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The band’s eighth full-length is undoubtedly their strongest since Writer’s Block, with a renewed focus on eclecticism and sweet melodies. | The band’s eighth full-length is undoubtedly their strongest since Writer’s Block, with a renewed focus on eclecticism and sweet melodies. | Peter Bjorn and John: Darker Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peter-bjorn-and-john-darker-days/ | Darker Days | There’s a bitter irony that Peter Bjorn and John’s legacy, as it stands, orbits around one song—particularly since the album that song came from 2006’s stellar Writer’s Block, found the Swedish trio proving they were capable of so much more. Writer’s Block comprised the sort of try-anything-once abandon that indie rock often exhibited throughout the 2000s, and treated various sounds within the sub-genre like a wardrobe stuffed with costumes, nimbly hopping from shoegaze-y guitars and wistful expansiveness to spare, narcotized pop and handclap-dotted strum-alongs without so much as batting an eyelash. It showcased a greater range than suggested by their previous efforts—the band’s self-titled debut from 2002 and 2004’s Falling Out, two equally solid guitar-pop albums—and the adventurousness stuck with them, at least for a little while.
Their immediate follow-up, Seaside Rock, was comprised entirely of shifting, slight instrumentals, and 2009’s Living Thing found the band’s sound taking on a slightly darker shape with clattering percussion, dirty guitar lines, and creaking atmospherics. These stylistic left-turns were more interesting than they were enjoyable, and in the long run, they’ve proved slightly more memorable than the band’s last two albums, 2011’s back-to-basics attempt Gimme Some and the collab-loaded Breakin’ Point from 2016. Despite contributions from pop power players like Greg Kurstin and Emile Haynie, Breakin’ Point represented an indistinct low point in Peter Bjorn and John’s catalogue— which is precisely why Darker Days is such a nice surprise. The band’s eighth full-length is undoubtedly their strongest since Writer’s Block, with a renewed focus on eclecticism and a handful of melodies just sweet enough without necessitating an emergency dentist appointment.
Curiously, the dusky melodies and off-kilter arrangements of Darker Days most closely recall Living Thing, a moody record that practically radiated the tension that accompanies following up a zeitgeist-grabbing moment. But Darker Days undoubtedly benefits from being free of such pressures; following the five-year period of creative gestation that was Breakin’ Point, the trio wrote, recorded, and self-produced this record in relatively quick fashion—a low-stakes approach that pays off dividends. The record’s highlights are steeped in the sounds of Swedish indie-pop that dominated indie in the late 2000s; the rubbery bassline of “Gut Feeling” pleasingly smacks of defunct Swedes Love Is All’s indelible “Felt Tip,” while the chunky guitars and soft vocals of “Every Other Night” sounds like the type of cloudy confection the Drums’ Jonny Pierce—another practical disciple of storied labels like Labrador and Sincerely Yours—writes in his sleep.
The stylistic left-turns taken on Darker Days are more hit-or-miss than the songs that explicitly recall the band’s native origins. “Dark Ages” cuts a striking figure with a level of swagger not unlike a James Bond theme, while the nearly nine-minute closer “Heaven and Hell” quietly radiates its own beauty via John Eriksson’s lovely vocal delivery and patient percussive build; but single “Wrapped Around the Axle” aims for a shimmying, mid-tempo groove and instead goes limp, and the turgid “Silicon Valley Blues” finds Peter Morén taking lead vocal duties to bemoan the digital intrusions of modern life. Like so many technophobic rock and pop songs over the last few years, it’s a little cringe-worthy to hear him namecheck George Orwell and rail against data-collecting nemeses over a pitter-patter beat and washes of guitar— but it’s also surprising, and indicative of the fact that even Darker Days’ most glaring missteps go a long way towards renewing interest in what Peter Bjorn and John are up to these days. | 2018-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ingrid | October 27, 2018 | 6.8 | 232df03c-ce2f-4f3e-af7c-fcf0d9c674ca | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
The hyper-prolific rapper with an endless number of YouTube freestyles finds a new focus and crafts his most accessible album. | The hyper-prolific rapper with an endless number of YouTube freestyles finds a new focus and crafts his most accessible album. | Lil B: I'm Gay (I'm Happy) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15641-im-gay-im-happy/ | I'm Gay (I'm Happy) | It's possible not even Lil B knows how much music he's released in the past four years. Spend 15 minutes trying to sort out how much he's made in the past four months and you'll feel in your stomach just how deep the Internet goes. More than any other musician, the Bay Area rapper has adapted his creative behavior to resemble the rippling action of your RSS feed-- an unceasing, pellet-dispenser flow of new content.
It's a self-contained musical universe, located at the vanishing point on the "all-or-nothing" spectrum, and its cult of faithful has been steadily building to the point where the mainstream rap industry has been forced to contend with him. The result was a hip-hop comedy of manners: as XXL included him on their Freshmen 2011 list alongside industry non-entities like Mac Miller and Lil Twist and Lupe Fiasco publicly congratulated himself for "getting it," B basically continued whistling his tune, collaborating with Lil Wayne and Jean Grae and Tony Yayo and rapping over How to Dress Well instrumentals. And then he announced at Coachella he was going to name his next album I'm Gay.
With this single statement, Lil B calmly detonated a flower-power land mine in the center of what is arguably rap's most tortured, combustible political arena. Whatever his motivations (it probably had something to do with his philosophy of universal acceptance and self-love, but his manifestos don't survive close analysis), he guaranteed that the album's audience would be exponentially larger than anything he'd done before.
I'm Gay appeared on iTunes last week, and by convenience or design, it's his most coherent, cohesive, and accessible single release to date. His followers may debate whether Rain in England or 6 Kiss or Illusions of Grandeur or Bitch Mob: Respect Da Bitch is better (Lil B has a flair for titles), but for the uninitiated, I'm Gay does a great job of articulating his ethos and appeal in the space of one album. If you're intrigued by Lil B but shrink from the commitment of keeping pace with a human data stream, it might be the only record you'll ever need.
That's not to say that I'm Gay contains all of Lil B's personae. The album finds him securely in his dazed, child-like observer mode, where he peers at the world as if for the first time and wonders aloud. He has many other faces-- occasional boom-bap traditionalist, tweaker of boom-bap traditionalism, uncomfortably personal YouTube diarist-- but this side is easily B's most relatable and endearing. The production, by frequent collaborators Clams Casino, 9th Wonder, and others, reinforces the mood of naive reverie: "Gon Be Okay" samples an orchestral flourish from the soundtrack to Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, while "Unchain Me" is built on a loop of "Cry Little Sister" from The Lost Boys soundtrack. "I Hate Myself" is a woozy, pitched-down loop of Goo Goo Doll's "Iris" in which the drums hit like down pillows. You're unlikely to find a more guileless or gentle hip-hop record this year.
Lil B's stream-of-consciousness lyrical approach remains uniquely suited to this sort of cosmic contemplation. Composing your thoughts on the fly has obvious downsides, and Lil B's YouTube channel is littered with examples of times he hit "record" and the muse failed to follow. But here, he's consistently focused and has a knack for articulating universal sentiments in seemingly artless wording: I can't think of anyone else who could say things like, "The people die for a piece of paper, it's so stupid" or "If God's real, then why'd my friend have to die?" or "Don't wanna go to school because the teacher's too simple/ I just wanna know where I come from, just tell me," and prompt contemplation instead of laughs.
But then, reproducing lines like these in print doesn't do them justice. Lil B's music draws on spontaneity as its wellspring; you hear him stumble, pause for breath, abandon a line of thought and start over. So when he happens across a searing image like "Mental slavery/ Niggas hangin off trees in the woods," and roams his way to "I'm nicer than Grandma with a cup of iced tea" a few lines later, there's a charge of discovery in the air-- the conviction that you're hearing music and expression being born raw.
"I'm ready to give up/My old thoughts...Everything I seen was a lie/I'm not ready to die/I love myself" he declares on "I Hate Myself," a vague but powerful manifesto that suggests why Lil B has inspired such fervent devotion. He projects fearlessness, which can take many forms: it can mean deciding to name your rap album "I'm Gay" out of thin air. (The subtitled "I'm Happy" was a deflating backward step, it's true, but it was hard to get riled considering how little motivation he had to choose the name I'm Gay in the first place). It can also mean posting the album for free to your quarter-million Twitter followers hours after it was made available for purchase. It can mean sharing every half-baked scrap and warty throwaway you record, trusting your fans to decide what's worth keeping. So while I'm Gay isn't a definitive statement, it is an especially compelling point on a bizarre trajectory, one that feels worth keeping around. | 2011-07-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-07-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Experimental | Basedworld | July 14, 2011 | 8.1 | 232e4aa5-adbb-416b-a25f-cd32b4b41c0e | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
DRINKS is the project of Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon and White Fence's Tim Presley. Rather than merge their respective psych sensibilities, they've stripped away the pop fabric to muck around in primitive territory, recasting themselves as outsiders. Hermits on Holiday is spontaneous and free-form, but it rarely lapses into the stuff of jam-band nightmares. | DRINKS is the project of Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon and White Fence's Tim Presley. Rather than merge their respective psych sensibilities, they've stripped away the pop fabric to muck around in primitive territory, recasting themselves as outsiders. Hermits on Holiday is spontaneous and free-form, but it rarely lapses into the stuff of jam-band nightmares. | DRINKS: Hermits on Holiday | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20759-hermits-on-holiday/ | Hermits on Holiday | Cate Le Bon has cut an imperious figure across her three solo albums. Her strong Welsh accent puts her at a curious remove, and she allows the guitars and organs that shape her songs to thrash, but only within strictly drawn boundaries, like Television riffs remade as repeating patterns. Her music has the sense of being just so, which seems to be in her nature: 2013's Mug Museum governed memory as a clearly labeled archive.
Le Bon moved to L.A. to make that album, enlisting White Fence touring member Nick Murray on drums. Two years later, she's teamed up with his bandmate Tim Presley as DRINKS, a collaboration (that they'd rather bill as a four-legged solo project) born of a lot of time spent "playing guitar and laughing manically at each other." Rather than merge their respective psych sensibilities, they've stripped away the pop fabric—White Fence's dusky harmonies, Le Bon's delicate organ refrains—to muck around in primitive territory, recasting themselves as outsiders.
As consummate musicians and students of pop, Le Bon and Presley aren't able to revert to Shaggs-like naivete, but they're able to suspend their aesthetes' sensibility in order to embrace chaos, even silliness. There's unmistakable precedent to the sound where they meet, the dub inflections and buzzing guitar welts. Hermits evokes the captivating disconnect of a late-'70s John Peel show, where the Slits and Delta 5 segued into Strictly Personal-era Beefheart's blues-pop abstractions—you half expect to hear Ivor Cutler pop up to recite a poem in between tracks.
Opener "Laying Down the Rock" is a bit of a red herring. It's the most formed song here, a shaggy but highly strung garage plodder that doesn't shine with the wonder of discovery. “Focus on the Street”, though, begins a process of stretching rock's fabric loose. The verse runs on an insistent buzzsaw riff and clipped vocal incantations, the picture of no-wave austerity. Where the duo should break into some kind of lambasting, art-damaged chorus, they drift into hairy freeform guitar, like hippies pranking a White Columns crowd. "Cannon Mouth" sounds like Le Bon impersonating Nico through a snorkel; "She Walks So Fast" remakes Faust's "Picnic on a Frozen River, Deuxième Tableaux" as splayed British post-punk, Presley yelping "rock'n'roll!" amidst the burly twang.
True to its creation, humor courses through Hermits, and rescues a few outlandish moments. "Tim, Do I Like That Dog" is almost seven minutes of Le Bon repeatedly asking Presley just that, bringing levity to the frankly hard-going music: strangled guitar scribble that thins to a single piercing note. The few audible lyrics that leap out elsewhere are funny, too, if completely inscrutable. The title track sounds like a reedy cuckoo clock, and marks times such as "Six past the eight—copulate." A glance at the muddled liner notes makes it seem like "Cannon Mouth" could be a song about austerity politics, privilege, and protest ("If you don't know what I'm on about/ Then you'll never want to scream and shout"), but Le Bon and Presley never make anything obvious. Only "Cheerio" veers too far into the unknown, stranding the listener among shrill proto-synth explorations.
Most of Hermits on Holiday is pretty spontaneous and free-form, but it rarely lapses into the stuff of jam-band nightmares. An interviewer recently asked Le Bon and Presley whether they intended Hermits to be a psych album. "I don't even know what those words mean anymore," Le Bon replied. Instead, the pair play like kids trying to light a fire with sticks and flint: there's a distant possibility something might take, but really it's all about the thrill of scrubbing around in the dirt. | 2015-08-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-08-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Heavenly / Birth | August 21, 2015 | 7.8 | 233125c5-ed6d-4700-b50d-4f315a1343b4 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Following the recent rediscovery of his 1975 album Valley of Search, the saxophonist releases a quintet set of all-new compositions that nod to jazz history while rocketing off to points unknown. | Following the recent rediscovery of his 1975 album Valley of Search, the saxophonist releases a quintet set of all-new compositions that nod to jazz history while rocketing off to points unknown. | Alan Braufman: The Fire Still Burns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alan-braufman-the-fire-still-burns/ | The Fire Still Burns | For crate-digging devotees of underground jazz, the 2018 rediscovery of saxophonist Alan Braufman’s 1975 album Valley of Search was an exciting development. Sparked by Braufman’s nephew (and Pitchfork contributor) Nabil Ayers, the reissue—originally recorded in the Tribeca loft Braufman shared with other musicians—added a small but vital piece to the puzzle of ’70s New York jazz. Braufman’s energetic quartet, including pianist and loftmate Gene Ashton, now known as Cooper-Moore, produced high-octane music, firing out each track in a single take.
But it turns out the Valley of Search reissue wasn’t the most exciting result of Ayers’ uncle-prodding. Not long after its release, Braufman, who moved to Utah in the ’90s, played with Cooper-Moore for the first time in decades, and Ayers suggested they make a new album. Braufman had spent the intervening years touring with other groups (including stints with Philip Glass and Psychedelic Furs) and recording as Alan Michael, but this would be just his second record under his own name. Brainstorming during commutes to his teaching gig at Utah State University, he quickly concocted a set of songs and assembled a quintet with Cooper-Moore’s help. They recorded The Fire Still Burns in a single day last September, at an upstate New York studio owned by the National.
As good as Valley of Search is, The Fire Still Burns is bigger and better. While Braufman and Cooper-Moore’s first album hinted at different modes, it dealt mostly in outward-bound free jazz. But here they weave many stylistic strands into a whirlwind performance. Brain-sticking hooks skid into impulsive sprints; moments of abandon build to straight-up swing. At times the group rockets away completely, only to hurtle back into grounded rhythms and repetitive vamps. The result is a sturdy suite that nods vigorously toward jazz history while sounding as fresh and immediate as a concert happening right in front of you.
That combination is captured best in “Home,” which Braufman wrote on a piano in just 20 minutes. It’s an instant classic centered on a huge hook that feels ripped from a lost ’60’s Impulse or Blue Note long-player. Opening with that riff over bassist Ken Filiano’s bowed strings, Braufman and tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis quickly ignite; when Andrew Drury’s insistent drumming lifts it, the group takes full flight. Along the way, Cooper-Moore’s piano chords flit around the rising horn figure, making “Home” feel both dizzyingly overwhelming and fundamentally reassuring. It blows you away, then catches your fall.
“Home” would be a big achievement on its own, but on The Fire Still Burns, no single tune exists in its own vacuum. Impeccably sequenced, with subtle fade-outs and hardly any pause between tracks, it plays like an eight-part suite (an effect inspired by Brafuman’s favorite Don Cherry albums, which he notes featured “tunes [that] didn’t stop, they evolve”). The thematic consistency comes mostly from group’s enthusiastic energy, allowing them to flow from the ceremonial piano strains of “Morning Bazaar” into the Ornette Coleman-like twists of “No Floor No Ceiling,” and from the loose, wandering title track into the syncopated funk of “City Nights.” Their vigor is so strong, it even turns the nearly saccharine ballad “Alone Again” into a sort of howling prayer, due purely to the collective heat of their tireless playing.
Perhaps that heat is what Braufman means when he says The Fire Still Burns. If so, it’s a convincing claim: He and Cooper-Moore haven’t lost any intensity in five decades, and their quintet sparks from the first note and never dampens. As flames engulf America in many ways, the title has added significance; like the ’60s jazz it echoes, Braufman’s music reflects turbulent times and impassioned resistance. But even with its many reference points, The Fire Still Burns shines a light all its own, fueled by unbowed creative minds.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Valley of Search | September 11, 2020 | 7.8 | 23314e6f-3f73-419b-bf79-d52fe59e5442 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
Teens of Style is the Matador debut of Will Toledo, a young songwriter who blends the cracked pop oddity of Guided by Voices with the emotional directness of Belle and Sebastian. His lyrics are rapaciously intelligent and self-aware, but he never lets his prodigious literary intelligence get in the way of crafting enjoyably off-kilter, anthemic rock songs. | Teens of Style is the Matador debut of Will Toledo, a young songwriter who blends the cracked pop oddity of Guided by Voices with the emotional directness of Belle and Sebastian. His lyrics are rapaciously intelligent and self-aware, but he never lets his prodigious literary intelligence get in the way of crafting enjoyably off-kilter, anthemic rock songs. | Car Seat Headrest: Teens of Style | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21121-teens-of-style/ | Teens of Style | Will Toledo isn't old, but he's feeling his age. He's in debt; his friends are getting married; his hands are frozen; he's stuck in the city; and worst of all, his songs are starting to sound the same. The world is moving past him, blurring into formlessness, and his music as Car Seat Headrest is an attempt to slow down and make sense of the rush.
Teens of Style is technically a compilation, comprising songs dating back to 2011 that were re-recorded for his Matador debut. (Teens of Denial, a planned 2016 release, will be his first Matador album of entirely new material.) You can hear the revised sound as a composite of the label's history: Guided by Voices' ear for cracked pop oddities, Belle and Sebastian's emotional directness, Yo La Tengo's intimate approach to jamming, Stephen Malkmus' ability to get wordy without forgetting to rock out. As a songwriter, Toledo is both present and detached, capable of living in a moment while floating above it. A self-summarization comes on the brawny "Strangers", when he deadpans a series of autobiographical quips: "Car seat is a menace to the public," "Car seat is a genetic stop sign," "Car seat's nervous and the lights are bright."
On that song, we find out the young Toledo fell in love with Michael Stipe: "I took lyrics out of context and thought, 'he must be speaking to me.'" His confusion over purposefully abstract lyrics may have turned him into a literalist, someone endeavoring to explain every twist and turn of his interior state. His lyrics are rapaciously intelligent, with a knack for wry humor. Take a lyrical adjustment on the new recordings, for example, that reflects the shift in his life status: "Times to Die" swaps a couplet about sneaking his way to musical success into a meditation on the existence of a higher power, like God or (even better) Matador founder Chris Lombardi ("Got to have faith in the one above me/ Got to believe that Lombardi loves me"), who will help decide whether or not Toledo is destined to be a cult hero.
Teens of Style has a noticeably jagged quality; unbelievably, it used to sound even DIY-ier. (The original versions can be found on Car Seat's Bandcamp.) The new recordings retain their rough edge, but there's luminescence in the production—the percussion is crisper, the guitars are brighter, and Toledo's singing is a lot more pronounced. The effect is an album that's bookish, but not sedentary. He sells abstruse metaphors and lyrical concepts with every ounce of himself, like failing to do so would mean the end of the world. In this way, he's a cousin of artists like Joanna Newsom, Bright Eyes, or Okkervil River, who never let their prodigious literary intelligence get in the way of crafting something you might actually enjoy listening to.
To (sort of) quote Brandon Flowers: He's human and rocker. The existential despair of "Something Soon" is crystallized in a blown-out chorus, while he uses a hypnotic keyboard line to make the haunting "Maud, You're Gone" a prom song for moody kids. A spectral choir comes through a radio at the start of "Sunburned Shirts" before breaking into a scratchy pop gem, like George Harrison on anti-depressants ("I haven't looked at the sun for so long/ I forgot how much it hurt to"). Toledo's voice is weary, and carries a shred of desperation—he sounds like a third-generation cassette tape recording of Julian Casablancas (who, otherwise, is his complete opposite as a frontman).
Earlier this month, I went to a Car Seat Headrest show held as part of the annual CMJ Music Marathon, where dozens of bands go to make their reputations. But Toledo began the set lying on the floor, with his microphone angled toward the ground, as the band launched into "The Ending of Dramamine", a 14-minute epic where he references Modest Mouse and sings about only thinking about himself. If you weren't standing right at the stage, you couldn't see him. The words flowed from the void, sung by someone so overwhelmed by the moment he would rather disappear. I couldn't absorb them all at once but what I remember is the crowd standing on their toes, edging their way forward, hoping to catch a glimpse. Then, he stood up. | 2015-10-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | October 28, 2015 | 8.1 | 2338156e-daa9-4f28-8f43-44f91bb50ca5 | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
Vampire Weekend return with a shaggy, sprawling double album all about rebirth, contentment, and the reclamation of light. | Vampire Weekend return with a shaggy, sprawling double album all about rebirth, contentment, and the reclamation of light. | Vampire Weekend: Father of the Bride | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vampire-weekend-father-of-the-bride/ | Father of the Bride | From the beginning, Vampire Weekend were winners: charming, relatively lighthearted; Columbia students one year, festival headliners the next. They had cute sweaters and smart jokes; they wrote with wit and curiosity about the tapestry of privileged life; they carried themselves with an almost infuriating sparkle. But they were also manic, weird, and provocatively cross-cultural, mixing up digital dancehall and string sections, Latin punk and raga in ways that didn’t quite fit. And despite their superficial politeness, there was something deeply antagonistic about them, the vestigial bite of suburban kids who grew up loving punk and hardcore but never quite felt entitled to its anger, the indie-rock band bent on breaking up the monopoly rock held over guitar-based music.
In time, they grew bigger, denser, more serious. Their third and last album, 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City, felt almost haunted, every line crammed with allusion, every space stuffed with weird, processed sounds. Even the silences crackled with old life, a poster on a city street stripped away to reveal the fragment of poster underneath. It felt, appropriately, like the band’s then-home of New York, a place where you can’t take a walk around the block without feeling like you’re bothering the dead.
Frontman Ezra Koenig relocated to Los Angeles, made an animated series for Netflix (Neo Yokio) and became a parent; Rostam Batmanglij—the band’s Swiss Army knife and in-house producer—worked with Carly Rae Jepsen and Charli XCX, leaving Vampire Weekend in 2016 to work on solo music; the band has lived inside a pregnant pause. Now we have Father of the Bride—a looser, broader album than Modern Vampires, the great sigh after a long holding of breath. There are still moments of conflict, but in general, you get the sense the band is just relieved to have run the gauntlet of their existential doubts and come out relatively unscathed, grateful to be here. A glass of wine? Why not. Make it white, and if you’ve got it, a little ice.
The music (produced again in part by Modern Vampires collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid, with a few cameos by Batmanglij) is accordingly sunny, celebratory, redolent at times of country, ABBA, lounge music (“My Mistake”) and Brazilian jazz (“Flower Moon”) and the barefoot exultations of Van Morrison (“This Life”). Just as indie bands like Pavement cautiously resuscitated the ’70s rock that came before them, Vampire Weekend have resuscitated—or recolonized, you could say—the multicultural boomer sounds of the ’90s, when bands like the Gipsy Kings and the Chieftains moved into the American market, when the Indigo Girls and Rusted Root helped constellate a folksy alternative to the punk-derived sound of “alternative music.”
In the past, the band tended to rely on unusual juxtapositions; here they present their sound more like a compilation, a set of cultural presets calibrated to induce nostalgia, revulsion, historical reconsideration. (Hey, you, remember Tevas? Peace Frogs? Papyrus?) The message is sincere, but the sound bristles with intellectual awareness, the protection you wear when wading into bad taste. “There’s always been that part of me [where] I see people beating up on something and I just wanna be like, ‘What’s really going on here?’” Koenig said on a recent episode of his online radio show, Time Crisis. For years, Vampire Weekend have implicitly threatened—in their perverse, contrarian, head-of-the-class way—to sound like Phish; Father marks the moment the threat becomes a promise.
For a band historically obsessed by the manmade world, its technology, its culture, and its flood of proper nouns, Father is relatively naturalistic, less reference-heavy and confined to its head. Several of the songs (“Hold You Now,” “Married in a Gold Rush,” “We Belong Together”) are literal duets between Koenig and Haim’s Danielle Haim—the sound not of one person thinking it through but two people hashing it out, of yin slowly reconciling itself to yang. Themes include spring, rebirth, a shedding of old skin, and reclamation of light; at one point, we return to the garden (“Sunflower”); at another, we hear the lullaby of crickets (“Big Blue”).
Of course, the garden—that fertile, innocent place we dwelled before civilization led us astray—is and has always been a fantasy, and home is never home again after one leaves. There are times when the universality of Father of the Bride feels forced, the sound of a restless mind repeatedly telling itself to relax, the paradoxical effort people make in the name of loosening up. Koenig said he wanted to try to write songs where a listener didn’t have to do too much legwork to figure out who might be singing them; to be clear, immediate, to conjure the myth of Ordinary People—you know, like country music.
But Vampire Weekend have never been that legible, nor is being legible any better than being a little obscure. More than anything, Father makes me think of something like Bob Dylan circa Self Portrait and New Morning: The sound of an artist trying to backpedal, in a fascinating, sometimes antagonistic way, on the gravity they had worked so hard to cultivate. “I think I take myself too serious,” guest guitarist Steve Lacy mutters at the beginning of “Sympathy.” “It’s not that serious.” Fair enough, but you can’t say a precedent wasn’t set. Nor could you deny that the song that follows—a violent, gothy piece of flamenco that features a club-jazz breakdown and ends in a hail of heavy-metal drums—is the most absurdly serious piece of music here, and incidentally, one of the best.
Father is the first time they’ve sounded overlong, the first time they haven’t sounded almost incandescently vital, but that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped moving; if anything, with the exception of “Rich Man”—a lilting nursery rhyme that mixes a Celtic reel with a sample of the amazing Sierra Leonean palm-wine singer S.E. Rogie—the music here is as big of a step away from Modern Vampires as Modern Vampires was from Contra. In tow come the Grateful Dead–style guitar solos (“Harmony Hall”), the summer-camp singalongs (“We Belong Together”), the Beatles-y meditations on cosmic insignificance (“Big Blue”). Exhausted by big questions, they’ve consigned themselves to tiny reminders; once almost comically buttoned up, they have ventured, conditionally, to let it all hang out—a gesture as proportionally life-giving, indulgent, and periodically goofy as you’d expect.
Generally speaking, happiness doesn’t make for great art; at the very least, it isn’t as combustible as misery, desire, or any other feeling rooted in what we lack rather than what we have. Listening to Father of the Bride, I hear songs of contentment sung by people who have tended to feel agitated, songs of belonging by people who have tended to feel as though they don’t belong. I miss the restlessness of Contra, the grandeur of Modern Vampires, the way the band used to sound anxious and self-examining about their privilege but now seem oblivious. Still, it takes a certain kind of bravery to feel the weight of lightness, to admit that things are okay. “I used to freeze on the dancefloor, I watched the icebergs from the shore,” Koenig sings on “Stranger,” “But you got the heat on, kettle screaming/Don’t need to freeze anymore.” Corny, but that’s life sometimes. And with that, the wallflower peels away from the wall and starts to dance. | 2019-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | May 3, 2019 | 8 | 233ea657-88dc-4f2a-8bbf-b0a46fa74148 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | |
A traditional, once-suppressed style from La Réunion, a small island off the coast of Madagascar, meets the electronic music of the 21st century. | A traditional, once-suppressed style from La Réunion, a small island off the coast of Madagascar, meets the electronic music of the 21st century. | Various Artists: Digital Kabar: Electronic Maloya From La Réunion Since 1980 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-digital-kabar-electronic-maloya-from-la-reunion-since-1980/ | Digital Kabar | Emanating from the tiny French island La Réunion, nestled some 500 miles off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, maloya dates back to the 17th century. Made by the slaves working the island’s sugar plantations, the music only began to be recognized by Réunionese society in the 20th century. But in the 1960s, a turn towards pro-independence and communist lyrics—not to mention its use in trance-inducing servis kabaré ceremonies, which the Catholic Church disapproved of—led to the prohibition of the style. When it emerged again in the 1980s, acts like Ziskanan and Ti Fock presented a more digestible iteration of that sound, which got picked up by western labels. But in the 21st century, artists like Christine Salem and Danyèl Waro have broadened the appeal of maloya, while Jako Maron has used modular synths and drum machines to both modernize and scuff up the form, stripping it back to its spiky, percussive essence. Maron’s 2018 tape for Uganda’s Nyege Nyege label helped spread greater awareness of maloya far from the island.
Maron appears three times on Digital Kabar: Electronic Maloya From La Réunion Since 1980, a wide-ranging 18-track set of older material and exclusive tracks that shows just how technology has altered the traditional sound of the island. Previously released on The Electro Maloya Experiments of Jako Maron, “Batbaté Maloya” strikes a midway point between Pan Sonic and charming drum-machine sputters, the ancillary buzz slowly throwing a pall over the entire track. As a producer for the hip-hop group Force Indigène, Maron blends together twanging strings and squalls of feedback. And his remix of drummer Patrick Manent’s “Kabaré Atèr” is as spare as can be. Rooting the mix in vocal chants and relentless drums, he brusquely chops and loops the vocals into a jostling call-and-response, with a menacing dose of acid bass infiltrating the threshing rhythms of the hand percussion. Rather than intensify and add layers, at the midway point, Maron cuts the electronics out, leaving the drums and voice to tussle, a rare instance of a remixer extracting themselves from the music.
Elsewhere, the set shows a plethora of artists moving away from the template, showing how the music naturally mutates the further it roams. In Berlin, the shakers and synth bass underpinning Alex Barck’s rework of Christine Salem’s “Oh Africa” percolate and carefully build to sweet dancefloor dopamine release. Barck, a member of Germany’s Sonar Kollektiv, is wise to foreground the evocative grain of Salem’s voice rather than overpower it with his own programming. Same with the stirring remix of Maya Kamaty’s “Pandiyé,” adding tumbling hand drums and her layered vocals until it achieves liftoff.
Such reworkings of maloya don’t always fare so well. Do Moon’s update of Ti Fock’s 1985 track “Kom Lé Long” veers dangerously close to breezy house tropes, mixing marimba and kick drum until the vocals feel like an afterthought. The loungey downtempo dub of “Mahavel” comes across as velvety wallpaper, while Boogzbrown & Cubenx’s hectic “Butcha” gets shot through with a ludicrous array of laser effects, as if hunting for the birds chirping throughout the track. La Réunion’s indigenous feathered species are better served on L’abuse’s “Ré-Union.” The expansive centerpiece of the set, it’s a gently cresting slice of 124-bpm ambient house, the bird calls and handclaps judiciously mixed with wordless vocals and piano. Fragrant as it is, the track unceremoniously cuts out after 13 minutes.
In the clash of traditional and futuristic, ancestral and electronic, Kabar brings to mind heady fusions like Shangaan electro, gqom, and batida that are sprouting up across the African continent and diaspora. Too often on this compilation, though, the remixers risk drowning out maloya’s fiery, vital message. As the singer Firmin Viry once said, “It is the cry of the people.” | 2019-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Infiné | July 1, 2019 | 6.9 | 2342fbc8-8821-4bd0-bc54-abad90b737f2 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
This collab between the fun-loving Boston rapper Michael Christmas and the fractious IDM producer Prefuse 73 has flashes of fun and brilliance, but their styles are often incompatible. | This collab between the fun-loving Boston rapper Michael Christmas and the fractious IDM producer Prefuse 73 has flashes of fun and brilliance, but their styles are often incompatible. | Fudge: Lady Parts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22335-lady-parts/ | Lady Parts | Michael Christmas and Prefuse 73 are both fringe rap in different senses. The Boston rapper Christmas took an unconventional path to niche web stardom bottling Superbad awkwardness on “Michael Cera,” which prefaced a breakout mixtape cheekily titled Is This Art?. As Prefuse 73, Guillermo Scott Herren has spent much of the last 15 years making IDM out of rap fragments, living at the edge of both genres. (Herren once had a day job making what he’s called “prehistoric trap beats,” which he hated.) His best rap artifact remains his Warp debut, Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives, a constantly breaking record that took swatches of sound from songs by Nas and ODB and let them glitch, like trying to tune an FM radio to a late ’90s rap station during a hurricane.
Christmas and Prefuse aren’t a match most would peg as a dream collaboration. Prefuse’s fractured style is more fit for off-beat swaggering of MF DOOM or the cranny-filling wordplay of Aesop Rock, both of whom were guests on Vocal Studies. And Christmas’ relatable stand-up act is better suited for warmer productions. He didn’t even know who Prefuse 73 was before they were put in a room together. But Prefuse’s more traditional flirtations with rap suggested that the pairing could not only work but even be engaging. At the behest of Christmas’ label, Lex Records, the two joined forces as Fudge for Lady Parts, a collaborative record that attempts to find common ground and marry their sounds somewhere at their outer limits. But despite a valiant effort from both, it’s a record that sounds better in theory than in practice.
Lady Parts isn’t an ideal entry point for either, nor is it their best work; they contort themselves into odd shapes trying to fit each other’s tendencies. There’s always a feeling-out process with collaborations like this one, but this never actually finds the sweet spot. Sonically, it is a variety pack from Herren, a sampler that scans much of his discography seeking out good fits for Christmas. The cuts all burst, and many are even mildly thrilling, but nothing here is nearly as off-kilter or kinetic as anything from his last release,* Rivington Nao Rio*. Conversely, Christmas occasionally steps outside himself trying to do too much in response, especially on songs like “These Saturdays” and “Japanese Mall,” which take him way out of his comfort zone, asking him to create chemistry where there isn’t any.
Christmas is best at commanding center stage, using his wit, presence, and comedic eye to control a setting and win over an audience, but Prefuse’s work is designed to stand alone, to create and sustain its own energy by constantly moving and adjusting. Both can’t happen here. This unintentional tug of war mires even their greatest experiments, which at their peak are both fun and frenetic. Sometimes Christmas gets lost in waves of sound (“Showstopper,” “I Got the Good”) or thrown off by a quick beat shift. He likes to build to his strongest punchlines; Prefuse, on the other hand, likes to jump-cut swiftly through ideas. Their styles just aren’t quite compatible.
But that doesn’t mean they come up empty on Lady Parts. Even without great chemistry, they make a handful of entertaining songs that thrive on sheer amusement. On “Young Vet,” Christmas ad-libs train sounds and car skids over a backflipping vocal loop, rapping about Scooby Doo and slut-shaming in the same breath. With five songs clocking in at under two minutes, Lady Parts often benefits from brevity. The punches come in flurries, and on “Crash” and “Circuit Breaker,” Christmas does some of his jolliest rapping. “Circuit Breaker” is where everything clicks, with Herren looping up a steady pulse that Christmas finally settles into.
Herren is an exceptional talent who is perhaps just better suited to solo work, but these sounds still carry his signature traits as Prefuse 73, zigzagging, rupturing, and splintering in weird places. Christmas is a fun-loving rapper with an infectious personality, filling the productions with references to Nerf guns, Grand Theft Auto strip clubs, and Twix commercials. He has bars like “Girls used to think my dad was Ma$e/Money make me do the Harlem Shake” and “Girls smell amazing like a Glade Plugin.” He doesn’t take himself too seriously and it’s a strength. In fact, Lady Parts as a whole is made in his image, and that may be its redeeming quality in the end. Despite its faults and flaws, it mostly scans as two talented musicians just having a good time. | 2016-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Lex | September 15, 2016 | 6.8 | 2345ba84-d720-493c-a780-34c5d0a18d91 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The first release on experimental electronic producer Jan Jelinek's label Faitiche, the homemade recordings of the late Ursula Bogner might never have been heard outside her immediate family had Jelinek not discovered them, or recorded them and conceived the entire backstory himself, depending on who you ask. | The first release on experimental electronic producer Jan Jelinek's label Faitiche, the homemade recordings of the late Ursula Bogner might never have been heard outside her immediate family had Jelinek not discovered them, or recorded them and conceived the entire backstory himself, depending on who you ask. | Ursula Bogner: Recordings 1969-1988 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12694-recordings-1969-1988/ | Recordings 1969-1988 | According to German electronic musician Jan Jelinek, the homemade recordings of the late Ursula Bogner might never have been heard outside her immediate family had Jelinek not discovered them through a random encounter with Bogner's son. I say "according to" because rumors that Bogner's story is a hoax-- a cover for music Jelinek made himself-- have already circulated. Some cite the recordings' rather clean fidelity, odd for music purported to be this old and inexpensively produced; others claim to hear Jelenik's minimal style in Bogner's simple compositions. Then there's the fact that Recordings 1969-1988 is the first release on Jelinek's label, Faitiche-- a name the label's own website claims is a French/German hybrid meaning "factish," or "a combination of facts and fetishes [that] makes it obvious that the two have a common element of fabrication."
Barring any denials or confirmations from Jelinek, that's probably all we'll ever know. His entertaining liner notes make Bogner's story seem plausible. Born in Germany in 1946, she became a pharmacist, wife, and mother by her early twenties, but still found spare time to study painting, printing, and electronic music. The latter interest led her to record her own synthesizer-based compositions on reel-to-reel tapes in a studio she built herself. Some songs survived intact, while others had to be assembled by Jelinek from individual, unmixed tracks.
The truth of this tale is ultimately a minor concern, because as intriguing as the story is, the songs on Recordings 1969-1988 are much more interesting. Bogner's work fits squarely in the world of early electronic music-- the period from the late 1950s to the early 70s, when synthesizers were so new that using them to craft melodic songs and create abstract sound were both considered "experimental" pursuits. The king of this era was Raymond Scott, whose whimsical jazz was adopted for cartoon soundtracks, and whose electronic inventions resulted in radio commercials, Jim Henson film scores, and unique curios like Soothing Sounds for Baby, a series intended to help parents pacify their infants. Bogner's music bears much of Scott's playful spirit, finding common ground between nursery-rhyme simplicity and the absurd humor of abstract art. Some of these songs are practically direct Scott rip-offs, but you can also hear echoes of Scott contemporaries and descendants: the radio concoctions of Daphne Oram, the comic pop of Perry and Kingsley, the conceptual art of the Residents, even the post-rock repetition of Black Dice.
Most of Recordings 1969-1988 sounds simultaneously like pop and art. Bogner's M.O. is to take a few simple loops-- rumbling bass, water-y plops, chirping squalls, laser-like blasts-- and overlap them, producing songs so sweet they'll make you laugh (the elephant-march opener "Begleitung für Tuba"), so repetitive they'll hypnotize you (the swinging "Inversion"), and so inventive they sound alien (the robotic "2 Ton"). At best, like on the jazzy "Punkte" and the cresting "Expansion", she crafts pulsing, organic melodies that burrow into memory like tree roots gripping the ground.
I've often wondered why the music of Raymond Scott, as catchy as it could be, is frequently relegated to the status of odd curiosity or gear-geek niche. The same will certainly happen with Bogner, whoever she "really" was/is. And sure, the songs on Recordings 1969-1988 (as well as the included shot of her with big glasses and floppy bowl cut) have a tech-y, art-nerd sheen. But give these tunes time, and you may find yourself humming them randomly, much the way a 60s housewife might have unwittingly memorized Scott tunes via the background noise of his sneaky radio jingles. | 2009-02-24T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2009-02-24T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | Faitiche | February 24, 2009 | 7.3 | 23498d3b-c62b-453f-bd78-3cbd266f75be | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Twins is Segall's third LP of 2012, and stands at a crossroads somewhere between all his records to date. There are ballads, searing garage punk, sentimental love songs, two-minute bursts rubbing up next to longer cuts; all executed with faster tempos, thicker fuzz, and more power. Twins makes a great case for naming Segall as San Francisco's garage laureate. | Twins is Segall's third LP of 2012, and stands at a crossroads somewhere between all his records to date. There are ballads, searing garage punk, sentimental love songs, two-minute bursts rubbing up next to longer cuts; all executed with faster tempos, thicker fuzz, and more power. Twins makes a great case for naming Segall as San Francisco's garage laureate. | Ty Segall: Twins | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17133-twins/ | Twins | Ty Segall is in an odd position. The San Francisco garage-rocker has always been prolific, but after four years of albums, collaborations, singles, and covers, his discography has become particularly unwieldy. His output from the past year alone has been diverse. On Slaughterhouse (and on stage), he's an impish, thrashing apostle of hardcore and 1970s hard rock. With Hair, his collaborative album with White Fence, he angled for jam-heavy, psych-leaning rock'n'roll. Only a year ago, he delivered his "serious" album Goodbye Bread, where he both cooed calmly and screamed about an exploding head. Impressively, all three of those albums are really good. It's a testament to Segall as a restless songwriter who can adapt to, and successfully execute, several different styles. So here we are with Twins, his third LP of 2012, which stands at the intersection of all of his recent interests.
In the tradition of Lemons and Melted, which each had ballads alongside searing garage punk, the new album doesn't have a unified focus. With the exception of frenzied, shredding highlight "You're the Doctor", there's nothing especially aggressive. "Gold on the Shore" is his acoustic-driven, folky, sentimental love song. Then there's "The Hill", the bleary psych track where Segall's voice recalls John Lennon's on "Tomorrow Never Knows". (The track also features some beautiful vocals from Thee Oh Sees' Brigid Dawson.) There are familiar elements from Segall's backlog in play, like that specific fuzz guitar tone, which is something like his trademark at this point, and some two-minute songs-- a number that's especially apparent on his recent Singles collection. Those bite-sized singles pop next to lengthier tracks like "Ghost", the slower stoned jam, or the romantic and apocalyptic closer "There Is No Tomorrow". With each new song, hook, idea, and tone, it's increasingly clear that Twins doesn't fit in any one box.
It's a grab bag, and it's easy to view it as a disappointment-- to look at Segall's disparities in 2012 and want him to pick a sound and follow it for 12 tracks. But alongside his engineer partner Eric Bauer (often credited as "King Riff"), he delivers a series of songs that, despite their aesthetic differences, flow very well. Even when he makes a significant jump, like from the giddy rampage of "You're the Doctor" to the paranoid stoicism of "Inside Your Heart", there's usually an easy thematic or sonic transition that keeps the album from sounding like a compilation. In that way, it's close in format to Goodbye Bread, which maintained cohesion despite several shifts in delivery and tone. Twins' offerings, however, are far more sugary and immediate: faster tempos, thicker fuzz, more power.
Lyrically, Segall thrives in two modes: songs about love with very straightforward wording ("Love Fuzz" is a falsetto stab at seduction; the content of "Would You Be My Love" is pretty much stated right there in the title), and stories with a more fantastical bent. The latter approach was prevalent on Slaughterhouse and especially "I Bought My Eyes", and it comes into play here with the darkly abstract "Handglams" and the creepy "is it living inside of me" tale of "Inside Your Heart".
In the liner notes, Segall writes two things that feel fitting for Twins. "This record is for San Francisco." That makes sense-- the man's a frontrunner to become San Francisco's garage laureate. But he's also talking about his friends and inspirations-- he mentions White Fence's Tim Presley, Thee Oh Sees' John Dwyer, and the rest of the Ty Segall Band by name. It's easy to hear how the album fits tidily in San Francisco's bigger picture-- to hear Dwyer's "falsetto-as-primary-vocal" on "Love Fuzz" and "Handglams", to hear Sic Alps' elegant minimalism on "Gold on the Shore", to hear the whole town's penchant for mysterious and druggy storytelling, etc.
His final "thank you" in the liner notes goes to Neil Young, an artist who, as soon as the masses pegged him with a genre, did whatever the fuck he wanted to do and didn't look back; who never compromised on his vision, even when it meant making a bizarre, shitty rockabilly album in 1983; who famously "headed for the ditch" when he felt his radio hits were "middle of the road." Twins doesn't stick to the middle or even pick a lane. It swerves, visiting territory well-tread with a perspective that feels new, and knowing Segall, he probably won't make another album that sounds like it any time soon. | 2012-10-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-10-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | October 9, 2012 | 8 | 2349c082-e2a4-4126-b9a9-d2d9851e69da | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
Inspired by his mother’s Alzheimer’s, the German ambient-dub musician crafts a masterfully melancholy lament that takes his signature crackle and pop into unsettling new terrain. | Inspired by his mother’s Alzheimer’s, the German ambient-dub musician crafts a masterfully melancholy lament that takes his signature crackle and pop into unsettling new terrain. | Pole: Fading | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pole-fading/ | Fading | In his shattering memoir Stammered Songbook: A Mother’s Book of Hours, Erwin Mortier charts his family’s struggles to care for his mother (and each other, and themselves) as Alzheimer’s takes her from them. “I can no longer hear the music of her soul,” he writes, “that whole vibrating fabric of symbols with which she wove herself into the world—or conversely, the world into her.”
Over the last few years, a number of electronic musicians have tried to hear that music—and begun making it themselves. In 2016, Hannah Peel made a glittering electro-pop album, Awake but Always Dreaming, as a way to cope with her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s. That same year, Leyland James Kirby announced that his long-running ambient project the Caretaker would itself contract (metaphorical) dementia, resulting in a series of harrowing invocations of neurological decline that terminated in the epic decay of 2019’s Everywhere at the End of Time; enduring its six-plus hours has recently become a TikTok fad.
According to the World Health Organization, some 10 million people in Europe have dementia. Tragically, one of them was Stefan Betke’s mother. Betke, who as Pole redefined ambient dub for a generation over the course of three classic albums (recently reissued by Mute in an essential box), has followed up 2015’s crisp Wald with an album inspired by his mother’s memory loss, and his loss of her. It is masterfully melancholy, full of extended autumnal sighs like “Erinnerung” (the German word for memory) in which bright melodies stay on the tip of the tongue, never quite congealing into patterns.
Fading is also unsettling, and anxious. “Drifting” welcomes listeners with a beatific cloudbank that shadows a landscape of rustles and scrapes; it burns off with pained breath. “Tangente” swings without swagger, the skittering beat as indebted to the click of knitting needles as to boom-bap. You might expect a track named for the glossy, gothy carrion crow would make the heart flutter, and “Nebelkrähe” does, but it’s more arrhythmia than heartbreak, a murder of blasted-out hiss and brittle kicks. Hovering doom.
“Töpel” has a lighter touch, replicating the awkward shuffle of the sea birds it takes its name from—but then crashes set in, a reminder that, in German, the word is also slang for a fool. Dementia has a way of tricking everyone in its orbit: It makes the familiar foreign, the habitual impossible, until all must be forgiven for bumbling around as they just do their best. In the dream landscape of “Traum,” Betke builds a tottering structure, with shrill flares in tangles above gurgling bass; to me, it sounds like self-recrimination, but we’ve all got our baggage.
There are moments of reprieve: “Röschen” is a bit fiddly, but eventually blooms as spatters of high-end fall upon deep furrows of funk. And closer “Fading” is positively baptismal, with pads like viaducts funneling Betke’s warm dub to wash away the sorrow.
