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Luaka Bop’s collection of ’70s rhythmic gospel rarities doesn’t feel like gospel in the traditional sense. These working musicians were deeply entwined with the funky, soulful sounds of their time. | Luaka Bop’s collection of ’70s rhythmic gospel rarities doesn’t feel like gospel in the traditional sense. These working musicians were deeply entwined with the funky, soulful sounds of their time. | Various Artists: The Time for Peace Is Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-the-time-for-peace-is-now/ | The Time for Peace Is Now | Forget the old canard about paying for your Saturday night sins by attending church on Sunday morning. The post-war explosion of recorded music was fuelled by artists transforming gospel music into earthly, earthy pop. Ray Charles built his carnal 1959 breakthrough hit “What’d I Say” on the call and response of a gospel choir, Little Walter changed “This Train”’s call for salvation into an ode to “My Babe,” Sam Cooke turned testimony into sensual pleading. By the time Aretha Franklin ruled the pop and R&B charts in the late 1960s, the open dialogue between gospel, soul, and pop meant even Paul Simon and Paul McCartney were writing songs that were effectively secular spirituals.
The music chronicled on The Time for Peace Is Now, the second volume of Luaka Bop’s World Spirituality Classics series (the first was 2017’s The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda), dates from just after this era, when a mention of Jesus didn’t preclude a single’s appearance on the charts. The Edwin Hawkins Singers blazed this path by taking the jubilant “Oh Happy Day” to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969, but the touchstone for much of The Time for Peace Is Now is the Staple Singers. Recording artists since the late 1950s, the Staple Singers became hitmakers once they signed to Stax, the home of deep Southern soul. “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There” were smash hits in 1971 and 1972, climbing the pop charts by camouflaging their messages of self-betterment and deliverance underneath funky grooves.
Each of the lesser-known acts on The Time for Peace Is Now adopts this aesthetic for their own purpose. They may be singing about Jesus, but the message is soft-pedaled within pleas for peace, love, and understanding, and the churchy origins are obscured by an emphasis on groove and feel. Since the artists on The Time for Peace Is Now recorded for tiny regional labels and never received national attention while they were active, the compilation represents larger trends within gospel and soul; these singers weren’t on the vanguard, they were riding a wave. They recorded when local studios and pressing plants were plentiful, as were professional musicians eager to make a quick buck at a session, so they were able to cut tracks that felt complete.
Nothing on The Time for Peace Is Now seems like outsider art. There isn’t a household name among these 13 artists, but many of the musicians worked regularly on the gospel circuit during the 1970s, when all these recordings were made. The Triumphs gained enough of an audience to play at the inauguration of Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, the Floyd Family Singers opened for Rev. James Cleveland at Madison Square Garden and cut an LP for Savoy, while the Gospel I.Q.’s are said to have recorded for OKeh. Due to bad breaks or distaste for the music industry, these artists receded from view, leaving their recordings to be unearthed by collectors and experts such as Greg Belson, who compiled this set for Luaka Bop.
Belson selected singles and album tracks that illustrate how deeply intertwined these working musicians were with the prevailing funky, soulful sounds of the time. Much of this has to do with the uncredited supporting bands, who evoke the sultry southern grooves emanating from Memphis and Muscle Shoals in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Occasionally, the production gets a little slicker and the rhythms a little heavier, as on the four-on-the-floor disco of “That’s a Sign of the Times” by the Floyd Family Singers. “That’s a Sign of the Times” dates from 1980, making it probably the latest cut here, but it sounds like it could be a few years older—an assessment that can be leveled against any song here. As much as the music on The Time for Peace Is Now sounds like a ’70s period piece, individual trends aren’t always easily identifiable. The Staples Singers are a pervasive influence—“We Got a Race to Run” is by the Staples Jr. Singers, who named themselves in homage to their heroes—and there are echoes of Curtis Mayfield and Gamble & Huff’s Philadelphia International evident in the compilation’s silky guitar runs and velvety vocal harmonies. Occasionally, a song even suggests something outside of soul: The lanky rhythms and swirling organ of “Peace in the Land” by the Gospel I.Q.’s are cousins to the British pub rock bashed out by Nick Lowe and Graham Parker.
The concentration on rhythm and vibe means The Time for Peace Is Now doesn’t feel like gospel music in the traditional sense: the chord changes often are elegant, the harmonies are never as raucous as a church service, and the songs seem to aspire to the crossover achieved by the Edwin Hawkins Singers and the Staple Singers. The spiritual message isn’t overt; it’s tucked away within lyrics that otherwise serve as affirmations and inspirations—sentiments that sought healing in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, assassinations, and the Vietnam War. From a distance, it can sound like soulful pop music, but a closer listen reveals that’s not true. Set aside the celestial lyrics: the songs and production are not quite polished, the musical ideas just slightly too common to stand out. What distinguishes the recordings on The Time for Peace Is Now is how the passion of the singers is tempered by the professionalism of their supporting players. Everybody involved was attempting to appeal to a broad audience: They were converting doubters into believers by playing gospel that could masquerade as pop. | 2019-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Luaka Bop | September 18, 2019 | 8.5 | 1ec436cc-07bd-4dde-96c6-dff57bda4fa5 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
On his second Ruby Suns album, California native and New Zealand-based musician Ryan McPhun dresses his work in global music, nibbling at the edges of unfamiliar sounds as he skillfully creates sunny psych-pop. | On his second Ruby Suns album, California native and New Zealand-based musician Ryan McPhun dresses his work in global music, nibbling at the edges of unfamiliar sounds as he skillfully creates sunny psych-pop. | The Ruby Suns: Sea Lion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11219-sea-lion/ | Sea Lion | The cover art for the Ruby Suns' sophomore disc, Sea Lion, is a fitting allegory for head Sun Ryan McPhun: A boy on an island takes pains to try to costume himself, tangling himself in lights and string, and wearing a feather in his hair and a crown on his head. McPhun's work as the Ruby Suns functions in much the same way: Stationed on New Zealand's North Island, the California native dresses his work in global music, nibbling at the edges of unfamiliar sounds but, ultimately, skillfully creating sunny psych-pop.
The result is an album of environments, both natural and imagined, hinted at by the cover art's pastel Candyland, the collage of African wildlife on the CD insert, and McPhun's tributes to his home state's Mojave desert and Joshua Trees ("Oh, Mojave"). The album's title refers to the colony of animals that sun in the ocean off of California's Highway 1, and on "There Are Birds", co-vocalist Amee Robinson pines for a world where "there are birds and it is calm." A host of animal references doesn't equate to an environmentally conscious album, but Sea Lion takes to heart quaint state park signage: take only pictures, leave only footprints. The Ruby Suns visit the world via an array of global signifiers-- pinging conga drums, field recordings of animals, slight, sunny harmonies-- but as they do, the band sounds genuinely curious and respectfully adoptive rather than calculating or opportunistic.
Sea Lion, therefore, has a fair amount of clutter-- expect comparisons to musically busy peers like Panda Bear or the Russian Futurists, and to the jumbled orchestral experimentation of Olivia Tremor Control-- but the album's building blocks ooze with a homespun grace. Opener "Blue Penguin" rubs the sleep out of its eyes before grinding a dirty acoustic guitar into overdriven tape. The tender horns on "Remember" are reminiscent of the gentle indie rock of Beulah before introducing a coda of warm, looped sighing. "Adventure Tour"'s high-pitched, descending choruses recall Avey Tare. "Tane Mahuta", sung in indigenous Maori, provides the sole link to McPhun's adopted home, but the song's furious strumming and dewy harmonies are straight from power- and African- (think Tabu Ley) pop.
Sea Lion likely will be pegged a great guitar-pop album, but it's more sonically complex than that suggests. Intriguingly, some of its stylistic conceits-- the 4AD hum of "There Are Birds" or the New Order-via-Graceland second half of "Morning Sun"-- are found on both their most straightforward and best pop moments. Meanwhile, the unfortunately titled "It's Mwangi in Front of Me", and the even worse "Kenya Dig It?", provide the record its most abstract, collage-inspired moments. Sea Lion's one constant is its hard-charging positivity; even songs that begin with a slow drizzle ("Ole Rinka") or hesitant atmospherics ("Blue Penguin") end up as paeans to suns or birds or-- most traditionally-- love. Sea Lion's artwork, song titles, and McPhun's background all suggest something pan-global and yet the album shines brightest when it stays closest to its indie rock roots-- a reminder that despite their escapist charms, exploration and travel work best as an accent to the familiarity and comfort of home. | 2008-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2008-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop / Memphis Industries | March 7, 2008 | 8.3 | 1ec83fa7-9dba-4923-8711-82bc0aec3b59 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Arriving a full 10 years after his debut single, Welsh producer Lewis Roberts’ first album is a bravura display of brain-bending editing that’s more concerned with big feelings. | Arriving a full 10 years after his debut single, Welsh producer Lewis Roberts’ first album is a bravura display of brain-bending editing that’s more concerned with big feelings. | Koreless: Agor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/koreless-agor/ | Agor | Koreless’ debut single sounded like the work of someone who’d already been whittling his ideas down for a good long while. Released in 2011, “4D” and its B-side, “MTI,” were elegantly stripped takes on the nebulous style known simply as post-dubstep: The drums were blippy, the wordless vocals cut to digital ribbons. Unlike dubstep, a style predicated on surfeit—bass so deep it sucks up all the oxygen in the room, reverb that blurs the bounds of time—these songs were trim and sinewy, their percussive sounds little more than bright slivers of tone, as though he’d carved them out of the tick-tocking of a digital metronome. The vocal, a sleek montage of hiccups and sighs, felt like an avatar of human expression, as economical as it was elegant: an aria compressed into a handful of digitized brushstrokes.
It would have been easy to assume that Koreless, aka Welsh producer Lewis Roberts, had begun by painting himself into a corner—that there was nowhere to go but bigger. James Blake had already succeeded in making dubstep as weightless as dust motes. The Field had reduced minimal techno to a gossamer scrim of acoustic samples. But Koreless spent the next few years proving his determination to render club music in the language of electron microscopy. With 2012’s “Lost in Tokyo,” 2013’s Yūgen EP, and 2015’s “TT”/“Love,” he kept zooming in further, until the music resembled luminous pinpricks quivering in empty space. That’s not to say it sounded cold: “TT,” in particular, is as warm and lush as anything from the past decade of dance music. It just seems to have been spattered out of a virtual eyedropper of vocal samples, one minuscule pastel dot at a time. Then, as if he had decided that he couldn’t drill down any further, Koreless seemed to disappear from view.
Actually, Roberts was spending his workdays writing and producing for artists like FKA twigs and Rita Ora, when not pushing painstakingly forward with Agor, his debut album, which arrives a full 10 years after his debut single. The first release under his own name in six years, Agor does not bear much trace of Roberts’ dalliances with pop. Instead, it represents a new shift in the old Koreless sound: bigger, fuller, and more enveloping, despite being assembled from tiny fragments. Like one of David Hockney’s Polaroid collages, it is a mosaic that invites you to swim in it.
Roberts has described the album’s creation in Sisyphean terms, calling it a “sickly obsession,” and you can hear his effort in the details. He remains an overwhelmingly technical producer, a virtuoso of the cut-up waveform, and much of Agor amounts to a bravura display of his brain-bending editing. A few interstitial tracks are essentially sketches to show off a particularly nifty textural pattern, like fabric swatches for the ears. “Hance” is built from bright percussive tones halfway between steel pans and pinball flippers, with a rhythm that alternately speeds and slows. A similarly jittery kinetic impulse drives “Frozen,” a Oneohtrix Point Never-style experiment that plays up the disjunct between antiquated harpsichord sounds and the opalescent shimmer of VR. The same sounds and techniques tend to recur across the album, giving it the feel of an interconnected suite. Roberts lavishes most of his attention on the human voice: shaving isolated syllables down to a hair’s breadth, then layering them in sync with equally infinitesimal bits of synth and percussion, so that it feels like you are witnessing the ripple of molecules as they warm and cool.
But the album is less concerned with pixel-sized fireworks than big feelings. Roberts likes to stack his synths in fat, top-heavy clusters that buzz with overtones, and he’s got a knack for the gut-punch chord change. Sometimes the emo goes into overdrive: Things reach an early peak on the two-part “White Picket Fence” and “Act(s),” in which a soaring, wordless soprano invokes Michael Nyman’s soundtrack to The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Here, and in a few other places on the album, Roberts leans a little too hard on the lever marked “pathos”; the sticky-sweet melody feels like a command rather than an invitation. It’s one of the few occasions where he draws his vocal melody out in great, sweeping lines, but his pointillism is more compelling.
Koreless has always taken an ambivalent attitude toward the dancefloor, and nowhere is that more evident than on Agor’s two biggest anthems. Schooled in the choppy syncopations of Robag Wruhme, Lorenzo Senni, and Joy Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo,” “Joy Squad” layers fluttering tones over the album’s sole, exhilarating house beat. Yet this moment of rhythmic abandon lasts less than a minute; the rest of the track’s runtime is given to agonizing build-ups, like a rollercoaster that’s mostly stomach-churning ascent. On “Shellshock,” a barnstorming song in the vein of Sam Barker’s drum-less techno epics, Roberts repeatedly teases a climax, climbing to a peak and then pulling out the rug. He did something similar on a recent remix of Caribou’s “Never Come Back,” turning a poppy highlight from Suddenly into a spine-tingling subversion of expectations. These counterintuitive moments show the extent to which Roberts, in Koreless’ six-year absence, has largely abandoned dance music’s conventions in pursuit of a more elusive payoff. On Agor, that willingness to push himself—combined with all his obsessive effort—yields both visceral thrills and real feeling.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Young | July 9, 2021 | 7.7 | 1ec8d9c5-5265-4279-b8fb-93495b2ce5ea | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Inspired by mainstream pop, the experimental punk trio try their hand at honed hooks and concise riffs. At their best here, they evoke not Bieber and Grande but classic Sleater-Kinney. | Inspired by mainstream pop, the experimental punk trio try their hand at honed hooks and concise riffs. At their best here, they evoke not Bieber and Grande but classic Sleater-Kinney. | Palberta: Palberta5000 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/palberta-palberta5000/ | Palberta5000 | Palberta billed themselves once as “New York’s weirdest.” As anyone who’s heard them beat the Bee Gees to death can testify, they’ve more than earned the title. This wildly experimental punk trio has earned critical comparisons to Captain Beefheart and Can; now, after a near-decade of unstructured punk cacophony, they are “focused on making music that people [can] not only sing along to but get stuck in their heads.” On Palberta5000, they accomplish this latter goal, but only through brute force. This band weakens a series of good-to-great songs by repeating a single lyric, without any variation whatsoever, for two to three minutes. A couple of these will definitely be more fun in the pit, but in the absence of pits and the abundance of lonely living rooms, Palberta5000 can be a slog.
This is a bummer, because there is otherwise a lot to laud on this album. The band’s playing, once sloppy on purpose, is now tight, intense, and all the more impressive because its members switch instruments between tracks. Nina Ryser murders the drums on “Fragile Place,” Anina Ivry-Block deftly lays her bass beneath “Big Bad Want,” and just about any time a guitar solo made me shiver, I checked the credits and found Lily Konigsberg on duty. All three women harmonize throughout the album in excellent vocal arrangements, at once studied and playful. There are some brief, tantalizing glimpses of what an instrument-free Palberta might sound like in “Corner Store” and “All Over My Face,” making me curious about the possibilities of a full-on a capella record.
Other bright spots include the jag of brief songs from “In Again” to “Eggs n’ Bac’”—classic, concise Palberta in damn-near perfect form. “Summer Sun” swoons and shimmers with giddy girl-group intensity, while “Red Antz” brings pretty Top 40 melodies to the band’s conventionally scuzzy sound. The album’s best track is the gorgeous love song “The Cow,” a resonant account of amorous friendship between two women who live in a grey city and yearn for greenery. They’d like, ideally, a cottage and a cow, but for now, flowers shooting up through the sidewalk on a morning-after walk home will have to do. The intimacy here is forgiving, prayerful: “I will be there with my hand on your chest/I feel your rumbling internal mess.”
At their very best on this record, Palberta sound like early, self-titled Sleater-Kinney, not ostensible pop influences Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande. “Big Bad Want,” especially, is a song Corin and Carrie would be proud to have written. It’d be right at home on The Woods, and not just because of its Little Red Riding Hood motif—at least, until Palberta hit the half-minute mark, repeat the lyric, “Yeah, I can’t pretend what I want” at least fifty times, and kill the whole thing dead. They repeat this trick over and over again throughout the album, and the tedium builds from song to song, an exponential diminishment of returns.
In fairness, the end of “Big Bad Want” would probably sound great live, clicking along quickly, building and building as the crowd thrashes. But “Corner Store” and “Fragile Place,” which both consist largely of a single lyric, repeated, are mid-tempo, not engineered for head-banging. Each takes a glittering jewel of a hook, some line that would’ve been a high point in a more complex pop song, and dulls it.
Repetition is, of course, a mainstay of both punk and pop songwriting. But there is a science to it, a subtlety of structure that makes it move rather than annoy. In pianist David Bennett’s great video essay on the enduring appeal of one-note melodies in pop, he explains that artists like Taylor Swift and the Killers use extended repetition of a single musical note to build tension that dissolves (“In the clear yet? Good.”) or disturbs (“But she’s touching his chest”) in a deeply satisfying way once broken. Many stand-out punk songs use repetition to rile a crowd, usually in service of some eventual explosion, or with enough variation in timing and tone to create sonic peaks and valleys. In one track on Titus Andronicus’ Local Business, Patrick Stickles sings absolutely nothing but the words “I’m going insane” for two minutes straight, but his delivery is so erratic, so exuberant, that the song is equally thrilling whether you’re sitting in your bedroom or surfing across a crowd.
In the absence of any of these techniques, Palberta5000 winds up risking monotony. That’s not a word I ever thought I’d deploy to describe Palberta. There is a good album here. The band’s more characteristically brief songs are flawless, but there’s a lesson in this album for punk bands who may want to explore pop: It ain’t as easy as a great hook.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Wharf Cat | January 26, 2021 | 6.8 | 1ed22db3-87e0-4df3-858c-e69f084cf3c8 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Like Burial or James Blake, this producer uses vocal samples to build gorgeous, unsettling post-dubstep; in his case with nods to many sub-genres. | Like Burial or James Blake, this producer uses vocal samples to build gorgeous, unsettling post-dubstep; in his case with nods to many sub-genres. | Pariah: Safehouses EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14683-safehouses-ep/ | Safehouses EP | As far as songwriting is concerned, starting with the vocal melody and working your way from there isn't exactly a novel concept. Regardless, it was a bit of a surprise when Arthur Cayzer, the UK post-dubstepper who works as Pariah, revealed to me that his beat-building process usually begins with a vocal sample: "I find that vocals make it much easier for me to connect emotionally with a tune, so I guess it makes sense that I have taken to using them in almost every tune I've written."
I've never really thought of the genres Cayzer works in as being particularly voice-centered, but maybe it's time for that to change. He counts Burial and James Blake, two like-minded artists who also showcase some sort of prominent vocal style in their work, as influences-- and that influence is definitely apparent to a point on Cayzer's debut EP, Safehouses. Save for the closing title track, all of the cuts here feature vocal samples in some way, whether it be the chopped-up cries within "Crossed Out" or the ghost-in-the-machine moans folded within "Railroad".
Cayzer isn't just an effective imitator, though; he's doing something distinctly different from his peers here in terms of presentation. Burial shrouds his melodies in bomb-shelter lockstep rhythms, while Blake usually turns vocal lines into putty in his hands, amorphously draping them over whatever screwed rhythm he's dumbing out to in his own mind; Cayzer, by contrast, presents his melodies nakedly, with precious few effects applied. This stylistic approach is aided by the pristine production at work here; every rhythmic hit and clapping backbeat sounds crisp and sharp-- almost the polar opposite of the bitrate-blown terror-juke of Werk Discs head Actress' fascinatingly complex release earlier this year, Splazsh.
The most stunning aspect of Safehouses isn't any singular stylistic tic, though: it's the overall sweep of the thing. Cayzer works through a breadth of sub-genres-- the bass music of "The Slump", "Prism"'s whomping acid-house squelch, the digitized hip-hop clap of "C-Beams", and most impressively, the Gas-recalling ambient smother of the title track. That he's able to incorporate so many recognizant signifiers while transcending pastiche is impressive; the fact that he's done so while moving light years away from his breakout single, last year's "Detroit Falls", is astounding. | 2010-09-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-09-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | R&S | September 29, 2010 | 8.2 | 1ed619f6-05e6-48b9-853d-949a4bc8f53f | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
On her Thrill Jockey debut, this Basque multi-instrumentalist ties together political and personal revolutions with atmospheric and even cinematic ballads. | On her Thrill Jockey debut, this Basque multi-instrumentalist ties together political and personal revolutions with atmospheric and even cinematic ballads. | Elena Setién: Another Kind of Revolution | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elena-setien-another-kind-of-revolution/ | Another Kind of Revolution | Americans often romanticize Europe—those short workweeks and stunning landscapes, their accessible health care. What the United States appears to have in youthful spirit, Europe makes up for in art history, afternoon wine, and a sustainable arts ecosystem. But romanticizing any place that consists of so many complex societies strips it of its more textured—and often troubled—history. That’s why songwriters like Spain’s Elena Setién and her Thrill Jockey debut, Another Kind of Revolution, feel so enticing. Revolution—political, personal, environmental—has been a constant for Setién; at their best, these songs show those scars, a reminder that no country is all cobblestones and pastries.
Setién grew up in San Sebastián in Spain’s Basque Country. She was raised during the long conflict between the Spanish government and the Basque National Liberation Movement, where Basque separatists fought for independence. This political turmoil provided the backdrop for an upbringing spent playing piano, then violin. As a young adult, she left Spain for London to study composition and violin. But when Setién began to release solo records, she returned to piano, the core of 2013’s Twelve Sisters, which suggested a more spare, sometimes more romantic take on the early work of Amanda Palmer. After coming home to San Sebastián, Setién recorded 2017’s Dreaming of Earthly Things, a record that now feels like a direct prelude to Revolution. “Your country was no country for a foreigner like me,” she sings at one point, referencing her years abroad, “with all my anger and my misery.”
Another Kind of Revolution is not as overtly political as, say, Hurray for the Riff Raff’s The Navigator, a record that could share a playlist with Revolution. But Setién explores politics by examining her lineage and legacy, digging into the history (both good and bad) that made her who she is. “In this lonely march, we’re marching/We all breathe as we can/And we carry all our sorrows/Every woman and every man,” Setién sings during “Down the Meadow,” a somber tune accented by morose piano and Spanish guitar. “Another Kind of Revolution” is a shimmering tribute to mythical women—it crescendos cinematically into an image of past, present, and future women standing together in solidarity.
Twelve Sisters and Dreaming of Earthly Things depended on Setién’s instrumental talents. But on Another Kind of Revolution, she takes a step forward as a songwriter and arranger. (She also plays every instrument here but guitar and bass synth.) “Window Two (for Sigurd and Albert)” is as whimsical and intimate as a fairytale, with a syncopated melody played on a dreamy Wurlitzer. “Sail Down the River” lets that Wurlitzer twinkle in high octaves, Setién doubling her vocals. “We grow like a tree with roots that remain/Much more endurant than our simple name,” she sings about leaving home but remembering how it shaped you. Her vibrato reflects stories of loss and endurance.
Revolution can get repetitive, with only a handful of tracks building beyond balladry. Pieces like “Old Jamie” and “Window One,” as well as the album’s stunning title track, succeed because Setién makes each song feel as vivid and atmospheric as a film score. But “We See You Shining for a While” and “Far From the Madding Crowd” feel one-note by contrast. Still, it’s clear that Setién is developing as a writer and arranger, so this seems like the start of something more.
Setién closes with “She Was So Fair,” a slower, troubadour-like tale braided by violin. “Years have gone by/She’s still lying on the bottom of the sea,” Setién sings of a forgotten heroine. “Her breath is water-filled/Her lungs repaired/She belongs down there/Lying on the bottom of the sea.” In Setién’s universe, whether the stories are triumphant or tragic, meanings and morals remain elusive. Setién’s particular revolutions might seem unfamiliar or mysterious, but her songwriting invites curious listeners in, adding texture and complexity where we may not have found it ourselves. | 2019-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Thrill Jockey | February 19, 2019 | 7 | 1edfb7bc-2f79-4310-92c9-a619c23701fa | Dayna Evans | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dayna-evans/ | |
Stripping back the gentle folk of last year’s Solid Love, the New York guitarist writes drifting, mostly instrumental songs marked by a profound sense of interiority. | Stripping back the gentle folk of last year’s Solid Love, the New York guitarist writes drifting, mostly instrumental songs marked by a profound sense of interiority. | Adeline Hotel: Good Timing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adeline-hotel-good-timing/ | Good Timing | In the 1983 film Sans Soleil, Chris Marker’s experimental documentary travelogue, a narrator relays a letter from a companion looking to understand “the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.” It feels counterintuitive: How can absence be lined? But the music of Dan Knishkowy’s Adeline Hotel project feels in tune with that idea. On the gentle folk songs of last year’s Solid Love, Knishkowy allowed his voice to sink into the mix, letting lyrics get lost in a tide of guitar and percussion. The effect was to de-emphasize whole images in the service of soft-focus fragments—a trick that feels true to the logic of memory, which only ever crystallizes partially.
Good Timing attempts something similar in a new context. There’s no band here, and almost no singing. These are delicate, tumbling guitar compositions without any fancy manipulation or production. And as Knishkowy strips things down, the music becomes more immediate: A song might build toward a chorus before rejecting it and moving on; melodies spin out of nowhere and settle back down. In their casually improvisational structure, these pieces flow like thoughts.
“Photographic Memory” opens with loose, circular playing that recalls wind and falling leaves; it keeps threatening to arrive at something more songful, but never quite does. “Relate to Joy” is similarly naturalistic, with a back half that’s among the most stunningly orchestrated passages on the album. Knishkowy relishes the give and take between order and chaos: moments of clarity set against a glittering, interstitial tangle.
Knishkowy settled on this solo approach last summer as an antidote to the constraints of an isolated year, and you can hear it in the music. Good Timing rejects the convention that every idea should play itself out, that phrases need to be fully developed before they’re put to rest. When you’re this planted in your own head, not everything needs to make sense.
The title of “Remembering Machines” seems to get at that, too, suggesting that even without lyrics, these songs offer a kind of oblique access to the past. “Blueberry Fingers” borrows its name from the lyrics of a song on Solid Love called “Trace,” and the way in which Knishkowy picks up the emotional thread wordlessly evokes how memories can recur in new forms.
The album’s peak is “Untangling,” which exists somewhere between a campfire and an avant-garde performance space. Bright, spindly textures nod to John Fahey and William Tyler, and right at the midpoint, a hint of conversation bleeds in from the background—the just-perceptible sound of people talking in the distance. It’s a rare moment of physical presence on an album that is otherwise profoundly solitary.
Knishkowy breaks that solitude one more time, on the title track, which contains the album’s only lyric. It’s a single line, repeated over the course of about a minute: “Good timing/When you’re lonely.” Shadowed by guitar and multi-tracked echoes, the words drift and blend together, slowly losing their shape. That energy—the feeling nothing is ever quite set in place—is at the heart of the album. It’s intrinsic to the free-associative thought processes Knishkowy maps out on guitar, and it’s part of why his music amounts to more than just cold etudes. Changeability is more than just a conceit; it’s what keeps these songs alive.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Ruination | February 19, 2021 | 7.7 | 1ee40036-70ba-40d2-9779-ffff9f28f8d4 | Will Gottsegen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-gottsegen/ | |
On their first LP for Sub Pop, the Australian punk rockers Deaf Wish actively fly in the face of adhering to a singular sound. In many ways, Pain can be viewed as a diverse 30-minute history lesson of the last 40 years of proto-punk, punk, and alternative rock music. | On their first LP for Sub Pop, the Australian punk rockers Deaf Wish actively fly in the face of adhering to a singular sound. In many ways, Pain can be viewed as a diverse 30-minute history lesson of the last 40 years of proto-punk, punk, and alternative rock music. | Deaf Wish: Pain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20804-pain/ | Pain | On their first LP for Sub Pop, the Australian punk rockers Deaf Wish fly in the face of adhering to a singular sound. Instead, over 10 highly individualized tracks, the band veers across a diverse spectrum, mixing the avant-garde with the melodic. In some ways, Pain can be considered a 30-minute history lesson of the last 40 years of proto-punk, punk, and alternative rock music.
Despite their relatively low profile, Deaf Wish have been recording and performing music for eight years and seem to have a handle on where their individual strengths lie. As a group, their approach to making music comes off as defiantly democratic, with each member given the opportunity to take hold of the microphone and exert their own measure of control. Considering this approach, it’s amazing how effectively they bring the varying tones and textures together.
On the opener, "The Whip", guitarist Jensen Tjhung steps up with a voice that sounds strikingly similar to Iggy Pop. He guides the band through the plodding funeral procession: over time it builds from a simple two-note riff and multi-layered vocal combination to a full-on hurricane with crashing cymbals and frenetic guitar scratchings fighting against each other to break out into the forefront. (Speaking of Iggy Pop, "The Whip" sounds like it has a fair amount of the song "We Will Fall", from the Stooges' 1969 self-titled debut, mixed into its DNA.)
The pace then accelerates with a one-two follow up of punk rock in the form of "Newness Again" and "They Know". There isn’t that much differentiation between the two songs. Both are played at warp speed and carry a heavy dose of manic anti-solo guitar parts threaded underneath; however, on the first, bassist Nick Pratt spits out vocal lines with a rapid, Johnny Rotten-esque fierceness, while on the latter, guitarist Sarah Hardiman moves the feeling into an opposite direction by bringing a degree of harmony and melody to the tornado of notes. It’s probably the definitive example on Pain of Deaf Wish’s built-in capability to alter the sound and feel of their music with a simple personnel swap.
That’s essentially the playbook for most of the album, with Pratt delivering hypersonic old-school punk rock like on the title track, a song that bears a striking resemblance to the Replacements’ classic "We’re Coming Out", Hardiman adding a measure of airiness like on the Sonic Youth-reminiscent "Sex Witch". Tjhung ties both ends together with a subversive, sneering pop affectation.
The formula holds out until you reach the penultimate track, "Dead Air", which is introduced by Hardiman with the disaffected line "In my heart there is only blood" before the band rages into a six-minute wall of guitar feedback and distortion. It’s an inferno of twisted sounds and whammy bar dive bombs cascading over plodding, melodic bass chord changes with no let up. There’s an urge to skip through it to get to the more traditionally framed album closer, "Calypso", but there’s something indefinably enigmatic about the intense soundscape that makes you weather the assault.
It’s evident that Deaf Wish can adopt just about any sound or style that they want to, and that’s what they seemingly tried to do on Pain. For many other bands, that approach could muddy the waters or create a convoluted listening experience, but this doesn’t happen here. They choose to be themselves—each one of them—and it works. | 2015-07-31T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-07-31T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | July 31, 2015 | 7.6 | 1ee423a6-31bb-4f00-ac78-3bd7b9b5177e | Corbin Reiff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/corbin-reiff/ | null |
On their dark and impressionistic new album, the long-running Southern rock band turns their political anxiety inward. | On their dark and impressionistic new album, the long-running Southern rock band turns their political anxiety inward. | Drive-By Truckers: *The Unraveling * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drive-by-truckers-the-unraveling/ | The Unraveling | Venturing north for his 1964 presidential campaign, Alabama demagogue George Wallace gleefully shocked the intellectuals and hippies by quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s observation that Chicago was “the most segregated city in America.” The Drive-By Truckers abhor their home state’s former governor, but they do share his eye for contradiction. Their 2001 album Southern Rock Opera noted how Wallace ended his life of opportunism courting black voters, theatrically begging forgiveness: “Such is the duality of the Southern thing.” You can hear that duality in so much country music, where passion vies against duty in songs of strained devotion. Instead of reactionary fables, the Truckers have spent their career writing character studies, describing the serpentine routes Southern people cut through capitalism’s wreckage.
The group’s previous record, American Band, arrived alongside the 2016 election, its subjects bluntly topical: “Ramon Casiano” told the story of a Texas teenager murdered in 1931, whose killer later became a border patrol cop and NRA lobbyist. The Unraveling turns political anxiety inwards. The mood of mounting disaster recalls 2008’s Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, perhaps the greatest Drive-By Truckers album—released just after guitarist Jason Isbell left the band, with bassist Shonna Tucker's 2011 departure leaving founding members Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley as the lone remaining songwriters. Aside from opening track “Rosemary with a Bible and a Gun,” which conveys a drifter’s flight with spiraling internal rhymes, there are no lingering portraits here. The new songs move like anguished monologues, probing for a source of horror, as if Hood and Cooley decided that narrative distance would amount to emotional abdication.
The Unraveling takes meticulous care with each mix. From “Rosemary” onwards, the vocals sit a touch lower than usual. Distorted electric washboard blares through “Babies in Cages,” a consuming echo, as Hood writes ICE detention centers into the Book of Revelation: “Standing in the darkness to answer for our sins/Children changing each other’s diapers in a pen.” His first image in “Thoughts and Prayers” is equally unnerving—gruesome stillness hovers over a mass shooting, screens aglow with news of the violence surrounding them. Hood falters after that, mocking the bromides applied to mass murder; there’s a moment of catharsis, some deserved disdain, but he ends up landing halfway between satire and jeremiad, dependent on the same hollowed-out language he criticizes.
A few disarming passages of The Unraveling reconsider the lyrical modes the Truckers have come to lean on. Mike Cooley was always the more conversational singer, an unhurried narrator; “Grievance Merchants” uses that style to expose the psyche of a far-right creep. Acid curdles Cooley’s wry voice as he mutters about “a conspiracy to water down his blood/And it’s all the fault of it, or them, or they.” The final track “Awaiting Resurrection” finds Hood overwhelmed by religious imagery, seeking some glimmer of illumination. He wonders whether he’ll get reincarnated as a dog, a bleak joke worthy of Leonard Cohen, the vaudeville penitent. Nearly nine minutes long, its empty spaces marked only by faint and shadowy instruments, “Awaiting Resurrection” bears little resemblance to the Southern rock that Drive-By Truckers long invoked. Heaven or hell, they each have their house bands—this could be the theme song for purgatory.
Back in 2015, Patterson Hood published an essay in the New York Times Magazine expressing the disgust he felt after seeing people wave the Confederate flag at a Drive-By Truckers concert. He urged them all to burn the old rag: “It is time for the South to—dare I say it?—rise up and show our nation what a beautiful place our region is, and what more it could become.” Condescending northerners would always say that the South needed to become like the rest of the country. George Wallace shocked them again when the 1960s lurched rightwards, piling up votes in some of their own enclaves. You can find a constituency for white identity politics and its gothic resentments all across America. On Southern Rock Opera Hood imagined the Devil, “who is also a Southerner,” brewing up sweet tea for his new tenant George. The Unraveling has the despair of a wish granted hideously wrong.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated when Shonna Tucker left the band. It has been updated to indicate that she left in 2011.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | ATO | February 11, 2020 | 7.1 | 1ee9dc20-2f81-471f-a221-ef889090630e | Chris Randle | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-randle/ | |
Balancing his characteristic humor with newfound vulnerability, Keef’s latest is a worthy capstone to a prolific year in which the Chicago rapper has resurrected his reputation and career. | Balancing his characteristic humor with newfound vulnerability, Keef’s latest is a worthy capstone to a prolific year in which the Chicago rapper has resurrected his reputation and career. | Chief Keef: Dedication | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chief-keef-dedication/ | Dedication | Keith Cozart has been known to the public as Chief Keef since 2012, when his first hit, “I Don’t Like,” vaulted him into the national consciousness. He was 16 years old then, and for many, he was inextricably linked with the crisis of gun violence in his native Chicago. The lightning to the thunder that was “I Don’t Like” was a WorldStar video of a kid excited that Keef, who had been sentenced to house arrest for unlawful use of a weapon, had been released—the first hint of the enthusiasm that would accompany the rapper’s initial rise. But Cozart is 22 now, and in industry terms, his arrival might as well have been a decade ago. His latest full-length, Dedication, is a testament to how much he’s grown—not necessarily as an artist (though that’s there too), but as a person. It’s a worthy capstone to a year in which Keef has released four solid-to-great solo projects, resurrecting his reputation and career.
Keef’s unconstructed approach to rap has earned him ferocious critics, in addition to those who would summarily dismiss him for being simply a bad influence, a media spectacle, or both. In his hometown paper’s good-faith review of his major label debut, Finally Rich, the writer Greg Kot asserted that Keef’s sole innovation had been to appear colder than any other contemporary gangster rapper, and dismissed his mumbled verses as “robotic, deadpan, stoned.” It was a fair assessment, if a stingy one. But five years later, with Keef matured and mellowed, it’s easier to listen to his current music and pick up on the charisma that caused one of his deeply passionate Chicago fans to threaten to beat the hell out of anyone questioning his reputation back in the day.
There are several indications of Keef’s growth on Dedication, but nostalgia is the principal element that unites the record’s grab bag of styles and approaches. It’s everywhere. Glimpses of his school days surface on “Keke Palmer,” where there’s an early reference to blue books; on “Text,” he recalls toting a BB gun in his lunch bag in second grade; and on the fearsome throwback “Glory Bridge,” he’s thinking about how fly he looked at school. In a recent interview, Snoop Dogg asks Keef what he loves the most about being from Chicago. The rapper, who has lived in California for the past several years, thinks for a moment, and then confesses to missing the city in its entirety.
It’s that willingness to admit to vulnerability, to having emotions other than fury, that keeps Dedication interesting throughout. Keef will never be a perfectionist. His verses are not compulsively crafted or alive with brilliant wordplay; they’re compelling mainly for their turns of phrase, for the sudden jokes or changes in perspective. His deadpan sense of humor remains well intact. The second verse of “Told Y’all” includes the immortal line, “Pull up in all white like a Nazi,” and there’s a funny couplet on “Keke Palmer”: “Hopped on yo shit and killed it, like ‘Whose song is this?’/All up in my DM, man, ‘Who mom is this?’” Keef admires Lil Wayne, and while he doesn’t share Weezy’s technical ability, he does share his role model’s gift for the unexpected left turn, the hilarious surprise.
Atlanta’s D. Rich produced more than half the songs on Dedication, with standout turns from StuntMan (“Keke Palmer,” “Text”) and Ness (“Glory Bridge”). In contrast to Thot Breaker and with the exception of the weirdly tender standout “Negro,” the record is decidedly drill, and on the imperial beats for “Mailbox,” “Cook,” “Get It,” and others, Keef teleports back to his old life. But while it’s not quite JAY-Z-on-American-Gangster-style reminiscence, even the more vividly violent songs here feel like they were made at a remove. “I passed the streets with flying colors” he boasts on “Bad,” another highlight, and the past tense is clearly intentional.
Though the record has some weak links, it’s cleverly sequenced to minimize mediocrities. It opens with two fantastic singles, “Ticket” and “Keke Palmer,” and is backloaded with can’t-miss tracks including “Negro,” “Less Speed,” “Kills,” and “Told Y’all.” Along with a couple of appearances from the GBE rapper Tadoe, there are solid features from A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie and Lil Yachty, but they blend in so well that you barely notice how unusual it is for Keef to break with his traditional insularity and collaborate with artists outside his immediate circle. It’s just another sign of his newfound humility, a quality that comes with age—and one that, after this year, should make even the most ferocious anti-Keef partisans willing to give the 22-year-old’s music another chance. | 2017-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Glo Gang / RBC | December 11, 2017 | 7.4 | 1eea9a63-5619-4d00-b0f6-9bd59ba71d78 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
The Rick Rubin-produced 13, featuring Rage Against the Machine/Audioslave drummer Brad Wilk, is the first Black Sabbath album to involve more than two original members since 1983's Ozzy-less Born Again. That it isn't an out-of-touch embarrassment is a surprise. That it's cohesive, engaging, and even fun is a near-shock. | The Rick Rubin-produced 13, featuring Rage Against the Machine/Audioslave drummer Brad Wilk, is the first Black Sabbath album to involve more than two original members since 1983's Ozzy-less Born Again. That it isn't an out-of-touch embarrassment is a surprise. That it's cohesive, engaging, and even fun is a near-shock. | Black Sabbath: 13 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18165-black-sabbath-13/ | 13 | The current Black Sabbath reunion has been star-crossed almost from the start. Original members Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward staged a splashy press conference in November 2011 to announce a tour and a Rick Rubin-produced album, but the mood quickly soured. Subsequent months brought a lymphoma diagnosis for guitarist and sole consistent member Iommi, a contract dispute involving drummer Ward, high-profile gigs with a fill-in behind the kit, and, finally, the eyebrow-raising news that the comeback LP-- the first full studio record to involve more than two members of Sabbath 1.0 since 1983's Ozzy-less Born Again-- would feature Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave drummer Brad Wilk. The peanut gallery snarked; fans despaired.
That 13 isn't an out-of-touch embarrassment is a surprise. That it's cohesive, engaging, and even fun is a near-shock. As with most Rubin ventures, the goal from the outset was to help the band recapture their original mojo, the chemistry that made their initial 1970-78 run so brilliant. Does 13 measure up to classics such as Paranoid and Vol. 4? Of course not. No amount of good intention could recapture the black magic of the band's narcotically enhanced glory days, and while Wilk's performance is sturdy enough, no sub could eclipse Ward, one of the most distinctive rock drummers of the last 40 years and the engine behind Sabbath's signature sludge-blues cadences. But 13 does offer many of the primal joys that helped immortalize Sabbath in the first place, while documenting the spark that still unites Osbourne, Iommi, and Butler, all three of whom sound about as vital here as anyone could've hoped.
The record's greatest strength is how well it captures the apocalyptic trudge that Sabbath nailed from the very first downbeat of their 1970 debut. The doomy passages in the first two tracks, "End of the Beginning" and "God Is Dead?", sound stupendously heavy. This isn't just a result of 13's raw production values; it's also that the band is clearly grasping for the same dire emotions (soul-deep malaise, reaper-fearing horror) that fueled their early work, emotions that from the mid-'80s on-- as Iommi carried on under the Sabbath banner with a Wiki-nightmare's worth of collaborators-- have shared album space with less weighty, more pedestrian hard rock. As Iommi, Butler, and Wilk lurch through the titanic riff of "End of the Beginning", with Ozzy sneering, "Reeeeeee-animation of the sequence," it's clear that a legacy is being reclaimed. Osbourne, for one, may have squandered any remaining mystique when he opted for reality-TV stardom, but he proves here that he still wields an eerie power at the mic.
The album doesn't fixate on crawling gloom. Early Sabbath is often portrayed as monolithic, but the band's 1970-78 discography was as eclectic in its way as the canons of the Beatles or Zeppelin. On 13, the band salutes fans with obvious allusions to some of their early outside-the-box classics: sassy midtempo groover "Loner" and the faintly cheesy yet improbably moving ballad "Zeitgeist" recall "N.I.B." and "Planet Caravan", respectively. And the sliding-panel, multi-movement structures of "Age of Reason" and "End of the Beginning" serve as a reminder that the original Sabbath explored their own outlandish brand of progressive rock on later LPs such as 1975's Sabotage. Aside from "God Is Dead?", with its plodding, laborious verses, the album's many long tracks feel brisk and hooky.
As sturdy as 13's songs are, the album's signature feature might be its pervasive jamminess. Sabbath were never much for the drawn-out grandstanding of Zeppelin, but they did begin life as a blues band on the nightly grind. The group flaunts those roots constantly on 13, in the process spotlighting the partnership that's always been Sabbath's heart and soul: the Iommi/Butler tandem. During triumphant instrumental breakdowns in "End of the Beginning" and "God Is Dead?", the guitarist and bassist braid together like a heavy-metal Garcia and Lesh, forming a single mercurial mass. Iommi indulges in his share of well-deserved guitar-heroism throughout the record-- most notably on the exuberantly bluesy "Damaged Soul"-- but with Butler shadowing him, these so-called solos feel more like hive-mind communions. It doesn't hurt that the bass tone on 13 is extraordinary-- one of the fattest and most gut-churning that Butler has achieved on record.
Offsetting that blood-brother harmony is the odd man out behind the kit. The stiff unaccompanied drum intro to "Age of Reason" is just one of many reminders here that Wilk comes from an entirely different school, not to mention generation, than his collaborators. While Rage Against the Machine owed Iommi a significant debt in the riff department, that band's rhythmic orientation had far more to do with crisp funk than blues-based hard rock. (To find a truly sympathetic sub for 13, Rubin and the band might have looked to the contemporary doom-metal demimonde, home of drummers like Eyehategod's Joey LaCaze, who specialize in the grimy ooze that powered early Sabbath.) Often, as on the triplet-feel verse section of "Live Forever", Wilk sounds like he's trying hard not to mess up. And he doesn't, exactly, but something is lost in the effort. Bill Ward's genius was that he never seemed to care about meeting an objective standard of precision. The early Sabbath drum tracks are riddled with what could technically be described as flubs; they also feature some of the most exhilaratingly earthy percussion rock'n'roll has ever seen.
To be fair, Wilk's appearance was always framed as a sideman gig. (The press materials for 13 diplomatically state that the band were "joined at the sessions" by the drummer.) And there are moments, such as on the sinister strut that opens "Dear Father", where Wilk achieves a real chemistry with his elders. Details aside, though, Ward's absence from 13 shouldn't be glossed over. His shaggy, intuitive swing may have been less commanding than the brontosaurus whomp of John Bonham, but it was no less integral to his band's signature sound. Sabbath has at times weathered their countless personnel shifts gracefully; for example, the lineup featuring late vocal great Ronnie James Dio, eventually billed under the name Heaven & Hell, attained its own special brand of dark majesty. Yet the fact that a full-on original-members reunion was promised and then retracted lends 13 a whiff of the consolation prize.
In the end, 13 isn't what every Sabbath die-hard dreamed it might be: a true pick-up-where-they-left-off comeback for the group's founding quartet. But the record does belong in the view of every metalhead-- not just because such a seminal band still deserves obligatory props, but because, imperfections aside, the record embodies the kernel of the original Sabbath idea. That chilling crawl, that low-slung death-blues groove that seemed to come out of nowhere back in 1970, persists here in all its ominous potency, sounding out like an admonition of a genre that's grown increasingly overcalculated and gridlike during the ensuing 40 years, trading tortured humanity for robotic precision. Though fans may resent Black Sabbath for not resolving their personal differences more gracefully, one can't deny the pull of that existential outcry as channeled into what we now know as heavy metal. Their frames might be rusted, but these iron men still walk. | 2013-06-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-06-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Vertigo / Republic | June 10, 2013 | 7 | 1eec3bf1-c3a1-49b9-8927-e56ae33f3c45 | Hank Shteamer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hank-shteamer/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a surreal, transcendental work by a giant of the American avant-garde. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a surreal, transcendental work by a giant of the American avant-garde. | Robert Ashley: Private Parts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/robert-ashley-private-parts/ | Private Parts | Robert Ashley’s Private Parts has a plot, but you wouldn’t know it. The 1978 LP, which would later serve as the foundation for the composer’s seven-part televised opera Perfect Lives, discusses at length the inner workings of two characters, a man and a woman, anonymous to us and perhaps even to each other. Words flood its 40-plus minute runtime, circling meaning but never arriving at a conclusion. What’s explored by Ashley, in his drawling monologues, seems to be everything that isn’t happening—an inversion that slinks and dances among the shadows. We are privy to his subjects’ fidgety obsessions, tics of behavior, heady ruminations and psychic detritus, but narrative, insight, or meaning remain as elusive as a not-quite-remembered dream. Private Parts is built on emptiness. It is startling just how riveting that emptiness can be.
Ashley was famous for his voice, an unhurried and boldly confident mumble; Private Parts was, in a way, his vocal debut. A few years prior, the composer had released the In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women, in which his speech is modulated and sliced up to dizzying effect, but on Private Parts, he assumed a role he would reprise for the rest of his career: the bemused and louche narrator of the cosmic-sardonic. Already in his late 40s, Ashely had kept active throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s directing the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, organizing the ONCE Festival of New Music in Ann Arbor, and collaborating with fellow unclassifiables Alvin Lucier, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma in the Sonic Arts Union. However, his recorded output was scarce and, for many, alienatingly confrontational. A rare 1968 release of “The Wolfman” is a quarter hour of migraine-mimicking din, while 1972’s landmark “Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon” describes ambiguously consensual oral sex with the thousand-yard stare delivery of a trauma survivor.
In Private Parts, however, Ashley discovered his true calling. These earlier punkish outings were notable, but the development of his televised opera spurred his creativity to unprecedented heights. Most of his work that followed—not only Perfect Lives but 1979’s Automatic Writing, 1985’s Atalanta (Acts of God), 1998’s Your Money My Life Goodbye—would build on the foundation laid by Private Parts. It was uncharted territory, and Ashley seized on the idea an entirely new form. “I put pieces in television format because I believe that’s really the only possibility for music,” he said in an interview. “We don’t have any tradition… We stay at home and watch television.” That his works traded in a kind of surrealism which would fly over the heads of all but the most dedicated audiences seemed not to bother him. “American television people are stupid,” he commented bluntly.
The album is structured into two episode-length pieces. At just over 20 minutes each—presumably, he was anticipating commercial breaks—there are still no suitably satisfying points at which to pause. Ashley is liberal, or perhaps literal, with the idea of opera. If an opera requires a theatrical setting, high drama, and rafters-directed singing, he doesn’t come close. But if it’s a medium built on a mixture of music, characters, spoken word, singing, set design, well, what else could it be?
Besides, the semantic nitpicking is rendered moot once you hear the music. It all comes back to that drawl. Ashley’s opera sounds like a stoned burnout reading the phone book, and yet it’s mesmerizing. Backed by the winding keyboard runs of avant-garde composer “Blue” Gene Tyranny and surname-shirking Kris’ percolating tabla, the anti-narrative of Private Parts exudes a steady gravitational pull. Small clusters of lines might suggest a direction, but Ashley keeps dodging any linear path.
On the A-side, “The Park” opens with the man: “He took himself seriously. Motel rooms had lost their punch for him. He opened up his bags.” We could be in the moody opening of a noir film. Then comes this detail: “There were two and inside those two, there were two more.” Already the looping, loping syntax trips us up, moving the story forward just vaguely enough that it starts to slip away. Perhaps Ashley was offering consolation for the rabbit hole to come with the next obfuscating line: “It’s not an easy situation. But there was something like abandon in the air.”
What the hell is happening? And what, if anything, is going to happen next? You sense clarity around the corner, that at any moment he will pull together the pile-up of disparate thoughts. But if he ever gets around to it, the lulling monotony of his delivery makes it almost certain you’ll miss the reveal. In the background, the keyboards float aimlessly while the tabla putters away—everything simmers, neither climactic nor cooling. The feel is closest to a spectacularly off-kilter lounge act, or of elevator music made by DMT enthusiasts.
Parallels can be found scattered across the post-war new music scene: John Cage’s text pieces like “Lecture on Nothing” certainly laid a groundwork, offering a template for good-natured, cerebral pranksterism. Ashley’s technique of writing vocal parts around the patterns of everyday speech echoes the early tape pieces of Steve Reich and the murmuring Greek chorus in Philip Glass’ “Einstein on the Beach” (ditto for his emphasis on trance-inducing musical structures). But Ashley had a balmy aesthetic all his own—his strangeness, though more extreme in many ways than his forebears, also seemed more relaxed.
Tyranny and Kris do as much of the legwork as Ashley by avoiding the traditional gestures of experimental music. (Ashley famously rejected the term experimental music outright, despite his associations with it. “Composition is anything but experimental,” he wrote. “It is the epitome of expertise.”) You might expect them to shade his prose with ominous clouds of dissonance, perhaps following his phrases with tightly orchestrated accents of free improv-inspired thwacks and skronks. Instead, they evoke the uncanny by keeping things bucolic and harmonious. Like a faucet left on, they just go, pouring out notes and phrases without end. They lean into new age’s welcoming eddies, yet there are trace amounts of menace detectable in their accompaniment. It’s not in the notes they play so much as the alien quality in the way they play them. Imagine a primitive algorithm attempting to emulate easy listening, droning on for no one in particular for hours on end.
It would be difficult for first or fifth-time listeners to distinguish between the A and B-sides in a blind listening test. Both move with the same placid stoicism, never giving the game away. Yet something about the B-side’s “The Backyard” hits just a little harder. Maybe it’s the lists, calculations, and appraisals. Starting with a meditative scan of the subject’s consciousness, Ashley then catalogs things she never thinks about, what she does, doesn’t do, and how her mind moves and operates (sort of). One of the most entrancing moments is built around the assertion that “Forty-two or forty and twenty is always sixty-two or sixty” which opens a chasm of price points and arithmetic that hooks into your brain and won’t let go. Why does the idea that “fourteen dollars and twenty-eight cents is more attractive than fourteen dollars” leap out from this miasma? Ashley answers immediately: “It’s just that way.”
