect of Hurricane Sandy in his new home of Brooklyn.
Remiddi's abstract lyrics are shot through with a longing that never devolves into outright despair-- “If I think about it/ Just don’t get me started,” is the first line on the record and indicative of how candid, direct conversation is something that’s just out of reach. It makes Permanent Signal effective mood music, in that it sounds heartbroken or at least wistfully romantic, and Remiddi's own feelings never trample upon yours.
Consider opener “Think of the Ocean” as guidance for a means of surveying the record: it’s blue, moves in regular, steady tides and difficult to portion out into distinct territories. Hooks slowly reveal themselves, but are almost always instrumental and often referential. “Cluster” employs a classic Cure trick, using descending guitar lines to make a major key melody draw tears like a minor one. Likewise, “I Lost Connection” is the musical and lyrical centerpiece of Permanent Signal, conveying its emotion not so much through his words but rather the slow rollout of major 7th piano chords, beautifully bright, wispy and touched with a dissonance that makes them sound sad anyway.
In one of the fleeting moments of pleasure, Remiddi breathes “This feeling is taking over/ The sky is made of blue," evocative, sweet nothings underscored by deep piano chords suggesting a house anthem about to break out. Instead, a steady kick drum pulses and eventually fades, a climax denied-- the name of the song, naturally enough, is “Minor Pleasure". Conversely, “The Way Out” and “It Ain’t Over” interrupt the liminal, waking dream spell with distorted, rumbling breakbeats. They aren’t distractions, but all the same, what are you supposed to make of an album operating under the auspices of pop that needs drum machines to provide the hooks?
At the very least, Permanent Signal proves Remiddi is still distinguishing himself from the long-forgotten also-rans that clogged many an MP3 blog three years back. Whereas most of them couldn’t transition from singles to albums at all, let alone cohesive ones, Porcelain Raft has become too adept at making cohesive, whole statements. Even if Strange Weekend achieved a similarly unified sound, if obvious singles didn’t stand out, key phrases did. And they've taken on a prophetic resonance, "Put Me to Sleep" being the least of them. Previously, Remiddi doubted the worth of conversation “Unless You Speak From Your Heart,"whereas “Think of the Ocean” finds him apologetically asking “If I could take off this mask/ Will you laugh at me?,” a concise epigram for a record whose consistency feels tentative rather than confident. Or, you could think of “Shapeless & Gone”, descriptive of the beatific state of Porcelain Raft’s earliest work and at the same time, an unintentional criticism of Permanent Signal’s lack of definition and presence. | 2013-08-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-08-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Secretly Canadian | August 19, 2013 | 5.8 | 1a10ab55-ae23-442c-9450-a1f996939adf | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Alongside Bat for Lashes, Fever Ray, and Zola Jesus, Glasser is in the upper tier of those making quasi-mystical, swirling electro-pop. | Alongside Bat for Lashes, Fever Ray, and Zola Jesus, Glasser is in the upper tier of those making quasi-mystical, swirling electro-pop. | Glasser: Ring | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14703-ring/ | Ring | Remember that eMusic Selected + Collected comp from back in early 2009? Basically a rundown of hot new acts at the time, turns out the thing was pretty farsighted-- more than a couple of the bands it featured (Girls, Salem) went on to find big audiences. It was also the first time many of us heard Cameron Mesirow aka Glasser, whose track "Apply" was one of the disc's standouts. Back then Glasser was a solo project-- just Mesirow singing over GarageBand beats-- but the song had a great mix of electronic drag and skyward pop, and showcased Mesirow's impressive vocal range.
Fast-forward almost two years later and it seems like the kind of music Glasser makes-- sort of quasi-mystical, swirling electro-pop-- has become a lot more popular. On the indie side you've got Bat for Lashes (Glasser's closest sonic relative), Zola Jesus, and Fever Ray, as well as Florence and the Machine threatening to break big in the mainstream. So the timing's definitely right for Glasser's full-length, and with Ring she's enlisted the help of producers Van Rivers and the Subliminal Kid to help flesh out her sound. Tracks are still based on Mesirow's early sketches, but now they've got more weight and sheen.
There isn't an easy descriptor for Glasser's sound-- she incorporates bits of tropical pop, tribal percussion, and a couple of different strains of electronic music. Her songs sidestep traditionally linear arrangements for a more open, circular approach-- they kind of swoosh around without pausing at verse-chorus intersections. Interesting as this is, the main draw of Mesirow's music is her voice-- warm and flexible, she can bend it to suit different moods and tempos. Ring's best tracks, like "Home" and "Glad", create space for her vocals to soar. In "Apply", which gets an update here, heavy tribal percussion and grinding synths give way to a sunny refrain where she just bursts into the upper register.
Mesirow's from California and comes from a family of artists, and her lyrics, which are sometimes vague and loosely metaphysical, bear the mark of a free spirit. To be honest, they can skew a tad squishy for me, but it's easy to overlook a line like, "What's real can be anywhere, so put your faith in me and we can be free," when it's sung so beautifully. Content-wise, the most interesting cut is "T", an ode to Mesirow's best friend, New York artist Tauba Auerbach. Presumably the two share a special bond, both getting a certain level of fame from their creativity, and it's about experiencing something only one other person you know can identify with.
Separate all of this from Ring and you're still left with a remarkably listenable album. People have compared Glasser to Björk but this isn't difficult music-- ultimately it feels more in line with loose, melodically generous records by Joni Mitchell or maybe even Feist. Granted, there's tons of sounds in this thing (in addition to the genre-blending are all sorts of orchestral and percussive touches) but Mesirow and her producers never let it become overwhelming. It's not an incredibly daring or cerebral record-- Ring is electic, beat-heavy, and easy to like. A sneakily confident debut that should please listeners at almost every turn. | 2010-10-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-10-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | True Panther | October 6, 2010 | 8 | 1a124837-3bc8-4717-b650-4e78ca94a3ba | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
On his first album for Exploding in Sound, this son of Palestinian refugees takes his humanistic blues-folk in a more energetic direction. | On his first album for Exploding in Sound, this son of Palestinian refugees takes his humanistic blues-folk in a more energetic direction. | Yazan: Hahaha | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yazan-hahaha/ | Hahaha | Growing up in New York City during the ’80s as the son of Palestinian refugees, Brooklyn singer-songwriter Yazan absorbed peace and justice as his core values through conversations with his parents and education at the United Nations International School. He’s spent the last few years putting those ideas into music, deconstructing how first-world privilege works in his barebones folk and blues-rock songs. It’s a sound and ethos that fits in well with the idiosyncratic indie championed by Exploding in Sound Records, where Yazan has recently found a home alongside peers like Pile and Bad History Month. On Hahaha, his third album and first on the label, he begins looking outward, both by trying to engage outsiders and by questioning his own motives.
Yazan has said he hopes to startle the complacent into action by shedding light on life problems big and small. It doesn’t get much smaller than “Cockroach,” a sweeping and boisterous rock ballad that trudges in time with his vocal trills. He wrote the song after a literal bug crawled through his practice space and someone squished it under their boot, leading to a moral spiral about the imbalance between the sanctity of human life and that of insects. Elsewhere, he calls out the false power of fear-mongering or, on the title track, laughs his way through shared anxiety while Pile drummer Kris Kuss takes a detour into ’60s psych. Even “The Star,” where Yazan imagines a world not driven by war, contradicts itself by employing heavy, Black Sabbath-inspired chords. For an album bent on spreading harmony and understanding, Hahaha feels delightfully manic.
That restless ambition winds up blurring many of the album’s details. All nine songs on Hahaha offer stacks of robust guitar and a disorderly splendour that at its best recalls Tom Waits, but too often they wander off as if caught up in their own optimistic high. “Do You Wanna Go?” embraces the openly gaudy appeal of shredding, but keeps pushing a fun guitar solo after it’s already gone far enough. The intentionally plunky number “Forgiveness Begins” offers a friendly reminder about self-forgiveness, but clumsily waltzes through a key change and extended outro that adds little benefit to the message or the melody.
This kind of emotional rambling fit on Yazan’s earlier records, where it was part of the complex blues-folk scenery. But when he tries to keep up with the rhythm-backed instrumentals of Hahaha, he ends up outshining his own points. Those stylistic differences are made obvious when Yazan pivots back to a more Americana-based approach: The message of “When I’m Gone,” about the importance of self-preservation when ending a relationship, is easy to absorb over its rolling roots guitar melody. The same is true for the love song “Ghost Blues,” a song so straightforward in its dark baritone storytelling that it could double as an homage to Bill Callahan.
Though its humanistic messages occasionally get lost in feeling, Hahaha captures Yazan’s gutsy, freewheeling positivity, and does it with enough energy to make you want to believe in what he preaches. At this album’s best, he brings his humbling practice of peace and acceptance to life in a harsh, scruffy, and very human sound. | 2018-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | April 23, 2018 | 6.8 | 1a12ad42-e533-4c62-ad28-989af7617a02 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
On his first full-length as Dedekind Cut, the artist formerly known as Lee Bannon constructs an ambitious form of ambient music, reflecting the violence and anxiety pervading our atmosphere today. | On his first full-length as Dedekind Cut, the artist formerly known as Lee Bannon constructs an ambitious form of ambient music, reflecting the violence and anxiety pervading our atmosphere today. | Dedekind Cut: $uccessor (ded004) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22394-uccessor-ded004/ | $uccessor (ded004) | This summer, Dedekind Cut—the artist born Fred Warmsley, formerly known as Lee Bannon—began aggregating songs in a Spotify playlist titled “Ambient Essentials.” It’s an eclectic and personal collection of favorites within that wide-ranging umbrella: Julianna Barwick’s calm vocal loops, metallic harmonies by Autechre and Oneohtrix Point Never, Laraaji’s glimmering New Age. Warmsley gives the impression of a dedicated listener; this mix felt less like a toolbox than a window into some music he’s used to make sense of the world.
As the prolific Warmsley has accumulated releases under his various monikers, his relationship with genre has shifted. He got his start producing instrumentals for Joey Bada$$ and the Pro Era crew, serving as their touring DJ in 2012. His output has since progressed from industrial beat-driven instrumentals to blistering jungle and techno, most recently landing in an eerie, arrhythmic place. Since adopting the moniker Dedekind Cut last year, Warmsley has put out three EPs, most recently the cassette American Zen, which comprised four tracks’ worth of even-keeled, dread-tinged drone. On $uccessor, his first Dedekind full-length, this sound emerges notably more grandiose, and more sinister. Leading up to the album’s release, Warmsley tweeted: “The parts you find ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty about [my] work as the Dedekind Cut will surely become its signature.”
Though “ugly” may be an overstatement, $uccessor is marked by the productive discomfort that accompanies such unabashed intensity. Whereas American Zen maintained a temperate pace, $uccessor isn’t afraid to crescendo or screech to a halt. This isn’t background music; it’s cinematic, full of movement. Most of all, it’s cavernous. The gently lapping, William Basinski-esque tones of opener “Descend from now” are swallowed 90 seconds in by strings and oceanic tape hiss. This gives way to “Instinct,” in which a fuzzy rhythm, layered beneath a pretty synth melody, builds to an urgent gallop. As Warmsley blends flat, chilly digital tones and analogue elements (including a field recording of birdsong), the disjuncture further pries open this sometimes uncomfortably vast sonic landscape. Warmsley deftly bridges his influences, braiding liquid futurism into the textural warmth of disintegrating tape loops.
There are moments when Warmsley loosens his compositional grip; tracks like “Fear in reverse” and “5ucc3550r” meander a bit, crackling and heaving without the insistence that characterizes much the rest of this release. But these slips into plotless quiet are among $uccessor’s most unsettling and purposeful moments. One review of March’s American Zen lamented that listeners “never find out what it’s trying to tell us”; asking Dedekind Cut to explain, however, seems a fundamental misunderstanding of the project’s vocabulary. A record can, of course, have a worldview without providing talking points.
$uccessor is undergirded by blackness: it was co-released by NON, the Chino Amobi-helmed collective of artists from Africa and its diaspora; its cover is Deana Lawson’s striking 2014 photograph Cowboys, of two young black men in jeans and chaps atop horses startled by the camera’s flash. As Dedekind Cut, Warmsley makes use of ambient tropes, but this album’s stakes are set far outside the boundaries of that genre. (In spirit and in sound, he’s perhaps better matched alongside his collaborators here, which include the protean likes of Amobi, Angel-Ho, and serpentwithfeet.) If ambient music—so often treated as a somehow ideologically neutral form, its canon overwhelmingly white, Western, and male—can be described as an atmospheric entity, it’s then deployed here to new, ambitious ends. Warmsley’s work is shot through with the violence, anxiety, and fracture that pervade our atmosphere today. But on tracks like the stunning “46:50,” which features muffled vocals from Active Child, an elegiac softness also reaches out to the listener, offering solace.
Warmsley has offered a remarkably expansive example of what these pliable forms can do. He seems winkingly aware, also, of the loaded nature of invoking a vast frontier. At a performance of $uccessor at New York’s Issue Project Room in October, old-school country music blasted as Warmsley walked onto the fog-filled stage, a curious counterpoint to the textural drone that followed. This, alongside Lawson’s Cowboys, points to a canny appropriation of the frontier narratives that have, I’d posit, quietly served as scaffolding for much of the Western experimental music canon. $uccessor marks a taking of the reins, so to speak, a direction that will hopefully continue to propel Dedekind Cut. | 2016-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Hospital / NON | November 16, 2016 | 8.2 | 1a160778-1a3e-456f-a0db-97305ad7d430 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
Beth Ditto’s second solo LP turned into a full-fledged Gossip comeback once her bandmates got involved. Rick Rubin captures the carefree vibes of old friends enjoying each other’s company. | Beth Ditto’s second solo LP turned into a full-fledged Gossip comeback once her bandmates got involved. Rick Rubin captures the carefree vibes of old friends enjoying each other’s company. | Gossip: Real Power | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gossip-real-power/ | Real Power | When Gossip announced their reunion last year, it looked like the Portland dance-punk trio had zipped into formation for the indie sleaze revival, the cultivators of its original aughts inspiration rightfully returning to their throne. But Gossip actually got back together in 2019, seven years after the band’s unexpected dissolution in 2012, when singer Beth Ditto returned to Rick Rubin’s home studio in Kauai to pen the follow-up to her debut solo album. Once she invited former bandmates Nathan Howdeshell to bounce ideas around with and Hannah Blilie to drum, those songwriting sessions turned collaborative quickly and, most promising of all, effortlessly. This was no longer a solo record; the band was back. “That’s the beauty of working with people you’ve known for so long,” Ditto told NME. “There’s no glamorous story, you just go: okay.”
In reuniting without explicit intentions or expectations, Gossip created a comeback album, Real Power, that sidesteps the feeling of trying on old clothes. There’s no pressure to once again soundtrack Skins’ teenage melodrama, dominate sticky clubs at 2 a.m., or hoist nonconformist anthems into the sky as a political statement. With no predetermined agenda guiding the album, Real Power plays like the jovial, carefree sound of friends enjoying each other’s company; they just happen to have instruments in hand.
Real Power slips into disco pop with a type of easygoing simplicity that begets happiness, even while Gossip address divorce, death, and isolation. Howdeshell and Blilie are to credit for that contradiction; the two continually lay down heavy grooves with a light touch, be it the sugar rush of “Edge of the Sun” or that gratuitous cowbell over slap bass on “Give It Up for Love.” Even when Ditto goes full diva belting out the title track, a glam anthem about Portland’s impassioned Black Lives Matter protests during the pandemic, she radiates pride: “Head is in the clouds, I’m moving mountains/Do you feel what I feel?” The way the three of them gyrate in sync is the answer.
While modern-day peers are effectively updating the dance-punk sound through minimalist pop or trying too hard to emulate the rebellious partying that indie sleaze’s latter-day documentarians glorify, Gossip are looking beyond that altogether, instead emphasizing spontaneity and low-key beats. They dare you to dance to softer sounds, like a stripped-back bassline in the style of the xx on “Turn the Card” or the rakish fingersnaps pushed to the front of country redux “Peace and Quiet.” Early on, “Don’t Be Afraid” lays down a dub groove establishing mood better suited for smoking a joint on your friend’s couch than doing bumps in the club bathroom. While the songs on 2012’s A Joyful Noise often overstayed their runtimes, Real Power knows when to bail. On the sneaky standout “Light It Up,” Gossip craft a collective trance with mellow synths and dreamy guitar reverb that turn Ditto’s lyrics—“Start a fire/Let it rage/Burn it up/Watch it go down in flames”—into a meditation on rebirth and new beginnings.
Ditto has always been colorful, from self-dying her hair with Kool-Aid in childhood to picking palettes for her plus-sized clothing line in Vogue. As she settles into her forties, she’s discovered that one of the most direct ways to extend her confidence, both to herself and others, is with patience. When Howdeshell relocated to his childhood farm in Arkansas in 2015 and became a born-again Christian, Ditto—an atheist—felt like she’d lost a friend to his past, and she mourned a creative death; in time, however, she learned to accept it. Over the bare beat of “Tough,” Ditto reflects on what it means to have faith in readjusted perceptions: “You need a change, so make a change/We’ll figure out something.” Much of Real Power revels in the way those deep breaths help steady us. In the case of Ditto’s scrapped sophomore solo album, they’re also to thank for Gossip’s graceful return in Real Power. | 2024-03-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Ultra | March 26, 2024 | 7.1 | 1a188c40-0221-467d-81e2-cbe7d616ec7f | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
The eccentric English songwriter and the prolific Finnish rock group collaborate for an album that routes ancient plant life into deeply human stories of toil, tragedy, and the afterlife. | The eccentric English songwriter and the prolific Finnish rock group collaborate for an album that routes ancient plant life into deeply human stories of toil, tragedy, and the afterlife. | Richard Dawson / Circle: Henki | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/richard-dawson-circle-henki/ | Henki | Nobody writes about humanity—our hopes and dreams, obsessions and follies—quite like Richard Dawson. A singer and guitarist from Newcastle upon Tyne in the north of England, Dawson works loosely in the folk tradition, though this hardly begins to explain the breadth and eccentricity of his songs. One minute you might find him singing a tale of alcoholic misadventure on a school trip; the next, venturing back to the early medieval kingdom of Bryneich, or hymning the lives of the poor souls packing parcels in an online retail warehouse. Truly, all human life is here.
Dawson has made a habit of pushing at the boundaries of his work, and his new album Henki is no different. At first glance you might think it’s not about people at all: Each of its seven tracks is named after a plant. Of course, that isn’t the whole story. The album is a collaboration with the Finnish group Circle, and the title is a Finnish word—Circle’s Jussi Lehtisalo says it translates as something like “spirit” or “ghost,” while acknowledging that its true meaning is hard to pin down.
Circle and Dawson made Henki in fits and starts. They first shared demos remotely, then met for in-person recording sessions at Pori on the Finnish coast, before finally completing the album remotely as Europe entered lockdown in spring 2020. This extended gestation seems to have worked in its favor. From its botanical theme, something magnificent takes shape: a suite of stories that deal with ancient history and deep time, touching on themes of human toil, tragedy, and the mysteries of the afterlife.
Dawson sings in a bold and unapologetic holler that sometimes scurries up into higher octaves unexpectedly. His guitar playing is equally distinctive: clanging chords dispensed with knotty dexterity. But where he really excels is as a storyteller, and Henki has some especially florid examples of the form. “Silene” is the true story of a 32,000-year-old seed buried by a squirrel, later plucked from the permafrost by Russian scientists, and finally germinated in a lab. “Ivy” relates the myth of the Greek god Dionysus, who granted King Midas his gold-creating powers.
The songs often lean hard into exposition—“Unfortunately the fungal cultures we brought with us/Have started to degrade,” Dawson sings on “Cooksonia.” But as the words fall from his lips, they take on the quality of parables, their dense narratives encouraging the listener to hunt within them in search of deeper meanings.
Now some 40 albums into their career, Circle’s take on various rock subgenres—prog, hard, glam, space, kraut—is performed with virtuoso technicality and camp extravagance, equal parts Neu! and Judas Priest. Most obviously, they give Dawson’s songs a sense of speed and scale. “Methuselah” races along in a power-metal charge, with rippling synthesizers and crashing thunder. A couple of minutes into “Ivy,” the guitars and drums lock into a motorik pulse, and the song only gets bigger from there, powered by a sense of unearthly propulsion. But Circle’s musicality also manifests in more textural ways. The 12-minute “Silphium” is adorned with decorative piano and sleek synths, and around its midpoint descends into an extended jazz-rock segment before dusting itself down for a final, triumphant reprise.
Death is everywhere on Henki, sometimes tragicomic. “Methuselah” is the tale of a man who sets out to find one of the world’s oldest trees, itself named after a preternaturally old biblical patriarch; the joke is, he can only prove he’s found it by chopping it down. Other times, death feels mysterious and unknowable: In “Lily,” a Newcastle hospital nurse recalls the paranormal events that have followed the passing of those in their care. “Black lights/Blooming in the doorway/Petals unfold around me,” muses Dawson, and Circle amp up the weirdness with eerie operatic chorusing.
In a catalog already noted for strangeness, Henki might be Richard Dawson’s strangest album to date. But his ideas are fertilized by these songs’ peculiar twists and turns; the more Dawson and Circle lean into their eccentricities, the more their music resonates. Whatever Dawson writes about, he’s really writing about people—the ways we choose to live our lives, and the strange and awful things that befall us along the way. Henki blows up these themes into widescreen, unfolding across continents, centuries, and even the afterlife. It feels profound, even as the true meaning of its songs—their Henki, if you will—slip through the fingers like air.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | Weird World | November 26, 2021 | 7.5 | 1a1b4bee-b895-4f97-85ed-503721232789 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | |
The 32-year old ex-underground MC Sumach Ecks splits the difference between Western aggression, Eastern mysticism, and extraterrestrial idiosyncrasy. This free four-song EP is as unclassifiable as the rest of his material. | The 32-year old ex-underground MC Sumach Ecks splits the difference between Western aggression, Eastern mysticism, and extraterrestrial idiosyncrasy. This free four-song EP is as unclassifiable as the rest of his material. | Gonjasufi: The 9th Inning EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16038-the-9th-inning-ep/ | The 9th Inning EP | Gonjasufi invented intelligent demon music. The one-man boom began on last year's A Sufi and a Killer, where San Diego-bred Sumach Ecks split the difference between Western aggression, Eastern mysticism, and extraterrestrial idiosyncrasy. Even his stage name is a compound noun: half weed, half wisdom. All rolled up into a blunt, banshee wail.
Released on Warp, A Sufi and a Killer was both futuristic and primitive, a glass pyramid breaking under the weight of his psychedelic bombed squad: Flying Lotus, the Gaslamp Killer, and Mainframe. The evil spirit was summoned by a 32-year old ex-underground MC who found his sediment-strangled singing voice via Bikram Yoga, high grade chronic, and magic mushrooms. A biblically bearded original prone to Twitter jeremiads against the contemporary age of "LITTLE SAMBO AND HIS PACK OF DEVIL WORSHIPPING BARBIES." He routinely stresses love, understanding, and the violent overthrow of government-- a peace-seeking yogi who will slap the shit out of you for talking reckless. Some things are not supposed to be logical.
Based in "the Mojave," the desert-dwelling prophet dropped The 9th Inning EP last month. We owe the free, four-song collection's existence to an arrangement between Sufi and viral video/mixtape portal, Hydroshare. He gets paid for old tracks that had been infecting his hard drives since being first recorded several years ago. We get new music to hold us over until his mini-album MU.ZZ.LE drops in January.
From the first words of The 9th Inning, we're sucked into apocalypse. Industrial noises clank like robots led to the guillotine. John Carpenter synths ooze and "Demonchild" starts with Sufi croaking, "My mama says son/ Look what the world's coming to/ My mama was right/ The sun is colored blue." What makes Gonjasufi's music so singular is that voice, suspended somewhere between George Clinton, Tom Waits, and something that crawled out of the La Brea Tar Pits-- prehistoric and warped from thousands of pounds of pressure.
"Eat Fish" finds Ecks hanging ectoplasmic hooks on boom-bap drums and raps from L.A. left-fielder Blu. The chorus' moral: "be rich, eat fish, and die." It's sage advice partially cribbed from the Wu-Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah, and indeed, the spirit of Wu-Tang hangs heavy over this project. With its stripped down organ loops and dusted drums, "The Lows", sounds like a distant cousin to Gravediggaz and Tricky's The Hell EP. Opting to spit his tiger style raps, Sufi channels the unhinged delirium of Ol' Dirty Bastard. There are cold-blooded threats of "wandering eyes getting poked" and the difficulties of keeping oaths not to kill when there are "vampires walking around with smiles on their grill." Lest you think there is a clear father to his style, he calls on "savasana" for calm-- the corpse pose in yoga.
Nor can you define the title track. It's not quite rap, and even though it's partially sung, it's light years from R&B. Disembodied vocals coo in the background, and Sufi sounds like someone who attempted to conjure Nate Dogg at a séance and received a demented ghost from a nearby dimension. It's unclear whether he's singing or rapping, and that's the point. It's otherworldly and unclassifiable. Or as he chants about a former partner, "similarities in our style, but I took it from here. I took it from here." Enter the demon. | 2011-11-15T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-11-15T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Hydroshare.tv | November 15, 2011 | 7.6 | 1a1bf527-8c5b-43b5-bc1d-ac7f3250cf8c | Jeff Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeff-weiss/ | null |
After almost a decade, the gorgeous voice of singer-songwriter Adam Torres remains the spotlight, but his songs have grown wider and more elemental. | After almost a decade, the gorgeous voice of singer-songwriter Adam Torres remains the spotlight, but his songs have grown wider and more elemental. | Adam Torres: Pearls to Swine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22309-pearls-to-swine/ | Pearls to Swine | There’s a degree of would-be myth to Adam Torres’ backstory. He first gained some local notoriety as an undergraduate in Athens, Ohio in the middle of the ’00s, performing solo shows and playing guitar for indie-folk outfit Southeast Engine, heroes of that Ohio scene. In 2006, he self-released his first solo album at the age of 20, Nostra Nova, an album that developed a cult-classic status in the decade since, and a slightly greater visibility upon its reissue via Misra Records last year. While whispers slowly spread of this songwriter you’d never heard of, Torres himself was mostly absent in those ensuing ten years before returning with Pearls to Swine, his first full-fledged release since Nostra Nova.
