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The debut collaboration of Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner is gorgeous and ponderous, a document of a creative process that feels a bit like watching someone get purposefully lost. | The debut collaboration of Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner is gorgeous and ponderous, a document of a creative process that feels a bit like watching someone get purposefully lost. | Big Red Machine: Big Red Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-red-machine-big-red-machine/ | Big Red Machine | Big Red Machine want you to think of their music not as a definitive product but as an indefinite process. Maybe not in a sudden Kanye “Ima fix wolves” kind of way, but more like a document of a process. When an album is framed this way, you can perhaps experience something new outside of a consumer framework, free of the burden of marketing and metrics, and rewarding on its own pure terms. This is the punk theory offered by PEOPLE, the recently launched artist collective founded by Justin Vernon of Bon Iver fame, the National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner, and entrepreneurs Tom and Nadine Michelberger. PEOPLE functions as a digital space for artists to experiment and create without ads or pitiless streaming margins. It is indie music’s small war against ethical consumption in late capitalism.
PEOPLE’s flagship release is Big Red Machine, an album that began 10 years ago when Aaron sent Vernon a slight instrumental sketch. Vernon donated his words and falsetto, and soon it became “Big Red Machine,” which appeared on the era-defining 2009 charity compilation Dark Was the Night. Almost a decade later, the two reconvened in Vernon’s April Base studio in Wisconsin to rediscover their collaborative spirit in earnest. The floating bog of an album they created there is both gorgeous and ponderous, using the same puddingy, R&B textures found on Bon Iver’s 2016 landmark art-pop album 22, A Million and the National’s still-great Sleep Well Beast, from last year. It feels a bit like watching someone get purposefully lost just because, well, they’ve never really been lost before, have they.
And if Vernon and Dessner are really trying to make PEOPLE “as much about the process of making work and showing all that openly, as the final outcome,” then perhaps what the sprawling and often inscrutable Big Red Machine does best is—through the medium by which it is delivered and the circumstances that birthed it—interrogate what we expect from music in the streaming era. It’s hard to hold onto anything concrete, musically or lyrically, here. The album’s 10 songs are much more thematic, sensory, and impressionistic. Their compositions are all suspension and ellipses, Vernon’s lyrics are mostly Sativa-fuelled poetry overlaid with the kind of yearning that comes from years of writing songs about doomed lovers. It is in between states, a musical and economic parasomnia that feels incomplete by the standard definition of an album but fully formed by PEOPLE’s definition.
Perhaps it’s unfair to levy criticisms about its lack of destination when getting lost for 45 minutes is kind of the point. All these songs creep in from and trickle back out into the night without much of an explanation. “Gratitude” builds out from a simple low-bit drum sample and a stately Dessner guitar riff to include a chorus of live drums, omnichord, piano, and Vernon singing about a litany of images whose relation to one another seems all but undiscoverable: a big bean field, Indians in the graveyard, lovers who were quarterbacks. On the opener “Deep Green,” the Vernon Mad Libs continue: “We met up like a ski team”—whose meetup habits are historically unremarkable to my knowledge—and then, “Well we rose up outta G-League/In a Teepee gloss/Where your tea leaves, boss?” The leaps from one image to another are so large it becomes impossible to glean any emotional connection; you’re simply hanging on to Vernon’s voice for dear life.
That voice—one of the most expressive baritones in indie music—is the showpiece throughout. And unlike 22, A Million, it is mostly naked and unprocessed, which brings you that much closer to his wintery impressionism. There’s an organic, old-school Bon Iver feel to the piano-led “Hymnostic,” a last-call, 6/8 ballad that runs on a rather traditional set chord changes. It isn’t until the instrumental break that a cacophony of distorted voices and buzzing synths take over the song for a bit, giving it a more acidic, unsettling tone. It’s one of many moments on the album when the production and arrangement pull focus and expand the borders of a song. Dessner and Vernon could place a distorted guitar sound off in the distance for you to squint at, then a woman vocalizing appears behind you, until a string section is summoned quickly in the foreground. As plodding as these songs can feel, they are composed in multiple dimensions and with a wide field of vision.
I’m reminded of the National’s 2015 project A Lot of Sorrow, a six-hour experimental live show they worked on with Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson (who, incidentally, also co-wrote “Hymnostic”). It was a process, too: drilling down into one song, pulling it apart in an endurance test to uncover the very essence of a band. But the work of Big Red Machine feels inessential by design. In fact, it calls into question what is essential in the modern economy of music: emotionally, politically, physically. An album intended to be distributed outside the major streaming ecosystem (though it is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal) and through a transparently collaborative process is just going to sound different and behave differently as a piece of art. Trying to meet it on its level is frustrating, but for fans of Bon Iver and the National, it will sound like a fascinating appendix to their catalogs.
In considering this idea of process outside economy, I keep coming back to a phrase Vernon sings over and over on the lovely “People Lullaby”: “Has me all borderline re-erased.” It’s a line I could burrow into for hours, in all its colloquial recursiveness, in all its dreamy inconsequence. What is this feeling that causes him to feel this way? The line doesn’t drill into the blood and body of the songwriters, it simply wonders the space and then takes its leave. It’s not the feeling of something tangible, sellable, describable, permanent—but it’s a good feeling, fleeting, and if strung together over a period of time, maybe feelings like that can give music a new kind of value. | 2018-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | PEOPLE / Jagjaguwar | September 4, 2018 | 7 | 2062622e-238d-4414-9e60-f176d5df0ab1 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
The ferocious noise-punk quartet Greys redirects indie rock's inward gaze back out into the wider world. | The ferocious noise-punk quartet Greys redirects indie rock's inward gaze back out into the wider world. | Greys: Outer Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21716-outer-heaven/ | Outer Heaven | For the past five Halloweens, Toronto has played host to Death to T.O., a marathon two-level party where 20-odd local bands dress up as some iconic group and cover a bunch of their songs in rotating 20-minute mini-sets. Last October, noise-punk quartet Greys performed as Smashing Pumpkins, a ruse that required not just an aesthetic suspension of belief (no dollar-store blond wig can make hulking bassist Colin Gillespie look like D'Arcy) but an ideological one as well. Essentially, the Pumpkins are Greys' polar opposites. Where Billy Corgan channels themes of alienation into unabashedly earnest, immaculately rendered grunge-prog, Greys power through theirs with bull-in-a-china-shop recklessness and snarky humor. And the messianic cult of personality and gothic flamboyance that Corgan so eagerly cultivates is antithetical to Greys' everyman, stage-leveling ethos. After all, Greys are the sort of band that write songs in honour of Fugazi's Guy Picciotto, while cheekily acknowledging that idolizing an anti-rock star like Picciotto is idolatry nonetheless ("You do what you do/ I do it, too!").
But listen to Greys' second full-length, Outer Heaven, and that Pumpkins gambit seems less like a one-off goof than a practice drill for the new album's fearless embrace of both art-rock experimentalism and pop accessibility. When they first emerged in 2011, Greys came off like a less brawny, more bratty complement to fellow Toronto-scene stalwarts Metz. Singer-guitarist Shehzaad Jiwani didn't necessarily shy away from melodic choruses and introspective lyricism, but he had to blow out his vocal cords to be heard amid the band's Jehu-schooled, post-hardcore pummel. And the feelings of inadequacy he was trying to express were filtered through cheeky song titles (see: "Use Your Delusion") and tongue-in-cheek complaints ("Wish I was born in New York, wish I was born in L.A., wish I was born in the royal family"). But with the tranquil, starlit jangle of the opening "Cruelty," Outer Heaven marks a clean, abrupt break from that past—not just by opening up greater spatial possibilities in the band's sound world, but by foregrounding a nakedly emotional tenor that permeates even the more typically ferocious tracks that follow.
Like many ’90s kids, Greys got swept up in the alt-rock revolution, before burrowing deeper underground to discover the self-sustaining network of bands and labels that laid the groundwork for it. (That evolution can be traced from the fact the aforementioned song about Picciotto swipes its opening line from the Foo Fighters: "There goes my hero!/ He lives right down the street!") Now that "indie" has become a satellite-radio format for well-heeled commuters, it's hard to remember a time when such a discovery could be so empowering that it could alter the course of one's life. But guitar-driven indie rock's deliberately modest scale and often introverted, sometimes ironic sensibility can make it ill-equipped to address the more complex socio-political conversations that dominate our thoughts today; at a time when the top pop stars of our age are tackling big issues head on, the insular nature of indie rock can seem antiquated at best and tone-deaf at worst. For those raised to believe in indie-rock's insurrectionary spirit, it's easy to feel like you were sold a false bill of goods—a music that once seemed absolutely revolutionary now reeks of complacency and privilege.
Jiwani is a unique position to reconcile this divide. He's of South Asian descent, which makes him a minority amid a scene that's predominantly white even in a city as famously multicultural as Toronto. So you could say his relationship with indie rock is complicated, and that tension comes to a head on Outer Heaven's delirious mid-album highlight, "Complaint Rock." Jiwani gamely assumes the role of a slack motherfucker ("gimme gimme my gold star/ for not trying so hard"), before summing up his chosen vocation with a two-faced cry of "I hate it!/ I want it!/ I need it! /I love it!" That conflict is as much musical as lyrical: partway through, the song's glass-smashing abandon gives way to a gentle waves of rippling, psychedelic guitars—as if Jiwani suddenly slipped into a spa isolation-tank treatment mid-song—before it's violently thrust back into attack mode for a final blitz. And that push-pull structure presents a perfect microcosm of Greys' larger mission—as easy as it is to complain about the state of indie rock and check out of the conversation, they feel compelled to stay in the game to get the job done right.
On Outer Heaven, that means redirecting indie rock's capacity for introspection and turning its gaze outward. In the past, Jiwani has expressed feelings of otherness in more generally misanthropic terms ("wish I could be somebody else and just go," he declared back on "Use Your Delusion"), but Outer Heaven's searing, slow-boiling salvo "No Star" sees him tackling matters of race in more explicit terms: "Don't shoot/ I'm not the enemy," he sings, giving voice to anxieties in the wake of last fall's Paris attacks and the subsequent bloodlusty calls for swift vengeance. And when you consider that he routinely gets the third-degree treatment from airport security, the harsh opening line of the industrialized stomper "Sorcerer"—"My body makes me sick/ I'm trapped inside my skin"—assumes an even more brutal resonance. But the songs here also touch on more universal, but often documented, situations: "Blown Out" chronicles the effects of depression on a romantic relationship, the song's thundering thrust and surging choruses mirroring the inner turmoil of someone who's "having a hard time when everything's fine."
Outer Heaven's heightened ambitions are best measured in terms of density rather than sprawl: the most bracing songs here pack in more radiant guitar textures, a greater lyrical depth, and sharper hooks without sacrificing Greys' innate moshability and punk-schooled economy. Ironically, the more self-consciously outré material feels staid by comparison: the sudden grindcore shocks of "Strange World" can't quite force the song to shake off its dirgey gait, and though the drum machine-ticked "My Life As a Cloud" taps into the spectral beauty of Halcyon Digest-era Deerhunter, its trickling guitar outro closes this highly charged album on an oddly resigned note. But even if Greys are still learning how to stretch out with purpose, Outer Heaven serves as a most welcome reminder of indie rock's iconoclastic potential, from a band committed to the belief that it could be your life. | 2016-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Carpark / Buzz | April 13, 2016 | 7.8 | 206e2967-643a-4503-863c-089a648078ea | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
This welcome reissue of the Clientele's first full-length restores it to its UK tracklisting and artwork and puts it back in print on vinyl for the first time in years. The original album has lost none of its evocative indie pop brilliance, and the bonus disc fleshes out the story of the band's early days. | This welcome reissue of the Clientele's first full-length restores it to its UK tracklisting and artwork and puts it back in print on vinyl for the first time in years. The original album has lost none of its evocative indie pop brilliance, and the bonus disc fleshes out the story of the band's early days. | The Clientele: Suburban Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19257-suburban-light/ | Suburban Light | In the late 1990s, an English band called the Clientele began to put out 7" singles on small labels like Pointy and Motorway and Elefant. The songs, mostly written by leader Alasdair MacLean, sounded as though they were recorded inexpensively but they didn’t sound careless; with rich, heavy reverb and careful arrangements, they had the whiff of a band with big ideas who didn’t yet have the resources to realize them. And so, instead, they huddled together in a rented room somewhere, turned on the tape machine, and created a world as best they could.
Suburban Light, the first full-length by the Clientele, initially released in late 2000, gathered these early singles and some other stray tracks. It was a modest record that developed a small cult, one that would grow a little bit with each new Clientele record through the last decade. While the group always had a very specific and identifiable aesthetic, they never quite sounded like this again, if only because, once they were signed to labels and putting out albums, they began to record in proper studios. But while Suburban Light is a special record, it’s not surprising that, for many, it flew under the radar. For one, its core musical idea—guitar-centric indie pop enamored with the gently psychedelic 1960s (deep Beatles cuts, Donovan, Kinks, West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band) and the UK indie pop of the ’80s (Felt, Television Personalities)—isn’t exactly novel. It’s not hard to imagine hearing these songs casually and thinking “Sounds nice enough” and then moving on to something more immediately distinctive. But those who stop there are really missing out; Suburban Light is a very unusual record in its way, a perfectly realized amalgam of time, place, sound, and subject matter.
Clues to its enduring appeal can be found in its most immediately noticeable quality: the relentless repetition of a small handful of themes. Almost every song here mentions rain, and two do so in the titles; there are references to stars and eyes and gardens and light and leaves and silent motorways—elemental tools for building intimate pop songs. But instead of worrying about redundancy, Alasdair embraces the recurring images, and the cumulative effect over the course of the record is that the record feels very much like a specific place, somewhere you visit rather than something you listen in on. This, combined with the album’s rich, heavily reverbed sound, makes Suburban Light feel unusually enveloping.
MacLean has always been open about his influences: surrealist poetry, found-object art, the fathoms-deep atmosphere of Galaxie 500. From the surrealists he learned a rich vividness with language; lines like “Bicycles have drifted through these leaves still wet with rain” (from “Bicycles”) and “6 am in morningside, the first car rushes by/ We walk down to the garden and the sunlight fills your eyes” (from “6am Morningside”, included in the U.S. version of Suburban Light and here on the bonus disc) have an uncanny ability to put pictures in your head. Suburban Light is filled with such couplets, lines dripping with romantic yearning for something just out of reach paired with nostalgia for something slipping from memory. The freighted imagery inflates mundane objects and situations into impossibly grand tableaus; these songs invite you to look a little more deeply at your surroundings, to see how a few workers walking over a bridge at dawn might be connected to your own sense of dislocation.
Indeed, Suburban Light evokes a lonely world. One of the reasons the record sounds so dreamlike is that the narrator is completely in his own head; he wanders lamp-lit streets and sees a carnival crowd dispersing but feels a million miles away. The scenes describing human contact seem to happen more in imagination than reality. So in addition to romanticizing the mundane, Suburban Light also makes moving through the world in solitude and observing it carefully seem like a state of grace.
Driving home all these quiet scenes and minute observations is music that is unfailingly gorgeous. MacLean is an inventive guitar player and he sings with real emotion, and he also has the songwriting chops to hang with his earlier pop heroes. Part of why Suburban Light feels so bound to memory is because the constructions of the songs hearkens back to an age when the right chord change, when paired with the precise melodic turn, counted for everything. The songs seem old in part because their melodic conception is from another era, one when competition for penning tunes was thick. And the extreme reverb, sometimes reminiscent of the ghost halo of echo surrounding voices in the Flamingos' “I Only Have Eyes for You”, evokes a particular era of radio, one we know now only filtered through many generations of media.
One of Suburban Light’s paradoxical qualities is that it’s not afraid of boredom. Because of its golden AM sonics, Suburban Light always exists on one level as ambiance, the kind of mildly bland prettiness you hear leaking from a beat-up transistor set to an oldies station. That quality, of past and present and foreground and background all existing at the same time, makes me think of a certain strand of atmospheric electronic music. MacLean has expressed great admiration for the music of Boards of Canada, but Suburban Light seems spiritually akin to something like An Empty Bliss Beyond This World by the Caretaker, the way it creates a stirring atmosphere that’s unsettling in its surface beauty while containing layers of deeper meaning. On the Clientele’s Lost Weekend, which contains tracks recorded around the same time as some of the songs here, there’s a brief sound collage with street noise called “Boring Postcard”. The title is a reference to Martin Parr’s book of the same name, which presents selections from his collection of postcards gathered over the years, without comment. The book features ancient snapshots of roads and banks and hotel lobbies, most of which are eerily empty; Clientele songs could be set in these places.
And now, thanks to Merge’s 25th anniversary reissue program, Suburban Light is back in print on vinyl, where it belongs. The bonus disc included here is universally excellent, and includes the tracks that were on the American version of Suburban Light as well as a few other singles that could have been on the record proper. It’s the definitive statement of early Clientele, and it underscores the kind of subtle brilliance this band was capable of. Suburban Light is ultimately about a particular way of seeing, of looking at your life from the outside while living inside of it, romanticizing events as they happen. All of which connects it firmly to the mindset of youth and young adulthood, when you’re straddling the space between hazy childhood and the uncertain future, inhabiting a world so lovely and unreal. | 2014-05-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-05-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | May 27, 2014 | 9.1 | 2072b46b-a935-40d3-bf29-d6bb82e602cd | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Circuit Des Yeux’s Haley Fohr recasts her alter ego as a long-haul trucker against ambitious, synthetic soundscapes that evoke the near-spiritual loneliness of the solo traveler. | Circuit Des Yeux’s Haley Fohr recasts her alter ego as a long-haul trucker against ambitious, synthetic soundscapes that evoke the near-spiritual loneliness of the solo traveler. | Jackie Lynn: Jacqueline | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jackie-lynn-jacqueline/ | Jacqueline | On Haley Fohr’s second album under the moniker Jackie Lynn, she lays out her rules for travelers. “Travel light, share your finds,” she starts out on “Traveler’s Code of Conduct,” doling out seemingly familiar instructions before the track slowly disintegrates, turning sinister and surreal. A low, electronic thrum engulfs Fohr’s voice as she begins firing off more complex, difficult thoughts—“I’m thinking of past lives/I’m thinking of having a kid”—the kind that might occur to you after long hours alone on the road. As with Fohr’s best songwriting, like her 2018 record as Circuit Des Yeux, what first appears simple or familiar soon reveals strange and surprising depths.
When we first met Jackie Lynn, she was a drug kingpin telling an elaborate tale of revenge and redemption. Jacqueline, however, depicts the everyday inner life of a long-haul truck driver. It’s a shift in character, retaining the dramatic presence of Jackie Lynn while re-casting the specifics. By adding the element of long-distance travel, Fohr merges Jackie’s story more closely with her own: The album was conceived largely during time on the road as a touring musician. In her original iteration, Jackie Lynn came with a lot of baggage, but on Jacqueline, she’s stripped back to an archetype. Fohr describes her as “more of a costume than a figure... her wig looks like a wig. It doesn’t look like real hair. I want people to recognize that that’s someone dressed up. All you need is dirty wigs to find a new you.”
Cut through with the scent of gasoline and hairspray, Jacqueline revels in the gritty glamour of its central concept. With the assistance of Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, and Dan Quinlivan (aka Bitchin Bajas), the ambitious, synthetic soundscapes have the feeling of trying on every gown in the closet. The record opens with the propulsive drum pattern and hyperactive synth melodies of “Casino Queen,” mimicking the forward motion of wheels on tarmac. “Shugar Water” is a bluesy, rambunctious bar sing-a-long, and “Odessa”—a seven-minute psychedelic jam—is a journey within itself. On the latter, Fohr carves out wide open spaces between her chopped-up vocal lines, using acidic sci-fi synths and urgent drums to evoke the near-spiritual loneliness of the solo traveler.
Yet the isolation of Jackie Lynn is felt most deeply in the album’s meditative moments. On some of these more minimalist songs, like “Dream St.” and “Lenexa,” the structure can feel so slight and spacious that there’s little to grab onto. But on the album closer “Control,” a masterful slow release, Fohr evokes a very different side of her titular character. Here, the casino queen has mellowed and turned inwards, hands steady on the wheel as she drives into the sunset.
Once again, Jackie’s experience seems to dovetail with Fohr’s own: Between extreme bursts of extroversion, the traveling performer must also find peace with her own thoughts. Fohr’s songwriting has always envisioned a vast emotional landscape, and in just a short time with Jackie Lynn/Jacqueline, she shows us a broad sweep of this driver’s isolated life. On the twinkling, sighing “Lenexa,” Fohr repeatedly intones: “I got everything you need.” The double-edged pronouncement encapsulates the mood of the record: On the one hand, it is an empowering statement of wholeness and self-sufficiency; and yet, in Fohr’s resonant voice, it is weighted with sadness.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Drag City | April 13, 2020 | 7.5 | 2073971c-cf80-4f0e-a4b4-bb8d4aef0ab3 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
The Nots' second album finds the Memphis band moving beyond minute-long blasts of hooky punk and experimenting with new textures and art-damaged noise. | The Nots' second album finds the Memphis band moving beyond minute-long blasts of hooky punk and experimenting with new textures and art-damaged noise. | Nots: Cosmetic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22337-cosmetic/ | Cosmetic | At its inception, punk wasn’t just an attack on ’70s rock excess but on the very idea of entertainment. By holding up a mirror shard to society’s ills, punk’s message was that entertainment-as-escapism was a luxury we could no longer afford. When the E-word is dropped in a punk context, it hits like an F-bomb—from Gang of Four’s Entertainment! to Sleater-Kinney’s “Entertain,” the sentiment is dripping in sarcasm and spite. So when Nots singer/guitarist Natalie Hoffman shouts “Entertain me/Tell me who to be!” on her band’s second album, she’s in good, caustic company: By setting her crosshairs on the conformist, intellectually corrosive effects of pop culture, she reminds us that punk’s primary function is not to amuse, but to abuse.
“Entertain Me” is the sneering last song on Cosmetic, the follow-up to the Memphis foursome’s 2014 debut, We Are Nots. For a band that once dealt in 48-second blurts, the track’s seven-minute sprawl offers a convincing gauge of their growth; their double-timed rhythmic thrust stretches out hypnotically as Hoffman’s guitar stake out new spaces between piercing punk aggression and amorphous, art-damaged squall. To borrow a pair of songs from their debut, the Nots still make songs out of black mold and white noise—a combustible, crudely rendered fusion of ’60s garage-rock, ’70s post-punk, ’80s hardcore, and ’90s riot grrrl. But where the shout-along chants of We Are Nots were at least hooky enough to not completely scare away the bookers at Memphis morning talk shows, Cosmetic is uninterested in cultivating any crossover territory the band may have been accidentally trod upon the first time around. Like a boxer who’s just taken a gulp of water and had their cuts jellied, the Nots have leapt right back into ring angrier, bloodier, and eager to do more damage.
Where their debut attacked such pointed trash-culture targets as televangelists and psychic talk shows, Cosmetic is fueled by a more existential angst. While she still deals in terse Morse code melodies, Hoffman’s invectives are even more distorted and less decipherable, though song titles like “Inherently Low” and “No Novelty” leave little room for confusion. Melodies rumble and roil like an upset stomach. Before, keyboardist Alexandra Eastburn complemented the band’s trash ‘n’ bash with the standard synth-punk effects of ray-gun zaps and carnivalesque swirls; on Cosmetic, she lurks lower in the mix but her presence is all the more amplified through disorienting drones and queasy oscillations that permeate these songs like a thick fog.
From the all-tension, no-release surge of opener “Blank Reflection” to the creepy, echoing incantations of “Fluorescent Sunset,” Cosmetic conjures the white-knuckled feel of careening down a bumpy backwoods road in the dead of night, Eastburn’s quivering keyboards serving as the lone, flickering headlights. But the Nots’ growing affinity for sonic experimentation never feels at odds with their innate punk-rock primtivism. Rather, Cosmetic’s stewing textural undercurrent intensifies the band’s outer antagonism by highlighting the trembling, deep-seated dread within. It’s riveting and ruining in equal measure. | 2016-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Goner | September 3, 2016 | 7.8 | 20787f84-5458-4865-93f0-2ab0476fe2d4 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Bajan-British rapper’s debut tackles the UK’s pressing crises—a looming Brexit, class hostility, widening poverty—with great jokes and writerly candor. | The Bajan-British rapper’s debut tackles the UK’s pressing crises—a looming Brexit, class hostility, widening poverty—with great jokes and writerly candor. | Slowthai: Nothing Great About Britain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slowthai-nothing-great-about-britain/ | Nothing Great About Britain | The release of slowthai’s debut album, originally planned to coincide with Britain’s exit from the European Union, did not go exactly to plan. A familiar story: lazy management, a PR disaster, and industry pushback prompted a rethink of the release schedule. And since Brexit was delayed, slowthai let the album breathe, too.
The 24-year-old rapper born Tyron Frampton used the extra couple months wisely, proving politically savvy in interviews and putting his money where his mouth is: On his recent tour of small-town Britain, tickets sold for 99p, or about $1.30. In his canny press campaign, the Bajan-British rapper positioned himself as the “Brexit Bandit,” a social renegade lampooning the political calamity and its role as a weapon of mass distraction. Britain has a healthcare crisis, a housing crisis, and a giant stake in the climate crisis to be getting on with, but the constitutional crisis dominates feeds. With Nothing Great About Britain, slowthai springboards from the Brexit charade to riffs on nationalism and poverty, redistributing wealth across the attention economy.
As a product of a precarious Northampton upbringing, slowthai is well-versed in crisis management. He has a knack for writing his grievances into first-person tirades with subtle designs on our economic system. For those who grew up in the remains of Britain’s welfare state, it doesn’t take a big leap to join the personal and political. On “Slow Down,” a bruiser from last year’s Runt EP, slowthai recalled spending a miserable Christmas asking Santa to fix his dire living conditions. Even in adulthood, his plea to an indifferent higher power resonates. Why does poverty exist? To what authority do we complain? There’s no hotline for capitalist despair.
Instead, slowthai comes out with a verbal guillotine and a point to prove. First for the chop is Queen Elizabeth—a “cunt,” in his reckoning, on the incendiary title track. The jibe holds up a mirror to classism (“I will treat you with the utmost respect only if you respect me a little bit, Elizabeth,” he jokes in a mock-bourgeoisie accent) but it’s primarily an exhibition of glee. By debasing the royals, he rejects the social mores of an imperialist institution that shackled his grandfather and spawned the far-right English Defence League, both invoked in the song’s vivid opening scenes.
Growing up, slowthai says, he was “always zoning out but also mad observant,” a paradox familiar to introverts with the outward appearance of vacancy. But as a teenager, he scuffed social borders and dropped macho postures, refusing to honor the stratified rules of the playground. One result is a rejection of high- and low-culture distinctions: He begins the record necking a “bottle of Bucky in Buckingham Palace,” then, on “Doorman,” demands entry to a millionaire’s mansion, with class war-waging urgency.
Another consequence is his omnivorous musical style. Helped by dextrous lead producer Kwes Darko, slowthai spits on grime beats, blazes through stoner jams, barks over Mura Masa-produced electro punk, and schmoozes through hip-hop ballads. Skepta turns up for a slightly stiff cameo on UK drill taunt “Inglorious”—part of a brief mid-album sag, the only spell where slowthai sounds reined in—but by the following track, he’s spooling out a disarmingly sweet homebody anthem in “Toaster.”
He’s also a genius character writer. The dopey outlaw narrator of “Toaster” derides authority and preaches the virtues of weed smoking, individualism, and domestic sanctuary. But in a twist that’s equal parts Mike Skinner and Nabokov, he begins to let slip delusions of grandeur. By the end, the game’s up: Cops bang the front door and incarceration beckons. Still, in slowthai’s telling, it’s hard not to side with the harmless mope in his Gucci loafers.
It says plenty about slowthai’s ego that the most autobiographical song, “Northampton’s Child,” is actually an admiring portrait of his mother. With flip-book concision, he shows the teen mom leave home and survive an avalanche of romantic and domestic upheavals, only to lose her youngest son (slowthai’s brother) to muscular dystrophy. Inhabiting these childhood scenes, slowthai swings from big picture to small, visceral reaction to candid reflection. One moment he balls up with fury, landing off the beat to threaten his stepfather: “You’re lucky I’m not as big as you/I would punch you till my hands turn blue.” A line later, when the stepdad kicks the family out, slowthai spits: “Now we’re living at Tasha’s/Funny how good vibes turned that room to a palace.” The memory is depressingly beautiful, in its specificity and then, after so many years, in its endurance.
For all his cartoonish videos and stage theatrics, slowthai’s role as a single character in this ensemble cast shows the integrity he brings to the task. Though he nods to the mannerisms of Dizzee Rascal and JME, Nothing Great About Britain avoids cross-generational pandering and bypasses territorial arguments over the borders of grime and UK rap. What binds the album is slowthai’s soul: his meticulously drawn characters, his affinity for left-behind outsiders like the glue sniffers sampled on “Doorman,” and his impatience with a profit-motivated world where, as he once put it, “You’re competing constantly without wanting to.” The Britain he envisions is fairer, more leisurely and attentive, and united in its resistance to authority. It’s who our society overlooks, he suggests, that determines what we need to overthrow. | 2019-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | True Panther / Method | May 21, 2019 | 8.4 | 20794119-dd30-473f-9f2e-26ecfbca40eb | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
Now mostly famous for being famous, Snoop releases his latest reminder to the world that he's still an active musician. | Now mostly famous for being famous, Snoop releases his latest reminder to the world that he's still an active musician. | Snoop Dogg: Doggumentary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15303-doggumentary/ | Doggumentary | Last summer, Snoop Dogg headlined the backpack-centric Rock the Bells tour, performing his classic debut album, Doggystyle, in full every night and drawing rapturous reviews. This year, Snoop will make a few stops on Charlie Sheen's continuous-trainwreck Violent Torpedo of Truth tour, performing a song that he and Sheen have apparently recorded together. That duality is pretty much circa-2011 Snoop in a nutshell. He's a rap legend, and he's also an unapologetically inane public figure, someone who's more famous for being famous than he is for rapping. He seems to enjoy both roles in equal measure. And so late-period Snoop albums become weird, uncentered artifacts, with no real idea or consistent personality pulling them all together. You get sweeping attempts at crossover hits, nasty street-rap throwbacks, and bizarre cross-genre collaborations that any self-aware A&R never would've allowed. And even though Snoop is nowhere near the commercial force he once was, he can still round up a fuckton of famous people whenever he decides to record an album. Not too many artists would bury their Kanye West collaborations on track 18 of their albums, but that's what Snoop does on Doggumentary, his latest reminder to the world that he's still an active musician.
More than many of Snoop's recent efforts, Doggumentary has something of a sonic identity. Snoop mines slick, slapbass-heavy 1980s R&B and computer-funk on the album, working with producers like Fredwreck, Jake One, and Battlecat to conjure the smooth soul of the early Reagan era. Another rap veteran recently did great things with that same loose aesthetic playground: Big Boi on last year's excellent Sir Lucious Left Foot. But where Big Boi and his collaborators attacked that stuff with a giddy sense of experimental joy, Snoop just lets it sit there, as if his older-than-time persona will be enough to sell whatever he wants. And so vast stretches of the way-too-long Doggumentary drift by, making no impression whatsoever.
Snoop is still a perfectly capable rapper, but he doesn't let off a single memorable line on the whole album. Instead, his greatest strengths now are his delivery-- he can stick right to whatever beat the world throws at him-- and his wizened, familiar voice. Since neither of these things has changed in the past decade, every new Snoop verse feels like a verse we've heard before, with the possible exception of the parts of the gently moralistic "Peer Pressure" where Snoop tells kids to project inner strength and resist alcohol and drugs-- messages that directly contradict almost every other song on his album.
With Snoop more often than not acting as a big blank at the center of his own album, many of the best moments on Doggumentary belong to his collaborators: E-40 letting loose tumbling flows over chaotic Rick Rock production on "My Fucn House", R. Kelly bringing regal grace to an eerie Lex Luger beat on "Platinum", Devin the Dude's loping everydude warmth on the otherwise shameful "I Don't Need No Bitch". As for Snoop himself, the best parts come in the moments where he stops rapping altogether and sings instead, or where he raps so easily that he might as well be singing. It's surprising that he doesn't do that more often here, since the mostly-sung "Sensual Seduction" was his last serious solo hit. And here we get "Boom", with Snoop skipping lazily over a sample of Yazoo's deathless electro classic "Situation", and "Wet"-- a song inexplicably written for Prince William's bachelor party-- where Snoop intones freaky come-ons through heavy Auto-Tune over the Cataracts' spaced-out synth squirts.
And then there's "Superman", the acoustic-ramble Willie Nelson duet that absolutely shouldn't work but somehow does. Snoop and Willie are both braided, weed-addicted elder-statesman outlaw figures, so it makes sense that they'd get along. But this song, like the supremely silly 2008 Everlast collab "My Medicine", shows that Snoop's gravelly drawl is pretty well-suited for country music. If he ever decides to push himself again, that's one direction available to him. But let's be serious: Snoop Dogg is not pushing himself anytime soon. | 2011-04-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-04-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Priority | April 8, 2011 | 5.5 | 207e23fe-38df-4ce3-b3e4-a6f0d51b09c0 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
The debut LP from Boston indie rock band Palehound is inspired by leader Ellen Kempner's breakup. But like her former camp counselor and roommate, Speedy Ortiz's Sadie Dupuis, Kempner never lets a sad jam wallow. Her songs are full of odd little about-turns that elevate Dry Food above the usual plainspoken acoustic indie fare. | The debut LP from Boston indie rock band Palehound is inspired by leader Ellen Kempner's breakup. But like her former camp counselor and roommate, Speedy Ortiz's Sadie Dupuis, Kempner never lets a sad jam wallow. Her songs are full of odd little about-turns that elevate Dry Food above the usual plainspoken acoustic indie fare. | Palehound: Dry Food | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20869-dry-food/ | Dry Food | On 2013's Bent Nail EP, Palehound's Ellen Kempner sang about taking a carrot for a pet in order to stave off late-teen loneliness. She makes similarly childlike gestures on her debut album. "You made beauty a monster to me, so I'm kissing all the ugly things I see," she seethes at an ex in a so there voice on Dry Food's title track. It's the most deliciously futile form of revenge and reclamation: doing the opposite.
Dry Food is partially a product of the 21-year-old Boston-dwelling songwriter's first big breakup—the deeper kind of solitude of having known and lost someone. Its sound captures the Herculean efforts required to survive the ensuing slump: "All I need's a little sleep and I'll be good to clean and eat," she sings in a medicated sigh on "Easy", her acoustic guitar rising and dipping with the methodical pace of someone trying to make a new routine stick. But like her former camp counselor and roommate, Speedy Ortiz's Sadie Dupuis, Kempner never lets a sad jam wallow: she kicks the end of the song into shape with a zippy electric guitar motif and some awkward, itchy squall.
It's followed by "Cinnamon", which takes the opposite tack, hooked around the kind of amiable, waterlogged psych burble that Mac DeMarco noodles in his sleep. Kempner sings dreamily about her worst self-defeating impulses, but is stirred from her reverie by a divine revelation that her life is becoming "a pretty lie". Frantic drums force the song somewhere agitated and ascendant, but instead of bursting into some bright new phrase, the furor falls away like a captivating slo-mo bellyflop.
Kempner has a knack for these odd little about-turns that elevate Dry Food above the usual plainspoken acoustic indie fare. And like her old roommate, she often obscures her intentions between appealingly twisty language. "Mouth ajar watching cuties hit the half pipe/ I only feel half ripe/ Around healthier folk," she sings on "Healthier Folk". She distils her disgust at her own post-breakup malaise with perfectly understated images: "The hair that's in my shower drain/ Has been clogging up my home," she sings on "Dixie". "And I try to scoop it up, but I wretch until I'm stuck." It's maybe the most straightforward song here, just fingerpicked acoustic guitar, but she messes at it like a cat dragging a mouse into a dark nook.
Saddest of all is closer "Seakonk", where Kempner protests that she's not alone, actually; she's home watching TV with her parents, sister and their dogs. There's a blithe fairground pirate ship sway to the song, which she closes with a jaunty "doo doo doo" that could have come from the credits of one of the cartoons she's watching—only she lets the final note deflate with a groan. It's at this point that Dry Food confronts the point it's been evading: kidding yourself is no way to recover, and comfort offers little impetus to move on. Palehound's discomfiting, unflinching debut suggests she knew it all along. | 2015-08-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-08-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | August 17, 2015 | 8 | 207f1a7e-dd33-4f55-a511-083ab8f2bf2b | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The low-profile Houston producer and singer utilizes elements of contemporary trap music as a jumping-off point for R&B at its most abstract. His blurry portraits offer uncanny clarity. | The low-profile Houston producer and singer utilizes elements of contemporary trap music as a jumping-off point for R&B at its most abstract. His blurry portraits offer uncanny clarity. | Bwoy Coyote: BC | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bwoy-coyote-bc/ | BC | Not much information is readily available on Bwoy Coyote. All that can be gleaned from his Bandcamp page is that he is a producer and artist who lives in Houston. A sense of mystery also animates his music, which utilizes elements of contemporary trap as a jumping-off point for R&B at its most abstract. It’s easy to get lost in his maze of minimal production and meandering thoughts. On BC, his most recent EP, Coyote distinguishes himself by only gesturing at what he feels, providing the briefest glimpses of his inner world.
Coyote frames his complex lines with the most rudimentary trap essentials. Mirroring the rocket hinted at in its lyrics (“I go takeoff James Harden/Houston Rocket, how I’m balling, takeoff”), “Starpower” launches upward on hi-hats and blinking swells of synth. Coyote trails along behind, establishing a singular statement of purpose in his cryptic lines: “I don’t need no starpower/Just cut me my check.” He speaks these lines first, and then he sings them, doubling for emphasis. His melancholic determination is reflected both by the sparse production and his plaintive vocals. The muted trumpets on “From Here” don’t signal triumph as much as they do resignation, and the song’s slurred, slowed-down percussion sounds mired in the muck of the chorus: “Where do we go from here, baby/Said, where do we go from here.”
Coyote hides his inner conflicts in these cavernous, deceptively simple productions. On EP opener and trunk-rattler “Page” (jointly produced by Bwoy Coyote and Cubeatz), Coyote ruminates over a recently ended relationship. The cluttered hi-hats and reversed synth melodies reverberate with Coyote’s urgent warbling, a discordant mixture that matches the ambivalence of the recollection. Across the release, Coyote sounds like he’s looking back at a past event, determined not to carry the same mistakes with him to the present. He makes his resolve clear on “Spirit=Free” when he hums a halting affirmation to himself over the song’s ticking clock snare and toy-like melody: “Your spirit is free/Be all you want/Be all you can be.”
Coyote finds freedom within the self-imposed limits of his productions, luxuriating in their bounds. Over the whistles and noodling synth pads of “Ben” (co-produced with VVS Chris), Coyote transitions seamlessly from singing to rapping, moving from mocking posers to mourning Nipsey Hussle in the span of a few moments. When he mutters the chorus, “We might be coming up fast/We might be coming up slow,” he’s not embracing apathy as much as he’s narrating a moment in progress. His blurry portraits offer uncanny clarity. He doesn’t provide specifics; instead he allows his impressions to generate a logic of their own. The almost-ballad “Make U Understand” starts with what seems like a chorus (“I can’t make you understand/You just gotta know”), but Coyote quickly tires of it, preferring to list a series of non sequiturs instead: “Cream Russian/Fees coming/Feel like Pharrell/They frontin’.” In Coyote’s telling, love feels as transient and random as the words that get stuck in your head.
Coyote maintains a Drake-tier distance between himself and his emotions, and Lil Uzi Vert’s shadow looms over his mournful melodic choices, but his form, or rather his formlessness, is unique. His drum patterns and sedate melodies stand out because of their stark simplicity; they flash in the dark, drawing you, moth-like, toward them. His lyrics point at images and emotions, leaving any sort of final observation up to the viewer. It’s the nighttime music your mind makes before you drift off into sleep.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | September 22, 2020 | 7.1 | 2086855a-3fc1-4593-af82-f51ea3ce7bca | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
This restrained collection of solo piano instrumentals evokes Satie, but the often-overlooked experimental touches presage Sakamoto’s subsequent work. | This restrained collection of solo piano instrumentals evokes Satie, but the often-overlooked experimental touches presage Sakamoto’s subsequent work. | Ryuichi Sakamoto: BTTB (20th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ryuichi-sakamoto-bttb-20th-anniversary-edition/ | BTTB (20th Anniversary Edition) | Sometime in the late 1990s, Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto was stuck in a Tokyo traffic jam. A melody had popped into his head while he was driving; during the standstill, he called home and sang it into his answering machine, he remembers. At the time, Japan was still in the grips of “The Lost Decade,” a period of economic downturn following the inflated tech optimism and conspicuous consumption of the 1980s. Y2K anxiety was gathering momentum. Amid the stress of busy city streets, the melody harbored a yearning for the reflective pleasures and possibilities of meandering. The little tune eventually grew into “Opus,” the opening track of Sakamoto’s mid-career solo piano album, BTTB.
BTTB, an acronym for “Back to the Basics,” has generally been remembered as homage: Sakamoto doing Satie, painting impressionistic scenes to speak to the subconscious. Memory, however, has a tendency to behave like water—one minute flooding the senses, the next smoothing away details. In BTTB’s case, the weirder, more prescient, and occasionally humorous moments have been washed from the public record. To be fair, the album’s form was fluid from the start. First released in Japan in November 1998 with 14 tracks, it was reissued just four months later with the addition of the somber “Snake Eyes” and a four-handed piano version of the 1979 song “Tong Poo,” from Sakamoto’s hugely influential Yellow Magic Orchestra. Subsequent European and U.S. versions did away with some experimental tracks to make room for more commercial offerings.
This new 20th-anniversary edition feels like Sakamoto’s director’s cut. With 18 tracks, it combines the 1999 Japanese release with two cuts from the 2000 stateside version: the ad-soundtrack-turned-hit-single “Energy Flow” and a beautifully looping closer called “Reversing.” At odds with much of the plaintive piano playing, “Do Bacteria Sleep,” omitted from European and U.S. releases, uses a mouth harp to bring to life a microscopic world of sound. The mouth harp’s peculiar vibrations decay at more or less the same rate as a piano’s notes, so the track’s mid-album position offers a palate cleanser within the stream of familiar sounds. Still, the curio reminds the listener of the piano’s stringed interior, the mechanics of its timeless appeal.
As if to emphasize the point, Sakamoto lifts the piano’s lid on a trio of compositions during the album’s back half, using a prepared piano to channel Satie via John Cage. During “Prelude,” rubber erasers blunt the vibrations of the piano strings, conjuring a xylophone rusting in a well. “Sonata” applies a similar process to a tripled pace, forcing the overlapping notes into dissonance. The energy suggests the mating call of some undiscovered bird, tripping over itself to find a receptive partner.
“Uetax” raised the most eyebrows among classical listeners and critics expecting only pretty piano pieces. Watery gurgles, not unlike a stomach mid-digestion, obscure a very faint voice. One imagines a mic inside a container of water atop the piano strings; the track even shares a name with a waterproof microphone designed for hurricane conditions. But the process is less important than the feeling—in its swerving of convention, it tickles and delights. It also clears the way for “Aqua,” a piano version of a synth instrumental Sakamoto wrote for an album by his daughter, Miu. It is as close to balladry as BTTB gets.
“Uetax” and its prepared piano siblings predict Sakamoto’s 2017 album, async, which found him in an introspective yet adventurously ambient zone; their reintroductions here are reminders that he’s been breaking boundaries between music and mere sound for decades. While the fingers of Ravel, Brahms, and, yes, Satie all amble alongside Sakamoto’s on BTTB, his appetite for nesting experimental sonics within atmospheric meanderings mark the album as a contemporary treasure. Snatching a moment of pause, BTTB suggests, is the surest path to a fresh perspective. | 2019-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Kab America Inc. | March 2, 2019 | 8 | 20870fc0-7a3d-4043-9db0-80b88fd46500 | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | |
The Australian singer-songwriter looks to the warm, easygoing sounds of ’70s troubadours on an album that rarely demands attention, only politely asks for it. | The Australian singer-songwriter looks to the warm, easygoing sounds of ’70s troubadours on an album that rarely demands attention, only politely asks for it. | Tex Crick: Live in… New York City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tex-crick-live-in-new-york-city/ | Live in… New York City | Tex Crick is a man of few words. You’re less likely to know the keyboard player from his instrumental solo project than you are the many appearances he’s made over the past few years with indie luminaries from his native Australia and beyond. Although most well-known as a member of Kirin J Callinan’s band, Crick has navigated a twisty, pleasantly variegated career path —adding a citric piano line to Traffik Island’s “Sunday Painter” here, covering “Moonlight Shadow” in Weyes Blood’s band there. His one solo record so far, 2017’s largely instrumental psych set Between Cruel & Tender, suggested a wry, virtuosic sensibility behind the long list of credits. But for the most part, Crick’s enviable CV—add Connan Mockasin and Iggy Pop and South Coast punks the Pinheads to the list—paints a picture of a versatile, reliable musician.
Live In… New York City establishes him as just that: a magnetic and decidedly old-fashioned crooner, whose playfully composed love songs radiate warmth and familiarity. Years as a sideman have not diminished Crick’s ability to command an audience, though contrary to what the title implies, this is not an actual live album. As the first artist to release a non-Mac Demarco album on Mac Demarco’s label, Crick projects a self-assuredness beyond his years, displaying a canny knowledge of when to step into the spotlight and when to hang back. The result is a record with the ingenuity of a debut and all the easygoing charm of a classic.
That restraint comes in handy more than a few times on Live In… New York City. Crick’s production largely abandons the lush psych of Between Cruel & Tender in favor of the genial, piano-led pop of ’70s greats like Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson. The short instrumental passages towards the record’s back half in particular—“Spinster St. I” and “Spinster St. II,” with their duetting clarinet and piano parts—echo the more wistful moments of Newman’s film scores. Crick is in tune with this feather-touch vibe: the possibilities suggested by an ambling piano line gently fading out, the power and warmth of a well-placed horn section, and the resonance of a good cliche, like “I’m achin’ for ya!” dropped right as a song reaches its apex.
All three of those things appear on the centerpiece “Sometimes I Forget.” It and direct follow-up “Peaches & Cream” are pretty much the only songs on the album where Crick discernibly uses more than five or six instrumental tracks, and, fittingly, they arrive around halfway through, serving as emotional anchors. “Peaches & Cream” is also the only song on the record with distinct, changing verses, as opposed to repeated hooks and phrases. Placed at the center of an album that rarely demands attention, only politely asks for it, it’s a big swing into wide-grinning showmanship, and it works precisely because Crick doesn’t overuse the style. He sings a little like Arthur Russell at his poppiest, but elsewhere, he actually recalls Cass McCombs circa-Mangy Love—practically mumbling lyrics like “Sweet darlin, you’re always on my mind,” and, “Oh, the way you make me feel, it’s so unnatural” like a rockstar preparing a stadium show without wanting to strain his voice. This understated style gives Live In… New York City a homespun intimacy, as if Crick is happily but self-consciously playing these songs for just you.
The “live” here refers not to the album’s format, but its tenor. This is a studio album that celebrates the most wondrous parts of just being alive and in love, alive and just hanging about, alive and playing music, alive and being surrounded by the hustle and bustle of a new, endlessly fascinating city. Crick wrote and recorded the record during a period of living in the New York training as a piano repairman, and many of the songs are set to a faint buzz of the sounds of the city, including recordings taken of the patrons at jazz bars Crick would frequent. New York is both culturally and geographically one of the absolute furthest places in the world from Australia, and this element of Crick’s production reflects the romantic, eye-opening wonder of moving to a place that feels sprung from the furthest corners of your imagination, when even the ambient buzz of its nightlife feels like a melody. These moments on Live In… New York City are just as important as the more distinct segments, and when Crick takes the spotlight—whether with a piano line or a vocal line—it feels earned, respectful of the fact that Crick is just one character in a sea of many. That is the crux of Crick’s artistry: a few words, done well.
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. | 2021-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mac’s Record Label | March 30, 2021 | 7.3 | 20882045-835e-48e7-8e8b-e41752c83a59 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The individual songs on the K-pop girl group’s mini-album are perfectly adequate, but the release itself never reaches the group’s former heights. | The individual songs on the K-pop girl group’s mini-album are perfectly adequate, but the release itself never reaches the group’s former heights. | Red Velvet: Queendom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/red-velvet-queendom/ | Queendom | When K-pop girl group Red Velvet debuted in 2014, it was unclear how well the then-quartet would fare. “Happiness” felt like a revamp of Miss A’s “Breathe”—quirky and fun but unconvincing as a first impression. It was followed by a cover of “Be Natural” that was too faithful to the original to showcase Red Velvet’s creativity. Then, half a year and one additional member later, they released two back-to-back singles that catapulted them into K-pop’s upper echelon: “Ice Cream Cake,” a sneering cheerleader romp with music box melodies, Brill Building girl-group harmonies, and a Skrillex-like buzz, and “Automatic,” a slick and sumptuous ’90s R&B track. These two songs were emblematic of their “red” (upbeat) and “velvet” (slower) sides, respectively, but more importantly, they foretold their impressive range.
Red Velvet’s discography serves as a convenient entry point for those interested in what contemporary K-pop does best. For a one-upping of a major Western pop single, there’s “Dumb Dumb,” which transforms “Bang Bang” into an even more boisterous kitchen-sink frenzy. For Korea’s undying love for Yours Truly-era Ariana Grande, there’s the unassailable “Talk to Me.” For a top-shelf K-pop song inspired by Ghost Town DJ’s’ “My Boo,” there’s the heartfelt “Blue Lemonade.” There are truly singular moments, too. “Bad Boy” is one of the only K-pop songs to actually feel sexy, its bassline and synths playfully grinding on each other, while “RBB (Really Bad Boy)” is built on an outrageous assortment of campy whistle-register shrieks and vocal warm-ups. The group’s first two albums, The Red and Perfect Velvet, are among the strongest albums in contemporary Korean music history, regardless of genre. Given such remarkable consistency, it’s fitting that Red Velvet’s latest mini-album is titled Queendom—they handily tower above their contemporaries.
Queendom doesn’t overflow with excellence, though, and its title track rarely offers the quintet the chance to flaunt their vocal prowess. After the year-and-a-half wait since their last single “Psycho,” the song’s uplifting dance-pop is too low-key and frustratingly one-dimensional. In the past, Red Velvet’s singles had specific textures and structures that bolstered their lyrics; the streamlined genre-blending of “Red Flavor” concluded with a sudden ritardando, suggesting a final savoring of summer love, while the stirring chord changes and strings of “One of These Nights” mirrored its uneasy navigation of heartbreak. Here, the message is one of direct encouragement, and without any risk-taking, cries to “be boss” fall flat. The pre-chorus stands out for its piano-house chords; they’re graceful and warm, like a friend clutching your hand, providing a wordless assurance of support. Yet this affection doesn’t register elsewhere, so the pep rings hollow.
Much of Queendom is similarly unambitious, but a couple of its other songs at least have everything in order. “Knock on Wood” traces the anxieties of falling in love, fleshing out the range of emotions felt with careful detail. The verses have sweet melodies, but sharp synth stabs reveal an undercurrent of nervousness. Later, the chorus’ staccato-like singing finds Red Velvet trying to appear composed. Even the titular line’s varied deliveries are important: When the members use a higher register, they sound giddy and hopeful, whereas confident moments present them as hotly determined to win over their crush. “Pushin’ N Pullin’” is the most brilliant track: After a referee whistle blows, piano chords bounce back and forth to signal fighting between lovers. When the chorus arrives, vocal harmonies blossom and push everything else aside. That the piano can be heard beneath this breathy, blissful cloud is moving; it’s a symbol of how this couple’s long-standing love and patience win over their quarreling. It’s the most striking depiction of romance in Red Velvet’s career.
Queendom both falters and thrives in simplicity. On “Better Be,” an elastic beat bubbles and squirms, but neither the vocal harmonies nor the instrumentation create enough tension to move the song past charmless cool. With its f(x) verses and ITZY synths, “Pose” convinces you of its poise despite the tepid energy level. “Hello, Sunset” actually nails a laid-back atmosphere, forming a gentle swaying rhythm with guitar strums. For a song about luxuriating in the joys of a long-lasting relationship, it’s an apt closer to this chapter of Red Velvet’s career.
In fact, right before Queendom’s release, the group celebrated their seventh anniversary with the “Queens Archive,” providing short video clips soundtracked by non-singles from their back catalog. Though it served as a reminder of how strong their music has always been, seeing these videos prior to Queendom’s release was bittersweet; it feels like Red Velvet are uninterested in proving their royal status on this mini-album. No song here is outright bad, and much of their best assets shine through the banalities, but Queendom feels like a signpost of Red Velvet’s former glory. You come to it expecting to meet the royals in the flesh, only to be confronted with their portraits instead.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | SM Entertainment | August 20, 2021 | 6.7 | 20904b07-a5da-4add-b4b1-56c1475433fb | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
The second album from the crossover star features a few inarguable pop hits, but Post Malone’s singular, dour mood wears thin and grows stale after too long. | The second album from the crossover star features a few inarguable pop hits, but Post Malone’s singular, dour mood wears thin and grows stale after too long. | Post Malone: Beerbongs & Bentleys | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/post-malone-beerbongs-and-bentleys/ | Beerbongs & Bentleys | At his Coachella set this year, Post Malone indulged in a little score-settling. He ran down some of the insults his critics hurled at him early in his career—“one-hit wonder,” “culture vulture,” “piece of shit”—during a heated rant that boiled down to: Look at me now. He certainly has reason to gloat. With his recent hits, he’s not only vanquished any lingering notion that his breakout single “White Iverson” was a fluke, but also proven himself one of the most perceptive figures in pop right now, an artist with a better understanding of commercial winds than even most of the rappers he cribs from.
Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Yachty, and their peers may have ushered in rap’s current rock-star era, but none have run quite as far with the premise as Post Malone. For Post, “rock star” is less a genre signifier and more a declaration of mass appeal. His music is melodic trap, mostly, yet its rugged sensitivity is so universal that much of it could slot into rock or even country playlists, too. He only rarely uses guitars, but they’re often implied. And while there isn’t so much a hint of twang on his stature-cementing sophomore album, Beerbongs & Bentleys, based on his guttural, belted delivery on opener “Paranoid,” it’s not a stretch to imagine him doffing a cowboy hat for a cheering arena. Twenty years after Whitey Ford sang the blues, this Bud Light–loving party animal with a gold grill and Willie Nelson braids has rewritten the rules of gravity for a crooning white rapper.
With its impassive descriptions of womanizing, pill-popping, and property destruction, Post’s smash 2017 single “Rockstar” sets the tone for Beerbongs & Bentleys. “Party going in with the threesome/Raw dog, prolly have three sons,” he raps on “Takin’ Shots.” On the champagne-clinking Swae Lee feature “Spoil My Night,” Post points out which woman he wants his handlers to deliver to him like he’s a diner at a lobster tank (“I ain’t even see the face, but she got beautiful boobies,” he enthuses). If Beerbongs’ hotel trashing, groupie-banging brand of debauchery sometimes feels like a throwback to the Mötley Crüe days, that may be deliberate: Tommy Lee even drums on “Over Now,” a rare overture to the rock fans Post Malone otherwise mostly courts with dog whistles.
The difference between rap’s current class of rock stars and the archetypal rock stars of the ’80s, of course, is that serious rappers aren’t allowed to enjoy their stardom. Success is a burden, modern rap songwriting conventions insist, and Post is never less convincing than when he fans the notion that he, too, resents his fame, as if it were possible that anybody who scaled the industry so purposefully never volunteered for it. At his nadir, Drake pushed his fame’s toll tropes to the point of self-parody, but even he never wrote a song as naked in its messaging as “Rich & Sad.”
At times it’s almost impressive how long an album called Beerbongs & Bentleys can go without cracking a smile. It is more assured and impressive than its predecessor, Stoney, but it’s also more exhausting. At 64 minutes, it repeats itself quite a bit, both thematically and sonically. Post has learned to do more with his voice, but he does it too much: He sings like a contestant on The Voice pleading not to be cut, overplaying every ache, quiver, and twitch. Especially in the album’s dour, mostly guest-free final stretch, it’s hard not to feel crushed under the weight of his undulating Adam’s apple.
The irony is Post sounds best when he isn’t trying quite so hard. “Rockstar” and its follow-up single “Psycho” have an ease to them, an unlikely grace. Each pairs the rapper with a spacious, unhurried beat and simply gives him room to ponder thoughts and chew syllables. It’s hardly a profound formula, but it plays to Post’s greatest strength: his melodic instincts. His best hooks are so tuneful and airless they directly target the ear’s pleasure centers. Too often, though, Beerbongs overplays its hand, twisting potentially breezy songs into something false and performative. For an artist whose secret weapon is his light touch, Post Malone lays it on mighty thick. | 2018-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Republic | May 3, 2018 | 5.6 | 2092f924-4cd9-454e-a56a-ae9e06ca6d39 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Afterlife compiles fifteen of DJ Rashad's previously unreleased collaborations. They match the mood and fervor you want from a Rashad track quite often, but it is hard to ignore their skeletal and fragmentary nature. | Afterlife compiles fifteen of DJ Rashad's previously unreleased collaborations. They match the mood and fervor you want from a Rashad track quite often, but it is hard to ignore their skeletal and fragmentary nature. | DJ Rashad: Afterlife | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21690-afterlife/ | Afterlife | Posthumous art is always going to be a tad controversial. At its worst it feels like a tabloid-style ransacking of an archive. At its best it's a thoughtful and prodding collecting of memories—the ultimate memorial to a life in art. Most of the time it falls somewhere in the middle. We turn to the rough drafts of greats because they might offer hints of the magnum opus always on the horizon. And without the presence and guiding hand of the art’s creator, quality rests solely in the skill of curation and editing.