Throughout, Betke employs his own version of Mortier’s “vibrating fabric of symbols.” The signature pops of static still crackle; his bass remains vertiginous. Over 20 years spent cutting discs at his scape mastering studio, he’s honed a tonal expertise that allows him to create uncanny dimensions, dropping delays in stereo fields that feel impossibly wide. His foreground sometimes seems to slide under your skin, and the horizon can appear infinite. Reticence does sometimes get the best of him: Fading feints from Hannah Peel’s empathy and refuses to devastate (or stunt) like the Caretaker. Yet it’s full of Betke’s own version of love. If older Pole was a weighted blanket, these are throws to toss and turn under, offering temporary comfort but no escape.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mute | November 5, 2020 | 7.2 | 234a75e3-f2ad-4989-a62d-0b8082b7a302 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
Despite living in an era when almost all music is available on tap, the Raincoats' 1981 post-punk classic still feels like a self-contained secret. It's telling that Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon was brought in to provide sleeve notes but doesn't say a single word about the record, and no demos, outtakes, or other ephemera are included. | Despite living in an era when almost all music is available on tap, the Raincoats' 1981 post-punk classic still feels like a self-contained secret. It's telling that Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon was brought in to provide sleeve notes but doesn't say a single word about the record, and no demos, outtakes, or other ephemera are included. | The Raincoats: Odyshape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15802-odyshape/ | Odyshape | It's well documented that plenty of oddities were snapped up and issued by major labels during the grunge era, but the fact that DGC released four albums by post-punk artists the Raincoats (including re-releases of their first three records and the then-new Looking in the Shadows) remains a confounding footnote of that time. David Geffen clearly didn't swell his already sizable bank balance by reissuing the band's second album Odyshape, as it quickly became as hard to find as the original 1981 Rough Trade version. It must be frustrating for the group to have their music fading in and out of time like this-- the preceding The Raincoats and the following Moving have been treated in the same manner-- but it helped cultivate a mystique around Odyshape. That feeling is partially shaped by the distinctly un-rock approach, with the core trio of the band (Ana Da Silva, Gina Birch, and Vicky Aspinall) occasionally utilizing African instruments including a balophone and a kalimba to get the job done.
A big part of Odyshape's charm is derived from its backwards construction, with the band leaning away from the spikiness that made The Raincoats such an inviting listen, and writing many of the songs without percussion. The tribal drumming of original member Palmolive was forcibly removed from the mix-- she quit the band by the time of this record, causing percussion to be added after the fact by a variety of guest players including Robert Wyatt and This Heat's Charles Hayward. Coloring in the songs in that manner might sound like the band were shoving a square peg in a round hole, but it undoubtedly contributed to the uniquely disorienting air that Odyshape thrives on. It's from a place where the Raincoats' best ideas stem-- throwing orthodoxy out of the window, playing on instruments with which they weren't familiar, assembling all the parts back to front because the standard way of doing things held little or no interest.
As such, it fits into that basic post-punk tenet of rejecting everything that came before to test out new ways of doing things. This album has little in common with anything else around at the time, other than the feeling that you're hurtling relentlessly forward into a previously unmapped musical space. There may be a little Scritti-esque hue to the guitar scratch on the pushy "Only Loves at Night", but much of Odyshape is positioned in a peculiar place somewhere between the earth and the sky. Sometimes a discordant violin howl is pitted against dreamy vocal pining ("Dancing in My Head"), at others the relationship is reversed and the singing takes on an earthy tone while the instrumentation is positively otherworldly ("Shouting Out Loud"). Occasionally those two impulses are conjoined, such as on the title track, where Birch delves into body dysmorphia over stop-start rhythms that feel like two different songs colliding.
That schizoid shift can partly be explained by all the instrument swapping going on in the band, but it's also an escape and an embrace of the circumstances in which the band found themselves. Holed up in a squat in London, which Birch admitted (in Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again) had mushrooms growing out of the toilet wall, they found a release in Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis albums, and the transformative tones of the unconventional instruments that ended up being scattered all over this record. England wasn't a peaceful place during 1981; riots prevailed, the economy was in dire shape, and the rise of Thatcherism gained a stranglehold on the country. Fast-forward 30 years later and Odyshape is being released again, in much the same climate, acting like an acute reflection of all that hurt and the contrasting desire to block it out for a while.
That divide between the oblique and the real is what separates Odyshape from the ideas the Raincoats' post-punk peers were pushing toward, many of whom went one way or the other but rarely met in the middle. It's a very intimate recording, full of sounds they wisely never tried to recreate again, and vocal takes that are often inflected with a heart-crushing vulnerability. There's no easy category for this record to slip into; sure, you can sometimes hear hints of reggae, and at times there's a folky tinge to a few of the songs. The latter is particularly unusual in the post-punk scene, but makes sense here when you consider how these tracks were initially conceived, and the fact that Robert Wyatt (also a keen jazz fan and with a distinctly English folk-iness all of his own) was drafted in as a collaborator. It's telling that Kim Gordon was brought in to provide sleeve notes but doesn't say a single word about the album, and no demos, outtakes, or other ephemera are included. Despite living in an era where almost all music is available on tap, Odyshape still feels like a self-contained secret floating out there waiting to be uncovered. | 2011-09-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-09-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | We ThRee | September 12, 2011 | 8 | 234addae-e3cc-401e-96d5-61533ec97d32 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
The Red Hot Chili Peppers' eleventh album is their first since 1989’s Mothers’ Milk without Rick Rubin behind the boards, opting instead for Danger Mouse and Nigel Godrich. | The Red Hot Chili Peppers' eleventh album is their first since 1989’s Mothers’ Milk without Rick Rubin behind the boards, opting instead for Danger Mouse and Nigel Godrich. | Red Hot Chili Peppers: The Getaway | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21992-the-getaway/ | The Getaway | Anthony Kiedis has had enough of your jokes, jeers, and general bullshit–and can you blame him? 30-odd years after his band formed, the Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman can’t catch a break. While we’re all sitting on our asses, cracking jokes about his hospitalization and his best friend’s rendition of the National Anthem, he and his pals are out there hustling—spreading love and #posivibes to stadiums worldwide, rescuing babies while doing Carpool karaoke with his bandmates, and getting inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Music isn’t a game to him–neither are carefully-placed tube socks. Appropriately, then, the Peppers’ first single from their eleventh album The Getaway, “Dark Necessities,” is no cheerful comeback celebration–in fact, it’s downright confrontational. “You don’t know my mind,” he sneers on the chorus, “You don’t know my kind.” Fueled by this self-awareness (subservient to a broader desire to shush the haters), the Peppers have come to set the record straight. (Take that, Mike Patton.)
Like* 2011's I’m With You, ____The Getaway* marks a changing-of-hands in the Peppers camp: it’s their first album since 1989’s Mothers’ Milk without Rick Rubin behind the boards. While the producer's absence hasn’t stirred up the same anxiety among acolytes as John Frusciante did when he left the group at the end of the '00s, its significance can’t be understated. Sure, Frusciante's guitarist’s showy solos and funk prowess certainly played foundational roles in the Peppers' halcyon days, but as far as arrangements, engineering, sequencing, and overall sound were concerned, Rubin deserves equal credit for crafting the sonic blueprint that turned four horny goofballs from Los Angeles into kings of the global stadium circuit: crisp, crunchy, crass–and immediate.
Rubin's playbook has blessed the Peppers with a quarter-century of successful chart showings and tours, but it’s also left them sock-deep in a creative quagmire for the past several LPs, dragged down by blaring, untextured mixes and a fatal lack of boundaries in matters of alpha-male kabuki. Good thing they picked the right duo to help them clamber out of the pit on The Getaway: pop-smith extraordinaire Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton produced the record and co-wrote five of its tracks, with longtime Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich handling the mixing. If Rubin's uniform racket is engineered to tickle the reptile brain, then Burton’s approach to rock production–best illustrated by his recurring collaborations with the Black Keys–seeks to unite a divided audience through commonalities, developing frisson through the simultaneous overlaps and juxtapositions between genres, textures, and patches of negative space.
Unsurprisingly, The Getaway easily stands as the Peppers’ lushest album to date, a welcome reprieve from 25 years of cramped, inert, (and in the case of Californication, occasionally unlistenable) mixes. While their sonic tropes haven’t changed–what would a Red Hot Chili Peppers album be without Flea’s slappy solos, Kiedis’ staccato raps, or full-band funk breakdowns?–Burton's foggy, psychedelic palette marks a drastic shift in the presentation of those motifs, widening the gulf between the band's funk-metal past and their hang-loose, jam-band present. The producer’s usual cinematic flourishes (fervent strings, accentuated flange, melancholy keys) reveal his influence immediately, and occasionally excessively; The inert trip-hop arrangements showcased on “Feasting on the Flowers” and “The Hunter” (both co-written by Burton) could have come from the cutting-room floor after one of his Broken Bells sessions, while closing track “Dreams of a Samurai” suffers from a severe case of atmospheric bloat.
The Getaway proves far more successful when Burton steps back and lets the band funk around (with a little extra supervision, of course). Employing an organic approach similar to his winning strategy on Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, Godrich staggers the tracks so the band's grooves can breathe–and more importantly, so their instrumental prowess can be put to use for a change: especially the talents of guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, who joined the band after Frusciante’s departure. Whereas I’m With You delegated the axeman to a textural supporting role, The Getaway casts the newest Pepper as a proper successor to Frusciante, ramping up his duties as a soloist and backup vocalist. Klinghoffer's yet to surpass his mentor's technical skill and overall gravitas, but between Kiedis’ puff-chested posturing and Flea and Smith's explosive percussive dynamics, the guitarist's restraint provides a much-needed anchor.
By now, Peppers fans know better than to expect Pulitzer-worthy poetry from a goofy bard like Kiedis: his rapping continues to function primarily as a vocal extension of his bandmates' rhythm section, rather than a thematic vehicle (unless there’s some hidden metaphorical genius embedded in couplets like “Up to my ass in alligators/Let’s get it on with the alligator haters”; I’m certainly amenable to enlightenment). Considering how the Peppers’ hopes of escaping their comfort zone led them to Burton and Godrich in the first place, the album’s lyrical stasis scans as disappointing, if unsurprising. Less than two minutes into the album, Kiedis gives his first shoutout to Call-ee-phon-ya; from there, the perfunctory Golden State worship quickly plummets into The Californians territory. "Driving down Calexico highway,” he croons on “Encore,” “and now I know the signs for sure.” Stuart, is that you? At least he delves into some other topics, including sex with robots (from the silvery highlight “Go Robot:” “You’ve got to choose it to use it so let me plug it in/Robots are my next of kin”) and Brazilians ("I met a girl with long black hair and she opened up so wide,” he boasts on “This Ticonderoga”), Iggy Pop & J Dilla (on a song called–what else?–“Detroit”), and worst of all, a dance Kiedis calls “The Avocado.” He even proffers up a few life lessons, including the following nugget of wisdom: "We are all just soldiers in this battlefield of life.”
Were it not for these issues and the B-Side's proliferation of yawn-inducing, stoned slow jams, The Getaway could have potentially bested By The Way as the Peppers’ best work post-Californication. By tapping into what made the Peppers Rock Hall-worthy–their instrumental potency, their extensive knowledge of funk, their willingness to laugh at themselves (to a point)–Burton and Godrich have gracefully, gently steered the band back on the right track. At the very least, this surprisingly complex album lends credence to Kiedis’ accusations. Maybe we don't know his mind, or his kind–or at least not quite like we thought. | 2016-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | June 20, 2016 | 5.4 | 234b8e81-1b00-488e-8c82-711fc955d971 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Jim O’Rourke doesn’t much care for ambient music, so it makes sense that his first ambient album picks apart the genre and scrutinizes its attempts to produce truly structureless music. | Jim O’Rourke doesn’t much care for ambient music, so it makes sense that his first ambient album picks apart the genre and scrutinizes its attempts to produce truly structureless music. | Jim O’Rourke: Sleep Like It’s Winter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jim-orourke-sleep-like-its-winter/ | Sleep Like It’s Winter | Jim O’Rourke inhabits genres as different as Americana, pop, and guitar rock in order to poke holes in them from inside. His last proper solo album, 2015’s Simple Songs, tackled ’70s singer-songwriter fare with seamless orchestration and wry lyrics. On Sleep Like It’s Winter, O’Rourke changes direction again, adopting the tropes of ambient music to disseminate both criticism and nostalgia over the course of a single, stunning 45-minute track. The result is an ambient album about ambient albums—a study as effective as Eureka’s and Insignificance’s respective examinations of orchestral pop and rock, even though O’Rourke never opens his mouth to voice a jokey critique.
He doesn’t much care for ambient, as it turns out. (His first love, stretching back to early albums like 1991’s Tamper, was tape music; Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond was a foundational high school read.) O’Rourke’s quarrel is with the genre’s purported absence of structure, a formlessness he sees expressed only through a narrow range of harmonies and sounds. It’s an understandable perspective for a musician whose first love was the avant-garde world of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, where every assumption about composing, instrumentation, and performing could be challenged.
So he’s made an ambient record, but in a way, all his own. Recorded for the recently launched Japanese ambient label Newhere, Sleep Like It’s Winter purposefully picks apart the genre and scrutinizes its optimistic attempts to produce truly structureless music. On its surface, the album resembles some of O’Rourke’s more spontaneous Steamroom releases (this spring’s Steamroom 40 was all live improvisation). In fact, he spent over two years making it, and the meticulousness of his craftsmanship seems designed to examine the very idea of structure.
Sleep opens with delicately stretched horns, which give way to a methodical piano line that wanders in and out of gradually sharpening drones with enough drama to discourage background listening. Put this on while you’re cleaning the house, and it will unsettle your subconscious; a focused listen, however, reveals subtle tension mounting throughout the piece. A conspicuous crescendo suggests that, even when working with such a vast canvas, O’Rourke never loses sight of its structural frames. Around the 16-minute mark, these sounds give way to silence, save for some buzzing cicadas and a few calling birds. For several minutes (though not quite 4:33), the environment surrounding O’Rourke becomes the only instrument, a solo of sorts that serves the structural purpose of bridging the record’s two halves.
If albums like Eureka, Insignificance, and Simple Songs feel connected by O’Rourke embrace of pop forms, Sleep finds its own musical touchstones in more abstract corners of his discography. The combination of horn drones and piano achieves the same anxious swell as “Our Exquisite Replica of Eternity,” the ornate opener to his ’90s duo Gastr Del Sol’s Upgrade & Afterlife (minus the staticky Kevin Drumm guitar solo. Later, he employs a bath of synths as euphoric as his computer-music classic I’m Happy & I’m Singing & A 1,2,3,4, as the composition gently dissolves over its starry second side. These moments suggest that much of Sleep’s “ambient music” comprises sounds that have always been important to O’Rourke—but, as is always the case on his albums, what matters is how and why he uses them. Even when occupying this new musical form, his creative ear for melody and harmony never feels limited by it.
The minimalist composer Morton Feldman once asked, “Do we have anything in music that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?” His compositions—built from impossibly quiet clusters of sparsely played notes and sometimes running as long as six hours—are often cited as predecessors of ambient. But Feldman doesn’t seem to think there really is anything that “wipes everything out”; his pieces are some of the most meticulously structured and intricately notated in 20th-century music. O’Rourke, a perfectionist if there ever was one, offers a similar rejoinder to ambient rhetoric within Sleep Like It’s Winter’s expertly carved frames. The tropes of ambient music may be well worn, 18 years into the 21st century, but he navigates and challenges them enough to make the genre his own. | 2018-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Newhere | August 3, 2018 | 8.1 | 23591faf-d766-4ba3-9ca1-f5130ab724f2 | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
For all its slacker-rock credentials, the Connecticut band could rarely be described as loose. Its third album is a short, hooky celebration of friendship and fuzz pedals. | For all its slacker-rock credentials, the Connecticut band could rarely be described as loose. Its third album is a short, hooky celebration of friendship and fuzz pedals. | Ovlov : Buds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ovlov-buds/ | Buds | Steve Hartlett isn’t known to get ahead of himself. Since 2009, the Ovlov main man has crafted blown-out indie rock with the present moment squarely in mind, while the group keeled between cult reverence, multiple breakups, and the promise of wider success. On the eve of the Connecticut band’s third album, Buds, the singer-guitarist (who also leads garage quartet Stove) signalled he might finally be reckoning with the future. “I’m right in the middle of trying to figure out what I actually want to do with music,” he said recently. Buds tells its own tale—one that looks close to home to find a way forward.
Hartlett’s preoccupation with the present likely stems from knowing just how quickly things can come apart. While Ovlov’s 2013 debut am hit like a stoned paean to times past and places changed, 2018’s Tru bore the weight of addiction and the death of Hartlett’s best friend two years earlier. In the space of 25 minutes, Buds continues to navigate loss while sounding largely at peace with the world. With brothers Jon and Theo Hartlett on bass and drums and childhood friend Morgan Luzzi on guitar, Hartlett crafts Ovlov’s breeziest record yet. It’s still wooly and doused in fuzz, but the band sounds more lucid than ever before.
Ovlov’s knack for threading even the most amp-blown passage with an earworm sets them apart. “Cheer Up, Chihiro!” a make-believe letter to the Spirited Away protagonist, started life as a demo for the band’s debut. It was judged “too poppy” for earlier albums, but it finds a home here flipping between spidery arpeggios, punishing low-end, and vocal counterpoint by Ringo Deathstarr’s Alex Gehring. Evoking early Crumb, it’s a masterclass in how to offset heft, in part thanks to a ripping sax solo by the Hartlett brothers’ dad, Ted.
Gratitude—for life, for familiar faces, for one’s history—defines Buds. On the album’s breakneck opener, “Baby Shea,” Hartlett recalls the band’s early years at the now-shuttered Brooklyn DIY venue Shea Stadium. There, we’re told, he “felt more through” his friends. “Land of Steve-O” stretches the sentiment even further: Written and demoed before Tru, it’s an instant Ovlov classic about an “extremely important” sixth-grade friend with whom he shared a mutual love of Papa Roach. “We’ll talk about the way we try to spend our days,” Hartlett sings, his refrain cloaked in a plume of scuzz. Here, and on the likes of “Moron Pt. 2,” he finds comfort in good company. The hooky directness is hard to resist.
For all their slacker-rock credentials, Ovlov could rarely be described as loose. On Buds, dynamics are tauter than ever. Muscular but never overpowering, Jon and Theo Hartlett’s interplay on “Eat More” opens space for their brother’s sorcerous solo. Conjuring My Bloody Valentine fed through Dinosaur Jr.’s wah-soaked “Little Fury Things,” it sounds like a tear in the fabric of the universe. “Feel the Pain,” meanwhile, isn’t just an in-joke about a band to which Ovlov are often compared: The first line is Hartlett’s direct reproach of J Mascis. “You could not feel the pain,” Hartlett gently intones, defending a friend, Dino Jr. drummer Murph, against Mascis’ reportedly poor treatment. For Hartlett, conscience and personal relationships trump lingering hero worship.
As “Feel the Pain” crests in a surge of tremolo chords and double bass drums, there’s a sense that Ovlov know they haven’t got it all figured out. But accepting the unknown can provide its own solace. Buds feels like a cause for gratitude in itself: Following a “final” show in July 2019, Ovlov had planned to take an extended hiatus, only for Hartlett to glean new insight about his priorities mid-pandemic. When you’re truly thankful for life, even 25 minutes feels like a gift.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | November 29, 2021 | 7.6 | 23602a32-eb03-4239-9ca0-4aae1c252ad3 | Brian Coney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-coney/ | |
On his second album with producer Palmistry, the elusive London vocalist delivers a surreal blend of singing, rapping, and voiceover narration. | On his second album with producer Palmistry, the elusive London vocalist delivers a surreal blend of singing, rapping, and voiceover narration. | Triad God: Triad | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/triad-god-triad/ | Triad | In the seven years since the release of his debut mixtape NXB, the London-based vocalist Triad God has hardly been seen or heard. While NXB developed something of a cult following and eventually received a proper rollout from now-defunct label Hippos in Tanks, its creator remained cloaked in mystery. Triad God may have made perfect sense alongside a roster that included Dean Blunt, James Ferraro, and Yung Lean, but he's avoided those artists’ paths to wider recognition.
Second album Triad, released on Lorenzo Senni's Presto!? label, is the first sign of life from Triad God in almost four years. We know about as much about him in 2019 as we did in 2012. There are no in-depth interviews with Triad God, and no video except a FACT Magazine freestyle filmed in London’s Chinatown and some brief camcorder footage posted to his official YouTube channel. We know, from a fleeting conversation with Dazed, that his given name is Vinh Ngan, that he’s from New Cross, London, that he’s of Chinese and Vietnamese heritage, and that he enjoys “Chinese love songs” and Tupac.
Though NXB was loosely described as “rap,” Triad God's vocals, delivered in both Cantonese and English, are a surreal blend of singing, rapping, and voiceover narration. He mutters, mumbles, coos, croaks, whispers; if he’s rapping, it’s less of a flow and more of a trickle. Whatever you call it, it’s a deeply intimate and confessional mode of delivery, somewhere between the monologue in a Terrence Malick movie and Lil B’s spoken-word album Rain in England.
The songs here are sketches that crumble at a touch. “I Luv U Freestyle” isn’t the improvised rap its title implies, but a recording of a lightly sung melody couched in room tone. Two different tracks, “BDG” and “Babe Don’t Go,” are built around repetition of the phrase “baby, don’t go,” as if each loop could intensify the melancholy. On "Gway Lo," Triad God chants, "Rapping is a lifestyle/Do you know what the fuck I'm saying?," a lyric that could have been lifted from any number of American rap songs. He repeats it again and again until the words are ground into dust. When musicians rhetorically ask if we know what they’re saying, the answer is usually a resounding amen. Here, the response is more uncertain.
The foundation over which these words unfold is assembled by producer Palmistry, who previously collaborated with Triad God on NXB. Palmistry carves his instrumentals out of ghostly chants, ethereal vocal samples, and other sonic shards that elude easy identification. The final product is a little like listening to a melodramatic Cantopop ballad muffled by a wall. The beats on NXB, which often sounded something like those of label-mates Nguzunguzu, were more expansive than the sparse designs here, but Triad God’s own voice is richer than on his previous album. The vocals on NXB were akin to voice memos; here they are more present and fully shaped, though still swaddled in echo and reverb.
As the weird music at the fringes of the internet—particularly the kind of innovative esoterica in which Hippos in Tanks specialized—comes under threat of extinction, Triad feels like the last transmission from a dying planet. For listeners with limited knowledge of Cantonese, Triad God’s music is a blindfolded voyage into a particle collider where disparate cultures smash together at the speed of light. Every word Triad God spits and every sample Palmistry flips sounds like it’s disappearing before it can be heard. Listen now, before the next MySpace presses delete. | 2019-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Presto!? | April 5, 2019 | 7.4 | 2366eb0f-bb12-4319-9bfc-3b05caec4e7a | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
San Franciso funk outsider Doug Hream Blunt has been championed by the likes of Ariel Pink and former Hype Williams member Dean Blunt, who took his name. David Byrne’s Luaka Bop imprint makes the once obscure Blunt readily acccessible with the My Name Is compilation. | San Franciso funk outsider Doug Hream Blunt has been championed by the likes of Ariel Pink and former Hype Williams member Dean Blunt, who took his name. David Byrne’s Luaka Bop imprint makes the once obscure Blunt readily acccessible with the My Name Is compilation. | Doug Hream Blunt: My Name Is | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21270-my-name-is/ | My Name Is | Even with assistance from the Internet, some cult records still have to travel off beaten paths, their pleasures imparted by friends in the know. Just how I came to know about a singer from San Francisco named Doug Hream Blunt four years ago, I am not exactly certain, though I suspect it was on a tip from either a member of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti or else Park Blvd. Records co-owner Jason Darrah. But the moment that pneumatic, rinky-dink keyboard figure that opens "Fly Guy" wheezed and wormed into my ears, I was charmed and confounded. The sleeve art was nothing but a generic white sleeve with a gold sticker advertising the 'hit' "Gentle Persuasion" and it was hard to tell if it was a put-on or else proof that outsider music could remain relevant and vital in an age when any musician could upload his music to MySpace and be discovered, when most clues could be tracked down with a simple Google search. I’m not the only one besotted by Hream Blunt, as Ariel Pink is a champion, while former Hype Williams member Dean Blunt posits himself as the progeny of the man.
Once hovering in obscurity and mystery, My Name Is makes Doug Hream Blunt readily accessible thanks to David Byrne’s Luaka Bop imprint, no stranger to tracking down itchy, quirky folks like William Onyeabor and Tom Zé. Even as the comp clarifies some of the Frisco fog that enshrouded that self-released CD and its bootlegged 12", there remains a slippery, eel-like quality to these 10 songs. We learn in the liner notes that in the mid '80s as a 35-year-old prone to taking odd jobs, Blunt answered a flyer for a workshop called 'How to Form a Band.' Nevermind it was intended for Bay Area teens, Blunt approached the classes with a similar sense of the naïf, imparting that spirit onto the other adult students, four of them women who comprise his band.
There's the spirit of the Troggs, the Shaggs, and Half Japanese to the grooves, something stupid yet undeniable, unlearned yet impossible to replicate. The whinnying, cyclical keyboard figure that Jeannie Killmer repeats ad nauseam on "Fly Guy" brings to mind '90s Ethiopian pop as well as what you might come up with at Guitar Center on a synth using the flute patch and your thumb. Even more charming and baffling are the lyrics, where Blunt makes a streetwise observation about capitalism: "The rich use paper then they charge you more," talks about teaching the youth and then adds: "Girl, I just wanna chill."
A similarly simple yet inveigling melody and needling guitar sidewinds through the wobbly boogie of said hit, "Gentle Persuasion". For all the speculation as to what it means "to do the ninety-nine", the notes just equivocate it to the mystery dance itself. Still, it takes a certain kind of Romeo to make a panty-dropping non sequitur of "like ice, your butt is like dice now, daaaamn."
Charming as those two tracks are, they both run past six minutes and verge on exhausting. But as "Big Top", "Caribbean Queen", and "Break Free" reveal, Blunt sets about recycling both melodies onto other songs to where their appeal becomes threadbare. Perhaps in keeping with the Haight-Ashbury spirit of his home, each song also contains extended, aimless guitar soloing. And while he might have a two-track mind musically, it's solely one track when it comes to his primary theme. Outside of the last song (an instrumental version of "Fly Guy"), the other nine share a similar beat and subject, the word "girl" uttered in every song. So even as My Name Is pulls back the curtain on Doug Hream Blunt’s mystery music, it also makes clear that the opposite sex will always remain one to him. | 2015-11-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Experimental | Luaka Bop | November 25, 2015 | 6.8 | 236aca49-b1e1-4dcb-b0a9-4fd778a4323f | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Spiritual singer/producer refocuses for a deeper, more rooted release. | Spiritual singer/producer refocuses for a deeper, more rooted release. | Georgia Anne Muldrow: Kings Ballad | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13913-kings-ballad/ | Kings Ballad | Georgia Anne Muldrow's latest album, Kings Ballad, was supposedly crafted against the backdrop of Barack Obama's early days in office. And just as Obama is, for better or worse, an inspiring figure whose influence isn't quite in sync with his accomplishments, Muldrow can sometimes come across as an amazing artist in theory: She hasn't totally delivered on the promise hinted at by her debut album, Olesi: Fragments of an Earth. It's not her inspirations or intentions that are in doubt. But hope is a campaign, not a governing strategy; similarly, dropping spiritual signifiers and referencing legends Nina Simone and Alice Coltrane doesn't necessarily make great music.
But Kings Ballad stands on its own, a vessel for Muldrow's lyrics and beliefs. It sounds more concentrated, cohesive, and restrained than previous albums, especially her binge of releases last year. Soulful where she was occasionally brash, her voice pivots and floats but sounds more grounded and assured, like on "Doobie Down", where she calmly vamps over her own coos and chorus ("No apologies, I'll be as black as I want to be"). It flows well, outside of a final stretch of songs seemingly tacked on for variety, including vaguely Latin "Morena Del Ray", vocoded sci-fi riff "Industrial Bap", and the senseless pop-punk outlier "Room Punk!".
Throbbing low end plays well with jazzy piano throughout the album, like the riff on "Indeed" and the elegiac, descending line on "R.I.P.", an ode to Michael Jackson that achieves a certain tension by ending on a snapped beat. The instrumental passages, including the liquid funk-lite of "Chocolate Reign" and chugging "R.I.P.", are decent. Her beats aren't the most adventurous take on splashy, one-two rhythms, but they work here. Kings Ballad still doesn't meet all the expectations Muldrow may have initially inspired, but it's a positive, measured sign that there's more to come. | 2010-03-22T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-03-22T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Ubiquity | March 22, 2010 | 6.9 | 236c0582-d8bf-4384-a799-00149a966a5d | Patrick Sisson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-sisson/ | null |
Nils Frahm collaborates with fellow composer Woodkid on a ruminative score for a documentary about Ellis Island, narrated by Robert DeNiro. | Nils Frahm collaborates with fellow composer Woodkid on a ruminative score for a documentary about Ellis Island, narrated by Robert DeNiro. | Nils Frahm / Woodkid: Ellis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22086-ellis/ | Ellis | Ellis Island was in operation from January 1st of 1892 to November 12 of 1954. That’s 62 years, 10 months, and 11 days. Over the course of that time, over twelve million immigrants passed through the island. According to the records, 3,500 people died from illness or injury. Only 2% of incoming immigrants, surprisingly, were turned away in 62 years. That’s a little over 240,000 people. Understanding the perspective of those 3,500 dead and 240,000 turned away is a key part of Ellis, a film by the French artist JR. Known to some as the “French Banksy” (take that however you will), a street artist and photographer famous for pasting enormous black-and-white images of tragic images on city streets, he was invited in 2014 to make work for a show at Ellis Island called “Unframed.” He pasted life-size images of Ellis Island workers and immigrants on several walls of the south side of the island complex. And then a year later he invited Robert De Niro to narrate a short film (14 minutes total) about Ellis Island’s immigrants, inspired by the project.
Accompanying the film, giving it texture outside of the visual is a score composed by Woodkid, better known as Yoann Lemoine, an award-winning music video director known for his work with Katy Perry (“Teenage Dream”), Taylor Swift (“Back to December”), and Lana Del Rey (“Born to Die”). His solo music work tends towards orchestral ambient with melodramatic flourishes that have overtones of Michael Bay. The score’s co-writer is the Berlin composer, Nils Frahm, who also performed the entire piece. This is just Woodkid’s second score for film, but Frahm has been busy in the last year with scores, making one for Victoria, a one-shot club heist escapade.
The film is composed mainly of a very slow, cleverly edited, one-shot tour of the abandoned Ellis island facilities. Viewers are given glimpses of De Niro passing through rooms. He narrates everything from the perspective of a long-deceased immigrant abandoned by both parents. The narrator dies on Ellis Island, never entering the country. The script that DeNiro reads from in Ellis was written by the Oscar winner Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), and the writing for the film shares the same, strange, didactic historical view of Forrest Gump, as well as its fondness for melodrama and bathos.
There are two tracks total for the score to Ellis, “Winter Morning 1” and “Winter Morning II” (which features De Niro’s full monologue). The score is built from a single piano and the accretion of ambient noises (rain, breathing, shuffling, etc). It slowly builds up towards a dramatic armada of strings. The most interesting part of the score is probably Frahm’s use of the piano, which is supposed to mimic the sounds of a dilapidated piano they found on the ruins of the island. According to Nils and Woodkid, the natural imperfection of the piano sound made it so that the recording caught the instrument breathing, working, and heaving through the process. “Winter Morning 2” is essentially the film made into an audiobook with a slightly different sonic backdrop. The pianos are replaced with a sustained warbles and bass noises that mimic the dank and dark compositions of Colin Stetson.
But somehow that fails to make any of the music all that interesting. Perhaps like the film, it wants too badly to teach you something specific, and the unsubtle way it works can hamper the beauty of what you’re listening to. It isn’t totally Woodkid’s and Frahm’s fault of course: Their score was one of the best parts of the film, hands down. But it carries baggage that makes listening feel tiresome. Overall, they succeeded in making a graceful piece of music that can contradictorily feel bland or even less powerful with the weight of the film’s message attached to it. | 2016-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Erased Tapes | July 8, 2016 | 6.3 | 236eb959-73de-4347-8cef-8094422e8b17 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
The New York band breathes life into the poppier side of ’90s indie rock, and their debut is both wry and sincere in its expression of the endless crap conveyor belt that is life and love as a girl. | The New York band breathes life into the poppier side of ’90s indie rock, and their debut is both wry and sincere in its expression of the endless crap conveyor belt that is life and love as a girl. | Charly Bliss: Guppy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23085-guppy/ | Guppy | Charly Bliss make no secret they’re a throwback. They hone in on an era from about 20 years ago, when seemingly every other band came blissed out, drenched in sun, and outfitted for a spot on the 10 Things I Hate About You or Jawbreaker soundtrack next to Veruca Salt. Back then, for every Breeders there were at least two Letters to Cleos or Stretch Princesses, and their legacy is now constrained doubly: condemned the first time around by a rockist critical establishment for being too poppy, then when everyone started being OK with pop again, dismissed with the same received condemnation. Thing is, this style never went away, it’s just tended to age down.
In the mid-’00s it retreated to teen pop—one of Charly Bliss frontwoman Eva Hendricks’ admitted biggest influences is the Adam Schlesinger/Kay Hanley power-pop vehicle that was Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack—and Warped Tour-adjacent pop-punk like Paramore and Fall Out Boy. It bubbles up periodically in the poppier singles from acts like Honeyblood and Swearin’, but the most mainstream outlet is, of all places, children’s shows. Which is all well and glossy for the kids, but it’s refreshing to hear a revival led by Charly Bliss made for adults.
Charly Bliss took three years from 2014’s EP Soft Serve to full-length debut Guppy, largely due to grappling with this context. The original incarnation of Guppy was a garage-rock set produced by Justin Pizzoferrato (Parquet Courts, Speedy Ortiz), but the whole thing got scrapped on grounds of grunge. “We’ve learned a lot from looking to bands that are more poppy,” Hendricks told The Fader, and the new record pulls no punches and sacrifices no hooks. Half the tracks run about three minutes or less. “Percolator” is a fake-out: the first couple seconds of Strokes guitars give way to an ebullient, literally cheering single. In case the hook of “Black Hole” weren’t enough, we get it again with a key change, and “Westermarck” and “Glitter” take to their choruses like flowers to the sun.
This all sounds simple, but it’s not. Executed poorly, an entire album of this might induce sugar shock. Or, like too many modern acts indebted to ’90s indie-pop, it might emulate the style rather than the substance, using nostalgia like a flashy suit to compensate for a lack of anything to say. But these hooks are delivery mechanisms for often acerbic, often exhausted lyrics about the endless crap conveyor belt that is life and love as a girl.
Charly Bliss gets this; there’s a bluntness to Hendricks’ lyrics reminiscent of The Pink Album-era Tuscadero or, at their bitterest, the quick-cut unease of early Throwing Muses. It’d be easy for a track called “DQ” to stop at its titular reference—it’s ice cream! So kitschy! Instead, it kills off a puppy in the first line—“I laughed when your dog died/It is cruel but it’s true/...Does he love me most now that his dog is toast?”—and when Dairy Queen finally shows up, it’s not quirky but rather the final dead end in Charly Bliss’ teenage wasteland. “Westermarck” (per its title, referencing the Westermarck effect) tosses in kissing cousins by the second line. It’s not all shock value, though. “Ruby” is an earnest, lyrically stark thank-you note to a therapist, the languid “Julia” a mash note to a friend (or more; it’s ambiguous). The glossiest part of “Glitter” is, crucially, the bleakest: “Am I the best? Or just the first person to say yes?” It’s an old songwriting trick, but it always works.
Then on the standout “Percolator,” Hendricks takes all the shit she’s given (“Eva, you’re being too nice, everyone is going to think you’re flirting with them,” she said in an interview with Bandcamp) as well as all the cudgels critics took to female-fronted bands and prods at them with exhausted sarcasm: “Swimming in your pool, I am pregnant with meaning/Could I be more appealing? Writing slurs on the ceiling?” It’s like a deeply mocking recap of a mid-’90s music video, but it’s simultaneously the most earnest track. “I cry all the time/I think that it’s cool/I’m in touch with my feelings” is ironic, but it’s the kidding-not-kidding irony that increasingly defines the decade. It works on multiple levels: as tossed-off sarcasm, as a statement of pride, and, crucially, as an undeniable pop song. It’s a deceptively hard balance to strike, but Charly Bliss does it effortlessly. | 2017-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Barsuk | April 21, 2017 | 7.8 | 236f214e-58ea-4cd2-baba-913d70bd47fd | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The New York party monsters change course, embracing the sounds of the ’90s and getting in touch with their feelings. | The New York party monsters change course, embracing the sounds of the ’90s and getting in touch with their feelings. | !!!: Wallop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/-wallop/ | Wallop | In Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011, Nic Offer, who’s spent the 21st century hosting party monsters !!! across eight albums and many more singles, talks about looking back. “Each decade pays for the sins of the last,” he says. He’s talking about the way the grunge and rave of the 1990s sought to counter the stadium rock and dance pop of the 1980s with what he called “a new sort of slickness,” a kind of trashy authenticity.
Over the years !!! have countered the po-faced myopia of the early 2000s with their own trashy authenticity. They slapped a dad-joke patch on mom-jeans funk to critique the police state with “Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story).” They’ve again and again ordered up the ugliest sleeves that their label, hero-to-all-your-designer-friends Warp, has ever approved. They turned one of the Magnetic Fields’ best songs, a conflicted invocation of MDMA as a psychic and physiological bulwark against homophobic violence, into affable coffee-shop disco, then turned Stereolab’s Marxist-feminist French disko into Brooklyn boys’ noise with a live cover band, Stereolad.
They’ve done it all with an accomplished, if ironic, panache. But Wallop begins with a great whooshing sound, like a sort of time travel, and indeed this solid collection is a change of course: a serious embrace of the sounds of the ’90s, an attempt to come to grips with that “new sort of slickness.” Opener “Let It Change U” is a cocky hulk that could’ve waddled onto an early Chemical Brothers or mid-career Beastie Boys album; the titular it is, of course, rhythm. The next track, “Couldn’t Have Known,” cuts acoustic guitars and stuttering breaks into a nod to Akufen’s 2002 barnstormer “Deck the House,” one of the first tracks of the new millennium that, with its kaleidoscopic cut-up of country licks, R&B runs, and a million other bits of cultural detritus, really sounded like the future.
Bookends in place, the rest of Wallop fills in the ’90s timeline. “Off the Grid” gathers Liars’ Angus Andrew and longtime !!! co-vocalist Meah Pace for a roiling bit of nihilism. “Get up, it’s here/You’ve got to start to assume/The end is near/And not a moment too soon,” they chant. It’s like Primal Scream covering “1999” in 1999. Like a few other tracks, it dissolves into a dubbed coda (“In the Grid”) that’s just long enough to make you wonder what a No Protection or Echo Dek-style version might achieve, yet not long enough to demonstrate it. But then in crashes “Serbia Drums,” built off a riff drummer Chris Egan recorded while on tour; with its crunchy guitars and DX-7 style bell melodies, it sounds about as dangerous as the dominatrix number in Showgirls. It doesn’t suck.
None of Wallop sucks, really, although “Rhythm of the Gravity” duckwalks up to cock-rock with an ostentatious guitar solo and breakbeats that are probably fun live but flatfooted on record. “$50 Million” and “My Fault” are selfies of a funky schmuck who doesn’t deserve these limber party jams but earns them like a salary anyway; the latter boasts a particularly lovely, fluttering synth sound with the exact timbre of empathy. “UR Paranoid” is hyper-tense until detonation and even tenser afterward, as effects drip down the walls of a good house beat and gaggles of vocals chase each other, crying out, “I’m not the one who’s paranoid!”
But of course the ’90s were a decade very much in its feelings, and the best parts of Wallop are its most emotional. “Domino” is among the prettiest and most intelligent songs !!! have ever recorded; its delicate investigation of urban planning avoids “Me & Giuliani”’s smugness, building a multi-level argument mirrored by a multilayered sound in debt to IDM. “Slow Motion” has an undertow of a drum loop and a chorus of Offers ruminating on regret while Uzor talks herself into trouble. “Everyone’s a total fucking idiot sometimes, right? Right?” she asks, while icy-hot melodies rise and fall. “When I look back on this moment/Think about hindsight/What am I going to say I was a total fucking idiot about then?” The loop just loops until it loses its will to rise out of a bed of indiscernible chatter.
Nostalgia is a killer, but luckily penultimate track “This Is the Door” is one inflatable bootie balloon short of a Lizzo anthem, and a hell of a showcase for Meah Pace. “Maybe you think that I don’t notice/But I do/So I thought I should show this to you,” she sings, her voice casual as if escorting you around her gracious living room while tasteful (and, yes, slick) adult-contemporary pop plays on the stereo. “This is the door.” And you’re out. Horns arrive to celebrate, Pace repeats her breakup line with increasing force to make sure you heard it, and in a few minutes the track has burned better than sage in clearing out the sins of the past. Onward.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | September 7, 2019 | 7.2 | 2373924c-9ef2-4d83-8674-abed05a0cb13 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
The Nigerian singer-songwriter follows up her dynamic hit “Try Me” with a stark and voluble EP that blends the warmth of R&B with contemporary Afrobeats. | The Nigerian singer-songwriter follows up her dynamic hit “Try Me” with a stark and voluble EP that blends the warmth of R&B with contemporary Afrobeats. | Tems: For Broken Ears EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tems-for-broken-ears-ep/ | For Broken Ears EP | After barely surviving secondary school in Lagos, Nigeria, Temilade Openiyi did everything she could to avoid going to college, purposely missing enrollment deadlines for the schools her mother would submit applications to. With few friends, a stubborn depression, and an impeccable singing voice—one thick and smooth like cold butter—music felt like her only calling. Her mother, however, wasn’t having it, and sent Temilade to a university in South Africa that offered her late registration.
While studying economics there in 2016, she began working on a song called “Try Me.” Freestyling at first, she sang painstakingly of a destructive love, and crafted the song’s skeleton of organs, pads, and synths after teaching herself how to produce music on YouTube. Back in Lagos, Tems tested the song at a few events, but felt pressured to put music on hold once more and take an office job. It crushed her, as office jobs are wont to do. Finally, in early 2018, she decided she would sing, even if it meant she would starve. Her first single as Tems, the moody “Mr Rebel,” earned her a small but captivated fan base that she fed a second single (“Looku Looku”) to six months later. Then, in 2019, with co-production from Nigerian artist Remy Baggins, she finally released “Try Me.” Her most successful single to date, it’s earned around 12 million plays across multiple streaming platforms, with nearly 7 million between YouTube and Spotify alone.
Now, a year after “Try Me,” she injects the dynamism of the hit into her debut EP, For Broken Ears. Crafting songs that feel wholly new and deeply satisfying as the EP’s only songwriter and lead producer, she maintains the passion of her early singles but abandons the melancholy that defines them. Throughout the record, Tems contemplates her access to people, freedom, and ease, ultimately settling into her place and power in the new vanguard of Afropop. In the weeds of her lyrics, her ideas are patchy, as if all born from freestyles, but they never feel disjointed. Her stark voice melds them together, pulling them across subtle rhythmic backdrops that feel minimal compared to her striking singing.
Similarly to the output of her contemporaries in this new Afropop vanguard like Cruel Santino, Amaarae, and Odunsi (The Engine), Tems’ music expands the genre with a melange of American, African and Caribbean influences. The echo and organ on album opener “Interference” sound like Tems is singing gospel in a candlelit chapel, but her fervent flow-switching on “Ice T” and “Higher” is more rap cypher than church. Predominantly, For Broken Ears is an R&B record, with swirly synths and airy harmonies, and Tems could be mistaken for an American or British artist if not for her colorful drops of pidgin and her African intonation. At one point, Tems was uninspired by standard Afrobeats production, but here, she finds a way to incorporate it without losing her unique edge. Lead single “Damages” is an Afro-dancehall ballad. “The Key” sounds like Afrobeats meets quiet storm.
Tems’ avoidance of traditional Afrobeats makes sense considering the upbeat, uptempo nature of the genre. The singer seems in touch with the darkness that shrouded her adolescence—the stress, the heartbreak, the feeling that she does not belong. She sings of these things more than the jovial pursuit of lust and love that characterizes popular Afrobeats. She starts the album with an assertion of her state of mind: “If you thought I was disturbed before, baby boy, I’m gon’ disturb you now.” Yet, in the EP’s powerful opening, she’s not crazed or vengeful, she’s conciliatory; it’s her newfound sense of serenity that may irk her adversaries. “Give me shame—I give you peace” she adds, sounding tranquil.
In less than twenty minutes of music, Tems dips in and out of autonomy and captivity seamlessly. On “Free Mind,” the EP’s most compelling track, she’s pining for the very peace she finds in “Interference.” She’s steeped in a life of 5 a.m. alarms and pretending to be okay, as if written in the throes of her office job. “Set me free...Farther than eyes can handle, freer than ocean,” she bellows, her voice rich with longing. As she ends the record with “The Key,” where she proclaims, “their chains, they cannot hold me,” you believe her.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Leading Vibe | October 7, 2020 | 7.6 | 237704a4-25ec-4bb5-9d7e-5166246de1ec | Mankaprr Conteh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mankaprr-conteh/ | |
Heems and Kool A.D. deliver two of three promised mixtapes from the Das Racist camp. While both lack the accessibility that marked the first two Das Racist tapes, they allow the rappers to indulge their most far-out ideas. | Heems and Kool A.D. deliver two of three promised mixtapes from the Das Racist camp. While both lack the accessibility that marked the first two Das Racist tapes, they allow the rappers to indulge their most far-out ideas. | Heems / Kool A.D.: Nehru Jackets / The Palm Wine Drinkard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16199-heems-nehru-jackets-kool-ad-the-palm-wine-drinkard/ | Nehru Jackets / The Palm Wine Drinkard | Last November, Das Racist-- the quick-witted rap trio responsible for two of recent memory's most irreverent and engaging mixtapes and one divisive full-length-- made their national TV debut on "Conan", performing lead single "Michael Jackson" from their 2011 album proper, Relax. The scene was set for all the makings of great agit-prop theater: two stone-faced women smacking the living shit out of crash cymbals, crazed instrument swapping, and not to mention an actual Michael Jackson impersonator showing up to bust some time-honored moves during the noisy coda. It was like Andy Kaufman had he been raised on Illmatic and cable TV: Das Racist's secret strength is that you're never quite sure whether they're laughing with you or at you, but when they are at their best, their wise-ass approach also feels inclusive. The "Conan" appearance, however, was anything but welcoming. Heems (Himanshu Suri) and Kool A.D. (Victor Vasquez) mumbled through their verses, leaving the sloppy music to do the heavy lifting. Which made some sense, considering the record they were promoting was built to polarize. The paranoid Relax felt like a warning shot, a suggestion that maybe we'd all gotten a bit too close.
And now we have two of three promised mixtapes from the DR camp, Heems' Nehru Jackets and Kool A.D.'s The Palm Wine Drinkard (hype-man extraordinaire Dapwell's bid is up next.) While both lack the accessibility that marked the first two Das Racist tapes, they allow the rappers to indulge their most far-out ideas. Heems and Kool A.D. sound like they don't care what anyone thinks, and the accompanying freedom brings back some of that early charm. Though the approaches are notably different-- with Nehru Jackets sticking closer to the Das Racist script and Palm Wine Drinkard spending most of its time in the deep end-- the tapes are filled with unexpected payoffs.