All those years removed from *Nostra Nova *it sounds like he returned as a ghost. Torres spent some time volunteering in Ecuador before resettling to Austin, TX to earn his graduate degree and work to help improve the water quality of the Rio Grande, all while releasing a spate of lo-fi demos he recorded in his closet. On Pearls to Swine, his songs are earnest and full of yearning, yet still difficult to divine the concrete relatability that lives within. It transcends his humble Ohio roots, a work of startling beauty that sits in your head like a half-remembered dream: you keep returning to it, trying to approach it from different angles and catch the secrets you’re missing before they slip away into the haze.
Torres’ voice is without a doubt the thing he’s known for and will be remembered by. It has an unearthly quality. Throughout Pearls To Swine, he sings in a ruminative falsetto that is able to bend in directions that defy the shape and scope of the human form. In the album’s stunning opener, “Juniper Arms,” he begins in near-wordlessness, a place he coasts in and out of before occasionally dropping back down to earth for a bit of clarity. The song is about Albuquerque, where Torres was born, as well as Austin, where he lives, but the words “Juniper arms” are the only ones in focus during the chorus. It’s like Torres tries to wrap his arms around the idea of home while drifting around it just out of reach.
There are more traditional moments like “High Lonesome” and “Morning Rain,” moments where Torres remains front-and-center over finger-picked guitar parts, where you could hear him as a compromise between Neil Young’s ’70s broken-angel croon and Jeff Buckley’s celestial melodies. Then there are the counterpoints where he lets himself go to those otherworldly places, like when his voice and the strings meld into one unsettling current in “Daydream.” He has a way of crafting songs that lure you out with their beauty before revealing its underlying rage.
Though Torres’ gorgeous and idiosyncratic voice is a major selling point of* Pearls to Swine*, it’s bolstered by his meditations on the tangible experience, much of it derived from the life Torres lived between records. Just as the experiences that birthed Nostra Nova were inextricably rooted in small college-town circuits and in the music community in Athens, the new record feels at one with the Texas landscape. There’s a sweeping whine in the string drone of “Outlands,” like wind coursing across the Chihuahuan Desert. It feels like a return journey after traversing the desolation and spending the bulk of a decade removed from his calling.
That gives the penultimate track, “Mountain River,” a climactic tone with Torres singing “I’m trying to find my way back home” all before the epilogue of “City Limits.” A tension permeates these songs: Torres sounds road-weary, but also like he’s trying to grasp the wonder that’s still out there in America. It’s a tension that many artists working in some strain of contemporary Americana touch on, like those cosmic Americana troubadours Ryley Walker, Steve Gunn, and William Tyler. It won’t reproduce the same kind of direct, intimate engagement the once-unknown *Nostra Nova *did. But Torres has traded away some pieces of the humanity that colored his earlier work in favor of a conversation about something elemental that's still waiting to be discovered. That doesn’t make for an immediate record. It makes for one full of enigmas, of beautiful and undefinable things that promise further revelations to come. | 2016-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Fat Possum | September 12, 2016 | 7.5 | 1a1cfbfe-9524-409d-a0cc-9337c35509fd | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | null |
The debut album from saxophonist Joseph Shabason, best known for his work with Destroyer, shows a new side of his instrument. He uses electronics to create a kind of ambient jazz. | The debut album from saxophonist Joseph Shabason, best known for his work with Destroyer, shows a new side of his instrument. He uses electronics to create a kind of ambient jazz. | Joseph Shabason: Aytche | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joseph-shabason-aytche/ | Aytche | Reed, metal, and the nature of breath itself conspire to create the saxophone’s distinctive tone—its shriek, its glide, its quicksilver caress. But what if you could mask or morph the instrument’s identity using electronics; how far could you stretch it without losing its essence? The question is at the heart of Joseph Shabason’s approach on his debut album, Aytche. Shabason is best known for his work with Destroyer, where he lends creamy soft-rock soloing to Dan Bejar’s knotty, knowing compositions. Here, however, he tackles a more personal, idiosyncratic sound: a kind of ambient jazz, or maybe pastel noir, inspired by Jon Hassell’s distinctive processed trumpet work and Gigi Masin’s wind-kissed ambient.
Aytche’s nine songs amount to a series of interrelated tone poems in which Shabason’s digitally processed tenor swims amid watery synths, brushed drums, and occasional contributions on bass, trumpet, and guitar. Opener “Looking Forward to Something, Dude” introduces both the album’s mood and its principal theme, one that will be reprised a few tracks later in “Smokestack” and again in the concluding “Belching Smoke”: a soft chorus of saxophones playing a parallel chord progression that ebbs and flows as naturally as breathing. The saxophone is a monophonic instrument, but Shabason’s battery of harmonizers and effects lets him milk rich chords from his horn, refracting sound through circuitry like light through a prism. Even if you’re not well versed in the mechanics of woodwinds, you can tell intuitively that it’s one player, not a chorus of three, by the way his vibrato is perfectly mirrored across the harmonized voices. There’s an unmistakably uncanny quality to the music’s slicked, too-perfect surfaces.
The album proceeds as a series of experiments in expressive veiling. “Aytche” is dominated by syncopated synths that sound almost like a halcyon memory of rave; above them float fluttering streaks of feedback and a muted trumpet solo, courtesy JP Carter. The saxophone is barely perceptible here, and it’s equally subdued in the gorgeous “Neil McCauley,” whose sorrowful keys and neon hues are faintly evocative of the Blade Runner soundtrack. “Tite Cycle,” led by a slow, meditative synthesizer melody, is similar in feel to the title track, with a tri-harmonized sax part woven in like a stoned afterthought. Here and elsewhere, birdsong is audible in the background, lending to the impression that at least part of the album was recorded outdoors. (The recurring motifs—both incidental birdsong and the repeated theme from the opening track—help reinforce the sense of the album as an interconnected suite, rather than a series of standalone pieces.)
Shabason has spoken of wanting to subvert listeners’ expectations of his instrument, to translate his horn into a “dense chordal texture” and avoid the show-offy displays of chops that constituted his training at conservatory. Yet some of the album’s most exciting moments come when the music is tugged in two opposite directions—between sourceless and anonymous ambient sound, on the one hand, and hard-won virtuosity on the other. “Neil McCauley” is essentially a stylish showcase for Bram Gielen’s breathtaking fretless bass playing; JP Carter’s needle-nosed trumpet solo owns “Aytche”; Nic Bragg’s weed-whacker guitar outbursts on “Smokestack” and “Belching Smoke” add grit to an album that tends to drift like dandelion tufts. And Shabason gets his own time to shine on “Long Swim,” the most conventionally jazz-like piece here. Laying down a bed of pure breath, he proceeds to build parallel saxophone parts—one processed using his customary effects, the other a lilting and lyrical solo, unfettered by technology, in which his own melodic instincts take the lead.
Aytche is, for the most part, an easygoing album, but an unsettling undercurrent runs through it as well. The muted thumps and ominous dissonance of “Chopping Wood” play like an ambient riposte to Bitches Brew. And while the drifting keys of “Westmeath” may sound as placid as a rural getaway, snatches of recorded speech hint at darker energies. “My father died in ’76,” murmurs an unidentified man, and though he quickly disappears beneath the surface of the music, stray phrases bubble back up periodically: “The pain was too much for him… last act of individual… days of vengeance…” Shabason has said that the track concerns themes related to Holocaust survivors, degenerative illness, and assisted suicide, but the composer, the grandson of Holocaust survivors himself, doesn’t belabor the point. Whatever personal meaning the music may have for him, he keeps it close, instead leaving the listener to contemplate only the rippled surface of grief—which floats, like the otherworldly sound of his saxophone, above a source that has been rendered all but invisible. | 2017-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Western Vinyl | August 25, 2017 | 7.6 | 1a20b049-6fe5-49a0-8c2e-65f01320b4a2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The UK art-rock duo’s first album since the shock of Brexit has the earnest directness of artists whose sense of the world has been nudged into focus. | The UK art-rock duo’s first album since the shock of Brexit has the earnest directness of artists whose sense of the world has been nudged into focus. | Field Music: Open Here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/field-music-open-here/ | Open Here | It takes a village to make a Field Music album. Peter and David Brewis, the brothers behind the project, have a penchant for excess, and their richly orchestrated art-pop experiments have called for a sizable cast of guest musicians over the last decade-plus. But while more than a dozen artists left their fingerprints on Field Music’s sixth album, the people whose presence is most felt throughout its eleven tracks are nowhere to be found in the album credits—they’re David’s and Peter’s young children. In press materials, the Brewises explain that fatherhood has helped inspire a new sense of personal and political accountability in their music. Open Here is too nuanced and complex to be called a kids’ record, but coming from a band whose work has often been clouded by emotional and lyrical ambiguity, it’s remarkably straight-ahead. This album bears the earnest directness of artists whose sense of the world has been nudged into focus in a new way.
The brothers’ experiences of fatherhood go hand-in-hand with a heightened attention to global politics, brought on, in part, by the unflattering spotlight cast on their hometown of Sunderland, England, the first city to vote in favor of Brexit. They reckon with the inexplicable things they will have to explain to their children, and inveigh against those who promote hatred and fear in the world in which they’re growing up. On “Goodbye to the Country,” one of the brothers sings from what sounds like a misunderstood outsider’s perspective in a xenophobic town (“Don’t you worry, I will be fine/With a knife at my neck and my very last dime”). “Checking on a Message” is deceptively peppy for a song about waiting up for news—election results, perhaps—that’s sure to be bad. “Count It Up,” on which the duo catalog several varieties of privilege (“the ever-growing list of things you can’t claim all the credit for”), has perhaps the most direct link to Brexit: David Brewis has said he wrote the song to voice frustration with his compatriots’ failure to see or think beyond themselves.
Writing songs about privilege is a tricky business. A song like “Count It Up,” released in 2018 by a pair of white guys with no notable background in social justice, could read to some as a well-meaning but clumsy effort of the newly woke, or a self-congratulatory reckoning that mistakes awareness for impact. Thinking about the Brewises’ message here with the attentive ears of their children in mind, however, makes all the difference in how “Count It Up” comes across. When the brothers sing, “If people don’t stare at you on the street because of the color of your skin/Count that up,” they’re not patting themselves on the back for having a conscience—they’re looking for the right language to talk about injustice with the young humans whose worldviews they’re tasked with shaping.
“No King No Princess” feels similar in its aim. Addressed to David’s children, it’s at once a jubilant dance party, replete with invigorating horn jabs, and an indictment of traditional gender roles. At the chorus, a pompom-toting choir swoops in with words of encouragement: “You can paint it how you want/And you can dress up how you want/And you can do the job you want/And you can do it.” I listen to this song and see the faces of young girls at last month’s Women’s March, perched on their parents’ shoulders and waving posterboard painted with girl power slogans while nearby marchers cheered them on. They might not have fully understood the context of the gathering, but they were certainly tuned into its energy and the value of their participation. Watching these girls be uplifted in real time was moving; listening to “No King No Princess” and picturing the exchange between Brewis and his children stirs up similar feelings.
Elsewhere, Open Here sets aside plenty of time for play. “Share a Pillow” may be the grooviest lullaby that ever was, inviting the restless kids to sleep in their parents’ bed with a peace offering of baritone sax riffs and sunny, layered vocal harmonies. Opener “Time in Joy” is a frothy, blissed-out ode to companionship wrapped in cascading flutes. Throughout the album, the Brewis brothers toy with the whimsical, outsized arrangements that are their calling card while borrowing bits and pieces of prog-pop and funk, amounting to some of their most expansive and boisterous music yet. Given the state of global affairs, it sometimes feels daunting just to have to be a person, let alone a person responsible for the wellbeing of others. With Open Here, Field Music rise to the challenge with a set of newly crystallized talking points, offered up along with a glorious mess of noise. | 2018-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Memphis Industries | February 2, 2018 | 7.2 | 1a24eaf0-e5a7-4142-9300-ac011bc75703 | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Prolific Detroit rapper-producer Quelle Chris offers up his most compelling bout of existential voyaging to date, ultimately catching more than just his own reflection in the mirror. | Prolific Detroit rapper-producer Quelle Chris offers up his most compelling bout of existential voyaging to date, ultimately catching more than just his own reflection in the mirror. | Quelle Chris: Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22859-being-you-is-great-i-wish-i-could-be-you-more-often/ | Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often | Catharsis has been such an effective coping mechanism lately that it can be easy to forget what you really need sometimes is a strong sense of meditative focus. Before you can ramp yourself up enough to go out there and Get Shit Done, you need to believe that you're the kind of person who actually can and that it matters if you do in the first place. If you cultivate your chill well enough, you'll be able to bust through barriers and push off antagonists with a sly deadpan and your energy still preserved.
That's been the recent vibe given off by prolific Detroit MC/producer Quelle Chris, a low-key incisive weed-and-brew wiseass whose halting flow deliberates like the underground's rejoinder to mumble rap. Innocent Country, from 2015, was the album that hinted at deeper existential crises beneath the veneer of comedic bravado, a curious interrogation of his surroundings on both a personal and a wide-picture scale. Last year's Lullabies for the Broken Brain highlighted that same sense of walls-closing-in restlessness with a string of bass-rich but sandpapery instrumentals that communicated an insomniac anxiety through kick drums. Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often is the logical progression from both: a bout of existential voyaging that can't help but catch more than just Quelle's own reflection in the mirror.
Single “Buddies” is probably the pull-quote track of the album, an ego trip statement delivered with a calmly bemused, beatifically sincere voice: “I fuck with myself/I fucks with myself/Might bring myself some flowers/I'm in love with myself.” After that hook winds up resurfacing as a reprise once most of the record's portrait has been assembled, it's a bit easier to recognize as the problem he hints at: what is there, really, to love about himself, and does he even fuck with anyone else he knows? So he questions his own intelligence along with everyone else's (“Dumb for Brains”), bites “the bullet, the case, and the trigger” en route to finding some measure of perseverance (“Popeye”), takes on a crew's worth of voices as he both champions and shoots down a rap-game-focused end run around a dead-end living (“The Dreamer in the Den of Wolves”), and generally tries to reconcile the bad stuff with the side of himself that’s worthy of celebrating.
Quelle's heaviness isn't a burden, though. His flow is immersed in a conversational ease, somewhere between classic Madlib and a Hannibal Buress routine, his inflections coming across like emotive gestures—shrugged shoulders, rolled eyes, rubbed temples. He's expressive enough to excuse lines flatter or cornier than the ones he actually brings, but mostly his cadence adds resonance to simple sentiments. When he admits, “Yes, I like to drink/Yes, I like to smoke/Yes it's an escape/I don't like to cope” over a pitched-up quasi-Quasimoto overdub on “Learn to Love Hate,” or takes a breather to rattle off a distilled barrage of pure-lyricist punchline shit-talk on “The Prestige,” Chris adapts to those shifts in tone and intensity with an almost disorienting ease.
He’s got some strong hands on deck for guest spots, too. There are characteristically quotable verses by Roc Marciano, Elzhi, Homeboy Sandman, Jean Grae, and other frequent cohorts, as well as beats by producers ranging from MNDSGN (woozily harmony-driven on “Popeye”) to Alchemist (looping psych-folk wails on “Pendulum Swing”) to Chris Keys (ruminative on three wildly different cuts). But for all the friends around him, Quelle’s personality—fractured as it is—manifests clearly through his own particular quirks. Whether it's a self-produced beat that kicks up dust particles (like the snare-melting trudge of “Fascinating Grass”) or his tendency to put on a voice that threatens to push you away before luring you back in, Quelle's whole approach is a self-examination that cuts both ways. Once you get that whole value-of-the-self situation figured out, Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often bumps enough to pace a purposeful movement out into the streets. | 2017-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | February 15, 2017 | 7.6 | 1a2922bf-6b87-4997-a3f7-f1b42cfc29a2 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
This 2xCD set compiles the first eight editions of Detroit producer Theo Parrish's "ugly" edits. It's not just a compendium of the wiggly, playful, grimy, irreducible disco edits the man had his way with, but also a fine gateway into his wholly idiosyncratic soundworld. | This 2xCD set compiles the first eight editions of Detroit producer Theo Parrish's "ugly" edits. It's not just a compendium of the wiggly, playful, grimy, irreducible disco edits the man had his way with, but also a fine gateway into his wholly idiosyncratic soundworld. | Theo Parrish: Uget | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15952-uget/ | Uget | It's hard to imagine disco music (much less modern dance music and hip-hop) without the edit, wherein songs had their choice drum breaks extended, were trimmed of excess, or looped for greater duration and danceability. Or as one DJ put it to me, edits arose from the pleasure principle, that "when you hear something great, you want it to continue." Early disco DJs used them as secret weapons for their dancefloors, as did hip-hop's pioneers, spinning familiar songs into alternate universes, but after the heyday of Chicago house masters like Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles, the edit as a DJ tool faded from view.
While London's DJ Harvey dropped his series of "Black Cock" edits in the mid-1990s, it was when Detroit producer Theo Parrish's self-deemed "ugly" edits (complete with slapdash spray-painted labels) lurched into view at the turn of the 21st century that the trend came back in full force. Rather than resort to using scalpel and cutting block, the technology allowed dancefloor professionals like Prins Thomas, Pilooski, and even James Murphy to drop such reconfigured tunes. It also allowed newbies and bedroom DJs alike to make their own edits, albeit to diminishing returns.
Theo Parrish's limited disco edits remain in high demand, getting bootlegged repeatedly (a bootleg of a bootleg?) and going for ludicrous sums online. And while this collection has neither "Ugly Edits" nor Theo Parrish's name anywhere on the art, the handy 2xCD set compiles the first eight editions of those edits released over a three-year period. It's not just an affordable compendium of the wiggly, playful, grimy, and irreducible disco edits the man had his way with, but also a fine gateway into his wholly idiosyncratic soundworld, suggesting a common ground between Larry Levan and Brion Gysin.
Always an inscrutable music-maker, with productions eschewing the distinctions erected between house, jazz, funk, avant-garde electronic, and soul music, all of Parrish's traits can be heard in the perfect opening track, a woozy, spiraling edit of Jill Scott's "Slowly Surely" from her 2000 debut album. Starting with a glitching CD, tocking drum machine, and a voicemail from the singer herself, she thanks him for a CD that she has yet to listen to. She talks of her over-protective manager but that polite backpedal transforms into a gently cycling whispered plaint: "I just don't know where I should go." Pillowy soft chords lift and drift back down; a woodblock and some other random percussive moments get foregrounded only to dissipate. Yet somehow 12 of the most effervescent minutes in house music have surely drifted past.
The set's bread and butter is in how Parrish dices and lengthens funk and soul cuts by acts such as the Dells, Minnie Riperton, Willie Hutch, Funkadelic, and Kool & the Gang. He takes Sylvester's "Dance" and boils it down to rubbery bassline, incessant hi-hat, and a pickup line for its first three minutes before the dancefloor release comes. In teasing out Sugarhill Gang's late-period joint "Hot Hot Summer Day", he lobs off all their wack rapping and instead elevates the melted-butter backing vocals from the last third of the song, spinning a nine-minute epic out of it.
Which is not to say he emphasizes only the bright, dancefloor-friendly aspects of tracks. When he takes incidental music from Quincy Jones's score for The Color Purple, a clanging polyrhythmic vocal chant dissolves into a disquieting stab of strings. In reworking slick boogie band GQ's "Lies", he offsets a loop about "a party going on" with a man agonizing, "I got to know why," to a cheating woman.
On the easily recognizable Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' Philly-Soul classic, "The Love I Lost", Parrish drops us midway into the track. He makes Teddy Pendergrass' honeyed yet gritty vocals bump against the sparse organ and guitar opening of the song (with plenty of vinyl crackle at the edges) before dumping both atop the propulsive middle section. What makes its sloppy nine minutes work is how he swings the equalization to extremes on every component, finding new spaces and juxtapositions where there previously were none. What should be familiar and mere repetition is anything but. As he once told Resident Advisor: "Repetition kind of sets a certain mass in a song… then there's little bits that come in and out and these changes that kinda shift on that pivot. This is where I go in my head sometimes… shifting, spinning, all kinds of stuff." Consider these 18 tracks, then, the results of Parrish's ever-spinning musical centrifuge. | 2011-11-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-11-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ugly Edits | November 4, 2011 | 8 | 1a351908-b98b-4d91-968b-3fa94b6d07c0 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Though the legendary UK grindcore band Napalm Death have scaled back the mach-speed sections of yore, their fifteenth album, Apex Predator - Easy Meat, remains strident in its determination to keep the listening experience kinetically satisfying and altogether disgusting. | Though the legendary UK grindcore band Napalm Death have scaled back the mach-speed sections of yore, their fifteenth album, Apex Predator - Easy Meat, remains strident in its determination to keep the listening experience kinetically satisfying and altogether disgusting. | Napalm Death: Apex Predator - Easy Meat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20116-apex-predator-easy-meat/ | Apex Predator - Easy Meat | Napalm Death are one of the most virulent bands in metal: the legendary UK grindcore crew's violent, stream-of-consciousness operates like a punk pandemic. Fed by the cesspools of unrest and corruption in the world, their inspiration flares up and runs wild, feeding off whatever styles are at the ready. Sometimes their visceral sound skews hardcore punk, and sometimes it's more death-metal influenced. On any given record, the approach largely depends on how they approach their muses—the scum of the earth—and fortunately for their fans, there's plenty of scum to be found in today's state of affairs.
Despite some early instability in their ranks—particularly between when they got their start in 1981 and 1992’s landmark album *Utopia Banished—*and the continued procession of new bands on the block, Napalm Death haven’t relented one bit. If anything, their path of destruction has grown ever wider, fueled, as always, by the grotesque workings of the musical and political communities that surround them, drawn increasingly closer together by the mores of the digital age. The band's most recent effort, 2012’s Utilitarian, ripped apart these themes at length, and longtime vocalist Barney Greenway and company’s new album Apex Predator - Easy Meat is similarly strident in its determination to keep the listening experience kinetically satisfying and altogether disgusting.
Three decades in, Napalm Death’s famously mercurial lineup has solidified into a concise unit: guitarist Mitch Harris, bassist (and longest tenured member) Shane Embury, drummer Danny Herrera, and that maniacal frontman Mark "Barney" Greenway. Embury and Herrera are the whiplash-inducing back end, hammering out tempos atop which Harris proudly stands and slashes, bolstering his dissonant chords with high-register yelps and screeches. And, even at 45, Greenway's role as vocal juggernaut remains secure as he continues to gleefully shove aside whatever structures his bandmates assemble in his path. On Apex Predator, Russ Russell’s mixing allows you to catch every strain, every gasp, every last drop of spit. From the way Greenway huffs and puffs on "How the Years Condemn", you’d think the guy was the Big Bad Wolf’s cousin from a nuclear dystopia. A closer look at Embury's lyrics reveals instead an ordinary man, haunted by the friends he's lost and desperate to better his life so as not to sully their memory. Napalm Death's splatterhouse hijinks are rooted in a more profound sense of psychological pain this time around, and that their ability to convey that pain hinges largely on its voice.
What’s more, he remains capable of embodying a dizzying number of roles, adopting the cadence of a murderous carnival barker one moment (on "Smash a Single Digit" and "Metaphorically Screw You") and an unholy clergy member the next (the title track, an almost meditational nod to Swans). Don’t come into this thing expecting a solo spree; aside from John "Bilbo" Cook’s delicious guest riff on "Hierarchies" (touted humorously in the liner notes as the "token guitar solo"), the axework on Apex Predator - Easy Meat skews workmanlike, with Harris welding together hardcore punk, chaotic, hyper-speed grindcore, and just a hint of groove metal to make the acrid medicine go down smoother.
Way back in the mothball-scented archives of YouTube there’s this old TV interview with Jim Carrey in which he half-seriously declares his allegiance to thrash metal, launching into an impassioned parody of Napalm Death. "Some day, this guy’s gonna wanna slow down and do some duets," he grins, launching into a simulation of what that might sound like. What's crazy is that Carrey's mockery ended up being half fulfilled. On Apex Predator, Napalm Death have scaled back the mach-speed sections of yore, specifically with regards to the drums, and the album does feature a screamed duet of sorts with the shattered dialogue of "Beyond the Pale". What’s more, as on 2012's Utilitarian and in other scattered corners of their discography, there are periods of clean singing that would've seemed unthinkable back in the days of Harmony Corruption. Here, it's more interestingly interwoven than in the past. And it’s still a Napalm Death record through and through—which means shredded eardrums and tinnitus for days. After all this time, we’d expect nothing less. | 2015-01-28T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-01-28T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Metal | Century Media | January 28, 2015 | 7.9 | 1a39a78e-bcf1-4a80-a4c9-e8c5af1277e2 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The Minnesota trio’s forlorn second album holds up alongside distorted post-shoegaze classics but stays true to its chilly slowcore roots. | The Minnesota trio’s forlorn second album holds up alongside distorted post-shoegaze classics but stays true to its chilly slowcore roots. | Double Grave: Goodbye, Nowhere! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/double-grave-goodbye-nowhere/ | Goodbye, Nowhere! | While Midwest emo may have originated in Middle America during the genre’s late-’90s heyday, it eventually found a home on the coasts. Much like Seattle’s Sunny Day Real Estate and Philadelphia’s Algernon Cadwallader fit into a scene thousands of miles from its epicenter, the band Double Grave gracefully adopted the sensibilities of the late 2010s Northeastern slowcore revival from their home state of Minnesota. On the trio’s second record, Goodbye, Nowhere!, themes of vast physical and metaphorical emptiness provide a backdrop to songs that sullenly grapple with getting older and trying to remedy the pitfalls of adolescence in the rear-view. It holds up alongside distorted post-shoegaze classics but stays true to its chilly northern roots.