If this all sounds maddeningly opaque, it is. But its strangeness is matched only by its visceral impact, and you can hear its effect on a generation of avant-garde seekers: Laurie Anderson’s deadpan excisions of American life owe a debt, while Throbbing Gristle’s “Hamburger Lady” from the same year feels like a scorched earth counterpart. The entire no wave scene, only a year or two behind Private Parts, reveled in a similar collision of high-art seriousness and low-brow shoddiness, while Brian Eno would tread the related terrain of surreal, syrupy American with David Byrne on the Talking Heads’ 1980 album Remain in Light and the pair’s 1981 collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
I’m not sure there’s an “ah-ha!” moment that the cleverest listeners are privy to. Close readings and intensive analyses of the larger piece Perfect Lives only reveal how impenetrable it really is. Reaching for an authoritative understanding might trace a structure and story, but the story that Private Parts would eventually belong to sits back at a mirage-like distance, and, according to Ashley, is built out of fragments, “some of which make sense, and others not so much.” It stands cooly unfettered, revealing almost nothing yet offering so much to parse through. Ashley himself once described modern life as “a blizzard of nuance, so dense that the main form is lost.” That sounds about right.
But another quote sticks out. Writing about the opera’s origin, fellow composer Alvin Lucier tells of a night drive through Ohio with Ashley, his account hinting at the dreamy infinity contained in the album. Stopping at a roadhouse, they came upon a group. “There was a row of men and women sitting at the bar talking to each other very seriously. It seemed to me that none of the occupants was married because they were having such interesting conversations… When we stopped at the same roadhouse on our way back, the scene was exactly the same. Here were these lives going on and on. It felt timeless.” | 2019-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Lovely | January 27, 2019 | 8.8 | 1eed7082-4cb3-45ab-bbfd-0c6efe16df6b | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
French Montana is poised to end 2012 as one of the year's hottest rappers. Mac & Cheese 3, featuring Diddy, Fat Joe, Rick Ross, Prodigy, Trina, Fabolous, Mac Miller, Wale, and others, is his most high-profile mixtape to date. | French Montana is poised to end 2012 as one of the year's hottest rappers. Mac & Cheese 3, featuring Diddy, Fat Joe, Rick Ross, Prodigy, Trina, Fabolous, Mac Miller, Wale, and others, is his most high-profile mixtape to date. | French Montana: Mac & Cheese 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17466-mac-cheese-3/ | Mac & Cheese 3 | Any way you slice it, French Montana is poised to end 2012 as one of the year's hottest rappers. (See "Pop That", the etymology of "fanute," "Stay Schemin'", sharing his "Versace silk swag" with the offices of GQ.) But I still have no idea what a great French Montana song sounds like. Don't get me wrong, I'm responsible for more than a few of the 25 million YouTube views granted to "Pop That". But much like his mentor Max B, French Montana's qualities as a rapper-- a marble-mouthed, sing-song flow that toggles between clear-eyed observation and heavy-lidded confession-- hardly translate on paper or in a boardroom. At this point he has more record deals than actual records, so the question remains: "What do you do with this guy?" Mac & Cheese 3 is French Montana's most high-profile mixtape to date and proof that no one else really seems to know the answer.
Or, that the answer is "everything." The roster of Mac & Cheese 3 is astounding on multiple levels, the first of which is that it would be utterly absurd even on a record that needed to justify the $9.99 expenditure. It might be the most heavily A&R'ed mixtape ever made. There really is no precedent for this mumble-goes-mainstream sort of blockbuster, at least not until the Duplass brothers get to direct the next Die Hard movie or something. What really stands out above all is how it assumes that French Montana is either the most malleable rapper alive or that he simply does not matter.
Witness him trading bars with past-their-prime NYC rappers like Fat Joe, Prodigy, and Fabolous, who says "teach me how to Douglas" on "Dance Move", an event that should not go undocumented. Or, maybe he's more of a XXL Freshman 10 type, so here's some Mac Miller, Tyga, and Wale features! Or, hey, we're getting the Bad Boy band back together! Not quite, Diddy and Ma$e show up separately and the latter appears promising to bring you "soup and orange juice if you’re really sick" on a track that borders on condoning sexual assault ("Grownups"). Another event that should not go undocumented. Or maybe French is a Slip-N-Slide rapper! Rick Ross would've shown up regardless, but Trina ends up stealing the show on "Tic Toc", partly because she contributes an awesome verse, partly because she adds contrast to a mixtape whose depressing sexual politics suggests that "Pop That"'s views on women were its biggest selling point.
"Ocho Cinco" sets the tone in terms of its features and its deadening misogyny. The second track on Mac & Cheese 3 features the following: perpetually ignored NYC mixtape space-filler Red Café, Everlast/Yelawolf hybrid MGK, Chief Keef producer Young Chop, and Diddy, who has apparently signed several of these guys. What exactly could unify this crew? Here's the group chant of a hook: "Told that bitch give me head, Ocho Cinco!" I mean, I've heard worse and having seen just enough SportsCenter and Real Housewives of Atlanta, I get the joke. It's still a joke that uses an episode of domestic violence as a means of demanding oral sex. "Ocho Cinco" is then followed by a skit which is 30 seconds of minor variations on threats to "beat my baby moms up" for listening to a French Montana tape. Needless to say, it's played for laughs.
Weirdly, through all of this, French remains kinda likeable if not remotely admirable. For all of its repulsiveness, "Pop That" felt more like the talk of a high school locker room than a conversation between high rollers in bottle service and, at its best, Mac & Cheese 3 retains that giddy vulgarity. Though he's obviously a spiritual descendent of Max B, I tend to hear Gucci Mane in how his slack delivery can obscure his clever wordplay or Noreaga in that his generally knucklehead demeanor can make the occasional but very real instances of resonance feel like they've been created against their own will.
And you have to at least appreciate the wealth of production here. Harry Fraud gave French his first solo hit ("Shot Caller") and is something of a kindred spirit in that he's a similarly hot name without an identifiable "trick." On Mac & Cheese 3, his uptempo, soul-infused beats prove to be complementary, utilizing recognizable samples ranging from Florence & the Machine ("Intro") to the original source material of Jay-Z's "D'evils" ("State of Mind") and Ice Cube's "Today Was a Good Day" ("Triple Double"). But once again, overzealous matchmaking sinks Mac & Cheese; access to a couple of Young Chop beats would be an unquestionable coup for French Montana if he actually sounded at home on them. As is, it's strange to hear a grown man following what were likely instructions to sound as much like Chief Keef as possible, and the only real difference between "Love Sosa" and "Devil Want My Soul" is that the latter is a minute and a half longer.
And trust, Mac & Cheese 3 did not need any sort of extra padding. If its fantasy football approach to team building is a remnant of the cash-flush late 90s, its CD-maxing length is as well, yet Mac & Cheese 3 never settles into a groove. French Montana simply blends in and is only as entertaining as his surroundings. When J. Cole turns up with a surprisingly slick verse and Rick Ross demands that his kids see him buried like a pharaoh, "Diamonds" makes the ridiculous enterprise seem worthwhile. When immeasurably duller guys like Ace Hood and Chinx Drugs and Mac Miller show up, Mac & Cheese 3 feels like it might never end. Even after spending more than an hour with a French Montana mixtape, you get no closer to figuring out what to do with him. It's appropriate he's so closely associated with a made up word-- like "fanute" French remains ill-defined, and you sorta just know when it's being used correctly. | 2012-11-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-11-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Coke Boys | November 29, 2012 | 5.4 | 1efaae5c-4f8c-49ac-85c9-a6b5dab4c265 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Fueled by controlled fury and unfathomable sorrow, Camae Ayewa’s latest album of Afrofuturist collage traces the traumatic legacy of European colonialism. | Fueled by controlled fury and unfathomable sorrow, Camae Ayewa’s latest album of Afrofuturist collage traces the traumatic legacy of European colonialism. | Moor Mother: The Great Bailout | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moor-mother-the-great-bailout/ | The Great Bailout | Across eight albums, Moor Mother—aka Camae Ayewa—has bore witness to history’s sins, threading connections between past, present, and future in a sensory overload fusing industrial noise, “witch rap,” and free jazz. “Going to see Emmett Till out his casket/Beaten to death with a hatchet/For whistlin’ at white girls,” she rapped on 2016’s Fetish Bones. On 2020’s Circuit City, she traced the racial disparities fueling the housing crisis. And on 2022’s Jazz Codes, she documented the erasure of Black genres in an attempt to rescue them from institutional amnesia.
On The Great Bailout, Moor Mother interrogates the knotty relationship between Europe and Africa, confronting the enduring legacy of colonialism. Journeying back to the 19th century, she shines a spotlight on Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833—a perverse form of reparations that compensated former slave owners, to the tune of £20 million. The enslaved people in the British Caribbean received nothing; rather, they were subjected to a four-year transition period, during which they were forced to work without pay. The Guardian called it “the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009”. Funded by British taxpayers across generations, the debt was only repaid in 2015.
By grounding The Great Bailout in the bedrock of British colonialism, Ayewa unearths an overlooked narrative of slavery, one often eclipsed by tales of American enslavement. Simultaneously, she connects the dispersed voices of the African diaspora by mapping out the far-reaching echoes of European imperialism, and joining forces with peers like British Iraqi soprano Alya Al-Sultani. Lines like “Who’s without citizenship?” and “Who’s still burning?” offer reminders of history’s grip on today’s crises, whether in Palestine, Sudan, or along the the Mexican-American border.
Unfathomable sorrow and controlled fury give the album its shape. On the opening “GUILTY,” Lonnie Holley sings over Raia Was’ siren calls, “We watched the slave ships being unloaded,” as harpist Mary Lattimore plucks out gossamer melodies; Moor Mother’s voice rises in the mix, whispering “Guilty, guilty,” before turning to an accusation: “Paying the crimes off/Did you pay off the trauma?” Built from sputtering drum machines, jazz horns, and queasy electronic tones, The Great Bailout is a disorienting hall of mirrors with no exit in sight. Every uneven loop and distorted blast amplifies the feeling of being trapped in a Dutch angle. Much like Moor Mother’s Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, The Great Bailout revels in discomfort. “ALL THE MONEY” suggests an illbient take on a Jordan Peele thriller, and the glitch-corrupted “LIVERPOOL WINS,” co-produced with Wolf Eyes’ Aaron Dilloway, feels like waking into a nightmare.
The journey through “COMPENSATED EMANCIPATION,” co-produced with noise musician C. Spencer Yeh, is particularly jarring. Gravelly drones conjure dystopian atmospheres shot through with Kyle Kidd’s gospel cries. “At any moment, they’ll be coming around,” Moor Mother hisses, oscillating between rage and panic, before a choking silence gives way to the opening chimes of “DEATH BY LONGITUDE.” The penultimate track, “SOUTH SEA,” serves as a purging ritual. Amid the mournful, wordless singing of Angel Bat Dawid and Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty, Moor Mother intones a meditation on history and suffering. She evokes the image of slave ships, of institutionalized death, of cruelty beyond measure. “We in the present are constantly injecting ourselves into the past,” she says, her voice firm and unforgiving. “The gaze of history shapes it. Crystallizes it. Collapses it upon the linear timeline. How do we keep ourselves tethered to the narrative? When and where do the ancestors speak for themselves?” The Great Bailout does not pose answers to those questions, but by asking them, it keeps history alive, and reclaims liberation from the slaveholders and their descendants, whose legacy ties itself up in knots to evade accountability. | 2024-03-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Anti- | March 14, 2024 | 7.8 | 1eff0858-c68f-4cb1-9219-1abe2f488cf2 | Boutayna Chokrane | https://pitchfork.com/staff/boutayna-chokrane/ | |
null | Forget about the records for a second. You know them, and you know they're amazing. What I want to ask is this: Is there any other artist in the world who isn't dead, 25 years past their prime, or bankrupt that has released, re-released, re-mastered, re-issued, re-packaged, re-bundled and re-offended more than Björk? It's ridiculous, it really is. But it's not until you trundle through the pages and pages of her back catalog that you realize just how brazen she's been. Back when people still bought CD singles, she was one of the worst offenders; not content with being a | Björk: Surrounded | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9250-surrounded/ | Surrounded | Forget about the records for a second. You know them, and you know they're amazing. What I want to ask is this: Is there any other artist in the world who isn't dead, 25 years past their prime, or bankrupt that has released, re-released, re-mastered, re-issued, re-packaged, re-bundled and re-offended more than Björk? It's ridiculous, it really is. But it's not until you trundle through the pages and pages of her back catalog that you realize just how brazen she's been. Back when people still bought CD singles, she was one of the worst offenders; not content with being a proponent of the standard two-part CD5 set (remember those?), she'd frequently roll out triple-disc releases, and issue them in packaging purposely made to feel incomplete unless you had them all. Then, inevitably, three months later she'd release a Ugandan Maxi-EP of the same single with most (but not all) of those B-sides plus a rare Fluke/Alec Empire/Mark Bell re-edit and it'd be robbery with a smile all over again. It would have been faster just to burn my money.
In this decade, Björk's release schedule has ballooned from excessive to patently opportunistic. Since 2000, she's augmented her usual stream of full-lengths, CD singles, DVD singles, 12" singles, bobbleheads, pudding spoons, and pogs with (deep breath): the Cambridge, MTV Unplugged and Live at Shepherd's Bush DVDs; the Inside Björk documentary DVD; four separate live CDs spanning Debut, Post, Homogenic, and Vespertine; the Vessel, Later With Jools Holland, and Miniscule DVDs; three additional iterations of her 1999 video omnibus Volumen (Volumen+, Greatest Hits: Volumen 1993-2003, and Volumen II); Livebox, a repackaging of those four aforementioned live CDs with a bonus DVD thrown in for kicks; the Live at Royal Opera House DVD; the 6xCD Family Tree box, which contained a sum total of 90 minutes of rare and unreleased material spread out across five mini 3" CDs as well as a best-of compilation; a single-disc Greatest Hits compilation with a completely different tracklisting; the Medulla Videos DVD; a Medulla documentary DVD; the Live DVD Archives and Live Television DVD Archives boxes and, probably the piece de resistance and ultimate harbinger of her total and utter lack of quality control, the 20-track Army Of Me: Remixes and Covers, on which Patrick Wolf and 19 musicians you've never heard of offered their unique and highly fast-forwardable interpretations of "Army of Me". That's right. One CD with the same song 20 times in a row. (It sold at full price.)
Where to go from there? Surely not into hiatus-- not when there's royalties to be made. Instead we get Surrounded, a 7xCD box containing DualDisc remasters of each Björk full-length. Don't get too excited: The remasters don't extend to the regular CD audio portions of each disc (which are heard here exactly as they are on their original pressings), but rather, to new Dolby 5.1 and DTS Surround Sound mixes. Then, presumably in an effort to further infuriate those who've dropped a small fortune on the Volumens, Björk's gone and parceled all her videos across the DVD portions of each album as well. What you end up with are seven full-lengths containing CD mixes, 5.1 mixes and videos from each era. And since Vespertine and Medulla have previously been released in 5.1 iterations, not even the surround stuff is entirely new.
One last thing about Surrounded merits mention: It is, of course, packaged beautifully. Like most of Björk's stuff, there's a real fetishization of the physical artifact at play here. That makes sense: If you're going to cash in on variations on a theme, you may as well elevate those variations to the stuff of high art. If the Ramones were the ultimate working-class band, Björk's the ultimate art director's crush. But despite the presentation, do you really need to drop $100 on this? Probably not. And even if you did, you'd kick yourself for it eventually, 'cause she's pretty much guaranteed to come back with another one that's bigger and better in a few years' time anyway. Built in obsolence-- it's not just for hardware anymore. And they wonder why people stopped buying CDs. | 2006-07-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-07-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Rhino | July 25, 2006 | 5.9 | 1f07b657-6811-4b98-828c-89f74e07e893 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
The scrappy indie-punk band reissues its beloved and long-out-of-print first album. | The scrappy indie-punk band reissues its beloved and long-out-of-print first album. | Remember Sports: Sunchokes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/remember-sports-sunchokes/ | Sunchokes | Had Carmen Perry known her haphazardly formed rock band was fated to gain widespread attention, she might’ve chosen a better name than Sports. The quartet quietly self-released their debut full-length, Sunchokes, just for the hell of it; this was 2014, when Perry and her bandmates Catherine Dwyer, Benji Dossetter, and James Karlin were all still enrolled at their liberal arts college in Ohio. They expected little more from the album than a time capsule to share with friends, but instead, Sunchokes spread by word of mouth until it caught the ear of Father/Daughter, the label that would release Sports’ next album, All of Something, a year later. But that celebratory moment ended up being anticlimactic: Sports broke up shortly after. Dossetter pursued medical school and Karlin relocated to Arizona, while Perry and Dwyer moved to Philadelphia together. Sports never toured All of Something, and had no plans to make music together ever again.
That is, until last year, when Sports returned with a new lineup, a new album, and new name to differentiate them from the Oklahoma synth-pop trio they were often mistaken for. Slow Buzz marked the first record for Remember Sports as they exist today, with their current lineup of Perry, Dwyer, guitarist Jack Washburn, and drummer Connor Perry. The updated name pokes fun at the band’s jinxed past, but it has a new resonance now that Father/Daughter has reissued a remastered deluxe edition of Sunchokes to commemorate its fifth anniversary. It’s a timestamp to testify how far Remember Sports have come, but also a salute to their beginnings that made them beloved in the first place.
Remember Sports make punky indie pop, combining scrappy guitar shredding with Perry’s brazen vocals, which often border on flat-out yelling. They’re most immediately reminiscent of Camp Cope’s Georgia McDonald, fiercely evocative and angrily bereft. Sunchokes showed her in a more lovelorn place: “I’m always wishing you good luck when you’re gone/And I keep trying to fit in with you where I don’t belong,” she admits on “When Morning Comes.” “When did you stop missing me?” she inquires on “Liked You Best,” before confessing that it took “three long years” to stop missing her subject on the title track. She’s self-deprecating, calling herself a jerk and arguing that she’s not worth getting attached to, but even her most crude put-downs are wrapped up with a tongue-in-cheek spunk that confirm she doesn’t need your pity. “So what if I’m lazy?/I like it that way,” she asserts on “Clean Jeans,” following it up with a kiss-off to flame all Instagram gym rats: “I could be at crossfit like you/But I’d rather be dead!”
But it’s impossible to talk about the origins of Remember Sports without mentioning Addie Pray, Perry’s solo project. This reissue includes five original recordings of Addie Pray songs that would later be fleshed out for Sunchokes or All of Something. The best of these—and most emotionally revealing—is “Get Bummed Out,” an ode to a romantic interest she’s trying to get over before they’ve even made it official. She originally uploaded the track to Bandcamp in 2012, and there’s a clear shift in her sentiments between this and the gutsier Sunchokes: “I’m in love with how you make me feel like I’m not so alone,” she sings, suggesting she might be more smitten with the idea of the relationship than the person.
The final moments of “Get Bummed Out” bring forth one of Remember Sports’ best lyrics: “Just make a mess of me, I’ll always clean it up,” Perry confides, as her solo acoustic guitar goes silent. Stark moments like these remind us why we listen to indie pop: Music made without the intention of necessarily being heard can yield the type of songwriting that needs to be heard most.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Father/Daughter | November 19, 2019 | 7.5 | 1f09ac70-7cfc-464d-b134-3ea9d9b2ba17 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Lush, heady, and shot through with an undercurrent of wistful contemplation, producer Brian Piñeyro’s “deep reggaetón” sound can’t be called lo-fi anymore. | Lush, heady, and shot through with an undercurrent of wistful contemplation, producer Brian Piñeyro’s “deep reggaetón” sound can’t be called lo-fi anymore. | DJ Python : Derretirse EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-python-derretirse-ep/ | Derretirse EP | The mid-2000s were banner years for reggaetón—particularly in Miami, where the fledgling sound, a Latin American take on dancehall reggae’s dembow riddim, could be heard booming from cars up and down the avenues. One of the people who picked up on the lurching kick drums and syncopated snares as they dopplered down the block was Brian Piñeyro. As soon as he heard it, Piñeyro told Pitchfork, he realized he wanted to make music that sounded like that, but to “recontextualize” it, make it his own. Eventually he moved to New York, where he became a fixture of the city’s underground electronic community, and as he began developing his voice, crafting nuanced lo-fi house and techno under aliases like DJ Wey, Deejay Xanax, and Luis, reggaetón’s telltale syncopation snuck into his productions alongside house grooves and slow-motion jungle breaks. One project in particular came to embody his “deep reggaetón” sound: DJ Python, a name whose serpentine connotations are a good fit for Piñeyro’s slinky, sidewinding grooves.
Unlike some other producers working under a reptilian moniker, there’s nothing threatening or venomous about DJ Python’s music, and the six-track Derretirse EP, the follow-up to his 2017 album Dulce Compañía, is Piñeyro’s warmest and most inviting record yet. (Its title translates as “to thaw” or “to melt.”) Reggaetón is having another moment right now, as part of the broader urbano movement, but DJ Python’s music sounds nothing like the luxe beats favored by Bad Bunny or Ozuna. Piñeyro remains rooted in the muffled drum machines and foggy synths of underground house and techno; the music on Derretirse is all instrumental, too, save perhaps for a strange, hard-to-identify sound that goes wriggling through “Cuando”—it sounds a little bit like a heavily vocoded scrap of speech or possibly jaw harp, but it could be anything, really. That ambiguity is part and parcel of the DJ Python aesthetic. Instead of using well-defined, declarative sounds to project emotion outward, he deploys nebulous elements in ways that draw the listener in.
His pacing is just as seductive. This is Piñeyro’s slowest record yet: Where most of 2016’s ¡Estéreo Bomba! Vol. 1 and Dulce Compañía bubbled along near house music’s lower limit, the tempos on Derretirse take a precipitous dive. At the same time, the dembow influence is as pronounced as it’s ever been. In “Tímbrame,” loping snares perforate a foggy expanse of synth pads and bell tones; in “Cuando,” handclaps take up the backbeat pulses, answered by echoing claps that lend a hint of the “Diwali” riddim. Sometimes, the dembow groove is mostly implied: In “Pq Cq,” the album’s spacious closing track, overdriven kick drums and rippling castanets carve out space where dembow’s accents would normally fall.
Still, despite the record’s languid energy—“I like calm shit,” Piñeyro once told Resident Advisor—this is no garden-variety chill. It’s lush and heady, and shot through with an undercurrent of wistful contemplation, but none of it sounds like an exercise in presets, whether musical or emotional: In “Espero,” muted rave stabs sing a doleful melody against guitar-like plucks and machine-like chirps—a strange jumble of expressive cues that somehow just works.
What’s clear from moments like these is how far Piñeyro’s production chops have come; this stuff can’t be called lo-fi anymore. That’s especially true on “Be Si To,” a clattering highlight. Metallic, scrap-heap drums that leave a ringing in the ears are balanced by enveloping synth pads and bass so deep you can only feel it. This full-spectrum array of frequency and texture is held together by a no-frills synth melody that sounds like a filtered dial tone, but is expressive–lyrical, even—in a way that’s unusual for this kind of subterranean club cut. As it bumbles away, one finger on the keyboard, it occasionally rises or falls in pitch before returning to its ostinato foundation. It sounds a bit like a car stereo whipping past—an echo, maybe, of the sensation that captivated a young Piñeyro all those years ago. | 2019-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dekmantel | June 14, 2019 | 7.8 | 1f0fb402-81a9-439f-ba45-1cb3fab4c43a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The UK mystery duo’s new EP is a more playful affair than Icons, more explicit in its internet-brained aesthetics—yet a little less exciting, too. | The UK mystery duo’s new EP is a more playful affair than Icons, more explicit in its internet-brained aesthetics—yet a little less exciting, too. | Two Shell: lil spirits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/two-shell-lil-spirits/ | lil spirits | In a dance-music scene deep in the throes of Y2K nostalgia, Two Shell have managed to ride the zeitgeist without being too obvious about it. Sure, the styles that the mysteriously masked UK duo pluck from are all very much in fashion: the racing drums of jungle, the synthetic rush of hyperpop, the cybernetic throb of techno. But for all of their trollish online lore-building, the music itself has never felt gimmicky. Last year’s Icons EP was a glitched-out slab of slippery grooves and headphone-candy sound design that required zero knowledge of their cryptic personae to appreciate. Two Shell have occasionally earned comparisons to the conceptual genre exercises of PC Music, but they’re as functional a dancefloor companion as any of the festival-crowd-filling UK club acts to which they’re often likened.
On lil spirits, Two Shell lean further into the internet-brained aesthetic they’ve developed through their various extra-musical stunts, dialing up the helium-ballooned vocals, bubblegum basslines, and digital intimacy in their lyrics. As on last year’s heavenly single “home,” lil spirits’ notification pings and chatroom-crush admissions mimic the dopamine hit of opening your phone to a flirty smiley face. It’s an all-around cuter affair than Icons, more explicitly streamlined in its hyperpop aesthetics, but a little less exciting in turn.
Like Icons, lil spirits feels caught in an endless shapeshift; tracks mutate from one gelatinous bassline to the next, governed by an inscrutable logic. The opening “i m e s s a g e” is the most straightforward workout of the bunch, bouncing on a squishy, dribbling groove as text-to-speech vocals swirl, singing of communication breakdown. “I don’t really know how to talk about it,” the TTS awkwardly enunciates, its cybernetic vocals shifting and riding along like an artificial MC vamping over the beat. On the slower “mind_dᴉlɟ,” the ping-ponging rhythm drops out halfway through to reveal a digital narrator calling itself the Mind Flipper, who guides the song through a bitcrushed tunnel of sounds before a clipping microhouse outro. Just when the song regains momentum, everything cuts to black—“Disk full,” says a robotic voice, and it’s as funny as it is frustrating.
The sparkly “love him” is one of the most directly SOPHIE-indebted productions the duo has crafted yet, topping its hyperactive, sped-up synths with cellular beeps and chopped-up vocals recalling Eiffel 65. A buzz-sawing tone clinches the absurdity, ushering the song toward its conclusion with a ridiculously plonked-out melody; it’s as if an elementary schooler started hammering away on their dad’s collection of expensive analog synths. “bluefairy” splinters into even more directions, its moody, aquatic front end giving way to a manic sequence of cheerleading vocals. “Entering hyperspeed,” announces a gentlemanly British voice, before deciding it’s time to go to the supermarket. The effect isn’t far off from watching a corecore video compilation: The song’s introspective aura is slowly swallowed whole by a constant slideshow of cascading thoughts.
Two Shell clearly have a lot of ideas circling in their heads—possibly too many. On lil spirits, it often sounds as if the two musicians are getting in their own way, swapping out rhythms before they have a chance to fully develop, relying too hard on cheekiness to carry the weight. If the relatively straight-faced Icons downplayed Two Shell’s antics, lil spirits does the opposite: Although the duo’s well-rounded sound design gets a chance to shine, too often the actual beats take a backseat to the hijinks. Two Shell can’t quite figure out how to make their sugary club experiments and crowd-igniting instincts play nice, and they often seem more concerned with playing pranks than with making tracks that actually work on a dancefloor. The results are still entertaining, but they can’t help but play like a file that crashed halfway through downloading. | 2023-02-16T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-16T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mainframe Audio | February 16, 2023 | 6.9 | 1f11b323-c46a-4fa5-813a-be344bde0d47 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Agitations finds Lotic at his least accessible, most grating, and perhaps not coincidentally, his most ambitious and stirring. This is miles away from the dance floor, but for all the mixtape’s disorienting ruptures and serrated edges, it again reveals Lotic as a sly, playful producer. | Agitations finds Lotic at his least accessible, most grating, and perhaps not coincidentally, his most ambitious and stirring. This is miles away from the dance floor, but for all the mixtape’s disorienting ruptures and serrated edges, it again reveals Lotic as a sly, playful producer. | Lotic: Agitations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21277-agitations/ | Agitations | The 30-minute mixtape Agitations finds producer Lotic (aka J'Kerian Morgan) at his least accessible, most grating, and perhaps not coincidentally, his most ambitious and stirring. "Agitations was born out of the frustrations that come with touring... and feeling increasingly out of touch with club culture and with the music industry in general," Morgan said in preface to his latest release. Accordingly, the music distances itself from the cyclical payoffs and rhythmic underpinnings of the dance floor. This is miles away from anything that could be considered "club culture." There’s something acutely alien about the tracks Morgan constructs, as if the producer is dealing in a musical language that's yet to fully emerge.
Throughout Agitations, Lotic's signature spidery sound design is subjected to further mangling via a series of violent jump-cuts and jarring bursts of noise. The arrangements treat sounds and themes like raw materials in need of repurposing: Each unit is contorted, smashed, and remade, either splintering into abstraction or writhing in glitchy tumult. Yet, for all the mixtape’s disorienting ruptures and serrated edges, Agitations, much like 2014's Damsel in Distress and this year’s Heterocetera EP, again reveals Lotic as a sly, playful producer. On Heterocetera, Lotic sampled the ballroom standard "The Ha Dance" by Masters at Work, reshaping it radically, and he alludes to this same sample again here in the opening moments of *"*Carried". This version sounds pared-down and pixelated, a mutation of a mutation, and it's a microcosm of Agitations' tendency to tease out strange turns in familiar currencies.
Agitations might not be conventional dance music, but it remains both fiercely visceral and highly visual. It lacks Damsel in Distress' mastery of cultural memory, and Heterocetera's propulsive push-and-pull, but more than makes up for it in raw dynamism; a dogged, thrilling futurism hinged on brute energy, angularity, and unremitting disquiet. Moving in dense, unstable clusters, the mixtape can be taken as a celebration of frustration, liberation, and chaos, a means for Morgan to work through the restlessness and anxiety he's faced of late. For an artist who's consistently latched onto and forged a style as imaginative as any in the electronic underground, Agitations shows Lotic pushing still further ahead. | 2015-11-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Janus | November 19, 2015 | 8.2 | 1f11d187-3a3a-45fa-ab73-00cf872eceb6 | Jonathan Patrick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-patrick/ | null |
The UK dubstep producer's first long-form release since her 2010 Hyperdub debut is an entirely different beast: I Make Lists reaches far beyond the London scene to the global club underground. | The UK dubstep producer's first long-form release since her 2010 Hyperdub debut is an entirely different beast: I Make Lists reaches far beyond the London scene to the global club underground. | Ikonika: I Make Lists EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16867-i-make-lists-ep/ | I Make Lists EP | There is a sample of Ikonika clearing her throat about a minute and a half into the London producer's I Make Lists EP, her first long-form release since debut album Contact, Love, Want, Have on Hyperdub in 2010. It's a let's-get-down-to-business kind of throat clearing, an aural rolling back of the sleeves before things kick off. And Ikonika really does kick off on I Make Lists. It's an entirely different beast from Contact, Love, Want, Have, which was a highly personal knitting together of her experience growing up on video games and R&B pop, getting into metal and becoming a drummer, and embracing-- and being embraced by-- the then wholly south-London dubstep scene.
Born from memories and echoes of garage, dub, and drum'n'bass, dubstep was the first anti-genre genre and, it can and has been argued, lost its way by becoming a genre. That rigidity is something Ikonika has always been wary of; her music is acutely aware of the limitations of borders. As if to make a point, I Make Lists reaches beyond the London scene to the global club underground she has become a crucial part of over the last couple of years, both as a DJ and owner of the Hum + Buzz label she runs with partner Optimum, releasing records by New York-via-Chicago's Brenmar and Sydney's Dro Carey.
Flight lines, lasers, and firework trails criss-cross throughout the record; it is bold, ballsy and high on adrenaline. There is plenty of acid, funk, gnarly bass, and yet more evidence of Ikonika's wily way with melody and synths that scissor-kick like hyperactive, high-pitched Middle Eastern rhythms. There is a sense that this is a record that would go off in Tel Aviv, in Cape Town, in Mexico City, in Buenos Aires. It also has a kinship with Kingdom's Fade to Mind label in New York as well as with Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990's Night Slugs in London, both proponents of this most borderless of new club music. Most of all, I Make Lists feels free.
Ikonika lives on the outskirts of London, minutes from Heathrow, and it's this proximity to escape, to worlds beyond your own, that throbs strongest on I Make Lists. The album artwork is an aubergine sky filled with paper airplane-like flying objects, fantasy versions of the crafts that cut across the skyline above the purpose-built studio in the garden of her house. Continuing the theme, closing track "PR812" is named after a Philippine Airlines flight that was hijacked back in 2000 by a perpetrator who robbed passengers at gunpoint before, incredibly, making his escape by parachute. It's also the most sensually electric track on the record: taut, mournful, and ever-reaching. Which leads us back to the throat-clearing, because ultimately, for all its thrills and spills, I Make Lists is the sound of Ikonika getting ready for her next move. | 2012-07-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-07-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hum and Buzz | July 18, 2012 | 7.8 | 1f144cfd-b7d6-4638-9fdf-fa0551306e3e | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | null |
Latest from Kieran Hebden is a mini-album that leans toward 4/4 techno, but, as usual, he seems less interested in developing genres than in absorbing their tropes into his own hermetic sound world. | Latest from Kieran Hebden is a mini-album that leans toward 4/4 techno, but, as usual, he seems less interested in developing genres than in absorbing their tropes into his own hermetic sound world. | Four Tet: Ringer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11505-ringer/ | Ringer | As Four Tet, Kieran Hebden has been a chameleonic interpreter of genres. Using a cut-up and collage approach, he's bent folk music, jazz, and hip-hop into impossible shapes; each time we seem to draw a bead on his style, whether it's folktronica, instrumental hip-hop, or IDM, Hebden neatly steps out of the crosshairs to leave us firing at thin air. In fact, his music is best understood according to practice. From the folky samples of Pause to the laptop bobbins of Rounds to the free-jazzy squalls of his collaborations with drummer Steve Reid, Hebden has seemed less interested in developing genres than in absorbing their tropes into his own hermetic sound world. What distinguishes Four Tet's albums isn't so much the kind of music he appropriates as how he uses it, and in this he's been fairly consistent: He snips and smears until his sources all but vanish into his crisp polyrhythms.
On his superlative album Rounds, Hebden's music did indeed seem round: It moved in great languid whorls, always closing in on itself. The song "Spirit Fingers", which fluttered and darted like a hummingbird, was an exception. In retrospect, "Spirit Fingers" seems to presage the four-song "mini-album" Ringer, which is as well-served by its title as Rounds was. Here, Hebden can no longer be meaningfully compared to Prefuse 73, as the album's dialed-down cut-ups and continuous rhythms render it too smoove for IDM.
At four songs, Ringer is economical, but the diversity within its half-hour run time makes it surprisingly robust as well. This is meant to be Hebden's techno-based album, with flashes of Afrobeat and krautrock. You'll catch whiffs of the former in the sidewinding percussion of "Wing Body Wing", and of the latter in the buried pulsation of "Swimmer" (not to mention 8-bit techno in the pixelated sprays of the title track). But as always, Hebden's latest is most interesting at the level of theme-- Ringer is about concealment and revelation, and it gains a great deal of tension in its quick juxtapositions of the two.
There is something tantalizing about these four tracks, which, at times, seems to verge on the lascivious. The title track thrums for ten hotwired minutes, but there's a sense of something being held back; the loping house beat it implies never actually appears. One of its sub-melodies comes into view measure by measure, showing a little more of its progression each time, like a hem creeping slowly up a thigh. This isn't the Four Tet who shoves shunts into his rhythms; "Ringer" unfolds with inexorable logic. But it's a logic parallel to the one we might normally expect, which exhorts a track like this to eventually break into a climactic clearing.
If "Ringer" flirts with the thwarted epiphany, then "Ribbons" (by my reckoning, the album's highlight) makes up for the tease by enacting the moment of revelation over and over, rooting itself in the ecstatic experience. Hebden punches trills into the seething percussion at various speeds and durations, sometimes slow and wet, sometimes quick and ringing; sometimes discretely separated, sometimes truncated and overlapped. It's the sound of a series of beaded curtains being thrown back, divulging more curtains: all revelation, nothing revealed.
After the flirtatious "Ribbons", Hebden pulls back coyly with the hypnotic "Swimmer": A wavering monotone surrounds it, exposing bits of gargling synths and holding back any sort of release until the halfway point, when the percussion suddenly snakes through the monotone like ivy. The closing track, "Wing Body Wing", is slightly less interesting than the others; its emphasis on bare-naked percussion makes it sound like half of a Sound of Silver-era LCD Soundsystem track. The rhythms are adroit, but seem to long for something more. Nevertheless, "Wing Body Wing" is the only time when the album's strategic omissions dilute its impact rather than bolstering it. | 2008-05-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-05-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | May 13, 2008 | 7.4 | 1f1929a3-3a09-4aa7-89d9-a69d7040b15d | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The Waterfall, My Morning Jacket's seventh album, is less a return to form than to spirit, reaffirming what an exciting rock band MMJ can be when they’re at their most generous, curious and restless. | The Waterfall, My Morning Jacket's seventh album, is less a return to form than to spirit, reaffirming what an exciting rock band MMJ can be when they’re at their most generous, curious and restless. | My Morning Jacket: The Waterfall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20396-the-waterfall/ | The Waterfall | "I'm getting so tired of trying to always be nice," Jim James laments on "Big Decisions", the first single from My Morning Jacket's seventh LP The Waterfall. It's a surprising line from James, a guy responsible for a nearly weeklong music festival in Mexico named One Big Holiday. If there was a mean bone in his body, we haven't seen it before—My Morning Jacket lyrics are mostly praise and posi-vibes, feeling wonderful about a wonderful higher power for giving wonderful men the most wonderful voices. On "Big Decisions", James pushes back on the weight of a lopsided relationship, and the mundane, everyday struggle is charged with everything that has made My Morning Jacket one of the most likeable major American rock bands of the 21st century—reverberating Flying V guitars, James’ expansive rebel yell, explosive harmonies and reverb capable of canvassing the entirety of Manchester, Tenn. and beyond. Even if James is reasserting himself in an atypically selfish way, it sounds like a triumph big enough for everyone to share.
Since My Morning Jacket abandoned the grain silo on their 2005 masterwork, their albums have followed a similar format: reverb or no reverb, James’ saintly voice can redeem anything, so no song idea was too strange as long as it could still work at Bonnaroo. On that level, The Waterfall does little you haven’t already heard from My Morning Jacket; they just regain the quality control that abandoned them on Evil Urges and ditch the damage control that pervaded Circuital. "Believe (Nobody Knows)" feels precision-engineered for the express purpose of opening My Morning Jacket's live show for the next two years: a big, windmilled chord anticipates every low-register repetition of the title in the prechorus, preparing for when James lets the final "BELIIIIIIIIIEVE" rip an octave higher. And that’s where the Klieg lights inevitably hit, as does the same recognizable liftoff from "Wordless Chorus" and "Mahgeetah", a feeling that the possibilities of life itself are limitless, not just the range of My Morning Jacket. You can’t fake something like "Believe (Nobody Knows)" if you haven’t played in front of tens of thousands of festival goers.
Then again, few found fault with the first ten minutes of Evil Urges and Circuital; the measure of a My Morning Jacket album is their success at doing what’s not expected of them. Compared to "Highly Suspicious" or "Holdin’ on to Black Metal", the risks here are more manageable, the results far more successful: there’s "Compound Fracture", which tails off into a coda of keyboard flutter and falsetto after flaunting Chvrches electronic stomp and Some Girls strut. "Get the Point" delivers James’ most biting lyrics to date within a McCartney-esque acoustic ditty ("I'm trying to tell you plainly how I'm feeling day to day/ And I'm so sorry now that you ain't feeling the same way"). The electronic cut-and-paste of "Spring (Among the Living)" is a sleek, modernist iPad compared to "Cobra"’s bulky, retro ENIAC, while Eastern modes poking through "Like a River" and "Tropics (Erase Traces)" scent the chillout tent with lavender incense rather than the usual weed smoke. It reaffirms that MMJ are one of the most exciting American rock bands going when they’re at their most generous, curious and restless, as they are here.
But "Big Decisions" puts the focus squarely on a new place for an MMJ record: the lyrics. The song, and the album as a whole, gives Jim James The Person center stage for what feels like the first time, instead of just The Voice of Jim James. As on record, James has been open with the big picture while skimping on the details—after 15 or so years of giving his all on stage, he’s left just as much off it, and here he is at 37, nearly crippled by workplace injuries, spent from partying and wondering aloud in Rolling Stone, "what have I done wrong in every relationship I've been in until now?"
There are legitimate personal stakes here and The Waterfall allows for James to express some uncharacteristic negativity without dwelling on it. For a record of spiritual and romantic reckoning, it’s remarkably level-headed and pragmatic. James sweetly coos over Chi-Lites psych-soul, "It’s a thin line/ Between love and wasting my time", clearly assessing a broken situation to which he mends on "Get the Point": "Daydreaming of leaving/ I only had to do it." He wishes his ex the best of luck and then immediately celebrates the exhilarating, frightening rush of single living on "Spring (Among the Living)"—during each rambling guitar solo, you can picture James right-swiping to his heart’s content.
For many, Jim James is basically synonymous with My Morning Jacket, so it’s justifiable to find parallels in the rejuvenation of each—My Morning Jacket has another album on the way some time next year. It’s welcome news for the band's fans, but maybe a bit disappointing considering how a predetermined release schedule usually results in two very good albums in place of one great one, and The Waterfall gets close to greatness. With a little troubleshooting, it might have matched At Dawn's cohesion or Z's dazzling diversity: The misty-eyed reflection of "Only Memories Remain" cycles back to a breakup narrative on Side B that otherwise feels like it was put on shuffle, and The Waterfall stalls the most during the usually incendiary guitar workouts. But this is Jim James accepting where he and My Morning Jacket are at the moment: a bit older, a bit broken, more skeptical but very much among the living. | 2015-04-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol / ATO | April 30, 2015 | 7.9 | 1f1dea8b-2528-4564-9958-b24d6dfd8d13 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Following on their stirring full-length debut, The Spoils, Zola Jesus return with a terrific EP that applies their gothic drama to more immediate songs. | Following on their stirring full-length debut, The Spoils, Zola Jesus return with a terrific EP that applies their gothic drama to more immediate songs. | Zola Jesus: Stridulum EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13987-stridulum-ep/ | Stridulum EP | Zola Jesus didn't need to clean up to stand apart from the lo-fi horde-- they already had Nika Danilova's voice, which tends to cut through a track and leave an indelible impression no matter how it's recorded. Whether it's wordless yowling, an extended cover of "Somebody to Love", or something as disarming as The Spoils' "Clay Bodies", her singing has a way of sticking in your memory. Even so, the Stridulum EP represents a large stride forward, not just in production quality, but in the band's focus. Heard next to their gauzy beginnings, these six synth-driven tracks sound surprisingly clear, even poppy. Whether this cleaner sound is here to stay or not, the emotions behind the music are just as heavy, and this self-contained EP is the perfect place for the band to try something different.
Danilova still belts out the lyrics from behind layers of cavernous reverb and the overall sound remains dramatic and foreboding. And though there are moments here where the foundation rumbles and the sound is disorienting, recording quality has nothing to do with it. Instead, Zola Jesus are more inclined to shake up the atmosphere with dissonance, like the whirring that disrupts the otherwise calming "Trust Me" or the ominous chamber-of-souls hissing at the end of "Night". Still, these hints of abstraction haunt the margins of more direct songs where hooky verses and memorable choruses are the norm.
The tracks on Stridulum follow a pattern that opener "Night" nails at the start: They build from minimal but insistent beats and simple melodies into crescendos where the synthesizer tones, sampled incidental noise, and layered vocals merge into a stirring whole. Danilova leans on immediate, familiar phrases here: "At the end of the night, we'll be together again"; "When you're lost, know I'll be around"; "It's not easy to fall in love"; "I can't stand to see you this way". The lyrics are visceral, and swooning chords and always-operatic vocals multiply the effect. Zola Jesus may be experimenting in more earnest and accessible pop here, but the charged theatrical mood is just as overwhelming.
Zola Jesus' brooding, gothic vibe probably isn't going anywhere, nor is their willingness to experiment with the sonics and constraints of their songs. But Stridulum's immediately striking cover art hints at the depth of the band's ambition: Their personality is still here, but there's more thought in the composition and the presentation. So rather than cleaning up and getting ready for a close-up, the EP feels more like a lateral move, in the best possible way-- there's no guessing what comes next. | 2010-03-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-03-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Sacred Bones | March 11, 2010 | 8.1 | 1f1e1d8a-fca8-4a70-b9ee-c04c1a892aae | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
Offering 12 songs in 21 minutes, the metal band refines its sound, creating an unsettled atmosphere littered with strange and memorable moments. | Offering 12 songs in 21 minutes, the metal band refines its sound, creating an unsettled atmosphere littered with strange and memorable moments. | Full of Hell: Garden of Burning Apparitions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/full-of-hell-garden-of-burning-apparitions/ | Garden of Burning Apparitions | Full of Hell exist in a constant churn. On Garden of Burning Apparitions, the metal band’s fifth non-collaborative full-length, they break down elements of grindcore, noise, hardcore, death metal, and industrial music so the sounds may be reconstituted into something uglier, more barbed, and more enigmatic. Their previous album, 2019’s excellent Weeping Choir, seemed to balance the totality of extreme music on a sharp pinhead as it teetered through moments of incredible dissonance without abandoning the stomps and hooks of the band’s hardcore roots. Vocalist Dylan Walker said that those songs covered “every little area that we wanted to be ever since we started the band,” so it’s not a surprise that Garden feels like a refinement of the same sound, pulling them to greater, if somewhat less accessible, heights.
On its surface, Garden of Burning Apparitions sounds incredibly unsettled. These songs feel tugged into place, one part jerked into sync with the next: The lengthiest section of the opening “Guided Blight”’s 58 seconds is Walker’s opening scream. And if it’s tempting to think of the barrage of sounds as a form of collage, it’s also clear that every moment has been given an incredible amount of thought. “Murmuring Foul Spring” moves from dishwater murk to bright blasts from drummer David Bland, the rest of the group playing so tight that it’s impossible to tell if the production is chopped by some kind of stroboscopic effect; the hardcore payoff in the closing moments ends so quickly that you’re left with your fist awkwardly in the air. Elsewhere, “Urchin Thrones” is crowned by Sam DiGristine’s saxophone, which he first uses as a traditional backing layer, playing a broad and blank sheet of sound. But when guitarist Spencer Hazard sprints away, he follows, doubling his lead as they flirt with atonality. It’s a strange, even frightening moment that lasts all of three seconds: a sudden shift proving that nothing is safe in these songs.
Garden is littered with these small but memorable moments: the slide whistle of feedback that ushers out “Asphyxiant Blessing,” or the spectral moaning that flits through the otherwise straightforward bridge of “Reeking Tunnels,” or the way closer “Celestial Hierarch” ends in an acid-etched loop that mimics the heartbeat-thump of a locked groove on vinyl. The album’s concision—12 songs in 21 minutes—means every moment counts, and Full of Hell uses every bit of space they afford themselves to get their message across.
Absent a song like “Armory of Obsidian Glass,” Weeping Choir’s sludgy six-minute centerpiece, Garden offers no place to rest. The closest thing to a break is “Derelict Satellite,” a hailstorm of noise that crowns the album’s opening third. Walker’s vocals are buried deep in the distance, barely audible behind a shredded curtain of rattling chain mail. The album moves through eardrum-shredding dissonance, rattling blast beats, and lurching riffs so rapidly that it’s difficult to clock exactly what’s happening as it’s happening. But there are so many ideas, so many nooks in its corners, that the swiftness creates a sense of desperation: a desire to hold on to it, even as it’s being swept away.
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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. | 2021-10-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | October 13, 2021 | 7.4 | 1f1f6173-2cff-4ce5-b4c9-f4c46971a778 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
The austere trio has profoundly warped its slowcore sound to create an ambitious, modern wonder of an album, an exploration of the song as an imperfect conduit of feeling. | The austere trio has profoundly warped its slowcore sound to create an ambitious, modern wonder of an album, an exploration of the song as an imperfect conduit of feeling. | Low: Double Negative | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/low-double-negative/ | Double Negative | It is a flabbergasting coincidence that Low’s 12th album ended up sharing its name with one of the most absurd moments of Donald Trump’s summer. In July, about a month after the band announced their album, Trump publicly backpedaled from a comment he’d made which seemed to indicate to Russian President Vladimir Putin that, unlike the CIA and FBI and the remainder of the intelligence agencies, he didn’t believe Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,’” went Trump’s revision. “Sort of a double negative.”
This might not even be worth mentioning if the Midwest’s premier slowcore ensemble hadn’t crafted their astounding new album, Double Negative, as a scowling and shellshocked response to Trump’s America. In a recent Wire cover story, guitarist and vocalist Alan Sparhawk said Trump’s administration prompted him to question “humanity, logic, modern society” and he’s quoted as referring to Trump as “that prick” onstage. And now, the album’s title is imbued with further meaning, a reiteration of the worst president at his worst. The serendipity adds to, but is hardly the extent of, the considerable wonder of an album in which a career indie band manages to warp their sound profoundly while retaining the soul of their art. Double Negative defies expectations yet makes perfect sense.
This record would knock listeners on their asses coming from any band at any time, but it is extraordinary that Low is doing such challenging, relevant work 25 years into their career. Long gone are the days when the group could dumbfound with just a handful of sounds: the splat of a snare; guitar, and bass that sounded suspended in codeine; Sparhawk’s perma-mourn; the heavenly Mimi Parker on halo. The prevailing slowcore sound of their first half-dozen albums cast Low’s musical identity in metal, to borrow an image from 2001’s landmark Things We Lost in the Fire, so much so that one could have easily overlooked the slow expansion of their sound over the last decade and a half.
The work on Double Negative, while often sounding completely radical in its own right, isn’t uncharacteristic, per se. It taps into the band’s wanderlust, its generous melodic sensibility, its considerable aptitude in creating atmosphere, not just in the abstract but in the realm of drone. The album is like a discovery of a new mutation of still-recognizable DNA. And finally this new strain of sound isn’t just bold for Low; it’s just plain bold.
No 11-song statement has functioned quite like this, though you’re likely to be reminded of snatches and scraps of other artists in the band’s pivot and ensuing textures—William Basinski’s tactile nature and exercises in disintegration, Throbbing Gristle’s thicker, full-bodied moments, My Bloody Valentine’s degradation celebration, the organized chaos of Björk’s Homogenic. This is a leap forward from its vaguely predictive source, a la Radiohead’s Kid A.
The band recorded Double Negative over the past two years with producer BJ Burton at Justin Vernon’s April Base studio in Wisconsin. Burton, who wrote and played on Bon Iver’s own makeover record, 2016’s 22, A Million, has made clear that he has a knack for helping steer a band into the logical unknown. Their previous collaboration with Burton, 2015’s glitchy-around-the-edges Ones and Sixes, only hinted at what was to come. Double Negative is nothing but edges. It is an album with noise coming out of its wounds. It conjures the exact inverse of the sort beautifying restoration work done on the soundtracks of vintage films to remove thumps, hums, and crackles. Here thumps, hums, and crackles are piled on and the results are rarely short of stunning.
On the surface, Double Negative may appear to be a collection of songs that were composed and then dismantled, a sort of electronic-indie answer to prefab distressed jeans. This seems particularly so on tracks like opener “Quorum,” which feels like it’s being run over by square tires with snow chains, and “Tempest,” which is filtered to the point of sounding as if it’s playing from a needle on a turntable that’s collecting toxic sludge. But apparently, the process was much more integrated than merely building up to break down—the band would show up with rough sketches of songs and then hammer them out with Burton. In the process, the line between performer and producer was scribbled out in static.
Collectively, Low and Burton take an egalitarian approach. Creation and decay intertwine and texture is as crucial as melody. At times, Low’s already oblique lyrics are obscured by distortion; at others, vocals are sampled and contorted into alien sound transmissions, courtesy of keyboardist/bassist/synth-manipulator Steve Garrington. The composition is dynamic and riveting—“Always Trying to Work It Out” is gentle, classic Low, smoldering under reverb until it splits in half and pours out even more static—midway through, the song sounds like it’s frying. And then boom: a muffled bass drum rumbles and it all pulls together just as it had before it fell apart. Additionally, many of the songs here extend way beyond their verses and choruses to ambient codas that are every bit as assured as the more conventional structures that lead to them. “The Son, the Sun,” is only ambience. Haunted by what sounds like moderate wind passing over a mic, while a distant synth echoes and coalesces with wordless, reverberating vocals, it’s a three-and-a-half minute shiver.
For something so consistently thrilling, Double Negative is deathly grim. Noise slurps and laps away at melodies with a diseased tongue. What sounds like a monster trapped in a box provides rhythm on “Poor Sucker.” On “Dancing and Fire,” Sparhawk moans, “It’s not the end, it’s just the end of hope,” a seeming rebuke to the title of Low’s 1994 debut album, I Could Live in Hope.
“Dancing and Fire” is one of the few songs with completely intelligible vocals on a record filled with voices under siege, obscured and buried as if to render in a way beyond words the current administration’s attack on speech. There’s a sort of strobe effect on “Dancing and Blood,” as though Parker’s vocal is playing off a cassette that warped after being left on a car’s dashboard in the summertime. Anxiety—from getting lost in all the noise, of not being heard, of even perhaps adding to that noise—runs rampant on Double Negative, which works just as well as music as it does conceptual art: Here is an album-long exploration of the song as an imperfect conduit of feeling. On such shaky ground, three songs here strive for permanence in their titles—“Always Up,” “Always Trying to Work It Out,” and “Rome (Always in the Dark).” The tragedy is implicit and enduring.