The 26th of this month will mark the two-year anniversary of Rashad Harden’s (DJ Rashad) passing, and in the 730 days since, the pulse of his legacy remains strong. Fifteen of Rashad’s previously unreleased collaborations have been compiled as Afterlife. The editors of the collection intelligently admit a fallibility in the face of the materials, and even offer a tantalizing hint of things still lurking in the vault, saying "it would be impossible to present a definitive collection of DJ Rashad's music" and that "many many classics will remain unreleased for ever." And like all posthumous art, Afterlife raises a very hard question: Does the trove of tracks significantly affect the ways we evaluate and interpret Rashad’s legacy?
In short, the answer is no, and the fifteen songs in Afterlife all feel incomplete in some way or another. They match the mood and fervor you want from a Rashad track quite often, but it is hard to ignore their skeletal and fragmentary nature. Many of the songs feel like sonic bridges between tracks in a DJ set; they can ferry one moment to the next, but seem to lack the legs to stand on their own. And as befits an album cobbled together from unfinished stuff, you can see the stitching exposed. It doesn't have the same complete narrative push of Double Cup, the concision of the Rollin’ EP. In composition it is closer to Rashad’s Just a Taste, Vol. One, a survey of work rather than an album perhaps.
Not to say that there aren’t highlights throughout. The opener, "Roll Up that Loud" is classic Rashad, ebullient from start to finish. It has the inimitable quality of a Rube Goldberg machine, with all the moving parts of the track whizzing back and forth. It's hard to know where artistic intentions and listener interpretations begin with posthumous work, but large chunks of this project reflect a surprising melancholy. This same feeling in Rashad’s work was most present in the Rollin’ EP, where high-speed funkiness was blended with a languorous mood. "Oh God," one of the most simple songs here, is composed of a lone synth arpeggio and gentle drum patterning, and its tone is as plaintive as 160 BPM music can get. Rashad’s collaboration with DJ Paypal, "Do U Wanna B Mine," meanwhile, counts as one of the odder songs Rashad had worked on. The melding of their two musical personalities leads into something that surprisingly sounds like earnest chiptune.
What Afterlife succeeds in above all is capturing the spirit of familial connection and experimentation integral to the Teklife crew. Teklife has always been a family affair. Not a single release from the collective has existed without collaboration. What made them so vital on stage and across blistering tracks was the ethic of teamwork. In all the times I’ve seen Rashad and the extended Teklife crew, I was witness to the exuberance of familial genius. The mixer was their hearth and they all took turns stoking the fire, whispering into each other’s ears, grinning because they all knew what five minutes into the future looked like: a mass of writhing bodies losing their shit in the face of something nearly ineffable. It was something I endlessly appreciated as a seventeen-year-old who had never even heard the whisper of a synth or the bump of a drum machine. To discover Teklife and Rashad then felt like walking across a mile of hot coals—throttled by the sheer force of realization at the other end. | 2016-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Teklife | April 11, 2016 | 7.2 | 20990f6c-418a-40f7-997d-d6ec6dceb1a9 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
The Danish R&B duo's second album proves their mettle as a musician's band; Quadron's hermetically sealed, ultra clean pop world evokes the last decade's neo-soul elite, and has won them fans in Prince, Pharrell, and Kendrick Lamar, who guests on the album's best song. | The Danish R&B duo's second album proves their mettle as a musician's band; Quadron's hermetically sealed, ultra clean pop world evokes the last decade's neo-soul elite, and has won them fans in Prince, Pharrell, and Kendrick Lamar, who guests on the album's best song. | Quadron: Avalanche | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18089-quadron-avalanche/ | Avalanche | Quadron are a musician’s band. The Danish duo count Prince, Kendrick Lamar, and Pharrell amongst their many famous fans. It’s not hard to see their appeal: Airtight and carefully virtuosic, they’re perfectly wrapped up in their own hermetically sealed pop world. The attraction largely boils down to singer Coco O’s elastic voice, sometimes chirpy and sometimes soulful. She works in the tradition of the last decade’s neo-soul elite, channeling the jazzy effortlessness of Amy Winehouse circa Frank and the vulnerability of also-ran Duffy, shapeshifting between extremes mid-song. Avalanche is the duo’s second album, and the one that’s poised to earn them wider attention off the back of simple and effective songcraft.
Coco’s partner is Robin Hannibal, also the mastermind behind buzzed-about R&B act Rhye. Avalanche is dominated by his touch, an oh-so-perfect production hand that brings to mind the fastidious fuss of Fleetwood Mac minus the shag carpet thud. This all-consuming perfection is at once Quadron’s most alienating and tantalizing quality-- no alarms and no surprises-- set out in clear tones from the very beginning with “LFT”. Cautious horns, careful guitar, and flamboyant strings offer an impossibly polished surface for Coco’s vocals to glide over, singing a melody that’s just twisty enough not to challenge the listener. “Yes I’m still looking/ Looking for trouble,” she intones defiantly, as if trying to prove her own edginess in a world of perfectly rounded corners.
The duo have deservedly received plenty of pre-release attention for *Avalanche’*s first single “Hey Love”. With its throbbing hand percussion and Timbaland-worthy vocal snippets, it has all the precociousness of one of those folky ditties that soundtracked iPod commercials at their ubiquitous peak in the mid 2000s. It’s bolstered with an earworm of a chorus, but it’s a bit of a fake-out: Avalanche prefers intimate ballads over perky pop, offering nothing else as jaunty as “Hey Love”. That’s not a bad thing in itself, but the songs feel a little insincere when saddled with the band’s generic lyrics.
The way Coco borrows mannerisms from country, 60s pop, and other recognizable signifiers brings to mind Camera Obscura stripped of their excess and showmanship. But her lyrics lack that band's depth and detail, meaning her vocal tics have to pick up the slack. On songs like “Crush”, she’s front and centre, exploring every corner of her voice, and moving from raspy and snarky to hurt and forlorn at the flip of a coin. These slower tracks are a catch 22, however, because when she doesn’t have a stellar melody to orient her, like on “Befriend”, it feels like she’s merely stringing together cliches. Other attempts at more upbeat pop (“Neverland”, “It’s Gonna Get You”) are anodyne and patently inoffensive, music made to be quietly piped through coffee shop speakers.
But when they’re on, they’re on. Avalanche ends with a stretch of soft-rock stunners, including the heartfelt title track and the slide guitar daydream of “Sea Salt”. “Better Off”, with its summer afternoon swing and gentle ebb, is arguably the album’s best song-- here Coco’s vocals sound expert and controlled, topped off with an appearance from a sedate Kendrick Lamar. He’s neutered and hushed to fit into their own cultivated world, because above all, Quadron inhabit a very specific universe on Avalanche, one where no note or sound is out of place. If schlocky FM-lite pop is what you’re into, there’s lots to like on Avalanche, but it’s an album that feels hard to love. Avalanche’s obsessive squeaky cleanness keeps its audience at a distance. Coco might insist that she’s still looking for trouble, but there’s none to be found on Avalanche. | 2013-06-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-06-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Epic | June 12, 2013 | 7 | 20997c10-4a30-4184-b22c-b5a1c14ce0b5 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
*Hypercaffium Spazzinate *is the first LP in over 12 years from the California pop-punk icons, and it relies on the same humor, honesty, and personal experience that has always powered their music. | *Hypercaffium Spazzinate *is the first LP in over 12 years from the California pop-punk icons, and it relies on the same humor, honesty, and personal experience that has always powered their music. | Descendents: Hypercaffium Spazzinate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22196-hypercaffium-spazzinate/ | Hypercaffium Spazzinate | The Descendents didn’t set out to become heroes of punk rock–if anything, they came together to earnestly troll it. The California group seemed innocent enough when they formed in the late ‘70s: four guys from Manhattan Beach playing cheeky hardcore songs about coffee, crushes, and hating your parents. Compared to their macho peers in the then-booming Golden State scene (Black Flag, TSOL, Fear, and the like) the Descendents struck most punks as unthreatening, maybe even a little bit soft–and that was the point, as frontman Milo Aukerman so passionately argued on a song titled (wait for it) “I’m Not a Punk:” “Show me the way to conformity,” he sneers, smirking at the beefcakes, “Try to be different but it’s always the same.” The self-proclaimed outcasts went on to achieve great success, releasing a slew of great albums over the next three decades that proved, once and for all, that the loser always got the last laugh–and more importantly, outlasted the competition.
Rumors of a new Descendents LP began to surface in 2010, when the band reunited for a set at Fun Fun Fest, followed shortly thereafter by a smattering of shows. At the time, frontman Milo Aukerman insisted that the gigs were mere “one-off shows” assimilated into into his summer vacations—one of the many perks of his lesser-known career as a biologist—but the the hype machine had already left the station. Before long, Aukerman put his academic pursuits on the back bunsen-burner to pursue music full-time. The quartet finally confirmed their reunion this past June by formally announcing *Hypercaffium Spazzinate—*their first LP in over 12 years, as well as the follow-up to 2004’s Cool to Be You. As with all Descendents records, the 16-track effort avoids over-aggression or extensive political chatter, instead relying on humor, honesty, and personal experience to power their musical and thematic engines, with considerable success.
The Descendents have come a long way from the spastic hardcore of their Milo Goes to College days—and not just because all four members are in their fifties. Even after over three caffeine-fueled decades of shouting himself hoarse and belittling the elitist attitudes of his fellow punks, Aukerman remains tethered to the band’s sonic and thematic cornerstones: reliability, universality, and of course, satire. Fortunately for the diehards, Hypercaffium Spazzinate is devoid of the stylistic overindulgence or inflated self-importance often associated with hiatus-ending efforts; the Descendents continue to focus on food, friends, family, and just about everything besides perfunctory political tropes—the only difference is their unprecedentedly mature perspectives on these topics, informed by the members’ experiences with aging, fatherhood, loss, and illness.
“No Fat Burger,” for instance, revisits and rebukes the gluttonous revelry of 1981’s “I Like Food.” Where the latter song sung the praises of “juicy burgers, greasy fries, turkey legs,” the new song chronicles a gastronomic break-up: “Can’t have no m0re juicy burgers/Can’t have no more greasy fries/Doctor took my lipid profile/He told me I’m barely alive.” Meanwhile, on “Limiter,” Aukerman uses nostalgia to accent his laments about society’s mounting tendencies to treat conditions like ADHD with pills (or “limiters,” as he calls them). “Whatever happened to drug-free youth?” he asks. “What’s to become of our sons, what can we do?”
Sobering lyrical themes aside, Hypercaffium Spazzinate is hardly the work of a band with their brows frozen in a collective furrow. It doesn’t matter if they’re grappling with self-hatred (“Fighting Myself”), toxic masculinity (“Testosterone,” which sees Aukerman railing against “fuckin’ dicks who beat [their] chests”, only to request a shot of the titular chemical so he can prove that he “has what it takes” to be a man), or intolerant Bible Thumpers (“Shameless Halo”)—the band charge through the pain as if it’s an excuse for pleasure, or at the very least, rudimentary, sugary pop-punk that puts the Warped crowd to shame. Stephen Egerton keeps his guitar riffs jagged and melodic, buoyed by Karl Alvarez’s staccato bounce; behind it all, Bill Stevenson wields his drum kit as an invaluable dynamic tool, switching between leisurely 4/4 and pugnacious double-time in order to emphasize his bandmates’ carefully-calibrated fury. Aukerman’s piercing tenor has withstood the test of time; apart from a slightly more limited range and a raspier delivery, he’s as impassioned as ever, pushing himself to the brink on lead single “Victim of Me” because he’s got absolutely nothing to lose.
Like the Descendents themselves, Hypercaffium Spazzinate has zero interest in flashy instrumentals or thematic grandeur. The album’s closer, “Beyond the Music,” frames the Descendents’ existence as an offshoot of a timeless friendship, rather than a career: “Frustrato-rock or chainsaw pop/Or whatever it is we play/This is our family/And it will always be this way.” Whether the track’s intended as the band's pre-emptive eulogy or a statement of renewed commitment is up for debate, but such postulation’s besides the point. Even for a bunch of brainiacs, these four Californians have always stressed the importance of living in the moment, sticking together, and keeping it simple—nothing more, and nothing less. | 2016-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Epitaph | August 4, 2016 | 7.3 | 209a5251-328d-486e-bdb3-570d45442d45 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The Stones Throw drummer/producer has worked with everyone from Paul McCartney to Common and tours with Diana Krall. His first solo offering is a grand addition to the ever-expanding canon of instrumental hip-hop beat tapes. | The Stones Throw drummer/producer has worked with everyone from Paul McCartney to Common and tours with Diana Krall. His first solo offering is a grand addition to the ever-expanding canon of instrumental hip-hop beat tapes. | Karriem Riggins: Alone Together | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17367-alone-together/ | Alone Together | Though you may not have heard of Karriem Riggins, the list of artists he's associated with in includes some recognizable names. The Stones Throw drummer/producer has worked with everyone from Paul McCartney to Common and tours with Diana Krall, a fellow mentee of the late jazz bassist Ray Brown, who, in turn, played alongside Dizzy Gillespie and pianist Oscar Peterson. Though his new album Alone Together is his first solo offering, it sounds like the work of a vet and is a grand addition to the ever-expanding canon of instrumental beat tapes. Because the producer is such a talented chameleon-- evoking with the 34 tracks here a whole range of his fellows-- the album ends up functioning as a sort of survey course: every piece, based on its distinct construction and influences, will lead the curious listener down a rabbit hole of wonderful sounds.
As a hip-hop instrumentalist, Riggins hews most closely to the Dilla format, taking miniaturized loops and samples and scrambling them together to come up with the eminently digestible sketches now immortalized as "donuts." This approach frequently yields tracks that sound time-stamped by certain periods of Dilla's progression, as if Riggins reached into his fellow Detroit native's seemingly bottomless vault in order to gain inspiration for his own meanderings. "Round the Outside" could be a great, lost sketch from the Ruff Draft sessions and the 40 second dream "Orbitz" contains that encoded whispering that marked Donuts as a distinctly spiritual experience. "Double Trouble" evokes Dilla most strongly; its woodwind flourishes and tonal progressions may as well have been produced by Jay Dee's ghost.
But Riggins is more than just a convincing Dilla clone. The producer's interest in exotic instrumentation also recalls some of Madlib's more far-flung forays. "Moogy Foog It" (think Beat Konducta in India), "Esperanza" (which incorporates a trilling flute), "Africa", and "Back in Brazil" are spread throughout the album, and each time one pops up, it makes for a peregrine treat, providing an outré extension to some of the more familiar sounds.
Though it works in many places, the scattering of sound-alikes is symptomatic of Alone Together's principal downside. There appears to be little thought put into sequencing-- tracks are placed back to back with all the personal investment of the iPod's shuffle function. "Stadium Rock", though aptly titled with its gladiator ululation, is a little jarring, coming as it does after the melody of "Oooooaaaaa". Meanwhile, the anxiety-inducing "Because", contains a jagged section of electric guitar which describes a tension that's altogether absent from the rest of the album.
For the most part, the analog warmth of live instrumentation is employed thoughtfully, reminiscent, in some places, of some of the best tracks on Oddisee's fantastic Rock Creek Park. The sketches come alive when they incorporate dulcet bell tones on "Ding Dong Bells", reedy harpsichord on "Harpsichord Session", and alto flute on "Alto Flute". (It's a minor complaint, but Riggins clearly needs a crash course in the art of naming things: There's a good chance his household pets are named Dog, Cat, and Bird.)
Complementing the warmth of the instruments are the voices. Riggins particularly excels when he incorporates live vocals, as on "Tom Toms", where a mellow voice adds warmth to the smooth surface of the track. And on album highlight "I Need Love", a trio of singers provides backing for an amorous chanteuse, a brief interpolation of that early Motown sound. But, even when vocals aren't present, Riggins gives almost every track enough musical complexity to stand on its own. Everything here would sound great with a rapper over it, yet none of the tracks feel handicapped by the absence of lyrics.
The death of the MC is all too common a conversation, but the current ascendance of instrumental hip-hop producers is a phenomenon that's been ignored for too long. More and more artists (Thundercat, Knxwledge, and Eb7#9, to name a few) are combining the rigidity of traditional rap structures, with the progressive tendencies of jazz to create instrumental music that appeals to fans of both genres. Though Riggins occasionally explores the margins-- "Water" recalls the complex ambitions of someone like Flying Lotus-- he mostly keeps things simple, content to unleash tracks that, frankly, sound as if they could have been made by others. That said, it's a beautiful album, casually constructed and surging with an uncommon warmth, a success that will hopefully prompt Riggins to continue working alone, eschewing collaboration to deepen his explorations into unknown territory. | 2012-11-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2012-11-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | November 9, 2012 | 7.8 | 209cf56d-dd62-4b66-bac4-4d6392330584 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The Dominican artist’s terrific second album runs at a breakneck pace and excels at two of the elements that make dembow so irresistible: hooks and humor. | The Dominican artist’s terrific second album runs at a breakneck pace and excels at two of the elements that make dembow so irresistible: hooks and humor. | Kiko el Crazy: Pila’e Teteo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kiko-el-crazy-pilae-teteo/ | Pila’e Teteo | You could be diplomatic and call Kiko el Crazy an influence, or you could cut the bullshit: The man fathered many of the trends that your favorite Spanish-speaking pop star is currently borrowing for style and clout. Everyone from Bad Bunny to Rosalía has sampled him or invoked some of his lingo, hoping to replicate just a little bit of his Dominican dembow magic. Take “Saoko,” on which Rosalía says “la pámpara”—a now-ubiquitous self-mythologizing catchphrase that Kiko invented. Or consider the (ethical?) non-monogamy banger “Titi Me Preguntó,” which samples the same slogan and Kiko’s maniacal laughter. A cursory review of the Billboard Latin charts over the last year will demonstrate that dembow is the industry’s new favorite toy—and that Kiko has been one of its primary envoys.
The artist born Jose Alberto Rojas Peralta has been making music since 2009, but he broke out of el bajo mundo, or the dembow underground, around 2019, arriving in the public eye with hot pink hair, neon drip, and hairless cats—a larger-than-life panache far removed from the diamond-hard toughness of many dembowseros at the time. He caught flak from homophobes for wearing skirts, painting his nails, and voicing support for queer communities—choices that he says caused some artists to refuse collaborations with him, even as his songs were planted firmly in the thematic realm of dembow’s (often hypermasculine) obsession with sex and partying.
But his debut, 2022’s Llegó El Domi, was marred by middling pop hooks and corny EDM build-ups; it was an obvious bid to soften dembow for pop audiences. For Pila’e Teteo, his second album, Kiko seems to have flipped a switch. Like the shock of a defibrillator delivered to an arrhythmic heart, it revives the devil-may-care whimsy that made Kiko so magnetic in the first place.
Pila’e Teteo excels at two of the elements that make dembow so irresistible: hooks and humor. Kiko’s charisma stats are maxed out here: On “Pichirry,” he recruits El Alfa to flip the Dominican term for chicken butt into a metaphor about a woman’s ass. On “Loca y Linda,” he daydreams about someone as “crazy and pretty” as the YouTuber and influencer Lele Pons. The Angel Dior-featuring “Pa’ Ti Ya” transforms an expression about being down for someone into a hook about loading up on pills (at one point, Dior brags about taking molly that sends him to Jupiter). Any dembowsero can rap about getting laid or turning up, but the ability to wield wordplay, metaphor, and onomatopoeia into laugh-out-loud moments is a gift, and part of what makes Kiko so exceptional.
Kiko may not be able to sculpt his voice into infantile babbles or trilling yelps like El Alfa, but he still has impressive vocal control. You can pretty much hand him any beat and he’ll find a way to fit his voice into its contours. Over the ragga bounce of “Pa Que Baile,” Kiko twists his vocals into playground taunts and dancefloor commands. On “Te Puede Llena” and “Tu Va Dobla,” producer Imperio builds a maze that Kiko easily solves: Layers of handclaps, chopped vocal loops, and Fever Pitch riddims cross over and under each other, Kiko turning every corner with effortless brio. “Saco e’ Sal” is horror-movie dembow, with Kiko rapping so fast, it almost feels like he knows he’ll be the first to get killed off.
Pila’e Teteo lands like a grueling HIIT workout; with 15 songs running well over 100 BPM—and most under the three-minute mark—you are likely to be panting by album’s end. The pace is breakneck, but rarely do Kiko and his guests struggle to keep up—instead, the speed is a motivator, pushing everyone here to stay the course or risk getting lost in the blur. Dembow is a collaborative, singles-based genre, but Pila’e Teteo takes it a step further; this is a lineup showcasing genre sluggers both past and present. There are appearances from veterans like El Alfa, Chimbala, and somehow, the late Monkey Black; as well as prolific young guns Flow 28, Angel Dior, and Braulio Fogón. The features are usually seamless complements to Kiko’s style, as on “Con una Casa en el Cuello” and “Saco e’ Sal.” In other moments, like on “Pa’ Ti Ya,” his creative partners outshine him. Kiko stepping aside from time to time isn’t necessarily a detriment. More so, it affirms his status as an expert curator: the man has summoned his peers and disciples for the teteo of the century.
When it falls back on lazy, retrograde tropes, Pila’e Teteo doesn’t live up to its promise. “Haitiana” reproduces cringey racial myths about Haitians, African-Americans, and blackness, while on “Rapa Un Cuero,” Kiko brags about having sex without a condom. And even though artists like Yailin La Mas Viral, Gailen La Moyeta, Tokischa, and La Perversa are part of a massive renaissance for women in dembow, Pila’e Teteo features none of them. In fact, it doesn’t feature any Dominican women at all; the Andalusian rapper Mala Rodríguez is the only woman to appear across all 15 tracks, and while her verse on “Saco e’ Sal” rips, the choice to spotlight someone from Spain rather than the Black women who are actually part of the movement is a disappointment.
Pila’e Teteo arrives at a decisive moment for dembow. Long derided by the elite as too crude, too Black, and too low-class—a barrier to entry that has obstructed the genre’s incursion into the mainstream Latin music industry—it finally seems that the world has picked up on the movement’s power. Skeptics often attributed that struggle to a problem of dialect, claiming that Dominican dembow artists relied too heavily on hyperlocal slang, which made their songs less palatable for a wider Spanish-speaking audience.
Ironically, that experimental engagement with language is part of what has drawn stars like Bad Bunny and Rosalía to the music. Whether it’s through ribbing banter, knowing innuendo, or onomatopoeic romps, dembow artists have transformed Spanish into a linguistic playground, one that all the new kids want to frolic in. As the Dominican critic Jennifer Mota has written, the world may stigmatize the way we speak the colonizer’s language as “improper.” But in their phonetic subterfuge, dembow artists are also forsaking more than 500 years of grammatical entrapment and colonial fuckery.
Pila’e Teteo builds a discipline of rebellion. With his inventive approach to language and wacky aesthetics, Kiko has shepherded a constantly transforming genre into freakier, more playful directions. Pila’e Teteo is not a hybrid-pop attempt at a crossover audience or a watered-down version for the uninitiated; it is dembow in its rawest form. It is the sound of La 42, of Dyckman, of Cristo Rey—the music that blares out of corner colmados and custom soundsystems, scandalizing your mother and infuriating gentrifiers. Let them stay mad. | 2023-04-19T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-19T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Rimas | April 19, 2023 | 8 | 209d43b4-f849-4595-bc9b-6ba081345b50 | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
Michael Gira reshuffles his famous band's lineup, inviting collaborators like the Necks and Ben Frost for a record that emphasizes elegiac beauty over raging catharsis. | Michael Gira reshuffles his famous band's lineup, inviting collaborators like the Necks and Ben Frost for a record that emphasizes elegiac beauty over raging catharsis. | Swans: Leaving Meaning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/swans-leaving-meaning/ | Leaving Meaning | In 2017, Michael Gira dissolved Swans, putting an end to its most stable configuration in 35 years of the post-punk brutalists’ on-again, off-again existence. It wasn’t the first time that Gira had started over. He first did it in 1997, after a 15-year stretch of constant evolution in which Swans grew from atonal bloodlust worshippers (Filth) to blissed-out neo-folkies (The Burning World) to self-flagellating maximalists (The Great Annihilator). Titling the band’s posthumous 1998 live album Swans Are Dead was Gira’s way of laying a boulder on the lid of the tomb—at least until 2010, when, after a decade at the helm of his psych-folk project Angels of Light, he rolled back the stone and brought Swans back to life.
Now, on his first Swans album since 2016’s The Glowing Man, Gira has reshuffled the deck once again. Players from throughout his various projects’ histories have rejoined him here, including several of Angels of Light’s core members (Christoph Hahn, Dana Schechter, Cassis Staudt, Larry Mullins) and pretty much the entire recent Swans lineup. As has frequently been the case over the years, Gira has swelled the group’s ranks with guest players: organist Anna von Hausswolff and her sister Maria; noise musician Ben Frost; shock-headed former street harpist and neo-cabaret singer Baby Dee; Australian improvising trio the Necks. (The latter, praised for their minimalistic attention to detail, make for an unexpected fit: When it comes to sustaining a single repetitive groove for endurance-testing lengths, the Necks are the pianissimo yin to Swans’ pile-driving yang.)
The chief difference between the recently departed Swans and their reincarnation here boils down mainly to method. Where heavy touring turned Swans’ 2010-2017 incarnation into something like a living, breathing organism—in which the band’s pummeling, long-form concert performances informed the shape of successive studio recordings, and vice versa—for Leaving Meaning Gira returned to his role as a producer, ringleader, and foreman, laying down basic tracks on his own and then inviting his contributors to fill in the blanks as they best saw fit.
Sonically, the album backs away from the dirge-rock rave-ups that defined the group’s last four albums. That’s a welcome development: By The Glowing Man, a record that often seemed intent upon dwarfing the horizon itself, they were running out of new things to say on such a scale. Leaving Meaning is shorter and simpler. Where Swans’ last three albums were all two-hour behemoths, this one clocks in at a relatively manageable 93 minutes, and only one song breaks the 12-minute mark—a significant departure from their recent habit of digging in for 20 or 30 minutes at a time.
The new record is sweeter, too, shifting its focus from raging catharsis to eye-widening beauty. Instead of the hammer-on-anvil force of recent albums, the largely acoustic palette leans toward plucked strings, brushed percussion, and sighing choirs. At least two songs are in an uncharacteristically chipper major key, and one of them (the radiant “What Is This?”) summons a sparkling beatitude reminiscent of Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas.
The gorgeous title track is a highlight. It’s one of two featuring the Necks’ ruminative piano-and-contrabass improvisations, and while Gira’s songwriting gravitates toward his usual contradictions (“I can be it/But not feel it/I can steal it/But not keep it/I can break it/But not heal it”), he sounds uncharacteristically calm, purring like an old cat in a bookstore window. He’s as charismatic a ranter as they come, but to hear him so sedate makes for a nice change.
“Amnesia,” which first appeared in radically different form on 1992’s Love of Life, here becomes a fingerpicked ambient waltz for strings, tympani, and choir. And when he digs into the barrel-chested depths of his register on songs like the tender, elegiac “Annaline,” he evokes the kind of weary tragedy endemic to sad drunks and wastrels. As a lyricist, Gira has always conveyed an irreparable brokenness, and in songs like this one—“Let’s burn in a fire/Let’s clean what is true” he groans—he embodies the image of a fallen man. (Rape allegations against Gira—denied by him, but never retracted by his accuser—will forever draw an uncomfortable shadow beneath Gira’s portraits of repentant sinners.)
It’s not all so gentle or so gossamer. “The Hanging Man” and “Some New Things” both reprise the pounding rave-ups of the band’s recent records and live shows, while the overdubbed chants and chain-gang rhythm of the closing “My Phantom Limb” recall the agonies of the Greed/Holy Money years. And as always, the apocalypse hangs heavy over songs braided from the strands of Gira’s holy trinity: sex, death, and the infinite. The lyrical themes here are all familiar by now: Lovers claw at each other, seeking self-annihilation. Salvation is an illusion. Negation is the only certainty.
“The Nub,” the other song with the Necks’ at its center, seems at first to be about sexual pleasure. But as it drifts and droops, and Baby Dee sings of krill, bleached fluid, and putrefying flesh, the song comes to resemble an audio portrait of a whale fall. Scavengers may feed on the decomposing meat for months; the skeleton then becomes a source of sustenance to mussels, clams, and microbes for years or even decades to come. Whether or not it’s what Gira had in mind, this ruined, rotting grandeur is a fitting metaphor for Swans’ ongoing body of work. Swans died so that new life may flourish.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Young God / Mute | November 13, 2019 | 7.7 | 20a2862d-c2d6-4c2b-9e70-28e6c2a6a07c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Georgia post-punk band Arbor Labor Union are veterans of various punk and hardcore bands, and on their new album they expand on the rootsy drone of their first. | The Georgia post-punk band Arbor Labor Union are veterans of various punk and hardcore bands, and on their new album they expand on the rootsy drone of their first. | Arbor Labor Union: I Hear You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21784-i-hear-you/ | I Hear You | Arbor Labor Union likes to sing about singing. The Georgia post-punk band’s debut album, released in 2015 under the name Pinecones, was titled Sings for You Now, and it contained numerous lyrical references to the titular act; in essence, the album was an account of the band’s own creation, propelled by muscular hymns and steeped in a mystical if not downright metaphysical aura. If Sings for You Now was an origin story, I Hear You is a mission statement. Following a name change to Arbor Labor Union, the group has refined and expounded upon its throbbing, rootsy drone. They’ve also doubled down on singing about singing—if not always in the most convincing way.
Veterans of various punk and hardcore bands, the guys in Arbor Labor Union drew inspiration from Henry David Thoreau’s transcendentalist philosophy for Sings for You Now, and these two areas of inspiration still hold heavy sway over I Hear You. On the pounding “Radiant Mountain Road,” an uplifting command to “Ascend to the Mount of Joy” is fueled by nervy guitar interplay. Rather than trading or entwining leads, though, guitarists Brain Atoms and Bo Orr speak to each other in blocks of chord and texture. “Belief’d” is just as elemental, a hymn cast in circular, mutant-Southern-rock riffs and bleary distortion; at the same time, there’s an almost pagan spiritualism at play, a call to invest “in the occult whispers of shifting plates” and “the stacking of heads into a faceless totem” before adding—exclamation point theirs—“We believe in those things / Belief!”
If it sounds a bit on-the-nose, that directness is even more blatant on tracks like “Mr. Birdsong,” “Hello Transmission,” and “Volume Peaks.” Here Orr sings of being “fresh and green/And you’d always heard of song/But you would never sing”; of how “In a song I sang to you/That in a song it came to you”; and how “I live in a song/I dance when it’s played.” At points, this recursive amplification of the power of song is dizzying. Other times it comes across as forced, a clever idea filled beyond its capacity, or a conceptual exercise that flies in the face of the music’s primal howl.
That howl, though, is considerable. Ironically, it’s also restricted mostly to the instruments. Orr’s vocals have developed only slightly since Sings for You Now. His style and subject matter are so similar to that of Lungfish’s Daniel Higgs, it's impossible not to compare the two—and in that match-up, Orr can’t come close in terms of depth, dimensionality, or sheer force of will. But even disregarding that, Orr’s delivery feels far too sleepy and easygoing when pitted against the enormity of the band, or even his own lyrics; even his occasional yelps of euphoria feel restrained. He’s most compelling on “IHU,” a shimmering, meditative chant that boils over into a call to action: “We trust our leader/We heed his word/We’ve studied joy / And it can be heard.” That joy can’t always be discerned throughout I Hear You, but Arbor Labor Union have taken a respectable leap toward realizing the throbbing cosmic Americana that clearly rings in their souls. | 2016-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | May 16, 2016 | 6.8 | 20a65847-e679-46cb-b5f9-b586b080eedd | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Having already amassed a solid discography of limited-run releases on numerous labels, St. Louis-based drone architect Joseph Raglani arrives at Kranky with a well-formed aesthetic. | Having already amassed a solid discography of limited-run releases on numerous labels, St. Louis-based drone architect Joseph Raglani arrives at Kranky with a well-formed aesthetic. | Raglani: Of Sirens Born | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12307-of-sirens-born/ | Of Sirens Born | Having already amassed a solid discography of limited-run releases on numerous labels, St. Louis drone architect Joseph Raglani arrives at Kranky with a well-formed aesthetic. You can hear that experience and the confidence it inspires on Of Sirens Born (previously a 2006 CD-R on Gameboy). It's a dense, patient work that could only have been made by someone who's done this before. There are certainly precursors to his music: the haunting film scores of Popol Vuh, the all-night minimalism of Terry Riley, the garage din of Yellow Swans, the natural timbres of South American folk music. But the assured way that Raglani mixes these styles is less mimicry than synthesis, as if he were directing his influences like actors on a film set.
Raglani's movie features an ensemble cast, but the name above the title belongs to Popol Vuh. Through a Kranky press release, he cites the German group's score to Werner Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God as a reference point, and you can hear PV's trance-inducing soundtracks in this album's ringing atmospheres. That gives Of Sirens Born a cinematic quality, with widescreen drones perfect for slow pans across foggy landscapes and ominous bodies of water. Through layered sounds and well-timed changes, Raglani builds a wordless narrative, each track feeling like an abstract painting set in motion.
The most Popol Vuh moment is opener "Rivers In". Pushing choral tones like ocean waves, Raglani sounds both austere and organic. You can practically see empty fields of grass wafting back and forth to these windy chords. The 10-minute "The Promise of Wood and Water" follows with similar environmental leanings, but floats off a bit too far, caught in a loop of hums and chimes that veers toward new age. Of Sirens Born recovers quickly. "Perilous Straits" evokes Terry Riley with rolling tones that gradually grow denser yet somehow clearer. "Jubilee" continues that upward drift, as sheets of static and distortion cover each other like winter blankets.
The album's noisiest cut, "Washed Ashore", is its peak, a grinding sprint that conjures images of an exploding temple, then descends into small, sparse sounds, like the crackling embers of an acre-sized fire. On an album with such clear antecedants, it's the one track that sounds only like Raglani, blasting away all traces of influence. If he keeps heading in this direction, such reference-deletion will become permanent very soon. | 2008-10-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2008-10-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Gameboy | October 23, 2008 | 7.4 | 20ac4c5d-384d-43bd-8f9c-718af65fe650 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Woodsist presents the first full-length from this krautrock-indebted collaboration featuring Wooden Shijps guitarist Erik "Ripley" Johnson. | Woodsist presents the first full-length from this krautrock-indebted collaboration featuring Wooden Shijps guitarist Erik "Ripley" Johnson. | Moon Duo: Escape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14117-escape/ | Escape | Moon Duo are San Francisco's Sanae Yamada and Erik "Ripley" Johnson, guitarist for psychedelic journeymen Wooden Shjips. After a quick EP and single released within a year of their 2009 formation, they're bringing Escape (via recent lo-fi haven Woodsist) just as swiftly. Four songs in just under 30 krautrock minutes, it's an LP that pulls Johnson even closer to Suicide and Silver Apples, influences that have played an audibly important role in his work with Wooden Shjips. Johnson's vocals are barely there, whispers buried in sheets of two-chord riffs and Yamada's keyboard dissonance. Moon Duo don't stray too far from the deep-cutting, fuzzy gymnastics of Johnson's other band, though he's allowed further freedom to hypnotize on the playground where he's most comfortable. More than just a branching off deeper into another third eye, Escape is a pop record at its core.
Or at each end. Opener "Motorcycle, I Love You" churns along on a classic Phil Spector drumbeat, speeding up as Yamada and Johnson add layer upon layer of shadow and menace. It's a very sexy juxtaposition, and Moon Duo's music is sexy throughout, the interplay between Johnson and Yamada on full, propulsive display. Whether Johnson's taking a pause to add some breathy vocals or working up a froth on his guitar, the song's pulse won't quit. The middle of the record's a different animal. "In the Trees" slows shit down to a grind, Johnson soloing through screens and clouds of low-end more akin to the drone of Wooden Shjips. "Stumbling 22nd St" employs an equally heavy feel, Yamada acting as the song's melodic spine this time out with a keyboard riff her bandmate embraces from time to time by mimicking it on guitar.
The titular closing track is pure pop in comparison, if only in that it's infinitely lighter and easy to digest. Riffing over a drumbeat and a breeze, Johnson sounds a lot like Ducktails' Matthew Mondanile as the latter does when in his zone. All that track-by-track geeking aside, what makes Escape so successful is that these two are able to meet you halfway-- just as they do one another. Traditionally, the repetitive forms they're working with make for relatively passive listening. But this isn't that kind of psych record; textures are engaging, rhythms reveal serious drive. And be it the way they set a hook or the way they lord over each song's space, Moon Duo don't beam you out. They pull you in. | 2010-04-09T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2010-04-09T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Woodsist | April 9, 2010 | 7.4 | 20adf9fc-bfac-459f-821b-284af44df22e | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
During an interview at a kitchen table in Soho sometime last month, Will Oldham mentioned Joanna Newsom as one of ... | During an interview at a kitchen table in Soho sometime last month, Will Oldham mentioned Joanna Newsom as one of ... | Joanna Newsom: The Milk-Eyed Mender | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5893-the-milk-eyed-mender/ | The Milk-Eyed Mender | During an interview at a kitchen table in Soho sometime last month, Will Oldham mentioned Joanna Newsom as one of his favorite storytellers. At the time, I'd only passingly listened to her two self-released EPs, and was more familiar with her keyboard work with San Francisco's The Pleased and harp contributions to the Deerhoof/Hella side project Nervous Cop. But that's changed with the release of her first long player, The Milk-Eyed Mender. Here, the words to her meandering stories-- disarming in their formal purity, but still highly individualized and eccentric-- elaborate on an aesthetic that evokes French coins, dark maroon leaves, shafts of wheat, and ostrich feathers as much as it references them directly.
Born in Nevada City and currently residing in San Francisco, Newsom's yarns summon a deep, rustic South. A line in the buoyant "Bridges and Balloons" uses e.e. cummings neologisms and Omoo's breezy prosody to impart the tale of a winter's day on a fallible ship: "The sight of bridge and balloon/ Makes calm canaries irritable/ They caw and claw all afternoon/ 'Catenaries and dirigibles/ Brace and buoy the living room/ A loom of metal, warp-woof-wimble/ And a thimblesworth of milky moon/ Can touch hearts larger than a thimble." In "Sadie", the title character is asked to accept a pinecone and a bone, talismans to ward off death. Really, they're the gentlest tokens that mark the beginning of a relationship, and later reaffirm the love despite an inevitable move towards taciturnity.
Newsom's wonderfully detailed romanticism ("Your skin is something that I stir into my tea"), homespun wisdom ("Never get so attached to a poem, you forget truth that lacks lyricism"), idiosyncratic flourishes ("See him fashion a cap from a page of Camus"), and insights into the prosaic ("There are some mornings/ When the sky looks like a road") infuse each track with the weightiness of an embroidered travel narrative and a private field-recording.
She wields a joyful trill reminiscent of Texas Gladden on her "Devil and the Farmer's Wife", while her often childlike intonation also recalls Linda Hagood of the early '90s Uncle Wiggly-related trio, Smackdab, saturated with the air of '60s English folkie Vashti Bunyan. Showing an appreciation for Appalachian folk and the experimental composer/folksong scholar Ruth Crawford Seeger, her spare arrangements-- harp, Wurlitzer electronic piano, harpsichord, piano, and slide-guitar on two tracks-- unwind like early Homestead oddity, The Supreme Dicks.
Creating avant-garde American music for the back porch, she expands upon tradition without losing authenticity. In this sense, her practice could be linked to Devendra Banhart, a friend and kindred spirit. Both map a pile of eccentricities that tumble together to create something useful, familiar, and nearly sacred. Here's hoping to a duet for the new folk future. Perhaps Kenny-and-Dolly style? | 2004-03-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2004-03-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Drag City | March 17, 2004 | 8 | 20b0c83c-69c0-421b-8988-679e870f9aca | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The Pittsburgh-based producer makes undeniably heavy music, combining hardcore techno, drum’n’bass, and footwork and sprinkling it with a bit of frivolity and chaos. | The Pittsburgh-based producer makes undeniably heavy music, combining hardcore techno, drum’n’bass, and footwork and sprinkling it with a bit of frivolity and chaos. | W00DY: My Diary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/w00dy-my-diary/ | My Diary | After spending the early part of this decade making prismatic pop songs and wheezy techno experiments, Pittsburgh-based producer W00dy has recently settled into a kind of mutant club music that’s built around hyperactive vocal samples and, as the title of a 2018 tape put it, Relentless Kickdrum. In her rhythmic contortions, you can hear the echoes of all kinds of speed-demon dance music: hardcore techno, drum’n’bass, and footwork, among other molar-grinding microgenres. It’s music for ragers, first and foremost.
But the real joy of her tracks is: They’re silly. That’s the stated goal of her work, per her Bandcamp page, to “bring absurdity 2 the dance floor.” Without sacrificing the gurning pace of her tracks, she arranges the components in these overlapping, off-balance loops, which blend and blur together in a wonderfully psychedelic way. Listening to her music feels like you’re watching the dancefloor from the center of a lazy Susan, trying to rediscover your center of gravity.
W00dy’s latest full-length, My Diary, only pushes her sound further in that dizzying direction. The album begins with a flurry of slurred syllables, fluttering around one another erratically. As “Can’t Resist It” unfolds into more rave-ready shapes, that vocal continues to dart around, like a fruit bat mischievously unleashed on an unsuspecting nightclub. It’s a kind of chaos you can’t help but smile at.
There are only four tracks on My Diary, but they’re each so jittery and unpredictable that they feel like they contain a whole album’s worth of ideas. “Came 2 Party,” for example, starts with a slivered vocal and hopscotching kick drum rhythm that sounds like a Teklife record sent through a paper shredder, before morphing into hardcore, acid, and filtered breaks, all within just a minute or two of one another. Each of the tracks—none of which are less than five minutes long—is so stuffed with details and micro-samples that it almost feels like too much for your brain to process at points. It's similar to the approach of rave revisionists like Lorenzo Senni or the many genre-destroying producers that fill surrealist labels like Orange Milk and Hausu Mountain. There’s a sincere joy for the styles that she’s playing with, but a beautiful perversity in how willing she is to mangle them and the speed at which she does so.
W00dy has described My Diary as a collection of her “most personal thoughts & feelings.” It’s hard to know what she means by that in a literal sense—there are no lyrics here to speak of—but you can extrapolate a little about her from these four tracks. It’s a portrait of a mind in constant motion, looping back on itself, swinging wildly from unrestrained joy to disarray and confusion, never stopping too long in any particular sound or feeling. That’s probably a familiar sentiment if you too are a sensitive person in the Internet age, watching every day as global tragedies and personal triumphs scroll past you every minute. My Diary echoes that feeling on some level. It’s overwhelming, seemingly by design, but it also offers a balm. You can always dance through it. | 2019-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | October 16, 2019 | 7.4 | 20b44555-5568-4916-a407-217ef96cff39 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Alice Bag was the lead singer and co-founder of the Bags, one of the first punk rock bands to emerge from L.A., and Alice Bag is her first solo record in a 40-year career. | Alice Bag was the lead singer and co-founder of the Bags, one of the first punk rock bands to emerge from L.A., and Alice Bag is her first solo record in a 40-year career. | Alice Bag: Alice Bag | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22069-alice-bag/ | Alice Bag | Alice Bag fell into punk rock via the same storied route of celebrated outsiders before her: the rejection of societal norms and the embrace of differences. Born Alicia Armendariz in Los Angeles in 1958, Bag’s youth as the child of Mexican immigrants divided her between worlds. At home, she was only allowed to speak Spanish. At school, where she was teased because of her overweight, frizzy-haired appearance, she could only speak English. Bag found solitude in music, soul tunes from her sister, traditional Mexican rancheras, and later, glittery acts like Queen, Elton John, and David Bowie; when she once transferred high schools, she requested classmates to call her “Ziggy.” It took her almost 4o years, but she has finally found a way to unite all these disparate influences in Alice Bag, which is somehow her first solo album despite a storied musical career.
That career began the late 1970s, as the lead singer and co-founder of the Bags, one of the first punk rock bands to emerge from L.A. After the Bags dissolved in 1981, Bag went on to play in other bands like Castration Squad, The Cambridge Apostles, Cholita! The Female Menudo, and Las Tres. In 2011, she released her first book, the autobiographical Violence Girl, and in 2015 she self-published her second, Pipe Bomb for the Soul. Alice Bag is first formal LP of any of her projects, in addition to being her debut solo record. While Bag wrote all of the songs, she is joined by a variety of L.A. musicians as well as her daughter.
Alice Bag is an amalgamation of stories and sounds from its creator’s life, the latter focusing specifically on feminism, politics, and breaking out of the hive mind. In the early ’00s, Bag moved from L.A. to Arizona and worked as a teacher. There, she met a student whose father was undocumented and one day, he never came back from work. Bag acted as the family’s translator as the attempted to get the man out of a detention center. “Inesperado Adios” tells the tale as a sorrowful Spanish duet between mother and son. “Poisoned Seed” rallies against genetically modified seeds, specifically ones that force farmers to become dependent on Monsanto. “Programmed” confronts societal brainwashing with the declaration “Education be damned we are being programmed!”
Sonically, Alice Bag is as diverse as her aforementioned musical interests. On “He’s So Sorry,” Bag goes full ’60s girl group, complete with “Be My Baby” drum beat, a Shangri-Las spoken-word prologue, and “oooh"-ing harmonies. Considering the Spector sound, it’s only fitting that the song’s subject matter would confront domestic violence. Bag herself grew up witnessing her beloved father abuse her mother, which makes lines like “Just because he’s sorry doesn’t mean he’s gonna change/Just because you love him doesn’t mean you’ve gotta stay” even more impassioned. Later, “Incorporeal Life” is a jazzy tango featuring rumbling drums and slinky vocals. Bag’s songs that serve as a call to arms (regarding consent, self-liberation, and confrontations) tend to (rightfully) be faster while the reflective ones like “Suburban Home” (about a stagnant romance) or “Weigh About You” (about negative influence of a relationship).
An album 40 years in the making has a high probability of being underwhelming—records with less than half that timespan have more than proved that point. But Alice Bag feels like effortless self-expression that simply needed an outlet. Alice Bag promises to introduce its namesake’s work to a new generation of radicals, and luckily, her words are a revolutionary rally cry. | 2016-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Don Giovanni | July 5, 2016 | 7.5 | 20b76f7d-8d34-47a2-8fad-19b4e1f64257 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
The lo-fi bedroom rock project from Indiana brings smooth guitar licks into clearer focus with their Fat Possum debut, a light and bright collection of weaving, winding psych-pop. | The lo-fi bedroom rock project from Indiana brings smooth guitar licks into clearer focus with their Fat Possum debut, a light and bright collection of weaving, winding psych-pop. | Hoops: Routines | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23258-routines/ | Routines | Hoops were born on a cassette reel. Since launching as the solo bedroom project of Drew Auscherman, the Indiana band has made the tape its preferred format. It’s the format they used to independently record and distribute their first three song collections—accurately titled Tape #1, Tape #2, and Tape #3—selling them at shows on tour and accumulating a following physically and in-person. One of these tapes caught the attention of Fat Possum Records, on which the now-four-piece group’s eponymous EP and new debut full-length, Routines, were released in quick succession.
All of this comes after the fact that Hoops’ sound recalls a time when cassettes ruled the nation. Hiss and fuzz aren’t just unavoidable variables in Hoops’ psych-pop—they’re vertebrae for the songs. That’s far from novel, but what sets Hoops apart on Routines is its proactive aversion to the trap of atmospheric overkill leading to song paralysis. If there’s one thing that Hoops lives by other than the code of the tape, it’s the will of the smooth guitar lick.
Hoops’ early releases adhered to the compact song-structure principles of lo-fi royalty Guided by Voices—get in, get the idea across, get out, get on to the next one—but the slick, sleazy vibe of ’70s radio comes to mind more often on Routines. For every moment of synths and chords swirling together in schematic agreement, there’s one of relentless motion—often featuring Auscherman’s guitar carrying the arrangement on its back and driving the song forward, like on the instrumental “Benjals.” It can be slurred or articulated, depending on what the moment requests, and often flipping back and forth.
Routines is the band’s first effort recorded in a studio instead of to a four-track. On “Burden,” there’s an appropriate reflection on the positive stress of a new environment: “It took me away from all my comfortable routines.” The versatility of core members Auscherman, Kevin Krauter, and Keagan Beresford—each of whom writes, sings, and swaps instruments—affords them chances to try on different masks, a huge strength despite some inevitable flat results. “All My Life” and “Underwater Theme,” a back-to-back package from the third tape, appear alongside each other again here. The former is dusted, polished, and with a fresh coat of paint, and the latter is at half speed and has an entirely different posture, slouching instead of squirming. While it doesn’t quite work as well, there’s great promise in the pivot itself.
“On Top” is the album’s highest flyer, and though it deals in unconditionally encouraging banalities (“Keep your head up, you’re doing fine/I know it’s hard but you’ll be alright”), it’s ultimately a pledge to the long view: “Don’t think twice when it all goes wrong/Put in time, you’ll come out on top.” Hoops’ talents are best used when serving their optimism, and anthems like this should guide them nicely moving forward.
Hoops takes its name from the hoop house, or polytunnel, which is a passive solar dome structure used for botany, something like a cheaper version of a greenhouse (and not basketball, in spite of the word’s more obvious definition in the state of Indiana). It’s also a conveniently concise symbol for how Hoops seems to operate. They’re small, protected encasements where seeds are planted and nurtured, but they have huge skyward views, and only in light do the yields thrive. | 2017-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | May 16, 2017 | 7 | 20ba2668-c18d-49f7-88d7-b2aa47aa3170 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | null |
An aptly titled debut record from a duo with a penchant for lush, moody, and surprisingly affecting trip-hop. | An aptly titled debut record from a duo with a penchant for lush, moody, and surprisingly affecting trip-hop. | Phantogram: Eyelid Movies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13954-eyelid-movies/ | Eyelid Movies | They couldn't have picked a better title. Eyelid Movies, the debut LP from the self-proclaimed "street beat" duo Phantogram, is a lush and evocative thumper indebted to the sultry side of Moby's Play. Riding a steady trip-hop inspired groove, the hushed and mostly mellow Eyelid Movies seems a fine companion piece to a long stroll or something more sedentary and meditative; point being, it sounds great in the background.
But lean a little closer and you'll find plenty about Eyelid Movies to get swept up in. Behind the synth wash are shades of Portishead crackle, Dust Brothers clutter, even a little late-era Yeah Yeah Yeahs geek glamour. "Street beat" seems to be a nice way to gloss over the fact that this is, at its core, a trip-hop record, a genre that Massive Attack's latest seemed to suggest had moved well past its use-by date. But Eyelid Movies, although decidedly a nighttime record, doesn't lean on heavy-lidded noir or string-led psychodrama to get its grooves across. It gets messy, sweet, and a little weird; with most trip-hop, the best you could hope for would be two out of three. Try ignoring Eyelid Movies too long, and something will reach out and shake you a bit.
Take, for instance, opener "Mouthful of Diamonds", which matches an alluringly buzzy backdrop with Sarah Barthel's breathy vocal. You could just as easily get lost in her voice or trip out on the oddly loping, slightly off-kilter synth line that underpins the whole thing. Or the ratchety thunk of "When I'm Small", which suggests a funky Odelay cut as sung by Martina Topley-Bird. Rife with sonic detail but not overrun by it, they'd still be fine songs without all the toppings. But Barthel and partner/producer Josh Carter find ways to dress the songs up without weighing them down. They can be emotionally affecting-- the "should've been easier on you" chorus of the Carter-sung "Turn It Off" is a heartbreaker-- and they can be just plain strange. The xx, with their slinky trickle of spy guitars and frequent collision of boy-girl vocals, are probably Phantogram's closest contemporaries, but there's a self-serious intensity in the xx that's lacking here. It's hard to imagine Romy and Oliver from the latter band pulling out the Weenish vocal of "Running From the Cops", and harder still to imagine them pulling it off without cracking a rare smile.
Eyelid Movies runs a tad long. This many breakbeat-based numbers in a row can be numbing, and the strong currents of melody that run over the first two thirds of the LP subside a bit toward the back, giving way to atmosphere. And Carter doesn't have quite the voice Barthel has, a fact of which he seems aware. He's smart to dress his voice up in effects, and smarter still to spend so much time singing in tandem with Barthel. But the best bits of Eyelid Movies show range and attention to detail, so it's hard to care when they downshift into waves of serpentine sound. Eyelid Movies is a sumptuous, seductive record, easy to let fall into the background, sure, but easier still to fall into. | 2010-02-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2010-02-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Barsuk | February 25, 2010 | 7.5 | 20bd038e-697e-406f-b5a9-3a6df4396144 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | 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 misanthropic pop perfection of the indie British band’s sixth and best album. | 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 misanthropic pop perfection of the indie British band’s sixth and best album. | Felt: Forever Breathes the Lonely Word | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/felt-forever-breathes-the-lonely-word/ | Forever Breathes the Lonely Word | In November 1986, a writer for NME visited the flat of indie-pop enigma Lawrence. The mononymous musician lived in a quiet suburb outside of Birmingham, England, alone except for a collection of records, a set of first edition Kerouac paperbacks, and enough cleaning products to stock a small hospital ward. “A platoon of Airwick Solids stoically occupy strategic vantage points; the toilet bowl harbors not the usual one, but a breeding pair of those Cartland-pink santisers; a wicker basket provides a mass grave for spent aerosol air fresheners.” Since he rarely left the antiseptic apartment, Lawrence explained that his days were typically spent wasting time with mundane activities, like assiduously washing his floppy brown hair.
By that point, the legend of Lawrence the recluse, Lawrence the perfectionist was as central to the narrative surrounding his band, Felt, as the music itself. But he was long used to being the odd one out. Too bookish and restrained for mainstream pop, too neurotic for punk, and too bright and structured for post-punk, Felt never quite fit in with the world around them, which is one reason they are still so beloved.
Not being trendy was fine because Felt wanted to be timeless. Inspired by New York City romantics like Lou Reed, Tom Verlaine, and Patti Smith, Lawrence wrote vivid songs with verbose, sensual titles like “The World Is as Soft as Lace” and “Sunlight Bathed the Golden Glow.” His characters, desperate loners and anxious misanthropes, searched for some semblance of hope in this cruel world. Yet even their sadness could be sublime. “And all my great plans get blurred/By the softest touch, the gentlest word,” he sang once.
Lawrence’s love of beauty was always at odds with his other obsession: success. From their earliest days, Felt was driven by Lawrence’s desire to be somebody. In 1979, Lawrence self-released the first Felt single, a mumbled noise track called “Index” that he recorded on a cheap cassette player in his bedroom. He wanted the song to be a “statement,” he told the Quietus, something that would get him noticed “immediately.” After it was named single of the week in Sounds! magazine, Lawrence decided he needed to look beyond the independent world. “I want to be in the charts,” he realized. “I’ve got to form a band: a proper band, along the lines of Television, with solos everywhere.” He recruited schoolmate Nick Gilbert first, then Maurice Deebank, a classically trained guitarist who once impressed him with a cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” According to Deebank, Lawrence himself had basically “no musical skills.” But he had a vision.
Lawrence’s plan was to release exactly 10 albums and exist for exactly 10 years, at which point thousands of hypothetical Felt fans would be devastated by their breakup. He was preoccupied with posterity and figured that Felt would be properly evaluated after their demise. “Sure I want to be legendary,” he once remarked. “Is it wrong to think like that?” On the occasion of their first record, 1982’s Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty, Lawrence was determined to release “the best English debut album ever.” Despite the unapologetically lofty goal, Lawrence was grounded by artistic integrity. He wanted to come by fame honestly, to be known as a generation-defining songwriter who challenged his fans like his underground art rock heroes. He named the band after a line from the Television song “Venus” off Marquee Moon; he was moved by the way Verlaine stressed “felt” and how the word itself—the past tense of emotion—conjured images of nostalgia. “Lawrence wanted Felt to be high art and low art at the same time,” Creation Records’ Alan McGee once said. “He wanted Felt to be in the singles charts and screamed at like a boy band.”
Pulling from his rigorous studies of British music magazines, Lawrence closely directed Felt’s presentation, from their haircuts to their photo shoots. His fascination with professionalism carried over to the music itself. He loved the DIY spirit of punk bands but despised music that sounded imperfect. “Being happy with music that sounded like a demo?” he once said. “That was the opposite of what I wanted.” As a result, Felt’s earliest records are pristine and dreamlike, their atmospherics subtle and otherworldly. Carried by the spindly fingerwork of Deebank, Lawrence’s wistful lyrics are exalting.
By the time of the NME profile that made Lawrence look like the indie Howard Hughes, Felt had largely moved away from artsy minimalism and towards pure pop. They were the closest to mainstream success they would ever be. A tour with the Cocteau Twins led to Robin Guthrie producing their fourth record, 1985’s reverb-saturated Ignite the Seven Cannons, which spawned the biggest single of Felt’s career, “Primitive Painters.” With thick jangly melodies and the euphoric backing vocals of Elizabeth Fraser, “Primitive Painters” amplified Lawrence’s private sorrows into broad swashes of bliss. In a perfect world, this would have been the transformative moment where Lawrence’s ultimate vision came into view, when Felt would take their place next to their idols.
Their first release on Creation, 1986’s Let the Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death (aka The Seventeenth Century), withdrew from the blissful opulence of “Primitive Painters.” It was a curious display of Lawrence’s desire to experiment with the melodic limits of pop, composed entirely of minimalist and imaginative instrumental sketches. It was also largely ignored. “We spent all Creation’s money on that record and it was a complete disaster,” Lawrence later said. Perhaps he was unconsciously purging wordless compositions from his system, because Felt’s next record in 1986 was full of fleshed-out compositions with timeless lyrics. It would be the best album of their career.
On Forever Breathes the Lonely Word, Felt sound reborn. It’s the most cohesive presentation of Lawrence’s vision, eight songs that tie together pop perfection and misanthropy to glorious ends. Part of this was technical. “I changed the songwriting style a bit,” Lawrence explained. “I wanted to write more concise songs with normal structures, as opposed to the first two LPs which contain long, semi-instrumental, six-minute pieces.” Another cause of this growth was bureaucratic. After many periodic departures and years of personal and creative conflicts with Lawrence, Deebank had finally quit the band after Ignite the Seven Cannons. His guitar’s presence in Felt was filled by the young keyboardist (and future Primal Scream member) Martin Duffy, who joined in 1985; that’s his soft, boyish face gazing out from the cover, as if affirming his integral role on the record. (That said, Lawrence’s creative influence remains undeniable; these are, as the record’s insert cutely phrases it, “Lawrence’s songs coloured in by the band.”)