Goodbye, Nowhere! Came to life during a period of personal growth and self-imposed solitude for lead singer Jeremy Warden when he and his bandmate-turned-fiancée Bree Meyer took a break from living together for the first time in a decade. Lead single “The Farm” deals with the predictability of recurring desolation, and “Long Drive Home” confronts the difficulty of trying to open one’s heart in a world where stoniness is an essential trait. The lyrics about feeling like pure garbage and its fuzzed-out whammy guitar initially sound like a soundtrack to getting home from school and throwing down one’s backpack in a huff. But the mysticism in the album’s fascination with death and alienation shows that Warden is, in fact, reflecting candidly about the grim realities of transitioning into “real adulthood.”
Goodbye, Nowhere! has strong intentions and great musicianship, but its production value is frustratingly mid-fidelity. It exists in a lackluster middle ground that sounds like the demo of any hard-working but unremarkable bar band playing in the scene of a small city. It sounds cheap, but it never feels thrifty. It’s why the album can play like a New England “type beat.” Having opened for bands like LVL UP and Pile, Double Grave roam in the same sphere as many of the indie rock bands that came before them, and their music at times feels like a derivative of the artists they have shared stages with. While hazy indie is an easily classifiable genre, the best artists within its niche aren’t those that simply duplicate the doomy Duster-style jamming that Double Grave can totter into. The record’s more percussive instrumentals, like “Slime,” play like every song on Ovlov’s first record Am mashed into one.
All this is more or less the byproduct of a band coming into their own sound, an invisible process akin to the worries of aging Warden touches on throughout. The sorrow that churns through the album feels dramatic and forlorn, but the neurosis in Warden’s songwriting gives the record heart. “Hard times keep coming down on me/I don’t know where I went wrong/I try to be cool and friendly/But nobody wants me/Nobody cares,” Warden sings on the stripped-down closing track “Too Late.” This kind of snow-dusted misery throughout Goodbye, Nowhere! is what makes the best slowcore records stand out in an oversaturated scene.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Forged Artifacts | August 12, 2020 | 6.9 | 1a3af92c-65ca-4a1e-8b01-f0f22447a1c2 | Ted Davis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ted-davis/ | |
Rhino reissues the first five albums from this famed Scottish band; each CD has been remastered and includes music videos. | Rhino reissues the first five albums from this famed Scottish band; each CD has been remastered and includes music videos. | The Jesus and Mary Chain: Psychocandy / Darklands / Automatic / Honey's Dead / Stoned & Dethroned | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11882-psychocandy-darklands-automatic-honeys-dead-stoned-dethroned/ | Psychocandy / Darklands / Automatic / Honey's Dead / Stoned & Dethroned | The Jesus and Mary Chain (henceforth “JAMC”) was the musical project of Jim and William Reid, who were (a) Scottish, (b) brothers, and (c) the foremost technological and scientific innovators of the modern rock era. Before they came along, many people still assumed that in order to make aggressive, energetic noises, the members of rock bands had to actually move around, do guitar windmills, and look engaged. The JAMC did not like this situation, because those poses tended to be either uncool or boring, and often made one look like a complete twat.
But after a brief scientific study of their equipment, it came to the JAMC’s attention that electric guitars, when paired with high amplifier volume and harmonic distortion, could create feedback, thereby producing aggressive noises mostly on their own, and freeing their actual players to stand around looking half dead, depressed, and generally too contemptuous and disgusted to really bother playing-- all of which seemed, in 1985 and in the particular case of the JAMC, totally super-awesome.
Obviously the drummer for such a group couldn’t sit behind a big kit looking like he knew what he was doing, so the JAMC stood Bobby Gillespie (yes, that one) up behind only two drums-- a floor tom and a snare-- and had him bash away like he was pissed off at them but either too bored or too drunk to finish them off. A similar approach was taken to bass guitar and vocals.
If the band had applied these tactics to knotty, difficult music, you would never have heard of them, and Dominique Leone would be reviewing these reissues. Luckily-- intuitively-- the JAMC wrote pop songs, basic three-chord rock’n’roll and all-hook melodies, vaguely in the style of early Beach Boys, girl groups, or the laid-back end of the Rolling Stones. Only...as played by lazy, spiteful, nearly hopeless people who didn’t care one way or the other and therefore covered the whole thing in screeching. (See also: the Velvet Underground.)
And thus we get Psychocandy (1985), the JAMC’s enduring contribution to the annals of rock history.
Sometimes people tell you that a 20-year-old album “sounded like nothing else,” but when you listen with today’s ears, it seems rather quaint and unsurprising. Psychocandy is not one of those albums. Its noise isn’t the thick, tactile noise of the new millennium: It’s thin, trebly, and drowned in indistinct reverb, such that this record still sounds like it’s being played in the apartment across the street at staggering volume while someone intermittently runs glass through a table saw. The music stumbles its way from stoned, lazy beauty (“Just Like Honey”) to speed-freak noise (“Never Understand”) to almost-bouncy pop (“Taste of Cindy”). Jim Reid chants his melodies in the selfish, mostly monosyllabic vocabulary of rock’n’roll (“I’m in love with myself,” “I don’t want you to need me,” “oh yeah,”). And just about every song comes out ideal: You’d think they’d sound like jerks, or toughs, and yet it all comes off so vulnerable, so pretty.
The UK loved it, and it’s worth asking why. One reason, I think, is that people in the stylish 80s were thrilled to see their own personal resurrection of the same rock’n’roll “cool” myth that runs through fellow heroin enthusiasts like the Stones, the Pistols, and Nirvana-- which is to say, a band that doesn’t seem to give a fuck about much, including pleasing its own audience, and thus lets that audience live out its own (sensibly unfulfilled) fantasies of alienated non-fuck-giving and antisocial moping. Psychocandy remains a perfect record for states of feeling so bratty, depressed, or disgusted that you actually start to enjoy it. Also, like with most heroin rock’n’roll bands, there’s an earnest, romantic belief in something beautiful and unattainable in the midst of it, which might be drug-related for them but doesn’t have to be for you. The many fun and pretty songs here still seem tired and hard-won, like the band’s grasping at beauty rather than just claiming it exists.
The JAMC also sent a couple massively influential messages to everyone else. One was that-- as mentioned-- you could make big noises without being or acting big. The other was a reminder that the ethos of a band could be wrapped up not in the notes or the songs they played, but in the actual sound of their records; that stuff could be content, not style. These lessons, put together, account for a good 75% of the shoegazer scene that followed.
With all of that accomplished, the JAMC’s next four albums were spent figuring out what in the world to do next. Decisions were made as follows:*
*
Darklands (1987): With Gillespie gone and replaced by an unobtrusive drum machine, the band turns down the noise attitude and works on developing the back-to-basics pop songs that were always underneath. The singles (“Happy When it Rains”) are a joy, big hooks laced with just the right amount of vintage leather-and-shades cool.
Automatic (1989): Conventional wisdom wrongly calls this the dud. With the band reduced to the brothers only, things go artificial: The drum machine is foregrounded, the bass is played on keyboards, the feedback’s on vacation. In that space, the Reids take their biggest shot at doing full-on pop, something that-- on a global alternative classic like the Pixies-covered “Head On”-- feels like a career peak. The rockier album cuts get pretty turgid, and both Reids start to feel like parodies of themselves, but at points they fall into a synthetic rock grind that’s almost industrial-- fascinating, in a time-capsule kind of way.
Honey’s Dead (1992): Conventional wisdom wrongly calls this the return to form, mostly because they got a drummer and wrote some lively tunes. The problem is that the well-recorded feedback and effortful Jagger yowling here sound like two guys straining to be cool, the exact thing that Psychocandy evaded. It’s also their first fully contemporary grunge-era record, so if you wanted to hear a rock band try, you could just buy something current.
Stoned and Dethroned (1994): Back to the beauty thing-- the band breaks out a few acoustic guitars and settles gracefully into a bunch of drawling Stones-type numbers. How convenient that William was dating Hope Sandoval, of popular acoustic drawlers Mazzy Star: Her duet with Jim on "Sometimes Always" really is a standout.
And these five discs offer those five records, each remastered, and each with a DVD face on the flipside containing all relevant music videos and a hi-res album version.
There is only one warning that must go with them: Do not try this at home. Since the turn of the millennium, a staggering number of rock bands have put a staggering amount of effort into seeming like they don’t care. Some have studied the poses and sounds like engineers; others have reduced themselves to the point of intolerable blandness, all because actually trying something might leave them open to embarrassment, open to criticism. Don’t try this at home: These days we could use more of the opposite end of the 80s, the unembarrassed striving and the unselfconscious quirk. | 2006-08-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-08-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | August 4, 2006 | 9.6 | 1a3bd266-1214-47ab-a3c3-0ec388f57ebb | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
After four albums, an EP, stray tracks, and some videos, the Books called it quits this year. You couldn't ask for a better send-off than this lovingly compiled box set that collects all of their released music on vinyl and mp3 along with a DVD of their videos. | After four albums, an EP, stray tracks, and some videos, the Books called it quits this year. You couldn't ask for a better send-off than this lovingly compiled box set that collects all of their released music on vinyl and mp3 along with a DVD of their videos. | The Books: A Dot in Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17003-a-dot-in-time/ | A Dot in Time | The Books met over Shooby Taylor. "It was pretty random," co-founder Nick Zammuto told Pitchfork in an interview in 2003. "I met this girl Julie up in Williamstown, and we were both working the field of art conservation. She ended up getting a job with the Guggenheim and I followed her down to New York where she got this apartment with her sister. Her sister was friends with Paul [de Jong, cellist and co-founder], and so we ended up living in the same building together. I remember the first time I went over to his apartment. He pulled out this Shooby Taylor record."
Taylor was a musical oddity known for his energetic, one-of-a-kind scat singing. He was profiled in Irwin Chusid's Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music. And the fact that his music was in the room when Zammuto first met cellist and fellow sound collector Paul de Jong makes perfect sense. Taylor's music was something that was lost, found, re-discovered, and shared. It was weird and it had an uncertain context and the people who passed those records around created new ones. Such odd gems are rescued from obscurity and passed around by people like de Jong and Zammuto. And that drive provided the initial inspiration for the Books.
That was the beginning of the last decade, and now the Books are no more. After four albums, an EP, stray tracks, and some videos, the Books called it quits this year. Nick Zammuto was somewhat evasive as to why, but it doesn't really matter. It feels right for the Books to wind things up. They had a brilliant idea, they created a sound around it, they bent and shaped and explored that sound as best they could. And then eventually it came time to put that sound away. You couldn't ask for a better send-off than A Dot in Time, a lovingly compiled and gorgeous box set that collects all of their released music on vinyl and mp3 along with a DVD of their videos.
The Books had a distinctive sound that was like nothing else when it arrived on the scene in 2002. It sounded so bizarre and alluring in part because it was the perfect music for a very specific time and place. If it'd have arrived five years later, it wouldn't have made nearly as much sense. In 2002, Google was firmly in control of the web search game, but information in general still seemed overwhelming, random, unknowable. There were fewer ways to focus attention on a single nugget of culture. And the Books were founded in part as a way to take a stream of artifacts and re-assemble them into something new. Which is another way of saying that the Books made less sense in the post-YouTube world; once everyone became an archivist and the fragments of culture were available to all, someone coming to the Books for the first time did so without the same sense of wonder.
But all that was a few years away. First, we had Thought for Food, one of the most startling and original debut albums of the 00s. With this project, you didn't know where one element started and another began. What was sampled? What was played? Where did these sounds come from? Was the young child being told, "You have no mother and father," and being asked not to touch his father in the song "Motherless Bastard" "real" or was this from a movie or was it staged? It was hard to know, and this lingering sense of strangeness and unknowability suited the music perfectly. Without access to the details of authorship, you could only let the sound wash over you, and it was a beauty. Subtle guitar and banjo, bits of cello, some voices. We were just coming out of the peak era of Chicago post-rock, and the Books' approach to sound bore some relationship to the thoughtful, understated, cerebral, but still deeply felt expression of Jim O'Rourke, one of the lynchpins of that scene. A decade on, Thought for Food still works its peculiar magic.
The Lemon of Pink is that odd follow-up album that finds a band refining and honing its sound but losing the element of surprise. The technique is almost identical, but Zammuto and de Jong had a better understanding of how to wield their instruments and samples for maximum impact. As is sometimes the case, for the Books, each of their first three albums has an almost equal number of fans who think it's the best. And in these cases, a lot depends on which you heard first. The Lemon of Pink showed them growing slowly into the more song-oriented direction they would develop later, but the samples are as fresh as ever, words and syllables plucked from who-knows-where and allowed to settle in your brain and grow into a new kind of meaning.
Lost and Safe was the breakthrough, the album that moved the Books out of the realm of small cult act. They'd become an enjoyable live band, and they found a sort of community in the world of bookish coffee shops and NPR. Many fans like Lost and Safe best, and in retrospect I feel I underrated it upon its initial release. It was one of those cases in which what I wanted from the band was different from what they were interested in doing. The Books were heading further in the direction of proper songs. Since Zammuto's voice is limited, his muted sing-speak-whisper integrated very well into the clips from instructional records and ancient news broadcasts. Coming as it did after the 2004 presidential elections, a difficult time for progressives in the United States, Lost and Safe had a political undercurrent that further bound the Books to this community. "I can feel a collective rumbling in America," went a line in "Be Good to Them Always", the album highlight and arguably the greatest single track the Books ever made. It's a song that contained so much: surface beauty, intricate construction, subtle commentary. And if the album as a whole didn't quite deliver on that promise, it was the third winner in a row from a group that didn't necessarily seem like they could sustain things that long.
Between Lost and Safe and their final album, 2010's The Way Out, the books released a collection of scraps called Music for a French Elevator. That EP has been greatly expanded with 32 additional tracks, and the set as a whole is unexpectedly satisfying and offers a different angle on the Books' world. Without the careful editing and thematic unity of their albums, French Elevator mostly shows how musical they were, and how adept they were at making simple guitar and cello patterns pack an emotional punch. Some of these extra tracks are just instrumentals played by Zammuto and de Jong and some are just samples, but they do illustrate the consistency of their aesthetic, how they were able to shape different textures so that they fit with with their overriding sound.
And then came The Way Out, a more playful and free-wheeling album. In retrospect, The Way Out is easily the least satisfying of the four, though it still has its charms. Experimenting with steadier beats and grooves while going heavier on the jokes, The Way Out ultimately feels like a dry run for Zammuto's solo work than a wrap-up to the Books proper. But heard here, in the context of their career as a whole, it's as good an epitaph as any. Something feels right about this box set, from the beautiful design to the fact that it feels a bit like a tombstone. As markers of the dead go, it's a beautiful one. May it live and decay and be covered with weeds and, eventually, be unearthed and dusted off by some young creative person still finding their way. And may that person pass it on to someone else and find a way to share something new with the world. | 2012-08-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-08-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | null | August 3, 2012 | 8.4 | 1a404fcb-e288-4419-9b8d-e341f23d2547 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The London producer's new EP is an unabashedly beautiful, even sensuous 17 minutes of music: He's a startlingly clear new voice, and here, he's just clearing his throat. | The London producer's new EP is an unabashedly beautiful, even sensuous 17 minutes of music: He's a startlingly clear new voice, and here, he's just clearing his throat. | Kwes: Meantime EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16535-kwes-meantime-ep/ | Meantime EP | The London-based singer/producer Kwes has the kind of personality you used to find all the time in old-school R&B but that you rarely find now: courtly, tender, sensitive, self-effacing, romantic. "I'm so bashful," he sings over a song named for the shy emotion, right before he actually offers the girl in question a cream soda. He's not a twee, toe-digging type, however: His presence and his voice are clear, calm, disarming. "I mean when I say/ You're beautiful," he sings tenderly on "lgoyh", and there is a glowing sincerity in his voice. For a soft-spoken 24-year-old, he carries himself with remarkable confidence, which radiates through his music with a kind of healing quality.
His new EP, Meantime, is an unabashedly beautiful, even sensuous 17 minutes of music: Sound layers are introduced like deal clinchers in a slow seduction. Kwes began as a producer of other people's music (Speech Debelle, Micachu) before he decided to become the focus of his own productions, and Meantime breathes quietly with his attention to detail. Beneath a serene surface, all four songs bubble intricately. Listening to it in headphones lets you appreciate Kwes' understanding of spacing in the mix, the comforting swirl of these songs.
To comfort seems to be one of Kwes's main goals as a songwriter. On "Bashful", he's meeting the gaze of an older woman head-on and telling her, "I know I may be young to you, but I want to prove/ You may think what I say isn't true." On "lgoyh", he croons, this time to a seemingly younger woman, "Don't waste too many tears/ On those energies/ You have too many years ahead of you/ And not too many before you." He's capable of more than just sweet nothings too: the surreal "Honey", the only other full song, appears to be sung from the perspective of a head of cabbage longing for the jar of honey a shelf above it (as Ryan Dombal noted in his interview with Kwes).
Meantime has only four tracks, and one of them is a two-minute sound collage. When Kwes releases more music, he's going to make a formidable impression. He's a startlingly clear voice, and here, he's just clearing his throat. | 2012-04-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-04-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp | April 30, 2012 | 7.6 | 1a429d41-c6e7-454c-aefe-796263feb65a | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The Parisian duo’s debut full-length harnesses controlled chaos, offering an engrossing introduction to their prismatic synth pop. | The Parisian duo’s debut full-length harnesses controlled chaos, offering an engrossing introduction to their prismatic synth pop. | UTO: Touch the Lock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/uto-touch-the-lock/ | Touch the Lock | The Parisian duo UTO’s electronic concoctions leave sharp, lingering afterimages in the mind. The couple known as Neysa Mae Barnett and Emile Larroche began making music together in 2016; Barnett wrote and sang and Larroche handled production on their playful debut EP, released in 2017. While Broadcast’s featherlight psych-pop melodies and Portishead’s flinty trip-hop are obvious influences, UTO deftly make the sound their own: Barnett will occasionally unleash a surprising, guttural howl, or Larroche will trigger a sudden shift in tempo that hits like a roundhouse kick. On Touch the Lock, the group’s debut album, the pair cohere these styles through murky electronic music and sprightly electro-pop, backed by more mature songwriting and a clear-cut sense of individuality.
The bouncy highlight “À La Nage” is the most pop-minded song here, but UTO add a twist by looping wordplay lifted from novelist Georges Perec over a chorus of chirped backing vocals and jubilant keys. “Take It All” marches in the opposite direction, drawing together watery chimes and a queasy drumbeat; the vocals echo Kim Gordon’s whispery, tantalizing hooks, as Barnett intones about “giving you my best heartbeats” with a pitch-shifted inflection. Many of Touch the Lock’s lyrics drift toward off-kilter, oblique poetry as Barnett switches between French and English. On the airy highlight “Souvent Parfois” (“Often Sometimes”), she uses ecological imagery—the stars, the woods—to ground herself in the face a bout of mental uncertainty, securing the anguish with a solid center of gravity.
UTO’s propulsive tracks are more restless, built around textured polyrhythms and noisy production. “Row Paddle” delivers a driving, delirious drumbeat and synth combo that sounds directly inspired by Yeezus’ messy, anarchic spirit. Later, on the standout “This New Phase,” clattering percussion swarms over Barnett’s muted, staccato delivery: “Your new tales, your absence, all the mess that leaves love,” she murmurs rapidly. “How I miss your old laugh/How I miss your presence.” Barnett wrote the song about watching her grandmother succumb to illness, and the repetitive verses crank up the tension before the production veers into a sudden choral section, dropping listeners directly into a swirling, stunning expression of grief.
Not every experiment on Touch the Lock lands with the same vigor. The album’s midtempo songs alternate between the dreamy and evaporative (“Délaisse”) or the overly dreary (“Elisa”). Yet when they excel, it’s hard to resist the duo’s obvious sense of controlled chaos. Though it feels rough around the edges at times, Touch the Lock is delightfully slippery in execution, rich with innovative, percussive quirks that expand UTO’s sound while amping up their sly personality, making for an engrossing introduction. | 2022-09-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Infiné / Pain Surprises | September 1, 2022 | 7.2 | 1a435beb-b0cb-4822-bddf-b1abf2c83cb2 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the banal ennui of vaporwave with its pioneering document from 2011. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the banal ennui of vaporwave with its pioneering document from 2011. | Macintosh Plus: Floral Shoppe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/macintosh-plus-floral-shoppe/ | Floral Shoppe | In a 2011 interview, Claire Boucher described her then-new project Grimes as “post-internet,” an attempt to put a name on the unique experience of discovering and making music in the digital age. “The music of my childhood was really diverse because I had access to everything,” she said, putting into words something an entire generation raised on Napster, SoulSeek, LimeWire, and other file-sharing programs was beginning to realize they had in common. To young producers, “everything” quickly proved to be a winning formula as the internet compressed every imaginable genre of music into an easily accessible folder.
By 2019, that optimism has long faded, and the internet’s sense of access has turned on us in ways that range from existentially overwhelming to outright terrifying. Social media has distorted reality with global consequences, giants like Spotify threaten to reduce music to Muzak one mood-generated playlist at a time, tragedies are live-streamed, and we all get battered into numbness by a feed we can’t really turn off.
Not long after Grimes’ 2011 interview, the album Floral Shoppe first surfaced online and everything about it felt utterly incomprehensible. Credited to the mysterious Macintosh Plus, it was festooned in garish Pepto Bismol-pink art with mint green Japanese type, a glossy cityscape, and a marble bust staring vacantly upward —the music inside only made less sense. Cheesy saxophones melted into ooze, easy listening skipped and tripped over itself like a buffering YouTube video, and vaguely human voices were slowed into breathy, bland moans. The first time I hit play in the spring of 2012, it stopped me in my tracks. I stared at my iPhone wondering if it was broken or if the file was corrupted. It sounded like the musical equivalent of a computer virus, as if all the exciting ideas at the time about “post-internet” music had soured and gone flat.
By no conventional logic should Floral Shoppe have made it beyond the deep-internet realms it emerged from. But like candy-colored mold, its power has rapidly spread while its then-teenage creator Ramona Xavier, the Portland artist now known as Vektroid, has remained an elusive figure, simultaneously a pioneer and an outlier. Her album remains one-of-a-kind in its depiction of anxiety and crisis rendered through waves of numbness that range from deeply unsettling to artificially ecstatic. Now approaching its 10th anniversary, Floral Shoppe stands as a touchstone of millennial art. Every year the world slips a little further into chaos, it only seems to make more sense.
Vaporwave, the genre Floral Shoppe came to define, is music designed to be ignored. Often built from corporate Muzak samples, it lingers in your perception, the way something might flicker in the corner of your eye. If Brian Eno conceived ambient music as something one could choose to focus on or comfortably let slide into the background, vaporwave turns that prescriptive power against the listener. It pushes you out with banality only to pull you back in, creating a trancelike state truer to the grind of daily life. As critic and early vaporwave champion Marvin Lin wrote in 2012, “It doesn’t matter whether or not you think you’re heard ‘vaporwave’ before. Trust me, you have—in hotel lobbies, in the opening sequence of a training video, over the phone waiting for a customer service representative.” For a younger generation raised in an increasingly corporatized music culture looking to rebel, creating a self-sustaining, defiantly unmarketable scene of literal Muzak feels like one of the most punk acts of this era, even if the music was anything but.
Floral Shoppe reflects a mind raised on IDM and classic Warp records. In a 2015 conversation, Xavier explained to me that by middle school, “I’d listened to all my Autechre and Boards Of Canada and Squarepusher and my Aphex. Then I tried to get into the finer points.” The album also feels like a natural progression of what was called hypnagogic pop at the time, impressionistic, hazy tunes that recalled the state between waking and sleeping. As some streamlined the style to find genuine pop success with what was cynically rebranded as “chillwave,” others looked for darker avenues.
Leading the scene with their explorations of dystopian Muzak jingles were L.A. experimentalist James Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never with the surreal, endlessly looped Top 40 song samples he nicknamed “eccojams.” Both are musicians whose influence is felt far beyond their divisive initial reception, but their conceptual ambitions feel small against the pure emotional impact of Floral Shoppe. The album’s sample sources include Sade, cheap New Age, Diana Ross, forgotten AOR, and the soundtrack to a Nintendo 64 game, all tuned to Xavier’s own, surreal frequency. If hypnagogic pop was often described as listening to a cassette tape melting on the dashboard, Floral Shoppe is like calmly listening to a Spotify playlist while your computer is on fire.
The album begins with “Booting,” a cut-up of Sade’s “Tar Baby” that loops like a GIF and builds into a spiraling anxiety attack. If hypnagogic pop or chillwave utilized loops as windows into a blissful eternity, Xavier cuts hers disorientingly short, turning them into walls gradually closing in on you. In its final moments, the track unspools even more violently, simultaneous slowing down further as sped-up versions echo in the background. It’s the musical equivalent of hyperventilating and it’s Floral Shoppe’s bleakest moment, broken just as abruptly by its most ecstatic.
The title to the following song, “Lisa Frank 420/Modern Computing,” fits like a mood board for Floral Shoppe as a whole, and its chirpy, euphoric groove has become its calling card. It repurposes Diana Ross’ version of “It’s Your Move,” but Xavier pitch-shifts the pop icon’s voice to a murky smear, draining its flirtatiousness and amplifying its desperation. The song is appropriately druggy, but in a way that feels more out of a necessity to insulate, a dizzying nosedive into a painful euphoria. It inadvertently recalls dub, where the mix functions as the lead instrument, building in echoes and dizzying audio pans as sounds bounce erratically from channel to channel. In a curious moment of vaporwave infecting the real-life corporate world, the luxurious track even became a viral hit appearing in countless email chains as the soundtrack to hypnotic footage of factory assembly-lines simply dubbed “The Most Satisfying Video In The World.”