If there was any question as to whether Kool A.D. was the true freak of the group, the first few minuts of The Palm Wine Drinkard lay it to rest. The opening track-- featuring the full seven minutes of Outkast's "Spottieottiedopaliscious" instrumental, junked up with what sounds like the din of a busy high school woodshop laid over top-- is annoying and offputting, but things get better. It could have skated by on the easy charms of stuff like "Lagrimas Blancas" (a funky chest-beater that finds A.D. cooling out by the pool in Barcelona, with an appropriate new mantra to match: "Bitch, I'm James Murphy"), or the ass-shakingly friendly remixes of DR's "You Can Sell Anything" and "Booty in the Air". But when A.D. really stretches himself, some of the most bizarre ideas turn into something interesting. Most notable are the three post-Drake R&B tracks, presented free of smugness or irony: The cottony, seductive "Ganglion of Lightnings"-- a 2008 track from A.D.'s Wesleyan group Boy Crisis, repurposed here-- is both sincere and intimate, conjuring a fluid dreaminess that feels sincere. Even when it fails, The Palm Wine Drinkard still entertains.
Heems' Nehru Jackets is a nice counterpoint Palm Wine's experimentation. It's a no-fuss, traditional mixtape full of solid features (Danny Brown, Action Bronson, and Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire) and some terrific production, all credited to Heems' childhood friend Mike Finito. "We definitely listened to a lot of Company Flow and Def Jux stuff in high school," Heems told MTV Hive this month of the pair's affinity for the currently defunct New York indie rap label. It shows-- Finito's production is both enigmatic and hard-edged (plus, there's his dead-on El-P imitation on "Mike Finito Raps Too"), full of junky drums, idiosyncratic sampling, and plenty of Punjabi influences.
Followers of Das Racist (or Heems' Twitter feed, for that matter) know that racial and socio-economic topics are always close at hand, but Nehru Jackets is not an overtly political record. Of the tape's 25 tracks, only a few dig into the specifics of any given issue. "NYC Cops", which first showed up on a Stereogum's Strokes cover tribute compilation, is borderline harrowing, a vitriol-spitting rundown of the NYPD's checkered past, with the too-short, self-explanatory "Juveniles Detained at Guantanamo Bay" striking a similar chord.
But Nehru Jackets as a whole is pretty loose, filled with free-associative raps that find Heems in various states of alertness, sobriety, and engagement. It's also way too long. As he explained in the same Hive interview, putting Mike Finito on was one of the primary goals here: "I figured the only way for people to hear [his talent] is if I hop on these joints and give my man some shine." Finito's work is one of the tape's strengths, but it also leaves Heems with a lot of ground to cover, and much of the material ends up feeling unfocused. In this setting, Heems is at his best when surrounded by better rappers, when he's able to mirror their enthusiasm and energy. If these two mixtapes prove anything, it's that these guys need each other. | 2012-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | null | January 26, 2012 | 6.5 | 23775ebb-642d-4757-8f7d-491991012eb8 | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
The Stranger Things actor’s move into music is refreshingly thoughtful and understated, with emotionally incisive songwriting and a featherlight voice wrapped up in Laurel Canyon arrangements. | The Stranger Things actor’s move into music is refreshingly thoughtful and understated, with emotionally incisive songwriting and a featherlight voice wrapped up in Laurel Canyon arrangements. | Maya Hawke: Blush | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maya-hawke-blush/ | Blush | Every once in a blue moon there emerges from the crowded field of car-crashing celebrity children a legitimate talent. A Carrie Fisher, say, or a Ronan Farrow: some rare, shining light who burns through our deep-seated aversion to nepotism by working hard and doing good. With her debut LP, Blush, which arrives on the heels of her star turn in last summer’s season of Stranger Things, Maya Hawke—actor, model, and daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke—makes a convincing case for her own place on this rarefied list. She is not the first Hollywood heiress to gun for indie cred—for the longest time, I thought Frankie Cosmos was a broke kid from Brooklyn—but her move into music has been refreshingly thoughtful and understated.
There is no entitlement or ostentation in Blush. Hawke wrote the lyrics for each track herself, proving herself a gifted explorer of the many forms love can take. Stunning standout “Hold the Sun” is the sort of song parents sing to rock their babies to sleep, and “Goodbye Rocketship” is a lullaby in reverse, sung from child to parent. Here, Hawke forgives a parent who did their best: “You didn’t know how to raise me any more than I knew how to grow up.” There is a striking emotional maturity in Hawke’s move toward reconciliation, which continues on “River Like You.” The song seems, at first, to condemn a friend who “rushed into my belly and clouded over my eyes.” But Hawke is not laying the blame at this person’s feet. “I’m a river, too,” she sings, and she’s “tamed the moss upon the rocks, and molded the red clay.” The song becomes a hand extended from one dysfunctional person to another, in an effort to heal together.
Other songs are especially poignant, given the context of their release in a pandemic. The record was finished late last year, but Hawke seems to have predicted the phenomenon of loving and caring from afar. She relies, in the lyrics of “Coverage,” on dreams and wishes, tells us that she’s not “really here.” Lead single “By Myself” is both an anthem for the present moment and for anyone who has, perhaps, been a little unsettled by how easily they adjusted to said moment. “I’m playing with myself,” she sings on the first chorus, and alters the verb on each repetition: “talking to myself,” “dreaming of myself,” “beating up myself.” This narrator is used to loneliness; prefers it, even. “I prefer my dreams of you,” she sings, “to anything you’d ever do.”
Hawke’s voice is beautiful. It is soulful, featherlight, a natural fit for the careful Laurel Canyon arrangements that make up most of the record. Producer Jesse Harris takes care not to smooth out her natural rasp, and often records her as though she’s practicing ASMR. At its best, on a seductive kiss-off like “So Long” or the yearning closer “Mirth,” this technique lets you feel like you’re in the room with her. That said, her voice isn’t built for the Joplin swagger of “Animal Enough.” It is not enhanced by the backing of a chorus of children on multiple tracks. The kids are charming, if a little grating, on the whimsical “Cricket,” but they are wildly out of place in the dark, brooding dreamscape of “Menace.”
Even these missteps, though, are evident of a compelling urge to experiment. Blush is a record of impressive variety, both in sentiment and sound. Some of the riskier arrows fall far off the mark, but more often than not, Hawke hits her targets with verve and style.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Mom+Pop | August 20, 2020 | 6.8 | 2379f724-f27f-471e-80b6-e7a414b63c3f | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Henry Laufer, the Los Angeles producer who records and performs electronic music as Shlohmo, has always been a fan of distortion, but on his second full-length he’s beating his synths to hell. | Henry Laufer, the Los Angeles producer who records and performs electronic music as Shlohmo, has always been a fan of distortion, but on his second full-length he’s beating his synths to hell. | Shlohmo: Dark Red | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20447-dark-red/ | Dark Red | Last year was a hard one for Henry Laufer. The Los Angeles native, who records and performs as Shlohmo, saw a collaborative EP with Jeremih delayed for months by mismanagement at Def Jam. In July, the two artists gave up and released the record for free, only to receive lukewarm reviews. Laufer also suffered through some personal losses, ones that he’s done his best to keep private. He’s spoken of hospital visits and funerals, of partying too hard and feeling like shit whenever he took the time to make music.
His second full-length, Dark Red, channels that heavy energy. The album is jarringly different from Laufer’s past work and a difficult, oft-deafening listen. The emotional anguish contained in many of these tracks was hinted at on his 2013 solo EP, Laid Out, but some internal dial has spun from "ennui" to "cold rage." The album’s third track, "Buried", is most representative, a near seven-minute piece of what could be called abyss-core. Its engine is a yearning sample, distorted into fragments and underscored with menacing guitar progressions. Shlohmo has always been a fan of distortion, but on Dark Red he’s beating his synths to hell, from the opening chords of "Meet Ur Maker", which contains a recognizable Shlohmo melody ripped to shreds, to the steel-drum-like plinks of "Remains".
Shlohmo has testified many times recently that he is looking to avoid the trappings of his more pop-leaning projects. Once, he made an avant-garde R&B that resembled the production of mainstream foils like Drake and the Weeknd. Now he’s dabbling in ambient noise and prog with dashes of drum’n’bass and allusions to footwork. Vocals are gone, samples chopped and buried. Collaborations have largely been nixed: "I just want to do my own fucking thing," Laufer said in a recent profile.
Fans of the producer’s older work may blanche at the aggression of the first three tracks here, which function as an aural "Beware of Dog" sign, warning the faint of heart away. Yet after repeated listens, the front trio reveals some of the best moments on the album, demanding attention but also meriting it. Those who want the old Shlohmo will have to wait for the final two tracks, "Fading" and "Beams", which concede to fans, and constitute a kind of middle ground between the producer’s past work and the new album.
If Dark Red were another EP, all that fury boiled down to a manageable five or six tracks might make an impressive statement. At an hour run-time, Shlohmo’s change in tenor loses its shock value and becomes a slog. The four tracks that make up the album’s mid-section are unmemorable, a fact that their names—"Apathy", "Relentless", "Ditch", "Remains"—seem to acknowledge explicitly. When the album’s rhythm finally picks up again on the drum and bass influenced "Fading", it comes as a major relief.
Los Angeles’s Low End Theory club was an early site of the alchemical process that has melded hip-hop kids and beatheads together into a formidable coalition. Laufer was a frequent attendee and in response he formed the Wedidit collective, a group of producers including RL Grime, Groundislava, Salva, and Ryan Hemsworth. All of these artists were early in working with modern electronic dance genres that share the musical vocabulary and dynamism of hip-hop.
But the rest of the world has caught up with this style of music-making, so on Dark Red, Laufer is scrawling furiously outside the lines. Early in his career, before he dropped out of art school, he talked about music as a diversion, something that was less serious and less restrictive than learning how to paint the right way. His experiences with the mainstream and the colonization of his own genre seem to have had a similar effect. With Dark Red, he’s taken another turn, slipping out of the pop-shadowing path he was on in exchange for something darker and bolder, but compromised by its own disorder. | 2015-04-07T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-04-07T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | True Panther / Wedidit | April 7, 2015 | 5.9 | 237be41f-9bf6-4551-85fd-c865d8acc366 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
A remarkable new set of 1967 recordings captures the Beach Boys as they grew into a more democratic band. They sound at once chaotic and relaxed, naive and sophisticated, pop-oriented and intimate. | A remarkable new set of 1967 recordings captures the Beach Boys as they grew into a more democratic band. They sound at once chaotic and relaxed, naive and sophisticated, pop-oriented and intimate. | The Beach Boys: 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-beach-boys-1967-sunshine-tomorrow/ | 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow | From early 1966 to early ’67, the Beach Boys matured from a platform for Brian Wilson’s songwriting and production into a fully democratic band. As Wilson and Los Angeles session musicians were laboring over Pet Sounds and the infamously scrapped Smile, a live quartet—led by Brian’s brother Carl—toured the world, with Bruce Johnston replacing the stage-shy Brian. But during the Summer of Love, as Wilson’s Smile lost focus, these two visions of the Beach Boys merged and created something new—as documented on the remarkable 2xCD set 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow. These recordings make it possible to hear the Beach Boys simultaneously as the moody pop geniuses of Pet Sounds and the fresh-faced surf-rockin’ teens from Hawthorne, Calif.—and, for that matter, the unabashed nostalgia-mongers of their later years.
Sunshine Tomorrow assembles the bulk of the Beach Boys’ post-Smile 1967 work. There are outtakes and demos from two albums, titled Smiley Smiley and Wild Honey, as well as pieces of a scrapped live record, a live studio session, and concert versions. The compilation is anchored up top by the first stereo mix of Wild Honey—a homemade, detuned, piano-based affair, where the band found a new voice for their ebullient early ’60s bounce. Clocking in at just over 20 minutes, Wild Honey is pure fun from the theremin burst opening of the title track to off-kilter folk-pop miniatures like “I’d Love Just Once to See You.”
Though most of the tracks are credited to the songwriting team of Brian Wilson and Mike Love, Wild Honey’s key is “How She Boogalooed It,” an original R&B tune credited to every Beach Boy except Brian. The other four members, along with Brian’s tour replacement Johnston, were beginning to contribute to the Beach Boys in unprecedented ways. That was especially true of Carl, who was beginning to take over the producer’s role. For those already familiar with the sweet charms of Wild Honey, this new mix reveals details throughout, like the DIY Pet Sounds-style busyness of “Aren’t You Glad” and the bass-led “Let the Wind Blow.” But the set’s value comes in the outtakes, rehearsals, live recordings, and even fake live recordings, revealing a band that retained far more ambition than their two modest 1967 LPs suggested. Though often framed as the band’s discovery of R&B, Sunshine Tomorrow reveals Wild Honey to contain almost as many connections to brother Brian’s sad-boy masterpieces and psych-pop as it does to the surf-rockers of yore.
Smiley Smile was recorded in June and July that year, when Beach Boys sessions moved predominantly from proper studios into Brian Wilson’s Bel Air home. Accordingly, Smiley Smile is the quirkier of the band’s two 1967 LPs, carrying forward the cosmic playfulness of Smile with the Boys’ earnestness swapped for Van Dyke Parks’ puzzle-box lyrics. In the studio, the band had been mostly subservient to Brian-the-Genius, and Smiley Smile reveals a finally-shifting dynamic. Working together on the exotica-tinged “Little Pad,” the Boys take up parts that would’ve once been played by the sessions musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, and it marks a beginning of their own individual creative developments.
But Smiley Smile’s lead single, “Gettin’ Hungry”—included as a live take on Sunshine Tomorrow—was the first Beach Boys release not to chart since a 1962 7” issued under the name Kenny & the Cadets. And Smiley Smile itself didn’t do much better. “It just didn’t have anything to do with what was going on [in 1967]—and that was the idea,” Mike Love is quoted saying in Howie Edelson’s perceptive liner notes. Wild Honey, released in December, was only a slight improvement in sales. Heard now, it’s clearly a breakthrough.
After the mega-success of “Good Vibrations,” the rock press had breathlessly covered the ongoing developments of Smile, elevating Wilson to intelligensia status—so much so that he’d been included on the planning committee for the June 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, with the Beach Boys scheduled for a headlining slot. But when the band pulled out of their performance, the ascendant underground effectively wrote the Beach Boys—one of the biggest American hitmakers of the decade—out of the ’60s rock narrative that followed. For that matter, the years following Smile are often written out of the Beach Boys’ own history. (In the 2014 Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, Wilson follows up Smile by waking up in the 1980s as John Cusack.) But while Wilson drew inward and gradually stop participating in the late ’60s, he remained a vital member of the Beach Boys for several more years and albums. Sunshine Tomorrow documents one of the all-time paradoxes of rock history: the sound of a band taking a major creative turn at the exact moment pop culture dooms them to obsolescence.
Sunshine Tomorrow also captures the final live performances of the original Beach Boys quintet with Brian (and without additional musicians) in Hawaii in August 1967. Intended as a live album and ultimately tossed aside, only 12 minutes make the cut here, including two rehearsal takes. Wilson’s vision of a smaller Beach Boys sound most definitely would not have passed the Monterey acid test against the likes of the Who and Jimi Hendrix, especially the muted surf toodles of the “Hawthorne Boulevard” set opener. But it’s a joy to hear the original Beach Boys do “Heroes and Villains” in all its barbershop weirdness, drummer Dennis Wilson translating Hal Blaine's cinematic thwack to an old-fashioned surfer's stomp. With the Hawaii concert tapes deemed unusable within days of the recording, the band reconvened a few weeks later at a Hollywood studio with auxiliary member Johnston to rerecord the songs, planning to add in crowd noise and release it as a “live” album. It, too, would disappear into the Beach Boys’ accumulating vault of unreleased music.
While Sunshine Tomorrow omits Mike Love’s oft-cited anti-“Heroes and Villains” tirade from the Hollywood session, in which he refers to the single as a “nuclear disaster,” the band is powerful but subdued throughout. Brian sings “The Letter,” a brand new hit for Alex Chilton and the Box Tops just then climbing the charts. Johnston serves as a passable Ringo on "With a Little Help From My Friends" (itself only four months old) while the dreamy Wilson harmonies make it glow. The real joy of the session is hearing some of the band’s studio-aided hits performed by the band itself. If “Sloop John B,” “California Girls,” “God Only Knows,” and “Good Vibrations” sound less immortal than their original incarnations, it is also the sound of the genuine Beach Boys, human and wonderful. One can easily imagine them playing (if perhaps not writing) the same arrangements in the family garage a half-decade earlier.
Behind the scenes, the Beach Boys were in chaos, having discarded three albums in one year. So it’s something of a surprise that Wild Honey is as relaxed-sounding an album as the band ever made. Given its short length and sometimes fragmentary tracks, it’s a shock that several of the outtakes included on Sunshine Tomorrow didn't make the official LP; it’s as good or better than much of the material that did. On the mysterious “Lonely Days”—“unknown” listed as author on the official release—Carl, Al, and Bruce pick up Pet Sounds’ melancholy while channeling it through a more innocent surf-ballad brightness. Brian’s “Time to Get Alone” achieves lost-masterpiece status with its denser string and horn mix, more like the baroque machinery of Pet Sounds and Smile than the syrupy vibes of the official 1969 version.
But the magic of Sunshine Tomorrow is that the Beach Boys are all of these at once: chaotic and relaxed, naive and sophisticated, pop-oriented and intimate. Brian is both present and slipping away. The tendrils of Smile wend below the surface, a specter that continued to haunt their works, like the dreamy harmony explorations like “Cool, Cool Water” (eventually on 1970’s Sunflower), the stacked backing vocals on their cover of Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her,” and—most significantly—in another lost masterpiece Wild Honey outtake, “Can’t Wait Too Long.” There, Brian keeps working with an alluring section of “Wind Chimes” developed during Smile but jettisoned from its simpler Wild Honey version.
Wondrously, there’s also a previously unheard solo piano version of Wilson and Van Dyke Parks’ Smile masterpiece “Surf’s Up.” “You know something, I better do the whole song,” Brian says after running through a few fragments, and thankfully he does, soaring into the perfect angelic high vocals. While brother Carl would finish the arrangement, sing lead, and make it the title (and closing) track of 1971’s Surf's Up, the November 1967 take is most likely the last time Brian played the song for decades, undocumented even in Keith Badman’s definitive day-by-day history. It’s a breathtaking performance. Like so much Beach Boys music, it is filled with dark undercurrents, a never-ceasing family turmoil that still acts as a counterpoint to the Endless Harmony brand the group so actively promoted.
The Beach Boys never fully resolved the tension between pop maturity and summer fun, either musically or personally. They came closest with Wild Honey and the albums that followed over the next half-decade, perhaps mostly clearly on Brian’s “‘Til I Die,” before the best-selling 1974 greatest hits compilation Endless Summer sucked them onto the oldies circuit for good. But 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow finds them firing in all creative directions at once for a brief, beautiful moment just as their wave started to recede. The box’s closing is reserved for an a capella mix of “Surfer Girl” from the band’s fake Hollywood live album, and there they are one last time, the fabulous Beach Boys, singing the sun into the surf. | 2017-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | July 1, 2017 | 8.1 | 237c8342-a4e0-44ec-a92a-c3c523be2f07 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
New York poet and singer's proto-punk classic is reissued with a live track-by-track recital of the LP, recorded this past June, tacked on as a bonus. | New York poet and singer's proto-punk classic is reissued with a live track-by-track recital of the LP, recorded this past June, tacked on as a bonus. | Patti Smith: Horses [30th Anniversary Legacy Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7277-horses-30th-anniversary-legacy-edition/ | Horses [30th Anniversary Legacy Edition] | Patti Smith sounded both young and old on her 1975 debut, Horses: young because only a young punk can slink into the spotlight and sell an opening line like, "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine"; old, because she was dead serious and sophisticated, an ur-punk but also a poet and a singer who knew to stop this close to overindulgence. Like her hero Jim Morrison she wrote absurd verses more fit for a diary than a rock 'n' roll record, but could also follow them with lines that genuinely terrified.
Smith is the fountainhead for the punks, grrrls, rockers, and artists that have worn the shit out of this record in their most raw, needy hours, and who study and mimic everything she does with that voice-- which is all rends, tears, and bite marks, and no clean cuts. So it feels cheap not to put this fully on a pedestal, even if "Land"'s meandering free verse makes a poor bookend for the enraged lust of "Gloria", and "Elegie" is a turgid closer. The flaws don't matter: Horses is an album of its time-- not because it's dated, but because it precariously captures a phase in Smith's life, and when all the raw elements fall in place, it feels miraculous.
Take "Birdland". Just like in a jazz ballad, you can practically hear the band breathing in sync, and the slightest misjudgment would screw up the flow of Smith's surreal-- but straightforwardly powerful-- poem. But Lenny Kaye's guitar stretches effortlessly from post-funeral ballad to ecstatic, crazy fury, and Smith's performance is fierce and horribly unbeautiful. "It was as if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars/ 'Cause when he looked up they started to slip." Holy God is she a poet, and she hurls those words so accurately you want to scream and give up too.
That was 30 years ago. Today, Smith is unavoidably grown up, stuck in the canon, and well defined, and that's the artist we hear on the bonus disc in this package, a live track-by-track recital of Horses from the Meltdown Festival in London, this past June. She took the stage with old friends Tom Verlaine and Lenny Kaye on guitar and Jay Dee Daugherty on drums. They knocked the roof off-- but they don't match the original. "Birdland" is fitful and noisy, the segue from "Lands" back to a "Gloria" reprise seems like a cop-out, and Smith's wild poet thing has settled into something a little more, hey, settled, like when she complains about how much time we spend on email and Blackberrys. "Elegie" takes far more meaning now that she has a list of loved ones to commemorate, like Robert Mapplethorpe, or her own husband. But play it back to back with the debut, and instead of a transformative force, you hear an old familiar voice cranking about George Bush.
Here's the thing about growing up: You don't know when it happens until later, but if you could catch it, it would be an amazingly quick moment-- like the point where you toss a ball in the air and it comes to a complete halt before it starts to fall to the ground. When we talk about youth and rock and roll, we're looking for that moment, of not being one thing or the other but of straddling both, of making mistakes that are above and beneath us, of a crest of energy as the ball gets ready to stop. We're talking about Smith changing from the twentysomething poet who decided to add guitar to her readings, and about an artist who can ape the last generation even as she spawns the next one. Or a performance like her old take of "My Generation", where she and John Cale knock the shit out of the by-then-ancient Who classic and Smith wraps with the wail, "I'm so young, I'm so goddamn young"-- and she's still, barely, right. | 2005-11-30T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Arista | November 30, 2005 | 9.4 | 237f68c2-1ab3-469b-8d5f-942913e6556e | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
The Icelandic composer's score for Bill Morrison's film about coal mining in northern England will not make a stellar accompaniment to your next barbecue. | The Icelandic composer's score for Bill Morrison's film about coal mining in northern England will not make a stellar accompaniment to your next barbecue. | Jóhann Jóhannsson: The Miners' Hymns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15578-the-miners-hymns/ | The Miners' Hymns | Jóhann Jóhannsson's The Miners' Hymns is the instrumental soundtrack to Bill Morrison's dolefully spare documentary about the history of coal mining in northern England. As such, it will not make a stellar accompaniment to your next barbecue. Composed for brass ensemble, organ, and a light scrim of electronics, the album takes you places that are woefully ill-suited to early summer; it feels perfect for a grim, drizzly late autumn, when wet leaves are choking gutters and the air carries the threat of pneumonia. This might not be the most inviting sound world to contemplate, but Jóhannsson's confident touch with it is powerful, and The Miners' Hymns creeps into your consciousness like a musty attic draft.
Jóhannsson builds the album's six pieces out of a series of low tones echoing faintly across a distance, like ships through fog. Extended periods of charged silence separate each burst. The structure is firmly "EVENT-pause-EVENT"-- a meek cluster of sound, an evaporation of echoes, a blank band of dead space. The effect is like slipping pebbles in a pond, watching the ripples distort your reflection, and then waiting for the surface to clear. Jóhannsson's pacing with this material is patient unto funereal, and occasionally the music appears to be just hanging there. But train your focus on it, and you will sense the slowly darkening atmosphere. The lonely horn figure of "Freedom From Want and Fear", for example, gathers weight with each repetition, so that when it blares, halfway through the track, the contrast registers like a flash of heat lightning.
The album was recorded in a Durham cathedral, and Jóhannsson has given the music a distinctly liturgical feel-- the descending bassline in "There Is No Safe Side But the Side of Truth" mimics the groaning sway of Renaissance sacred music. And when two sourly whining quarter tones give way to a gorgeously warm brass chorale in "The Cause of Labour Is the Hope of the World", the album's final track, it feels like an epiphany, a generous flooding of light that casts a backward glow on all the gloom and pallor that preceded it. Suddenly, the album's mood retroactively shifts. It's not a bleak autumn record; it's a halcyon autumn record, bathed in inviting half-light. I am reminded of playing basketball at dusk, and that imperceptible moment when you just can't see anymore and everyone reluctantly heads inside. It's a quietly exhilarating "hallelujah" that depends entirely on the previous 45 minutes of buildup for its weight, a nice reminder that some things are worth sticking it out for. | 2011-06-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-06-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | FatCat | June 28, 2011 | 7.7 | 238c977a-3ba1-449b-b5e1-86898153f8b3 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Sub Pop celebrates the seminal early Mudhoney recordings with a 2xCD set that features singles, compilation tracks, and demos, plus two fine live sets from winter 1988. Meanwhile, no envelopes are pushed on the quartet's latest, The Lucky Ones, but there's an increase in firepower that makes it their best effort in a while. | Sub Pop celebrates the seminal early Mudhoney recordings with a 2xCD set that features singles, compilation tracks, and demos, plus two fine live sets from winter 1988. Meanwhile, no envelopes are pushed on the quartet's latest, The Lucky Ones, but there's an increase in firepower that makes it their best effort in a while. | Mudhoney: Superfuzz Bigmuff Deluxe Edition / The Lucky Ones | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11680-superfuzz-bigmuff-deluxe-editionthe-lucky-ones/ | Superfuzz Bigmuff Deluxe Edition / The Lucky Ones | A strange thing happened on grunge's way to the mainstream: the best band got left behind. Maybe that's not so strange, since the best in any scene is rarely the biggest. What's odd is, before grunge's breakthrough, Mudhoney were pretty huge. Their brain-shaking 1988 single "Touch Me I'm Sick" was a definite indie rock hit-- at that year's CMJ Conference, so many people asked me if I had heard it that I nearly got a complex. A follow-up six-song EP, Superfuzz Bigmuff, was almost as popular, and certainly as good. At the time, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Mudhoney would make grunge big.
Why Nirvana did so instead is no mystery, but the indelible mark left on indie rock by Mudhoney's first few records shouldn't be obscured. While the impact was partially due to buzz and circumstance, it came mostly because the music killed. Rising from the ashes of sludge-masters Green River, Mudhoney blurted a Technicolor yawn of 60s garage, Stooges-style howl, Jimi Hendrix fuzz, post-Black Flag steam, and proto-slacker slop. And they wrapped it in a blissfully primal package-- as animalistic as Iggy, with even less pretense. In 1988, Mudhoney were cool, especially because it didn't sound like they wanted to be.
"Touch Me I'm Sick" and Superfuzz Bigmuff are still powerful two decades later: Steve Turner's guitar bleeding over "Twenty Four", Mark Arm's screams pumping the veins of "No One Has", Dan Peters filling every open drum space in "Burn It Clean"-- none of it has been diminished by time. That's evidenced by Sub Pop's deluxe 2xCD set, which adds singles, compilation tracks, and demos, plus two fine live sets from winter 1988. Three versions of "Touch Me I'm Sick" all slay, but it was with follow-up single "You Got It (Keep It Outta My Face)" that Mudhoney peaked. The tune's lopsided sway is both urgent and half-awake, like a muttering drunk who blows your mind with off-handed profundity. An all-together-now "Fuck you!" at the end is Mudhoney in a nutshell-- they're laughing cause they really mean it, and vice versa.
While the smoke from these records was still clearing, Mudhoney released a pair of excellent, underappreciated full-lengths, 1989's Mudhoney and 1991's Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. Both offered gems approaching the best of Superfuzz Bigmuff. But they also exuded a modest, workman-like feel, indicating the band was headed towards a solid career unlikely to diverge from its quickly-beaten path. Five more albums over the next 14 years kept the flag flying, suffering only from a lack of surprise. Mudhoney got perhaps too good at being Mudhoney, able to churn out solid songs so effortlessly they've rarely felt the need to stretch their boundaries.
No envelopes are pushed on the quartet's latest, The Lucky Ones. But there's an increase in firepower that makes it their best effort in a while. That's especially true of the first three songs, a head-spinning block that nearly matches the snap of Mudhoney's prime. The chugging "I'm Now" tears the air, while "Inside Out Over You" marries Billy Childish stomp to Dinosaur Jr. slouch, and "The Lucky Ones" rides Turner's high-rev fuzz. Lyrically, Arm seems acutely aware of time. "The past made no sense/ The future looks tense" he snarls in "I'm Now", and later he envies those spared time's march: "The lucky ones have already gone down/ The lucky ones are lucky they're not around."
The album sags a bit in the middle, offering competent but not particularly memorable tunes. But Mudhoney rips through the last few tracks as convincingly as they did the opening three. On closer "New Meaning", over another searing Turner guitar line, a happily-hoarse Arm defends the band's continued relevance: "I've got new meaning, baby/ Don't you take it away." That new meaning may be same as the old meaning, but the fact that this hard-working band still means something is impressive-- and, based on The Lucky Ones, difficult to deny. | 2008-05-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-05-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | May 20, 2008 | 9.1 | 238e8867-0f8a-4427-898e-9cb0ef4a1629 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
These two new albums from the longstanding Japanese instrumental outfit Mono feel like a double-LP split in half and given two names. The Last Dawn continues along the orchestral arc that 2012's For My Parents followed, while Rays of Darkness strips things down to the rock-quartet bone. | These two new albums from the longstanding Japanese instrumental outfit Mono feel like a double-LP split in half and given two names. The Last Dawn continues along the orchestral arc that 2012's For My Parents followed, while Rays of Darkness strips things down to the rock-quartet bone. | Mono: The Last Dawn/Rays of Darkness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19934-mono-the-last-dawnrays-of-darkness/ | The Last Dawn/Rays of Darkness | Mono’s debut album, 2001’s Under the Pipal Tree, featured a few flourishes of cello amid its melodramatic, guitar-driven post-rock. Since then, the Japanese instrumental outfit has incrementally raised the presence of chamber sounds on their records, to the point where their last two full-lengths—the 2010 live album Holy Ground and the 2012 studio album For My Parents—were swamped with symphonic fluff. It’s pretty enough, but it also undercut one of the band’s initial strengths: tension. Crescendos and cannonades became as quaint as clockwork, and the band’s magnificence was made mundane. The best that could be said of Mono is that they were impeccable self-editors.
That hasn’t changed on The Last Dawn and Rays of Darkness, two new studio albums being released concurrently. Spread between two discs, the 10 songs feel more like an average Mono double-LP split in half and given two names. But there’s something at least nominally interesting about the way they’re divided: The Last Dawn continues along the orchestral arc that For My Parents followed, while Rays of Darkness strips things down to the rock-quartet bone—and adds a couple of tiny surprises that don’t make up for an overall lack of spark.
The Last Dawn is a dreary exercise in being as obvious as possible. With violin and cello as its crutches, “The Land Between Tides/Glory” squanders a fantastic intro—Zeppelin-esque in tone, shoegazing in execution—with percussive clichés and a corny piano coda. The candlelit keys on “Kanata” are even worse; there are 70s soap-opera theme songs with more emotive potency. Mono’s debt to Mogwai and Sigur Rós has never been hidden, but the waltzing schmaltz of “Cyclone” could be the product of any Explosions in the Sky knockoff of the past 10 years. Make no mistake, The Last Dawn is both sweeping and elegant, full of grand melodic gestures and updrafts of euphoric distortion. You can hear the big punches coming from a light year away, and that’s part of their power: They tug at the nervous system like circadian rhythms. But when the title track sleepwalks out of the orchestra pit and into the realm of noise-pop lullaby, it might as well be the scratch of a pencil on a checklist.
And, Rays of Darkness is just inexplicably dull. On it, Mono pulls off an impressive feat: smashing gargantuan swells of drama and volume into two-dimensional smudges, as if they were bugs to be afraid of. The removal of a string section might seem like a brave move on their part, especially after relying on its ostensible grandeur for so long—but they don’t substitute anything in its place except a higher setting on the fuzz pedal. “Recoil, Ignite” isn’t bad by any means, although its whale-song-through-a-Marshall-stack sound just sits in the midrange, inert and suspenseless. Making background music this loud is an accomplishment itself, even though “The Last Rays” confuses beige static with edgy experimentalism.
A couple of guest artists help liven up two of the album’s four tracks: Calexico’s Jacob Valenzuela lends his trumpet to “Surrender,” and Envy’s Tetsu Fukagawa sings on “The Hand That Holds the Truth”. The former track is another case of missed opportunities; Valenzuela’s tone is dusty and ghostlike, but all he does is follow the guitar for a few bars. Nothing will make you wish harder for Rob Mazurek’s punchy, twisty trumpet on Tortoise’s “TNT”. Fukagawa’s vocals on “The Hand That Holds the Truth” are far more successful. True to form, he howls a hole through the flimsy, post-rock-patterned tissue of the song. If only the song pushed back—against him or anything.
Post-rock works best when it embraces, or at least acknowledges, the subatomic friction within the conventional rock lineup. The same goes for cinematic music, another genre that Mono have a leg in; without counterpoint and textural contrast, it can slump into a pretty blob. These two new releases may be at attempt to point out some diametric dialogue at play within Mono’s music, but the range is so constricted it doesn’t allow for much beyond meek agreement. There’s a lack of texture and energy to these two albums, and also a lack of ideas; almost every song feels like a practice-space warm-up jammed and discarded by a far better band. At times in the past, Mono have been that band, and echoes of that exquisite urgency still surface here and there. It’s not enough. Mono have clearly evolved over the 13 years since Under the Pipal Tree—but if The Last Dawn and Rays of Darkness are any indication, that evolution is going around in circles. | 2014-11-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2014-11-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | null | November 5, 2014 | 5.7 | 238f1d04-8db3-4ab9-87ee-b892111aff4a | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
The debut album by Matt Walker, aka Julio Bashmore, revives and tweaks the sounds of vintage house. Walker's a nonspecific revivalist who draws inspiration from every point on the genre's timeline, and Knockin' Boots could actually be the best LP-length statement to come out of the reawakening of vintage house music. | The debut album by Matt Walker, aka Julio Bashmore, revives and tweaks the sounds of vintage house. Walker's a nonspecific revivalist who draws inspiration from every point on the genre's timeline, and Knockin' Boots could actually be the best LP-length statement to come out of the reawakening of vintage house music. | Julio Bashmore: Knockin' Boots | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20797-knockin-boots/ | Knockin' Boots | A lot of grown-up club kids have felt gratified—vindicated, even—watching vintage house music finding large crossover audiences thanks to the efforts of Disclosure, Jamie xx, and a small army of lesser-known producers doing their best to channel the sounds and energy of the Warehouse and Paradise Garage. While this wave of revivalists has been good about citing their sources and highlighting the original artists in their DJ sets, their actual music occasionally suffers from an overabundance of respect. House music was born out of a hacker mindset, and treating it with kid gloves, instead of finding a way to innovate on the old sounds, robs the music of one of its most vital elements.
Producer Matt Walker (aka Julio Bashmore) got his start in Bristol's dubstep scene, but he claims that his first exposure to dance music came through his older brother's vintage house records, and house seems to be his true calling. His breakout 2011 single "Battle for Middle You" combined classic house revivalism with a quintessentially Bristolian combination of sub bass frequencies and icy synths. The resulting track had all the feel of a long-lost Chicago treasure being rediscovered.
Since then, Walker's lost some of the Bristol chill, but kept his focus on house, to impressive results. His debut album, Knockin' Boots, could actually be the best LP-length statement to come out of house's reawakening. Walker's a nonspecific revivalist who draws inspiration from every point on the genre's timeline—"Rhythm of Auld" emulates the kind of hard-edged disco funk that house was built on (including a spookily dead-on vocal part by J'Danna, who sings on three of the album's tracks), while "She Ain't" sounds like the funkily robotic stuff Cajmere was doing 20 years later with a dash of ghetto house raunch sprinkled on top.
He's not bound to any sort of outsized sense of responsibility to authenticity, though, and he freely adds his own personalized flourishes to the recipes he's working from. "She Ain't" ends in a glitchy breakdown that would've been very out of place in the mid-'90s. On some tracks he goes even further—a gently percolating bump combined with BIXBY's aching vocals peg "Let Me Be Your Weakness" as a stab at circa-1988 soulful house, but the rest of the arrangement is a fascinating mutant mashup of '80s freestyle and turn-of-the-millennium UK garage.
After "Battle for Middle You", Walker started collaborating with Jessie Ware, and some of her pop ambition seems to have rubbed off. It doesn't have anything as world-crushingly catchy as Disclosure's "Latch", but Knockin' Boots has enough pop hooks to interest people who don't normally listen to dance music outside the club. Much of the credit should go to the cast of vocal talent, which includes J'Danna, BIXBY, space-funk auteur Seven Davis Jr., star songwriter Sam Dew, and South African rapper Okmalumkoolkat (who helps to pull hip-house into pop's globally connected present on "Umuntu"), but Walker also has a talent for making tracks that can jack your body but also get stuck in your head.
Walker's already carved out a spot for himself on the worldwide pop scene with the Dew-fronted "Holding On", which has been on heavy rotation on Apple Music's Beats 1 Radio. House's danceability and deep utopian streak have helped it take root around the globe, spinning off more variations than even the most ambitiously imaginative house music fan could have pictured back in the days when Ron Hardy was spinning the smooth soul chopped up over thumping beats that "Holding On" tries—very successfully—to emulate. Now that house has conquered the world, it's feels right that a younger generation is bringing back the sounds of its earliest days for a victory lap, but it feels even better to know that there are artists like Walker involved who can keep pushing them into the future. | 2015-07-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-07-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Broadwalk | July 28, 2015 | 8 | 2390f9c2-46b3-4662-a2dd-27179bfd0d35 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
The UK singer refines her sound into something moody and aquatic, trading a narrowly escaped adult-contemporary fate for narcotic electronic pop with ASMR undertones. | The UK singer refines her sound into something moody and aquatic, trading a narrowly escaped adult-contemporary fate for narcotic electronic pop with ASMR undertones. | Låpsley: Through Water | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lapsley-through-water/ | Through Water | Låpsley’s debut, Long Way Home, slipped into enough corners of the music world that it might as well have been three albums, not one. The drifty adult-contemporary track “Hurt Me” anchored her to British radio; DJ Koze’s disco remix of “Operator”—which the German producer called a “unique and perfect” song—took her to the clubs. And Billie Eilish fashioned her breakout single, “Ocean Eyes,” after Låpsley’s “Station.” That’s a lot of possible directions to take; given that “Hurt Me” was her biggest hit, it would have been incredibly easy for the UK singer to start down the dismal path to becoming another Adele (a fellow XL signee) or Ed Sheeran.
Fortunately, Låpsley is more interesting than that, and Through Water refines her sound: heavy piano chords; wistful, solipsistic duets with her own pitched-down voice; high, ethereal backing vocals; and low, mournful synth pads like artfully arranged clouds. The title track drifts and swirls around a recording of Låpsley reading a speech by her father, a sustainable-development and water engineer, chopped up and echoed. The effect is a little James Blake, a little Enigma, and more than a little evocative. Out of its original context, the speech’s science jargon is rather abstract—all “impacts,” “mitigation,” “adaptation”—and Låpsley’s own meditations on extreme weather events come couched in distance as well. It’s an unusual take on climate change, which artists more often make cyberpunk or grotesque. Låpsley’s version isn’t an apocalypse but a slow dissolution, which is more often how these things go; the accidental yet unavoidable subtext is that the planet is in its own crisis now, of the shut-in and quiet kind. Against this claustrophobia, the narcotic ASMR spell of Through Water is a comfort.
Such aesthetic clarity is vital for an album that, judging from its credits, should be all over the place. Låpsley wrote and produced most of the record, but her collaborators include adult-contemporary linchpin Eg White (Adele, Florence and the Machine); while making the album, she says, she listened to “lots of WizKid, Drake, Robyn, [and] Ryuichi Sakamoto.” This isn’t a coherent sound so much as four playlists merged and shuffled, and it’s remarkable how Låpsley turns them into one. When Låpsley mentioned Robyn, she was talking about her own “My Love Was Like the Rain”: “I never really write at such a fast tempo, and I just remember shoving loads of, like, Robyn tracks on, and thinking, ‘I want to make a song that has this kind of energy!’” she told Apple Music. But what emerged was no Body Talk banger, nor (thank goodness) landfill alt-pop, but something more like a discotheque returned to the overgrowth. Sedate organs and synth pads flood it like water, and backing vocals and synth wind around it like vines; only the hollowed-out, crackling skeleton of a beat hints at what it once was.
Elsewhere, the lush pastoralia of “Our Love Is a Garden” is Låpsley’s homage to 4AD in the days of Ivo Watts-Russell and This Mortal Coil. She follows it up with the stunning instrumental “Leeds Liverpool Canal,” fogged over by minor chords and underpinned by sounds of running water (Through Water at its most ASMR) that a delicate piano line hits like sunlight. The effect is haunting, almost post-apocalyptic, like morning after a disaster. The alchemy doesn’t work every time. The Afrobeats-inspired “First” is like hearing Drake and WizKid through stagnant water, less “One Dance” than one lilt. Her less inventive arrangements lapse into mundane ballads—“Speaking of the End,” or the first half of “Bonfire,” which fortunately does go places—and half-hearted dance, like “Womxn”; perhaps this one just needs its own disco mix.
Låpsley’s songwriting, though formalist—full of tidy extended metaphors and twists on cliches—can be deceptively spiky. “My Love Was Like the Rain” turns an old Shakespearean conceit into an ex-partner’s litany of negs (“Remember when you said my love was like a rose/Not the sweet bloom, but the pain as it scratches your hand”). But the partner’s an afterthought, and their half-insults something to embrace: “I embody these elements; I wear them like a fragrance.” There’s a concealed bitterness to her voice on that chorus, but the rest of the track is shimmering and warm and alive. An aquatic rose-and-lily fragrance, after all, would be rather pleasant, actually, and soothing. And an album that embodies black skies, pulverizing rain, and cerebral, arctic chill can be quite compelling: winter, but the kind you can burrow into forever.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | XL | March 26, 2020 | 6.8 | 23919e79-23e1-4a1a-9cf4-9d9c01d9b30d | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
On their eighth album, the trio again pivot to the present, using current affairs, pop culture tropes, and contemporary electronics to aim for Spotify omnipotence. | On their eighth album, the trio again pivot to the present, using current affairs, pop culture tropes, and contemporary electronics to aim for Spotify omnipotence. | Muse: Simulation Theory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/muse-simulation-theory/ | Simulation Theory | Coming to theaters in November, the most diabolical plot yet for world domination from a familiar trio of cybernetic mercenaries. After acquiring Netflix, HBO Go, and Amazon Prime accounts, they achieve technological singularity halfway through a “Stranger Things” binge, having consumed enough popular media to pass now as humans. If that sounds like the typical plot of any Muse album, it essentially becomes their autobiography on their eighth, Simulation Theory. Muse’s most approachable and most ruthlessly broad record yet, it is an attempt to replicate Scorpion’s Spotify omnipresence, so on the nose the first track is called “Algorithm.” Even singer Matt Bellamy has taken off the shutter shades to take a good look in the mirror and admit that, despite Muse’s operatic ambitions, they have always been a pop band.
The instrumental pyrotechnics. Production from Rich Costey, Shellback, Mike Elizondo, and even Timbaland. Bellamy’s megawatt vocals and vague platitudes about breaking free and overcoming something or another: There is little functional difference between Muse and “Fight Song,” especially since most people encounter them in four-minute chunks on corporate radio, anyway. They’ve produced two solid decades of singles that are enjoyable enough when divorced from the insufferable political significance or higher intelligence they use as filler for their full-lengths. Like Coldplay but without the advantage of rapper cosigns, they’ve moved from “Radiohead if they still played alt-rock” to “Radiohead if they got into EDM.”
Simulation Theory is another deliberate pivot into the present. “Something Human” requires using Muse and trop house in the same sentence, at least until the acoustic guitars arrive. The song then becomes an uncanny homage to George Michael. The airy backing track of “Get Up and Fight” could pass for Balearic pop or a Sweetener outtake, while those whoa-ohs during state-of-the-art guitarless rocker “Thought Contagion” should be of great interest to both satellite radio providers and Imagine Dragons’ copyright lawyers. Leave it to Muse to discover Fleetwood Mac in 2018 and go straight for Tusk. They get the lesser-known of Los Angeles’ major college marching bands to play on the alternate version of “Pressure”—that it’s a highlight for UCLA says more about their current football team than the song itself.
And what’s more in line with this decade’s prevailing commercial trends than rebooting the least-obscure IP as something more shiny and self-aware? People will enjoy Simulation Theory because it’s essentially Ready Player One on wax, its techno-dystopian plot merely a piñata for pop culture nuggets that spill out on slightest contact. Because they are Muse, they can get “Stranger Things”’ Kyle Lambert to design the cover and throw in some blatant visual cues to Drive and Tron. The fluorescent howler “The Dark Side” could’ve easily been called “The Upside Down,” so credit Muse for showing some restraint. What once were string-tapping solos or tripled-tracked riffs are now sequencers, because it’s not enough for Muse to share festival stages with S U R V I V E or M83. If need be, Muse can simply replace them. That notion of swapped parts applies to the politics of Simulation Theory, too. “Propaganda” conflates a seductive woman with a totalitarian surveillance state; otherwise, these are the trite warnings of paranoid androids who have already made albums called Drones and The Resistance.
This is a band that has given up on trying to look cool to most anyone, so Muse do here what they have always done and likely will always do—throw money at their latest fancy with the indiscriminate, earnest taste of a teenage boy. The sequencers on “Algorithm” are on loan from any number of post-Chromatics opportunists, but none of them would actually add a real string section like Muse. “Propaganda” and “Break it to Me” veer frighteningly close to the monogenre pop that has crowded out guitar music on rock playlists, except Bellamy still believes in solos. A damn dobro even rises from the digital belches and fingersnaps of the former, with Bellamy doing his best Tom Morello impression before he overdubs a theremin.
If there’s anything Muse truly nail here, it’s at last embracing just the right amount of camp—not an easy skill for earnest bands to pick up on the fly, as U2 and the Arcade Fire have proven. In the past, that never stopped Muse’s name from gracing Grammy trophies, arena marquees, or the top of Billboard charts. Even if Simulation Theory is harder to laugh at than Muse’s previous records, and its appeal makes their longevity easier to understand, does that make it good pop, or are they simply less fun to kick around now? The lingering discrepancy between Muse’s popular and critical reputations comes from the fact that they have never before expressed humor in their own superhero cosplay, which by Drones entailed shiny suits and a stage made of magnets. They used to think they were Christian Bale’s Batman, and are starting to accept that it’s OK to be Adam West. | 2018-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | November 15, 2018 | 6 | 23938c54-dbe1-4c1e-873e-dcd5af9a7bcf | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Cameron Mesirow’s intimate new project builds her production around conversations about formative sexual experiences, which run the gamut from humorous to disturbing, and are often both at once. | Cameron Mesirow’s intimate new project builds her production around conversations about formative sexual experiences, which run the gamut from humorous to disturbing, and are often both at once. | Glasser: Sextape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/glasser-sextape/ | Sextape | The intricate, often tempestuous songs that populate Glasser’s first two albums, 2010’s Ring and 2013’s Interiors, tend to bloom outward from Cameron Mesirow’s voice. Her singing is not necessarily the most complex or arresting element of a given track—that would be the multifaceted beat-work she lays beneath it, made up of synthesizers, drum machines, and snippets of breathy, nonverbal vocalizations—but it is the most prominent. Glasser’s first new release in five years, a single, 17-minute track called Sextape, similarly centers the human voice, although there’s hardly any singing to be found on it. Instead, Mesirow builds her production around recorded conversations with friends about formative sexual experiences, which run the gamut from humorous to disturbing, and are often both at once.