The cheery Hammond that kicks off opener “Rain of Crystal Spires” immediately draws a line between old and new Felt. With Duffy’s organ now serving as the lead sound, Felt’s uptempo melodies provide a foil for Lawrence’s brooding anxieties. In their early days, Lawrence was aggrieved by the constant Velvet Underground comparisons Felt received. (“We were much more mature,” he would protest.) Here, they leaned into the cozy influence of the ’60s on the delightful organ bounce of “Grey Streets” and the lush backup harmonies of “September Lady.” A note on the record’s packaging winks at the throwback: “Any similarity to songs already written is purely coincidental.”
With no instrumentals taking up space, Forever Breathes the Lonely Word showcases Lawrence’s best lyricism. He spins tales of weary hearts and wistful longing, of a world that offers little hope, and expresses doubt in religion, celebrity, and faith of all sorts. He imbues these narratives with a familiar intimacy; “I like lost people, because I suppose I’m one,” he once remarked.
From the confines of that sterile apartment, Lawrence imagined worlds for his discontent far more magnificent and vivid than his own. The melancholy of “Rain of Crystal Spires” is illuminated by visions of the legendary Arthurian island of Avalon as “Homer’s Iliad lay burning in the fire.” “Grey Streets” evokes images of “Closing eyelids [that] stutter and tumble and turn away/Makeshift memories they collide for another stay.” Later he envisions hallways choking on smoke, dead, uprooted trees, and “a man who’s got three square eyes and a boy with the snakeskin head.” Lest his listeners hear these poetic references and think of him as a “university type,” Lawrence clarified that he just had the ear of an aesthete. “I swear I’ve never read a poem in my life... It’s difficult to explain, but I just love beautiful things, beautiful words,” he objected. “We all know what classic pop music sounds like but there’s never been any classic pop lyrics—not for me anyway. Sure, I can take all the throwaway stuff but I prefer something more magical.”
By 1986, Lawrence had become a master at subtle shade in his lyrics, slipping in a snub and changing subjects before there’s time to process it, usually with a flair of the mystical. “I’m not your Jesus so will you get off my cross,” he requests during “A Wave Crashed on Rocks.” “You travelled back four centuries in search of a silver sword/Your self-induced hallucinations they just make me bored,” he taunts on “Gather Up Your Wings and Fly.” “Grey Streets” is especially vitriolic, an account of the power dynamic between a fan idealizing an artist. “And you were attracted to me because my face smiled down from a wall and you said I looked kind,” he tells the fan with a sad smirk. He lays into the fan’s coolness, saying, “You’re so semi-precious about life and you won’t let your feelings show.” (The words “semi-precious” are given a particularly spiteful emphasis.) For all the ennui in his voice, Lawrence was never apathetic. The depths of his despair didn’t need to be vulgarly overstated, they could just breathe.
“Grey Streets” gives way to the record’s centerpiece, “All the People I Like Are Those That Are Dead,” the closest thing to a Felt anthem. “Maybe I should entertain/The very fact that I’m insane,” Lawrence begins with characteristic self-deprecation. As guitar melodies twist around Duffy’s organ, Lawrence leans into his despair: “Maybe I should take a gun/And put it to the head of everyone,” he breathily wonders, seeing that as a mercy killing. A little over midway through, the instruments recede and Lawrence murmurs the title serenely to himself in near silence. The five-minute song epitomizes everything revered about Lawrence as a songwriter and Felt as a whole. Even when truly wallowing, denouncing God and all the sorrow he has caused, he never submits to melodrama. He knows he’s not alone in his misery. He just wants to show how much it can hurt when you feel so much.
Forever Breathes the Lonely Word was Felt’s crowning achievement and so naturally it was received rather passively by the UK press. Sure, it was beautiful, they seemed to agree, but it was too insular to place on a pedestal. “Felt haven’t reinvented anything, won’t change anything. Only ninnies would turn Lawrence into anything except an armchair camp hero,” wrote NME’s Mark Sinker. “But,” he conceded, “this is a great record.” The record didn’t chart, and it failed to appear on either NME or Melody Maker’s best of 1986 lists. There could only be one surly dweeb romanticizing violence in 1986, and Morrissey won the popular vote with The Queen Is Dead.
There’s not one specific reason why Felt never found commercial success. “It was too understated to be commercial, too art to go pop, too pop to go art,” Creation’s Alan McGee once said. Melody Maker put it more bluntly in 1986: “Felt make brilliant records that nobody buys.” Maybe it was the lack of support from BBC host and tastemaker John Peel, who was admittedly not a fan and never championed them on his show. Or it was the time that, shortly after the release of Forever Breathes, Lawrence attempted to mellow his nerves with some acid before a concert. Unfortunately, he got so freaked out that he refused to play until the audience—full of A&R scouts—left. And yet, Lawrence completed his 10-year plan and in 1989, after four more Felt records, the project ended. In the early ’90s, he formed Denim, a snarky ’70s revivalist act who met an untimely end when a song called “Summer Smash” was set to debut right after Princess Diana died in a car accident. Effectively abandoned by EMI, Lawrence went on to perform under the name Go-Kart Mozart, a maximalist electro-pop band still going today. As shown in the documentary Lawrence of Belgravia, the years that followed were marked by struggles with drug addiction and homelessness.
But Felt had not been forgotten. As Lawrence once predicted, the band has been cherished in its afterlife. The swoony organ in “Rain of Crystal Spires” alone can be easily linked to the spring in the step of jangle poppers from C86 all the way to Slumberland. The cult of Felt can be heard in the gentle daydreams of the Field Mice, in the bookish malcontent of Glasgow’s Camera Obscura, and in the lucid ponderings of the Clientele. Felt were especially rampant in the 2011 musical conscious, with both San Francisco duo Girls and Irish post-punkers Girls Names naming songs after Lawrence. A few years later, indie pop darlings the Pains of Being Pure at Heart referenced Felt in their song “Art Smock” and then covered “The Ballad of the Band,” with Kip Berman providing a properly bitter Lawrence imitation.
But their influence might be most obvious in the introspective songwriting of Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, a gigantic Felt fan who admittedly became obsessed with them only after their dissolution. “Poetic, ambitious, amazing,” is how he once described Forever Breathes the Lonely Word. “It’s hard to imagine this record ever having been released. Hard to imagine it was ever new.” Beyond referencing them in songs and fawning over them in liner notes, Murdoch’s music glows with Lawrence’s solitary introspection and his eye for profound beauty.
Though it can feel like a cosmic slight that Forever Breathes the Lonely Word was not recognized as a masterpiece in 1986, this twist of fate feels harmonious with the ideas that Lawrence laid out in Felt songs. “I’d like to be remembered as someone who never lost touch with what he set out to do,” Lawrence told Melody Maker in 1989, after the band’s final record. “Felt never made a timeless classic—the greatest thing would be to make a record that could sit next to Marquee Moon or Horses. They’re on the top shelf, standing alone. And our records are scattered about on the shelf beneath with all the other greats.”
Forever Breathes the Lonely Word closes with a song brilliantly titled “Hours of Darkness Have Changed My Mind.” After a record full of warmth, Lawrence presents a sparse sound that harks back to Felt’s first records. He gazes into the darkness and mystery swirling about him and admits a dream. “I’d like to do something that makes somebody somewhere care,” Lawrence sings with a desperation that is quiet but quite clear. | 2019-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Creation | May 26, 2019 | 9.3 | 20bd4c29-ff86-45d3-af80-d8e4bf1e9f3b | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
The latest EP from quietly legendary Cleveland producer Warren Harris offers deep house music with a beating human heart. | The latest EP from quietly legendary Cleveland producer Warren Harris offers deep house music with a beating human heart. | Hanna: The Never End EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23262-hanna-the-never-end-ep/ | The Never End EP | Few terms have been as widely abused in the electronic musical lexicon as “deep house”—a phrase that has come to stand for glossy surfaces and a sedated pulse, an EDM for grown ups that flouts its maturity via half-hearted sax samples. Trace the genre’s history back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, however—to the work of Blaze, Kerri Chandler, and Larry Heard—and you will find something rather different. Back then, no one was consciously trying to create deep house. Instead, the label was used to describe a kind of house music that was slower, moodier, and jazzier than usual.
Hanna—aka Cleveland producer Warren Harris—fits firmly into this mold. He is one of those quietly legendary American electronic artists, overlooked in his own backyard but hugely respected overseas. Harris is a don of expansive house now into almost 20 years of releasing music, more into the chords themselves than the tricky business of dancing. The Never End, a new six-track EP, is unlikely to change his relative anonymity. Nothing here screams of a commercial breakthrough, and at times—as with the inclusion of ill-fitting drum and bass track “Deceptiv”—you feel like Harris is too wrapped up in his own musical universe to care. And yet The Never End proves to be a fantastic example of deep house alchemy, a release that shows how to navigate the paper-thin line between deep and dull, soulful and soulless.
The key tracks are the three straight-ish house numbers—“Punk,” “July,” and “Twombly’s Glen”—which are bookended by noodling, pleasantly forgettable ambient numbers in “Being” and “When.” Much like Larry Heard before him, Harris uses a small number of musical ingredients—jazz-inflected chords, burbling bass lines, and swinging drum machines—but rings a musical magic out of them, where what counts is not piling on the layers but finding precisely the right sounds to create a melodic mood.
It is striking, particularly on “Punk” and “July,” just how melancholic the results can be, a world of blue notes and extended musical funks. Near the start of “Punk” is a spoken word vocal that sounds on the verge of tears—“I just can’t fight,” the choked voice intones, “I know you understand”—to which Harris adds elegiac chord swoops, the flutter of an acoustic guitar, and a wandering synth line. The effect is quietly devastating. “July” is even more moving, as a perfect two-second snatch of melody is layered over a descending, aquatic synth run, an eerie clip of saxophone, and a shuffling house beat. There’s almost nothing to the song, but each element is finely weighted for maximum emotional heft, creating a tears-on-the-dance-floor moment that is straight out of the Satoshi Tomiie songbook.
After this sustained melancholia, “Twombly’s Glen” feels like a walk on a summer’s day with the sun on your face. Its palette is similar to “Punk” and “July,” with the syncopated chatter of hi-hats and sustained synth washes, but the song’s circular, airy melody suggests the hopeful ecstasy of love, overlaid by the joyful patter of keyboard riffs that flutter right out of the speakers. On these three songs, The Never End is house music with a beating human heart. It’s an arm around the shoulder and a cathartic swing on the dancefloor rather that a selfie and a fist bump. It’s house music that hurts and isn’t afraid to cry. More than deep, it is profound. | 2017-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Apron | May 22, 2017 | 7.6 | 20c4d336-020d-4a65-9b07-d05829c606ca | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | null |
Stereolab’s masterpiece fused analog with digital, past with future, Marxism with the commercial magic of music through a pristine record that defined an age of “recombinant pop.” | Stereolab’s masterpiece fused analog with digital, past with future, Marxism with the commercial magic of music through a pristine record that defined an age of “recombinant pop.” | Stereolab: Dots and Loops | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stereolab-dots-and-loops/ | Dots and Loops | In September 1997, Stereolab’s sixth album Dots and Loops was their first to land on the Billboard charts. It may have been riding the critical goodwill of the previous year’s breakthrough Emperor Tomato Ketchup, but the time was ripe for Stereolab’s breakthrough, as well—over the past year, the modern rock landscape had finally caught up to the crate-digging leftists. Less than a year after Billboard’s Modern Rock chart was topped by two moody Fats Domino and B.B. King-sampling coffee-shop poets came a catchy song about crystal meth addiction and an unavoidable pub singalong by anarchists who cited Paris 1968 graffiti in their liner notes. It’s fitting, then, that Dots and Loops is, even more than Emperor, the perfect realization of the sound that Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier had been shaping since 1991.
The roots of Stereolab lie in the teeming indie-pop scene of London in the late 1980s. Gane played guitar in the deeply anti-Thatcher jangle-pop band McCarthy, who released three albums in their brief career titled I Am A Wallet, and The Enraged Will Inherit the Earth, and Banking, Violence and the Inner Life Today. Sadier, born in the Parisian suburbs during the political tumult of May 1968, was a fan. She met Gane at a McCarthy gig and they hit it off immediately. The two started dating and Sadier toured as a vocalist with the band and appeared on a handful of their later recordings. When McCarthy broke up in 1991, Gane was through with British indie-pop. Whatever came next for him and Sadier, he decided, wasn’t going to sound like any current trend in guitar music.
Digging through his record collection, Gane returned to the first two albums by (at the time relatively unknown) Neu!, a Düsseldorf experimental duo active from 1972 to 1975. He obsessed over Klaus Dinger’s mechanistic drumming and appreciated his sardonic anti-consumerism (Dinger playfully named the duo “Neu!” and designed their bold cover art as a jab at advertising lingo). Also like Dinger, Gane approached Stereolab as a musical and ideological tabula rasa, relying on the mechanistic “motorik” drumming of Neu! songs “Hallogallo” and “Fur Immer” to eliminate all vestiges of residual rock influence and barrel ahead into an unknown future. Unlike Dinger, however, Gane kept one eye on the past. The other component of Stereolab’s sound was the buzz of a Farfisa organ and the otherworldly tones of the Moog synthesizer. Gane’s retro preoccupations extended to the packaging as well: One album was a nod to hi-fi godhead Juan Garcia Esquivel, and the cover of their first for Elektra portrayed a stylus hovering over a record like an invading craft making first contact. Gane named the project Stereolab, after a hi-fi system test record from 1960. They etched “NEU KIDS ON THE BLOCK” in the runout groove of their first 10” on outré London label Too Pure, a new imprint fond of loud, female-fronted, krautrock-loving groups.
The calm in the center of Stereolab’s trebly storm was Sadier. Her dispassionate French/English croon itself was a throwback—at least to those early ’90s heads familiar with “Bonnie and Clyde” or ye-ye icons like Francoise Hardy. She was fond of Guy Debord’s 1967 Situationist manifesto Society of the Spectacle, which, across 221 short “theses,” argues that capitalism and mass media discourse have combined to wholly subsume reality, leaving only media representations in their wake. Debord’s thinking deeply influenced Sadier’s lyrics, and its abbreviated style is refracted in Sadier’s phrasing (imagine Sadier singing the line “cyclical time in itself is time without conflict,” number 129 in Spectacle). The band’s early 1993 peak saw Sadier advocating for “La Resistance” on their highest-charting single to date, and on the 18-minute krautgaze epic “Jenny Ondioline” she wonders if “democracy is fucked.” Looking back, that song marked a symbolic end of Gane and Sadier’s indie-motorik project. Sadier’s lyrics would hold fast and gain new dimensions while Gane’s restless tinkering with Stereolab’s sound continued apace.
With 1996’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Stereolab made its first masterpiece. Opening track “Metronomic Underground” sounded much more like Can than Neu!, and more like spongy, alien trip-hop than either. The ultimate record collector band had finally done what critics (often unfairly) expect of all bands: “transcended their influences.” After five years, Emperor positioned Stereolab at the forefront of “alternative” music. In part, Gane had Chicago producer/drummer John McEntire to thank. McEntire’s band Tortoise had caught Gane’s ear with their moody 1994 debut, and their 1996 breakthrough Millions Now Living Will Never Die led critic Simon Reynolds to position the group at the forefront of a “post-rock” movement in American indie music. Like Gane, McEntire was a studio rat and gear nerd. Unlike Gane, McEntire composed songs with instrumental loops. On The Fawn, the 1997 album from McEntire’s other band The Sea and Cake, he and singer/songwriter Sam Prekop excised virtually all indie rock signifiers and built songs like “The Argument,” from Prekop’s Latin-pop-influenced acoustic guitar and hundreds of electronic loops. With McEntire, Gane had found the perfect collaborator who could not only bring his ideas to fruition, but cast Stereolab’s entire sound in his own image.
McEntire produced all but three tracks on Emperor’s follow-up, 1997’s Dots and Loops, which, unlike any Stereolab album before it—or, really, any other album at the time—cocooned the group in a sovereign sound world. Sometimes derided as the moment when Stereolab tipped over into the bourgeois excess of those space-age pop albums that initially inspired them, 20 years later Dots and Loops is the telos of Gane’s original ideal for the group. It’s the first album on which Stereolab actually made the rhythm-focused, rock-averse music that they’d long striven toward—a late-90s’ version of Neu!’s headlong quest into some imaginary future, precision-tooled using cutting-edge studio technology so that every chord and vocal line becomes immaculate hi-fi test material.
The first seconds of opening track “Brakhage” show McEntire’s influence immediately: after sputtering to life like it’s being tuned in from outer space on a vintage receiver, a two-chord keyboard vamp oscillates over McEntire’s skittering drum and vibraphone loops. In comes Sadier, doubled by Mary Hansen, with one of her simplest manifestos, sung like a nursery rhyme: “We need so damn/Many things/To keep our dazed lives/Lives going.” Maybe Sadier was simultaneously referring here to consumerist desire and the sheer amount of studio gadgets required to make the album itself. For Gane, the lengthy process of composing through loops functioned as a self-made digging expedition. “I like building up layers, and then looking through those layers to reveal something underneath,” he later said. “New sounds come from the natural process of all of these things going on at the same time. I like the element of chance.”
Working digitally was a natural response to dealing with all these things at the same time, and it was Gane and McEntire’s inaugural experience using Pro Tools in the studio. The digital audio workstation (or DAW) was just then establishing itself as a studio necessity, and Pro Tools was quickly becoming the default option. The album’s detractors might say that the endless possibilities of digital editing only contribute to Dots and Loops’ fussiness. The first minute-and-a-half of the mesmerizing “Diagonals,” however, is evidence of McEntire and Gane’s ability to negotiate the infinite possibilities afforded by Pro Tools. They speed up a marimba loop until it purred like a tiny engine, and thread it through a mutant-funk jazz drum loop, sampled from krautrock progenitor Amon Düül’s “I Can’t Wait.” As a languid brass chart lazily washes ashore, it breaks into a 5/4 time signature (one of the group’s favorites on this album, used for the equally frenetic “Parsec” and the unhurried “Rainbo Conversation”) as Sadier and Hansen warble in both French and English about the materialistic escapism of the bourgeois European holiday.
Stereolab fans will often argue that Transient, Mars, or Emperor are a better distillation of what makes the band great, but Dots and Loops’ interaction with its historical moment separates it from its predecessors. Tracks like “Brakhage,” “Diagonals,” and “Parsec” rank among 1997’s most future-looking pop, the stuff that seemed, then and now, to exist in its own stratosphere: Missy Elliott and Timbaland’s Supa Dupa Fly, Busta Rhymes’ “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See,” Aphex Twin’s “Flim,” Roni Size’s New Forms, Björk’s Homogenic, and Mouse on Mars’ Autoditacker. That last album, the third by German electronic duo Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner, is a uniquely visceral kind of electronic music, the kind of thing that seemed to emanate from gently prodding some squishy beast with small jolts of electricity. Mouse on Mars were studio obsessives who loved experimenting with live instruments, contact microphones, obscure samples, and—deploying one of Reynolds’ “post-rock” criteria—using guitars and guitar gear for non-rock purposes.
Mouse on Mars were also veterans of Too Pure, and Stereolab cut the three Dots and Loops tracks that weren’t recorded by McEntire in Chicago at the pair’s St. Martin Tonstudio. Their production touch on the album is light, but the atmosphere of a mid-tempo waltz like “The Flower Called Nowhere” (Pharrell is a fan) is much earthier and more organic than McEntire’s comparatively chilly work, but the two-part, nine-minute album-closing “Contronatura” showcases the real Mouse on Mars M.O. For the first half, Toma and St. Werner buoy Sadier and Hansen’s empathetic vocals—”My dearest friend, don’t go”—on a viscous sonic goo which sutures the laconic first half to the song’s jauntier second. Over halfway through, Sadier shifts the song from a dialogue between friends to a political tract that captures the album’s mystifying artificial/natural spirit in its final moments: “This is the future/Of an illusion/...Living fantasy of the immortal/The reality of an animal.” To mark the transformation, Toma and St. Werner turn the track into a thumping, gelatinous march rhythm. The last four minutes of Dots and Loops are also its most danceable.
Stereolab’s trans-Atlantic, deeply collaborative production on Dots and Loops emerged at a moment when global trade initiatives and rapidly expanding electronic networks were rendering the world more technologically interconnected and economically interdependent than ever before. In 1997, the Internet Underground Music Archive was four years old, Justin Frankel released the first version of Winamp—a novel way to play the compressed digital files that were being ripped from CDs and traded through syrup-slow dial-up connections—and prosumer-level digital production software was proliferating. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act—which permitted labels to copy-protect music files and sue anyone who shared songs without express permission—was still a year from being rammed through Congress and enacted into law. The music business was careening toward its millennial economic peak, and massive retail emporia like HMV and Virgin Megastores carried tens of thousands of titles. As a deeply collaborative form of commercial art, pop music has always tended to fold back on itself from time to time, as styles, melodies, and even recordings are incorporated into new sounds. In the late 1990s, that process dramatically accelerated.
Let’s call the most adventurous, sample-driven and style-copping music of this period “recombinant pop.” Around the world, musicians who came of age during the 1980s were digging through an ever-increasing archive and using digital software to redefine alternative music through the looped, sampled, and collaged productions of hip-hop and electronic music. Per an influential sociological study published in late 1996, “omnivorous inclusion,” had emerged as the defining characteristic for highbrow music nerds, a position, the researchers concluded, that was “better adapted to an increasingly global world managed by those who (show) respect for the cultural expressions of others.” Gone was rock’s romantic authenticity, drawn from the soul of the poet. “It was not so hard to accept the ersatz as ultimate authenticity,” cultural critic Geoffrey O’Brien argued in an examination of Burt Bacharach’s sudden return to fashion at this moment. “The point is not roots but connections, the more far-fetched the better.” A January 1998 SPIN feature on so-called “Sound Boys” argued similarly that “song-based rock music has ceded cutting-edge status to pure sonic exotica.” The rock and pop world had finally met Stereolab on its terms.
1996 and 1997 were a tipping point for recombinant pop. Penultimate Dots and Loops track “Ticker-Tape of the Unconscious” opens with a sample from Gal Costa’s Tropicalia gem “Divino, Maravilhoso,” and its brisk, undulating rhythm track sounds a bit like Timbaland or the Neptunes trying their hand at lounge jazz. Along with Emperor, those two years were heady: Beck’s Odelay, Cornershop’s When I Was Born for the 7th Time, Cibo Matto’s Viva! La Woman, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing....., Fat Boy Slim’s Better Living Through Chemistry and Daft Punk’s Homework each created era-defining beat music that sampled broadly from global sources. The Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal label released the throwback roller-rink funk of Luscious Jackson, while Matador was handling stateside releases of Tokyo lounge-pop weirdos Pizzicato Five and Cornelius’ Fantasma, the peak of Keigo Oyamada’s dense, sample-laden Cornelius project.
Oyamada was the center of Tokyo’s “Shibuya-kei” scene, a network of savants described by Scottish art-pop provocateur (and, in 1997, scene reporter) Momus as “intelligent shopping as art.” That’s as good a phrase as any to describe recombinant pop, or its hip-hop predecessor, crate-digging. It worked both ways, too: Dots and Loops sounded like nothing else at the time, and like lots of stuff from other times—a hipster marketing team’s dream. A year or so later, the jittery, retro-psychedelia of “Parsec” was used in Volkswagen’s “Less Flower, More Power” TV ad, which itself used a minimalist, white-out design—referred to in photographic circles as an “infinity cove”—that mirrored Gane and McEntire’s impeccable, futuristic vision.
Apart from McEntire and the band itself, Dots and Loops owes its sound to another studio epicure and insatiable consumer of pop’s past. Like Gane, Sean O’Hagan spent much of the ’80s in an indie-pop band (Microdisney) before seeking a more eclectic, recombinant sound. As the High Llamas, O’Hagan developed a lush style of string and brass arrangements around a British folk-pop core, incorporated antique instruments like the tack piano, and named songs after his 60s heroes—“Bach Ze,” “Shuggie Todd.” O’Hagan’s specific muse was Pet Sounds-era Brian Wilson and the meticulous, academic arrangements of his later collaborator Van Dyke Parks. O’Hagan adopted chilly electronic textures for Cold and Bouncy, released in early 1998—the wriggling sounds under his signature loping string and brass arrangement on “HiBall Nova Scotia” sound like they could’ve been sampled from Mouse on Mars. Not for nothing, but “cold and bouncy” is another perfect phrase to describe Dots and Loops, too.
O’Hagan’s bucolic tempos, amoebic electronic textures, and weepy strings suffuse the four-part, 17-and-a-half-minute epic “Refractions in the Plastic Pulse”—one of Sadier’s finest Situationist statements on human interaction amid the Spectacle—and provide a serene, unsettling drone behind the busy “Rainbo Conversation.” Best of all, though, is his punchy brass arrangement on “Miss Modular,” Stereolab’s first stab at Motown-style R&B-pop. While O’Hagan’s Farfisa plays tag with McEntire’s syncopated drum loops, his effervescent horns swell and ebb, and Gane’s strummed acoustic gives the song the surreal feel of the best ’60s Latin pop with a late ’90s production sheen. Sadier contributes one of her finest lyrical moments to the track, as well. The imagery she conjures—a trompe l’oeil on a cardboard box, a spectacle that rhymes and arouses a flash in the eyes, an intimate show—is mild Situationist poetry about the commercial magic of pop music itself.
Though Stereolab would continue at a fairly prolific clip for the next 12 years before declaring a “hiatus” in 2009, they never again made anything as singularly wonderful and of its time as Dots and Loops. Jim O’Rourke joined his Chicago contemporary McEntire for the 1999 LP Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night and 2001’s Sound-Dust, though the 2002 death of Mary Hansen was a creative and psychic schism from which the band never fully recovered. Pop music and the recording industry changed quite a bit as well: the digital wave that was cresting in 1996 and 1997 hit the shores at the turn of the century, and Stereolab’s retro obsessions and recombinant methodology dispersed broadly (while the motorik drumming that they introduced to the indie rock world became its 21st-century Bo Diddley beat). None of this dims the joy of listening to Dots and Loops 20 years later, it only enhances the experience. A band that started in the midst of CD mania by obsessing over pop’s analog past reached their peak six years later by embracing the bleeding edge of digital studio technology. They made a work both of its moment and one that seems to hover outside everything else. In 1997, the alternative music world finally caught up with Stereolab—right as they exited its orbit. | 2017-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Duophonic | July 23, 2017 | 9.2 | 20c4de6c-948f-4208-8b6f-ef399c75ec38 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
SF rock fixture recently constructed a handbuilt jukebox jammed with 100 songs recorded with help from a coterie of the Bay Area's garage-pop artists. | SF rock fixture recently constructed a handbuilt jukebox jammed with 100 songs recorded with help from a coterie of the Bay Area's garage-pop artists. | Sonny Smith: 100 Records Volume II: I Miss the Jams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15067-100-records-volume-ii-i-miss-the-jams/ | 100 Records Volume II: I Miss the Jams | "When you're young... to say screw it all and chase your dreams is seen as courageous and brave," Sonny Smith reminds us in his song-poem "Broke Artist at the Turn of the Century". "People salute you. As you grow older, they no longer think of you as heroic. They see you as something else: selfish, foolish, or lost." Yeah, he's singing in character-- Hank Champion, descendent of Texan miners-- but surely that line in the sand between youthful ideologue to struggling something-or-other has occurred to Smith. Especially lately: The San Fran renaissance man-- artist, author, and bandleader-- recently completed work on his most elaborate project yet, a handbuilt jukebox jammed with 100 songs written by Sonny and recorded with help from a coterie of the Bay Area's garage-pop movers and shakers.
Each tune is assigned a fake band name, each record its own custom sleeve with several groups even earning their own elaborate backstories; the mind reels at the scope of the project, the mastery of mixed media such an undertaking would require, the drive it'd take not to just say screw it and move onto something else. Here's this relatively unsung singer-songwriter crafting possibly the most complicated box set of all time, in an edition of one; brave, to be sure, but at least on paper, not too many degrees removed from foolish either. But Smith, as he did with his Sunsets' still-great Tomorrow Is Alright LP, makes it all seem too easy, and his affably eclectic jukebox-era songcraft and the formidable crew he's assembled for backup make I Miss the Jams-- the second, 10-song set culled from the original 100-- seem anything but foolhardy.
With all the project's extra-musical elements, Smith and company could've almost been forgiven for half-assing the songs themselves; standing in a room with that jukebox, punching buttons for Earth Girl Helen Brown or Loud Fast Fools, the occasional noise splatter or big dumb lark would seem almost inevitable. But the 10 tracks on I Miss the Jams would suggest that Smith put the tunes at least on par with all the trappings, offering up a genial set of retro-minded rave-ups recorded in warm, punchy mid-fi. Smith's sly wit and remarkably natural way with songcraft are very much in evidence here as they were on the Sunsets' LP, but the songs here are simpler and, accordingly, more direct; the bawdy "I Wanna Do It", featuring a brassy vocal from the Sandwitches' Heidi Alexander doesn't mince words, while "Teen Age Thugs"-- its verses in Spanish, its chorus bored into your skull in English-- makes its point despite the potential language barrier. "Broke Artist" tells its tale of a skid row artist, his similarly hard-luck benefactor, and a run in on the wrong side of the tracks; Smith's best lyrics have a short-story quality about them anyway, and it's nice to see him finding yet another way to marry his many passions on wax.
Perhaps understandably, the tunes do occasionally feel a tad like genre exercises-- "Ain't No Turnin Back" skiffles, "Back in the Day (I Can't Stand It)" is straight British invasion R&B-- but Smith's such an unflappably cool songwriter than even borrowed clothes fit him like a glove. Like Tomorrow Is Alright, I Miss the Jams is a remarkably blithe, laid-back work, the subtle charms of Smith's gently funny, sneakily subversive songs occasionally taking a listen or two to sort themselves out. But there's a durability there that belies the fairly easy reference-grabbing and the slightly shrugged-off attitude on display; Smith's fairly unshowy, trend-averse style may never win him the fanbase of some of his peppier, more hook-forward left coasters, but their clean lines and easy feel lends them a feeling of timelessness that seems like it ought to endure.
For all the romantic notions of creative solitude in "Broke Artist", Smith couldn't have made his big box happen without a good showing from the smoldering San Francisco indie rock scene, who come out in droves here. Ty Segall takes it down a notch or four on the surfy "One Way Doomsday Trip to Nowhere", Smith and the Fresh & Onlys' Tim Cohen attempt to out-deadpan each other on the otherwise rollicking "Time to Split", and Kelley Stoltz fulfills his unspoken obligation to be on every San Fran record ever by appearing throughout. The spirit of community amongst this ragtag crew hasn't gone unremarked upon, but it's definitely in full force here; although it's certainly Smith's record at the core, it plays like a nice little overview of the San Francisco scene as it stands, their unusually fresh and forward-looking take on shuffly mod-pop. Through it all, Smith and company remain calm, totally uncowed by the task at hand. With friends like those willing to help flesh out songs like these, Smith's wild-eyed devotion to this absurdly laborious project makes all the sense in the world. | 2011-02-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-02-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Turn Up | February 4, 2011 | 7.6 | 20c99c65-f681-46bd-a094-f25c86026945 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The second album from singer-songwriter Sophie Allison is piercing and unpredictable. In contrast to its bigger and brighter sound, the mood is grimmer, the emotional truths darker. | The second album from singer-songwriter Sophie Allison is piercing and unpredictable. In contrast to its bigger and brighter sound, the mood is grimmer, the emotional truths darker. | Soccer Mommy: color theory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soccer-mommy-color-theory/ | color theory | When Sophie Allison sings, she sounds wide-open and guarded, casual and intense, intimate and coolly removed. In her best songs as Soccer Mommy, a piercing line —“I don’t wanna be your fucking dog,” for example, from “Your Dog”—wriggles away from direct interpretation as she delivers it, turning from declaration to hypothesis. Some of the magnetism of her pop-inflected indie rock comes from the winding shape of her melodies; in their unpredictable motion, they often resemble counterpoint written to a root melody that’s been erased. But a lot of her power derives from the immediacy of her voice—when she opens her mouth it’s as if a spotlight appears.
The songwriting of her earliest direct-to-Bandcamp material was still hazy at the edges, but by her 2018 studio debut Clean, a world-class indie rock singer-songwriter was standing in her place. It doesn’t always happen this way, but the acclaim followed her swiftly and her fanbase multiplied. She toured with Vampire Weekend and Wilco, with Liz Phair and Paramore and Kacey Musgraves. In another era, Clean might have landed her a lucrative major-label contract. In this era, she enters the low-level managerial world of a successful indie rock band, one in which you become your own manager and booker and agent, even if you also hire and pay those people. “I’m touring for a living and I run a small business, basically,” she told the New York Times last month. “It’s a very isolating existence.”
color theory exhibits much of the growth—and some of the growing pains—that usually attend massive transformations. She’s on Loma Vista now, home to fellow indie-label graduates like St. Vincent and Andrew Bird. It might not be Caroline or DreamWorks in the ’90s, but Allison makes the most of her opportunity, and the songs feel like a response to an exponential leap in platform and possibility.
As she did on Clean, she worked with producer Gabe Wax, who has also helmed projects by the War on Drugs, Deerhunter, and other indie A-listers. Where Clean was warm and rough-hewn, the product of a careful microphone set-up and mutual trust, color theory feels dazzled with the endless creative possibilities of the studio. The drizzle of acoustic and electric guitars on “lucy” feels fine-tuned to evoke memories of The Bends-era Radiohead. On the seven-minute-plus “yellow is the color of her eyes,” layers of Mellotron, Wurlitzer, and Prophet synthesizer (all played by Allison) lend the song the sleepy-eyed sheen of shoegaze. The drums on “circle the drain” are subtly sweetened by drum machine à la the work of ’00s pop hitmakers The Matrix, and its edges shimmer with drones and synths until it resembles one of the billowing soap bubbles in the video for Sheryl Crow’s “Everyday Is a Winding Road.”
In deliberate contrast to the bright sound, the mood is grimmer, the emotional truths darker. Allison has said the album depicts three states of being, represented by three colors: blue for depression, yellow for mental and physical illness, gray for mortality. Clean began with the urgency of youth, in the moment of a break-up; the first lyric of color theory opener “bloodstream” is wearier. Observing the “pale girl staring through the mirror,” she remembers the way blood used to flow “into my rosy cheeks” before she looks down: “Now a river runs red from my knuckles into the sink,” she sings, her voice flat and resigned. She is quick to qualify and complicate the alarming image (“Maybe it’s just a dream”) but the feeling resounds: color theory pitches headlong into the anomie of early-20s depression—the moment in adulthood when the bright colors of adolescence start to dim for the first time and it occurs to you, with dull alarm, that the rest of it might be like this.
As a lyricist, Allison keeps her footing in this more internal landscape. She has a skill for following winding syntax to a sharp point: “I am fake it till you make it in a can/And you have a calmness that I could never understand,” she sings on “Royal Screw Up,” a song that also includes the frank admission, “I am the problem for me/Now and always.” You can trace her admiration of Taylor Swift in how she follows a standard-issue pop-song metaphor until it yields a moment of truth: “I try to break your walls but all I ever end up breaking is your bones/And the bruises show/Standing in the living room talking as you’re staring at your phone/It’s a cold I’ve known,” she sings on “Nightswimming.” The paired couplets are neat as a folded napkin, and the alienation—who hasn’t felt dismissed by a brandished smartphone?—is palpable.
If there is anything missing from color theory, it’s a sense of intensity and surprise. Many of the songs chug along around the same midtempo, with a similar first-drum-lesson beat. Her choices are intentional; Allison has cited “bops” from her childhood like Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn,” Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy” and Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” as inspiration, and she has borrowed some of these songs’ chunky simplicity for her arrangements. The varied strum patterns that gave Clean’s songs their sinuous, lived-in feel have given way mostly to chugging down-stroked power chords, and the palette is bright, clean, and uncluttered. But she doesn’t tap into these anthems’ urge to shout from the rafters, even if what you’re shouting is that you’re desperate, rock-bottom, about to give up: The songs on color theory sometimes feels like a series of 8-point-font text messages projected onto highway billboards.
On the penultimate song “stain,” she casts off most of the instruments and leans into the microphone again, just her fingers gripping a pick and a backing of tense silence. The music instantly becomes corporeal, urgent—she has yet to locate this power within the glossy peaks of new sound she has churned up. “Now I’m always stained, like the sheets in my parents’ house/Yeah I’m always stained/And it’s never coming out,” she sings, and as the song cuts out—neatly, at exactly three minutes, one of the album’s shortest—your nerves jangle with the humming of the strings, your gut churns in simpatico with Allison’s.
Correction: An earlier version of this review mistakenly referenced New Pornographers and Barenaked Ladies as being signed to Loma Vista. They have since been removed.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | February 28, 2020 | 7.8 | 20deda1e-7748-4916-980d-668ec2ae17ae | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
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 Houston rapper’s 2002 album, where stoner logic and slacker humor becomes a timeless look into the psyche of the everyman. | 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 Houston rapper’s 2002 album, where stoner logic and slacker humor becomes a timeless look into the psyche of the everyman. | Devin the Dude: Just Tryin’ Ta Live | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/devin-the-dude-just-tryin-ta-live/ | Just Tryin’ Ta Live | Devin Copeland was more into breakdancing than rapping. Moving around Texas in the mid-1980s, he would link up with any dance crew he could find. Being himself trumped any aggrandized persona he could come up with. He was calm and lovable, a scamp, though this Devin that his Houston friends knew was not the one introduced to America through the music video to Scarface’s “Hand of the Dead Body.” There’s Devin, posted up next to a cop car, mean-mugging as a neighborhood protest breaks out in defense of Scarface and Ice Cube. This is the most serious Devin the Dude would be for the next seven years.
Devin was always “the dude,” another cast member in Rap-A-Lot Records’ long history of colorful characters who never fit hip-hop’s ideal image of a star. He didn’t have Scarface’s mystique, Bushwick Bill’s outrageous stage persona, or Big Mike’s blunt delivery. He and his group the Odd Squad—a rag-tag trio of misfits turned best friends featuring Jugg Mug and the blind rapper DJ Rob Quest—defied all conventional Rap-A-Lot logic. They were funky class clowns, messing around with samples and instrumentals and delivering only one album, 1994’s rollicking Fadanuf Fa Erybody. The Odd Squad’s sound didn’t come anywhere near the rugged sides of Houston, instead opting for back-of-the-crate samples of Milt Jackson, the Crusaders, and the Five Stairsteps. It was part East Coast boom-bap, part juvenile raps about sex (“Your Pussy’s Like Dope”) and weed (“Rev. Puff”). The album crashed and burned; later that year, Rap-A-Lot poured its resources into Scarface’s hard-bodied The Diary instead. With dreams of a second Odd Squad record dashed by the label, Devin determined he could be just as good on his own.
The road towards Devin the Dude’s second solo album, the quixotic and subtly titled Just Tryin’ Ta Live, made it seem like he was being primed for stardom. There was Devin on the chorus of “Fuck Faces,” a sex romp from Scarface’s 1998 album My Homies that evolved into a cult classic. A year later, Dr. Dre tapped Devin for “Fuck You,” off of Dre’s explosive 2001, plucking him off of shows with Dre protégé Mel-Man. Houston’s favorite weed head, the guy type-casted for stoner comedy soundtracks, was suddenly a known entity outside of city limits, though not really a household name. “I’ve never considered myself a star,” he told Noisey in a 2017 profile. “I feel like I am no better than anybody else, and sometimes I don’t get the girl at the end.”
Devin’s previous album, his 1998 debut The Dude, amped up the goofball nature of Fadanuf and packaged it around verses from Scarface, the Odd Squad, and others. It had all of the same crude sexual humor that made Devin an outright star on “Fuck Faces” but as the album wore on, it flattened out. Devin intended Just Tryin’ Ta Live to lean more into the music than his humor, alluding in a 2002 interview with MTV to a more “serious riff” going through the album. The sound of Devin’s world—green, hazy, and funky—also had space for deeper meaning.
And by trying to be serious for once, Devin the Dude unlocked his secret power: creating moments more realistic than any of his Houston counterparts. Just Tryin’ Ta Live is the kind of rap album where you don’t even need to aspire to be Devin—mainly because he’s high and non-aspirational. It’s a ne’er-do-well opus, a 60-minute stretch of time where the narrator could be any person on any given day. Off sheer charm and confidence, Devin could make you rally behind having a shitty car—as long as you had a car, you won. Other Houston rappers indulged in mafioso fantasies or wild capitalistic flexes. Devin’s world was hard, but he always took it easy.
At the onset, Just Tryin’ Ta Live attempts to balance Devin’s would-be superstar status with his affable, BarcaLounger nature. It cultivates and further expands on Devin’s everyman persona, a man more concerned with “reefer and beer” than being the biggest rapper alive, much less on his block. It’s a self-awareness few artists could crystalize or even approach; Devin does it for an entire album. The opener, “Zeldar,” imagines an alien traveling through space and time just as Devin would, using weed to cure anxiety but remaining an outcast: “I rolled into the hood/I’m greeted, but it wasn’t all good/I saw mixed people all kinds of colors and they looked at me like I was weird.” Producer Domo’s pianos and cartoon sound effects play around as Devin attempts to bring levity to his celebrity: “My name is Zeldar and we shop at Walmart.”
Devin might yearn for the high of celebrity, but he also relishes the lows of normal life. “Lacville ’79,” a downtempo funk odyssey, unfurls as Devin overhears neighborhood gossip while being ostracized for his beloved, busted car. As long as he has his gateway to the world, a 1979 Cadillac Seville, he’ll keep on pushing—regardless if crooked cops know the stash spots underneath the dash, or if pedestrians gawk at his beater. On “Go Somewhere,” he drunkenly details a night where he’s stopped at the entrance of the club and can’t get in, despite being a guy who appeared on a Dr. Dre album. “The bouncer’s at the door thinkin’ I gotta lie to get in,” he raps before being accosted and interrogated. “‘You ain’t no motherfuckin’ rapper, where’s your gold and your diamonds?’”
The moments when Just Tryin’ Ta Live tries to bring in some outside perspective are jarring compared to the half-baked, wholly self-deprecating raps surrounding them. On “Some of ’Em,” Xzibit takes shots at nameless foes and Nas raps about how he wants none of the media scrutiny and racism aimed at the three famous Mikes—Jordan, Jackson, and Tyson. Such ambition is lost on Devin. His worldview is shaped around surviving for himself. The main character of his world likes rapping because it’s a fun job: You get to smoke, fuck, and drink. He often succeeds at doing all three.
Devin portrays himself as a sinner who loves free sex with no strings attached, a wanderer who won’t commit himself to one thing forever. But it never feels like a party anthem, because around the corner, there’s Devin experiencing a real-time struggle between being rich, being poor, and finding the happy medium. All of this is laid out on the album’s signature moment, the DJ Premier-produced “Doobie Ashtray.” Through his trademark scratches, sleepy guitar notes, and an ocean-deep bass line, Preemo taps into the Texas roots of his childhood and together he and Devin lay down the modern blues. “A rich man can lose a lot at one time and feel like he has nowhere to go,” Devin told MTV in 2002. “A man that really don’t have much at all could lose as much as a doobie and feel like he’s left out. The song is about how you’re going to face that. What is your next step?” A true stoner classic, “Doobie Ashtray” asks the question that lies at the center of Devin’s philosophy: Are you more with less or less with more?
Devin’s desire to become an everyman rap star traces back to Scarface. If not for Face, who hailed the Odd Squad’s lone album Fandanuf Fa Erbody as his favorite release of all time, there would be no solo Devin the Dude album. It’s why the two men’s stories—one who saw the world for its gravity and treachery and another who saw the spoils and desired no part in its weariness—are so intertwined. It’s the tao of Houston rap: For every hard-headed rapper who chooses to narrate the ills of society and how it affects them, there’s the other, who wants to merely live within said society and be content.
The resigned optimism of days spent in a fog of weed and Lone Star comes screeching to a halt on the title track and album closer. With a swollen guitar and drums beneath him, Devin raps about wanting to get out of his comfort zone, then relents at the last second. “I just write shit, hopin’ it might hit so I can make a living/But there some who don’t like it,'' he reflects. “But I... I really don’t give a motherfuck.” It’s the climax to a film where Devin, steady on a mission to enjoy his vices without getting hemmed up, refuses to bust under pressure. Being himself, he decides, allows him far more clarity than attempting to be someone else.
Just Tryin’ Ta Live is about Devin the Dude being rooted in his own faith. Fame wasn’t going to find him the same way it found his friend-turned-fan Dr. Dre or one of his idols, Too $hort. It’s a rap album whose creator sees fame as a byproduct of his day job. He continued to point out the clear outline for his career: find simplicity as a man who uses rap as a profession, not as a mythical persona. The style wound up having disciples such as Larry June, Curren$y and Le$—self-made men who just rap, smoke, and enjoy cool shit. The Devin the Dude of Just Tryin’ Ta Live is never out of reach for anyone; he knows that being a man of the people, for the people, is the kind of fame money can’t buy.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Rap-A-Lot | January 31, 2021 | 8.7 | 20e2e343-da83-4506-8daf-3e3d698f9dfa | Brandon Caldwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-caldwell/ | |
Tinashe's latest release is another helping of the moody, ominous R&B that she has quietly made her name on. | Tinashe's latest release is another helping of the moody, ominous R&B that she has quietly made her name on. | Tinashe: Nightride | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22603-nightride/ | Nightride | Over the past four years, Tinashe, a 23-year-old former child actor turned singer, has been nudging the needle of R&B forward with a handful of moody and distinctive projects. Eschewing the glossy production and gospel-influenced, showboating singing style characteristic of traditional R&B, she wove a cocoon, leaning on woozy, atmospheric beats that nodded to chopped-n-screwed culture. Despite her movie-biz background and, yes, camera-ready face, however, she’s struggled to break through in the music industry. In an interview with xoNecole last year, Tinashe explained why she hadn’t been given much support.
“I think it comes from a place of there is only room for one. Or there is only room for two. … There is a Beyoncé, there is a Rihanna, there is Zendaya, there is a Jourdan Dunn. There is a Black girl in all of these positions and we don’t need another one. It’s just kind of ridiculous because there are like a hundred blonde, white actresses and leading ladies. There are a hundred rappers that all virtually look the same, sound the same, and dress the same and no one cares. But for some reason, when it comes to young women … There can’t be room [for us all]. There can’t be five Black girls winning.”
There is truth to her response, especially in rap. As more and more promising female rappers pop up, from an industry standpoint there’s still Nicki Minaj and everyone else. But Tinashe’s music also has a somewhat reticent, inaccessible air to it, and her lyrics lack stickiness, which make holding the spotlight hard. Despite her best efforts—the choreographed shows, the sexy cover shoots, the collabs with bigger players like Chris Brown and Nick Jonas—and a warm critical reception (Aquarius, her 2014 debut studio album, ranked on many year-end lists, including Pitchfork’s)—she hasn’t quite become a “star.” She scored a mainstream smash with 2014’s “2 On,” but that might have been a fluke, owing more to the ubiquity of DJ Mustard’s club-ready beats and a stronger POV than Tinashe typically employs in her own slippery vision. Clearly, her team wants Tinashe to be a radio artist (see her addition on a new version of Britney’s sharp “Slumber Party”), but she is making much smarter music than “2 On” or “All Hands on Deck.” In fact, if claiming a spot on heavy rotation playlists is the goal, she might be making music that’s too good, as evinced by her latest project, Nightride.
Delays of Joyride, her upcoming sophomore album, and fuzziness over exactly what Nightride is—a mixtape for sale, a companion piece to Joyride?—hint to her team’s confusion of how to market the excellent yet not-easily-defined music she’s creating. For example, “Energy,” the mystical Mike WiLL Made-It track, is one of the best songs of the year and it didn’t even make the cut here.
Album opener “Lucid Dreaming” is a soothing balm, its wooden chimes evoking the calm of savasana. However, Nightride’s first half is heavily weighted with somber ballads, and the first 25 minutes begin to drag, with the exception of the taut “Company,” which skitters and flits. But from that point on, Nightride sounds fascinating and, while polished, less sleek and cold than the title suggests. It has more of an ominous, broken-down carnival vibe. Tinashe is making some very weird music here (she’s not alone in that, of course—Sevyn Streeter, Dawn Richard, Abra, Kelela immediately spring to mind as her peers). The lopsided, one-wheel-falling-off wonk of “Ride of Your Life” gives way to “Party Favors,” an off-kilter banger that inflates and deflates, swelling with and hissing out helium. And really, considering the country is currently on Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride, shouldn’t the music crafted during it swerve left, taking bumpy, pitch-black back roads instead of paved, well-lit streets?
Generally, production here is drizzly and overcast, and work from newcomer Stephen Spencer (his glitchy-yet-sultry slow-burner “Spacetime” is just begging to soundtrack a futuristic sex scene) to vets like Metro Boomin, Boi-1da, and The-Dream (whose winking “Company” is the lone cloudless song on the project) is excellent and cohesive despite there being almost as many producers as there are songs. Obviously they were inspired by the theme—Tinashe has long preferred shadows and slinkiness to bright poppiness, and Nightride is strictly after-hours music. She even trades her standard breathiness for a richer tone to match the deep groove of “Sunburn.” The listener’s only decision is setting—dim club, deserted freeway, darkened bedroom. The music is infinitely interesting, possibly more so than the artist singing it. But then again, you shouldn’t count out anyone releasing an album like Nightride. As she whispers after “Sacrifices,” “I will not be ignored.” | 2016-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | November 19, 2016 | 7.8 | 20e41864-7902-4e59-bc46-30891a7644e3 | Rebecca Haithcoat | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca- haithcoat/ | null |
The lead singer of the now-defunct Smith Westerns steps out with a solo debut that furthers the emotional trajectory of his former band while offering a softer approach. | The lead singer of the now-defunct Smith Westerns steps out with a solo debut that furthers the emotional trajectory of his former band while offering a softer approach. | Cullen Omori: New Misery | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21838-new-misery/ | New Misery | When a band goes through a messy divorce, you often get a clean division of communal artistic property. The ensuing rivalry, whether spoken or unspoken, typically pits the eccentric against the centrist—see Mars Volta vs. Sparta, Lennon vs. McCartney, Wilco vs. Son Volt, or Andre 3000 vs. Big Boi. For those who must choose sides in following the dissolution of Smith Westerns, which saw former guitarist Max Kakacek breaking off from the band to form Whitney, an immediate tonal difference can be identified: Whitney plays breezy AM radio-indie; Lead singer Cullen Omori made a solo record and called it New Misery.
So it’s up to Omori to further the emotional trajectory the Smith Westerns established over their three LPs. While they grew from reckless, glam-punk wunderkinds to the verge of maturity, the best Smith Westerns songs (“Weekend," “All Die Young”) were the sound of young men seeing their golden days dissolving in front of their eyes in real time. Their success was enviable by just about any standard, but now that the smoke has cleared, Omori is now saddled with the expected problems of someone who skipped college to be in a modestly popular rock band: financial instability and a lack of marketable skills.
There are points here where Omori directly invokes his previous band’s rep as hedonist brats amongst the genteel indie rock acts that defined the early part of the decade, but his malaise is typically drawn broadly enough to not offend the specifics of any quarter-life crisis. “Wrote a letter to my former self/ Saying ‘thanks for knowing when to give up’,” he smirks on “No Big Deal,” speaking to the regrets and fear recognizable to anyone who invested their formative years in something that left them unprepared to face the future. Sure, an early highlight of New Misery is a sleepwalk of drowsy harmonies and slide guitar reminiscent of All Things Must Pass. But its sentiment is a far more cynical rendering of the same idea: “And Yet the World Still Turns.”
Omori has never been the most personal songwriter, so the context of New Misery gives an easy entry and a new way to experience a style that has remained mostly intact since Soft Will. Very little of it can be described as “rock,” none of it as “punk,” the result of Omori trying to emulate the top 40 music he’d hear in hospitals while working with a medical supply company. New Misery provides sturdy melodies throughout; as with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, Omori’s voice ensures that he’ll always approach pop sounding like a classic rock throwback, though he doesn’t have the same taste for adventure or sonic precision.
New Misery’s filler doesn’t lie in the songs themselves, but rather within them, the predictable indulgences of both solo albums and transitions from guitar to synthesizers. The instrumental sections that of “And Yet the World Still Turns” and “Lom” meander rather than mesmerize, overdubs add distance rather than depth, Shane Stonebeck’s production slathers reverb on every instrument, turning even the coke-sniffing Drive-pop of “Cinnamon” into aural taffy.
The razored leads of Kakacek were often the thing that could draw boundaries on Smith Westerns songs as they became increasingly reliant on reverb and Chris Coady’s humidified production. Omori hasn’t quite figured out how to replace them; “Poison Dart” and “Sour Silk” would be gorgeous Smith Western ballads without the time-stamped, sci-fi synths that feel like placeholders. He certainly doesn’t need any implication that Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich’s absence are palpable and sorely missed here; after all, the reception of Whitney’s Light Upon the Lake singles has them well-positioned to play afternoon festival slots for at least the next two years. But that’s where the non-musical context of New Misery comes into play—it’s a transitional album in all senses, more intent on Omori getting lost inside himself before he tries to move forward. | 2016-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | April 26, 2016 | 6.2 | 20ece5f6-eabc-4cbf-bf97-699f8289147e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Five classic Throbbing Gristle albums have been beautifully remastered and lovingly repackaged in gatefolded 2xCD editions. | Five classic Throbbing Gristle albums have been beautifully remastered and lovingly repackaged in gatefolded 2xCD editions. | Throbbing Gristle: Second Annual Report / D.O.A. / 20 Jazz Funk Greats / Heathen Earth / Greatest Hits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16108-throbbing-gristle/ | Second Annual Report / D.O.A. / 20 Jazz Funk Greats / Heathen Earth / Greatest Hits | "Yea yea twist again better than we did last summer, laughing in the face of all rock and roll historians collectors revivalists purists inquisition members puritans bores creeps and not forgetting the fussy midgets with obscene hairdos." So wrote Claude Bessy in the liner notes to Throbbing Gristle's Greatest Hits, one of the five classic Throbbing Gristle albums Industrial Records have just reissued, and which now sit upon my desk, uncanny and accusatory, over 30 years after that pre-emptive fit of snark. Throbbing Gristle were never meant to be reliable, but here they come again, ready to be harvested by the very culture industry they alternately solicited and spat upon so long ago.
Permit me to adjust my obscene hairdo and offer those of you not already in the know some history: In their first incarnation as the Death Factory, they were the house band for Coum Transmissions, an abject performance-art troupe whose presentation of used tampons, anal syringes, and pornography featuring band member Cosey Fanny Tutti in the ICA gallery for their "Prostitution" show in 1976 earned them tabloid infamy and denunciations in Parliament as "wreckers of civilization." So far, so punk. But the music of the Death Factory, soon re-named Throbbing Gristle after a Yorkshire slang term for an erection, was a horse of a different color: "industrial music for industrial people," a dystopian, negative form of what the band itself called "post-psychedelic trash."
While the rest of the Class of '77 pogoed steadily, Throbbing Gristle blew hot and cold, a passive-aggressive tug of war between the sharp and the slimy: The formal elegance of Chris Carter's synthesizers are scrawled upon by Genesis P-Orridge's bass riffs and Cosey Fanni Tutti's fuzz guitar freakouts, spiced with violin and dubby honks of cornet. This already pungent stew is spiked with taped material selected by Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson-- excerpts of everyday intimacy and true crime verité-- and the arsenic tang of Genesis' vocals, either sung in a soft sort of sprechstimme or howled into effects. On their debut, The Second Annual Report, the music alternately chugged along like a squelchy, crude cop of the Velvet Underground, or stretched out into malingering new age, like a syphilitic Tangerine Dream. But they got both more virulent and more ambitious with time, upping the hostility and dread on D.O.A, taking a kitsch detour toward mutant disco on 20 Jazz Funk Greats, auto-cannibalizing their catalog in the live-in-the-studio ritual recording of Heathen Earth, and reasserting a strangely forceful collection of avant garde anti-pop for a Greatest Hits package revealingly subtitled Entertainment Through Pain, which collates their singles output as a quiver of tense stabs at accessibility.
In time for Christmas, a revived Industrial Records has just re-released all five of these classic albums, lovingly repackaged in deluxe gatefolded 2xCD editions. In each case, the original album is (wisely) preserved intact on one CD, while a second CD collects period singles, live performances, and a smattering of alternate mixes and unreleased material. Artwork is supplemented with alternate takes from photo-sessions, and it's a jarring experience for collector scum like myself to see and hear these goofy blooper reels and deleted scenes, in which the avatars of colder-than-thou aesthetics stand on one foot or giggle. Savvily recognizing the waning moment of the CD as such, there are vinyl editions of the albums too, which faithfully reprint the original artwork at full size and format. While so far I've only checked out the vinyl for 20 Jazz, it looks drool-worthy and sounds far stronger than any other pressing that this fussy midget has encountered.
Given that these albums have stayed continuously in print for years through arrangements with Fetish Records, and later Mute, one must ask: Why bother paying attention to these reissues? In a triumphant vindication of sound over image, the real motivation for this re-presentation of a back catalog is that all five of these five albums have been remastered by Chris Carter himself, a labor of obsessive-compulsive love whose consequences I intend to unpack, album-by-album, below. On the face of it, the idea of an "audiophile TG" makes for a jarring proposition: The band always seemed weirdly proud of the dismal fidelity of its early recordings, and its stated objective was to be repellent and un-assimilable. As an early Coum Transmisions slogan put it, "We Guarantee Disappointment." However off-message, the immersive experience of these new versions redeems what might sound gratuitous, or merely greedy, about this gambit. It's the audio equivalent of a "director's cut" edition of a beloved series of seedy cult movies, something to file between your Kenneth Anger boxset and a Hermann Nitsch coffee-table tome.