Floral Shoppe’s transformative power only grows stronger as the songs it samples get more obscure, such as a handful from Pages, the unsuccessful first band from Mr. Mister co-founders Steve George and Richard Page. Their 1978 song “If I Saw You Again” aims (and misses) for the kind of chart success Supertramp were enjoying, but Xavier is only interested in its short intro, a bouncy flutter of synths and drums. It gets turned inside out over the three minutes of Floral Shoppe’s title track, where she bends and folds the sample in on itself until it becomes labyrinthine. “Library” meanwhile zeros in on the hook taken from the group’s “You Need A Hero,” turning its breathy sensuousness into a hot night in the uncanny valley. It works in other ways too, like when the panic attack which opened the album bubbles back to the surface on “Geography,” a musical snippet from N64 shooter game Turok: Dinosaur Hunter stretched to eerie, unsettling lengths.
From there, Floral Shoppe passes a point of no return. The majority of its final tracks all sample the same early ’90s New Age group Dancing Fantasy, unifying the second half into a suite. The sprawling “Chill Divin’ With ECCO” repeats faceless synth washes and empty guitar riffs ad infinitum, but the result is stunning and Floral Shoppe’s peak balancing act of banality and transcendence, like taking MDMA only to stare at a Weather Channel forecast. It’s followed by the soothing comedown of “Mathematics,” a scrambled fog of synth bleeps and pillowy saxophone that floats for over seven mind-clearing minutes. “I Am Pico” and “Standby” are both immaculate hold music, short vignettes that seem to drift even further into a faceless oblivion, before the closing “Te” anchors Floral Shoppe with a return to reality.
“Te” is the only track on Floral Shoppe without samples and hits like a breath of fresh air after staring at a computer screen too long. Its melody shows no signs of the elongated slowdown or scrambled editing that preceded it, and as birds chirp in the distance it brings a sense of peace and balance the rest of the album dismantles so expertly. It also suggests the direction Xavier would begin to move in the future. She followed Floral Shoppe with increasingly dense projects under other one-off names such as 情報デスクVIRTUAL and Sacred Tapestry that dove even deeper into Muzak before evaporating altogether. When she returned on New Year’s Day in 2013 under her earliest moniker Vektroid (the name she continues to use today) it was with “Enemy,” a 10-minute colossus of a track that brilliantly fused Muzak, industrial, IDM, and video game music with distorted vocals coming from an actual human collaborator, Moon Mirror. Abandoning samples almost completely, Xavier’s work has only grown more potent and exciting, including an ongoing hip-hop collaboration producing for Houston rapper Siddiq.
It all stands as a reminder that for the tremendous power Floral Shoppe commands, it was the work of a very talented young producer finding her voice and at times its reception threatened to overwhelm that voice. Though Vektroid has reimagined and fleshed out some of her early work, Floral Shoppe remains untouched and the Macintosh Plus moniker hangs on the shelf for good reason. Nothing could change or improve its sound which, even after thousands of soundalikes, has lost none of its perception-shattering power. Its ability to channel personal ennui, despair, isolation, hope, and stupefying overstimulation into a new musical language once felt like looking at a funhouse mirror, but years later feels as crisp as an iPhone selfie. The thing about growing up in the heyday of internet file-sharing is that for all the isolation it instilled, it was easy to forget that there really was a person on the other end of the screen. We were separated, but connected, in the same paradoxical way that makes Vektroid’s masterpiece as personal as a diary and as universal as a meme. Floral Shoppe is no longer just hers, it belongs to an entire generation. | 2019-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Beer On The Rug | April 21, 2019 | 8.8 | 1a44e29d-2487-495a-bd47-e71eef8e3aae | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
On his debut solo album, the Hiss Golden Messenger member finally lets out his voice—a cool, soulful thing filled with deep reverence for the road, if some cynicism about the myths it’s spun. | On his debut solo album, the Hiss Golden Messenger member finally lets out his voice—a cool, soulful thing filled with deep reverence for the road, if some cynicism about the myths it’s spun. | Scott Hirsch: Blue Rider Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22236-blue-rider-songs/ | Blue Rider Songs | When you’ve been traveling as long as Scott Hirsch has, you know better than to expect easy revelations from the road. In the mid-’90s, the California native formed the noise band Ex-Ignota alongside his friend MC Taylor. By the end of the decade, they had broken off as the Court and Spark, an alt-country group that presaged their spiritually inclined outfit Hiss Golden Messenger. Initially, the duo was roughly split into Hirsch’s music backing Taylor’s lyrics, though it became the latter’s project over time. Hirsch took on more of a live role, and after a year of heavy Hiss touring in 2015, he moved from Brooklyn back to California, opened a studio, and started work on his debut solo album. It’s taken a long time for him to let out his voice—a cool, soulful thing filled with deep reverence for his source material, if some cynicism about the myths it’s spun.
In 2013, Taylor and Hirsch teamed up with Steve Gunn for one-off collaboration Golden Gunn, which riffs on JJ Cale’s logo on the cover. This generation of pickers doesn’t hide their influences, fearing accusations of unoriginality, but foregrounds them, confidently establishing themselves as part of a trailblazing lineage. Hirsch is especially overt in this respect, referencing Cale in “Blue Rider” (“they call me the breeze”), and the “weed, whites, and wine” of Little Feat’s “Willin’” on “Sundown Highway,” influences than manifest deeper in the music. His guitar choogles closer to Lowell George’s “Honest Man” than any Little Feat staples, and channels Cale’s spry equanimity and rickety drum machines. (Given Hirsch’s canonical approach, it’s also probably no accident that Blue Rider Songs arrives through a Tulsa label, Scissor Tail.) Like Phil Cook (pulling organ duties here), Hirsch finds ways of enlivening tradition, dusting on spacey synths to spotlight country funk and dub’s common rhythms, and injecting soulful vocal harmonies to lift the gorgeous, humid atmosphere.
Over the past year, several of Hirsch’s peers have been out searching for meaning on America’s interstates. Cook’s Southland Mission fled to remember the value of belonging, while Gunn’s oblique Eyes on the Lines reflected Walt Whitman’s admiration in “Song of the Open Road,” “You express me better than I can express myself.” Just as William Tyler’s Modern Country surveyed the margins, warning against forgetting the “cultural geography of this vanishing America,” Hirsch’s Blue Rider Songs also veers from the beaten track. It steers onto the “blue highways” described in travel writer William Least Heat-Moon’s 1982 memoir as the periods at dawn and dusk “when the opening road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.” Hirsch’s narrator is lost, seemingly exiled, but it’s not the kind of self-indulgent searching where he expects to be handed a pearl somewhere along the line.
He sets his compass on “Loss of Forgetfulness,” gently establishing the self-deceit of those who believe in free will while clinging tight to symbols that seem heaven-sent. Hirsch’s tone is never admonishing, the communal backing harmonies and horizontal groove doubling up as a kind of reassurance: Who wouldn’t want to believe in self-determination while holding out hope that some greater power could come and clean up our messes? But Hirsch knows that the hard work is all his to do, and ventures out into a landscape saturated by pink light, gold houses, and purple diamond suns. Men are “shitty diamonds, cut from the earth” who have to be sent out “to find their worth,” on “The Sun Comes Up a Purple Diamond,” a reprisal of an understated Golden Gunn song that he turns into a soulful romp coated in rusty shimmer.
Although everything here sounds familiar in one way or another, Hirsch has a finely tuned ear: the harmonica on “Sundown Highway” flares like distant coyote calls, and spare centerpiece “Raga of the Sea” distills the moment where loss makes its gravity known. “Who thought this would be easy?” he asks amid luxurious peals of guitar on “We Took Back Roads (Blue Highways).” “It’s a heavy weight.” On Blue Rider Songs, Hirsch debunks the idea that redemption is ever a cakewalk, and finds something more truthful and lasting in the pursuit of accepting responsibility. | 2016-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Scissor Tail | August 22, 2016 | 8 | 1a49a7f0-ce66-41ff-915a-585c2acb5838 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The UK producer’s new record pulls apart the seams of dance music, trading four-on-the-floor beats for meditative chaos and boundless expansion. | The UK producer’s new record pulls apart the seams of dance music, trading four-on-the-floor beats for meditative chaos and boundless expansion. | Call Super: Eulo Cramps | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/call-super-eulo-cramps/ | Eulo Cramps | Something secret is happening in JR Seaton’s work as Call Super. Over the last decade, they have developed a private language for their largely instrumental electronic music, which skirts the edges of the dancefloor like a small woodland creature slinking through the underbrush. Pay attention to the track titles, and weird patterns and semi-rhymes emerge—apparent series like “Okko Ink,” “Ekko Ink,” and “Ekkles,” or Arpo and “Arpo Sunk”; vowel-heavy names like Suzi Ecto, “Sulu Sekou,” “Fluenka Mitsu”; the aliases Elmo Crumb and Ondo Fudd. These mysterious, staccato words and phrases, occasionally nodding playfully to Harpo Marx or Elmer Fudd, suggest a code that might unlock the secrets of the UK musician’s invented universe, if only we could crack it.
On Call Super’s fourth album, Eulo Cramps—there’s another one of those cryptic titles—this trail of breadcrumbs leads not out of the woods but deeper into it. Seaton started out in the early 2010s making stern, barnstorming club tracks, and they’ve never completely abandoned their dancefloor tendencies—just see the lush, quick-stepping “Swallow Me,” from last year, or the sparkling floor-fillers of 2021’s Cherry Drops I and II. But Call Super’s three previous albums have frequently strayed far from club convention, swapping four-on-the-floor beats and crowd-moving riffs for serpentine clarinet melodies and crinkly textures of tin foil and bubble wrap. Those motifs, indebted to both Jon Hassell’s ambient jazz and the electric-typewriter rhythms of early IDM, have become signature elements of Call Super’s music. On Eulo Cramps, they render their most holistic and beguiling vision yet.
The new album is part of a broader multimedia project, Tell Me I Didn’t Choose This, that will combine text, painting, and music. But even experienced in isolation, Eulo Cramps feels like a culmination of ideas that have been bubbling in Call Super’s work for years. It’s shot through with acoustic or acoustic-sounding instruments: piano, congas, drums, bells, and harp strings. Melancholy clarinet melodies—played by Seaton’s father, then multi-tracked into eerie harmonic clouds, or twisted and pitch-shifted into surreal, synthetic ribbons—form the tonal center of many tracks. Sounds jostle together, collide, and sometimes fuse, endowed with an unusually tactile heft. In some moments, it feels as if Seaton has daubed on keys with a sponge or putty knife, yielding thick, gloopy streaks; the high end bristles with metallic shards and wooden splinters. It’s the most vivid sound design of the producer’s career.
Three tracks toward the beginning tap into Call Super’s powerful rhythmic instincts: The rippling “Fly Back Stork” sounds like a forceful response to Ricardo Villalobos’ classic “Fools Garden (Black Conga),” while muscular drum fills propel “Sapling” and “Illumina Spin” along their rolling journeys. But little here sounds like typical dance music, and the deeper the album goes, the more things pull apart at the seams. The harp strings and clarinets of “Glossy Bingo Stain” proceed haltingly over uneven hand drums whose rhythm is difficult to parse. “Coppertone Elegy,” which sounds like the Cure’s Disintegration remade for the experimental techno set, layers scraping textures over glowing pads, acoustic guitar, and indistinct murmurs; there’s no center, just a boundless expansion. Occasionally, the crackle of an audio cable in a socket will interrupt the flow of a track. In the dirgelike “Clam Lute Wig,” it sounds like Seaton is reaching into the murk, rooting around to see what lurks there, and stirring up meditative chaos.
Even the album’s guest vocalists convey a similar sense of fragmentation. In “Sapling,” Canadian singer Eden Samara’s voice is split across the frequency spectrum like light through a prism; every so often, an intelligible phrase (“Your taste concealed”) will surface amid all the dappled accents. Something similar happens to Julia Holter’s high, breathy voice in “Illumina Spin,” vaporizing it into a lustrous mist. Even the spoken words of Berlin’s Elke Wardlaw, which run through the core of “Goldwood,” are processed in a way that suggests pulverization, lending her assonant rhymes an atomized, pointillistic feel.
This fractured aspect goes to the heart of the album’s underlying themes. Seaton has discussed Eulo Cramps in autobiographical terms, hinting at youthful traumas: They have said that “Coppertone Elegy” is about the multiple selves within us, while the closer “Years in the Hospital” engages the memory of a long period of illness. Beyond a stray word here or there, these inspirations may not translate to the listener, but that hardly matters. What’s clear is how carefully Seaton has approached every sound on the record, always avoiding the familiar path in favor of the one that burrows deeper inward, the better to flesh out the contours of their inner psyche. Eulo Cramps is that rarest of albums in dance-adjacent electronic music: a record as personal as it is original. | 2023-10-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Can You Feel the Sun | October 16, 2023 | 7.9 | 1a4a842a-696e-4c8d-bda2-0671480625fb | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The multilingual East African rapper embraces a crisp, confident sound on her second full-length. | The multilingual East African rapper embraces a crisp, confident sound on her second full-length. | MC Yallah: Yallah Beibe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mc-yallah-yallah-beibe/ | Yallah Beibe | MC Yallah doesn’t sweat getting lost in translation. The Kenya-born, Uganda-raised rapper shoots off high-speed rhymes in Luganda, Luo, Kiswahili, and English, sometimes keeping pace with 300 bpm singeli beats. “Even if they don’t understand, it’s the impact that I leave on them,” the artist said of her English-speaking listeners last year. “Music speaks to the hearts of the people.” On her second album, Yallah Beibe, the MC stretches and snaps her elastic flow across icy beats by producers Debmaster, Shigge, and Chrisman. With her distinct phrasing and charming bravado, MC Yallah is an exhilarating voice emerging from Kampala’s Nyege Nyege Tapes collective.
Born Yallah Gaudencia Mbidde, the rapper has been involved in the East African hip-hop scene since 1999, issuing a handful of singles over the following decades: 2008’s “Abakyala (Women),” 2012’s “Ndeete,” 2017’s “Mpambana,” and 2018’s “Ting Badi Malo.” In 2019, she finally released her debut album, the eerie, static-smeared Kubali, an 11-song project made entirely with Debmaster. On that record, Mbidde draped her rich voice around Debmaster’s jagged beats to a quiet, slightly muddled effect. On Yallah Beibe she embraces crisper production, and her swift, cocky verses explode from the mix. She sounds refreshed and confident.
The mainstream rap world is slow to honor non-Western artists, so Mbidde spends a chunk of the album singing her own praises. Amid the rapid-fire bars of “Sikwebela,” she demands her crown over trap hi-hats and plinking keys that recall John Carpenter’s score for Halloween. On “Miniboss,” she christens herself as HBIC; swaggering across a programmed flute loop and tinny percussion, her hard consonants pop like pressurized champagne corks. Mbidde has honed her unique meter over the years by revisiting her prior work. “I inspire myself by listening to myself, listening to my flow,” she told Resident Advisor in 2020. “When you tend to listen more to music by other rappers it corrupts you a bit.” When she writes, Mbidde cycles through all four languages in her arsenal, testing out the cadence of each tongue before committing her vocals to tape. If she raps in Lugaflow, it is not only to shine more light on the Ugandan scene, but to maximize the musicality of Luganda.
MC Yallah commands the stage all by herself, but her collaborative tracks are just as captivating. She invites Ugandan dancehall star Ratigan Era on the Chrisman-produced club cut “Big Bung,” and his velvety, Auto-Tuned voice is a perfect foil to Mbidde’s sharp and springy inflection. On the goth industrial “No One Seems to Bother,” Mbidde is joined by Lord Spikeheart, singer for Kenyan metal band Duma. His gristly screams tear through Debmaster’s dungeon synths and disperse like shattered glass under Mbidde’s verses. “I’m fed up of all the evil that I see on the cable/Brothers killing brothers, Cain killing Abel,” she snaps in English. Mbidde recorded the song after the murder of George Floyd, and she details the tragedies that plague her own country. “Greed, corruption, human sacrifice,” she raps, before citing poverty as an undeserving target of disdain: “The Disease of materialism is cutting deeper/If you have not, then you’re treated as a leper.”
Mbidde navigates the darkness with energetic bars and creeping beats. Some of the best songs on Yallah Beibe, like “No One Seems to Bother,” sound broadcast from a shadowy S&M club. On “Baliwa,” Shigge spits out drum machine beats as brittle as icicles, while Mbidde pitches her voice to demonic depths. As a pipe organ sample blares in the background, she multitracks her phrases into a sinister chant: “Always hating... Always laughing.” Mbidde strikes a delicate balance across the album, but on “Baliwa” her incantation sounds more frightening than usual: a haunting litany that transcends language. | 2023-04-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Hakuna Kulala | April 21, 2023 | 7.7 | 1a4bdccd-4c2e-43c7-b594-437630fba3c6 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Fog's Minnesota driver's license is inscribed with the name his mama gave him (a comparably unromantic Andrew Broder ... | Fog's Minnesota driver's license is inscribed with the name his mama gave him (a comparably unromantic Andrew Broder ... | Fog: Ether Teeth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3130-ether-teeth/ | Ether Teeth | Fog's Minnesota driver's license is inscribed with the name his mama gave him (a comparably unromantic Andrew Broder), and the shrewdest Minneapolis hipsters might recognize him by his club moniker, the farcically straightforward DJ Andrew, but on Ether Teeth-- his second full-length-- he is, conveniently, all Fog. Broder's latest alias is an appropriate metaphor for Ether Teeth's eleven wispy, befuddling tracks: alternately gorgeous and jarring, soothing and repetitive, Ether Teeth is a hypnotic, moody collection of experimental guitar wails, lush piano, eclectic sampling, and ethereal, hissing blank space.
Bursting forth from the collage-driven DJ tradition (Prince Paul to Kid Koala), Fog is obviously well-versed in the process of snatching and reusing, infusing his tracks with occasionally ironic spots of found sound. The general problem with found stuff-- be it a Diana Ross backbeat or a canary-- is that the act of recognition is not an especially artful endeavor in and of itself. Recontextualization is hip-hop's founding principle, but it's a tenet based on the idea that sampling should involve skillful arranging and sequencing, not straight up cutting and pasting. Appropriation and transplanting requires ingenious tweaking in order to deserve a stamp of reinvention; to become the painting-- not just the wall it's hanging on.
Fog, fortunately, realizes this-- his snagged material, which can consist of anything from film dialogue, to conversations, to fragments of old songs, to birds, birds, birds-- are placed over alarmingly beautiful, droning guitar chords and splatters of piano. Despite a couple of rough spots, Ether Teeth is largely composed of sublime moments in which the sound becomes part of the song, complimenting the melodies and functioning cohesively rather than extraneously. "Plum Dumb" is a heart-stopping, expertly assembled opener that layers rich guitar plucking over a Casio-looped classical drone and buzzing, almost-human turntable slips. A creepy choral refrain of "which nobody can deny!" eases in like a second melody; soon, a meandering piano line snakes through, building to a thunderous, overwhelming climax before easing back out and ending on a breathtaking choral sample, now louder, stranger, and throatier.
The foot-stomping "What a Day Day" is more straightforward: snarky, sarcastic and fueled by aggressive acoustic guitar, Fog's charmingly haphazard singing finds a contextual home here. After an unpredictable two minutes, it bursts into a chorus on par with the best melodramatic piano ballads from the 70s: "If you need me, call my lawyer." Another archaic vocal sample pops up at the end, warning everyone to "get out of Terrible Town" and "go on to Lovelyville."
"The Girl from the Gum Commercial" opens with some nicely obnoxious open-mouthed gum mauling; these smacks sound oddly percussive against a rudimentary piano melody and quiet guitar strums, like sticky, high-pitched drums. Fog's voice sneaks around the tune, sometimes loud, sometimes inaudible, but the track vehemently refuses to follow any sort of logical, linear path. It's a dynamic trick: if you've got the patience to stick it out for five minutes, the alarming turntable debauchery halfway through should substantiate the investment for most.
It's the winning (if anything-but-cheery) "Cheerupcheerily" where Fog's isolated misery is most dramatically defined. As an ambient swell-- almost certainly snatched from a U2 track, and quite possibly the instrumental "Korova 1"-- loops repeatedly, the song gradually builds into a clarinet-dotted wail of distortion so focused and thin, it threatens to tear a hole through your line of sight. Like cinema's recent Americana melodramas, it's a meditation on ache and desire that's at once aware of its insignificance in the scope of things.
Ether Teeth sags briefly midway through-- "No Boys Allowed" and "Apologizing to Mystery" are both half-conceived-- but immediately after, the 11-minute "Wallpaper Sink or Swim" seems a clear and devestating revelation. After five minutes of its barely-there piano and jutting left-channel samples, a thundering melody harkens a new beginning, killing itself on an odd chord before rising again as a dramatic, ascending progression. Hushed jazz drums begin to stutter and fall all over the track as horns, tones and samples wander around Fog's constant chant, "Goats will eat tins cans," an apparently meaningless repetition that has a surprising function: the lyric is the grounding melody around which an orchestra of instruments circle, a moment in which hip-hop's tradition of juxtaposition meets music theory.
Fog lays down some skillful, ambitious, and certainly curious foundations on Ether Teeth, but his coloring book isn't completely filled in. But that he's made such a tremendous leap from his amateurish if promising debut to this highly developed, emotionally attenuated sound manipulation speaks to his future. For its sometimes uneven composition, Ether Teeth brings reality closer to your ears than most music ever hope, melding folk, hip-hop and psychedelia to produce a few of the finest tunes you'll hear this year. Surprisingly personal and emotionally resonant, Ether Teeth is potent inspiration, undeniably captivating in its moments of brilliance. | 2003-05-20T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2003-05-20T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Ninja Tune | May 20, 2003 | 8.4 | 1a54e5d2-f5d2-4c85-9fed-fc4756bf672f | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
A second collection of unheard material from the German new wave band reveals its voguish attempt to transition into the 1990s. | A second collection of unheard material from the German new wave band reveals its voguish attempt to transition into the 1990s. | Saâda Bonaire: 1992 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/saada-bonaire-1992/ | 1992 | Saâda Bonaire were lost and found twice. Formed in 1982, the German new wave band had only one single to its name before getting dropped by a label that blew its budget on a young Tina Turner. Thirty years on, Captured Tracks released a compilation of previously unheard 1980s material that satisfied a cult following, revealed a hidden Mideastern influence, and unlocked songs that deal with queer love affairs. Now, the label has unearthed a new trove of unheard tracks from the band’s even lesser-known second lineup.
In 1990, producer and string-puller Ralph “Von” Richthoven set sights on restarting the project, recruiting vocalist Andrea Ebert to replace Claudia Hossfeld, who’d left in 1985, alongside returning frontwoman Stephanie Lange. Keeping in vogue with the new decade, they threw out the new wave synths and boogie guitars in favor of baggy trip-hop breakbeats, quiet storm breeziness, and Chicago house productions. The group were noticeably paying attention to recent hits from Soul II Soul, Crystal Waters, and Deee-Lite (even lyrically nodding to R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”), though 1992 opens with their covers of early ’70s selections from James Brown and Stevie Wonder.
In Saâda Bonaire’s hands, Brown’s appreciative single “Woman” sinks into a loungey instrumental, as if what’s a revelation for the Godfather of Soul is, for Ebert and Lange, just a known truth that bears repeating. Their cover of Wonder and Syreeta’s duet “To Know You Is to Love You” brings its sexual undertones full-frontal, thanks to a background mix of impish giggling, breathy moans, and hushed whispers. With two female voices, the sapphic suggestion is there for the taking—“lesbian chic” became an American phenomenon in 1993 with an era-defining k.d. lang magazine cover, and the track might have seemed ripe for fetishization. But not even that fad could hand Saâda Bonaire a wide release, and the tapes from this period were stowed away and, until recently, thought to be lost.
It’s a shame, because Middle Eastern instrumentation was still a staple in the band’s ’90s incarnation, and the album’s Turkish vocalists and saz guitarist steal every scene gracefully, even if just for an introduction. Arabesque flute wraps around the coiling bassline of “Running” to give an otherwise temperate track some much-needed flair, and returns in the breakdown of the eight-minute “So Many Dreams.” Swapping in and out vocal hits, horns, and funk guitar against rich Italo-disco piano, the track also encapsulates the desert festival-readiness of 1992’s production: sun-bleached with a hint of psychedelia, sobered by the headspace of open air.
The production serves to parry the vocal blemishes that have become a semi-endearing characteristic of the group’s work. But quiet storm tracks demand allure, and Lange and Ebert sometimes create the opposite effect. “Lovelife” interjects with grievous vocal scatting, and in the chorus of “Extremes,” the two struggle to keep in time and on-tune. Mercifully, these tough listens are short-lived.
In the time between the band’s ’80s and ’90s lineups, Richthoven worked as a club DJ in Bremen, which helps to explain the shift towards New York and Chicago house in the record’s latter half. “Your Prince” and “7th House” echo the styles of Louie Vega and Kenny Dope, respectively, with the former propelled by rattling shakers and carnival whistles, while the six-minute successor pairs more cavernous sounds with a blubbery bass groove. As they turn towards the dancefloor, Saâda Bonaire’s distinct Eastern influences fall by the wayside. To bring so many facets of then-contemporary popular music together on one plate is valiant, but 1992 misses the first album’s fascination with weaving Eastern sounds into Western pop. Richthoven and co. could have created house thumpers with their hands and feet sewn together, but when they displayed more curiosity, they found a sound that outlasted trends. | 2022-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Captured Tracks | May 9, 2022 | 6.5 | 1a58fb73-f548-454f-93e4-7a24a520b0c7 | Nathan Evans | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-evans/ | |
Stripping away the dancefloor euphoria of his most recognizable work, Andy Butler’s latest is a moody left-turn highlighted by some winning collaborations with ANOHNI. | Stripping away the dancefloor euphoria of his most recognizable work, Andy Butler’s latest is a moody left-turn highlighted by some winning collaborations with ANOHNI. | Hercules and Love Affair: In Amber | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hercules-and-love-affair-in-amber/ | In Amber | Andy Butler’s fifth LP arrived with a telling press quote: “In all honesty, based on [the] initial soundscapes, I did not know this was going to be a Hercules and Love Affair album.” And from the onset of In Amber, it’s abundantly clear what he means. “Grace” starts off with punchy kick drums, twinkling piano loops, and deep bass notes, but it’s all taken a few steps away from the dancefloor Butler has long called home. Everything moves just below 120 BPM and the mix is light and spacious, leaving plenty of room for his unassuming baritone to tell his story of self-empowerment. Straddling the line between experimentation and reinvention, Butler strips away the project’s usual club music trappings to highlight weightier themes and darker personal expression.