Sextape’s production takes cues directly from the rhythm of the voices Mesirow recorded; it doesn’t merely weave its spoken word components into an established musical template, but begins with a single voice speaking about an awkward, coercive sexual experience at a gay bar. Almost immediately, lacunae appear in conversations: “He reached around and grabbed my—” a voice says in the first minute, the object of that particular reach left on the cutting room floor. Mesirow homes in on the phrase “and then,” repeating the two words percussively until they form a rhythm, then introduces Sextape’s first beat: a pounding, dancefloor throb evocative of the clubs and bars where some of these encounters took place.
Dance music and queer sex intertwine at the root; there is no house music without Frankie Knuckles’ Warehouse, no techno without the Music Institute in Detroit. Yet few contemporary dance artists engage directly with the thorniness of queer intimacy, the complications that arise when queer people seek each other out to dance, to flirt, and to fuck each other. The current discourse on sexual abuse has focused almost exclusively on violence committed against straight women by straight men, leaving queer people to their own, quieter discussions on what consent looks like and how best to avoid harming others. Sextape broaches that conversation without ever slipping into the didactic mode. It’s an intimate piece, not a political one. Rather than write lyrics about complex sexuality, Mesirow simply lets people speak, and finds the music in the conversation instead of forcing the conversation into the music.
An uncanny exhilaration infects the voices on Sextape, even as they describe sexual experiences in which consent was blurred or non-existent. It’s as if Mesirow’s interview subjects were animating their past selves for the first time in years, tapping into the long-buried thrill of discovering sexuality for the first time, only to feel that thrill sour in hindsight. One interviewee recalls repeated sexual encounters with a gay high school teacher, and in his voice lies a deep sympathy for the “fearless” and naive teen he used to used to be. You get the sense that there is a strange catharsis in excavating these memories, in holding the bewildered, excitable young person against the adult who better grasps dynamics of power and consent.
It can be uncomfortable, even painful, to bear witness to these conversations, but Glasser isn’t interested in brutalizing listeners. Sextape doesn’t concern the immediacy of sexual trauma so much as it considers the way those murky early encounters can shape a person’s relationship to sexuality over time. Mesirow counters the weight of the piece’s conversations with often playful instrumental gestures: a bouncing, detuned synth riff, a pounding club beat that interpolates a voice saying “gay dot com” over and over again. It’s some of the most compelling production she’s written as Glasser, and it spirals beautifully out from the voices of friends sharing intimate secrets. With Sextape, Mesirow relieves some of the weight these conversations are often asked to bear and lets them breathe, gently and compassionately, in the open. | 2018-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | April 9, 2018 | 7.8 | 23974441-3324-4325-ae5d-4ac248112a8b | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Songwriter M.C. Taylor—who records as Hiss Golden Messenger—wrote Bad Debt in 2009, months after his son was born, and recorded it in his North Carolina kitchen. Destroyed in a warehouse fire and just now seeing wider re-release, Bad Debt is an album deeply concerned with the nature of faith and man’s relationship with his Maker. | Songwriter M.C. Taylor—who records as Hiss Golden Messenger—wrote Bad Debt in 2009, months after his son was born, and recorded it in his North Carolina kitchen. Destroyed in a warehouse fire and just now seeing wider re-release, Bad Debt is an album deeply concerned with the nature of faith and man’s relationship with his Maker. | Hiss Golden Messenger: Bad Debt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18834-hiss-golden-messenger-bad-debt/ | Bad Debt | The story of how Bad Debt was destroyed has eclipsed the story of how it was created. M.C. Taylor wrote these songs in the months following the birth of his son in 2009, then he recorded them in the dead of the North Carolina winter on a cassette recorder at his kitchen table, playing softly so as not to wake the household. Taylor was all set to release those recordings as Bad Debt, his first wide release as Hiss Golden Messenger, but the CD stock was destroyed during the London riots of 2010, when his distributor’s warehouse was burned. The opening chords of “No Lord Is Free” sound all the more resolute for cutting so gingerly through the ambient hiss of Taylor’s kitchen.
It’s almost impossible to imagine the magnitude of such a setback for any artist, but especially for one trying to launch a new venture. That story has attached itself like a tall tale to the album, at least for those intrigued listeners who have dug deeper into Taylor’s catalog following the subsequent release of Poor Moon in 2011 and the mighty Haw in 2013. Yet neither story affects how we hear these modest and deeply moving songs three years later, when Bad Debt is finally getting a proper release—with three new tracks—via the Tar Heel State indie Paradise of Bachelors. There are two reasons this tale of tribulation persists: First, it exposes the consequences of that fire and makes very real the sense of monetary and professional loss. Second—and much, much more crucial—that fire seems almost biblical in nature, as though God Himself reached down and smote Taylor. It is a tribulation worthy of Job.
“Are you with me now”? Taylor sing-whispers at the very start of the album. He delivers the line in a hush, even before the guitar enters, and that question resonates as both a gentle invitation to the listener and an invocation of a heavenly host. Bad Debt is an album deeply concerned with the nature of faith and man’s relationship with his Maker. That title pretty much sums up the spiritual dynamic, although who owes what to whom remains mysterious and unresolved. The homespun quality of these recordings is crucial: They are raw and rough, humble and private.
He makes good use of that room. Listening to these dozen songs, you can almost measure its dimensions. That space and the lo-fi recording technology create a rustic reverb, as his strums and singing reverberate quietly against the walls. To that simple palette—which recalls the Tallest Man on Earth at his most reserved or M. Ward at his most forceful—Taylor adds what sounds like a foot tapping against the floor to “Straw Man Red Sun River Gold” and “The Serpent Is Kind (Compared to Man)”. On “Call Him Daylight” his vocals echo slightly, suggesting a conflicted soul. These are subtle flourishes, yet they add urgency and depth to these songs and reinforce the sense of a live performance or a late-night rumination.
That field-recording aesthetic is the musical equivalent of sackcloth, especially compared to the lusher Appalachian folk-rock arrangements on his subsequent albums*.* Heard in the skewed chronology of the growing Hiss Golden Messenger catalog, Bad Debt may strike some listeners as mere demos, yet there is nothing missing from these performances, no sense of potential left untapped. These songs sound full and finished even in their austerity. Even so, a deep sense of uncertainty pervades every syllable and every strum, as though no question can ever be answer satisfactorily, and it is precisely that spiritual disaffection that separates Taylor from the artists for whom God’s existence and benevolence are givens. Rather than cynical or despairing, however, Bad Debt sounds hopeful, exuding a sense of hushed celebration. These are, after all, songs sung by a new dad. | 2014-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | January 17, 2014 | 8.2 | 23992943-9590-4394-b887-8277c67567a0 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Syd, the charismatic songwriter and performer at the center of R&B group the Internet, sounds more comfortable and focused than ever on her slinky, confident solo debut. | Syd, the charismatic songwriter and performer at the center of R&B group the Internet, sounds more comfortable and focused than ever on her slinky, confident solo debut. | Syd: Fin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22836-fin/ | Fin | For being such a breezy new voice, Syd—the charismatic songwriter and performer at the center of R&B group the Internet—is unleashing her debut solo album with a curiously resolute title: Fin. The artist, born Sydney Bennett in Los Angeles, is just 24, part of a loose kinship of musicians, like Frank Ocean and her brother Taco, who rode into public consciousness with Odd Future and Tyler, the Creator (much of Odd Future’s early work was produced in Syd’s home studio, at her parent’s house). Though she and the Internet have released three albums together, it was the 2015 Ego Death that provided a breakthrough, gaining them a Grammy nomination and a certified smash in the Kaytranada-produced single “Girl.” Now she’s trying it out on her own, with an album of twelve slick hits that are the best proof yet of what she is capable of as an artist. Aren’t things just beginning?
Fin is, indeed, a fresh start. Stepping away momentarily from the Internet finds her as comfortable and focused as she’s ever sounded. “This is my descent into the depth I want the band to get to,” she told the FADER last year. “For me, this is like an in-between thing—maybe get a song on the radio, maybe make some money, have some new shit to perform.” Working with a variety of superstar producers, like MeLo-X and Hit-Boy, she leans on her different influences—boastful hip-hop, hippie neo-soul, sensual R&B—without ever losing the thread that ties them together: her inventive songwriting and magnetic personality, which leaps from the speakers every time she opens her mouth. Syd has perfected a pose, a slouching shrug and studied distance that makes her appealing, if a little remote. On Fin, it’s better defined than it ever has been.
She uses this bemused vantage point to reinvigorate some R&B archetypes, inhabiting them and winking slightly at the same time. The opening number, “Shake Em Off,” is all dirt-off-your-shoulders bravado: “Young star in the making/Swear they sleeping on me” she sings casually. Track two is called “Know,” and it is an Aaliyah bop, with Syd singing—in the airiest part of her vocal register and over a sputtering beat—about keeping a hook-up hidden away from the public. “Got Her Own” is a playful gay flip on the theme of loving a girl for her independence and ambition. On a quick sensual interlude called “Drown in It,” Syd sounds as proudly nasty as Ty Dolla $ign when she promises to “Swim in it/Dive in it/Drown in it/Hide in it, babe.” And there is “Body,” a minimalist moment that’s sole aim seems to be uncomplicated sensuality; as she told Zane Lowe in a recent interview, she just wanted it to be the “baby-making anthem of 2017.” This is a demonstrably cool album, but it’s hot when it needs to be, and gay listeners (like myself) will be psyched to have songs that are romantic and sexy but do not belabor the fact that they are sung from one woman to another, manifested by an artist who sounds entirely comfortable with her persona and talent.
On the final track, the revealingly titled “Insecurities,” she shows that there is, in fact, another side to her beneath the relaxed exterior: a woman who may sound self-assured, but who gets stuck in the same toxic bullshit that so many of us do, in this case a girl she loves with all her heart who can’t return the favor. Here, she sounds a little beleaguered and hesitant, singing, at first, about packed suitcases but an inability to leave. “You can thank my insecurities,” she sings. “They’re the reason I was down so long.” It’s a welcome omen that there’s deeper psychological anxieties for her to explore on the next album, and I’d love to hear more about that more vulnerable Syd. But by the end of the track, we’re back to where we started, and the song ends with a stiff upper lip and a casual middle finger, melting into a pool of psychedelia. On Fin, what Syd seems to want to portray most of all is an admirable, inspirational confidence, a young woman singing and rapping while totally at ease with the beats that please her most. | 2017-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | February 8, 2017 | 8.1 | 239d831e-55d6-44a6-bc77-5ad3805ea58f | Alex Frank | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alex-frank/ | null |
On their eighth album in 16 years, the veteran British art rockers smooth out some of their eccentricities but lose some of their swagger in the process. | On their eighth album in 16 years, the veteran British art rockers smooth out some of their eccentricities but lose some of their swagger in the process. | Field Music: Flat White Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/field-music-flat-white-moon/ | Flat White Moon | Field Music have a thing for the most lavish proclivities of 1980s pop. At their best—like Commontime and Open Here—the Sunderland band’s art rock invokes second-wave British invasion acts like Duran Duran, Phil Collins, and the Human League, along with the swagger of Was (Not Was). They’ve never received their due—not even in a country as hungry for guitar heroes as the UK, where rock magazines have been forced to make stars of Royal Blood—but their music has always been ambitious. Field Music produce the kind of songs that, if sold under Brandon Flowers’ name, would be heralded as progessive stadium anthems. So it’s strange that Flat White Moon feels like the answer to a question nobody asked: What would happen if the band ditched its eccentricities?
On their eighth album in 16 years, brothers Peter and David Brewis move away from the overtly political writing on their last two records—Open Here featured astute Brexit-era observations; Making a New World was an unlikely concept piece about the aftermath of the First World War—for more personal songwriting. But where those albums were radiant and quirky, Flat White Moon is blunt and crepuscular. Field Music are a great singles band, and not in the cruel sense that their albums aren’t very good. Here that swaggering touch has deserted them. The math-rock drums and hard-edged guitars that balance the band’s pop instincts have been mostly smoothed out; the blaring brass of some of their most anthemic songs is no more. At their best, Field Music take risks. Flat White Moon is a record that too often plays it safe.
So you get a song like “Do Me a Favour,” which according to press notes was written about David Brewis’ young daughter, yet sounds not personal but simply generic. “When you are out there/With no one to hold on to/You'll be strong enough,” he sings, matching bland platitudes with a mid-tempo AM radio rock arrangement that goes nowhere.
Other moments are just confusing. Field Music have always enjoyed a dash of Paul McCartney’s gentlemanly English whimsy, but “When You Last Heard From Linda” sounds like any of hundreds of forgotten bands that tried to ape the Beatles in the late 1960s. “Invisible Days” is something a young band that learned about Smile three years ago might attempt. Most disappointingly, the ability to craft a chorus seems to have deserted them—the hook to “I’m the One Who Wants to Be With You” slowly deflates like a burst soccer ball—and the songs that do attempt to introduce those trademark irregular drum patterns, such as “Meant to Be,” are strangely jerky.
There are some superb moments. “No Pressure” is one of the few tracks to deliver the band’s familiar sense of levity, as the brothers take turns on lead vocals. Bringing politics back into their writing, the song takes aim at Britain’s ruling class, encapsulating the sentiment of the scattered Northern England strongholds—communities “crushed in the ruins”—that continue to resist the Tory Party’s rule, now in its second decade. Featuring a delicate drum machine, “The Curtained Room” is one of the band’s better quiet songs, introducing a more whispering, almost David Gilmour-style vocal and melody. These moments leave open the possibility that Flat White Moon is simply a stagger in the wrong direction, and not evidence of a band hitting veteran status but now running on fumes.
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. | 2021-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Memphis Industries | April 27, 2021 | 6.1 | 239e643a-b2a5-404b-812c-8826fa1e0705 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Adam Bainbridge’s production is always tasteful and seldom bad, but is only great when heightened by its guests. | Adam Bainbridge’s production is always tasteful and seldom bad, but is only great when heightened by its guests. | Kindness: Something Like a War | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kindness-something-like-a-war/ | Something Like a War | Though Adam Bainbridge, the British producer who records as Kindness, hasn’t released a record in five years, they remain quietly influential. Their credits aren’t extensive, but they are consistent, and Bainbridge’s handiwork is on some of the decade’s most gorgeous songs: Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky,” several tracks on Blood Orange’s Cupid Deluxe and Freetown Sound, and Robyn’s simmering nostalgia reverie “Send to Robin Immediately.” In 2012, the brushed-chrome polish of their arrangements set World, You Need a Change of Mind a little off the popular pulse; now the sound is everywhere.
Like all of Kindness’s work, Something Like a War is produced with deceptively invisible skill. Contributors and session musicians include Arthur Russell collaborator Mustafa Ahmed, a cadre of rising jazz stars, and several guest artists, many of whom appeared on Bainbridge’s monthly RBMA radio show. While the album is named for a documentary about India’s population control program, and begins with a fairly explicit statement of political themes—an Underground Resistance sample leads into the slogan, “build your people, make them equal”—more often it’s a record of personal as political, subtle as pointed, softness as weapon.
Bainbridge’s production is always tasteful and seldom bad, but is only great when heightened by its guests. On Something like a War, those guests are generally pretty good; sometimes they are very good. Bainbridge lends Gambian Swedish singer Seinabo Sey an arrangement as sumptuous as her voice, something her solo album didn’t always do. They bring Jazmine Sullivan out of hiatus for funk standout “Hard to Believe,” and she shocks the track alive. Several songs feature Robyn.
The downside is that when Bainbridge’s guests recede into the background, sometimes the songs do as well. “Who You Give Your Heart To” and “Dreams Fall” aim for intimate and wind up sleepy. “No New Lies” is a nocturnal brooder made for late-night sets and half-lit streets; it’s also a little lost amid its surroundings. The mood becomes so muted that when ’90s Philadelphia rapper Bahamadia appears on the title track, a verse full of overearnest psychspeak (“mood switched up to the gaslighting stuff … the narcissist in ’em I couldn’t tame”) nevertheless provides a jolt of tempo that makes the feature sound better than it is.
This effect, a stylish melting into the background, is maybe best seen on the Robyn tracks. Kindness is more interested in mood-setting than big moments, which means that “Cry Everything,” a song about the heavens bursting open, doesn’t work; there’s no moment of catharsis, and somehow, a Robyn song about sobbing becomes a letdown. She’s better deployed on “The Warning,” a ballad that meanders but soon finds its way to a chorus—the almost a cappella plaint “will you tell me, did you ever care?”—that plays so directly to her strengths it’s almost funny. And “Softness as a Weapon” brings out the best in both artist and producer: Robyn’s warmth matches the slow-growing, horn-flecked instrumental, production perfectly matched to theme. Like Bainbridge’s highlights of the decade, it kindles tension, rather than slackening it—building a mood, rather than assuming one.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Female Energy | September 13, 2019 | 6.5 | 23a5541f-210a-4993-a406-3679c168ab5c | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
R.E.M.'s first album since 2001's effects-heavy Reveal doesn't totally strip away their recent fondness for digital production, but manages to return them to a more natural sound. Guests include Scott McCaughey (Young Fresh Fellows), Ken Stringfellow (Posies), and Q-Tip (A Tribe Called Quest). | R.E.M.'s first album since 2001's effects-heavy Reveal doesn't totally strip away their recent fondness for digital production, but manages to return them to a more natural sound. Guests include Scott McCaughey (Young Fresh Fellows), Ken Stringfellow (Posies), and Q-Tip (A Tribe Called Quest). | R.E.M.: Around the Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6752-around-the-sun/ | Around the Sun | After the surprise departure of drummer Bill Berry, the remaining members of R.E.M. found themselves unmoored and adrift both professionally and musically. They had always presented R.E.M. as a cohesive, democratic whole, with all four members receiving equal songwriting credit. Despite their one-time vow not to move forward as anything but a quartet, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe stuck it out after Berry left. Some fans considered this to be an unfortunate decision, but the remaining members seemed to view it as an opportunity to redefine their sound. R.E.M.'s first post-Berry album, 1998's Up, picked up not where its predecessor, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, left off, but where Radiohead's OK Computer did, with the trio taking a touristic trip into synths, programmed beats, and sound effects, and quoting Pet Sounds almost verbatim on "At My Most Beautiful". It sounded like a transitional record, but then so did the follow-up, Reveal.
On their third post-Berry album, Around the Sun, Buck, Mills, and Stipe have settled on an uneasy mixture of textureless production and tentative stabs at past glory. On lead track and first single, "Leaving New York", Stipe harmonizes with himself in a low voice that could have been sampled from Reckoning. "Final Straw" borrows its whirling organ from Out of Time's "Low", and Q-Tip's cameo on "The Outsider" recalls KRS-One's appearance on "Radio Song". Around the Sun sounds more straightforward than its two predecessors, however none of the instruments-- including Stipe's voice-- sound live or organic. Instead, they have a sparkling sheen, which has never been the best trait for either Stipe's vocals or Buck's usually piercing guitar.
Concurrent with the band's move away from its rootsy jangle was a trend in Stipe's songwriting toward the blandly declarative, which began with "Everybody Hurts". Each subsequent album has contained more and more full-sentence song titles-- "You're in the Air", "I've Been High", "She Just Wants to Be", "I'll Take the Rain", etc. This tendency seems foreign and unexpected coming from a songwriter who in the past sounded unwilling to settle for easy answers, and who even parsed the difference between asking and telling on "Fall on Me".
Perhaps it's impending middle age, perhaps it's the empty drum stool, or perhaps it's Stipe's role as the pop culture attache for the American political left, but his lyrics have become lazily explanatory: No longer content to question the world, Stipe seems intent on simply describing it, often in the most anodyne terms. "It's harder to leave than to be left behind," he sings on "Leaving New York". Elsewhere, he says, "Open up your eyes/ You're so alive" ("Aftermath"), "There's love at the end of the line" ("High Speed Train"), and, "Some things don't hold up over the course of a lifetime" ("Worst Joke Ever"). Too often Stipe sounds like a parent passing on received wisdom to children. At worst, this tendency is grossly arrogant; at best, it's merely complacent, as if success has excused R.E.M. from searching beyond platitudes.
But Around the Sun manages to overcome at least some of its shortcomings thanks to Stipe's new role as shunned lover. Having once promised he would never write a love song-- or lip-sync in a video, or carry on past 1999, or play as a trio-- he sounds very new to the form, and songs like "Make It All OK" and "High Speed Train" even sound endearingly awkward and vulnerable.
Elsewhere, Stipe's love songs are more cryptic. On "The Outsiders", he sings about meeting someone for dinner and getting life-changing news, but he never reveals the terrible secret. "Make It All OK"-- about recriminations between lovers-- gives Stipe his best line: He answers rejection with the taunt, "Jesus loves me fine." His tone is so self-serious that the song sounds bled of its humor, pathos approaching bathos. But Stipe's romantic confusion-- and the unprecedented hints at what may or may not be his personal life-- gives "Make It All OK" and "Aftermath" a prismatically emotional quality, their flaws so naked that they become strengths.
It's too bad the same can't be said of Around the Sun in its entirety. Its chief problem is that every word, every note, and every instrument sounds dry, sapped of most of their personality. Whereas R.E.M. were once Southern eccentrics trying to figure things out, and making lasting music in the process, lately they sound neither Southern nor eccentric and, more to the point, their music is far from memorable. | 2004-10-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-10-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | October 4, 2004 | 5.2 | 23a56087-f86d-4c3a-aacc-b098d7510067 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Danger Mouse and the Shins' James Mercer release a four-song EP of outtakes and B-sides from their initial sessions, an epilogue of sorts to their LP. | Danger Mouse and the Shins' James Mercer release a four-song EP of outtakes and B-sides from their initial sessions, an epilogue of sorts to their LP. | Broken Bells: Meyrin Fields EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15262-meyrin-fields-ep/ | Meyrin Fields EP | Broken Bells members James Mercer (of the Shins) and Danger Mouse, aka Brian Burton, each made their names on twisting the sounds of the 1960s-- the former turning the Beach Boys and the Kinks into gleefully obscure indie pop and the latter remixing the Beatles' White Album into a hip-hop backing track. The music they make together, however, sounds instead like radio hits from some 1960s vision of the future: love songs from a world that will never exist. That sense of unrealizable possibilities reinforced the sense of loss on their debut, and made songs like "The High Road" and "The Ghost Inside" sound bruised and battered, but not bitter or jaded. These four new songs are outtakes and B-sides from their initial sessions, which along with that similar album cover suggests they intended Meyrin Fields as an epilogue to Broken Bells.
Yet, the EP has its own distinctive flavor, notably different from that of the LP. Burton's production is somehow both heavier and lighter: There's more going on in these songs, but the elements, such as the Jack Nitzsche-style guitar on "Heartless Empire" or the constant blips and beeps on "Windows", evoke spaceship mechanization and anti-gravity weightlessness. Gears grind and sirens wail on the title track, while a high, inhuman voice ghosts Mercer's vocals to reinforce the catchiness of the melody, like a gremlin in the works. If Broken Bells was indeed a break-up album-- and especially if it turns out to be about the break-up of the Shins-- Meyrin Fields continues that theme and plays it out a bit more, suggesting new stages of grief and acrimony. Meyrin Fields never sounds as eulogistic as Broken Bells did. It's less about loss than about the undiscovered country that comes after.
That's a lot for four songs to convey, but it comes through clearly on the EP's first half. The title track and "Windows" are both tense and ominous, with similar stabs of melody and a distressed urgency to the production. Burton treats the songs as short films to soundtrack, and every element goes toward reinforcing Mercer's dark drama. In fact, perhaps the main spark in this collaboration is how it gets both artists outside their comfort zones: Burton's beatmaking priorities draw Mercer out of his indie-pop realm and reveal the breadth of his songwriting, while Mercer's eloquent concision keeps Burton sharper and more focused. Both men show us something new, even as they struggle to break free of the gravitational pull of their other projects.
On the second half, however, that tension releases, and Meyrin Fields powers down with the loping reggae approximation of "An Easy Life" and the buoyant drift of "Heartless Empire". The arrangements are less insistent and sinister, but the melodies remain slightly chilly. "An Easy Life" was originally released as an iTunes exclusive to the album, and it sounds similarly tacked-on here. "Heartless Empire" does it one better, but throws everything-- grinding guitars, a whistled solo-- at a song that simply isn't very memorable. Still, this EP sounds like more than the sum of its parts. Maybe it's the realization that Gnarls Barkley will never top "Crazy" or that the Shins may never re-form, but there's an intriguing sense of desperation on these songs, as though both Mercer and Burton are realizing that this band could indeed be their lives. | 2011-03-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-03-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Columbia | March 31, 2011 | 6.7 | 23b447d6-3b3b-4f09-8cf4-16b46f2929e2 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The inscrutable indie hip-hop group returns with an uncontainable record that defies genre and expectations at nearly every turn. | The inscrutable indie hip-hop group returns with an uncontainable record that defies genre and expectations at nearly every turn. | WHY?: Alopecia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11254-alopecia/ | Alopecia | Eyebrows raised when Why? were chosen to support the Silver Jews on a 2005 tour, but that seemingly incongruous bill made more sense when considering one of Berman's better lines: "All my favorite singers couldn't sing." Likewise on Alopecia, Yoni Wolf doesn't seem to know he isn't a diva on "Simeon's Dilemma", that he isn't a New Pornographer on "Fatalist Palmistry", or that he's not a grizzled battle-rapper on "The Fall of Mr. Fifths", and he won't let any of it get in his way. He's got too much to say to be concerned about it.
"Unclassifiable" is usually lazy shorthand for albums featuring both guitars and keyboards. Alopecia is a liquid in the sieve of genre: put it on headphones and it begs to bump; recite lyrics aloud and people will look at you with loathing usually reserved for religious leaflet canvassers and slam poets; try and decode the words in your head and you'll only hear the melodies behind them. As for his lyrics, it's wrong to call them stream-of-consciousness, since that implies Wolf is a poor self-editor; nothing about Alopecia is lazy. It's more like 5 a.m. journal entries cut up and turned to collage. Clearly, every line won't be pure gold, but they all add up to something.
Alopecia opens with the chain-gang lurch of "The Vowels Pt. 2", its slow claps and big, watery bass hits rubbing against Wolf's most insistent rap/sing delivery, and the unlikely hook of "Cheery-ay, Cheery-ee..." somehow becoming the record's most ingratiating. Funnily, the first two lines ("I'm not a ladies man, I'm a landmine, filming my own fake death...") reveal most of the record's preoccupation. No matter what he's on about on Alopecia-- although most of the time, he's pretty easy to follow, especially compared to his Anticon brethren-- sex and death are never far from Wolf's mind. The former is pretty evident on "Good Friday", a crisper revisiting of the acoustic plucking-plus-beats of Why?'s earlier work, and an uncomfortable litany of perversions Wolf "wouldn't admit to his head-shrinker" that includes forgetting Elton John lyrics in karaoke. Wolf's voice is (putting it delicately) distinctive, but his monotone murmur here is just one example of his ability to change up his delivery.
Not that he needs to-- while Wolf fearlessly splays open his head for all to see its contents, the band is the real star (the core of Yoni, brother Josiah Wolf, Doug McDiarmid, and here fleshed out by Fog's Andrew Broder and bassist Mark Erickson). They're what make "The Hollows" work as both tentative and propulsive guitar-rock under Wolf's paranoia, and make "Palmistry" cheerful and memorable pop under the sobriety of his lyrics. "These Few Presidents" is stiff indie rock, with drum-machines and the polite blurt of an organ, until the bottom drops out and cascades of clattering percussion and yawning low frequencies soundtrack the most sincere Hallmark card ever: "Even though I haven't seen you in years, yours is a funeral I'd fly to from anywhere."
"Mr. Fifths" returns to bouncy, rap-minded delivery, with tongue-twisting lines about syphilis and the sound of high heels on marble. But they've got some nerve here, making us wait until the record's last third for its best songs: "A Sky for Shoeing Horses Under" is some strange, sublime triangulation of Steve Reich, deadpan rap swagger, and blustery multi-tracked choruses you could link to Alice in Chains. But trainspotting is beside the point-- the band creates a musical landscape so vivid that every cryptic line doesn't seem inscrutable, but more like puzzles worth unlocking.
The stalker's serenade, "Simeon's Dilemma", is creepy, sure, but then Wolf busts out the falsetto like he's a supporting character in a boy band getting his big solo moment-- you can almost hear him pointing at notes on the invisible scale with his hand. Then there's the disorienting and dreamy behind-the-beat thump of "By Torpedo or Crohn's", featuring what I guess you might expect from underground white-guy rap: cryptic lyrics about throwing up behind Whole Foods, the admission that as a kid he "didn't shit his pants much," and hoping for health food in hell. It contrasts with the rest of Alopecia, but even as a portrait of a medium existence, it's still a complicated one, and its most lasting impression after the lulling sing-song of the chorus is pervasive anxiety. It's weird to think that 2008 could be a year of reaffirmation for Anticon, but along with Subtle, they just won't adhere to the boxes we've tried to stuff them into.
If there's anything that drags down Alopecia, it's that "Fatalist Palmistry" is the only real sigh of relief on a very sober record (and even that song begins and ends on thoughts of death). Even as it charted a difficult breakup, 2005's Elephant Eyelash had a few more moments of relative sunshine. Here, Wolf's exhaustively catalogued his sins and imperfections as on "Good Friday", and even the stalker in "Simeon's Dilemma" has no release or acknowledgment to look forward to; he braces for the fall, and prepares to "deny, deny, deny." Wolf seems doomed to feel too much here-- to take in everything, and take it all very, very seriously. | 2008-03-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-03-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap / Rock | Anticon | March 11, 2008 | 8.2 | 23c0ddf1-ed4a-4b73-840a-28b7888f87f1 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
Dark Sky Island is Enya's first album in five years, and it's her best since 1995's The Memory of Trees. Her songs feel sharper than they have in a long time: the textures are glassier, the ballads heartbreaking. | Dark Sky Island is Enya's first album in five years, and it's her best since 1995's The Memory of Trees. Her songs feel sharper than they have in a long time: the textures are glassier, the ballads heartbreaking. | Enya: Dark Sky Island | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21237-dark-sky-island/ | Dark Sky Island | It can be difficult to differentiate between Enya records. Her early work still feels only slightly displaced from 4AD and ambient music; though Enya has never been comfortable identifying her music as "new age," it shares new age's fixations on geology and infinity, which also appear in the music of contemporary acts, from Oneohtrix Point Never to Mark McGuire. But as her career advanced her songwriting and the architecture of her albums solidified into a kind of extreme aesthetic discipline, and her songs began to melt inextricably into each other. Dark Sky Island is her first album in five years, since 2008's Christmas-themed collection ...And Winter Came. I can say with some confidence that it's her best record since 1995's The Memory of Trees, but I'm not certain if that means anything to anyone, including myself. Her albums generate a very specific environment, one which envelops the listener regardless of the quality of her individual songs.
Enya's music is primarily about distance: between minutes, between people, between stars. Her songs stretch accordingly, synthesizers advancing and receding within them like shadows. Sometimes her music seems to move with the velocity of a glacier. Drums are employed sparingly. Either her vocal is the rhythmic engine of the songs (as in "Orinoco Flow", or on this album, "Echoes in Rain") or the rhythm is organized into arpeggios that sound like crystal, and which are often generated from a Roland Juno 60 synthesizer. There are also sudden clusters of sampled timpani in her music, but they provide shape to her songs more than they provide any animation. The way she constructs her music out of samples gives her otherwise warm and amniotic compositions a kind of Arctic and alien dimension.
Her songs feel sharper on Dark Sky Island than they have in years. Its textures are glassier; the individual sampled string hits on "Echoes in Rain" sound like arthritic branches sprouting from a frozen earth. The ballads are heartbreaking. "I Could Never Say Goodbye" and "So I Could Find My Way" describe an incredible distance that can't be collapsed; in the case of "So I Could Find My Way", that distance is the vastness between life and death. (She wrote it about her producer Nicky Ryan's mother.) Elsewhere she (somewhat invisibly) experiments; in "Sancta Maria" a synthesizer collides gently against more classical instruments in a way that seems to clarify each. She sings several interstellar ballads in Loxian, a language her lyricist Roma Ryan invented, though the language is mainly experienced on record as a blur of vowels. (These "experiments" of course merge seamlessly with the rest of her work; they're composed of the same glossy surfaces and drift through identical rhythms.)
Her first two albums, Enya and Watermark, are much more digressive and rhythmically diverse than her later work, including Dark Sky Island; for every gentle, shapeless ballad, there would be exercises in more precise, classical forms, or a song would unfold into a more distracted rhythm. Most of her songs since have been subject to a merciless symmetry. She drifts somewhat out of her aesthetic on Dark Sky Island's "Even in the Shadows", which pulses like an artery from the double bass playing of Eddie Lee; as a result, it's one of the best songs on the record. But it matters little. Though her approach has calcified, the environments generated by her records are still singular, a gentle, untroubled, indefinite ambience that is very soothing to inhabit. It's like being embraced by the air. | 2015-11-20T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-11-20T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner Bros. | November 20, 2015 | 7.1 | 23c1e975-1480-497f-8992-b1cd20b13206 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
Recorded at the same time as last year’s WARM, the companion album showcases Tweedy’s aged songwriting that continues to be humble and revealing. | Recorded at the same time as last year’s WARM, the companion album showcases Tweedy’s aged songwriting that continues to be humble and revealing. | Jeff Tweedy: WARMER | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-tweedy-warmer/ | WARMER | Pity the companion album, the quick follow-up record that an artist swears is just as good as the predecessor it was simultaneously recorded with, despite giving it a fraction of the promotional push. And so it is with WARMER, the surprise sequel to Jeff Tweedy’s gracious 2018 acoustic record WARM. “WARMER means as much to me as WARM and might just as easily have been released as the first record of the pair,” Tweedy insists in a statement, even though the album’s very title suggests a secondary position in a sequence.
Adding to the impression that WARMER is something less than Tweedy’s most cherished material is its unceremonious physical release on Record Store Day. But then again, the joy of Tweedy’s recent releases is that they don’t demand ceremony—if anything, they thrive on its absence. After two decades of carrying the mantle of an important indie artist, Tweedy has retreated to his own Chicago studio, where he’s freed himself from expectations with a series of recordings that blur the distance between cutting-room scraps and some of his career-best songs. WARM was a revelation precisely because it wasn’t fishing for prestige. Instead of striving to be a major work, it settled for simply documenting a songwriter in his element.
Recorded entirely alone save for drums from his son Spencer, WARMER doesn’t quite wow like WARM, nor does it offer that initial thrill of hearing an artist reclaim what made them great after a relative drought. It’s a touch more subdued and a little more one-note, seemingly born more of a pleasant itch than a pressing need to create. But the humble magic of WARM carries through, and these songs are as revealing and beguiling as the first batch.
Tweedy’s usually most enjoyable when he’s enjoying himself, and he’s in an especially affable mood for much of the record’s opening half. An acoustic nod to T. Rex, “Family Ghost” is a glammy, hooky pleasure, while the waltzing “Ten Sentences,” with its slide guitar, is a zippy exercise in western swing. The grumpy contingent of Wilco fans who still think that 1999’s Summerteeth was overblown should find these recordings a happy compromise: They’ve got the same open-armed pop sensibilities, but considerably more studio restraint.
Tweedy’s songs are often a good deal more sorrowful than his performances let on. On “Orphan,” he longs for his parents and absolves them in death (“Bring them back to me/I will forgive them, let them love me again,” he begs.) He ponders his own demise on “Empty Head,” and on “Landscape” he describes the creative process in trying terms: “Pushing words onto the page/Patching where the heart is frayed.”
And yet, despite his grief, he’s steadfast in his refusal to romanticize suffering. One of the most powerful takeaways from Tweedy’s 2018 memoir titled Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) was his dismantling of the myth of the tortured artist. “I think that artists create in spite of suffering, not because of suffering,” he wrote. He mirrors that messaging on “Ultra Orange Room,” where he shakes the belief that “there is no mother like pain.” “When I was young, I wanted a masterpiece,” he sings, “Every thought I’d come across never would belong to me.” Throughout WARMER he downplays lyrics that a lesser songwriter would have mined for misery, but these songs are no less moving for that understatement. Sometimes it’s the heaviest sentiments that call for the lightest touch. | 2019-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | dBpm | April 16, 2019 | 7.6 | 23c62998-eed4-4ce2-bcbf-63121a2b4536 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Teyana Taylor and her tremendous voice are so deft at performing modernist soul with the genre’s forebears as her backdrop, and her album features some of the best Old Kanye beats heard this year. | Teyana Taylor and her tremendous voice are so deft at performing modernist soul with the genre’s forebears as her backdrop, and her album features some of the best Old Kanye beats heard this year. | Teyana Taylor: K.T.S.E. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/teyana-taylor-ktse/ | K.T.S.E. | For Teyana Taylor, music has been a waiting game. She started her career at Pharrell’s Star Trak label over a decade ago, but it wasn’t until 2014 that the singer released her first full-length studio album, VII. It was a smooth and adventurous pop record that only made a small splash due in part to the lax promotion behind it. Since then, her star has risen mainly for music-adjacent accolades, such as dancing sweat-slicked and ripped in the video for Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo track “Fade” and the emergency birth of her daughter Junie, who she delivered straight into the hands of her husband, NBA champ Iman Shumpert, with whom she shares an eponymous reality show. It’s finally time for her enormous voice to retake the spotlight.
Taylor’s latest, K.T.S.E. (short for Keep That Same Energy), is long overdue, but the album remains too small a platform for her tremendous vocal talent. It is the final of the five G.O.O.D. Music albums produced by Kanye in Wyoming, the least controversial—save for its delayed release—and, perhaps, the most in touch with the Old Kanye. Soul samples abound throughout, from the Delfonics to GQ to the Stylistics’ “Because I Love You, Girl” on the New York native’s personal empowerment anthem “Rose in Harlem.” The minimalist guitar noodling often found in the blues makes the flirty “Hurry” even more playful. These songs aren’t just Kanye catnip, but a marker of Taylor’s flexibility. She is deft at performing modernist soul with the genre’s forebears as her backdrop. Her singing sounds luxurious but effortless; even when she adopts a Migos-type flow on opener “No Manners,” it’s sticky and seductive.
Album closer “WTP” is one of the most compelling songs on the album—but it is a lot to untangle. Taylor floats over a pseudo-vogue beat, singing only a sultry cabaret-style hook as rapper Mykki Blanco tries on the role of ballroom commentator. The song’s mantric backbone of “work this pussy” straddles the line between a hypnotic siren call and a runway maxim for feeling like you have the best tuck at the ball. The song is de rigueur fun at a time when Vanessa Hudgens can guest on “RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars” and passively say, “I’m really into voguing right now.” Ballroom continues to face mainstreaming beyond the short reaches of Paris Is Burning and vogue house’s canonical text Masters at Work’s “The Ha Dance” making its way into all types of global club music. It feels perfect for Taylor, but it’s also dishonest and off-putting as produced by MAGA-era Kanye who has no business pilfering from anyone’s liberation sound when he likes the way it sounds when Trump talks.
Kanye’s fetid touch could sideline Taylor yet again, even though she belongs among a cadre of R&B singers, like Kehlani and SZA, whose hefty talents and distinct points of view are often relegated to supporting roles on albums and tours. This absence was probed last August by Mosi Reeves for NPR in a piece called, “Kehlani, and R&B’s Women of Color, Struggle to Be Heard in Pop Market” as Demi Lovato’s Kehlani-like “Sorry Not Sorry” went to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 while Kehlani has yet to score a Top 20 single. Even SZA—whose extraordinary, voice-of-a-generation album Ctrl earned her five Grammy nominations (she won none of them) and debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200—spent 2018 as an opener on the TDE Championship Tour instead of taking a victory lap with top billing on her own stadium outing. K.T.S.E.’s length—22 minutes, even shorter than the pint-sized ye—makes it feel like a blip on the bloated timeline of Kanye West’s 2018 when it should really be Taylor’s turn at musical stardom. But within this brief album are all the small secrets of Teyana Taylor just waiting to be delivered on a massive stage. | 2018-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | G.O.O.D. Music | June 27, 2018 | 7.8 | 23c68f14-952a-4917-a612-040bad914e17 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | |
On Greta Kline’s third official album, pure love, self-loathing, and taxidermied dogs all find their way into her dazzling world of perennially inspired indie pop. | On Greta Kline’s third official album, pure love, self-loathing, and taxidermied dogs all find their way into her dazzling world of perennially inspired indie pop. | Frankie Cosmos: Vessel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/frankie-cosmos-vessel/ | Vessel | Towards the end of her third studio album, Vessel, Greta Kline articulates the philosophy of her current self in 13 words: “I wasn’t built for this world/I had sex once, now I’m dead.” Kline has always written with an inspiring economy of language—such as on the 2012 collection much ado about fucking and the many elegies for her deceased dog, JoJo—which seems to honor the Yeats maxim that “sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind.” But she bests herself here, on the deceptively sunny “Cafeteria.” And brutal as Kline’s epiphany may be, it contains the promise of accruing years and experience: knowing oneself. It’s a moment of pure self-possession among all the distressing frayed edges that make up your early 20s.
The 24-year-old Kline has become known as no less than a savior of indie pop and the poet laureate of New York City DIY. With wry minimalism and a voice both cherubic and droll, Kline shows that we feel the depths of the city in a granular way—like in the small defeat of swiping an empty MetroCard, or the tiny victory of ascending a platform just as the train arrives. Since the turn of the decade, Kline has taken this idea and shaped it into hundreds of cleverly-arranged pop miniatures, strummed into Garageband and posted to Bandcamp like an infinite diary. She made the twee stylings of her K Records forebears feel like a folk form. And within this humble framework, she conveyed humor, anguish, desire, sensitivity, grace, and not a tinge of eccentricity. (“Be normal, Frankie/Be normal,” goes one of her greats.) Her self-reflexive web of recurring characters, like JoJo, made the world of Frankie Cosmos feel much bigger than any one album.
Vessel edits the script a bit. If there was a reportorial flair to Frankie Cosmos songs before—a bus that splashes her with rain, a perfect day lingering on the books outside The Strand—then on Vessel, her discoveries are more insular. The album is less about the epic poem of New York than about how the brain and the heart are connected by nerves and blood—less about Kline’s place in the world, than her place within herself. Her New York optimism, in fact, feels despairingly absent; adding to the sense that things have changed is a macabre image of her beloved dog in a taxidermy museum. And while Frankie Cosmos has always been punk in spirit (here, there are 18 tracks in 33 minutes), Vessel’s unvarnished indie rock is a hair closer to punk in sound. A couple of songs do exceed three minutes—which is like “Desolation Row” by Kline’s wise standard of brevity.
No matter the setting, it is hard to imagine Kline ever being starved for inspiration. You could picture her left at a beach penning witty odes to ex-lovers based on every seashell. Kline makes things as banal as a dying phone feel profound. Her language remains a singular mix of pure love and self-loathing, like a romantic e.e. cummings bot amid a stream of raw protected tweets. One moment, on the retro daydream “Duet,” Kline is “making a list of people to kiss/The list is a million Yous long.” Later, on the charmingly faltering piano ballad “Ur Up,” she is succumbing to a modern nagging concern (u up?), but adding her own vernacular and political twists: “I wonder if ur up/I’m America/Thinkin’ of you for no reason.” It’s funny and it shakes you all the same. As ever, Kline’s words are alive on the page as much as in song. “I want in on the other side/Of your eyelids where you hide”—from “Caramelize”—is one of the loveliest lines I’ve ever heard, or read, about connection among the painfully shy. Our inner lives are confusing, this all seems to say, but Kline’s melodies are like magnets that pull us through the maze.
When Kline sings about heavy things—like the emptiness of the world, the meaninglessness of a crush, crying, death—she does so in a way that makes her subject feel bearable upon arrival. Her softness is like a coping mechanism in the face of harsh reality, which is never clearer than on the twee thrasher “Being Alive.” Each of Kline’s bandmates takes a turn singing the quintessentially Frankie chorus, as if it were too weighty to carry alone: “Being alive/Matters quite a bit/Even when you/Feel like shit/Being alive.” It all brilliantly conveys a kind of muted resignation to feeling transcendentally alive, but its sense of togetherness also testifies to the power of friendship as a way of getting there.
There is often a hard-edged realism to Vessel that Kline hasn’t exhibited before. She shows the personal is political, with blunt appeals to “be less accommodating” of others before herself. But more than ever, her writing feels straight-up despondent, with a twinge of “Daria”-like jade—there are songs titled “Apathy” and “I’m Fried”—which makes Vessel recall one of Kline’s noted influences: the lost 1950s folk outsider Connie Converse, who also expertly tied her dejection to wit. Kline sees shallowness in others and the weaknesses in herself. She feels a general disconnect: “I won’t get married,” she sings, “Not at the party.” But through it, she sends a message that someone like Converse couldn’t in her time: That young women are allowed to be dour.
Vessel is not the first album I would suggest to an uninitiated Frankie Cosmos fan. Still, as with any great book or television series, you want to continue following along, even if the best place to start is at the beginning. With her lengthy tracklists, Kline has found a way to evoke the endlessness of her unruly Bandcamp experience even as she puts out formal records—and if this lends Vessel a feeling of being slightly unformed, it’s fitting. Kline’s songs, after all, are so much about how humans are rarely fully-formed, and the universal process of growing up that also—spoiler—never quite ends. | 2018-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | March 29, 2018 | 7.8 | 23c8b692-ef44-4fc7-90ac-60635b229a74 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The album-length collaboration between the pop star of the North and the rap star of the South seems like a good match, but it turns into a drastically uneven project in almost every way. | The album-length collaboration between the pop star of the North and the rap star of the South seems like a good match, but it turns into a drastically uneven project in almost every way. | Drake / 21 Savage: Her Loss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drake-21-savage-her-loss/ | Her Loss | There are tracks on Her Loss, Drake’s new quasi-collaboration album with 21 Savage, that seem like the natural evolutions of those on 2009’s So Far Gone. “Hours in Silence,” to take one, is built around a much livelier Memphis rap song that sounds as if it’s being replayed underwater; Drake half-croons through his web of gossip and self-mythology, where cryptic comments on exes’ finstas and villains ripped from mob movies weigh equally on his mind. Like he once did with Lil Wayne, he cedes a little time to a considerably more magnetic rapper from the South before singing, over and over, that things are “my fault,” the lines begging for the “of course not” counterweight from a former lover which would absolve him, but never comes.