Assessed as an archival work of restoration, it's a bullseye. I've been listening to these records for 25 years, and for me, this feels like the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel, if the Sistine Chapel were painted by Hieronymous Bosch instead of Michelangelo. Simply put, the heat and noise and grit and dirt and gristle is still there, but Chris Carter has finally put meat on the bones. There's simply more vitality and physicality to the music, and yet it still sounds "very TG": The harsh, brittle, and scalpel-sharp high end is preserved, but the kick drums are heavier, the riffs hit harder, and the field recordings now produce a tactile IMAX-theater immersion effect. But going beyond these side effects of possibly overheated fanboy devotion, the re-introduction of Throbbing Gristle into the cultural bloodstream also offers up a temperature-taking opportunity to assess both the entire arc of their career and the harder question of whom it might speak to today.
SECOND ANNUAL REPORT
Recorded in their rehearsal space and at various grubby gigs onto a Sony cassette recorder in a defiantly lo-fi manner in 1977, Second Annual Report makes an oddly recalcitrant candidate for a remastering job. Music this deliberately weedy was never going to please audiophiles, and the wags at Industrial Records know that even today this record is a tough sell. For sheer sangfroid, it's hard to beat a press sheet that boasts, "Contains three different versions of 'Slug Bait', a song about eating a baby." Talking about killing people isn't necessarily interesting (hello, Foster the People), but when I hear Genesis P-Orridge describe a businesslike psychopath butchering a family ("I cut his balls off with my knife (KNIFE); I make him eat them right there in front of his pregnant wife (WIFE)"), I still blink and twitch a little. The creeping dread "Slug Bait" achieves lies not in the lyrical body count but in the hiccupping repetition of trigger words as Gen's vocal longjumps from a casual speaking voice to a garbled shriek, and in the deliberate misfit between the vocal's desperation and the detuned pastoral synths smeared underneath.
It's hard to say whether this was a raising or a lowering of the bar, but the bunker mentality of "Industrial" subculture as a power-obsessed stance of aesthetic nihilism wedded to nasty, lo-fi noise was born on this record, leaving a bloody trail for Wolf Eyes, Brainbombs, Prurient, and others to follow into the present moment. As if that were not prescient enough, Second Annual Report counterbalances the bloodthirsty yang of its first eight songs with the yin of its long, brooding final track, the gauzy, scuttling, 20-minute soundtrack to the Coum Transmissions film "After Cease to Exist". Which is to say that, in 1977, TG already forecasted the ongoing migration of noise dudes toward new age (take a bow, James Ferraro), a sea-change which has been recursively washing over the underground for the past several years.
D.O.A.: THE THIRD AND FINAL REPORT OF THROBBING GRISTLE
Widely regarded as the band's finest hour, 1978's D.O.A. effortlessly surpasses Second Annual Report both in its ballsy, forceful execution and its passionate range. If TG are Fleetwood Mac, then D.O.A is their Rumors: the sound of a band alchemically transforming romantic upheaval into their sharpest statement. In a proggy gambit worthy of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, D.O.A. explodes the idea of a unified album into a suite of collective songs punctured by four solo pieces from each band member. Sleazy's "Valley of the Shadow of Death" is a fetishistic fly-on-the-wall compilation of working-class men and boys talking shit, a sonic file folder of vanished moments that are naggingly unclear (Chit chat? Hustling?). Gen's melancholic pleading on his solo effort "Weeping" couldn't be further from the tranquility of Cosey's idyllic "Hometime", and this polar juxtaposition flags the album's messy personal backstory (the album was recorded after Gen and Cosey's ongoing romance imploded, and Chris and Cosey's lifelong partnership began). But the standout solo track is surely Chris Carter's celestial arpeggio staircase "AB/7A", a clear influence upon the now-much-imitated Emeralds aesthetic of heart-tugging synth mandalas.
Counterbalancing these solitary excursions, the group efforts on this album are exhilaratingly bleak: From the chemtrails of distortion on "Hit By a Rock" to the amplified sound of early computer code stored on cassette on "I.B.M." to the final raveup of "Blood on the Floor", it's never less than car-crash fascinating. At the center of the record is "Hamburger Lady", a nightmarish vision of a burn victim's excruciatingly prolonged survival in the administered world of a high-tech hospital. It's probably Throbbing Gristle's greatest song, and it sounds tougher and more menacing than ever. The re-mastering has put a bass-jeep-worthy oomph into the low end of the kick drum, thickened the seasick, doomy bass dirge that, yes, throbs at its heart, and sharpened the edge of the scything central riff, a party horn run through a custom-built effects unit called the Gristleizer. Witch-house wishes it were this creepy, but even upside-down crosses won't save you from the horror of everyday life. A nauseating masterpiece, and an essential recording.
20 JAZZ FUNK GREATS
You could write an entire book about the sly wit and polymorphous slipperiness of 20 Jazz Funk Greats, whose kitsch seaside holiday photo on notorious suicide spot Beachy Head tips off the viewer to the deliberately fishy insincerity of its sonic contents. In a smash and grab that testifies to both increased musical ambition and a relentless urge to wrongfoot audience expectations, 20 Jazz Funk Greats finds the band waking up from D.O.A's dark night of the soul and feeling curiously frisky. Snacking on not only the titular funk and jazz, the band also takes touristic zig zags through exotica, rock, and disco. Like the alien mimic in John Carpenter's sci-fi horror film "The Thing", each song seems almost persuasive as a stab at these genres, but crucially twists itself out of alignment in a perverse reveal.
"Hot on the Heels of Love" is a delirious slice of Moroder-esque boudoir-disco complete with breathy vocals from Cosey and, thanks to the remastering, a floor-filling low-end thump. The blueprint for 100% Silk's hipster-house shenanigans arguably starts here, with people who have no business taking over the dancefloor doing it anyway, with surprisingly solid results. An even stronger case for the critical re-thinking that mastering can achieve, "Convincing People", which has previously struck me as a less-than-successful stab at a cynically collapsed political anthem, now sounds suitably fist-pumping. But the standout moment here is still "Persuasion". Handcuffed to a plodding, two-note bass figure, Gen croons a narrative of pornographic photography sessions, which is punctured by squealing shards of Cosey's guitar and deeply unnerving tapes of unidentifiable people in compromising situations that seem to mingle distress, ecstasy, and pain. Tilting a repellent and yet seductive purr against found audio fragments, it's as if the crew of "To Catch a Predator" arrived too late to stop the Drake of "Marvins Room" from making a snuff film: once encountered, you can't hit undo.
But as much as TG tried to deliberately "guarantee disappointment" and mutate away from any signature, certain gestures had started to recur: "Six Six Sixties" ends this album in the riff rock grind-mode just as "Blood on the Floor" ended D.O.A. Patterns had begun to emerge, and the cumulative pressure of their own survival now forces the band members to work harder to surprise themselves. It's in the pathos of their promiscuous liasons with the forbidden territory of various forms of "real music" that this album generates a weirdly gripping power of its own. I am biased and perhaps lonely here, but this fussy midget regards it as their peak.
HEATHEN EARTH
A live-in-the-studio séance recorded in one take in front of a posse of friends and associates, I've always regarded Heathen Earth as the dog in the manger, sounding slightly stiff relative to the unhinged and abrasive live sound captured on the TG24 boxset, which archives their scalding live gigs before frequently hostile crowds with less fidelity but more heart. The opening salvos of this concert draw upon songs and rhythmic tapes already deployed on 20 Jazz Funk Greats, and they sound tentative, fragmentary, slightly inhibited. But things begin to erupt when the whistling-led mirage of "The World Is a War Film" dissolves into a ripping version of "Something Came Over Me", turning that single into a propulsive, masturbatory launchpad for a swirling noise-dub overload which Carter's remastering has pumped into startling new prominence. Gen holds back from taking much of a vocal frontman position, and the result is a greater awareness of TG's ear for texture. It would take a spicerack of adjectives to do justice to the gnarled, twisted, flanged, and serrated soundworld conjured by the band's unique gear and more-is-more approach to processing. But it's a testimony to their precision that, for all their influence, nobody quite sounds like them when they are truly on blast, as they are here. Things come to a suitably frenzied peak in the stomping, cornet-led "Don't Do as You're Told, Do as You Think", in which Cosey's horn-through delay finally makes good on the clammy flirtations with jazz from 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Having promised a séance on a rainy afternoon, a relaxation technique cassette concludes the jam.
GREATEST HITS
Though they are taking the piss in passing themselves off as band who had "hits," this compilation from 1980 of 7" singles and assertive album tracks in fact does the trick nicely: It makes a first-rate introduction to the band and offers a less torturous entryway to their prickly, poisonous oeuvre than any particular album. The swells of "Hamburger Lady" start us off feeling nausea, and this bumpy ride builds in force from there. You can sense in this victory lap a kind of précis of their career arc that testifies to the strange tractor-beam effect of pop values on an experimental band. The single element from Second Annual Report is "Tiab Guls", a backward version of "Slug Bait" that effectively censors the bloody lyrics by upstaging them into a blur. The perkiest and most uptempo high points of D.O.A. and 20 Jazz dominate, and the cover, a pastiche of Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny exotica sleeves, tips its hats to the cover of 20 Jazz as well. But the real peaks are the spiky singles "United" and "Adrenalin", fantastically complete exercises in minimalistic synth-pop songwriting that imply an alternative universe in which Throbbing Gristle were just a fuzzier, more dyspeptic cousin to Depeche Mode and John Foxx.
I wish there were a hidden TG album with 20 more songs like these, and it just so happens that the bonus tracks on this CD are the most intriguing and fully formed, including alternative mixes of "AB/7A" and "The Old Man Smiled". It is this full-speed-ahead electronic pop aspect of TG's lineage that aligns these pioneers of industrial music with the minimal synth, cold wave, and proto-techno revivalists of today. TG were crucial early pioneers of an aesthetic that now cuts a broad swathe across the audio landscape, from Martial Canterel, the Wierd Records posse, and Cold Cave, through to, arguably, lots of recent pop and R&B production, where icy synths and stark drum patterns undergird alienated vocals ad infinitum.
It's an unintended irony that a band so hostile to the very idea of "music" as such should have created recordings that have become enshrined into canonical constellations, but TG's influence has spiraled outwards as a direct result of their very unreliability and deviance. Thanks to the weird range and high quality of their catalog, separate strands of Throbbing Gristle's DNA are now entwined within the histories of electronic music, techno, dance music, goth aesthetics, occult subcultures, the avant edge of indie rock, and the entirety of the noise underground. It's a capitalist fairtytale born of hipster hindsight: The people who tried as hard as possible to make their audiences uncomfortable turned out to have a little bit of something for everyone.
In the wake of Sleazy's startling death in 2010, a kind of melancholic asymmetry has settled into place: the archive as mausoleum. The band can no longer re-unite and tour, though rumors and speculation continue to circulate about the ultimate fate of the extended recording sessions that the band tracked in London at the ICA for an extended deconstructive cover of the entirety of Nico's Desertshore album. In the wake of the decline of the CD and the seemingly inevitable slide downward in fidelity as the new brigade of information hunter-gatherers settle for the lossy, filed-shared free-for-all of torrents over the material culture of collectables, it's a perhaps deliberately out-of-step gesture to decide at precisely this point to remaster, repackage, and represent these Mosaic tablets of noise into upscale commodities memorializing a vanished moment of rebellion. So much for laughing in the face of historians, collectors, and revivalists.
Having the last laugh while seemingly anticipating this bittersweet outcome, Throbbing Gristle still don't add up: These albums are perversely inconclusive, by turns drably ugly and beautifully vital. However much Chris Carter has clarified their sound and stabilized their canon, the work itself remains as profoundly self-differential as ever. To cite a phrase the band used for its LP of the cut-ups of their icon and friend William S. Burroughs, there is "Nothing here now but the recordings." But those recordings have a funny way of coming to life. In 1981 in the NME, Paul Morley prophesized that "one day TG's music will sound rich and sweet." Thanks to Chris Carter's remastering and the necromancy of Industrial Records, that day has arrived. | 2011-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | null | December 7, 2011 | 8.6 | 20ee2c47-9cee-4c8c-ac3d-12bc161d2bb0 | Drew Daniel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/drew-daniel/ | null |
The past decade of British club music looms large on Lorenzo Calpini’s breezy debut album, which enlists a global cast of guest vocalists to broaden the Rome-based producer’s sound. | The past decade of British club music looms large on Lorenzo Calpini’s breezy debut album, which enlists a global cast of guest vocalists to broaden the Rome-based producer’s sound. | Lorenzo BITW: Love Junction | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lorenzo-bitw-love-junction/ | Love Junction | Lorenzo Calpini makes chromatic, high-sheen club tracks with the precision of an obsessive fan and the breezy insouciance of an outsider. Based in Rome, he fell for UK sound system music from afar, devouring Rinse FM podcasts in the golden years after dubstep’s peak, when UK funky briefly reigned supreme. He upgraded his distance learning to a full degree with a two-year stint in Leeds—where he concluded, with some disappointment, that British ravers were more interested in getting wrecked than in appreciating the music. (Not a totally unfair assessment.)
It was once Calpini returned to Rome that he found his footing as a producer and DJ, inspired by the syncopation of UK funky and the complementary sounds of Lisbon kuduro, as well as the African rhythms that form the roots of both styles. His singles and EPs to date have slotted in easily on London’s Nervous Horizon and Lisbon’s Enchufada, two labels where brawny drums take center stage. But on his debut album, he brings in a crew of vocalists to broaden his scope.
Love Junction arrives via Friends of Friends, the LA label that’s home to artists like Groundislava and Shlohmo—beatmakers who aren’t necessarily aiming for the dancefloor—and it’s a breezy fusion of Calpini’s influences to date. The past decade of UK club music looms large; you can hear the dreamy post-dubstep of Mount Kimbie in the reverb-heavy guitars of “Kanaan” and the peppy Afro-swing of J Hus in “Hello!” and “Come Over.” African instruments and rhythms pop up throughout the record, sometimes nodding to the hypnotic pulse of vintage Afrobeat. Threading it all together is Calpini’s particular synth sound: warm, gooey, and a little bit wistful, as if weighed down by the nostalgia of a distant onlooker.
His collaborators include Ghanaian rapper Nawtyboi Tattoo, the star of Love Junction’s two biggest pop moments: “Come Over,” a blazing-bright production with a chorus from Ghanaian singer Lamisi; and the ecstatic “Hello!,” a ridiculously catchy Afro-swing hit-in-waiting that feels built for Carnival season. What Nawtyboi lacks in lyrical dexterity, he makes up for in sheer exuberance—turning a single, globally recognized word into an entire chorus isn’t as easy as he makes it look. Also on the sound system side, dancehall bumper “Clearing My Mind” features the Auto-Tuned warble of Jamaican singjay 45DiBoss over grimey, square wave synths and a rhythm that cracks open dembow’s regular thump to make something refreshingly wonky. “Chasing” is less successful; Bristol singer Chikaya brings a yearning R&B vocal to a slow-motion house groove that’s warm as a bubble bath but fades when it should be taking off.
The vocal tracks are evenly interspersed with instrumentals, which makes sense on paper but doesn’t always feel natural. On the groove-based tracks, Calpini leans into his African influences, but rather than building endless grooves in an Afrobeat style, he tends to change course every four or eight bars, betraying a restless, puppyish energy. The best results come when he lets himself go with the flow. On the title track, techno and Afrobeat collide naturally; the metallic buzz of the Tanzanian zeze provides an organic pulse as skittish saxophone cuts a looping trail through the groove, like an insect on the breeze. “Rio Grande” is a keeper, too, resembling Calpini’s drum-heavy early singles with its insistent, rattling conga and one huge, fat question mark of a synth, teeing you up for a drop that doesn’t land where you’d expect. But “Lips & Bones” is overstuffed: It riffs on a combination of Night Slugs-style fruity keys and grotty, basement-rave drums, but there’s just too much going on, even before the Latin jazz drum breakdown.
Still, it’s rare to encounter a club producer with such versatility at his fingertips. Being an outsider can bless you with a fresh perspective, as grime MC Kwam points out in the opening seconds of drum workout “Goo”: “We got some different flavor here... from mainland Europe.” Love Junction has a relentless enthusiasm that’s hard to resist, even when Calpini’s surplus of globally sourced ideas don’t quite stick together. | 2018-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Friends of Friends | June 28, 2018 | 6.7 | 20f0d672-2fd2-41a6-8723-50b711d3cf04 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
Mixing mid-fi ’90s influences with elements of slowcore, the Brooklyn trio Wild Pink evoke early Death Cab as they calmly process the chaos of the city around them. | Mixing mid-fi ’90s influences with elements of slowcore, the Brooklyn trio Wild Pink evoke early Death Cab as they calmly process the chaos of the city around them. | Wild Pink: Wild Pink | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22856-wild-pink/ | Wild Pink | The members of Wild Pink live in Brooklyn but really reside in their own minds. Whether it’s mundane NYC landmarks (the Taconic Parkway, a giant clock over the John Smolenski Funeral Home) or hallowed monuments, Wild Pink seek the familiar in their dynamic surroundings. “Riding out some psychotropics/In the shadow of the World Trade/Trying hard to understand the culture in my face,” John Ross sings in “Great Apes.” Wild Pink lives in this wearied New York state of mind: standing on the subway, walking through crowds lost in thought, letting the mental chatter drown out every voice around you.
After two EPs that found the Brooklyn trio exploring an array of mid-fi ’90s influences, they’ve honed a sound that suits Ross’ perspective—maybe not so much comfortably numb as “manageably anxious,” reminiscent of early Death Cab for Cutie or American Analog Set, bands who took on characteristics of slowcore without being stylistically bound to it. Parallel to his band’s evolution, Ross has ditched his searching yelp and distilled his entire emotional range into a single, unshakeable tone. It’s not monotonous, per se; what Ross does is a variation on “shower voice,” a sort of a tuneful mutter. The ways his timbre peaks through sundazed ambience (“Broke On”), glistening jangle-pop (“Great Apes”) or piercing fuzz (“Nothing to Show”) can be remarkable or infuriating—like hearing chatter in the library where you can *just *make out enough of the conversation that it doesn’t become white noise.
At times, Ross can unnerve the listener enough to lean in closer for his lyrics, which are like quotables from non-contextual conversations: “I’ve got a dad’s breath/From cheap beer and cigarettes,” “You are the beauty queen/You left piss on the seat,” or most memorably, “Then I said something dumb/Like ‘the Redskins hate the Cowboys because Kennedy died in Dallas.’” Ross says the latter to defuse the tension of visiting a roadside vigil on the opening “How Do You Know if God Takes You Back?,” and throughout *Wild Pink, *the jokes serve as his emotional armor. His picture of an isolated, yet contented youth is drawn with John Darnielle-esque detail (“My whole world was in my room/Playing both sides of a Magic game/Black vs. Green/And a bootleg Maxell tape of Queen”) and on the devastating closer, he recalls to a friend, “On 9/11 your mom took you to see Legally Blonde.” The names of these songs are, respectively, “Wanting Things Makes You Shittier” and “They Hate Our Freedom.”
For the most part, though, *Wild Pink *deals in the usual language of the overeducated and underemployed. “You’re cultured and cursed/With dated ideas about what it means to have American Dreams,” Ross sings on “I Used to Be Small.” And other times, he just takes issue with cell phones. “Put your phone down/Put your phone down,” Ross sings, but none of his words feel judgmental—they’re just a polite, noticeably exhausted request.
“You’ll hear about the war and know it’s not yours,” Ross warns during a visit to a nursing home on “Broke On.” Throughout, there’s a discernible yearning for something worth fighting for, something character-building, as the older generation might have put it: “there’s no war left to win” or, “all my life I wish I had died bravely.” These lines carry a heavier, more political resonance now than they probably did when Wild Pink was recorded. Had it been released last year, it might have just been a solid indie rock record about everyday New York living. But Ross sounds like so many people whose nebulous concerns about the future have been sharpened. Wild Pink may not be a generation’s bonfire, but it now sounds like the slow burn leading up to it. | 2017-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | February 24, 2017 | 7.3 | 20f13301-c73b-474c-b051-110f4947fdd1 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On his third solo album, the New York drummer sheds his earlier records’ conceptual frameworks, marshaling percussive chaos into increasingly controlled forms. | On his third solo album, the New York drummer sheds his earlier records’ conceptual frameworks, marshaling percussive chaos into increasingly controlled forms. | Greg Fox: Contact | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/greg-fox-contact/ | Contact | Over the course of three studio albums, Greg Fox’s solo output has become less conceptual. In 2014, Mitral Transmission drew upon experiments using free-jazz drummer Milford Graves’ various bio-sensing apparatuses, which allowed Fox to find music in the natural rhythms of his body. The Gradual Progression, released in 2017, was a richer, headier work, one still intimately connected to process, though the conceit wasn’t as high-minded: Channeling jazz and new age, Fox began working with software called Sensory Percussion, which can turn a drum kit into an electronic controller or sampler, allowing for a broader array of sounds in the mix.
On Contact, there are even fewer formal constraints. Recorded with veteran doom-metal producer Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O))), Six Organs of Admittance) in just two days, the album feels more improvisatory than The Gradual Progression, and more blindingly technical. Fox remains a gifted physical performer, marshaling percussive chaos into increasingly controlled forms—defined rhythmic mutations in cymbal crashes and cool, rolling snare hits. The track titles draw from Buddhist concepts, though Fox admits they’re “somewhat arbitrary”; more than any overarching thematic framework, a freeform, exploratory sensibility guides the album.
There’s a sense, too, of things being stripped back. This is clearest on the three title tracks, which are minimalistic to the point of resembling technical exercises. Fox presents complex rhythms in isolation, without any extraneous samples or production tricks. It’s sonic acupuncture—just Fox and the kit, iterating on a series of patterns to near-therapeutic effect. “Parasthesia” achieves something similar with an opposite tack; occasional blasts of processed, oxidized sound punctuate a sustained ambient tableau, with fewer flourishes and relatively little negative space. Where the three “Contact” tracks are aesthetically austere, “Parasthesia” represents an economy of motion. There’s a bit of that on “Vedana,” too, though the effect is somewhat weaker; the repetitions fatigue more than they entrance.
As indebted to prog as to spiritual jazz, “From the Cessation of What” is the album’s most developed piece, and its most texturally stunning. What begins as something misty and spacious quickly tightens as the drumming becomes more dynamic. With a cascade of bright, percussive plinks, the track becomes almost dialogic; the interplay between the starkness of the kit and the gloss of those sampled tones resembles a kind of conversation. And in the final third, amid psychedelic organ, Fox lets loose, closing with splashy, cathartic release.
The album’s title, Contact, nods to the basic mechanics of drumming: the isolated experience of hitting, rolling, or brushing as a moment of connection. But more than ever, in Fox’s solo catalog, that physical sensation bleeds into the psychic. The relationship between gesture and emotion is newly unmediated, and individual actions evoke worlds. Fox is the lone, many-limbed curator, conjuring sounds and samples in space. And though Contact is mostly a one-man endeavor, the music generates a sense of proximity, of presence. That tension feels both like an ironic reminder of our current isolation and a gesture toward a more communal future.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | June 1, 2020 | 7.4 | 20f7fbf8-27d1-48cb-87d1-d0aa8cd8aafe | Will Gottsegen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-gottsegen/ | |
The young American singer launches her career with a slinky, vintage album featuring production from Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner—though it sounds more like Turner side-project than a showcase debut. | The young American singer launches her career with a slinky, vintage album featuring production from Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner—though it sounds more like Turner side-project than a showcase debut. | Alexandra Savior: Belladonna of Sadness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23176-belladonna-of-sadness/ | Belladonna of Sadness | Alexandra Savior has a penchant for clever wordplay and a voice that can hypnotize, terrorize, or both in four measures or less. Her YouTube covers favored the elongated swoons of Adele and Angus & Julia Stone ballads before she found a fan in Courtney Love and signed to Columbia. For her first full-length, she teamed up with Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys and producer James Ford whose production credits pepper the vast majority of Turner’s output. But instead of a debut album that flaunts the dynamism of a new artist, the result is an album that barely even feels like one—or, at the very least, only vaguely resembles a collaborative effort that casts Savior as the hostess of Turner’s discount ideas.
From the looks of “An Introduction,” a brief video she dropped a month before the album, the trio get along famously; she, “Al,” and Ford wearing a paper bag all ham it up in between vocal takes. She jokes about giving the studio a “feminine touch” by hanging roses from the ceiling. “There’s a feminine aspect to it,” she says of *Belladonna *and her limited aesthetic influence. “I think that that’s what I was trying to bring in—but at the same time, having this grit like a horror film would have. I wanted it to be murderous.”
The clip pulls back the curtain on Belladonna’s deceit: This is an Alex Turner album passed off as Savior’s simply because she sang it. Her vocal affectations so closely mirror the languid elasticity of her mentor’s that they come off as impressions instead of articulations of original thought. Turner’s musical ticks are so distinct that they’re instantly recognizable when someone else tries to dress them up as their own. Direct lines can be drawn from “Do I Wanna Know?,” “Crying Lightning,” and scores of Arctic Monkeys and Last Shadow Puppets singles to the bulk of Belladona’s ebbing bass lines and spooky chord progressions. “Mirage” hits a little too close to home with its stage-name games and persona dress-up: “She's almost like a million other people/That you'll never really get to know/And it feels as if she's swallowing me whole” would serve as wry commentary and a portrait of an alter-ego if Savior herself wasn’t leading an album that sounds like it could slip into an Arctic Monkeys set with a simple pronoun swap.
But Belladona isn’t without its charms, and Savior succeeds in delivering that “murderous” quality she was after. The ceaseless cavalcade of minor chords and eerie, campy vibes perfected by Turner lend themselves especially well to “Bones” and “Mystery Girl.” Turns of Belladona even resemble Tarantino in their enthusiasm for vintage noir and suspense, like “Vanishing Point,” which is ripe for licensing for any manner of stabby plot points in the CW’s latest blood-spattered drama (her demo for “Risk”—another collaboration with Turner and Ford—appeared on the second season of “True Detective”’s soundtrack). Her voice and affectations are so guided by the heavy hands of Turner and Ford that Belladonna of Sadness is largely indistinguishable from their work: At best, Savior is a muse for her own introduction; at worst, she’s a conduit who’s yet to prove that she can hold her own with the company she keeps. | 2017-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | April 19, 2017 | 6 | 20fb7fcc-7f2b-49b6-9288-8a23af61c0d1 | Hilary Hughes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hilary-hughes/ | null |
After the turbid nightmares of Wu-Tang's 8 Diagrams, it's no surprise that RZA's follow-up is a notably lighter affair, a record that divides his work between a could-be pop audience and the hardcore Wu heads. | After the turbid nightmares of Wu-Tang's 8 Diagrams, it's no surprise that RZA's follow-up is a notably lighter affair, a record that divides his work between a could-be pop audience and the hardcore Wu heads. | RZA: Digi Snacks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11942-digi-snacks/ | Digi Snacks | Most would argue that the differences between Robert Diggs and Bobby Digital are essentially nil beyond the latter wearing a paper-plate mask while in character. Not exactly-- the story told by RZA in the Wu-Tang Manual has one major advantage over the narrative sorta-established by his alter ego over the past decade (!) in that it actually has something of a point to it. Namely, that any time the Wu has been caught slippin', it's because everyone else failed to give RZA the benefit of the doubt.
And while it's easy for RZA to claim ownership of 20/20 foresight while trying to do the unprecedented, micromanaging the careers of eight budding superstars, it wasn't until winter of last year where his artistic leadership underwent real scrutiny. While a Wu-Tang project in name, 8 Diagrams was ultimately considered RZA's baby, as the rest of the Clan (most notably Raekwon and Ghostface Killah) wiped their hands of it upon release, slamming the Abbot as a control freak "hip-hop hippie" that went behind everyone's back to completely change the character of the record-- a sentiment that gained even more traction after the subsequent drop of Ghost's excellent but cruise-controlled Big Doe Rehab.
But the divisiveness was more talked about than practiced-- both records had nearly equal fortunes commercially (none) and critically (almost rote praise). Still, it's easy to see how RZA could piggyback on this situation and garner so much goodwill leading up to his latest solo LP. First off, he didn't come out of that fiasco looking as petty as Ghost and Rae do when they bitch to the media, and while 8 Diagrams wasn't the maverick work of genius some tried to pawn it off as, his sonics did enough to temporarily deflect the fact that half the Clan sounded frighteningly washed-up. More to the point, Bobby Digital is actually a more trustworthy brand name as far as solo albums go-- his first two bows are uneven, but unhinged semi-classics amongst the Wu faithful, while Birth of a Prince (released as RZA) contained tracks like "We Pop" and "Fast Cars" that have few peers in his discography in terms of sheer awfulness.
Yet despite being erudite and lucid in his recent outside pursuits, Digi Snacks finds RZA unable to convey what he really believes, stumbling through mealy-mouthed lyrical and musical ideas before passing the baton to a more engaged but exponentially less interesting subordinate. He's actually become easier to parse-- far less of the "prominent dominant Islamic Asiatic black Hebrew" stuff; unfortunately he's a lot harder to understand. Here he's working with about three mismatched cadences at once on "Booby Trap", as a grown man going by the name of Dexter Wiggles shouts, "Zap! It's a booby trap/ Would you like a digi or a Scooby snack?" Even as someone who thought that "ears of corn/ And heads of lettuce" ran on some engine of internal logic, Digi Snacks is unknowable, switching from boilerplate social uplift ("I said, 'damn that's poverty'/ He said, 'that really bothers me'") to Gods and Earths pillow talk to Wu mythologizing to standard-issue gun talk, all of it bound together by god knows what-- maybe a weird admiration of Jay-Z's The Black Album?
It's as good of a guess as any, considering RZA bites the "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" flow wholesale on "No Regrets", and slaps it on a Maths & English leftover starved of air and funds. But I guess we shouldn't go any further before discussing "Straight Up the Block", a collaboration with David Banner that makes more sense than it first seems-- after all, both have an aversion to meter and a penchant for dubious political conspiracies. But this attempt at an international player's anthem manages to be the most egregious misuse of talent outside of the Mets-- Banner salvages the beat from Swizz Beatz' scrapyard and then tunes down RZA's voice to the point where his slow grind French ("Je m'appelle Bobby Digi-tell...mademoiselle") tumbles out of his mouth like broken Slinkys.
Advance single "You Can't Stop Me Now" gave the impression that we might get a more earthbound, introspective RZA, but it's like "December 4th" without those silly interludes-- who hasn't heard this story of his come-up dozens of times? It doesn't help that RZA sounds almost completely uninvested. He could just as easily be reciting from a book, which is technically an improvement over the thudding, bored verse from Inspectah Deck, who might as well be rattling through the Yellow Pages. With that you see the ill effects of the estranged Clan, since Deck's bow is the only one from the A-listers on the entirety of Digi Snacks.
After the turbid nightmares of 8 Diagrams, it's no surprise that Digi Snacks is a notably lighter affair, but it just divides RZA's work between a pop audience that never really wanted him and the hardcore Wu heads who think "Tearz" is as soft as they should ever get. "Good Night" revives the waterbed motion of "My Lovin' Is Digi" better than the eponymous sequel, mostly because it's still entertaining to hear didactic rhymes about sinking one's "Titantic" (sic) into your Atlantic and the boundless verbal elasticity needed to fit "Chicago," "Virgo," and "convertible" in the same rhyme pattern.
If anything, Digi Snacks managed to pinpoint where we are in the Wu cycle of life. In 1998, hip-hop was flush with enough cash to possibly sustain a Bobby Digital movie and now, low-overhead labels like Koch ratchet down expectations to the point where it can be pursued as the niche project it always was. But "half-baked" isn't an improvement over "raw" for a guy like RZA, and anyone who's heard a recent Kool Keith record can tell you that an astounding catalog, reality-defying self-confidence and an otherworldly alias can't restore rapidly dwindling goodwill on its own. Things just ain't the same for quasi-mad scientist/ghetto philosopher/sexual dynamo superheroes. | 2008-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | RZA as Bobby Digital | July 1, 2008 | 4 | 20fdf675-536c-4a76-b04d-7b19df63167d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
A frequent collaborator of Babyface, Flying Lotus, and Kamasi Washington, the Los Angeles keyboardist brings a wide range of inspirations to bear on a fun, frothy record that’s slathered with vocoder. | A frequent collaborator of Babyface, Flying Lotus, and Kamasi Washington, the Los Angeles keyboardist brings a wide range of inspirations to bear on a fun, frothy record that’s slathered with vocoder. | Brandon Coleman: Resistance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brandon-coleman-resistance/ | Resistance | Older siblings can mess you up in so many ways. They can out-wrestle you, put your toys on a higher shelf should the whim strike, casually tell you that you’re adopted at dinner. And then there’s what Brandon Coleman’s brother did to him when he first took up playing piano at the age of 16: He gave him a copy of Herbie Hancock’s Sunlight. Hancock’s skills could make almost any novice abandon the piano, but this 1978 disco-funk album was shot through instead with Hancock’s vast array of synths and his vocoder-warped vocals. And in the years since, Coleman has gone on to play for Babyface, Childish Gambino, Flying Lotus, and Thundercat; he’s also a pillar of saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s band.
On Resistance, his first album for FlyLo’s Brainfeeder imprint, Coleman lets the Sunlight in while also drawing on the other late-’70s/early-’80s titans who also roboticized their pipes. Across Resistance’s 12 frivolous but frisky tracks, he also alights on Stevie Wonder and Zapp & Roger, and, like his predecessors, Coleman finds a way to use the vocoder’s warble to amalgamate jazz, soul, and funk. That’s Coleman’s vocal fluttering across the symphonic disco stomp of “Live For Today” with the life-affirming purr: “Girl, we can’t be afraid to live for today/No matter what they say.” It’s a carpe diem come-on couched in the plushest velvet.
While vocoder-tinged songs were mostly a funk curio in the late ’70s and early ’80s, those silvery, weirdly slick singing styles have since become mainstream thanks to the unavoidable alien shimmer of Auto-Tune infiltrating modern popular music, from EDM to R&B to hip-hop. In dusting off the old vocoder, Coleman has good company in artists like Daft Punk and Chromeo. But he doesn’t sound overly studious about the era—more like he was neck-deep in it, the feel less robotic and more fluid.
Coleman’s chops are on point throughout, nailing high notes with the vocoder, adding beguiling keyboard ripples, crafting sweet bridges to catchy choruses, riding in the pocket of the album’s infectious grooves. His horns and fat synth squelches on “A Letter to My Buggers” are the sweetest ear candy, and he adds just a smidge more bounce to the ounce on the Zapp homage “Sexy,” carrying on that vocoder-funk lineage wherein a future full of horndog cyborgs is envisioned.
It’s a fun future to imagine and move to. And throughout, Resistance keeps the proceedings light, sometimes to a fault. “Addiction,” with its big, echoing canned claps and keytar vrooms, isn’t about the opioid crisis—just old-fashioned pheromones. But such playfulness—frothiness, even—makes for a fun spin. For those accustomed to Coleman’s role laying the foundation for expansive spiritual-jazz explorations in Kamasi Washington’s band, it’s revelatory to hear him so spry on his feet and down to get down. If his work with Washington contains all the weight and gravitas of Sunday church, Coleman’s Resistance has all the fun, breeziness—and yes, sunlight—of an afternoon church picnic. | 2018-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Brainfeeder | September 28, 2018 | 6.7 | 20ffc793-be88-49db-b593-6d376344859b | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
After four albums and four EPs of ambitious yet friendly, pristine and proggish indie pop since 2006, this oddly named band steps into the spotlight. | After four albums and four EPs of ambitious yet friendly, pristine and proggish indie pop since 2006, this oddly named band steps into the spotlight. | Portugal. The Man: The Satanic Satanist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13270-the-satanic-satanist/ | The Satanic Satanist | When you name your band Portugal. The Man (punctuation purposeful), you relegate any music you release under such a moniker to "conceptual" status by default. Whether a self-fulfilling prophecy or the product of title-driven priming, then, this Portland by way of Alaska band has now released four albums and four EPs of ambitious yet friendly, pristine and proggish indie pop since 2006. 2007's 10-track EP It's Complicated Being a Wizard, for instance, opened with a 23-minute opus, followed by that same piece broken up into nine sections. Accessibility and a vague gloss of concept comprise The Satanic Satanist, on which the band, already tailor-cut for indie approval, seems to throw everything on the table to make a groovy album with wide appeal.
Satanist isn't necessarily thrilling, but within the tighter parameters the band set for itself, the group has succeeded at making a good-old-fashioned classic rock record. Song lengths stay around the three-minute mark, the production quality gleams, every hook feels anthemic, and the whole thing is permeated by themes of nostalgia, nature, and togetherness (man). I could dive into the lyrics and try to delineate some sort of binding narrative to the work, but the album doesn't seem to want me to (nor do you). The best quality of Satanist is that everything sits right on the surface, from the opening rally cry of "People Say" ("What a lovely day yeah we won the war/ May have lost a million men, but we got a million more") through the hyperactive bongo/wah-wah work on "Lovers in Love" and the would-be hippie anthems "Everyone is Golden" and "The Sun" ("we are all just lovers"!). Binding the whole piece more than even the cross-faded tracks is the limber, occasionally awesome voice of singer-songwriter John Baldwin Gourley, which can hop north into a crystal falsetto, or drop down into a soulful moan at a second's notice.
While the deal Portugal. The Man made with Satanist doesen't quite qualify as a Pyrrhic victory, it does raise an important, evergreen question about sacrifices. Compromises, more specifically: the sort that bands now and then make with the goal of accessing more ears. Is it better to release more "challenging" music and risk remaining largely unknown, or strive toward "pop" record, maybe gain a few new fans, but risk sacrificing a lot of what makes your band unique? These guys have balanced eccentricity and pop savvy since they started, and Satanist is the first record where it seems they've thrown their weight toward the latter. And while it's certainly enjoyable, it's also a bit more generic than anything they've done before. Maybe their own philosophy can be used to explain my point better: If, as they assert, "Everyone Is Golden", doesn't that sort of devalue gold? | 2009-07-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2009-07-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Equal Vision | July 24, 2009 | 6.5 | 21101f53-b70f-4d4c-a772-3f46340d7d1c | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
Hannes Norrvide's long-running coldwave synth project breaks into the greener pastures of Depeche Mode-style new wave. | Hannes Norrvide's long-running coldwave synth project breaks into the greener pastures of Depeche Mode-style new wave. | Lust for Youth: Lust for Youth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lust-for-youth-lust-for-youth/ | Lust for Youth | Coldwave never cared about you. The minimalistic, machine-driven sound that bubbled up twice in the past half-century—once in the midst of post-punk's late-1970s heyday, and again in early-2010s Brooklyn—was largely reliant on keeping its audience at bay, all but ensuring its limited shelf life. With synth lines so brittle that you could snap them over your pinky finger, hissy drum machines, and vocals that frequently bordered on atonality, coldwave was purposefully alienating. A lot of DIY or home-recorded music from this decade gained recognition from its warmth and inviting textures; in stark opposition, coldwave's practitioners rarely seemed interested in whether anyone was listening at all.
The subgenre's aesthetic limitations are baked in, and practically a virtue, which makes Lust for Youth's trajectory over the last three years all the more fascinating. When Swedish synth aesthete Hannes Norrvide's project emerged with his 2011 debut Solar Flare, all the marks of coldwave's sub-zero sound were present and accounted for, and it was still mostly business as usual when Loke Rahbek (who also founded the aptly-named Posh Isolation label) joined up for the following year's Sacred Bones debut Growing Seeds.
But as Lust for Youth persisted, there emerged signs of life after coldwave. Pomegranate from 2013—billed as a collaboration between Norrvide and Rahbek's Croatian Amor project—explored the opalescent clouds of new age; Perfect View from the same year incorporated conversational vocal samples not unlike something from the Swedish imprint Sincerely Yours. When International arrived in 2014—the fifth Lust for Youth release in the span of four years, evidence of coldwave’s one-take prolificacy—the group had expanded to a trio and tilted towards the explicitly poppier sounds of new wave, a journey they continued on 2016's Compassion.
Their latest, a self-titled effort, finds Lust for Youth back to a two-person setup, Rahbek having departed while Norrvide and Malthe Fischer soldier on. The paring back of personnel isn't reflected in the record's sound, though; instead, Norrvide and Fischer pick up where Compassion left off, with gleaming synths and crisp drum patterns lovingly recalling the dour, sweet-and-sour synth-pop of New Order, Depeche Mode, and their thousands of imitators.
Norrvide's vocals are front and center, and his voice often possesses a lovely ugliness that's alluring when cast in the right light, as when he scales the jagged pop mountains of “Adrift” or drapes himself over “Great Concerns.” Lust for Youth is at its most engaging when Norrvide and Fischer throw curveballs. They find an able collaborator in Danish musician and philosopher Soho Rezanejad, whose vocals add a glowing and gloomy texture to the slow-dance duskiness of “Fifth Terrace”; with wavering atmospherics lying under a cumulus of spoken-word, “Imola” suggests a sparser take on the starry-eyed synth fantasias of M83.
Otherwise, Lust for Youth trades in one kind of over-familiarity for another. The gloriously mopey sound of new wave might be novel to Norrvide and Fischer, but there's not much here that stands out in synth-pop's always-crowded field. In a sense, that's fine; Lust for Youth wear this sound well. But Lust for Youth shows they might have escaped coldwave’s dead end only to settle into a rut. | 2019-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Sacred Bones | June 7, 2019 | 6.2 | 21121a9d-8160-4cd5-97dc-e92eacd9330a | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Kaytranada and Aminé team up for a set of sunny, funky party tracks best experienced with a Mai Tai in hand. | Kaytranada and Aminé team up for a set of sunny, funky party tracks best experienced with a Mai Tai in hand. | Kaytraminé / Aminé / Kaytranada: Kaytraminé | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kaytramine-kaytranada-amine-kaytramine/ | Kaytraminé | In 2014, the 20-year-old Aminé was just another college dropout with a mixtape, trawling for beats on SoundCloud. But rapping over Kaytranada’s single “At All,” his nimble flow served as the perfect foil to the Montreal producer’s funky, uptempo take on neo-soul. Kaytra—in the process of assembling his debut EP for XL—heard his remix “Not at All” and reached out to offer the beats that would go on to highlight Aminé’s 2015 mixtape Calling Brio. Despite their clear chemistry, their only other collaboration would come on Rejjie Snow’s 2018 single “Egyptian Luvr.” Then, in 2021, the pair rented a luxe beach house in Malibu and got to work. After two weeks of recording, they debuted the results to a party full of friends.
Enter Kaytraminé, the duo’s self-titled collaborative album. The 11-track LP—featuring heavy hitters like Pharrell, Snoop Dogg, and the ascendant Ghanaian singer Amaarae—is a buoyant summer jaunt that artfully meshes the two artists’ styles and sensibilities. As a producer, Kaytranada is a svengali of samples, stacking tracks like building blocks to craft fresh beats with a vintage feel. Aminé—not unlike Anderson .Paak, another Kaytra collaborator—is a goofy yet technically proficient MC with singing chops who doesn’t shy away from a twerk-friendly dance record or a crude joke.
Kaytranada’s first two albums flowed like seamless mixes, his house-adjacent style bending and shifting to suit the personalities of the guest vocalists. But his production discography is evidence of his innate ability to adapt to other artists’ styles, whether it’s Kelela, Cadence Weapon, or Freddie Gibbs. The funk-influenced tropical house of Kaytraminé wouldn’t feel out of place on Bubba or 99.9%. But there are tonal shifts that seem designed to showcase Aminé’s range as a singer and a rapper, like the strings swirling around his stop-and-go flow on “Westside” or the sparse arrangement of the latest entry in his series of “STFU” tracks.
Aminé’s two most recent solo albums balanced wistful optimism with sneering swagger, presenting him as a party boy who occasionally paused for self-reflection or a critique of consumer capitalism. That Aminé appears long gone, giving way to a hedonist whose favorite boast is his Delta Medallion status. As a party record, Kaytraminé has no skips—provided that party is loud enough to camouflage some of the cornier lyrics. Aminé’s oral (sex) fixation gets old fast, and a few lines are groan-worthy enough to distract from the fun (“Just popped an X bitch I feel like I’m Malcolm,” he raps on “Who He Iz”).
A carefully curated guest list helps prevent Kaytraminé from tumbling into an abyss of lighthearted braggadocio. Pharrell adds a sprinkle of his ageless pop perfection to lead single “4EVA,” contributing both the hook and co-production, and Amaarae manages to match Aminé’s smooth-singing dick-swinging in her own high register on “Sossaup.” But it’s hard to hear what Uncle Snoop on “Eye” or Big Sean on “Master P” add beyond bankable names; I have to imagine “Big Sean” [ft. Master P] would’ve been a more interesting song. The standout feature belongs to Freddie Gibbs, who sounds right at home on “letstalkaboutit,” wielding a rapid-fire flow as smooth as Kaytra’s plunging bassline. Gibbs doesn’t have Aminé’s vocal breadth, but the way he delivers questionable lines with caddish confidence—“Two girls suckin’ dick, I had my own Verzuz”—illustrates a fluency in the “money, clothes, and hoes” schtick that his host lacks.
If you’d like to hear a cerebral wordsmith rhyming over Kaytra beats, you’re better off seeking out his collaborations with Wiki or Mach-Hommy. Kaytraminé is a soundtrack for the young, dumb, and full of cum, a record produced by the kind of goofball who gets a kick out of being princess-carried by a woman bodybuilder and rapped by a guy whose debut LP pictured him on the toilet with his pants around his ankles. Their star-crossed bromance birthed an album best consumed in direct sun, drink in hand, with minimal clothing and even less inhibition. | 2023-05-24T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-24T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Venice Music | May 24, 2023 | 7.3 | 2112961e-642b-44b1-aaac-6b8bc0ab20b5 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Now reissued with bonus material, this album is now best rememberd for birthing the Postal Service, via the Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard collaboration "The Dream of Evan and Chan". A decade on, it offers a vision of how "experimental" met "catchy" in 2001. | Now reissued with bonus material, this album is now best rememberd for birthing the Postal Service, via the Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard collaboration "The Dream of Evan and Chan". A decade on, it offers a vision of how "experimental" met "catchy" in 2001. | Dntel: Life Is Full of Possibilities | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15950-dntel-life-is-full-of-possibilities/ | Life Is Full of Possibilities | Ten years ago, this sounded like the future. The combination of pop songcraft and electronic texture that Jimmy Tamborello conjured on Dntel's Life Is Full of Possibilities seemed to achieve one of the implicit cardinal goals of independent music: to strike a seamless balance between "catchy" and "experimental." It was a coup for those of us who had both Squarepusher and Promise Ring discs in our CD changers, a promise that the exhilarating high-budget sonics of Radiohead's Kid A could be brought down to the more human scale of bedroom indie pop. In a certain, ineffable way it just sounded right for its time, much in the way that Dirty Projectors' Bitte Orca and tUnE-yArDs' w h o k i l l have in recent years.
In the decade since Life Is Full of Possibilities was first released on the Plug Research label, we've realigned our perceptions of both "catchy" and "experimental." The sweet, straightforward melodies on Life Is Full of Possibilities now seem almost embarrassingly earnest, the electronic manipulations cold and procedural. While Tamborello's mastery is undeniable, there's a staggering sense of openness to Life Is Full of Possibilities in both its content and its execution. There is no mystery here; you can see the gears turning, both emotionally and sonically. For all its skittery beats and overdriven synthesizers, Life Is Full of Possibilities often feels less like an "intelligent dance music" record than a straight-up 1990s emo record, with the muscle of a traditional rock band proxied by Tamborello's smart, dynamic arrangements.
Though Tamborello's instrumentals are the only constant on an album studded with guest vocalists, Life Is Full of Possibilities feels more like the product of a disciplined, rotating collective than a solo album with one-off collaborators. Each song is particularly well-suited to its respective singer, and each singer fully engages with Tamborello's instrumental tracks. An air of melancholy hangs over most of this album, but Tamborello understands that Mia Doi Todd's flat, confident vocals on "Anywhere Anyone" evoke a very different kind of melancholy from Beachwood Sparks singer Chris Gunst's fragile, unsteady vocals on "Umbrella". Tamborello foregos a more manipulated vocal treatment and lets a tuneful vocal from Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard anchor the swirling, overdriven "(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan", setting the stage for the bajillion-selling full-length collaboration the two would release as the Postal Service. (Music theory geek aside: there's a certain magic to Gibbard's voice when he sings a perfect fifth up followed by a minor third down, as he does in nearly all of his best songs.)
Four remixes of "Evan and Chan" are far and away the drabbest bonus material on Sub Pop's deluxe reissue; removed from the original song's arc, the individual sonic elements here just aren't that interesting. An alternate version of "Umbrella" shows what a more half-assed version of this album might have sounded like, with Chris Gunst's voice locked into a repetitive pattern and bolstered by obvious, heavy-handed swells of distortion. "Evan and Chan" B-side "Your Hill" is the strongest non-album cut here, culling its primary melody from a loud monophonic synthesizer while using vocals as abstract, poetic ornamentation. Broadly speaking, the bonus material here veers more toward the conventional IDM of its time, falling short of the original album but also making a case for its unique strengths.
The best thing about this reissue has nothing to do with its bonus material, though; a solid remastering job pushes both treble and the bass beyond the relatively thin, high-mid-leaning sonic footprint of many late-90s and early-00s computer-recorded albums. Digital conversion technology, much like music itself, has changed a lot in the last 10 years-- which seems like a fairly short time between release and reissue, but also a really long time to have passed since this particular album came out. For a record fixated on personal nostalgia, Life Is Full of Possibilities still feels bright-eyed and forward-thinking. That Tamborello's ambition and optimism now seem slightly distant and idealistic probably says more about us now than it does about this album. This may not be the future we chose, but it remains a beautiful future to imagine. | 2011-10-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-10-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Sub Pop | October 20, 2011 | 8.8 | 21130af5-d723-4fed-b282-0307978afd8b | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
The Chicago cellist duets with scraps of radio and field recordings on her bold and strangely moving second record. | The Chicago cellist duets with scraps of radio and field recordings on her bold and strangely moving second record. | Lia Kohl: The Ceiling Reposes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lia-kohl-the-ceiling-reposes/ | The Ceiling Reposes | What is it about a scratchy radio broadcast, encountered out of context, that captivates the senses? Woven into the ambient fabric of a song (this is a nice example, and of course this, and this, and even this), even the dullest, most quotidian transmission takes on an almost oracular gravity. Traffic update, weather forecast, stock-market report: All these humdrum sounds become charged with the possibility of meaning, even when their actual significance is elusive. They are small, cloudy windows thrown open onto another world, like a whiff of air that zaps you back to a specific beach, perhaps even a specific afternoon, from your childhood.
Chicago cellist Lia Kohl’s second album, The Ceiling Reposes, exploits this uncanny mode of transport by weaving scraps of radio and field recordings into improvisations on her instrument, along with a haphazard jumble of synthesizers, piano, bells, kazoo, and concertina. The overall effect is like a bird’s nest outside a yarn factory: a tidy cluster of chaos interwoven with brightly discordant tendrils of color.
Jamming with found sounds is, in effect, a form of collaboration for Kohl, who was born in New York and grew up in San Francisco. She began playing cello in third grade and soon dedicated her life to the instrument: youth orchestra, music camp, summertime master classes in Europe, post-college moves to Berlin and New York. All this time, though, she felt like a practitioner rather than a creator. It was only in Chicago, where in 2013 she moved to study under a performer in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, that she found her own voice. She collaborated with dancers; played on records by Steve Gunn, Whitney, and Makaya McCraven, among others; and released duo projects with Ohmme’s Macie Stewart and reed player Zachary Good. By her debut solo album, 2022’s Too Small to Be a Plain, she had developed the searching, abstract sensibility that also distinguishes the new album. Collaging together studio experiments and bits of incidental sound, she approaches the recording process almost as though it were a bonsai or zen garden, cultivating suggestive shapes from aleatory arrays of objects and forms.
The Ceiling Reposes is similar in spirit to Too Small to Be a Plain, but it marks a major step forward. Its tonal sensibilities are bolder and more fully developed, its juxtapositions more provocative; its fortuitous collisions and slippages testify to a steadfast belief in musical freedom. “in a specific room” opens the album with staticky fizz and the tinny digital chimes of a doorbell on the fritz. Kohl bows broad, assertive chords in the low end, multi-tracked beneath the sound of her fingers scraping against strings. Out of a cloud of eerie, Theremin-like tones bursts a jaunty passage of drive-time radio banter. Halfway through, she pivots to what feels like a whole new piece, pairing new-age synth arpeggios with needling cello tones and a passing nod to the falling NASDAQ; the piece fades out in a quiet delirium of birdsong.
There are no real “songs” here, but each track has a much stronger identity than those on her previous album. In “when glass is there, and water,” an elegiac melody emerges out of engine throb and Gregorian chant; “or things maybe dropping” uses dubby rhythm as a backdrop for splashing oars, free-jazz saxophone, and what sounds like someone idly trying out the drum kits at Guitar Center. There are traces of her classical upbringing in the airy lines of “the moment a zipper,” which briefly hint at Bach’s cello suites, and in her most melodic passages, like the pensive “sit on the floor and wait for storms,” her flashing attack faintly evokes Mabe Fratti. Mostly, though, pieces simply swirl like seagrass, a pointillist matrix of rainfall, rustles, and softly seesawing strings.
The most affecting moments have an enigmatic pull. At the end of “sit on the floor and wait for storms,” as bowed cello bubbles up into a roiling foam of grain delay, a man’s voice cuts through, and even though he is speaking, his tone nearly harmonizes with Kohl’s instrument: “All things, all things,” he sighs, and then, after pausing, repeats: “all things.” He sounds like he’s shrugging; he sounds apologetic, slightly regretful, maybe fatalistic. You may find yourself asking, All things what? The sample gestures at unknowable mystery; it could be an entry in a six-word-story contest.
It’s just one of many moments where a piece of broadcast shrapnel pierces the mix, to jarring and sometimes profound effect. There are snippets of classic rock and jocular shock jocks, weather reports and blasts of distorted bluegrass. Sometimes Kohl harmonizes with what she eavesdrops over the airwaves, and sometimes she lets the dial tilt toward chaos. In the most exhilarating moments, it sounds like standing outside La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House while a neighbor tunes a busted AM radio, an enveloping cocoon of drone and static. It sounds like summer in the city when all the windows are open and all the sounds in the world are playing at once and passing through you—as though you, too, were made of air, just one more vibration in a cosmic web of buzz. | 2023-03-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | American Dreams | March 14, 2023 | 7.9 | 2113e218-f8f7-4195-b63a-4a820188db28 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Rot Forever, the debut double album from Portland band Sioux Falls, swells from indie rock into six- or seven-minute epics, like early Modest Mouse or Built to Spill. At 72 minutes, the album is too long, but they have the energy and gravity to support this kind of cinematic ambition; the band plays as if they are trying very hard to pull something up through the earth. | Rot Forever, the debut double album from Portland band Sioux Falls, swells from indie rock into six- or seven-minute epics, like early Modest Mouse or Built to Spill. At 72 minutes, the album is too long, but they have the energy and gravity to support this kind of cinematic ambition; the band plays as if they are trying very hard to pull something up through the earth. | Sioux Falls: Rot Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21492-rot-forever/ | Rot Forever | In its more expansive moments, Rot Forever, the debut double album from Portland band Sioux Falls, seems to test its own capacity for decay. The songs often stretch until they start to dislocate, swelling from indie rock into six- or seven-minute epics. In this way Sioux Falls can resemble early Built to Spill or Modest Mouse, though their songwriting is less tangential than either; Sioux Falls songs tend to cycle through at most two or three related ideas, just at different volumes.
At its best, this effect can be hypnotic and stirring. At its worst it can be exhausting. The songs build geologically, morphing from pebbles into mountains and then crumbling back into their constituent parts. "Chain of Lakes," "San Francisco Earthquake," "Dinosaur Dying"—the song titles and their uncoiling inner structures seem to imply something about geology and archeology, destruction and creation. To their credit, Sioux Falls have the energy and gravity to support this kind of cinematic ambition; the band plays as if they are trying very hard to pull something up through the earth.
For all of its attempts at colossal scale, Rot Forever also feels very intimate. The album’s length—72 minutes—contributes to this relaxed, almost yawning aura; it occasionally feels like listening to one lone, faintly edited practice session. It can feel arbitrary, but its arbitrariness is part of the charm; songs like "Your Name’s Not Ned" take their shape through an application of instinct and aggression that seems more rooted in mood than method.
Unfortunately, the album is simply too long, and it digresses through similar ideas more than it advances. Eiger seems to faint through his vocal melodies; he sings at the kind of aggressively bored frequency at which vowels tend to morph into yawns. At a certain point the album's dynamics become routine, all of the energies produced by the band hit the ear neutrally, and Rot Forever begins to rot itself, softly melting into a background, not of its own accord but by something built into its nature. | 2016-02-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Broken World Media / Standard Brickhouse | February 12, 2016 | 6.9 | 2113e737-5903-4f32-b43f-ace411217669 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
Chicago producer Larry Heard set the template for house, techno, deep house, and more for generations of electronic music producers. Slowly, portions of his back catalog are finally getting reissued such as Alien, Heard’s third full-length under his own name, originally released in 1996. | Chicago producer Larry Heard set the template for house, techno, deep house, and more for generations of electronic music producers. Slowly, portions of his back catalog are finally getting reissued such as Alien, Heard’s third full-length under his own name, originally released in 1996. | Larry Heard: Alien | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19255-larry-heard-alien-reissue/ | Alien | Dabbling in 1970s rock, R&B, and reggae when not holding down the throne in a Yes cover band, the Chicago-based drummer-for-hire Larry Heard must’ve caught director Ridley Scott’s Alien at his local Cineplex at some point in 1979. While the influence of that claustrophobic horror film about the dread of deepest space didn’t quite manifest itself doing nightly covers of “And You and I,” when Heard invested in new-fangled synthesizers and drum machines in the early '80s and struck out on his own, his love of sci-fi moved to the fore in his own music.