For a producer and songwriter who’s spent nearly a decade and a half sculpting the golden eras of disco, house, and techno in his own image, Butler makes a bold change of direction across these 12 songs. Flourishes of post-punk, goth, industrial, and the edges of 1980s rock are scattered throughout the production, paired with uniquely varied vocal performances. Most notable is the return of ANOHNI, who—14 years after her performance in “Blind” helped define the sound of H&LA—brings an essential energy that ranges from despondent to furious. In “Christian Prayer,” ANOHNI denies ideas of an afterlife as she shouts through searing guitar feedback and rumbling drum fills, “When I die, do not appeal to your godhead.” Then in the simmering anthem of dismissal “Contempt for You,” she repeats like a rousing mantra, “Sure am glad I survived, but I’ve got nothing but contempt for you.” The rage isn’t hopeless: Somehow, the raw conviction makes her words feel uplifting and communal.
There are also spaces for reflection and calm, which are often where the album falters. Icelandic singer Elín Ey lends the downtempo “Dissociation” a gentle poise, though her placid delivery sounds anonymous compared to ANOHNI’s injured tremble on the stripped-down elegy “Who Will Save Us?” The funeral march of “You’ve Won This War” fixates on a two-chord progression around which the fluctuating arrangement orbits, as Butler oscillates between grim talk-singing and a sort of regal chant. But despite its cutting dynamics and diversity of sounds, the song’s six minutes of sullen Ren Faire theatrics seem to plod aimlessly. Butler uses a similarly linear structure with “The Eyes of the Father” and elevates his ideas with a string section, lyrical guitar leads, electronic noise, and stirring vocals. The music feels meditative, and its layered arrangement swells and contracts alongside the lyrics’ emotional uncertainty.
Butler has always sounded most confident when writing for the dancefloor, so it’s no surprise most of the standouts fall in that comfort zone. At its core, “Killing His Family” smartly blends distorted percussion with a bouncy house bassline, which Butler uses to shift between moody, deconstructed verses and poignant, earwormy choruses. The acerbic “Poisonous Storytelling” is a severe, drum-heavy pop ballad that’s equal parts industrial techno and angelic chamber music. For all the genre blending and production flair, there’s nothing kinetic or buoyant enough to stand alongside his best-loved floor-fillers, though “One” comes closest. The song embraces their foundational strengths, built around an insistent, detuned bass loop and ANOHNI’s most magnetic and rousing performance here. It’s the kind of emotionally charged, genre-invigorating classic that Hercules and Love Affair has become known for. On In Amber, Butler may have found a handful more peaks and his share of valleys, but few can emerge from the shadow of what came before. | 2022-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Skint / BMG | June 16, 2022 | 6.7 | 1a5a2245-121c-41eb-893c-5fde676f4f69 | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
The all-star collaboration between a producer, a saxophonist, and a symphony is a celestial event. But it’s Pharoah Sanders’ playing that holds it all together, a clear late-career masterpiece. | The all-star collaboration between a producer, a saxophonist, and a symphony is a celestial event. But it’s Pharoah Sanders’ playing that holds it all together, a clear late-career masterpiece. | Floating Points / Pharoah Sanders / The London Symphony Orchestra: Promises | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/floating-points-pharoah-sanders-the-promises/ | Promises | In a 2020 interview with The New Yorker, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, who turned 80 last October, said he hadn’t been listening to records for a while. “I listen to things that maybe some guys don’t,” he said. “I listen to the waves of the water. Train coming down. Or I listen to an airplane taking off.” For most of Sanders’ career as an improvising musician, he was in a studio or on a stage with other musicians, and they listened and played together in real time. But he’s a listener as well as a player, able to respond to what he’s hearing and create beautiful art under different circumstances. His adaptability allowed him to work in a multitude of settings over the years, from harsh free playing through groove-heavy spiritual jazz and excursions into popular song.
In the past year, Sanders worked with Sam Shepherd, the British producer and composer who records under the name Floating Points, on a sweeping, nine-movement piece called “Promises.” Shepherd composed the music, played various instruments, electronic and otherwise, and enlisted the London Symphony Orchestra to perform it. Sometimes the piece is so quiet you might check your volume setting to see if it’s still on, and other times, when the strings hit a crescendo, it’s earth-shaking. In the middle of this tapestry is Sanders, his warm tone and fluid technique undiminished even at 80 years old, listening to his surroundings and finding brilliant patterns to stitch the work together and thus elevate it.
There are clear antecedents to this record. As far as strings and an improvising saxophone, there was Ornette Coleman’s 1972 Skies of America, also recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra—though his arrangements had a biting edge of atonality that would break the spell cast here. Alice Coltrane’s Lord of Lords from the same year has a similar spiritual underpinning, and her arrangement of “Going Home” on that record shares some feeling with this piece. And the combination of squelchy jazz-informed electronics from a young DJ and acoustic improvisation from an elderly master brings to mind Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid’s 2007 record Tongues, and work by Flying Lotus, but those are beat-driven projects and Promises is about melody, harmony, and texture. There’s patience and focus to this piece, all powered by Sanders’ horn.
Throughout its emotional 46 minutes, Promises stirs feelings that can be hard to name. The first sound we hear is one that courses through the entire piece—a brief, seven-note refrain played by what seems to be a harpsichord, sometimes accented by a bell-like tone that could be the celeste. The cluster of sounds begins in silence, and we can hear the creak of wood and some shifting objects in the room where it was recorded, and it repeats every nine seconds for almost the duration of the piece. It’s a small twinkly loop that brings to mind the feeling of awakening, as if something that was unclear is now understood, there to be rediscovered with each cycle. And that repeating fragment holds the composition together, and every sound exists in relation to it, even if we can’t quite sense how they fit together.
When Sanders enters early on, his tone is clarion, melodic but harmonically free, hovering near that central cluster of notes without sounding bound to it. His opening solo, set against a quiet backdrop, is slow and searching, alternating between held notes that convey melancholy and short trills of melody that suggest hope. In “Movement 3,” when the strings enter, soft at first, then more shrill, Sanders shifts his playing to meet their register, and the piece gets spacier, even a little psychedelic. Something about that central loop, the strings, Sanders’ lines, and Shepherd’s subtle synthesizer drones makes me think about seeing a planet spinning on its axis from somewhere in orbit. And then as “Movement 3” bleeds into “Movement 4,” Sanders’ sets his horn aside and begins to vocalize wordlessly, offering small flutters of syllables closely into the microphone.
The effect of his naked voice is disarmingly intimate and moving. Amid this carefully composed and engineered piece, and following virtuosic soloing from one of the living masters of his instrument, we hear the simple sound of a human utterance—the most basic unit of interaction into the realm of a dream. Through “Movement 5” Sanders plays with more intensity, a cello solo follows in “Movement 6,” as the symphonic elements gather force. In “Movement 8” Shepherd folds in bits of trilling Alice Coltrane-like organ runs, and then in “Movement 9,” following a violin solo, the orchestra briefly rattles and shakes in a sharp but brief climax, and then Promises is gone, returning to silence.
The arc of Promises needs time and space to unfold, and the length and continuous nature of the piece is central to its impact. If it were 20 minutes long—or 60—it wouldn’t have the same force. Nothing is rushed, but nothing is lingered over for too long, either. And as gorgeous as Shepherd’s music and arrangements are, I keep circling back to Sanders, his horn now quieter but just as emotionally powerful as when he wielded it alongside John Coltrane at age 25, when he was ripping terrifying blasts of sound that could peel paint. He’s always been quiet as far as the press goes, doing few interviews and letting his playing do the talking. On this piece, a clear late-career masterpiece, it’s saying plenty.
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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. | 2021-03-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Jazz | Luaka Bop | March 26, 2021 | 9 | 1a5db09c-dcc9-4ddf-8864-e2ec7e433ec7 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
With the grime revival in full swing, one of the genre’s elder statesmen returns with an album that’s torn between his UK roots and his affinity for American hip-hop. | With the grime revival in full swing, one of the genre’s elder statesmen returns with an album that’s torn between his UK roots and his affinity for American hip-hop. | Dizzee Rascal: Raskit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dizzee-rascal-raskit/ | Raskit | In 2008, with exquisite timing, Dizzee Rascal released the Calvin Harris/Chrome collaboration “Dance Wiv Me” and confirmed, some five years after Dizzee's classically bleak debut, Boy in Da Corner, that the mainstream British public was ready to embrace the electro bounce of pop grime. But Dizzee’s acute temporal nous didn’t last. By 2013, when he released The Fifth, his firebrand talent had drifted into blandly transatlantic commercial rap. British audiences were bemused by the presence of figures like will.i.am; American listeners were unimpressed. When Skepta unleashed the thrillingly skeletal grime banger “That’s Not Me” to global acclaim about eight months later, Dizzee’s creative choices on The Fifth seemed particularly inopportune.
The early hype had it that Dizzee’s sixth studio album, Raskit—a misty-eyed reference to a moniker Dizzee employed on his early recordings—would see the East London MC return to his grime roots. This proves to be somewhat wishful thinking: True, Raskit is largely free of The Fifth’s blatant pop choruses, “special” guests, and tired commercial production. But it retains that album’s deliberately divided identity, with beats that fall between grime’s crude electronic minimalism and trap’s skittering intricacy. Dizzee has long been inspired by American hip-hop. In 2016, he told Complex that “I Luv U” was “me doing Three 6 Mafia,” and there is something refreshing about his insistence on avoiding the low-hanging fruit of the grime revival. But doing so means that Raskit needs to be special indeed if it is to avoid stumbling in between the twin demands of grime and rap audiences, neither of whom are exactly ill-served for trunk-rattling beats in the summer of 2017.
At times Raskit succeeds. There are no obvious hits, but Dizzee is on head-spinning verbal form throughout, his frenetic flow and condensed rhyme schemes combining with the swagger that marks many of his best tunes. Fans of UK slang will be in for a treat, too, thanks to lines like “Driving me crackers/You bloody spackers/Should get off my knackers” (on “Space”), while references to old beefs with Wiley and Megaman leaves plenty for students of grime history to chew on.
Considerably more interesting, though, are the moments when Dizzee surveys the inequalities of modern Britain, providing some of his most profoundly moving lyrics since the street-level laments of Boy in Da Corner. The reflective “Slow Your Roll” is a particular highlight, as Dizzee reflects on the gentrification tearing the soul out of modern London over mournful, filtered chords: “Foreign investment raising the stock up/So the rent got propped up/And it kept getting topped up/So the heart got ripped out and rinsed out.” His brilliant (if slightly exhausting) lyrical craftsmanship is let down only by the occasional leering crudity of lines like, “I should have had her in the back seat of the Jag” (from "Way I Am”).
But the production, which comes largely from American artists such as Valentino Khan, Salva, and Cardo, struggles to match his verbal inventiveness. There are moments of musical brilliance, like the monolithic synth stabs on "Wot U Gonna Do?,” the finely tuned sample cut-ups on “The Other Side,” and the haunting shapes on “Ghost,” which expands Raskit’s rather limited sonic palette by sampling the Israeli Marine Corp Brass Band. Elsewhere, on the meandering “Space” or the grime throwback “Sick a Dis” (produced by the English singer Donae’o), the production does just enough to provide Dizzee with a base to launch his thrilling verbal tirades.
But these moments are weighed perilously against a number of tracks where the overly slick specter of The Fifth raises its coiffured head. “Bop N’ Keep It Dippin’” and “Man of the Hour” are weak G-Funk retreads, while “She Knows What She Wants” starts with a horrible Auto-Tuned hook that sounds even worse given Dizzee’s gripes about the pitch-correction tool Melodyne on “The Other Side.” These poor production choices are particularly painful from an artist who has, in the past, shown both wild production chops (notably on Boy in Da Corner) and the ability to cherry-pick other producers’ best beats (such as Youngstar on “Stand Up Tall” or Armand Van Helden on “Bonkers”).
Of course, if Dizzee wanted to show his affinity with American hip-hop in 2017, then releasing an album so severely need of an edit is a note-perfect move. But grime at its best is defined by its steely economy, which makes Raskit’s rambling length and diluted focus frustrating. As a platform for Dizzee's flashy lyrical dexterity, Raskit does more than enough to shift the bitter aftertaste of The Fifth. With more of the laser-eyed focus that marked Boy in Da Corner, it could have been a triumph. | 2017-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Dirtee Stank / Island | July 21, 2017 | 7 | 1a5f1314-5d80-4b73-a0c0-9cdb135e0b62 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | null |
The Besnard Lakes’ husband/wife team of Jace Lasek and Olga Gorea aren’t just songwriters who produce pop tunes; they're composers who create musical suites out of sweepingly melodic movements. Their fourth album is their most “composed” to date. | The Besnard Lakes’ husband/wife team of Jace Lasek and Olga Gorea aren’t just songwriters who produce pop tunes; they're composers who create musical suites out of sweepingly melodic movements. Their fourth album is their most “composed” to date. | The Besnard Lakes: Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17749-the-besnard-lakes-until-in-excess-imperceptible-ufo/ | Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO | The Besnard Lakes make music as elegant as their album titles are clunky. The Montreal quartet’s fourth record, Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO, is no exception. The group’s co-auteurs, Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas, approach the construction of Besnard Lakes’ LPs with the same level of fastidiousness that Brian Wilson and Roger Waters displayed on masterworks of studiocraft like Pet Sounds and Dark Side of the Moon. Lasek and Goreas aren’t mere songwriters who produce pop tunes; they are composers who create musical suites out of sweepingly melodic movements. Until in Excess is the most “composed” Besnard Lakes’ album yet-- the band worked on different sections of the album’s eight songs, and shifted them around like puzzle pieces until achieving the perfect specimens of epic-osity that Lasek and Goreas heard echoing like an interstellar church choir in their heads.
Which is to say, Until in Excess more or less delivers on the “wow” factor one has come to expect from a Besnard Lakes album. As with 2007’s The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse and 2010’s The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night, Until in Excess doesn’t skimp on the creamy vocal harmonies, booming drum rattles, cinematic strings swooshes, and wicked David Gilmour guitar solos that explode out of the murk with dependably dramatic elan. Well, actually, there aren’t that many guitar solos on Until the Excess: “People of the Sticks” climaxes with some awe-inspiring six-string heroics by Lasek, as does the slow-building “Colour Yr Lights In”, where the squiggly arpeggios lift the anthemic chorus to the precipice of prog-rock nirvana. But aside from the heavy riffing that grinds throughout “At Midnight”, rock music takes a backseat to loftier ambitions on Until in Excess. Lasek and Goreas instead turn the uplifting expressiveness that Besnard Lakes is known for in on itself, fostering a mood of introspective melancholy on a series of slow, orchestral-like pieces.
Most of Until in Excess resembles “Catalina”, a beautiful slow-motion shoegazer symphony that lards on nearly two minutes of introductory new-age synths before easing into the glimmering, mid-tempo meat of the track. Besnard Lakes reliably fill the vastness of their huge-sounding music with immaculate musical ornamentation, and “Catalina” is a fine example of their impeccable Canadian architecture. (Look out for the dreamy surf-guitar accents laid out delicately in the mix that don’t make themselves fully discernible until the third or fourth listen.) “The Specter” is another stunner, opening with a splashy electric keyboard lick that soon gives way for exquisite guitar-driven counter-melodies and spectral mellotron washes. Neither track seems all that concerned with chorus-verse orderliness, which suits a record that favors atmosphere over punchy songs.
So, yes, Until in Excess is another Besnard Lakes’ album album that stubbornly demands to be absorbed all at once, from beginning to end. Other than “People of the Sticks”, the individual songs haven’t been designed to stick out from the whole; the deliberate pace makes the entirety of Until in Excess feel like one long, woozy track. While the winking title doesn’t exactly do the album justice-- it’s not as “excessive” so much as “dense”-- Until in Excess does lack some of the immediacy of Besnard Lakes’ other records. The album closing “Alamogordo” ends with three attention-killing minutes of ambient noise, finally wearing out the welcome for an otherwise captivating collection. For all its beauty, Until in Excess is a little draggy; the balance of ethereal grace and all-out force that distinguished their breakout Dark Horse has tipped a little too far to the ponderous side. Until in Excess rewards patience, but the roar of old is missed. | 2013-04-01T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-04-01T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | April 1, 2013 | 7.3 | 1a621210-e70c-4d9f-ba30-b32f905815ea | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
As a loose concept record about the many subtleties of love and distance, the Pittsburgh rapper's new release is the most surprising, concise, and accomplished album of his career. | As a loose concept record about the many subtleties of love and distance, the Pittsburgh rapper's new release is the most surprising, concise, and accomplished album of his career. | Mac Miller: The Divine Feminine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22293-the-divine-feminine/ | The Divine Feminine | Mac Miller isn’t the Divine Feminine. The Pittsburgh keg-stander turned style-sampling artisan isn’t making a play at defining femininity. This isn’t an attempt to examine feminism in any way. He isn’t being facetious or woke. In fact, he doesn’t even try to explore what being a woman is like in any sense in any of these texts. The Divine Feminine, a concept record of sorts in distinct contrast to September 2015’s GO:OD AM, is an album about love as it relates to the female form and beyond, as Miller has referred to it, “the feminine energy of the planet.” It broaches smaller, bite-sized topics revolving around romance and connection in an attempt to understand the universe at large, bringing to mind a quote from Carl Sagan’s 1985 sci-fi novel Contact: “For small creatures such as we the vastness [of the universe] is bearable only through love.”
When Miller talks about The Divine Feminine, he considers the universe, the distance between persons, and deciphering love on an ideological level. He’s mentioned playing the record for a couple and slowly observing them cut the distance between each other in a room as it progresses. “I want people to put on the record and it’s a date in itself,” he told i-D. “I want people to love to this record and realize they can love to it.” There’s a very real connective tissue to these ideas of space and intimacy. It’s about contact and togetherness, closing the gap between people; about being in unison and growing apart, and all the stages in between. It peels back and exposes the many layers of love—romantic, schmaltzy, sensual, carnal, wilting. It’s easily his most intoxicating release yet, an odyssey of soulful compositions paring down his expansive and eclectic soundboard from the last few years into something distinctly cozy and pleasant.
Mac Miller has put in hard work establishing himself as a Serious Rapper since the release of his emotionally and sonically flat debut Blue Slide Park, putting on his fair share of wordplay showcases and aligning himself with the right people since his sprawling breakout Watching Movies With the Sound Off in 2013, but much of that work came off as pandering or, worse still, overly earnest. He’s gotten more comfortable in his own skin with each release, but that threatened to be an issue here, given the title. Yet, The Divine Feminine is by far the most settled he's ever been. There aren’t any plays to satisfy or ingratiate a specific subgroup of listeners. There aren’t any lyrical exercises or overthought exhibitions of verse structure and execution, no plays to prove himself a rapper’s rapper—frankly there’s almost more singing than rapping. But this is his most nuanced release, a record that forgoes personal narrative and somehow reveals his individuality in the process. He does it all with just a little help from his friends.
The album interlocks a diverse array musicians without losing the main thematic thread. The fingerprints of his sonic soulmate Ariana Grande are all over the record: backup vocals, feature vocals, voiceover work, and her positive influence on him shows. Cee-Lo Green lends his unmistakable vocals and energy to “We,” which simmer just above the surface of crisp drum kicks. Miller and Kendrick move in tandem on the epic closer “God Is Fair, Sexy Nasty” without any competitive tension. Students from Juilliard played strings on the album, and they accent the arrangements well. He even gets noted lothario Ty Dolla $ign to play a gentleman (or at least as close to that as he gets) on “Cinderella,” which is no easy task.
As a group, led by Miller’s pronounced vision, they forge the lover’s guide to the universe, painting in tiny brush strokes from a warm and familiar tonal palette. The Divine Feminine has very specific set of sonic reference points: the rich and heavy funk of Anderson .Paak’s Malibu, flexed into with help from Dâm-Funk and .Paak himself on tracks like “Dang!”; flecks of the Social Experiment’s juke and jazz (especially on “Stay”); even the electro-fused alt R&B of a producer like Kaytranada. It’s heavily indebted to the growing fusion jazz rap movement with contributions from pianist Robert Glasper, Brainfeeder bass maestro Thundercat, and trumpeter Keyon Harrold, sometimes appearing in the record’s margins, but usually as full-fledged performers (the first two also played on To Pimp a Butterfly). The Divine Feminine reins in Mac Miller’s wide-ranging taste, bonding aesthetics and fully realizing his artistry.
It’s worth noting that The Divine Feminine has the fewest tracks of any Mac Miller album and that it is the clearest, most concise record of his career; that’s a correlation, not a coincidence. The project started as an EP, but it became a full album as Miller continued to flesh out its ideas. Across its 10 songs, it observes love as a part of the human experience without forcing any beliefs on the listener, dealing mostly in the building blocks of feelings. “Dang!” and “Stay” play back-to-back and examine loss of love close up. The Grande duet, “My Favorite Part,” is basically the downtempo reprise of One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful.” The album’s emotional and sonic center is “Planet God Damn,” about becoming vulnerable, a sentiment echoed by Njomza on the hook: “Tell the truth/Show me you.”
As the closer, “God Is Fair, Sexy Nasty,” trails off into Glasper piano chords, a widow recounts how she fell in love with her husband, punctuating her story with a mantra: “How important it is to love, respect, and care for each other.” That kind of union is something Miller clearly strives for, something he calls “the best love story in the world.” The Divine Feminine doesn’t just chase that, it bottles the very essence. | 2016-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. | September 17, 2016 | 7.8 | 1a67d5e6-14c7-4468-a4a6-d94c6fbfe555 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The music on the Field's third album may be still be built from loops, but Axel Willner has never orchestrated so many of them so artfully. His dense and infinitely listenable soundscapes put his acolytes to shame. | The music on the Field's third album may be still be built from loops, but Axel Willner has never orchestrated so many of them so artfully. His dense and infinitely listenable soundscapes put his acolytes to shame. | The Field: Looping State of Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15790-looping-state-of-mind/ | Looping State of Mind | The title of the Field's third album, Looping State of Mind, might have you thinking that producer Axel Willner is getting back to basics. Especially after he strayed, with only intermittent success, from his instantly recognizable template on his 2009 sophomore record, Yesterday and Today. After all, at its simplest, techno is music that can be built with just a few loops. And Willner's first few records certainly made effective use of the form, layering shimmering loops of voice and synth and guitar on each track until he'd built a fluffy and infinitely soothing wall of sound.
Immersive and repetitive, the Field's first singles and 2007 debut album, From Here We Go Sublime, were like ambient records disguised as both experimental techno and luscious pop. So is Looping State of Mind a return to that sound, the one that made the Field a crossover favorite with rock kids a few years back? Not exactly. In a few instances it's barely recognizable as "the Field" at all. It may be still be built from loops, but Willner's never orchestrated so many of them so artfully into such dense and infinitely listenable soundscapes.
Good thing, too, because the last few years have seen a lot of bedroom producers become briefly famous for ambient records disguised as pop, for amorphous electronic doodles disguised as songs. Instead of coasting, as one of the inadvertent models for the current "chill" thing, a producer who'd probably earn infinite props just for repeating himself, Willner decided to put 99 percent of his acolytes to shame here. True, there are still tracks, like "It's Up There", that recall Willner's best-loved stuff, but even they feel richer, like the early Field in 3D and high-def. "Arpeggiated Love" is on the one hand a dead-ringer for the propulsive, ecstatic sound-wash of From Here We Go Sublime. But Willner now fleshes it out with shiver-inducing soul music harmonies that owe less to sleek German techno than gospel-tinged American house. True, he was quoting classic soul group the Flamingos as early as Sublime, but he's never been so overt in dipping into dance music's global history.
As that might suggest, Looping often strays far from the Field we know, into territory that recalls deep house, post-punk, shoegaze, noise-rock, and cosmic techno. And he manages to swirl them all together in a way that makes his earliest attempts to fuse ambient and trance feel like gorgeous apprentice work. Yesterday and Today sometimes sounded hesitant, as if Willner didn't quite know how to make his music fresh for a second time. On Looping he packs all seven tracks with curveballs, and each new direction feel successful, vital, surprising.
At one point on opener "Is This Power", everything drops away except for an eerie bass twang that recalls Joy Division or the Cure circa "A Forest", but when the boogie bass finally drops back in, you're not only reminded that this is dance music, it's easily the funkiest Field tune you've probably yet heard. The rhythms on Looping are more varied than anything the Willner's done before. Though he hasn't entirely abandoned that programmed motorik pulse that drove Sublime, his work with live bands over the last few years has clearly fed into Looping. "Then It's White" summons a Yorke-less Radiohead, with the way the drums subtly mesh human fluency and digital tech. And that's not even counting the Amnesiac-like mix of pensive piano and mournful, computer-warped vocals.