That song’s brief turn from 21 finds the Atlanta rapper affecting something just short of a Drake impression, the danger posed by armed enemies made to sound nearly romantic (“They looking for myyyy faaaaace”). But much to its detriment, Her Loss relegates 21 to a supporting role, neutering the textural and thematic contrast that sold “Jimmy Cooks,” the beloved “Bound 2”-style hedge tacked onto the end of Honestly, Nevermind, Drake’s otherwise dance-focused album from earlier this year. There are moments of considered writing and bursts of Drake at or near his mischievous best, but in its middle, the record becomes inert, making the bits of self-conscious misanthropy scan as strained rather than gleeful, as if the id could be focus-grouped.
At its beginning, Her Loss hints at a looser, more natural interplay. After a brief intro from Atlanta’s Young Nudy—whose roving inner-monologue style would have been a welcome destabilizing force on this album—Drake opens “Rich Flex” with the kind of rapping-to-one-another hook (“21, can you do somethin’ for me?”) that blows past So Far Gone to recall groups from the 1980s and early ‘90s. And throughout, he and 21 are most effective when they either imitate one another, as 21 does on “Hours in Silence” and Drake does on “Major Distribution,” or when they retreat to their opposite stylistic poles: Drake bounding across “BackOutsideBoyz” like the only man to ever be sad in a nightclub, 21 rapping on “More M’s” that “I been in them rooms/I never did no contemplating,” his trademark economy of language unsettling as ever.
It’s the muddy, Drake-dominated middle ground that mostly doesn’t work. As the album’s title seems to promise, Her Loss is littered with bitter, very online barbs for women who have betrayed Drake and 21, wronged them in other, indeterminate ways, or simply drifted into the digital expanse. Both artists, but especially Drake, have staked songs on this going back years; what drags down Her Loss is not so much a moral failing as a creative one, the sense that Drake is turning a big dial labeled MISOGYNY while looking to an imagined audience for approval. This is occasionally colorful (from “On BS”: “I blow a half a million on you hoes, I'm a feminist”), but more often, it’s tiresome, even sort of depressing. Quips about group chats sound as if they’ve been sourced from Twitter, and punchlines like the already infamous one that trades on rumors Megan Thee Stallion was lying about being shot by Tory Lanez cast Drake as desperate to provoke, rather than in his ideal mode: someone tortured by the competing impulses to withhold and to overshare.
This tension between the acutely memorable and the vaguely forgettable is embodied by the production. The submarine Juicy J and DJ Paul flip from “Hours in Silence” is joined by reworks of Ginuwine (“Treacherous Twins”), B.G.O.T.I. (“Spin Bout U”), and the same Isley Brothers song that previously became JAY-Z and Too $hort’s “A Week Ago” (“Privileged Rappers), all of which play on a late-2000s production style—now effective bait for nostalgists— that treated samples as found sounds to be warped into an alien texture. This suits both Drake and 21’s voices: The former’s ecstatic vocals on “Treacherous Twins” alone make Her Loss worth the streaming bandwidth. But the original compositions for the album are less effective, hampered by mixes that make each element of each beat seem oddly isolated; it makes the music sound cheaper than it surely is. (There is a different kind of cheapness at intermittent play: The hammily stupid Daft Punk flip on “Circo Loco” and the O’Jays sample that pops up halfway through “Middle of the Ocean” only to invite unflattering comparisons to AZ and Nas and Dipset.) Still, tucked between the sameness are pockets of strangeness—like the drawn-out instrumental ending to “Jumbotron Shit Poppin,” at once triumphant and melancholy.
Things never quite coalesce. On the intriguingly atonal first half of “Broke Boys”—a beat odder and heavier than anything Drake has rapped over in ages—he sleepwalks through a passage that aims to tout his decades-long commercial dominance but communicates, instead, just how flat his output has become, a project that now privileges year-over-year incrementalism over fits of excitement. “Nothing had changed,” he raps, “I’m just harder to please.” He then notes that Ferrari has begun to produce SUVs, and that he and his friends have already ordered several. “We ain’t got a choice,” he says. You imagine him pointing to a conveyor belt. | 2022-11-08T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-08T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rap | OVO Sound / Republic | November 8, 2022 | 6.4 | 23cd0354-50f9-48d2-b5c9-425dcd23b82b | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
On their second album, this unruly British trio make the rare garage rock-informed record that aims for the upper reaches of Royal Albert Hall. | On their second album, this unruly British trio make the rare garage rock-informed record that aims for the upper reaches of Royal Albert Hall. | Yak: Pursuit of Momentary Happiness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yak-pursuit-of-momentary-happiness/ | Pursuit of Momentary Happiness | There are bands who spend their entire careers hustling to make the right connections... and then there’s Yak. Though they’ve been a group for barely half a decade, the British trio have already amassed a coterie of mentors, collaborators, and famous fans strong enough to fill the headlining ranks of an entire edition of Desert Daze. Their 2015 EP, No, was released through Jack White’s Third Man Records; their 2016 full-length debut, Alas Salvation, was recorded with Pulp’s Steve Mackey and earned tour invites from the Last Shadow Puppets, the side band of Arctic Monkeys singer Alex Turner. For their second Third Man release, the new Pursuit of Momentary Happiness, Yak singer and guitarist Oli Burslem hooked up with his pal Jay Watson (of Tame Impala and Pond) in Perth to record at Kevin Parker’s own studio. That plan fell apart, however, when they spent more time drinking than working; still, a cameo from Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce isn’t a bad consolation cosign.
When you hear Pursuit of Momentary Happiness, you’ll understand why some of the most notable names in alt-rock are drawn into Burslem’s orbit: They recognize a true kindred eccentric. But despite his boldface buddies, Burslem found himself broke and living in his van between his attempt to write the album during a month-long sojourn in Japan, his fruitless trek to Australia, the actual sessions in London’s RAK Studios, and a mixing stint in New York. So while these songs sport the scuzz and lava-lamp patina of an obscure 1970s psych record salvaged from the dollar bin, Pursuit of Momentary Happiness ultimately maps the soul-crushing struggle to survive in the here and now. Yak match raucous, restless energy with uncommon gravitas, making this the rare garage rock-informed record that aims for the upper reaches of Royal Albert Hall.
Burslem doesn’t so much sing these songs as inhabit them, making you feel—emotionally and physically—exactly what he’s feeling. Amid a flurry of prog flutes, “Bellyache” marches in on a tough wah-wah groove reminiscent of John Lennon at his rawest, with the singer taunting some greedy fat cats reeling from their own gluttony. “White Male Carnivore” is even less subtle. Unleashing a torrent of verbal barbs like a guitar-charged Sleaford Mods, Burslem presents a savage caricature of thin-skinned toxic masculinity, with a blitzkrieged quote of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” providing the final unflattering brushstroke.
Even when Pursuit of Momentary Happiness threatens to veer toward rote early-2000s garage revivalism, Burslem’s diseased drawl adds a peculiar, unnerving edge. “Blinded by the Lies” seems like a fish-in-a-barrel attack on desperate fame-seekers until Burslem starts screaming “Kick ’em in the face!” This is the sadistic glee of someone who clearly isn’t satisfied with mere intra-song shaming.
While Pursuit of Momentary Happiness draws from a bottomless well of piss and vinegar, it counterbalances those urges with irreverence and grace. Burslem’s charms are most amplified when the band simmers down for his introspective turns, giving him the space to sashay through the brass-pumped doo-wop of “Words Fail Me” and the narcotic gospel of “This House Has No Living Room” as if he were starring in a glam-rock musical about his own life.
The latter song achieves liftoff thanks to Pierce’s slide-guitar sweeps and a climactic guest vocal routed through his familiar “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space” effects. But it’s the title track that hews closest to Spiritualized’s signature prescription of self-care via hypnotic psychedelia. “I just wanna... feel good,” Burslem sings, boiling down the album’s agitated essence into a single plea. The soothing space-rock surge that accompanies those words suggests that his pursuit of happiness has been fulfilled, if only for a moment. | 2019-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Third Man / Virgin EMI | February 8, 2019 | 7.6 | 23cd81fb-6acb-473f-bd3c-ac8f1e7bed98 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The first mixtape from Rakim Mayers sidesteps the usual pitfalls of the heavily anticipated debut. Piloted by sweat-free cool and stellar production choices, LIVELOVEA$AP is a triumph of immaculate taste. | The first mixtape from Rakim Mayers sidesteps the usual pitfalls of the heavily anticipated debut. Piloted by sweat-free cool and stellar production choices, LIVELOVEA$AP is a triumph of immaculate taste. | A$AP Rocky: LIVELOVEA$AP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16026-liveloveaap/ | LIVELOVEA$AP | A$AP Rocky violated rule number one of the 10 Crack Commandments: Never let no one know how much dough you hold. The cheddar bred $3,000,000 worth of jealousy after the 23-year old New York rapper disclosed the value of his deal with Sony/RCA last month. The offer was tendered largely off the strength of his first two videos, "Purple Swag" and "Peso", a pair of codeine fever dreams that recast Harlem World as a slick-talking color-corrected suburb of Houston.
To cool-hunting 360-wielding record executives, the videos might as well have been advertisements for the A$AP lifestyle: Colt 45, purple weed and purple drank, dice games, bike riding, brandishing Berettas, clothing designers ostensibly known only to Kanye, and a pretty blonde girl in a grill mouthing the phrase: "this is for my niggas getting high on the regular." Picture an episode of "Gossip Girl" where Blake Lively watches Traffic and subsequently opts to explore the Danger Zone of 125th and Lennox.
Unavoidable in the conversation is the enduring absence of a New York commercial force under 30. Since the emergence of Dipset and G-Unit in the first half of the last decade, NYC rap aspirants have largely fallen into four categories: ringtone wunderkinds ("This Is Why I'm Hot", "Chicken Noodle Soup"), technically skilled personality voids (Papoose, Saigon), artful traditionalists (Action Bronson, Roc Marciano, Ka), and Maino.
By contrast, Rocky was telegenic and chanting swag. His lead singles poured syrup-slow Houston ride music atop the malt liquor melodies of Harlem's Max B. What Rocky lacked in lyricism, he made up for in narcotic charisma. Seeking street-cred, Drake announced plans to take Rocky on tour. Seeking swag-cred, Lloyd Banks and Jim Jones hopped on tracks with him. Hype metastasizes fastest in New York, and it's easy to conflate the need for a standard bearer with the desire for a savior. Rocky was the chosen one. Hence, $3,000,000.
Commence the hating. Odd Future's Hodgy Beats called him "A$AP Copy." Old heads looked askance at his appropriation of styles alien to the five boroughs. Blogs painted it as the worst New York investment since the Yankees gave Brien Taylor $1.55 million. Rocky didn't help matters when he allegedly punched out a soundman at the Fader Fort and announced that he and his whole crew had adopted vegetarianism. Thus, every mention of his debut mixtape, LIVELOVEA$AP has pondered whether it justifies the price tag of a Bugatti and several dozen ivory backscratchers. Good isn't enough. People expect Rakim Mayers to be the second coming of his namesake.
Of course, the odds are slanted in your favor when you're a rapper named Rakim. You can't exactly sell life insurance. And throughout LIVELOVEA$AP, Rocky embodies the sweat-free cool of someone who has stolen the test and memorized the answers ahead of time. It sidesteps the usual pitfalls of the heavily anticipated debut; there are no ill-fitting famous rapper cameos or last-cup leftovers from $10,000-a-beat producers. Rocky makes no cornball radio plays, nor any awkward attempts to prove his depth. Even on "Demons", the record's most emotionally raw track, Rocky is preternaturally self-assured. He's got stomach pains but dreams with the inevitable triumphalism of someone who can convince RCA/Polo Grounds to hand over their Pitbull blood money. After about a minute of complaining, he's back to "fucking the chick you're next to." By rough estimate, Rocky fucks about 13 or 14 different girlfriends in the course of the album's 56 minutes. There are two different mentions of Naughty by Nature's "O.P.P.". He is nothing if not efficient.
That's the thing. It's pretty easy to point out the pitfalls of LIVELOVEA$AP. Thematic and lyrical concerns are basically limited to Rocky being a pretty motherfucker, repping Harlem, doing drugs, and getting more women than James Worthy in Houston. Rocky raps effortlessly, switching back and forth between Midwestern double-time to something that resembles Wiz Khalifa auditioning for Byrd Gang. The dark, drugged visions of Memphis rap also creep in throughout. But to his credit, he doesn't waste much time persecuting haters, preemptively striking only once on "Leaf": "They say I sound like André/ Mixed with Kanye/ A little bit of Max/ A little bit of Wiz/ A little bit of that/ A little bit of this/ Get off my dick."
It's more difficult to point out where exactly Rocky excels. He's a good rapper, but he's not Kendrick Lamar. He's melodic, but he's not a walking hook like 50 Cent. His voice is strong but not completely singular. Instead, Rocky has great instincts: the moment when he abruptly switches to his Bone Thugs-N-Harmony flow for a few bars in "Trilla", the bizarre song structure of "Bass", where he just repeats "Bass" in lieu of a hook; the last minute and a half of "Demons", where his scrambled lo-fi refrain fades into the chlorine fog of the Clams Casino beat.
If anything LIVELOVEA$AP is a triumph of immaculate taste. Rocky's ear for beats is worthy of Rick Ross or early Game. Courtesy of Clams Casino, Burn One, Beautiful Lou, A$AP Ty Beats, and SpaceGhostpurrp, the stellar production makes this something like a swag-rap generation The Documentary. He cherry-picks from the best of internet micro-trends-- taking celestial based weirdness, the funk of country rap, the stoned pace of screw, and the tape-warp of Memphis. But at the core is the French-braided, gold-toothed kid from money-making Manhattan, inflecting his songs with hints of third-generation Spanish Harlem and West Indian patois. For someone who brags, "the only thing bigger than my ego is my mirror," Rocky wisely cedes the spotlight to well-chosen guests, including Oakland's Main Attrakionz, Houstoner Fat Tony, and the larcenous intensity of L.A.'s Schoolboy Q. Meanwhile his A$AP crew shows few signs of being there for reasons of nepotism or weed carrying.
"Houston Old Head" might be the best sign that Rocky can deliver on his seven-figure potential. It's not necessarily the most memorable song, but it's his most surprising-- a swaggering lean-sipping version of Neil Young's "Old Man", with it's chorus, "If you listen when your old head talk/ You'll be straight." It's basically the opposite of Odd Future's youth worship-- the admission that occasionally your elders can put you up on game. It shows he's willing to listen and soak up different styles and sounds-- crucial elements for evolution. Even if the fusion initially seems unorthodox, LIVELOVEA$AP is exactly the sort of record you'd expect to hear in 2011 from a New Yorker who was 13 when "Big Pimpin'" came out. Rocky did what should've been expected of him; he made a very good record. Now we wait to see if he'll get clientele. | 2011-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | November 10, 2011 | 8.2 | 23d020cb-da7c-4824-bc7b-f8757a81cab4 | Jeff Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeff-weiss/ | null |
The Montclair, NJ-based rapper follows his breakout debut with an expansive, funk-embroidered recollection of his childhood, complete with an accompanying 35-minute film. | The Montclair, NJ-based rapper follows his breakout debut with an expansive, funk-embroidered recollection of his childhood, complete with an accompanying 35-minute film. | Topaz Jones: Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/topaz-jones-dont-go-tellin-your-momma/ | Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma | On his 2016 debut, Arcade, Topaz Jones offered a bright-if-brief introduction to his quick-witted personality. His biggest hit was the pop-rap single “Tropicana,” whose lopsided hook showcased his slippery songwriting and love of funk. Despite that, Jones bristled at the track’s success (“I was petrified of being labeled as the ‘Tropicana’ guy,” he explained). In the five years afterward, the artist dug deep into his roots in Montclair, New Jersey, and drafted a screenplay for an audiovisual project about his upbringing there. On the expansive result, Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma, Jones builds on his reflective, funk-embroidered hip-hop to chronicle his formative years with confidence and hard-hitting storytelling.
In the album’s accompanying 35-minute film, co-directed by Jones and creative team rubberband., he crafts a semiotics lesson in Black cultural history, spliced together with dreamlike staged sequences, clips from home movies, and interviews with family members, teachers, activists, and artists including Black Thought and Ivy Sole. The short, which won a Sundance Jury Award earlier this year, updates the Black ABCs, an educational program started in the 1970s by Chicago teachers and the Society for Visual Education to educate Black youth through illustrated flash cards. Jones’s version—“C” is for code-switching, “I” is for intellectual property, and so on—is a concise framing device for his coming-of-age tales and musings on education, family, and music, aided by beautifully filmed depictions of Black identity and culture from all along the East Coast to flesh out the album’s more introspective themes.
The album itself evokes Jones’s youth through spoken-word segments from family members and lively, well-defined details in sound and lyrics. During a family gathering that takes place in “Herringbone,” reminiscences of cookouts past are lit up by rhythmic bass guitar, synths, and pattering drums. The soulful instrumentation avoids pastiche even as Jones mines influences like Sly and the Family Stone and Funkadelic, with his voice pitched up on the chorus and a gimlet-eyed ending to his reverie: “You know we just imitate what the parents show/The bad habits, the trust issues, the marriage woes/We inherit those.”
That brooding, introspective side gives the album tension even in its brighter moments. Jones goes back to high school on the sunny “D.I.A.L.,” landing on different pockets of rhythm against horns, a shuffling beat, and washes of electric guitar. While recounting his hard-nosed adolescence missing class and getting into fights, a moment of clarity arrives. “I’m cycling through memories/Hindsight is 20/20 clean,” he admits. “Now you got me backpedaling/Psychiatrist not helping me/Your childhood not so heavenly.” It’s the kind of brisk analysis that typifies the album, open-hearted even as he tackles self-doubt.
Jones’s stories are amplified by the warm, easygoing backdrops. The relaxed pace lets Jones zoom in and out of conflicts, whether calling out overbearing performances of masculinity and the way he’s conformed to them himself on “D.I.A.L.” and the lustful “Black Tame,” or later leaning into a free-wheeling, surreal self-portrait on the standout, freestyle-like “Buggin’.” Over a scuffed beat, Jones raps with veering flow switch-ups about seeing a spider on the wall and imagining a day in its life, all to land on a universal truth no matter who or what you are: “If you not light on your feet, you might get crushed next.”
Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma only errs when Jones runs into the occasionally clunky punchline (“Counting every second like they sang for Rent,” “Everybody want the plug, I’d rather be the adapter”). Still, Jones is clearly operating at a more thoughtful and focused level here than on Arcade. “I think I’m finally finding me/My whole life it’s been hide and seek,” he confesses on the cinematic “Mirror.” All across this album, Jones makes that self-discovery evident with light-footed ease.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | New Funk Academy / Black Canopy | April 30, 2021 | 7.4 | 23db81df-d27b-4f67-a75f-d65df5b09a78 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The singer-songwriter’s intimate 14th studio album strips down to spare acoustic guitar, lingering on the moments when the buzzing world around all but fades away. | The singer-songwriter’s intimate 14th studio album strips down to spare acoustic guitar, lingering on the moments when the buzzing world around all but fades away. | Damien Jurado: In the Shape of a Storm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/damien-jurado-in-the-shape-of-a-storm/ | In the Shape of a Storm | For his 14th studio album, veteran singer-songwriter Damien Jurado strips away the roaring drums and vintage production of his recent works for a softly lit, spare stage of intimate acoustic guitar and voice. His lyrics alternate between dark and light, forming sharp contrasts and soft grey areas. On this spartan stage, he paints a world where love is both thrilling and unrequited, where friendships thrive and fade, and literal and metaphorical storms rattle foundations.
In the past, Jurado has invested in high concepts—he’s sang of aliens and the cosmos and killers. But here he sings from his life, of concrete moments where place often sets the scene. The words are so close it feels like a conversation, breath steaming windows or cooling coffee. “There is nothing to hide,” he proclaims in album opener “Lincoln,” a sentiment that speaks to the album writ large. In The Shape of a Storm lingers on the bare moments, when the buzzing world around all but fades away.
Love fuels much of the album’s narrative. “Newspaper Gown” and “Where You Want Me To Be” deal with secret longing, while “Oh Weather” and “Throw Me Now Your Arms” brim with romance. “Anchors,” “Hands on the Table,” and “In the Shape of a Storm,” are journey ballads, the first two brutally tethered to love, the third in search of solace. They fold into each other like scenes from a romantic montage, from meet cute to devastation and a reckoning of what’s lost and gained between.
On an airy pizzicato waltz on album highlight “South,” Jurado recalls pondering the future with a childhood friend: “Tom and I out on the hillside / Waving at planes and pulling our wrists,” he sings. They speak of relationships and cities, and who’ll come out ahead. By contrast, the whistle solo that concludes the track recalls a lone cowboy crossing a canyon, evoking the freedom and loneliness that accompanies the coming-of-age kids inevitably crave. In seeking the future we miss what’s in front of us, he seems to say.
It’s impossible to listen to In the Shape of a Storm without also thinking of the late Richard Swift, Jurado’s longtime producer and friend, who died in July 2018. The record’s intimacy feels like a candle held in Swift’s honor, a testament to their bond. Last December, Jurado participated in a collaborative tribute performance of Richard Swift’s final album The Hex; he was the only performer to break down in audible sobs, alone onstage with just his acoustic guitar. In the Shape of a Storm is an album’s worth of that feeling. In grief many cloak themselves in distractions, or hide away entirely: Jurado treats it as an invitation to look closer, feel deeper. “Time does not heal,” he sings resolutely on “Silver Ball.” It reads like a lament, but Jurado sings it like a promise. Recounting his highs and lows with stark clarity, Jurado has never been more resonant. | 2019-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mama Bird | April 5, 2019 | 7.4 | 23dcd118-ab33-4074-a05c-b42c23edb26c | Erin Osmon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-osmon/ | |
On their second album, the Boston slowcore trio’s pensive, downtempo rock has grown tighter, clearer, and at times brighter. | On their second album, the Boston slowcore trio’s pensive, downtempo rock has grown tighter, clearer, and at times brighter. | Horse Jumper of Love: So Divine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/horse-jumper-of-love-so-divine/ | So Divine | Minutes into Horse Jumper of Love’s second record, So Divine, it’s obvious why the Boston trio opened for slowcore legends Duster on their 2018 reunion tour. Both bands have an affinity for allowing the space between thoughts to germinate, until a molehill-sized musing becomes an impenetrable, towering glacier. But Horse Jumper of Love are not copying their predecessors as much as making similar ideas their own.
Three years after their self-titled debut, the band’s pensive, downtempo rock has grown tighter, clearer, and at times—dare I say—brighter. Opening tracks “Airport” and “Volcano” begin where Horse Jumper of Love left off, crawling forward with unhurried momentum and quietly seething until their layers of heavy rhythms become unbearable. “Everything is freaking me out,” Dimitri Giannopoulos grouses on “Volcano” with an almost humorous nonchalance.
Giannopoulos’ lyrics are impressionistic and threadbare fragments: plants splattered with yogurt, Dixie cups of rainwater, fingers stained by cherry pulp. Like another musician who found inspiration in gallery visitors, the standout “Poison” compiles observations from Giannopoulos’ time as a museum security guard into a surreal domestic drama (“I opened my legs so you can crawl through,” he sings, channeling a very patient father). Giannopoulos maintains that there’s no single objective meaning behind his lyrics, which makes the unambiguous couplet that comprises the subsequent “Cops” somewhat startling: “All the cops burst into tears of joy/When it’s announced we’re in a police state.” It’s an unexpected moment of candor from a band more comfortable with opacity, and as the song’s heavy instrumental outro gives way to the otherworldly wooziness of “Aliens,” its bluntness feels out of place.
These songs rely on sedate, hypnotic repetition, and to succeed they require a tether, something to keep them from dissolving completely. While “Airport” and “Volcano” sustain themselves with incremental progression, songs like “Aliens” and “John Song” never fully emerge from the lo-fi haze. So Divine is at its strongest when moving forward, as on the standout “Ur Real Life,” which seesaws between distortion and restraint. “I feel OK/Under your real life,” Giannopoulos bashfully profeses, before the trio surge once more.
“Nature,” the penultimate track, is a welcome departure from So Divine’s slow burn. Lush, twangy, and a tad bluesy, the song detonates into a sudden fray of noise and concludes with an understated profundity: “It was too visceral/I don’t know/If you’ll ever see it clearly.” Many slowcore bands’ minimalist lyrics walk a fine line between the heavy-handed and the abstract. Though Horse Jumper of Love occasionally brush against both extremes, they trudge on in search of balance.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | August 14, 2019 | 7.4 | 23dd2cf7-62ee-4977-ba6b-f95508030e72 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
The prolific rapper continues to push himself to vocal extremes, but his new album seldom coalesces his virtuosity into something that surpasses his signature work. | The prolific rapper continues to push himself to vocal extremes, but his new album seldom coalesces his virtuosity into something that surpasses his signature work. | YoungBoy Never Broke Again: Colors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/youngboy-never-broke-again-colors/ | Colors | Over the past half-decade, despite a gauntlet of legal obstacles—some his own creation, others reportedly the government’s—YoungBoy Never Broke Again has become, by some metrics, one of the most popular artists on the planet. The Baton Rouge rapper, still only 22, began his career as an adolescent imitating rappers on the genre’s leading-edge, circa 2014 (Young Thug, hometown hero Kevin Gates), and has continued to search for new variations, deeper grooves within that style, even as his contemporaries have moved on to sharper, less melodic ones. Like Gates and another Baton Rouge breakout star, Boosie, YoungBoy’s songs—even the ostensible hits—are shot through with immense psychic, and sometimes physical pain. The pace and volume of his output has not sapped his willingness to mine the past for grisly vignettes; even when he sounds like he’s on autopilot, his songs have shocking revelations and incredible stakes.
When YoungBoy is at his best, he raps as if each thought is occurring at the moment he says it, leaving no time for them to be sanded down to neat syllable counts or a familiar syntax. There are times he uses this idiosyncrasy of writing to complicate more conventional pop frameworks; other times, he injects bits of singing into an otherwise stoic verse like fits of irrepressible emotion. On Colors, his sixth solo record since the beginning of 2020, YoungBoy continues to push himself to vocal extremes—in addition to that familiar growl and effusive harmonizing, there is a passage he literally whispers, and several with staccato chirps that recall Playboi Carti. But these runs of virtuosity seldom coalesce into something that approaches his signature work.
Colors is broken into distinct sections—some more effective than others—and the arrangement makes for a strange, slightly dulled listen when taken in full. It opens with a predictably furious suite (“Long Live,” “Bring It On,” “No Switch”) that culminates with closing ad-libs on song three: “I’m from the bottom of the motherfucking United States,” YoungBoy says, bitterly. The production’s tone softens on the next song before giving way to a pair of tracks—“2Hoo” and “DC Marvel”—that deliver on the album title and cover’s promise with synthy, pastel romps about sex. As quickly as this comes, it’s abandoned for a few thinner campfire cuts; then a block of Gothic street rap; and finally, the closing, five-song run of emo tracks, which could have been issued as a separate EP. The breaks, especially into that last, softest movement, are jarring, and not in a way that enhances the experience.
What does stitch Colors together is YoungBoy’s willingness to lay bare the most tortured parts of his psyche. The threatening “Know Like I Know” functions mostly as a diss toward Memphis rapper NLE Choppa, but its asides—“My mama know I’m a demon seed”—are bone-chilling, as are the flashbacks to “suicidal missions” on “Expensive Taste,” or even the hook on “Gangsta,” where YoungBoy raps, “Industry don’t like me ’cause I’m thuggin’ and I’m dangerous.” That last sentiment isn’t a rote, filler boast; with YoungBoy, it rings true.
While Colors does not meaningfully synthesize (or even thoughtfully arrange) its disparate parts, a generous listener might find the volatility of YoungBoy’s emotions from one song to the next an interesting thread on its own. “Bring the Hook,” a diss song aimed at O-Block and the late Chicago rapper King Von, is staggering in its brazenness; four tracks later, on “Snow Bunny,” he’s dedicating verse after tender verse to a white woman from Florida who sent him naked photos while he was locked up and whose phone number he lost. If there is a constant presence on the album, it’s government agents: Throughout Colors, Feds watch as pallbearers—for YoungBoy and his enemies—move around Baton Rouge like pawns on a chessboard. | 2022-02-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Never Broke Again, LLC / Atlantic | February 2, 2022 | 6.6 | 23e2c776-d528-4d99-a7f6-d46235c8d772 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Grief clarifies the air in Sleater-Kinney’s taut 11th album, which processes loss and societal turmoil and finds strength in chosen family. | Grief clarifies the air in Sleater-Kinney’s taut 11th album, which processes loss and societal turmoil and finds strength in chosen family. | Sleater-Kinney: Little Rope | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sleater-kinney-little-rope/ | Little Rope | In the process of digging oneself out, a little rope could help. By the fall of 2022, Carrie Brownstein required it. Sleater-Kinney had just begun recording their taut and cathartic 11th album, Little Rope, when Corin Tucker—her co-creator, 30 years ago now, of the genius post-riot grrrl band—received a phone call from the U.S. embassy in Italy attempting to notify Brownstein that her mother and stepfather had been killed in a car accident. Death clarified the air in the room of Little Rope, intensified its tenor, and distilled its priorities. All of the nascent songs—which amount to Sleater-Kinney’s sturdiest, catchiest rock record since 2015’s hiatus-breaking No Cities to Love and their most somber since 1999’s The Hot Rock—were immediately “dragged into the hellscape” of grief, Brownstein said in an interview, adding, “I needed to hear Corin’s voice.”
Sleater-Kinney are synonymous with determinedly clawing out a sense of self and ripping up patriarchal models to restructure the rock’n’roll order. But their Great Feminist Songbook has always included mortality, sorrow, and dying: the guttural punk standard “Good Things,” the hospital-room plea “The Size of Our Love,” the picture of a Golden Gate suicide on “Jumpers,” the dread-laced drama of comeback single “Bury Our Friends.” Even so, Sleater-Kinney have rarely plumbed such autobiographical reservoirs of sadness as they do on Little Rope, responding not only to loss but also self-doubt, societal despair, and depression. Brownstein said, “Finishing this record was basically my way of praying every day,” and her brutally vulnerable lyrics evoke spectral communion. “I forgive you, I wish I told you so,” she sings on the anthemic “Hunt You Down.” “I send your ashes my love.”
Little Rope is the fourth album of Sleater-Kinney’s second act, their second since drummer Janet Weiss left and subtracted an irreplaceable frequency. In the 1990s and 2000s, Sleater-Kinney seemed to contain their own secret language in the legendary criss-crossing interplay of Tucker and Brownstein’s dueling down-tuned guitars and counterpointed screams. “Living in Olympia, we had lost perspective on what a traditional group looked or sounded like,” Brownstein wrote of the origins of their entanglement in her 2015 memoir. “My entire style of playing was built around somebody else playing guitar with me, a story that on its own sounds unfinished, a sonic to-be-continued, designed to be completed by someone else.” Today that mysterious lexicon feels more transparent. The coordinates where Tucker and Brownstein once met—friction, unprettiness, imposing stakes, the shared consciousness of their work’s insurmountable consequence—have no doubt shifted. But still they meet. Togetherness remains Sleater-Kinney’s essence.
Tucker’s titanic vibrato and ferocious conviction are the anchors of Little Rope. She has audibly risen to the occasion, in every note, to support her friend. Little Rope often recalls the ’80s pop-rock stars of the two musicians’ childhoods and The Woods-era classic rock touchstones more than the raw spark of punk, even as the exploration and ecstasy of ’70s post-punk animates some its most thrilling songs. Tucker instantly matches the force of the monster riff crashing open “Untidy Creature,” the album’s liberationist wrecking ball of a closer, a reminder of that Black Sabbath poster on Dig Me Out’s cover.
Opener “Hell” quakes, an infernal picture of parenthood in the mass-shooting horrorshow of the United States, where “Hell is desperation/And a young man with a gun,” where, without gun control, life is merely theoretical. As Tucker screams, “You ask why like there’s no tomorrow,” the why breaks the roof off the song, and the doom becomes a demand to not look away from a world in crisis. The desolate cityscape “Six Mistakes” sprints after the tom-heavy minimalist swoop of drummer Angie Boylan (who has toured with Sleater-Kinney since 2019 and drums on the entirety of Little Rope); about two minutes in, Tucker’s hooks and Brownstein’s guitars ignite.
A lightly blown-out killjoy anthem, Brownstein’s terse, nervy “Needlessly Wild” documents those times in adulthood when repressing a restless punk ethos is not quite an option: “I’m aggressively fun/Death of the party/A lecture for one.” She bites deep into the word “hate” to express how little of it she possesses, turns “I’m totally tired” into an irreverent Fall send-up. Brownstein gives voice to her eternally maladjusted soul, too, on the self-steeling pep talk “Dress Yourself.” Though it was written before her mother’s death, it feels like a brooding maternal reprimand: “Get up girl and dress yourself/In clothes you love for a world you hate.” But the song’s unsparing depiction of depression builds as if stepping into light. As the band falls back, Brownstein’s yearning for “a new word/For that old pain inside of me” becomes an epic, clarion piano ballad, a way out through illumination.
“If you could talk, what would you say?” Tucker sang in 1997 on “One More Hour,” the immortal document of her and Brownstein’s own romantic fissure. There’s no question mark on Little Rope’s most stadium-sized song: “Say it like you mean it,” Tucker hollers boldly in a bittersweet rallying cry, reaching for a higher register with each windswept chorus, conducting all the triumph of a synth-streaked power ballad. Whether Tucker sings out to a friend, a partner, a child, culture at large—her desire is forthright. Perhaps to assuage the overwhelming uncertainty of their present circumstances, perhaps due to the confidence that accrues with age, “Say It Like You Mean It” is a beacon of solidity.
Audre Lorde once wrote that poetry is the “skeleton architecture of our lives,” offering keys to embody and unlock reality, to catalyze change. Her coinage applies easily to Sleater-Kinney songs. “Dig me out,” “Anger makes me a modern girl,” “Culture is what we make it” remain survival maxims. On Little Rope, Brownstein and Tucker craft a few more for Sleater-Kinney 2.0. “The thing you fear the most will hunt you down,” Brownstein sings, a colossal hook on the four-on-the-floor centerpiece “Hunt You Down,” drilling into her psyche as if to remember that facing the unknown brings relief. Like a Jenny Holzer slogan composed in iambic pentameter, the line is borrowed from poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch; it is a fact, as this band has always attested, more bearable with camaraderie. The lyric is a mantra when Brownstein sings it alone. When she and Tucker sing together, it becomes a monument. | 2024-01-19T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-19T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | January 19, 2024 | 7.7 | 23e54cd6-2006-4653-837c-96880e6df640 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
More consistent and of higher quality than much of Ryan Adams' recent output-- 2002's Demolition, 2003 twofer Rock N Roll and Love Is Hell, and 2005's 29-- the prolific singer/songwriter's latest has a sonic landscape that makes any room feel oh so tastefully arranged, like an overpriced bar a few punks still go to anyway. | More consistent and of higher quality than much of Ryan Adams' recent output-- 2002's Demolition, 2003 twofer Rock N Roll and Love Is Hell, and 2005's 29-- the prolific singer/songwriter's latest has a sonic landscape that makes any room feel oh so tastefully arranged, like an overpriced bar a few punks still go to anyway. | Ryan Adams: Easy Tiger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10363-easy-tiger/ | Easy Tiger | This was not the Ryan Adams album I was expecting. I ended up downloading the leak like a hardened criminal because these days labels send out the kind of CDs that don't play on computers (otherwise, albums might leak). Squinting at my iPod, I misread the title of one of the songs as "Ryan Adams Rip Off", and I suddenly hoped this was going to be his self-referential comedy album. You know, the follow-up to recent stunts like Adams' online-only 2006 hip-hop debut "Welcome to Ryan Adams Dot Com Motherfucka (Aw Shit)". That there's a track called "Halloween Head" only furthered my suspicions. A couple of days later I realized all the songs on my MP3 rip had Ryan Adams' name in the title; there's just a tagging error I'd somehow only noticed on one.
As it turns out, the singer-songwriter's ninth studio album since Whiskeytown is more consistent-- if more predictable and less spectacular-- than pretty much any other record in his exhaustive catalog. If 2001's Gold was a bid for the "multi-platinum ring," as Pitchfork's Chris Schiel put it, the music on Easy Tiger suggests Adams is vying for a spot on the Starbucks CD rack*. * This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in contrast to Gold, or his inspired 2000 solo pinnacle Heartbreaker, the move feels like a forced attempt to grub some crossover dollars and prime retail exposure.
Hell, it just might work, even if there's no "New York, New York" here, or "Come Pick Me Up", or whichever your favorite Adams song might be. Because even while Easy Tiger consists mostly of second-tier Adams songs, it remains blessedly free of the third-tier compositions that marred 2002's Demolition, 2003 two-fer Rock N Roll and Love Is Hell, and the last of Adams' 2005 triptych, 29. These new songs don't always offer enough to cling to after repeat plays the way his best songs do, but producer Jamie Candiloro-- who has also worked with R.E.M., Luscious Jackson, and Luna-- helps put together a sonic landscape that makes any room feel oh so tastefully arranged.
Adams has used several of his albums to stake out new (old) stylistic territory the way other bands switch wardrobes. Easy Tiger, however, is practically a compilation of his past seven years, minus Rock N Roll's new wave bent. The Cardinals, who played backup on the three 2005 LPs, return here to the loose, dueling-guitar jams of Cold Roses on opener "Goodnight Rose", and to the steel-twang country of Jacksonville City Nights on "Tears of Gold". They even leave Adams alone for Heartbreaker-style finger-picking on the lonely-boy lament "These Girls" (a cast-off from 2000's unreleased Destroyer). Despite harmonica that recalls "Come Pick Me Up", the wistful finale "I Taught Myself How to Grow" might just as easily belong on sad-bastard Anglophile outing Love Is Hell. So could another crashing piano ballad, "Off Broadway", about being lost in your own city.
For a change, let's talk about Adams' voice-- how he shapes phrases and sentences, and occasionally slides them around the edges of the beat during "Goodnight Rose" and the mellow acoustic rocker "Everybody Knows" (with its heartbreaking refrain, "You and I together, but only one of us in love"). A gifted chameleon, Adams' voice transforms from a fragile After the Gold Rush whine on "Off Broadway" and the album's finale, to a huskier, low-register rasp on dull mid-tempo rocker "Two Hearts" and the folky "Oh My God, Whatever, Etc." He goes husky to a fault on the contrived "The Sun Also Sets"-- a stark contrast to his stoic country croon on the down-home "Pearls on a String". Fittingly, the free-wheeling opener and its anachronistic vernacular ("the whole she-bang") take Adams back to the Jerry Garcia tones of Cold Roses, stretched rolling-paper-thin. If what Adams is singing often veers toward vague maxims ("Don't live your life in such a hurry/ Life goes by us all too fast"), at least he's got the delivery down.
I wasn't entirely off-base about Easy Tiger's good humor, either. "Rip Off" is just a moseying country-rock exercise that packs some brutal honesty ("It's a little too late for goodbyes," Adams opines), but chugging rocker "Halloween Head" is so much funnier than its title suggests: "Here comes that same old shit again/ I've got a Halloween head," it begins. When there's a guitar solo, Adams shouts, "Guitar solo!" And when the song ends, we hear piped-in thundershowers, straight out of the Doors' "Riders on the Storm". Just as another larger-than-life figure, R. Kelly, went from "Bump N' Grind" to "Ignition (Remix)" to the comic stylings of "Sex Planet", Adams has gone from "My Winding Wheel" to "Wonderwall" to this. Man, I really wish he'd made a whole album's worth.
The full-court press push behind Easy Tiger suggests that the AOR consistency of its music is the result of Adams' newfound sobriety. (Then again, the guy has self-mythologized so long we should assign ratings to his news clippings.) But "Two", the album's first single and a duet with Sheryl Crow, encapsulates Easy Tiger's best and worst-- a tight band, spare yet evocative vocals, but also undercooked lyrics and a twangy, light-rock approach that verges on total snooze. According to The New York Times, Adams scrawled a caricature of himself singing lyrics that spoof the song's chorus: "Blah, blah, blah, whine, whine, whine/ It takes two when it used to take one." See? Comedy Gold. | 2007-06-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-06-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Lost Highway | June 25, 2007 | 6.2 | 23e5ec68-4ba5-42d3-8148-aa6ffe9f3429 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Though my hopes were briefly raised by a frazzled Christopher Lloyd in 1985, it's painfully obvious now that time ... | Though my hopes were briefly raised by a frazzled Christopher Lloyd in 1985, it's painfully obvious now that time ... | Coldplay: A Rush of Blood to the Head | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1538-a-rush-of-blood-to-the-head/ | A Rush of Blood to the Head | Though my hopes were briefly raised by a frazzled Christopher Lloyd in 1985, it's painfully obvious now that time travel doesn't exist as a human technological capability. This being overwhelmingly the case, I will try my best to transport with words, and paint a picture of another time-- a time ever so slightly more innocent, when terrorism wasn't being used as an excuse to crush civil liberties and drop bombs on mustachioed megalomaniacs. So, drag that bottle of Orbitz out of the back of the closet, put X-Files on the VHS, and journey back with me to the year 2000.
It was a wondrous time-- we were still fascinated by the three zeros that had signified the birth of the new millennium, and many were relieved to have escaped judgment from an infinite, intangible being. Then, toward the end of the year, we began to hear rumblings from the many-headed hydra of UK rock journalism that some amazing new music had come to usher us into the New World. This music was deemed fascinating, uncompromising and utterly prizeworthy by our English brethren, who spoke in hushed tones of how it was to be the coming of "the next Radiohead," or perhaps more tellingly, "the next Travis."
This new music was produced by a band of four affable blue-collar lads from Europe's island neighbor who called themselves Coldplay, and before you knew it, there was no escaping their lead-off single, "Yellow", as it burned itself into the national consciousness via extensive radio exposure and ABC promotional spots. I, myself, was never too taken with that single, though I openly admit to enjoying the album it was culled from, Parachutes. It was innocuous, to be sure, but it was also honestly rendered, and the opening three songs, effortless and hummable as they were, were hard to deny.
Two years and a veritable avalanche of press later, A Rush of Blood to the Head has Coldplay taking a second shot at it, and to be perfectly honest, what they throw at the wall doesn't stick quite as well. I will credit them where it's due: they've admirably eschewed cloning their debut album, a path that would have been all too easy to take given that record's critical and commercial success. But while the sound of this album is more expansive, the influences a bit less obvious, and the approach more varied, the guys forgot to tote along their initial strength: the songs.
Atmospherically, a couple of these tracks are remarkable-- particularly "Daylight", with its swooping guitar and synth lines. Even its strings, which echo melodies from Suede's last album, lend a sense of drama to a song that otherwise wouldn't hold much. Midtempo non-rockers "Green Eyes" and "Warning Sign" stretch the most obvious thread back to Parachutes with their lovelorn lyrics and slightly more developed melodies. And there are also a couple of "memo to listener: we can rock, too!" moments, specifically "A Whisper" and the lite-apocalypse of opener "Politik". The latter essentially takes the blueprint of "Yellow"-- namely, the slamming, repetitive strumming of clean electric guitar-- and builds a more spacious song from it, one with more rattle and hum, but less melodic substance. Martin's double-tracked vocals hover curiously low in the mix and the band thrashes earnestly, but all the listener really comes away with is a nebular dustcloud and the sense that Coldplay want to break out of their box.
Part of the blame for moments like these rests on producer Ken Nelson, who doesn't seem to know what to do with the band's expanded sound this time out. He alternately dries up the quietest passages and drenches the louder sections with Martin Hannett-sized reverb tides. It takes a lot of discretion to handle that sound, and the folly of Nelson and the band (who co-produced) often comes at the expense of the vocals, which frequently get lost in the haze.
And that's a shame because vocalist Chris Martin has improved since the band's not-so-humble beginnings-- his voice is dramatically fuller than in the past, and he falters less on the higher notes. But, of course, he's still far from foolproof: at times, his attempts to broaden his palette don't pan out, such as during the regrettable midsection of "Clocks", where he barely bothers to add a melody to the central lyric "nothing else compares." To his credit, he does manage a pretty good verse melody here, but then he oddly shies away from what should be the hook at the end, tentatively trailing off as though he's not sure it's good enough.
That could very well be the case, too, as it's been widely posited that Coldplay nearly didn't make this album at all, fearing that they didn't have the depth to provide an adequate follow-up to their debut. I'll avoid the obvious cheap shot there and instead offer that they indeed still might. Parachutes proved that Coldplay have at least a nascent songwriting capability, and A Rush of Blood to the Head shows them testing themselves musically, so it seems logical that if their third album were to combine those strengths they might finally start to sound like the band the UK press is always going on about.
After over a half-dozen listens, I still haven't taken anything away from A Rush of Blood to the Head (by contrast, I recognized Parachutes' "Don't Panic" for the relatively tight song it is after hearing it once), and my girl, who was much more a fan of Parachutes than I was, sums it up as "boring." She's pretty much got it right. Coldplay may claw their way back from this, but it'll be a pretty steep climb. | 2002-09-08T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2002-09-08T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | EMI / Capitol | September 8, 2002 | 5.1 | 23e6e67c-597b-4972-85b5-199f6c06d150 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
British producer JR Seaton's debut album as Call Super turns sharply away from dancefloor functionality and towards headier expressions. His efforts result in one of the most evocative sound worlds that techno's seen this year. | British producer JR Seaton's debut album as Call Super turns sharply away from dancefloor functionality and towards headier expressions. His efforts result in one of the most evocative sound worlds that techno's seen this year. | Call Super: Suzi Ecto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19734-call-super-suzi-ecto/ | Suzi Ecto | Even in Berlin, techno is never quite the monolithic entity that it might seem. The formula may be dead simple—a four-to-the-floor beat plus a handful of shadows and metal shavings—but the proportions are always in flux. And as they shift, so does the music's relationship to the dancefloor; so do its imaginative possibilities. Last September, the British producer JR Seaton told Red Bull Music Academy, "I can probably see myself making stuff that is less to do with clubs in the future." He had been living in Berlin for four years, and while the city's techno community had drawn him to the city, he was circumspect about the way that club music's strictures can hinder an artist's development. Just a year later, his prediction is already coming true: after a string of EPs that established him as a clever, capable techno producer—part interpreter, part torchbearer—his debut album as Call Super turns sharply away from dancefloor functionality and towards headier expressions.
It's still body music, particularly if you turn it up loud enough that it gets ahold of your ribcage. But it's not so much party music, necessarily. The first thing you may notice is the relative scarcity of four-to-the-floor kicks; there's plenty of pulse running through Suzi Ecto, but it moves in fits and starts. Seaton's obvious affinity for classic electro is a factor, but these aren't the textbook whipcrack rhythms of Kraftwerk and Drexciya. They're softened up and sanded down; there are few grooves here, just bursts. Many of the drum sounds, like the dry, boxy toms of "Okko Ink", sound like they come from a Wurlitzer on the fritz, and even the most regular beats come across like metronomes buried deep in a pile of leaves. In "Fold Again at Last", an unsteady rhythm of glassy, conga-like tones is all but drowned out by metallic locust buzz.
Ah yes, that buzz: the whole album is alive with it. Seaton has talked about the way his creative process puts the signal chain front and center—that is, his compositional style is less a matter of putting beats and notes in neat rows than generating electronic sounds and sending them careening through a series of effects. It's part alchemical reaction, part Rube Goldberg contraption, and one side effect of his method is the omnipresent crackle and hiss. Not all hums are created equal, however, and it's a sign of Seaton's careful approach to sound design that his buzz sings in a way that's very different from, say, the flat, affectless hiss of Actress. Indeed, while his gunked-up machine aesthetics relate to contemporaries like Actress, Lukid, and the L.I.E.S. stable of basement-rave noiseniks, what distinguishes Suzi Ecto is its sparkling clarity. There are tiny chirping noises everywhere, like a forest full of birds and crickets, all made out of metal. Gloomy, abstracted electronic music rarely sounds so insanely detailed; for all its haphazard qualities, everything feels carefully, even obsessively, crafted.