With tracks like “Distant Planet", “Mystery of Love", “Washing Machine", and “Can U Feel it", released under monikers like Mr. Fingers, Gherkin Jerks, Disco-D, The It, Blakk Society, Fingers, Inc., and more, Heard set the template for house, techno, deep house, and more for generations of electronic music producers—be they in Chicago or Detroit, or overseas in London and Berlin. Heard’s fundamental house music blueprints like Fingers, Inc.’s Another Side and Mr. Fingers’s Ammnesia are agonizingly long out of print, but slowly, portions of his back catalog are finally getting reissued. Last year brought about a reissue of his incredibly rare Gherkin Jerks’ EPs and now follows Alien, Heard’s third full-length under his own name, originally released in 1996.
While the two volumes of Heard’s Sceneries Not Songs, released in the early '90s, retained their deep house music underpinnings, with Alien, Heard ventured into unknown sonic terrain, fusing together styles that had long influenced him while largely jettisoning his telltale house beat. Wielding sci-fi soundtracks, slippery jazz fusion, progressive rock cues taken from personal favorites like Gentle Giant and Return to Forever, Heard ended up with an amalgam that in the hands of a lesser musician would be disastrous, if not tedious.
Alien is not quite a house album with its beats scrubbed off, nor is it exclusively a chill-out soundtrack, and this reissue asks the question of just who the album was originally intended for. The sophisticated club kid wanting bachelor loft music? Adult-oriented jazz for househeads? Fusion for fusion aficionados? People who want the relaxing ambient version of the film Alien? Eighteen years after its original release, it remains a singular entry in Heard’s influential catalog, with the man composing the entire album on a Korg O1/W workstation keyboard, a Roland d550 and Oberheim Matrix 1000.
Opener “Faint Object Detection” is the album’s most menacing and dramatic track, reveling in the peculiarly juxtaposed ominous and relaxing moods conjured by Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. The ten-minute “Micro-Gravity” is the first of three expansive, suite-like epics contained on the album that blatantly evoke Heard’s prog-rock fixation; the opening two minutes of the track are full of dread before a pinging melody arises, leading into an bossanova-eque middle section, buoyant and melodic before swerving back into darkness near the track's end. Another double-digit excursion, “Galactic Travels Suite”, moves from space age musing to New Age meditation to downtempo nod, carefully avoiding the sonic trappings of all three.
You could mistake other album tracks for lite-jazz, while elsewhere, there are abstract electronic musings that could get mistaken for something off of Oneohtrix Point Never’s latest album, last year's R Plus Seven. The album only feels dated on the hip-hop moves of closer “The Beauty of Celeste”. Overall, the fact that Heard, one of the most important electronic musicians of the 20th century, could step away from the genre he built his legacy on while exploring the outermost reaches remains a remarkable feat. A Red Bull Music Academy lecture esteemed Heard for “[putting] deepness into house music and [teaching] the machines some soul", but on Alien, Heard also sent house music into deepest, darkest space. | 2014-04-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-04-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Alleviated | April 25, 2014 | 7.8 | 21146c05-1086-4ed5-808f-b7243e2e5019 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The story of Ryan Adams' artistic decline is currently approaching epic, a long, complicated tale of public cockiness, big mouth ... | The story of Ryan Adams' artistic decline is currently approaching epic, a long, complicated tale of public cockiness, big mouth ... | Ryan Adams: Rock N Roll | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/40-rock-n-roll/ | Rock N Roll | The story of Ryan Adams' artistic decline is currently approaching epic, a long, complicated tale of public cockiness, big mouth bravado, and exasperated recordings: his churlish, fuck-off swagger was silly from the start, but Adams' self-satisfied smirk has got nothing on his newfound capacity to eschew every last one of his songwriter's instincts. Now, with a discography that's wiggling towards infamy, Adams shoots up one last middle finger to the slowly dispersing crowd.
It's admittedly unfair that Ryan Adams has been forced to spend most of his songwriting career cowering in the shadow of his much-beloved solo debut, enduring loads of (unfavorable) critical comparisons to his younger, more inspired self. Adams' spiral into self-indulgence has triggered plenty of sputtering, red-faced indignation, and if it weren't for the lingering resonance of 2000's Heartbreaker, chances are nobody would care that each of Adams' subsequent efforts has lacked a certain quiet grace. Ultimately, the problem isn't knee-jerk alt-country purists getting pissed about Adams' penchant for electric guitars, or cred-obsessed indie kids hollering about Gap commercials, it's Adams' newfound incapacity (or refusal) to write a song with any acceptable degree of sincerity-- and knowing that he probably could really stings.
Adams' latest, Rock N Roll, feels sloppy and stupidly rushed; recorded in less than two weeks, the record is so blatantly dismissive of both itself and its audience that it insults nearly everyone who attempts to interact with it. Adams' original scheduled-for-2003 release, the largely anticipated Love Is Hell, was clumsily manhandled by Lost Highway labelheads before finally being split into two separate EPs (respectively subtitled Part I and Part II; Part I was released simultaneously with this album), leaving Adams a comparably small window of time in which to record the proper follow-up to 2001's bloated-but-redeemable Gold. Still: it didn't have to be this way.
Here, Adams stuffs the contemporary radio-rock cannon with more overblown, riff-heavy regurgitation, most of which is either painfully generic or preposterously derivative (the buoyant "Anybody Wanna Take Me Home" cops loosely from The Smiths; "So Alive" is karaoke U2; "1974" is an uncomfortable Bon-Jovi-meets-The-Stooges homage). The entire record reeks of late new-wave/80s rock cribbing, and consequently, it's difficult to write about without duly repeating a laundry list of influences: Adams' muses range from predictable (see Joy Division, Paul Westerberg) to bizarre (Adams quasi-mimics the prog diddlings of Rush on the forensically titled "Luminol", and ends up with a song that sounds a lot like rehashed Oasis). Suddenly, the record's opening couplet-- "Let me sing a song for you/ That's never been sung before"-- seems vaguely humiliating.
It's not so much that Rock N Roll is incorrigibly written as that the record is unforgivably careless, unwilling to commit to anything including itself. Each phoned-in track boasts a new kind of lame production (including plenty of weird vocal echoes), tired lyrics ("You're taking me higher than I've been before"), overstated guitar-rock noodling, and unbearably repetitive amp assaults-- combined, they successfully obscure any kernels of ingenuity that might have been buried beneath the buzz. Adams' definition of rock and roll has always been cartoonish (jean jackets, American flags, bar flitting, surly public appearances), but Rock N Roll's interpretation of its namesake officially approaches ridiculous.
In all likelihood, Adams would like for you to think his flippancy is intentional, and for everybody to grin and chalk up his cocky half-assing to more authentic rock and roll behavior. In this, Adams is insistent: just as he did with Gold, Adams includes liner note photos of tattoos and cigarettes to remind us that he's badass, confirming the characterization with a handful of lazily sprung expletives (including the unconvincing "It's all a bunch of shit.../ It's totally fucked up" of "Wish You Were Here"), some clever allusions to chemical abuse ("And if I could have my way/ We'd take some drugs"), and an embarrassingly obvious I'm-friends-with-The-Strokes aside (booming opener "This Is It"). Possibly the best thing about "Rock N Roll" is how girlfriend Parker Posey is credited in the liner notes as "Exe'cute'ive Producer," appearing "courtesy of her bad self." At least being precious is being honest.
There are some curious guest turns (Billie Joe Armstrong inexplicably pops up, and Melissa Auf Der Maur provides background vocals on a handful of tracks, as does Posey), but Adams is almost always at his best when he's on his own and thinks no one else is looking: the album's title track is a sweet piano ballad, his plaintive wail layered nicely over fuzzy snippets of found sound. Lasting less than two minutes, "Rock N Roll" is (check the glaring irony!) also the record's least self-conscious song, a flash of earnestness that disappears almost before you notice its arrival.
You have to angle Rock N Roll up to a mirror in order to read the cover text properly, and, in a way, the inherent fallacy of a mirror image is also the very best metaphor for this record: Rock N Roll is backwards Ryan Adams, one-dimensional, vain, and entirely lifeless. | 2003-11-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2003-11-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Lost Highway | November 9, 2003 | 2.9 | 211a7e24-3416-400d-aea7-fb7a480399b0 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
Brooklyn band sings lo-fi campfire serenades and gentle, nocturnal pysch-folk. | Brooklyn band sings lo-fi campfire serenades and gentle, nocturnal pysch-folk. | Grizzly Bear: Horn of Plenty | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3666-horn-of-plenty/ | Horn of Plenty | Considering their name, Brooklyn address, and penchant for lo-fi campfire serenades, there's a powerful temptation to put Grizzly Bear in the same pen as those other charismatic megafauna, the Animal Collective, and be finished zookeeping for the night. But Horn of Plenty proves that categorization would be neither fair nor accurate. The gentlemen of Grizzly Bear paw around in wholly distinct regions of gentle, nocturnal psych-folk, conjuring visions of an imagined bedroom collaboration between the Doug Yule-era Velvet Underground, Nick Drake, and a pajama-clad Pooh with his head jammed in a honey jar.
Originally conceived by multi-talented singer-songwriter Edward Droste as solo demos, the recordings that became Horn of Plenty were later augmented by the additional vocals and instrumentation of Christopher Bear, and after hearing the off-handed cohesion of the duo's dreamy harmonies and their seemingly effortless musical interplay it's difficult to imagine these songs achieving such heights of hushed majesty in any other format. And the extra set of hands ensures the flow of enough fresh oxygen to allow the album to avoid complete descent into the troubled, myopic solitude of such similarly toned homespun constructions as Skip Spence's Oar or Syd Barrett's The Madcap Laughs.
The album opens with the appropriately submerged sounds of "Deep Sea Diver", which gradually climbs through currents of chiming, bell-like keys and guitars before finally surfacing into golden falsetto rays of sunlight. "Disappearing Act" marries its autumnal folk choruses to gauzy smears of vinyl hiss, handbells, and remote martial snares, while the clattering pocket symphony of "Showcase" eventually dissolves into the wordless vocalizing of felines on distant fire escapes. On nearly every track a previously unheard element, such as the mournful violin that shivers up the spine of "Eavesdropping", makes a brief spectral appearance before once again vanishing, leaving the listener to wonder at what hidden treasures further scrutiny might unearth.
Given the heady depth of Horn of Plenty's hazy musical swoon, Grizzly Bear's lyrics somewhat surprisingly strike a pleasant counterbalance by residing more often than not in the familiar realm of day-to-day reality. It's not unusual to hear Droste and Bear singing relatively mundane pronouncements like "My chest hurts a lot tonight" or "It's amazing I can still sing this song so simply about you," with such matter-of-fact nonchalance that as a result these songs collectively sound as unforced and natural as a series of quiet exhalations, capable of transferring the beguiling, intoxicating atmospheres of Grizzly Bear's bedroom directly into your own. | 2005-02-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2005-02-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Kanine | February 10, 2005 | 7.7 | 211ab132-6be4-475d-95b9-342888574742 | Matthew Murphy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-murphy/ | null |
On Last Year Was Complicated, Nick Jonas follows in the tried-and-true “I'm having sex now, guys” footsteps of boybanders past. | On Last Year Was Complicated, Nick Jonas follows in the tried-and-true “I'm having sex now, guys” footsteps of boybanders past. | Nick Jonas: Last Year Was Complicated | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22040-last-year-was-complicated/ | Last Year Was Complicated | Toward the close of 2014, Nick Jonas was thrusted pelvis-first back into the pop stratosphere. His eponymous second album introduced a rebooted youngest Jonas brother, with comeback singles “Chains,” “Levels,” and “Jealous” offering a “blue-eyed soul with brown eyes” aesthetic steeped in a sexy “tossing the purity ring” sound. With his third studio album, Nick Jonas keeps the pace going. But as the shock and awe of his suddenly-bared pecs fade, does he still stand out in pop's crowd of vaguely soulful, sorta-bad boys?
It’s a format both created and perfected by Justin Timberlake moons ago, where the shedding of the boy-band skin is supposedly everything the artist needed to locate his truest creativity. We saw a similar “Guys, I’m having sex now” pivot from One Direction alum Zayn Malik, whose slightly awkward album nonetheless debuted at number one. After all, no one leaves a success story behind for the pop equivalent of a hippie commune: The motive is to prove success without other bandmates*.* On Last Year Was Complicated, you can feel Jonas striving to hit his marks.
Jonas enlists Jason Evigan (responsible for co-penning “Chains” as well as Demi Lovato’s “Heart Attack”) for much of the tracks' production and songwriting. While the result is a 12-track standard edition full of potential hits, the brunt of it rests on interchangeable tempos from existing, already-charting singles. “Champagne Problems” could easily be sung over Mike Posner's “I Took A Pill In Ibiza”; “Chainsaw” and “Under You” slot seamlessly over Jonas’ other hit “Jealous,” and with a shift in octave or two, “Don't Make Me Choose” could be a song by the Weeknd.
It's not that he doesn’t stretch out from time to time here. “Touch” is a skirting folktronica track, shifting from guitars and dubs as Jonas smoothly whispers sweet nothings (some flaccid, like “I wanna get inside your brain”). “Unhinged” showcasese Jonas’ ability to craft a solid ballad once the 808s and synths are stripped away. Other experiments, like the Timbaland-lite production of __“__Voodoo” and Miguel-nodding electro-funk of “The Difference” come across as clunky, trying on styles that aren’t a perfect fit. Still, the experimentation shows some promise.
The eyebrow-raising inclusion of the last album’s hits (“Jealous,” “Chains,” “Levels”) on the deluxe edition serve as a stark reminder: Nick Jonas might have talent and chops, but he’s playing a pure numbers game here, one without much room for big risks or rewards. Perhaps that’s the biggest takeaway from Last Year Was Complicated. We are dealing with a star whose looks and talent became mutually exclusive, and the package is so perfect that it has to live on every shelf, in every store, in every city, in every country. It's a little disappointing for fans who thought he might actually let things get a little, well—complicated. | 2016-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island / Safehouse | June 16, 2016 | 6.3 | 211ccab6-761b-483e-a5fa-105eee30ee28 | Kathy Iandoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kathy-iandoli/ | null |
EARS, the rich and rewarding new album from composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, is hard-to-pin-down music for the spaces in-between. In her hands, acoustic instruments sound like electronic ones, synthetic sounds reference nature, and human voices sound like the creation of machines. | EARS, the rich and rewarding new album from composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, is hard-to-pin-down music for the spaces in-between. In her hands, acoustic instruments sound like electronic ones, synthetic sounds reference nature, and human voices sound like the creation of machines. | Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: EARS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21562-ears/ | EARS | In 1980, the trumpeter Jon Hassell partnered with Brian Eno on an album called Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics. The record’s title gives away its m.o.; they were trying to imagine a music that was native to a place that didn’t exist. Hassell had a background in jazz, Indian music, and classical minimalism; Eno had a background in art rock and ambient music and using the recording studio as instrument. On Fourth World they took their interests in texture and unusual structures and created music that was hard to pigeonhole. You could draw lines from certain genres to individual elements, but the sound of the whole and the way it all came together felt unique to this project. EARS, the rich and rewarding new album from composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, owes some of its sound and more of its spirit to Fourth World: this is hard-to-pin-down music for the spaces in between.
Many of the warm, bubbling textures on EARS can be traced to Smith’s obsession with a rare analog synthesizer by Buchla, but the real secret of the album’s aesthetic owes more to the fact that it’s hard to make out the sources. In her hands, acoustic instruments sound like electronic ones, synthetic sounds reference nature, and human voices sound like the creation of machines. The defining characteristics of each instrument—in addition to analog synths, the album features woodwinds and flute from Bitchin Bajas member Rob Frye along with Smith’s singing—are turned inside out and re-defined, giving the record a pleasingly alien mood that also feels oddly familiar.
Smith is prolific and her Bandcamp has nine releases, many of which are quite good. But many of her earlier records are "experimental" in the most literal sense, where she gives herself certain limitations and parameters and sees what she can create within those strictures. EARS has more to offer as an album-length experience. And while this sort of ambient music is often associated with lengthy side-long compositions, Smith’s pieces are relative miniatures, mostly of pop-song length.
Each track it filled competing approaches that clash in delicate ways. "Arthropoda" is like a new age rainforest recording made on a distant planet, with buzzing insects and liquid gurgles, but it also sounds human, as Smith’s layered voice repeats an unidentifiable phrase with a deadpan insistence that brings to mind Philip Glass or Laurie Anderson. "Wetlands" finds Smith taking voice processing even further, as syllables blur into unearthly whooshes of noise that seems to be moving through a medium thicker than water. Tracks like "First Flight" have a more conventional spacey drift and these bring to mind the earlier synth music of Oneohtrix Point Never, but Smith’s work never feels particularly referential. Even though many parts of this record sound like they could have been made in the ’70s or ’80s, you never get the sense that the technology is the point.
Though tracks are easy to distinguish by shifts in melody, they all work together as a sort of suite, and EARS almost feels like a concept album. For a technically sophisticated record that doesn’t have a great deal of dynamic range, EARS has a surprisingly strong emotional tug. Smith focuses on a narrow band of feeling—wonder, curiosity, disorientation, bliss—and constructs a gleaming sonic world to house them, a place where the lines between thoughts and feelings and styles are porous. | 2016-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Western Vinyl | April 12, 2016 | 8 | 211e7c98-330b-4197-9bb2-2bc6723ddecb | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The enigmatic rapper’s debut LP is an honest and optimistic coming-of-age story about overcoming pain with the guidance of loved ones. | The enigmatic rapper’s debut LP is an honest and optimistic coming-of-age story about overcoming pain with the guidance of loved ones. | Navy Blue: Àdá Irin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/navy-blue-ada-irin/ | Àdá Irin | Last December, rapper Navy Blue graced the stage for a rare live performance at a small venue in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Gripping the microphone, he paced the stage in snow white Stone Island sweats, rapping over tense, jazz-infused loops with his eyes shut, only opening them to glance over at his friends following along. By the end of his set, I couldn’t tell if he was holding back tears. It felt uncomfortable, like eavesdropping, but that discomfort is integral to Navy Blue’s music.
Born Sage Elsesser, Navy Blue is a former skating phenom turned recording artist who began posting his music to Soundcloud in 2015 without disclosing his identity. This wound up being wise, since his earliest raps were raw, incomplete, and bordered on spoken-word. But through sporadic EPs, guest verses, and producing beats for frequent collaborators, he got to polish his style without the pressure of scrutiny from fans who knew him as their favorite skateboarder or style guru.
Àdá Irin, the 23-year-old’s debut album, is the result of his earnest labors. It’s an honest and optimistic coming-of-age story about overcoming pain with the guidance of loved ones, and there’s a starry-eyed passion ingrained in every line, even the ones that are hard to interpret. Several track titles end in exclamation points (“Crash!” and “22!”), and his urgent need to communicate comes through even when his message is abstract. Compared to his older music, Àdá Irin is more straightforward; he’s less likely to use poetic language, which makes it special when he does: “Plummet in the earth, my body’s underneath/My papa in the wall, my worries in the creek,” he says on “Hari Kari.”
Even when he’s baring his soul, Navy Blue remains elusive. “Trickle-down effect, my mother made a soldier/Shoulders ain’t for crying on, my brother know/Hold ’em close, privately we cope,” he murmurs on “Simultaneously Bleeding.” The snapshots are blurry but their intimacy is clear. Songs will often feature muffled drums and lyrics that stream past, but occasionally something piercing emerges from the fog: “Another face like mine on the news,” he says somberly on “Life’s Riddle,” freezing you in place.
Most songs run under three minutes; if they were any longer they might have sounded like monologues over woozy loops. The exception, the self-produced “Hari Kari,” is a moment when he connects to his roots, as he blends a jazzy piano with funky percussion; it feels like a tribute to his father, who he describes in a 2017 interview as “a rastafarian drummer who’s initiated in Santeria.”
Navy Blue strings a sense of fragile hope through the album, even as he grapples with feelings that would defeat most of us—pain, anxiety, fear. “22!” is the high-energy centerpiece, with rattling hi-hats and a pounding bass. His optimism shines through: “Bleed and I replenish/Demons on my Achilles/I give more than I am given,” he says, realizing that his pain has purpose. “To Give Praise!” ends the project like a fairytale. As the horns blare and a graceful melody settles in, he gives thanks to his family and friends, who guided him so he could grow and make an album like Àdá Irin. “If you got ’em both, you better check your mom and dad/Tell ’em that you love ’em, some would kill for what we have,” he states, breaking through the gloom. It feels like a hand on your shoulder. | 2020-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 12, 2020 | 7.9 | 21214b4c-02b7-4713-8b51-6c14e5362b97 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Gentle but full of motion, the Portland, Oregon producer’s seemingly uncomplicated music brings the language of left-field ’90s dance to the great outdoors. | Gentle but full of motion, the Portland, Oregon producer’s seemingly uncomplicated music brings the language of left-field ’90s dance to the great outdoors. | Akasha System: Echo Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/akasha-system-echo-earth/ | Echo Earth | House music is often thought to belong indoors: in nightclubs, warehouses, dingy basements where sweat drips from the walls. But in Akasha System’s music, the sounds of classic house are oriented outward. The Portland, Oregon producer, aka Hunter P. Thompson, favors titles like “Hawk Country” and “Rain Theme,” and he cites back-country hikes and mossy tree trunks as inspiration for his airy melodies and sturdy basslines.
The Pacific Northwest frequently seems to inspire this tendency to infuse electronic textures with a sense of place. Vancouver ambient musician Loscil routinely invokes the local geography in both his titles and his moody, rain-slicked tones; Grouper’s work is inextricable from the fogbanks of the Oregon coast; Portland modular synthesist Ann Annie films her devices in front of picturesque outdoor backdrops. It’s less common to find these kinds of inspirations in dance music of the sort that Thompson makes, in which the steady beat is inextricable from decades of association with the act of dancing—triggering, in effect, a kind of muscle memory.
But Echo Earth, much like previous Akasha System albums Vague Response and Temple Images, isn’t really club music, at least not exclusively. One of Thompson’s chief models is Chicago house pioneer Larry Heard, who drew up the blueprint for canonical deep house but also understood that four-to-the-floor pulses weren’t limited to the dancefloor. That was particularly true on albums like 1996’s Alien or 1994’s Sceneries Not Songs, Volume 1, in which placid tracks like “Dolphin Dream” and “Tahiti Dusk” were keyed to new-age frequencies. Echo Earth utilizes a similar palette of softly rounded synths and unadorned drum machines, to similarly wistful ends.
Another contemporaneous touchstone is Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, in which bold drums and riffs dissolved into pure atmosphere. Akasha System has a similar way of enveloping muscular drum programming in buoyant, jewel-toned chords and synthetic choirs. The Portland musician clearly has an affinity for that era’s left-field dance music: In the opalescent synth tones and flickering micro-rhythms triggered by dub delay, there are also echoes of Sun Electric’s 1996 album Present, which, like Aphex Twin’s record, abandoned rave’s muddy fields for airier, more spacious climes.
But if revivalism can be boring, Echo Earth is decidedly not. For all its gentleness, it’s full of motion: His synthesizers are forever in flux, constantly changing timbre and tone color, and his drums are particularly inspired. His kick drums never simply follow the expected path; they jog and leap, dodging the downbeat like a trail runner jumping fallen logs, and his claps and hi-hats are similarly nimble as they pan across the stereo field or ricochet down the delay chain. What appears on the surface to be a simple, unfussy sound—and his tendency to reuse the same palette from track to track lends to that impression—turns out to be remarkably nuanced. Contrast is the secret ingredient: A bright arpeggio trips up the scale, offsetting sustained chords that barely waver; a cowbell clatters across a field of hush, punctuating the stillness like a woodpecker’s insistent staccato. Crisp, cutting textures balance out the soft, wispy tones, keeping them from becoming too diffuse, and vice versa. The closer you peer, the more Akasha System’s seemingly uncomplicated music turns out to be something like an interdependent system, a dynamic landscape of give and take.
It can be tricky, of course, when the artist sets the terms like this: Would you have detected the presence of old-growth forests and mountain streams in the music if Thompson hadn’t titled these tracks things like “Meadow Walk” and “Spirits of the Lake”? Maybe not, but it hardly matters. Like a walk in the woods, Echo Earth clears the head and sharpens the senses.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | 100% Silk | December 11, 2019 | 8 | 2123fed8-ef5a-4274-89a2-6cb99c3507bd | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Erika Anderson's second full-length as EMA finds her working in a loosely conceptual zone, with songs about surveillance and the difficulties of navigating plugged-in digital culture. It's a risky and uneven album with its share of brilliant moments. | Erika Anderson's second full-length as EMA finds her working in a loosely conceptual zone, with songs about surveillance and the difficulties of navigating plugged-in digital culture. It's a risky and uneven album with its share of brilliant moments. | EMA: The Future's Void | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19208-ema-the-futures-void/ | The Future's Void | A line on a short a capella song called “Coda”, from EMA’s 2011 album Past Life Martyred Saints, goes like this: “I looked on the computer/ And it just was an emptiness that/ Made me want to throw up on the spot.” On Past Life, Erika M. Anderson sings noise-drenched songs about grey ships and blue scars and red pants that hide menstrual blood and drugs that make her so sad that she can’t stop taking them, but that brief moment is slightly jarring because you don't necessarily picture the narrator in these visceral and harrowing scenes sitting in front of a computer. But the line is that much more striking because of the contrast; in hidden bedrooms where goth kids cut their arms with butterfly knives, there’s also, of course, a laptop. And even an act as banal as cracking it open and browsing the web might lead you to confront loss and take stock, and that moment could actually make you ill. On an album with many great images, “Coda”’s moment of digitally-invoked despair stood out, and that anomalous line effectively serves as a portal into another world, the one of EMA’s second album, The Future’s Void.
The key track on Past Life Martyred Saints, and the one that gave the album its name, was its first single, “California”. On it, Anderson sang-spoke lines about splitting from her home in South Dakota and leaving behind friends, who we assume are still there, in order to make her mark as an artist out West. However much of the impressionistic “California” was literally true, it certainly felt like autobiography, and it was emblematic of a record packed with details both personal and universal. The Future’s Void is presented as a different kind of record, one that’s about things and issues instead of people. One of those things is the state of our lives as lived online, with thoughts about Big Data, and, yes, the spiritual vacuum of media-saturated culture. There’s more to the record than that, but given the title, the Oculus Rift headset on the cover, and the content of the two lead singles, “Satellites” and “3Jane”, the initial encounter with it happens within this framework.
Digital culture is tricky to write about, because so much of what we’re used to hearing is delivered as a polemic without complexity. On one side you have people talking about disconnect and loneliness and the deterioration of human interaction, basically saying we’ve changed for the worse, and it’s hopeless. On the other, you have the digital utopians—most of whom make their living from the online world, not coincidentally—and they’re telling us that people are more connected because of technology. Writing about what is almost certainly the truth—that contemporary life is a messy, ever-shifting mix of good and bad, and that generalizations about large groups of people are impossible—is hard enough to do in an essay, never mind a four-minute pop song. So you have to hand it to Anderson for addressing such a difficult subject.
Even the songs here that are not about the media per se have it lurking somewhere in the background. There are lines like “when you click on the link” and “makin a living off of takin selfies” and “feel like I blew my soul out across the interwebs and streams,” and it’s hard not to cringe just a little, because they seem so on-the-nose. I sense judgement in these lyrics, and even if the judgement feels accurate, it’s a point of view we're bombarded with every day, one that is hard to say something new about. Anderson has indicated in interviews that she's aware that she was taking a risk writing about technology, knowingly using phrases that could seem clumsy as a way to push against limtations. But for me, when the record falters, it’s often because these moments take me out of it; they come over as too easy.
Which is not to say that they aren't also used in songs that resonate. “3Jane” is the perfect representation how the album’s awkwardly delivered details can take on serious power when considered whole, and it also seems like the successor to the pairing of “Coda” and “Marked” on Past Life Martyred Saints. The first thing to note about “3Jane” is that the arrangement and melody are absolutely gorgeous, the delicate piano and ghosted synths and thumping tom-toms and shimmering cymbals combine into a ballad that moves with tremendously emotional force. And while lyrics like “it’s all just a big advertising campaign” and “it doesn’t seem like it was only yesterday when you wandered out on superhighway” are iffy, the song ultimately comes over as honest and moving. “It left a hole so big inside of me,” recalls the fantasy of trepanation from “Marked”, and the way Anderson sells it, you feel what she’s feeling.
The aching beauty of “3Jane” is found elsewhere on The Future’s Void, on the sing-song organ that half-quotes the melody from “Taps” (Anderson is a genius at making obvious musical references sound strange) in “Dead Celebrity” and on the mid-tempo acoustic lilt of “When She Comes”—the easiest song on the album, catchy and instantly appealing, with lyrics that feel like an evocative puzzle you don’t need to solve. “100 Years”, a song about history and industrialization, is striking most because of the nakedness of Anderson’s vocal, both fragile and strong; after years of being subjected to Auto-Tune and processing and reverb, hearing a flawed human voice this close to the microphone, outlining a melody and cracking subtly here and there, is so real it’s an almost psychedelic experience. “So Blonde”, the album’s most obviously personal song, crackles with memorably imagery (“her pills are shakin in her bag”) and evokes the alt-rock 90s and the era’s interrogation of cultural iconography, with Anderson’s Courtney Love-like scream on the title refrain driving it home. There are moments of brilliance here.
There are also songs that are easy to skip. Anderson in industrial rock mode just doesn’t work for me this time, and some of that might be up to the production. The album was recorded simply, in her basement, often alone, and sometimes, especially during its quieter moments, that works to its advantage. But the noisy “Cthulu”, “Smoulder”, and “Neuromancer” never hit the intensity they’re going for, and these three songs in sequence in the middle of the record drag it down big time. There are no memorable hooks during this run, and the pinched filter applied to Anderson’s voice wants to evoke a Nine Inch Nails-style blown-out intensity, but it never reaches that pitch.
Still, despite the lyrical clunkers and ill-advised production choices, The Future’s Void has the feel of a real statement, of an artist trying for something new even if she doesn’t always get there. And the EMA project is antithetical to the idea of perfection anyway, so combing through the messy whole to find the places of clarity and insight feels somehow appropriate. | 2014-04-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-04-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | April 10, 2014 | 7.4 | 2124d8ac-5f42-4dd0-8aaa-90c61ab7eb6f | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Though his music sometimes exhibits the romantic sweep of chamber music and can be marked with skittering beats, Venezuela-born producer Alejandro Ghersi’s work as Arca is defined above all by its fluidity and flexibility. Mutant builds on his 2014 album Xen to create a hypnotic and eveloping world. | Though his music sometimes exhibits the romantic sweep of chamber music and can be marked with skittering beats, Venezuela-born producer Alejandro Ghersi’s work as Arca is defined above all by its fluidity and flexibility. Mutant builds on his 2014 album Xen to create a hypnotic and eveloping world. | Arca: Mutant | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21231-arca-mutant/ | Mutant | Though his music sometimes exhibits the romantic sweep of chamber music and can be marked with skittering beats, Venezuela-born producer Alejandro Ghersi’s work as Arca is defined above all by its fluidity and flexibility. You can hear conventional musicality inside of his tracks—melodies, chord changes—but rather than being fixed on paper, they are always in flux. Individual notes twitch and vibrate, refusing to stay with a single pitch; rapidly shifting clusters hint at proper chords without ever quite committing to them; tempos speed up and slow down according to whims rather than the grid of a timeline. Arca’s deeply organic machine music is defined by Ghersi’s ability to find grace in imperfection.
Ghersi has come a long way in a short time, his career the sort of underground/mainstream hybrid that could only happen in the digital era, when producers rapidly move from sharing home-recorded beats online to working with stars. Though his music has varied greatly, you’ve always been able to hear his voice inside of it. The first music heard from Ghersi was a series of three low-profile releases in 2012 that made small waves among electronic music heads but were little heard outside of that circle. But among that group was someone working on Kanye West’s 2013 album Yeezus, and Arca wound up contributing to four tracks, including "Blood on the Leaves" and "I’m in It". That same year, he also produced for FKA twigs, helping to create a futuristic pop that was simultaneously dense and spare and defined by its elusiveness. Xen, Arca’s 2014 full-length debut, expanded Ghersi’s range further, sounding like a bent version of modern classical music crumpled into a ball with a post-dubstep beat tape. Music created for a fashion show in Italy earlier this year spoke further to Ghersi’s ability to move between genres, scenes, and high/low art boundaries, and his continued collaboration with artist Jesse Kanda on the visual aspects of his work make Arca a project with a rare thematic integrity. He’s developing quickly but building on a clear foundation.
If Aphex Twin took the playful communal energy of early-'90s rave and turned it to highly personal art, and producers of the early '00s like Fennesz and Tim Hecker showed how emerging software could be used to create new worlds, Arca is making the abstract electronic music of our current moment, music for an idea of humanity that exists outside of binaries. "Xen is a genderless being," he told The Guardian last year. "It’s about resisting labels and integrating different sides of ourselves." Accordingly, Arca tracks are never one fixed thing: Conventional beauty is swirled together with ugliness, aggressiveness exists alongside serenity, chaos and form fail to cancel each other out. Mutant is an album of contrasts, and Ghersi has an uncanny ability to let extremes interact with each other to create something new.
The 20 tracks here stretch for over an hour, but lines between them are unclear, and when heard at once the record can seem like one long suite, treating us to an array of sounds and moods. You can imagine "Vanity" as a piano solo, so pretty and memorable are the central melodic motifs, but Ghersi’s production on the track is essentially a series of controlled explosions, the sound of a song breaking into a million pieces and re-assembling itself. "Alive"’s drones are positively cavernous, sounding like a memory of an ancient civilization bubbling up through a hole in the earth, and he breaks up the static drift with splattering breaks that jolt the song at irregular intervals. The repeated vocal loop on "Umbilical" is one of the few sounds on the record connected to life on planet Earth, but it’s mixed in with some of the album’s harshest and coldest electronics. As the tracks tick off and you lose track of how far into the album you actually are, the clarity of Ghersi’s vision comes into focus. The broken-ness of the music takes on an empowering energy, as oblong fragments bind together into gorgeously weird shapes and dynamic shifts that shouldn’t make sense feel perfectly logical.
Compared to Xen, Mutant feels less composed and less indebted to classical music. With many tracks on the former album you could squint a little bit and imagine them being performed by a daring new music ensemble, à la Aphex Twin with Alarm Will Sound. But Mutant leans toward soundscape, avoiding proper songs. There are moments in the back half, particularly on "Enveloped", where beats crop up and you can imagine them being used to back a pop production of some kind, but even here the warped instrumental patch used for the melody is too strange and otherworldly for an artist that has ever been on the radio. It’s not an easy listen; this is glorious music that sounds like a living thing, and it can be hard to connect the album to anything outside of itself. Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí said that the straight line belongs to man and the curved to God; on Mutant, Ghersi turns a fixation on porousness and instability into a kind of spiritual pursuit. | 2015-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Mute | November 18, 2015 | 8.4 | 21277ed0-5d61-4169-85b6-7346e0ca1fe6 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Informed by their study of Zen Buddhism, Danielle L. Davis and Steven Whiteley create spacious, playful synthesizer melodies that push at the boundaries of what “meditative” music can be. | Informed by their study of Zen Buddhism, Danielle L. Davis and Steven Whiteley create spacious, playful synthesizer melodies that push at the boundaries of what “meditative” music can be. | Liila: Soundness of Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/liila-soundness-of-mind/ | Soundness of Mind | It was a photograph of a synthesizer that first caught Steven Whiteley’s eye. In 2018, Whiteley, a composer living at New Mexico’s Upaya Zen Center, came across an unusual Instagram post from the Bay Area’s Green Gulch Farm Zen Center: Danielle L. Davis’ modular synthesizer, sitting on the porch of a yurt. Before long, Whiteley traded life in Santa Fe for a residency at the Marin County retreat, bringing along little more than a laptop, MIDI controller, and classical guitar. There, the two musicians bonded over Pauline Oliveros’ philosophy of Deep Listening, which posits drone music as a path to heightened states of consciousness, and jammed in their free time. Eventually, both left Green Gulch for Oregon’s Great Vow Zen Monastery, on the banks of the Columbia River; granted time to pursue creative practice, they zeroed in on their sound, performing free-flowing improvisatory music on piano and electronics for monks and fellow students. In 2019, after their respective residencies ended, Davis and Whiteley moved to Portland, where they used a wealth of acoustic and electronic instruments to bring to fruition ideas that had germinated in the monastic environment.
Despite its genesis, the music on Soundness of Mind, Liila’s debut album, isn’t always serene. Placid electronic tones are offset with pinwheeling synthesizer melodies; thrumming xylophone patterns punctuate breathy choral pads reminiscent of 1980s sampler presets. They summon a rich, unpredictable, and often surprisingly lively sound. On “Nazīr,” a spindly beat of sticks, harp, and bells approximates an arte povera take on a hip-hop rhythm. Whatever the layperson might assume that electronic music grounded in Zen practices ought to sound like, this 28-minute album frequently upends expectations; it is as playful as it is reverent, and the heady results push at the limits of what “meditative” music can be.
New-age sensibilities are at the heart of two of the record’s most captivating tracks. “Not One Not Two” twines droning synth pads with a long, meandering piano fantasia against a chattering backdrop of birdsong. It’s difficult to discern exactly how many elements are in play—synthesizers bleed into bird calls; the piano might be the work of two hands or four. Perhaps that’s the reason for the title, which paraphrases a principle that the influential Sōtō Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki Roshi described as “the oneness of duality”: The track teems with disparate yet complementary elements, flickering between buzzing union and gentle discord. “Whale Song for No One” is similarly drifting and even more complex, flecked with robot chirps, virtual choir, and cicada-like buzz. With its pulsing marimba and bells, it feels like a response to Visible Cloaks’ take on Japanese ambient traditions, while the title suggests a winking awareness of new-age cliché.
A few tracks are particularly energetic. A kinetic blast reminiscent of Oneohtrix Point Never’s hyperreal environments, “Osha” is a rock tumbler full of small, staccato sounds—choppy voices, claps, castanets, laser-like rototoms—buffed by reverb to a dull gleam. “Frozen Islands,” one of the album’s highlights, again resembles Visible Cloaks’ pastiches of Eastern electronic styles. What makes the song feel fresh is its sprightly sense of motion, with airy pads, pentatonic scales, and plucky percussive details all firing like the pistons of a cartoon engine.
The opening “Appa Wú Wéi” is the album’s best and most enveloping song, laying out the mesh of chimes, marimba, wordless voices, and spiraling synth leads that give much of the record its billowing shape. The reference points are not particularly new; the rippling mallets recall Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, while the gradually expanding layers suggest a tradition of cosmic electronic music running from the Berlin school through Emeralds. The magic is in the way the music moves: at once calm and invigorating, with animated arpeggios spinning over a measured andante beat. There’s a sense of clarity in its bright harmonics and brisk forward glide. The “wú wéi” of the title is a reference to the principle of “effortless action,” and the song’s development mimics the movements of natural forces like wind and water; it’s easy to envision the landscape of the Marin Headlands, the fog burning off rolling green hills that slope down to the Pacific Ocean, where waves wear away at the rock. The song is radiant and full of joy: the sound of two minds flowing in sync with each other, and with everything around them.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Not Not Fun | June 29, 2021 | 7.2 | 212b7bce-9514-43fe-95d4-b531af7142a4 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On their latest, this Brooklyn dance-noise quintet finds crazy colors while tearing loose from the axis. | On their latest, this Brooklyn dance-noise quintet finds crazy colors while tearing loose from the axis. | Guerilla Toss: GT Ultra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/guerilla-toss-gt-ultra/ | GT Ultra | On GT Ultra, Guerilla Toss continue to play at the mystical meeting point of DIY punk-jazz skronk, jamband festival populism, and the clanging dance music befitting their spot on the DFA label. In practice, it’s a collision that sometimes suggests a neon-splattered version of the rolling grooves surfed by Talking Heads and Brian Eno on Remain in Light. If GT Ultra doesn’t quite have a “Once in a Lifetime” moment, it does have the band’s most nuanced work yet. Capturing the group’s assault with a depth unheard on their previous releases, GT Ultra condenses their garish colors and considerable charms.
Perhaps the opposite of timeless, GT Ultra is so completely in the technological and aesthetic present it’s hard to fathom what this music might sound like in a decade, riding proud for the only time is now/no future hippie-punk ethos. And with an album cover depicting a sheet of LSD blotter and a title referencing the CIA’s MKULTRA program, in which unwitting subjects were dosed with acid, psychedelia and psychedelics are central throughout. Rooting in the Boston experimental scene before relocating to Brooklyn, Guerilla Toss practice musical psychonautics of a most forceful variety, the aural equivalent of flooding the eyes with strobe lights. Live, they’ve been a trigger for enveloping set-long mosh pits, and GT Ultra acts as a carrier for almost unceasing voltage.
Fading in on a synth wash, they get right to the frenzy with the opening “Betty Dreams of Green Men,” in which insistent congas carry a massive groove meant for far larger spaces than the DIY venues the band usually play. Held together by Kassie Carlson’s spoken/sung/shouted surrealisms and drummer Peter Negroponte’s drive, the propulsive music obscures the far-out textures hovering lower in the mix. On “Skull Pop,” a throat-singing hum sets up stereo-spun drum fills, while layers of crossing synths seem ready to burst into the foreground, leaving the rhythm (and body) behind. The band’s methodical escalations also serve them in surprising ways, on “Crystal Run” twice climbing ladders to ecstasy as Carlson finds her most ineffable melody yet on a short, arresting bridge.
If Guerilla Toss’ particular combination of sounds suggests a clear formula in places, GT Ultra also demonstrates enough resourcefulness that the band might already have some alternate pathways in sight. On the LP, both sides end with slight outliers, places where the moshing might slow when played live. “The String Game” pulls another page from Remain in Light, beginning with a haunted recitation similar to “The Overload” before establishing (for Guerilla Toss) a slow-motion churn. But the album's closer, “Dose Rate,” offers perhaps the most alluring coordinates for where Guerilla Toss might point themselves. As lyrics shout out Orange Sunshine LSD and a big summer chorus mentions “Lucy level,” “Dose Rate” glides like an introspective crowd-surfer at sunset.
GT Ultra is anything but monochromatic, but its energy also feels occasionally constrained by its own parameters, with Carlson’s lyrics and the band's arrangements pogoing at the edge of total freedom, and perhaps total chaos. “Dose Rate” visualizes something else, a dream inside a dream. And if most of the album is perhaps best enjoyed when in need of a certain rush, it’s a heady approach that seems ready for festivals of all stripes, equally prepared to both get weird and make a big, big beat. | 2017-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | DFA | July 5, 2017 | 7.5 | 212c76b2-96b0-43cc-893f-24ac7dd8654d | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
Golem, the second full-length from Los Angeles-based psych-rock quartet Wand, draws from the old-school prog/psych sourcebook, but the songs often wander away from the script in a way that is refreshing. | Golem, the second full-length from Los Angeles-based psych-rock quartet Wand, draws from the old-school prog/psych sourcebook, but the songs often wander away from the script in a way that is refreshing. | Wand: Golem | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20338-golem/ | Golem | The heavies of glam and garage rock past loom large over Golem, the second full-length from Los Angeles-based psych-rock quartet Wand. It’s not a nostalgia-driven record, but you can definitely catch a whiff of David Bowie, T. Rex, and eyeliner-era Brian Eno wafting through the band’s heavy riffs and stoned melodies.
However, Wand’s most obvious touchstone is a little more contemporary: Ty Segall. Over the last couple of years, Segall and his close-knit crew—bands like Thee Oh Sees and White Fence— have established a headier and heavier take on dinosaur rock by amping up the tempo and coating familiar-sounding riffs in a layer of lo-fi psychedelic grime. From the double-tracked falsetto vocals to the alien guitar tones, their influence is clear and present on Golem. Wand aren’t sound-alikes, but they also aren’t shy about appropriating moves from the other bands in their scene.
And they’re pretty good at those moves. Evidently there are no hard feelings: Wand has opened for Ty Segall and the band’s singer/guitarist Cory Hanson has also accompanied Segall comrade Mikal Cronin on the road. Wand’s debut album, Ganglion Reef, was released on Segall’s Drag City imprint, GOD? It’s a bit like the Beatles releasing Badfinger on Apple—an act that took heavy inspiration from their more well-known mentor/producers, but also delivered independently memorable material on their own in a similar style.
There are some notable differences, though. Where their peers might ground stoney riffs in personal and real-life inspired subject matter, Wand’s tunes tend to dwell in the wizard candle-lit realms of the fantastic. Some of Hanson’s lyrics ("The forest is soft and the spiders are dead") sound like they might have first been uttered in the midst of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. And who knows, maybe they were; the members of Wand have been known to play the game.
Fantastic imagery aside, D&D is not a bad platform for understanding Wand. The game makes use of established ground rules, but the tone and setting can be embellished to suit the tastes and interests of the players. Wand’s foundation lies in the old-school prog/psych sourcebook, but the songs often wander away from the script in a way that is refreshing. Glimpses of pop nostalgia are regularly smeared over with anachronistic synthesizer squiggles or blotted out with heavy rock riffs reminiscent of the Melvins. These are the record's best moments—when a Marc Bolan vocal seamlessly blends into the kind of tape-collage weirdness that might have been at home on a Butthole Surfers LP. Still, listening to *Golem—*which arrives via Los Angeles garage and weirdo-rock standby In the Red—it’s hard to shake the been-there-done-that feeling. Wand excels at delivering heavy and murky sounds, but they're a bit late to a conversation that their peers have already dominated. | 2015-03-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-03-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | In the Red | March 19, 2015 | 7 | 21349f92-53df-42f5-8b6a-a1339c25ec2c | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
On his new Drone Logic, Daniel Avery schews the hyper-rhythmic minimalism and throwback New Jersey garage sound that currently power UK club music in favor of soupy, riff-driven compositions that borrow from UK fetishes past: burbling acid house, elegant Detroit techno, big beat. | On his new Drone Logic, Daniel Avery schews the hyper-rhythmic minimalism and throwback New Jersey garage sound that currently power UK club music in favor of soupy, riff-driven compositions that borrow from UK fetishes past: burbling acid house, elegant Detroit techno, big beat. | Daniel Avery: Drone Logic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18638-daniel-avery-drone-logic/ | Drone Logic | Daniel Avery occupies an odd spot amongst underground dance producers: he values largesse. Aspiring to the kind of big-room, anthem-wielding sound the Chemical Brothers perfected in the mid 90s—and, one presumes, their career trajectory—Avery eschews the hyper-rhythmic minimalism and throwback New Jersey garage sound that currently power UK club music in favor of soupy, riff-driven compositions that borrow from UK fetishes past: burbling acid house, elegant Detroit techno, big beat.
Don't mistake Avery's ambition with that of big-tent super-producers. With the blessing of UK legend Andrew Weatherall—who once summed Avery's sound as "gimmick-free machine-funk of the highest order"—Avery cut his teeth as a resident DJ at London's Fabric, an epic, expertly tuned soundsystem whose main floor is outfitted with bass transducers for a more immersive experience. The tracks on his debut LP Drone Logic feel tailored to this kind of high-end environment: crisp, thrumming tunes that proudly prance over a wide spectrum of frequencies. The album feels decadent, like one-percenter techno: rave music made for the best systems, to be played by the most talented DJs, drawing only from the purest eras of British dance exceptionalism.
Avery keeps his rhythmic patterns simple, drawing most of his drum sounds from pre-approved house and techno palates, and he does this to better showcase his big, groovy synth riffs. Drone Logic is overlong at nearly 70 minutes, but at no point does Avery want for melodic ideas. He loads the tracks full of acid-dusted basslines and stabbing synths, occasionally punctuating key moments with short vocal samples. Tracks like "All I Need" can feel a little cluttered, not because Avery overstuffs them but because they he never just lays in the groove; ideas and melodies are constantly being advanced. Drone Logic smartly reprises successes from Avery's early EPs, opening things up with an "album version" of the deep, hypnotic "Water Jump" and later delving into the springy sci-fi of "Need Electric".
Avery's avoidance of breakbeats and his heavily melodic approach means there's a lot of Detroit in his sound, especially second-wave stalwarts like Anthony "Shake" Shakir and Carl Craig, the first generation of producers with the luxury of building on a template already defined for them. Avery's at his best at his most tuneful and romantic. "These Nights Never End" compliments a roiling 303 bassline with a lapping, progressive synth melody and hissy strings, occasionally pulling back to allow the bassline room to tickle your hips. The crisp, sugary closer "Knowing We'll Be Here" drops a candied vocal sample among fizzing keyboards and a simple, hypnotic chord progression. Avery's lush psychedelics flirt with trance music, and Drone Logic often plays like a more urban version of James Holden and Nathan Fake's pastoral sprawl.
It's not hard to spot Avery's influences, and while his sound is by no means modern, it's a different kind of retro than that being proffered by his peers. Add to that its pristine production and Drone Logic feels modern, but miles away from the zeitgeist. Avery owns this space, and there's a refreshing self-assuredness to Drone Logic, which, combined with Avery's careful hand and his connections, can come off as predestined. You might find it too retro, or just not hip enough, but there is zero second-guessing on Avery's part: never does he glance over his shoulder with a nod to UK bass culture or a capitulate to a straight house track. Avery's singular vision might've left him a man without a country, but Drone Logic's undeniable heft and silky craft ensure he'll have plenty of takers. | 2013-10-23T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-10-23T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Phantasy | October 23, 2013 | 7.2 | 2138be7b-ea9a-4cbc-b1ec-1b39b96fbd54 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
I remember being particularly excited to hear Tujiko Noriko when Shojo Toshi was released a year\n\ and a half ... | I remember being particularly excited to hear Tujiko Noriko when Shojo Toshi was released a year\n\ and a half ... | Tujiko Noriko: Make Me Hard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5834-make-me-hard/ | Make Me Hard | I remember being particularly excited to hear Tujiko Noriko when Shojo Toshi was released a year and a half ago. At first, there was a certain novelty in knowing that the somewhat unclassifiable Austrian Mego label, often responsible for a blend of heavy noise processing with a sweet undercurrent, would be introducing a wholehearted pop album. "100% nerdy glitch-boy free," read the press release. Upon finally hearing the album, the novelty was completely irrelevant. Shojo Toshi seemed to shed the antisocial shield and intrinsic self-aware cynicism of our rich lineage of electronic music. A welcome contrast to tongue-in-cheek hip-hop references (obsessively aiming at a mundane form of subversion), those who think the vibraphone is the end-all and be-all of exciting music, and the token group of run-of-the-mill noisemongers. Aesthetically moving and impervious to inane musical politics, Tujiko Noriko had the potential to appeal to more than just elitist art snobs.
The collage cover of Shojo Toshi, designed by Noriko's visual art team, SlideLab, explains the music better than I can. On the left side, a soldier sits atop a skyscraper, further down a businessman talks on a cellphone, and on the right, Noriko hides under a mushroom, shooting a baguette in their direction. The images are comical, inviting, and full of pathos, but perhaps what's most striking is SlideLab's restraint. A good portion of the cover is left to a monochromatic cream tint, allowing plenty of space for the drama to unfold within. Noriko's music is achingly similar, a singular, monochromatic chord progression or beat is spread over the length of each song, often pushing around six minutes, and is punctuated by masterful arrangements of sound borrowed from the surrounding world, be it a businessman on a cellphone or a tape-recorded orchestra.
Make Me Hard is a refinement of these ideas. The interjections of found melodies, concrete noise, affecting sense of disparate elements matched together, and the real selling point, Noriko's extremely emotive voice, are all placed in the expansive background of repetition. Noriko seems to narrate the surreal environment of her album, and the encompassing sense of autobiography adds to the unique allure of the work.
The songs seem colossal in duration, even more sonically dense than before, and yet somehow restricted in scope. There are many different textural, cultural, and personal ideas at play on Make Me Hard, and Noriko has built what seems like a much-too rigid form for their display. The songs, while often achieving breathtaking eloquence, occasionally rely too heavily on Noriko's well-explored ethereal and repetitive modes. The strengths and weaknesses of the album fit clearly into this design. If Noriko's work didn't expand small fragments of life into broad, encompassing, and passionate epics, it would lose much of its charm, yet the music, in its far-reaching and complex toggling through thousands of pieces of aural detritus, throbs for a next step.
There is a sense that this album might've been better served as either an epic, single piece, with attention paid to an overall sense of unity, or shortened by about 20 minutes, tightening the ends of the songs as they stand. Yet, this in no way undermines the great strides Noriko has taken with Make Me Hard. Despite comparisons to Phew, Haco, and even Björk, Noriko's style and personality seem without obvious precedent. Make Me Hard, while imperfect, is full of color and obsessed with the joy of observation. And, oh yeah, it's all in Japanese. Good luck. | 2003-01-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2003-01-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mego | January 5, 2003 | 7.2 | 213aa623-6907-4869-b880-fabccb3eff17 | Pitchfork | null |
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The country singer-songwriter’s sharp and conversational third album transforms everyday pathos into widescreen dramas. | The country singer-songwriter’s sharp and conversational third album transforms everyday pathos into widescreen dramas. | Brandy Clark: Your Life Is a Record | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brandy-clark-your-life-is-a-record/ | Your Life Is a Record | Plenty of songwriters could find pathos in a pawn shop. A small-town staple full of other people’s heirlooms, hawked at bargain prices—it’s an easy vessel for tugging heartstrings. Brandy Clark understands this. “No one goes into a pawn shop on the best day of their life,” she joked while introducing a new song, called “Pawn Shop,” at a recent concert. And yet, her ballad pleasantly averts expectations. It’s at once tragic and kind of pathetic, filled with conversational asides to remind you that this isn’t just any pawn shop: it’s a specific one, with a specific address (Charlotte Avenue) where her characters—a recent divorcee and a failed musician—choose to unload their well-loved possessions. “Someone told me it costs a lot,” she sings. “Man, ain’t that the truth.”
A dejected mumble turned into a sweeping chorus, it’s a prime example of the Washington-born country songwriter’s gifts. Her lyrics are so sharp and conversational that it often takes a minute to realize just how much she’s saying. Take, for example, her 2013 song “Stripes,” where a woman assures her cheating partner that she’d risk spending the rest of her life behind bars to enact her revenge—only thing is, she’s not crazy about the wardrobe change: “I hate stripes,” she muses, “and orange ain’t my color.” Clark’s characters often find themselves in these situations, caught between fantasy and humdrum reality, rehearsing their comebacks as they study their own disappointed expression in the mirror. Even when she worked behind the scenes, penning songs with artists like Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves, her distinct voice always came through: “This ain’t my mama’s broken heart” went the chorus to Lambert’s hit single co-written with Clark, and the message was clear: that song had already been written. It was her turn now.
Clark’s third album as a solo artist, Your Life Is a Record, furthers her search for new stories, even if the emotional territory is more familiar. It’s a break-up album, less focused on wordplay and punchlines than universal truths. And while her songwriting continues to avoid the obvious path, her arrangements decidedly do not. Produced by Jay Joyce, an in-demand Nashville figure who’s worked with Eric Church and Keith Urban among many others, the album bursts with orchestral flourishes and horn sections, swelling to symphonic extremes that can feel distracting during the ballads and pointedly ironic on the lighter fare. The latter approach suggests the ornate, tragicomic work of Randy Newman, and indeed, the man himself lends vocals to a song called “Bigger Boat” that would fit seamlessly in his own repertoire. For Clark, it’s more of a stretch, especially considering the way her two previous albums—2013’s 12 Stories and 2016’s Big Day in a Small Town—paired intimate stories with textures to match. She now challenges herself to locate her characters in more dramatic settings, where their small-town worries feel colossal and cinematic.
It’s a goal she alludes to in the opening “I’ll Be the Sad Song,” where she introduces the metaphor of life as a long but purposefully structured album. In that context, many of these songs might represent those moments when you just need to lose yourself in the sound. Even more than the attempts to soundtrack those helpless feelings (“Love Is a Fire,” “Apologies”), the best moments are when Clark fights through the heartbreak to find her own footing again. In a standout called “Can We Be Strangers” (as in, “We struck out as lovers/We struck out as friends”), she sings over a lush, easygoing groove about the perspective that comes once you’ve moved past missing the good times and you’re just trudging through the bad ones. Clear-eyed and defiant, it’s a breakup song for when you’ve worn out all the old breakup songs and you’re just ready to get moving again.
A similar epiphany takes place in “Who You Thought I Was,” the album’s glowing centerpiece and one of Clark’s finest songs to date. It was inspired by an award-show speech from John Prine—another idiomatic writer concerned with our least romantic types of tragedies. When the 73-year-old icon found himself faced with a standing ovation, he addressed the crowd: “Well, I’m John Prine…but I’d like to go back to being who you thought I was.” His joke suggested a career-long discomfort with acclaim, but Clark sings of a more intimate dynamic. In the verses, she unfolds a lifetime’s worth of aspirations—to be a rock star, to stay young forever—and realizes that the closest she came was simply being in the presence of somebody who saw the best in her. It’s a sad realization, sung in the aftermath of a breakup, but she pairs it with the record’s most surprising and uplifting arrangement. Even when the words sound like the end of the road, the music pushes her to believe that maybe next time, she’ll get it right.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Warner | March 6, 2020 | 7.5 | 213ee9d5-a7ea-4f03-8b9b-48c6f5557ccc | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
What happens when an introvert becomes an extrovert? Alessia Cara is finding out, after she signed with Def Jam and her loner's anthem "Here" crashed airwaves. Four Pink Walls strays from those solitary songs that gave Cara her start, and that's not a good thing. | What happens when an introvert becomes an extrovert? Alessia Cara is finding out, after she signed with Def Jam and her loner's anthem "Here" crashed airwaves. Four Pink Walls strays from those solitary songs that gave Cara her start, and that's not a good thing. | Alessia Cara: Four Pink Walls EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21074-four-pink-walls-ep/ | Four Pink Walls EP | Alessia Cara struck an introvert’s pose on her April debut, "Here", and found herself famous. The single’s sound perfectly matched the attitude of its lyrics: a minor-key piano loop anchored a surprisingly powerful series of verses about a miserable party experience. "Really, I would rather be at home by myself," Cara sang, demonstrating a well-defined personality and no small amount of self-assuredness. People noticed. "Here" debuted at #4 on the Billboard/Twitter Emerging Artists Chart. Lorde, Taylor Swift, and Drake co-signed her. The New York Times profiled her.