Despite the sometimes winning simplicity of his music, Willner was no slouch as a producer before. Yet listening to this album, there's no doubt he's grown way more assured and inventive over the last two years. And he's brought all his skill to bear on Looping, as composer and arranger and texturologist, in order to build something this simultaneously sweeping and subtle, deep and immediate. It could still alienate those perpetually pining for copies of "A Paw in My Face" or "Sun and Ice". But if they listen more deeply, they might just hear Willner’s masterpiece-to-date. | 2011-09-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-09-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | September 7, 2011 | 8.5 | 1a68ea88-d315-4a35-8f3b-d994e4a1125f | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Working with operatically trained vocalist Alison Skidmore, the Manchester producer has humanized his sound, made it more beautiful and richer on the surface while further accentuating its dark heart. The new dynamic leads to another big leap forward. | Working with operatically trained vocalist Alison Skidmore, the Manchester producer has humanized his sound, made it more beautiful and richer on the surface while further accentuating its dark heart. The new dynamic leads to another big leap forward. | Andy Stott: Luxury Problems | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17205-luxury-problems/ | Luxury Problems | Andy Stott took his time getting here. The Manchester producer spent a good part of the last decade turning out solid tracks under his own name and under the alias Andrea. Though he always returned to dub techno, he flirted with a range of genres, from juke to house to dubstep, and some of his music was very good. But Stott never quite zeroed in on a unique voice. That changed in 2011 with the release of two short albums, Passed Me By and We Stay Together. Stott left behind the quicker tempos of dance proper, and slowing down allowed him to sink deeper into his music, where he found a new world of atmosphere and texture. Passed and Stay were heavy records that highlighted something new about the expressive power of bass. Dub techno, stretching back to its origins with the early-1990s Berlin project Basic Channel, tends to view the low end as a mysterious black sludge. Where bass in Skrillex-style EDM is a precision weapon, with drops punctuating the tracks and jacking up the mood in an instant, the bottom octave in dub techno is more of an enveloping presence. It's murkier, more oppressive, colder, something you wade through and push against. Which is why the inertia of the relentless 4/4 beat signifies energy whatever the tempo.
On his two 2011 releases, Stott found an unusual musicality in deep, foreboding bass. His music throbbed with the sooty remnants of industry and had obvious appeal for those interested in dark ambiance of any stripe; its all-consuming nature gave him a new audience beyond the realm of dance music. With his new album, Luxury Problems, he adds a few more wrinkles, and his music has become simultaneously more complex and more accessible. Working with operatically trained vocalist Alison Skidmore (Stott met her as a student when she taught him piano), he's humanized his sound, made it more beautiful and richer on the surface while further accentuating its dark heart. The new dynamic leads to another big leap forward for the producer.
Skidmore's voice is a versatile instrument in its own right, but Stott's looping and processing gives it even more flexibility. Though Luxury Problems has a consistent overall mood, the feel and structure of the individual tracks vary quite a bit, and the pieces featuring Skidmore find her singing pulled into all kinds of interesting shapes. The album opens with her in her most glassy and ethereal, as repetitions of her singing a single word, "touch," float through space like soap bubbles. The "ch" phoneme is looped and becomes the hi-hat on the track, and gradually the sounds assemble themselves into a ghosted version of a conventional dance rhythm. But when Stott's machine bass pulse enters just under halfway through, we realize we're in for a world of serious contrasts: "Numb" is delicate and gorgeous but has an undercurrent of menace, and the tension between these qualities is the record's essence.
If "Numb" is Skidmore at her most spectral, "Hatch the Plan" finds her sounding more grounded, almost in the mode of a singer-songwriter. The choral-like layering on "Plan" brings to mind School of Seven Bells and even Throwing Muses. But it's the longest track on the record and is purely instrumental-- mostly a deeply unsettling mix of bass churn and machine noises-- for its first two minutes. That it moves from pure soundscape to something close to a proper song is further evidence of Stott's confidence; none of these tracks feel like they have to be any one thing, they're always growing and changing and defying expectations.
"Lost and Found" has a similarly melodic approach, unspooling in a Middle Eastern mode and bringing to mind Dead Can Dance at their most subtle. We can hear Stott drawing lines between 4AD-style gothic new wave and dub techno, building bridges between sounds and ideas based on his understanding of the elements and moods that connect them. Elsewhere, on "Expecting", he goes further into abstraction, constructing an intensely dark and ominous atmosphere that bring to mind the ice-cold isolationist drone of Thomas Köner. The excavation of electronic music history takes a more unusual turn on "Up the Box", which plays with a snippet of what sounds like the "Amen" break. But the familiar splash of jungle snares and cymbals is transformed by Stott into something of his own own, as he mixes the tricky rhythms with his now undeniable bass signature, a groaning maw flecked with distortion that feels like it's rattling everything within earshot. Stott has a rare ability to pull sounds from different places and fit them into his album conception.
Two records from the past offer antecedents for Stott's breakthrough: Luomo's Vocalcity and Burial's Untrue. It's not that Luxury Problems sounds like either of these releases-- the mood and textures are vastly different in each case. But there's a spiritual connection between the three, all of which found producers working within the confines of a specific genre of electronic music discovering a way to turn their music inside and out and broaden its appeal through the manipulated voice. But if Vocalcity was a digital refraction of house music and Untrue took early UK dubstep as a jumping-off point to express post-club emptiness and yearning, Luxury Problems is more internally focused, an evocative and immersive soundtrack for a sustained look within. It's the headphones album of the year from a producer with a long history who has come into his own. | 2012-10-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-10-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Modern Love | October 29, 2012 | 8.7 | 1a6a55d8-e5ce-4b8c-b39a-ecca37ccb514 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Covering Bill Evans and riffing on Moroccan gnawa and classical minimalism, the 10-piece Harlem band embraces a global vision infused with jazz’s searching spirit. | Covering Bill Evans and riffing on Moroccan gnawa and classical minimalism, the 10-piece Harlem band embraces a global vision infused with jazz’s searching spirit. | N to The Power: Autogenesis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/n-to-the-power-autogenesis/ | Autogenesis | New York City teems with creative instrumentalists on the run—toward one another, and away from stylistic constraints. They seek tighter connections and a looser environment in which instruments don’t play assigned roles, electric and acoustic are not opposing factions, and “composition” means whatever ends up in the mix. This ideal is neither new (Miles Davis epitomized it a half-century ago) nor uncommon. Still, when realized with elegance and wit, as on Autogenesis, the debut release from N to the Power, it leads to fresh and distinct sounds that straddle our usual categories. This music embraces a global vision, conveying both the edge of experimental music and the buzz of electronica, all the while infused with jazz’s searching spirit.
This creative process began with informal jam sessions between multi-instrumentalists Blake Leyh and Tony Jarvis, who are Harlem neighbors. Leyh, who grew up in England, is best known as a film composer and sound designer working with the likes of John Waters and Jonathan Demme; as music supervisor for David Simon’s HBO shows, he was responsible for the lovingly curated live-music sequences in Treme. Jarvis was born and raised in Madison, Wis., where he studied early on with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians co-founder Roscoe Mitchell. His professional experience spans enlightened punk (Tar Babies), updated funk (Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings), and straight-up Afrobeat (the Broadway musical Fela!).
Maybe there’s too direct a hit of Fela’s infectious, laid-back beats on the “Marrakesh Memosphere,” yet that track achieves the propulsion and buoyancy of the Moroccan Gnawa music that inspired it. This group shares Mitchell’s collectivist vision. Here, as foregrounds and backgrounds shift like savvy cinematography, the community comes off like an indie film’s ensemble cast, with Jarvis’ bass clarinet as the character we’re all rooting for. Rarely does one instrument steal the scene. “Supertonic” assembles a master shot sequence. Flurries of notes from Bruno Coon’s trumpet and Jarvis’ bass clarinet are processed into reverberant halos. Next, Coon, on guitar, sounds out rhythm more than melody, much like a djembe would. Patterns coalesce, lent shape and texture by terse figures from Leyh’s electric cello and glowing long tones from Yusuke Yamamoto’s vibes. Sonic murmurs and suggestive echoes frame the action, their sources manipulated beyond identification. The effect is simultaneously alluring and disorienting.
If that track’s overlapping cycles initially suggest minimalism (Steve Reich’s Different Trains), they also shimmy well enough to shake off comparisons. Setting aside the force and grace of cellist Yves Dharamraj’s playing, and of Jarvis’ (primarily on bass clarinet, sax and flute), this music doesn’t stress technique: Many of these parts could be played with just rudimentary skills. The focus is on establishing and disrupting persuasive moods and inviting grooves through instrumental figures played in real time, then chopped and sculpted into charming, oddly shaped forms. Guitars and compelling rhythms abound, yet there’s hardly a chord heard, and no trap set in sight (beats come mostly from hand percussion, cymbals, and plucked strings).
This music relies on energy flows, sometimes suggesting rapid motion and other times repose. “The God Particle” starts with a simple flute gesture and grows into something like a New Orleans second-line parade in outer space, its beats heavy but its feel weightless. A 12-and-a-half-minute version of “Peace Piece,” which jazz pianist Bill Evans composed mostly upon a simple ostinato, is elevated by Dharamraj’s expressiveness on acoustic cello and Leyh’s tender touch on a fretted electric one. Its loops reinforce the circular nature of Evans’ concept. In 1962, Evans told a Time magazine reporter that, after playing it at a club, a teenage fan rushed up and said that “when he heard it he felt like he was standing all alone in New York.” This version, offered in the midst of forced social distancing, has the opposite effect: It suggests much-needed communion.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Xenotone | September 10, 2020 | 7.2 | 1a7037a0-d920-4327-879b-cb08b86dd197 | Larry Blumenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-blumenfeld/ | |
Candy-colored plugg beats sharing space with sample-based production might cause whiplash in anybody else’s hands, but it all comes together with the confidence of Shhnow’s voice | Candy-colored plugg beats sharing space with sample-based production might cause whiplash in anybody else’s hands, but it all comes together with the confidence of Shhnow’s voice | Tony Shhnow: Reflexions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tony-shhnow-reflexions/ | Reflexions | Tony Shhnow’s music camps out at the intersection of hard-earned life lessons, money counter adlibs, and #vibes. Play any Shhnow song and you’re as likely to be captivated by the beat as much as anything he’s saying, a testament to the golden ear he’s developed as a key player in Atlanta’s plugg rap scene. It’s initially bizarre to hear Shhnow comparing himself to a mathematician for the way he holds his gun on the corner over beats that would sound at home on an episode of Steven Universe, but his ability to flow over just about anything has kept his prolific streak interesting. His grim stories and silly metaphors sound just as comfortable over CashCache and scene veteran MexikoDro’s airy synths as they do over the warped samples of New Jersey producer GRiMM Doza. That ability has made him one of the most exciting rappers working, it’s genuinely exciting to hear what sound he’ll tackle next, a chameleon in Bape fatigues.
For all the different sounds Shhnow has rapped over, most of his projects tend to focus on one specific style at a time. There isn’t much on Reflexions, his second release of 2022, that differs from his previous work, but the project is the first to display it all in one place. Considering his expanding profile, Reflexions feels like a Tony Shhnow sampler, an audible photo dump of his capabilities. Candy-colored plugg beats sharing space with sample-based production might cause whiplash in anybody else’s hands, but it all comes together with the confidence of Shhnow’s voice.
Take opening song “Summer Off Relaxxx,” which begins with producer FwThis1Will’s slinky sirens and 808s before smash-cutting to Braezonday’s deep-fried flip of John Legend’s “Prelude” from his 2004 debut album Get Lifted. Shhnow not only offers up clever lifeisms (“I Velcroed all my shoes, it ain’t no day that I’m gon’ trip”) and vague allusions to his drug-dealing past; his delivery morphs from rigid to lethargic as the beat switches, maintaining momentum without derailing the song. Shhnow’s malleable voice plays a huge part in the unpredictability of his songs. He can be loud and glued to a rhythm like he is on “Show U,” or he can be mellow and jog a half-step behind like he is near the beginning of “Park My Car.” During the middle section of his verse on “Go!,” his delivery gets breathy and high-pitched but no less forceful. He’s clearly having fun with pushing the boundaries of his sound, which gives each song on Reflexions the colorful and unpredictable air of a gumball machine.
As a rapper, Shhnow trades in punchlines, flexes, and grim stories about his days in the trap. He isn’t revolutionizing rap by any stretch, but his non sequitur songwriting is both clever and thoughtful as each song demands. Sometimes, like on “Bape ☆” or “Park My Car,” he’s in pure Gucci Mane floss mode, dashing his way through ultra-saturated production that cascades like digital raindrops. On “Nothing 2 My Name,” he sprints from a playing-card-based word scheme (“Take your queen, shut down the club off a face card”) to flashbacks to the block and quips about a woman being built like cursive handwriting over the span of one verse.
But no matter how his words bounce across Reflexions, the beats always push them into another dimension. Producer Dilip’s vocal sample, synths and pounding drums on closing track “Fye Up Da Kush” sound like mid-2010s Jahlil Beats reinterpreted by Lex Luger. Beats shatter (“Park My Car”), float by on piano keys (“Last Chance”), and smolder with quiet storm synths (“Keep N Touch”). Remarkably, none of them sound out of place. Cohesive and raw, it’s one of the best batches of beats I’ve heard on an album all year.
The level of lyrical and musical comfort Shhnow displays on Reflexions is almost unnerving. There aren’t very many other rappers who can rhyme next to ZelooperZ, Matt Ox, and OJ Da Juiceman on the same album and have all three sound at home, but he manages with a cool smirk. The plugg rap revival may have been how Shhnow got his start, but Reflexions is proof that he’s ready to fly wherever his boundless imagination and golden ears take wing.
Correction (April 3, 2023): The John Legend sample featured on Tony Shhnow’s “Summer Off Relaxxx” was produced by Braezonday, not Sparkheem. | 2022-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | June 15, 2022 | 7.5 | 1a7195f6-348b-40d9-a584-17342dde781c | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The second album from the Maryland singer-songwriter is sharp and beguiling, carried by Katie Von Schleicher’s innate and economic pop instincts. | The second album from the Maryland singer-songwriter is sharp and beguiling, carried by Katie Von Schleicher’s innate and economic pop instincts. | Katie Von Schleicher: Shitty Hits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katie-von-schleicher-shitty-hits/ | Shitty Hits | Internships typically end with a handshake, a letter of rec, and a modest happy hour on the company dime. Katie Von Schleicher’s got her a record deal. A few years back, Ba Da Bing label head Ben Goldberg made his then-charge an offer: make a record and the label might just put it out there. Much to Goldberg’s delight, Von Schleicher returned with Bleaksploitation, a small-yet-staggering collection of full-throated lo-fi lamentations recorded entirely by Von Schleicher—also of cracked Americana combo Wilder Maker—herself. Bleaksploitation had something, and Goldberg made good on his word. Two years later, and we have Shitty Hits, a record that more than delivers on Bleaksploitation’s early promise, deepening its emotional excavations and expanding on its scraped-knee sonics. Von Schleicher needs maybe a half-dozen words to conjure up all-too-familiar scenes: unbridgeable distances between bedmates, deafening silences between old familiars. She’s at her sharpest, though, when she’s staring directly into that mirror, waiting for something to snap into focus.
Recorded to tape at her childhood home in Maryland with a few familiar faces—her Wilder Maker bandmates, plus multi-instrumentalist Adam Brisbin, Baroness bassist Nick Jost, and Ava Luna drummer Julian Fader—Shitty Hits is a kaleidoscope in grayscale: creaky chamber-pop, dirge-driven doom-folk, hushed solo piano works. Self-deprecation aside, Von Schleicher has rather sturdy pop instincts, and, as that title would suggest, no qualms about subverting them. While several tunes betray a fondness for the ambling basslines and roundabout George Harrison leads of the post-psychedelic Beatles, Shitty Hits spends as much or more time in the shadows: long, listless mornings spent with the shades closed, seeking some clarity in the half-light.
Von Schleicher is never less than beguiling. Sweeping one minute whittled down to a whisper the next, her full-spectrum tone fills in every furrow and frustration in her unembroidered lyrics. Occasionally, the trickier arrangements stand between Von Schleicher and her meaning; once they’ve made room for the sax, and the bass, and the drums, and the synth, the finer points Von Schleicher’s digging into here can get a tad muddled. But, as with Bleaksploitation, she manages to hold onto the unvarnished edges of home-recorded music while shooting for something far bigger; besides, if the music she’s making is grander than the machine she’s making it on, that’s little more than an equipment issue.
Not sure it even passes the Be Sharps test, but as titles go, Shitty Hits suits Von Schleicher. It’s a record that revels in contradiction: pop songs too scratchy and subterranean for the radio, pocket orchestras a touch too big for one four-track to contain. Hers aren’t “stick in your head” melodies, they’re “haunt the edges of your psyche” melodies, buoyed by shoestring arrangements and Von Schleicher’s captivating vocals. Equal parts brittle and brazen, Shitty Hits is the work of a well-past-promising newcomer. Interns of the world, unite and take over. | 2017-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ba Da Bing | August 10, 2017 | 7.1 | 1a758579-b5db-445d-bdf0-27e0c04d98e7 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Depeche Mode's thirteenth album sounds like it could be a set of outtakes from 1993's Songs of Faith and Devotion. On Delta Machine, they don't even bother pretending technology has opened up any possibilities for recorded sound in the past 20 years. | Depeche Mode's thirteenth album sounds like it could be a set of outtakes from 1993's Songs of Faith and Devotion. On Delta Machine, they don't even bother pretending technology has opened up any possibilities for recorded sound in the past 20 years. | Depeche Mode: Delta Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17792-depeche-mode-delta-machine/ | Delta Machine | People who make machines use the term "delta" to mean "change." Depeche Mode aren't so keen on that any more. Another kind of delta is the home of a strain of blues that's associated with more intense emotion and simpler technology than the synth-pop that made Depeche Mode famous. They got interested in playing with that kind a couple of decades ago, and it served them well, at first.
But the partnership of singer David Gahan and songwriter Martin Gore can't escape the machine they've become, or the holding pattern they've gotten stuck in. (And then there's third member Andy Fletcher, who...Anyway!) The last album they made with more than two songs that have persisted in their live repertoire was Songs of Faith and Devotion in 1993. Since then, they've been on a steady regimen of releasing a studio record every fourth year, followed by a tour where they play a whole lot of songs from the era when Designing Women was on the air.
Delta Machine, like Playing the Angel and Sounds of the Universe before it, was produced by Ben Hillier, includes three songs with lyrics by Gahan, and sounds like it could be a set of outtakes from Songs of Faith and Devotion. The word "soul" appears in five of Gore's songs here, not including "Angel" or "Heaven" (which shouldn't be confused with the earlier "Halo" or "Judas" or "Sacred" or "Jezebel" or "Martyr"). It's old news that Gore's favorite lyrical topic is sin and salvation, and that's historically been a pretty fertile topic for songwriting in general. Unfortunately, there's no line here as sly as "Strangelove"'s "I give in to sin/ Because you have to make this life livable," and no sense that Gore's idea of sin extends to anything other than mildly kinky sex.
Then there's the blues stuff, i.e. loops of bluesy guitar licks, as on "Goodbye" (which might just as well be called "Personal Jesus XIV: The Personalizing"). Another one turns up in "Slow", repeating endlessly as Gahan sings Gore's lyrics about taking it nice and easy in bed these days. The requisite Gore vocal here, "The Child Inside", might have the most embarrassing extended metaphor he's committed to date (tears turn into a river that overflows and drowns the loved one's inner child?). As for Gahan's own songs-- this time, their music is by Kurt Uenala-- they're generally a reasonably convincing imitation of middling Gore. His "Should Be Higher" is yet another on the pile of ex-junkie lyrics; his "Broken" is a pale Silly Putty copy of "Behind the Wheel".
It's not a totally dull record. Gahan and Gore are singing as well and hyperdramatically as they ever have. "My Little Universe" is a clever piece of minimalism, constructed around a bare handful of acid-synth riffs-- effectively a companion piece to their 30-year-old "Leave in Silence". "Soft Touch/Raw Nerve" is catchy enough that its rhyme of "helping hand" with "understand" is forgivable. "Angel" will sound pretty good on their next greatest-hits collection, as long as they don't sequence it too close to "I Feel You".
Still, what made Depeche Mode work, when they worked, wasn't just the contrast between Gore's dry detachment and Gahan's dorky innocence (up to, let's say, Music for the Masses) and the late-breaking badassery that replaced it (from Violator onward). It was their constant pushing forward of their sound-- expanding the vocabulary of what electronics could do in pop songs. Their records were packed with cross-talking hooks, ingeniously knotted melodies, noises that blurred the border between pitch and percussion. They made rules for themselves, which made it more fun when they broke them.
But they stopped pushing forward long ago, and now they don't even bother pretending technology has opened up any possibilities for recorded sound in the past 20 years. Now they're just extruding a new album once in a while, reconfiguring the grooves and keywords of the albums from the period when they were a force in pop, without the push toward new noises and uncertain feelings that made that music powerful. There is not a single moment of shock or freshness on Delta Machine, and it's enormously frustrating to hear what was once a band of futurists so deeply mired in resisting change. | 2013-03-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-03-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Mute / Columbia | March 28, 2013 | 5 | 1a761226-0eed-469b-8ac7-c5919c4f1b7d | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
Since abandoning his Final Fantasy guise to make music under his own name, Owen Pallett's treated his work like a logic maze; on his latest, which features contributions from Brian Eno, he steps free of his own labyrinth, resulting in his most pleading and open vocal performances. | Since abandoning his Final Fantasy guise to make music under his own name, Owen Pallett's treated his work like a logic maze; on his latest, which features contributions from Brian Eno, he steps free of his own labyrinth, resulting in his most pleading and open vocal performances. | Owen Pallett: In Conflict | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19395-owen-pallett-in-conflict/ | In Conflict | Owen Pallett's 2010 album Heartland marked the first appearance of "Owen Pallett" in his own music. Before that, he operated under the pseudonym Final Fantasy, until Square Enix rights holders objected. The "Owen Pallett" of Heartland, however, was still a figure essentially rooted in fantasy: the album told the first-person story of Lewis, a self-aware fictional character who does battle with the God of his universe. (The God's name? Owen Pallett.) Pallett's presence was a dramatic construct, in other words, meditating on authorship and agency, and the fact that the songs were set in Spectrum, a 14th-century country Pallett invented, added another distancing tool. There was powerful, communicative pop songwriting on Heartland, but Pallett built the album like a logic maze, perhaps so we could never locate him inside it.
On In Conflict, Pallett mostly steps free of his own labyrinth. The album is mournful and restrained in tone, featuring his most pleading and open vocal performances. The lyrics, meanwhile, veer often into excruciatingly personal territory: On "The Passions," he invites us into his bedroom while someone goes down on him. "You hook your pinkies in my jeans/ I'm 28 and you're nineteen," he croons. If Heartland had him tentatively dangling a foot in autobiography, In Conflict finds Pallett taking a running leap off the dock.
"I was inspired by my interactions with John Darnielle while on tour with the Mountain Goats," he told the New York Times' T Magazine about the decision to dig deeper into his own soul. "He has this apparatus in his brain that turns the most inconsequential life events into magic." "Apparatus" is a very Pallett-ian word choice, offering a peek into how his mind grasps the minds of others. He thrives on processes and structures; his music can sometimes feel like a series of rigged gizmos. To see Pallett live is to be equally dazzled and mowed over—looping violin lines in real time, singing and playing and stomping pedals and band leading and dryly joking, all at once. You are so astonished that sometimes you forget to be moved.
He's less concerned with dazzling us this time around, and as a result he moves us more. His looped violin is still the DNA of the music, but the giddiness has been carefully siphoned from it: The arrangements are far simpler and cleaner, highlighting his beautiful, long-breathed melody writing. On "Song for Five and Six", he croons "The sun has set on me," in a delicate head-voice, the rising melody cutting straight to bone. That same effortless falsetto lifts the stepwise melody of "Infernal Fantasy" heavenward and invests the big power ballad arc of "The Secret Seven" with profound ache. If nothing else, In Conflict is a fantastic argument for Pallett's virtues as a pure pop singer.
Even in "confessional" songwriting mode, however, Pallett is still heavily allegorical and occasionally inscrutable. For every straightforward-sounding admission, like "I'll never have any children/ I will bear them and confuse them" from "I Am Not Afraid", there are stretches like this, from "On A Path": "Dig, dig for silver in the name of keeping the order/ Silver is nothing more than the displacement of water/ It's a trick of the light on the face of your daughter and/ Or your son." Pallett's lyrics teem with thick bands of language that act like yellow lights in the listener's rush to associate him directly with any of the album's narrators.
By the end of In Conflict, it's not clear which of the album's characters is Owen Pallett—or, if they're all just mini-Owens carrying pieces of Pallett with them. At least one of them calls him out directly: "Owen, where were you to stop the fire?" he wails on "Infernal Fantasy", a song that talks, as many of these songs do, about tortured lust. The overall effect is less layers of a brilliant puzzle and more shattered mirror shards.
There are traces of blood here, too, and at least some of it is Pallett's. "The world will forget any good you have done," he assures us bleakly on "The Riverbed". "There's a gap between what a man want and what a man will receive," he muses on "Song for Five and Six". "You stand in a city that you don't know anymore/ Spending every year bent over from the weight of the year before," he sings on "On A Path," a line that becomes, slowly, "I stood for a city but I don't know anymore."
Over time, In Conflict reveals a series of oblique takes on volatile private emotions—sexual need, spiritual exhaustion, reflections on mortality. It's fitting that Brian Eno, the original oblique strategist, joined Pallett for these sessions; besides gracing the album with some clear Eno touches (the tumbling chorale of "By bill, by vote" on "On A Path," the Remain in Light-reminiscent chanting "Wait for sunlight" on "Infernal Fantasy"), he shares Pallett's belief that the best way forward is at an acute angle. In Conflict might not be an autobiography the way you or I would write it, but make no mistake: the deeper you look into it, the deeper Pallett himself stares back at you. | 2014-05-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Domino / Secret City | May 26, 2014 | 8 | 1a76bfd3-d4a5-4531-b74c-3ea2af80e428 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On his first album in eight years, the Alabama singer-songwriter turns from folk music to synths, drum machines, and internet speak, but the sorrow at the heart of his music is timeless. | On his first album in eight years, the Alabama singer-songwriter turns from folk music to synths, drum machines, and internet speak, but the sorrow at the heart of his music is timeless. | A.A. Bondy: Enderness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aa-bondy-enderness/ | Enderness | Auguste Arthur Bondy has never been one for the modern world. He once described his time in the alternative rock band Verbena as like being “an infant in a crib full of bats.” After that band folded, his solo records eschewed the glossy electronics and rousing crescendos popular in the late 2000s. Instead, he wrote unfashionable, blues-steeped country. Try as they may, placements of Bondy’s songs in popular television shows like “Friday Night Lights” couldn’t lure him from the margins, where he was content to play intimate rooms—just a simple guy with a guitar, a harmonica his only shiny thing.