It's a wonderfully penumbral set, sumptuously grayscale in a way that gives its rare bursts of color all the more impact. In "Okko Ink", a snippet of saxophone seems to have been rolled out on waterlogged tape and tacked up in the background, and in "Sulu Sekou", there's a melancholic clarinet melody that faintly recalls Djivan Gasparyan's "I Will Not Be Sad in This World". It's almost incongruous, this Fourth World outburst nestled among the metal shards, except that it's not, and that, in turn, is a testament to the breadth of Seaton's vision for techno. He's created the most evocative sound world that the genre has seen this year, and the peak-time dancefloor's loss is our gain. | 2014-09-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-09-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Houndstooth | September 17, 2014 | 7.7 | 23eb479f-bb9b-44b1-976b-230d6df38b78 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Math-rock band returns after 11 years with not just a good reunion album, but also the most immediately satisfying record in their entire catalogue. | Math-rock band returns after 11 years with not just a good reunion album, but also the most immediately satisfying record in their entire catalogue. | Polvo: In Prism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13398-in-prism/ | In Prism | The alt-rock reunions we've seen over the past decade have generally fallen into one of three categories: the notoriously combative legends who've let time-- or lucrative post-reunion guarantees-- heal all wounds (the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr.); the post-punk pioneers collecting on the debt owed to them by a new generation of spiritual offspring (Wire, Gang of Four, Mission of Burma); or the fleetingly successful 1990s-era acts who don't have anything better to do (Urge Overkill). But the sudden, surprising return of Polvo (or, at least three quarters of its original line-up) after a 12-year absence does not adhere to any of these scripts. As a band that bridged late-80s SST-schooled indie-rock and more abstract, angular 90s math-rock, Polvo's legacy feels very much frozen in time-- they're not a band whose influence is especially apparent among contemporary indie-rock acts; their popularity never extended beyond the campus-radio crowd; and there's no juicy back-story to propagate their myth. They were simply a very good band that made some very good records, and then just plain stopped.
But Polvo's first album in 12 years presents a different kind of reunion rationale-- one that's less about extending a legacy as rewriting it. Like Hüsker Dü, the Minutemen, and Sonic Youth before them, Polvo reached their critical peak with an epic double-album statement, 1996's Exploded Drawing, which saw them successfully unraveling their bee-swarm guitar buzz to explore the polarities of their sound, from psychedelic-folk lullabies to brutalizing post-hardcore. But instead of answering their Daydream Nation with their Goo (i.e., a more streamlined, approachable set), Polvo took a hard left on 1997's Shapes, a hodgepodge of contorted classic-rock riffage and fractured-folk interludes that, in hindsight, anticipated the current vogue for Arthur-endorsed new-school psychedelia, but at the time felt like a directionless drift into the unknown, one from which Polvo never returned. Until now.
In Prism thus feels like an attempt to chart an alternate course for Polvo post-Exploded Drawing, in which the band harnesses its psychedelicized sprawl into a precise, laser-focused tracklist, where even the eight-minute excursions feel brisk and purposeful. Ten years of recording-technology advances also means that Polvo has never sounded more radiant; liberated from the murky, mid-fi production of the band's older records, Ash Bowie emerges as a forceful, almost swaggering vocalist on In Prism's blast-off opener "Right the Relation", which, despite its cryptic allusions to Polvo's history and ethos ("We see the beauty behind imperfection... I kill my creation to right the relation") is the band's most forthright, unfussy rocker to date. And, if this were 1997, you could easily imagine "Beggar's Bowl" becoming the band's crossover calling card on alt-rock radio, thanks to seismic, Led Zep-like convulsions and an uncharacteristically funky "Another One Bites the Dust"-style break that showcases the muscular time-keeping of new drummer Brian Quast. Remarkably, Polvo achieve these breakthroughs without sacrificing any of their signatures, such as spastic structural shifts and eerie, spidery guitar leads where you can feel the strings bend. They've just organized them in such a way that their aggressive and melodic impulses complement rather than fight against each other.
Of course, you'd expect a new Polvo album to deliver at least a couple of corkers. But where In Prism truly distinguishes itself-- not just as a surprisingly good reunion album, but also as the most immediately satisfying front-to-back album in the entire Polvo catalogue-- is in its quieter, headier stretches. Where the extended running times of "D.C. Trails" (6:57) and "Lucia" (8:15) may seem to indulge the band's old free-form tendencies, each is carefully constructed on an upward arc: the former cruises on a pleasingly lysergic jangle-pop tip before climaxing with a fireworks-worthy guitar jam; the diregy, doom-metal build up of "Lucia" makes the song's sudden transition into a melancholic, tambourine-rattled pop song all the more effective and affecting. In Prism could be the first Polvo album where the melodies leave as lasting an impression as the noise around them, with Bowie tapping into a more guileless mode of expression that rarely revealed itself before.
It's only during the prolonged middle breakdown of the drifty, eight-minute closer "A Link in the Chain" that In Prism acquires an air of ponderousness. But by that point, Polvo's comeback coronation has been handily earned. If no one was really asking for a new Polvo album at the start 2009, In Prism's dreamy discord feels perfectly in tune with that of contemporary psychedelic iconoclasts like Deerhunter. And if Polvo's reformation initially defied the traditional logic for indie-rock reunions, In Prism ultimately sets a new standard for them: don't just make it sound like you never left, but rather make the past seem like a mere warm-up for what's to come. | 2009-09-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-09-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | September 1, 2009 | 8.1 | 23f1af6e-fd7e-4613-b51b-05d98ed5376b | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Jilian Medford’s third album is bigger, brighter, cleaner, and more ambitious. Even when she’s hollering, she sounds dwarfed, standing vulnerable but unafraid amid towering emotions. | Jilian Medford’s third album is bigger, brighter, cleaner, and more ambitious. Even when she’s hollering, she sounds dwarfed, standing vulnerable but unafraid amid towering emotions. | IAN SWEET: Show Me How You Disappear | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ian-sweet-show-me-how-you-disappear/ | Show Me How You Disappear | Jilian Medford started Ian Sweet in 2014 while studying at Berklee College of Music, and after graduating, she put together a band for the spiny, hushed songs she was writing. Her debut, 2016’s Shapeshifter, moved with the same restlessness she brought to her singing, which shifted nimbly and unpredictably between belt and squeak. Her songs felt simple enough on the surface; brightly colored and acidic, they filtered the touchstones of a comfortable early-2000s childhood (skating, Michael Jordan, Nickelodeon Slime Time Live) through the brittle anxieties of 2010s early adulthood. But she often seemed to be twisting their structures on purpose, as if trying to wring new information from old shapes. On 2018’s Crush Crusher, she parted ways with her band and dove deeper into textures, producing a muted indie-pop album that felt halfway between a waking dream and an unfinished sketch. Through it all, she’s seemed like a roving mind in search of a target, scanning her inner horizons for material strong enough to satisfy her.
On her third album, she’s found it. Show Me How You Disappear is bigger, brighter, cleaner, more ambitious than anything she’s done. Working by herself with a number of handpicked producers, including Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Empress Of) and Andy Seltzer (Maggie Rogers), Medford sights some big feelings, swings, and connects. The album scales heights and punches the air upon reaching them, and the best songs swell in your chest like prime-era Broken Social Scene.
Medford has slowed the metabolism of her music, simplifying and amplifying her gestures in the process. “Power” clicks reliably along well-worn quiet-LOUD-quiet rails, exploding into distortion at the chorus until the wish in its lyrics—“I want to feel the power of knowing/Nothing/Nothing/I want to feel the power of holding/No one”—shines overhead like stadium lights. The chorus only comes around twice, but it burns so bright that it leaves an after-image.
In interviews surrounding this record, Medford has alluded to suffering from acute anxiety, which led her briefly into an outpatient facility. While there, she discovered the transformative power of mantras, a revelation she plugged directly into her songwriting. “I want to stop, I want to,” she stutters on “Dumb Driver”; “I want to get better, better, better” on “Get Better.” “I’ll start saying your name/Saying your name backwards so I’ll forget it,” she repeats on “Drink the Lake,” and the poignancy snowballs as the phrase loops—a resolution so frail it requires constant reinforcement.
The self-annihilating danger of codependency has lurked in Medford’s lyrics since the beginning—the repeated chorus of “Hiding,” a standout from Crush Crusher, was just “I forgot myself in you”—but where her earlier music felt knotted and interior, a monologue directed toward a sidewalk, her new songs meet you right in the eyes. The second half of that “I want to get better, better” couplet is, “But in my mind, I’m still lying in your bed.” As she sings, a synth wails overheard like a klaxon announcing a jailbreak. This is what unwanted disappearance into someone else feels like, the music suggests—a national emergency, even if no one else even notices.
Medford has cited some big-tent influences (the specter of Coldplay was raised) and you can hear her ambitions playing themselves out in the margins of the production. The treated drums and processed vocals in “Dirt,” for example, or the intriguingly deformed whistle on “Sword” that sounds like a curdled version of the one from Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” testify to imagined festival stages. The reverb is cavernous—when the guitars and synth tangle on “Dirt,” the slow-curling dry ice is implied. Her voice rings clear in the mix, but even when she’s hollering, she sounds dwarfed, standing vulnerable but unafraid amid towering emotions.
Those emotions, and their sometimes-terrible clarity, resonate above all. “I see it now, I see it/So much more than before/I see everything,” she repeats, with wonder, on the final track. Her lyrics still wander in long, conversational loops—“I’ve been dreaming of basketball hoops/And sitting on couches with you, it tricks me into feeling like you’re still around,” she sings on “Dumb Driver”—but the bad feelings on Show Me How You Disappear are pure in their simplicity. Missing someone hurts. Longing is nourishing and exhausting, Medford suggests, and sometimes you can’t decide if it’s the point of existence or the only thing keeping you miserable.
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. | 2021-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | March 5, 2021 | 7.8 | 23f520b2-72d5-4570-822b-42a4dafcfe5f | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
A decade into their career, Baroness continue to take chances. On this double album, that means experimenting with length and adding a new focus on melody. It's an epic record that is heavy in a new way. | A decade into their career, Baroness continue to take chances. On this double album, that means experimenting with length and adding a new focus on melody. It's an epic record that is heavy in a new way. | Baroness: Yellow & Green | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16771-yellow-green/ | Yellow & Green | When they started making burly, progressive sludge almost 10 years ago, Baroness weren't teenagers: They were grown men with a refined, nuanced approach to heavy metal. Even in 2003, it wasn't your typical Southern sludge swamp. That said, I doubt anyone listening then could've predicted Yellow & Green. The quartet's new 18-song, 75-minute double album offers a broad, rich expanse of pretty, psychedelic, occasionally heavy, mostly straight-up rock that veers easily into pop, post-rock, and lulling ambient washes. There are a number of new elements to Baroness in 2012-- frontman John Baizley is the father of a young daughter and lives in Philadelphia instead of Savannah; after the recording of Yellow & Green, Matt Maggioni came on board as the group's new bassist (which means longtime member Summer Welch is no more). The sound itself is the biggest shift, though it shouldn't come as a total surprise. They've hinted at these new avenues, and even tentatively explored a few, on their first two LPs, Blue Record and Red Album. What's surprising here is how well it all works.
There's almost always some filler on a record of this length-- it's a casualty of double albums-- but there's an impressive scarcity of it here. Even the songs that float by more humbly, or as background music, ultimately have a place in the overall dynamic by the first or second listen. And they are all songs. Take the "themes" that open Yellow and Green, respectively, the warm, aqueous two minutes of "Yellow Theme", the more drifting, airy, chilly (and post-rock anthemic) four-and-a-half minutes of "Green Theme". These are beautiful instrumentals, compositions with actual force and not more incidentals.
I recently interviewed Baizley about the record. He detailed how the group's idea of heaviness shifted from their early days to the present. He explained that "tricks" like "10 amplifiers on stage, a ton of volume, and notes on [a] guitar that were more appropriate for bass guitar" were a kind of "artifice to mask youthful songwriting." In the present, the group is more focused on subtlety: "Now that songs have become more important to us, we're trying to find the more nuanced, more appropriate-for-us idea of heavy." Yellow & Green showcases this new take in spades. As Baizley put it, "the Baroness-circa-2012 definition of heavy [is] not a tuning and it's not necessarily a volume; it's more of a feeling or an idea or some goal post that we're headed towards." And, practically speaking, the cleaner singing is a kind of survival tactic: His and backup vocalist Pete Adams' vocal cords couldn't continue along the raw, shouting path they'd set for themselves earlier on.
Baizley stressed that, although it's a double LP, Yellow & Green is not a concept record. That said, one theme certainly leaps out: that of aging, and the ways it changes our ideas surrounding music from one stage of adulthood to the next. Albums that force artists to go deep into themselves as people and as musicians tend to end up as accidental concept records, collections that document the time they pushed themselves to create, and the life they were otherwise living at that time. But this one feels very closely aligned to getting closer to 40, to feeling your bones creak a little more, your eyes getting a little weaker.
It's in the lyrics with words that fixate on disappearances, fractures, sleep, bruises, bracing for death, failing hearts, and saying goodnight to your father. Or there's the nostalgia of a line like, "when we were kids we never felt so young, take me to a hazy Sunday morning." Then again, we also get plenty of blood ("this apple makes me sick, says this pig upon the stick, it's my own blood") and water, as both baptism and drowning, or beginning and end. (A track like "March to the Sea" has water in its title, but there's something about its musicality that brings to mind early-1990s post-rock, too, and that post-Slint, June of 44-style obsession with anchors and sails.)
John Congleton, who also produced Blue, again gels perfectly with the band. Each song has levels and layers: It's an album for headphones as well as one for lighters in the middle of a smoky club. You get weird gurgles of noise, shimmering deep layers of sound, electronic swirls. "Twinkler" is like a downcast campfire greek chorus; "Cocainium" has that kind of ambiance, too, but picks up the drum beat-- it's a variation on psychedelic pop that made me think of the Turtles until the muscular bass, distorted guitars, and grungy chorus.
Baizley said the cover art, and the songs themselves, reflect the feeling of the moment before or after a disaster; of course, these are very different feelings, but I know what he means. It's not all waiting around and recovering. There's pure climactic catharsis, as you'd expect from Baroness, but these tracks work in a way Baroness songs haven't previously. Instead of explosions, billows, and howls, we get a more meditative air, even on some of the bigger rockers like "Take My Bones Away" or the rollicking "Board Up the House". Each mountain is chased with something a littler gentler. It's thrilling hearing people this technically adept holding back a little, showing restraint, and cramming what they know into a pop nugget. It's what Torche have done well in the past, especially on Meanderthal, but it's bigger, more spacious and stadium-sized here. (Like if Torche actually were the Foo Fighters.)
One of these climaxes is "Eula", the heart-crushing finale to Yellow, seven minutes of crisp acoustics, atmospheric (and anthemic) vocals, and warped chiming sounds that accompany descriptions of bones breaking, a house becoming a cage-- in other words, the end of something. But it's not: "Eula" ushers in the more pastoral Green, which also stands on its own as a great record. After the main "Green" theme comes "Board Up the House", a bit of shout-along rock'n'roll with a Radiohead-like approach to percussive filters and shifts. Elsewhere on this half there's the thorny Fahey-pop of "Stretchmarker" and a dose of chewy pop-metal via "The Line Between", another possible single. It ends with "If I Forget Thee, Lowcountry", an outro like the Yellow opening: We get that slippery, aqueous sound again.
I've always liked the elegance of the group's primary-color schemes-- topical, clearly delineated ways to make each album feel like a whole. Here, more than anywhere else, the colors aren't needed: These songs stick together well without a framework. Tracks play off each other, make echoes, and then go on. Each disc stands on its own as a powerful document; together, they genuinely earn the word "epic." During a video interview we did with the band, Baizley joked that you should go for a run, walk your dog, or otherwise take a break from Yellow & Green at the end of the first half, before venturing into the second. The halves do elegantly mirror each other-- each with its nine songs, intro, and finale-- and a pause could make sense. But I prefer listening to the entire thing from start to finish. This is an impressive effort, one that involved a lot of heavy lifting, and it's best experienced with that sort of commitment. | 2012-07-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-07-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | July 18, 2012 | 8.5 | 23f734af-b8c5-4299-9aad-f1e0fbd252d5 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
James Mercer & co. aim to deflect the inevitable Brafflash by crafting a more texturally diverse record than their outstanding, if uncomplicated, previous outings. | James Mercer & co. aim to deflect the inevitable Brafflash by crafting a more texturally diverse record than their outstanding, if uncomplicated, previous outings. | The Shins: Wincing the Night Away | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9808-wincing-the-night-away/ | Wincing the Night Away | While indie rock has embraced grander and more elaborate productions, the Shins have remained unlikely champions of uncertainty and understatement. Unlike many of their meteorically successful indie peers, the Shins don't want to change your life-- and that's a good thing, because the band's biggest strength is an uncanny gift for conjuring a deep, vivid, and palpable sense of the familiar. Many of the Shins' best songs evoke a feeling of comfort and closeness that's immediately recognizable but rarely experienced-- intimacy is the band's best weapon, amplifying the subtle ebbs and flows of their music so that the slightest injection of unease or melancholy hits with remarkable force.
On their third Sub Pop full-length, Wincing the Night Away, the Shins take a decisive but wobbly step out of their comfort zone, and in doing so sacrifice much of this musical/emotional proximity effect. While the band has taken a good deal of criticism for sounding "too average" or "boring," the ill-suited sonic punch of Wincing the Night Away throws the singular strengths of their previous work into stark relief. The almost-live sounding Chutes Too Narrow left plenty of room for singer James Mercer's excellent vocals to guide its songs both melodically and rhythmically. But on Wincing, too-loud drums and bass distract not only from the elegant movement of Mercer's melodies, but from the delicate harmonic tensions that underlie them.
That said, the first four tracks of Wincing are unerringly solid. Echoing the striking contrast of Chutes Too Narrow opener "Kissing the Lipless", Wincing's lead track, "Sleeping Lessons", builds from sparse, muffled arpeggios to full-on rock'n'roll. While slick and robust production doesn't flatter much of the record, it works well as a counterpoint to the song's quiet initial moments. "Australia" is a peppy rocker in the spirit of Chutes' best, elevated by a newfound confidence and expressive range in Mercer's voice. Single "Phantom Limb" is pure, lush pop, boasting a chorus that plays like the aural equivalent of that optical illusion where a staircase appears to ascend indefinitely.
With the exception of the excellent "Red Rabbits", the more noticeable aesthetic departures on Wincing don't fare as well. "Sea Legs", with its intrusive synthesized drum beat and lackluster arrangement, brings to mind that unfortunate Eve 6 song about putting your heart in a blender, while "Spilt Needles" comes off as sterile and overcalculated, despite its strong chorus. Still, the album finishes strong: "Girl Sailor" surpasses "Phantom Limb" in lyrics and overall structure, making it a likely contender for the album's second single, and "A Comet Appears" is beautifully orchestrated, if not terribly memorable, making it an appropriate closer for a record that often emphasizes texture over form.
There's a time-honored imperative to encourage bands for attempting to develop and expand, and the Shins could certainly take their music in many different directions with great success. But it's hard not to notice that the least adventurous tracks on Wincing the Night Away are generally the most rewarding. In many cases, the album's more experimental touches seem at odds with the natural elegance of Mercer's songwriting, making it hard to read the album as a shoddy blueprint of what a more "difficult" Shins record might sound like. Instead, Wincing the Night Away is a lovely and well-executed album and-- for the first time in the band's career-- nothing more. | 2007-01-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-01-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | January 22, 2007 | 7 | 24031d13-3206-479f-9114-47ea54331ef7 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Josiah Wise’s second album is an eager, effervescent tale of romance, outlining a genealogy that stretches from gospel to the shiny, gossamer R&B of the ’90s and ’00s. | Josiah Wise’s second album is an eager, effervescent tale of romance, outlining a genealogy that stretches from gospel to the shiny, gossamer R&B of the ’90s and ’00s. | serpentwithfeet: DEACON | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/serpentwithfeet-deacon/ | DEACON | When Josiah Wise’s gothic gospel project serpentwithfeet first appeared in 2016, its atmospheres were decidedly dank. His debut EP, blisters, produced with the grim electronic composer Haxan Cloak, had the foreboding of a horror movie and the fearsomeness of scripture. The first lyrics we heard through his silken falsetto were hair-raising: “It’s cool with me if you want to die,” he cooed on “four ethers,” “And I’m not going to stop you if you try.” The production was similarly unnerving; the story of serpentwithfeet felt deliberately written with gruesomeness lurking around every corner.
Yet Wise has always been a romantic, mingling the exquisite with the sensual. On blisters, he imagined anointing himself with the humors souring in his lover’s belly; on serpentwithfeet’s first full-length album, 2018’s soil, he compared his devotion to that of an angel to a god. With his new album, DEACON, the focus is on joy rather than pain, and the ambiance is less creepy and more confectionary. Here, serpentwithfeet tosses out the phantasmagoria but brings the same imagistic instincts to stories with happy endings. A night shared with a lover in a club or a bedroom can feel supernatural, too, and Wise details these baffling encounters without dulling their wonder. The titular deaconship can be understood to mean that serpentwithfeet is our guide to forces that defy understanding.
Wise first experimented with using the gospel idiom to profess romantic devotion on soil, but lyrically and musically, the narratives remained blood-soaked. By contrast, DEACON is airy, even sunny. Over a tumbling blues piano figure on “Malik,” Wise preaches about the object of his affections: “Blessed is the man who wears socks with his sandals.” “Amir” is built on a tender harp sample that sounds like it could be a reprise to the harpsichord-driven “Angel of Mine.” The first half of the album is made up of these giddy dispatches from a relationship’s honeymoon phase. Especially on the hummable “Same Size Shoe,” Wise explores plain contentment with the same descriptive finesse he once dedicated to tragedy. Here, the “good news” is simply the bliss of a Black love that doesn’t require translation, where intimacy goes uninterrupted by misunderstanding.
Near the album’s midpoint, dark forces arrive to interrupt Wise’s reverie. In “Sailors’ Superstition,” he sees the beginning of the end on the horizon, bidding his partner to keep their love low-key, not to “whistle on [their] ship” and tempt the “rascals of the air.” Anyone who’s seen a horror movie knows this is the moment when something finally goes wrong. But then, in an inversion of classic serpentwithfeet style, the Nao-assisted “Heart Storm” arrives to split the sky open, dispelling the gloom before it gets a chance to take hold.
Musically, DEACON outlines a genealogy from gospel to the shiny, gossamer R&B of the ’90s and ’00s, sounds that Wise grew up on. When the tracks aren’t built around claps or snaps, the percussion is often squelching and organic, reminiscent of Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins’ productions for artists like Destiny’s Child and Brandy; both styles inject vitality into Wise’s lyrical imagery. His trademark serpentine runs capture the ecstatic improvisation of gospel, retaining both spontaneity and rigor. Every harmony carries the significance of a choir. Where Jesus Is King just barely had the gall to chop-and-screw gospel while leaving its textures conservatively intact, Wise reawakens the gospel influence already present in pop music, reasserting its sturdiness in conversation with newer sounds.
DEACON is a brief and light album, not leaving quite the impression of serpentwithfeet’s earlier work. The editing-down of the lyrical drama is a refreshing change, but some of the stark songwriting and compositional tenacity of Wise’s earlier work seems absent. Opener “Hyacinth” and later track “Old & Fine” feel unfinished, as if lacking a dramatic arc. There is, though, a distinct pleasure that comes from hearing the towering instrument of Wise’s voice wrap around these simpler songs.
Nowhere is that more true than on “Fellowship,” the album’s closer, where the vision of happiness sounds downright normie (“Christmas movies in July with you”), even a little twee (“our fascination with Prosecco”). But it pays off when, in a Sampha- and Lil Silva-assisted chorus, Wise surrounds the romantic and erotic love that drives the album’s narrative with a chorus of platonic support: “I’m thankful for the love I share with my friends.” Their soulful ad-libbing evokes the most comforting moments of choir singing; it sounds immediately like something you would skip to the end of a lesser song to hear. It’s a gesture of warmth more affecting than any literary allusion or gory image.
DEACON could use a few more awe-inspiring moments, but by celebrating simplicity, it enshrines the Black, queer love at its center as something blessedly uncomplicated and precious. Love doesn’t need tragedy to be great, and neither does serpentwithfeet. On DEACON, Wise proves his musicianship can stand on its own—no melodrama required.
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. | 2021-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Secretly Canadian | March 29, 2021 | 7.7 | 24059f55-59f9-4462-bff5-bfcbcbeeafb5 | Adlan Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adlan-jackson/ | |
This revelatory survey of the music of Northern Brazil from the 1970s and ’80s is by turns alien and familiar, sacred and profane, always raw and thrilling. | This revelatory survey of the music of Northern Brazil from the 1970s and ’80s is by turns alien and familiar, sacred and profane, always raw and thrilling. | Various Artists: Jambú e Os Míticos Sons Da Amazônia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-jambu-e-os-miticos-sons-da-amazonia/ | Jambú e Os Míticos Sons Da Amazônia | Joaquim Maria Dias de Castro—better known as Mestre Cupijó—was already an accomplished bandleader in his hometown of Cametá, a small city in the northern Brazilian state of Pará, when he ventured upriver to live in an Amazonian quilombola community among the descendants of escaped slaves. There he absorbed siriá, the traditional sound of those mixed-race communities, where African, indigenous, and mestiço cultures commingled for generations, and he returned to Cametá determined to modernize that sound, blending it with elements of the Colombian cumbia, Dominican merengue, and Cuban mambo that had spread across northern Brazil in the 1960s, carried across the jungle by distant radio signals.
“Despedida,” captured live in a Cametá nightclub in 1973, represents the first recording of modern siriá. An invigoratingly raw blend of bashed drum kit and bittersweet horns, it is the closing song on Jambú e os Míticos Sons da Amazonia, Analog Africa’s fascinating new survey of the bygone sounds of Belém, the capital of Pará and the gateway between the Atlantic and the Amazon. But in many ways, Cupijó’s story serves as a prelude to this compilation. Analog Africa first turned its eye to Brazil in 2014 with Siriá, an anthology of Cupijó’s music, and Jambú, the result of label co-founder Samy Ben Redjeb’s digging expeditions in Belém, widens the lens to focus on carimbó and lambada, sister sounds to siriá that also incorporate a mixture of indigenous, Afro-Brazilian, and Portuguese influences.
With the exception of giants like Pinduca, a legendary figure who first modernized and electrified carimbó, many of these artists will be unfamiliar to all but the most dedicated students of Brazilian music (for several, it is their first time appearing on streaming services), and the music is uniformly thrilling, blending the syncopated shuffle of carimbó—a beat, originally played on hollowed-out tree trunks, that’s part galloping horse, part drunken stumble—with trance-like woodwind melodies, throaty sing-alongs, flickering rhythm guitar, and the overdriven sonics you might expect from a genre whose pioneers ran their electric guitars through church PAs powered by car batteries.
It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what is so gripping about this music, what gives it a quality at once alien and familiar. “Jambú” refers to a medicinal Amazonian herb frequently mixed with cachaça, to reportedly powerful effect, and that stimulated/sloshed dichotomy plays out in a kind of rowdy melancholy: The beats surge like floodwaters, the percussion clatters like a thumped table covered with empties, the singers’ voices have the ragged edge of sun-up on no sleep. The slippery trills and eerie, modal sax melodies of songs like Messias Holanda’s “Carimbó de Pimienta” and Verequete e o Conjunto Uirapurú’s “Da Garrafa uma Pinga” remind me, in their mercurial moods, of Ethiopian jazz.
The compilation’s excellent liner notes detail the clubs and bars where this music took shape in the 1970s and 1980s, and quite a few of these songs make no bones about their mission as straight-up party music. Pinduca’s “Vamos Farrear” is a rousing toast with a sly twist (“Let’s drink cachaça, everyone/Let’s party/The cachaça is tasty/No one will get drunk”); the irresistible “Coco de Bahia” is a tribute to the coconuts of Bahia, Brazil that’s loaded with winking double entendres. Such wordplay runs through many of these songs, as do snapshots of rural life in remote farming communities: Vieira e Seu Conjunto’s lilting “Melô do Bode,” which hinges on the double meaning of “bode” (“goat”/“problem”) is about a troublesome animal he can’t wait to unload.
Throughout, a captivating mix of the profane and the sacred holds sway, particularly in the acoustic “pau e corda” (“stick and chord”) style of Verequete e o Conjunto Uirapurú. Verequete, the “King of Carimbó,” was a devotee of Candomblé, a regional religion with African roots; he took his name from a vodun, or divinity, in the jejes-nagós cults of Mina. Relying on traditional instruments like curimbó drum, saxophone, banjo, sticks, triangle, ganza, and afoxé, Verequete’s band offers not just a testament to carimbó’s pre-electric roots but also its roof-raising qualities. And Janjão’s “Meu Barquinho” is a song about the orishas Zango and Yemanja, while his album Carimbó e Outras Mirongas was meant as a call to preserve the cultural heritage of Brazilian Candmoblé and other folk-religious forms.
To the uninitiated, Jambú may sound at first nearly as incomprehensible as it is exciting. The first dozen times through, I had trouble making sense of the overloaded midrange and upper register: the horns, guitars, call-and-response vocals, and insistent shakers and maracas. But eventually, it all settles into place, yielding both a rich diversity of complementary styles—just compare the rollicking, jazz-band madness of Os Muiraquitãns with the spindly elegance of Mestre Vieira’s brand of lambada and guitarrada—and a riveting glimpse at styles and cultures long ignored by the official history of Brazilian popular music. Jambú is the next best thing to a seat in Mestre Cupijó’s dugout canoe. Decades after he ventured upriver, he takes the rest of us with him.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Analog Africa | August 15, 2019 | 8 | 2405a18f-4a7c-4a7f-b720-5ebce872cfe1 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Haim’s impeccably crafted mix of influences—soft rock’s incandescent glow, R&B’s sensuality, the spiky-yet-polished effervescence of pop-rock—come together seamlessly on their winning full-length debut. | Haim’s impeccably crafted mix of influences—soft rock’s incandescent glow, R&B’s sensuality, the spiky-yet-polished effervescence of pop-rock—come together seamlessly on their winning full-length debut. | Haim: Days Are Gone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18574-haim-days-are-gone/ | Days Are Gone | Before Danielle and Este Haim were riding motorbikes in the sun, catching fish with their bare hands, or making potential suitors weep with heartache, they were Valli Girls. The Los Angeles sisters played guitar and bass, respectively, in the tween-pop quintet that was assembled and signed to major label Columbia in 2004, with 1980s soft-rock linchpin Richard Marx attached as a creative contributor. The results were decidedly mixed: there was the acoustic melodrama of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants soundtrack cut "Always There in You", the cruelly ironic "Born to Lead" ("My independent voice will have its say"), and most notoriously, "It's a Hair Thing", the dog whistle-pitched theme song for the short-lived animated TV show "Trollz".
This early group wasn't the beginning of the Haim sisters' musical career—the pair had been performing covers with the rest of their family, including youngest sister Alana, since they were old enough to hold instruments. "We're just ourselves," a 17-year-old Este Haim was quoted as saying in a 2005 press release that touted the Valli Girls' debut album, Valli Nation. That sentiment wasn't entirely true: as a Fader story from earlier this year detailed, musical prodigies Danielle and Este weren't all that into playing songs that they didn't write, so they pulled out of their contract. The family band was christened with the endearingly dorky name Rockinhaim, thereafter shortened to Haim when the sisters decided to strike out on their own in 2006.
So far, the story of Haim has seemed ripe for the type of movie you'd catch playing on VH1 on a Sunday afternoon and Days Are Gone, the trio's outstanding full-length debut, is the latest plot twist. The album arrives just as Haim's impeccably crafted mix of influences—soft rock's incandescent glow, R&B's sensuality, the spiky-yet-polished effervescence of pop-rock—are more fashionable than ever. But Haim weren't just raised on these genres; they were raised to perform them; they may benefit from perfect timing, but they scan as anything but opportunistic.
Since Days Are Gone single and blog-buzz fire-starter "Forever" made the rounds in early 2012, Haim have often been mentioned alongside Fleetwood Mac; critic Ann Powers recently described their sound as an encapsulation of Billboard's Hot 100 singles of 1987, which included the Mac's Tango in the Night single "Little Lies". The comparison is not without merit—much of the dusky, ebullient "Honey & I", one of Days Are Gone's highest highs, sounds as if The Reminder-era Feist fused together the acoustic riffs of "I Don't Want to Know" and "Never Going Back Again". But Haim also channel the best elements of their current peers: Phoenix's compressed pop economics, the cool-handed spaciousness of Arctic Monkeys' recent work, and Spoon's wound-coil precision.
The latter quality is Haim's secret weapon. Along with drummer and L.A. scene fixture Dash Hutton, Haim sound as tight and in-the-pocket as you'd expect from a group of people that have spent most of their lives making music. Simian Mobile Disco's James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons) and studio-man-of-the-moment Ariel Rechtshaid (Vampire Weekend, Usher) both receive co-writing and production credits and contribute just the right touches to Haim's sleek, streamlined arrangements. The record's mix is translucent and refreshingly bare-bones, which affords plenty of space for Days Are Gone's many indelible hooks—the twitchy R&B of "If I Could Change Your Mind", "Don't Save Me"'s rollicking bursts of euphoria, the resonant melancholia of closer "Running If You Call My Name"—to work their uncanny magic.
When you hear about the influences and consider just how slick the record can be, you might imagine Haim coming over as faceless. But the band's most unusual quality on Days Are Gone is their ability to absorb inputs and continue to sound distinct. The album's punchy title track was co-written by Jessie Ware, another artist who's made a name replicating the sounds of pop's past, along with Ware's frequent songwriting collaborator Kid Harpoon ("Wildest Moments", "Night Light"); Ware and Harpoon's style is usually easy to pick out, but it's barely felt on "Days Are Gone", as Danielle Haim's staccato delivery pops and locks where Ware's vocals would have crested and swelled. That Haim retain their identity through collaboration speaks to their confidence.
The lyrics on Days Are Gone aren't necessarily built to withstand close analysis; largely, the words function to add a bit of weight to the effortless, feather-light melodies, but Haim do know how to turn a phrase. "The Wire", especially, has some of group's most effective lines, a level-headed act of kiss-off kindness ("I gave it all away/ Just so I could say that/ Well I know that you're gonna be OK anyway") paired with a rolling melody that makes the song one of the most benevolent breakup anthems since Robyn's "Call Your Girlfriend".
Days Are Gone is so polished that Haim could easily be seen as clinical and lifeless, but their lighthearted attitude complements their recording rigor. Whether they're covering Miley Cyrus and Sheryl Crow, making "bass faces", or reuniting Rockinhaim by bringing their own parents on stage for a rendition of "Mustang Sally", Haim come over as affable, playing-to-the-rafters rock stars as well as studio pros. Taken as a whole, the project is a testament to what's most important, and Days Are Gone's divine pleasures suggest that, rock history be damned, family business doesn't always have to be dysfunctional. | 2013-09-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-09-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | September 30, 2013 | 8.3 | 240708c6-48f4-475a-b373-9deef91e00e9 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Formed in 2003, Frightened Rabbit established their reputation with ramshackle anthems of heartbreak and hangovers. With the National's Aaron Dessner behind the boards, their newest is more a sensible repositioning than a reinvention. | Formed in 2003, Frightened Rabbit established their reputation with ramshackle anthems of heartbreak and hangovers. With the National's Aaron Dessner behind the boards, their newest is more a sensible repositioning than a reinvention. | Frightened Rabbit: Painting of a Panic Attack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21679-painting-of-a-panic-attack/ | Painting of a Panic Attack | Forming in 2003, Frightened Rabbit established their reputation with ramshackle anthems of heartbreak and hangovers that presented frontman Scott Hutchison as self-loathing, self-destructive, but ultimately sympathetic. By 2010, success and expanding ambition started to strain against their underdog appeal. That tension was projected onto the anxious, thickly overdubbed The Winter of Mixed Drinks. Pedestrian Verse arrived three years later, an album that isn’t widely considered their best, but it's definitive in its own way. It's the one that said “this is who we are going forward”: a major-label band that plays 2000-3000 cap rooms. Shortly thereafter, Hutchison moved to Los Angeles with his girlfriend. Sub in High Violet and Trouble Will Find Me for their respective years, and this is basically the same exact career trajectory as the National, so it’s only natural that the two bands go from sharing tour bills and a producer (Peter Katis) to sharing a studio—and so with Aaron Dessner behind the boards, Painting of a Panic Attack is more a sensible repositioning than a reinvention.
“Death Dream” immediately extinguishes any hope that Frightened Rabbit might return to the scrappy charms of Sing the Greys or The Midnight Organ Fight. He often plays the religious skeptic in his lyrics, but Hutchison sure thinks piano sounds heavenly in a church; it’s hard not to think of “Fake Empire” just from the mere tone of the reverberant chord that opens “Death Dream.” By the time the progression begins to settle, it’s pretty much impossible to not hum “stay out...super late…tonight,” as the “Fake Empire” melody fits almost exactly. While it boasts Hutchison’s most vivid and morbid poetry yet, “Death Dreams” doesn’t lift off, floating more towards the rafters like a errant balloon. So it makes for a curious opener, though it’s an accurate preview of yet another instance where Dessner’s charges end up sounding like his main band.
This can work for a newer act that’s trying to hit a similar emotional tenor to the National. On their respective sophomore LPs, Local Natives and Sharon Van Etten followed raw debuts by contrasting Dessner’s sumptuous, solemn orchestration with simmering angst, the sound of people trying their best not to crack up in public. A band less willing to exert their own personality ends up with something like Wilder Mind. Painting is somewhere in between; Dessner helps add a silvery stylization to Frightened Rabbit’s jittery indie-folk on “Break,” while late-album ballads “400 Bones” and “Die Like a Rich Boy” cover Hutchison’s barstool laments with Rag & Bone sympathy. The choral burst of “Get Out” is jarring in a strictly musical sense, more so if you once viewed Frightened Rabbit as an alternative to post-Britpop Patsavas-core like Snow Patrol and Travis. But "Grey’s Anatomy" is still chugging along and thus will need stadium-ready surges from a bearded man with a burly voice expressing an all-purpose longing about a flawed girl that won’t get out of his heart.
They’re both effective, as formula should be, reliant on devices that become cliches only within their established parameters. After The Midnight Organ Fight, Hutchison joked that he couldn’t make another break-up record because he hadn’t had one that year. But it seems like he’s recognized that fans rely on Frightened Rabbit for a specific kind of Scottish miserablism, which Painting of a Panic Attack delivers with consistency if not conviction. They don’t strike me as cynical, so I’d hate to use the word “pandering” for the way uber-Frightened Rabbit laments “Blood Under the Bridge,” “An Otherwise Disappointing Life,” and “Woke Up Hurting” play towards expectations. But it’s really difficult to do otherwise after Hutchison’s expected recriminations of god, booze, and breakups tell you nothing the titles didn’t already, and the heavy-handed rhyming of “I Wish I Was Sober” only enhances the suspicion that it’s concept-driven exercise rather than an expression of actual emotion.
Yet, the best Frightened Rabbit songs aren’t entirely defined by their despondance or desperation. What’s missing from Panic is some kind of levity or the cutting humor that once personalized Hutchison’s self-loathing. It’s admittedly impossible to gauge the legitimacy of Hutchison’s emotions; like the National, maybe Frightened Rabbit have just gotten too good at their formula for it to not seem self-aware. And too often, the title of Painting of a Panic Attack serves as an unintentional reminder of the way Hutchison comes across: like a television version of a person with a broken heart. | 2016-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Canvasback / Atlantic | April 11, 2016 | 6 | 24074835-97c7-4902-b3ce-385c6cef4edc | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The reissue of Maxwell’s second album from 1998 showcases the mercurial spirit that followed the R&B auteur down new, aqueous corridors. | The reissue of Maxwell’s second album from 1998 showcases the mercurial spirit that followed the R&B auteur down new, aqueous corridors. | Maxwell: Embrya | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maxwell-embrya/ | Embrya | In 2011, during the filming of his “VH1 Storytellers” episode, Maxwell attempted to describe his second album, 1998’s Embrya, and its uneasy position in his discography, the way it wriggles away from the more concrete and clarified R&B statements that surround it. “It’s one of those records where you’re like, ‘Should I have done that or should I have not done that record?’,” he said, seeming to pose the question to his own audience.
When Maxwell arrived on radio and MTV in 1996, he brought a sound back with him, the quietly storming soul music of the late-’70s and early-’80s, a genre that could hover politely in the air between neighbors at a cookout or totally collapse the air between two people in a bedroom. His debut, Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, modeled itself after records like Marvin Gaye’s I Want You, linked sequences of seduction that either blossomed toward or shrank away from the possibility of love; it eventually sold two million copies and earned Maxwell a Grammy nod.
Now he wanted the sound he had pulled from the past to follow him and bend around whichever corner he turned. As he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2016, “What I did with [Embrya], on purpose, was that it was the anti-Afro ’70s funk-soul record.” He resisted the notion that his music could be pinned down and examined, and he seemed to want to write music that could circulate forever, that slipped away from any attempt to capture it, like a wave of water or an anxious thought. The songs he wrote for Embrya respond to this inner stubbornness, loosen themselves from their points, spread and pale like watercolors. It was as if had he had opened a window in his urban hang suite and the ocean poured in.
Made primarily as a reaction to his own debut album, Embrya has few previous models for its itself. It is the only R&B record I’ve ever heard that’s submerged as it is. (Even the Sade records that producer Stuart Matthewman worked on periodically come up for air.) At an hour long, it spills itself across four sides of vinyl on its new reissue, released on the occasion of the album’s 20th anniversary. It can be difficult to focus on its individual hooks; they rear up and break apart like waves in bottomless lakes of songs. Flamenco guitar solos ripple and die off like pulses on a radar screen. Strings stir and resettle like clouds of silt at the bottom of an aquarium.
There’s simply not enough water metaphors on this green earth to describe Embrya. This is by design; few R&B albums, let alone albums in general, embody the liquid rush of desire as completely as it does. Maxwell’s piercing tenor is double-tracked so often that even its edges seem watery, and his lyrics crumble from the direct romanticism of Urban Hang Suite into impressions and feelings that aren’t necessarily certain of what they are; he sings words like “plush” and “blush” almost interchangeably, and they melt away in pale petals of near-meaning.
As each song wades gradually from chord to chord, it grows harder to determine one’s position in them, whether at their middles or near their ends or slipping away into new, just-forming instrumentals, as when “Matrimony: Maybe You”—a pop-jazz track smooth and untroubled as the skin of a pebble—narrowly forks into a funk workout called “Arroz con Pollo.” Which isn’t to suggest the sound of the album is uniform; its songs are as various and vivid in their depth charges of color as Monet’s “Water Lilies,” which he painted as his vision was failing and the world itself was melting into streaks of color. There are indeed verses and choruses on Embrya; there’s a deep mysterious pull in the groove of “Luxury: Cococure” from which the chorus seems to bubble upward. “Drowndeep: Hula” is one of Maxwell’s tenderest yet murkiest ballads; if its drumbeat were a little slower and dilated it might’ve produced an early draft of Massive Attack’s “Teardrop” instead. “Gravity: Pushing to Pull” finds Maxwell descending to a pressurized depth, his voice riven with low distortions. But as Embrya advances it can feel just as often like a lens is dwelling over different gatherings of sound—hands swimming up the keys of a synthesizer, basslines played so flexibly they’re invertebrate—briefly snapping them into focus before they sink back into the texture of the record.
In this way Embrya somewhat foreshadows D’Angelo’s 2000 masterpiece Voodoo, both artists searching for something even beyond the outer limits of their debut albums, both records achieving something close to perpetual motion in the slow circulation of their grooves. But where Voodoo stretches time out until it’s crisp and brittle, Embrya’s time feels thick and immeasurable and seems to pass in gradual stirrings, the liquid counterpoint to Voodoo’s spare, desiccated funk. It’s an album of traceless, amnesiac swellings, never seeming to quite know where it’s going or where it’s just been, flowing without ever seeming aware of its flowing, which is its truly remarkable achievement. According to Maxwell, Embrya is “a story that unfolds,” but it’s impossible to pick up a single thread of it and follow it to its original source; it’s all source, a concept album in which there is no concept, just feelings, impressions, intimacies and their absences, wave after wave after unending wave of them. | 2018-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony Music’s Certified Classics | October 8, 2018 | 8.3 | 2409f13f-f7d6-4648-bfe9-4d0371602a61 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | |
Whether as a commercial concession or an experimental detour, Ghost goes full-tilt R&B on his new album. | Whether as a commercial concession or an experimental detour, Ghost goes full-tilt R&B on his new album. | Ghostface Killah: Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13537-ghostdini-the-wizard-of-poetry-in-emerald-city/ | Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City | On the face of it, a Ghostface R&B album isn't the worst idea in the world. Ghost, after all, has traveled this ground before. On his debut album Ironman, he enlisted Mary J. Blige for "All That I Got Is You", a gut-wrenching memoir of a childhood spent picking roaches out the cereal box. And on The Pretty Toney Album nugget "Holla", he straight-up rapped over an entire sweaty Delfonics oldie, his urgent yowl thrillingly banging against the song's weeping strings and punchdrunk guitars. Ghost understands how soul music works, and many of his own best records strive for transcendence as hard as any old Al Green jam. If he'd used either of those tracks as the basis for The Wizard of Poetry, we could have a classic on our hands.
But you review the album you got, not the album you wanted. Rather than either of those tracks, Ghost has built his R&B experiment, understandably enough, around the only song of his to get significant New York radio burn in recent years: The Ne-Yo collaboration "Back Like That", the sole Hot 97 concession on the otherwise hard-as-fuck Fishscale. (The Kanye-assisted remix shows up here as a bonus track even though it was already on More Fish three years ago.) "Back Like That" wasn't a bad song-- far from it-- but it's tough to imagine how Ghost thought he could make an album full of that, especially when he didn't land a single guest singer anywhere near as talented as Ne-Yo.
In fact, it's tough to imagine how The Wizard of Poetry came into existence in the first place. If it's a A&R-driven commercial Hail Mary, then how did the Def Jam authorities allow Ghost to get away with "Stapleton Sex", the squirmiest fuck jam in recent memory? "Stapleton Sex", which Ghost hilariously alleges he wrote for Natalie Portman, starts out with "My face is wet, got a hair on my tongue," and only gets more greasily specific from there. ("This ain't no R&B dick," he helpfully points out.) But if the whole album is Ghost's baby, then why is he paired up with scrub-ass R&B new jacks like Lloyd and Ron Brownz? I promise you, Ghost doesn't bang any Lloyd CDs in his car.
As a writer, though, Ghost remains fascinating and contradictory. Check, for instance, opening track "Not Your Average Girl", where he builds his perfect woman (she should be on the couch reading a book and biting a pen when she gets home, but also shoot home invaders, which seems like a tall order) before tossing all that to the side on the last verse: "We run trains on them bitches, never ice they arms." Or "Do Over", where he starts out hangdog, apologizing for every form of infidelity before revealing that he's on a bus to prison, apologizing for that, too, and signing off with this: "Thanks for your patience. You find a man. I hope he's true."