We are in a climate where art is judged for its politics as much as (if not more than) its aesthetics, where people look at entertainment like they do voters: You’re either part of the problem, or the solution. Making a socially conscious album might seem like an obvious move, but Low present something far more visceral than protest music, a body of work that doesn’t dictate but is more interested in a despair that galvanizes and paralyzes. The political and aesthetic here, in fact, are impossible to separate. Double Negative’s sheer audacity, its lack of easy answers and its risk of alienating longtime fans, rules out any notion that this is some sort of cheap bandwagon-jumping or pretentious wokeness. At times there’s even a chilling pragmatism—caked in fuzz and to a double-time pulse that honks at a (relatively) brisk 103 BPM, Sparhawk and Parker sing on the album’s ultimate track, “Disarray,” “Before it falls into total disarray/You’ll have to learn to live a different way.” Their radical revision of their sound doesn’t provide a model, merely an impressionistic expression of how that might feel. That the song sails out on Low’s most enduring trademark—Sparhawk and Parker’s intertwined harmonies—suggests not everything has to be lost in the fire. | 2018-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | September 14, 2018 | 8.7 | 1f212f05-3b62-45dd-802d-42c4f7051914 | Rich Juzwiak | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rich-juzwiak/ | |
The Swedish trio follows its newfound pop success with more pronounced nods to left-field and international influences. | The Swedish trio follows its newfound pop success with more pronounced nods to left-field and international influences. | Peter Bjorn and John: Living Thing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12874-living-thing/ | Living Thing | It was the whistle heard around the world. You heard Peter Bjorn and John's breakthrough single "Young Folks" on "Grey's Anatomy". You heard it on the in-house muzak system while waiting in line to order at McDonald's. You heard it every time your co-worker in a neighboring cubicle deigned to whistle while they worked. But while making their unwitting entry into the North American mainstream with 2006's Writer's Block, the Swedish trio of Peter Morén, Björn Yttling, and John Eriksson used their busy interview schedule to talk up far less populist inspirations: the minimalist post-punk of Young Marble Giants, the rhythmic jazz of the Ethiopiques series, and other Other Music-recommended curios.
That this follow-up album bears more pronounced nods to PB&J's left-field and international influences could easily be interpreted as a reactionary riposte to their sudden pop success (also known as "pulling an In Utero"). But it also constitutes a perfectly logical next step in a career that's seen the band quickly evolve from a traditional Beatlesque retro-rock trio to adventurous producers of cosmopolitan pop music on Writer's Block. The deconstructionist ethic of Living Thing comes as even less of a surprise when you consider how the band's interim activities have played to the extremities of their sound: There was a digital-only album of texturally rich instrumentals (last year's Seaside Rock) and a stripped-down acoustic solo album from de facto frontman Morén, while Yttling became the go-to producer for veteran acts looking for some extra pop polish (Primal Scream). However, the fact that an album like Living Thing was to be expected from Peter Bjorn and John doesn't make it feel like any less of a letdown.
You could call Living Thing PB&J's companion to super-fan Kanye West's 808 and Heartbreaks, where a deliberate over-reliance on drum-machine beats and bleats is exploited to illustrate the emotional unrest and stagnation conveyed in the lyrics. The tension peaks early on with Morén's "It Don't Move Me", a diatribe against sentimentalism ostensibly directed at an ex-lover ("forget photos and letters... you don't move me no more"), but which could easily be about his band's own ubiquity-- it can't be a coincidence that the song plays like a virtual rewrite of "Young Folks" (ascending chorus and all) but with the bongos and whistles relinquished in favor of a hand-clapped electro-funk backing track and deep piano tones. However, if PB&J are committed to keep moving forward, they're doing so at a snail's pace-- whether it's the oversold optimism of Eriksson's twee-pop opener "The Feeling" or Yttling's half-baked stoner-rock dirge "I'm Losing My Mind", the sense of ennui and longing they're trying to express is all too accurately reflected by sputtering rhythms that rarely gain any traction or momentum.
The skeletal production is in turn matched by nursery-rhyme hooks that tenuously toe the line between endearingly naïve and amateurishly underdeveloped: The shantytown chant of "Nothing to Worry About" finds PB&J ably adapting to a post-"Paper Planes" pop landscape, but its clunky chorus line ("Do this thing/ This type of thing/ Put a little money in this type of thing") feels too self-consciously vague to make you want to join the song's kiddie choir. Likewise, the garish provocations of "Lay It Down" ("Hey, shut the fuck up, boy/ You are starting to piss me off") clash awkwardly with the song's congenial snap-along sway. And when the band settles nicely into the relaxed juju groove of the title track, it forgets to write a proper chorus-- so it just crams in a hurried rewrite of the one featured in the superior ELO song of the same name.
Not surprisingly, Living Thing fares best when the songs don't draw too much attention to their simplicity and lay off the gimmickry: the late-1980s U2/Gabriel slow burn of "Just the Past" (complete with lighter-waving fade-out); the tropical doo wop of "Stay This Way"; the Kraftwerkian post-coital glow of closer "Last Night". But there's a noticeable deficit of swoon-worthy climaxes to complement these meditative turns. Compared to the widescreen splendor of Writer's Block, Living Thing sounds like a noble but flawed attempt by Peter Bjorn and John to test the fortitude of their songwriting using the most barren and broken of arrangements. But more often that not, it sounds like they settled on the drum-machine presets first, with the lyrics and melodies thrown on top as afterthoughts. After hearing Yttling repeatedly declare, "I'm losing my mind/ That's why I ain't fine" for the umpteenth time, it's hard to shake the nagging feeling that Peter Bjorn and John applied the Writer's Block title to the wrong album. | 2009-03-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-03-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Wichita / Almost Gold | March 31, 2009 | 5.5 | 1f219127-cf7b-4b4d-aa56-a7b6868346f6 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On his proper full-length debut, the mixtape veteran and Jim Jones ghostwriter tempers street-rap hardness with glimmers of emotional nuance. | On his proper full-length debut, the mixtape veteran and Jim Jones ghostwriter tempers street-rap hardness with glimmers of emotional nuance. | Max B: Vigilante Season | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15339-vigilante-season/ | Vigilante Season | Cam'ron's meandering 2006 Jay-Z diss "You Gotta Love It" did little to threaten hip-hop's biggest star. But it did have memorable lines about Jigga's newfound love for chancletas, and, more significantly, announced the arrival of Max B, an ex-con rapper with the gift for a gripping melody. Max went on to much under-the-radar creative success. His widely credited ghostwriting for Jim Jones produced some of the latter's biggest hits, and helped Jones' second LP land on the Billboard top 10. He was the musical mastermind behind underground Harlem super-group Byrdgang. And Max's succession of solo mixtapes, from Million Dollar Baby Radio to Coke Wave to Quarantine, established the rapper as a major talent. His style was gritty and unrefined, yet retained immediate pop instincts. Vigilante Season doesn't move too far afield from his mixtape work, despite being his first official solo LP. This is a mixed blessing. For his fanbase, it includes better sound quality, no DJ drops, and several missing pieces from a career that was cut too short. But while it has some great moments, it doesn't stand above some of his better tapes, and may be an uneven entry point for those not steeped in the Biggaveli mythos.
But flawed as Vigilante Season is, investing time in Max's world can be rewarding. Like the biggest rappers of the past few years-- think Gucci, Drake, even Soulja Boy-- Max fills a space that, a decade ago, would have been occupied by producers. He is as much songwriter as rapper, and musically, Max is an old soul. This is most evident on one of the album's best moments, the sublime "Where Do I Go (BBQ Music)", which features dual choruses, one of which interpolates Cherrelle and Alexander O'Neal's 1985 R&B classic "Saturday Love". His ear for memorable hooks, sung in a grungy slur, gives his music a hazy, intoxicated quality. Max's lyrics don't have the opulent imagery of Gucci or the poetic minimalism of a rapper like the Jacka. But like both artists, his raps sound cool, with an effortless detachment that disguises musical precision.
His lyrics provide a rough, if familiar, street-rap character sketch, with all the rags-to-riches tales and illegal business that image implies. One of Max's particular innovations was to give late-00s New York a more universal appeal, taking an every-thug street-prophet template and coloring it with the melodicism of classic West Coast or Midwest (think Bone Thugs-N-Harmony) gangster rap. Some of this material would be tedious in most rappers' hands. It is pro-forma street music, and brutality and misogyny are a part of its fabric. His work is engaging not in spite of this-- your mileage may vary for obvious reasons-- but because he manages to suffuse this ugliness with an undercurrent of nuanced emotion. There is no redemption in his words themselves, and little sense of the pain underlying it all. Instead, the record's druggy, mournful tone and melancholy songcraft provide a contrasting canvas for Max's cool remove. In this contradiction, his detachment provides balance, raising the emotional stakes. Max is an actor in a drama larger than himself, an unreliable narrator in a chaotic world. In the tension between song and rapper lies the music's power and truth.
The production throughout-- the bulk courtesy of Harlem producer Dame Grease-- sounds dirty and dilapidated, yet remains open to smooth pop songcraft. His beats are tense and compressed, but tackle a range of moods, from the ambiguous nausea of "White Lines" to the wistfulness of "You Won't Go". Compared with the freewheeling, capricious atmosphere of the now-classic Coke Wave mixtape, Max's lyrics are shot through with bitterness. His frequent target is Jim Jones, who managed to swindle Max out of his publishing in exchange for bail money. This tone, though understandable, makes Vigilante Season a limited introduction to Max's work, but it does add a further dimension to one of this era's most underrated rap artists. | 2011-04-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-04-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Amalgam Digital | April 25, 2011 | 7.7 | 1f294c1d-492a-40c9-9828-db8ec8fad979 | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
After laying out the template for Common's latest album, the drummer/producer offers up another hour-long selection of more than two dozen expertly-made beats that are just waiting to be rapped on. | After laying out the template for Common's latest album, the drummer/producer offers up another hour-long selection of more than two dozen expertly-made beats that are just waiting to be rapped on. | Karriem Riggins: Headnod Suite | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22935-headnod-suite/ | Headnod Suite | The veteran beatmaker had a banner year in 2016, executive producing Common’s Black America Again, providing the blueprint for Kanye West’s “30 Hours,” and collaborating with Kaytranada, Esperanza Spalding, and the Roots. Four years after Karriem Riggins' first solo endeavor, Alone Together, put him on the map as more than just a standout session musician, Riggins’ musical life seemed richer than ever.
Alone Together’s sequel, the new Headnod Suite, echoes the template laid out by its predecessor. The record is, again, a nearly hour-long selection of more than two dozen expertly-made beats, seemingly linked by very little other than the fact that Riggins considered them strong enough to make the album. There’s one exception on Headnod—about two-thirds of the way through the record, a set of tracks form a mini-suite that stands as a short detour before we return to regularly scheduled swing programming.
These tracks, part of the “Cheap Suite,” are the most cohesive section of the larger record. They are roomier, more experimental, and they lead Headnod Suite into more interesting territory, as Riggins explores rhythm-and-space-led compositions reminiscent of the work of Deantoni Parks. Though they are harsher and less soulful than much of what precedes them, these tracks work as a unified experience. Moreover, once you listen to them, you note the trail of breadcrumbs from earlier in the album (“Invasion,” “Dirty Drum Warm Up”) that heralded their arrival.
Elsewhere, Riggins focuses on rolling out gem after gem, with careful thought given to the little details that distinguish a cubic zirconia from a diamond. Riggins is such an expert drummer that it can be hard to identify him as having any kind of percussive signature. These features—the perfectly chopped sample over the tiptoe-light beat on “Sista Misses,” the atmospherics and perfectly placed guitar riff on “Other Side of the Track,” the clatters and snaps that open “Bahia Dreamin,’” the complex bass work underlying the candy-sweet, teased-out melody on “Crystal Stairs”—give him his voice as a producer.
Riggins’ abiding love for hip-hop is showcased throughout Headnod Suite. On “Never Come Close,” a selection of Prodigy’s verse from “Shook Ones Pt. II” leads out of the track as if it were a final showstopping instrumental flourish, while on “Keep It On,” Common’s ad-libs are swaddled in a steady beat and warm instrumentation, like a beloved child. Even the interludes that Riggins commits to exploring throughout the record come off as a tribute to the skits and exclamations that adorn rap albums—little breaks where vocals communicate an attitude and sense of place.
Though there are few beats here that miss the mark, the big issue is that Riggins has trouble editing his cuts down to a standard length. They regularly sprawl beyond the two-minute mark and sometimes even make it to three. In an interview with XXL, he expressed that one of the big differences between Headnod Suite and Alone Together was that the new album contained more “stuff MCs will want to rap to.” True, some of the tracks seem gratuitously extended in order to coax rappers into adopting them, giving them a home on their own projects. You can’t blame Riggins for wanting more spotlight. His turn on Black America Again gave Common the template for what was arguably his strongest record in more than a decade. Coming off that success, and his many other impressive collaborations, Headnod scans as a beat tape in the classic sense: welcoming to all listeners, but meant to convey something particularly special for those who might help Riggins take his career even further. | 2017-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | March 2, 2017 | 7.3 | 1f29ab4d-25da-4ac7-b798-bea4fdec1875 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
On the London duo's second album, and first for Warp, they alter course from the manicured electronics of their debut, taking more risks-- especially with their vocals, and those of unexpected collaborator King Krule. And refreshingly, there's no nostalgia, dubby decay or wistfulness here. | On the London duo's second album, and first for Warp, they alter course from the manicured electronics of their debut, taking more risks-- especially with their vocals, and those of unexpected collaborator King Krule. And refreshingly, there's no nostalgia, dubby decay or wistfulness here. | Mount Kimbie: Cold Spring Fault Less Youth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18061-mount-kimbie-cold-spring-fault-less-youth/ | Cold Spring Fault Less Youth | There exists a lovely, hazy video of a young Mount Kimbie performing in a church with a young James Blake. They're playing Kimbie's breakthrough "Maybes" (which later received an epochal Blake remix), and near the end of the song, the three of them-- Blake and Kimbie principales Dominic Maker and Kai Campos-- take on the song's prying, percussive vocal riff. Maybe it's the setting, but the moment feels big. Friends singing with friends, tripping into pop music, figuring it out on the fly. Blake would develop those instincts, finding plenty of acclaim as a singer songwriter. Kimbie spent the ensuing years folding in on themselves, making pretty electro-acoustic vignettes. They released a couple of EPs and, eventually, a debut album, Crooks & Lovers, that treated the U.K. electronic scene like a bonsai tree, pruning the unruly until something manicured and personal remained.
On Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, their second album and first for Warp, they alter course. They take more risks, particularly with voices: their own, often, and with unexpected collaborator King Krule. The duo, which has valued coherency and neatness, move towards live instrumentation, peppering their fizzy electronics with thumbed bass lines and crumpling drums. The music that results remains small and detailed, but also allows the humid outside air to contaminate it. If Cold Spring is not an unbridled reach for a brass ring, it's at least an acknowledgment that such a ring exists.
Don't let those instruments-- including the bossy brass sounds that open the album-- throw you, though. Cold Spring is a distinctly electronic album, and a modern one as well. Dolorous electric pianos and stuttering electronics constantly bother the rhythm section. And while Cold Spring owes debts-- to Four Tet and Fridge, to Oval, to wonky stylists like Isotope 217-- its collection of tones, syncopation, and lurch is contemporary and distinct. There is no nostalgia, no dubby decay or wistfulness, locked up in Cold Spring. This alone is refreshing.
Cold Spring succeeds because Maker and Campos go out of their way to foil their default, kempt state. The most noticeable example of which is the addition of King Krule, a.k.a. gravel-voiced youngster Archy Marshall. His churlish, marble-mouthed tone is so at odds with the Kimbie universe that when it first arrives, during the opening moments of "You Took Your Time", it sounds like someone aggressively tousling the band's meticulously combed hair. Krule is a magnetic presence, fronting on a murder-- "Now did you see me/ I killed a man"-- and slowly chewing words over a distended synthesizers and thin percussion, resulting in something of a grime ballad. When he returns later on "Meter, Pale, Tone" he expertly summarizes the odd, personal charm of Mount Kimbie: "Crack a toe/ It was the loudest of sounds."
Make and Campos take turns at the mic themselves, reprising the blocky sing-chants of "Maybes" to pleasant effect. It reminds me of shape-note singing in its pacing and expression: limited voices, irregular melodic shifts. It's not pop music, but on tracks like lead single "Made to Stray" and "Blood and Form" their voices balance on the arrangements' edges and tightrope to the finish. The instrumental tracks have a broader, almost post-rock feel to them, offering jazzy percussion, needle-threaded bass workouts, and heaving atmospheres. The resplendent "Break Well" and the closing "Fall Out" prove them still capable of erratic beauty.
For these gains they've sacrificed some of their agility, the crisp snaps and cracks of Crooks & Lovers, and their easy self-containment. But Cold Spring is miles from epic or strained, and it's comfortable with its imbalance. It feels like a personal triumph: On album two Mount Kimbie were a smidge more ambitious, something that will be true whether or not the outside world deigns to notice. | 2013-05-29T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-05-29T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | May 29, 2013 | 7.7 | 1f2af569-30d7-43ae-bf5a-3eb5123569db | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
On her third album for Hyperdub, the UK experimental musician uses chaotic arrangements and glitchy drums to express knotty, difficult-to-name emotions. | On her third album for Hyperdub, the UK experimental musician uses chaotic arrangements and glitchy drums to express knotty, difficult-to-name emotions. | Loraine James: Gentle Confrontation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loraine-james-gentle-confrontation/ | Gentle Confrontation | The Kübler-Ross model has done the bereaved dirty ever since it entered the public consciousness in the 1970s. Its five tidy stages are woefully inadequate to handle the myriad shifting forms of grief: unpredictable physical manifestations, the random recovery or loss of memories, slow-dawning realizations, circular ruminations. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but it can help form emotional scar tissue. Loraine James’ third album for Hyperdub, Gentle Confrontation, is a self-examination of the marks and bruises inflicted by a significant loss in childhood. James has always wielded her voice as a malleable tool—sometimes sharpened into a jagged point between glitchy stop-start arrangements and skittering drums, other times barely perceptible beneath woozy pitch bends and plaintive synth chords. But with Gentle Confrontation she sounds newly and vocally vulnerable. “When I was seven my dad went to heaven, possibly,” she croons on “2003,” the album’s lead single. “I looked at the sky: uncertainty/It hurt me, uncertainty.”
In the six years that she’s been releasing music, James has proven herself to be a gifted moodsmith with no shortage of textures to meditate within. Alongside two previous albums of dancefloor-skewed IDM, there was a tender tribute album to minimalist composer Julian Eastman, Building Something Beautiful for Me, and a self-titled LP from her ambient project Whatever the Weather, all released at an impressive pace. In retrospect, it now seems that the Eastman project and Whatever the Weather may have been necessary precursors for James to tap into the marrow of such heartfelt material on Gentle Confrontation. The album’s self-titled opening track elegantly bridges the full expanse of James’ identities in an introduction that feels suitably cinematic: A dramatically swelling orchestral arrangement is given generous space to establish a doleful emotional register before being joined by electronic pulses and sampled drum loops.
Gentle Confrontation sprawls, and each track settles into a distinct tonality. James mirrors her raw lyrics on “2003” with a spare musical arrangement that consists of little more than the rhythmic movement of air through gasping levers and bellows. The coolly modern R&B production of “Let U Go” is remarkable for its subtly twisted feeling of discombobulation: Samples run in reverse beneath wonky chords; vocal processing renders indie R&B darling KeiyaA’s voice unrecognizable. Other standouts include “I DM U,” which pits James’ heady, unpredictable programming against the sharp sticks of Black Midi drummer Morgan Simpson. “Cards With the Grandparents” turns inwards, transforming a vignette of family life into an abstract sound study: James samples the sounds of a shuffling deck, laughter, and conversation, but she balances the light-hearted patter with a dose of melancholy (“My grandad has dementia, but he’s still very cool”).
When James revisits an idea, which she does a couple of times, each second pass reveals her evolutionary process. “Glitch the System (Glitch Bitch 2)” takes up where “Glitch Bitch,” from her 2019 album For You and I, left off. While the rework keeps the earlier track’s mid-tempo kick and swing, it casts off the fixed 4/4 structure and dials up the fluttering synth pads and pillowy kicks, yielding a melodic push-and-pull that soars with abandon. Similarly, “Prelude of Tired of Me” offers a mumbling inner monologue and a bottom-heavy sketch of a beat, whereas “Tired of Me,” seven tracks later, arrives spruced up and with extra sass. What at first seems like reticence—Loraine is back, she mutters, but she’s not feeling it, doesn’t want to talk about it, doesn’t want to think about it—abruptly dissolves into soft golden light and the plucked tones of a pastoral sunbeam. “I left it all/And I wonder/How would I find the power again?” she harmonizes, delicately.
Gentle Confrontation is peppered with notable collaborations, perhaps in acknowledgement of the role that music plays in formative years, when metabolizing one’s own thoughts and emotions through the lyrics and gestures of others becomes so critical. James credits early-2000s indie-electronic acts Lusine and Dntel as inspirations, and you can hear their influence on “One Way Ticket to the Midwest (Emo)” which features Corey Mastrangelo of the math-rock band Vasudeva. Its lilting folktronica is sweetly calming, providing a moment of rest at the album’s midpoint. But across the sheer length and expansiveness of Gentle Confrontation, some collaborations—particularly the sleek, sophisticated ballads featuring Eden Samara and George Riley—don’t quite attain the same level of resonance. Though delicately sung and tastefully produced, both lack the sense of revealing transformation so convincingly conveyed at other points in the album.
In the album’s closing track, “Saying Goodbye,” Contour sings a telling line: “To look me in the eye is to know my strife.” His velvety timbre and gentle cadence smooth over James’ fractured synths and scratchy percussion. Along with the opening title track, it provides a poignant bookend to an album that refuses to draw a neatly conclusive arc. Instead, Gentle Confrontation offers an invitation to bear witness to a process that’s human, hard to define, and close to the heart. | 2023-09-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | September 27, 2023 | 8 | 1f2af949-cb4d-4959-b43b-7359b91d9f2b | Christine Kakaire | https://pitchfork.com/staff/christine-kakaire/ | |
Blackstar has David Bowie embracing his status as a no-fucks icon, clutching onto remnants from the past as exploratory jazz and the echos of various mad men soundtrack his freefall. | Blackstar has David Bowie embracing his status as a no-fucks icon, clutching onto remnants from the past as exploratory jazz and the echos of various mad men soundtrack his freefall. | David Bowie: Blackstar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21332-blackstar/ | Blackstar | David Bowie has died many deaths yet he is still with us. He is popular music’s ultimate Lazarus: Just as that Biblical figure was beckoned by Jesus to emerge from his tomb after four days of nothingness, Bowie has put many of his selves to rest over the last half-century, only to rise again with a different guise. This is astounding to watch, but it's more treacherous to live through; following Lazarus’ return, priests plotted to kill him, fearing the power of his story. And imagine actually being such a miracle man—resurrection is a hard act to follow.
Bowie knows all this. He will always have to answer to his epochal work of the 1970s, the decade in which he dictated several strands of popular and experimental culture, when he made reinvention seem as easy as waking up in the morning. Rather than trying to outrun those years, as he did in the '80s and '90s, he is now mining them in a resolutely bizarre way that scoffs at greatest-hits tours, nostalgia, and brainless regurgitation.
His new off-Broadway musical is called Lazarus, and it turns Bowie’s penchant for avatars into an intriguing shell game: The disjointed production features actor Michael C. Hall doing his best impression of Bowie’s corrupted, drunk, and immortal alien from the 1976 art film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Trapped in a set that mimics a Manhattan penthouse, Hall presses himself up to his high skyscraper windows as he sings a new Bowie song also called "Lazarus." "This way or no way, you know, I’ll be free," he sings, smudging his hands against the glass. "Just like that bluebird." Bowie sings the same song on Blackstar, an album that has him clutching onto remnants from the past as exploratory jazz and the echos of various mad men soundtrack his freefall.
Following years of troubling silence, Bowie returned to the pop world with 2013’s The Next Day. The goodwill surrounding his return could not overcome the album’s overall sense of stasis, though. Conversely, on Blackstar, he embraces his status as a no-fucks icon, a 68-year-old with "nothing left to lose," as he sings on "Lazarus." The album features a quartet of brand-new collaborators, led by the celebrated modern jazz saxophonist Donny McCaslin, whose repertoire includes hard bop as well as skittering Aphex Twin covers. Bowie’s longtime studio wingman Tony Visconti is back as co-producer, bringing along with him some continuity and a sense of history.
Because as much as Blackstar shakes up our idea of what a David Bowie record can sound like, its blend of jazz, codes, brutality, drama, and alienation is not without precedent in his work. Bowie’s first proper instrument was a saxophone, after all, and as a preteen he looked up to his older half-brother Terry Burns, who exposed him to John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and Beat Generation ideals. The links connecting Bowie, his brother, and jazz feel significant. Burns suffered from schizophrenia throughout his life; he once tried to kill himself by jumping out of a mental hospital window and eventually committed suicide by putting himself in front of a train in 1985.
Perhaps this helps explain why Bowie has often used jazz and his saxophone not for finger-snapping pep but rather to hint at mystery and unease. It’s there in his close collaborations with avant-jazz pianist Mike Garson, from 1973’s "Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)" all the way to 2003’s "Bring Me the Disco King." It’s in his wild squawks on 1993’s "Jump They Say," an ode to Burns. But there is no greater example of the pathos that makes Bowie’s saxophone breathe than on "Subterraneans" from 1977’s Low, one of his most dour (and influential) outré moments. That song uncovered a mood of future nostalgia so lasting that it’s difficult to imagine the existence of an act like Boards of Canada without it. Completing the circle, Boards of Canada were reportedly one of Bowie’s inspirations for Blackstar. At this point, it is all but impossible for Bowie to escape himself, but that doesn’t mean he won’t try.
Thematically, Blackstar pushes on with the world-weary nihilism that has marked much of his work this century. "It’s a head-spinning dichotomy of the lust for life against the finality of everything," he mused around the release of 2003’s Reality. "It’s those two things raging against each other… that produces these moments that feel like real truth." Those collisions come hard and strong throughout the album, unpredictable jazz solos and spirited vocals meeting timeless stories of blunt force and destruction. The rollicking "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore" gets its name from a controversial 17th-century play in which a man has sex with his sister only to stab her in the heart in the middle of a kiss. Bowie’s twist involves some canny gender-bending ("she punched me like a dude"), a robbery, and World War I, but the gist is the same—humans will always resort to a language of savagery when necessary, no matter where or when. See also: "Girl Loves Me," which has Bowie yelping in the slang originated by A Clockwork Orange’s ultraviolent droogs.
Though this mix of jazz, malice, and historical role-play is intoxicating, Blackstar becomes whole with its two-song denouement, which balances out the bruises and blood with a couple of salty tears. These are essentially classic David Bowie ballads, laments in which he lets his mask hang just enough for us to see the creases of skin behind it. "Dollar Days" is the confession of a restless soul who could not spend his golden years in a blissful British countryside even if he wanted to. "I’m dying to push their backs against the grain and fool them all again and again," he sings, the words doubling as a mantra for Blackstar and much of Bowie’s career. Then, on "I Can’t Give Everything Away," he once again sounds like a frustrated Lazarus, stymied by a returning pulse. This tortured immortality is no gimmick: Bowie will live on long after the man has died. For now, though, he’s making the most of his latest reawakening, adding to the myth while the myth is his to hold. | 2016-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia / RCA / ISO | January 7, 2016 | 8.5 | 1f2bede9-0a2a-4a7e-92e5-fba8dd2f069b | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Liars' relentlessly tense new album finds the always excellent band focusing on detail and texture rather than stylistic schizophrenia. | Liars' relentlessly tense new album finds the always excellent band focusing on detail and texture rather than stylistic schizophrenia. | Liars: Sisterworld | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13991-sisterworld/ | Sisterworld | Whatever or wherever Sisterworld is, it sounds like a pretty creepy place. The fifth Liars album is relentlessly tense-- not so much scary as surreal. Every track is shrouded in echo and anxiety, and often all the tension erupts into bursts of buzzing guitars or pounding beats. Not every dark cloud breaks into a thunderstorm, but it constantly feels like one is lurking around the corner.
Despite such potential for surprise, overall Sisterworld isn't actually all that surprising compared to the rest of Liars' discography. For a band known for switching gears from track to track and album to album, this is the most thoroughly Liars-sounding record so far. It has the rhythmic insistence of Drum's Not Dead, the sleepwalking chants of They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, and the straightforward songwriting of Liars, often sounding like a streamlined update on the latter. The narrowed range brings increased depth, and it's intriguing to hear Liars focus on detail and texture rather than stylistic schizophrenia. It turns out refinement suits them as nicely as reinvention.
Take "Here Comes All the People", which the band spent a year on, crafting its basic structure in Los Angeles and adding orchestral atmospheres in Prague. None of that guarantees quality-- it's possible to make crap in both L.A. and Prague. But Liars used this elongated process to give zoomed-in attention to each moment. So the trembling guitar line, high-pitched strings, and psychotic piano all fit together, like a puzzle whose picture isn't clear until the last piece is in place. When singer Angus Andrew ends the song by chanting "counting victims one by one," the killer effect comes through lethal injection rather than a loud, blunt act. That mood continues into the meditative "Drip", a track that's almost all atmosphere, with Andrew murmuring, "When will I awake from this dormant sleep?" as if he has no say in the matter.
Not everything on Sisterworld is so subdued. "Proud Evolution" grows into a persistent Krautrock-styled groove; the clicking "No Barrier Fun" has the catchy lilt of a nursery rhyme; and "Scarecrows on a Killer Slant" sounds like a warped version of Liars' slamming "Plaster Casts of Everything". Even "Drop Dead", a drunken march that sound ever ready to collapse, holds upbeat energy in its skewed sway. Still, the dominant mode here is creeping tension without tons of cathartic release. That tension is so well-crafted that it consistently engages, but 42 minutes of it might not completely win over every Liars fan, especially those drawn to their more raucous moments. Admittedly, some parts are easier to admire than they are to enjoy. But stick with Sisterworld as it builds, let it seep into your brain while you wait for its bulging seams to burst, and you might find yourself unable to turn your ears away. Eventually, Liars' commitment to their own creepy cause proves contagious. | 2010-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mute | March 9, 2010 | 8.1 | 1f2c5860-f5cd-4959-a584-9e88cbdb1adf | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
For their Dave Fridmann-produced Sub Pop debut, veteran slowcore band Low expand their palette, but achieve varying degrees of success. | For their Dave Fridmann-produced Sub Pop debut, veteran slowcore band Low expand their palette, but achieve varying degrees of success. | Low: The Great Destroyer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4902-the-great-destroyer/ | The Great Destroyer | "The future is prisms and math," Alan Sparhawk sings on "Death of a Salesman", one of the few successful tracks from The Great Destroyer. Any English professor will tell you it's dangerous to conflate an author with his narrator, but in this case, there are parallels to draw. Think of the prism as this statement from the band's online bio (written circa Secret Name): "Low is a trio from Duluth, Minnesota, who make very slow music. That's not the only thing there is to their music, or even the most important thing, but it's what you'll notice first." Anyone that's listened to myopic negative criticism of the group knows this all too well.
The bio goes on to note that there's more to Low music than narcoleptic tempos; indeed, you'd have to be tone-deaf or stubborn to listen to Secret Name or Songs From a Dead Pilot and not realize that. Still, the stereotype remains-- as do expectations from fans of all stripes, whether the band wants to cop to them or not. Most importantly, there's the expectations that the band has of themselves; over the past decade, the group has shown a willingness to buck convention and follow their muse wherever it leads. Unfortunately, it sounds like they've been lead astray. In other words (again, from "Death of a Salesman"): "I forgot all my songs/ The words now are wrong/ And I burned my guitar in a rage".
This forgetful rage is exemplified by "Everybody's Song", one of the album's many missteps. On this song, the group rocks out-- Sparhawk breaks out the Spinal Tap amp, Mimi Parker pummels her snare and high-hat, and Zak Sally...well, Zak doesn't have to change his approach too much, though he might be plucking his bass strings with more force than usual. On top of this mess are those patented gorgeous two-part harmonies, uncharacteristically straining to make themselves heard over the racket. And that's what this track amounts to-- a big ball of racket, crass and boorish, full of the sound and fury that don't amount to much. More importantly, it goes against everything that Low does successfully.
Don't take my word for it, though. According to Low, "they play songs stripped to their bare essentials: slow tempos, quiet voices, powerful lyrics, and minimal instrumentations." You'd think that a song following that plan of attack would be a smashing success, or-- at the very least-- a bit better than this Marshall Stacked stuff. Instead, they end up with a song bastard naysayers can use as Hater's Exhibit A in the case of Why Low Is No Good. "Broadway (So Many People)", an interminable seven-minute track, takes its sweet time alternating between bored lead-footed strumming and waning echoed ambiance before giving way to a cloying coda that aims for "pretty" but ends up well in the rough.
The rest of the album consists of various extrapolations of Low's sound with varying degrees of success. "Monkey", the lead-off track, is what "Everybody's Song" would be with just a smidge of restraint, a better sense of dynamics, and some self-awareness. Following that is "California", probably the best pop song the group's ever recorded (with the meta-aware "Just Stand Back" and the peppy Spector homage "Walk Into the Sea" finishing close behind). On the other hand, there are Low-by-numbers tracks like "On the Edge Of" (working the quiet/loud trick like a broken light switch) and over-wrought slabs like "Step" (complete with vocal effects, piano taps, hand claps, and children's vocals all drunkenly stumbling into each other), where the busy hands of producer Dave Fridmann still end up doing the Devil's work.
Erring on the side of minimal instrumentation would have done this record a world of good. "Cue the Strings" would play out beautifully as just Mimi & Alan set against a sea of feedback, but the invasive metronomic beat and the fake strings (popping in on cue) muddy the waters; the all tension/no release moves of "Pissing" is the slightly more successful flip side to "Everybody's Song" and its all release/no tension MO; "Silver Rider" pays too much attention to its own edict ("Sometimes your voice is not enough") and adds just enough bells and whistles-- a timpani drum here, a buried looped vocal there, some acoustic picking sprinkled throughout-- to upset the song's balance; "When I Go Deaf" works fine as a quiet acoustic number but loses a bit of its emotional heft when the full band comes in and the guitar tech plugs in Sparhawk's Flying V.
"The future is prisms and math." So let's crunch some numbers: Low's been an ongoing concern for over a decade. The Great Destroyer is their 8th album, and 12th full-length release. They've recorded enough songs during the course of their career to fill a three-CD box set with a set of 52 songs that barely overlaps what's available on their full-lengths. And never mind the number of tours and shows and hours logged in countless studios. I mention all this because of the intriguing subtext permeating most of these songs. It's in the song titles--"Death of a Salesman", "When I Go Deaf", "Cue The Strings", "Walk Into The Sea". It's in the lyrics--"never sing that song again," "the march is over/ The great destroyer/ She passes through you like a knife," "Yeah, time's a great destroyer/ It leaves every child a bastard." And, most tellingly, on "Just Stand Back": "I could turn on you so fast/ I'll just cut you in the end." Sounds like they're cutting bait and heading back to shore.
You can imagine a wry smirk on Alan's face when he sings: "It's a hit/ It's got soul/ Steal the show/ With your rock'n'roll". It's a wry encapsulation of a band that's made a point (up until now) to forgo convention, instead setting off to discover a new dialect in an old language. This line could easily serve as an epithet, or an epitaph. And maybe this is a death, and The Great Destroyer is Low themselves, orphaning their fans and their history for the sake of the group's creative edification. If this album is indeed the beginning of a long, arduous journey of rediscovery and rebirth and other fun ponderous stuff, here's hoping the rest of the trip is more enjoyable than this initial misstep. | 2005-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2005-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | January 26, 2005 | 5.5 | 1f2da56e-7a45-40f9-b943-0199ce53835a | David Raposa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-raposa/ | null |
Torch of the Mystics is Sun City Girls’ best-loved album. It's replete with moments of hypnotic tunefulness stretched into songs that feel as classic and well-worn as the dusty cassettes the band uncovered on their travels around the globe. Long out of print, it's been resissued on CD and vinyl. | Torch of the Mystics is Sun City Girls’ best-loved album. It's replete with moments of hypnotic tunefulness stretched into songs that feel as classic and well-worn as the dusty cassettes the band uncovered on their travels around the globe. Long out of print, it's been resissued on CD and vinyl. | Sun City Girls: Torch of the Mystics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21175-torch-of-the-mystics/ | Torch of the Mystics | The arc of Sun City Girls’ 26-year history was long, but it bent toward chaos. Their music was an unpredictable pile-up of rock, pop, jazz, blues, psych, noise, improv, and many far-flung global sounds—with special love for the music of the Middle East—delivered as ballads, jams, rants, plays, and pranks. Their dual passions for playing whatever they felt like and confounding any audience who would listen dovetailed perfectly, such that even their biggest fans can cite Sun City Girls moments that they found baffling or even off-putting.
This penchant for messiness helps explain why 1990’s Torch of the Mystics is Sun City Girls’ most famous and perhaps best-loved album. The most surprising aspect of this record is how well arranged and engaging the music is. Though the trio had roots in the Arizona hardcore scene of the early '80s, no one ever pegged them as purveyors of three chords and the truth, especially given the rambling releases that preceded Torch. But the three-chord riff that launches album opener "Blue Mamba" couldn't be more direct, and remains Sun City Girls’ biggest-ever earworm.
Torch of the Mystics is replete with moments like that—nuggets of hypnotic tunefulness stretched into songs that feel as classic and well-worn as the dusty cassettes the band uncovered on their travels around the globe (later mined for compilations on bassist/singer Alan Bishop’s Sublime Frequencies label). You can actually whistle along to most of Torch’s songs—one even starts with Bishop whistling the melody for you—and even the farthest-out tunes have discernible shapes that quickly burn into memory.
The most immediate images come from the guitar of Alan Bishop’s younger brother Rick. Earlier Sun City Girls albums hinted at his instrumental prowess, but it’s on full display on Torch of the Mystics. His playing isn’t about technical know-how or honed chops—though he clearly has both of those—but rather finding epiphanies in repetition. The curling chords of "Esoterica of Abyssynia" are so dizzying they seem to fold in on themselves, like a musical Möbius strip. Similar effects spin from the warped strings of "Radar 1941", which sounds like a water-logged surf tune that washed up from the other side of the planet.
An equal counterpart to Rick’s guitar is the malleable voice of his sibling, Alan. The Bishops’ worldly travels clearly gave Alan an ear for all manner of singing styles, and on Torch he displays the vocal capabilities to match them. At times he sounds like he’s channeling ghosts of singers past, as in the worshipful warble of "Space Prophet Dogon" or the strikingly-beautiful scale-riding of "The Shining Path". The latter is a cover of Bolivian folk song "Llorando se feu", and Sun City Girls’ treatment is typical of their magical way with covers. It retains the stirring mood of the original while transposing it to a more mysterious, fantastical realm (in this case, one haunted by the Spaghetti Western scores of Bishop hero Ennio Morricone). Yet as breathtaking as his singing can be, some of Alan’s most moving vocal performances come when he yells, hums, and moans, reaching for a higher plane while simultaneously conveying pristine beauty.
That pursuit is all over Torch of the Mystics, and a big part of what makes it great. It’s as much about the profundity of disorder as the clarity of structure. Though the latter may be more obvious on first listen, dig in deep and the trio’s love of surprise and confusion emerge loudly. Many tracks teeter on the edge of explosion, straddling the line between inspiration and insanity. Four of the songs were completely improvised, and all were recorded in single takes, but the album’s unity emerges from the band’s persistent vision. Torch of the Mystics finds a point at which chaos and order meet to become a third path—one that, in this thrilling and still-vital incarnation, only Sun City Girls could discover. | 2015-10-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Abduction | October 28, 2015 | 9 | 1f2e57df-bac1-49ac-8036-fbd4bf300029 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The New Jersey rapper makes Haiti the main character of his latest project, balancing social context with a sense of intimacy and urgency. | The New Jersey rapper makes Haiti the main character of his latest project, balancing social context with a sense of intimacy and urgency. | Mach-Hommy: Balens Cho (Hot Candles) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mach-hommy-balens-cho/ | Balens Cho (Hot Candles) | Haiti is more than just a character in Mach-Hommy’s music—it’s the lens through which he views the world. Once one of the richest and most lucrative colonies in the Americas, the country famously played host to the West’s first successful slave revolt and remains an example of what happens when Black people take ownership of their labor, land, and capital: Punished with the present-day equivalent of $21 billion in debt to its colonizers—compensation for the enslavers’ “property”—the island nation is still reeling from its colonial history.
This context gives Mach-Hommy’s new album Balens Cho a sense of intimacy and immediacy. The Haitian-American MC doesn’t need to quote Fanon or other scholars to illustrate the effects of colonialism. He reflects it through depictions of the people within his sphere, like the brother-in-law who flees to Europe to study art, never to return, or the father whose social capital turned to dust in Mach’s hands after he died. He’s clearly scarred, but his defense mechanisms rely less on violence than they do on protection—of his heart, his mind, and his body.
Balens Cho contains no shortage of cheeky one-liners (“Your flow trash, plus you psoas like the muscle”), but they feel more matter-of-fact than a flex, a tool for Mach-Hommy to burn his thoughts into your brain. He wields his voice with intention, from gravelly croons on hooks to rhythmic flows in his verses. The brief interludes—which feature Caucasian interlopers to Haitian culture and sound like clips from vintage broadcasts—are somewhat jarring, making it difficult to become immersed in the images Mach-Hommy paints. They’re a reminder of the voyeuristic nature of listening to music this intimate as an outsider to the environment in which it was created; a mirror for some, a telescope for others.
If Mach’s approach seems somewhat combative, it’s likely by design. He makes no effort to make the music more accessible and often seems to attempt the opposite. His early fan base was small but passionate, and until very recently, you had to work hard—and pay a lot—to find his music. Even parsing the lyrics requires extra effort; they’re not available where you’d expect to find them, and transcriptions that pop up online are quickly struck down (as he reminds us on “Magnum Band Remix”: “Chain snatching to DMCA, either way, your link gone”). And because Haitian Creole varies from region to region, some of the lyrics in his native tongue may be tricky to interpret even if you speak it fluently.
Balens Cho feels softer and smoother than his last LP, this spring’s Pray for Haiti. Much of that can be attributed to Montreal producer Nicholas Craven—who produced half of this album’s eight songs—and Sam Gendel, a virtuosic instrumentalist whose saxophone is the second-most expressive voice on the record. It often serves as an instrumental foil to Mach-Hommy’s voice; Gendel’s extended outro on “Wooden Nickels” seems to mirror the end of “Traditional,” the two instruments in conversation with each other.
Even when it’s somber and elegiac, Balens Cho is devoid of self-pity. “What happens when conditions ain’t livable?” he asks knowingly on “Traditional.” “What happens when your vision ain’t visible?” The stories he tells here are not merely his own. He understands, better than most, the role of mythmaking in reshaping reality. Often, all it requires is a perspective shift; a statement like “All space programs derive themselves from Africa” might seem radical until you dig deeper and find that the oldest astronomical sites are found in Africa, where ancient astronomers named constellations centuries before the Greeks. Part of Mach’s genius is that he forces you to meet him halfway, to seek that which lies outside oneself. For those who do, the rewards are plentiful.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Mach-Hommy | December 9, 2021 | 8.1 | 1f30fd25-bb2d-4670-b6f5-fe263a62f0e5 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
A document of the Detroit jazz collective’s later years captures a cast of dozens balancing local community with cultural staying power. | A document of the Detroit jazz collective’s later years captures a cast of dozens balancing local community with cultural staying power. | Tribe: Hometown: Detroit Sessions 1990-2014 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tribe-hometown-detroit-sessions-1990-2014/ | Hometown: Detroit Sessions 1990-2014 | Almost from its birth, Tribe was much more than simply a jazz group. It was a living example of the ways that community and cultural capital could evolve together during the American century’s final third, in a city that helped define the era’s musical and civic spirit: Detroit, Michigan. Tribe began as a collective around four musicians—reed player Wendell Harrison, trombonist Phil Ranellin, trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, and pianist Harold McKinney—who embodied the late 1960s’ spirit of black self-determination. It ended up a local institution, tutoring program, and one of the unmistakable through lines in the city’s musical history. The contributions of Tribe members stretch directly from Ray Charles and Motown to Geri Allen and Detroit techno. If Hometown: Detroit Sessions 1990-2014, a wonderful compilation of mostly unreleased recordings from the latter chapters of Tribe’s history, doesn’t quite scale early-career musical heights, it makes clear that judging lifelong endeavors through a narrow lens of a single period of time—even one that contemporary perspective deems “classic”—is a fool’s errand.
There is no denying the value of Tribe’s revolutionary early sounds. Recorded mostly under the names of individual players and only occasionally as a group, their fluid mixture of soulful post-bop swing, free avant-garde playing, hard in-the-pocket jazz-funk, and almighty music of the spirit continues to spill gracefully off comps like Soul Jazz’s Message From the Tribe: An Anthology of Tribe Records 1972-76 or P-Vine’s Vibes From the Tribe Vol. I and Vol. II; it’s likely to appeal to any admirer of improvisational rapture or a fat-ass groove. But the myriad activities around these recordings, the ones that helped build and sustain both Detroit’s mythical creative streak and its literal artistic community, expose Tribe’s deeper virtues.
This is where neighborhood capital, and Tribe’s contribution to it, come into play. The self-sustaining ethos of Tribe Records, Harrison’s Wenha Records, and Harrison and McKiney’s Rebirth Records helped carry on Motown’s ideal of homegrown, artist-run labels, one that continues in the city’s dance music to this day. Tribe magazine—published from 1972 until 1977 and edited by journalist Herb Boyd, author of Hometown’s liner notes and the great 2017 book Black Detroit: A People's History of Self-Determination—was deeply involved in local politics, galvanizing votes for the city’s first black mayor, Coleman Young. (According to Mark Stryker’s fine new book Jazz From Detroit, the publication was also successful enough to fund Tribe Records.) And both Marcus Belgrave’s Jazz Development Workshop and Harrison and McKinney’s educational and event-production organization Rebirth Inc. were responsible for fine-tuning an endless list of Detroit’s musical talent.
That’s one reason Hometown is stocked with performers you may recognize from classic John Coltrane albums (bassist Reggie Workman) or Theo Parrish 12"s (trumpeter John Douglas), along with lesser-known giants (trumpeter Jimmy Owens, trombonist Kiani Zawadi). Despite consisting of three separate sessions recorded over 24 years, and featuring two dozen players, the collection feels like a unified work. Eschewing the outer territories Tribe members once wandered, Hometown conveys a more comforting musical tradition (though with plenty of details that trail outward like breadcrumbs, for those paying attention). Its sound is, to quote the title of the McKinney piece that opens the set, “Wide and Blue.” Recorded live in 1995, at the SereNgeti Ballroom, a great turn-of-the-century Detroit jazz space, the song cuts a relaxed and confident stride: McKinney and Workman’s extended conversation and Harrison’s compact tenor solo are bookended by a theme stated on four horns—Harrison, Belgrave, Owens, and Zawadi. It’s a harmonic statement that wouldn’t seem out of place in the classic Blue Note songbook—that is, until the diminuendo, when horns unlock into a frenzied blowing burst that’s part Frenchmen Street, part Saturn.
Hometown collects many such knowing touches as it showcases the depth of an oft-ignored creative community and its cultural staying power. The experience and mastry is there for all to hear, whether in the lesser-known compositions (each of the 10 songs is an original that features its author) or in exceptional playing, which is beguilingly concise.
The songs are alone worth the price. Ranelin’s “Freddie’s Groove” is a dance number honoring Freddie Hubbard, precisely capturing the legendary trumpeter’s funky Red Clay/Straight Life period (cue: Ralphe Armstrong’s uncut bassline, Harrison quoting cartoon themes like Sonny Rollins, and guitarist John Arnold in rocked-up George Benson mode). The Pamela Wise composition that gives the compilation its name beautifully mixes the propulsion of a squad of percussionists with the intertwined melancholy of Douglas’ trumpet and Harrison’s tenor, supported by Wise’s modal keys. Zawadi’s “Libra Ahora,” the set’s single moment of stretching out, brings the clave and the drummers (including a star turn by percussionist Frencesco Mora), plus an extended interplay between the four horns. And then there’s McKinney’s “Juba,” which opens with the pianist’s wife and twin daughters in a rendition of an antebellum handclap-and-voice holler, followed by a horn party that McKinney amends by banging out wonderfully dissonant clusters.
Such social history has always been central to Tribe’s musical expression, and Hometown features a trio of direct lyrical engagements with the past that also speak to the present. Wise’s “Ode to Black Mothers” and “Marcus Garvey,” featuring words by poet/pastor Mbiyu Chui, are familiar ceremonial acclamations in which a lone teacher rises on a bed of drums to bear a valuable lesson. But McKinney’s closing “Slave Ship Enterprise” is something else entirely: a two-decades-old, solo piano-and-voice reading whose prescience would be remarkable if you didn’t know that black America has been preaching its message for a century. It is an inversion of the chords of “America the Beautiful,” rewritten as an operatically delivered tone poem, with McKinney unfurling a broad “comment on the American phenomenon”—at times ambient, at others direct. “Seems so near and dear, yet so far/Near as our ideals, yet far from the way we are,” reads his indictment of the “land of the free,” a ship “of state… where captain and captive must share a common fate.”
The fact that “Slave Ship Enterprise” ends on an almost undeserved image of hope—“U.S. spells ‘us’”—says a lot about where the faith of both Tribe and McKinney, who passed away in 2001, lay. (Belgrave died in 2015.) Like much of the collective’s work, musical and otherwise, it was rooted in the strength of the community and its culture. There was (and remains) an inherent understanding that the vitality of any hometown is expressed not only in how brightly its light shines, but in how long the people keep it on. | 2019-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Strut | October 25, 2019 | 7.7 | 1f396d44-ddb5-4bb2-b943-0d5522524536 | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | |
The latest from the wildly eclectic Calexico takes its cues from the group's two most recent records, the kitchen-sink aesthetic of 2003's Feast of Wire and the more basic rock-band approach of 2006's Garden Ruin. Iron & Wine's Sam Beam and Tortoise's Doug McCombs guest. | The latest from the wildly eclectic Calexico takes its cues from the group's two most recent records, the kitchen-sink aesthetic of 2003's Feast of Wire and the more basic rock-band approach of 2006's Garden Ruin. Iron & Wine's Sam Beam and Tortoise's Doug McCombs guest. | Calexico: Carried to Dust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12175-carried-to-dust/ | Carried to Dust | Being in Calexico is almost like attending a music school, where every record is another lesson on the way to a dissertation. Core members Joey Burns and John Convertino prepped in Giant Sand and Friends of Dean Martinez, and they've kept a busy schedule of extracurricular activities since, touring with Wilco and Iron & Wine and playing on dozens of other people's records. Their own albums have swerved all over the stylistic map while maintaining an essential sense of identity. The divergence in sound between their last two albums, 2003's Feast of Wire and 2006's Garden Ruin, basically predicts the shape of Carried to Dust-- Feast of Wire was the record where they tried everything and made it work; its follow-up was their basic rock album.
While they're frequently thought of as stylists or synthesists, Calexico use their cross-genre amalgams to make music of emotional power and beauty, and this record has exceptional instances of both. "Writer's Minor Holiday" provides the beauty. Convertino's laid-back, jazzy drumming drives the track, freeing falsetto vocals and sparing dabs of steel guitar to serve as ghostly hooks and allowing the central melody to reveal itself slowly. Several of these songs are like that-- the primary vocal is so understated it defers to the instruments; to that end, string-soaked, waltz-time ballad "The News About William" works almost like a duet between Burns and Paul Niehaus' steel guitar.
Multi-instrumentalist Jacob Valenzuela gets his first Calexico co-lead vocal here, sharing the mic with guest Amparo Sanchez on the Spanish-language "Inspiración", which has the album's boldest borderland horn part and a freaky underlying organ ostinato. Other guests include Jairo Zavala, who partners with Burns on the dark chorus of "Victor Jara's Hands", and Iron & Wine's Sam Beam, who lends his soft harmonies to the sensuous flamenco-dub slide of "House of Valparaiso". The album's final third is darker and harder, moving from the desert surf of "El Gatillo (Trigger Revisited)" to the sawing, mournful cello of "Falling from Sleeves" to the icy, spooky soundscape of closer "Contention City", a slow drift of electric piano, glockenspiel, and otherwordly steel guitar featuring Doug McCombs of Tortoise and Brokeback.
Carried to Dust, therefore, is more in the band's usual Southwestern jazz/country/rock/tejano mold than their last, but it's not as diffuse or far-ranging as Feast of Wire. Ultimately, this is the type of record this band is suited to making, and it richly rewards repeat listening-- details and melodies that seem buried or understated eventually come to fore, slowly revealed in a mixture of organic warmth, welcome variety, and subtle complexity. | 2008-09-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-09-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Quarterstick | September 11, 2008 | 8.3 | 1f3d7fc3-da32-45ee-8f95-b4897d244f15 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
On their latest, tropical-house duo Classixx enlist guest vocalists from How to Dress Well to Passion Pit's Michael Angelakos to T-Pain. | On their latest, tropical-house duo Classixx enlist guest vocalists from How to Dress Well to Passion Pit's Michael Angelakos to T-Pain. | Classixx: Faraway Reach | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21947-faraway-reach/ | Faraway Reach | When Classixx released their debut album Hanging Gardens in 2013, it turned out that the Los Angeles duo Tyler Blake and Michael David, previously known for their production, were equally talented as songwriters. Among the album's many highlights were the songs in which the duo brought in outside voices, such as the glorious Nancy Whang-assisted kiss-off "All You're Waiting For" and the pre-sunrise melancholy of “Borderline,” which featured an affecting performance from Kisses vocalist Jesse Kivel. These fleeting glimpses of the pop album Classixx might one day make were tantalized, and on their sophomore effort Faraway Reach, they plant their flag even firmer in straight-ahead pop.