Less than six months later, she's made a fast transition from ostensible outsider to insider. An "antisocial pessimist" who’d rather not have been invited to the party in the first place is quite suddenly the toast of the pop scene, her songs in heavy rotation on Beats 1. Cara finds herself a priority for Def Jam. They’ve quickly capitalized on her success with an EP, Four Pink Walls, which packages "Here" next to four other songs, three of which are very different from that first hit.
Cara has a strong voice but lacks the power of an Ariana Grande, let alone a Mariah or a Whitney. Nevertheless, the label seems to think she’s best off belting anthems on the familiar subjects of teenage-dom. "Seventeen" kicks off the record with a vocal loop, a simulated handclap, and stirring chords that build into a hook about listening to your parents and appreciating your youth. Sometimes you can hear Cara’s spiky attitude poke through the sweet, pop polish. For instance, in response to her mother’s earnest advice about staying grounded, Cara rolls her eyes: "Yeah, I guess that sounded nice when I was 10."
But—spoiler alert—she accepts the advice, and it becomes the song's focus. This sense of giving in to conventionality is also present on the record’s other anthem, the even catchier "I’m Yours", which, with its fluttery melodies and earthshaking chorus, could have fit in nicely on the Haim album. Some of "I'm Yours" is seemingly meant to reflect an antisocial pose—this time toward a guy—but it's more poutily flirtatious than anything else. "Oh how rude of you, to ruin my miserable, and tell me I’m beautiful," she sings. "I'm mad at you for being so cute."
There’s no reason to expect Cara to be permanently frozen into a charmingly grouchy position. But the specificity of "Here" has given way to blander, faux-outcast posing. "Seventeen" and "I’m Yours" are both well-constructed pop songs, sugary lyrics and all, and it’s easy to imagine them as huge hits. The worst track here, as its name suggests, is "Outlaws". Its cheerful, burping horn and tinkling keys don’t seem to do anything for Cara, as she croons that her partner is "the shine into her star." She sounds properly Stepford-ized, almost completely without her personality.
That leaves us with the title track, a boom-bap, neo-soul closer that shares more musical DNA with "Here" than anything else on the EP. And suddenly, the girl with her own opinions and feelings is back. She sounds comfortable vocally, and you can hear shades of Lauryn Hill (who Cara has said she admires) and Erykah Badu. This is also the track where Cara lets us back into her shyness. She tells the story of her sudden fame, going "from ‘when boredom strikes’ to ‘Ms. Star on the Rise,’" she sings. "But those four pink walls, I kind of miss them, man."
The four pink walls are her bedroom, where she was first discovered posting clips to YouTube, before she was snatched up by Universal Music Group. Early fans of those raw recordings may be less than happy that she's given into the customary tropes of bubblegum pop. And Cara herself sounds a little unsure about leaving behind the walls she knew so well for ones that may end up holding her back. | 2015-09-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Def Jam | September 18, 2015 | 6.6 | 2140fcbe-588c-4d9b-beab-2b4d0eb87623 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
Shackleton, who has made himself a genre of one with his dark, dramatic dub-inspired work, takes a turn toward the operatic. | Shackleton, who has made himself a genre of one with his dark, dramatic dub-inspired work, takes a turn toward the operatic. | Shackleton: Devotional Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22124-devotional-songs/ | Devotional Songs | When Sam Shackleton moved to Berlin in 2008, it was easy to assume that, trading one scene for another, he was abandoning dubstep for techno. There was plenty of cross-pollination between the two genres at the time, much of it ascribed to Shackleton and his own Skull Disco label. The British artist came from the darkest, dankest corners of the bass music scene, yet Ricardo Villalobos was playing out his tracks; indeed, Villalobos even remixed “Blood on My Hands” into a hair-raising after-hours anthem, paving the way for Shackleton to release his debut album on Perlon, the iconic minimal techno label.
In retrospect, though, it looks more like Shackleton, true to his name, was setting off for points unknown, points that can't be found on any of the usual techno-tourist maps of the German capital. Holed up in Neukölln in a kind of self-imposed exile, Shackleton has progressively estranged himself from established sounds. Instead, he has invented his own tonal and textural language, turning into a genre of one in the process. Since 2010, when he launched his Woe to the Septic Heart! label, he has channeled his dub bass lines and vaguely Middle Eastern percussion into an increasingly complex and porous weave of deep hues, glistening timbres, smeared echo, and rippling polyrhythms, dappled with shadow and overlaid with spoken-word vocals that read like scraps of dream logic.
His masterpiece so far has been 2012's Music for the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ EPs, a box set combining tense rhythm studies and ambient sketches with a sprawling, psychedelic suite in the vein of Coil’s Musick to Play in the Dark. That set ran nearly two-and-a-half hours long, but with 2014's Freezing Opening Thawing, he proved that he could say just as much in more concise formats: The three-track, 24-minute EP was his most rhythmically and timbrally dazzling work to date.
Devotional Songs follows seamlessly from his past half-decade’s worth of releases. Featuring the bright colors and staccato attack of mallet player Raphael Meinhart and the fluid lines of keyboardist/accordionist Takumi Motokawa, it is his most compositionally ambitious work yet: four long tracks, three of them between 10 and 13 minutes long, full of cycling arpeggios and intricate counterpoints and wild cadenzas throwing off harmonic sparks. It is the least obviously electronic thing he has ever done: For long stretches, acoustic and electric timbres dominate, with Shackleton’s synthesizers and effects frequently relegated to a background role, and much of the time, there's no percussion at all, save for Meinhart’s vibraphone and marimba. Elsewhere, Shackleton’s drums have never sounded less like machines. It’s easy to imagine these songs, suffused as they are in bells and chimes, being performed in some misty clearing high on a Japanese mountaintop, with nary a power strip in sight.
But the album breaks from the rest of Shackleton’s catalog in one very important way. This isn’t the first time he’s worked with vocals; much of his early work featured gravelly dub poetry from his frequent collaborator Vengeance Tenfold. But this is the first time he has ever worked with a singer. And Devotional Songs’ featured performer is not just any vocalist; it’s Ernesto Tomasini, a four-octave opera singer from Palermo whose CV includes both classical opera and collaborations with Coil’s Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and Nurse With Wound’s Andrew Liles; For a time, he performed in clubs as the Electro Castrato. It’s his voice that gives Devotional Songs its unmistakable character, less opera than British progressive rock of the ’70s. His melodies often resemble virtuosic updates to This Heat’s incantations; occasionally, his open-ended melodies suggest a more sinister version of Dead Can Dance’s Brendan Perry.
Shackleton has always had a flair for the dramatic—his label is, after all, called Woe to the Septic Heart!—but Devotional Songs is orders of magnitude more theatrical, beginning with Tomasini’s booming voice and extravagant enunciation. The lyrics are goth bordering on camp. “Don’t look behind, don’t look back/All signs point to our untimely death,” runs the refrain of “Twelve Shared Addictions,” an abject listicle (“Twelve shared addictions/eleven filthy thoughts/ten relentless traumas,” etc.) that splits the difference between “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and Swans’ fetishism of failure. The droning, birdsong-laced “Rinse Out All Contaminants” is visited by “the pounding fist of malcontent”; in the spooky “You Are the One,” Tomasini sings of plagues and boiling blood in a querulous voice, while the ominous chants of “Father, You Have Left Me” make James Blake’s take on filial abandonment look like a Hallmark movie in comparison.
Devotional Songs is occasionally—often, even—heavy going. It possesses a certain Janus-faced quality, to use a metaphor I’m sure Shackleton and Tomasini would appreciate, flitting from cool, hypnotic instrumental passages into full-on breast-beating mode. But the album is also possessed of a sly sense of humor. Its excesses have a cartoonish aspect that are in keeping with the Zeke Clough’s gory cover art for Skull Disco and Woe to the Septic Heart!; they render Shackleton's bathetic tendencies—let’s not forget that he once wrote a song about watching the Twin Towers fall on 9/11—with a welcome nudge and wink. Devotional Songs is an album that no one but Shackleton could have made, and its unexpected turn to the operatic suggests that Shackleton’s own septic heart may be sweeter than anyone had previously thought—and that, in any case, it certainly hasn’t run out of surprises. | 2016-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Honest Jon’s | July 18, 2016 | 7.2 | 21420273-26b3-4dc0-aa20-f9b794ff5711 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Vancouver singer-songwriter lays everything bare on his latest record. | The Vancouver singer-songwriter lays everything bare on his latest record. | Nicholas Krgovich: “Ouch” | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nicholas-krgovich-ouch/ | “Ouch” | “You learn that so much of the fear and anxiety that exists about letting people know what’s going on with you is so much your own thing,” Nicholas Krgovich said in a recent interview with Discorder magazine, a realization borne of a “newfound interest in clarity and transparency.” From this he has derived a lesson: “No one cares, basically.” This well-fuck-it attitude helps account for Krogvich’s extraordinary candor. On his latest album “Ouch”, the Vancouver singer-songwriter lays everything bare, divulging private pains without a shadow of reserve or self-consciousness.
“Ouch” was a provoked by a breakup—Krgovich’s first, despite being 35 at the time of the album’s writing. Over the course of 12 grief-stricken, heavy-hearted songs, he relays the anguish of being left by a man he loved a great deal. The aftermath seethes with dejection and despondency, torments that seem in the moment permanent, with no prospect of relief. “I wake up and I hate this room/And I hate this coffee/And I hate this food,” he laments with grim conviction on “Goofy,” coming off as almost childishly inconsolable. “It’s hard to imagine a time when I won’t at least feel a shade this way.” At no point on “Ouch” does this hurt ease up.
The juvenile quality of Krgovich’s heartache, miserable in the most self-pitying way, is not a shortcoming. Instead, it captures truthfully the experience of being dumped—in all its callow, hair-pulling, feet-stomping injustice. “No amount of Jonathan Richman, Hafiz and Alain de Botton is stopping me/From screaming ‘fuck you’ into the air,” Krgovich croons blithely on “Spa.” “No amount of going out and spending time with friends pretending that you don’t exist/Is doing anything.” It hardly flatters Krgovich to sound this sullen and resentful. Yet he never downplays the pettiness he’s feeling, for the sake of tact or dignity, instead embracing the part of the bitterly jilted.
Risking embarrassment in this way is a brave gambit, and it works on “Ouch” because Krgovich fully commits to the truth, or at least his side of it. When he confides the particulars of the relationship and its strange, uneven dynamics on “Guilt,” his reflections feel like the product of someone unflinchingly honest with his own weaknesses. “I spent all my 20s/Atrophied, barely alive,” he sings. “Thought that might even the playing field/A nice thought, but a lie.” Krgovich is honest enough about his anger to direct rancor at his ex but he is smart—and given the circumstances, gallant—enough to share the blame.
Even at his most overtly forlorn Krgovich keeps things jaunty: “Everything’s fine I guess/But I wish I were dead,” he sings on “Hinoki,” but the tone is distinctly sunny, his delicate voice awash in twangy acoustic guitar and some ethereal backing “oohs” and “ahhs.” An occasional saxophone solo whisks “Ouch” into rosy yacht rock territory, or perhaps into the realm of Destroyer’s Kaputt, with which this album shares an affinity for a retro smooth-jazz and soft-rock aesthetic. And on a half-dozen tracks he makes use of analog drum loops courtesy of Owen Ashworth, whose project Casiotone for the Painfully Alone practically trademarked this kind of intimate-ebullient melancholy.
In a kind of introductory essay to the album published on his Bandcamp page, Krgovich writes effusively about a “WTF With Marc Maron” podcast featuring Lorde. “She had just put out a breakup album and said something like she didn’t write about the specifics of the relationship because she didn’t want to build a totem to this one particular person,” Krgovich explains. “What I had just made with “Ouch” was all specificity.” It’s an instructive comparison. While Melodrama has the universal scope of not just a breakup but the breakup, about all breakups, “Ouch” is utterly, unapologetically about Krgovich’s own, an album of unvarnished particulars and graphic details. That doesn’t make “Ouch” less relatable. It has the opposite effect. Its specificity is what makes it ring true. | 2018-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Tin Angel | November 29, 2018 | 7.2 | 2143295c-f19c-4982-b0f6-c1d54b89824d | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
The ambient composer turns his attention to the skies, sourcing an epic, heart-stirring sound from gravitational waves emanated by two massive black holes that collided 1.3 billion years ago. | The ambient composer turns his attention to the skies, sourcing an epic, heart-stirring sound from gravitational waves emanated by two massive black holes that collided 1.3 billion years ago. | William Basinski: On Time Out of Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/william-basinski-on-time-out-of-time/ | On Time Out of Time | William Basinski’s oeuvre stretches back to the 1980s, but only in the 21st century was he finally recognized and exalted for his work. Even if the Twin Towers hadn’t fallen, Basinski’s profound music might eventually have found an audience, but within a year of its release, The Disintegration Loops—a fragile ambient set, recorded from crumbling magnetic tapes shortly before 9/11, that he paired with haunting video of Manhattan’s damaged skyline, shot from his Brooklyn rooftop—went from being a music archivist’s worst nightmare to a profound meditation on death, loss, and decay, earning Basinski his long-overdue accolades. (He’s even become meme-worthy.) In the stream of music that has followed, Basinski continues to strike a singular balance between past and present, beauty and noise, signal and silence.
The title On Time Out of Time would fit virtually any of Basinski’s releases, since most of his music is based on encounters between the past and the present, be they recordings sourced from shortwave radio or old lo-fi piano loops, both drawn from tapes that had lain dormant in his archives for decades. But On Time reaches a little bit further into the past. As part of a collaboration with artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, working under the aegis of the MIT- and Caltech-operated Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (or LIGO), Basinski utilized deep-space recordings captured by LIGO’s interferometers. Two decades of decay informed the tapes behind The Disintegration Loops, but the sounds of On Time Out of Time date from 1.3 billion years ago, when two massive black holes merged and the resultant gravitational waves rippled across our universe. Or, as Basinski glibly put it when presenting the piece live, it’s what it sounds like “when two black holes fuck.”
The 39-minute composition may draw from deep in the universe, but it retains the telltale intimacy of all Basinski’s work. There are spectral drones, the warm crackle of static, the squiggle of radio frequencies in the night air. “It was just coming from the sky,” Basinski used to say of his culling method, one hand on the dial of his shortwave radio. As much as the use of space recordings is aligned with Basinski’s method, it also harks back to his own childhood, growing up in Houston, where his father worked for NASA in the early 1970s.
There’s nothing inherently warm about the signals that LIGO picked up. Considered separately, most of the sounds here convey all the chilly eeriness of the void of deep space. It’s a buzz that brings to mind inhuman things: microwaves, quasars, the fluorescent lights at Office Depot. But Basinski weaves these transmissions into something far more evocative. A small, quivering high frequency resonates some four minutes in, adding a brief glimpse of warmth before vanishing back out of range. Bass thuds like cannons fired from a distant galaxy boom from deep within the mix. Something luminous and large emerges, lingering like the Carina Nebula. Time seems to disappear from consideration.
Basinski leads us to drift for a good 24 minutes before a slow fade overtakes the piece, nearing silence and complete blackness. But, ever so carefully, the otherworldly tones return and Basinski draws us back in. Way out here, in a corner of the universe that humans will presumably never reach, Basinski employs the most inhuman of elements to find and amplify the mournful heart in the middle of a black hole. Just as The Disintegration Loops conjured the elegiac out of the encroaching abyss, On Time Out of Time makes the billion-year-old buzz of two neutron stars into something heart-stirring.
The CD and digital-only piece “4(E+D)4(ER=EPR)” is also culled from the 2017 installations that yielded “On Time Out of Time.” It clocks in at under 10 minutes and features similar elements, but arranged with more momentum, the loops closer in spirit to the placid moments of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project. It feels slight in comparison to the main event here. But the epic title track looms large, up with the other heavenly bodies—be they floating or fucking—in Basinski’s night sky. | 2019-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Temporary Residence Ltd. | March 13, 2019 | 8 | 214487b2-4303-4c56-9d8d-0777207ed1f4 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
*Triplicate, *again, features Dylan singing tunes from the Great American Songbook. His voice is filled with character, though the cumulative impact of the 30-song set is somewhat dimmed. | *Triplicate, *again, features Dylan singing tunes from the Great American Songbook. His voice is filled with character, though the cumulative impact of the 30-song set is somewhat dimmed. | Bob Dylan: Triplicate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23041-triplicate/ | Triplicate | Bob Dylan’s Triplicate is the third album of American standards that Bob Dylan has released in the past two years. It is also three albums long, with 10 songs on each album, for a total runtime of 95 minutes. Dylan, a songwriter whose most enigmatic refrain is that he is less complicated than everyone makes him out to be, has explained that 10 is the number of completion, a lucky number, “symbolic of light.”
In any case, the project brings the total number of hours of Bob Dylan singing American standards to just under three. Like Fallen Angels and Shadows in the Night, Triplicate leans most heavily on material associated with Frank Sinatra, a singer with whom Dylan has nothing obvious in common other than that fame turned both men into myths. Some of the songs here—“Stormy Weather,” “As Time Goes By,” “Stardust”—are well known, at least to the vanishing population of those who care. Most were written in the misty and unremembered days when the singer still went by Robert Zimmerman, a period on which Dylan has staked his entire career.
The arrangements are polished and controlled: guitar, bass, brushed snare drum, the occasional weep of steel guitar. Dylan’s voice is not, and has not been for nearly 50 years, but coming to a Bob Dylan album for vocals is like going to the state fair for the food: Let’s hope you like it fried. In the absence of a crooner’s virtuosity and polish, there’s character, that great unteachable quality that makes even the marginal doodles of a genius flicker with life. Dylan’s voice—gutted but charming, a ghost banging around in the closet looking for a lightswitch—sounds best on the album’s mid- and uptempo songs, where it carries wisdom and resilience and light, imbuing received wisdom with the bittersweetness of lived experience.
The ballads, beautiful as they are, sometimes feel static, bereft of that innerverse opened by singers like Johnny Hartman or, say, Willie Nelson, whose own standards album Stardust remains a high point for projects like this. There seems to be a tempo threshold below which the songs on *Triplicate *become quicksand for Dylan, turning him from an old scamp into a confused puddle of remorse. Call it the difference between just enough and one too many. (At least he’s not maudlin, the cliff over which all ballads peer.) The exceptions—“There’s a Flaw in My Flue,” “But Beautiful”—tend to be songs whose lyrics offer their singers an opportunity to be funny, a quality Dylan continues to not get enough credit for.
In either case, the gambit—and this has always been Dylan’s gambit as a vocalist—is not to sing well, but to sing appropriately. For the same reasons you wouldn’t cast a 7-year-old as someone’s grandmother, it’s tough to sell “Here’s That Rainy Day” when sung by a singer who sounds like they’ve always stayed dry.
Traditionally, an album like Triplicate would have been a way for a performer to showcase their interpretive powers, the relic of a time when songwriting was consolidated in office buildings and movie studios and popular art was understood—without handicap—to be the product of the division of labor: Some write, some produce, some play, some sing.
The irony is that this is a tradition Dylan helped to destroy. “Tin Pan Alley is gone,” he wrote in 1985, referring to a metonym for the songwriting industry during the 1930s and ’40s. “I put an end to it. People can record their own songs now.”
Can and do are different things. We still have our superproducers, our backdoor deliveries, the shapes moving behind the curtains. We also still have our “bad” singers, many of whom are the most interesting vocalists around: Young Thug, Bill Callahan. Things—as the durability of the sentiments behind these songs show—don’t change all that much. Still, 95 minutes is a long time.
Let’s say we take Triplicate at face value. What do we have? A good-natured investigation into the Great American Songbook that allows a wealthy eccentric to stroll, publicly, through the annals of his own mind. One does get the sense of life behind these performances, of private experience refracted through universal sentiment, of hard knocks transubstantiated into easy wisdom, but, as is often the case with Bob Dylan, the drama remains mostly internal. There is something ridiculous about it, something enigmatic, something that glitters with the transcendence of a weird idea brought to stubborn fruition. Something Dylanesque. | 2017-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | April 6, 2017 | 6.5 | 2147354f-2e31-4922-9d19-3ce8e35c0a46 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Up-and-coming Cleveland songwriter collects his first few months' worth of singles and mp3s, plus releases a new four-song single that ups the fidelity. | Up-and-coming Cleveland songwriter collects his first few months' worth of singles and mp3s, plus releases a new four-song single that ups the fidelity. | Cloud Nothings: Turning On / Leave You Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14765-turning-on-leave-you-forever/ | Turning On / Leave You Forever | Last fall, Cleveland native Dylan Baldi began recording songs in his parents' basement, on a computer, under the name Cloud Nothings. By December, Baldi was playing his first show, opening for lo-fi kingpins Woods and Real Estate in Brooklyn. There was one snag: Baldi, 18 at the time, was in the middle of his first college finals. He opted to drop out, play the show, and spend his time touring and recording like wild.
Turning On is a compilation that lassos together nearly everything from those first several months, including one split cassette, a 7", and the cassette-turned-CD-R-turned-vinyl LP from which it takes its name. All of the songs have been floating around online for a while, but the comp is as much a primer for a forthcoming full-length as it is an early portrait of a young songwriter with an immediate ear for what works and why. Though Baldi figured out pretty quickly how to deliver his hooks in a variety of styles (see: the post-punk squall of "I Am Rooftop" or the AM-radio twinkle of "Strummin'") his strength lies in always giving straight-ahead pop mechanics license to spazz out. Verses boast sharp fangs, choruses beg repeating, and everything is presented with throaty conviction.
But what becomes clear most quickly is how much these songs would benefit from a studio and band. (Baldi recorded every instrument himself.) Beneath his chorus and backup vocal on "Waddya Wanna Know", you can barely make out a handsome guitar line that, if heard more clearly, would only tease out more melody. Three quarters of the way through "Water Turns Back", the disc's highlight, Baldi solos loosely but very faintly, the sound of his Fender almost completely buried in an already heady mix. Moments like that are scattered throughout this compilation, though to really hear a difference, you need to hear something new.
Released alongside Turning On, the four-song Leave You Forever single, recorded this summer, finds Baldi giving his songs a bath. The guitars are clean and sharp, there's a drummer with verve behind the kit, and as a result, every hook is more vibrant. From the slingshot pace of the title track to the La's-like ribbons of "Talk to Me" to the harmony-enriched coda of "You Were Scared", there's a lot at which to marvel. Here, Baldi sounds not just like a guy getting over a girl, but someone whose melodic understanding continues to evolve as his confidence grows. | 2010-10-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-10-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | null | October 25, 2010 | 7.9 | 21477f00-a90a-4a69-be1f-0e940cfdaaf0 | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
Death From Above drummer/vocalist Sebastien Grainger's new solo effort Yours to Discover is an album of love songs, a release that's catchy for the wrong reasons and confined by its narrow scope. | Death From Above drummer/vocalist Sebastien Grainger's new solo effort Yours to Discover is an album of love songs, a release that's catchy for the wrong reasons and confined by its narrow scope. | Sebastien Grainger: Yours to Discover | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18750-sebastien-grainger-yours-to-discover/ | Yours to Discover | It’s always difficult to establish a solo career in the shadow of your previous band if it was short-lived, intensely loved and went out in peak form. But over the past decade, Sebastian Grainger’s had it easier than most in that unenviable position. As the drummer/vocalist in Death From Above 1979, he basically did one thing—searing, noise-pop breakup songs where he and bassist Jessie F. Keller punished their instruments as hard as they punished themselves in the lyrics. And DFA 1979’s last album You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine nailed an extremely specific sound and feeling so perfectly that a reunion show where a police horse got punched seems like the only logical or acceptable follow-up. You couldn’t begrudge the lack of new material, as their limited range and narrow focus led you to believe that it would never top You’re a Woman, and in all likelihood, should be a lot worse. Unlike the more “singer-songwriter” excursion of 2008’s Sebastien Grainger & The Mountains, the slicker, louder Yours to Discover gives you an idea of just how much worse.
By a good distance the best song here, “Waking Up Dead”, is the closest Grainger gets to recalling his old band in both content and delivery. Feeling like shit about a busted relationship and knowing you deserve to feel that way was basically You’re a Woman’s emotional baseline and despite its zippy, glossy latter-day Strokes facade, “Waking Up Dead” is a domestic drama given a gut-level punch. After another night of getting wasted and forgetting anything he might’ve said, Grainger yelps “I woke up in an empty bed/ you left for work/ I thought you left for good”, and yeah, we’ve all been there. The chorus also boasts an immediate hook, albeit one that starts out strong for its first couple of bars before taking too many indecisive turns. Still, “Waking Up Dead” is the peak of Yours to Discover and the last time it ever bears some resemblance of a relatable human moment. It’s also the second song, and the first is an instrumental “Overture.”
This is problematic since Yours to Discover is an album of presumable love songs. Not only that, there’s more than a few lovemaking songs, which in a roundabout way has the album picking up where DFA 1979 left off. It’s just an alternate reality where “Sexy Results” turns out like Sugar Ray’s “Fly”, a jumping off point rather than the previous album’s total outlier of a closer. Sure, many people love “Sexy Results” (myself included) and DFA 1979 might still be living off some of that Motorola Q money, but it benefitted greatly from humor (in both the lyrical construct and Simpsons reference) and context within a caustic, self-flagellating record. Yours to Discover has neither qualities aside from a few casual remarks about becoming a greying letch. And as such, all that remains is the smooth talk and the smoother corporate rock sheen. For the latter, don’t think of Toto, but rather latter day Weezer and Fountains of Wayne, assembly line pop-rock incapable of inspiring any emotion except for the nagging sense you’re being sold something.
In this event, it’s non-descript civic planning over lukewarm funk on “The Streets Are Still a Mess”, demo-quality disco more akin to the other DFA (“Let’s Move To NYC”) or, most often, Grainger himself (“I Want Sebastien Grainger”). Grainger’s usually selling himself in the figurative sense, as a power-pop craftsman, and some of these songs are actually pretty catchy. But they stick for the wrong reasons, whether it’s an awkward melodic turn or, more often, an unconscionably lazy lyric. Over a dorm-room acoustic strum, “I'm Looking For A Hand” oozes fake strings and even faker sentiments—“How many times have I gone missin’/ looking for a girl in a world of women/ I tell it to you, ma-ha-ha-an/ I’m looking for a ha-ah-ah-and.”
Yours to Discover never feels like a dishonest record, just one where it’s incredibly hard to grasp the intentions or ambitions of its creator. Are we to take the title, cover and solo attribution of Yours to Discover as a sign that it's meant to be heard as a transmission from Sebastien Grainger rather than "Sebastien Grainger's new project"? Or, does the plasticine production and rigid verse-chorus structure of these songs give you a sense that Grainger hears it as a star turn of sorts, albeit in an aesthetic that has no currency whatsoever? The bigger issue and really the only one, is that for an album so obsessed with physicality, none of its twelve songs operates from the brain, heart or groin. So while Grainger didn’t make a record that tops You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine, he did make one more deserving of its title. | 2013-11-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-11-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Last Gang | November 25, 2013 | 3.9 | 21497065-35ab-4bd8-a18c-7f1c69f645eb | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Roughly two years after their dynamic debut Silent Alarm, Bloc Party are no less earnest and deadly serious, but no less in charge of their craft either. | Roughly two years after their dynamic debut Silent Alarm, Bloc Party are no less earnest and deadly serious, but no less in charge of their craft either. | Bloc Party: A Weekend in the City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9859-a-weekend-in-the-city/ | A Weekend in the City | Of all the big British rock bands of the moment, Bloc Party are probably the guys who take themselves the most seriously. As smart people go, they're surprisingly convinced of their own capacity to say something meaningful. They're just as serious about the possibilities of grand, ambitious pop/rock. Whether it's the messianic hooks of U2, the far-reaching drama of Radiohead, or the grandiose sensitivity of Coldplay, most indie rockers approach stepping lightly and sounding self-conscious; Bloc Party come at them with a sincerity that can seem almost naïve, almost teenaged. And with music and image both totally free of the attitude we expect from young, clever bands-- there's no humor, irony, cynicism, or snot, and never a trace of cool-guy apathy-- they seem as earnest and serious-minded as seminarians or door-to-door campaign volunteers.
All of this could have led them down the path to an absolutely dreadful second album: pompous, preachy, overreaching, and still dull. But then there's the other side of their seriousness. Judging by their records, Bloc Party are awfully dedicated to the craft and the details of making this stuff: From their first songs onward, they've been cruising through big tricks with a studied ease that makes you wonder why other bands find it so difficult. If they have the demeanor of rock's teacher's pets, they have the talent and the work ethic, too-- they're attentive, conscientious, and good at what they do. And this keeps them … well, convincing.
And so when A Weekend in the City comes bursting out at you with a gaggle of second-album upgrades-- new tricks, new scope, new arrangements-- the bulk of them sound like good ideas: They've been executed by hard-working professionals. The opener has singer Kele Okerere trying on a sly, potentially embarrassing falsetto, but within a minute the band's starting to kick up dust, on its way to a chorus hook that's loose, energetic, and honestly thrilling: It's the kind of craftsmanship that would sound good coming from nearly anyone. "Hunting for Witches" fakes you out with a sample collage at the top, then takes on xenophobia in a dutiful re-take on the band's first hit, "Banquet". And then there's "Waiting for the 7:18", the best summary yet of the band's personality: unfashionably starry-eyed at the start, then running its way up to huge hooks and guitar heroism that feel a lot more fierce and weighty than you'd think. Through it all, they're upping the technical ante, too-- Matt Tong drumming tricksy rhythms alongside computer programs, Russell Lissack stepping out from between synthesizer choirs with a string of squalling guitar leads. It's darker, broader, and more desperate than their debut, and through its first half-- when they're front-loading the hooks and energy-- it's difficult to imagine what they might have done better.
Okerere's lyrics reach a lot farther, too, which both helps and hurts. Looked at line by line, there's plenty of clumsiness, and the words don't do much to dispel the band's earnest-undergraduate feel. The subject matter and the sentiments, though, are starting to shine brighter, and not on the Big Topics. A pair of rather complicated songs-- "The Prayer" and "On"-- are spent begging both drugs and the powers that be for the power to live out nightlife fantasies: "Tonight make me unstoppable/ And I will charm, I will slice/ I will dazzle them with my wit." Elsewhere, Okerere starts to sing about his own sexuality and love life: This may be the moment where the earnest undergrad, always more comfortable writing about Issues, starts learning to reveal.
But of course there's always the part where it all starts to drag. Bloc Party's sound may have a lot to do with the many bands these days that have been influenced by post-punk, but the truth is that-- sincere young men that they are-- they have none of the punk-bred skepticism or self-censorship of the average indie act. This is, without doubt, a good thing, and a nice change. But at times it really does let the band get pompous and dull: When they go wrong, it almost always comes in the form of easy drama or their visile sappy streak, two things they turn out not to be as skilled with as you'd think. Maybe it's just that the hooks aren't working, but "Uniform", the longest song on the record-- spent taking the kids to task for their "masks of cool and indifference"-- is a chore: Self-serious, schoolmarmish, convinced it's being dramatic when it's mostly just being boring. And the second half of A Weekend in the City keeps falling into similar traps: Drama that's more ponderous than ominous, and ballads that shoot for slick, sensitive pop-chart appeal, but come off fluffy, underinspired, or strangely retro-- stuff that would have felt heavy in 1995, but seems too doe-eyed and green today.
Still, one can't help but be impressed by these guys. They're a rare rock band, after all-- such skilled craftsmen that they can hang on to indie fans even as they aim, with striking earnestness, to be the kind of band who show up on "first album I ever bought" lists. | 2007-02-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-02-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Vice | February 5, 2007 | 7.5 | 2149980d-e395-4e13-8346-45f402f3d407 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
Light in the Attic’s new age compilation I Am the Center doesn’t try and pretend new age music was something it’s not. Focusing on private presses, it starts in 1950, about 25 years before the term “new age” existed in any kind of widespread way, and leads up to 1990, when the genre had devolved into factory-like repetitions of itself. | Light in the Attic’s new age compilation I Am the Center doesn’t try and pretend new age music was something it’s not. Focusing on private presses, it starts in 1950, about 25 years before the term “new age” existed in any kind of widespread way, and leads up to 1990, when the genre had devolved into factory-like repetitions of itself. | Various Artists: I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age Music In America 1950-1990 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18655-i-am-the-center-private-issue-new-age-music-in-america-1950-1990/ | I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age Music In America 1950-1990 | One of the best things about Seattle label Light in the Attic’s new new age compilation I Am the Center is that it doesn’t try and pretend that new age music was something that it’s not. Look at the album’s cover illustration and you’ll see an angel-like creature carrying an orb of yellow light through the clouds; open the gatefold and you’ll see what appears to be a bird made of stars launching itself out of the ocean. Press play and be delivered into over two hours of mind-numbingly mellow music with titles like “Unicorns in Paradise” and “Tien Fu: Heaven’s Gate”. The structures are simple and the textures are light. Focusing too hard on it is like trying to remember a dream you just had: It will do nothing but piss you off. But like the right color paint on the walls or a thoughtful arrangement of lamps, good new age music feels both peripheral and essential: Something made not to be focused on as much as to remind people listening to it that focusing is only one way to experience the world.
Center starts in 1950, about 25 years before the term “new age” existed in any kind of widespread way, and leads up to 1990, when the genre had devolved into factory-like repetitions of itself. (Steve Vining, who took over the pioneering label Windham Hill from its founder Will Ackerman, once said that running it was more like running Proctor & Gamble than running a record label.) The picks here focus on private presses: Essentially, DIY labels operating outside conventional channels of marketing and distribution. If there’s any argument being made by Light in the Attic here, it’s that new age wasn’t just a multimillion-dollar industry engineered to relax middle-aged Americans rich enough to afford CD players in 1982 (when they cost the equivalent of about $1,600), but an underground scene as self-reliant and countercultural as the ones surrounding newer labels like Oneohtrix Point Never’s Software or Los Angeles’ Not Not Fun—labels whose artists have recast aspects of new age as a form of punk, or what Lopatin once called “quiet noise.”
Like any genre, the sound of new age varies. Some of the tracks here are acoustic; some are all electronic. Some—like the keyboardist Stephen Halpern or Brian Eno collaborator Laraaji—suggests a quiet, person-to-person connection that way a folksinger with a guitar might. Others—a like Iasos and Constance Demby—make cavernous music seemingly designed to remind us that we are but specks of dust in a cosmos too awesomely infinite for our mortal brains to ever possibly comprehend. (Iasos insisted that his first album was not made by him but through him; Demby once invented an instrument called the “space bass” that she has described as “a transdimensional communication device”—gestures that both assert new age ideas about spirituality but also reassert very old-fashioned ones about how the self can dissolve when it comes into contact with the sublime.)
Personally I prefer the less grandiose stuff, but the variety of I Am the Center is one of its best attributes: Instead of pigeonholing the genre by turning it into something overly specific, Center shows how artists with totally different approaches to sound and style can still be grouped together. Crucially, it does this without trying to stretch the Venn diagram of new age to include artists or styles with more cultural cache, like 70s classical composition or drone—music that shares new age’s interest in spirituality and repetition but that tends toward an intensity that, in the context of new age, seems damningly unchill. What you end up with is a compilation that stays true to its genre while also doing everything it can to demonstrate how varied that genre can be.
When I was a kid, I suffered intense anxiety problems, which my mother tried to help me combat with a variety of cures: Exercise, homeopathic medicine, counseling, religion, and eventually, new age music. While other kids were being subjected to the Beatles on car trips, I lay on the carpeted floor of my room listening to cassettes with titles like Celestial Journeys and Inner Sanctum II: Reclaiming the Inner Sanctum. A few years later, when I started to get into punk and hardcore, I realized the best new age music wasn’t all that different: There was a similar purity of purpose, a similar rejection of societal values, and a similar unwillingness to bend, either toward more concrete rhythms—which can sometimes turn new age into chintzy, synth-heavy instrumental pop (e.g. the ubiquitous Kitaro)—or toward more complex compositions that might have leant their makers credibility but compromised the essentially relaxing quality that good new age promised never to disturb.
Still, I write this knowing that new age is among the most easily ridiculed genres of music that exists. Its practitioners can be somehow pretentious and weak-minded, ludicrously abstract and yet as sure of their discoveries as a scientist. “Music helps to concentrate oneself,” the liner notes to I Am the Center start. “To bring oneself to an inner state when we can assume the greatest possible emancipations. That is why music is just the thing which helps you too see higher.” The words—a quote from Thomas de Hartmann—say it all, which is to say that they don’t really say anything. Then comes the voice of Yoga Records founder and Center’s compiler, Douglas Mcgowan: “So many declarative statements to make on the subject of new age, and so little time. And yet,” he goes on, “we do have the time, and the best new age music shows us this.” It’s the kind of subtle, canny move new age acolytes aren’t exactly known for making: Accepting the occasional goofiness of what they do while reasserting its value at the same time. | 2013-11-14T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-11-14T01:00:02.000-05:00 | null | Light in the Attic | November 14, 2013 | 8.3 | 214d8561-3219-4c89-89ac-3ff8cda838cd | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
On his 14th album, Beck roams across a pleasant, gently psychedelic landscape looking for something new. | On his 14th album, Beck roams across a pleasant, gently psychedelic landscape looking for something new. | Beck: Hyperspace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beck-hyperspace/ | Hyperspace | Beck has now spent 15 years struggling with the very challenge he presented in the first half of his career: Who does he want to be? After a string of minor statements, Hyperspace doesn’t reignite his spark but it sheds a little light. Produced mostly with Pharrell, his 14th album is a breezy song cycle that rarely rises above a warped, shimmering sigh. Following 2014’s densely orchestrated Morning Phase and 2017’s labored pop turn Colors, it immediately feels like a relief. Like his best records, you can imagine the mood board hanging in the studio—synth-pop, vaporwave, trap beats, the future as imagined in ’80s movies—as he bends his influences into new shapes. At first, the plan was to collaborate with Pharrell on just one song, but after a few sessions, they felt there was more ground to cover within this gently psychedelic landscape. It was a good instinct.
The album sounds best when they stick to the plan. The cloying, stomp-clap single “Saw Lightning” is an outlier; it’s also the type of song that might have kept Beck up at night after “Loser” threatened to turn him into a one-hit wonder a quarter-century ago. Maybe he imagined himself at 49 searching for a hit while rapping over distorted slide guitar and so he decided to pivot his career in every other conceivable direction, as quickly as possible. “I would have thrived in a time like this,” he recently told NME. “I was creating so much music and my limitation was that I didn’t have the equipment to record myself. If I had a laptop and SoundCloud I would have loved it.” His sentiment rings true—particularly in a year when the biggest breakout hit was a grungy, tossed-off hip-hop-country hybrid—but his use of the past tense speaks louder. Why isn’t Beck thriving in a time like this?
He’s found himself in a strange position. Kind of like the Flaming Lips, he has been grandfathered into the role of an eccentric major-label lifer, and, like the Flaming Lips, he occasionally wanders into the interesting-in-theory vanity project netherworld. But Beck still adheres to old-school tenets of the industry: big singles, high-profile collaborations, brand partnerships. Hyperspace was previewed with a blandly conventional Amazon Exclusive set of Prince covers, an especially damning moment as it coincided with the 20-year anniversary of Midnite Vultures, Beck’s spiritual tribute to Prince. It’s been a long time since he successfully integrated his personality and his music. On a trajectory more like a blockbuster film franchise, his biggest release of the decade was essentially a reboot of 2002’s Sea Change.
Despite its missteps, the smooth, twilight sound of Hyperspace pushes him toward new territory. During the second half of the record, the sky seems to darken and the songs bind together into a mini-suite with overlapping themes and melodies. It culminates with a gospel choir bursting out of “Everlasting Nothing,” but the whole record works toward a more muted kind of celebration. Along the way, there are guest verses from Pharrell and L.A. songwriter Terrell Hines, undetectable vocals from Sky Ferreira and Coldplay’s Chris Martin, and yet the mood remains intimate, solitary even. Its best songs—“Chemical,” “Dark Places”—are like lullabies delivered from a space shuttle with just one person on it. You can feel the distance.
The results are consistently pleasant to listen to, though there’s a subtle dissonance between medium and message. Thematically these ballads draw a line to Sea Change, Beck’s initial foray into heartbreak and sincerity. Many of the songs on Hyperspace continue a weary road narrative, their lush settings just a blur outside a moving window. A few moments allude to his recent divorce from actress Marissa Ribisi and another makes a direct, slightly jarring reference to using heroin. But all of them search for escape in their vague, downer narratives. He rarely focuses on any thought for too long, and the transience works in his favor. If he’s going to drift, at least he’ll enjoy the view.
“I feel so ugly when you see through me,” he sings midway through the album. At one point in his career, it might have sounded like a confession, back when his constant reinventions felt like a defense against being pigeonholed. On those early records, he’d bury apocalyptic visions in music that was playful and referential, rarely drawing attention to how much thought was being poured into every decision. Nowadays, it’s less rewarding to dig for the substance beneath his aesthetics. There’s less to see through. “There was a point where I was, like, ‘Is this over?’” he recently admitted to the New Yorker. “But I wake up with songs going. Melodies, harmonies, a bass line. It’s like there’s a radio station playing in my head all the time.” Listening to Hyperspace provides a similar experience—sometimes he hits pure signal, and sometimes it’s just background noise as he gets to wherever he’s going next.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Capitol | December 3, 2019 | 6.5 | 214e86c9-a0cc-4b30-a2ca-16dea7baa298 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Borrowing the sample-crazed approach of the Avalanches, this unlikely California trio create winning tunes from a junkyard jumble of soft-rock keys and big breakbeats. | Borrowing the sample-crazed approach of the Avalanches, this unlikely California trio create winning tunes from a junkyard jumble of soft-rock keys and big breakbeats. | The Samps: Breakfast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-samps-breakfast/ | Breakfast | If the name Mötley Crüe (give or take some letters and umlauts) weren’t already taken or if Tommy Lee weren’t so petty, it would make a great handle for an unlikely California trio. Oakland’s J. Darrah, aka 12manrambo, is a noted collector, blogger, and dealer of rare Bay Area rap tapes. Oakland drummer Harland Burkhart plays in the shape-shifting metal bands Wild Hunt and Dispirit. And Los Angeles’ Cole M. Greif-Neill, aka Cole M.G.N., is a collaborator of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti and a celebrated producer whose credits include Julia Holter, Snoop Dogg, Beck, and Christine and the Queens. But when the ragtag group made their debut EP in 2010, they called themselves the Samps, evoking perhaps the only technique that could unite three musicians working in such wildly different worlds. Sampling is about what you bring to the table, never mind where it comes from.
Their debut EP took the Avalanches’ approach—chopping dozens, even hundreds, of samples and buffing them, like agates in a rock tumbler, until their origins are all but untraceable—and tipped it toward sounds in vogue at the top of this decade, like the squishy funk of Nite Jewel or the pop fantasies of Washed Out. Eight years later, their debut album, Breakfast, continues in the same vein, but it’s bigger in every way: often funkier, frequently funnier, and, at its best, far stranger.
Their palette is a junkyard jumble of soft-rock keys, wailing guitar solos, gargantuan breakbeats, and outmoded drum machines. They apply distortion to everything, with a dash of madcap humor riding just beneath the surface. “We’re gonna have a big fun tonight,” purrs an oily baritone at the record’s outset, before a searching string intro gives way to a starry-eyed line from the film George Washington: “I wish I could go to outer space, man. I wish I had my own planet. I wish there were 200 of me, man. I wish I could just sit around with computers and brainstorm all day.” A bumptious funk romp in the lineage of Todd Edwards and Akufen, “Head” takes the tongue-in-cheek baton in a darker direction, folding in an iconic clip from the 1992 horror film Candyman and a few filthy rap couplets.
Daft Punk loom large over the Samps’ hooks and kitsch. The stuttering hard-rock guitars and drums of “Spice Ship” sound like “Robot Rock” as performed by an assembly line run amok; the sleeker “Hit n Run” flips yacht-rock guitar licks into filter-disco heaven, with vocoders glistening like spun silk. And “Let Me Down” caps the album with its most ebullient mood of all, whipping filtered synth chords and wordless vocals like a meringue, light as the frothiest M83 song.
The Samps are more intriguing when they’re less obvious. Beneath the omnipresent distortion, “World Keeps Burning” has an understated yearning that recalls Washed Out’s “Feel It All Around.” The album’s opening stretch zig-zags mysteriously between acid-fried DJ Shadow tributes and airy pop-ambient that could bring a tear to Godley & Creme’s cheeks. The Samps have cited Kompakt as a major influence; you can hear echoes of Dettinger’s lumpy, off-kilter beats on “Recovery,” while “Try Two Move” sounds like the Field run through one of Tim Hecker’s distortion units. On songs like these, the Samps harness euphoria without tugging too hard on the heartstrings. That restraint goes a long way.
Tucked deep in the back half, between the abstracted “Try Two Move” and the eager-to-please “Let Me Down,” “Backstabbers” seems easy to miss—just a few gossamer synths braided with easy-listening sax, acoustic guitar, and ambient rumble. It all hangs on a single sample, pitched way down, that layers a voluminous kick drum with pastel-colored atmospheres. Every time it hits, it’s like the dull surface of a geode cracking open to reveal a hidden world of crystals. The way it came to be remains a mystery, but the shine is irresistible. | 2018-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Gloriette | December 5, 2018 | 7.3 | 21530de1-f647-4e92-93e9-9f2e60af793d | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
More of a producer than a composer, Toro Y Moi carries the chillwave torch into 2010 and works best when he's exploring sounds instead of songs. | More of a producer than a composer, Toro Y Moi carries the chillwave torch into 2010 and works best when he's exploring sounds instead of songs. | Toro y Moi: Causers of This | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13931-causers-of-this/ | Causers of This | About six months removed from the summer of chillwave, Toro Y Moi's debut LP is being released in the dead of winter. Which is kind of great, if only because it prohibits us from falling back on categorizing Chaz Bundick's sound as "beach music." After all, chillwave was never really about the beach. Even if the springy sounds of Neon Indian and Washed Out often felt coastal and waterlogged, the style was always more about texture and atmosphere than it was about place. As Bundick told me in a recent interview, "The beach thing is coincidental. If I look at a band like Best Coast or Wavves, they live on the beach. I go to the beach, like, once a year."
The other hump to get over when discussing chillwave is the purported sameyness of the artists involved. You know, the idea that Toro Y Moi isn't really that different from Washed Out, Memory Tapes is basically an ambient Neon Indian, and so forth. This one's a little more difficult because there really are clear aesthetic similarities between these guys. Still, there are distinctions. Looking at Toro Y Moi in comparison to Washed Out and Neon Indian, the main difference is that the latter two put more of an emphasis on hooks. Their songs are generally catchier and more straightforwardly composed. Bundick, on the other hand, is more producer than songwriter. While they might lack the immediacy of a "Deadbeat Summer" or "Feel It All Around", his tracks often have deeper, more interesting layers.
Which approach you prefer will impact how much you get out of Causers of This. The album is geared more toward those who appreciate production, and in some ways is a departure from Bundick's earlier singles such as "109" and "Sad Sams". At times guitar-based, those songs were generally pretty punchy and utilized a fair amount of lo-fi tape hiss. Here, though, Bundick embraces a cleaner and mellower sound that's more indebted to hip-hop. He wears his inspirations proudly, and throughout there's a clear nod to producers like J Dilla and Flying Lotus. What he extracts from these sources, Bundick combines with his own vocals and other instrumentation to make warm, wobbly pop songs that, while not always as catchy as his contemporaries', are distinctive and appealing in their own right.
The album starts out strong with a string of tracks that showcase Bundick's range. First two songs "Blessa" and "Minors" exhibit his pop sensibilities, setting a wash of vocals over looped electro-funk instrumentals and crisp drum programming. Here Bundick strikes a nice balance between sticky vocal melodies and the undulating arrangements that feature through the rest of the record. On other tracks in the first half, he takes on genre experiments with similar success-- first jaunty piano soul on "Imprint After" and then sparkly disco with "Lissoms", the album's most propulsive moment. While these songs are all enjoyable, "Fax Shadow" serves as the best representation of Toro's potential. It's the most complex track here, and in its Dilla soul sampling and distorted beat pattern, Bundick shows production skill far beyond most of his peers.
Each of these songs work in a similar way. Instead of using crude production, he manipulates sounds to create texture. It's the way "Freak Love"'s drums fall off that enhances its mood, not that they sound blown-out or tinny. This craftsmanship carries him through most of the album, but begins to fade towards the end. Bundick doesn't run out of ideas at this point, but his balance of arrangement and song feels off. "You Hid" is wobbly but one-note, lacking punch, and the closing title track is too cluttered. If Causers of This stayed consistent through the end, it might be up there with the assured debuts of his peers; instead, it's just a few notches below. | 2010-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Carpark | February 17, 2010 | 7.6 | 21531af8-f56a-498f-a114-210b8c7aedea | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
The Swedish band’s 1986 debut balanced lumbering riffs and operatic drama, spawning the genre of epic doom metal. This reissue pairs its crushing, rough-hewn songs with demos and rehearsal recordings. | The Swedish band’s 1986 debut balanced lumbering riffs and operatic drama, spawning the genre of epic doom metal. This reissue pairs its crushing, rough-hewn songs with demos and rehearsal recordings. | Candlemass: Epicus Doomicus Metallicus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/candlemass-epicus-doomicus-metallicus/ | Epicus Doomicus Metallicus | There’s no award for album titles, but when one spawns an entire genre in its wake, it feels like the highest possible honor. It doesn’t happen often—see Smokey Robinson’s A Quiet Storm and Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports—but as heavy metal became globally popular in the 1980s and continued branching out into web-like subcategories, it happened twice in just a few years. In 1982, the British band Venom released their startlingly extreme second album, Black Metal, first inspiring a wave of speed-demon thrash bands, then even more evil-sounding bands who took the “black metal” banner and ran with it. And in 1986, some kids in Sweden who played slow, dramatic, heavy music not only coined the “epic doom metal” genre tag, but also made its ur-text. Like a power hitter pointing to the bleachers beyond centerfield while approaching the plate, Candlemass dubbed their debut Epicus Doomicus Metallicus. Peaceville Records’ new 35th anniversary reissue celebrates the album with a fresh remaster and two bonus discs of demos and rehearsal recordings.
By the mid-’80s, the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) had ripped like a wildfire around the world, distancing metal from the blues riffs of its early days and speeding up its tempos. Its many thrash progenies, such as Metallica and Slayer, further ramped up that arms race. In this landscape, Candlemass were retro fetishists from a corner of the map that hadn’t yet established itself as a metal stronghold. Avowed Black Sabbath fans, they drew up an entire blueprint from the slowest, creepiest songs in their idols’ catalog, such as “Into the Void,” “Electric Funeral,” and of course, the song that’s commonly cited as the first-ever example of doom metal, “Black Sabbath.” Candlemass strove in the complete opposite direction of their most popular contemporaries, but just like thrash bands’ giga-warped take on Iron Maiden’s galloping riffs and black metal bands’ lo-fi corruption of Venom’s vision, they made Sabbath’s sounds their own by taking them to the extreme. Fatter riffs, slower tempos, more operatic vocals, more gothic synths, nerdier lyrics—these were Candlemass’ aspirations.
The melodies on Epicus Doomicus Metallicus are dramatic and expansive without being overly complex, alternately hinting at pre-Renaissance origins and/or the most basic skeletons of classical music. Especially during acoustic passages on songs like “Under the Oak” and “A Sorcerer’s Pledge,” it’s easy to imagine the music being cribbed from a cruel medieval dynasty’s funeral rites. (On their next album, the band actually covered the most famous funeral march of all-time.) Epicus’ deceptively simple trick is that these melodies, when transposed on drop-tuned, distorted electric guitars, make the beefiest blues riff sound like a kitten’s mewl. Witness the transition on opener “Solitude” where, just as a mournful acoustic guitar line peters out, an electric fades in, playing a version of the same melody, but simplified in a brute-force way that instantly awakens the lizard brain. This is what striking gold sounds like—a simple, near-accidental discovery that, in time, made thousands believe that it was as easy as sticking a pan into a creek.
Candlemass’ early lineup shuffling suggests that it might actually be that easy. Of the six people that play on Epicus, only two, bassist Leif Edling and rhythm guitarist Mats Björkman, showed up on the following year’s Nightfall. Epicus was recorded with a singer (Johan Längquist) and a lead guitarist (Klas Bergwall) who were called in as session musicians at the eleventh hour to record material that, apart from the guitar solos, was already finely mapped out. Despite the constant churn, Candlemass were consistent, putting out four good-to-great albums between ‘86 and ‘89, and Edling was the glue that held it all together. He’s the sole songwriter on the vast majority of Candlemass’ output, and on the demos included with this Epicus reissue, he’s even doing the vocals. Especially for music that’s driven by lumbering riffs instead of tight grooves, it’s rare for a non-singing bassist to be the bandleader: Unlikely as it was, Edling became the godfather of epic doom metal.
Compared to Candlemass’ ensuing output, Epicus has a charmingly rudimentary, rough-hewn quality. It’s not astounding to imagine session players learning these parts in a matter of weeks. At the time, Längquist (who rejoined the band in 2018) wasn’t quite the lurid, vibrato-prone wailer that his more celebrated successor, Messiah Marcolin, was. But these crushing, slightly ridiculous songs require everyone to hit their marks, and as a result, Candlemass never sounded more united toward a single purpose. This renders the reissue’s demos, whose differences mostly lie in audio fidelity, less essential; it also makes the band’s more grandiose later material look even more ambitious by comparison. Compared to the self-consciously “epic” bands it would inspire, Epicus balances histrionics with an edgy brawn, instantly recognizable among the era’s more primordial heavy metal.
Bands like Pentagram, Trouble, the Obsessed, and Witchfinder General had built on the Sabbath template throughout the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, so the term “doom metal” was already in the ether by 1986. But due to a number of factors—in Pentagram’s case, forming in 1971 but not releasing their first album until 1985—it took until the mid-’80s for the the genre to evolve and spark scenes as far-flung as New Orleans and Northern England. Epicus was initially received so poorly that Candlemass were dropped from their label, Black Dragon Records, shortly after its release. Six months later, demand was so high that the album had been repressed three times. And now, you can hear its echoes in every skyward-reaching doom band. | 2022-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Peaceville | June 7, 2022 | 8.4 | 21570436-5314-4c6f-89d9-fd51cc3cccfe | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
The Toronto post-rock band returns with their first album in eight years. It’s the well-oiled sound of a band pushing the boundaries of a genre littered with tropes, without succumbing to any of them. | The Toronto post-rock band returns with their first album in eight years. It’s the well-oiled sound of a band pushing the boundaries of a genre littered with tropes, without succumbing to any of them. | Do Make Say Think: Stubborn Persistent Illusions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23220-stubborn-persistent-illusions/ | Stubborn Persistent Illusions | Listening to the Toronto band’s new album, I wished upon myself an experiment: What if I heard one of these tracks without knowing it was Do Make Say Think? I’m sure “Horripilation,” at more than ten minutes long with its braided guitars and dual drums, would have given the band away immediately. But other songs would have kept their secret, and so there is much newness in which to revel on Stubborn Persistent Illusions, the band’s first album since 2009’s Other Truths, which will sound both familiar and peculiar to anyone who has spent time with their previous music.
Even the most arcane genres have tropes, and post-rock has built up plenty of its own. The most well-defined and obvious are often derided (or celebrated) as “crescendocore,” a self-explanatory tag that doesn’t quite pin down a group like Do Make Say Think. Yes, they are often building up to something in their songs, but not always in volume or drama. The group, who shares members with the recently revived Toronto indie outfit Broken Social Scene, has the well-oiled sound of a band in its third decade, a chemistry required to compose such experimental rock and make it sound natural instead of regimented. They don’t always sound tight, but they never sound apart.
Stubborn Persistent Illusions has the immediate trappings of a Do Make Say Think record. “War on Torpor,” which is unusually charged up from its first moments, can feel like it’s spinning in place as a result. “Horripilation” might be immediately identifiable as a DMST song—the clean, almost bumbling guitar riffs have a delicate sturdiness in their repetition—but as it winds around in minutes-long sections, the group uncovers new wrinkles in their sound. Two minutes in, a snare drum sounds downright funky all alone like that, and a few minutes later, a bass drum marches into a gallop. It’s not just that it sounds like a Do Make Say Think recording, it covers distance like one, a marathon approach: themes are repeated like track workout sets, interludes play out like lazy jogs, the home stretch feels like an accomplished return.
At their core, DMST are a guitars and drums group—two of each—but they’ve often let other instruments perform the cinematic lifts of their mid-song interludes. A couple minutes into “Her Eyes on the Horizon,” the horns take over entirely, slowing things to a creak so that the band can rebirth the original theme on a refreshed, sanctified canvas. In this way, Do Make Say Think’s songs don’t demand attention so much as reward it. The album is easy to let play through, but sometimes hard to feel intimate with its complexity. It makes for music that’s wonderful to live with, encouraging repetition while allowing for unconcentrated listening.
Like most post-rock outfits, DMST invest heavily in timbre—their guitars variously ring, buzz, shudder, and twinkle—but they rarely let things get atmospheric, instead grounding their music in weaving, persistent riffs. The album’s frantic centerpiece, “And Boundless,” is propped up by a misdirecting set-up track called “Bound.” The first song builds and collapses a twinkling surge, but it doesn’t pay off in the way most DMST pieces do. “And Boundless” is a relentless and unnerving march by comparison, built on imposing, siren-like guitar strums and crashing drums, this from a band frequently and accurately pegged as pastoral. Even at their loudest, DMST are never rollicking or spinning out of control; here they’ve harnessed and reigned in one of their most nerve-wracking works into an opus that winds around like a top prowling around a table.