It’s been eight years since Bondy last released a record, and his distaste for the present day has intensified. But rather than avoid popular sounds, on Enderness he gathers and subverts modern tools to construct his indictment of the modern world. With an arsenal of synthesizers, drum machine, sparse electric guitar, and a skeptic’s pen, he builds a plodding dystopian story of living death stoked by internet anti-reality, big pharma conspiracy, and environmental apocalypse—aka 2019. It’s existential dread as mid-tempo cradlesong, the music of our worst sleepless nights. “Stranger if you come/Know that much is broken/I forget the way/Surrender is spoken,” he sings on album standout “Images of Love,” bass pulses driving the caustic groove.
On “Diamond Skull,” Bondy strings tragic and worrying subjects of popular obsession into a stream-of-consciousness phantasmagoria over a simple guitar riff, like Nick Cave on “Higgs Boson Blues.” Observations about white nationalism, spiritual charlatans, and hollow celebrity worship spill into internet speak: “OMG sea to sea/L-M-F-A-O,” he sings with a knowing wink. Like so many who simultaneously bemoan and fuel the simulation—tweets and grams as a form of self-flagellation—Bondy is both in on and imprisoned by the joke. Case in point: He tweeted for the first time in February to promote Enderness, and he’s dropped only seven breadcrumbs since. “#TBT to when my house burned down,” he posted on May 2 with a photo of himself in Christ pose, standing amid a melted stove and other charred debris. The fire happened the day after he finished the album.
Three wordless meditations—“The Tree With the Lights,” “Pan Tran,” and “Enderness”—separate the movements of the album’s greater statement, across which Bondy seems to change perspective. First he writes from a character’s viewpoint. Then, he's an omniscient narrator. With "Lost Hills," toward the end of the album, he's in the first person. He describes destruction in California, where his house burned down, and the literal and figurative emptiness left behind: “Apocalypse from every highway/The places that we fled/As I return to California/My spirit underfed.” The title track recalls a new-age-inspired channeling of the ocean’s waves via rolling synthesizer effects, reflecting all that washes over us in our day-to-day existence with crushing and renewing force—a fitting conclusion to an album of absurdist brain-spill.
Twelve years ago, Bondy expressed his sorrow in sparse, strummed and finger-picked acoustic guitar. Today, he uses a mesh of electronics, alternately celestial and hellish in tone and tempo: beautiful, sad-bastard music sourced from lonely sojourns down the information superhighway. It isn’t so different from his standard posture, mercilessly grabbing at the heart with earnest (and at times heavy-handed) narratives sung in an alluring, unvarnished voice. With Enderness Bondy brings us squarely into the present, where our homes are on fire and all we can do is tweet. | 2019-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | May 7, 2019 | 7.1 | 1a790400-a0f8-41b5-8af0-fae65546d8fc | Erin Osmon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-osmon/ | |
The self-taught Chicago polymath follows his own odd muse on his GOOD Music debut, whispering consumerist sweet nothings over sparse, menacing beats. | The self-taught Chicago polymath follows his own odd muse on his GOOD Music debut, whispering consumerist sweet nothings over sparse, menacing beats. | Valee: GOOD Job, You Found Me EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/valee-good-job-you-found-me-ep/ | GOOD Job, You Found Me EP | It’s a good bet that that “How?” and “Why?” are recurring questions in Valee’s inner monologue. As a child, the precocious Chicagoan would toy around with his home’s electrical wiring. In a fit of inspiration—and in a moment of divine intervention, considering its riskiness—he managed to reroute a light switch through his parents’ surround-sound receiver, so that when the bass kicked in, the lights flashed on. He’d rapped occasionally in high school, but after graduation the cat-curious polymath started a business doing low-level repairs for Chicago-area schools. An impulsive trip to a Guitar Center spawned a home recording studio and, a few experimental years and six mixtapes later, a contract with Kanye West’s GOOD Music. With GOOD Job, You Found Me, Valee’s unique style, honed during cloistered, solitary sessions in his loft apartment, gains the audience it dearly deserves.
Valee (“Vuh-lay”) sounds like a housecat pacing on a narrow windowsill. Or maybe he sounds like Michael Jackson’s pinpoint footwork on a magical, light-up sidewalk in the “Billie Jean” video. Or maybe he sounds like a light rain on a corrugated steel awning. His nearest analog is 21 Savage, but where the Atlantan’s barely-vacillating monotone lands with the force of a baseball bat on a windshield, Valee’s voice seems to gambol weightlessly, a fluffy white cloud amid crisp blue springtime skies. On the ribald, wildly catchy “Shell,” his voice is delicate, bordering on conspiratorial. Were he not backed by the kind of thunderous beats that would’ve made the lights flicker in his childhood home, his music might be denuded of its menace.
Just as intriguing as the incongruity of Valee’s downy voice and heavy instrumentals (typically produced by Rio Mac or ChaseTheMoney) is his hardcore punk-style commitment to brevity: GOOD Job crams six songs into 14 concise minutes, and the longest, a remix of “Miami” featuring Pusha T, falls just short of the three-minute mark. For an artist whose lyrics have an uncomplicated relationship with consumption—he’s in favor of it, particularly as it pertains to drugs, designer clothing, and, surprisingly, RC cars—the self-restraint is fascinating. He’s not subverting trap-rap form with overwrought showpiece onanism or any outward political awareness, but self-abnegation. Most songs are a single verse, if there’s a verse at all; the airy “Vlone,” which comes nearer to avant-garde dance music than it does to any particular rap subgenre, is just a chorus. Once he’s fully expressed an idea, Valee moves on without fireworks or fanfare.
Unfortunately, half the ideas on GOOD Job were used on previous projects. This version of “Shell,” with a rare-for-Valee second verse, appeared on his 1988, and his biggest hit, the rumbling “I Got Whatever,” was on 12:12 Again, as was the original of “Miami,” only modified here by a fairly staid Pusha T verse. Though the EP is largely excellent, with fewer than seven minutes of new material it struggles to serve its two opposing masters. Ostensibly, GOOD Job is art unmolested by corporatist interest. But functionally it doubles as a press release meant to introduce Valee to West’s audience—a painfully normal crowd likely unattuned to rap’s odder, underground offerings. But Valee’s capture could prove valuable for GOOD Music, a label otherwise bereft of young, intriguing talent (and historically unable to nurture it). If they allow the dreadlocked Chicagoan to follow his most outré instincts, and encourage him to whisper consumerist sweet somethings for two minutes at a time, they could have their first bona fide new star in recent memory. | 2018-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | G.O.O.D. Music | March 8, 2018 | 7.4 | 1a7e265b-b343-4dc7-a836-fafa22f64ff4 | Torii MacAdams | https://pitchfork.com/staff/torii-macadams/ | |
Big Boi returns with a collection of shiny bangers unbothered with modern trends. With Killer Mike, Snoop Dogg, Organized Noize, everyone here sounds a little out of touch and just fantastic. | Big Boi returns with a collection of shiny bangers unbothered with modern trends. With Killer Mike, Snoop Dogg, Organized Noize, everyone here sounds a little out of touch and just fantastic. | Big Boi: Boomiverse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-boi-boomiverse/ | Boomiverse | “As long as I have a job, he’ll always have a record deal,” L.A. Reid once said about Big Boi. It sounded nice; it’s the sort of thing we like to imagine hardened moguls saying about their sentimental favorites. It was around the time that Big Boi’s first solo record, Sir Lucious Leftfoot: The Son of Chico Dusty, was struggling publicly to escape Jive’s corporate ledger into the world. As the recording sessions, bills, and tensions mounted, the album began to feel like a toxic, troubled asset, which made it all the more surprising when the exhilarating, endlessly replayable final product finally leaked into daylight: This was the album everyone was so worried about?
Seven years later, Big Boi’s solo career feels if not adrift, then circling the same spot. He’s definitely not coasting, but his solo career is still a goodwill project. Sir Lucious is still unstoppable whenever you cue it up, a massive, liberating party going on behind a door you forgot to open for seven years. But 2012’s Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors was a step backward, a genial and middling album full of collaborations that didn’t quite gel. Boomiverse is closer in spirit to Sir Lucious: He’s steered the ship back toward the straightforward, funk-infused party territory. The producers are a straight-flush of dependable collaborators, from Organized Noize to Mannie Fresh to even Scott Storch, who also worked on Sir Lucious and whose name doesn’t pop up on that many big-name rap records anymore.
Boomiverse doesn’t have the same freewheeling, blitzkrieg energy as Sir Lucious, but it reestablishes Big Boi as a dependable record maker who will always make music worth checking for, no matter what else is going on around him. He’s not really in a position to be competing against Migos on rap radio, and he doesn’t want to, at all—“The Super Bowl ring hand is full,” he told Pitchfork in 2012—so he embraces his parallel universe. Everyone on Boomiverse sounds out of touch and fantastic. Snoop Dogg, Killer Mike, Kurupt—they are all leaning into the pits and crags in their voices, embracing their age as a sort of superpower. Big Rube pops up on the opening, Organized Noize-produced “Da Next Day,” and he sounds approximately six thousand years old: “True fusion only occurs at the heart of a star,” he rumbles, which is not really a sentiment for the squeaky-voiced anyway.
You can tell that Big Boi is still in love with the sound of his voice, and still fascinated by finding places it can drop into busy productions: “This type of paper just don’t fold or get thrown in the booty club, flexing/We hoody-hoo them hoes and have them glued to the section/Ain’t nothing new, that’s just us oozing perfection,” he hop-skips on “Order of Operations.” “I put the bottle down, hit the throttle, got’em now/Sodom and Gomorrah, deplorables all around my style,” goes a section on the Fresh-produced “Follow Deez.” He sounds like he’s sipping from the same fountain of youth as E-40, whose enthusiasm for his art could power city blocks.
There are a couple of moves here that land on twisted ankles: “Mic Jack,” produced by DJ Dahi and DJ Khalil, sounds like a Justin Timberlake solo cut translated from Hungarian, with bar mitzvah-worthy synthesizers, Adam Levine awkwardly crooning, “The dancefloor tells no lie,” and Big Boi proclaiming, “I build a bear before I build a bitch.” “Kill Jill” pairs a haunting little vocal sample from the virtual anime pop star Hatsune Miku with Killer Mike and Jeezy; it’s a strong cut, but it’s hard not to wince a little when Big Boi muses, out of nowhere: “They say Cosby gave them roofies/Now who know what the truth is?” It would be repugnant if it wasn’t so half-hearted; he doesn’t even have the bravery to stake out a position, he just indulges in some drunk-uncling.
This is exactly the kind of avert-your-eyes old-guy grumbling he’s normally so adept at avoiding. As usual, he takes a bar or two to remind us how seriously he takes his lyrics—“I’m gone keep on pushing this pen, I don’t write on no iPhone” (“Made Men”), or “I tend to overthink when I ink these bars, but y’all don’t even try” (“Overthunk”)—but his touch is nimble and he never lingers on a point or gets bogged down. On “Order of Operations,” he talks about buying land over Lexuses. On “Da Next Day,” he calls himself “rap’s Underground Railroad” and leaves a dollar tip for a Waffle House waitress in the same breath. This is Big Boi’s mind in motion—jokes, insights, insults, wisdom, and confessions all shooting out of the nozzle of a fire hydrant. There’s room in his party for human-sized feelings.
There is exactly one potential pop hit on Boomiverse: “All Night,” a singing-in-the-shower romper with a rollicking piano line that feels like something D.R.A.M. might be doing. Check the credits, and lo and behold, it’s none other than Dr. Luke behind the boards. The song has none of the lacquered, assembly-line sheen of his usual work, providing further evidence that Big Boi at his best is a top-shelf collaborator, someone who instinctively knows how to draw vital energies out of unlike minds. Boomiverse probably won’t alter his trajectory, but there are several songs here that I would not be the least bit irritated he played at a festival. For a guy whose catalog includes “Rosa Parks” and “Bombs Over Baghdad,” that is not faint praise. | 2017-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic | June 19, 2017 | 7.4 | 1a7e4c80-7ef9-49cf-a683-91ff09a7e04f | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On its debut album, the Mississippi synth-punk band hones a sound characterized by unlikely combinations: frenzied rhythms and tranquil synths, blistering riffs and hopeful lyrics. | On its debut album, the Mississippi synth-punk band hones a sound characterized by unlikely combinations: frenzied rhythms and tranquil synths, blistering riffs and hopeful lyrics. | MSPAINT: Post-American | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mspaint-post-american/ | Post-American | Without hearing their music, it would be reasonable to assume MSPAINT is a hardcore band. The Hattiesburg, Mississippi quartet spent the past three years opening for the likes of Soul Glo, Militarie Gun, and Gel with a fervor that goes toe-to-toe with the headliners. But MSPAINT come from a college town known for “lighthearted” music, and their synth-punk is an unlikely contender for the co-sign of national hardcore bands: “I feel like a jester up there, watching people fucking spin-kick each other to our music,” vocalist Deedee recently admitted. On their debut album Post-American, MSPAINT introduce themselves as a band whose barked vocals are better fit for retro synths, experimental electronica, and blown-out bass. Consider them an industrial art-punk group that sits with the Doc Marten anarchists at the cafeteria table.
Exhausted by playing in rock bands, all four members of MSPAINT—vocalist Deedee, bassist Randy Riley, drummer Quinn Mackey, and Nick Panella on synthesizers—founded the project on a two-part promise: no guitars, and, apart from Mackey on drums, everyone picks up a new-to-them role. That decision led to their experimental sound and 2020’s self-titled EP. The confidence to pull it all off, however, didn’t arrive until now. Post-American is self-assured in its sound and direct in its approach, often thanks to its aggressive rhythm section. Riley cranks his fuzz pedal so loud that you can hear a bit of feedback in “Titan of Hope” from his bass’ volume alone. Combined with Mackey’s hard-hitting fills and emphasis on upbeats—particularly on “Hardwired” and “Decapitated Reality,” which features Pierce Jordan of Soul Glo—MSPAINT’s status as the token alternative act on hardcore bills makes sense: How could Riley’s blistering riffs and Mackey’s racing drumbeats on “Information” not start a mosh pit?
Post-American is rooted in punk rhythms as a guiding spirit; the synths and electronic add-ons are a complement to Deedee’s hopeful lyrics, a method that pays homage to artists like DEVO and SOPHIE who viewed synths as a storytelling instrument. Taking cues from childhood technology, like the dissonant screeches of dial-up and alien zaps of fax machines, MSPAINT incorporate sounds from the past to image a more peaceful future. Panella’s synths morph from jaunty ’80s chords in the Ian Shelton-featuring “Delete It” to melodic drones fit for stoner prog on the title track, leading the band to jokingly describe their genre as “post-modeM.” In “Flowers From Concrete,” a tranquil synth intro flutters like a harp before speaker-rattling bass explodes and Panella switches gears, transitioning to wavy notes that sound like the neon beam of a campy alien abduction and finally, by the end, a straightforward keyboard interlude to slow your heart rate. This is MSPAINT’s secret skill: casting a strangely placating effect despite the rhythmic frenzy and gruff hollers holding their music up.
Despite his urgent bellow, Deedee isn’t singing from a place of anger. Following the unbothered flow of underground hip-hop, his syllabic meter gives lines like “Guillotine will decide who’s separated in classes” or “Inherit death like a birthright/Eyes open up but your spirit stays closed tight” the casual feel of an MF DOOM track, no matter how loudly he’s shouting. For a guy with such a booming voice, Deedee seems bent on using it to spread some good. He sings about what the future can and should offer, instead of lamenting what the present lacks. On “S3,” Deedee compartmentalizes thoughts in a push for self-growth. Throughout “Titan of Hope,” he waxes positive nihilism in a game of contrasts meant to inspire. Deedee’s penmanship is the final garnish on an album defined by unexpected combinations. His presence as a frontman instills a humble profundity in MSPAINT’s music, a feeling that lingers after the dust settles from all the unintended mosh pits it spawns. | 2023-03-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Convulse | March 15, 2023 | 7.4 | 1a7f4dae-9939-4c03-8e55-4c7bce6fd1c3 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
The Morning Benders return with a new name and a new sound. This collection draws inspiration from leader Chris Chu's childhood obsession with R&B groups like Boyz II Men and synth-heavy pop artists like Madonna. | The Morning Benders return with a new name and a new sound. This collection draws inspiration from leader Chris Chu's childhood obsession with R&B groups like Boyz II Men and synth-heavy pop artists like Madonna. | POP ETC: Pop Etc | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16718-pop-etc/ | Pop Etc | Two clichés that seem to pop up a lot in writing about music: One artist might "know his lane and stay in it," while another "moves outside of her comfort zone." There is virtue in both approaches. On the one hand, it's admirable to know what you do best and parlay that strength into a work to match (see the Ramones or Beach House). On the other, it's hard not to respect when someone decides to do something different with the hope that his or her audience will follow along (see Beck or Joni Mitchell).
The Morning Benders, a Brooklyn-via-San Francisco outfit, were for two albums a workmanlike indie rock band, and on their last effort, 2010's Big Echo, they brought in Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor to produce a solid collection of wooly chamber rock. This year, they changed their name to POP ETC after discovering that the word "bender" has an offensive homophobic connotation in the UK, and they made a shift in sound that was just as radical. Instead of widescreen guitar rock, the newly christened band would draw inspiration from leader Chris Chu's childhood obsession with R&B groups like Boyz II Men and synth-heavy pop artists like Madonna. We're talking neon keyboards, plenty of Auto-Tune, songs with titles like "I Wanna Be Your Man". Is the band's self-titled album under the new moniker a brave change-up? Sure. Is it any good? Not even a little. Forget staying in their lane; the Band Formerly Known as the Morning Benders have drifted into the median, jumped the guardrail, and tumbled end-over-end in the direction of a sheer cliff.
It's not as if twee-leaning indie that incorporates R&B and synth-pop is unheard of. Bands like Passion Pit and, on a smaller scale, the Vampire Weekend/Ra Ra Riot side project Discovery found ways to channel the brashest sound of the radio into something that felt personal and distinctive. But Discovery emanated warmth and affection while Passion Pit get over on exuberance and songwriting chops. POP ETC have none of these qualities. This is unbearably cloying music in the vein of Owl City's "Fireflies", a mix of scrubbed-clean earnestness, bright-eyed naiveté, and some of the dopiest lyrics this side of Zach Attack.
There are two types of singers in the world: those who can sell a chorus like "Rock your body quick and get up, get up," in a song that starts, "I came here to party don't bring me down," and those who cannot. Justin Timberlake can certainly pull it off. Chu, well... when you miss the mark as badly as he does here, you end up with a dangerously annoying flesh-eating earworm. And so much of what's wrong here really does come down to how he uses his voice. It's not that he's a bad singer, at all; it's all in his tone, and how it works in this setting. In the fuzzy and mellow world of Big Echo, Chu's voice took on a hint of mystery and ambiguity. In POP ETC, he comes over like a breathlessly enthusiastic YMCA counselor with no self-awareness trying to impress 10-year-olds with wacky pop-culture appropriations. Which might be possible to overlook if the melodies and hooks were good enough, but they're functional at best and sometimes ("Keep It to Your Own") downright awful.
"We've committed to our new sound, and we're not ashamed," Chu said in an interview with Pitchfork. "We're not trying to sneak anything by anybody. We are what we are-- and, hopefully, you'll like it." I like this attitude. Chu is right that he's got to follow his muse and he and his band have to go where their interests take them. But such a decision wouldn't be commendable if success were assured. Albums like this remind us why we look up to those who take risks. Here's hoping that the next one POP ETC take works out much better. | 2012-06-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-06-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Rough Trade | June 28, 2012 | 2.5 | 1a81b673-a8c3-4b51-9863-a8306dd66436 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Australian trio’s zonked lo-fi electronica and dub pop beams in from an alternate dimension where the primary building blocks of pop music are melodica and drum machine. | The Australian trio’s zonked lo-fi electronica and dub pop beams in from an alternate dimension where the primary building blocks of pop music are melodica and drum machine. | Th Blisks: Elixa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/th-blisks-elixa/ | Elixa | It’s easy enough to identify Th Blisks’ component parts—trip-hop, torch song, post-punk, bedroom pop. It’s harder to pin down the distended, discombobulating result. Troth’s Amelia Besseny and Cooper Bowman and Low Life member Yuta Matsumura make washed-out indie dub pop songs that sound like old train cars rattling along, faded boom-bap loops and metallic post-punk guitars taking the place of dinged-up tracks and twanging overhead wires. The Australian trio made its new album, Elixa, remotely while living in Hobart, Newcastle, and Papunya, a small community outside Alice Springs. But if Elixa doesn’t quite belong to any one real place, its peculiar ambiance evokes a sprawling, desiccated urban landscape of the mind.
How So?, Th Blisks’ 2022 debut, felt similarly unclassifiable: from the mondegreen-ish band name and song titles—“A Sylph,” “Taipei Dubble”—to the album cover, which featured (I think) portraits of each band member made of pebbles, it felt like an entryway into an alternate universe where the primary building blocks of pop music are melodica and drum machine. Elixa provides a clearer picture of whatever weird liminal zone Th Blisks are transmitting from: The textures and core materials are largely the same, but it feels more spacious, less lo-fi.
Besseny’s vocals are still largely illegible, but occasionally a fragment of what she’s saying adds to Elixa’s air of laid-back benevolence: “It’s not without, it’s not within,” she sings on “Enchancity,” her reedy voice drifting over the beat; on “Knuckledust,” she sings of “a good place to start” over a track that sounds like “Steal My Sunshine” after a collective barbiturate overdose. The positivity within Besseny’s lyrics—“Looking for a faith/Without all the fiction,” she sings on “Do You Bless It?”—speaks to a primary appeal of Elixa: This sideways and detuned music nonetheless still conveys brightness. That’s not all it contains, though: The cavernous dirge “No Know” and the ghostly processional “Umbrah” temper Th Blisks’ warmth with a sinister, creeping edge.
If you were to test a sample of Elixa’s DNA, you might trace its genealogy back to sensuous, strange ’90s artists like the Japanese trip-hop singer Poison Girl Friend or fogged-out Melbourne band Hydroplane. Th Blisks also feel like contemporaries of fellow Australians a.s.o. and YL Hooi, who releases music via Bowman’s Altered States label. Besseny’s vocals sometimes recall Grimes circa Geidi Primes. That swath of references is mostly to say that Elixa belongs to a broad canon of music that seems to exist a millimeter or two outside the space and time in which it was actually released: the soundtrack of a city that doesn’t exist and probably never will. | 2024-06-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Efficient Space | June 25, 2024 | 7.8 | 1a81ea66-cfe3-4112-b504-1f1e2c29ec25 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
BRMC’s eighth album continues to prop up the rock-historical establishment. It offers more of the same, but at least it’s more of the same in a fairly compelling way. | BRMC’s eighth album continues to prop up the rock-historical establishment. It offers more of the same, but at least it’s more of the same in a fairly compelling way. | Black Rebel Motorcycle Club: Wrong Creatures | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-rebel-motorcycle-club-wrong-creatures/ | Wrong Creatures | In the 1953 film The Wild One, a woman asks Marlon Brando’s character, “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” He takes a quick moment to consider the question, then responds, “Whadda you got?” Black Rebel Motorcycle Club took their name from Brando’s biker gang in that film, but they also took their unfocused defiance as well. Even on their 2001 debut they were as much a stance as a sound, both of which were rooted deep in the past, not only old counterculture flicks but old rock’n’roll as well: the Velvet Underground, Suicide, Ride, the Jesus & Mary Chain. Since then they’ve hissed and shaken fists at the establishment, each album a carefully calibrated pose of rebellion based largely on past examples. But they’re so musically conservative that it’s impossible to be truly defiant; they’re too busy propping up the rock-historical establishment to break free of anything in any meaningful way.
On one hand, they understand that their bundle of musical reference points and the poses they’ve been striking all mean something different at different points in time. That hasn’t made Black Rebel Motorcycle Club any less predictable, but it does give their music some much-needed heft. On the other hand, their “Whadda you got?” attitude means they’ve never really engaged very closely with any particular historical moment they’ve lived through; their rebellion remains general and unspecified. Even during the Bush era, when artists were looking to the past to comment on the present, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club wrote songs that were too vague, too wishy-washy carry any real subversive power. This is a band that actually had a tune simply called “U.S. Government.”
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have built a long career more on spit and perseverance than on vision, and with nearly 20 years behind them, they’ve become a thing of the past themselves: a historical influence, a rock touchstone. Perhaps that’s their final form, their intended destination. Despite it sounding exactly how you’d expect, the fact that they are releasing their eighth album in 2018 is a respectable accomplishment in and of itself, especially when you consider the tribulations they’ve faced just over the past decade: the backstage death of bassist Robert Levon Been’s father in 2010 and, more recently, the slow yet determined recovery of drummer Leah Shapiro from a Chiari malformation that affected her balance and rhythm.
Wrong Creatures is, of course, more of the same, but at least it’s more of the same in a fairly compelling way. The guitars still shriek and moan, the drums still pound out steady trance rhythms, and Hayes and Been still sing with a sneering detachment that makes it all too easy to ignore their lyrics. Some songs are ridiculous for familiar reasons: “Little Thing Gone Wild” sounds like turn-of-the-century garage rock, a slightly slowed down Vines, but at least it doesn’t perpetuate old-school sexual politics like that title seems to indicate. Other songs are ridiculous for new and refreshing reasons: “Circus Bazooko” tiptoes around the fairway on a trippy music-box organ riff that’s silly rather than sinister.