Their songwriting remains a strong point, and Classixx continue to show a knack for choosing kindred-spirit collaborators. This time around, names that would appear in larger fonts on festival posters show up: Michael Angelakos of Passion Pit—whose has worked with dance producers before, appearing on last year's Adventure, the underrated debut from France's Madeon—drops by on “Safe Inside,” and his wide-eyed sincerity neatly aligns with Classixx's buoyant worldview.“I Feel Numb” is full-on disco, featuring a heart-on-his-sleeve vocal from Holy Ghost! frontman Alex Frankel.
“I am the one who makes you feel OK,” Frankel assures a concerned significant other as he warns them that he might be slipping into another depressive spell. It's an example of the world-weariness that suffuses the record—Frankel makes this person feel not good, not great, but just OK. And, as any adult will attest, sometimes OK is good enough. An album that recasts the dancefloor as a space to explore—and, crucially, attempt to combat—the malaise of adulthood, Faraway Reach concerns itself with less-than-glamorous topics ranging from depression (the aforementioned “I Feel Numb”), to mundane and banal activities like fighting with one's partner in line at the grocery store (“In These Fine Times”) and allowing of the pain of the past to inform but not define you (“Just Let Go,” which absorbs the anthemic qualities of big-tent EDM and features How to Dress Well aka Tom Krell in full-on diva mode to great effect).
Classixx redeems the bleakness of these topics with their natural sense of warmth—their music often feels like a familiar hand on your shoulder urging you to keep going. In hindsight, the sun-bleached vibes of Hanging Gardens played a role in the rise of tropical house, and the same laid-back tempos and vague hints of sea breeze are found on Faraway Reach. But there's an inclusivity to Classixx, a sense of arms-outstretched welcoming that makes it impossible for anyone to turn their nose up at their music.
“I can do whatever I want,” warbles T-Pain on standout “Whatever I Want.” This confidence applies equally to his collaborators—in a nod to Michael David's birthplace of South Africa, Classixx effortlessly bring in Nonku, daughter of famed South African artist Ray Phiri, on “Ndivile.” And the album's wordless moments, of which there are only three, including tranquil opener "Grecian Summer" and the title track, demonstrate that Classixx haven't lost the ability to craft propulsive dance grooves, even if they're treated more as scene-setters and transitional tools. At various points, Faraway Reach is: a shrug; a call-to-arms; a balm. At its best, it's all these things at once. | 2016-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Innovative Leisure | May 28, 2016 | 7.7 | 1f403a63-65d8-45b2-80a4-769da24e9d8b | Renato Pagnani | https://pitchfork.com/staff/renato-pagnani/ | null |
A new reissue of the the master craftsman’s 2001 album offers the quintessential portrait of his third act, showcasing a fascination with the places where genres intertwine. | A new reissue of the the master craftsman’s 2001 album offers the quintessential portrait of his third act, showcasing a fascination with the places where genres intertwine. | Nick Lowe: The Convincer (20th Anniversary Reissue) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nick-lowe-the-convincer-20th-anniversary-reissue/ | The Convincer (20th Anniversary Reissue) | Nick Lowe was never known for his finesse. They called him “Basher” back in the days when he produced seminal records by the likes of Elvis Costello, the Damned, and the Pretenders. Most of the time, he was satisfied after the first or second take, moving on to the next thrill, a breakneck pace reflected in the music he made with and without his band Rockpile during the late 1970s. His tempos were reckless, his hooks were heavy, and he relished every harmony and joke. On the back cover of his 1978 solo debut Jesus of Cool, Lowe sported a replica of the Riddler outfit from the 1960s Batman TV series, and the suit fit: He was a pop prankster on the run from sincerity and maturity.
Time waits for no one, and, after his pop stardom slipped away during the 1980s, Lowe decided to act his age. A quick glance at the album cover for The Convincer, Lowe’s newly reissued 2001 album, conveys just how many years had passed since he was a shaggy-haired scamp, cracking wise about how it’s “Cruel to Be Kind.” Staring directly at the camera, bearing a wry grin, Lowe is clean-cut, grey, and dapper: The rock’n’roll ruffian has turned into a debonair charmer. Musically, The Convincer is the quintessential album of Lowe's third act. Its unfussy, minimalist production enhances the deliberate craft of its songs: There are no unnecessary elements, only what’s needed to bring the song to life.
Discussing his creative approach at the time of The Convincer’s release, Lowe told No Depressions’s David Cantwell, “I work on it like mad until it feels like I’m singing someone else’s song and I can take any kind of liberty with it I want.” Cover songs have long been a trademark of Lowe’s work, and the selections of “Only a Fool Breaks His Own Heart,” originally cut by jazz singer Arthur Prysock and popularized by the calypso vocalist Mighty Sparrow, and Johnny Rivers’ “Poor Side of Town” serve as mile markers, illustrating where Lowe had been and where he was headed. Both of the songs date from the middle of the 1960s, right in the swinging heyday of the British Invasion, but they speak to a time when professional songwriters composed malleable standards that would sound good in the hands of pop, country, or R&B singers. Lowe aimed for this sweet spot with his original material, echoing the stylish, composed lilt of the Brill Building while incorporating the homespun craft of Nashville's Music Row.
Lowe wasn’t interested in stylistic exercises; he wanted to find the places where different genres intertwined. Underneath Lowe’s pre-Beatles craft, his band cooks with the simmering intensity of Memphis soul. The smoldering opener “Homewrecker” makes this influence plain, unfolding in suspended tension until the southern groove snaps it into focus. Lowe’s compositions play to these juxtapositions: Witness how the surly “Has She Got a Friend?” gets sweetened by a soaring, soulful bridge that flips the song’s rockabilly on its head. Sometimes, Lowe lets the twists lie within his stories, as on “Indian Queens,” where the narrator recounts misadventure after misadventure. Lowe’s flair for exquisitely rendered details comes to a peak on “Lately I’ve Let Things Slide,” a weary chronicle of a relapse: “There’s a cut upon my brow/Must have banged myself somehow/But I can’t remember now.”
Maybe there's a connection between “Lately I’ve Let Things Slide” and the wild carousing of Lowe’s youth, but the song, while rendered with specific imagery, doesn’t feel autobiographical. He’s not wallowing in the darkness—he’s savoring a song so finely sculpted that he can perform it with the freedom of an actor. In this song, Lowe gives his best vocal performance on record, snarling punchlines (he delivers “Let’s cut to the chase, pal” with barely concealed contempt) and milking drama from even the quietest moments. These are well-worn showbiz tricks that hardly felt modern in 2001, and they sound even more old-fashioned 20 years later on this reissue, accompanied by a bonus acoustic EP (largely covers, all worthy, including the original “Different Kind of Blue”) that was originally included with the album’s first pressing. Still, The Convincer doesn’t seem dated so much as suspended in time. Its mid-century points of reference are so far in the past that they now sound fresh, providing the essential elements for a master craftsman who can carve them into music that only sounds sturdier and more distinctive with time.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Yep Roc | September 20, 2021 | 7.6 | 1f47598a-4991-4e07-8b94-c44df7de53c6 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The indie rock veterans return with their second album since their almost decade-long layoff. While the punchy hooks and uptempo shouters are still here, the album as a whole is a shade darker, focusing on personal loss and the passage of time. | The indie rock veterans return with their second album since their almost decade-long layoff. While the punchy hooks and uptempo shouters are still here, the album as a whole is a shade darker, focusing on personal loss and the passage of time. | Superchunk: I Hate Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18365-superchunk-i-hate-music/ | I Hate Music | When bands have been around awhile, people tend to discuss the way age has entered their work, even if the topic doesn't quite fit. With Superchunk's 10th album, I Hate Music, a collection that focuses on the forward march of time and the pain that goes along with it, this kind of commentary is unavoidable.
The Chapel Hill quartet has been a reliable and surprisingly consistent force for almost 25 years. They formed in 1989, a little bit before "punk broke," during a time when people with their eyes on the underground and ears on college radio thought of the band's North Carolina hometown as an indie-rock Seattle. They released their ninth album Majesty Shredding in 2010 after the almost 10-year hiatus following 2001's Here's to Shutting Up, and nothing much had changed: Superchunk still delivered amped-up, pogo-inspiring power pop. They've had a formula from the beginning, but it's one that works.
Their second post-hiatus record, I Hate Music, has a strong title that carries a deeper layer of meaning with it. They've released records upon records full of unbridled joy, frontman Mac McCaughan also records solo material as Portastatic, and he and bassist Laura Ballance are still going strong with their powerhouse indie label, Merge. So, no, Superchunk don't hate music. The sentiment speaks to something you find happening when you edge closer to 40 and beyond: loved ones start dying, and something that used to seem distant starts hitting close to home. As McCaughan sings on "Me & You & Jackie Mittoo": "I hate music-- what is it worth?/ Can’t bring anyone back to this earth/ Or fill in the space between all of the notes/ But I got nothing else so I guess here we go…" It's an "I can't go on, I will go on" sort of thing, and they create one hell of a ruckus in the process of moving on.
Like post-SST and then present-day Dinosaur Jr., the pace is a little slower here, some of the guitars quieter, and the production shinier, but the upward push of McCaughan's voice and that Superchunk momentum remains. (The acoustic and synth flourishes lend it a feeling similar to the early work of the more downcast, stripped-back Portastatic.) It's more grounded and focused than Majesty, and more thoughtfully reflective. Superchunk's best songs have always been the spastic ones, but though this is their darkest album to date, they don't fall into a midtempo torpor. McCaughan's nasal yowl can't help being anthemic, whether he's calling a co-worker a slack motherfucker, asking you to punch him harder, or, as in I Hate Music's excellent opener, "Overflows", singing lines like: "Everything the dead don’t know/ Piles up like magazines and overflows/ And everything that you won’t see/ Just swirls around/ Comes down and buries me." The subject matter here stings.
I Hate Music doesn't treat loss as vague or theoretical. The album's dedicated to a close friend of McCaughan and the band, the filmmaker and artist David Doernberg, who died after a battle with cancer in March of 2012. As McCaughan wrote in a blog post around that time: "I can't possibly enumerate the ways that Dave was intertwined into the fabric of our own family and lives. Likewise I have a feeling the hole that his passing leaves is larger than we even yet know." Once you learn where the songs are coming from, the sad lyrics are sadder, the happy lyrics more wistful.
Doernberg haunts the record beautifully. McCaughan sings in the final song, "What Can We Do": "Meet you on the corner every time it snows/ I’ve got wrinkles around my eyes/ I’ll say I love you, I won’t say goodbye," while the breezy "Me & You & Jackie Mittoo" references the Skatalites founder and the joy of hearing his music in a van with friends. On another standout, "Trees of Barcelona", McCaughan shares the wonderfully rendered memories of Portastatic playing Primavera Sound in 2007, and the friends who ran through the city when that set was over. The quieter, milder "Your Theme" asks for the impossible in simple terms: "Oh what I’d do/ To waste an afternoon with you/ Eating obscure, looking at girls, shopping for jeans/ Learning how to be and not to seem/ Singing your theme."
Thoughtful, quiet moments like that work but, this being Superchunk, the uptempo tracks still hit hardest. The fantastic "FOH", for instance, is cut from the same the cloth as Superchunk's raging best, as McCaughan asks a series of questions with few answers: "Did you lose something?/ Oh, I lost something.../ Tell me, are you coming around?/ When are you coming around?" Mount Moriah's Heather McEntire lends distant backing vocals to "Breaking Down", a jaunty song about fading memory. And things get especially amped on "Staying Home", a one-minute punk song about staying home that feels like their "Screaming at a Wall".
A song that combines both approaches is the the previously mentioned slow-builder, "What Can We Do" with its "I won't say goodbye." It's an epic recounting, and a fitting end to an album about listening to the music you loved with a friend and hating that music because it won't bring him back. But all the band can do is create more music anyway, offering up songs that will inevitably soundtrack other lives and deaths, too. | 2013-08-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-08-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 14, 2013 | 7.8 | 1f48a58e-b57d-452b-8498-a074931eda61 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
On her second EP, the South Korean producer branches out from the house music of her debut, touching upon juke, trap, and techno while sing-rapping in a mixture of English and Korean. | On her second EP, the South Korean producer branches out from the house music of her debut, touching upon juke, trap, and techno while sing-rapping in a mixture of English and Korean. | 박혜진 Park Hye Jin: How can I | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/park-hye-jin-how-can-i/ | How can I | 박혜진 Park Hye Jin’s previous solo release, the 2018 EP IF U WANT IT, was characterised by a dreamy electronic mood and laconic vocal style. So it’s a kick in the pants to hear the South Korean house DJ warning us to “shut the fuck up” over a sinister techno backing on “NO,” the fourth track on her new EP—like catching your grandmother cursing, or Daft Punk dabbling in hardcore. How can I is Park’s first release for Ninja Tune, the new label a sign of her blossoming status in the dance world. But far from playing it safe, Park uses the opportunity to expand her musical horizons: The EP’s six tracks touch variously upon juke, trap, house, and techno without ever committing to a genre.
Pulling this all together is Park’s flat-but-flexible voice, which has a way of creating micro-melodies out of the smallest inflections. In the chorus of “Can you” Park adds a sing-song edge to the word “babe,” transforming a trite line (“Can you be my babe?”) into an infuriatingly catchy hook—half playground taunt, half declaration of intent. She later adds an impassioned “I fucking hate you,” the two phrases crashing into each other and throwing off narrative sparks.
Park began experimenting with rapping and singing around 2015, two years before she turned to DJing. Yet her vocals on this EP, sung half in Korean and half in English, have more in common with the finite, hammer-headed style of juke than the expansive world of rap; her ultra-repetitive lyrics and sharp vocal hooks tend to ratchet off the beat like just another percussive sound.
The production on “Can you,” the EP’s best track by a pinch, also nods toward juke, using the barrelling kick drums, skidding hats, and frantic BPMs pioneered by DJ Deeon and DJ Slugo in Chicago a quarter century ago. But Park subverts juke’s unyielding musical storm by adding hazy synth melodies to the mix, and the light-and-shade contrast between melody and beat echoes the battle between love and hate played out in the song’s lyrics. “How come” follows a similar route, its 172 BPM scramble, garbled vocal cutups, and nebulous chords suggesting the energetic elegance of a rave in a rose garden, while “NO” is straight-up nasty, with Park’s bullish vocal riding a metallic techno stomp. “Like this,” the EP’s opening track, is the only song that would have easily fit on IF U WANT IT, its house shuffle and feather-light chords serving as a dapper stylistic bridge to what has come before.
At times it feels like Park is deliberately playing against her strengths as she confounds our expectations and forgoes the gorgeous indolence of IF U WANT IT. The repetitive nature of her vocals means there is little room to hide when the hooks don’t connect. The EP’s title track is horrible: A generic trap beat meets a slurred chorus that sounds about as melodious as a foghorn and inspires a mixture of mortification and distress. But a single misstep on an EP full of intriguing new paths does not a total failure make. How can I is not as thematically coherent or straight-up enjoyable as IF U WANT IT, but it is considerably more inspiring in its experimentation—a challenge, perhaps, to a house-music scene too happy in stasis. | 2020-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | June 29, 2020 | 6.8 | 1f4ee35e-19db-4e16-85b9-681803b3b333 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Continuing to mature into a more grown-up image, the nine-member K-pop girl group balances self-contentment and romantic confidence with breezy summer thrill-seeking. | Continuing to mature into a more grown-up image, the nine-member K-pop girl group balances self-contentment and romantic confidence with breezy summer thrill-seeking. | TWICE: Taste of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/twice-taste-of-love/ | Taste of Love | Nine-member K-pop girl group TWICE have been around for more than a half decade, navigated stark stylistic changes, and maintained a dependable discography every step of the way. During the first three years of their career, they released ebullient singles that worked in tandem with their cutesy, chipper demeanor: energetic group chants, light and airy production, genre-hopping that matched the many moods of young love. The 2019 hit “Fancy” signaled their move toward a more mature image, and the follow-up singles—including the Dua Lipa-indebted scorcher “I Can’t Stop Me”—confirmed they could thrive in this new era (2019’s Feel Special and 2020’s Eyes Wide Open are their most electrifying releases). TWICE continue their hot streak on Taste of Love, offering further proof they stand head and shoulders above most of their contemporaries.
This excellence isn’t immediately obvious from lead single “Alcohol-Free,” an unhurried bossa nova song produced by JYP, aka label head Jin-young Park. On the surface, the love-drunk lyrics feel unnecessarily tethered to a sobriety metaphor—a peculiar move for a group shedding its youthful side. But in the context of their work until now, “Alcohol-Free” is a significant step: TWICE now unabashedly sing about love without the anxieties that underlined previous singles. On early-career highlights “TT” and “Likey,” beats that landed between freestyle and Atlanta bass suggested that TWICE were forcing themselves to push past sadness and hesitation. Here, any bounce or buoyancy points to paradise; the cheery atmosphere is wholly, remarkably content.
Taste of Love overflows with these moments of clear, magnetic confidence. “First Time,” one of the strongest tracks, is both spacious and patient. These two qualities are crucial, as they allow vocals to remain the focal point, and Nayeon and Jihyo’s declarations of a fulfilling romance sell their deep satisfaction. Jade Thirlwall has a co-writing credit, and it serves as an illuminating point of comparison: Little Mix have captured K-pop’s spirit better than any other Western girl group, but on this mini-album, TWICE sound most self-assured when eschewing maximalist bombast for subtler evocations. “Conversation” most elegantly showcases their less-is-more approach: The verses are backed by little more than frothy synth bubbles, but when the chorus arrives, a commanding bassline reveals the sensuality and insistence in every line. TWICE don’t need to belabor broadcasting their emotions; the production does enough to fill in the canvas.
TWICE’s devotion to breeziness on Taste of Love cements it as one of K-pop’s best summer albums. It also makes their search for love more fun than ever. “Scandal” has whispered vocals, sparse piano-house thumping, and a seductive bassline—they’ve never sounded so poised. On “Baby Blue Love,” laid-back disco grooves anchor their desire for dancing with somebody. The song is less about infatuation, though, than savoring the highs of summer partying—its sweeping strings provide a modest but luxe climax. “SOS” takes their in-the-moment living even further: TWICE ask for a lover to save them, but they sing with such understated cool that it’s evident they’re uninterested in anything long-term—right now, it’s about playful memory-making. The shimmering synth blips mirror their lighthearted calls, closing the album out on a sweet, pleasurable, altogether carefree note. TWICE make it all look so easy. And with Taste of Love, they convince you that seeking out summer thrills is the most important and irresistible task at hand.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.
Back to home | 2021-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | JYP | June 22, 2021 | 7.3 | 1f4f8d40-98d8-4f69-9a23-5ed24a6b1671 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
The German producer offers his prettiest, silkiest, and most poignant minimal electronic music ever. | The German producer offers his prettiest, silkiest, and most poignant minimal electronic music ever. | Robag Wruhme: Venq Tolep | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/robag-wruhme-venq-tolep/ | Venq Tolep | In Robag Wruhme’s world, the sun is forever on the horizon—the sky turning peach, the birds gently chirping, the moon hung just so. Once upon a time, the German producer born Gabor Schablitzki pursued a more antic muse. Both solo and in the duo Wighnomy Brothers, with Monkey Maffia, his productions epitomized the fidgety energy of the genre known simply as “minimal”: dry, scratchy rhythms, bristly as an anti-static brush, flecked with hiccupping repetitions and crisscrossing strobes. His 2004 album Wuzzlebud KK remains a masterpiece of the period, as burly a profile as minimal ever managed, but as the style’s flame faded and Wruhme’s rhythmic tics fell out of favor, he pivoted toward the moodier sounds of 2011’s Thora Vukk, finding a middle ground between his bruising dancefloor instincts and pensive jazz piano.
Now, eight years later, Venq Tolep shows how much Wruhme has mellowed with age. This is the prettiest music he has ever made: The album is suffused with the wistful glow of radiant synths, the occasional piano or string ensemble, and largely wordless vocals. Lysann Zander, of the groups Stereofysh and Send More Cats, is credited on the first two tracks, but her voice has been rendered unintelligible, as pure, silky tone color. Rather than a collection of club tracks, Venq Tolep is poised in the gray area between home-listening house, ambient, and half-remembered vestiges of IDM. Sometimes it feels like an attempt to fashion a new kind of songwriting, one less dependent upon lyrics than simple human presence.
The music isn’t beatless, by and large—as always, it swims in rippling drum programming, a stream of syncopated hi-hats and glitchy fills that move like liquid. His arrangements move in similar ways, surging forward and falling back just short of the anticipated peak. That curious sense of motion plays out across the album, translating to the only slightly frustrating thing about the record: Especially in its first half, as it skips across a succession of short, sketch-like pieces, Venq Tolep struggles to get going. The gentle “Westfal,” all backwards hi-hats and sighing vocoder, would make as fitting an introduction as the album’s actual opener, which precedes it; track three, “Iklahx,” peters out after a couple minutes of pitter-pat clicks and heavenly coos. Only with track four, “Ak-Do 5,” does Wruhme really find his percussive groove, wedding the airy sounds of early Boards of Canada to a crisp, decisive drumbeat, but then it’s back to the hammock, as though he were worn out from the brief exertion.
Still, as horizontal house goes, it doesn’t get lovelier than this, and the album’s reluctance to deliver dopamine hits when they’re expected also translates to one of its more alluring qualities: the frequent tension between the harmonic and melodic qualities of traditional song form and dance music’s linear, repetitive structure.
There’s only one fully vocal track: “Nata Alma,” a remix of Bugge Wesseltoft and Sidsel Endresen’s 1999 song “You Might Say,” a haunting plea from the depths of a failing relationship. This actually isn’t the first time Wruhme has reworked the song; the Wighnomy Brothers delivered a punchier version of it in 2003, but this one sounds little like the earlier remix. It’s sadder, slower, and more expansive. Endresen’s delivery is the perfect foil for Wruhme’s tearjerking: There’s real pathos there—you can practically make out the contours of the lump in her throat—but there’s even more restraint.
The album ends with an outro that might at first seem like overkill, given the preponderance of intros, sketches, and interludes. It’s a simple conceit: Over plangent piano chords, friends from around the world phone in, say their names and hometown, and count to three in their native languages. Some names are familiar (Pampa boss DJ Koze, labelmate Axel Boman), some less so; they come from San Francisco, Hamburg, Tel Aviv, Santiago, and if there’s no obvious organizing principle, the scattered map points suggest a picture of international community, the kind fostered by a lifetime in independent music. It’s strangely affecting, this tender portrait of a chosen family, and proof of how Wruhme can elicit real emotion out of such humble stuff. | 2019-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pampa | June 6, 2019 | 7.9 | 1f5d8a92-e509-45d6-8181-ae257dc705fc | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Saxophonist Daniel Thorne and his Immix Ensemble stretch the boundaries of contemporary classical music and avant-garde composition. Each movement on Transition garbles a classic instrument with electronic processing. | Saxophonist Daniel Thorne and his Immix Ensemble stretch the boundaries of contemporary classical music and avant-garde composition. Each movement on Transition garbles a classic instrument with electronic processing. | Immix Ensemble & Vessel: Transition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21612-transition/ | Transition | Most musical instruments are frozen in history, timeless in function but stuck in the contexts that surround their invention. Spurred on by this idea, saxophonist Daniel Thorne and his Immix Ensemble teamed up with Bristolian producer Sebastian Gainsborough (Vessel) to compose Transition. Transition is a four-movement suite, stylized as a conversation between concert-hall orchestration and left-field electronic production--something which in the last few years is a rapidly growing intersection. Each of the work’s four songs is supposed to highlight the historical snapshots of specific instruments (the trumpet, the saxophone, the oboe, etc) and how their contexts can be remixed or garbled with the presence of an electronic partner.
It’s not necessarily a groundbreaking concept. For last the decade, artists like Nils Frahm, Max Richter, or Daniel Wohl have been stretching the boundaries of the conversation between contemporary classical music and avant-garde composition that Thorne and Gainsborough are just entering. The piece is actually two years old, having been originally commissioned in the fall of 2014 for performances at Tate Britain and the University of Liverpool. The performances also stressed a collaboration between video art and orchestration, meaning it often feels like something substantial just listening to the album.
To its credit, Transition is an extremely breezy listen for a record of experimental classical music--running a little over 26 minutes, with only one song extending over eight minutes. The economy and pacing allows Thorne and Gainsborough to play with a wide range of elements without any feeling of excess or wasted space. Each of the four movements use their minutes wisely, allowing for more exploration than you’d think possible.
Starting with “What Hath God Wrought,” the artists decided to pair the bass clarinet and saxophone, the instruments whose sounds compliment and challenge each other the best across the entire album. There is something dancerly about the ways the two instruments weave around each other. Their faceoff is made interestingly discomfiting by a low drone that Vessel overlays on top of the action, something that very slowly takes over the song. His electronic touch is barely perceptible at first, but he sneakily washes out the sounds, making them feel older and less stable by generating a series of bleeps and fields of static that give the recording the character of an old radio broadcast. “What Hath God Wrought” gets more and more crowded, allowing the analog and electronic sources to crash into each other and becoming indistinguishable. It seems to make the argument very early on that these sounds can’t exactly coexist naturally, that they always generate friction by sharing the same space.
Following “What Hath God Wrought” is “De Revolutionibus” (“On Revolutions” in Latin), a movement that furthers the tension Transition wants to make very apparent. Of the four movements, it seems to be the most influenced by Vessel’s history of moody and industrial productions. It’s undeniably Gothic in mood, with violins screaming in the presence of electronic squeals and hisses. There are brief horrifying moments where it sounds like insects are crawling around the recording microphones. The instruments are artfully crumpled together, adding to the texture of a song that seems to draw inspiration from bumper-to-bumper traffic and free jazz. It’s the most interesting eight minutes of the entire album.
“Scope” was the only one of the songs not co-penned by Gainsborough, and as a Thorne-focused affair, it lacks the same tense conversation of the two pieces that preceded it. The electronics seem to disappear for nearly six minutes, and it makes for a conventional and wan listening experience. To make up it seems they packed the closer “Battle Cry” with all the violence its title suggests--transforming the conversation between the musicians into a full blown argument. Fittingly “Battle Cry” ends abruptly. The last squeaks of the trumpet cut the rope, and curtains fall down on Transition almost with no warning.
Overall Transition is never as probing as it can be. It doesn’t allow for total investment from a listener because the marriage of sounds is incomplete and fitful. The thought experiment that should be at the core of the album sometimes felt lost in a confusing morass of interjections and trip-ups. But there are enough moments of pure gold that peek its head out of the morass that make the experience worth it in the end. | 2016-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Erased Tapes | March 14, 2016 | 7 | 1f6e6181-592a-41d9-abcc-e55bf8de1f3e | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
After a string of surprisingly and contentiously accessible albums, SY attempted to balance their pop curiosity with its experimental instincts. | After a string of surprisingly and contentiously accessible albums, SY attempted to balance their pop curiosity with its experimental instincts. | Sonic Youth: A Thousand Leaves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sonic-youth-a-thousand-leaves/ | A Thousand Leaves | In 1995, Sonic Youth bucked expectation and headlined Lollapalooza. The booking, an offer they had refused multiple times, seemed emblematic of the band’s trajectory; five years prior, they had signed with David Geffen’s DGC imprint, the label that released more accessible LPs like Goo and Dirty. Sonic Youth had always found Lollapalooza corny—a “crowd of university kids with a spring-break mentality,” as Thurston Moore once put it. But in 1995, with a supporting lineup of Pavement, Beck, and the Jesus Lizard, Sonic Youth recognized that a cultural shift—one they’d been nurturing for the past 15 years—was rumbling in the mainstream. They also realized that their festival bounty could finance a new means of creative freedom: Sonic Youth used their earnings to purchase a 16-track recording studio in lower Manhattan, and A Thousand Leaves was the first LP to grow from its soil.
It was a polarizing harvest. Those initiated on the poppier Goo and Dirty found the 1998 album’s yawning passages and guitar tangles inaccessible. Those who felt betrayed by the very accessibility of Sonic Youth’s early-’90s DGC output, however, heard a band merging its dual aptitudes: fearless experimentation and melodic indie rock. Now, 21 years since its release, A Thousand Leaves reveals a group that was still full of creative ambition nearly two decades into its career. Despite major-label grooming and the hurdles of parenthood (Moore and Kim Gordon had their daughter Coco in 1994), Sonic Youth made an album for no one but themselves. A Thousand Leaves is far from perfect, but it’s the sound of four musicians doing exactly what they set out to do.
This clear-cut sense of intention no doubt stems from Sonic Youth’s increased control over their music, or at least the means of making it. Unencumbered by hourly rates, the group took nearly two years laying down the 11-song LP in its new studio in New York’s Financial District. “We just sort of let ourselves grow away from the cycle of writing, recording, touring—the competitive nature of being out there,” Moore told The New York Times in 1998, later revealing that the compositional inspiration for A Thousand Leaves was just as unrestrained. “Turntable and disk jockey culture is pretty much all about repetitive and improvised structure,” Moore explained. “There are no real classic song ideas.”
That A Thousand Leaves was void of “classic song ideas” might have fueled some critics’ disdain for it in ’98, but much of the record has aged well in the past 20 years. “Sunday,” an undeniable gem that marries Sonic Youth’s dual tendencies toward melody and experimental spinouts, was an early single, paired with a Macaulay Culkin-starring music video directed by Harmony Korine. “Sunday” also received the commercial radio treatment, its original five minutes chopped to three. The truncated version sadly omits the song’s most interesting passage: a mess of squeals and gasps from Moore’s and Lee Ranaldo’s guitars around the three-minute mark. As their gnarled instruments unspool, Moore deadpans: “With you, Sunday never ends,” just before the lights dim and the song is snuffed out.
Some of the most successful tracks on A Thousand Leaves are crafted from opposing forces. Songs like “Wildflower Soul” and “Karen Koltrane” fold quiet, measured details into greater passages of cacophony. “Wildflower Soul” seemingly spans every word in the band’s sonic vocabulary: ’60s folk, the Velvet Underground, and the combative guitar ensembles of Glenn Branca. The 11-minute “Hits of Sunshine (For Allen Ginsberg)” is brimming with clatters, clicks, and squeaks that sound handmade in a foley studio. During a wordless interlude, guitars warble like Peter Frampton’s talk box dosed with codeine, their oozing pace steadied by Steve Shelley’s modest snare.
Thurston Moore has said that Sonic Youth’s approach to writing lyrics had more to do with the musicality of words—how they function within the existing composition—than their literal or metaphorical significance. “Hits of Sunshine” is one of the few tracks on the album whose lyrics succeed on both planes. Moore practically whispers, unveiling vivid, impressionistic scenes. “The painting has a dream/Where shadow breaks the seam,” he murmurs. “Blue is bashful/Green is my goal/Yellow girls are running backward.” It’s a fitting elegy for the legendary Beat poet (and friend of the band) Allen Ginsberg, who died in 1997.
Elsewhere, the voice is wielded as an instrument of abrasion, particularly on Kim Gordon’s superbly caustic entries. “The Ineffable Me” is delightfully snotty, Gordon’s vocal cords ripped raw and strained into shrieks as she tears down office misogynists. “Don’t you break her… Or you’ll fuck with me,” she commands, before taunting her enemy: “It’s a cushy job/A pussy’s job/A cum junkie’s job/Makes my dick throb.” Bass crunches and rumbles beneath her as if she’s standing atop an active volcano. Gordon spews equally potent venom on “French Tickler” and “Female Mechanic Now on Duty,” the latter alternating punk discord with lulling guitar excerpts. “Modern women cry/Modern women don’t cry” Gordon muses at the song’s center, summarizing the complex, often conflicting standards women are held to (which, two decades later, have not much improved).
The tracks on A Thousand Leaves that haven’t endured are those that drag, or, as one reviewer wrote in the ’90s, feel simultaneously “tossed off and overwrought.” Opener “Contre Le Sexisme” is one. While its atmospheric chimes and smears of static make for a nuanced ambient piece, Gordon’s pitchy croons are just small enough to irritate, like a fruit fly flitting around your ear canal; the instinct is to swat it away. “Hoarfrost” and “Snare, Girl” are snoozers of a different caliber; they follow a more traditional song structure than “Contre,” but fall flat when compared with the rest of the album. Perhaps they were inserted as sonic respites from all the noise, but silence could have done the job just as well.
Some of the record’s shortcomings haven’t evaporated with age, but 21 years after it divided critics and disoriented fans, A Thousand Leaves is an exciting—if flawed—testament to longevity and process. Prior to A Thousand Leaves Sonic Youth had already put in 17 years as a group, released nine albums, and started families; they could have easily banged out another crowd-pleasing LP and collected their checks, or retired altogether. Instead, they chose to make a piece of art on their own terms and time. That it emerged imperfect was likely the least of their concerns. | 2019-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Geffen | May 9, 2019 | 7.6 | 1f6ecca0-1ef9-4c7f-9b86-ba13617a39d2 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Multi-instrumentalists Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly, and Joe Westerlund combine forces on textured, stormy folk compositions that encourage deeper listening. | Multi-instrumentalists Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly, and Joe Westerlund combine forces on textured, stormy folk compositions that encourage deeper listening. | Setting: Shone a Rainbow Light On | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/setting-shone-a-rainbow-light-on/ | Shone a Rainbow Light On | Shone a Rainbow Light On, by the new instrumental folk trio Setting, evokes the dark, infinite expanse of the night sky with its shimmering stars. The joint project of multi-instrumentalists Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly, and Joe Westerlund, the album draws upon free improvisation, Americana, and minimalist music to recreate the textures of the murky unknown. The three artists are experts in composing intricate soundscapes out of a few elements: Fennelly crafts celestial drone music as Mind Over Mirrors, Bowles has played for years in the trailblazing psychedelic noise band Pelt, and Westerlund has drummed in the folk-rock group Megafaun and DeYarmond Edison, the early band of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. Together, they show that Americana music doesn’t have to be sun-dappled and bright, it can be mysterious and unwieldy, too.
Formed during the pandemic in 2021, Setting began as a series of regular improvisation sessions in Westerlund’s backyard in Durham, North Carolina. Bowles and Westerlund had already been playing together occasionally as a percussion duo, and Fennelly had given them the motivation to all gather while passing through Durham from the North Carolina coast. During the trio’s early sessions they’d jam outside at a distance, letting the wide-open spirit of the outdoors seep into their work. The trio’s songs move in cycles, like a storm blowing through a field, and their instruments often flutter like birds or buzz like insects.
Though Settings’ music sprawls, it feels minimalistic in practice, exploring just a couple of chords like Philip Glass and encouraging deeper listening like Pauline Oliveros. The trio often begins with a few long notes, gradually adding rhythms and other timbres to the mix; their motions are subtle, their music deepening with each added layer. Opener “We Center” feels like a delicate meditation at the start, beginning with soft, rustling noises. Pulsating rhythms enter at a distance and come into view with each repetition. Hearing the song is like looking out at a barren wilderness and noticing, upon closer examination, that it’s teeming with life.
Shone a Rainbow Light On’s twists and turns give each track bottomless dimension. The tense, fast-paced, “Zoetropics” starts with forlorn tones and bustling rhythms; bristling, plucked melodies join the fray only to pull away as quickly as they enter. “A Sun Harp” opens with a series of free improvisations on piano, synths, and percussion, layering patterns that don’t seem to mesh; it grows into an uproar, each instrument crescendoing until it bursts aflame. Their music is at its most haywire, yet by the end, it still returns to a place of calm. The solemn closer “Fog Glossaries” is the most unexpected. The rumbling song sighs out chords, and a chime gloomily marks the passage of time. It’s the darkest track on the album and where the trio’s details feel their most vivid—nature’s thorniness displayed in full beauty. | 2023-10-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Paradise of Bachelors | October 4, 2023 | 7.1 | 1f7b0920-1d86-4ae3-8c5d-f0bec68b6a3a | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
The band’s seventh album is compulsively listenable, oddly moving, and stranger than it first appears. | The band’s seventh album is compulsively listenable, oddly moving, and stranger than it first appears. | Hot Chip: A Bath Full of Ecstasy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hot-chip-a-bath-full-of-ecstasy/ | A Bath Full of Ecstasy | New Hot Chip songs always seem like spaceships: sleek, polished, unsubtle, a little ridiculous. These qualities make it easy to marvel at the work of the London group while also underestimating it. Hot Chip have been around for nearly 20 years now, and though they reached a peak about halfway through (their mid-career albums Made in the Dark and One Life Stand are hard to choose between), they’ve never entirely dropped off. Their last album, 2015’s Why Make Sense, was a grower, complete with one of their best singles to date (“Started Right”). Their new one, A Bath Full of Ecstasy, sounds at first so Hot Chippy as to be a caricature, with big Technicolor beats and big, tenderly sung ballads from lead vocalist Alexis Taylor, but it turns out to be another strong entry. For the most part, it’s compulsively listenable, oddly moving, and stranger than it first appears, as the band gets existential on the dance floor.
This is despite some truly dopey lyrics. The opener is called “Melody of Love,” and floats this sentiment at you: “I always seem to hesitate/Too little always comes too late/There is a sound that resonates/A melody of love.” That’s purpler than a bruise. But Hot Chip have one of the more interesting relationships with banality this side of Dan Bejar (think of their ludicrous, beautiful song “Brothers”). And the more you listen to “Melody of Love,” the more comforting you find it. The scale of the music is just immense, enough to dwarf the silliness of the words. The track was created from a 12-minute, gospel-sampling instrumental track and whittled down to a state of intense purity with the help of the xx producer Rodaidh McDonald, but it still feels colossal. At some point, even the lyrics start to make sense as a catalyst for free association. A line as throwaway as “Do you have faith to feel in this world” seems profound for the kinds of thoughts it inspires with the soaring music accompanying it.
If this sounds like testimony from someone who has done a slow-acting but effective hallucinogen, then I’ve managed to deliver the correct impression. Hot Chip recruited the psychedelic whiz Philippe Zdar, of Cassius, and his Dionysian energy overflows as he monkeys around with the mix of songs like “Positive,” playing restlessly, helping the track light up like the dance floor at Angels in the early 1990s. The band is most effective when Zdar or McDonald succeed in pushing it out of its comfort zone; the lesser songs here—“Spell,” the title track—feel as if they could have been recycled from old sessions. (But neither is without its charms: The hook on “Spell” takes you right back to the “Ready for the Floor,” too catchy to dismiss entirely.)
Taylor had an interesting exchange with a reporter at The Guardian on the subject of chemical escape. The reporter seemed more than a little bit taken with the idea that the “ecstasy” in the album’s title was an explicit reference to the party drug. Taylor responded that the feeling of ecstasy was “just a nice thing to be talking about these days.” Whether drug-induced or not, it didn’t matter to him (and it shouldn’t, really, to anybody). More to the point, the songs on A Bath Full of Ecstasy were written “for people to bathe in, or be lost in an active way,” he explained. This goal, when met, puts the best songs here in line with recent releases from Neneh Cherry and Helado Negro. It’s music that creates a soothing bubble, not to seal off the outside world but to create space to breathe within it. For perspective, not escape.
The tracks that best exemplify that idea are mostly mid-tempo numbers in the album’s back half. The entire band rises to meet Taylor’s dreamy melancholy on “Why Does My Mind?,” one of a pair of heartbreaking songs, and perhaps Hot Chip’s most Zen expression to date, as Taylor wishes away his desires, lust, and blues. Goddard follows on its fraternal twin, “Clear Blue Skies,” his friendly, casual warbling belying the weight of the questions he poses (“Why does it matter?”) over a 2-step-indebted beat that sounds like something Kieran Hebden, a friend of the band, might have cooked up. It all wraps up with the gorgeous “No God,” where Taylor jubilantly embraces life on Earth, rejecting the importance of anything else. (“No God… can make me feel the way you make me feel.”) Perhaps 70 years ago, the suggestion that a romantic connection could be more important than a divine one would have registered as a radical act. Now, it scans as sweet and a bit strange, the perfect Hot Chip combination. Also, it’s a jam.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | June 20, 2019 | 7.3 | 1f7b10a3-8e3b-40a0-be82-3285d2416d86 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
The final volume of Matthew Herbert's "One" trilogy is an overwhelming, inscrutably political electronic record culled from an unlikely source: It consists of manipulated recordings Herbert made of a pig's life "from birth to plate." | The final volume of Matthew Herbert's "One" trilogy is an overwhelming, inscrutably political electronic record culled from an unlikely source: It consists of manipulated recordings Herbert made of a pig's life "from birth to plate." | Matthew Herbert: One Pig | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15930-matthew-herbert-one-pig/ | One Pig | The last volume in Matthew Herbert's "One" trilogy contains the same sonic ruminations on consumerism and mechanization as the previous installments, as well as their mood and tenor. Like One One, a heady singer-songwriter record, there's a hushed creeping intimacy to the thing, and a Zen-like acceptance of overbearing forces, even if it intends to keep on kicking against them. Like One Club, which twisted field recordings from the Frankfurt nightclub Robert Johnson into splayed-apart dance music, thereby ingesting corporatized club culture on its own terms, One Pig is an overwhelming, inscrutably political electronic record culled from an unlikely source. In this case, it consists of manipulated recordings Herbert made of a pig's life, "from birth to plate."
This certainly isn't the exploitation record PETA assumed it was gonna be, and it's not a slab of musical vegan didacticism that presumably, many more, who prefer their music to be good first, and message-oriented second, feared either. No matter how visceral Herbert's mix of animal grunts and menacing electronics feel, the message is never something simple like, "it sure is sad that we kill animals." Rather, it moves listeners to be more mindful of consumption and waste (the pig's parts were even turned into instruments), while acknowledging just how strangely disconnected we are from the animals killed to put food on our table, or say, shoes on our feet.
But the lingering feeling on One Pig, the first half in particular, is still one of abject horror. "September" (each song is named after the time of year when the sounds contained therein were recorded) begins with stabs of noise that could be from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre score, and then shifts into a slowly molting rhythm, punctuated by horrifying retches from the pig. As the track perversely bounces along, the animal wails become harsher, and Herbert pulls the growl in and out of the mix and you begin to expect, even anticipate them. Its appearance in the mix becomes as viscerally rewarding as a typical pop-song hook.
Much of the record intends to freak listeners out, but there are gorgeous moments of pause too, and often those conflicting feelings are contained on the same track, making the message complex and never one-note. "November" is a delicate recording of the pig oinking, jaggedly interrupted by telling sounds (knives clanging together, something plopping on a hard surface) and nervous rhythms (gulps of tinny feedback, vibrant drumming), foreshadowing the pig's death, and even suggesting it's oddly cognizant of the end in some way. It's a way to invoke empathy for the creature. But then, the track bounds foreword into an intense damaged dance track, slamming into "December" which begins with an ominous metal gate opening. Rarely does a piece of music feel this genuinely temporal-- like anything could happen at any moment.
As One Pig moves closer to the end, the songs gain focus and the pig itself is subsumed into the process, not just sampled, but literally creating the music thanks to a strange "pig blood organ" and a drum made of pigskin. "August 2010" begins with recordings of the pig being cut up and fried, and ends with it being joyously consumed by a room of people. In between is a sea of strange, melodic whines and moans-- like the pig cheaply Auto-Tuned or vocoded. According to this excellent making-of video on The Guardian's website, the sound's generated by that organ, whose sucking rhythms are the result of blood coursing through the instrument.
To suggest you cannot enjoy the record would be inaccurate, but Herbert has cleverly designed an album that must be experienced on its own terms. The last track, a touching, voice-and-guitar ode to the pig by Herbert that looks back to One One's simplicity-- and in that sense, provides circularity to the entire trilogy-- makes the pig's absence palpable. Throughout the album, even those most viscerally catchy and hypnotic songs, just as they're almost getting into a conventional groove, are boldly interrupted by the pig, making it impossible to ignore the processes that lead to the record's creation. Imagine if those really sweet leather boots you bought let out a "moo" every time you stuck them on your feet and tightened the laces.
Herbert notes in the making-of video that, for legal reasons, he could not record the actual death of the pig. And that says a great deal more about government-sanctioned ignorance and the bizarre regulations on food manufacturing than One Pig really ever could. What Herbert has put together is a witty, difficult, touching testament to making something lasting out of one of the world's many cruel inevitabilities. | 2011-10-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-10-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Accidental | October 14, 2011 | 8 | 1f7c1b88-0b08-4f37-ad0f-023c004876f1 | Brandon Soderberg | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-soderberg/ | null |
C-ORE, Mykki Blanco’s loud, new collaborative project, doubles down on Blanco's outsider status, punk in both aesthetic and practice. Most of C-ORE is a chasm of noise, and the project feels like an entry point to an alternative space where it’s okay to still think things are amiss in the world. | C-ORE, Mykki Blanco’s loud, new collaborative project, doubles down on Blanco's outsider status, punk in both aesthetic and practice. Most of C-ORE is a chasm of noise, and the project feels like an entry point to an alternative space where it’s okay to still think things are amiss in the world. | Various Artists: Mykki Blanco Presents C-ORE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20960-mykki-blanco-presents-c-ore/ | Mykki Blanco Presents C-ORE | In Jeff Chang’s 2014 book Who We Be: The Colorization of America, he likens the race to co-opt hip-hop and other subcultures in order to capitalize on a wider consumer base as something of a gold rush. Lady Gaga positioned herself as a benevolent ally to the marginalized despite being white, thin, blonde, and rich. Feminism, once an ideological haven, has now become a buzzword bastardized beyond recognition because we insist on aligning its values with celebrities. What keeps the status quo—particularly as it pertains to money, power, and beauty—intact is a kind of cultural phagocytosis: devouring difference in order to bastardize and co-opt.
Part of the appeal of Mykki Blanco, a multigender-identifying performance artist and musician, has been his refusal to become prey. "I would rather be famous like Insane Clown Posse, than A$AP Rocky," Blanco said in 2012, helping situate the shock-rock roots of his debut LP, Cosmic Angel: Illuminati Prince/ss. At the time, Blanco was amongst a cohort of ‘gay rappers,’ all finding critical acclaim—and fashion week placements. But Blanco didn’t just survive the mainlining, he got harder.
Listening to C-ORE, Blanco’s loud, new collaborative project, feels a bit like fear closing in on itself. Out on his new !K7 imprint, Dogfood Music Group, C-ORE is an album that amplifies the psychic tensions of living under "conventional cultural boundaries and constructs," as Blanco says in the press release. Blanco, Yves Tumour, Psychoegyptian, and Violence put to music a dense prognostication of a world within sight, where subcultures and identities rise up to claim their right to expression. C-ORE doubles down on being outsider and punk in both aesthetic and practice.
"They don’t wanna see a man in a dress succeed," he says, setting up the threat that is "Coke White, Starlight". A reverberating clank, produced by Jeremiah Meece of The-Drum, the song ensnares you with its righteous rage and then pushes you to dance as it clicks into double time. It’s just one of two Blanco tracks on C-ORE—the other is "Paw", an aqueous, drumless, EKG-bleep—but it’s an entry point to an alternative space where it’s okay to still think things are amiss in the world.
Most of C-ORE is a chasm of noise. Like a key scraping at a car door, Violence etches guttural raps onto piano and strobe-synth beats. Airhorns signal his impending verse on "Saturn". The four contributions by Yves Tumour are mostly wordless: "Histrionic" is a three-part suite of dank, hissing, convulsing sound and explosion, which find contrast in the mellow, minimal, hi-hat-driven stutter of "Childish". And one of C-ORE’s real standouts is the "LBCD", by Psychoegyptian. "My rap name used to be Little Soda, Little Child Soldier, Little Not Sober, Little I Might Make You Get Melanoma," he bellows, his taunting cadence like Azealia Banks meets Mark Hoppus. Later, on "Lullaby", he borrows the drunken slur of Kanye-via-Travis Scott. These moments moments of humor help leaven a project that might seem high-minded and self-serious.
Earlier this year, a few months after the release of his third project Gay Dog Food, Blanco announced he’d be leaving music and rap to pursue investigative journalism. C-ORE isn’t a Kingdom Come-like statement of return, but it’s also not a departure. As a collaborative work, it documents multiple experiences of life on the margins of America, of music—putting it all on blast. | 2015-09-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | !K7 / Dogfood | September 18, 2015 | 7 | 1f825873-b52b-47fe-a26a-80683c3bc2f2 | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | null |
On this unsettled solo album, Ought frontman Tim Darcy slowly dismantles the confessional crooner archetype, transforming himself from singer-songwriter to sound sculptor. | On this unsettled solo album, Ought frontman Tim Darcy slowly dismantles the confessional crooner archetype, transforming himself from singer-songwriter to sound sculptor. | Tim Darcy: Saturday Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22875-saturday-night/ | Saturday Night | Saturday night has long been pop music’s favorite part of the week—a time for fighting, fevers, and over-excited group spelling bees. But if the cover of his first solo album is any indication, Tim Darcy likes to spend it alone with his plants. His Saturday Night isn’t about going out on the town, but retreating inside his mind, following his wandering thoughts wherever they lead, even if they take him to some dark places. As frontman for Montreal quartet Ought, Darcy has, over the course of two records, emerged as one of indie rock’s most wily and witty wordsmiths, channeling the daily absurdities and anxieties of modern urban life into twitchy post-punk screeds. By contrast, Saturday Night is more intimate in every way: in scale, in production, and most importantly, in its emotional vocabulary.
On the one hand, Saturday Night does exactly what you expect a solo record from a member of a raucous rock band to do: It’s more off the cuff and rougher around the edges, and showcases a more introspective side than the day job normally allows. On the other hand, it’s an assault on that very idea. Over its 11 songs (including one hidden one), Darcy slowly dismantles the confessional crooner archetype until he’s just messing around with the raw materials, transforming himself from singer-songwriter to sound sculptor. And it becomes increasingly clear that, for Darcy, Saturday Night isn’t just a reservoir for songs that don’t quite fit his main band’s m.o., but a portal to a world beyond rock’n’roll entirely.
From the outset, Saturday Night both plays to expectations and subverts them. Opening rave-up “Tall Glass of Water” begins on familiar fidgety footing—though it’s a little more rickety than the typical Ought jam, the frenetic energy coursing through it makes the source easy enough to identify. But one minute in, Darcy brings the song’s smash ‘n’ grab momentum to a dead stop and reboots it as a cool mid-tempo strut—as if he was playing Lou Reed’s Transformer at 45 rpm and suddenly flipped it to 33. “Well the questions are being asked,” he sings, “Is it fate or is it popsicle?” The meaning may not be clear, but the message is: we’re on his melted clock now, and things are about to get surreal.
Saturday Night frontloads its most melodic moments, though even the sturdiest songs are outfitted with booby traps and escape hatches. “Joan Pt 1, 2” is a hit of woozy distorto-pop that free falls into an empty-cathedral chorale. “You Felt Comfort” wraps warm ‘n’ fuzzy guitar strums around frank lyricism (“You felt comfort and release/For a trauma that was making you weak”) in classic Neutral Milk Hotel fashion, before the rhythm suddenly drops out for the final verse as if the drummer was coin-operated. But the swooning “Still Waking Up” is Darcy’s shiniest diamond in the rough. It strikes a perfectly Morrissey-esque balance of aching melancholy and arch meta-humor: “Waking up alone was always a hard day’s night/’Cause my head is full of popular songs/Old ones I never sang along to/Isn’t it funny how that happens?”
But with the gleaming mid-album instrumental “First Final Days,” Darcy draws a line in the sand, closing the book on the album’s more sanguine first act while anticipating the anti-pop provocations that await on side two. The title track is unlikely to join the pantheon of Saturday-night party songs, its claustrophobic psychosis rendered with a dirgey drumbeat, ear-piercing guitar scrapes, and Darcy’s deadpan-to-panicked vocal. (“Let me out! And I’ll run!” he pleads, as if a prisoner to his own song.) “Found My Limit” is less jarring, but its hypnotic avant-folk oscillations and Darcy’s eerie, disembodied voice make it equally chilling. When Darcy gets back to more recognizable song forms on the psych-pop shanty “Saint Germain” and the drowsy piano-bar ballad “What’d You Release?,” they feel corrupted, as if infected by the preceding forays into free-form, found-sound disorder.
But if Saturday Night’s drifting second act carries the sense of Darcy feeling and fumbling his way through the dark, he eventually finds the calm in chaos. The penultimate instrumental “Beyond Me” is Saturday Night’s messiest song—all trembling, corroded strings and random piano plinks—but it’s also the album’s purest, most joyful expression, like the bleary-eyed moment of relief that hits you as the sun rises after a night of brutal insomnia. And with that, Darcy arrives at a place that’s the complete inverse of Ought, both musically and philosophically: Rather than concern himself with navigating the outside world, with Saturday Night, he’s produced a suitably unsettled soundtrack for just trying to keep your shit together on the inside. | 2017-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | February 23, 2017 | 7 | 1f8e75a2-7f25-4405-89b5-9bdc0a279d3e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The new album from R&B singer Kehlani Parrish is refreshingly self-assured. She’s got a lot to say on these songs, which are blunt, unflinching, and exuberant. | The new album from R&B singer Kehlani Parrish is refreshingly self-assured. She’s got a lot to say on these songs, which are blunt, unflinching, and exuberant. | Kehlani: SweetSexySavage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22794-sweetsexysavage/ | SweetSexySavage | There are a couple of ways to tell the story of Kehlani Parrish’s ascension from a gifted hopeful to a higher R&B court. One is a story of unhindered success: in her teens, Kehlani was the vocalist of a covers band that earned fourth place on “America’s Got Talent” and placed her on the radar of Nick Cannon and most major labels. Atlantic groomed her publicly and behind the scenes for cred and stardom, from 2014 mixtape Cloud 19 to 2015’s album-called-mixtape You Should Be Here to heavy promotion at radio. By 2016, she’d scored nods from both pop and pomp culture: a trendily morose cut on the soundtrack to—brace yourself for the following phrase—the Oscar-nominated Suicide Squad and a left-field Grammy nomination for a Best Urban Contemporary Album that is still a free set on SoundCloud.