Elsewhere, “As Far As the Eye Can See” finds the band at their calmest, playing grazing tunes built around the type of filigree guitar-riffs-as-theme they’ve made into a hallmark. It’s an effect that produces an internal logic, in which a song can feel like an island with its own ecosystem, and an album an archipelago. It’s challenging to find your way inside. In the oscillation from serenity to cinematic triumph, their music can seep into your conscious and float around your daily life, not so much a soundtrack as a pliable accompaniment. Even when it’s not competing for your attention, Stubborn Persistent Illusions feels impossible to put down. | 2017-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Constellation | May 17, 2017 | 7.8 | 2163154d-7815-4d6c-bc21-e4ec06fb8af0 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
The hybrid pop collaboration between Josiah Wise and Haxan Cloak is a sly and personal exploration of the queer experience, boiling with personal energy and fantastically operatic in scale. | The hybrid pop collaboration between Josiah Wise and Haxan Cloak is a sly and personal exploration of the queer experience, boiling with personal energy and fantastically operatic in scale. | serpentwithfeet: blisters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22333-blisters/ | blisters | An actual serpent with feet is an image that belongs to a prelapsarian world. It’s a mythical reminder of original sin, and perhaps a symbol of lost potential, fallibility, desire, and all sorts of biblical things good and bad. It’s a hell of a name for a musical project, coded with all the grandeur and primordial muck of the Book of Genesis. serpentwithfeet is Josiah Wise, a classically trained singer who’s moved nomadically between neo-soul, funk, R&B, and a self-described style of pagan gospel—he finds refuge, takes lessons, and moves on. On his debut EP, *blisters *he’s enlisted Björk collaborator and producer the Haxan Cloak to help craft a world that boils with personal energy and is fantastically operatic in scale.
*blisters *is a brief five-song EP, barely over 20 minutes long, but it’s gorgeously multivalent and strangely wrought, morphing that short timespan into an experience that is unabashedly vulnerable and powerfully queer. Its opening title track sounds simultaneously ancient and postmodern. Harps share space with thunderous electronic drums and belches of static creating a whirlpool of sounds that seems totally inhospitable until Wise’s voice threads it all together. A combination of spooky processing and classical inflections make his voice so affecting: shifting between whispers and moans, splitting off, multiplying, and taking root in your ears in such strange ways.
The way his voice is used reminds me of Holly Herndon’s vocal experiments. It’s protean and malleable, at any time diffuse or concrete, and serves as the album’s most powerful instrument. In the following track “flickering,” Wise continues this experimentation by dissolving almost all instrumentation, and allowing his voice to luxuriate in its own timbre. It’s easy to get hypnotized by Wise’s singing, which borders on glossolalia in terms of its pounding spirituality, but when his words connect, they resonate right in the chest. On “flickering” in particular, Wise loves the melodrama (“I’m starting to feel the cord connecting us two is made of gossamer”), but he sells it by virtue of his delivery, thumbing the scale with emotional weight. When he says, “Don’t let me doubt you,” or, “I offer myself to you,” the pain goes from his mouth to your heart in a flash.
It works because his music is theatrical. It demands you to sit down and pay attention. In particular, blisters invests in the megachurch and the opera, always looking for a safe landing between dogma and drama, faith and obsession. In songs like “four ethers” he leans into the glory of these forms. The song hangs on a motif of swirling atmospheric strings that are less Wagner or Puccini, but more like Hans Zimmer in effect, and it’s incredible if not a little cheesy. It works together with the tone of the song’s lyrics which are puncturing but somehow funny and self-mocking (“Your name is about as easy to remember as the four ethers/And who the hell knows the four ethers”).
He’s also direct, visceral, and imagistic, recalling Frank Ocean’s knack for storytelling circa-Channel Orange: “Babe I know you learned some fucked up shit from your mother/Had you tucking your dick/Had you hiding the shit that really made you special.” He delivers these lines with a lilting falsetto, as Haxan Cloak’s noises and screeches of strings explode around him. In these personal disclosures of desire, sexuality, and failure, Wise can make individual and personal struggles seem mythic.
In addition to his subtly haunting textures, Haxan Cloak also makes Wise sound swaggering and enormous. It’s because Wise has intent and vision as he explores the difficulties of identity and the liquidity of the queer experience with a sly sense of humor. Listening to *blisters, *I was reminded of the bittersweet optimism of the theorist José Esteban Muñoz, who wrote, “Queerness should and could be about a desire for another way of being in both the world and time.” In *blisters, *Wise pauses to examine the ugliness of our world, then floats right past it to another way of being. | 2016-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Tri Angle | September 2, 2016 | 8 | 2165d8e0-0347-482c-9c84-df5c40b744b4 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
This just-reissued live album is not simply P-Funk in its early phase—it’s P-Funk in transition. Having hardly rehearsed with two new members, Meadowbrook captures moments of barely controlled chaos. | This just-reissued live album is not simply P-Funk in its early phase—it’s P-Funk in transition. Having hardly rehearsed with two new members, Meadowbrook captures moments of barely controlled chaos. | Funkadelic: Live - Meadowbrook, Rochester, Michigan - 12th September 1971 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22765-live-meadowbrook-rochester-michigan-12th-september-1971/ | Live - Meadowbrook, Rochester, Michigan - 12th September 1971 | Everybody with a stake in R&B knows the essence of live P-Funk: the costumes, the stagecraft, the dozen-plus musicians pushing freewheeling communication through the chaos. It’s known in the visual sense by the coming of the Mothership (an on-stage prop), and in recorded history on Parliament-helmed albums like 1977’s Live (P.Funk Earth Tour) and 1993’s Tear the Roof Off - 1974-1980. Anyone who’s seen footage of the band at their prime can’t overstate the greatness of their spectacle; their Halloween ’76 stop in Houston during their reputation-immortalizing if money-losing Earth Tour is the stuff that shifts tectonic plates.
That history places the live-staged peak of the P-Funk operation at a mid ’70s origin point without the come-up background to go with it. Records of the band’s tour itinerary are surprisingly sparse in the years before the summer of 1975, too. But there was a stretch in 1971—including an extended stay in the UK—where their relentless barnstorming was starting to shape who they’d become en route to the double-LP sprawl of America Eats Its Young and funk-rock power hitters Cosmic Slop and Standing on the Verge of Getting It On. It wasn’t until 1996 that an official release on Funkadelic’s early label Westbound Records gave fans insight into what this year had in store for the band—and what they made of a well-regarded but turbulent moment in their history.
Funkadelic Live: Meadowbrook 1971 was recorded when they were dealing with a personnel turnover that could’ve annihilated less-driven bands. Mere months after Maggot Brain came closer than anyone had ever gotten to picking up Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic rock-soul mantle, Funkadelic would have to become an almost entirely different band. Rhythm guitarist Tawl Ross and on-and-off drummer Tiki Fulwood were both casualties having their separate issues handling drugs. Bassist Billy “Bass” Nelson would split from the group over financial compensation. And guitarist Eddie Hazel—the man who gave Maggot Brain its most searing moments, particularly the title track’s acid-rock lamentations—was one foot out the door en route to a time-monopolizing gig with the Temptations. Hazel and Nelson were still with the band as of September ’71, but the other two musicians needed substitutions—in both cases, on extra-short notice.
That’s what makes the just-reissued *Meadowbrook 1971 *more than a mere happenstance snapshot of the band: it’s not simply P-Funk in their early phase, it’s P-Funk in transition. Originally given a soundboard recording without the band’s prior knowledge by Westbound label owner Armen Boladian, this September 12th gig on the outskirts of the band’s adopted Detroit home is a band piecing themselves together while discovering how to adapt. If that sounds like a sort of stop-start feeling-out process, it really is: new rhythm guitarist Harold Beane had been a Stax sideman most known for playing with Isaac Hayes, and freshly recruited drummer Tyrone Lampkin was the drummer for the Apollo Theater house band. Those are strong bonafides, but not entirely compatible with the acid-blotter blueprint of Funkadelic—and what’s more, they’d hardly even rehearsed before the show, if at all. That makes the first half of this set an exercise in barely controlled chaos.
The 14-minute version of “Maggot Brain” is worth the recording’s existence alone: at this point, it’s still a recent composition, but it’s had enough time to mutate and expand into a spotlight showpiece that makes the full-band interplay as important as Hazel’s soloing. In other moments, the struggle to click-in makes the songs raucously janky at best and an actual “scrap this and start over” moment at worst. The metallic roar of “Alice in My Fantasies” fits the former, as though it’s just barely being held together through the sheer force of its raunch; it wanders with a predatory restlessness compared to the snap-tight *Standing on the Verge *version they’d drop three years later. But the false-start flailing around “I Call My Baby Pussycat” is mostly worth hearing for the way they actually change it in real time from its uptempo origins on Parliament's Osmium to the slower, slinkier variation they’d record for America Eats Its Young.
George Clinton’s memoir rightfully touts Lampkin, the drummer, as a transformative force who “helped remake the band’s sound: louder, both looser and tighter,” but that night he was so intent on bursting out of the pocket and bringing the flash that Clinton had to make a point of half-apologizing for it. “Y’all got to kinda bear with us,” he tells the audience over a more boisterous variation of the “I’ll Bet You” drum beat than the band was presumably used to. “We got a new drummer here tonight... Tyrone. We’re gonna get it together anyhow, and gonna pee on your afro.” That last ad-lib wasn’t the only preview of the band they’d become by ’74; Lampkin flashes the elasticity here that would make the grooves of songs like “Cosmic Slop” and “Red Hot Mama” rock-solid no matter how many flourishes they’d get. That makes the selections from their ’70 debut—a snarl-of-joy rendition “Good Old Music” and a thunderstorm of a take on “I Got a Thing, You Got a Thing, Everybody’s Got a Thing”—reach the top of their potential for heaviness and wildness.
In the end, it’s still Clinton who nails his preacher-turned-benevolent freak heights as Bernie Worrell acts as conductor/NASA ground control. Worrell held a vital role in keeping the fracturing group on point, dropping moments of dissonant counternotes with classically trained comedic timing, finding new ways to layer on distortion, and giving the other players riffs to improvise over in an enviable feedback loop. Parliaments oldie “All Your Goodies Are Gone (The Loser’s Seat)”—which was vocal-group soul in ’67, slinky funk in ’74, and a simmering acid-gospel 15-minute meditation on loss here—is the centerpiece that points to better things to come. In Rob Bowman’s must-read liner notes, Nelson reminisces that it was “like the instruments were playing us.”
And even if the band was played within an inch of their life—the customary noise-freakout closer of “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow” was cut short when a frustrated Nelson walked off the stage early—it’s hard to think of a moment where stress and strength intersected for P-Funk as fruitfully as it did here. Beane would be a key player in America Eats Its Young; Lampkin would be a percussive axis all the way through The Electric Spanking of War Babies. And by the time Hazel returned to make one of his biggest imprints on the band with his co-writes and solos on Standing on the Verge, he had guitarist Garry Shider and bassist Cordell “Boogie” Mosson to spar with. But before all that fell into place, this one night of fortuitously recorded havoc proved that it would take more than just a clash of styles to undo Funkadelic—in fact, that clash wound up making the funk even stronger. | 2017-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Tidal Waves | January 14, 2017 | 8 | 216726db-ddd9-4f23-9722-02675ddf3584 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The rapping, singing, and drumming polymath approaches the funk canon from a rap perspective, offering a wide-angle portrait of Los Angeles’ hedonistic landscape. | The rapping, singing, and drumming polymath approaches the funk canon from a rap perspective, offering a wide-angle portrait of Los Angeles’ hedonistic landscape. | Anderson .Paak: Oxnard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anderson-paak-oxnard/ | Oxnard | With its languid pace and sunstruck mix of hedonism and tragedy, Los Angeles has always had a powerful and enduring relationship with funk music. The onset of G-funk in the ‘90s channeled the whining synthesizer experiments of Zapp and Parliament Funkadelic into something sepulchral and nihilistic and, in doing so, defined parameters for L.A. Funk. And now, you can hear Parliament-by-way-of-Dr. Dre in the music of Thundercat, Dâm-Funk, Terrace Martin, and Dre’s own Aftermath Records artist, Anderson Paak.
On Oxnard, Paak’s follow-up to his 2016 breakthrough Malibu, the rapping, singing, and drumming polymath approaches funk from a rap perspective. When Paak allows himself to be instinctive and loose, Oxnard blends these influences with a comforting ease. Cloaked in natty threads and a horndog ladies-man persona, he favors bubbling bass, silky textures, and sunset timbres, forever somewhere between Snoop Dogg’s “G’z Up, Hoes Down” and Bootsy Collins’ “I’d Rather Be With You.” In that richly instrumented, sometimes misogynistic, and sexually debauched space, Paak has enough leeway to showcase his versatility as a vocalist.
In the best possible way, Paak has a voice like ’80s R&B singer El DeBarge after a pack of cigarettes. Though Paak doesn’t have DeBarge’s piercing falsetto, his pitched-up, suggestive rasp is apt for a self-styled lothario. Throughout Oxnard, he exalts blowjobs and carps about a “petty bitch” and, on “Sweet Chick,” has sex with a skater who “watches anime while [he’s] laying dick.” Even his vaguely political song, “6 Summers,” opens with artless wish-casting: “Trump’s got a love child/And I hope that bitch is buckwild/[...] I hope she kiss señoritas and black gals.” Individually, his moments of hetero-masculine bluster are mostly passable—”Sweet Chick” is particularly enjoyable—but, in aggregate, they seem like a sock stuffed down the front of his jeans.
Oxnard is at its best when Paak’s overt lasciviousness is muted by rap legends Kendrick Lamar, Q-Tip, and Tha Doggfather himself. (Dr. Dre interrupted leg day to make a rare appearance, but the stiff, militaristic delivery that marked his last album, Compton, is still present.) Paak and Lamar’s pastel boogie “Tints” is breezy, fun, and should have been released in the summertime; Q-Tip, his own high-pitched voice sharp as ever, recalls past heartbreaks on the ruminative “Cheers”; and Snoop Dogg who is transforming into rap’s own Willie Nelson as his hairline recedes, reminisces about his Long Beach childhood on the lolling cookout jam “Anywhere.” (Perhaps the most glaring sign of the end times is that Snoop Dogg now seems a moderating influence.)
The crucial flaw of Oxnard isn’t its forgivable spates of juvenalia (after all, much of funk is thinly-veiled sexual metaphor and innuendo) or Paak’s occasionally stilted rapping—it’s the album’s sprawling, burdensome ambition. With its lyrics about a mythical, lesbian Trump offspring, the initial two minutes of “6 Summers” mistakes easy provocation for insight, the cocksure “Mansa Musa” seems more in service of Dr. Dre than it does Paak, and “Left to Right,” performed partially in Jah-fakin’ patois, is a golden, crispy Jamaican patty filled with compost. Paak can do nearly anything, but that doesn’t mean he should do everything. With its often effortless synthesis of funk and rap, Oxnard is a wide-angle portrait of Los Angeles’ hedonistic landscape—it’s just a little out of focus. | 2018-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Aftermath | November 16, 2018 | 7 | 216a13c3-9df9-4cab-8103-59e8ef09045c | Torii MacAdams | https://pitchfork.com/staff/torii-macadams/ | |
Like the best holiday-themed art, Chance and Jeremih’s expanded reissue of their 2016 Christmas mixtape is part timeless, part time capsule. | Like the best holiday-themed art, Chance and Jeremih’s expanded reissue of their 2016 Christmas mixtape is part timeless, part time capsule. | Chance the Rapper / Jeremih: Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama: Re-Wrapped | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/merry-christmas-lil-mama-re-wrapped/ | Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama: Re-Wrapped | A year ago, when Chance the Rapper and Jeremih originally gave us their free mixtape Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama, already feels like a moment frozen in history. Barack Obama was still in the White House, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time before Donald Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office. In music, a brutal 2016 taught fans that the biggest news stories for the foreseeable future would be about which beloved visionaries we’d lost.
On the mixtape, Chicago’s most magnetic rapper and R&B hitmaker, respectively, pulled off what it’s appropriate only around the holidays to call a “miracle.” That they were able to craft a Christmas record fluent in both present-day hip-hop and yuletide tradition, playable on Power 92 or alongside A Motown Christmas, was enough of a feat. That they also managed to salute a black, hometown president, whom Chance had met at age 8 and only recently sung for at a National Christmas Tree Lighting? All while simultaneously reflecting and soothing our deeper sense of cultural malaise? Well, some presents you can’t buy in a store.
The 2016 release of Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama was the gift we didn’t know we needed. The spirit of hope it carried into the new year, however, couldn’t last. Chance continued to scale new professional and philanthropic heights: winning multiple Grammys, rapping on his first No. 1 single, hosting “Saturday Night Live,” and donating millions to Chicago Public Schools. More quietly, Jeremih worked on his forthcoming album, Later That Night. But the tweeter-in-chief wrote about their home city as if it were enemy territory; each new day has brought fresh crises born of ignorance or mendacity. So the sudden arrival of an expanded edition of Chance and Jeremih’s tape—with more new music than old—feels like narrowly avoiding a year without a Santa Claus.
Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama: Rewrapped, streaming on Chance’s beloved launching pad SoundCloud and available, at least initially, for free download on his site, is a two-part package. The first, labeled as “Disc One,” dusts off the nine songs from last December’s mixtape. The second, “Disc Two,” adds nine all-new songs and one previously unreleased remix. The combination is not only a timely excuse to revisit the best holiday-party soundtrack in recent years, but a worthy extension of it. It’s like when you buy A Charlie Brown Christmas and there’s a second TV special included. Except in this case, the bonus material actually holds up pretty well.
Disc Two keeps many of the basic elements of what is now Disc One. Jeremih still croons tender seduction and Chance still raps about the sacred and profane with equally evident glee, their lyrics again riffing nimbly on weekend-night-out themes, Chicago references, and holiday carols that are burned into the collective memory. While Chance has said that Common and Emmy-winning “Master of None” actress Lena Waithe play drums on all of the new tracks, the set’s overall sound—gospel-soul warmth, stuttering low end—is most striking for how in keeping it is with its predecessor. Hannibal Buress even returns for another cameo, his laconic musings both on-the-nose and laugh-out-loud.
Still, there’s no formula for a holiday classic. What the new Rewrapped songs have most in common with their forebear is a feeling of sincerity. There’s no tolerance for bullshit. Chance has said his favorite song here is “Family For,” and with its rich vocal harmonies, clean guitar strums, and warbly chipmunk-pitched sample, it’s a clear highlight—not least because Chance can rap about a South Side spot “where they ain’t scared to say the name of the Savior” in one breath and declare “we screamin’ ‘Fuck the president’ like Marilyn Monroe” in another. Chance’s jubilance on the rumbling “Held It Down,” another ode to family, is convincing enough to be worth lowering the windows for in winter (there’s also a hilarious but cruel diss of someone else’s “ugly ass family, your great-great grandmammy shoulda used Plan B”). The less weighted songs have this whiff of reality about them too. Hear it in the way the loping window-shopping anthem “Down Wit That” summons up those harsh Michigan Avenue winds, or Jeremih’s mention of “black ice” in the hypnotically gliding “Lil’ Bit (Interlude).”
On last year’s songs like “Joy,” Chance and Jeremih did what the best Christmas songs and films can, create a festive space where it’s (shhh) okay to wear a misty-eyed grin. That happens again here, especially on the children’s choir-bedecked “Big Kid Again,” where they name-check their own real-life children and rejoice in being able to fulfill their kids’ Christmas lists. That’s in between channeling the Jackson Five’s “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” reminiscing about meeting Obama, and punning on the Grinch. The emotional show-stopper, though, is “One More Cry,” which pairs Jeremih’s lilting choruses with Chance’s quavering confessions, Chance working himself from unhurried to frenzied and back as he finds room to comment on voter disenfranchisement, his late aunt’s death from cancer, and Biblical grace. All that’s missing from Disc Two in this vein is a guest verse as stunning as Noname’s on Disc One’s somberly observed “The Tragedy.”
The more playful songs don’t always match the fresh inspiration of the first disc—where you had the stepper’s R&B of “I’m Your Santa,” the blunt topicality of “Shoulda Left You”—but it all still ought to go down nicely with spiked eggnog. “Let It Snow,” chiming like a digitally tweaked bell choir, isn’t a cover, but like the original mixtape’s “Snowed In,” it has a similar “since we’ve no place to go…” conceit—which Chance neatly takes off in an unexpected direction for a celebration of “black power, black privilege.” The Friday fanfic “Ms. Parker” is little more than a salaciously goofy novelty—but where would Christmas be without those? “Are U Live” is another welcome surprise, enlisting rising Chicago rapper Valee for a haunting, sing-song track that’s as close as Chance gets to trap. Nobody asked for a “piano remix” of last year’s “I Want You Back”-turned-Christmas carol “Stranger at the Table,” but damn if this one isn’t plaintively gorgeous.
“Last Christmas was a war zone,” Chance raps on the versions of “Stranger” on both discs. And, ugh. Whether It’s a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story, Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas” or Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” the holiday-themed art that endures is part timeless, part time capsule. Charlie Brown killed the aluminum Christmas tree. Disc One, still full of bops, has also taken on a bittersweet tinge of nostalgia. Listening to “Shoulda Left You,” where Chance pays tribute to David Bowie and Prince, and Jeremih previously sang, “Fuck 2016,” means not only hearing their weary rejection of a shitty 12 months, but also remembering how hearing that song felt a year ago. It felt good. Feeling hopeful felt good too.
The same day Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama: Rewrapped arrived, House Republicans passed Trump’s only meaningful legislative achievement, a tax bill that will rob from our children and give to the very wealthiest. Despite pretending to bring back Christmas to a black White House where it was very much celebrated, Trump seems at worst hostile or at best oblivious to this time of year’s corny-but-true meaning. Poor little rich kid: He’ll have to find out about Scrooge’s three ghosts on his own. (Surely he has at least seen the end of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation?) For the rest of us, this music is a balm, self-care; a seasonal reminder of our shared humanity, and a glimmering from Michelle Obama’s native metropolis that things might not look so bleak forever. Aw, Chance and Jeremih always know just what to get us for the holidays. | 2017-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | self-released | December 22, 2017 | 7.7 | 216caaf6-f06b-478f-8f33-51c1ca548782 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Former blog-house band has fully transitioned into a sleek, urbane pop-rock outfit, taking polished cues from Steely Dan and Phoenix. | Former blog-house band has fully transitioned into a sleek, urbane pop-rock outfit, taking polished cues from Steely Dan and Phoenix. | Metronomy: The English Riviera | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15337-the-english-riviera/ | The English Riviera | Devonshire, England's Metronomy have traveled an impressive stylistic distance in the short span of three albums. The group began in 2006 as glitchy electronic smirkers, proffering a garishly irreverent take on chinstroking IDM. Yet for their third full-length effort, The English Riviera, they've fully transitioned into a sleek, urbane pop-rock outfit, taking polished cues from the well-heeled likes of Steely Dan and Phoenix.
The subtraction and addition of band members during that time surely played a role, yet Metronomy have largely always been the baby of singer and multi-instrumentalist Joseph Mount. And while the music Mount and his comrades are making might sound a lot different from what they were turning out at the group's inception, the two sounds do have a philosophical kinship. There's a significant amount of deliberation apparent in both sonic approaches; as loopy as "early" Metronomy may have been, when you're making electronic music mostly without words that isn't meant for the dancefloor, craft is necessarily going to be a major selling point. Likewise, finely calibrated pop-rock invites an appreciation of its studio-sculpted contours.
As you'd imagine given that description, The English Riviera is an extremely listenable album, starting with "We Broke Free", an exquisite, low-slung slice of 70s studio rock redolent of Boz Scaggs and the Dan. That seductively contented vibe pervades much of the record, including "She Wants", "Loving Arm", and the waltzing "Trouble". While still vigorously scrubbed, songs like "Everything Goes My Way", "The Look", and "The Bay" reflect dance and indie sensibilities, aligning those efforts more closely with the likes of Phoenix, Hot Chip, Junior Boys, and Stars. But where Steely Dan's lounge-lizard odes were laced with irony and venom, and where the springy pop of Phoenix is animated by giddy energy, Mount's immaculate compositions remain mostly inert. Almost all of the songs on The English Riviera sound great, yet few of them really emotionally or physically involve the listener, and there's little to take away besides an appreciation of that effortlessly attractive sheen. Metronomy deserve a ton of credit for so quickly and satisfyingly mastering a sound that's so disparate from the band's origins. However, the group hasn't quite figured out how to animate its precise creations with personality or passion, suggesting they'd be best served by not immediately leaping to another sonic identity with their next release. | 2011-04-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-04-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic / Big Beat / Because | April 19, 2011 | 6.4 | 216cfd8b-8e13-4eea-81a1-23087b21b160 | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
The Swedish producer and frequent Robyn collaborator offers an ambitious three-album suite of understated, occasionally disquieting techno nocturnes. | The Swedish producer and frequent Robyn collaborator offers an ambitious three-album suite of understated, occasionally disquieting techno nocturnes. | Mr. Tophat: Dusk to Dawn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mr-tophat-dusk-to-dawn/ | Dusk to Dawn | Hardcore Robyn fans already know the work of Swedish producer Rudolf Nordström, aka Mr. Tophat. He co-produced “Baby Forgive Me” and “Beach2k20,” two of the gorgeous, gently filtered house-pop tracks from last year’s Honey; his own 2017 release Trust Me, a three-song, 35-minute EP of throbbing, desaturated grooves, featured Robyn throughout. His latest solo release, Dusk to Dawn, is an ambitious three-album suite of understated, occasionally disquieting techno nocturnes. More melodic than the distortion-warped A Memoir From the Youth, two and a half hours of mostly chill, mid-tempo house conceal interesting moments within slack expanses. At its best, it’s a triple-album endurance listen that rewards partial concentration; at its slowest, it’s an illustration that Tophat’s signature long-format tracks don’t scale.
As in his work with Robyn, Tophat’s specialty is sleek, extended compositions that hide their seams, even as they meander and pool into ambience. Part I opens with the 14-minute “Intro,” a low, slow-building track bookended by medieval-sounding whistles; the beat doesn’t come to stay until two songs later. Vocals surface here and there, as if wandering from room to room at an enormous nightclub. The cheekily titled “Hedonism M.C. Robyn” features little more than some backing vocals, though she’s still unmistakable. There’s a good deal of variety for anyone motivated to find it: a section within “Hedonism” that sounds like ’90s video game soundtrack; acid-house tweaks on “Acid Samba” and “Memento Mori”; the flamenco-style guitars that surface in “Dusk to Dawn (Acoustic Edit Version)” and much later on “Solitude.”
“Vivid Imaginations” and “Tears of Illuminations” are highlights of Part I, working twitchy Balearic beats towards Italo-disco. Part II, the most compelling and active section, begins with a run of features from Swedish pop singers Noomi and Lune, as well as producers Axel Boman and Kleerup. Frothy synth and sub bass on the final version of the title track make the kinship with “Beach2k20” clear. But the spacey minimalism of “Pleiades” recedes to the background. Mainstream dance music is beset by expressionless, interchangeable vocal performances; once you’re familiar with how skillfully Tophat handles the real thing, it’s harder to settle for synthetic flute and chime.
Dusk to Dawn has moments of real drama and surprise, as when a klaxon-like siren cuts sharply through interstellar glitter on Part III’s “Thoth,” or when the AI voice of “Solitude” poses the alarming question, “Why even wear a heart/When you could store it in a chest freezer?” But seemingly every interesting transformation is counterbalanced by slow changes, like the glacial “Indecision.” The final effect can be tastefully listenable, like a boutique hotel soundtrack; a hipper chain could probably play the whole thing in the lobby. It’s not so important to remember everything about a long night, but too many of these tracks vanish without a trace. | 2019-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Twilight Enterprise / Junk Yard | June 26, 2019 | 6.8 | 216d1dcb-ff8a-4f2e-bfec-8c6c4323e0fe | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
Ellen Fullman’s imposing Long String Instrument and Theresa Wong’s cello create harmonically complex chord clusters that seem to place you within the belly of the composition itself. | Ellen Fullman’s imposing Long String Instrument and Theresa Wong’s cello create harmonically complex chord clusters that seem to place you within the belly of the composition itself. | Ellen Fullman / Theresa Wong: Harbors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ellen-fullman-theresa-wong-harbors/ | Harbors | The buzzing hum of Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument engulfs its surroundings. As the composer walks in a stately manner between parallel arrays of 70-foot steel and bronze strings, her rosin-coated fingers gently stroking the thin wires, rapturous drones emerge, the tones enfolding each other like tiny fibers being spun into yarn. Wooden resonators are attached to the metal strands, allowing even the most subtle gesture of her hand to fill the air around her. The Instrument, which Fullman invented in 1980, is capable of transforming a room into a resonating body, its contours and contents vibrating along with the strings as they activate the entirety of the space. It often takes up to five days of calibrating and tuning until the instrument matches the reverberant qualities of wherever it is being installed. It is quite literally tied to its environment.
Fullman’s invention is surprisingly versatile given its simple design, and she has performed and recorded with musicians across the avant-garde spectrum, including Pauline Oliveros and members of her Deep Listening Band, guitar duo Barn Owl, percussionist Sean Meehan, and cellist Okkyung Lee. It is another cellist, Theresa Wong, that has been Fullman’s most consistent foil, and Harbors, their first album as a duo, is the culmination of over a decade of steady collaboration. The enveloping nature of the Long String Instrument provides a unique challenge to those who accompany it, and Wong tends to position herself in a supporting role, coloring the drones with swells of low-end, wisps of high-pitched harmonics, and punctuating thrums of pizzicato. Rarely does she attempt to tease out melodies from within Fullman’s rich, harmonically complex chord clusters, making the music less traditionally accessible but enhancing its mystery and subtlety.
The first and third parts of Harbors are predominantly dense, with Fullman demonstrating the expansive capabilities of the Long String Instrument as Wong’s cello fits snugly inside its drones. As “Part 1” ends it begins to unravel, you can hear Fullman shuffle across the floor as Wong responds to each sweep of the Long String Instrument with mournful harmonics, foreshadowing a more sparse “Part 2.” The second movement, quiet and dissonant, features both Fullman and Wong plucking the strings of their instruments, the sharp sounds reverberating in markedly different ways throughout the room. This contrast, felt as Fullman once again begins her deliberate march across the room at the beginning of “Part 3,” is almost shocking as the space suddenly comes alive with sound.
Harbors was inspired by the confluence of nature and commerce in the San Francisco Bay. The vast, undulating sound of the Long String Instrument evokes the dual rolling of fog and waves, and the rumble of passing ships can be heard as Wong slowly tugs her bow across the cello’s lower strings. But the album feels more nuanced than a simplistic one-to-one musical translation of the soundscape of the Bay—its three unique parts provide a murkier narrative that seems self-contained. What comes through is the sense of awe that arises when staring off past the water’s edge, and its relative stillness in an otherwise urban environment, as it is transmitted through suspended strings and fills the performance space. While other minimalist composers have cosmic ambitions, Fullman’s music is terrestrial, rooted not only in the inspiration she takes from her surroundings but also firmly bound to the place in which it is realized.
A recording is an imperfect conduit for the power of the Long String Instrument. That isn’t to imply that Harbors is deficient as a composition or that the performances are somehow lacking, but rather that music that invokes such a dramatic physical presence feels different when being heard on speakers at home, or even the more immersive sonic environment of headphones. However, in a time when most of us are confined to very specific spaces, the same ones we’ve likely been in for months, there’s power in music that asks us to place ourselves elsewhere, exploring other spaces with our minds. Harbors might feel one step removed from its ideal setting, but in a time of isolation and physical stasis it feels like an escape to inhabit these sounds as they saturate the air in a permeating cloud of overtones, wherever you may be.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Room40 | August 12, 2020 | 7.4 | 217472d7-02f1-4da8-8c87-9ab34822ee96 | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
The Scottish group’s 1989 cult classic is an album of euphoric love and loss that unfolds slowly and with starry eyes. Its noir mood and icy melodrama are still felt all over modern pop. | The Scottish group’s 1989 cult classic is an album of euphoric love and loss that unfolds slowly and with starry eyes. Its noir mood and icy melodrama are still felt all over modern pop. | The Blue Nile: Hats | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-blue-nile-hats/ | Hats | Paul Buchanan, the elusive and self-deprecating frontman of Scottish pop group the Blue Nile, once compared making records to falling in love. “You can’t do it every year,” he elaborated. Since forming in 1981, the Blue Nile have released only four albums, each one followed by a long period of silence. Their music is patient and understated. Their songs mostly explore the trajectory of relationships, from their glittery beginnings to their plateaus of contentment and their exhausted, haunted finales. Their stories are set in the smoky locales of noir: in ragtown, shantytown, tinseltown. It’s usually raining. To listen passively to the Blue Nile is to ride in a taxi through the city at night as familiar scenes blur outside your window.
To listen closely to the Blue Nile is to become a part of the scenery. In this way, Buchanan’s metaphor about the time between albums comes alive. The long gestation of each record suggests, as in the early stages of a relationship, a sharpening of the senses, getting lost in a world that’s getting smaller around you. You want to do it right this time. The Blue Nile’s music also sounds like falling in love, slow and starry-eyed, with melodies that fizzle and glow like streetlights. By the time they released their sophomore album, Hats, in the autumn of 1989, Buchanan was 33 years old, and his songs, once littered with bold declarations of love, now seemed to be composed entirely of ellipses and question marks.
The members of the Blue Nile met while they were students at the University of Glasgow. After graduating and easing into an uninspiring teaching gig, Buchanan says he and his friends turned to music in search of a career that they “could be instinctive about.” With Buchanan on guitar and vocals, Paul Joseph “PJ” Moore on keyboards and synth, and Robert Bell on bass, they recruited a drum machine as their fourth member.
The Blue Nile’s first single—1981’s “I Love This Life”—is a catchy song about an up-and-coming rock band doomed to remain a cult act. Dreaming of adoring crowds and hit records, Buchanan sings with appropriate joie de vivre, but even on his first single, he sounds more like a veteran actor portraying a teenager. He has the type of pained, dignified voice, like Frank Sinatra or Johnny Cash, that makes it hard to imagine him ever actually being young. “I know I’m going out of style,” he sings and immediately asks, “Am I already out of style?” The song, paired with a downbeat B-side called “The Second Act,” became a self-fulfilling prophecy as the band continued in relative obscurity.
Their debut album, A Walk Across the Rooftops, arrived in 1984 via the stereo equipment company Linn, who were looking to expand their reach by starting a label. (“Linn weren’t a record company and we weren’t a band,” Buchanan would later reflect in Elliot J. Huntley and Edith Hall’s biography From a Late Night Train.) Still, their unusual working relationship allowed the members of the Blue Nile to record in Linn’s studios and operate without a strict deadline. As so often happens with our first brushes of love, the band chased this experience the rest of their career. No pressure and no expectations—a creative process they could be instinctive about.
Whittled down to seven songs, A Walk Across the Rooftops is a stately record that established the Blue Nile’s sound—a sprawling, sophisticated strain of ambient synth pop—and their major themes. “I am in love with a feeling,” Buchanan sings in “From Rags to Riches.” “Is there a place in this city/A place to always feel this way,” he asks in “Tinseltown in the Rain,” a minor hit in Holland and the closest thing the Blue Nile have to a signature song. The album, punctuated by Bell’s slap bass and a vibrant backdrop of keys and guitars, dazzled critics and established a small audience of devoted fans.
Instead of rushing to make a follow-up, the Blue Nile studied where their music had taken them, as they traveled through America and Europe. “[O]ne of the best things we saw in our first trip to London,” Buchanan told NME after the album’s release, “Was a guy and a girl standing in Oxford Street… They were obviously having a moment—breaking up or something, something that was wrong—and you just looked at it and knew the feeling. It was a brilliant reminder of what’s worth all the hassle.”
It was an omen. The five years between A Walk Across the Rooftops and Hats were trying times for the band. Relationships, both romantic and professional, crumbled around them. An album’s worth of material was scrapped—the feeling just wasn’t there—and the tapes were burned. Witnessing the dissolution of his parents’ decades-long marriage, Buchanan’s writing became increasingly sparse and tormented, like Raymond Carver stories stretched into the shape of torch ballads.
At his mother’s house, Buchanan tracked a new song called “Christmas” that wouldn’t end up making the record. Its lyrics are a portrait of the least romantic kind of adult despair: money running out, children crying. But the song is a balm, smoother and sweeter than anything the band had ever recorded. At one point, Buchanan plays an uncharacteristic guitar solo and hums along sadly. “Take it easy,” he sings as if to himself, “I still love you. I believe in you.”
This is the tone of Hats: a series of hard-won love songs written like no one was in the room. Despite its long incubation, the music arrived fairly quickly once the band established its arc. The song that opened the creative floodgates was “The Downtown Lights,” a rush of images and emotions that flows at the deliberate pace of a steady walk through snow. Buchanan’s guitar has hints of Nile Rodgers’ palm-muted funk; Bell’s bass slides where it once popped. By the end of the song, Buchanan is bellowing and the band is locked into an airtight stride, accompanied by a string section woven so closely to the lyrics you might think they’re daydreaming it.
Despite the movement of the music, Hats is an album in stasis. The Blue Nile understand that, like all good theater, relationships are inextricably linked to their setting, and the characters on Hats are prisoners to it, escaping only in fantasy. “Walk me into town/The ferry will be there to carry us away into the air,” Buchanan sings in “Over the Hillside.” “Let’s walk in the cool evening light/Wrong or right/Be at my side,” he pleads in “The Downtown Lights.” “I pray for love coming out all right,” he sings in the climactic final verse of “Let’s Go Out Tonight.” Then he cries out the title as one final desperate attempt to save something that’s already gone.
The magic of Hats is how the music makes defeat sound euphoric. Depending on your mood, Hats can be an uplifting album (“It’s all right” serves as its rallying cry) or a uniquely devastating one. These are multi-dimensional portraits: colorful cities populated by lonely people, romantic gestures received by silence, beautiful evenings going nowhere. The most immediate tracks on the album shift between moods like a plane dipping through clouds. “Headlights on the Parade” rides its glowing new wave groove while Buchanan prods a lover that something isn’t right. “Over the Hillside” begins with a sad hospital pulse and his depictions of a long, sleepless night, but it transcends to feel like an invitation, like elegance—“Thunder Road” in a luxury car. “Tomorrow I will be there,” he sings proudly at the end, “Oh, you wait and see.” On some listens, you believe him.
The Blue Nile are a band whose criticisms only draw fans closer. Sure, all their songs are about love. Yes, they have erred on the side of adult contemporary. It’s true that, in the ’90s, Rod Stewart and Michael McDonald sang Buchanan’s words as comfortably as their own. But just as Big Star became a symbol for the fame-averse underdog ideals of ’90s indie rock, the Blue Nile have proven newly influential. You can hear their heavenly chill on recent albums by Destroyer; their lowercase romance in the xx; their intense intimacy in Majical Cloudz. When Buchanan joined Jessie Ware to co-write a track on last year’s Glasshouse, it became clear how his band’s work had been reflected in pop music’s patient, moody turns.
While their influence has long run deep, with outspoken fans including Vashti Bunyan, Phil Collins, and the 1975, to this day nothing sounds quite like Hats. The Blue Nile themselves never quite replicated it, opting for a loose, soulful atmosphere on 1996’s Peace At Last and a more sober approach for 2004’s High. Its closest companion is Paul Buchanan’s 2012 solo album Mid Air—a collection of near-demos on piano that further refined his sunken vignettes. “Tear stains on your pillow,” he sings in “Wedding Party,” “I was drunk when I danced with the bride.” The stories—as with most concerning the Blue Nile—are between the lines.
It’s a shame that Hats was never a hit, but it also would have been a shame if it were. It’s hard to imagine being confronted by these songs in the wild. It seems inappropriate to even listen to it in the daytime. You carve out a place to hear Hats; you confide it in other people. An oft-repeated legend about the band involves Paul Buchanan at a Glasgow bar shortly after the release of their debut album. As he downs a few pints among the locals, the conversation turns to music, and someone recommends him a great new band from the area. They’re called the Blue Nile, they say. You’ll love them, I’ve got their tape in my car.
The anecdote illustrates the overarching philosophy for Buchanan’s art, to be removed from it completely. “[Y]ou hope that someday in the future some kid will be walking along the beach and find a little piece of green glass that has been worn down by the waves,” he once explained to The Sydney Morning Herald. “He’ll pick it up and put it in his pocket, take it home and love it. He won’t necessarily know why he loves it, but he’ll love it. Those are the kind of records we try to make.” In another version of this metaphor, he relates a boy and a girl watching a film on their first date: “They are much more important to each other, hopefully, than the movie is to either one of them.”
At the core of Hats is a heartbroken song called “From a Late Night Train,” featuring just piano, trumpet, and Buchanan’s vocals, all combining to sound like rain on the windshield of a parked car. “I know it’s over,” he sings in a low, beaten voice, “But I love you so.” It’s a song that illustrates the stakes of love, sung in the final moments of a relationship when there’s nothing left to say but the inevitable. On a record filled with questions—Where is the love? What’s so wrong tonight? How do I know you feel it? How do I know it’s true?—sits this gut-punch of an answer. You’re left broken, alone, and in love, looking into someone’s eyes and seeing the end of a dream. | 2018-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Linn / A&M | January 7, 2018 | 8.8 | 21797bf2-95ad-4454-8e5b-61793ecbc541 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
In the past two years, this proto-Web 2.0 band has seen the myth of its self-made success eclipse the music contained on its still-fantastic debut. The band responded by enlisting producer Dave Fridmann to help shape a sophomore effort that, once again, it's quietly nudging into the marketplace. | In the past two years, this proto-Web 2.0 band has seen the myth of its self-made success eclipse the music contained on its still-fantastic debut. The band responded by enlisting producer Dave Fridmann to help shape a sophomore effort that, once again, it's quietly nudging into the marketplace. | Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Some Loud Thunder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9820-some-loud-thunder/ | Some Loud Thunder | Unless you've been living under a rock that is itself under a larger rock-- or you're not an indie rock fan-- the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah story should have a folkloric familiarity to you. To read an indie blog or webzine in 2005 was to hear the tale of five brave lads from Philly and Brooklyn who bypassed the Byzantine conduits of record labels and PR agencies, selling more than six figures' worth of their debut album on the merits of the music alone.
But online opinion is like a magnifying glass in sunlight: Whatever it admires too closely for too long is enlarged, then incinerated. There was truth in the emerging narrative, but it reflected longing more than reality; the band's story became the stuff of myth, and myths beg to be debunked. That crystallization was completed when mainstream publications began filling their pages with identical articles about the internet as independent music's democratic new frontier and adopting CYHSY as the trend's avatar.
This was how, in the space of a couple months, CYHSY were transformed from a unique phenomenon to a creative ideal, and the music contained on their still-terrific debut album became difficult to hear above the din of warring ideologues. "Two years ago," the Independent Online's Andrew Purcell wrote in a January 12 article, "Clap Your Hands Say Yeah rewrote the rules of pop music, but this won't save them from the kicking that's coming their way." He's probably right, but this isn't necessary if we're careful not to get our distaste for packaged mythology mixed up with distaste for the music itself. Before CYHSY's sophomore album Some Loud Thunder materialized, the question of how the band would follow its hot-topic debut seemed hopelessly complex. But given that the group had little to do with its own hype-- and that Alec Ounsworth is by all credible reports a very private person who disdains public opinion-- the answer, in retrospect, is obvious: They made another Clap Your Hands Say Yeah record.
If Some Loud Thunder isn't as consistent as the debut, it's an adequate follow-up that contains a handful of fantastic songs, a handful of uneven ones, and a handful of duds. Famed producer Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Mogwai) brings his usual touch to the album-- it's denser than the debut, with even more towering harmonies. The only time Fridmann does the band a disservice is on the title track, which opens the record with the same sort of vague antagonism with which "Clap Your Hands!" kicked off the debut. "Some Loud Thunder" seems like a solid, peppy indie rock song, but it's such a mess that it's hard to tell for sure-- pickled in ugly distortion, it sounds like a bad rip. (Ounsworth claims the album is intended to be heard on vinyl; perhaps it works better there.) As a mission statement and a fuck-off, "Some Loud Thunder" is even more effective than "Clap Your Hands!": The latter was obviously intended to be daunting, while the former is rich with ambiguity. Was it meant to sound shitty or did it just turn out that way? Regardless, it's a drag to listen to.
The most engaging songs here zero in on what CYHSY do best: cracked, brassy vocals, shaggy rhythms, and luxuriant melodies. The flickering luau-rock of "Mama, Won't You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning?" finds Ounsworth's clarion voice at its most affecting, eventually washing out in a tide of woozy harmonies. "Love Song No. 7", with its slithering vocal line and stark piano, is distinct from the band's usual fizzy shimmer; it's darker and finer than anything else on the record. "Underwater (You and Me)" profits from its density, with tight coils of reverbed guitar spring-loading the bouncy melody. These tracks find CYHSY tweaking their template with more sumptuous, Fridmann-assisted layers, with excellent results.
An entire album of songs this well-tuned would have trumped the debut, but Some Loud Thunder bogs down in some uneven ideas. The transition from bright acoustic jangle to crispy garage-psych on "Emily Jean Stock" is vitalizing, but Ounsworth's drooping affectations emphasize the hokier qualities of his voice. The goofy yet fun "Satan Said Dance" is an indie-dance track laced with twittering sci-fi keyboards; one wonders if the indie world is comfortable enough with its relationship to dancing to enjoy a song about Hell being a place where Satan makes you dance. I have a soft spot for the admittedly overcooked "Yankee Go Home", a Destroyer-caliber piece of musical theater where Ounsworth gets to inflect the hell out of lubricated words naturally suited to his slippery voice, like "Honolulu." Rounding out these problematic tracks are stillborns like the meandering "Arm and Hammer" and the throwaway gypsy instrumental "Upon Encountering the Crippled Elephant".
In the end, one wonders if the hype didn't exert a subtle influence on CYHSY after all. Consider that Ounsworth, who represents himself as being neither comfortable nor interested in anything resembling a spotlight, has answered that hype with a murkier, weirder album than the one that spawned it, one that seems pulled in too many different directions. Then consider how the title Some Loud Thunder seems, deliberately or not, to refer to the very extra-musical cacophony that Ounsworth claims to be unaffected by. A wheel's stationary hub might not care about its spin, but it still feels the pressure of all those whirling spokes. | 2007-01-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-01-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Clap Your Hands Say Yeah | January 29, 2007 | 7.2 | 217fe835-98c6-4b5d-aca6-ecb211cc6aa9 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The latest in Mike Volpe’s series of boutique beats and remixes shows the producer in a new light. It sounds top-shelf, produced and engineered with a meticulousness that puts the new kids to shame. | The latest in Mike Volpe’s series of boutique beats and remixes shows the producer in a new light. It sounds top-shelf, produced and engineered with a meticulousness that puts the new kids to shame. | Clams Casino: Instrumental Mixtape 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/clams-casino-instrumental-mixtape-4/ | Instrumental Mixtape 4 | It was 2013 when Mike Volpe last released a volume of his instrumental tapes series and he was near the most visible point of his influence. The dense, thumping beats he created as the producer Clams Casino had, in the previous five years, become an undeniable part of the hip-hop mainstream. Each instrumental was a nebulous ecosystem, enveloping the accompanying rap verses in a cloud of weed smoke. The style was so influential that it birthed a subgenre, cloud-rap, and spawned a universe of imitators.
Volpe’s contributions—his skittering layers of drums and bass thump, his oozing samples—have changed the genre for good. But the intervening years have pushed the producer into a different lane. He’s a veteran now, and instead of continuing to innovate, he’s chosen to step into the background and refine his sound, collaborating with favorites like Vince Staples and A$AP Ferg, contributing to a diverse array of pop albums, and furthering his own solo career with last year’s debut 32 Levels. To hear a full collection of his recent work, on Instrumental Mixtape 4, is to consider Clams Casino in a new light, as an architect contributing new designs in a city whose skyline he helped shape.
The 13 beats here—two of them original, the others culled from various projects—are, for the most part, in the mold that made Casino’s name with gaseous, disembodied vocal samples, deep pockets of negative space. Three come from Staples’ Summertime ’06 and two others debuted as Ferg tracks. “Elastic Heart” is a remix of the Sia record of the same name; “Stem/Long Stem” is a DJ Shadow remix. Given the time that’s passed and in comparison to the Soundcloud offerings that have followed, the work on the new tape sounds more top-shelf, produced and engineered with a meticulousness that puts the new kids to shame.
If anything has changed, it seems to be the producer’s recognition of his own importance to the venture; his beats in recent years have been bolder, with their own outsize personalities. The beats for “Norf Norf” and “Worth It” were always obvious gems. Here, it takes several listens to shed the memories of Vince Staples and Danny Brown respectively, both of whom scribbled compellingly in the blank space of those tracks with their typical hyperactive bars. But with no voices present, attention is drawn to the flick of the snare that interrupts the drawn out synths of the “Norf Norf” beat, the gasps of air pulsating within the latticework of “Worth It.” “Wavey,” one of the original tracks, stands as one of the best offerings here, as Clams colors with the same palette as “Norf Norf,” but allows his vocal samples the space to play. Distorted beyond all recognition, they nonetheless sound alive, and the track is startlingly emotional and touching in its vulnerability. The same is true of the “Stem/Long Stem” remix, which immediately follows. With its twinkling, almost tender profundity, it sounds about as close as Volpe could get to creating a lullaby.
The beats here generally fall into two separate categories based on their momentum. The Staples’ and Ferg beats, along with the original opener “Say Your Prayers” and the quick-hit Kali Yuga (originally a beat for Ghostmane) drive forward with more muscle, a sense of internal momentum. The remixes, on the other hand, tend to drift by, their countervailing rhythms confusing the passage of time. Combining both modes is “Time,” which is about the most danceable track that Casino has ever made, its wistful samples more solid than his usual work and its surprising structure giving it a gasp of momentum even as it fades out. (The track was included on the enormous #savefrabic compilation cobbled together last year on behalf of the shuttered London club.)
Casino’s style, as much as anyone else’s, helped to define the sound of rap online in the early 2010s, giving artists from a wide variety of backgrounds a shared vocabulary. There was a time when hitmakers like Drake, A$AP Rocky, and The Weeknd flocked to that sound—now, all have moved on to brighter, sharper things. Volpe could have gambled on a reinvention, a new signature that could recreate the influence he wielded a couple years earlier. Instrumental Tape 4 demonstrates that he’s made a wiser, safer choice, perfecting his skills, growing his ego, working with the right people and finding new pockets in his sound. All the while, he’s continued to turn out raw, melodramatic beats that remain remarkably powerful, even if their ingredients have grown familiar. | 2017-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | July 5, 2017 | 7.4 | 2182771d-7f7c-41ba-83a4-266a28caf93f | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The latest from the re-reformed post-punk superstars shows the band's vigor, melodic prowess, and capacity to surprise remain undiminished. | The latest from the re-reformed post-punk superstars shows the band's vigor, melodic prowess, and capacity to surprise remain undiminished. | Wire: Red Barked Tree | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14950-red-barked-tree/ | Red Barked Tree | Wire always seem to be ahead of their time, no matter what time they choose to exist in. Their legendary three-album evolutionary run from 1977 to 1979 predicted punk's gradual mutation into synth-pop; their second incarnation (circa 1985-1990), as a textural electro-rock outfit, anticipated the late-80s vogue for industrialized funk and dream-pop. And even their most recent reunion in 2000 was an uncannily prophetic move-- after seeing their currency rise throughout the Britpopped 90s, Wire resurfaced just as indie rock was about to be revitalized by a post-punk craze that eventually also lured first-wave peers like Gang of Four and Public Image Ltd out of retirement.
But if a second Wire reunion was inevitable, its outcome has been refreshingly less predictable: Not only has the band avoided the easy nostalgia trend of playing its classic albums live in their entirety, Wire Mk III have proven to be more prolific and long-lasting than the band's two storied previous phases put together. Sure, founding guitarist Bruce Gilbert checked out of the current campaign back in 2004, but the band's momentum has continued apace. And there's no reason to suggest this won't continue: The new Red Barked Tree shows the band's vigor, melodic prowess, and capacity to surprise remain undiminished.
That album title is the first brow-raiser: Amid a discography filled with cryptic names (154, A Bell Is a Cup... Until It Is Struck, Object 47), Red Barked Tree presents a disarmingly simple image that's reflected in the album's surprisingly relaxed, pastoral turns (acoustic guitars! on three songs!) and a lyrical framework addressing the emotional and environmental costs of modernity run amok. Red Barked Tree is a shrewdly sequenced album, and it has to be, given that its impulsive stylistic shifts-- from mechanized thrash to psychedelic folk to nervy power-pop-- mirror the "age of fragmentation" that Colin Newman is railing against. But its 11 songs are more or less positioned along a logical arc, where a sense of ominous unease gives way to violent release before simmering into a peaceful comedown.
With their 2002 Read & Burn EP series, Wire already proved that a band of fiftysomethings could handily out-thrash all of Williamsburg, and on Red Barked Tree, that hot-blooded energy is still in bountiful, if more rationed, supply. But the most remarkable thing about Red Barked Tree is how, 34 years into their career, Wire are still eager to redefine their essence, whether in the form of shimmering, shoegazed sea shanties ("Adapt") or a campy suave-rocker that sounds like it sauntered in off the first Roxy Music album (Graham Lewis' "Bad Worn Thing").
Even when Wire directly invoke their past work, it's subject to savvy recontextualtion: "Clay" puts the bouncing synth-bass frequencies of "I Am the Fly" to less caustic use, while "Two Minutes" applies the full-torque velocity of "Too Late" to a disaffected spoken-word commentary about modern necessities and addictions. By the time we reach the slow-burning title-track closer-- a quiet plea for eco-sanity propelled by tense, tightly coiled acoustic strums-- Wire have successfully reinvented themselves once again, this time as wise elder statesmen cautioning against a world where over-reliance on GPS systems has replaced the basic survivalist skill of knowing your map references. | 2011-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Pinkflag | January 13, 2011 | 8 | 21849632-04ef-4207-a681-c7713107036a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On its latest release, the Swedish band that has previously blended death metal, folk, and progressive rock has moved into a more measured sound that puts less emphasis on dynamics. | On its latest release, the Swedish band that has previously blended death metal, folk, and progressive rock has moved into a more measured sound that puts less emphasis on dynamics. | Opeth: Heritage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15866-heritage/ | Heritage | In a review of the special edition reissue of Opeth's 2005 collection Ghost Reveries, I quoted band leader Mikael Åkerfeldt as saying that what his group does is "more than metal." At the time, the forward-thinking Swedish group was still very much performing within the metal tradition. On their 10th album, Heritage, they aren't. For longtime fans, the shift from progressive death metal to full-on progressive rock won't be a surprise: 2003's Damnation gave a good idea of what Åkerfeldt sounded like doing clean vocals sans death growls, and since 1995's debut, Orchid, he's never been afraid to stretch the templates of all the genres they incorporate. (Åkerfeldt's used his airier croon for ages-- here, more confident in that angle, he removed the heavier stuff and expanded upon the airier bridges.) What might surprise you, though, is the intense completeness of the transition: Heritage's 1970s-inspired prog feels more like the follow-up to fellow countrymen Dungen's 2004 opus Ta Det Lugnt than Opeth's own Watershed.
The 10-song collection is another collaboration with Porcupine Tree's Steven Wilson, who mixed the record with Åkerfeldt-- it has a warm, analog feel, something that lives up to the colors of the cover painting. The brief opening title track is a plaintive, scene-setting piano piece Åkerfeldt says was inspired by Swedish jazz pianist Jan Johansson and the folk music of his country. Elsewhere, guest spots from Swedish flautist Björn J:son Lindh and Weather Report percussionist Alex Acuña (both on eight-minute loud-quiet-loud standout "Famine"), give Heritage a mystical, pastoral feel. If you've heard only the King Crimson-nodding lead track, "The Devil's Orchard", you have a good idea what to expect: an exuberant, forward rushing blend of bell-bottomed jazziness and Deep Purple, Camel, and Jethro Tull love made more complex with quick tempo shifts, stop-on-a-dime implosions, and breezy, racing, drifting, and other sorts of atmospheric, psychedelic flourishes.
Another track, the muscular "Slither", is appropriately dedicated to Ronnie James Dio. The 37-year-old Åkerfeldt, who says Heritage is an album he's been "building up to write for and participate on" since he was 19, has also mentioned listening to Alice Cooper frequently over the past year. You won't necessarily detect the latter in any obvious way, but you'll feel it in the album's appropriation of the texture and atmosphere of an era. Åkerfeldt and co. do offer a convincing take-- it's a pretty, well-thought out collection-- but for all the ideas and layers, Heritage feels somewhat empty. It's the group's most genre-melding, but it's also the most obvious, largely because much of it sounds like things we've heard before. The lifelessness may also be the result of the singularity of the vision: Heritage lacks the usual shift and pull between heavy and soft that they've managed to weave into their music for the past two decades. It feels a bit listless and emotionally distant. When it comes down to it, Åkerfeldt's death growl is more memorable than his rock singing (and both work best when you get them together). There are dynamics here, but not the kind that create unexpected chills.
The story behind Travis Smith's colorful cover painting is instructive. We're told Åkerfeldt gave the artist a number of references including Pieter Bruegel's "The Triumph of Death", Hieronymus Bosch (in general), and the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. The final picture depicts a tree sprouting the heads of each Opeth member with the noggin of ex-keyboardist and backing vocalist Per Wiberg, who left the band after recording his parts for the new record, toppling into "a pile of ex-members' skulls." Beneath those skulls? The roots of the tree that point to the band's devilish roots in death metal. We're also told the nine stars in the sky represent Opeth's nine past albums, the sun representing Heritage. Then comes the line of people "want[ing] a piece" of the band, etc. It's fine to get conceptual, of course, but the forced, overripe symbolism of this image and its fussiness point to a problem with the record: Åkerfeldt remembered to include everything here except space for his songs to breathe. He refers to Opeth records as "observations" and, ultimately, for all its considerable beauty, Heritage too often feels like a passive, backward glance. | 2011-09-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-09-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Roadrunner | September 27, 2011 | 6.9 | 21865376-0d8b-4290-8138-38ff6feb16f6 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The London multi-instrumentalist and producer’s debut solo LP is subtle and oblique, rejecting the ordering logics of containment by melding house, jazz, classical, and electronic music. | The London multi-instrumentalist and producer’s debut solo LP is subtle and oblique, rejecting the ordering logics of containment by melding house, jazz, classical, and electronic music. | Ben Marc: Glass Effect | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ben-marc-glass-effect/ | Glass Effect | In 2020, as part of a “Classic Album Sundays” night at Camden Town’s Jazz Café, Ben Marc joined a suite of jazz musicians and collaborators to perform a live reimagining of DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing....., the groundbreaking 1996 instrumental hip-hop project comprised almost entirely of samples from funk, psychedelia, rock, and ambient vinyl. Marc, who was a music student at Trinity College London at the time of its release, remembered the album from his work upstairs at the Trocadero HMV, seeing in its innovative patchworks—Metallica, Marlena Shaw, Pekka Pohjola, Tangerine Dream, Björk—some of the formal structures of jazz.