Even the halfassed songs are filled with enormously likable turns of phrase, like when Ghost interrupts a story mid-sentence to refer to himself as a "prestigious gentleman." So many great little verbal moments here: "The smell of her fragrance baffled my nostrils," "My dick is hard as a callus," "I pull out like a tooth in the back, it's rotten." A totally sincere pickup line: "I would love to have a thing like you on the team." Another: "I love it like that, stretchmark fat." And Ghost delivers all this stuff straight-faced; he doesn't do punchlines. Even when he's trying to be as straightforward as possible, his mind works in fascinating ways. You just have to wade through swamps of dreck to find those brilliant little moments.
The Wizard of Poetry has exactly one indispensable moment: the weirdly gripping story-song "Guest House", where Ghost bugs out looking for his girlfriend before finding her banging the cable guy, played by a titanically goofy Fabolous. Ghost's response: "Snatched his covers/ Had them looking like the black Adam and Eve, two sinful lovers." "Guest House" comes packed with the same plot twists and telling details and a breathless crime narrative like "Shakey Dog", but it uses them in the service of, basically, a soap opera, or a "Trapped in the Closet" chapter. It works in a way that almost nothing else here completely manages. | 2009-10-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-10-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | October 7, 2009 | 5.1 | 240bb2f7-c919-4f61-860e-1f51e4994677 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Madlib pays tribute to the late J Dilla, a producer with whom he created the classic Champion Sound. | Madlib pays tribute to the late J Dilla, a producer with whom he created the classic Champion Sound. | Madlib: Beat Konducta Vol. 5-6 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12772-beat-konducta-vol-5-6/ | Beat Konducta Vol. 5-6 | Another month, another meditation on the legacy of James Yancey. It's been three years since Yancey's untimely death and his grip on the imagination and inspiration of hip-hop artists still hasn't loosened-- and somehow, for the most part, hasn't crumbled into exploitative shamelessness. You can chalk that up to most of the tribute-paying artists-- Q-Tip, Common, Busta Rhymes, Talib Kweli, ?uestlove, Erykah Badu, damn near every hip-hop artist in Detroit-- having known and respected the man on a collaborative level (and, in the case of Yancey Boys' Illa J, as family). Madlib's own personal musical tribute to Dilla is particularly faithful: They were two producer-MCs who had forged a mutual stylistic compatibility, one that began with beat-tape trading by mail and resulted in the underground classic Champion Sound, and in that album's wake they both wound up inspiring and pushing each other to expanded vistas. Donuts might have sounded like a drastically different album without the choppy, grimy aesthetic of The Unseen and Madvillainy's production mind as a creative sparring partner, and Madlib's early Beat Konducta work, the creation of which ran largely parallel to the construction of Donuts, benefited greatly from his study of Dilla's meticulous drum and bassline construction. Among all the things that were lost to hip-hop heads with Dilla's passing, the possibility of future collaborations and stylistic cross-pollinations between these two beatmaking auteurs was one of the most significant.
As an elegy, a payment of a gratefully-acknowledged artistic debt and an expansion of one man's sound, the fifth and sixth volumes of Madlib's Beat Konducta series are a stirring culmination of everything Dilla did to affect Madlib as a musician. Granted, there's little mistaking it for anyone other than Madlib: There's a constant volley of vocal snippets, lyrical and otherwise, that fit his thematic blend of fragmented quasi-narrative and off-kilter humor. Plus, his restless, loop-jostling production style is instantly-recognizable here in one of its most dubbed-out, bass-heavy and atmospherically THC-soaked incarnations yet. Still, the Dilla influence is clearly evident in a number of ways, especially the way vocals are chopped and truncated to serve as melodic hook, percussive exclamations, and reconstructed grooves for several tracks, as well as the recurring presence of that weighty, synthesized bass Dilla loved to lace his tracks with. And there's a few other flourishes-- like the air-raid siren that popped up every so often on Donuts, or the "Make It Funky" clip of James Brown saying "I don't know" used on the Slum Village track of the same name-- that range from obvious nods to what seem like elaborate in-jokes between friends.
At 42 tracks stretched across 67 minutes, this looks a bit like an unwieldy collection of fleeting ideas when the tracklisting's all splayed out in front of you. And it's a bit difficult to get a firm grasp on everything, even after several listens: There's just so many ideas Madlib's managed to cram into even the shortest minute-long loop that it's hard to point to a particular track and highlight its characteristics without taking the rest of the album into account. There's some particularly inspired standout moments that'll stick with you: the soul strings that get hacked up into hiccupping, off-beat tics on "The String (Heavy Jones)"; the way "The Get Over (Move)" actually welds the guitar riff from the Buzzcocks' "Boredom" to an archetypal Yancey boom-clap and somehow makes it make sense; the muffled/smothered beats on "Smoked Out (Green Blaze Subliminal Sounds)" where nothing's clear or amplified except a persistent tambourine slap.
But this isn't an album that benefits from a track-by-track dissection or a thorough inventorizing, even if the bulk of the beats sound attention-grabbing enough when they pop up as individual moments in a divorced, shuffle-mode context. More than any other collection of semi-instrumental productions Madlib's assembled, the combined Dil Cosby Suite and Dil Withers Suite is a complete work. The best way to listen to this album is to throw it on, zone out and keep your finger away from the controls, letting the rhythmic detours and left-field segues sneak up on you before dissolving into the next beat (abetted, every so often, by some sparse but well-placed scratches from guest turntablist J-Rocc). Before long you'll click with its flood of sounds and ideas and emotions, and the everywhere-at-once scope-- mournful and celebratory, solemn and comedic, starting from soul and circulating its way through every other vein of hip-hop production structure. Three years later, after all the eulogies for Dilla, this record stands as one of the most meaningful. | 2009-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | March 6, 2009 | 8.3 | 240f2b2e-fbd3-4fe2-9684-1739ebcbdd3d | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The Wait & See EP consists of songs that didn't fit onto Majical Cloudz's 2015 album Are You Alone?, but nothing has changed, strictly speaking: Singer Devon Welsh’s rich, burly tenor still feels as if it is emanating from the center of your skull, and he sings his lines as if he’s maybe reading them off the page for the first time. | The Wait & See EP consists of songs that didn't fit onto Majical Cloudz's 2015 album Are You Alone?, but nothing has changed, strictly speaking: Singer Devon Welsh’s rich, burly tenor still feels as if it is emanating from the center of your skull, and he sings his lines as if he’s maybe reading them off the page for the first time. | Majical Cloudz: Wait & See EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21497-wait-see-ep/ | Wait & See EP | Majical Cloudz, a duo of two superhumanly sincere beings from Montreal named Devon Welsh and Matthew Otto, present us with a musical equation as legible as freshly painted white highway lines. Two members, two tiny dots on a massive canvas, Welsh's bottomless longing and Otto's vapor-trails electronics. Together, they explore how much mystery can be plumbed from radical transparency, and on their 2013 album Impersonator they hit massive dividends: It remains as transfixingly direct exploration of elemental stuff—trauma, pain, death, childhood, love—I've ever heard. Every time I listen to it, I feel like something has been dredged from my dreams.
In retrospect, this aesthetic might be so well-defined that there could only ever be one perfect album of it, and Impersonator was probably it. Last fall’s follow up Are You Alone? was gentler, less wracked by fear and dread, more reliant on ballads. It was lovely, but where Impersonator flirted with bathos, Are You Alone? nearly surrendered to it. The line between "raw, uncompromising emotional honesty" and "yeeesh" is razor-thin, after all, and some types of emotional outbursts only carry their full impact once.
The Wait & See EP consists of songs that didn't fit onto Are You Alone?, but it feels perched at this same divide, and again the balance feels slightly off. Nothing much has changed, strictly speaking. Welsh’s rich, burly tenor still feels as if it is emanating from the center of your skull, and he sings his lines as if he’s maybe reading them off the page for the first time. His writing hints at life-changing late-night conversations: "You said, ‘When I am dead, I will never feel this strange again,'" he sings on "Heaven." But a few releases in, his straightforward lines are beginning to sound less like powerful honesty and more like simple guilelessness, an innate and involuntary quality rather than a conscious act.
These are intangible criticisms, but music this bare traffics necessarily in intangibles. Here’s a concrete problem: The mix here sounds more conventional, and beholden to other, "normal" synth-pop, than the bizarre, featureless expanse of Impersonator and Are You Alone? On those albums, the synths didn't have clear attacks or decays; they happened in free space, so that nothing that happened felt strictly "real." Welsh’s gorgeous voice didn’t even sound quite right, like maybe he’d sung the lyrics backwards and played them forwards. It made you lean forward to listen more closely to music that was already perfectly clear: You heard what he was saying, but what was he saying? On Wait & See, Welsh and Otto have floated down to Earth a bit, and with the journey they shed a little bit of their unearthly magnetism.
The most powerful moment on the EP comes with "My Heart Soaks Up Every Drop of Your Blood," a title that feels intentionally clunky and literal. The music is at its simplest here, which is always the most vital spot for Majical Cloudz’s music. As in all of his best songs, you can’t quite tell if Welsh is being tender or murderous: "You are the seed in a pile of dust," he says, which is maybe not something you’d want whispered to you before dropping off to sleep. As always, it’s this liminal spot, somewhere between dread and comfort, that they occupy. Even if it's become more familiar to us, this is still a territory with no other real inhabitants, and at no point could you mistake this band for anyone other than themselves. | 2016-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | January 25, 2016 | 7.5 | 241e38ab-2507-4310-b6bc-f029dc255b2c | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Billy Corgan reenlists the creative core of James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlain for a lengthy synth-pop excursion that is clinically competent and rarely as thrilling—or thrillingly weird—as their previous work. | Billy Corgan reenlists the creative core of James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlain for a lengthy synth-pop excursion that is clinically competent and rarely as thrilling—or thrillingly weird—as their previous work. | The Smashing Pumpkins: CYR | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-smashing-pumpkins-cyr/ | CYR | At the peak of his artistic powers, Billy Corgan couldn’t bear the thought of being less popular than Pearl Jam, less revered than Kurt Cobain, and less cute than James Iha. In the mid-’90s, he saw himself as a force of divine talent, and his sociopathic competitiveness, tyrannical perfectionism, and endless personal grievances were unseen in Chicago outside of the Bulls locker room. The most generous interpretation of his current irrelevance is that Corgan has come to accept it. He’s undoubtedly noticed how the indifference towards his new music, embarrassing ticket sales, and bountiful PR gaffes barely affect the brand at this point—“Riot Fest headliner” appears to be their permanent floor. But there’s a glimpse of the old Billy Corgan in Smashing Pumpkins’ new album CYR, backed by an enthusiastic new label that will actually bankroll his dreams of an animated series. A “return to form” can’t happen without a return to proper Smashing Pumpkins optics.
The profoundly inessential 2018 album SHINY AND OH SO BRIGHT VOL. 1 has been retroactively written off as tour promo, or at least a prelude to CYR, which can be viewed as the first true reunion of the Corgan/Iha/Jimmy Chamberlin creative core since 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. CYR is likewise being promoted as a double album, nevermind that it’s actually shorter than the 1998’s Adore or 2000’s MACHINA/Machines of God or that it arrives on streaming services as a unified block of 20 tracks.
In practice, CYR is already bisected into “singles” and “the other ones”—a whopping 10 singles were portioned out in five pairs over the past three months. The initial “CYR”/“The Colour of Love” drop was at least proof that Corgan’s populist instincts haven’t completely vanished. After a decade of unconvincingly cosplaying as a rootsy singer-songwriter, glam-rock yeoman, Rick Rubin salvage project, and an H&M soundtrack aspirant, Corgan created a role delicious enough to demand attention: corporate synth-pop impresario. Imagine him working with the same raw materials as Adore and swapping out the black cloak for a sleeves-rolled white blazer, hunched over the mixing console, forcing Jimmy Chamberlin to play with a click track, demanding another take from his female session vocalists until they heed his command of “Robert Palmer, but more neon.”
“CYR” and “The Colour of Love” are Corgan’s most convincing singles in ages, if only because he believes in their hooks enough to repeat them until they stick. Neither is really a bold new iteration of Smashing Pumpkins, just an alternate history where Corgan’s synth-pop muse is promoted to the big leagues and all the goth stuff is saved for the inevitable B-sides collections. And lest anyone think that Corgan has completely reinvented himself, that’s colour of love, not “color”—the seeming affectation of someone who believes the Queen’s English signifies art or a pledge of allegiance to touchstones Sisters of Mercy and Joy Division.
The subsequent singles slowly chipped away at the novelty, but at least demonstrated Corgan’s commitment to the bit—CYR’s lone alt-rock throwback “Wyttch” is a Guitar Center employee’s faded memories of customers fumbling through the “Thunder Kiss ’65” riff. Touring member Katie Cole and longtime collaborator/Black Eyed Peas associate Sierra Swan make the most of a rare Smashing Pumpkins supporting role, adding necessary melodic color and indicating that, indeed, other human beings were involved in the creation of a 72-minute album written and produced entirely by Billy Corgan. Ever the Pumpkins lifer, Chamberlin attributes his dry, mechanical playing to Corgan’s desire for an “early-’70s prog” sound; anyone else will just hear one of the most propulsive drummers in rock history relegated to a human metronome. The input of other members of Smashing Pumpkins has always been intentionally difficult to quantify, and without a single memorable guitar part throughout, Iha and bassist Jeff Schroeder are mere witnesses to Corgan treating CYR as his Logic X tutorial.
Corgan admitted he was initially frustrated by the learning curve of self-production until he recognized how technological limitations inspired the distinct sonic character of his formative bands. Some ear-turning elements scattered throughout are new for Smashing Pumpkins—the vaguely tropical sway of “Dulcet in E,” 808 handclaps on “Starrcraft” that could’ve been pulled from an OVO sampler pack—and they are also new to anyone toying with a DAW’s factory presets. But none of Corgan’s definitive qualities as a musician—symphonic grandeur, needling immediacy—translate to his production, which burdens CYR with out-of-the-box anonymity; a Smashing Pumpkins album that sounds like it was handed off to a guy at the Genius Bar.
The production’s clinical competency only highlights the assembly-line songwriting of CYR’s back half. Whereas the back half of Smashing Pumpkins albums are typically earmarked for oddball experiments and cult favorites, CYR doles out one three-and-a-half-minute song after another, working within nearly identical vocal cadences, song structures, textures, and even tempos eerily similar to Logic’s default of 120 bpm. Only the most blatant examples of Corganphonics break up the monotony—drawling out “swoon” for two seconds until it sounds like “swan” on the otherwise mesmerizing “Save Your Tears,” the phonetic (and incorrect) pronunciation of “Samhain” on “Wyttch.” Credit where it’s due: CYR has the least amount of filler of any supersized Smashing Pumpkins album because it has the narrowest gap between the singles and the deep cuts. I also can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t trade any random three-song run for another “Glass and the Ghost Children” just to feel something.
CYR ends up being just as immersive as Smashing Pumpkins’ masterworks, just in a modern way. It’s the sort of album that gets accused of trying to game Billboard’s streaming calculations through sheer volume, single after single blending into a curiously ambient experience with Corgan’s voice faintly present in the background like an essential oil spray. But the real failing of CYR is the same one that’s plagued him since MACHINA effectively ended his imperial phase: No matter how much he writes about the nature of true love and magick and our connection to an eternal timeline, it’s impossible to grasp what any of it actually means to Corgan on an emotional level. “Drum and Fife” remains the most resonant song he’s made in the past 20 years and it’s simply an admission that he’s going to keep doing him even if no one gives a shit. Lest anyone doubt that Corgan can’t tell the difference between spinning his wheels and being on a roll, he’s already got nearly 50 songs ready for the next album.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sumerian | December 1, 2020 | 5.5 | 24201803-f2f7-4dc0-85cf-aa96e3026347 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Home to Girl Unit, L-Vis 1990, Jam City, and Bok Bok, Night Slugs increasingly looks like the most exciting thing in UK dance music; hear why now. | Home to Girl Unit, L-Vis 1990, Jam City, and Bok Bok, Night Slugs increasingly looks like the most exciting thing in UK dance music; hear why now. | Various Artists: Night Slugs Allstars, Volume 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14927-night-slugs-allstars-volume-1/ | Night Slugs Allstars, Volume 1 | The title here has to be just a little tongue-in-cheek: The Night Slugs label has only been around for about a year, and this compilation covers literally every artist who has recorded original material for it. One way to read it is that they're all stars-- corny, I know, but the label's releases have been noticeably consistent (or at least consistently interesting) since they started coming out in January, demonstrating a cross-section of UK dance music whose influences are all over the map: southern U.S. rap, London grime, a little bit of dubstep, Detroit techno, Dâm-Funk-style electro-funk, etc. Throwing proper nouns at this music is fun for genre wonks, but the reality is that the comp works well because it makes all that variety explicit.
Still, the marks that unify Night Slugs are as obvious to my ears as the ones that vary it. Most of the label's productions are colorful and brash, working not only through layers of sound but head-on collisions of them. If the music were generally less imaginative than it is, I'd say that the urgency and pride with which it all foregrounds its glitz borders on tasteless, but Night Slugs know to whom they're appealing, and it's not the folks thoughtfully nodding their heads in the corner. Some of the synths here are noxious enough to peel paint from the walls, and though the futurist crunk of Girl Unit's "Wut" is the only song to feature an actual airhorn, airhorns are implied throughout. There is exactly one track that could probably be described as "laid-back" here-- Jacques Greene's "(Baby I Don't Know) What You Want"-- and its runner-up is called "Booty Slammer".
Night Slugs' record covers-- all designed by co-founder and label contributor Bok Bok-- are always combinations of black and one or two other colors, presented in various shades. Usually, the image is geometric and semi-architectural (a suspension bridge and car; glowing pistons spelling out words), but presented ag [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ainst a completely black background in a way that makes them look iconic, like they're without space or landscape. I mention them because they're a strong analogue for the label's musical style: Not only do the bright colors sing in the darkness, but they're given a proper spectrum. In the same way the tracks remind me that there's a lot of range to be extracted from the seemingly monotonous blast of a rave synth, the covers remind me that hot pink can get as close to purple as it can to white-- range in places you might expect to be limited. Listen to this comp more than a few times and you'll probably start to hear chasms between stuff like Bok Bok & Cubic Zirconia's "Reclash (Dub)" and Girl Unit's ever-luxurious "Wut". The palettes are similar, but the ends to which they're used-- and the moods they evoke-- are different.
People who've followed the label since its inception-- and before that, when it was just a club night-- will diddle around with arguments about what should or shouldn't've made it onto this comp. Those arguments can be fun, like: Two tracks from Lil Silva seems more generous toward Lil Silva than to us as listeners; "She Wore Velour" is a more obvious choice for Velour than "Booty Slammer"; and "Bust Broke" as a choice for Kingdom feels willfully evasive when we have "Fogs", but they're both good. On the other hand, Bok Bok gives Girl Unit's "IRL" a remix, and Jam City's "Arpjam"-- one of the comp's new tracks-- indicates that regardless of whether Night Slugs are ready to put out Volume 2 by 2012, they're not slowing down just yet. | 2010-12-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2010-12-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | Night Slugs | December 10, 2010 | 8.1 | 2420b622-e413-4bb4-b7fb-aa618ce955e7 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Lou Reed and Metallica's collaborative album based on German playwright Frank Wedekind's plays about a social-climber-turned-prostitute has been preemptively crowned "The Worst Album of All Time." How bad is it? Well... | Lou Reed and Metallica's collaborative album based on German playwright Frank Wedekind's plays about a social-climber-turned-prostitute has been preemptively crowned "The Worst Album of All Time." How bad is it? Well... | Metallica / Lou Reed: Lulu | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15996-lou-reed-metallica/ | Lulu | When Metallica announced last June that they had recorded a new album with Lou Reed, fans of both artists responded with confusion, if not outright despair. But while this partnership may seem random, the two actually have a lot in common. Both abuse electric guitars; both like to wear black and be photographed by Anton Corbijn; both have indulged in lifestyles that threatened to become death-styles; both have a habit of alienating their fans by taking ill-advised stylistic detours and, by extension, both are considered by many to be class-A assholes. But while these surface similarities may provide the two parties with small-talk/commiseration fodder when, say, hanging backstage before murdering "Sweet Jane" at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, they're pretty miserable grounds for a full-on collaboration, especially one that spans two discs and close to 90 minutes. And yet, showing their usual proud disregard for their fans and music in general, Lou Reed and Metallica have gone and made Lulu anyway.
It'd be one thing if Lulu were being slipped into the marketplace as a low-profile curiosity, akin to a 90s-era spoken word album with some alt-rocker screeching away in the background. Instead, it's being trumpeted by its makers as a historic event. In a now-infamous interview, James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich recall bursting into tears of pride during the recording sessions, while in another Reed grinningly insists that Metallica has "pushed me to the best I've ever been." It was one of many unintentional jokes in an online promo campaign that effectively ruined Lulu's chances of being taken seriously before it was even heard.
Lulu was first previewed with an especially repellent 30-second tract of "The View" that confirmed everyone's worst suspicions of the project-- namely, that Reed's crotchety, atonal poem-rants would be wholly incompatible with Metallica's fidgety riffage. The clip's most prominent lyric ("Throw it away/ For worship someone who actively despises you!") seemed to mock both artists' most forgiving fans for even clicking on the link. By the time "The View" was released in its full, five-minute ghastliness-- with Hetfield variously professing himself to be a table, a 10-story building and, possibly, the premier member of Philly hip-hop band the Roots-- the Internet had all the evidence it needed to preemptively crown Lulu the Worst Album of All Time.
But even in that regard, Lulu disappoints. For all the hilarity that ought to ensue here, Lulu is a frustratingly noble failure. Audacious to the extreme, but exhaustingly tedious as a result, its few interesting ideas are stretched out beyond the point of utility and pounded into submission-- the average song length clocks in at eight excruciating minutes. Still, it's kind of fascinating to hear two veteran entities trying like hell to excavate common ground that simply does not exist.
Lulu's source material-- a series of transgressive plays by Munich playwright Frank Wedekind about a stripper who becomes a social-climber only to wind up a prostitute-- allows Reed to set a familiar Berlin scene with "Brandenburg Gate", a would-be anthem that, with a less torturous delivery, could almost pass for something from Reed's mid-1970s songbook. Instead, we get Hetfield belting out its "small town girl" chorus like he's trying to summon the next featured attraction at a strip club.
Reed's influence also feels responsible for the ominous, omnipresent Velvets-esque string textures and a couple of curiously avant guitar solos from Kirk Hammett (see: "Dragon"). Metallica, meanwhile, inspired Reed to come up with at least one perfectly metal lyric ("I cry icicles in my stein"), while getting him to update the S&M suggestiveness of "Venus in Furs" to the bloodlusty standards of the modern-day headbanger. However, a great deal of Lulu's songs find Reed graphically describing violent, depraved sexual trysts from the female protagonist's perspective, and with lines like "I will swallow your sharpest cutter like a colored's man dick" in abundance, some dyed-in-the-denim Metallica fans could be squirming like they did when Kirk started wearing eyeliner.
Unfortunately, these small surprises can't save Lulu from the much larger issue that lies directly at its core: For most of the record, Lou Reed and Metallica barely sound like they're on the same planet, let alone in the same room; the album works neither as powerful rock music nor as an impressionistic soundtrack to a spoken narrative. Reed's monotone remains unresponsive to what's happening around him whether the occasion calls for full-torque thrash ("Mistress Dread") or dreary acoustic mood pieces ("Little Dog"), while Lars Ulrich's flailing fills during the breakdowns on "Pumping Blood" and "Frustration" are essentially drummerese for "what the fuck do I do with this?" But for all of Reed's meandering, a-melodic verbosity, it's actually Hetfield who sounds the most out of place here; beyond his self-parodic turn on "The View", he contributes intrusive back-ups to the bar-band slog "Iced Honey" and the maddeningly repetitious "Cheat on Me" like someone in the back row of a class photo trying to mug his way into the frame.
Remarkably, there is actually a light at the end of this dark, despairing tunnel-- and, not coincidentally, it's the song least connected to the Lulu concept. Clocking in at an absurd 19 minutes, "Junior Dad" is-- like almost everything else here-- too long by half, with its last eight minutes taken up by an extended string drone. But, despite its laughable title, "Junior Dad" possesses everything the rest of Lulu doesn't: a graceful, affecting melody, a logical arrangement, a pretty guitar line, a sympathetic narrator and, most importantly, a true synthesis of each principal's strengths, outfitting a Reed streetwise hymn with Metallica's stadium-sized crunch; it's like "Street Hassle" refashioned as a Black Album power ballad. "Junior Dad" is a song that seemingly does the impossible: it momentarily redeems the idea of a Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration as a plausible, potentially fruitful concept. But its late appearance also serves as a potent reminder of just how terribly that concept is executed on everything that precedes it. | 2011-11-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-11-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Warner Bros. | November 1, 2011 | 1 | 242aa9d1-0022-4254-a1c6-5dcaddbf8792 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Fusing dream pop and R&B, KING floats through its debut album, making easy atmospheric blends akin to Sade and Janet Jackson. KING harkens back to a time when there were clearer distinctions between R&B, pop, and hip-hop, when acts like Jodeci and SWV ruled the airwaves and the music was lighter and more sensuous. | Fusing dream pop and R&B, KING floats through its debut album, making easy atmospheric blends akin to Sade and Janet Jackson. KING harkens back to a time when there were clearer distinctions between R&B, pop, and hip-hop, when acts like Jodeci and SWV ruled the airwaves and the music was lighter and more sensuous. | We Are KING: We Are KING | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21469-we-are-king/ | We Are KING | In 2011, KING's debut EP came out of nowhere to almost-immediate acclaim: Prince, Roots bandleader ?uestlove, and Foreign Exchange frontman Phonte Coleman all praised the group's talent, and rapper Kendrick Lamar sampled "Hey," arguably KING's best song, for Section.80 track "Chapter Six." The group worked with singer Bilal for a song on his 2013 album, A Love Surreal, and with jazz pianist Robert Glasper, on his Black Radio LP. By 2014, at the FYF Fest in Los Angeles, the singers covered Nina Simone's "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" alongside Devonté Hynes, Moses Sumney, and Solange. The trio—comprised of Anita Bias and twins Paris and Amber Strother—has seen its stock rise significantly, although it didn't have a lot of music to speak of. Their EP had only three tracks—three wonderful tracks—but a short playlist nonetheless. Behind singles "In the Meantime" and "Mister Chameleon," KING was set to release its long-awaited first LP in 2014, but the year came and went without a full-length project. So there's plenty of interest in We Are KING, even if the singers are just on the periphery of larger mainstream circles.
Fusing dream pop and R&B, KING floats through its debut album, making easy atmospheric blends akin to Sade and Janet Jackson. We Are KING is rich and transformative, centered on hazy mid-tempo grooves that calmly evoke a surreal ambience. KING harkens back to a time when there were clearer distinctions between R&B, pop, and hip-hop, when acts like Jodeci and SWV ruled the airwaves, and the music was lighter and more sensuous. We Are KING recalls the best of that era without completely rehashing it. These sounds are remarkably modern, yet as it plays, you find yourself thinking of simpler times—that homecoming dance or first kiss—as the singers keep their voices supplanted in the backdrop. This isn't an LP of long runs or over-the-top vocal solos. It's a light touch, built to establish a meditative mood. On "Love Song," for instance, the vocalists hum softly without their words taking shape. The compositions are equally vital, and throughout the album, KING does a stellar job of letting the music breathe for its roughly 60-minute runtime.
Over its 12 tracks, We Are KING slowly reveals itself through sweet one-liners that waft in from distant places, like on "Supernatural," one of three holdovers from the group's EP. After a brief intro of scenic wails, the song becomes a synthesized ode to puppy love: "There's magic in everything you do… I'm in love with everything 'bout you." We Are KING entices us to get away from the mundane, to spend time in grand spaces without smartphones and social media. Among other things, Paris, Amber, and Anita want you to reconnect with real people on real levels, to study their nuances and embrace their intricacies. They'd rather you appreciate what's in front of you, not the artificial world just beyond your passcode. "Red Eye," a transitional cut near the album's beginning, is about pushing beyond your comfort zone. "Native Land," the album's closing track, envisions a grand journey to remote shores.
At times, the singers address worldly, more grounded issues, stuff we can all relate to. "Mister Chameleon" is a tale of smoke and mirrors, of falling in love with a person you thought you knew. "Oh, Please!" depicts a romantic chase: It's the album's most overt display of personality, and the lyrics are more pronounced. As a whole, We Are KING is seamless: It properly showcases the group's breezy aesthetic and has the feel-good creativity of black music's great luminaries. Sure it took some time to get here, but unhurried art has its own special rewards. We Are KING has long-lasting impact, much like the music it emulates. | 2016-02-03T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-03T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | KING Creative | February 3, 2016 | 7.8 | 242b9c93-741b-48dd-a257-68c0b000d45f | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
The Florida rapper’s latest “sad ass album” sticks to the same tried and true formula, at times actually sounding a little more hopeful. | The Florida rapper’s latest “sad ass album” sticks to the same tried and true formula, at times actually sounding a little more hopeful. | Rod Wave: Beautiful Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rod-wave-beautiful-mind/ | Beautiful Mind | On the afternoon of June 13, Rod Wave declared that his latest project Beautiful Mind would be his last “sad ass album.” Calling the Florida rapper’s music “sad” is an understatement—his songs plumb the depths of physical, financial, and emotional pain so intensely it can feel like he’s perpetually stuck underneath a rain cloud. Since at least 2017’s “Mike Tyson,” the triumphant boom of his voice has separated him from the legions of other rap crooners leaving their hearts in their Notes apps. Across three studio albums, Rod Wave has perfected his brand of rain cloud rap, in the mold of mentor Kevin Gates if his ears were stuck on the blues hymns of the Mississippi Delta. Much of Beautiful Mind follows this blueprint, but there are more specks of joy and optimism than before, a yearning to move beyond the hurdles and embrace new life experiences. If he’s as ready to “live happy travel [and] get dis money” as he claims, then Beautiful Mind makes a case as his most hopeful album to date.
That hope relies on a formula he’s polished before. Rod Wave songs tend to span a handful of subjects—bad memories, getting money, navigating haters, reminiscing on lost love, or any combination of the four. But it didn’t matter how many times you’d heard him sing about waiting at bus stops with headphones in; he sells these tried and true stories with conviction. Beautiful Mind adds a few more stories to his narrative vision board, giving Wave more chances to look forward. “Stone Rolling” starts with family problems but ends with a journey that stretches across the United States, from smoking sessions with Sauce Walka in Houston to a fantasy of settling down in the Carolina countryside with his children. His spirited performance on standout “Yungen” matches his dumbfounded lyrics about amassing a fanbase paralleled by sampled news footage of a crowded Miami concert where some ticket buyers were forced to listen from outside the venue. You can’t say that he isn’t at least counting his blessings more.
The variety is welcome, but it’s not varied enough to prevent many of the two dozen tracks from bleeding together. For every plea of hopeless romance like “Married Next Year” or “Never Find Us,” there are several bids for Wave to brood about picking up women in hotel rooms across the country like “Never Get Over Me” or “Pieces.” Sometimes, like the moment he remembers “Eviction letters traumatized me even though it was sunny” on “Better,” his writing is detailed and intimate. Other times, like on “Rockstar Heart,” Wave sounds more like the loudest kid in class reading a rushed What I Did This Summer essay.
It doesn’t help that his overreliance on piano and guitar beats—the bread and butter of pain rap but basically a meme for Wave at this point in his career—is a bit more grating than usual. Standouts like the clacking synths of “Yungen” and the deep strings twirling between vocal samples on “Me vs. The World” are few and far between, bookended by ill-advised stabs at Dawn FM-era Weeknd style radio interludes and predictable beats from usual suspects Tahj Money and Will-A-Fool. Wave’s stories are easier to invest in when the instrumentals backing them swell to the same heights; his usual combination of piano, guitar, and 808 has diminishing returns.
Despite all the hardship he’s endured, Rod Wave’s earnest recounting of his fight to the top has made it easy to root for him since the late 2010s. He’s built a fanbase loyal enough to listen to his shows in parking lots and counts Meek Mill and hip-hop’s favorite comedian Druski as friends. Pain has always been a central aspect of Wave’s music, but his blues are beginning to repeat themselves. He can’t rap about the same stormy days waiting for the bus forever. The glimmers of a brighter future that dot Beautiful Mind—or, failing that, newer bits of pain and suffering inspired by the slog of fame—are its best moments, pushing Rod Wave just a little bit closer to peace. | 2022-08-17T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-17T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo | August 17, 2022 | 6.9 | 242dd6fd-ab88-4a7a-9935-becf2394bda7 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
A veteran of UK garage and R&B, Craig David follows up his 2016 comeback by fishing for current trends to keep him relevant. | A veteran of UK garage and R&B, Craig David follows up his 2016 comeback by fishing for current trends to keep him relevant. | Craig David: The Time Is Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/craig-david-the-time-is-now/ | The Time Is Now | A single phrase—“Bo selecta”—encapsulates both the peak and the nadir of the British singer Craig David’s career. It was the anthemic refrain of his breakout performance on the Artful Dodger’s 1999 garage classic “Rewind”—a song that launched David to instant stardom, followed by his 2000 debut, Born to Do It, released when he was just 19. (A decade later, it remained the fastest-selling debut album by a male solo artist in the UK.) David soon crossed over into the U.S. charts with “Fill Me In” and “7 Days,” showing how UK club music, hip-hop, R&B, and pop could all intermingle. But it was “Bo’ Selecta!”—a TV show in which the stand-up comedian Leigh Francis donned an obnoxious rubber mask to play the singer—that soon set the singer’s career on a downward spiral.
After a questionable album of Motown covers, Craig David decamped to Miami, where he no doubt heard the blueprint for his hybrid hits revisited by artists like Drake and Justin Bieber. But he was greeted as a survivor by the UK press with 2016’s Following My Intuition, and now he follows up with his seventh album, The Time Is Now. At this point, though he is only 36, David occupies the role of something like an elder statesman, having weathered both a cultural backlash and a collaboration with Sting. But outside of a few tracks where he sounds reinvigorated, he’s not quite sure how to fit in to the present pop landscape.
The Time Is Now finds Craig David fishing for a current trend—or three—to sink his hooks into, and across 15 tracks, he lands a few. He teams up with producer Jonas Blue (responsible for that tropical house remake of “Fast Car”) for the bantamweight “Heartline,” where his purr melds into the downy backdrop of tropical-house marimbas and defanged ratchet snares. It all might blow away at the slightest gust did the singer not convey just enough emotional heft to keep it grounded.
David is most successful when he finds collaborators who push him into new territory. Kaytranada makes a slick R&B groove hiccup for “Live in the Moment,” while D.C. rapper GoldLink’s double-time delivery adds a bit of grit to the singer’s honeyed hook. However unintentionally, the fact that he has known both the highs and lows of fame makes David’s carpe diem advice actually feel earned. But on “I Know You,” David acts like someone who has mistakenly stumbled into the EDM tent. Part of the blame falls to producer Fraser T. Smith, who has credits on five of the album’s tracks. While his production for Adele and Stormzy shows that Smith can do both anthemic pop and rugged grime tracks, here, and on songs like “Love Me Like It’s Yesterday,” he falls back on tired tropes like generic filter sweeps and door-chime keys.
Breezy tropical house, Latin-tinged stabs at replicating “Despacito,” EDM-friendly drops, Auto-Tuned croons—David dabbles in all of it like a man half his age. Consider “For the Gram,” a car crash of his most cringeworthy tendencies. Singing about Instagram, he awkwardly attempts to out-Drake Drake (whose own blend of hip-hop and R&B itself owes something to David’s turn-of the century suavity) with lines about hashtags, emoji, and sliding into DMs. For an album called The Time Is Now, David spends too much of his time looking like he's trying to catch up. | 2018-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Insanity / Sony | January 25, 2018 | 5.5 | 242f80b8-9d4c-4571-b190-aed7bf36ac57 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Peter Matthew Bauer's Liberation! marks his first time singing, writing lyrics, and leading a band; it’s also the first project he’s worked on since his tenure as bassist and organist in the Walkmen, who, in Bauer’s own words, are on a “pretty extreme hiatus.” The record is a bold stroke on a blank canvas, with songs that celebrate freedom and fear in the same breath, two emotions that definitely crop up when someone’s moving on in life. | Peter Matthew Bauer's Liberation! marks his first time singing, writing lyrics, and leading a band; it’s also the first project he’s worked on since his tenure as bassist and organist in the Walkmen, who, in Bauer’s own words, are on a “pretty extreme hiatus.” The record is a bold stroke on a blank canvas, with songs that celebrate freedom and fear in the same breath, two emotions that definitely crop up when someone’s moving on in life. | Peter Matthew Bauer: Liberation! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19470-peter-matthew-bauer-liberation/ | Liberation! | Peter Matthew Bauer's Liberation! marks his first time singing, writing lyrics, and leading a band; it’s also the first project he’s worked on since his tenure as bassist and organist in the Walkmen, who, in Bauer’s own words, are on a “pretty extreme hiatus.” Taking those milestones into account, Liberation! is a bold stroke on a blank canvas, with songs that celebrate freedom and fear in the same breath, two emotions that definitely crop up when someone’s moving on in life.
Bauer’s musical palette is broad and unique, expanding past the sounds of his previous band: he implements polyrhythmic island music on the the title track, the sounds of slow 1960s beat bands on “Shiva the Destroyer”, and true American heartland rock on “Irish Wake In Varanasi (For Big Pete Devlin)”. The opening track “I Was Born in An Ashram” doubles as biographical fodder—Bauer was, indeed, born in an ashram—and as a means of setting up Liberation!'s theme shambling along the path to personal nirvana. He sings about religion and the “freedom” it affords as if he were taking part in a classic-rock exorcism, which is evident in his singing voice, moving between a Kurt Vile-esque drawl and a pursed-lip Mick Jagger croon. Accordingly, the music occasionally takes on the lo-fi pluck of Constant Hitmaker and the swagger-psych of Their Satanic Majesties Request.
Orthodox Hinduism, Scientology, Christianity, and religious hokum all receive lashings from Bauer’s sharp tongue. Rather than possessing the snide reproach of a message-board atheist, Bauer comes across as someone choosing to embrace mystery as its own religion, as terrifying as that may be. “Only you can convince yourself,” he sings on “Shaved Heads & Pony Tails”, which ma ybe the first indie rock song about a śikhā; the album's true mantra comes on the final track, where Bauer exalts over a two-chord stadium-ready tune, “You are the chapel, and everything is wonder." Elsewhere, he lets his voice go on album closer “You Are the Chapel”, dialing into the talk-anthem spirit of Bruce Springsteen, while underneath the drums thunder louder than any other instrument featured on the album. It’s a great closing anthem made even better by an errant Oasis diss: “I see you looking like Oasis/ why does anyone want to look like Oasis?”
Liberation! is most successful as a shaking off of Bauer's relative anonymity: he paints himself as a funny guy, an American wanderer, and someone eager to expel what’s been boiling underneath those bass parts for the Walkmen for so many years. Perhaps that’s why this album sounds like such an impulsive, energetic mishmash that all comes out in a fury, as Liberation! doesn’t feel dwelled-upon or over-wrought. There are points, like his off-handed “ooo’s” at the end of “Latin American Ficciones”, that could stand to be more filled out, and sometimes the bare-bones production seems too small for the ideal size of the songs. But the ramshackle spontaneity is Bauer’s charm, as the songwriting compliments the heady spiritualism of his words. Liberation! gives Bauer a voice, and the mystery of where he goes next is just as exciting for us as it is for him. | 2014-06-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-06-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | June 25, 2014 | 7.2 | 2430b64d-25bf-422c-af92-de22dd8bb083 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | 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 Herbie Hancock’s jazz-funk masterpiece, a celebration of all that is modern and ancient. | 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 Herbie Hancock’s jazz-funk masterpiece, a celebration of all that is modern and ancient. | Herbie Hancock: Head Hunters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/herbie-hancock-head-hunters/ | Head Hunters | In 1973, Herbie Hancock, a virtuosic jazz dissident, stomped out an entire history of sound when he walked out a bassline on a modular synthesizer. This was not someone’s upright acoustic bass played with calloused fingers, it was preprogrammed on a circuit board obscured inside a small wooden box, amplified by some hidden electrical process. And it wasn’t one bassline crawling out of the speakers, it was two, dubbed on top of each other, split across the stereo field, blasphemed onto what was ostensibly a jazz recording in post-production.
For purists, it was just another heretical element on another album of heresy from yet another jazz pioneer turned iconoclast. The afterimages of Miles Davis’ blinding turn toward the electric music a few years earlier were still being processed by audiences, players, and critics alike. Hancock, having played keys for six years with Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet, had his own gauntlet to throw. Inspired by the power he saw in James Brown and Sly & the Family Stone, Hancock wanted to quit wafting in the rarified air of acoustic and avant-garde jazz. “I was not trying to make a jazz record,” Hancock said later. He wanted to get low, down to the floor, through the earth. He wanted to make a pure funk record. Instead, he made Head Hunters.
A year before Hancock plunked out that bassline, his woodwind player, Bennie Maupin, sat among the sold-out crowd at Los Angeles Coliseum for Wattstax, a 1972 benefit concert sometimes referred to as “Black Woodstock.” Every marquee artist from the iconic Memphis soul label Stax performed that August afternoon—from the Staple Singers to the Bar-Kays to Isaac Hayes, who closed the concert wearing a gold chainmail cape. The eight-hour show meant to “give back to the community” in the primarily black Watts neighborhood, which had been torn by riots seven years earlier. Tickets were $1, and the security force was entirely black and unarmed. With over 110,000 in attendance, it was then the largest gathering of African Americans in one place since the civil rights March on Washington in 1963.
Maupin, a 32-year-old jazz woodwindist nonpareil from Detroit, had been playing with Hancock for the previous three years on a trilogy of experimental albums known as Hancock's Mwandishi period, from the Swahili name for “composer” that he had adopted at the time. Mwandishi (1971), Crossings (1972) and Sextant (1973) were lofty, sometimes electronic excursions, all influenced deeply by jazz’s big extinction event, Miles Davis’ 1970 album Bitches Brew. The Mwandishi group would sometimes sit in the tour bus and listen to records by German electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen at Hancock’s request. In the studio they were incorporating the vanguard production techniques of Bitches Brew, which were verboten in traditionalist jazz circles: extensive editing, amplified instruments, two drummers, overdubs, synth loops. Having played bass clarinet on Bitches Brew, Maupin served as real connective tissue from the most infamous jazz record to the second most infamous jazz record: Head Hunters. When Hancock disbanded the Mwandishi group in search of a new sound, Maupin was the only member he kept.
The heady strains of the Mwandishi era were a lot more highfalutin than the music Maupin witnessed at Wattstax, though. As the bands grooved to soul, R&B, and funk onstage, Maupin watched a group of young kids dancing the funky robot, popping and locking their joints at right angles. “I just started to hear in my mind melodies centered around that kind of movement,” Maupin later said. The melody: two little hitches, a staccato double-tap, followed by a bluesy riff down a minor pentatonic scale. Tributaries of jazz history flowed through Maupin, who had played with hard bop greats like Lee Morgan and avant-garde pioneers like Pharoah Sanders in the previous decade. But at Wattstax, he was tapping into a broader, more popular, more body-focused black experience. The music Hancock was plotting, like the melody Maupin imagined, drew from the politics of the Watts Riots and Black Nationalism and the counterculture, but also the beat, the one, the groove that made kids want to free their mind and dance.
When the concert let out, Maupin brought his riff idea based on the funky robot back to Hancock at a rehearsal space in Los Angeles, where he fed it to the newly assembled Head Hunters lineup. Maupin didn’t use the woozy timbre of the bass clarinet but rather the gritty R&B sound of the tenor sax. The upheaval of avant-garde and the donning of funk all poured into “Chameleon,” an indefatigable 15-minute track that staked a new epoch for jazz the minute Hancock plunked out its bassline. Nothing was what it seemed: the bassline was a synth; the guitar-sounding riff was a bass, played by Bay Area funk stylist Paul Jackson in the altissimo register. Hancock plays his clavinet like Hendrix comping time with a wah-wah pedal. The in-demand R&B session drummer Harvey Mason plays in a straight-eighth funk feel, like Clyde Stubblefield did behind James Brown. “Chameleon” slid in and out of the downbeat of ’70s funk, the looseness of cool jazz, the musical modes of R&B, all while drawing upon the rhythms of Anlo-Ewe and Afro-Cuban drumming, black counterculture, and the vanguard of modular synthesizers.
All this blending of traditional instruments and technology, of black American and African sound, was reflected on the album’s cover: Next to Maupin, there’s Jackson holding a Fender bass; Mason clutching a snare; a virtually unknown percussionist from the Bay Area, Bill Summers, holding gourd rattles. Front and center is Hancock, his face covered with something resembling the ritual kple kple mask worn by the Baoulé people of the Ivory Coast—the eyes, however, are radio knobs, and the mouth is a VU meter, an electronic tool for measuring loudness.
A satellite view of Head Hunters reveals a vast bazaar of cultures and genres, a complicated interchange of artistic and personal histories. Recorded in a single week and released shortly thereafter, on October 13, 1973, it spent 42 weeks on the Billboard chart, becoming the first platinum-selling jazz album, as it was being slammed by critics as a rapacious commercial move. It was an album that captured jazz as it broke out and mingled with America, appealing both to the Wattstax crowd and to white suburbia. “Sure I’m getting a bigger white audience,” Hancock said a year after the album’s release. “But I’m also getting a big black audience, which I never had...I’ve finally been able to come out with some music the general black public can relate to.”
By 1973, rock, pop, and R&B had been cannibalizing the jazz audience for over a decade. In the wake of Miles’ electric albums, jazz fusion groups like the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, and Return to Forever tried to capture both sides of the aisle. The walls were crumbling between the haughty air of jazz and what was being played on commercial radio. Taking a cynical view, jazz historian Grover Sales put it this way: “Some bored rock artists had been gravitating towards jazz because they were bored, while jazz players dallied with rock to recapture their dwindling audience.” In the eyes of purists, fusion groups had poisoned the sanctity of jazz, for reasons ranging from crass commercialization of what was once a pure art form to something more pernicious. Head Hunters co-producer David Rubinson said that “jazz fusion meant... white people playing black music.”
But Head Hunters avoids the fussy, technical chops of those fusion groups, and instead sinks deeply into funk. In a 1985 interview, Hancock revealed his mindset going into making a pure funk record: “When I heard [Sly & the Family Stone’s] “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” it just went to my core. I didn’t know what he was doing. I mean, I heard the chorus, but how could he think of that? I was afraid that was something I couldn’t do. And here I am, I call myself a musician. It bothered me…I decided to try my hand at funk.”
Like jazz, funk was, at its genesis, a wholly black and political genre, tempered in the Black Power movement of the ’60s and carried forth into the Nixon era by Brown, Sly, George Clinton, Curtis Mayfield, and others. For all of funk’s nastiness and ecstasy, its subversive emancipation of mind and ass, its no-pretense elemental nature, Rickey Vincent, in his 1995 book on the history of funk, lands on a long-view definition. He writes that funk is “...an aesthetic of deliberate confusion, soulful behavior that remains viable because of a faith in instinct, a joy of self, and a joy of life, particularly unassimilated black American life.” The black roots of Head Hunters create this underground communion of joy, a funky celebration of all that is modern and ancient.