The other story is one of overcoming the system. That “America’s Got Talent” stint only panned out after several difficult years—contractual hell, homelessness, depression—and what followed was hardly fairytale. It’s pretty uncontroversial now to recognize turn-of-the-century R&B as overflowing with innovation and talent, but A&Rs remain terrible at knowing what to do with it. For every The Writing’s on the Wall or Aaliyah, there are three slept-on debuts and overlooked follow-ups, and who knows how many shelved, stalled, and otherwise mismanaged counterparts. The 2010s revival is more ephemeral in its streaming numbers and blog buzz, but not much kinder to its potential stars. Despite two hits in “2 On” and “All Hands on Deck,” Tinashe’s Joyride tour was cut short. Kelela and SZA are excellent yet still “rising.” Jhené Aiko is in a group with Big Sean. And Kehlani’s output and talent has consistently exceeded what its promotion would imply. You Should Be Here was a big-leagues album promoted like a mixtape—an increasingly common blurred “indie” and “mainstream” marketing tack—and judging by the album features (Zayn?) and tour spots (G-Eazy) she’s done since, the industry seems to be pigeonholing her with performers who are hilariously out of her league.
It’s even more remarkable, then, that SweetSexySavage is so self-assured: the work of a distinctive artist owning a style that seemingly everyone is attempting. Kehlani doesn’t even try to disinvite comparisons—the album’s title is a direct play on TLC’s CrazySexyCool, and it’s full of nods to the past, like the “Try Again” intro of “Advice.” But unlike so much R&B, SweetSexySavage neither relies on nostalgia nor falls into the traps these throwback albums tend towards: treating R&B as a costume, the musical equivalent of a belly shirt, or recreating in hazy moods and amorphous vibes a genre better known for massive hooks.
The production helps. In addition to longtime producer Jahaan Sweet, SweetSexySavage brings in Pop & Oak—among the more promising of pop-R&B production teams (Usher’s “Good Kisser” is a highlight)—and it avoids many diluted Top 40 names. “Escape” is a sweet mid-tempo ballad that flirts and flutters around the edge of saying “I can’t make you love me,” but it’s also kind of like a Jordin Sparks album cut. The soundtrack cut “Gangsta” is a clever update of 2000s thug-love tracks, like “Soldier” or almost any Ja Rule duet, to the glum mien of movie and radio pop, but it’s rightly relegated to the bonus tracks.
Good production is relatively easy to find, though; voices like Kehlani’s are not. Her closest Y2K peer is probably Kandi Burruss: a consummate songwriter equally adept at hitmaking and candor. Kehlani is a talented vocalist, but on record she’s conversational, with a lot to say. Much of SweetSexySavage is about reclamation: taking all the shit women receive from men, shrugging, and asking, “What about it?”
“If I gotta be a bitch, I’mma be a bad one,” she taunts on “CRZY,” and the track isn’t resigned but an anthem. “Distraction,” arranged like a one-woman girl group, walks the independent-woman walk by setting clear, disinterested boundaries for its come-on: “I can’t say I give my all... are you down to be a distraction?” “Not Used to It” is unflinching in its fear of commitment. On “Do U Dirty,” Kehlani’s a player and proud of it; the dreamy production makes lines like “I’m cold and yet life is colder.../I could fuck you now and years later on you’re going to be stuck just reminiscing” catch listeners off-guard. The bluntness is welcome in today’s music world, full of men reveling in such scumbaggery and women exploring, in song after despairing song, codependence and the wounds it causes. Kehlani’s adept at the latter as well; “Everything Is Yours” is a moody love song steeped in loathing. Kehlani sings “my ring is yours, everything is yours,” and it’s just as much a confession of love as of giving up.
But Kehlani can be more optimistic. She told Rolling Stone that, where Cloud 19 proved “I can sing!” and You Should Be Here showed “I can write!,” her new album says, “I can chill! And have fun!” The single “Undercover,” for one, captures perfectly the delirious headspace of having the most disastrous and unlikely of your crushes reciprocated: “They don't wanna see it happen,” Kehlani sings, “But we say fuck it.” Refreshingly, SweetSexySavage is at its best when it’s most exuberant, giddy in the face of haters and common sense alike. | 2017-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic / TSNMI | January 30, 2017 | 7 | 1f8fddfa-2030-46c4-b1d6-c6c98daea73c | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
On the Baltimore/Portland duo Wye Oak’s fourth album, Shriek, Jenn Wasner replaces her guitar with bass and drummer Andy Stack adds synthesizers to his plate. Wasner's voice also takes up more space on the record; she sings more confidently, and with a broader range. | On the Baltimore/Portland duo Wye Oak’s fourth album, Shriek, Jenn Wasner replaces her guitar with bass and drummer Andy Stack adds synthesizers to his plate. Wasner's voice also takes up more space on the record; she sings more confidently, and with a broader range. | Wye Oak: Shriek | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19286-wye-oak-shriek/ | Shriek | Jenn Wasner was a little worried about reinventing herself on Wye Oak’s fourth album, Shriek. "There is more at stake than whether my feelings get hurt or not," she said in an interview earlier this year, addressing how fans would receive the Baltimore/Portland-based duo’s decision to replace her guitar with synthesizers. "We've been touring in this band, making a living off of it since Civilian, and we are very fortunate that that has been the case, but we're both very aware that it could totally go away.”
She had some reason to be concerned. Wye Oak has been beloved, especially since 2011's excellent Civilian, for the charged interplay between Wasner’s formidable axe-wielding and band mate Andy Stack’s immense, intense drumming. Up until that point, the singer had kept her love of the instrumental and structural aspects of pop and R&B sequestered from her main outfit, seeking other artistic outlets in dancefloor-ready odes to Robyn as Flock of Dimes and last year’s gauzy, Mariah Carey-indebted bauble Dungeonesse, the self-titled album she wrote with Baltimore-based musical polymath Jon Ehrens.
While Flock of Dimes had been ongoing to an extent, Wasner started Dungeonesse to escape a creative funk she had fallen into following Wye Oak’s constant touring behind Civilian. After Stack moved from the East Coast to Portland, she stared down another mental block, this time specifically around the guitar, before realizing she could just hang up the damn thing and make music inspired by her first musical loves as a child of the '90s. That’s when Wasner “sort of fell to the ground in relief and excitement.”
That’s also where the album begins. After a light pitter-patter of synths like raindrops on her bedroom window, Wasner sings, “This morning, I woke up on the floor, thinking ‘I have never dreamed before.’” This chimerical quality suffuses Shriek, as if Wasner still can’t believe she can make the kind of music she has always loved without shunting it into a side project for fear of sacrificing Wye Oak’s identity. But don’t let the soft lighting fool you: Wasner’s bass (Stack now handles melody in addition to keys and percussion) reverberates with nearly the same tension as her six-string, fortifying songs like “The Tower” and “Glory” with a stiff, funky backbone. Even though the latter’s synthesizer solo leaves something to be desired after Wye Oak’s guitar freak outs—nothing on Shriek sends all-over chills quite like The Knot’s “For Prayer” or equally bruising "Take It In"—Wasner’s instrument carves a viscerally satisfying groove into the air.
Her voice also takes up more space on this record, going deeper and flitting over Stack’s melodies with such abandon it’s as if she might float away. Comparatively, her vocals on Wye Oak’s earlier material come out wispy and flat, crunched by the massive noises emitting from her guitar. Even on “Paradise”, with its familiar squalls of feedback in the background and pummeling drums, she sings more confidently and with a broader range.
That specific song makes me long for the old Wye Oak, actually, like thinking you see an old friend on the street that turns out to be a total stranger. Even though no band owes their audience music they don’t want to make anymore, it’s still a little sad reading Wasner in 2009 talk about how much she needs her guitar. “I know it’s cliche,” she said, “but I love it. I would go crazy without it.” Many fans will probably feel the same way—I doubt their new live setup will wrench me apart with the same visceral impact as their Civilian tour—but even the most steadfast relationships change, and it’s clear Wasner has moved on. As she should: the way she was feeling, if the next Wye Oak album were made the same as the last, it wouldn't sound as effortless, and she wouldn't sound as sure of herself. So we'll have to get used to it, and while we're at it, maybe we can enjoy ourselves as much as she did. | 2014-04-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-04-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | April 28, 2014 | 7.2 | 1f964e57-0ae6-4d40-978f-0dfa3690cfcd | Harley Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harley-brown/ | null |
The Philadelphia death metal quartet has a blast on its fifth album, veering between styles with uninhibited energy and virtuosic musicianship. | The Philadelphia death metal quartet has a blast on its fifth album, veering between styles with uninhibited energy and virtuosic musicianship. | Horrendous: Ontological Mysterium | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/horrendous-ontological-mysterium/ | Ontological Mysterium | Unless you’re a band with 14 years of mind-meld chemistry under your belt, under no circumstances should you attempt what Horrendous are going for on their fifth album. The Philly death metal vets have a history of shapeshifting—witness their gradual transformation from OSDM revivalists to progged-out fusion heads between 2012’s The Chills and 2018’s Idol—but this is by far their brashest play yet. In under 40 minutes, Ontological Mysterium gallups, grinds, and glistens through an array of seemingly unrelated death metal subsects, even venturing beyond the genre for the occasional melodic interlude. It’s tempting to view this as a culmination that Horrendous have been building toward, but the freewheeling spirit and outright fun of Ontological Mysterium make it the band’s most drastic departure to date.
With its emphasis on momentum and melody over technical prowess, the wide-open, triumphant intro track “The Blaze” might make you think you’ve accidentally pressed play on an atmospheric black metal classic like Agalloch’s Ashes Against the Grain. Oddly enough, Ontological Mysterium’s other biggest outlier is its delirious closer, “The Death Knell Ringeth,” a lizard-brained groove metal banger that completely counters the methodical opener. In between, Horrendous return to their signature brand of progressive death metal, jam-packing it with more solos, non-sequitur song structures, and unrestrained experimentation than ever. After three albums of ruthless precision and studied evolution—2014 breakout Ecdysis, 2015’s Anareta, and Idol—the eclecticism comes as a shock.
In an interview, guitarist/vocalist Matt Knox explained the new album’s stylistic sweep as a way to “encapsulate everything we’ve ever done.” Indeed, you can hear the strains of doom that crept into Ecdysis on “Preterition Hymn,” the catchy, Symbolic-era Death worship of Anareta on “Chrysopoeia (The Archaeology of Dawn),” and the jazzy, fretless bass-led tones of Idol on “Aurora Neoterica.” But the frenzied way they’ve arranged and sequenced the songs has no precedent in the Horrendous catalog. In this regard, Ontological Mysterium channels an uninhibited energy, a no-holds-barred ethos that runs counter to the careful curation of the band’s past work. When, at the very end of the album, second guitarist/vocalist Damian Herring bellows, “Time is too fucking short,” you might wonder if “carpe diem” was the original creative prompt.
The willingness to pull out all the stops is apparent in Ontological Mysterium’s virtuosic musicianship, but its heightened sense of freedom also brings out Horrendous’ inner metal goofball. It’s hard to imagine the younger, more self-serious incarnation of this band indulging in this album’s pulpy horror and campy riffage. Even Knox has acknowledged that, in the pursuit of different vocal approaches, the band wound up with some that were “completely absurd”—see the “Iron Man”-esque intro of “Exeg(en)esis” or the Peter Steele-style clean baritone that pops up in “Chrysopoeia (The Archaeology of Dawn).”
Despite all of the eye-popping pyrotechnics, the members of Horrendous know when to stay out of each other’s way—the second Herring or Knox start to run counter to the song’s groove, the rhythm section falls into lockstep and bassist Alex Kulick picks up the melodic backbone. When Kulick’s neck slides and Jamie Knox’s drum fills pave the way for the breakdown on “The Death Knell Ringeth,” both guitarists hang back and play rhythm parts. The Knox brothers have been playing with Herring and a rotating cast of bassists since 2009 (Kulick came onboard full-time for Idol), and their innate coordination as songwriters enables them to throw out the subgenre-specific blueprints past albums relied on. For Horrendous, who have always been a workmanlike unit of death metal perfectionists, the whirlwind approach is a breath of fresh air. | 2023-08-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Season of Mist | August 22, 2023 | 7.8 | 1f973d42-479d-4dd2-8a02-108e922ae1e7 | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
The soul singer’s latest is a multi-perspective, multi-genre examination of addiction and family breakdown. | The soul singer’s latest is a multi-perspective, multi-genre examination of addiction and family breakdown. | Raphael Saadiq: Jimmy Lee | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/raphael-saadiq-jimmy-lee/ | Jimmy Lee | Raphael Saadiq’s solo career has been haunted by the ghosts of tormented men and women. One such figure hides beneath the catchy pop melody of “You’re the One That I Like,” a song from his 2002 debut Instant Vintage about losing a love interest to addiction. Another lurks in “Grown Folks,” a concerned-but-scolding soul track off his sophomore album Ray Ray, about parents who can’t seem to prioritize their children. And even “Good Man,” from his 2011 retro-R&B album Stone Rollin’, is filled with contempt for the would-be patriarchs that just can’t get it together.
He’s walked a fine line between approaching these self-destructive figures—stand-ins for the ruptures and trauma in African-American communities—with empathy and pity. Which is perhaps why his latest album Jimmy Lee feels like a long-held exhalation. Named after his late brother who died of an overdose around the time Saadiq left legendary R&B group Tony! Toni! Toné!, Jimmy Lee is a multi-perspective, multi-genre examination of addiction and family breakdown that pushes Saadiq to his most humanizing work yet.
Jimmy Lee is Saadiq’s first solo album since 2011’s Stone Rollin’, but his fingerprints are all over the past few years of Black American culture. “Mighty River,” which he co-wrote with Mary J. Blige for the 2017 film Mudbound, earned the duo an Academy Award Best Original Song nomination. On the small screen, Saadiq has served as composer for HBO’s Insecure since 2016. But his greatest artistic feat since Stone Rollin’ has by far been serving as executive producer of Solange’s 2016 album A Seat at the Table.
Working with artists like Solange (and Kendrick Lamar, who also features on Jimmy) seems to have emboldened Saadiq. Both the charging blues song “Kings Fall” and neo-soul groove “I’m Feeling Love” offer sympathetic, heart-rending perspectives on addiction from within the storm, while the Motown-steeped protest song “Rikers Island” brims with an urgency and mourning the artist has usually reserved for love songs. Mid-album cut “My Walk” slides gritty, beating synths beneath his easy blues and soul cadence; it’s his biggest musical departure, and also the album’s most frankly autobiographical track.
The R&B legend still stays close to the sounds that raised him, as on the straight-up gospel song “Belongs to God.” But even that inclusion belies an artist more willing to embrace loose ends, disorienting interruptions, and the unknown. On Jimmy Lee, Saadiq shout-sings, whispers, and croons with new abandon. It feels like a refutation of his old reserve, and it also represents a welcome stretch from Saadiq before he takes his sound all the way back to his beginnings: He recently announced that a Tony! Toni! Toné! reunion is in the works.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | September 19, 2019 | 7.8 | 1f97a47c-aa6e-4284-a26f-5f97ed7165db | Ann-Derrick Gaillot | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ann-derrick-gaillot/ | |
Jakub Alexander records ambient techno music under the name Heathered Pearls. His debut Loyal had all the heft of a desert mirage, which was its chief attraction but also its chief flaw. Although the rosy glow of his synthesizers remains the main draw on Body Complex, he injects more physicality: Per the title, you can actually dance to many of these songs. | Jakub Alexander records ambient techno music under the name Heathered Pearls. His debut Loyal had all the heft of a desert mirage, which was its chief attraction but also its chief flaw. Although the rosy glow of his synthesizers remains the main draw on Body Complex, he injects more physicality: Per the title, you can actually dance to many of these songs. | Heathered Pearls: Body Complex | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20895-body-complex/ | Body Complex | Jakub Alexander's debut album as Heathered Pearls had the all the heft of a desert mirage. That was its chief attraction, but also its chief flaw. Loyal offered track after track of beatless shimmer, and it was gorgeous, but after a while, you could be forgiven for wanting something a little more substantial to sink your teeth into.
Body Complex retains Loyal's delectable lightness but wisely injects a little more variety and a lot more physicality. Per the new album's title, you can actually dance to many of these songs. Although the rosy glow of his synthesizers remains the music's organizing principle and main attraction, six of the new album's 10 tracks feature crisp, boom-tick drum programming. His beats aren't terribly ornate or advanced, but they're utilitarian in a way that suits listening as well as dancing. Like a square black frame around a watercolor, they help to delineate all the washed-out frequencies they contain.
The shoegaze- textured "Personal Kiosk" balances murky chords with scraped cymbals, while "Perfume Catalog" attaches a muffled machine beat to gauzy choral pads and high-end shimmer; it sounds a little like some heavenly fusion of Actress, 10cc's "I'm Not in Love"—or the first few seconds of it, anyway—and Newworldaquarium's "Trespassers", still the high-water mark for the treble register in techno. "Warm Air Estate", featuring a singer named Outerbridge, points to a possible next step for Alexander's project: actual songs. His vocals remain indistinct, but the mere presence of a voice, with a clearly defined bassline, makes for the most corporeal music Heathered Pearls has made yet.
Still, the atmospheres remain Heathered Pearls' selling point, with their tantalizing combination of magic-hour sunlight and gooey haze. "Cast in Lemon & Sand" and "Artificial Foliage" both sound a lot like Victorialand-era Cocteau Twins with the attack softened and the reverb blown way out. Cocteau Twins are, like Kate Bush and New Order, one of those acts that far too many artists try to emulate without really understanding what makes them tick, but Alexander gets it. Maybe that's not surprising, given that his alias sounds like a mockup for one of Vaughan Oliver's sleeves for 4AD. Alexander, who A&Rs for Ghostly and selects music for Tycho's design-centric ISO50 blog, is nothing if not knowing when it comes to the combined power of word, music, and image, which makes his choice of song titles a little bit surprising. "Perfume Catalogue", "Sunken Living Area", "Holographic Lodge"—they read almost as parodies, as ironic commentary on ambient music's frequent role as a kind of lifestyle accessory. Fortunately, Body Complex never gets bogged down by ambient music's wallpaper associations. This isn't music for living rooms; it's music for living in. | 2015-08-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-08-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | August 10, 2015 | 6.9 | 1f99c98b-87b0-4599-9b40-95963d1c619e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Welsh brothers earned a rep for festival anthems that bridge big-room functionalism with subtle experimentation. On their debut album, they go in search of transcendence. | The Welsh brothers earned a rep for festival anthems that bridge big-room functionalism with subtle experimentation. On their debut album, they go in search of transcendence. | Overmono: Good Lies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/overmono-good-lies/ | Good Lies | “Functional” is a dirty word in dance music. No one wants to be merely functional, nor find themselves on the receiving end of utilitarianism. You don’t want to be invited to a “function,” either—you want to go to a party. Yet culture has been tacking in the direction of the functional for a while now. Music is composed to study or sleep or chill to. Algorithms anticipate our desires. Any creative act can be made into content, which computers then sell ads in front of. There are brand “activations,” which is just another word for functions. All this matters rather a lot for the state of dance music, which, at its core, is meant to serve a specific purpose. Even its name issues a command: Dance.
But the best dance music knows all this and blithely ignores it. Instead, it deftly undercuts function with surprise, or pairs it with emotion in sweet harmony. The brothers Overmono have garnered a reputation as both virtuosos of the functional (see the Pavlovian hooks of 2020’s “Everything U Need” or the following year’s “Bby”) and explorers of what lies beyond it (just listen to those plush plucks disintegrate on 2019’s “Le Tigre”). Occasionally these two modes meet, and deliver something like the heart-bursting “I Have a Love” remix. It’s in these moments, when Overmono bridge the gap, that you grasp what they’re all about. The pair grew up on either side of the same small Welsh town, Monmouth, 10 years apart in age, split between separated parents but tethered by a shared upbringing in music—under their dad’s professional tutelage, in the choral and mining band traditions of Wales, and then digging through record bins and banging out rave tapes in the woods. Good Lies, their debut album, inhales the vapors of dance music’s countercultural emergence and steers against the functional course in search of transcendence.
There’s something almost unnerving about the precision with which Overmono operate: The scant palette they draw from—globular basslines, glassy percussion, an array of disembodied vocals—is unerringly clean. Even seeing two brothers teaming up after successful solo careers (Tom Russell as techno titan Truss, younger Ed as breaks magician Tessela) feels uncannily symmetrical. But there’s grit, too, and the tension between the rough-edged and the machine-tooled makes the whole exercise all the more vivid and enveloping. It’s in the straining vocal chops and bit-by-bit build of “So U Kno,” and the glossy, luminous, Frank Ocean-on-acid swirl of “Walk Thru Water.” Not a drop of Smerz’s syrupy, breathless delivery is wasted on the title track as it rattles along with all the tumult of falling in love. They’re happy to take things slow, too. “Vermonly”—one of a handful of more sedate tracks here—sits like a mottled antique mirror in the midst of the album’s energetic closing run, as if inviting you to pause and take a more considered look.
The most abiding moments on Good Lies come when the Russell brothers set aside their laser guides. Closer “Calling Out” sounds like it’s happening in reverse, all hollowed-out kicks and retracting synth stabs. The hiss and stray wind chimes that periodically cut through the tight swing of “Cold Blooded,” and the in-and-out float of its stringy vocal, make it feel like chancing upon a new favorite song as you scroll across the radio dial or drift between Room 1 and Room 2. There are missteps—“Sugarrushhh” is a little aimless; “Skulled” is the sort of love letter to hardcore rave that Burial has done better—but none so big as to lead them off course.
The Russell brothers haven’t been shy about their ambitions to take this show to the big stages; the sky-touching chord progressions would have given it away if they hadn’t. At times, you can almost picture the confetti cannons going off—never more than when they flip Tirzah’s bluesy register into an ecstatic swoon on “Is U.” But Good Lies makes clear that Overmono haven’t sacrificed intimacy or immediacy to the prospect of festival slots and pyrotechnics. Just as the pair’s name conceals a certain domesticity (Overmonnow is a suburb of Monmouth), fuzzy tracks like “Calon”—Welsh for heart—and the undulating “Arla Fearn” offer a sense of grounding that helps the big emotional swings hit. Good Lies toes a fine and, yes, functional, balance. There’s beauty in all this precision too—like an Eames chair, a perfectly weighted spoon, or the cone of a 15-inch subwoofer pushing air out of the bass scoops. | 2023-05-12T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-12T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | May 12, 2023 | 7.7 | 1f9a0e7c-bdba-40b1-bad7-cc87e2eb13da | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
Old age suits the country singer well. On his latest album—featuring three newly penned tunes—Willie sings with a kind of chagrinned humor, as if nobody is more surprised by his longevity than he is. | Old age suits the country singer well. On his latest album—featuring three newly penned tunes—Willie sings with a kind of chagrinned humor, as if nobody is more surprised by his longevity than he is. | Willie Nelson: Ride Me Back Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/willie-nelson-ride-me-back-home/ | Ride Me Back Home | Perhaps the only thing more impressive than the fact that Willie Nelson is still at it—it being writing, recording, touring, and toking—is the fact that he’s still good at it. These 86 years seem to have sharpened his focus and his sense of humor, so there’s not that feeling he’s going through the motions when he plays “On the Road Again” for the millionth time. Nearly six decades after he wrote “Crazy,” he has largely avoided the pitfalls that have snared so many older country and rock artists, instead emerging as a grandfatherly influence for yet another generation of country misfits like Sturgill Simpson and Margo Price (both of whom played Willie’s Outlaw Music Festival last year). To be active, relevant, and beloved as an octogenarian in the business—that’s the dream of any artist.
In recent years, Willie has even managed to enter something of a renaissance phase of his career, with a string of albums that include his first new songwriting credits in decades. Apart from his largely overlooked collection of Sinatra covers (which I’ll argue surpasses Dylan’s handful in terms of interpretation, insight, and just plain ol’ enjoyment), he has made his own thoughts on mortality, technology, and creativity the focal points of his recent work. Old age is his new favorite subject, or the subject he knows most intimately, or maybe just the subject that lends itself to the best punchlines. He sings with a kind of chagrinned humor, as if nobody is more surprised by his longevity than he is.
That’s a welcome trend that continues on Ride Me Back Home, which features three newly penned tunes. That doesn’t seem like very many, but they frame this album with warmth, empathy, and humor. “Come On Time” finds him challenging the very notion of time to a fight, as though he might spar his way to another couple years on earth. “I say come on, Time/I’ve beat you before,” he sings over a chugging rhythm section. “Come on, Time, what have you got for me this time?” His desperation barely veiled by his humor, he knows he’s bested before the fight even begins, and all he can do is try to make something out of it: “I’ll take your words of wisdom and I’ll try to make them rhyme.”
Buying the farm, at least for Willie, is inextricably linked with making music. “One More Song to Write” sounds so breezy that its insights might initially sound modest, but this gracefully melodic tune might hold the key to his long career. “I’ve got one more song to write, I’ve got one more bridge to burn,” he sings. “I’ll know when it’s right, I’ve got one more song to write.” For all his prolificity—is there even an authoritative album count anymore?—he’s always chasing that next tune, that next rhyme, that next show. He’s always thinking about the future.
It doesn’t really matter to Willie who came up with that next tune or that next rhyme. At his best, he can rewrite a song just by singing it, and he can suss out new depths just by adapting it to his own jazzy meter. The slight delay in his delivery on Guy Clark’s “Immigrant Eyes” subtly reinforces the song’s dusty two-step rhythm as well as its very timely sentiments about family, immigration, and empathy. Likewise, he capers over the lyrics of Mac Davis’s “It’s Hard to Be Humble,” having a blast singing the word “egotistical” and chuckling with his sons Lukas and Micah over the notion of him wearing “skintight blue jeans.”
Ride Me Back Home is Willie’s thirteenth album with producer/co-writer Buddy Cannon, the Pancho to his Lefty, and it casually evokes the old Texas dancehalls where Willie cut his teeth long before he embodied the outlaw country ethos. There’s a roominess to the music, a jovial looseness in its rhythmic complexity, and something like celebration in its exploration of these grave subjects. Nothing on here sounds rehearsed or calculated. Instead, it sounds like Willie has been living with these songs for so long that he can play them as easily as inhaling and exhaling.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Legacy | June 25, 2019 | 7.4 | 1f9ddbd0-00e5-4070-9849-c352a6f30539 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Inspired by Australia’s lush temperate rainforest, the Melbourne producer’s second album emphasizes melody and background texture more than big drops or bass lines. | Inspired by Australia’s lush temperate rainforest, the Melbourne producer’s second album emphasizes melody and background texture more than big drops or bass lines. | Roland Tings: Salt Water | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roland-tings-salt-water/ | Salt Water | On an international stage, contemporary Australian electronic music is most often identified with the EDM-inflected, festival-ready production of an artist like Flume, or the chill, algorithm-friendly compositions of lo-fi house, the preferred vernacular of DJs like Mall Grab and DJ Boring. Melbourne-based producer Roland Tings—real name Rohan Newman—sits somewhere in between, with a sound built for big rooms that still feels precise and considered. Though his live performances are energetic and immersive, his rhythms are more apt to nudge the body than shove it. Salt Water arrives four years after his self-titled 2015 debut, but it’s the kind of sculpted, careful record that sounds like it could have taken much longer: refreshingly untempted by current trends or timely rhythms, resolutely committed to doing its own thing.
At earlier solo shows, Newman improvised drum loops on a TR-8, lending his sets an acid-house flavor that was classic without being nostalgic. Recently, after a few stateside tours with the likes of Chrome Sparks and Com Truise, he’s expanded his act, adding a live drummer and the occasional guitarist alongside his Juno 106 synthesizer. On his own time, he says he prefers listening to ambient and rock over electronic music, and the cross-genre influence is felt throughout his own work.
Salt Water was recorded during a year-and-a-half period Newman spent living on Australia’s southern coast, near the Great Otway National Park. The ecological theme extends beyond song titles like “Rainforest” and “Sun Drops Behind the Hill”: The album has an organic essence, lush and alive like a rave in a foggy jungle. Each instrumental track functions as an equal member of an ecosystem. Brief stabs of acid sound like distant birds; percussive samples become a chorus line of cicadas; quietly thundering bass takes the shape of a storm cloud on the horizon. On “Rainforest,” “Up Close,” and “Circulating,” cascading voices float in and out of the mist, harmonizing with the acoustic surroundings until the exact words and their meaning is inseparable from the enclosing environment.
Deeper into the album, cuts like “In a Cloud” and “Water Music” lull the listener with spacey, reverb-drenched synth lines. Newman’s work is euphoric and ecstatic without the melodrama of trance music. His songwriting begins with the overriding melody rather than an undergirding drum sequence, and he emphasizes background texture more than big drops or bass lines. For Roland Tings, ambience isn’t just what’s happening around the drums—it’s the main attraction. Just as spending time in nature is more about soaking up a feeling than seeing one thing in particular, Salt Water prizes the space between beats as much as beats themselves. | 2020-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Cascine | January 4, 2020 | 7.3 | 1f9f9b81-e006-484e-b771-576ff3883de0 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The rebirth of LCD Soundsystem is marked by an extraordinary album obsessed with endings: of friendships, of love, of heroes, of a certain type of geeky fandom, and of the American dream itself. | The rebirth of LCD Soundsystem is marked by an extraordinary album obsessed with endings: of friendships, of love, of heroes, of a certain type of geeky fandom, and of the American dream itself. | LCD Soundsystem: American Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lcd-soundsystem-american-dream/ | American Dream | Of course James Murphy fell for his own rock’n’roll myth. This is the guy who entered the realm of semi-stardom 15 years ago with “Losing My Edge,” a song that both poked fun at and paid tribute to music snobbery, that imagined a miracle man who witnessed every “seminal” underground event up-close, that used a list of cooler-than-thou names as an impenetrable shield. It made sense for him to concoct his very own “I was there” moment on April 2, 2011, when LCD Soundsystem played what was billed as their final show at the most storied venue in New York City. It was instantly legendary, the underdog’s big day. A perfect ending. Too perfect, maybe.
As an ace student of the game—“LCD is a band about a band writing music about writing music,” he once quipped—Murphy knew that he couldn’t just reunite for a lucrative victory lap, playing his most popular songs on Spotify to the genre-agnostic, dance-friendly demographic he helped cultivate throughout the 2000s. It would ruin the legacy and go against everything LCD stood for: integrity, respect, a sly but genuine love of just how much music can shape a human being’s identity. So even though a new album was always planned since the band officially reformed 20 months ago, the intervening hit-filled gigs could feel odd. Yes, they sounded great, and all the members looked excited to be playing together again, but the context was tweaked. LCD Soundsystem were no longer on the cusp of a cultish zeitgeist. Murphy still sang “this could be the last time” during “All My Friends,” though the line’s tang of finality was dulled.
For his part, Murphy recently promised to never make a show of LCD’s retirement ever again. But as much as the band’s fourth album, American Dream, marks a rebirth, it’s also obsessed with endings: of friendships, of love, of heroes, of a certain type of geeky fandom, of the American dream itself. These are big, serious topics for a project that essentially started as a goof, but it’s the direction Murphy has taken since Sound of Silver’s “Someone Great” combined his affection for bubbling synths with a poignancy about the fleeting nature of life. Now, as a 47-year-old father of a young child, Murphy is using his long-running affection for bygone post-punk and art-rock sounds to carry on traditions; the album includes pointed references to Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Suicide’s Alan Vega, and David Bowie, all of whom passed in the years since LCD’s last record. Whereas Murphy once took on all of these influences lightly and cleverly, they feel heavier across much of American Dream’s 70 minutes, with the lingering responsibilities of a disappearing history becoming more apparent.
On paper, that might sound like a bit of a slog, but this is not the case. Roughly half of the album is buoyed by the twitching rhythms and spirited mumble-rants that Murphy, who once again plays the vast majority of the instruments himself, is known for. Soon-to-be live scorcher “Emotional Haircut” is ostensibly a lark about an old rocker dude trying to cling onto some youth by-way-of a trendy new ’do—but it doesn’t stop with the easy joke. The song’s intensity comes from Murphy’s identification with this character who absorbs pummelling frequencies at very high volumes in order to quell the anxieties of aging. “You got numbers on your phone of the dead that you can’t delete,” he yelps as the music notches up to a panic. “And you got life-affirming moments in your past that you can’t repeat.” It’s at once funny, terrifying, and strangely reassuring.
A similar emotional brew rumbles through the burbling “Tonite,” which reads like an updated treatise in defense of a certain type of outmoded music nerd—or, as Murphy oh-so-knowingly puts it, “a hobbled veteran of the disc-shop inquisition sent to parry the cocksure mem-stick filth with my own late-era middle-aged ramblings.” It’s a pep talk for those who’ve felt duped by late capitalism’s gobbling up of punk values in the name of branding and moneyed elitism. Sure, this might be easy for James Murphy to say—as a Coachella headliner and Williamsburg wine bar owner, he’s not exactly in the DIY trenches—but, as music recedes ever further into the background of popular culture, such bemused wishful thinking can’t hurt. Fandom comes up again on “Change Yr Mind,” where Murphy wades into comment sections, both parroting and rebuffing those who doubted the return of LCD Soundsystem. After a litany of taunts and self-doubt elbowed between Robert Fripp-style guitar shocks, the singer comes to a simple epiphany: “You can change your mind,” he repeats, as the static track cracks open. This is the freeing sound of losing followers.
The idea of change, and whether or not it’s truly possible, has been a recurring theme for Murphy, and American Dream has him taking some legitimate steps away from his renowned style. While the album’s classic-sounding LCD tracks are comfortably familiar, they can also feel redundant, unnecessary reminders that struggle to supplant Murphy’s own past glories. So the record’s newfangled moves don’t just offer variety, they provide American Dream’s most rewarding moments and serve as the best justifications of this reformed group’s continued existence.
Take album opener “Oh Baby,” Murphy’s attempt at the type of unsettlingly pretty tick-tick slow burner that turned Suicide into subversive NYC icons. The song is decidedly mid-tempo. And Murphy isn’t rambling here—he’s crooning. Very convincingly. Sexily, even. It’s a breakup song (Murphy went through a divorce around the time LCD disbanded in 2011) stuck somewhere between a bad dream and reality. And unlike so many LCD songs, which are marked by the hyper-specificity of an obsessive-compulsive creator, “Oh Baby” feels spacious and inviting. You don’t have to be a laid-off record store clerk to fully understand this song’s intricacies. Like Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream,” which has been covered by everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Neneh Cherry, “Oh Baby” is the type of track could be successfully pulled off by creep-show genius Ariel Pink or Rat Pack redux Michael Bublé.
Murphy keeps dreaming on “I Used To,” another winning outlier. He seems to be peeking through to the past, to his formative rock influences, trying to confront their mysterious force. The searching song is brought further into focus by its stalking bassline and hulking, unfussy drum beat—turn your ear the right way, and this is what a Led Zeppelin post-punk album could have sounded like, with a stinging guitar solo coming halfway from hell. Staying in this more diabolical lane, the nearly 10-minute centerpiece “How Do You Sleep?” is tempestuous, ecstatic, and utterly, utterly savage. Sharing a name with John Lennon’s infamous 1971 takedown of Paul McCartney following the dissolution of the Beatles, the song is almost certainly a salvo aimed at Murphy’s estranged DFA production partner, Tim Goldsworthy—aka the guy Murphy’s label sued for nearly $100,000 in missing funds in 2013, aka the guy who called Murphy an over-therapized bully and a sociopath, and admitted to having “weird reoccurring dreams of ‘Game of Thrones’-style deaths for him” in the recent New York rock oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom. So, yeah. These two men no longer like each other.
For all the bad blood, though, “How Do You Sleep?” is not a guns-out rocker or a punch line-stuffed lyrical skewering. It’s painstaking in its build, amassing ominous percussion and gargantuan bass synth tones before the full rhythm finally straps in after more than five minutes. Meanwhile, Murphy mixes enigmatic taunts with more direct swipes, hollering from deep in the mix: “I must admit: I miss the laughing/But not so much you.” This is venom, but it’s expertly controlled venom. The song works astoundingly well without any backstory, as a universal, fist-pumping broadside directed at former friends everywhere, but it’s even more damning with its likely target in mind. You almost feel pity for Goldsworthy—but then the beat connects and, well, he must have done something wrong to deserve such an epic shaming. And still, there is a bittersweet element in acknowledging the loss of someone who’s still living, a haunting presence no longer felt.
Another ghost inhabits the album’s final track, “Black Screen,” but the situation is flipped: The person is no longer alive yet they are sorely missed. No name is mentioned in the song, but there is reason to believe it is a belated message for David Bowie, who befriended and collaborated with Murphy in the last few years of his life. In fact, Murphy was once considered to be a co-producer on Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, though in the end he only officially contributed percussion to a couple of tracks. Since some of LCD Soundsystem’s best tracks have been thinly disguised love letters to Bowie’s influence, why didn’t Murphy fully take the chance to work with one of his deepest musical loves? “Black Screen” gives us some answers. “I had fear in the room,” Murphy sings in his smallest voice, “so I stopped turning up.” This is not a flip comment; it is sorrowful. Regretful. Painfully vulnerable. The song glides along a straightforward sonar-blip beat, with Murphy recalling his relationship with his idol in quiet awe, eventually conjuring an image of interstellar infinity. It concludes with pulses and piano that would not sound out-of-place on the dark side of a Bowie art-rock opus—an ending that could go on forever. | 2017-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Columbia / DFA | September 1, 2017 | 8.5 | 1fa5561c-62d3-4824-96bb-6b5f7cd1cb32 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
The Los Angeles producer’ upbeat second LP is a short, feature-heavy collection that emphasizes his charmingly loose funk and synth-pop arrangements. | The Los Angeles producer’ upbeat second LP is a short, feature-heavy collection that emphasizes his charmingly loose funk and synth-pop arrangements. | Jim-E Stack: Ephemera | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jim-e-stack-ephemera/ | Ephemera | Jim-E Stack has hovered around the fringes of electronic indie-pop music for a while now, first crafting homespun hybrids of club and dance music on 2014’s Tell Me I Belong. He’s worked with left-of-center pop artists as a producer and songwriter since, providing reverb-heavy synths and shuffling, distorted kick drums to songs by Charli XCX, Empress Of, and Caroline Polachek. On his second solo LP, EPHEMERA, Stack moves past the sample-happy instrumentals of his debut and instead teams up with several former collaborators for an upbeat 20-minute set emphasizing funk and synthpop arrangements that feel charmingly loose and lived-in.
Stack pieced together EPHEMERA over the past few years from sessions with artists working on their own projects, but despite the title, the album doesn’t feel like a total hard-drive dump. Empress Of is laid-back and in high spirits on “Note to Self,” a chugging synthpop track with pitch-shifted vocal accents and shimmering piano. The song barely feints at a chorus, but the fractured details add up to a jubilant shot of self-confidence. Stack keeps the breeziness going on “Sweet Summer Sweat,” propped up by a hazy guitar loop and honeyed vocals from L.A. artist Dijon. Midway through, a lean club break packed with echoing sirens and cycling drums adds a euphoric kick of momentum.
As EPHEMERA bends from blissful songs to more melancholy interludes, Stack builds on moods rather than memorable hooks. Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon lumbers over “Jeanie,” a scuffed R&B track submerged in guitars that resemble Jai Paul’s watery electro-funk (see also: the yearning, ruptured instrumental “Be Long 2”). The garbled “Lost Man” fares better, with an assist from London rapper Octavian over a snapping backdrop that calls back to Tell Me I Belong’s mid-tempo highlights.
Stack doesn’t linger in the downcast headspace for long. On “Can We,” a gauzy pop song featuring Kacy Hill, he offers more solid structural and rhythmic ground. Stack produced the bulk of Hill’s airy second album this year, and the pair’s alchemy together feels weightless; here, Hill’s voice is slightly pitched up, dancing over rolling drums, whizzing synths, and funky guitar licks. EPHEMERA doesn’t make much of an effort to break new ground, but on “Can We,” Stack dials into his sweet spot, melding a dulcet vocal delivery with his own understated, soothing flourishes.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | AWAL | November 11, 2020 | 6.5 | 1fa55ce6-655e-47eb-9b51-4ee08bcc9d3e | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
After a decade in the game, the Memphis rapper releases his first major-label album. Guests include Rick Ross, Big K.R.I.T., and 2 Chainz. | After a decade in the game, the Memphis rapper releases his first major-label album. Guests include Rick Ross, Big K.R.I.T., and 2 Chainz. | Yo Gotti: Live From the Kitchen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16266-live-from-the-kitchen/ | Live From the Kitchen | Memphis' Yo Gotti is the latest subject in the rap industry's ongoing, long-term study: If an album is released in a Best Buy and no one is around to purchase it, does it exist? As it pertains to Live From the Kitchen-- the rapper's first major-label album, despite having been in the game for over a decade-- the answer might as well be no. To be fair, 16,000 people bought it in its first week, but amongst his fans, there's little doubt that Live instantly took a backseat to the mixtapes and tracks that preceded it. That's something close to a shame, because it's a solid, listenable, blue-collar rap album, the sort of thing that used to start careers as opposed to branding them dead on arrival.
Live From the Kitchen sounds like a professionally mastered mixtape, which explains why it succeeds artistically while failing commercially. On the one hand, Gotti stays in his lane, repeating the textbook trap music that he's been pumping out for years with slight updates from producers du jour like Lil Lody and Mike Will. On the other, the updates are very slight, and any of these songs could be dropped into an installment of Gotti's Cocaine Music mixtape series without anyone being the wiser-- it's hard to expect many people to pay for something that they've routinely been given for free over the course of a few years.
It is that consistency that is Gotti's calling card, and he carries it over to Live From the Kitchen with ease. He is a classic example of a rapper succeeding as much for how he sounds when saying something as opposed to what he says, but his lyrics have a striking directness that has allowed him to build the type of grassroots fanbase that can serve as a livelihood, even if they don't show up to retail stores. "Testimony", the album's opening track, is a perfect example: Not only does Gotti sound inherently right over DJ Montay's synth horns, but the outlining of his upbringing as a street dealer features no hint of braggadocio or cinematic theatrics. The tone isn't as much somber as it is unflinchingly matter-of-fact, which is an approach that still holds its appeal even during the reign of Rick Ross.
But the corollary here is that, although Gotti can easily work off of this blueprint, he rarely, if ever, transcends it. As far as dealers-turned-rappers go, there's a reason why he has never reached the heights of T.I. or Young Jeezy or Gucci Mane. He has neither the personality nor the pop instincts of those guys, and that becomes a problem over the course of a full-length. Tracks like "Harder" and "Cases" are perfectly fine Southern rap records, but for the top songs on the album, they're distinctly void of anything that would make them standout amongst a deluge of similar-sounding songs that flood the market on a routine basis.
Maybe the fate of Live From the Kitchen-- which, just to really hammer it home, had its lead single released in May of 2009-- is merely illustrative of the industry being the survival of the fittest. But it's hard not to sympathize a bit with Yo Gotti, who willingly entered into the major-label system because, well, that's just what rappers do, even though his fate seemed more or less preordained from the start. His debut album as a "rap star" will be followed by many mixtapes that sound just like it and are basically just as good, but unfortunately for him, that works out way better for the listener than it does the artist. | 2012-02-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-02-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | RCA / Polo Grounds Music | February 8, 2012 | 5.6 | 1fa86727-b75f-4af9-ba87-61a044d7c8da | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
The first career-spanning Pavement comp contains their best-known songs as well as concert staples, fan favorites, and at least a couple of curveballs. | The first career-spanning Pavement comp contains their best-known songs as well as concert staples, fan favorites, and at least a couple of curveballs. | Pavement: Quarantine the Past | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14002-quarantine-the-past/ | Quarantine the Past | Pavement have a fairly small catalog-- five full-length albums and a handful of EPs, plus a compilation of early singles. Over the past decade, their B-sides, radio sessions, and assorted rarities have been repackaged into a series of excellent reissues, which has made it easy to be a Pavement completist without blowing a lot of cash. It's all very accessible, but it's not easy to know where to start. Quarantine the Past, the first-ever Pavement retrospective compilation, solves this problem by providing a cheap and easy entry point to the band that represents the breadth of their songbook. The best-known songs are featured-- "Cut Your Hair", "Gold Soundz", "Here", "Shady Lane", "Spit on a Stranger"-- but so are concert staples, fan favorites, and at least a couple of curveballs. The sequence is non-chronological, zig-zagging through the catalog and evenly distributing the obvious classics throughout the running order.
It's important that a Pavement best-of not only focus on their singles, which often erred on the side of novelty and levity. The dark horses here are essential in sketching out the group's range, from the punky blast of "Unfair" and "Debris Slide" to the loose, stoned sound of "Heaven Is a Truck". "Grounded" is majestic, "Shoot the Singer" is wistful, "Date With Ikea" is a suburban anthem. "Embassy Row" is like an alternate-universe Pavement that could compete on modern rock radio with the likes of Weezer, and "Box Elder" is a platonic ideal of simple, lo-fi indie pop. Fans of the band may look over the tracklisting and wonder why some of their favorites didn't make the cut, but every song on this thing is an unimpeachable gem, and the collection presents a well-rounded summary of their distinct and varied body of work.
Pavement were mainly a vehicle for the songwriting of Stephen Malkmus, who penned almost all of the band's material. In terms of rock archetypes, Malkmus is a true original. He's erudite but bratty, laid-back yet buttoned-up. He's an inscrutable goofball, a pragmatic romantic, an aloof charmer. His music is loaded with references to cultural history-- one of these songs is an imaginary history of R.E.M.-- but his nerdy impulses and arty affect is consistently overwhelmed by his casual coolness. There's an impossible ease and haphazard grace to this music. A lot of bands work very hard to make you appreciate their meticulous craft or browbeat you with hooks, but Pavement tossed off brilliantly composed pop songs with a shambling, carefree swagger. They made it sound easy, and maybe it was. The best kind of genius tends to come very naturally to people, like a side effect of just being themselves. In "Frontwards", Malkmus sings "I've got style/ Miles and miles/ So much style that it's wasted," and that's pretty much him and his band in a nutshell.
Malkmus' lyrics, central to the band's appeal, alternate between whimsical nonsense and epigrammatic quotables. The songs seldom slot neatly into readily identifiable emotional states or refer to specific experiences, instead falling into the liminal spaces between thoughts and feelings. Malkmus' words indicate context and supply the listener with rich imagery, but the real poetry is in the way his phrases flow with the melodies, and are offset by evocative guitar textures and unexpected noises. The group never compromised tunefulness for artiness, but mystique and abstraction were among their core values. In retrospect, certain lines ring out like statements of intent-- "We need secrets," "Tricks are everything to me."
The very best Pavement songs delight in curiosity and imagination, drawing connections between images and ideas as if everything in the world was full of character and significance. This is part of why, for example, a playful joke about the voice of Rush's lead singer in "Stereo" never gets stale. It's in the middle of a song that may as well be a sub-genre unto itself, bouncing about gleefully, utterly fascinated by the all the obscure details of the world. They found the magic in the mundane, and could make small enthusiasms, silly in-jokes, and skewed observations seem profound and glorious.
A decade after the band's dissolution, Pavement's music has proven itself to have an evergreen quality. To be sure, it's all very much of its time and no band aside from perhaps Guided By Voices better epitomizes the sound and style of 1990s indie rock, but the material transcends its era as much as it defines it. This compilation exists mainly to get an entry-level Pavement product on the market to coincide with their reunion tour, but it has a value beyond crass commercial necessity. Unlike other cross-generational legacy bands like the Pixies, Sonic Youth, and Talking Heads, Pavement's songs fit together comfortably as a jukebox-friendly hit parade.
Some tracks, like the Spiral Stairs showcase "Date With Ikea" and the early EP cut "Mellow Jazz Docent", shine brighter than in their original contexts, while numbers like "In the Mouth a Desert" and "Gold Soundz" come out sounding like modern standards. As much as their albums excel as unified works, no one ever needed to hear those records in full to fall in love with "Cut Your Hair", "Shady Lane", or "Range Life" on MTV, college radio, or someone's mixtape. Quarantine the Past doesn't replace the albums, but it's a highly listenable alternative that is as much a treat for nostalgic older fans as it is a valuable gateway for new listeners. | 2010-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador / Domino | March 8, 2010 | 10 | 1fb0966b-166d-46e3-b654-c59096fd44d5 | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
The moody London indie folk trio return with a stripped-back record inspired by long-distance longing. | The moody London indie folk trio return with a stripped-back record inspired by long-distance longing. | Daughter: Stereo Mind Game | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daughter-stereo-mind-game/ | Stereo Mind Game | For a microgeneration of angsty teens, the music of London indie folk trio Daughter was a formative soundtrack to aimless Tumblr scrolling and late nights aching for connection. In particular, the band’s 2011 breakout “Youth” provided solace to struggling adolescents with its trembly vocals and tormented lyrics comparing romantic disappointment to “heaving through corrupted lungs.” Their raw emotionality and billowing, gothic production would go on to influence future critical darlings like Julien Baker and Ethel Cain; Cain fell for the band’s live performances, while Baker praised the wilder, denser 2016 follow-up Not To Disappear on the Talkhouse.
After a video game score and a record from frontwoman Elena Tonra’s side project Ex:Re, the band scales back for its third proper album Stereo Mind Game. Inspired by Tonra’s long-distance relationship, the album wrestles with connection and distance. On the jaunty, cinematic “Swim Back,” Tonra longs for more straightforward communication, scheming to “find a hole in the ocean” to travel to her lover. On “Be On Your Way,” she relinquishes ownership of them and vows to meet in other circumstances. She becomes a reluctant optimist: On a previous record, a line like “I have a feeling we’ll repeat this evening” would be a fatalistic concession to toxic patterns, but now, it’s an earnest promise to a lover.
In contrast to the bluster of Daughter’s first two records, Stereo Mind Game at times can feel undercooked; an antsier arrangement on the relatively restrained “Dandelion” would better pair with the song’s when-will-they-text-back anxiety. But elsewhere, the embrace of negative space helps the individual elements hit harder. On “Party,” the simple guitar strokes and drum beats help foreground Tonra’s tense writing: “I could stop if I want, I just don’t want to yet/I’ll creep the volume up, I’ve got to drown myself out,” she sings about her relationship to alcohol.
While Daughter’s past work could tend toward depressive myopia, Tonra stretches herself as a writer on Stereo Mind Games. On the percussive, almost-spoken-word track “Junkmail,” she leans toward Florence Shaw and away from Florence Welch, flatly intoning observations like “You can’t edit the scenery to view it better” and “Should I pay for viewing your faint lookalike?” The ticking ballad “Future Lover'' winds up the best song on the record by dialing down on doomy imagery and adding a singalong chorus. The smaller stakes of Stereo Mind Games feel healthier and rewarding; the music is still vulnerable, but anguish no longer consumes every moment. | 2023-04-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Glassnote | April 10, 2023 | 6.7 | 1fb52fca-90f9-4195-90ab-388ee804af99 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
The Los Angeles songwriter balances autobiographical odes to love and loss with dreamlike imagery on her soft, hopeful debut. | The Los Angeles songwriter balances autobiographical odes to love and loss with dreamlike imagery on her soft, hopeful debut. | Arima Ederra: An Orange Colored Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arima-ederra-an-orange-colored-day/ | An Orange Colored Day | Arima Ederra started writing her debut, An Orange Colored Day, after an especially poignant afternoon in the park with a group of friends who had each lost a parent. As the sun was setting, painting the field before them orange, two friends jumped from a tree and started running. Ederra jumped after them, and soon after, she wrote “Free Again,” a warm, exploratory song that revels in the freedom and safety of childhood. The song’s ethos—optimistic but informed by a sadness right outside the frame—defines the album. These soft, reggae-inflected R&B lullabies insist on cherishing beauty, even when Ederra has to find and create it for herself.
Throughout the album, Ederra situates specific imagery about love and yearning in a cocoon of wonder and gratitude, signaled by gentle guitar melodies, crystalline steel drum tones, and twinkling keys. Grief and joy are especially intertwined in the way Ederra sings about her family. “Drugz/Wooden Wheel,” written after Ederra spent her last $50 on a gift for her mother, transforms a moment of anxiety into a meditation on familial gratitude. She sings, “I can’t buy drugs, I spent my money on my mama/I bought her roses by the dozen, she lives for me and my brother.” She builds up momentum, quickening her vocal delivery as she repeats “Girl, what you crying for?/It’s coming back to you now.” “Yellow Cabi,” a gentle piano ballad, is a beautiful tribute to her late father, who was a cab driver. Her voice is tender and honeyed as she details his late nights driving alone, providing for his family. These meandering, golden songs flit between the autobiographical, which can be lonely and heavy, and the fantastical, which serves as an emotional foil and a reprieve.