Two years later, Marc’s debut solo LP Glass Effect is similarly oblique, hypnotic, and unresolved, rejecting the ordering logics of containment by melding house, jazz, classical, and electronic music. In different hands, attempts at genre experimentation can present at once as insecure skill showcase or rejectionist muddle, but Marc evinces a heads-down collection that is evocative and maintains its integrity. Glass Effect is a subtle record, filled with electronic drifts and rushes atop signature bass, in which Marc tries to find calm.
Raised in Birmingham and the Caribbean, Marc (né Neil Charles) has worked with Barbadian-British saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, Ethio-jazz multi-instrumentalist Mulatu Astatke (with whom Marc toured for over 10 years), and grime MC Dizzee Rascal, who joined Marc on the 2020 EP Wait. Marc seems comfortable marshaling transdisciplinary textures, with stated influences including J Dilla’s instrumental hip-hop, Machinedrum’s electronic layering, and Sun Ra’s interplanetary jazz assemblages.
Marc’s sort of anti-primitivist Jon Hassell formation combines highly globalized, capitalist stimuli—travels in Ibiza, London, and Japan are cited in the album notes—without granting them profundity. There is a bit of Mount Kimbie’s debut Crooks & Lovers in the record, its lack of ego or anxiety, but also a tenseness, best seen in “Jaw Bone,” the distortion-heavy, alto-sax medley. How these experiences and affects collide with a declared theme of Black male “resilience” is not clarified by the presence of ideology or through a subversion of form. Instead, it seems Marc is seeking answers in the feeling that emerges from a creative practice, in the comfort of work as a grace that protects the besieged subject and opens them up to kindred others in turn. This is perhaps clearest in the title track, a bouncy street lullaby of piano, synths, and guitar, too propulsive to be bedroom air space, but too soothing to let Marc’s demons out.
Yet the energy simmers, expressed through telegraphed build-ups: xylophone and echoey yelps cascading into synths and electric guitar in “Sometimes Slow”; clappity steps and birdsong giving way to guitar, cello, and strings in “Mustard.” There is an edge here, too. In “Dark Clouds,” Marc and Nigerian-British poet Joshua Idehen play “buccaneer,” navigating stormy waters and throwing all of England aboard—frumpy parliamentarians, Kensington pearl-clutchers, and an elitist London jazz scene confronted by the anti-colonial politics of its new wave. Idehen huffs over brassy broken-beat: “Check me bringing the summer to your borough/…Check me in a hoodie/Shokoto and boba/Check me in my Sunday best and trainers/Street scholar/Chirsping on your sons and daughters.” This narrative is played straight and playfully, its end result somehow heartening, not despairing.
It is the classical, though, that Marc returns to in this collaboration and the others on the album, citing a training that folds virtuoso tendencies into a larger whole. In a recent interview, he describes working with vocal soloists as an orchestral effort, recalling labors late into the morning hours with Judi Jackson to co-design the soaring “Give Me Time.” (“Healing ain’t over night,” she insists.) This particular vision yields the standout “Keep Moving,” where the gorgeous trilling of Attica Blues vocalist MidnightRoba is buttressed by Luigi Grasso on flute and by Marijus Aleksa, the Lithuanian drummer who plays on most of Glass Effect.
With the Endtroducing..... set, as with this record, Marc shows that jazz conjunctures are met outside the individual, an artist’s self-effacement becoming an eddy for contemporary collaborators and their historical influences. There is an empiricism behind this, as if Marc were testing the harmonies and polyrhythms, improvising and refining to better understand their formal complements. He is not tepid in doing so, and the result is assured—the pensiveness forming an emotional tissue that connects the strands. The record’s complexity reveals itself over several listens, its slow-motion quietude opening up into a not-quite-happiness; what might be described as flow, or else, focus. | 2022-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Innovative Leisure | April 27, 2022 | 7.6 | 218d6d17-a77c-4617-80a1-7deeff61a41f | Kaleem Hawa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kaleem-hawa/ | |
The LA-based electronic duo that gave Kanye’s The Life of Pablo its gospel-house sheen embraces pop on an album featuring guest vocals by Amber Mark, Khalid, and The-Dream. | The LA-based electronic duo that gave Kanye’s The Life of Pablo its gospel-house sheen embraces pop on an album featuring guest vocals by Amber Mark, Khalid, and The-Dream. | DJDS: Big Wave More Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/djds-big-wave-more-fire/ | Big Wave More Fire | Last year, Los Angeles electronic duo DJDS shared a sprawling playlist titled “BIG WAVE MORE FIRE,” which they described as a “soundtrack to a TV show that doesn’t exist.” The semi-regularly updated, genre-agnostic collection of songs highlights Jerome LOL and Samo Sound Boy’s curatorial abilities, imagining a pool party where Arthur Russell rubs shoulders with dancehall dons and Lana Del Rey alike. Given their discerning taste and ear for cherry-picking vintage sounds, it’s no wonder Kanye West recruited DJDS to help give The Life of Pablo a gospel-house sheen.
On the pair’s third album, which shares the playlist’s title, it’s clear that their all-night studio sessions with West, as well as subsequent production work for artists like Khalid, The-Dream, and Kacy Hill, have brought their creative goals into sharper focus. Big Wave More Fire is not only their most pop-oriented and guest-packed effort to date—it’s also their most ambitious. While 2016’s Stand Up and Speak saw the duo move away from their sample-based early material, going so far as to hire anonymous, uncredited vocalists off Craigslist, here the tracklist is stacked with big-name veterans and new talents alike. DJDS frequently document their creative process by sharing photos and videos of their guests in the studio, and there’s an intimacy to these 14 songs that couldn’t have been achieved solely by bouncing stems back and forth to artists over email.
Many of these collaborations look puzzling on paper, but the producers’ pristine melodies and uncluttered beats reveal how inspired the pairings really are. Canadian indie mainstays Broken Social Scene and Brooklyn alt-R&B trio Wet don’t have much in common stylistically, yet “New Grave,” a ghostly duet between the group’s respective leaders, Kevin Drew and Kelly Zutrau, works by digitally altering both singers’ voices until they echo one another. Two-part suite “I Heard” and “I Heard (Pt. 2)” places rumbling basslines and organ swells underneath The-Dream and newcomer Vory’s lovesick tales, before passing the baton to West’s G.O.O.D. Music affiliate Hill. The most ambitious crossover event is “No Pain,” which assembles Khalid, Charlotte Day Wilson, and Charlie Wilson (who previously appeared on the duo’s 2016 song “You Don’t Have To Be Alone”) into an unlikely R&B group, fusing each artist’s brand of gravitas into a deeply soulful lament.
Although DJDS cut their teeth playing underground warehouse parties, several tracks on Big Wave feel built for peak-time festival sets. The horn-heavy “Pick Me Up” and “Why Don’t You Come On” are feel-good, hands-in-the-air dance-pop jams, both capable of knocking off all flower crowns in their immediate radius. With two contributions, the springy “I Get By” and the dark-horse “song of the summer” contender “Trees on Fire,” Amber Mark narrowly takes the title of the album’s most valuable vocalist. On the latter track, a euphoric anthem about desire, her husky voice perfectly complements rookie Marco McKinnis’ butter-smooth crooning.
As if to underline the duo’s new embrace of pop, Big Wave More Fire includes DJDS and Empress Of’s uptempo cover of Lana Del Rey’s Lust for Life standout “Love.” It’s easy to see what drew them to the single’s Beach Boys-indebted noir: Like the best songs that have come out of this new phase of the pair’s career, it’s romantic, nostalgic without being cloying, and feels equally suited to sing-alongs in the car and the amphitheater. | 2018-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Loma Vista | May 26, 2018 | 7.3 | 218e821a-83f5-43b3-af33-36bc892f37c3 | Max Mertens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-mertens/ | |
The singer-songwriter’s second album is a well-curated coming-of-age tale. Full of summery R&B and glitzy amapiano, it moves beyond feel-good anthems and thoughtfully tackles the insecurities of young adulthood. | The singer-songwriter’s second album is a well-curated coming-of-age tale. Full of summery R&B and glitzy amapiano, it moves beyond feel-good anthems and thoughtfully tackles the insecurities of young adulthood. | Ayra Starr: The Year I Turned 21 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ayra-starr-the-year-i-turned-21/ | The Year I Turned 21 | Before Ayra Starr even turned 21, she had already graduated college, signed with the powerhouse West African label Mavin, and dropped her debut album, 19 & Dangerous. Her second LP, The Year I Turned 21, is the next chapter in her pop stardom storybook. While 19 & Dangerous spotlit an angsty Ayra jaded by toxic, past relationships, TYIT21 captures a Grammy-nominated Starr fixated on getting the bag. This new Ayra might be dripping in designer, but there’s an underlying vulnerability that grounds her. Not straying far from her signature sound, Starr’s well-curated album explores introspective depths and thankfully journeys beyond feel-good anthems.
In the lead single “Commas,” the Beninese Nigerian singer-songwriter credits her success to God, radiating a gracious spirituality that floats through the album. Money is a recurring motif: “To be real I’m still eating off my last hit,” she raps breathlessly, then lets the words settle into the gospel-tinged choir of “Bad Vibes.” What initially sounds like a flex suddenly feels existential. Starr’s reflections on money bounce between moments of gratitude, reminders of the hustle, and an insatiable desire for more, painting a far richer picture of a young woman grappling with adulthood. On “1942,” she stammers, “I don’t wanna lose”; the worry feels especially palpable when Milar, Ayra’s brother, interjects that he’s scared he might “lose it all” one day. The line hints at insecurities Starr might hesitate to voice herself. Here lies the driving force of TYIT21: the fear of everything you’ve worked for suddenly vanishing into thin air.
Turning 21 is both a milestone and trope, but Starr’s portrayal across the record feels refreshingly complicated, filled with contradictions and uncertainties. She sparkles on “21,” a heartfelt meditation that wrestles with the weight of self-definition. The woozy ballad thrives in its dreamy simplicity, allowing Starr to explore the lush textures of her voice; breathy croons and spoken word morph into full-bodied belts. Her musical alchemy makes R&B’s flow and Afrobeats’ rhythmic pulse groove in unison, rendering her voice a natural fit for more traditional ballads. It’s an internal monologue between youthful optimism and being comfortable not knowing it all. “21” fades on the soft refrain of the word “22,” a chilling lullaby turned cosmic nightmare.
Despite her undeniable growth over the last two years, Starr’s words still read like a diary. This album basks in the greenness of youth. From the violin-guided opener “Birds Sing of Money,” Starr puts up an IDGAF front, spitting, “I don’t watch my tone cause I like how it sound bitch,” a cheeky swerve from her softer, rose-colored lyrics. “Lagos Love Story” is an Afropop sugar rush that revels in the thrill of a young romance—the kind of love that leads to impulsive promises after a day of smoking weed at the beach (“Let’s make babies, we’re still young but I dey ready,” she proposes). Three tracks later, Starr has prematurely declared her “Last Heartbreak Song” in a duet with Giveon. Who’s going to break it to her that this is only the beginning?
There is a palpable maturity, however, in the production of her sound. While staying true to her earlier Afro-fusion works, TYIT21 taps into dancehall, Nigerian highlife, and amapiano, demonstrating an expanded range, restraint, and purpose for Starr. She tones down the Afro trap and EDM beats of her debut, opting instead for summery melodies, log drums, and acoustic guitar licks, even as she navigates more serious themes. Nigerian Pidgin and Yoruba are sprinkled throughout, alongside her love of proverbs, a mission to popularize Nigerian culture for Gen Z’ers across Africa. The features are also well-matched, with Starr’s buttery vocals melting into those of her collaborators, like Asake and Seyi Vibez. In the sabi girl bounce “Woman Commando,” Anitta and Coco Jones adapt to complement her alté style, rather than outshine her. On the bonus track “Santa,” with Rauw Alejandro and producer Rvssian, Starr contributes to a growing movement of Afrobeats and reggaeton collabs. The invited guests here feel like intentional curatorial choices, showcasing her versatility as an international star.
Turning 21 is weird. You’re not a kid anymore, but being an adult feels like playing pretend. With your twenties also comes a lingering twinge of regret, in which you doubt whether you’ve done enough before hitting this “landmark occasion.” It’s a clumsy era of navigating newfound changes while dealing with the pressure to be somebody. Closer “The Kids Are Alright”—dedicated to her late father—opens with a voice note from Starr’s mother: “I want you to be happy…Enjoy what you worked for. Don’t save, save, save…because your dad did not really enjoy what he worked for. He was always pleasing people.” The Year I Turned 21 suggests holding onto the freedom of your salad days isn’t so bad. Maybe adulthood can afford a touch of teen spirit. | 2024-06-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mavin / Republic | June 6, 2024 | 7.6 | 2190c4cd-7317-4f9a-be94-3abfcef96097 | Boutayna Chokrane | https://pitchfork.com/staff/boutayna-chokrane/ | |
After 2014’s plodding Sunn O))) collaboration Terrestrials, the black metal outfit Ulver have sprung back to life with a krautrock-leaning collection derived from several live improvisational pieces the band performed at various shows two years ago. | After 2014’s plodding Sunn O))) collaboration Terrestrials, the black metal outfit Ulver have sprung back to life with a krautrock-leaning collection derived from several live improvisational pieces the band performed at various shows two years ago. | Ulver: ATGCLVLSSCAP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21456-atgclvlsscap/ | ATGCLVLSSCAP | There will always be a strong contingent of fans imploring Ulver mastermind Kristoffer Rygg to stay sequestered in some dark, Norwegian wood, blessing his acolytes with abundant black metal masterpieces. And who could blame them? After all, the chameleonic outfit are responsible for two of metal’s greatest albums: 1995’s folk-steeped, hellish Bergtatt, and 1997’s *Nattens Madrigal: atte hymn til ulven i manden—*a searing, lo-fi suite devoted wholly to the mighty Canis lupus ("Sopranos" fans might recognize its cover art from a poster in Meadow’s room). By the end of the '90s, the band moved on from black metal to albums influenced by Wagner, Massive Attack, prog futurism, and modern classical, belying their sole stylistic constant: inconsistency. Rygg’s restless, morbid creative spirit has enabled Ulver to expand their dark horizons outward and mine sorrow from any style they choose, teaming up with such disparate collaborators as Mysticum and Norway's Tromsø Chamber Orchestra along the way.
Ulver's 16th album, ATGCKVLSSCAP, provides proof of their initial ferocity, even after countless incarnations. After 2014’s plodding Sunn O))) collaboration Terrestrials, Ulver have sprung back to life with a krautrock-leaning collection derived from several live improvisational pieces the band performed at various shows two years ago. Gone are the classically-inspired arrangements and sound effects resembling dying flies; in their stead stand waterlogged bells, torrential percussion, and frog noises. Spiritual energy abounds; the album’s centerpiece, "Om Hanumate Namah," pays tribute to a powerful Hindu monkey god with a meditative structure that becomes more and more animated with each recitation of its mantra.
With plenty of thrills tucked away inside ATGCKVLSSCAP’s Can-y first half—"Glammer Hammer"’s cinematic crescendoes and anxious keyboards; the metallic, clanging drums that stamp out "Moody Stix"; and the rugged psychedelic freak-outs of "Crogmagnosis," to name a few—it’s a shame that the album’s static, drone-intensive second half wipes out the guitars, bass, and drums that made the first six tracks so rich-sounding. "Desert/Dawn," "D-Day Drone," and "Gold Beach" make for nice background music, but seem weak and uninspired when compared to the record's energetic upswing.
Over the last decade, Rygg’s taken on a more prominent vocal presence in Ulver, showcased most recently on 2011’s War on the Roses. His impressive bass register and haunting tone work well within the band’s grim palette—and yet, he’s got but two opportunities to show off his pipes on ATGCKVLSSCAP, just as the album nears its conclusion. "Nowhere (Sweet Sixteen)" marks the closest the band’s come to pop so far: a seething ballad peppered with spoken-word passages and trembling guitar chords. On the following song, "Ecclesiastes (A Vernal Catnip)," Rygg surrounds his tenor with bongos, pianos, and synths, but without a clear structure, the frontman's left to wander about aimlessly. As a result, the late-album arrangement of these two outliers feels unnecessary and out-of-place. Two steps forward, one step back: such is the dance of courting other genres, even if the risks have helped keep Ulver vital. | 2016-01-29T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-29T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental / Metal | House of Mythology | January 29, 2016 | 6.5 | 2191865b-a2c2-4d91-9fc7-0bbd7322f4eb | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The British duo Slow Club traveled to Virginia’s Spacebomb Studios to record their latest LP. The songs are dressed in easy listening costumes, but they seethe with disconnect and sorrow. | The British duo Slow Club traveled to Virginia’s Spacebomb Studios to record their latest LP. The songs are dressed in easy listening costumes, but they seethe with disconnect and sorrow. | Slow Club: One Day All of This Won't Matter Any More | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22215-one-day-all-of-this-wont-matter-any-more/ | One Day All of This Won't Matter Any More | Like Slow Club’s previous albums, One Day All of This Won’t Matter Anymore finds the British duo of Rebecca Taylor and Charles Watson trying on new sounds. This time, they traveled to Spacebomb Studios in Richmond, VA., where producer Matthew E. White enlisted the studio’s house band to provide the template. The core of the Spacebomb house band also helped give Natalie Prass her slow-burning variation on classic soul for her 2015 self-titled debut. But Slow Club have already done soul, with 2014’s Complete Surrender. The sound they ended up capturing here is more akin to soft rock of the ’70s and ’80s. Taylor often channels the likes of Sheena Easton and Linda Ronstadt, while Watson can sound like the singer from America or Walter Egan (the guy who sang “Magnet and Steel”).
Slow Club present these songs in easy listening costumes, but below the surface, One Day is seething with disconnect and sorrow. The pair sing in unison less than on any of their previous releases—or at least Taylor’s voice is lower in the mix than usual when she helps augment Watson’s melodies. Though they aren’t singing together as much, it sounds like they might be singing to each other more than ever. Taylor sings lines like “I’m finding it too hard to accept your help” in “Champion;” Watson sings lines like “you’ve got your battles and they rage like an ancient rolling sea” in the lead single, “Ancient Rolling Sea.”
Whether or not the latter song is actually about her, Taylor’s lyrics do evoke raging battles. She sings of being awful to lovers in several songs, and of “turning up at parties like a hurricane” on “In Waves,” the album’s second single. The latter track boasts a brilliant video, in which Taylor uses a GoPro head strap mount to capture a dizzying day of her boozing and brooding. The video also includes a shot where Watson is slouched into a seat across from Taylor in a coffee shop, playing up the rigmarole of talking on the phone to the press: “We were kinda aware it’s not like a load of bangers,” he says, “but it’s what we enjoy doing.”
While he’s right that there aren’t a load of bangers on here, there are several stellar songs, the best of which showcase the duo’s adaptability, especially in surrendering musical control to the Spacebomb house band. Songs like “Where the Light Gets Lost” and “Give Me Some Peace” reach transcendence in their final minutes, as the full band stretches the tunes into unexpected shapes. “Sweetest Grape on the Vine” effortlessly floats along the “sunny day highway” that Alex Chilton was singing about in Big Star’s “Big Black Car.” “Come on Poet” allows Taylor to belt out hard emotional phrases that seem like necessary exorcisms.
The biggest issue with One Day is the sequencing. Two Watson-led songs kick off the album, so it takes about 10 minutes before Taylor steps into the spotlight. This wouldn’t be so jarring if their songwriting styles didn’t seem to be growing apart. Slow Club identified as a Sheffield duo for several years, but now they live in separate cities, he in London and she in Margate, about two hours away. The Spacebomb house band do a decent job of keeping the instrumental shades consistent, but the songs Watson sings often have comparatively lighter stories—given the heaviness of Taylor’s lyrics, it feels odd to postpone her entrance for so long. For example, on “Tattoo,” Watson sings against a breezy disco-lite rhythm of saving up money to get some ink, only for it all to be ruined by scars resulting from a double bypass. Watson’s nonchalant narrative and dark humor are a stark foil to Taylor’s writing, which feels deeply personal; “Tattoo” rather inappropriately precedes a track where Taylor sings, “my hunger, it struck, we succumbed to our fuck.” You might call this uneasy listening. | 2016-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Moshi Moshi | August 15, 2016 | 7.4 | 2193f744-3914-4e2a-ac98-79dc3240916a | Pat Healy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pat-healy/ | null |
Juice WRLD’s emo-rap debut is an adolescent breakup record that is equal parts endearing and grating. | Juice WRLD’s emo-rap debut is an adolescent breakup record that is equal parts endearing and grating. | Juice WRLD: Goodbye & Good Riddance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/juice-wrld-goodbye-and-good-riddance/ | Goodbye & Good Riddance | The 19-year-old Illinois rapper Jared Higgins (aka Juice WRLD) arrived suddenly and fully formed on the Billboard charts over the last few months. First it was with a song called “All Girls Are the Same,” which is obviously bratty and stupid, but also sneakily catchy and endearing in the way it casts Higgins as a bit of a heartbroken doofus. “Tell me what's the secret to love, I don't get it,” he sings in a monotonous drone. Another single quickly followed, and Juice WRLD’s first official album, Goodbye & Good Riddance, fell out of the sky just months after news he’d signed a deal with a major label. As a result, Higgins feels a bit like a ringer who has been hidden from view and unveiled all at once.
It’s possible Higgins has enjoyed such a rapid climb due to the familiarity of the emo-rap he trades in. But that same familiarity can nag at the ear and force comparisons. He can sound warbly and frustrated—one part Lil Yachty and one part Post Malone—or depressed and histrionic, like Lil Peep and nothing,nowhere. To be sure, Higgins has latched onto this wave of emo-rap in both sound and lyrics, and Interscope has invested in his timely recipe of weepy trap because he’s such a convincing aggregate of the sound. If there’s an urgency to Goodbye & Good Riddance it’s not so much what is inside the album, but the timing of its delivery.
Goodbye & Good Riddance is an adolescent breakup record, and it’s accordingly cathartic, petty, and clumsy in its emotional processing. It’s as hard to like Higgins as it is easy to pity him. The album cover signals some of this schtick with a campy anime drawing of Higgins doing a burnout, sticking his middle finger out the window, and literally leaving a woman in his dust. It’s a small-minded, juvenile gesture that fits hand-in-hand with that lead single and the general sulkiness of the rest of the album. Higgins sings at a persistent “you” throughout Goodbye & Good Riddance, but he’s clearly self-obsessed in a moment of torment, paralyzed by heartbreak but not to the point that he can’t crawl in front of a mirror to glance at himself fall apart. For Higgins, heartbreak is performative and despondency is chic.
Thankfully, there’s an emotional immediacy to the music and Higgins is doing more than just spinning his wheels. He sings often in weepy groans and emo snarls that match the blunt rawness of his lyrics, even if he’s in the habit of telling instead of showing his feelings (“Who am I kiddin’?/All this jealousy and agony that I sit in”). He also often grimaces through vapid clunkers like “I take prescriptions to make me feel a-okay/I know it's all in my head.” These aren’t lyrics that can be delivered with tact, and Higgins hams it up at every turn. What he lacks in narrative, he makes up for in moody hooks, to the point that the nursery-rhyme simplicity of his singsong couplets can wash away the groaning melodrama of a line like, “I’m on the drugs way too much” and needle it into your skull. The tragic upshot of the album—love sucks, drugs help—is as productively communicated by song titles like “I”ll Be Fine,” “Scared of Love,” and “Hurt Me” as the lyrics inside of them.
The more pressing accomplishment on Goodbye & Good Riddance is that Higgins has crystallized the sonic footprint of this emo-rap moment. The production is handled mostly by Higgins’ frequent collaborator Nick Mira, who encourages the maudlin effect of Higgins’ writing with mawkish synth atmospheres and fidgeting trap snares; the same current runs through the whole tracklist like a wet blanket.
Other than the cringey voicemail skits peppered throughout, Higgins stands alone on the album without a single feature to accompany him. Even if his draw is relatability, it could have scanned awkward to hear Higgins share this space with anyone else. Throughout Goodbye & Good Riddance, his heart-on-his-sleeve coping sounds both ingratiating and grating. In that way at least, he’s bottled up sad sap adolescence remarkably well. | 2018-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Grade A Productions / Interscope | June 1, 2018 | 6.4 | 21968ec7-8124-4bd9-88f6-dd6983e8160e | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
Before Power Trip released Manifest Decimation, they were one of those groups people said you needed to see live to understand. However, the new eight-song LP, Manifest Decimation, their first release for Southern Lord, is such a strong collection that you could never see the Dallas crossover thrash band live and still understand what makes them special. | Before Power Trip released Manifest Decimation, they were one of those groups people said you needed to see live to understand. However, the new eight-song LP, Manifest Decimation, their first release for Southern Lord, is such a strong collection that you could never see the Dallas crossover thrash band live and still understand what makes them special. | Power Trip: Manifest Decimation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17893-power-trip-manifest-decimation/ | Manifest Decimation | Before Manifest Decimation, Power Trip were one of those groups people said you needed to see live to understand. This isn’t to take away from the EPs and singles they released before this LP, because they contained good songs. It’s just that they were still eclipsed by frontman Riley Gale and company’s whirling dervish stage presence. There’s a reason they’ve toured plenty with their west coast pals, Trash Talk: They play bridge shows, they make liberal use of gang vocals, their fans are very into circle pits, and, hell, they shout out straightedge hardcore bands on their Facebook page. But this debut eight-song collection, their first release for Southern Lord, is such a strong record that you could never see Power Trip live and still understand what makes them special.
The Dallas, Texas, quintet play crossover, i.e., thrash that draws from hardcore punk. The guitars, placed up front, are clean, dexterous, and fast; the vocals and drums, in the back, are draped in sludge and reverb. Those elements will, at times, remind you of the darker side of the old-school thrash spectrum (Slayer), but the spirit of this stuff pulls more from the hardcore scene, like their Astoria forebears Leeway or, on the burlier side, Cro-Mags. Unlike other contemporary thrash bands, Power Trip create a legitimately violent atmosphere, and don’t go around wearing sleeveless jean jackets with the front of their baseball caps turned up. They sound less like they’re here to party, and more like they want to kick your ass.
You could safely say Power Trip are a punk band. Their whiplash fight song, “Power Trip,” includes the lines “We ride as one/We’re ruled by none,” and you believe them. Manifest closer, “The Hammer of Doubt,” was originally out, in different form, on a 2010 compilation called America’s Hardcore. They’ve covered Prong. They could easily cover Black Flag. They remind me of my early days in high school when I was coming out of a steady diet of hardcore and getting into bands like Metallica, D.R.I., Suicidal Tendencies, and Anthrax.
The music on Manifest Decimation is bleak, dirty, heavy. It’s also very catchy. At any given moment, Gale can sound like Lemmy fronting Cro-Mags, Discharge, or Exodus. At other times, he locates a grizzlier tone that evokes guys wearing corpsepaint. There are samples about death and Texas from movies like Robocop 2 and Blood Simple. The Italian artist Paolo “Madman” Girardi offers detailed old school apocalyptic metal cover art. The lyrics deal with government and religious suppression like so: “Histories trapped in illusion, who sees through who?/For every mindless vision of who owns the truth/For every one who spoke out, thousands were slain/Torture and bloodshed in the sake of some holy name.” That’s the classic side of things, but while Manifest Decimation does sounds vintage (the chug-chug-chug, the whammy-bar abusing solos), these guys aren’t stuck in 1986.
What helps makes this album great, outside of the excellent riffs and choruses, is the way Power Trip mix in flourishes that place Manifest Decimation firmly in the present. (In that sense, you’ll also think about another Texas band, the now-defunct Iron Age.) There's nothing obvious; it’s little touches, like the weirdo echo effect on Gale’s voice throughout. The album opens with a blast of swirling feedback and ominous synth tones, something threaded throughout the album via brief, almost industrial snippets. The feeling’s picked up in some of those headier vocal effects, too—the phased pan on “Conditioned to Death” (which features some great early Metallica riffing), the disembodied backing vocals on the frantic “Murderer’s Row” (complete with some Slayer-like soloing). It adds to the urgency and intensity, and also sets them apart. That said, none of it would matter if they weren’t writing songs like the swarming title track or the Motörhead-banging “Heretic’s Fork.”
Recently, people who take metal seriously have spent some time talking about whether or not thrash is dead, or if we’re actually in the midst of a thrash revival. Power Trip have found a way to create something new by pulling from the past. In that way, it feels like they exist on both sides of the argument without giving a shit either way. | 2013-06-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-06-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal | Southern Lord | June 28, 2013 | 8 | 2197fb94-f0a0-40f6-a8ab-f5ef9a500436 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | |
When the Velvet Underground's second album descended on the world in January, 1968, nobody was ready for it. As the story goes, it was a relentless, screeching, thudding, scoffing assault on the pop sensibilities of its time. For its 45th anniversary it's been reissued in expanded, remastered form, and listening to White Light/White Heat now, it doesn't quite fit the template of its legend. | When the Velvet Underground's second album descended on the world in January, 1968, nobody was ready for it. As the story goes, it was a relentless, screeching, thudding, scoffing assault on the pop sensibilities of its time. For its 45th anniversary it's been reissued in expanded, remastered form, and listening to White Light/White Heat now, it doesn't quite fit the template of its legend. | The Velvet Underground: White Light/White Heat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18770-the-velvet-underground-white-lightwhite-heat/ | White Light/White Heat | When the Velvet Underground's second album descended on the world in January, 1968, nobody was ready for it. The Velvet Underground and Nico, the year before, had had Andy Warhol's imprimatur to promise that its passages of bleeding-raw chaos were art; it had also had the complicated but unmistakable beauty of the songs Nico sang as a lifeline for the tiny mainstream audience that caught on to it at the time. White Light/White Heat didn't have either.
By the time they released it, the Velvets were downplaying the art-world connection (despite the very arty slash in the album's title, and the fact that its black-on-black sleeve was designed by the Factory's Billy Name). Nico was out of the band, although bassist John Cale would continue to work with her for years. And the album was a relentless, screeching, thudding, scoffing assault on the pop sensibilities of its time: six songs with lyrics designed to horrify the bourgeoisie (not that they'd have listened to the Velvet Underground in the first place), ending with a one-take, two-chord, 17-minute speedfreakout. It clung to the bottom of the album chart for two weeks, disappeared, and went on to become the glorious, tainted fountain from which all scuzz flows.
That's the White Light/White Heat of legend, anyway. For its 45th anniversary—closer to its 46th, but keeping time was never their strong point—it's been reissued in expanded, remastered form, as if what this pinnacle of sloppy noise needed was remastering. As always, the title track, which seems like it should start cold with Cale and Sterling Morrison's backing vocals, sounds like it's had a little trimmed off the top to remove an extraneous sound—although, of course, extraneous sounds are kind of the whole point of this album.
Listening to White Light/White Heat now, it doesn't quite fit the template of its legend. For one thing, Lou Reed's songwriting is often a lot more conventional than it's reputed to be. Strip away the noise and flash and references to illicit drugs and sex, and "White Light/White Heat", "Here She Comes Now", and "I Heard Her Call My Name" are all the sort of simple rock'n'roll readymades that Reed had been cranking out at Pickwick Records a couple of years earlier. (So is "Guess I'm Falling In Love", recorded in scorching instrumental form at the White Light sessions, which is practically the same song as the Rutles' "I Must Be In Love".)
For another, the live disc appended to this edition is a reminder that the Velvet Underground were radical in a totally acceptable way for their time—that, professionally speaking, they were a party band with an audience of hippies, who appeared on bills with the likes of Sly & the Family Stone, Canned Heat, Iron Butterfly, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Chicago Transit Authority the year White Light/White Heat came out. The performance, apparently from John Cale's collection, was recorded at the Gymnasium in New York in April, 1967 (two of its songs previously appeared on the 1995 Peel Slowly and See box set). It presents the Velvets as a full-on boogie band, whose set is bookended by the instrumental grooves "Booker T." and "The Gift"—turns out they're slightly different songs, contrary to what VU fans have assumed for the past few decades. The rest of the gig includes what might or might not have been the first public performance of "Sister Ray" (it was still a very new song, at any rate), and one legit addition to the canon: "I'm Not a Young Man Anymore", a chugging electric blues that wouldn't have been out of place in Creedence Clearwater Revival's early repertoire.
So once this mysterious black-on-black artifact is demystified, what's left of it? More mystery, it turns out. What possessed Cale to start playing an out-of-time, two-note bass part louder than anything else at the end of "White Light/White Heat", and how could he have guessed that that was a great idea? Was the famous split-second pause before Reed's splatterbomb solo on "I Heard Her Call My Name" intentional? What the fuck was up with Reed filling in words—"SWEETLY!"—in the middle of Cale's vocal on "Lady Godiva's Operation", and why is it still hilarious? Speaking of that song, might lyrics about a delicate hypersexual creature interacting with "another curly-headed boy," directly followed by a medical horror-show, have anything to do with a curly-headed songwriter who was given electroconvulsive therapy to "cure" his bisexuality as a teenager? Why is "Sister Ray" way, way more potent than any other extended jam on a simple riff by an American band of the 60s?
It's surprising to hear anything besides the universe catching its breath after "Sister Ray" ends, but the first disc of this reissue is filled out with other previously released evidence of John Cale's final months in the Velvet Underground: the instrumental "Guess I'm Falling In Love", both versions of the electric-viola showcase "Hey Mr. Rain", and the band's thoroughly charming stab at making a commercially viable single, "Temptation Inside Your Heart"/"Stephanie Says". There's also a previously unheard alternate take of "I Heard Her Call My Name" (not quite as good as the official one, and mostly interesting to hear which of Reed's apparent ad-libs weren't), and one fascinating curio: an early version of "Beginning to See the Light", recorded at the "Temptation Inside Your Heart" session. By the time the song appeared on The Velvet Underground in 1969, it had become lither and wittier, and Reed had sharpened a few of its lyrics; this broad-shouldered, clomping version is distinctly not there yet, but everything the Velvets released on their official albums is so canonical that it's strange and heartening to realize that their songs didn't just spring into existence already perfect. | 2014-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | January 16, 2014 | 10 | 21988ea6-fe1e-4629-84ce-fc28b3c1ba81 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | 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 look back at a 1984 album that exemplifies the best of Italo disco, in all its joyfully eccentric glory. | 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 look back at a 1984 album that exemplifies the best of Italo disco, in all its joyfully eccentric glory. | Savage: Tonight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/savage-tonight/ | Tonight | Savage spends the first few seconds of his 1984 national television debut frozen stiff. As the intro of his first single, “Don’t Cry Tonight,” begins to play, he poses in a half-kneel, his right hand resting on his leg in front of him, his left around his neck. A fedora covers his entire face, like an off-brand Bob Fosse impersonator. Behind Savage (real name: Roberto Zanetti) spin the neon blue lights of the futuristic set of Discoring, a show airing on Italy’s Rai 1 network that regularly features acts from the country’s burgeoning dance scene.
After eight motionless bars, Zanetti raises his head and looks into the camera. Suddenly, a jolt: His right hand pounds the ground and his left points behind him to 8 o’clock. He rises slowly, arms outstretched at his sides, index fingers pointed, then drawing them together in front of his chin. He balls his hands into fists and hides his face again, only to re-emerge when, about 75 seconds into his song, he begins lip-synching lyrics that have the syntactical incoherence but emotional clarity of someone talking in his sleep: “When you find the light to an upset shade away/If you’ll never, never let me go with every melody…” Zanetti, though, is very much awake, his eyes wide open and barely blinking. His expression, sometimes punctuated by a grimace, is so intense, its projected passion feels potentially murderous, like that of a chronically misunderstood loner in a giallo.
Zanetti’s performance elicits the same response as the best songs in Italo disco, the genre that Savage would come to exemplify. Heard the first or the fiftieth time, an effective Italo song makes you wonder, What’s going on here? What’s going to happen next? This is a style so reliant on novelty, it can shock from measure to measure. In his memoir, Italo Disco: History of Dance Music in Italy from 1975 to 1988, producer Raff Todesco (Time’s “Shaker Shake”) enumerates the elements to a successful Italo song, including synths, a lack of guitars, an embrace of technology, and, perhaps most notably, a “catch,” by which he means “something that was unique”—a vocalization, a strange sound, a weird way of singing. The result is a genre that is a true neophile’s delight, a smorgasbord of idiosyncrasies.
It has been posited that for all its garish futurism, bald-faced hokeyness, and earnest expressions in limp English, Italo is “the most amazingly uncool genre ever created,” but Savage wasn’t necessarily trying to be cool. He was trying to be different. Like the disco that preceded it and the house that would follow in its wake, the Italo hits of the early ’80s generally landed around 120 BPM, like ‘Lectric Workers’ “Robot Is Systematic,” Gary Low’s “You Are a Danger” and “I Want You,” and Klein & M.B.O.’s “Dirty Talk.” To stand out from the pack, Savage deliberately paced his first single at a slower-than-typical 104 BPM. In a conversation with Pitchfork, Zanetti said that when clubs would play his song—and it was met with such fervor upon release that this sometimes happened three or four times over the course of a night—DJs would have to stop the music to make way for the lumbering strut of “Don’t Cry Tonight.” From the jump, Savage was, simply, unmatchable.
Italo disco filled the booming club scene of ’80s Italy. Many of these spots—like Rimini’s notorious Altromondo Studios, decked out with a spaceship and robots—were coastal. As sociologist Ivo Stefano Germano puts it in the documentary Italo Disco: The Sparkling Sound of the 80s, tourists who acquired the songs they heard in the club while on vacation could bring home a souvenir of the Italian “summer that never ended.” Of the Italo labels—all indies—Severo Lombardoni’s Discomagic was the biggest, but even it struggled to cough up money for adequate promotion. Songs spread out from warehouses, where hungry DJs were invited to sample the latest productions to take back to their clubs. The local DJ culture at the time was about as intense as it got, outside hotspots like New York or Chicago, and created a preview of the decades to come for much of the rest of the globe. The songs that went on to regional, national, and occasionally international fame were generally voted through by the people and their dancing feet.
Todesco writes that the big Italo labels and distribution houses (Discomagic, Il Discotto, Many Records) were hardly choosy and “would give free access to everyone: producers, improvisers, off-key singers obsessed with the stage;” it was “chaos in search of glory.” This was, to some degree, crucial to the genre’s appeal, as it created Bizarro World versions of pop stars (get a load of O’Gar). People who had no business in the music biz, at least per conventional ideals, were now in business. Granted, eccentricity flourished in the ’80s even on relatively conservative U.S. airwaves, but Italy took it to another level. The world of Italo was one in which Tarzan loved the summer nights, penguins invaded, ah-liens attacked with their lah-sers, and whatever was going on in Sylvi Foster’s indecipherable “Hookey” was more than OK. The music was often put together as though it were made on an assembly line—there were producers, there were singers, and there were sometimes public faces who lip-synched vocals (a preview of the Milli Vanilli scandal that would grip the U.S. pop scene in the late ’80s and early ’90s).
Before he picked up the mic, Zanetti worked behind the boards in the Italo scene. Under the name Robyx (after a superstar musician character he’d written comics about in his youth), he wrote, produced, and co-produced some future Italo classics: Stargo’s ode to peppers, “Capsicum”; G.A.N.G.’s heavy and sleazy “Incantations” (a face-numbing 10-minute, 89 BPM medley of covers of Mike Oldfield’s “Incantations — Part One” and “Foreign Affair”); and Rose’s defiantly shrill “Magic Carillon” (released after “Don’t Cry Tonight,” in 1984). He says that he chose the name Savage because it “sounded better” to go with an English name, though he happened to pronounce it like the French “sauvage.” (Other Italo artists selected their English monikers to winkingly reflect phonetic double entendres in Italian—Den Harrow sounded like “denaro,” or Italian for “money,” and Joe Yellow like “gioiello,” or “jewel.”) As Todesco writes: “The Italian melodic taste, which had always been excluded from the dance world, culturally and technologically took possession of the new musical process by confronting the American and English musical domination with their own weapon... the English language.”
In Savage, Zanetti played all roles and virtually every instrument. He was Italo’s true auteur. His studio virtuosity—writing, producing, playing, and singing—was initially the result of economic concerns. He rented the synths and drum machines he played on “Don’t Cry Tonight” and the album that followed in 1984, Tonight. But much like his distinctive gesticulations, devised because he couldn’t dance and needed something to do to fill his first single’s interminable intro, he used limitations to his advantage on his album. He eventually liked having full artistic control of his tortured image. It made him unique in a genre that prized uniqueness—a multi-threat in Italo was rare, which meant Savage occupied a singular raft in a sea of novelty.
It also made his full-length more consistent and cohesive than most Italo LPs; few of the style’s artists evinced the vision that Zanetti did with Savage. (He even had a few logos, as seen on a computer screen in the “Don’t Cry Tonight” video: a digital drawing of his trademark crouch, and another of his head behind his fists.) Tonight never crawls past 108 bpm, and the song that pushes it that far is Zanetti’s similar-sounding follow-up to “Don’t Cry Tonight,” “Only You.” (“Don’t let me go/Don’t cry tonight,” goes the imperative chorus of his first hit; “Don’t push me aside/Don’t leave me to die,” he pleads on “Only You.”)
Zanetti was hardly the first dance musician who didn’t feel like fixing what wasn’t broken on his second single. By the time he recorded the “Only You,” he had upgraded his drum machine from the LM-1 to the versatile and au courant LinnDrum, but the track has a similar spare sound—the puncturing drums, the classical-inflected organ, the octave bassline, which is perhaps the distinguishing characteristic of Italo (though certainly not present in all examples). Zanetti said the bobbing basslines, which gave the songs a chunky, pixelated, quintessentially ’80s feel, resulted from his lack of access to a sequencer. Once again, making do, when done elegantly enough, came off as style.
Zanetti wrote and recorded Tonight between January and May of 1984, after the success of “Don’t Cry Tonight” created a demand for a full-length. Italo was very much a singles genre, though it did yield some notable albums: Scotch’s Evolution, Radiorama’s The 2nd Album, Kano’s Another Life, Azoto’s Disco Fizz, and, perhaps most prized among Italo enthusiasts, Nemesy’s self-titled LP. On Tonight, Zanetti walks the line between eking out a style and repeating himself. The man loved humanoid gurgling (courtesy of an Emulator) as atmosphere, four-on-the-floor beats, and the aforementioned octave basslines, but beyond those broad strokes, the songs are simply too eccentric to carbon copy. “Don’t Cry Tonight” features a high-pitched synth line—the type that would come to be most closely associated with G-funk—that bends like a slide whistle. “Radio,” per its video, opens with the sound of an atomic bomb and then a menacing metronome; its edgy tick-tick-tick reimagines Alan Parson Project’s “Eye in the Sky” with a much firmer bottom end. It climaxes in a scream. The chorus of “Fugitive” is blessed with a chirp that sounds like a dot matrix printer. It’s an embarrassment of catches, to borrow Todesco’s term.
The album is an exercise in contrasting minor chords—“A Love Again” trots in at 84 BPM and immediately sounds like it wants to take a nosedive into a pit before brightening considerably during the chorus. The decaying synth in the chorus of “Fugitive,” a song about hiding from one’s lover’s lover, gives way to a breakdown that is the spitting image of “Underground Theme” from Super Mario Bros. (though Savage’s song predated the video game’s release by about a year). The only partially beatless track, “Turn Around,” is sentimental even for the would-be New Romantic Savage, but its initial piano-ballad gloopiness is redeemed when the song is subsequently fried in a blast of synths.
Zanetti had a basic grasp of English when he wrote “Don’t Cry Tonight,” and, like Thom Yorke on Kid A, he assembled the song’s words “like a puzzle,” which helps explain inexplicable lines like, “For a thunder is as past a path we’re human been/And you rather like to feel what is my life.” Credit where it’s due: He stumbled on brilliance with the opening of the song’s third verse: “Just the random access memories of dreams.” For the record, he thinks it was a coincidence that Daft Punk named their fourth album Random Access Memories. After “Don’t Cry Tonight,” Zanetti enlisted his English-proficient engineer, Paul Jeffery, to help him make sense. As a result, Zanetti’s brooding is rendered occasionally poetic: “Radio” contains the litany, “Have you ever seen my heart in love?/Have you ever seen my eyes on you?/Have you ever reckoned with my world?/Have you ever figured with my heart?” Elsewhere in that track: “Your fantasy is my memory,” which sounds like a cool brag in a been-there-done-that kind of way. He follows it up with, “Your destiny has time to be.” So that’s a relief, at least.
The words are second, though, to the singing, which is so melancholy it sounds like Zanetti is savoring the bad taste in his mouth. His voice is clear and self-consciously suave, like Dracula with reverb. He’s more convincingly romantic than most of his contemporaries and his singing is more conventionally attractive. It wasn’t always that way within Italo’s menagerie of odd voices, though the pull of the genre can make what initially seems abject strangely alluring. Italo can take some getting used to—a song that may at first strike you as unlistenably absurd may dig its way into your brain and compel you to return again and again. In the words of Italo remixer and enthusiast Flemming Dalum in Italo Disco: The Sparkling Sound of the 80s, “Italo disco is a virus. A magical virus.”
In a 1985 issue of Record Mirror, the Pet Shop Boys rhapsodized about Italo, with Neil Tennant calling it “fantastically unfashionable, dead naff.” He noted that the banality of the genre’s lyrics “often makes them strangely moving somehow,” and praised the “boom clap boom clap boom clap — clap clap” beat. The perceived cheapness of the genre, Tennant said, was its appeal. He singled out “Don’t Cry Tonight” in particular for being “very sweet” and “very sad.” Twenty years later, on the Pet Shop Boys’ two-disc Back to Mine compilation, “Don’t Cry Tonight” was the first song on Disc 1.
What the Pet Shop Boys’ early praise of Italo gets at is its multivalence—songs can be simultaneously goofy and sentimental, incomprehensible yet moving, pop aberrations that are nonetheless utter jams. There is often, certainly, a camp appeal, but the earworms, low-end propulsion, and sheer technological euphoria rescue Italo from purely ironic listening. It’s too sophisticated for that. A single chord sequence can contain both beauty and decay. There’s real joy in the verbiage: “You’re my really disco band”; “Stop to you!”; “Nobody else than you!”; “Hey, you, take a look at you!”; “So you think you can pull my leg?” As producer and Toy Tonics founder Mathias Modica says in Italo Disco: The Sparkling Sound of the 80s: “Italo disco is part the most incredible trash and part the most total genius.” Listeners might have a difficult time deciding which part they prefer. There’s so much going on, so much to love and laugh at, that Italo achieves a rare vitality, full of the contradictions and multitudes of life itself. Perhaps it’s no surprise that over 40 years later, the genre lives on via a rabid cult of fans.
Zanetti continued to release Savage singles throughout the ’80s and early ’90s (he circled back and released a full album in 2020, Love and Rain). He found even greater success as a Eurobeat producer and label head. His DWA label put out ’90s smashes from Double You, Corona, Alexia, and Ice MC, whose “Think About the Way” features prominently in Trainspotting. Again, occupying a fairly unique space, Zanetti was able to outlive the genre and reach the masses through more frenetic (albeit less eccentric) material. At 66, he still plays as Savage, and when he performs “Only You,” he still does his trademark hand motions. What was devised to compensate for a dancing deficit just looks like dancing if you watch it enough. | 2023-06-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Discomagic | June 25, 2023 | 8.2 | 21993eed-448f-4d1e-aac8-7adac2255dc8 | Rich Juzwiak | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rich-juzwiak/ | |
Adopting a new alias, the EDM producer Porter Robinson sets aside Worlds’ electro-pop crossover and embraces early-2000s trance and video-game music. | Adopting a new alias, the EDM producer Porter Robinson sets aside Worlds’ electro-pop crossover and embraces early-2000s trance and video-game music. | Virtual Self: Virtual Self EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/virtual-self-virtual-self-ep/ | Virtual Self EP | Porter Robinson has spent much of his career trying to escape his own shadow. The North Carolina native released his first record, a pounding trance anthem, when he was a 15-year-old denizen of online production forums, and his career since then has followed a zigzag path away from the cruder hallmarks of youthful ebullience. The brash, buzzing electro-house and dubstep of his 2011 debut for Skrillex’s OWSLA label gave way to the more plangent melodies of “Language” and “Easy”; his 2014 album Worlds largely jettisoned rave bombast in favor of wistful electro pop and Vocaloid balladry. In early 2017, he explicitly disavowed much of his own work, winnowing down his catalog to a slim list of keepers: “i’ve been making music for 12 years and i only wrote 11 songs, wow.” He was 24 years old at the time.
These sorts of evasive maneuvers may be increasingly familiar to digital natives eager to divert attention from early traces of their public selves. But with his latest project, Robinson not only changes course once again; he also re-engages with the sounds of his youth. The debut EP from his Virtual Self alias makes a headlong plunge into an aesthetic rooted in the late 1990s and early 2000s: hard trance and Eurodance crosscut with sparkling keygen melodies and the high-velocity soundtracks of video games like “Dance Dance Revolution” and “Beatmania IIDX.”
The EP’s neon onslaught couldn’t be further from Worlds’ delicate textures and crossover inclinations, which found common cause with electro-pop acts like Chvrches and M83. “Particle Arts” is a 175-BPM juggernaut of trance stabs and happy-hardcore breaks; “EON BREAK” deals in hardstyle cadences and machine-gun snares. Where Worlds’ aggressive moments were tempered by wispy atmospheres, Virtual Self opts for a more unvarnished palette, and its funkless, hyperactive rhythms are evocative of “DDR”’s relentless acrobatics.
Not everything is a copy of vintage sounds. Despite the rushing snare rolls and classic “Reese” bass of “Ghost Voices,” the song’s lithe vocal flips and slinky air peg it to the post-Disclosure era; it’s the record’s most contemporary-sounding cut. And the carefully sculpted vocal synths of “a.i.ngel (Become God)” aren’t terribly far off from the sound of Oneohtrix Point Never’s Garden of Delete. There are other similarities with that album, too: Just like digital breadcrumbs that OPN used to construct Garden of Delete’s elaborate backstory, Robinson created an array of Twitter accounts to lend mystery to the Virtual Self rollout. Much like OPN’s invented genre of “hypergrunge,” Virtual Self’s “neotrance” is a way of tackling ideas of nostalgia, adolescence, and, crucially, the contingent nature and arbitrary standards of taste.
In its saccharine overdrive, much of the EP is distinctly, unabashedly unfashionable—corny, even. Unlike someone like Lone, whose rave revivalism views its inspirations through tastefully rose-tinted lenses, Virtual Self hones in on the most garish aspects of Robinson’s influences, burning away any possibility of subtlety beneath a billion-watt gleam. Halfway through “Key,” he even indulges in an honest-to-goodness key change—pop music’s hokiest trope.
A number of self-consciously underground artists have been playing with similar ideas for a while; Lorenzo Senni and Evian Christ have both tackled trance from a position of tongue-in-cheek plausible deniability. Robinson, though, is known and loved for his sincerity and his sensitivity, which makes the Virtual Self project feel different—more like an embrace, rather than a nudge and a wink. As it happens, December 31, 2017 marked a remarkable historical footnote: On that day, every living adult had been born in the 20th century; everyone not yet 18 had been born in the 21st. The notion of a generational divide couldn’t be rendered in starker terms. No matter which side you were born on, Virtual Self’s trance revamp reminds us that the boundaries of taste are always in flux—and that ultimately, nostalgia will rehabilitate even the shaggiest underdogs. | 2018-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | self-released | January 3, 2018 | 5.9 | 219c746a-f3a1-4769-a113-500406e345c0 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Sigur Rós’ elemental 1999 breakthrough. | 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 Sigur Rós’ elemental 1999 breakthrough. | Sigur Rós: Ágætis byrjun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sigur-ros-agaetis-byrjun/ | Ágætis byrjun | With their second album, Ágætis byrjun, Sigur Rós knew only that they wanted to make things bigger. Their first record, 1997’s Von, was dark and, by the standards of what they became famous for, positively screechy: Back then, they were inspired by the hurtling propulsion of Smashing Pumpkins and My Bloody Valentine, bands that generated soothing textures from cacophony. Von sold 300 copies in Iceland. But the dismal showing left no seeming dent on young Jónsi Birgisson’s confidence. The singer posted a salvo on the band’s website prior to Agaetis’ release: “We are simply gonna change music forever, and the way people think about music.”
It’s alarming to consider, from the vantage of 2019, the degree to which he seems to have accomplished his mission. If we now live in a world of small, soft drones, a pruned garden of “Lush Lofi” and “Ambient Chill” and “Ethereal Vibes” Spotify playlists, we can blame this condition, at least in part, on the impact of Ágætis byrjun. It is an album that has terraformed our landscape—so much of our lives now sounds like it, from Nissan commercials to “Planet Earth” documentaries to the long trail of ads that could not procure Sigur Rós’ approval and went about constructing benign replicas of Sigur Rós songs instead.
Before Ágætis, post-rock was a niche concern, a tiny sub-sub-genre centered around a dozen or so bands in England and North America—Stereolab, Bark Psychosis and a few others in London; Tortoise and Gastr del Sol in Chicago; Godspeed You! Black Emperor in Montreal. After Ágætis, the sound—massive, surging, triumphal; melancholic and soothing and mostly major-key; wreathed in strings and horns and ripe with melodrama and headlocking you into transcendence—is a global phenomenon. They opened for Radiohead; they turned down a slot on “Letterman” because the host wouldn’t give them enough time. They even appeared on “The Simpsons.” Twenty years into their career, they tour arenas and command a massive following. They are a cultural institution.
It’s hard to know if Ágætis byrjun catalyzed the massive shifts that unfolded in its wake, or if those shifts were already brewing, in search of a seaworthy vessel to carry us wherever it was going. Today, Sigur Rós’ career seems like a natural and desirable trajectory: Get your music into the ears of some important people (in Sigur Rós’ case, it was celebrities like Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow); from there, your music might shoot outward into some large-scale and modestly experimental commercial film (Tom Cruise and Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky); and then it can rain down into dozens and dozens of television shows via the diligent work of music supervisors. But when it all happened to Sigur Rós, it was all pretty new, and it was all happening to the music industry at the same time.
To make the album itself, they recruited a keyboardist named Kjartan Sveinsson, who knew a lot more than they did about the things they were interested in—arrangements, composition, songs that sounded like cavernous day spas. They enlisted producer Ken Thomas, who started out as an assistant working on Queen albums before moving on to early industrial acts like Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten. He also mixed the first record by Björk’s early band the Sugarcubes, which is what led him to Sigur Rós.
With Thomas, they built a record that felt like being stuck inside a church bell. Their enormous sound came not from size, but from scale. The distance between the quietest noises—the little cymbals ticking the eight notes on “Svefn-g-englar,” Birgisson’s falsetto—and the loudest ones—say, the drums and organ that land like Thor’s hammer about six minutes into the same track—feels measurable only in miles. It is a long, liquid sound, devoid of sharp points: Even the most massive dynamic shifts happen with rounded edges. The drums are nested inside so much reverb that you can nearly hear the air gathering around the snare head before impact. Birgisson played his electric guitar with a cello bow, which offered the sonorous tones of feedback without the disturbance of picks. It is thunderous and dreamy, soothing and stirring—a big, frosted wedding cake of mallet percussion and pianos and strings and piping, cooing vocals. It is a sound designed to overwhelm, and it does, which is probably how British critics ended up gasping that the music was “like God weeping tears of gold in heaven.” Music of this scale is never kind on the higher faculties.
The album is a triumph, above all, of arrangement and engineering. When the piano kicks in on “Starálfur” (the same one that accompanies the discovery of the mythical jaguar shark in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), I still have to suppress a delighted giggle of wonder. It’s like watching an invasion of CGI superheroes, or (I imagine) revving a high-performance car and watching the speedometer float. It isn’t so much a sound as a special effect, and it communicates with your brain solely in dopamine floods.
If you are inclined to sniff suspiciously around grandiose music, examining it for kitsch, you probably reeled away staggering from Sigur Rós, who proudly stink of it. This was another part of their appeal and their strength: The music is texturally complex, for sure, but the emotional framework is deliberately simple and clear. They are gloriously unafraid of blast-off. The piping melody that ends “Olsen Olsen,” doubled up with horns and a choir, is straight out of a Mannheim Steamroller Christmas album.
Live, they maintained this communal feeling without sacrificing clarity. You can hear this in the live recording included in a generous and fulsome new 20th-anniversary reissue. The gig was June 12, 1999 at Reykjavík’s Íslenska Óperan—an album-release celebration. They were brand new to this material, but somehow they sounded as commanding then as they do now. The box set also includes reams of demos and half-finished versions of Ágætis byrjun—they provide a nice glimpse into the band’s working method, which was open-ended and involved multiple versions of the same song, some with or without vocals or at different speeds. Spending time with all of these raw tracks is a bit like opening up a “version history” in Google Docs—you learn a little bit about how the final product came to be, but it only serves to heighten your appreciation that you were spared the editing process.
Parsing the re-release, I was drawn back to the album itself again. It doesn’t really require elaboration, or added context. It’s entire appeal lay in the sense that it dropped, immaculate and mysterious, from the sky. Unless you were Icelandic, you didn’t know what they were saying—and often not even then. On Ágætis, Birgisson famously dabbled in an invented language called Hopelandic—some on “Olsen Olsen,” and some lightly sprinkled throughout. This might have spurred some listeners on to discover “what he was saying,” but for most of us, he was saying whatever we heard. His words were not messages, they were bird calls. The single most indelible word Birgisson has ever sung—“tju”—is a gibberish syllable, a refrain from “Svefn-g-nglar” that sounded then and will always sound just like “It’s you.” There were no other meanings within to parse or contemplate—just a pretty sound. We heard ourselves in it. | 2019-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Krunk | June 30, 2019 | 9.4 | 219d37b0-3412-46b1-9653-edde863183ae | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ |
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