There are no big new ideas on Wrong Creatures, but there are enough small new ideas to give the album its own identity within their catalog. In particular, Hayes frequently uses his guitar to puncture the band’s minor-key drones with compact riffs or random asides, as though having a conversation with himself. The album is lousy with anthems, and one benefit of their plodding tempos is that those rousing moments sound earned. “Echo” opens with a bassline like someone’s faint memory of “Walk On the Wild Side,” and it ends up sounds like any given Coldplay tune from the 2000s. To their immense credit, the band is equally unapologetic about both reference points, which makes “Echo” the most startling and satisfying song on the album.
They can’t muster the same rousing energy on “Calling Them All Away,” and by the time they get to closer “All Rise,” the climactic push sounds scripted, obvious, rote—ending the album with a thud. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club don’t sound like a band winding things down on Wrong Creatures. While they’re not radically altering their own musical DNA, they are still in their own way trying to figure out what they can and cannot do. While that probably sounds like a backhanded compliment for these rock‘n’roll veterans, it might actually be the secret to their longevity. Maybe they’ll even figure out what they’re rebelling against. | 2018-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Vagrant | January 13, 2018 | 5.8 | 1a83c8ce-2db3-414e-8379-2e22c6eedab8 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
As Overmono, the UK techno duo of Tom and Ed Russell shift their focus away from club-friendly 4/4 kicks to tracks with looser architectures. Their second EP feels gutsy and modern. | As Overmono, the UK techno duo of Tom and Ed Russell shift their focus away from club-friendly 4/4 kicks to tracks with looser architectures. Their second EP feels gutsy and modern. | Overmono: Arla II EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23112-arla-ii-ep/ | Arla II EP | Overmono is the collaborative effort of Tom and Ed Russell, UK techno’s foremost biological (as opposed to chemical) brothers. For the last half-decade, they’ve worked under several aliases—Tom most prominently as Truss and MPIA3, Ed as Tessela—and have been among a small cadre of producers to emerge from the London bass scene with fresh takes on their country’s lineage of dark, grimy techno. Gear savvy, club-focused, and deceptively playful, this informal group—which also includes Blawan, Untold, and Pariah, among others—took the industrial muscle of Surgeon, Regis, and the Downwards label and added a wink to the grimace.
Arla II is the siblings’ second EP as Overmono, following last year’s Arla and a track as TR / ER in 2012. They’ve used the project to shift their focus away from club-friendly 4/4 kicks to tracks with looser architectures, favoring whirring percussion and yelping vocal samples. In both tone and construction, these Overmono tracks seem informed by shadowy mid-90s rave music and the eerie IDM it mutated into.
The opening “O-Coast” (which, coincidentally or not, shares a name with a popular new synthesizer) sounds like a Boards of Canada track on two hyperactive mitzis and with a busted ankle, whisking childlike vocal abstractions into a coiling synth line. Subby kick drums sit behind the mix, more rumble than rhythm. It’s a potent, tricky concoction that is notable for its lack of utility: too abstract and inattentive for the dance, too manic and paranoid for the comedown. Arla II’s four primary tracks (it contains two short interludes as well) all mostly function in this manner. “Telephax 030” is particularly stressful, two vocal samples disagreeing against a hissy, reverberating cymbal—like a domestic argument and the resultant shattered window, looped in perpetuity.
“16 Steps” is Overmono’s finest piece yet, a shuffling thicket of a breakbeat and oxidized utterances set over foghorn bass blasts. It’s over before your feet or your stomach figure out how to handle it, a metallic taste left on your tongue. The closing “Powder Dry,” with its aching pads, feels sentimental and plodding in contrast, the only time Arla II feels easy for either the artists or the listeners. Still, this represents a step forward for the Russell brothers. These tracks feel gutsy and modern even when their influences and lineage are apparent, and they conjure paranoia and anger without resorting to hissy industrial aggression. Tom and Ed plan to perform these pieces as part of a live show, and that seems like an ideal way to experience this music: with a loud, blasting club for these loud, confounding tracks. | 2017-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | April 11, 2017 | 7.4 | 1a840c6d-e3fa-4c61-9464-d6888ebd200e | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Crowd-pleasing anthems come naturally to the Korean superstar DJ. If only her debut album had more of them. | Crowd-pleasing anthems come naturally to the Korean superstar DJ. If only her debut album had more of them. | Peggy Gou: I Hear You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peggy-gou-i-hear-you/ | I Hear You | Has any DJ played the game quite like Peggy Gou? Plenty of DJs are influencers, but it’s rare they have a catalog of stylish deep house 12"s to their name. Some are fashion models, but have they been on multiple covers of Vogue, Dazed, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar? There’s always that one percent of superstar DJs bopping between Vegas, Ibiza, and Dubai on their private jets—but only one of them is a 32-year-old Korean woman who insists on managing herself.
Gou has gone from zero to 500 mph in the years since she swapped a fashion career for dance music, ticking off every conceivable goal for a rising celebrity DJ: the first Korean woman to play Berghain, headline sets at Ibiza’s superclubs, a crossover hit on a cool indie, a clothing line backed by Virgil Abloh, a Kylie Minogue remix to promote three new flavors of Magnum ice cream. Most impressively, last year she released “(It Goes Like) Nanana,” a frothy ’90s house bagatelle that went to No. 1 in five countries and has been streamed nearly 500 million times. This is not the sort of thing that happens to DJs, unless their name is Diplo, David Guetta, or Calvin Harris.
Now, eight years after her first single, she releases her debut album on XL Recordings, home to big-league dance acts from the Prodigy to Overmono. Drawing heavily on the ’90s club music that Gou says “changed her taste” during lockdown, I Hear You operates in the same mode of retro fantasia that generated “Nanana,” cherry-picking iconic sounds from house music’s ’80s and ’90s heyday. In rough historical order, we’ve got glassy Italo synths, super-sized syndrums, pumping organs, plasticky MIDI horns, the fierce thwack of the TR-909, several saggy breakbeats, and one tasty jungle loop.
Gou is good at stirring up rosy nostalgia for some long-lost Disco Europa, a mood that strikes a chord with a generation longing for the imagined freedom and optimism of dance music’s golden era. Her breakout tracks—2018’s “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)” and “Han Jan”—were defined by their space, restraint, and melody. What they lacked in over-ratcheted builds and drops they made up for in cosmic detailing: bongos, twinkling bells, aquatic basslines, and a uniquely dreamy femininity imparted by Gou’s faux-naive speak-singing in a mixture of Korean and English. I Hear You strikes a frustrating standoff between these two versions of Gou: It lacks the authentic quirkiness of those earlier hits, yet never lets loose the confetti cannons and fishbowl cocktails promised by “Nanana.”
That song is a perfect Frankenstein of familiar club moments: Korg M1 organs, the pitch-bent lick from ATB’s “9 PM (Till I Come),” a polyglottal chorus a lot like A Touch of Class’ Eurohouse hit “Around the World.” What else to say about this neatly welded banger? It’s simply too effective to care what you think of it. It would also be remarkable for Gou to pull off the trick a second time on the same album. “Back to One” is a fun attempt, packed with pumping organs and tacky brass, but the vocals don’t take off and her fake laughter suggests the opposite of carefree euphoria. “1+1=11” is plastic Balearica, mixing a sparkly synth-guitar line with a breakbeat here, an acid wiggle there. “Lobster Telephone” plays to Gou’s strengths with its flamboyant ’80s touches, and might even be a sly dig at Western fans’ noncomprehension of her Korean-language vocals: The lyrics are apparently surreal nonsense (hence the Dalí-referencing title), which makes the meaning equally foreign to everyone.
The rest, to borrow an idea from a house classic, is a land of confusion. There are two collaborations (duets, in fact): one with an internationally recognized pastiche-rock god who just turned 60, the other with a trans rapper from Puerto Rico known for a 2023 collaboration with Latin Grammy-winning producer Bizarrap. What connects Lenny Kravitz and Villano Antillano? Well, they’re both on this album. “I Believe in Love Again” is as syrupy and sincere as its title suggests, grooving along at a radio-friendly tempo. The chorus has a vacant, Random Access Memories disco slinkiness, but Kravitz’s smug squeal is such a powerful turnoff I’ve since been using it as a contraceptive—and I actually like the guy. Meanwhile “All That,” showcasing Antillano’s Spanish-language raps over a slowed-down “Think” break, could have been a spritz of campy mystery and romance, but instead feels like an earnest slog.
In the filler zone of tracks seven to nine, Gou doubles down on her signature moves, adding bigger builds and acid-burst drops (“I Go”) and following Moby’s formula for melancholy exotica (“Purple Horizon”). “Seoulsi Peggygou (서울시페기구)” is much more likable, juxtaposing a folkish melody on Korean gayageum (probably played by Gou herself) with salsa horns and a jungle loop intelligent enough for LTJ Bukem. But the East-West fusion doesn’t go further than that—it’s no “Sumo Jungle Grandeur,” for example—and the experiment is dropped after two and a half minutes.
But whatever! It’s a ’90s-inspired dance album, we’re here to have fun and down a few piña coladas, are we not? If only Gou had the same idea. The problem really starts with the opening track. “Your Art” is a portentous introduction, with Italo storm clouds gathering under a spoken-word salad of Instagram affirmations and vague political soundbites. “Create your universe anew… be present,” she says hypnotically. “Look up, look down… what do you see?” These words are adapted from a poem by Olafur Eliasson, an artist and eco-activist once known for installing an artificial sun in London’s Tate Modern; he also designed the strange mirrored headpiece Gou wears on the album cover.
“We have colonized, industrialized, modernized,” she continues, improbably. “We have forgotten self-respect, and to listen to ourselves.” This is a planetary-scale reach for an artist who, for one thing, must be among the music industry’s biggest carbon emitters (did nobody inform Eliasson?). And unless there are some revolutionary slogans hidden in the mix, nothing on I Hear You engages with art or politics or nature in any graspable way.
By prefacing her debut with this meaningless own goal, Gou undermines her brand as global party girl in chief and reminds us of everything we’d rather forget while we’re on our fizzy beach holiday: the poisonous waste produced by the fashion industry, the lethal emissions generated by the private jets and luxury cars she likes, the murderous regimes that use electronic music festivals to culture-wash their reputations. The “leave politics out of music” brigade might be annoyed that any of this is even mentioned in conjunction with their fave, but look—she started it.
Gou is blessed with talent; she writes, produces, mixes, plays her own instruments, is an exceptional DJ; she’s born to win. As her Billboard interviewer recently noted, she has “a business acumen that could be characterized as corporate hustle if it didn’t also happen inside dark techno clubs.” There’s no point in throwing around grand concepts like so much glitter in order to feel like a serious album artist—just turn up the “nananas” and keep the piña coladas coming. | 2024-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | June 7, 2024 | 6.2 | 1a888d4d-f412-40e5-bd53-386afcce24c3 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
The singer-songwriter’s second album is headier and more dynamic than her Mercury Prize-winning debut, but its sharp writing is often blunted by its temperate sound. | The singer-songwriter’s second album is headier and more dynamic than her Mercury Prize-winning debut, but its sharp writing is often blunted by its temperate sound. | Arlo Parks: My Soft Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arlo-parks-my-soft-machine/ | My Soft Machine | At some point over the past decade, young singer-songwriters got the memo that specificity is key. It’s the details that draw in a listener, that make the personal vividly universal: the forgotten scarves, acne pits resembling moon craters, an ex tying their new lover’s shoelaces. In the best scenario, these observations are guided by the songwriter’s truest tool, perspective. Often, though, the effect can be less like storytelling than listmaking. Where Lorde’s sublime “Supercut” dramatized being overwhelmed by recollections of a failed love, many of her descendants simply dumped their camera rolls and assumed that the poignancy can be taken as read.
Arlo Parks’ debut album often succumbed to the latter pitfall. Collapsed in Sunbeams, released in 2021, won the British singer-songwriter acclaim (and the Mercury Prize) for her cocooning lo-fi arrangements and flashes of intimate poetry: “I’d lick the grief right off your lips/You do your eyes like Robert Smith,” she sang on lockdown favorite “Black Dog,” its thumbed acoustic chords like shafts of light through closed curtains. But it was the best of a surfeit of songs that blandly consoled troubled peers—as if the subjects of each verse of Kelly Rowland’s angsty 2002 ballad “Stole” got their own spin-off—her stories flattened further into guidance counselor-core by emollient choruses and Radiohead To Chill Out To arrangements.
Easy reassurance is harder to come by on Parks’ second album, My Soft Machine. The writing, if not the music, is all the better for a more myopic focus, less concerned with the trials of her generation (though still there, on “Purple Phase” and “Puppy”) than documenting the 22-year-old Londoner’s new life in Los Angeles: a freshly minted pop star falling in and out of Escalades with her fellow pop-star girlfriend. She feels "hyper-real" when she glows in someone's gaze, but desolate when that gaze is denied, when all she can do is suck dry the memories of good times: “There are sandflies in the champagne,” she sings on “Weightless,” paradise spoiled. It’s simultaneously darker and more joyful, both as a result of the sometimes druggy, sometimes desperate stories she’s telling and the heady way Parks tells them, telescoping from euphoria to panic as subtly as the dusk sky darkens.
Frustratingly, these adrenaline spikes of desire are often muted by hazy, Vaseline-coated arrangements. There’s more color here than on Parks’ debut: an amiable golden-hour wash of loose funk, fizzing drum machines, and sleepy boom-bap, plus flickers of the dance music that limn her new nocturnal adventures. The combination works on “Impurities,” a honeymoon-phase reverie that shimmers with the idle glitter of feeling newly comfortable around someone. But this doggedly breezy mode can leave the appealingly conversational Parks floating like driftwood in the shallows, blunting her lyrical immediacy. “Room (Red Wings)” has bars—“Ghosting me hard for a kick/Blowing me up when you need it/My wings are clipped and my head’s in bits” is a perfect summation of the casual cruelty of leaving someone on read—but the sweetly bleary, Frank-as-aesthetic production only outlines the hope of loving someone who always lets you down, not the agony.
That sense of Parks’ sharp lens being diluted is most galling on “Blades.” It’s a dispatch from a party after an argument, where Parks maintains an exhausting vigilance on her girlfriend, and her lover’s traits become all the more arresting to her for how painfully remote they are in the moment: “And you laugh the same/Hand on mouth ‘cause you hate your teeth/And I love your teeth/And I’m scared to speak as I catch a whiff of your rose Diptyque,” she sings in a hesitant yet rapturous run-on. Yet the cirrus-cloud funk and puckish bubbling synths make the song sound less like a heart-in-mouth dispatch than a soundtrack to any old party.
The few deviations from the dreamy production are hit and miss: When Parks reaches for chugging guitar on “Devotion,” the effect is less brazen than boilerplate. (At this point a pop-punk detour seems obligatory for any synth-pop album.) “Pegasus,” a two-step lullaby featuring collaboration magpie Phoebe Bridgers, is a welcome, if extremely sappy, change of pace. “Puppy,” though, tries something totally different: steamy, warped bass straight out of a Jai Paul song and distorted guitar, bringing out the bleakness of Parks’ realization that pain is inevitable.
One highlight reveals what it takes for Parks to keep those feelings at bay. “I’m Sorry” captures a moment of confession: Parks apologizes to a loved one for being distant as she admits, “It’s easier to be numb,” over cool drums and honeyed synths. And yet, she resists that kind of desensitization, noting the smell of “petrol in the air, wisteria and scrambled eggs.” Suddenly the effort behind her alertness to the flashes of beauty and innocence that litter the rest of My Soft Machine—the loose cherries, blue jewels, and flexing deltoids—becomes apparent: the spoils of her hard-won outlook. Parks is a sweet-hearted songwriter obsessed with the alchemy of devotion, how care and touch can make you melt, radiate like a star. Her evocative words still want for that magic touch. | 2023-05-31T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-31T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Transgressive | May 31, 2023 | 6.9 | 1a8df03b-1270-4717-97a5-692da031ff2f | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The nascent pop star attempts to move beyond reggaetón on his latest album, but he never fully commits to any particular direction. | The nascent pop star attempts to move beyond reggaetón on his latest album, but he never fully commits to any particular direction. | Rauw Alejandro: Vice Versa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rauw-alejandro-vice-versa/ | Vice Versa | Much like hip-hop’s turn-of-the-century acceptance into the U.S. pop charts, reggaetón has been fully assimilated with the current Latin pop mainstream. Its cultural impact has been palpable, legitimizing a genre historically pushed to the margins, branded vulgar and low-class by the upper crust of Latin American society. Pop charts freed from gatekeepers in terrestrial radio are now dominated by the reggaetón riddim, so much so that some of its biggest stars make great strides to embrace grittier sounds more in line with the sound’s underground origins. But most artists still feel pressured to stick to the formula, churning out generic reggaetóncitos until they have enough clout to experiment and find their voice.
So for Rauw Alejandro, a nascent pop star with gifts as a singer and dancer surpassing most of his contemporaries—including bellwethers Bad Bunny and J Balvin—the challenge becomes not how to get reggaetón on the charts, but how to get on the charts without making reggaetón. And indeed, while Alejandro dabbled in some new directions on his debut LP Afrodisíaco, much of that record hewed closer to the watered-down reggaetón and trap that dominates the Latin charts. Yet its success has emboldened him to further experiment on his latest LP, Vice Versa, albeit with mixed results.
For better or worse, Vice Versa is presented distinctly in Alejandro’s voice; historically a prolific collaborator, he largely eschews features. Outside of Anitta’s turn on “Brazilera,” the most prominent guest on the record might just be the Daddy Yankee sample on “La Old Skul.” Alejandro is also listed as a producer on five of Vice Versa’s 14 tracks, evidence that his confidence in his own vision extends behind the boards, too.
The most forceful example of this is album opener “Todo De Ti,” his declaration that he is veering from the standard pop formula du jour—the Latin one, at least. And while it’s certainly a surprising direction for a young artist who came up on reggaetón and Trap&B, it’s also somewhat dispiriting that the big tonal shift comes from a track that would sound more at home on the boring half of a Dua Lipa LP, a lifestyle ad in audio form with a saccharine melody that appears to be lifted from Fergie’s biggest hit. “Desenfocao’” feels modeled after the contemporary Weeknd, softening a Michael Jackson-via-Max Martin take on rock music with a slick pop sheen.
This expanded range has also yielded some fascinating results, mostly at the higher tempos. After hinting at an affinity for Euro club music on Afrodisíaco’s “Quimica,” he further experiments here with UK rave and drum’n’bass. “Cosa Guapa” begins innocently enough as a standard pop reggaetón, then teleports to the floor at Fabric; “¿Cuándo Fue?” lulls listeners in with familiar syncopation before dropping them into a vortex of skittering snares and deep, pulsing synthesized bass. It’s the most thrilling moment on the record, an injection of unbridled energy that fades much too quickly.
Unfortunately, most of the actual reggaetón numbers, like the lovers daydream “Nubes,” skew generic and boring. Even “La Old Skul”—a transparent attempt to pay tribute to reggaetón’s roots with a sample of one of its more enduring hits—falls flat, failing to capture any of the irreverent spirit that made the movement so exciting. And while it’s cool that Anitta and Brazil’s baile funk are getting shine on a mainstream pop record, the smooth surface of “Brazilera” betrays much of the wild, frenetic energy that makes that music so appealing.
Vice Versa is ultimately pop experimentation with trepidation; Alejandro wants to expand the palette available to a successful Latin pop star, but seems to believe that change will be slow to come—better to play it safe with some bankable beats, just in case. And it appears to be a shrewd move, business-wise, at least: Vice Versa and “Todo De Ti” debuted at or near the top of several charts, racking up streams in the hundreds of millions. But if he truly wants to help shift the sound of pop music, he’ll have to take a leap of faith.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Sony Music Latin | July 12, 2021 | 7.2 | 1a8e81b0-5ed2-446c-b9b4-3b7ff648fdb9 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The excellent album from the Long Island singer-songwriter Jade Lilitri is sharp and radiant, a massively catchy guitar record about trying to walk the straight and narrow. | The excellent album from the Long Island singer-songwriter Jade Lilitri is sharp and radiant, a massively catchy guitar record about trying to walk the straight and narrow. | Oso Oso: Basking in the Glow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oso-oso-basking-in-the-glow/ | Basking in the Glow | Any cynic can make a resolution to be more positive. It’s another thing to suppress the eye-rolls triggered by all the clichés that come with it—“first things first,” “focus on the good.” This is the challenge Oso Oso frontman Jade Lilitri has taken on—“radically committed to letting the light in”—for his third album, Basking in the Glow. Accordingly, the music is relentless, almost ruthless in its melodic radiance, both a testament to the power of positive thinking and a poignant reminder of its limitations. “Sometimes you do what you feel/Well most times I feel like shit,” he sings on Basking in the Glow’s penultimate track, one that vividly names Lilitri’s white-knuckle grasp on serenity—it’s called “Impossible Game.” You’ve been told “fake it til you make it,” but what if you’ve made it and it still feels fake?
Or, think of Basking in the Glow as Lilitri considering his newfound success and adulation, acting out the anime butterfly meme: “Is this happiness?” Lilitri achieved minor notoriety with the short-lived Long Island emo band State Lines, after which he released his first album as Oso Oso in 2015 to a handful of positive blog reviews and filled in as a second guitarist for the Hotelier in 2016. In order to keep that small-time hustle going, he envisioned a future very similar to his present: living with his parents and saving just enough money to finance his recordings and maybe break even on tour. His breakout album, 2017’s The Yunahon Mixtape, was only called a mixtape because Lilitri couldn’t find a label to release it, so he dropped it on Bandcamp for free. But it achieved the same desired result for any mixtape from an unheralded artist: it created enough buzz to get people to actually pay him to make and play music.
Basking in the Glow appears to follow the M.O. of pop-punk scions Jimmy Eat World on Bleed American, making a “disgustingly catchy and straight-ahead” album as revenge against an industry that was content to ignore them only two years prior. Lilitri has said he’s not fond of the whole dog and pony show of putting out records, but Basking in the Glow has enough potential pop singles to sustain a year-long album roll-out campaign. The melodies were always there for Oso Oso, but here Lilitri achieves the rare feat of making a more maximalist, cinematic album without piling on overdubs, string sections, or convoluted song structures. On the only song that wouldn’t qualify as a radio single, “Intro,” Lilitri reminisces about running his hands through blades of grass and staring at clouds, his words made almost redundant by the kind of dreamy, swelling guitar tones found on early Death Cab for Cutie songs.
Otherwise, Lilitri honors the heightened expectations and trust of his new label, Triple Crown, by embracing his showmanship; “pop” is more of a verb than a genre. The chorus of “Impossible Game” flowers up from a thicket of thorny, minimal guitar lines; the last chorus of “The View” sprints forward from its restrained bridge like a revved-up toy race car; “A Morning Song” and “Wake Up Next to God” have hooks that are both preceded by a split-second break where the guitars drop out. When Lilitri lands on the other side and speeds on, it’s like a little jolt to the chest.
Lilitri’s dedication to concision and coherence doesn’t come at the expense of subtle, sharp songwriting. On the delirious chorus of “The View,” there are certain phrases that he pronounces more clearly and naturally than others. Maybe your ears only catch the words “My eyes lit up when I saw it” or “...everything I wanted” or “...in love with it.” Ostensibly, it’s a song about a crush guided by impulsive infatuation. But dig into the chorus further, and “The View” is Lilitri’s love song to another person’s apathy—looking for “a way out from everything I wanted,” nihilism disguised as Buddhist philosophy.
But as “The View” kneels over for a slight breather during its bridge, Lilitri starts to feel those old wants again, the pull of playing tiny house shows, the songs that only come on at 4 a.m.: “I’m falling into old habits/I’m stepping over the cracks again.” A few minutes later on the title track, he yells, “I hate these songs I sing, this empty drink, do I even give a fuck?” over a glam-rock strut. Otherwise, he’s “making progress in microscopic strides,” “watching optimists drink half-empty cups,” hating how much he misses the one he loves, weighed down by warm memories, dipping only one foot into the lake, each a carefully balanced binary proving either side can only get a temporary upper hand in a never-ending battle.
Similar to Sparklehorse’s Good Morning Spider, Liltiri makes a commitment to becoming a happier man only after emerging from a sea of static on “One Sick Plan.” It’s a complete outlier on a record produced to a glimmering, late-summer brilliance by Mike Sapone, sounding like a demo cassette fished out of a flooded basement. The lyrics read like a directive he wrote to himself at a much younger age, anticipating the self-doubt and cynicism that can creep in when outside validation is scarce. “I see my demise/I feel it coming/I got one sick plan to save me from it,” he sings over harshly strummed, no-fi acoustics, most likely sick in the Long Island skate-kid sense of the word. It’s also the most vulnerable and dewy-eyed love song he’s written under the Oso Oso name: “Don’t stop chasing what you want...I need heaven, I need you/I need your perfect point of you.”
Lilitri repeatedly circles back to the metaphor of a “narrowing road” on Basking in the Glow, one frequently used in 12-step recovery to describe the way people are less likely to swerve towards temptation with time. “So long, hollowed, narrowing road/I think I’m turning back, it’s the only way I know,” is a frightening thing for Lilitri to admit, but “The View” musters every fiber of its being to propel itself towards “Impossible Game”’s brief and beautiful moment of zen - “I got a glimpse of this feeling, I’m trying to stay in that lane,” Lilitri shouts, teeth gritted, clutching the steering wheel, but committed to moving ever forward towards the light, even if it’s one microscopic stride at a time. | 2019-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Triple Crown | August 16, 2019 | 8.3 | 1a8efb13-1ae2-4b19-9154-0e7a36d6fee3 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ |
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