Despite its themes of loss, Ederra’s music maintains a sense of hope. Her songs often take on a prayer-like tone, allowing her to think beyond immediate circumstances. “Faith is what makes us beautiful,” she explains, “like being able to see the unimaginable, or being able to believe that things can be better.” Opener “Letters From the Imaginary” establishes a wonderstruck tone with its shimmering harp and cloudlike layered vocals. Ederra invites us to jump head-first into her dreamy narrative: “Take my hand now,” she sings. “I’ll show you worlds above the clouds.” “Dual Skies” is about someone mourning the loss of a younger brother. But it’s also one of the most triumphant songs on the album: Ederra’s voice is eager and determined as she sings over a bright, staccato synth tone. She again uses the language of the imaginary to assert that love transcends time and space, existing eternally between the people who have shared it, even when they “love between dual skies.”
Like a potter pulling shapes out of clay, Ederra reaches into the haze of grief and unearths new visions of her future that are full of beauty and emotional safety. Engaging in fantasy can sometimes feel like escapism, but here it is an act of self-determination. In “An Orange Colored Day,” she uses particularly ornate imagery—tranquil gold faces, love beaming through cracks in windows, a heaven soft as skin—to reposition loss as an opportunity to honor enduring love. Ederra chooses to remain hopeful in these moments, to prioritize a version of herself who has grown around and through her pain, even when that person can feel far away, like a figment of her imagination. | 2022-11-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | November 17, 2022 | 7.4 | 1fb565c1-1fb3-4b3b-aa1e-56bbd9d16a08 | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
Friends of Friends offshoot Young Adults' latest release is an EP from Daniel.T., a Southern California house upstart who’s put out promising nu-disco singles as one half of Cosmic Kids. Tetrachromat is his sunniest and most musically varied offering so far, painting the producer as an enthusiastic cultural omnivore. | Friends of Friends offshoot Young Adults' latest release is an EP from Daniel.T., a Southern California house upstart who’s put out promising nu-disco singles as one half of Cosmic Kids. Tetrachromat is his sunniest and most musically varied offering so far, painting the producer as an enthusiastic cultural omnivore. | Daniel.T.: Tetrachromat EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20968-tetrachromat-ep/ | Tetrachromat EP | Over the past few years, L.A. has spawned an Internet-friendly coven of young dance producers. The growing label Friends of Friends and its offshoot, Young Adults, have helped shape a loose aesthetic, with the sub-label focusing on a more explicitly niche template of chilled-out, lo-fi house music, providing a home for releases from Suzanne Kraft, Marvin & Guy, and slow-mo house deity Mark E. Their latest release is an EP from Daniel.T., aka Daniel Terndrup, a SoCal house upstart who’s also put out a few promising nu-disco singles as one half of Cosmic Kids.
Tetrachromat is his sunniest and most musically varied offering so far, painting the producer as an enthusiastic cultural omnivore. Terndrup’s ear is tuned to a certain feel-good, typically Californian frequency: his favored warm and atmospheric sounds connect him to a nebulous lineage populated by Balearic pop, space disco, and SoCal neo-psychedelia. The EP begins with the warmly burbling "Mission Hill Morning", a track that calls to mind the gentle late-aughts disco put out by Oslo label Smalltown Supersound, and concludes with the slightly-too-on-the-nose uke-strumming of "The Sun & the Sky", which Terndrup fleshes out with genial whistling and sing-song vocals. It’s PCH music for commuting into the city for parties, a "Ventura Highway" for the laptop generation.
Wisely, Terndrup places his best track right in the middle. The woozy "Planetesimal" features the EP’s heaviest build-up and its biggest payoff, in the form of a giddy, insouciant synthesizer line that cascades over the sounds of sputtering engines like a stretch of Rainbow Road. This is exactly the kind of sound that often gets called colorful, and Terndrup seems to know it—the term "tetrachromat" refers to a person who possess an extra cone in the eye, leading to an enhanced ability to see color (a less-than-reliable test for the condition was passed around online earlier this year, after a certain meme got the Internet talking about color perception.) After the warm bubble bath of the first half, the chilly "Laced" comes as something of a surprise, though Terndrup incorporates enough equatorial flourishes to suggest a strong connection to the rest of the material.
Terndrup’s flexibility with his sound can sometimes project a lack of confidence—the title track, a mellow cloud of contentment disturbed by a wildly ebullient melody, suggests a more restless producer than the EP’s general mood describes. Still, the sense that he has further to go in terms of editing and honing his sound doesn’t detract from his ability to filter a wide range of influences into an appealing and well-crafted aesthetic. | 2015-09-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Young Adults | September 2, 2015 | 7.7 | 1fbb7a4e-cc01-4bd4-bc29-ec1019d9780d | Abby Garnett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-garnett/ | null |
With their skate-punk shout-alongs and double-tapped guitar heroics, this D.C. duo embodies the sound of emo in 2019. | With their skate-punk shout-alongs and double-tapped guitar heroics, this D.C. duo embodies the sound of emo in 2019. | Origami Angel: Somewhere City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/origami-angel-somewhere-city/ | Somewhere City | More than any indie rock sub-genre, modern emo is largely driven by “the kids”—the fans, the bands, even the industry benefactors are often high school or college kids, with almost no degree of separation between them in the message boards and Facebook groups that make the whole thing run. As a result, recent influence spreads quickly, which is both exhilarating and frustrating to anyone trying to follow the scene’s rapid turnover. If Origami Angel’s Somewhere City is unrecognizable as a scene-defining emo record for someone who stopped paying attention around The Hotelier’s Home, Like NoPlace is There, it’s because Origami Angel wasn’t the kind of emo band that existed en masse five years ago.
Ryland Heagy and Pat Doherty emerged from a void created in 2016 by Modern Baseball’s newfound desire to transcend the Philly party emo they once perfected as well as the cancellation of one-time next big thing JANK—all of a sudden, there was a wave of bands fluent in memes, math rock, the lingua franca of therapeutic self-empowerment, and community building.
Among this group, Origami Angel’s chops and brand stewardship immediately stood out. They released entire EPs themed around Pokemon, full of strident skate-punk vocals and tapping runs they’d be more than happy to map out on Guitar Hero. They were undeniably fun, but Somewhere City gives them a newfound sense of purpose. In Somewhere City, “watching Danny Phantom, eating Happy Meals” is encouraged as a form of self-actualization, people expose their raw feelings without judgment, and if things get awkward, there’s always a sympathetic “whoa” or “woo!” waiting from your new best friends.
They’re one of those duos that sounds bigger than two people through hyperactivity—the tapping runs, Drop-D dissonance, power chord sequences and handclaps of “Doctor Whomst” are held together by sheer momentum, a quality that does more to keep Somewhere City coherent rather than its conceptual underpinning. Origami Angel never let up for more than five seconds, save for the twinkly arpeggios that serve as Somewhere City’s introductory scene setting (and even “Welcome To…” ends in gratuitously overdubbed gang vocals). The production is cleaner and brighter compared to May’s four-track EP Gen 3, but the hyperspeed approach actually has the effect of downplaying the impressive sophistication and complexity of Somewhere City’s musicality.
If Somewhere City finds itself unable to bridge a generation gap, it’s not due to any of its musical qualities—for anyone over the age of 30, they can be heard as celebration rockers taking the baton or beer from Japandroids or Fang Island. But after decades of being dismissed as strictly a vehicle for solipsistic, suburban angst, emo in 2010s has swung in the opposite direction, and Somewhere City’s relentless positivity can exert an uncomfortable peer pressure on the listener to conflate great intentions with art itself. Are you feeling sad and alone? Origami Angel will be there for you with chicken nuggets and a shoulder to cry on. Did you know that you’re special just the way you are? Did you ever wish every song on Bleed American had the message of “The Middle”? There’s no doubting Origami Angel’s sincerity, but its tendency to immediately reframe any uglier emotions undercuts their conceptual ambitions and makes the “I Just Want to Sell Out My Funeral”-style montage that recaps the nine previous songs feel a bit unearned. Somewhere City is an invigorating place to spend a half hour, but Origami Angel would be wise to explore the darkness on the edge of town. | 2019-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Chatterbot | December 3, 2019 | 7 | 1fbc5741-141c-49fd-bc22-4eca41d2e54f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Numero Group turns up an outlier in the new-age icon’s catalog: an album of vocal music that, while a lesser work, offers a glimpse of a seldom-seen side of Laraaji. | Numero Group turns up an outlier in the new-age icon’s catalog: an album of vocal music that, while a lesser work, offers a glimpse of a seldom-seen side of Laraaji. | Laraaji: Vision Songs, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laraaji-vision-songs-vol-1/ | Vision Songs, Vol. 1 | The new-age renaissance of the past few years has been especially beneficial to Edward Larry Gordon, who since 1980 has been better known to noise and new-age fans alike as Laraaji. Revived interest in the genre has led to an ongoing reassessment of his massive body of work. He’s played with Blues Control and Sun Araw, and his blissed-out explorations on zither and bells have even been the subject of remixes. In addition to touring the new-age conference circuit, Laraaji has made appearances at eclectic festivals like Big Ears and Moogfest, while many of his most prominent works have been reissued, from transcendent albums like Celestial Vibration and Essence/Universe to the Brian Eno-produced Ambient 3: Day of Radiance.
Leave it to Numero Group to find the outlier in Laraaji’s vast catalog: a set of aslant lyrical songs that only ever saw the light of day via a limited batch of self-released cassettes in 1984, when Laraaji had his public-access show on New York television. A few songs have been pruned from the original tape, but the set nevertheless reveals a rarely heard aspect of Laraaji, in which he improvises vocal takes in what the notes call “a bulk download—a visionary zap of vertical energy.” The songs spontaneously arose from social settings in the spiritual community, and they feel as loose and blousy as yoga pants.
Hindu chants bubble up and evolve at not too far a remove from the Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda ashram tapes from that same era that saw reissue last year, though the urgency and gospel-rooted sound of that set is replaced by something decidedly more informal here. Laraaji’s telltale zither is deployed to different ends. While on his more expansive albums, his open-tuned style conjures cumulus clouds and body-melting drifts, here he uses the instrument in much the same way that a folk singer does an acoustic guitar. It harks back to Laraaji’s earliest days in New York City, performing as a comedian and taking part in hootenannies in the Village and at venues like the Bitter End. On “Is This Clear?” his plainspoken style and open-tuned strumming brings to mind Richie Havens, while at other points, Laraaji’s singing isn’t all too far removed from that of Cat Stevens.
Whereas his instrumental works deliver bliss, songs like “I Can Only Bliss Out (F’Days)” make that quest overt, setting it to a slinky Casio drum machine. His chintzy keyboard riffs on “All of a Sudden” provide a steady pulse until the midway point of the song, where they begin to hiccup and blip like Mister Rogers’ trolley derailing. On Vision Songs, Laraaji isn’t as interested in songs or even singing so much as in delivering uplifting messages, which come across as new-age boilerplate (“We shall be released into pure light/And we shall be reborn again”), weird mindful details (“Brush your teeth like you got it right now”), and endearing if slightly awkward aphorisms (“Growth can change us and change can grow us/New can take us into the beyond”). There are brief glints of enlightenment to be heard here, but more often than not, Laraaji’s makeshift songs come across like daily affirmations as heard in a hotel lounge. | 2018-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Numero Group | January 16, 2018 | 6.7 | 1fbcd4f8-e9e5-490d-ab4b-7c0973ae545f | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Bland production and weak songwriting hamstring the personalized nature of Younger Now, making it merely a suggestion of the kind of artist Miley Cyrus could be. | Bland production and weak songwriting hamstring the personalized nature of Younger Now, making it merely a suggestion of the kind of artist Miley Cyrus could be. | Miley Cyrus: Younger Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miley-cyrus-younger-now/ | Younger Now | Miley Cyrus has long been seeking a musical identity. Just before the release of her popsplosion album Bangerz, she seemed destined to go back into the family business. Her string of 2012 covers—released as a series of videos called the Backyard Sessions—were deep-voiced and sultry. On “Lilac Wine,” she volleyed between Nina Simone’s sinuous vocal timbres and the romantic drama of Jeff Buckley, both of whom once performed the song. But it was her version of “Jolene” that made it clear she understood the nuances of her godmother Dolly Parton’s music—and her father Billy Ray’s music—and that perhaps these little studies would guide her future output of slick pop-country.
Then, in early 2013, Miley uploaded a video of herself dressed in a frog onesie doing her best twerking impression. It seemed innocuously silly, in line with having “no swag” as she told Sway in a 2010 interview—but it wasn’t. This kicked off a Miley’s lewd ‘n’ twisted era: the topless Terry Richardson photoshoots, the crotch-grinding of Robin Thicke at the VMAs, all leading to a psilocybin-tinged friendship with Flaming Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne. Together, the two concocted Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, a 23-track album of drug-fueled self-indulgence that fits in, somehow, cameos from both Big Sean and Ariel Pink. Dead Petz was basically a collegiate hippie fantasia played out on our Twitter feeds and TV screens.
And now, she’s over it! Her latest album, Younger Now, is supposed to be a vision into her post-neon maturity and a clear idea of who Miley Cyrus is, but as a statement of reinvention, it’s merely a suggestion of the kind of artist Miley Cyrus could be. Younger Now blends pop-rock and pablum country fare that is so restrained, so thinly produced, it seems like her lovably goofy personality was hobbled throughout the recording process. Even before she read the funeral rites for Ratchet Miley, Cyrus teased the kind of performer she was becoming. A recent cover of Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” showed a self-assured pop star reclaiming her Appalachian roots while still maintaining the post-Disney cool facilitated by Mike WiLL and Pharrell.
Instead, Miley delivered “Malibu,” her first single after giving up her bong and getting back with Liam Hemsworth and a preview of the lifelessness to come. Even though “Malibu” is supposed to be a paean of reconciliation, it is far too breezy and pappy to evoke any sense of passion (which she excels at). Even when collaborating with Dolly Parton on “Rainbowland,” the muddy production leaves Miley uninspired—it’s not until a voicemail from Parton teasing, “You probably wrote this about some boy you loved” at the end of the song that we get some clarity.
The album is not without bright spots. The quiet “I Would Die For You” gives Miley room to explore the depth of her voice and the song’s stripped-down percussion makes it one of the least soupy tracks here. She sounds strongest on “Miss You So Much,” where the power and mourning in her voice become the stars of the song. Though it was written about a close friend’s boyfriend who overdosed, Cyrus had been hanging out with her beloved grandmother the day she was recording: “It made me kind of think about her, the more I started singing it.” Miley’s connection to the transcendent spirit of love and grief is just the realest thing on an album full of limp deliveries.
Even though Younger Now has these few successful moments, it’s hard to reconcile—much less care—about this harmless Miley. The odd country-pop lope of “Bad Mood” and the thoughtless strings and horns that pepper the arrangements of the forgettable ballads that close the album do little to take away from her unapologetic abandonment of rap music and culture. “I can’t listen to [hyper-sexual lyrics] anymore. That’s what pushed me out of the hip-hop scene a little. It was too much ’Lamborghini, got my Rolex, got a girl on my cock’ — I am so not that,” she told Billboard in May. This was, naturally, met with a maelstrom of ire on Twitter and elsewhere for “[disrobing] her black culture cloak after profiting from it.” Aside from insulting people who viewed her music as a commodification of rap culture, it’s hard to take Miley’s “I am so not that” declaration seriously when her Bangerz Tour was a pervy “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” romp where she both simulated an orgy and straddled a hot dog as she rode it through the air. If she’s asked about her past performative sexuality, as she was by NPR, she will dubiously cite riot grrrl impresario Kathleen Hanna as a totem for it being feminist and acceptable.
Like so many of us at the age of 25, Miley’s imagination is galvanized by pop culture, but she is often missing its original context. She finds inspiration on the surface and cherry-picks what to use for herself without understanding the work’s original point of view, whether it is Hanna’s Bikini Kill days or twerking born of bounce music in New Orleans. The irony is that when she is working with material from other people’s toolboxes she sounds the most engaged and the most like herself. Her search for the next new sound that defines Miley Cyrus as someone who contains the filigrees of a pop star, the chops of a songwriter, and the agency of a woman who is in full control of her art should continue beyond Younger Now, because there is precious little to be found here. | 2017-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | September 29, 2017 | 4.7 | 1fbd5773-ae29-49d5-a1ad-c952e948abdc | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | |
Rundle has made her name performing mournful, minor key compositions, swelling with gothic drama, and her latest is her heaviest and most uplifting work yet. | Rundle has made her name performing mournful, minor key compositions, swelling with gothic drama, and her latest is her heaviest and most uplifting work yet. | Emma Ruth Rundle: Marked for Death | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22492-marked-for-death/ | Marked for Death | The music of Emma Ruth Rundle is nearly swallowed by darkness, but Rundle does not seem oppressed by it. Having toured with acts like Deafheaven and Earth, Rundle made her name performing mournful, minor key compositions, swelling with gothic drama. But to classify her music as macabre is to deny its cathartic, even uplifting qualities. On Marked for Death, the follow-up to 2014’s Some Heavy Ocean, Rundle upgrades that album’s gothic folk with a more colorful palette. Here, she strengthens the atmospheric guitar work that comprised her instrumental solo debut, Electric Guitar One, and enlivens her songs with anthemic, weightless choruses. And while her two previous solo releases, as well as her work in the noisy LA trio Marriages, set a precedent for Marked for Death’s more ambitious material, it doesn’t make the record feel any less thrilling. Each of its eight tracks showcase a songwriter testing the limits of her sound and redefining herself in the process.
As we have come to expect from Rundle, the lyrics throughout Marked for Death range from devastatingly beautiful to just plain devastating. The album follows a loose narrative about a doomed relationship, touching on themes of hopelessness and mortality. The opening title track introduces two fatalistic lovers, with Rundle asking a series of questions that progresses from “Who else is going to love someone like you that’s marked for death?” to simply, “Who else would ever stay?” In the following track, Rundle is wrestling with the sacrifices of commitment, detailing an inherent power struggle and loss of identity (“I am worthless in your arms/But you offer this protection no one else is giving me”). It’s unquestionably heavy material, and, in these two tracks, the music is built to carry the load. The guitars are crushing, approaching shoegaze levels of fuzz, while the rhythm remains slow and insistent.
After the lumbering introductory tracks, the tension breaks in “Medusa.” Rundle’s voice, clear and calm, soars like the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan in the song's inscrutable refrain. The album’s finest moments are crafted in this mold, settling on a style of slow-building, otherworldly balladry that invoke the early days of 4AD. In “Heaven,” Rundle’s greatest work yet, she sings over a quietly escalating storm of strings, fingerpicked guitars, and militant percussion. By the time the song climaxes with Rundle bellowing, “I can see fire... I can see in heaven,” you are right there with her. Gorgeous and unsettling,“Heaven” feels like the culmination of all of Rundle's best work, boasting the record’s most gratifying melody as well as its gothiest couplet. “The only church I’ll ever know is in the Earth,” she sings, “The ground below me says ‘Come home now.’”
Like Some Heavy Ocean, Marked for Death also closes with a sparse solo piece—just Rundle's voice, electric guitar, and the lo-fi hum of her amplifier. But while Ocean’s “Living With the Black Dog” was a dark admission of hopelessness, “Real Big Sky” feels like a transcendent turning point. Rundle calls back to the lingering question in the album’s opening track (“Who else would ever stay?”), but now finds her narrator faced with new revelations– no longer fearing death, but keeping a light on to welcome it. It’s a staggering performance, with Rundle’s voice alternately quivering and soaring. In the song’s music video, she introduces the track with a grand statement: “I don’t think there’s anything more exhilarating than seeing natural beauty… Seeing something that there aren’t words for.” Marked for Death finds Rundle grappling with elements beyond her control, but she's closer than ever to becoming her own force of nature. | 2016-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sargent House | October 13, 2016 | 7.4 | 1fca1103-44ca-428a-ae61-b053731fdedd | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
After making a splash in 2008 with a strong EP and brilliant full-length debut, Fleet Foxes return with a darker album that's equally assured. | After making a splash in 2008 with a strong EP and brilliant full-length debut, Fleet Foxes return with a darker album that's equally assured. | Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15363-helplessness-blues/ | Helplessness Blues | Fleet Foxes' unpretentious, crowd-pleasing directness was the key to their rapid rise. Their Sun Giant EP and self-titled debut LP, both released in 2008, brimmed with inviting melodies, evocative lyrics, and open-armed harmonizing that seemed designed to reach a wide variety of listeners. Their bright folk-rock sound wasn't exactly "cool," but that was sort of the point-- it's familiar in the most pleasing way, lacking conceit or affectation. Their expression of their love for music (and making music) was refreshing three years ago, and that sort of thing never gets old.
But clouds inevitably roll in. On the band's follow-up, Helplessness Blues, the mood is darker and more uncertain, adding shade to their gold-hued sound. The change in tone reflects the tumultuous road Fleet Foxes traveled during the album's creation. In late 2009, Fleet Foxes had an album's worth of songs ready, but the tracks were mostly scrapped before mixing. The arduous creative process took a toll on the group members, particularly singer/songwriter Robin Pecknold, who told Pitchfork at the time, "The last year has been a really trying creative process where I've not been knowing what to write or how to write."
The group's persistence paid off, though: Helplessness Blues is comparatively deeper, more intricate, and more complex, a triumphant follow-up to a blockbuster debut. Working again with producer Phil Ek, they've crafted a cavernous record that allows more room for them to breathe and stretch. The album's longer, episodic cuts contain disquieting shifts in tone. "The Plains/Bitter Dancer", for example, begins as a spindly, psychedelic folk tune reminiscent of some of the Zombies' more introspective moments, and then, after a brief pause, bursts suddenly into the type of gangland chorus Fleet Foxes have practically trademarked by now. Elsewhere, shorter songs seem to end mid-thought; the rollicking tumble of "Battery Kinzie" cuts off suddenly, while "Sim Sala Bim"'s heavy-strummed raga quickly unfurls like broken strings. This battle between tension and serenity is new to the band's repertoire, and it lends the album a compelling uneasiness that starkly contrasts the sunnier disposition of their first two releases.
The group harmonies that flowed from Fleet Foxes are in shorter supply here, employed largely to embellish tracks, allowing Pecknold to take a clearer lead role, both vocally and lyrically. He first emerged as an impressionistic songwriter, but he's since become stronger and more descriptive, conjuring vivid imagery of men striking matches on suitcase latches and penny-laden fountains. Mostly, he spends time working out his own personal puzzles, pondering the big questions of existence and meditating on the dissolution of his five-year relationship during one of Helplessness Blues' more difficult creative periods.
The record reflects his determination to deal with the present while leaving the past behind. At times, Pecknold's voice takes an aggressive tone, as on the eight-minute breakup saga "The Shrine/An Argument"; other times, it cracks slightly, exposing his pain on the bittersweet "Lorelai". But the warmth is there. On the album's most intimate track, "Someone You'd Admire", he contemplates the contradictory impulses to love and to destroy, accompanied by spare harmony and softly strummed guitar.
Pecknold confronts more universal concerns as well, starting with "Montezuma"'s memorable album-opening lines: "So now, I am older/ Than my mother and father/ When they had their daughter/ Now, what does that say about me?" He wrestles throughout the record with his own measurements of success, and whether any of it adds up to anything. He asks questions only to come up with more questions, and they all lead into a sort of resolution on the album's title track, "Helplessness Blues". Here, he retreats from the world into idyllic, pastoral imagery and wishes for a simpler life before trying to come to grips with his newfound renown. "Someday I'll be like the man on the screen," he promises at the end of the song.
Helplessness Blues' analytical and inquisitive nature never tips into self-indulgence. Amidst the chaos, the record showcases the band's expanded range and successful risk-taking, while retaining what so many people fell in love with about the group in the first place. And once again, a strong sense of empathy is at the heart of what makes Fleet Foxes special. Much has been made of American indie's recent obsession with nostalgic escapism, but Robin Pecknold doesn't retreat. He confronts uncertainty while feeling out his own place in the world, which is something a lot of us can relate to. | 2011-05-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-05-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | May 2, 2011 | 8.8 | 1fd0868a-ac7e-4605-aad9-e291dd06c6f2 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The second full-length from New York folk-pop trio Florist distills their sound to its essence. It finds beauty in simplicity and strength in fragility, full of songs that are quietly commanding. | The second full-length from New York folk-pop trio Florist distills their sound to its essence. It finds beauty in simplicity and strength in fragility, full of songs that are quietly commanding. | Florist: If Blue Could Be Happiness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/florist-if-blue-could-be-happiness/ | If Blue Could Be Happiness | In the overall arc of their short but productive career, Florist’s debut album, 2016’s The Birds Outside Sang, was a bit of a left turn. Written and recorded in the aftermath of a cycling accident that left songwriter Emily Sprague temporarily partially paralyzed, the record captures the discomfort of unfamiliar terrain navigated not by choice but by necessity. Unable to play guitar, Sprague wrote most of the album using keyboards, which form the foundation for the record’s claustrophobic first half. It’s an album of detachment and longing, one which evokes the feeling of being held prisoner in your own broken body.
For their second album, If Blue Could Be Happiness, Florist have returned to their comfort zone, the sort of hushed, bedroom folk pop Sprague has been steadily refining ever since she started recording songs as a teenager. But this time, everything feels animated by a newfound clarity and focus. The band—which includes Jonnie Baker and Rick Spataro—has stripped their sound to its essence: finger-picked guitar lines, yearning vocal melodies, the soft shuffle of brushed drums. They’ve done away with embellishments like tape hiss and sing-alongs, and now the production feels at once more crisp and intimate.
At the center of Florist’s spartan sound, Sprague is a lyricist who always sounds like a wise-beyond-her-years naturalist—a sort of upstate New York Phil Elverum in training. But here she claims that role with a previously unseen authority and purpose. When struggling to make sense of a parent’s death, she seeks solace in nature’s logic; when faced with everyday struggles, she finds comfort in the smallness of human affairs. There’s a timeless quality to these songs that makes them feel unmoored from the current moment, a reminder that this too will pass. But Sprague still has an empathetic embrace waiting for anyone who’s trying to cope during difficult times. “If you’re terrified of living, like me, I hope you’ll be fine,” she sings on ”Blue Mountain Road,” “Cause we’re terrified together, in this terrifying time.”
Like Elverum, Sprague has a tendency to cut the most direct path as a lyricist. But on these songs, she manages to withhold her poetic impulses almost completely, as if to ask, why wrap the world up in verse when there’s so much beauty to be found in seeing it as it is? This directness can be disarming, like on “Eyes in the Sun,” where she asks, point blank, “Do you wanna join the road of my life?” She then lays it all out in just a few lines, like her hopes and fears are two sides of the same coin: “It’s been a while but I’m not afraid/Of the things that make me feel something big/Like looking at your eyes in the sun/Like looking at your eyes in the dark.”
While many of these songs could be described as minimal, they’re also musically rich. Round chords ring and synths twinkle on “Glowing Brightly,” as Sprague thumbs through the faded snapshots in her head. On the title track, the band wraps up Sprague’s gentle voice in a warm cocoon of sound. “Blue Mountain Road” opens with distant noises that bring to mind the sound of a freight train while “Instrumental 3” feels like the music you might put on in the drawing room of a creaky old house in an attempt to lure out the ghosts. Nearly all of these songs are driven by guitar lines that are simple yet memorable, a perfect match for Sprague’s earnest, plainspoken profundity.
The concept of mindfulness has become something of a trend lately, peddled by meditation apps, self-help books, and yoga classes as an antidote to the ills of an over-connected life. But a state of mind isn’t something that can be bought, it’s something that has to be earned. Sprague seems to understand this; her hard-won superpower is an ability to communicate to us the beauty and value of things that we often overlook. On these songs, she often cuts through the mind’s noise to focus on what’s right in front of her: a beam of light, a lover’s eyes, the worn texture of a cherished memory. This focus seems to have only intensified following her accident and recovery. In this regard, she brings to mind the late Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, who, following his own brush with death, returned to his craft more present and attuned to the living things around him. Like Sparklehorse’s music, If Blue Could Be Happiness has the power to transform your outlook and change the trajectory of your day, if you will let it.
The album’s arresting closer, “Red Bird,” appears here in the original demo form that Sprague recorded and played for her mother on the day before she died. But even without knowing this fact, the song captures your attention. There’s something intangible and powerful at the core of it, a force you can’t quite put your finger on but which can move you to tears all the same. Sprague traces a delicate, lilting melody with her voice as strings quiver like leaves behind her, summoning a sense of longing that feels ancient and deep. Birds have always embodied nature’s wisdom in Florist’s songs and here they provide comfort, a stable force in the face of impermanence and loss. “I understand the birds now that I’ve learned some things,” Sprague sings in the song’s final moments. If we stop to really listen, maybe we can, too. | 2017-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Double Double Whammy | October 2, 2017 | 7.7 | 1fd44cdc-1c21-437a-aded-22c6cdc1c082 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
A harrowing and unrelenting record, Stage Four is a glowing testament the post-hardcore band's melodicism, honesty, and unconditional empathy. | A harrowing and unrelenting record, Stage Four is a glowing testament the post-hardcore band's melodicism, honesty, and unconditional empathy. | Touché Amoré: Stage Four | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22359-touche-amore-stage-four/ | Stage Four | Touché Amoré have been around for just under a decade, but they’ve already ascended from stalwarts of the Long Beach punk community, to flag-bearers of the American post-hardcore renaissance, to the heaviest band managed by Roc Nation. They’ve shared stages with heavy-hitters like Converge and AFI, and even played Jay Z’s Made in America festival last month alongside Rihanna, Coldplay, and Lil Wayne. Anyone who’s heard Touché’s racket—a leaden mix of serrated guitar leads, head-spinning tempos, and frontman Jeremy Bolm’s impassioned screams—knows that it’s not exactly poppy; but what the band lack in a universally-adored sound, they make up for twice-over with timeless themes.
Bolm’s hyper-confessional lyrics are a beacon of hope to anyone plagued by anxiety, depression, toxic relationships, and general self-doubt. Touché’s journey is Bolm’s journey, and the band’s output thus far has belied the stereotypical arc where the frontman battles then conquers his demons. Their first two albums, 2009’s *…To The Beat Of A Dead Horse *and 2011’s Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me, showed a man at war with himself, struggling to navigate relationships personal and artistic amid anxiety's unyielding fog. Two years later, on 2013’s ambitious Is Survived By, he appeared on the precipice of climbing out of that pit of doubt. “It’s not for nothing, but I’ve seen a transformation,” he reported on “Social Caterpillar,” “Like I consider my happiness for the first time in ages.”
And then it all fell apart. On Halloween 2014, in a cramped concert hall in Gainesville, Florida where Touché Amoré were performing as part of annual punk blowout The Fest, Bolm received word from his family back in California that his mother Sandy had died following a long battle with cancer. Understandably, the loss—and the fact that he couldn’t be by Sandy’s bedside when she passed away—tore him to shreds. When one of your parents dies, you never really recover; all you can do is sift through the memories and hold tight to the ones that make you smile. Or you can write an album about it, which brings us to Stage Four, Touché Amoré’s best album.
Grief gathers its strength from fine details: childhood memories, sun-faded postcards, the box of Cheez-Its that never got thrown away. It’s difficult to render those artifacts as universal truths, especially to those who have been lucky (or young) enough to have avoided the experience. *Stage Four *definitely doesn’t have that problem. Instead, its vivid imagery, anthemic arrangements, and unsuspecting listenability position it as hardcore’s Carrie & Lowell: an autobiographical tragedy that soars in spite of an overwhelming urge to succumb.
Whereas past albums have traditionally tasked guitarists Clayton Stevens and Nick Steinhart with all of the heavy lifting, wedding every syllable that falls forth from their leader’s mouth to a ragged note, *Stage Four *sees Bolm taking a stronger melodic initiative. Roughly one-third of the album’s tracks bear his abyssal murmur, a hoarse monotone landing somewhere between Kurt Cobain and Gregorian monk. His clean vocals on “Water Damage” and “Palm Dreams” are unlikely to earn him a spot on *The Voice, *but it’s to the band’s benefit: There’s still plenty of room for Stevens and Steinhart to churn out the heavy riffs.
The remaining space is filled up by Bolm's memories, expressed invariably with blunt, self-scrutinizing detail. On “Eight Seconds,” he recalls the exact moment he learned of his mother’s passing, conjuring the moment painfully and cumulatively, gasp by gasp: “A missed call with a message attached/‘We need to talk when you have a chance’/I stood frozen in that Gainesville venue/Not knowing how to react.’” By the next track (“Palm Dreams”), he’s back in California at his childhood home, sorting through his mother's belongings in solitude (“I dug through 40 years/All alone/On my own”) and lamenting his failure to address “the questions that went unasked/That appear when time has passed”–namely, how Sandy came to arrive in California at the first place. After an extensive guilt-trip, he vows to “find connections through extensions” (this album, perhaps?) and commends anyone on the listening end who’s experienced a similar hell: “It’s a rite of passage/It’s a torch to carry/When you feel that damage/And it’s extraordinary.”
Melodic shifts and thematic focus notwithstanding, *Stage Four *isn’t too far removed from the turbulent post-hardcore showcased on Is Survived By, a similarity largely owed to the production: muffled guitar roaring in the front, staccato cymbals clattering in the back, whirling feedback throughout. Both albums were produced by Brad Wood, famed sonic architect behind Liz Phair’s *Exile in Guyville *and Sunny Day Real Estate’s *Diary, *two similarly confessional classics. His mix for closer “Skyscraper,” a devastating duet with folk balladeer Julien Baker, which juxtaposes the duo’s whispered, steadily-strengthening pleas for closure with a phased, shoegaze-y backdrop. Intimacy meets infinity.
At last, they clamber back up from rock bottom to the literal top of the world. The album concludes atop a Manhattan skyscraper late one night, as Bolm gazes out at the bright urban sprawl 102 stories below. A few minutes before, on “Water Damage”, the man had declared that he’d yet to recover. But as he stands as close as he can to a heaven he wants so desperately to believe in, he realizes the sheer scope of it all—New York City, life, death, art—and finds comfort in it. “You live there, under the lights,” he observes, Baker’s angelic coos not far behind. “New York City/It’s all yours.” He's brought his mother back to life as both a saint of the infinite city and a crucible of hope for the rest of us. | 2016-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | September 16, 2016 | 8.1 | 1fdaa7a1-3756-4d15-976d-89864e9aeac2 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
(What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is Oasis' absolute pinnacle, and this expanded three-disc edition—which outfits the original album with 28 bonus tracks—shows just how much the band was on a roll in 1995. | (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is Oasis' absolute pinnacle, and this expanded three-disc edition—which outfits the original album with 28 bonus tracks—shows just how much the band was on a roll in 1995. | Oasis: (What's the Story) Morning Glory? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19771-oasis-whats-the-story-morning-glory/ | (What's the Story) Morning Glory? | It’s hard to remember now, but when (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? was released in the fall of 1995, Oasis were losers. Sure, their 1994 debut album Definitely Maybe had gone straight to No. 1 on the UK albums chart, and sold several million copies worldwide. But in their first true test of post-success fortitude, Oasis could no longer claim the title of biggest rock band in the land. “Roll With It,” the teaser from Morning Glory, was released August 14, 1995—not coincidentally, the very same day as “Country House”, the jaunty new single from their bitter rivals in Blur (aka the London art-school yin to Oasis’ Mancunian street-tough yang). A year’s worth of tabloid sniping between the two groups—which hit its peak/nadir when Oasis architect Noel Gallagher declared that Blur’s Damon Albarn and Alex James should “catch AIDS and die” —had effectively come down to the UK chart equivalent of an after-school fistfight. And in this case, it was Oasis who walked away licking their wounds—that week, “Country House” outsold “Roll With It” by more than 50,000 copies to take the No. 1 spot.
As it should’ve: “Roll With It” is nobody’s favorite Oasis song and would be hard-pressed to crack a Top 20 list of the band’s all-time best. It's a catchy enough tune, sure, but its shoulder-shrugged message of “you gotta roll with it” felt atypically blasé coming from a band that had previously endorsed self-deification, immortality, and shagging well-heeled medical professionals in helicopters. However, for a band never encumbered by humility, the decision to go with Morning Glory’s weakest song was, in retrospect, Oasis’ cockiest gesture yet: They were willing to take the first strike in the so-called Battle of Britpop because they knew it was only a matter time before they’d be delivering the knockout blow.
(What’s the Story) Morning Glory? would go on to sell more than twice as many copies in the UK as Blur’s contemporaneous The Great Escape, and, over the following two years, it served as the unofficial soundtrack to England's imminent changing of the guard. But, just as significantly, it achieved a metric of popularity that had proven so elusive to Oasis' Britpop peers: bonafide American success, with the album reaching number 4 on the Billboard charts and selling 3.5 million copies Stateside. (The Great Escape, meanwhile, languished in the lower reaches of the Top 200.) For all their unibrowed laddism and two-fingered paparazzi salutes, Oasis projected a glamorous image of Englishness that was potent enough to stoke the Cool Britannia fancies of those North American Anglophiles who make trips to specialty shoppes to load up on Dairy Milk bars, but (unlike Blur) not so colloquial as to alienate the heartland. It’s the stuff upon which Austin Powers franchises and Brit-themed pub-chains would later be built.
Fortuitously arriving at the mid-point of the '90s—and representing the peak of a Britpop narrative that took root with the retro-rock renaissance of the Stone Roses and the La’s five years previous—(What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is Oasis' absolute pinnacle. If Definitely Maybe presented Oasis' raw materials—’60s psychedelia, ’70s glam and punk, Madchester groove—Morning Glory melted down and remoulded them into a towering sound that was unmistakably their own, with those omnipresent (but never ostentatious) string-section sweeps classily dressing up the songs like ribbons on a trophy. And yet the real triumph of Morning Glory is measured not by the tracks that have since become karaoke classics, first-dance wedding standards, and go-to bathtub sing-alongs, but the exceptional album tracks that never got a shot at certain chart supremacy—like the jet-roar jangle of “Hey Now” (for my money, the best Oasis song never to be issued as a single) and the crestfallen “Cast No Shadow”, dedicated to a then-mostly-unknown Richard Ashcroft of the Verve, a band that would soon reap the benefits of Oasis’ American incursion.
Ironically, the Oasis-whetted appetite for all things English was arguably also crucial to the impending Stateside success of the Spice Girls, who would usher in a wave of preteen-targeted pop that would eventually push guitar-oriented rock acts down the charts by decade's end. And what’s most striking about listening to (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? today is how, at the height of their powers, Oasis seemed to be bracing for their own eventual downfall. The tone of the album is decidedly darker and more reflective than the working-class escapism of Definitely Maybe, be it the foreboding “it’s never gonna be the same” prophecy of opening salvo “Hello”, the title track’s white-lined dispatches from the after-party circuit, or the cigarette-lighter-illuminated comedown of “Champagne Supernova”, wherein Oasis already sound nostalgic for the idealism of their debut album. And while Noel still deals in absurdist metaphor here (how exactly does one slowly walk down the hall faster than a cannonball?), he also emerges as a more personable, sobering foil to brother Liam’s bratty swagger—not just on his showstopping star turn on “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, but also in the way his backing vocals imbue “Cast No Shadow” with a deeper sense of despair.
This expanded three-disc edition of Morning Glory?—which outfits the original album with 28 bonus tracks—shows just how much Noel was on a roll in ’95. Conventional wisdom suggests Oasis released two near-perfect rock ‘n’ roll albums before a grueling, prolonged process of diminishing returns set in. That’s not entirely true—the truth is, Oasis produced at least three albums worth of spectacular songs, it’s just the one of them was spread out over various B-sides. Fourteen of these were collected on the 1998 compilation The Masterplan (a.k.a. Oasis’ Hatful of Hollow), half of which is culled from the Morning Glory era and reappears here. And as any long-time fan can tell you, these castaways rank among some of the band’s finest moments: perennial encore standard “Acquiesce” is a perfect sonic manifestation of Liam and Noel’s notoriously embattled but co-dependent relationship, contrasting the former’s sneering verses with the latter’s heartfelt chorus; “Rockin’ Chair”, along with the Noel-sung ballads “Talk Tonight” and “The Masterplan”, evince a subtlety and sensitivity rarely heard on Oasis’ albums proper. And for those who prefer to savor Oasis’ easy-going melodicism minus the Wembley-toppling bombast, the cache of Noel-strummed acoustic demos included here offer lovely, low-key showcases of his songwriting savvy.
Such unwavering consistency was no doubt the cornerstone of Oasis’ early success, but, in hindsight, it also factored into their subsequent stagnation. As this box set makes abundantly clear, Noel Gallagher is a master craftsman, able to construct totemic tunes with even the most modest of means. But he’s never really been one for artistry. No matter how much he professed his desire to be as big as the Beatles, Oasis were never concerned with the Fabs’ creative process—i.e., how they pulled from contemporary influences ranging from Dylan to Motown to Stockhausen to create truly modernist pop music—so much as their cultural omnipotence. And for a while, Oasis convinced us you could achieve the latter without bothering too much with the former: just write a stadium-sized chorus and the rest will take care of itself. (The relationship between Oasis and their idols can ultimately be measured as such: In 1968, George Harrison released the most freewheeling musical experiment of his career, Wonderwall Music; 27 years later, Oasis would appropriate the title and apply it to their simplest, most universal anthem.) What's the Story (Morning Glory) thrust Oasis to the top of the mountain, but left them with heads full of snow and clouded vision (while a revitalized Blur would later emerge as the band more in tune with The Beatles' adventurous spirit). In the dying moments of “Champagne Supernova”, Liam lets the song’s central question—“Where were you while we were getting high?”—hang in the air, as if to suggest the good times are already gone. And as Oasis would eventually learn, getting even higher won't bring them back. | 2014-09-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-09-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Big Brother | September 29, 2014 | 8.9 | 1fdae395-4ea3-4ccd-8402-367aeedde1dc | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The composer Egisto Macchi was part of the same collective that included Ennio Morricone. He scored numerous films and documentaries in Europe: This collection gives shape to his legacy. | The composer Egisto Macchi was part of the same collective that included Ennio Morricone. He scored numerous films and documentaries in Europe: This collection gives shape to his legacy. | Egisto Macchi: Biologia Animale E Vegetale | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22076-biologia-animale-e-vegetale/ | Biologia Animale E Vegetale | When you imagine the music of a western film, you’re likely hearing the string arrangements of Ennio Morricone in your head. But you might not know that Morricone was part of an entire supergroup of Italian avant-garde composers called Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza (Il Gruppo), whose collective experimentation only found its way into the mainstream vis-a-vis their work in film and documentaries. Their work together spanned musique-concrete, serialism, and free jazz improvisation. One of the lesser-known members of the group, at least in the States, was Egisto Macchi, who like Morricone scored numerous films and documentaries in Europe. Biologia Animale E Vegetale collects the best of Macchi’s work for documentaries. Available for the first time since 1978, this collection of more than two hours of “library music” gives shape to a legacy that’s only being now rediscovered.
Biologia Animale E Vegetale is composed of 24 tracks, and thematically it’s supposed to explore the biological undertones of Macchi’s composition strategy. Macchi believed that that in the span of a composition something like a biome could be created, a small self-enclosed world that nurtured a symbiotic connection between composer and listener. The titles are all related to biology in one way or another, and the pieces themselves attempt to capture the essence of some biological subject (plankton, heart beats, frogs and toads). Macchi accomplishes this by attempting to mimic the movement of an animal in the pace of piece, or by creating a musical narrative about the process he is attempting to soundtrack. For example in “Cuore” (Heart) he starts with a pulsating drum beat that perfectly pantomimes the sound of an uncertain heartbeat. In “Stadi embrionali” (Embryonic stages), he attempts to mimic the sounds of growth and gestation. It starts off with the barest of minimal piano repetitions, and then as the actual organism of the song gets larger and larger, strings, horns and percussion crash into each other, leading the song down pockets and tangents.
He also touches upon early electronic music with two-part compositions like “Cellule Animali 1” and “2.” The main motif of a vibrating ambient echo is painted in with pattering percussions that sound like raindrops. He carries this same tone into a composition called “Microorganismi,” which is essentially an exercise in anxiety and restraint. The ambient echo reappears, and is only accompanied by a slithering percussive sound, like spiders were let loose on a set of microphones and drum kits.
There is more whimsical music available in Biologia, and strangely some of these compositions would fit well in a latter day Wes Anderson film. “Millepiedi” (Centipede), which is delicate and pastel hued, or “Cani e cuccioli 1-3” sound like they were composed on a toy piano. Other tracks, like “Nascita di un fiore,” are irrepressibly romantic, recalling walks in the park. But for the most part, a lot of these songs resemble each other, even with minor variations in progression and instrumentations. Even when the pieces grow slightly indistinguishable, there's something interesting at work, a suggestion that there is something unifying in the pace of all biological life, a certain sense of speed and tension in all things that walk or move or breath. | 2016-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Cinedelic | July 6, 2016 | 6.9 | 1fdea061-0318-45b1-8f01-273b712ce8f9 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Later this year, Relapse will issue LPs from Richmond, Va., doom acts Cough and Windhand. The two groups have released their best music to date on Reflection of the Negative, an immersive split EP that serves as an important notice for Richmond as a center for metal in the United States. | Later this year, Relapse will issue LPs from Richmond, Va., doom acts Cough and Windhand. The two groups have released their best music to date on Reflection of the Negative, an immersive split EP that serves as an important notice for Richmond as a center for metal in the United States. | Cough / Windhand: Reflection of the Negative | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17894-cough-windhand-reflection-of-the-negative/ | Reflection of the Negative | If ever there were an optimal time for Virginia doom acts Cough and Windhand to release their best music to date, this moment seems like the right one. During the last few years, both Richmond bands have fostered a buzz that’s escalated steadily enough to mirror the electric crawls of their music. Ritual Abuse, Cough’s second album and first for relative metal major Relapse, evidenced the group’s ability to punish over the long haul, or to keep 12-minute marches interesting with deliberate lulls and requisite quakes. A year ago, Windhand emerged with a self-titled five-song debut that managed to be simultaneously spooky and psychedelic, with tremors of backwoods horror reverberating within the band’s riff-and-rhythm lockstep. It also introduced Dorthia Cottrell, a singer who slipped a fetching dose of soul into the band’s tidal sway. “Heaven”, she beckoned through repetition at the close of the record’s best song, “is on its way.” You wanted to stick around to see just what that meant for Windhand.
Later this year, Relapse will issue new LPs from both bands, something they’re teasing with the new, three-track split album Reflection of the Negative. The contributions from both bands are, so far, inarguable career highlights, cuts so well imagined and executed that you’ll, once again, want to know what’s next for both. The move is a marketing coup for Relapse, of course, but Reflection of the Negative is also one of the most immersive metal sets to arrive so far this year. If this is only a prelude, the main event will be aptly named.
As Craig Hayes pointed out at Popmatters last year, splits between heavy metal bands are a matter of convenience not only because they allow acts to share costs and fans but also because they serve as de facto display cases for subtle subgenre variations. Heavy metal is a realm of both establishing and erasing rules, meaning that a niche is pure only until someone new can come along and rearrange its ideals. That’s especially true here, with two acts from the same town and typically pinned with the same genre tags-- sludge, doom, stoner, psychedelic-- going in wildly different directions.
As they did in 2010, Cough uses the split LP format to go the distance with one uninterrupted track. These 18 minutes are a showcase of pacing and structure. Cough rides the same theme for the distance, and they don’t suddenly sprint after distended stretches, an easy and pervasive technique in such situations; instead, the quintet methodically adds and removes elements like a creaking organ, spliced movie samples, and shrieking second guitar to maintain intrigue without seeming impatient. Vocalist Parker Chandler initially crawls inside of the amplifier wall, his shrieks made mostly unintelligible by the band’s creeping tumult. Near the halfway mark, though, the drums briefly disappear, leaving only the scrambled guitars and his now settled desperation: “The time has come for sacrifice,” he repeats. The ingenious setup keeps the track interesting by revealing the layers slowly and in an unexpected order. Nearly a decade into their career, Cough has never sounded so belligerent, frightening or immediate.
On its side, Windhand opt for two numbers, both of which find the band ratcheting its intensity and urgency. The shorter “Amaranth” deals in italicized aggression, turning everything from Cottrell’s arching vocals to the sprawling guitar solo that consumes the song’s back half into a point that must be made now. Though it’s slower than its counterpart, “Shepherd’s Crook” capitalizes on the same feeling. Every piece comes with a little extra energy, whether it’s the irascible noise-guitar introduction or the fortified punch that the drums pack in the otherwise torpid verses. On their debut, Windhand, especially Cottrell, sometimes seemed as if they were hanging around for an audience to arrive, dipping into a groove long enough to give a crowd the chance to show. But with Reflection of the Negative, they’re coming at the audience from all angles. They’re done waiting, and they’re much better for the shift.
Reflection of the Negative also serves as an important notice for the Virginia capital of Richmond. When people talk about metal in the South, they’re quick to trot out the humid burgs of Savannah and New Orleans or, in a much different way, the death metal crucible of Florida. But Richmond has a historic and lively past with loud music, whether talking Honor Role and Breadwinner, Pig Destroyer and Municipal Waste, or even GWAR and Avail. Between Inter Arma’s Sky Burial, a study in metal miscegenation, and Reflection of the Negative, the city’s already responsible for two of the year’s most compelling metal albums. Release dates for full-lengths from Windhand and Cough haven’t even been announced yet. The time is right. | 2013-04-15T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-04-15T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | April 15, 2013 | 7.9 | 1fef4fe3-d9be-401f-b92f-80e9e4c50ac4 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Originally released on the UK post-punk group Wire’s label in 1982, this long-lost one-off spotlights a singular busker who made magical music out of a stringed wooden door. | Originally released on the UK post-punk group Wire’s label in 1982, this long-lost one-off spotlights a singular busker who made magical music out of a stringed wooden door. | Michael O’Shea: Michael O’Shea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/michael-oshea-michael-oshea/ | Michael O’Shea | In Albert Camus’ 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, he wrote of modern life: “At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.” Bleak stuff—but the miracle of living in a bustling metropolis is that unexpected, life-changing encounters are possible, too. Take the example of Laraaji, just an unknown street musician busking in Washington Square Park in the late 1970s when Brian Eno dropped a business card in his zither case. Laraaji went on to become one of the luminaries of ambient and new age music.
Not long after, a similar encounter happened at Covent Garden in London’s West End, where the busker Michael O’Shea made the acquaintance of Wire’s Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis. Spellbound by his street-corner performance on a homemade stringed instrument, Gilbert and Lewis told him to drop by the studio anytime. Nearly two years later, O’Shea showed up unannounced; they recorded on the spot. Wire put out the results on their experimental label, Dome, in 1982. It would be O’Shea’s lone release and quickly became scarce. Thanks to Dublin label All City’s AllChival imprint, Michael O’ Shea’s singular music returns, its mystery wholly intact.
O’Shea, who came of age in London in the 1960s, got his start playing harmonica before traveling as a relief worker during the Bangladesh famine crisis of the early ’70s. While there, he contracted hepatitis and dysentery, teaching himself sitar during his convalescence. His nomadic lifestyle took him to Germany, France, and Turkey, where he brushed up against Algerian, Indian, and other strains of music. His travels also led him to sell off all of his instruments, but he came across an old door and set about festooning it with strings to craft a homemade instrument that variously evoked comparison to a dulcimer, zelochord, or sitar. O’Shea played its 17 strings with a pair of chopsticks and ran it all through a battery of effects. He called the thing “Mó Cará,” or “my friend” in Gaelic.
Odd as the man and the instrument might seem, O’Shea wound up with gigs at venerated London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s. He brushed shoulders and shared stages with Don Cherry, Alice Coltrane, Rick Wakeman, The The’s Matt Johnson, and Irish post-punk Stano, and even opened for Ravi Shankar at Royal Festival Hall. Outside of a few tracks on Stano’s debut album, little documentation of these encounters survives. (Wakeman apparently scrubbed his contributions from their recording altogether.)
Which leads us to this album, cut at Wire’s studios in a single session on July 7, 1981. The epic opener “No Journey’s End” puts us squarely in the no-man’s-land of O’Shea’s inner world. There’s little else like it. It feels at once orderly and amoebic, moving between chaotic density and calm. It brings to mind Laraaji’s music, but also hints at North African, Indian, and Irish folk idioms while not really seeming to resemble any of them. At best, they reflect how O’Shea might have encountered these styles in his travels, alighting on them before sallying forth into new realms. The piece gives the distinct impression of falling and rising way off the ground. Across its 15 minutes, the struck strings, gentle electronics, and intensifying patterns of the Mó Cará begin to mesmerize like a Spirograph.
The rest of the recording offers up more succinct glimpses into O’Shea’s world, with Gilbert and Lewis switching up the atmospherics surrounding the strings. Cavernous echo and reverb make “Voices” and “Anfa Dásachtach” seem like they are emanating from a submarine, bubbling up from deep underwater. “Kerry” is perhaps the pop iteration of the A-side, a two-and-a-half minute air. “Guitar No. 1” finds O’Shea switching to the titular instrument and conjuring a dark mood on its six strings. One gets the impression that no matter what tool was within O’Shea’s reach, he was liable to set up on any given street corner and strike passersby in the face with cosmic profundity. | 2019-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Allchival | February 2, 2019 | 8.4 | 1ff3fc01-a519-4b54-aa44-702287b5aa29 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Holger Czukay left Can in 1978 and began a solo career shortly afterward. His debut solo album, now reissued, reveals an impish, cut-and-paste jester behind Can’s impassive façade. | Holger Czukay left Can in 1978 and began a solo career shortly afterward. His debut solo album, now reissued, reveals an impish, cut-and-paste jester behind Can’s impassive façade. | Holger Czukay: Movie! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21966-movie/ | Movie! | ‘Humor’ is not the first thing that springs to mind when you think of the music of Can. Power, darkness, intensity, sure, but even though the German progressive rock band used a can of okra as the cover image of Ege Bamyasi and released the punning 1978 single entitled “Can-Can,” the group’s sense of humor was well-buried under their muscular music.
So when bassist/producer/tape splicer/ shortwave radio manipulator Holger Czukay stepped away from the band for good in 1978 and started releasing solo material the next year, Can fans must have been baffled by Czukay acting like Buttons the Clown. But as Grönland’s much-deserved reissue of his debut album (now titled Movie! and boasting new cover art) reveals, Czukay might have been a merry prankster all along. There’s little in Can’s decade-long discography like the leftfield disco slink of “Cool in the Pool,” the album’s lead-off track, wherein Czukay’s heavily-accented come-on “Let’s get coooool in the poooool” might make you pause on the diving board. One can’t help but imagine how the wonky, lightweight ditty must have infuriated krautrock fans, but thanks to the likes of DJ Harvey and Prins Thomas, it’s become a disco-not-disco favorite in the 21st century. And for all of its skanking guitar and slinking rhythm, it’s a bizarre song, each sliver of space shot through with strange audio snippets, outbursts of opera singers, radio broadcasts and helium-voiced squeals. It’s like what Spike Jones & his City Slickers might have done with a disco track (the reissue's lone extra is an instrumental take of “Pool,” though without the vocals, it loses some of its charm).
The thirteen-minute long “Oh Lord Give Us More Money” halves the difference between between “Pool” and mid-70s era Can, Czukay teaming up with his old bandmates Michael Karoli, Irmin Schmidt, and Jaki Liebezeit for a long, serpentine jam. Much like their prior work, the band seamlessly shifts from loose and exploratory to tightly-wound in a single measure. But Czukay replaces the vocal space that Mooney, Suzuki, or Karoli previously occupied with a bevy of more goofy sound samples, primarily from cartoons: splats, slide whistles, howls, scampering feet, explosions. It’s a speedball of Can’s musical dynamism circa Soon Over Babaluma and Czukay’s sonic impishness; it runs a bit long, but not before making you grateful you heard it.
“Persian Love” anticipates the sort of sampling work Brian Eno and David Byrne would explore two years later on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (though Can did “Ethnological Forgeries” themselves back in 1974). Czukay builds a track out of snippets from Farsi songs and soundtracks, pairing the ululations with nimble key phrases and spry guitar licks. And while it draws on Persian sounds, the playfulness of the music surrounding can also bring to mind King Sunny Ade’s highlife, suggesting a willful blurring of boundaries, between Germany, Iran, and Africa. And the epic closer “Hollywood Symphony” is as shambolic as anything Can ever did. Liebezeit’s drums shuffle along while Czukay adds lyrical ramblings, layers of bass and synth, shortwave and more sampled dialogue (presumably from old Hollywood movies) that Czukay then interacts with. As Liebezeit’s drums goes into double time, Czukay goes full mad-scientist, adding synth squiggles and a dizzying amount of voices to it all, before the piece draws to an elegant conclusion. The seriousness of Can and prog-rock in general gives way to Czukay’s whimsical way with cut ’n’ paste, and on Movie!, Czukay acts less like a student of Stockhausen and more like Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Mad Professor, making merry with reels of 2” tape in his hands. | 2016-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Gronland | June 13, 2016 | 8 | 1ff7a103-cced-478f-9b9c-077a8b2bf5f8 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
On their third album, the first with power producer Jack Endino, the Virginia doom band Windhand overcome the mistakes they made on their 2013 collection, Soma. Most importantly, the haunted, hypnotic voice of Dorthia Cottrell guides the action rather than being trapped inside the tumult. | On their third album, the first with power producer Jack Endino, the Virginia doom band Windhand overcome the mistakes they made on their 2013 collection, Soma. Most importantly, the haunted, hypnotic voice of Dorthia Cottrell guides the action rather than being trapped inside the tumult. | Windhand: Grief's Infernal Flower | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21054-griefs-infernal-flower/ | Grief's Infernal Flower | The draw of Windhand is neither mysterious nor complicated: Even on the Virginia doom squadron’s very early demos, the haunted, hypnotic voice of Dorthia Cottrell cut through thick guitars like a finger beckoning through the pale fog. "Black Candles", the first song of the band’s first release, transcended its lockstep Black Sabbath ancestry only when she arrived, shifting as she did from a soulful moan to a blues wail in one sublime instant. Even when the band became more elaborate for their 2011 full-length debut, both by adding samples and entering extended psychedelic tangents, Cottrell remained the focus of the action and attention. Each song felt like a setup for her arrival, as Windhand methodically followed another set of doom or stoner instructions. Maybe it’s the group’s tube-amp buzz, but something about the relationship has long suggested a colony of worker bees, preparing the hive for its rightful queen.
But this approach—and Cottrell, specifically—got lost on Soma, the disappointing 2013 album that once seemed as if it might signal Windhand’s move toward the masses. Nearly from start to finish, Cottrell fought against the sounds surrounding her. The band suddenly subsumed the leader, presenting itself less as a support squad and more as the new star. Bass overran Cottrell on "Orchard", and the riffs wouldn’t step out of her way for "Woodbine". During the record’s two-song, 45-minute closing sequence, the band swallowed her almost entirely. Sure, the riffs, rhythms, and solos were competent and sometimes even captivating, but if you’re an idiomatic doom band signed to one of metal’s biggest labels, you’d hope so, right? Windhand overrode their best asset.
Grief’s Infernal Flower, Windhand’s third album and first with power producer Jack Endino, reverts to the strength of Cottrell and the songs themselves. The shift is apparent as soon as the drums and guitars lock into a march at the start of opener "Two Urns". Cottrell’s presentation—cool, collected, sinister—sits just above the surface of the still-roaring band. This time, she guides the action rather than being trapped inside the self-aggrandizing tumult. During the first eight minutes of Grief’s Infernal Flower, Windhand land a very deep hook, something they rarely accomplished across Soma’s 70 minutes. They even creep toward the economy and impact of alternative rock with "Crypt Key", a five-minute bruiser whose instant chorus suggests the Breeders with a big, burdensome case of the blues and a Sleep-sized backline. Windhand’s performances are direct without being simple here. The band and Endino take care to fold the layers of sound beneath or around Cottrell, never above her.
This directness carries over to Cottrell’s two solo numbers, too, both of which are more concise and less cloaked than her lone acoustic turn from Soma. The wonderfully frail "Sparrow" ponders the space between eternal devotion and the disappointment that mortality inevitably brings. You can imagine it as an antediluvian tune Harry Smith might have collected or a number fit for Windhand’s vintage guitar vortex—a testament to Cottrell’s command of songs when she’s given space to sing them.
Despite Windhand’s emphasis on economy, the quintet hasn’t given up on its love of at-length indulgence and improvisation just yet. For the finale, they pair two 14-minute tracks, each ending with a slow, steady, psych rock march. There are extended solos in both, the tones bending and fluttering into surreal patterns. During "Kingfisher", Windhand hover in a half-acoustic, half-electric haze, suggesting folk rock lost on a narcotic trip. Still, even as the jam lurches ahead, the singer and the song seem in control, as Cottrell judiciously delivers her sermons at the start and in the middle. She then slips into the background, as if dispatching the band to do her bidding. Likewise, Cottrell drifts in and out of "Hesperus", appearing, disappearing, and reappearing only to counter electric miasmas with arching melismas. Even when she’s quiet, Cottrell is now in control.
Early this year, Cottrell released a self-titled set of solo recordings. With her voice multi-tracked and manipulated, she sang 11 rather simple folk-and-blues songs over her own acoustic accompaniment. The sound was lovely, yes, but the effort felt listless and inward, as if a tape recorder had just happened to catch these back-porch performances on the wind. The hesitation mirrored Soma. But making and issuing that album, released the same month Windhand cut Grief’s Infernal Flower, must have galvanized Cottrell’s role as a capable singer able to command an entire enterprise. She expresses no hesitation here, and for that, her band has never sounded better. Sure, you can come for the twin guitars and the loaded rhythm section, but at last, Cottrell has made it clear you’re staying for her. | 2015-10-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | October 14, 2015 | 7.8 | 1ffc9556-9793-4ee5-a93d-cb0e174886e2 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
On a double-set of albums, the New York rapper stakes a claim to life’s dualities, exploring the many layers of her personality with style and vulnerability. | On a double-set of albums, the New York rapper stakes a claim to life’s dualities, exploring the many layers of her personality with style and vulnerability. | Princess Nokia: Everything Is Beautiful / Everything Sucks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/princess-nokia-everything-is-beautiful-everything-sucks/ | Everything Is Beautiful / Everything Sucks | The comedian Hannah Berner recently posed a question on Twitter: “Does anyone else feel like they are a lazy perfectionist with ADHD and chronic fatigue who is pretty chill besides the occasional panic attack and loves their friends but hates people?” The answer, at least among the many people I know who shared the tweet, seems to be a resounding yes.
In a climate of absolutist cultural politics and rigid personal-brand guidelines, it can feel risky to embody harmless contradictions in public. Princess Nokia’s two new albums are presented as a response to this paradigm; on the jointly released Everything Sucks and Everything is Beautiful, the artist stakes her right to duality, no matter how seemingly oppositional. There may be something in the air: Moses Sumney has described his new album as an expression of multiplicity. Noname recently announced a mini-run of shows pointedly called the Hypocrite Tour.
If anyone would take the mantle of divergence as ethos, it’s Nokia, who has proudly and loudly collected a number of identities over the years. “I’m a weird kid. I’ve got so many personalities eatin’ me up inside. And I think that’s the basis of the music and my whole identity,” she said in a 2017 interview. The albums funnel some of those identities and their respective musical styles into two distinct modes. Press materials describe Everything Sucks as “a brash, ruthless and insistent collection,” and Everything is Beautiful as “a representation of the sensitive, feminine side of the gender fluid artist.” It’s almost a little too on the nose.
Everything Sucks was made primarily in the span of one intense week in New York, with friend and producer Chris Lare (aka owwwls), and that tight turnaround is evident. Its 10 songs are a locust swarm of angst, restless and frantic, as one can become in a city so densely populated. The first four tracks are zealous fight songs with lyrics like, “I’m the monster under your bed/I’m the goblin from the dead” and “Who dat, who dat, who dat?/The bitch is back/Who dat, who dat, who dat?/I will attack.” You can practically see a moshpit forming while a devil circles her left shoulder. There’s a preemptive, almost B.Rabbit-esque listing of her flaws: she’s crazy, she’s gross, she’s generally a mess, and what of it? The closer “Just a Kid” is an exception to the aggression, an awkwardly delivered but vulnerable story of the traumas of her early years, including a stretch in foster care.
Nokia finds more success on Everything is Beautiful, which, in comparison, is warm and expansive. Made over a span of two years, including some time in Puerto Rico, it has the optimism and groundedness of being in a place where you can occasionally look up and see a wide sky. The production, with beats primarily by Tony Seltzer and 1-900, are peppy and bright, and the themes spiritual and forward-looking, like an antidote to the hellishness explored on Everything Sucks. The jazzy sounds that have shown up in segments of New York’s reinvigorated independent rap scene offer a welcome complement—via the downtown crew Onyx Collective and Los Angeles saxophonistTerrace Martin—to Nokia’s experiments with effective but technically imperfect vocal styles. One song, the gentle and self-deprecating “Heart,” is ready-made for a sync on a future season of Insecure: “I hate social media, I wish it all would end/I’m not like those other girls, in fact I’m fucking worse,” she raps. This is Nokia at her best, a relatable, unpretentious narrator of her own growth.
For someone proud to have resisted the industry machine, both albums show that Nokia is adept at making music that fits neatly within its bounds. There are familiar flows and familiar sounds throughout: she out-Chances Chance the Rapper with a version of his signature sing-songy delivery, snarls in Cardi B’s clipped flow, and resuscitates the plonking piano that gave OG Maco a hit some years back. It’s easy to grow tired of her insistence that she’s a misfit, until you consider that scores of artists have built careers on similar narratives with far less self-awareness. And yet the album’s best moment comes in the form of a poem on an outro track: “I survived from trauma and I’m living out my purpose/And I’m sure you are too, we’re really not that different.” | 2020-02-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | null | February 29, 2020 | 7.1 | 2001047b-5599-4ac4-8b71-dc18bbf91d28 | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
While nodding to West Coast legends of the ’90s, G Perico steps into the spotlight on his debut, a searing and vivid album that details a world of his own. | While nodding to West Coast legends of the ’90s, G Perico steps into the spotlight on his debut, a searing and vivid album that details a world of his own. | G Perico: All Blue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23252-all-blue/ | All Blue | If you’re unfamiliar, G Perico can seem like a contradiction in terms. He channels pimp rap legends, then calls into KDAY to dedicate slow jams to his girl. He opened a business near the same blocks where he used to earn all his money tax-free, then survived an assassination attempt after he’d gone legit. When he was a child, his grandmother gave tarot card readings out of the house; the rapper, born Jeremy Nash at the tail end of the ’80s, thought he could see his own future, one that ended in an early death. And when he makes his case against Donald Trump, he does it on a song built for the strip club—City Hall is too far north, anyway.
But nothing about G Perico is a contradiction. His lived experience is that of someone who grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the ashes of crack and Reagan and the Riots. He wears his hair in a Jheri curl and could trade slicked-back shit-talk with anyone up to and including DJ Quik and Too $hort, and he always makes sure his lawyers are paid on time. On his debut album, All Blue, Perico funnels all of that and more into lean, shimmering songs that recall early ’90s G-funk but provide, well, a blueprint for the future.
Last fall, Perico put out Shit Don’t Stop, an engrossing mixtape that made him a minor sensation on both sides of the 10 freeway. All Blue is Shit Don’t Stop blown up to its widescreen endpoint: more joy, more peril, more money. There are sunny afternoons interrupted by drive-by shootings, liquor-soaked parties with third strikes looming overhead. On the opener, “Power,” he raps, “My homies live forever, we ain’t never gonna die,” but the understanding that this might not be true underscores almost every song on the record. And when All Blue ends, with “Alive Tonight,” it breaks up fatalistic verses with a hook that doubles as a somber thank-you for another 24 hours free from handcuffs or bullet wounds.
It’s hard to overstate how focused All Blue is. It clocks in barely longer than 35 minutes; of 13 tracks, only three surpass the three-minute mark. So rather than a first-person narrative, the LP plays as if G Perico is your friend you catch up with a few times a day, dispensing wisdom (don’t walk with the flow of traffic, in case killers try to pull up behind you) and summing up the grimmer part of his life in neat couplets (“I could’ve been lost my life, Crip/So fuck all that nice shit”). The songs are sleek and economical, from their tightly wound structures to remarkably straightforward storytelling (from “Can’t Play”: “My uncle smoked crack/I used to sell it to him/I used to drop it in his pipe and watch him go stupid/After every four zips, rubber banded cash/Grab some more and throw all the money in the stash”). The fat’s been cut away—all that’s left is bone, sinew, and curl activator.
All Blue is the record you make when you can’t sit still. When he raps, Perico is constantly in motion, whether he’s skipping out of police custody before he sees the county jail (“Wit Me Or Not”), flying back and forth to Vegas just to play craps (“How You Feel”), or fucking, digging through her purse, and leaving (“Get My Staccs”). Physical spaces figure prominently in his work, and Perico renders them in such vivid detail that when he brags “made hundreds of thousands on West 104th Street,” your mind’s eye can populate the block with every actor. Perico’s at a point in his life where he can bounce back and forth between South Central and palaces in the Hills; he just happens to have his sharpest thoughts while in transit.
Perico invites obvious comparisons to ’90s legends like Quik, but he’s not a revivalist. If anything, he seems to exist parallel to conversations about era and lineage in rap. In his writing, Perico’s world is populated by neighbors and enemies and smokers desperate to wash his cars—never other rappers. It’s refreshing, and it eases the weight of tradition and expectation, all while pulling liberally from the aesthetics of the early Clinton years. In that way, All Blue is a distinctly L.A. record, shaped by the city’s culture but not backward-gazing or needlessly reverent. And on “Bacc Forth”—the anti-Trump song Angelenos will hear all summer between midnight and last call—he boils his city’s ethos down into six words: “Looked at death and started dancing.” | 2017-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Priority | May 5, 2017 | 7.9 | 2008bb9f-8ffc-495f-a8ae-faaa64abce2a | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
Recorded in a rented house in the Hudson Valley, and weaving together found sounds with spontaneous music-making, the quartet’s self-titled album is as much an audio documentary as it is a folk album. | Recorded in a rented house in the Hudson Valley, and weaving together found sounds with spontaneous music-making, the quartet’s self-titled album is as much an audio documentary as it is a folk album. | Florist: Florist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/florist-florist/ | Florist | In 2019, discussing the correlation between the wordless ambient music she releases under her own name and the folk-influenced songs she writes for her band Florist, Emily Sprague confronted the limitations of being a lyricist. “I’m interested in words being more—like a sentence saying a hundred emotions, and being five words long,” the 28-year-old artist explained. With Florist, she has put this idea to the test. Her words are simple and pared down and always open for interpretation. Take, for example, the winding desert road of a title track to 2017’s If Blue Could Be Happiness, where she repeats those five words during a long, slow coda that encourages you to sort through your own associations with each one.
“But language just scratches the surface of what we experience,” she continued. “I feel like I need to be able to explore sound and communicate things without words, too.” For the most part, Sprague has explored these thoughts via modular synth on serene but adventurous records like Hill, Flower, Fog. At the time of the interview, she was also working on a new album with her Florist bandmates—guitarist Jonnie Baker, bassist Rick Spataro, and percussionist Felix Walworth—that presented new context for her ambitions. The self-titled 19-track release is as much an audio documentary as it is a folk album, with over half the tracklist consisting of found sounds, momentary improvisations, and combinations of the two, presented as duets with nature.
In order to listen to Florist front to back, you have to take a retreat similar to the one the band took to make it. Instead of their usual routine, entering the studio with a batch of songs that Sprague had prepared, the quartet temporarily moved in together and embarked on a more collaborative process. In a rented house in the Hudson Valley, they set up their equipment on a screened-in porch and let music-making become part of their daily practice—something that could weave between cooking and catching up, brewing coffee and watching the rain. To mirror the process, after each major song on the record, there’s a quiet comedown, equalizing the noises they made together and the ones that surrounded them.
Among the first things you notice is the dynamic of the band. Because Sprague is such a striking lyricist, and because her voice is so quiet and affirming—a kind of scribbled birdsong that follows the cadence of poetry recitations more than pop music—it has been easy to overlook how crucial each member is to the group’s minimalistic style. On Florist, they constantly draw your attention to their delicate interplay: In “43,” one of nine tracks featuring vocals, the band follows Sprague’s lyrics concerning the nature of home and family, all leading to an image of fireflies and a long instrumental outro led by a stormy, electric guitar solo: a rare moment on a Florist record where things sound in danger of spinning out of control, teasing a sense of chaos.
It’s a reminder that Florist has always been a collaborative effort, a sensitive group of musicians all equally in tune with the small wonders and moments of connection and disruption Sprague evokes in the lyrics. In these songs, you can hear how their increased intimacy allowed them to locate subtle new textures that conjure these feelings—say, the layered horns in “Spring in Hours,” or the slide guitar in “Feathers.” Listening to the instrumental tracks, like the fingerpicked “Duet for Guitar and Rain,” you gain insight into how they may have landed on these sounds—momentary bursts of inspiration, collected like seashells on a beach.
Of course, none of the instrumental tracks would be nearly as interesting if the more traditional songs weren’t among the strongest Sprague has written. After the stark evocation of grief on 2019’s Emily Alone—a sad and singular peak in her catalog, written and recorded in isolation after the death of her mother—these songs continue a narrative of loss and recovery, a tentative sunrise after a long, sleepless night. In the wake of those songs that explored Sprague’s relationship with her mother, “Red Bird Pt. 2 (Morning)” is a stunning, clear-eyed invocation of her father’s vantage: his memories of driving to the hospital on the night she was born, helping build the house where she grew up, and carrying the weight of grief alongside her in the present day.
Sprague has always been preternaturally equipped to deliver these autobiographical stories while maintaining a unifying, zoomed-out perspective, where each “you” and “I” slowly assume a cosmic form. This worldview forms an almost psychedelic throughline in her work, slowing down time—every drop of rain, each passing thought—so that she can better understand its full trajectory. The lyrics on Florist are filled with deaths and reincarnations: hearing her mother through the birdsong in “Red Bird Pt. 2 (Morning),” or the portrait of herself in “Dandelion” as a withering plant in the garden of her home. (After recording the music in Florist, Sprague moved to the Catskills, where she grew up—a type of homecoming that many of these songs search for.)
Because the interludes outnumber the actual songs, it is difficult to call this Florist’s most accessible album, but it is certainly their most physical. Had the tracklist been condensed, you might hear a great album by a deeply in-tune band recording in the woods. Instead, you get to explore each of those components: the band members convening, the songs falling into place, the woods themselves. It’s best experienced as a whole, but some tracks stand on their own. “Sci-Fi Silence” begins with a humming synth, then fades into a gentle folk song and slowly builds into an anthem, centered on a single phrase. “You’re not what I have but what I love,” Sprague and her bandmates sing together, over and over again. It’s the type of distinction she has spent her career exploring. On Florist, they fill the space between: a living document of what mattered most and what’s still flickering in the night. | 2022-07-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Double Double Whammy | July 28, 2022 | 8.5 | 200c1102-d037-4f1b-bb23-458348ba4cc1 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Electronic producer Scott Hansen builds a subtle album heavy on warm synths and serene beauty that at its best evokes the work of Boards of Canada and Bibio. | Electronic producer Scott Hansen builds a subtle album heavy on warm synths and serene beauty that at its best evokes the work of Boards of Canada and Bibio. | Tycho: Dive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16071-dive/ | Dive | Scott Hansen, aka Tycho, is a fairly well-known graphic artist, and you can hear his design skills at play in his music. Like a particularly crisp logo or font, his songs have a good sense of scale and proportion, and it's clear that a lot of work goes into them. Take a look at his artwork and you'll have a good idea of what his electronic compositions sound like, too. Nostalgic, 1970s-inspired imagery, a heavy sense of tranquility and faraway longing, all tied together with a pretty sleek modernity. Several of these elements have been sort of beaten into the ground in indie music over the past few years, but with Dive, Hansen manages to pull them together in a way that still feels compelling.
Tycho's tracks are built primarily with synths and sampled live instrumentation, and his electro-organic approach brings to mind leaders in this field like Boards of Canada and Bibio. Sonically, too, he explores terrain similar to those guys': "A Walk" and "Coastal Break" nail a pastoral peacefulness with warm, sepia-toned beats and flourishes of acoustic guitar. What separates Tycho, at least from a lot of the bedroom-oriented artists currently exploring similar sounds, is simple craft. These tracks are OCD-level meticulous. Hear it in the percussion: In place of the tinny, synthetic beats favored by lots of indie-ambient startups, Hansen takes extra care to capture real live drum sounds with a crack and thump that makes you feel like you're in the room with them.
His attention to detail goes beyond highlighting individual instruments. It's there in the way Hansen simply builds a song, merging all the synth wooshes and percussive ripples to find a natural arc. "Daydream", for example, starts out fairly simple with twinkly guitars and a sturdy, knocking beat, but the song's pulse quickens as it progresses, and by the end you've got something heady enough to live up to its title. Because Hansen clearly wants this to be a deep headphone experience, those subtle shifts go a long way in holding your interest. And in terms of the imagery he builds-- fields, pastures, calming oceanic scenes-- it's all there, and it's pretty easy to set your brain on "relax" and conjure up those natural landscapes.
If that nicely detailed tranquility is Dive's biggest selling point, it also exposes a nagging flaw, which is a lack of tension. Hansen is so committed to keeping things serene that he doesn't incorporate much danger or risk, and at times the album can feel a bit one-note. An out-of-nowhere tonal change or an occasional tinge of darkness would give the record more balance, make it more interesting. That missing element of surprise keeps Tycho from reaching the same heights as BoC or Bibio (the former more otherworldly, the latter more adventurously poppy), but ultimately Hansen succeeds at what he sets out to do. Dive might not be the most ambitious instrumental record you hear all year, but it almost always sounds good. | 2011-11-28T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-11-28T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | November 28, 2011 | 7 | 200e316a-0d04-4230-9c06-5a7f32ef0e9d | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
The Fleet Foxes tourmate and old-time music practitioner follows an album of traditional tunes with a collection of his own songs. | The Fleet Foxes tourmate and old-time music practitioner follows an album of traditional tunes with a collection of his own songs. | Frank Fairfield: Out on the Open West | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15504-out-on-the-open-west/ | Out on the Open West | Frank Fairfield's backstory is the stuff of old American legend: A troubled vagabond who eventually made his way home to Los Angeles, Fairfield rooted through the city as a street musician, pulling bow across fiddle and hammering away at a banjo or acoustic guitar on corners or in flea markets. One afternoon, the right musician saw him play, became his manager, hitched him to a tour with champions Fleet Foxes, and landed him a record deal with one of the country's most trustworthy syndicates of old sounds, Tompkins Square. Now, he's the subject of a documentary and a touring musician with audiences in multiple continents. In a time where musicians and their managers attend workshops on going viral, and when the companies that own the music plan album leaks in advance, Fairfield simply played because he somehow had to talk about his feelings. Everything else just found him.
Fairfield's debut collected his interpretations and arrangements of 11 traditional tunes; Out on the Open West, the follow-up to his 2009 entrée, features three arrangements of traditional tunes, and they're all instrumentals-- the halting "Haste to the Wedding/The Darling True Love", the ebullient "Turkey in the Straw/Arkansas Traveler", and the foot-stomping "Texas Farewell". But the best songs here are Fairfield's own, and they're tremendous achievements from a guy who once said he wasn't a songwriter: "But That's Alright" is a sad, spirited bit of self-medication, the title phrase muttered in the chorus with the same kind of bitter resolve that tides people through strings of bad news.
On "Kings County Breakdown", he bows with a get-out-of-town abandon, like he's racing away from a hard week's work for his favorite vacation spot, or more likely, his baby. "Ruthie" is a tender, torturous goodbye. Fairfield is a strong player, but here, he smartly fumbles along the banjo's neck, the lament's lyrical depression mirrored by the broken technique. "Who will set her coffin? Lord, who will lay her down? Who will lay sweet Ruthie in that cold rocky ground?" he sings before answering that he will. The despair is overwhelming. Out on the Open West, then, not only cements Fairfield as a remarkable performer but also suggests that he's an evocative writer with his own stories to share.
It also puts Fairfield squarely in the folk tradition of collaboration. His self-titled debut was mostly Fairfield. On "Kings County Breakdown", though, he's sawing his fiddle alongside mentor and guitarist Tom Marion. That's young colleague Jerron "Blind Boy" Paxton singing perfectly content harmonies on "But That's Alright" and Old Crow Medicine Show's Willie Watson doing the cheery picking on the title track. But the most remarkable moment in Fairfield's slender catalog is "Poor Old Lance", a stunning bit of sadness that puts him squarely in the league of his heroes. Assisted by a trio of fiddle players, Fairfield sings with the sort of human moan that you can hear in Doc Watson's blues or any number of Harry Smith or Alan Lomax's field recordings. These troubles have never seemed more like Fairfield's own.
Fairfield is worthy of your consideration, even if you've never heard or considered the old-time music. He plays with a rare integrity, offering up his life in a way that does exactly what folk music must do-- it relates the world as the singer sees it, mixing sadness with sweetness, excitement with low-down and miserable depression. This has nothing to do with genre; hip-hop, jazz and rock all feel this way, too. Like the best of it all, Fairfield's music seems inexorably real and entirely necessary. | 2011-06-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-06-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Tompkins Square | June 6, 2011 | 8 | 2011e4c5-ea29-46f4-bfc9-6b8d044d5146 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The Flaming Lips' unrelenting new album retains Embryonic's weighty mood but deconstructs the instrumental bombast into skeletal, mechanical forms. Where its 2009 antecedent played on themes of environmental destruction, The Terror deals in personal turmoil-- loneliness, depression, and anxiety. | The Flaming Lips' unrelenting new album retains Embryonic's weighty mood but deconstructs the instrumental bombast into skeletal, mechanical forms. Where its 2009 antecedent played on themes of environmental destruction, The Terror deals in personal turmoil-- loneliness, depression, and anxiety. | The Flaming Lips: The Terror | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17804-the-flaming-lips-the-terror/ | The Terror | When Wayne Coyne opened The Flaming Lips’ 2004 Coachella set by crowd-surfing in a giant inflatible bubble, it represented more than just another gimmick to add to the band’s ever-increasing arsenal of theatrical parlour tricks. It effectively split the Flaming Lips into two bands. On the one hand, you have the merry pranksters that have remained a constant in music-new feeds for the past decade, whether they’re doing rails with Ke$ha, beefing with Erykah Badu, or taking the concept of a physical album release to literal extremes. And then the other, you have a band that, over the past few years, has entered the most fiercely experimental, stridently anti-pop phase of its long and storied career. It’s just that the former aspect inevitably overshadows the latter-- even on the tours for 2009’s dark, disorienting Embryonic, volcanic salvos like “Worm Mountain” and “See the Leaves” simply got subsumed into the Lips’ usual onstage circus and became the backing soundtrack to more bunny-costume dances.
But with The Terror, the Lips take the bold step of bursting their own bubble. The band’s unrelentlingly bleak new album relates to its predecessor much as Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots did to The Soft Bulletin, retaining its antecedent’s weighty mood but deconstructing the instrumental bombast into more skeletal, mechanical forms. For all its claustrophobic tension, Embryonic still offered much in the way of thunderous rock catharsis; The Terror presents no such salve, drowning its meditative, melancholic melodies in a suffocating, smoggy haze of buzzing synth frequencies, with little rhythmic release. The first song may be called “Look… The Sun is Rising”, but it’s less cheery proclamation than grave warning, its stuttering drum beat and dentist-drill shocks conjuring ominous images of a not-too-distant future where the mere act of going outside will require the use of a gas mask and protective suit.
Tellingly, The Terror has resulted in a complete rethink of the Lips’ stage spectacle, one designed to disorient rather than delight. Last month at South by Southwest, the band previewed the album in its entirety at Austin’s Auditorium Shores with a set-up that deemphasized Coyne’s usual carnival-barker cheerleading in favour of an all-out video-screen sensory assault (and random acts of hair-pulling), the singer held in place by a custom-made synthesizer molded into a baby doll sprouting massive tentacles that extended to the stage’s backdrop. Naturally, a set of unfamiliar, unremittingly gloomy material didn’t make for ideal Friday-night entertainment for many of the 30,000 in attendance, but Coyne’s static position onstage is a fitting visual metaphor for his performance on the record.
Where Embryonic played on themes of environmental destruction, The Terror deals in more personal turmoil-- loneliness, depression, anxiety. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the album was preceded by news of Coyne’s separation from his partner of 25 years, Michelle, and of multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd relapsing temporarily.) Accordingly, Coyne spends the record singing like someone who’s strapped to a hospital bed, often resorting to a cautious sing-speak or fragile falsetto as if too beaten down to muster up the strength for anything more. (Or maybe it’s a vocal-eroding side effect of being the most chatty, gregarious frontman in rock.) Even when unleashing an invective like “You’ve got a lot of nerve/ A lot of nerve to fuck with me,” his voice remains eerily emotionless, relying on duet partner du jour Sarah Barthel of Phantogram to give the line extra bite.
In light of Coyne’s more muted presence here, the real drama on The Terror stems from the way in which the Lips layer their tones and drones into heady, hypnotic surges. The Terror may be the Flaming Lips' most demanding album to date, but it’s also the most sonically of a piece, immediately thrusting you into its dense miasma and seamlessly dissolving one track into one another; in the transition from the despairing “You Are Alone” into the spectacular percussive procession “Butterfly, How Long It Takes to Die”, you hear the same quiet-to-clamor fluidity that Liars mastered on Drum’s Not Dead. And from the desolate post-apocalyptic atmosphere, some powerfully affecting moments emerge, like “Try to Explain”, a beautifully bruised break-up ballad that romanticizes the past while defeatedly acknowledging that things will never be the same.
But if The Terror presents a distillation and refinement of ideas initially explored on their post-Embryonic interim releases-- like last year’s Heady Fwends collaborations and their infamous hours-long jams-- it still feels underdeveloped in spots. At 13 minutes, centerpiece track “You Lust” is the longest song to appear on a proper Lips record since the 1980s, and a companion piece to Embryonic’s “Powerless”, using a coolly repetitive organ refrain as the foundation for an agitated, free-form synth freakout. But its imposing grandeur is diffused by an intrusive, creepily whispered chorus incantation and a drifting, protracted denouement that lingers for far too long. And in the wake of the absorbing, slow-roiling intensity of the penultimate “Turning Violent”, the closing “Always There... In Our Heart” (a bookend echo of “Look… The Sun Is Rising”) doesn’t quite deliver the blown-out grand finale its repeated 1-2-3-4 build-ups suggest, instead simmering down before reaching full blast. (Seemingly aware of this anti-climax, the band tack on the incongruently cheery Hyundai-ad jingle “Sun Blows Up Today” and an Edward Sharpe-assisted cover of "All You Need Is Love" as bonus tracks, a move that feels not unlike appending a gag outtakes reel to a film’s closing credits.) But even if it doesn’t consistently exhilarate to the same extent as the band’s most totemic works, The Terror is nonetheless a significant work in their voluminous canon: By matching their ever-evolving, exploratory musical ethos with less eager-to-please, more confrontational modes of performance, the album marks the moment when the Flaming Lips become whole again. | 2013-04-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-04-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bella Union / Warner Bros. | April 4, 2013 | 7.8 | 2012fb45-5515-4d2e-968f-391cfbced9cc | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Classic-rock magpies, brothers Michael and Brian D’Addario construct a fabulously campy pastiche from the spangled castoffs of the 1970s. | Classic-rock magpies, brothers Michael and Brian D’Addario construct a fabulously campy pastiche from the spangled castoffs of the 1970s. | The Lemon Twigs: Songs for the General Public | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-lemon-twigs-songs-for-the-general-public/ | Songs for the General Public | The Lemon Twigs, the project of brothers Michael and Brian D’Addario, are a classic-rock vampire act. Cloaked in the sequins and skin-tight leather of the axe-wielding ’70s, their latest album plays like a bit: Think of them as the Zoomer version of the Darkness in the way they gleefully joust with rock’s macho past. An over-the-top and occasionally frustrating listen, Songs for the General Public is a gaudy, tongue-in-cheek patchwork.
The D’Addario brothers are meticulous songwriters who channel inspiration from Ziggy Stardust and Marc Bolan; fussy, baroque and extremely complicated, their music glows beneath black lights and is drenched in sexuality. On their third album, the arrangements have become more refined and almost neurotically precise. Where their last record was a concept album about a monkey raised by humans, the new one is more thematically free-associative, populated by tough guys, nutty poets, and the occasional leather fiend. On the tightly conceived “Hell on Wheels,” black Cadillac Eldorados blaze through the streets as competing strings and jangly piano keys balloon to Michelin Man proportions. The D’Addario brothers sound like they’re running through a revolving door, breathlessly switching between Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger impersonations as they take each lap.
On Songs for the General Public, songs constantly go in unexpected, devilish directions. Take “Moon,” which starts with a harmonica solo and somehow transitions into full Elton John balladry by the song’s midpoint. The D’Addarios compare the moon to a giant toenail in the sky and rhyme “We resent people with lives” with “We resent tall guys.” The song is stuffed with ideas, almost to a fault. While such excess can be exhilarating, it’s sometimes hard to parse exactly who the Lemon Twigs are and what they really want to say. They slingshot their way through so many different influences, it can feel like they aren’t fully grounded.
What is crucial is that they do everything with levity. Just take a song like the operatic “Fight,” which infuses anthemic elements of Bruce Springsteen and Queen into a tight three-minute sprint while also making time to lament the woes of a middle aged man who wants to feel “beautiful again,” and really isn’t in a great spot with his old lady. Or perhaps “Ashamed,” an oddly touching ballad about a “brother and sister who make it with each other,” speckled with acoustic guitars and delicate strings that evoke the warmth of the Velvet Underground.
More often than not, listening to Songs for the General Public feels like watching the D’Addario brothers throw old ’45s at a brick wall to see what sticks, snickering all the while. They want you to have a good time, and they sound tighter than ever; they just need to figure out how to control the Frankenstein that they’ve made.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | August 20, 2020 | 6.9 | 20186aa0-3be2-4811-a12d-691ddd9f2c10 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
null | Wire were born at the dawn of punk, but they became the quintessential art band. In the three closing years of the 1970s, the English quartet had one of the greatest opening runs of any band, shifting to post-punk before punk began to go stale and forging three masterpieces in a creative furnace so hot it burned out by the end of 1980. Those albums-- *Pink Flag*, *Chairs Missing*, and *154*\-- still sound remarkably fresh, and have been re-mastered and reissued with their original vinyl tracklistings, both individually and as part of a five-disc set, *1977>1979*, that also includes live | Wire: Pink Flag / Chairs Missing / 154 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11866-pink-flag-chairs-missing-154/ | Pink Flag / Chairs Missing / 154 | Wire were born at the dawn of punk, but they became the quintessential art band. In the three closing years of the 1970s, the English quartet had one of the greatest opening runs of any band, shifting to post-punk before punk began to go stale and forging three masterpieces in a creative furnace so hot it burned out by the end of 1980. Those albums-- Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, and 154-- still sound remarkably fresh, and have been re-mastered and reissued with their original vinyl tracklistings, both individually and as part of a five-disc set, 1977>1979, that also includes live performances recorded in London (in 1977) and New York (1978).
Pink Flag was a fractured snapshot of punk alternately collapsing in on itself and exploding into song-fragment shrapnel. The record's minimalist approach means the band spends only as much time as needed on each song-- five of them are over in less than a minute, while a further nine don't make it past two. It's clear you're not getting a typical 1977 punk record from the opening seconds of "Reuters", an echoing bass line that quickly comes under attack by ringing but dissonant guitar chords. The tempo is arrested, lurching along to the climactic finale when Colin Newman, as the narrating correspondent, shouts "Looting! Burning!" and then holds out the lone syllable of "rape" twice over descending chords, which grind to a halt over chanting voices. It's all the bombast, tension, and release of a side-long prog opus in just three minutes.
As if to underscore that this isn't a predictable album, the next song, "Field Day For the Sundays", rages to a close in just 28 seconds. The band acknowledges the thin line between advertising jingles and pop songs on the 49-second instrumental "The Commercial", but also write a few genuinely hummable songs, like "Three Girl Rhumba", whose guitar part is actually more of a tango, and the more identifiably punk "Ex-Lion Tamer". "Strange," meanwhile, makes the mistake of sticking around, only to be eaten by spacey amp noise and quivering ambience-- a taste of things to come.
Wire immediately left the crunch of Pink Flag behind on Chairs Missing, 1978's great leap into even artier weirdness and Brian Eno-inspired ambient experiments. Producer Mike Thorne's synthesizers took a more key role, propelling songs into haunting soundscapes and downpours of noise. The funny thing is that, though a fairly major departure for the band, the album cloaks its curveball up front, beginning as Pink Flag did: With bassist Graham Lewis's nakedly produced pulse being attacked by guitars. "Practise Makes Perfect" seems almost cheekily named for the way it builds directly on the constant crescendo structure of "Reuters", except this time Newman's ragged vocal is met with interjections of derisive laughter and the final comedown leads into a bed of gently viscous synth.
That denouement foreshadows one of the album's most arresting tracks, the starkly minimal bass-and-electronics sculpture "Heartbeat", an openly beautiful piece of experimentation that morphs into a pop song without a chorus. The album as a whole is less purposefully fragmented than its predecessor, the songs more conventionally structured even as they veer in unexpected directions. The stunning centerpiece is "Mercy", which provides the basic blueprint for an absolute ton of tension/release post-rock. Over nearly six minutes, it storms through thunderous verses with Robert Gotobed's drums shuddering away underneath. Each new section leads to a nastier climax, culminating in a blazing guitar-and-drum conflagration.
On 1979's 154, named for the number of shows Wire had played to that point, the band moved further into the abstract. "On Returning", "The 15th", and "Two People in a Room" are concise, punchy songs that place the vocals up front, sometimes with two-part harmonies. The last of these is one of Wire's great, frenzied moments, with Newman's tortured vocals shouting down Bruce Gilbert's intravenous guitar riffs with crazed shouts of "My God, they're so gifted!" 154's centerpiece, "A Touching Display", out-apocalypses "Mercy"; it's a hellish soundscape that features Lewis' heavily distorted and processed bass fretting out a harrowing anti-melody. Despite the incredible highs, though, 154 is also the least consistent of Wire's first three albums, and a few of its experiments don't bear full fruit.
One of Wire's overlooked strengths was their ability to write a tremendous pop song, as exemplified by songs like "Mannequin", "Outdoor Miner", and "Map Ref. 41 Degrees N 93 Degrees W" (an open field in Iowa, by the way). Listen to the harmonized "ooh ooh"s on "Mannequin", the softly sung verses of "Outdoor Miner" (which was only prevented from chart success by a payola scandal), and the transcendently huge chorus of "Map Ref." indicate this was a band that could have made an entire career out of harmony-laden power pop.
As it stands, they didn't, and Wire famously quit a year after 154, claiming to have run out of ideas. Their subsequent reunions have put the lie to that notion, but you have to admire Wire's insistence on laying off when the inspiration doesn't feel right, even as the band's initial run remains an unassailable testament to its unquenchable creativity. | 2006-05-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-05-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | May 5, 2006 | 10 | 2020f1e2-63c4-491b-a198-7ec7556727d9 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Tyler, the Creator’s sixth album is impressionistic and emotionally charged, the result of an auteur refining his style and baring more of his soul than ever before. | Tyler, the Creator’s sixth album is impressionistic and emotionally charged, the result of an auteur refining his style and baring more of his soul than ever before. | Tyler, the Creator: Igor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tyler-the-creator-igor/ | Igor | The moods of Tyler, the Creator’s albums have largely been defined by absence—of his father, of critical acclaim, of love. He responded to what was missing with antagonism, album after album, until 2017 when he looked back at his life with a sunny lens and twinge of nostalgia to deliver his best work, Flower Boy. That Grammy-nominated album is eminently pleasing, the sound of an iconoclast succumbing to his better judgment. Igor, the 28-year-old’s sixth full-length, is Tyler finally content in the face of all that agony.
Igor sounds like the work of a perfectionist giving shape to his more radical ideas. Tyler, who proudly produced, wrote, and arranged the album, is singing more but he’s not worrying whether his tracks have a traditional pop arc. Songs don’t build to a crescendo, they often begin there. The opening “Igor’s Theme” serves less as a guiding force and more like a recurring motif of doom that hides in the shadows and pops its head in at select moments, like on “New Magic Wand” where spooky synths erupt below Tyler’s thought process: “I saw a photo, you looked joyous,” goes one of the more poignant lines. Atop this budding dread, Tyler layers candied keys and harmonizing vocals. The brightness is defiant, as Tyler processes the loss of someone he loves.
The first we hear of Tyler’s vanishing relationship is on “Earfquake”: “Don’t leave, it’s my fault.” First pitched-up and later untreated, Tyler’s voice is pleading but not cloying. He doesn’t sound like he’s lying to quickly repair deep damage, as his words may suggest, he’s just being sincere. Igor becomes a gracious and giving breakup album whose narrative is fleshed out more clearly later in the record: Tyler seems to have fallen for a man (“You’re my favorite garçon,” he sings at one point) who wants to return to his female partner. “I hope you know she can’t compete with me,” he first sings on “Gone, Gone / Thank You,” before shifting his tone: “Thank you for the love/Thank you for the joy.”
As the album progresses, Tyler goes through his undulations of denial and acceptance, but spends considerable energy hoping to help his beloved find satisfaction, even if that means a future without him. “Take your mask off,” he advises on “Running Out of Time,” “Stop lyin’ to yourself, I know the real you.” It’s an empathetic turn from an artist previously allergic to other people’s perspectives. The parting ultimately leads to self-discovery: “You never lived in your truth,” he tells his ex. “But I finally found peace, so peace.”
There’s a run at Igor’s center where each song’s momentum seems to propel him forward emotionally. It’s during this stretch that Tyler is at his most creatively fluid, as on “A Boy Is a Gun,” where he flattens his voice to sing “gun,” sounding like a laser cutting across the track and maybe also through his own psyche. Combined with the Kanye West–assisted “Puppet,” these tracks in their varied tone and tempo reflect the volatility of Tyler’s emotions across Igor. Most songs don’t even have a natural ending, they just snap off, like someone pulled the aux cord abruptly.
Igor may be unsettled but it never feels restless. As Tyler grapples with uncertainty and unfulfillment, he delivers an album that feels like it is suspended in midair. It reminds me of Solange’s When I Get Home or King Krule’s The Ooz, albums that succeed in communicating mood as their own sense of logic. Tyler’s interpretation of this sort of stream-of-consciousness feels weightless. The whole album is sustained by mutating, colorful chords, impressionistic cracks in tonality. On top of that, Tyler’s synthetic falsetto singing adds a surreal element to Igor. The lines between desire and reality and internal monologue and human conversation all become blurred.
Tyler, the Creator never shied away from sharing what he thought his life was missing. “I ain’t got no fucking money,” he yelled simply enough on the inimitable “Radicals,” an early Odd Future anthem. And when he got what he thought he wanted, he flaunted it: “Also stuck with a beautiful home with a case of stairs,” he taunted his father on “Answer.” Igor is the first time Tyler has not been motivated by some absence because he lost a bit of himself in someone else. “Are We Still Friends?,” the album’s rough and honeyed send-off, is Tyler’s final attempt at salvaging his relationship. He’s finally without his beau and asks for the compromise of friendship. The track, as with many on Igor, ends sharply with a synth never resolving its buzz. There’s nothing left to say when you’ve given all of yourself away. | 2019-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | May 20, 2019 | 8 | 202a580b-df97-48a3-a811-9706aceeb8c4 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
Ryan Adams' cover of Taylor Swift's 1989 is a lot of fun to think about and talk about, but not much fun to listen to. It is, in other words, a pure product of the Internet. At its best, Swift's 1989 crackles with life, while Adams has transformed it into... a run-of-the-mill Ryan Adams album. | Ryan Adams' cover of Taylor Swift's 1989 is a lot of fun to think about and talk about, but not much fun to listen to. It is, in other words, a pure product of the Internet. At its best, Swift's 1989 crackles with life, while Adams has transformed it into... a run-of-the-mill Ryan Adams album. | Ryan Adams: 1989 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21101-1989/ | 1989 | Ryan Adams' cover of Taylor Swift's 1989 is a lot of fun to think about and talk about, but not much fun to listen to. It is, in other words, a pure product of the Internet—a robust, cross-platform, thinkpiece-generating app that testifies mostly to Adams' ability to get attention. You have to hand it to him for knowing what he's doing: His album choice churns up some nice, irony-rich soil for culture and music critics to wriggle around in. Even though Taylor Swift has been a songwriter first and foremost throughout her career, 1989 was where she collaborated more intensely with superstar producers like Max Martin and Shellback to help her cross over from Queen of Pop Country to the center of the pop world proper. The move worked spectacularly: 1989 is among the best-selling albums of the post-Napster era. And now Ryan Adams has transformed it again, into... a run-of-the-mill Ryan Adams album.
It's an odd object to engage with. Adams is entertaining, always has been, and he's carved out what is by now a fascinating career, filled with a few widely beloved heartland rock albums and a great many weird one-offs that have won him a devoted cult. 1989 is on the one hand an example of the latter, but it's presented in the style of the former. He throws himself into the album completely—the arrangements are fully realized and he sings with care and precision, revealing his admiration. But he also reveals some fairly crucial points about how good songs are put together.
Every recorded song is the end point of a long road with many possible forks in it—a series of small decisions about chord changes, melody lines, lyrics, and arrangements. Swift's 1989 songs are written for a specific kind of production—the melodies are clipped, percussive, and designed to hit with force at very specific times. They are written to be electro-pop songs, which rely more on big dynamic changes and repeating cells of melody.
At its best, Swift's 1989 crackles with life, and highlights what it feels like to be young and looking at the world from a very specific moment; Adams transforms those feelings into a wistful and generic feeling of weariness. To put it in the context of an artist to whom Adams is often compared, 1989 shows why Springsteen went synth-pop on Born in the U.S.A. in 1984—the songs demanded it. The songs that sound like anthems were meant to be anthems; Springsteen's stark demos of the songs are instructive but they weren't the finished product. Remember, too, that he tried to turn his dark folk masterpiece Nebraska into a full band album but realized it needed to come out as an acoustic demo. Which is to say that "Out of the Woods" is "Dancing in the Dark", not "Atlantic City".
Swift knows this about her own material, and the demos of 1989's songs she included on the album show how dramatic the transformation can be. In Adams' hands, they are flat, flavorless rockers, and when the music isn't simply boring it crosses the line into actively grating. He wants "Blank Space" to be a Big Star-style heartfelt ballad, but the melody feels thin, rushed, and monochrome in this setting. He delivers "Shake It Off" in a grim and determined tone that would be appropriate if he were singing about how conservative politics have decimated rural families at the inaugural Farm Aid—but when paired with a repeated refrain of “haters gonna hate," it sounds ridiculous. And Adams' "Style" is downright garish, coming off like Bono fronting Survivor, the dark side of the album's titular year.
Adams' 1989, for all its sincerity and technical execution, is ultimately hollow because it's nothing but context. There's everything surrounding it (the unexpected match of singer and song, the details of the release) and there's what you bring to it (your relationship to the music of Swift and Adams, your demographic profile, your feelings on rock and pop and covers in general) but there's no essential reason for it to exist. This is why Father John Misty's rush-released version of "Blank Space", wherein he remade Swift's song in the style of the Velvet Underground, was such a brilliant example of a recorded song as music criticism. His track was a hilarious (and, importantly, still musically enjoyable) reminder that Adams' entire album is a gesture. It's a formal exercise. You listen and think, "Ah, I see what he did there" and then you forget about it. | 2015-09-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Pax-Am | September 25, 2015 | 4 | 202cd16b-349f-40a3-9449-62c6ea0bd229 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the brilliant 1979 album from the Mael brothers that transformed them into future-pop prophets. | 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 brilliant 1979 album from the Mael brothers that transformed them into future-pop prophets. | Sparks: No. 1 in Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sparks-no-1-in-heaven/ | No. 1 in Heaven | Punk set out to shock the ’70s rock establishment, but disco did a far better job. Safety pins and ironic swastikas had nothing on one-piece jumpsuits and boogie shoes. After all, no one ever hosted a baseball-stadium rally to detonate a bunch of Sex Pistols records, a fate that befell a pile of Saturday Night Fever soundtracks at Chicago’s infamous Disco Demolition Night on July 12, 1979. As some noted at the time, and many more have since, it’s evident that coded racism and homophobia were fuelling that event more than a simple distaste for 4/4 grooves and syrupy strings. But perhaps the most ridiculous thing about the sight of young men storming the field at Comiskey Park to defend rock’s honor was that many of their heroes were looking to get on the Studio 54 guest list themselves.
By 1979, pretty much every rock act of note—the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, KISS—was making a beeline to the dancefloor, and if others like Pink Floyd, the Eagles, and Lynyrd Skynyrd harbored no explicit desire to get in on the 12" market, they were at least absorbing some of disco’s polish and finesse. For many of these artists, disco proved to be more of a one-night stand than a serious commitment, a fleeting concession they could make to the pop marketplace while reassuring the Disco Sucks crowd it was all just some cocaine-addled mistake. No rock band would be crazy enough to actually completely reinvent itself as a full-on disco act and seek out one of the genre’s key architects for guidance. But then no rock band is quite like Sparks. For them, disco wasn’t simply some bandwagon to jump on—it was the career-saving life force that transformed them from glam-rock has-beens to future-pop prophets.
When you consider the story of Sparks, nothing really makes sense; everything about their narrative is just a bit off. For over 50 years now, brothers Russell and Ron Mael have enjoyed a telepathic creative partnership that’s yielded several hit singles—yet rarely in a row, rarely in the same country, and rarely in the same style. Their career has been a never-ending roller-coaster ride, but the Maels always manage to correct course when it appears they’re flying off the rails. They pick up fans in one territory as they shed them in another; they’ve alienated old followers with their wild aesthetic shifts while endearing themselves to new niches.
Even at the height of their commercial success, Sparks were never an easy sell. Founded in Los Angeles, the group first gained notoriety by crashing the UK glitter-rock scene with their violently theatrical 1974 hit single “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us.” But their look was as glum as it was glam: in contrast to Russell’s pretty-boy preening, Ron adopted a stern, professorial look, topped with a Charlie Chaplin-inspired toothbrush moustache that many interpreted as creepy Hitler cosplay (a confusion compounded by the fact the Maels are Jewish).
That contrarian streak would only become more deeply entrenched over the coming decades. Over the course of 25 albums, Sparks have left no genre—operatic art-rock, new wave, house music, classical, metal—uncorrupted. But their catalog is unified by a singular crass’n’classy spirit that’s made them the only band to appear on the soundtracks to both the Jean Claude Van Damme bloodbath Knock Off and Leos Carax’s arthouse mindfuck Holy Motors. (Their love affair with the latter filmmaker will intensify this summer with the release of Carax’s Sparks-scored musical Annette, starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard.) As confirmed by director Edgar Wright’s recent star-studded documentary/fan letter, The Sparks Brothers, the Maels are beloved by many infinitely more famous artists—from Beck and Björk to Flea and Jack Antonoff—for their brazen nonconformity and derring-do. But there was a time when those qualities were more liabilities than assets.
As glam rock degenerated into punk in the mid-’70s, Sparks found themselves in an awkward position. While first-wavers like the Sex Pistols, Ramones, and Siouxsie Sioux admired the Maels for their disruptive presence, the actual music Sparks were making at the time—the carnivalesque art-pop of Indiscreet, the butt-rock raunch of Big Beat, and the Beach Boys-inspired fantasias of Introducing Sparks—represented precisely the sort of spectacular excess that punk sought to extinguish. What’s more, those records were commercial disappointments—even in the UK, Sparks’ most reliable market. But instead of trying to rehabilitate their image by making a play for the pogo pit, the Maels were more keen on joining the other revolution happening at the time.
Released in July 1977, Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” was the Star Wars of disco singles—the sort of blockbuster event that makes everything that came before it seem obsolete and inadequate. The song originally appeared as the final track on Summer’s album I Remember Yesterday, a conceptual record that explored different eras of music from the ’40s up to disco. “I Feel Love” was a late-addition lark that imagined the sound of the future, one where live instrumentation would be replaced by oscillating synth patterns and traditional song structures would dissolve into hypnotic mantras. But the song proved to be less fantasy than prophecy, signaling disco’s shift from a sleek variant of funk into the foundation of electronic dance music.
It was “I Feel Love” that forever changed the name of its producer, Giorgio Moroder, into an adjective. Once a purveyor of piano-tinkled bubblegum pop and funkified Moody Blues covers, by 1977, Moroder had (alongside his silent production partner, Pete Bellotte) become a genre unto himself. His landmark solo album, From Here to Eternity, extended the electronic explorations he began with Summer over the course of an entire record, while his synth-driven, Oscar-winning score for Midnight Express the following year further tightened his stranglehold on the pop zeitgeist. Moroder’s rise happened to coincide with the Maels’ growing disillusionment with rock music, which portended their dismantling of Sparks from a five-piece band down to the core fraternal duo.
Among all the rock acts of their vintage, Sparks were the ideal candidates for a disco makeover. Raised on a steady diet of Saturday matinees and Sgt. Pepper’s, the Maels approached music as a form of roleplay, inhabiting their satirical songs like characters in an absurdist sketch show. Unlike many other bands of brothers, they avoided typical sibling-rivalry sensationalism and flipped the fraternal-jealousy cliché into their stage schtick, with the buttoned-up Ron shooting death stares at the coquettish Russell as if he were silently hatching a plot to destroy him. In their ’70s glam-rock prime, Sparks didn’t have to put on lipstick, dresses, or feather boas; for the Maels, rock’n’roll was the costume, the vehicle that allowed them to act out their most ridiculous flights of fancy. And it was a costume they could easily throw off once it had outlived its usefulness.
As they tell it, Sparks’ dancefloor pivot wasn’t so much an act of trendspotting opportunism as just another new experiment in playing dress-up. “We were feeling that we had been taking a band format as far as we could go,” Ron recounted in a 2020 interview. “We heard ‘I Feel Love’ on the radio [and] we thought it could be interesting if Russell was singing on that kind of cold electronic background.” But without access to that sort of gear, all they could do at the time was put the idea out to the universe. At one point in the late ’70s, a German music journalist asked the Maels if they had any new music on the horizon; the brothers responded that they were working with Moroder. It was purely jokey wishful thinking, but like the futurist premise of “I Feel Love” itself, their dream eventually became a reality. The journalist happened to be a friend of Moroder’s, and before long, the Maels were hunkering down in the producer’s Musicland Studios in Munich, toying with the furniture-sized synths and sequencers that would shape the sound of their 1979 album, No. 1 in Heaven.
From its dewy opening synth droplets, No. 1 in Heaven doesn’t simply expand the Maels’ musical horizons, it exists on another planet entirely. That feeling that grows even more pronounced once a throbbing “I Feel Love” pulse sets “Tryouts for the Human Race” in motion. Where even Sparks’ most accessible songs can dart around like a pinball, Moroder keeps the Maels on a linear ascent, with the producer’s trusty session drummer, Keith Forsey, serving as the Mercedes-grade pace car. When Russell’s hair-raising voice enters the mix, you’re treated to the thrilling spectacle of the most restlessly rhapsodic singer in rock reborn as a natural disco diva.
Sparks, of course, weren’t the only rock-oriented artists tooling around with electronics in the late ’70s. But in contrast to Kraftwerk, or Bowie, or Tubeway Army, the Maels weren’t so much embracing the sci-fi qualities of the synthesizer as using it to heighten the ever-present tension between Russell’s vamping vocals and Ron’s withering lyrics. In true Sparks fashion, No. 1 in Heaven isn’t just a disco album; it’s an album about disco, drawing narrative inspiration from the genre’s underlying motifs and energies and filtering it through their own uniquely peculiar perspective. Ironically, by completely overhauling their aesthetic, Sparks never sounded more Sparksian, probing a culture obsessed with lust, vanity, and materialism as eagerly as Kraftwerk celebrated European public-transit efficiency.
So where Summer treated disco as a conduit for orgasmic ecstasy, Russell sings “Tryouts for the Human Race” from the perspective of actual sperm gunning for their one-in-a-million shot at being a fertilizing hero. (“One of us might make it through/The rest will disappear like dew!”) Emerging from a blizzard of sparkling synth tones, the giddy “Academy Award Performance” bounds down the red carpet like a young starlet greeting the paparazzi pit, but the song’s exhortations (“Play the shark! Play the bride! Joan of Arc! Mrs. Hyde!”) could just as easily describe the plight of any woman who has to put on many different faces in order to satisfy the patriarchy. The proudly Eurotrashy “La Dolce Vita” sounds tailor-made for the sort of Mediterranean nightclubs where Moroder’s music reigned supreme, but it’s more interested in examining the characters who frequent such establishments—namely, the young gigolos serving as bored arm candy for older rich socialites. And with the ebullient “Beat the Clock,” the Maels use disco’s relentless, sweat-soaked rhythms as a metaphor for a nascent computer-age culture on the cusp of accelerating out of control, presenting a highly prescient portrait of a young busybody eager to cross off his bucket list—getting a PhD, traveling, sleeping with Liz Taylor—before he reaches adulthood.
But for all its craven characters and dry-ice decadence, No. 1 in Heaven ultimately leads to a moment of soul-purifying rapture. When Sparks began working on the record, they had seemingly lost the ability to write a hit song—so the most they could do was dream of one. The album’s quasi-title-track closer, “The Number One Song in Heaven,” is the ultimate manifestation of the question that hovers over Sparks’ entire career: Are they being ironic or not? Certainly, the very concept of a chart-topping song written by God fits right into the Maels’ meta-humor wheelhouse. And yet, the song’s belief in disco’s unifying power and out-of-body transcendence is 100 percent genuine. Beginning with a slow-motion opening tract that appears like a bright Biblical light beaming down from the clouds, the song suddenly shifts into an exhilarating second act that makes it feel like you’re being rocketed into the stratosphere. If “I Feel Love” was Moroder’s attempt to imagine the future, “The Number One Song in Heaven” is his vision of the afterlife: electronic disco reborn as a spiritual experience.
While it’s impossible to confirm if No. 1 in Heaven was indeed a hit among the Pearly Gates cognoscenti, the song did return Sparks to the Top 20 in the UK, and the album accrued enough pop-cultural cachet to prompt Paul McCartney to adopt Ron’s signature look and mannerisms in the video for his 1980 single “Coming Up.” (“Beat the Clock” further infiltrated the mainstream when it was quoted on the chart-topping novelty disco-Beatles medley “Stars on 45.”) But those Top of the Pops appearances and rock-star acknowledgements were just the first ripples of this album’s outsized impact.
For the first post-punk generation—the teens caught between punk’s cynicism and disco’s celebratory energy—No. 1 in Heaven showed how you could succumb to the allure of the dancefloor without sacrificing your subversive spirit. In its fusion of flamboyance and frigidity, No. 1 in Heaven effectively shaped the neon-tinted sound and arch sensibility of ’80s synth-pop as we know it—in Wright’s documentary, members of Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, Erasure, Visage, and New Order all profess as much. (The latter’s Stephen Morris also admits he cribbed the drumbeat from “The Number One Song in Heaven” for Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”) The album’s influence only continued to reverberate across the decades: In the vocoderized vistas of “My Other Voice,” you’ll find the blueprints for Air’s space-age bachelor-pad soundscapes and Daft Punk’s robot prog; in “Tryouts for the Human Race,” you get the dry run for LCD Soundsystem’s skyscraping electro-rock anthems.
Sparks’ relationship with Moroder would last for just one more album, the more new wave-leaning Terminal Jive, after which the forbidding logistics of touring with “a synthesizer the size of a building” (as Ron describes it) prompted the Maels to reform Sparks as a proper band for their ’80s run. There would be many more peaks and valleys to follow, but No. 1 in Heaven was the album that gave Sparks the confidence to weather them, cementing their legend as rock’s most unpredictable, chameleonic, and brilliantly counterintuitive band. Thanks to four decades of advances in synthesizer technology and the album’s legion of imitators, No. 1 in Heaven may no longer represent the sound of the future—but its techtopian pop still feels like the future you wish you were living in now.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-05-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Elektra | May 23, 2021 | 9.4 | 203006c4-4312-4d65-923a-a435f58db2bc | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Death Cab's second album for Atlantic and sixth proper LP overall is one of the darkest and most muscular in the band's discography, as they move from the undergraduate longing of their earlier work and the looming mortality of Plans to a more generalized existential angst. | Death Cab's second album for Atlantic and sixth proper LP overall is one of the darkest and most muscular in the band's discography, as they move from the undergraduate longing of their earlier work and the looming mortality of Plans to a more generalized existential angst. | Death Cab for Cutie: Narrow Stairs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11501-narrow-stairs/ | Narrow Stairs | Love isn't watching someone die, contrary to what Ben Gibbard memorably sang on Death Cab for Cutie's major-label debut. No, love is watching someone grow and change and still staying with them-- whether we're talking about family, friends, romantic interests, or a little college-town indie rock band from about an hour-and-a-half outside Seattle. Death is just the dénouement. In the three years since their platinum-selling, Grammy-nominated Plans, Gibbard and Death Cab producer/guitarist Chris Walla have both entered their thirties, coming off a wave of successes that included 2003's Transatlanticism going gold and the debut by Gibbard side project the Postal Service becoming Sub Pop's best-selling disc since Nirvana. That's a whole lotta love.
Narrow Stairs, Death Cab's second album for Atlantic and sixth proper LP overall, is one of the darkest and most muscular in the band's discography, but they're still aiming for the same place: your heart. It's an album about growing and changing and becoming resigned to the fact that you'll never be truly content-- not even if you quit that day job, achieve your rock'n'roll dreams, and find yourself in a loving marriage. At times, the maturation feels forced; the more adventurous moments here are experimental only for such a high-profile group, and they don't play to Gibbard's sentimental, word-weighing strengths. Still, even the disappointingly sleepy Plans had ear-catching singles, and when Death Cab go with their pop instincts on Narrow Stairs, they bang out songs focused and evocative enough to win over maybe a few of this loved-and-hated group's longtime skeptics.
There are some vast expanses to navigate first, both production-wise and lyrically. Where Transatlanticism spanned an ocean, and Plans opened astride "the East River and Hudson," Narrow Stairs starts along the California coast, where Gibbard retreated to write the album. "I descended a dusty gravel ridge," his bookish tenor begins, in clear but vivid language, on "Bixby Canyon Bridge". Gibbard has said the song is about trying to commune with Jack Kerouac, who stayed in the same cabin to write Big Sur. From an initial echoey guitar trill, the track grows to pounding, distorted bombast somewhere between OK Computer and the new Coldplay single.
Speaking of singles, Narrow Stairs' first is the eight-and-a-half minute "I Will Possess Your Heart", a decision that's likely to be more successful as brand repositioning than it is as rock music. Death Cab get uncompromising-artist points for the four-minute intro that builds up with vamping bass, sprinkles of keyboard, and atmospheric guitar, but it's hardly essential to the standard-length pop song that follows, about how a well-intentioned man can turn into a de facto creepy stalker. "You gotta spend some time, love," Gibbard sings, as if by explanation for the song's length.
On Narrow Stairs, Death Cab move from the undergraduate longing of their earlier work and the looming mortality of Plans to a more generalized existential angst. But they're most successful when they don't switch up their style to match; the sound of settling, as Transatlanticism maintained, is a peppy "ba ba," not the krautrock pulse of this album's synth-touched remainder metaphor, "Long Division". Elsewhere, the tabla on "Pity and Fear" sounds out of place, not far-out; as Indian-instrumented songs about an apparent adulterous one-night stand go, this one's no "Norwegian Wood".
"No Sunlight" cuts through the murk like a beam of, well, sunlight-- musically, at least. Bright keyboards and guitars sweeten Gibbard's pessimistic lyrics, which contrast childhood bliss with the emptiness of adulthood. The best song on the album, "Cath...", matches the knotty, Built to Spill-style riffs of Death Cab's early records with a plainspoken (and gut-wrenching) account of a bride who dooms herself to misery by marrying the wrong man. Where fools rush in, Gibbard refuses to rush to judgment: "I'd have done the same as you," he concludes.
What Death Cab have to fear most is not their urge to dabble in different genres, but the risk of sounding like a more cloying version of their younger selves. On "You Can Do Better Than Me", which waltzes its 1960s-pop organs way past the line that Ben Folds' "The Luckiest" toed like a ballerina, Gibbard's nice-guy earnestness becomes too much even for a listener who relates to nice-guy earnestness. It's easy to tell where the heavy-handed "Your New Twin Sized Bed" and "The Ice Is Getting Thinner" are headed as soon as you hear their first lines, and thin ice is a pretty thin cliché for such a lyric-focused group. "Grapevine Fires" does better, adding funereal harmonies and recalling debut LP Something About Airplanes with a line about "wine and some paper cups."
Surely Death Cab's awkward position as one of the few indie rock groups with a platinum record would be enough to drive anyone to drink. Fellow million-sellers Modest Mouse brought on Johnny Marr for their latest major-label LP; the Decemberists, who also signed to a major but didn't go platinum, have yet to release their follow-up. Narrow Stairs' musical growing pains make sense for an album that stares into the banal void of contemporary adulthood. If you love the band, you'll probably find enough reasons here to keep sticking with them. | 2008-05-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-05-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic | May 12, 2008 | 6 | 203b11b1-1151-4d3f-b303-412c191f8e6a | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Inside producer Jack Hamill’s sci-fi odysseys, Detroit futurism meets ’80s disco in the neon glow of the chillout room. | Inside producer Jack Hamill’s sci-fi odysseys, Detroit futurism meets ’80s disco in the neon glow of the chillout room. | Space Dimension Controller: Love Beyond the Intersect | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/space-dimension-controller-love-beyond-the-intersect/ | Love Beyond the Intersect | Jack Hamill has spent the past decade building out his Space Dimension Controller project as though it were a Hollywood blockbuster franchise. The music, a mixture of Detroit-inspired techno, electro-funk, and atmospheric electronica, conveys a cinematic sensibility that’s reflected in his titles (earlier albums The Pathway to Tiraquon6 and Welcome to Mikrosector-50 were both bookended by tracks called “Feature Presentation” and “Closing Titles”) and even his character development. Mr. 8040, the Belfast producer’s alter ego, is a recurring figure: a space-journeying, time-traveling narrator with the unfortunate tendency to slip into the 20th century’s most hackneyed rap cadences. (Consider this, from Welcome to Mikrosector-50: “I’m the Space Dimension Controller/And time travel is my thing/So I brought you all to the future/To show you all about the funk I bring.”)
It can sometimes be hard to say whether Space Dimension Controller is a musical alias or a kind of cosplay. It’s not that his productions are derivative; at his best, Hamill has spun his influences into a rich, captivating blend whose signature would be unmistakable even without all the hokey sci-fi world-building. But his determination to stick to the bit can wear thin. The vocals and spoken-word interludes are often at cross-purposes with the genuinely immersive qualities of the music. And at times, Hamill’s determination to emulate the sound of black American electro-funk verges uncomfortably on pastiche.
Love Beyond the Intersect, Hamill’s first full-length in six years, continues in the vein of its predecessors. The ambient swirl of buzzing synth drones, radio static, and spaceship noises that opens the album is so evocative of the movie theater that you can practically taste the imitation butter flavor on your tongue. True to Hamill’s penchant for concept albums, the record comes couched in a space-travel narrative that doubles as an allegory of losing and rediscovering one’s way. (Hamill has spoken in interviews and on Twitter about getting sober and finding new love, both of which are hinted at in the text accompanying the album.)
Fortunately, the music doesn’t belabor the tacked-on narrative. As usual, Hamill splits his vocals between gravelly rapping and gossamer vocoded refrains, but both are downplayed here. Worked more deeply into the mix than on previous records, they’re largely indistinguishable from his synthesizers, and the lyrics mostly set aside elaborate fantasy elements in favor of couplets about self-knowledge and romantic love. If they’re still giving out Nobel Prizes for literature in the 81th century, Mr. 8040 won’t taking one home.
Musically, these are Hamill’s most confident productions yet, displaying a masterfully evocative blend of textures: spongy bass synths, graphite-slicked analog drum machines, pads as rosy as the blush on a replicant’s cheeks. The fundamentals of his music haven’t changed much in the past 10 years, but his fusion of influences like Cybotron, Egyptian Lover, Model 500, and Metro Area feels more holistic than ever. They’ve all pooled into a sound you might call ambient techno-boogie, in which Detroit futurism meets ’80s disco in the neon glow of the chillout room.
The problem is that Hamill’s fusion has become perhaps too holistic, because most of these songs follow exactly the same template. Again and again, he uses the same rubbery basslines and pitch-bent funk leads, the same gaseous pads, the same hissing Roland hi-hats. Sometimes, it sounds like he’s repeating old glories: “Slowtime in Reflection” is remarkably similar to the 2010 track “BBD Alignment,” just updated with more vivid production. And some songs on Love Beyond the Intersect are almost indistinguishable. “PVLN” and “Voices Lost to Empty Space,” which follows it, share the same key and tempo. Rather than complementary parts of a suite, they feel like alternate takes that Hamill couldn’t decide between. (For what it’s worth, the latter, an instrumental, is the clear winner.) This kind of consistency carries across the whole album. If you’re in the mood for it, the experience can be pleasantly immersive, like a blissfully inconsequential afternoon at the multiplex. But the world is already awash in sequels. Hamill is clearly talented; it would be nice to hear him visit some new worlds.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | R&S | November 26, 2019 | 6.2 | 203df13c-028e-49b2-9eaa-3c0290d0d779 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Latest from the accomplished producer discards the sleek, gleaming microsound detail of Jelinek's earlier work for oddly cut loops of creaky old instruments like guitar and organ. | Latest from the accomplished producer discards the sleek, gleaming microsound detail of Jelinek's earlier work for oddly cut loops of creaky old instruments like guitar and organ. | Jan Jelinek: Tierbeobachtungen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9702-tierbeobachtungen/ | Tierbeobachtungen | There's a tendency with Jan Jelinek to lean on record titles and release notes for clues about the content of his music. As his latest is called Tierbeobachtungen, German for "animal observations," some have been hearing an "animal like" quality in these tracks. And as he's said that he recorded these tracks in various locations while between studios, others are hearing something restless and displaced.
It's an understandable tendency with projects as abstract and focused on pure sound as Jelinek's, to search for a concept around which to orient the music. And perhaps there's something to these ideas. But I'm hearing a record that continues very much in the vein of last year's Kosmischer Pitch, Jelinek's subtle (almost subliminal) homage to Krautrock, with a couple of noticeable differences.
Like his last record, Tierbeobachtungen discards the sleek, gleaming microsound detail of Jelinek's earlier work for oddly cut loops of creaky old instruments like guitar and organ. Whatever the sound sources-- whether the instruments were recorded live or sampled-- the grainy distortion of the recording is highlighted and the almost imperceptible air of the room is preserved. This is warm, loose, fuzzy music; in its unfussiness it's almost the exact opposite of the perfectionism Jelinek exhibited when he first came on the scene.
But where Kosmischer Pitch still made judicious use of beats, *Tierbeobachtungen * drifts untethered, the rhythms created only by the overlapping loops that are, for the moment, his sole mode of composition. Though Jelinek is still presumably working with software, his music presently bears a sharp resemblance to that of turntable artist Philip Jeck, minus the disembodied voices the latter usually cycles into his loops. Both the duration and quality of Jelinek's base segments have the sense of skipping vinyl. Most tracks consist of a half-dozen or so fragments ranging from a couple seconds to almost 10, which are set in motion, played off of each other, and tweaked in the mix.
The effect is both static and oddly propulsive, with swells of sound shoving the tracks toward something even as everything seems to be simultaneously spinning in place. The tension between movement and stasis is the most enticing thing about Tierbeobachtungen, creating a sort of woozy, disorienting headspace that winds up being psychedelic and more than a little heavy, despite the absence of extreme dynamic range or noise. The music is hypnotic and meditative but also quietly unsettling and sometimes even a little creepy.
At this point Jelinek's preference for widely variable "head" music-- even in his dance work, people talked more about texture than swing-- may well be his defining characteristic. He's not interested in drama, narrative arc, specific emotional states, or music scenes; Jelinek, more than just about anyone going, is exploring sound as an end in itself, the way a painter might explore the line or a filmmaker, light. Farben, his house alias, is the German word for "colors," after all. That he chose this specific word strikes me as the truest use of language on any of his albums to date. | 2006-12-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2006-12-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental | ~scape | December 12, 2006 | 7.9 | 203e5555-b7d3-4f5a-ae1f-85fe86b119ae | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Australian duo Kllo is consistent in its commitment to moodily lit, immaculately appointed spaces—to stylish understatement at all costs. | The Australian duo Kllo is consistent in its commitment to moodily lit, immaculately appointed spaces—to stylish understatement at all costs. | Kllo: Well Worn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22170-well-worn/ | Well Worn | The good news: “Bolide” is easily the best new SBTRKT song since “Right Thing to Do,” and “Walls to Build” is right behind “Bolide.” Both pair slinky UK garage rhythms with flickering keyboard stabs and midsection-caressing bass; singer Chloe Kaul’s voice curls like a wisp of colored smoke, and in “Bolide,” her singing has been sampled and applied like brushstrokes in wide, wet streaks. Both tunes artfully contain their contradictions: bittersweet but invigorating, soft and enveloping but also prickly—half fur coat, half porcupine.
Neither of these songs, however, has anything to do with SBTRKT. They’re the work of Kllo, an Australian duo—cousins, in fact— who make tidy fusions of bass music and R&B. They released their debut EP in 2014, and despite having a name that’s hard to wrap tired eyes around at first—that’s “Kllo,” not “Kilo”—they quickly found themselves feted by Radio 1, Spotify, Hypemachine, and Australia’s Triple J radio. They arrived with their aesthetic fully formed: Their debut EP, Cusp, features the same rippling syncopations and deep blue keys as Well Worn, the same breathy yearning and yawning emptiness. They are nothing if not consistent in their commitment to moodily lit, immaculately appointed spaces—to stylish understatement at all costs. The same could be said of the EP’s three remaining songs, which trade 2-step’s skippy energy for dusky boom-bap grooves, eking ethereal R&B out of muted drum hits and limpid piano, all overlaid with Kaul’s smoky tremolo.
Now, the bad news: As wonderfully executed as it is, their new EP also feels a little bit like old news—maybe even doubly so. Back at the dawn of the decade, part of what made acts like SBTRKT and Disclosure so surprising was the way they stoked nostalgia for late-’90s UK garage among a generation too young to have experienced it the first time (and, in the case of many American listeners, who may not have had any idea who MJ Cole and Artful Dodger were in the first place). The garage revival, which unleashed a flood of 130-BPM grooves, syncopated chord stabs, and kindling-dry rimshots, even led to something called “future garage,” a mostly-meaningless term that denoted garage-inspired electronic music with a richer, more vividly 21st-century palette. Part of what makes Kllo interesting—part of the itch they scratch, given that neither SBTRKT nor Disclosure has subsequently managed anything as good as their early releases—concerns, essentially, a kind of double nostalgia, for both first-wave UK garage and its brief revival just a half-decade ago. “On My Name,” another of the EP’s cuts, features actual wobble bass, a sound that American dubstep chased out of vogue not long after Skrillex swept the 2012 Grammys. Perhaps we’ve entered the era of future-past garage?
It doesn’t help that Kllo’s lyrics feel like they've been cut-and-pasted from the final iteration of a long Google translate chain, rendering vaguely metaphorical statements merely doggerel. On “Walls to Build,” they take a perfectly catchy hook (“Forward/ Forward, it’s all here/ Forward”) and undercut it with supporting verses that simply don't make any sense, and aren’t vivid enough to skate by as “impressionistic.” In “Bolide,” a song named for a type of meteor, a chain of assonant rhymes (“Hold tight, hold tight/I’m noticing the mine, I’m noticing the mine/Bolide, bolide/So close to leave the mine, so close to leave the mine”) serves mainly to distract us from the fact that the lyrics simply don’t scan. It’s as though they were so intent upon maintaining their restraint, they forgot that they were singing about flaming chunks of rock and ice streaking brilliantly across the night sky.
None of this is to detract from Kllo’s evident skill as stylists, though; it’s true that Kaul sometimes leans a little too hard on jazz-singer mannerisms, but she never oversells it, and in any case, her husky voice is so warmly agreeable, she could make Yellow Pages entries sound seductive, while producer Simon Lam has an uncommon grasp of dimmer-switch dynamics. If Kllo can come up with ways to make this sound more their own—and carve out sharper, less muddled sentiments in the process—they’ll be a formidable force. | 2016-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Ghostly International | August 9, 2016 | 6.5 | 20408f70-ce49-4435-9e23-cfbc772e42d0 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On his latest solo album, the Irish folk singer sets sail on a journey of the heart, full of sad break-up songs and meandering musings. | On his latest solo album, the Irish folk singer sets sail on a journey of the heart, full of sad break-up songs and meandering musings. | Glen Hansard: Between Two Shores | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/glen-hansard-between-two-shores/ | Between Two Shores | “It was a total vagary, an odyssey, an epic adventure... but thank God we had our instruments with us,” Glen Hansard recalled to the Irish Times in 2016. He was talking about his month-long participation as an oarsman on the final leg of the “Camino by Sea,” a three-summer voyage from Ireland to northern Spain that concluded that year. The mornings he spent rowing across stretches of the cold, blue sea cemented Hansard’s fondness for sailing, and that in turn helped inspire his latest album, Between Two Shores. The title, he’s explained, refers to that moment when a sailor finds himself halfway between departure and arrival, without a shoreline in sight. It’s a fitting title for an album that’s thematically adrift.
The product of a few weeks spent in France’s Black Box Studios with producer David Odlum, a former member of Hansard’s band the Frames, Between Two Shores was cobbled together out of songs left over from past sessions and home demos. This helps explain the album’s lack of focus. What’s missing is a singular idea for a listener to rest her headphones on. Instead, we get a hodgepodge of sentimental tunes that aren’t quite parallel, perpendicular, or adjacent to each other. Even its best songs, like “Time Will Be the Healer,” sound as though they were plucked from disparate moments of Hansard’s life and washed of their specifics so they could coexist on an album that’s described as “spontaneous” in its press release.
Some songs, like “Wheels on Fire,” give off a call-to-arms attitude (“You can turn and twist but we will overcome”), while many others (“Why Woman,” “Setting Forth”) sink sorrowfully into the predictable melodies and unimaginative words of the underachieving breakup song. “I’m letting go of us completely/I’m getting out,” Hansard offers on “Setting Forth.” The pallid lyrics do little to distinguish themselves from the lyrics of the similarly-titled “Movin’ On,” which puts a minor twist on the same sentiment: ”I’m tired of sitting around and waiting/I’m moving on.”
There’s no sign here of the vividness that defined Hansard’s previous solo effort, 2015’s Grammy-nominated Didn’t He Ramble. Punch-packing phrases like ”Everybody’s looking at you/But I can’t stand to watch,” from that album’s “My Little Ruin,” have no equal on Between Two Shores. Instead, we get half-drawn characters and ruminations on love that lack courage and complexity. Hansard references his “woman,” “my darlin’,” and his “baby” often, but fails to give her dimension. His banal observation of a lover who keeps letting him down on “Your Heart’s Not in It” does little to inspire sympathy for the position she’s put him in. To effectively tell a story about a love gone sour, the narrator must tell complicated truths. Hansard’s contemporary Josh Ritter did this well on 2013’s The Beast in Its Tracks, a divorce album that’s as devastating as it is hopeful. On that album’s “New Lover,” Ritter contemplated his role in the breakup, admitting “I feel like a miser, I feel low and mean/For accusing you of stealin’/What I offered you for free.” Between Two Shores would have benefitted from a similar sense of self-reflection.
The album’s strengths reveal themselves in the production. This is Hansard’s first solo spin in the producer’s chair, and he proves himself capable and even visionary, mixing strings and saxophones to create an orchestral effect or making room for an acoustic track that washes the listener’s ears in strums and thrums. On “Roll On Slow,” deftly deployed, Dap Kings-styled horns escalate and recede across a bed of percussion until they reach their climactic moment in the song’s final gasp. And what “Setting Forth” lacks in lyrical value, it makes up for in instrumentation. Recorded in a single take at New York City’s Avatar Studios, the song maintains its motion with a stable of instruments led by the piano’s tender melody—that is, until Hansard breaks into a warbling coo reminiscent of Springsteen on “I’m on Fire,” taking back the listener’s attention with his stunning falsetto.
Hansard’s emotive delivery is well-known for its arresting effect. Ever since his early days with the Frames, his vocal performances have been turning heads. He’s capable of pulling notes from the bottom of his belly and belting them out until even the most cynical among us get goosebumps. Hansard’s most famous song, “Falling Slowly,” showcased this talent in overdrive, eventually leading to an Academy Award for him and co-writer/duet partner Markéta Irglová after it was featured in 2007’s Once. Ten years later, and Hansard’s haggard vocals are still doing most of the heavy lifting. They often bring much-needed weight to Between Two Shores’ thin ideas. But there’s only so much a single voice can do to keep a sinking album afloat. | 2018-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Anti- | January 20, 2018 | 5.7 | 20431e50-bfdb-43ac-a473-efd8fece33ae | Abigail Covington | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abigail-covington/ | |
DJ Khaled has ranged from summertime hitmaker to self-help guru, and neither are all that interesting on his latest guest-filled album. There are plenty of voices but no clear message or intention. | DJ Khaled has ranged from summertime hitmaker to self-help guru, and neither are all that interesting on his latest guest-filled album. There are plenty of voices but no clear message or intention. | DJ Khaled: Father of Asahd | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-khaled-father-of-asahd/ | Father of Asahd | The creep of positivity culture has been steady and relentless. It has become a dominant modality of Instagram influence and global culture ever since the publication of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret and among its most ardent benefactors (and beneficiaries) is DJ Khaled. For years, he has blended be-your-best-self mantras with middling music to great fame and, presumably, growing wealth; he even published a book detailing his “keys to success.” In the Snapchat era, Khaled’s vague, emphatic preaching made him an intriguing public figure beyond music. But unfortunately, as in the arena of emotional development, shouting aphorisms does little to prompt significant artistic growth.
Khaled’s new album, Father of Asahd, continues in his tradition of envisioning every song as a posse cut. The project’s 15 tracks feature 29 different performers plus his own signature bellowing. (The absence of Drake, a reliable hitmaker and longtime collaborator, is palpable.) The result is pure chaos. Since assembling Akon, T.I., Rick Ross, Fat Joe, Birdman, and Lil Wayne for “We Takin’ Over” in 2007, Khaled has proven himself adept at project-managing rap and R&B’s biggest stars into contributing verses for transparent plays at song-of-the-summer singles. Along the way, the strategy has produced actual anthems, hit songs with a backseat full of guests that will likely activate nostalgia even when they sound thin and tinny in retrospect.
The formula’s limitations are evident on Father of Asahd: There are plenty of voices but no clear message or intention. The world seems colder than it did in 2015, and Khaled’s platitudes no longer function as an effective anchor. Vaguely uplifting songs (“Won’t Take My Soul” and “Weather the Storm”) mingle with generic theses on envy and loyalty (“Jealous” and “You Stay”). Specificity, I’ve learned, is another victim of positivity vulture. It’s hardly a flex to gather dancehall’s biggest names—Mavado, Sizzla, and Buju Banton, newly released from prison—for a motivational opener, only to throw in strained vocals by New Jersey singer 070 Shake.
But something is bound to stick. There are a handful of introspective verses from Meek Mill and Lil Baby; it’s a shame they are not alchemized into effective songs. Cardi B and 21 Savage rapping over a Tay Keith beat on “Wish, Wish” is refreshing and poised for radio play. The clear standout is “Higher,” featuring John Legend and the late Nipsey Hussle. Especially in the context of his death last month, Hussle’s two verses are an eerily on-time reflection on his own life, beginning with his family history and ending with this urgent prophecy: “Homicide, hate, gang banging’ll get you all day/Look at my fate.” It offers a rare moment of depth and vulnerability on an album largely marked by inanity.
In recent years, ostensibly as Khaled has increased his budgets and access to the major-label clearance apparatus, his more-is-more approach has expanded to include a reliance on recognizable samples and interpolations; “Wild Thoughts,” featuring Rihanna, Bryson Tiller, and a prominent sample of Santana’s “Maria, Maria,” reached No. 2 on the U.S. Billboard charts in 2017. This time around, samples include OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson,” which is remade into “Just Us,” a cloying pop song featuring SZA; “Freak N You,” featuring Lil Wayne and Gunna, is built around sped-up Jodeci vocals; the Buju Banton closer “Holy Ground” borrows a riff from Lauryn Hill’s “To Zion.” It strikes as a cynical play at nostalgia. Whereas his peers are trying new strategies to best the streaming wars, Khaled, a firm Gen Xer, appears to remain focused on traditional radio. His challenge to the hegemonic structures of radio and music industry marketing, he recently told Jimmy Fallon, is to force multiple current singles into rotation.
Here and elsewhere, Khaled owes a great debt to Diddy, another guru of positivity and the progenitor of Khaled’s style of not-quite-producer, not-quite-curator auteurship. The blueprint for much of Khaled’s discography was established by Diddy way back when he was known as Puff. In 1997, he released No Way Out, a Bad Boy compilation that repurposed songs by the Police, Grandmaster Flash & the Message, and India to various degrees of effectiveness. One of those tracks, “Senorita,” is literally referenced on Father of Asahd’s “You Stay,” in the form of a similar use of India’s “No Me Conviene.” More than 20 years later, it’s time to try something new. | 2019-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | We the Best / Epic | May 22, 2019 | 5.4 | 204756a0-b1da-4954-91ee-31c8a3868e40 | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
On his new album, the Portland rapper rediscovers the appealing lightness that made him famous. | On his new album, the Portland rapper rediscovers the appealing lightness that made him famous. | Aminé: Limbo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amine-limbo/ | Limbo | In 2017, Aminé had a moment: his debut album, Good For You, introduced him as a happy-go-lucky rascal, and the lead single, “Caroline,” went multi-platinum. The project he released the year after, ONEPOINTFIVE, squandered some of that good will, catering to trendy trap and straying from the outsider charms that initially made his music so interesting. On his new album, Limbo, he’s more pragmatic, suddenly concerned with crafting a sustainable legacy, and this new attitude produces the best music of his career.
Aminé’s shift was inspired at least in part, by the death of NBA icon Kobe Bryant. (“That was like seeing Superman die,” he said.) On “Kobe,” Aminé’s friend, comedian Jak Knight, speaks of Bryant as a benchmark, his death a symbolic end of innocence. To Aminé, the tragedy represented an unofficial start to his real manhood. The shock seems to have loosened something in him. The verses on Limbo are much more relaxed, the hooks are catchier, and his outsized personality radiates. He mixes subtle bouts of introspection with kooky references to Jim Carrey’s The Mask, Allen Iverson’s infamous “practice” speech, and the guy in the AllState commercials.
It would be an overstatement to call the album mature, but it does seem to exist in a transitional state between carefree youth (as embodied by Good For You songs like “Sundays” and “Yellow”) and real adulthood. On the opener, he raps, “Beat so cold it made Aminé want to open up,” and the album is reflective of that accessibility; he sounds uninhibited. Limbo isn’t exactly The Big Day, but he places more importance on being responsible and dependable, pondering what it means to be a better son and a potential father. “To my future daughter or son/The streams from this album gon’ pay for your college funds,” he raps on “Fetus.” He’s also eager to reposition himself. On “Shimmy,” which puts a reanimating spin on an ODB classic, he’s on the comeback trail, getting his groove back “like Fela, not Stella” and shaming fake flexers.
OnePointFive was mired by lackluster rapping, but the studio time wasn’t wasted by Aminé’s producer Pasque, who took the opportunity to experiment with off-center trap beats. Armed with those lessons, his work on Limbo feels like a progression, and additional production from Injury Reserve architect Parker Corey makes this Aminé’s best-produced album. He has always been a child of Drake, as a tune-happy flirt from an unlikely rap market, but on Limbo he leans into the comparison. He acquires moody beats from Drake producers Boi-1da, T-Minus, and Vinylz, and “Can’t Decide” and “Riri” are exactly the kind of rap-sung hybrids that the Toronto rapper built his empire on. It seems apparent that Aminé is thinking with that career trajectory in mind.
Aminé is more conscious of the big picture on Limbo, but there are still a few glimpses of the nonchalant scamp he used to be, and some of the most enjoyable songs on Limbo are least invested in assessing his standing. On “Compensating,” he pals around with Young Thug and comes up with his snappiest melodies. He embellishes his punches on “Pressure in My Palms” with slowthai and Vince Staples sharing a verse and matching his energy. In the first verse alone, he references an Arthur meme, Steve Harvey’s Miss Universe gaffe, Fergie peeing her pants on stage, Winona Ryder shoplifting, and the Malice at the Palace, relishing the absurdity of each one. These songs aren’t just high-spirited, slightly goofy, and unassumingly clever; they have a lightness that is invigorating. They feel like proof that the fun-loving kid who went viral in 2016 hasn’t yet been entirely overwhelmed by the burdens of reputation.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Republic | August 11, 2020 | 7.5 | 204902f1-8d9e-46ae-bf5d-4e0722863e0f | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Recorded by Chad VanGaalen in his basement, this Calgary band's pleasantly varied and concise debut, versed in the use of tape hiss as both a stylistic aid and compositional element, is soaked in the stocky blasts of melody of Deerhunter or Times New Viking. | Recorded by Chad VanGaalen in his basement, this Calgary band's pleasantly varied and concise debut, versed in the use of tape hiss as both a stylistic aid and compositional element, is soaked in the stocky blasts of melody of Deerhunter or Times New Viking. | Women: Women | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12285-women/ | Women | There is an irony to Women's moniker-- the most un-Google-able name in rock since the Music-- that extends beyond the fact that the band is actually four dudes: Like many of their peers and forbears in the worlds of lo-fi psych-rock and industrial post-punk, Women make boys' club music, treehouse rock. Their debut deftly uses tape hiss as both a stylistic aid and compositional element, resulting in stocky blasts of melody. But where peers Deerhunter veer into amorphous song-globs and Times New Viking threaten to come unglued at any moment, Women has the cool, hard weight of something created under duress. You're reminded of how This Heat recorded their songs in a meat factory; Women’s cover-- a creepily synchronized group tai chi exercise-- recalls the sleeves for Reagan-era punk, released at a time when everything seemed vaguely politicized.
Women was recorded by Sub Pop artist Chad VanGaalen in his basement, at least partially on boom boxes. The jangly whoosh of opener "Cameras" seems like a direct product of those bohemian environs: Quivering voices are propped up by picks scraping against strings, even when an exacted synth squiggle-- the first of several compositional left-turns-- betrays the rugged surroundings. "Cameras" lasts a mere 60 seconds and segues seamlessly into the steel-wool industrial sounds of "Lawncare", and from there, Women is deceptively easy and oddly energizing. Standout "Black Rice"'s guitars rapidly approach and fall off little cliffs. "Group Transport Hall" is paisley-wallpapered psych, its hasty acoustic march a textural curveball. It's on tracks like these that singer Patrick Flegel's voice-- a sour monotone throughout much of the album-- gains unexpected contour, admirably navigating "Black Rice"'s sighing chorus.
Elsewhere, Women draws from a deceptive range of styles: "Upstairs" sounds like a mathematical composite of the breezier half of Chairs Missing. Instrumental "Sag Harbor Bridge" is almost John Fahey-esque in the way that its distorted, weaving fretboard runs conjure its namesake. On "Woodbine", another instrumental, a long drone sits impatiently as tittering electronics accumulate at its edges.
By Women's end, the band's guitars have rusted: "January 8th" is fevered paranoia, its guitars angrily panning between speakers. "Flashlights" slows the pace momentarily before ramping up to a Sonic Youth-style jamboree. It's a brash, youthful ending for a band that spent most of the album avoiding such bludgeoning. Also strange is "Shaking Hand", jittery, Dischord-style precision-rock; at just under five minutes, it's the longest track on the album. Women do spend a tad too much time flexing their way through their instrumentals-- a shame since, when they bother with songcraft, they rarely miss: concise, nuanced statements with idiosyncratic arrangements. Awkward, youthful moments exist, but Women tire of them almost before you do. What's left are the best of post-punk ingredients: curiosity, noise, and sly artifice. | 2008-10-13T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-10-13T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Jagjaguwar | October 13, 2008 | 7.9 | 204be31b-bafa-4d8d-ba4f-1b4db9b41181 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Solo debut from the Strokes guitarist finds him trying his hand at a more cosmopolitan rock sound. | Solo debut from the Strokes guitarist finds him trying his hand at a more cosmopolitan rock sound. | Albert Hammond Jr.: Yours to Keep | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9509-yours-to-keep/ | Yours to Keep | Quite a few spindly young guitarists would sacrifice body parts to be the third-most-famous Stroke. I probably would, too-- not so much for the money, the girls or the chops, as to don Albert Hammond, Jr.'s upscale formalwear and Chia hair. But somehow, at least for him, it turns out there's actually more to life than clean, supporting fretwork and curl-enhancing conditioner.
With Yours to Keep, Hammond-- like legendary third-wheel George Harrison before him-- becomes the first of his group to strike off for solo glory. Fortunately, the album is more "Wonderwall" than Wonderwall Music, a set of slight, cosmopolitan babe-lair rock by a guitarist who (superfans, you can exhale now) apparently hasn't yet left his band. Still, don't let First Impressions of Earth's shredder-school frippery deter you: Hammond's rare solos, on songs like "Last Nite", "Under Control", and "Trying Your Luck", have always been concise and grammatical, and so is his debut album.
Hammond has given tunes to the Strokes before, mostly for 2001 tour video In Transit, but his prime non-instrumental contribution remains fan club-only giveaway "The Elephant Song", recorded in 1999 for a New York University class project. Yours to Keep could hardly be further from the scruffy rawk of that early demo, though the most evidently Strokes-like song here, "In Transit", does seem to repurpose its sticky riff. Instead, Hammond's solo outing is a spry if unexceptional pop charmer, less supercilious than Is This It or Room on Fire but almost as cool.
Yours to Keep affords the guitarist more stylistic freedom than the Strokes' unsmiling mien typically permits. Opener "Cartoon Music for Superheroes" is a Beach Boys lullaby with a teenage indie pop beat and syrupy sun-spangled instrumentation, while "Back to the 101" is top-down power-pop you'd expect from the New Pornographers. "Jamaica, ooh, I'm gonna take ya," Hammond jokes on balmy "Holiday", which is better than "Kokomo" but not as good as the equivalent Weezer anthem. Lead single "Everyone Gets a Star" distills most of the album's styles into a jealous new-wave piña colada with elegantly wasted vocals closest to those of his dayjob frontman.
At other times, like Air's JB Dunckel (aka Darkel) on yet another 2006 solo debut, Hammond displays a fondness for the most famous dead Beatle. Yep, the Stroke's vowels are as phlegmy as John Lennon's on the skiffle-like "Call an Ambulance", with whistling and falsetto la-la-las. More ragged plaints join horns and faux-British enunciation on languorous finale "Hard to Live (in the City)". Sean Lennon himself performs guest duties on the album, joined by Julian Casablancas, Ben Kweller, and the Mooney Suzuki's Sammy James Jr. Elsewhere, "Bright Young Thing" picks up "I Got You Babe" music-box sounds and splotchy drum machine, while foggy folk waltz "Blue Skies" is the best reminder that Albert Hammond Sr. was a singer/songwriter, too.
From the first chords of Is This It, the Strokes came into the world wearing the international rock crit kick-me sign of disgustingly spectacular privilege. Except on last year's effortful First Impressions of Earth, the Lower East Side rock flagbearers have rendered their elite upbringing appropriately irrelevant through equally disgustingly spectacular displays of fuck-you talent. On Yours to Keep, Hammond doesn't surpass his main gig's rock'n'roll peaks, but he's still exasperatingly above average. What do the rest of us gotta do? | 2006-10-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-10-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | October 12, 2006 | 6.9 | 204c676d-51bc-41f1-ae9c-63a1145b7e2e | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
On her rawest and most cohesive project to date, the pop singer explores themes of depression and anxiety but too often relies on familiar imagery. | On her rawest and most cohesive project to date, the pop singer explores themes of depression and anxiety but too often relies on familiar imagery. | JoJo: Trying Not to Think About It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jojo-trying-not-to-think-about-it/ | Trying Not to Think About It | JoJo knows you remember her. She can’t outrun the early 2000s nostalgia that her name and music immediately triggers; she has strained to articulate her identity as an artist, separate from her past success. She was 13 when she became the youngest person to top the Billboard charts with 2004’s “Leave (Get Out),” a supremely catchy earworm that’s aged into a glittering karaoke staple; her next album, 2006’s The High Road, brought the sleek breakup track “Too Little Too Late.” Then came a nearly decade-long legal battle: She sued her former label, Blackground, and was barred from releasing new music or placing her old music on streaming services. (Taylor Swift even invited her over to offer advice on navigating the industry.)
In 2014, she finally broke free from her label contract. She dabbled in electropop on her long-awaited third album in 2016, then launched her own imprint with Warner and released a slinky R&B record in 2020, crooning alongside Tinashe and Demi Lovato, two fellow veterans of young fame. That same year, she won her first Grammy for a fleeting feature on a treacly PJ Morton song, an achievement that could have tipped her back into splashy pop and widespread radio play.
Instead, JoJo has quietly crafted what she calls a “capsule project,” an elegant EP with deliberate and defined parameters. The music on Trying Not to Think About It is meant to portray the singer’s struggles with anxiety and depression: These are soft, cozy songs, with harmonies tucked between trickling piano keys and misty synths. “I hope this feels like a warm weighted blanket,” she told MTV, and the 12-track project plays like her most cohesive release yet. She constructs and curates a delicate feeling of intimacy, instructing us to exhale at the end of “Good Enough *interlude*,” like the narrator of a meditation app. On “Anxiety (Burlinda’s Theme),” she personifies her mental illness, addressing it in the second person: “You only show up when it’s inconvenient,” she belts over a building drumbeat. “Your power is amazing!” Elsewhere, she sings about slow, quiet collapse and the feeling of being drained. “The energy that it takes to be somebody just ain’t in me,” she murmurs over finger snaps on “Fresh New Sheets,” pleading to stay curled up with her space heater.
“Fresh New Sheets” is one of many moments that strains to be relatable, but the cutesy specificity can sound retrofitted from a meme or a tweet. She croons a jazzy ode to the comforts of “sugar and carbs”; she blames Mercury in retrograde. On “Spiral SZN,” a snappy pop track with blaring bass, she brands herself as someone who just “can’t chill,” tidying up the ache she articulates elsewhere. For too much of the record, JoJo relies on familiar metaphors: storms roaring in her brain, lovers shedding their skin, sunrise waiting on the horizon. Her vulnerability is commendable—this is the rawest she has ever been in her music—but she weakens the impact when she couches her confessions in worn imagery. It’s shallow writing about an inherently deep topic.
JoJo is still at her best when she’s at her most cutting, leveling the sting at herself. “Do I love you this much/Or is this just something to do?” she sings on “Feel Alright,” as her voice stretches into a howl. She makes her frustration palpable, sounding furious at her own self-sabotage. On “Good Enough,” her layered vocals swirl as she asks, over and over, if she can live up to her perfectionist standards, if she can ever find herself acceptable.
These songs feel less insightful, however, when you slot them into the long lineage of pop-adjacent artists musing about mental health. As the stigma finally, gradually starts to ebb, a wave of artists are singing about depression and anxiety, sometimes directly and sometimes draped in irony: “All the kids are depressed,” Jeremy Zucker hums; “I’m holding hands with my depression,” Julia Michaels rasps; “I feel like giving up,” Shawn Mendes wails. JoJo’s contributions succeed when her songs feel like snapshots, documenting her internal tension. She doesn’t stun us with insight and she doesn’t describe mental illness in a new or novel way. Instead, she offers a graceful portrait of a hidden battle, with the hope that someone hearing it might feel less alone.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Clover / Warner | October 15, 2021 | 6.3 | 204fa91f-3996-4222-a2c8-b878343bb3db | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Singer/songwriter Gallant's weightless voice channels ’80s and ’90s R&B, channeling the feeling of those eras without taking too much from them. On Ology, he’s coming to grips with all the struggle he’s endured, assessing himself through a mix of candor and ambiguity. | Singer/songwriter Gallant's weightless voice channels ’80s and ’90s R&B, channeling the feeling of those eras without taking too much from them. On Ology, he’s coming to grips with all the struggle he’s endured, assessing himself through a mix of candor and ambiguity. | Gallant: Ology | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21770-ology/ | Ology | Christopher Gallant’s story is fairly common: The singer/songwriter got his start recording tracks as a teenager to assuage his angst. After high school, Gallant moved from Columbia, Md., a sprawling suburb of Washington, D.C., to New York City to study music and launch his career. But Gallant’s music didn't pan out there for whatever reason, so he eventually moved to Los Angeles after he graduated, where his aerial-view R&B had greater chances to be heard. Gallant soon caught the attention of Jake Udell, a business manager who helped catapult EDM artists ZHU and Krewella to prominence.
In 2014, Gallant released an EP called Zebra, a moody affair on which the singer delved into his own anxieties and partially addressed his time in New York. The results were haunting, and you could feel the pressure Gallant was under to make a way on his own. New York’s pace is incredibly fast; Gallant’s music is made for wide-open spaces, to enter the room and spread out comfortably. There was undeniable talent on Zebra, but the singer’s vocals were somewhat recessive, his piercing falsetto hidden behind dense electronic layers.
Gallant’s voice is more pronounced on Ology, a sign that the singer is becoming more confident in his art and the personal stories he shares. His pain is still prevalent, his torment a strong inspirational source that remains for the album’s duration. There’s a sense of isolation in these songs, as if Gallant recorded them alone in the dark, with only his introspection pushing him toward something brighter. Gallant mines that despair for self-therapy; his cathartic wails echo through the stillness, arriving in sharp bursts. On "Talking to Myself," for example, Gallant unveils hurt in the smoothest way possible, masking it behind a sultry R&B groove. "I’ve been whispering to ghosts lately," he sings over a stuttering melody. "I’m begging for more time, before I’m buried deeper in the trenches of insanity." Gallant’s lyrics are vast and ambiguous, taking tonal cues from Frank Ocean while coming to grips with his own struggles. Gallant’s words read like diary entries on paper and sound mysterious on the album, unveiling pieces of his life without giving too much away. Gallant is a self-proclaimed introvert, so as a result, it's hard to get a sense of just who he’s supposed to be. His lyrics seem weightless, wafting throughout Ology without landing anywhere.
Gallant’s voice and the delicate way he contorts it, emulating ’80s and ’90s R&B without taking too much from those eras, is easily his best attribute. Ology recalls the great feelings of those genres, with subtle tinges of hip-hop and soul, leaving a nostalgic imprint. On "Miyazaki," over a beat seemingly flown in from the early 2000s Soulquarians/Touch of Jazz period, Gallant reinterprets a line from Groove Theory's classic "Tell Me," his version giving off the same sweet vibe as the original. On assertive ballads like "Weight in Gold" or "Bone + Tissue," Gallant’s inflection is the clear focal point. On those tracks and others, Gallant's delivery takes precedence over what he's saying. His words come off poetically, and in its totality, Ology is a slow burn that grows more infectious as it plays. Gallant pivots adeptly between old and contemporary styles, landing on something all his own. | 2016-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mind of a Genius | April 12, 2016 | 7.5 | 20578379-4f59-4e31-9d94-763b4b382419 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
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