Funk was psychedelic dance music, working-class rebellion, something elusive and unattainable to a mainstream white audience. And as always, mainstream America drank deep from this new well of underground black music. It made Hancock rich—and the numerous times “Chameleon” and “Watermelon Man” have been sampled in hip-hop only made him richer. But it was a sticking point for critics who called the great jazz piano player a pop sell-out. Members of the jazz cognoscenti did not want the hem of their garments sullied with the commercial slop of popular music. In conversation with famous jazz grouch Wynton Marsalis, Hancock defended Head Hunters not as an album that set out to make money, but an album that happened to make money. “Look I’d like to have a Rolls-Royce,” Hancock said, “but I’m not trying to set myself up to get a Rolls-Royce.”
It is impossible to capture the whole external life of the galactically important Head Hunters, what it touched, how it functioned, its shape in society, its place on the great cosmic map (though musicologist Steven Pond approaches totality in his peerless 2005 book on the album). Truthfully, though, Head Hunters doesn’t confer great importance by the sound of it. It doesn’t scream “cash-grab,” or signal a fissure in jazz, or really exist in any of the contexts that surrounded its release almost five decades ago. The microbial funk of the album, its living power, lies below all that.
Head Hunters states its intent in its name: The music will blow open your skull the second you press play, the instant the bassline from “Chameleon” comes out of the speakers in full stereo sound. And if that doesn’t move you, how about when Harvey Mason comes in with the funkiest drum part in the history of drumming, a groove even Hancock said he had never heard before in his life, that snare hit coming just before the two, the kick drum so dead and relaxed, are you kidding me? Head Hunters rightfully belongs to the Library of Congress as one of our nation's most treasured recordings, sitting there, smoking, untouchable, a factory of winces and hoooos.
Hancock’s idea for Head Hunters involved making a funk album with players who brought many other worlds to the table. Mason was an R&B drummer who played deep in the pocket, but he didn’t just sit on one pattern, he tugged and pulled at it throughout the song, a tailor constantly adjusting the fit and feel. Then there’s Summers’ famous solo on beer bottles, pennywhistle, shekere, handclaps, and falsetto ad-libs at the beginning of “Watermelon Man,” a tune carried over and radically reinterpreted from Hancock’s earlier career as a more traditional jazz player. This section is an adaptation of the traditional calls of Ba-Benzélé pygmies of Central Africa, an effort by Summers “to bring up the level of appreciation of the African experience.” With a fat Fender sound, Jackson plays the best bassline on the album—better even than “Chameleon”—defining the one and creating the syncopation outside of Summers’ nest of percussion.
Maupin doesn’t just riff around on the blues scale; on the vastly underappreciated “Sly,” he goes far out, squeaking and running high and low on the soprano sax, bringing his ’60s avant-gardism back into the soundscape, all on a song named after funk master Sly Stone himself. “Sly” may not have the cultural cachet of “Chameleon” or “Watermelon Man,” but it is the album’s true synthesis of funk texture and jazz feel. When the song shifts grooves around the two-minute mark, Hancock starts comping on his clavinet in stereo, Summers starts an Afro-Cuban groove on the conga, and Mason loosens his wrist on the snare to give Maupin as much room as he needs. By the time Hancock gets to his solo on his Rhodes, the song feels both impossibly free and tightly wound.
Finally, Head Hunters cools down with “Vein Melter,” the corpse pose, a psalm on death written for a friend of Hancock’s who died of a heroin overdose. With Mason’s snare rolls every measure, it sounds like a funeral march, but Hancock doesn’t put anything to rights. He delays interment with a sneaky grin while comping on the Rhodes with preternatural chill. “Vein Melter” never succumbs to meditative repetition—you can hear the heaving breath, the residual energy of the first three songs pulsing behind it.
Head Hunters is the bond that connects unnamable forces at the center of jazz and of funk, divine aspirations and base desires, head and body. It’s foolish to try to name the spark of music like this, a parlor game better left to the comedown of an acid trip or a street preacher on his last leg. Head Hunters isn’t the god, it’s just five consummate pros jamming, with a light amount of editing and production. It’s simple, really, even accidental. About six minutes and 55 seconds into “Chameleon,” as Hancock solos on his Arp Odyssey, he lands on a four-note phrase that’s about a half-step away from the key of the song. It is a phrase that pulls your shoulders up to your ears, makes you put your hands up to your face to block the punch. It is the single funkiest, unholiest, nastiest moment on the record, and it was a complete mistake. Hancock was futzing with the manual pitch bender on the synthesizer during his solo and didn’t realign it. He was playing the wrong notes, but the right notes were coming out.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | April 5, 2020 | 10 | 243112ae-6c06-4829-8237-4fc7ed49604f | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
The Brooklyn rapper has a reputation for emulating Earl Sweatshirt’s brutal atmospherics and determined flow, but what sets him apart is the emotional precision he brings to his debut EP. | The Brooklyn rapper has a reputation for emulating Earl Sweatshirt’s brutal atmospherics and determined flow, but what sets him apart is the emotional precision he brings to his debut EP. | Medhane: Ba Suba, Ak Jamm EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/medhane-ba-suba-ak-jamm-ep/ | Ba Suba, Ak Jamm EP | The spirit of Earl Sweatshirt infuses Medhane’s small body of work, it’s true. You can feel his presence in the cracked beats, brutal atmospherics, internal rhyme patterns, and in Medhane’s stodgy, determined flow. Hell, I’ve been sending links to the rising Brooklyn rapper’s first EP, Ba Suba, Ak Jamm, to confirmed Earl fans myself. But, just as Action Bronson arrived in a haze of Ghostface Killah comparisons before his individuality revealed itself, listening to Medhane on repeat makes it obvious that he hasn’t simply heisted Earl’s style. There’s a specificity to his writing that sets him apart from the pack of rappers, like Sweatshirt, who’ve emerged from MF DOOM’s corner of the underground rap furnace.
Over six tracks packed tightly into 13 minutes, Medhane soulfully examines what it means to earn your keep in America and to find your purpose in life when you’re at the bottom of the capitalist crush. These are heavy topics, but there’s a richness and an emotional precision to his language that makes every angle explored feel authentic and relatable. It helps that Medhane is so resonant on the mic. In a voice that’s bled dry and grainy, he imbues his flow with a stoic determination; he has little interest in checking too many stylistic boxes or engaging in super-technical rappity-rap.
“Days” sees Medhane spitting over a string arrangement so deeply screwed, it could have originated in a George Martin recording session. Lines like “The weight of the world was heavy on my aching back/Trying to keep my soul straight and my faith intact” capture the trying nature of the daily grind with a refreshing directness. Medhane talks of being overworked for low wages on “Garden” and hopes that a decent payday is right around the corner on “AiteDen.” This is music for stalking the subway, headphones plugged in, on that cold journey home from a thankless job. He sounds like a young man whose next step always feels tantalizingly close and miles away at once.
Ba Suba, Ak Jamm is loaded with sentiments like this. Only in his early 20s, Medhane is an expert at capturing the feeling of being run down by this wicked thing called life. This isn’t desperation, exactly; it’s an everyday bitterness that most people can understand. Though he doesn’t feel the need to stud his bars with too much overt autobiographical detail, there’s personalization in how Medhane weaves his family into narratives. When kin make appearances in rap music, songs tend to get caught up in “Dear Mama”-style whimsy. But here, Medhane raps about his family like they’re simply omnipresent figures in his life: the aunt who gave him a meal when he needed it (“Garden”), the mother he deeply respects (“MedTypeBeat!”). Lyrics read as though lifted from dilapidated diary pages.
The beats are warped and wavy throughout the EP, adding a thickness to its climate—and with almost no hooks to be found, this is hip-hop stripped of any pop inclinations. But, as heavy as this all may sound, the record’s brevity gives it infinite replay potential. Music is often dubbed “depressing” because it uses downbeat chords. But Ba Suba, Ak Jamm is a reminder that music is one of the least depressing things in a universe that’s extremely cursed. Sometimes it’s grim, because life is often grim. When a young guy like Medhane so concisely captures that quality, the effect can be unexpectedly beautiful. | 2018-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Grand Closing | August 6, 2018 | 7.3 | 2438ea61-0fab-4495-878c-ae4b9645a6ca | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
G Herbo remains rap’s youngest old man, a wizened 21-year-old who sounds, for the third year running, like he’s on the cusp of something truly great. | G Herbo remains rap’s youngest old man, a wizened 21-year-old who sounds, for the third year running, like he’s on the cusp of something truly great. | G Herbo: Strictly 4 My Fans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22758-strictly-4-my-fans/ | Strictly 4 My Fans | On the second half of Strictly 4 My Fans, when G Herbo’s longtime collaborator Lil Bibby shows up for the record’s sole collaboration, the headliner is having a crisis of confidence. He’s tired of clutching a pistol handle every time he turns a corner; he says his mother’s tired of wondering if he’s alive or not. And when the exhaustion really sets in, he turns back to a recurring nightmare: his face on the evening news under reports that he’s been gunned down, “no gun on me—so that means I lied in all them fucking rhymes.” By the time Bibby takes his turn, he’s mulling a move down south to cheaper real estate and quieter evenings. “I was always silent/Grew up violent, adapted to my climate.”
While that sort of bone-deep fatigue is the emotional throughline for many of Herbo’s best songs, Strictly 4 My Fans is anything but perfunctory. If anything, he sounds reenergized, like he’s been caged up for too long. And he has plenty to say—the tape opens with a furious take on the election, made all the more foreboding when the tape dropped a few weeks too late: “‘What if Fred Hampton was president?’ I woke up praying that/Because if Trump become the president he might bring slavery back/Been on black folks eighty years—might as well bring Reagan back.”
Whether he’s processing CNN tickers or drifting up and down Essex, Herbo has a gift for describing rapid change. On “Gutta,” he raps “These little niggas dangerous/Don’t even mask up no more, these little niggas brainless”—a notably weary point of view for someone who was born in 1995. Rappers from Chicago are far too often poked and prodded through sociological lenses, but with Herbo there’s something fundamental and cross-generational, a furious, unmoored delivery that always seems to be swimming upstream against the quickening decay of a country.
Strictly 4 My Fans is constructed strangely, in that it puts two mid-tempo sex songs back-to-back, right in the middle of the sequence. (The closest parallel in recent memory is probably the one-two punch of “Do It To Ya” and “Me & My Bitch” on YG’s My Krazy Life, though that suite was designed to serve a narrative purpose on a concept album.) Fortunately, each is well-produced (by Kid Marquis, flipping a Silk sample, and Charlie Handsome, respectively), and the momentum doesn’t ebb too much. “Pull Up” also features hands-down the record’s funniest moment, when Herbo opens the song “Let me show you how the gangstas do it/I know you tryna get it on, turn the Bryson Tiller off and let me fuck you to this gangsta music.”
More than last year’s Ballin’ Like I’m Kobe or Herbo’s breakthrough Welcome to Fazoland, this record relies on warm soul tones, including those approximated by 1980s gloss. And while he remains one of the best mechanical rappers working today, there’s rarely a moment here where Herbo sounds as if he’s breaking new formal ground. Strictly 4 My Fans is not an experiment or a leap forward. What it does provide is another fourth-quarter dose of rap’s youngest old man, a wizened 21-year-old who sounds, for the third year running, like he’s on the cusp of something truly great. | 2017-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 9, 2017 | 7.5 | 243a62ad-d90d-4dcc-a0f3-a1c660d642fb | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
While he was recording his debut as Here We Go Magic, Luke Temple simultaneously made another solo album with a few friends helping him out, including future Here We Go Magic member Michael Bloch and Glass Ghost's Eliot Krimsky. Temple shelved the results, Don't Act Like You Don't Care, until the present day. | While he was recording his debut as Here We Go Magic, Luke Temple simultaneously made another solo album with a few friends helping him out, including future Here We Go Magic member Michael Bloch and Glass Ghost's Eliot Krimsky. Temple shelved the results, Don't Act Like You Don't Care, until the present day. | Luke Temple: Don't Act Like You Don't Care | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15726-dont-act-like-you-dont-care/ | Don't Act Like You Don't Care | This is sort of complicated, so try to follow along. Before Luke Temple self-recorded his murky, self-sampledelic 2009 debut as Here We Go Magic (the only release from the project thus far that features Temple all by his lonesome), he made two solo albums that mixed chamber-pop experimentation and singer/songwriter fare: 2005's Hold a Match for a Gasoline World and 2007's Snowbeast. While he was recording Here We Go Magic, he simultaneously made another solo album with a few friends helping him out, including future Here We Go Magic member Michael Bloch and Glass Ghost's Eliot Krimsky. When Here We Go Magic started gaining steam and turned into a full-band/full-time concern, Temple shelved the results, Don't Act Like You Don't Care, until the present day.
An early working title for the album was The Country Record, and that title speaks volumes. The majority of Don't Act Like You Don't Care is comprised of uncomplicated ditties, both jangly ("Ophelia") and bummed out ("So Long, So Long"). Temple experimented plenty on Gasoline World (Snowbeast, too); there are fewer risks taken overall here, which makes the record a fascinating window into an alternate-- and, to me, not totally desirable-- route his music could have taken had Here We Go Magic not attracted attention in the first place.
It's especially likely that listeners approaching this album are the ones who were initially ensnared by HWGM's increased profile; for them, potential (albeit minor) revelations are in store. Although Here We Go Magic's fleshed-out second album, last year's Pigeons, was far from the gestation period at the time of this LP's recording, you can pick out strands of that album's wooly, gently weird genetic code in the mutant folk of "More Than Muscle" and the unsettling twists and turns of "Weekend Warrior". Don't Act's sparse closing track, "Luck Part", slowly opens up with dark ambience and swaying unease. It'd be interesting to hear how these tracks would sound as played by Temple and his band now; they certainly fit in with his latest gig's M.O.
Don't Act Like You Don't Care is enjoyable but fails in key respects. It's poorly sequenced-- sprightly cuts up front with the slow, samey stuff crammed in the rear-- and the four-tracked production means that a decent amount of the material sounds like it never quite made it past the "basement demo" phase. In the three years since the recording of this album, Temple's made considerable leaps as a songwriter; a bit of present-day woodshedding would have likely benefited this material, which was recorded in a pair of four-hour sessions. Instead, this odd and intermittently pleasurable artifact just kinda sits there, an unintentional rebuke to the artist that orphaned this poor thing. | 2011-08-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-08-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Western Vinyl | August 24, 2011 | 6.1 | 243d5fd9-799b-482a-88f8-8a45d7fa6e6d | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Kameron Bogges makes one-man black metal that charts the hellish exhilarations and debilitating lows of bipolar disorder. | Kameron Bogges makes one-man black metal that charts the hellish exhilarations and debilitating lows of bipolar disorder. | An Isolated Mind: I'm Losing Myself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/an-isolated-mind-im-losing-myself/ | I'm Losing Myself | Kameron Bogges wrote and recorded his first album as An Isolated Mind following a week-long stint at a psychiatric hospital and a subsequent bipolar diagnosis. Though rooted in black metal, the music he makes under this alias veers off in multiple directions, charting bipolar disorder’s hellish exhilarations and its debilitating lows. He self-released I’m Losing Myself in March, but now it’s available physically through I, Voidhanger Records, curators of outre and fringe black and death metal.
Losing is not a unified listen, but the brutal seams reflect its subject. “Turritopsis dohrnii” is the most tumultuous song, churning through discordant bits of black metal, synthesizer, and goth piano before opening into starlit post-rock guitar. Even a more conventional song like “Pathologized Existence” can’t stay on one track for long. Frantic subgenre-hopping around isn’t new for Bogges; his previous project Four Hoove Death Pig also played with stylistic collisions. But the stakes are higher here: for Bogges, exploration becomes a way to rebuild himself.
The last two tracks, “I’m Losing Myself” and “I’ve Lost Myself,” take up nearly half of the record, and they’re a devastating combo. “Losing” travels through desolate, bell-like bass, chilling strings, and errant, faint percussion, leading to “Lost’s” ambient drones, where there’s no metal, no drums, no direction, no hope. Unlike most ambient music, which encourages getting lost, “I’ve Lost Myself” feels claustrophobic and eerily blank. After the tumult, it feels less like release and more like surrender. Bogges captures depression at its most devastating: when your capacity to feel dissipates, where you can’t even conjure extreme sadness or self-hatred. Depression isn’t one monolithic mood, after all, but a complicated force with great internal violence.
One-man black metal is usually born of self-imposed isolation and self-righteous anti-humanism; Losing depicts how dangerous isolation can be for an already-fragile mind state. In that way, it feels painfully real, even intimate. Black metal is so often depicted as a destructive force, but Bogges uses it to heal. | 2019-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | I, Voidhanger | July 10, 2019 | 7.7 | 243e3713-91cd-4e11-9bd8-b6dd23c88ab8 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
The long-awaited debut from the lauded singer and guitarist is a fine showcase of her immense talent, though the constant balladeering doesn’t really capture what she does best. | The long-awaited debut from the lauded singer and guitarist is a fine showcase of her immense talent, though the constant balladeering doesn’t really capture what she does best. | H.E.R.: Back of My Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/her-back-of-my-mind/ | Back of My Mind | The best song on Back of My Mind, H.E.R.’s debut full-length, is the first one. On “We Made It,” over a glimmering sample moving in reverse, the singer and guitarist nimbly hits swirls of falsetto notes, sing-songy raps, and full-on wails—the only time she does so on the album. There’s a gnarly guitar solo that she’s become known for at her many award-show performances, references to eating in fine-dining establishments in Paris, and a pretty piano outro. Back of My Mind never hits the triumphant high of its opener again. At 21 tracks, the album is too long, musically uneven, and leans on unnecessary guest appearances. But it also has moments of real promise, when H.E.R.—the four-time Grammy-award winner born Gabriella Wilson who’s been pitched to audiences for years now as a dynamic, mysterious talent—lives up to the hype.
One of those moments is on “Damage,” which thoughtfully incorporates a late-career Herb Alpert sample (one Bone Thugs-N-Harmony fans might recall) by adding in plucks of piano, thudding drums, and a big low end. With the help of songwriter Ant Clemons, H.E.R.’s delicate lilt folds in beautifully with the beat as she warns a lover to be careful with her heart. Its warm, ’80s-inspired production and schmaltzy lyrics sound like something you’d heard on a late-night slow jams radio show.
Ballads were a staple of H.E.R.’s initial five EPs, and she again uses them frequently on Back of My Mind, for better or worse. Nearly all of them are simple and pretty, like “Mean It,” a gentle and poignant acoustic song with a chorus that gets more lodged in your chest each time H.E.R. recites it. But by the time you get to “Exhausted,” another ballad that relies solely on her voice and one layer of instrumentation, you wish H.E.R. would break out of her sleepy hum and shoot for something more spirited.
Rather than doing that, she tries to switch things up through collaboration, which leads to mixed results. The Lil Baby feature on “Find a Way,” for example, sounds like a Lil Baby song, not a H.E.R. song, with its flavorless trap beat and stock lyrics. The title track, meanwhile, is more successful, as she and Ty Dolla $ign’s sweet spots overlap, creating a smooth back and forth. Elsewhere DJ Khaled and, disappointingly, Chris Brown, show up and don’t contribute anything to make the record feel more dynamic.
H.E.R. seemingly has the heavy, heartstruck ballads built for streaming playlists down, but there seems like there’s already a limit on where she’s willing to go within a song. The choices she makes—from the glossy R&B production to favoring vocal riffing over a good hook—feel altogether safe, like she’s protecting a legacy she was born into. What new wrinkles could she incorporate into her sound? Listening to Back of My Mind, it’s hard to tell, but the answer may lie in a song like “We Made It”—or its sonic opposite, the earthy, “Hold On.” Its soulful DNA feels endearingly familiar—so much so that I had to make sure it wasn’t a cover—and, paired with its live instrumentation, gives H.E.R. a different sort of backdrop to work with. She’s searching for more corners to place her voice in, singing up and down with the notes of her guitar. She harmonizes as the track fades out, conjuring an image of her standing on stage in the spotlight just before its cut. The stage is where H.E.R. shines—and it’s the closest the album comes to capturing H.E.R. at her greatest.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA / MBK | June 23, 2021 | 6.8 | 245143f9-3ee2-4176-b3b4-5ff9c06d83ac | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
Minor Victories includes members of Mogwai, Editors, and Slowdive, and their self-titled debut is a mix of sighing shoegaze, cinematic wanderlust, and gloomy riffage. | Minor Victories includes members of Mogwai, Editors, and Slowdive, and their self-titled debut is a mix of sighing shoegaze, cinematic wanderlust, and gloomy riffage. | Minor Victories: Minor Victories | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21943-minor-victories/ | Minor Victories | Minor Victories have wisely shied away from billing themselves as a supergroup, a term that implies a degree of star power they can’t quite deliver. They prefer the much more neutral descriptor “band.” Still, it’s impossible to separate the group from their other projects. Any band featuring Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite, and Editors guitarist Justin Lockey (along with his brother James) is going to carry certain expectations, and on their self-titled debut they live up to each and every one of them.
The album’s creation involved a lot of emailing back and forth between members before some of them had even met, sort of a Postal Service situation only with a lot more CC’s. “We didn’t record in the same room, or at the same time,” they write in the album’s liner notes, “to be honest we probably didn’t start off with the same vision.” Shared visions are irrelevant, though, when you have a lineup of players with such defined lanes. The album’s sound feels preordained: Slowdive’s sighing shoegaze, Mogwai’s cinematic wanderlust, and Editors’ gloomy riffage are all represented, and in more or less equal measure.
If there’s one thing all three of those bands have in common, it’s that you if you’re reading this site you probably know what they all sound like, but you probably can’t hum any of their songs off the top of your head. That’s not a knock; like a lot of acts from their respective scenes, those groups prioritized aesthetic statements over strong songwriting voices. That sonics-first mindset inevitably carries through Minor Victories, too. On opener “Give Up the Ghost,” Goswell sings broodingly about black roses and the blood surging through her veins, but it’s mostly an excuse for the song’s gothy ambiance, buzzsaw guitars, and moody orchestral accents. “A Hundred Ropes” and “Folk Arp” are even more sweeping, with even more dramatic string arrangements. Everybody in the group clearly knows their way around a studio, and the album rarely sounds less than superb.
What’s missing, though, is the central promise of a supergroup: the thrill of hearing established musicians in a truly different context. Minor Victories’ lineup may stem from different circles, but their approaches are so complementary that there’s rarely any tension or surprise. Unsurprisingly, then, the album’s most memorable tracks each introduce an X factor. Twilight Sad’s James Graham gamely duets with Goswell on “Scattered Ashes (Song for Richard),” a pop number with handclap drums and a blissfully fuzzy riff that imagines a Jesus and Mary Chain cover of “Dancing in the Dark.” Then, a couple of tracks later, Mark Kozelek joins her for what’s essentially a stowaway Sun Kil Moon song, “For You Always.”
It’s at once completely out of place, completely obnoxious, and completely welcome. Kozelek goes into full Benji overshare mode, rattling off a flood of dates and locations with almost obsessive, journalistic detail. “We met once in Los Angeles just around the time of the Columbine murders and Mojave 3 were playing on Sunset Boulevard at Tower Records…” he sings (well, sort of sings), recounting his 20-year friendship with Goswell and its periodic romantic undertones. For her verses, Goswell mirrors his wordy delivery, and though she can match neither the grace nor the clumsiness of his prose, it’s exciting to finally hear her outside her element. Like everything Kozelek has a hand in, it’ll drive some listeners absolutely nuts. But in one song he does what Minor Victories manages only intermittently: He makes a lasting impression. | 2016-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | May 31, 2016 | 6 | 2451f991-f2a0-4401-9ca3-82a2823d82d6 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
On her meditative and mesmerizing new album as Circuit Des Yeux, Haley Fohr embraces collaboration, working with members of Bitchin Bajas and other Chicago neighbors instead of going it alone. Accordingly, her music opens up, and the songs on In Plain Speech escort you toward stillness and awe. | On her meditative and mesmerizing new album as Circuit Des Yeux, Haley Fohr embraces collaboration, working with members of Bitchin Bajas and other Chicago neighbors instead of going it alone. Accordingly, her music opens up, and the songs on In Plain Speech escort you toward stillness and awe. | Circuit des Yeux: In Plain Speech | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20464-in-plain-speech/ | In Plain Speech | Calling music "meditative" often means it's mellow and soothing—a conduit for relaxation. But truly meditative music isn't so much sedative as it is transformative, inducing a deliberately slower, quieter mental state. That's the kind of meditation Haley Fohr encourages as Circuit Des Yeux, and never more so than on In Plain Speech. The album is all long arcs and patient development. It's not laid-back; much of it is urgent and dramatically tense. Fohr's not here to placate, but she does seem bent on getting you to step back, to hear things calmly rather than in a rush.
If that sounds more like a task than a pleasure, don't worry: Fohr does most of the work for you. Her songs escort you toward stillness and awe rather than requiring you to get there first. The music is immediate and enveloping, and because of her rich, stirring voice, it's sometimes even bracing. But once you're ensnared, it becomes quietly mesmerizing. Part of that comes from the way she builds songs, adding pieces and textures subtly over time. But much of In Plain Speech's meditative power is a product of the wholeness and commitment of Fohr's vision, which communicates itself on a more intuitive level.
Often her approach is refreshingly simple: to make you pause, Fohr pauses herself. In "Do the Dishes", after a stretched-out haiku moaned over a cycling sample, she retreats into complete silence, then re-emerges with long, wordless tones. A similar full stop comes after the folk-rock climax of "Fantasize the Scene", as Fohr appends a string-heavy epilogue that evokes the best dirges of Nico.
Though it doesn't contain a literal pause, "A Story of This World" is In Plain Speech's most stillness-inducing track, and its best. On the surface, it's a simple folk tune, with acoustic strums, gentle strings, and Fohr's koans about how "all the gold turns to rust." But the tune's primal patience—its willingness to hang in space as it moves, to stand rather than sprint—is so thorough it feels like nature. Here and in the slow-burning instrumental "Dream of TV", Circuit Des Yeux recalls the Dirty Three, the way they grow a tune so organically it feels more like weather than music—and the way they tease out powerful emotions without triggering easy sentimentality.
Past Circuit Des Yeux albums flirted with the maudlin, but In Plain Speech feels brighter and more optimistic; the music seems to be continually rising. Where she was once introspective, Fohr is now interested in human connection, using second and third person more than first. "Do you roam for the end?/ Do you roam to transcend?" she asks beatifically in "Ride Blind". Later, "Fantasize the Scene" dreams of eternal companionship: "I know a place where we could go/ Maybe I will meet you there/ In a world where we'll go all the way."
The optimism of In Plain Speech still comes with plenty of heavy drama, especially in Fohr's harrowing singing. Dark, thick, and nearly scraping baritone, her voice is so strikingly different —and so unafraid to skirt melodrama—that you can never quite get comfortable with it. But that uniqueness is part of what makes her music so compelling, as is her willingness to drift into wordless sounds—perhaps her recent experience using her voice as an instrument in Mind Over Mirrors was an influence.
Part of In Plain Speech's relative sunniness comes from Fohr's embrace of collaborators. She went it alone on previous albums, and the music was accordingly intimate and confined. Here, with the help of some Chicago neighbors—including Cooper Crain (Cave, Bitchin Bajas), Rob Frye (Bitchin Bajas), and Kathleen Baird (Spires That in the Sunset Rise)—her music opens up and spreads out, incorporating more percussion and strings. Fohr's voice remains central, but these partnerships have added new verve to her music.
That openness to collaboration dovetails with Fohr's framing of In Plain Speech as an outward-looking album. As she recently put it, "This record is me putting out my hand and asking the world to grab onto it." That may seem to contradict the idea of this music as meditative, but it actually fits quite well. Where previous records offered a portal into Fohr's own inner space, In Plain Speech is about altering her listeners' perceptions, and taking them somewhere new. | 2015-05-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-05-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Thrill Jockey | May 18, 2015 | 8 | 24533423-61b5-4a0b-8f6c-e5bec4162497 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Featuring members of Girlseeker, VÅR, and Sexdrome, the young Copenhagen punk band merges the noise and clangor of 1970s post-punk and no wave with the aggression of 1980s hardcore on this debut EP. | Featuring members of Girlseeker, VÅR, and Sexdrome, the young Copenhagen punk band merges the noise and clangor of 1970s post-punk and no wave with the aggression of 1980s hardcore on this debut EP. | Lower: Walk on Heads EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16817-walk-on-heads-ep/ | Walk on Heads EP | Earlier this month I finally witnesssed a person walking across the heads of fellow human beings, so now I can say with authority that it's an excruciating thing to watch. Imagine someone's heel pressed so firmly against your forehead it begins piercing into your skin, and the uncomfortable sensation of losing yourself beneath it. This makes it even more apt that the Copenhagen punk band Lower have taken the title Walk on Heads for their debut EP, which merges the noise and clangor of 1970s post-punk and no wave with an aggression akin to 1980s hardcore, stretching those downer feelings across eight-and-a-half all-too-short minutes. As my eyes glued themselves to that headwalker, I could hear Lower frontman Adrian Toubro shouting in the back of my mind: "Walk on heads/ Oppress the crowd/ Throw your bones/ Into their mouths."
If you clicked onto this review with even the slightest of preconceived notions about Lower, you're likely well aware that in 2012 it's impossible to have a conversation about blackened, underground punk without discussing Copenhagen. And the bands that compose that young scene are so intertwined that it's also difficult to talk about them individually without referencing the others. Lower, for example, also includes guitarist Simon Van Formann, who plays in Girlseeker with Iceage's Johan Suurballe Wieth; bassist Kristian Emdal, who plays in VÅR with Iceage's Elias Bender Rønnenfelt; and drummer Anton Rothstein, who plays in Sexdrome with VÅR's Loke Rahbek. Recently NME ran a feature on the Copenhagen scene, labeling it "the new heartland of hardcore" and "Hottest Underground Rock Scene," which are at once hilarious ways of putting it and also probably quite accurate.
Walk on Heads adds another dimension to the story, beginning with "Craver", the EP's undeniable highlight. The menacing drum rolls that open the song feel almost like a rotating crank, building tension for the rocket-fire speed that's on the brink of recklessly unwinding over three following tracks. The shrill chords of "Craver" are barely altered throughout, instead focusing on creaking, painfully stretched walls of noise, which suffocate the vague, snarled bassline creeping underneath, delivering faint hints of an oppressed hook.
But what makes "Craver" exceptional is Toubro's lyrics, which pop like dense, ambitious poetry with gray imagery even on paper. They're spit so fast on record you can barely catch them. In a deep and air-deprived fashion, he sings about yearning for a more inspired existence, "ignited by boredom" within "hermetic landscapes," pushed to burn holes through thick clouds to "brighten our vision." This is a classic punk theme, and an excellent topic for a song. There's an intrinsic urgency to it, and Toubro boils that down to an essential, oft-repeated "craving for oxygen." It's a visceral moment that's hard to shake.
And then Toubro describes a burning candle, equating its slow collapse to what sounds like death, conjuring a sense of the draining of time. "A light is lit/ But won't shine forever," and later, "A light is lit/ Soon it'll be dark again." Part of what makes Toubro's lyrics hard to decipher sonically is his Danish inflection. To my American ears, listening to Lower can often feel like hearing music with my face pressed up to a glass window, listening in on a moment so distant it's entirely untouchable. This can heighten the allure of a record in a way that still feels genuine.
A similar concept to "Craver" is at work on "Escape", which plows ahead with the perpetual assault of an uptempo drum beat. In a disillusioned city, within the confines of a bleak, fluorescent-lit room, Toubro grimly shades a "weak, faint, and pallid" character with "inane eyes," engaging in the "fast-fix liberty" of escapism through television. He calls it "a self-inflected genocide," screaming the words violently. But again Toubro moves so rapidly you could miss it all, including his description of the "trench" where he remains, quarantined. There are allusions to war and combat on nearly every Walk on Heads track, but it turns out those references are not the EP's most startling.
"Pictures of Passion" races forward on the heels of "Craver". It moves to a particularly curious and uncomfortable place when Toubro describes an image-- "a relic of fascism"-- depicting passion and purity in "machine-gun fashion." For fans of Iceage, these lines may recall the scrutiny that band underwent last year, over misguided accusations of nationalism, which pointed at drawings from the singer's Dogmeat zine. The images were misinterpreted as strikes against multiculturalism in Denmark, sentiments rekindled when Toubro sings of "[seaming] the beauty that's torn," stitching something back together that's been opened up. This line is followed directly by Toubro's reference to fascism and "hierarchy in the sun," provoking discourse. Lower are hardly the first to appropriate this kind of imagery for shock value. In that pool you'll also find Joy Division, New Order, Death in June, Throbbing Gristle, and David Bowie.
All of which is to say that Walk on Heads is a beguiling listen, one that works the mind in a way few brief, out-of-nowhere punk EPs have managed to in recent memory. Often with scenes like the one that's emerged in Copenhagen, a band can garner value simply for being an important piece of the cultural fabric. But Walk on Heads more than stands its own ground, picking you open for eight minutes, fucking you up, and throwing you down, pining for more. It makes you do a double take, not only at Lower, but at the entire place from which they spawned. | 2012-06-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-06-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Escho | June 18, 2012 | 8 | 2459de05-fbd8-4d2e-981f-32ecf8f0a426 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
On her latest album, the goth-folk artist with an ear for black metal adds layers of electronics and a new sense of grandeur to the mix. The result is her best and most emotionally direct work yet. | On her latest album, the goth-folk artist with an ear for black metal adds layers of electronics and a new sense of grandeur to the mix. The result is her best and most emotionally direct work yet. | Chelsea Wolfe: Pain Is Beauty | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18456-chelsea-wolfe-pain-is-beauty/ | Pain Is Beauty | The slightest decision can haunt an artist. This much is true of Chelsea Wolfe, an L.A. singer-songwriter whose records have synthesized doom folk, wasteland noise, and noirish experimentation. Wolfe's 2010 cover of "Black Spell of Destruction" by black metal outfit Burzum may follow her forever. Her own music, though difficult to categorize, shares something essential with that genre. It's austere and atmospheric, expressed with the reverb through which Wolfe often pushes her voice; she's opened for extreme bands like Sunn O))), Boris, and Swans and has cited Gorgoroth's "Of Ice and Movement" as a treasured song. Shortly after the Burzum cover came another one that's gained less traction on the web: a surreal, pitch-shifted take on the 1997 Notorious B.I.G. classic "Hypnotize", found on a collection of rap covers from Ben Chisholm's ghostly White Horse project. Chisholm also happens to be Wolfe's bassist and co-producer on Pain Is Beauty, her best and most emotionally direct work yet.
There are no nods to hip-hop on Pain, but their exercise in booming, electronic, populist territory is telling. While 2011's Apokalypsis and 2012's stark Unknown Rooms inched Wolfe closer to her melodic potential, they could only suggest the towering quality of this superseding new LP. At times Apokalypsis felt disguised in a permanent Halloween costume, a gothic nature fashioned so carefully as to induce skepticism. Her material had strong, original moments, but its overly witchy aura could distract; the veiled, candelabra-lit "Mer" video, though beautiful, edged toward self-parody. I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that Wolfe kept bats for pets or grew up with a cemetery in her backyard (the latter is actually true). Now, on Pain Is Beauty, we get a better sense of her talent and spirit.
Wolfe's songs of Pain emphasize massive builds with engulfing power in the vein of Swans. It's emotionally exhausting in equally mad and enjoyable ways, lasting nearly an hour across 12 twilight tracks of aggressive crescendos, poised reprieves, and suspended drama. The slower her metamorphosis, the heavier and more cavernous. As the record approaches its midway point, the ominous drones opening "Sick" signal the beginning of a wicked, cinematic patch. Wolfe has expressed interest in film soundtracks, and these songs, including "Kings" and "Rein", realize that ambition, building and swarming, creaking and pounding. They arrive at grim, seasick neo-folk balladry on "They'll Clap When You're Gone", which features some of Wolfe's most trudging and startling lyricism: "Someone opened me up while I was sleeping/ Filled my body right up with sand," she sings. "I carry a heaviness like a mountain." The clarity of her songs can be terrifying.
These songs require more patience than Pain's preceding, hook-driven opening, but the flood-tide dynamics remain-- the poppier songs are bleakly romantic, cheerlessly danceable, and equally all-consuming. The elegiac "We Hit a Wall" moves with a fierce march both funereal and inviting. The slyly anthemic "House of Metal" conjures the cool, emotional slink of dark Tri-Angle Records-style R&B, while "The Warden" has a metallic, soft-sung coldwave feel that could appear on a Wierd Records compilation. "Destruction Makes the World Burn Brighter" has a warped, ominous 60s girl group sound-- upbeat Spector pop paired with thoroughly deranged lyrics, a could-be Blue Velvet soundtrack extra.
Wolfe's indecipherable vocals tend to forego a lyrical message for the sake of mood, but the sublimely intoxicating strength of her melodies carries weight. At times her voice recalls Marissa Nadler, a kindred spirit who similarly has connections to both folk and metal along with a shared pop touchstone in Joni Mitchell. Wolfe sings with conviction, grounded in themes of nature, ancestry, and tormented love. "The Waves Have Come", an epic, skin-crawling, eight-minute ballad with pierced high strings, is a journey of terror and sorrow and the record's most intense moment-- sung from the lovelorn perspective of a natural disaster survivor, inspired by the hugely fatal Japanese earthquake and tsunami two years ago.
A peculiar thing about Chelsea Wolfe and her cultural presence is how her cultish following is so disjointed-- she's popular among fans of extreme music, but also the fashion and art worlds, having repped designers like Alexander McQueen and Iris van Herpen, and soundtracked New York painter Richard Phillips' 2011 art film with Sasha Grey. And while there's something fascinating in how Wolfe attracts these crowds, she seems to exist alone in her own world on Pain Is Beauty, crystallizing and strengthening her musical language without compromising her original, principled vision. There's a propulsive quality to much of the beat-oriented Pain, but there remains a relative sense of privacy. It's hard to imagine Wolfe dancing to Pain Is Beauty, save for inside her own head. | 2013-09-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-09-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sargent House | September 6, 2013 | 8 | 245a4996-b16f-46b6-84fc-91ae57297e98 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
Talib Kweli's collaboration with 9th Wonder, Indie 500, takes its title from the Indie 5000 parties that briefly flourished in '90s New York during the Rawkus/Fondle 'Em years. The album is all about commitment, whether he's criticizing gentrification practices or memorializing fallen heroes. | Talib Kweli's collaboration with 9th Wonder, Indie 500, takes its title from the Indie 5000 parties that briefly flourished in '90s New York during the Rawkus/Fondle 'Em years. The album is all about commitment, whether he's criticizing gentrification practices or memorializing fallen heroes. | Talib Kweli / 9th Wonder: Indie 500 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21215-indie-500/ | Indie 500 | On the first track of Indie 500, a song inspired by Pete Seeger's civil rights anthem "Which Side Are You On", Talib Kweli raps, "Celebrities be making money off the powerless/ Their silence in the silent in the face of injustice is just cowardice." He distances himself from the celebrity straw man, but he could easily be viewed as one of them. He's a public figure who visits eateries on Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations", debates politics with Bill Maher, and engages in public arguments like the one he had with CNN's Don Lemon. He's recorded hit albums like Eardrum, which peaked at No. 2 in 2007. And his 2002 song "Get By" is one of the best rap songs of the millennium, a perfect distillation of his working-class striver's aesthetic. Perhaps Kweli affects modesty to emphasize his commitment to the community, and to the political and social issues that affect us. But let's face it: He's not exactly an unknown Prisoner of Conscious.
Kweli's collaboration with 9th Wonder, Indie 500, is all about commitment, whether he's criticizing gentrification practices on "Every Ghetto" or memorializing fallen heroes Pimp C, J Dilla, and Roc Raida on "Great Day in the Morning". The album title appears to be repurposed from the Indie 5000 parties that briefly flourished in '90s New York during the Rawkus/Fondle 'Em years. Sadly, there are no appearances by Moodswingaz and the Juggaknots here. But Jessica Care Moore, whose name will ring familiar to Nuyorican Poets Café fans, and whose Black Tea: The Legend of Jessi James was released on Kweli's Javotti Media imprint, delivers a strident declaration of her self-worth on "These Waters". Another Javotti artist, the Brazilian-born rapper Niko Is, doesn't stand out as sharply, but he lands some nice lines. "Motherfuckers scared to speak out, so they tweet out," he claims on "These Waters".
Occasionally, Indie 500 loses focus. Kweli excels at the activist raps, and although his cipher with Problem and Bad Lucc on "Pay Ya Dues" lacks competitive tension, it's a nice display of the trio's lyrical skills. His humble-brags on "Lo Fi" about how "Promoters will walk me right to a table and be, like, this is your spread," however, seem perfunctory. He doesn't come off as insincere, but it's not his lane.
Indie 500 is intended as a statement of self-determination from two artists with superior track records. But its execution feels rushed. The track sequencing could be better. Kweli appears on all but three Indie 500 tracks, and overall, the compilation doesn't sound like a concise effort. The production, handled by members of 9th Wonder's Soul Council, often relies on conventional drum arrangements and loop-chopping techniques. There's considerable prowess, however, to be found in Khrysis' contributions. "Technicolor Easels", which is a Niko Is solo showcase, is bathed in synthesizer ice. "Understand", where Kweli raps alongside Brother Ali and Planet Asia, has an easygoing piano stride.
In spite of its flaws, Indie 500 features two can't-miss moments. "Bangers" opens with a brief lecture from 9th Wonder, who notes how golden age rap spurred youth to enroll at black colleges, and dryly notes, "In 1988 to 1993, black college enrollment went up 46 percent." MK Asante captures the vibe nicely when he says, "Live from the flames of Baltimore."
Then there's Rapsody, who is part of 9th Wonder's Jamla imprint and appears on three tracks here. In the past, she struggled to get noticed for albums like The Idea of Beautiful and She Got Game, at least until a feature on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly brought her some long overdue attention. On "Life Ahead of Me", she candidly addresses sexism in the rap industry: "If I had a penis your penis would be hard as a brick is/ Saying I'm a king on some rap shit/ But my gender got 'em tender/ I recognize y'all lies." Rapsody argues that if she were a man, she'd be widely regarded as one of the most talented rappers today, and she might be right. | 2015-11-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Javotti / Jamla | November 12, 2015 | 6.3 | 245b77c4-597d-4301-9018-674cd29506b6 | Mosi Reeves | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mosi-reeves/ | null |
On the Baltimore musician’s first album in five years, he finds inspiration in his daily meditation practice, but his songwriting sounds as antic as ever. | On the Baltimore musician’s first album in five years, he finds inspiration in his daily meditation practice, but his songwriting sounds as antic as ever. | Dan Deacon: *Mystic Familiar * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dan-deacon-mystic-familiarandnbsp/ | Mystic Familiar | Five years have passed since Gliss Riffer, Dan Deacon’s last proper album, which isn’t to suggest he hasn’t stayed busy. In the intervening years, Deacon has scored eight films, ranging from HBO’s Well Groomed to Rat Film, which explored Baltimore’s racial segregation as seen through the lens of the city’s rodent infestation. These projects allowed Deacon to further explore his compositional side and his electro-acoustic work, previously best heard on his 2012 album America.
Mystic Familiar draws on these roots while retaining the manic, chewed-power-line indie pop that charged albums like Spiderman of the Rings and Bromst, infusing it all with a mystical inquiry into the nature of change and the mutability of nature. Those themes announce themselves with the very first track, “Become a Mountain,” which begins with just his unadulterated voice and intensifying piano chords. With every passing measure, new layers emerge—glissading keys, synth squiggles, then horns and strings—until the jittery song finally bursts into cinematic widescreen. It conveys all the thrills of Deacon’s best moments in the span of a few seconds.
Deacon’s perspective on change and evolution comes from a daily meditation routine and the use of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards—all part of a worthwhile attempt to get outside of himself. But for all of his newfound nuance as a film composer, some of the nagging aspects of Deacon’s previous efforts drag Mystic Familiar down. A Dan Deacon song generally toggles between an all-out gallop or a breakneck pace, suggesting at once the whirring arpeggiations of Philip Glass’s Glassworks and the froth of a basement mosh pit, to the point where they become undifferentiated. His go-to move remains dogpiling on all available sounds, always opting for a gushing dam break when a few drops would do the trick.
The four-part “Arp” is breathless and dizzying, taking in free-jazz saxophone, pummeling floor toms, modular-synth squelches, and all manner of chipmunk voices, but by the end, exhaustion sets in. The exuberant “Sat By a Tree” might be a retelling of the tale of Siddhartha Gautama, who famously found enlightenment beneath a bodhi tree: “What would you cast into existence/If you contained the persistence to unwind,” Deacon sings, but it’s hard to unwind amid all the aural Mountain Dew that sprays forth from every element of the song.
While Deacon’s instrumental command has demonstrably strengthened in the past few years, his lyrics have only gotten more pat, as evidenced by two songs near album’s end. “Fell Into the Ocean” is riddled with what resemble insipid inspirational Instagram captions, complete with garbled syntax, delivered in an infuriating cartoon voice: “Burn bright: The fire inside is brighter than you think” and “Feel free: First you must relax before transcend.”
Far more effective is the instrumental “Weeping Birch.” Composed of Deacon’s synths and Disklavier Mark IV in conversation with the quick bow work of violinist Ruby Fulton and the drumming of Jeremy Hyman, it boasts an evocative mix of acoustic and electric timbres; in contrast to his maximalist tendencies, it’s perfectly measured. Highlighting the compositional maturity too often gets buried in Deacon’s work, it conveys acute emotional profundity without needing to say a word.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Domino | February 3, 2020 | 6.4 | 245fa05f-9c79-4e60-8c1c-a1e91d0eb3bd | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The Swedish rapper’s third album offers glimpses of his full potential, songs that pierce through the detachment that once obscured real emotion. | The Swedish rapper’s third album offers glimpses of his full potential, songs that pierce through the detachment that once obscured real emotion. | Yung Lean: Stranger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yung-lean-stranger/ | Stranger | It was easy, when he first emerged, to feel cynical about Yung Lean off name alone: a perfectly grating encapsulation of a certain early-2010s mode of irony that reconstituted hollowed-out rap tropes into winky Tumblr art. If Lean and his small crew of disillusioned Swedish teenagers hadn’t come up with the Sad Boys, inevitably someone else would have. My Twitter timeline, around the time “Ginseng Strip 2002” was blowing up, was filled with the same performative melancholy—sincere articulations of depression primed for external validation, or sometimes simply sadness as #aesthetic. Coupled with Lean’s tendency toward rap cliche word salad, it felt impossible to tell how seriously one was meant to take any of it. It wasn’t until later that I learned the real origin of Lean’s seemingly sardonic name, derived not from cool Internet rap but from his middle name, Jonatan Leandoer Håstad. The detail was funny in a sense—a man destined from birth to be a Cool Internet Rapper—and a bit symbolic too, a sign of something real behind the pose of it all.
The dialogue around Lean often felt more frustrating than the music: “Look how this Swedish teenager interprets hip-hop!” But Lean’s early releases rarely differentiated themselves from their source material enough to reward this curiosity, much less outweigh the baggage of a white rapper whose “outsider” status draws more attention than those who originated his style. More interesting than his “outsiderness” was his specific point of access: What kind of music do you make when Clams Casino is your DJ Premier? That premise, at least, seemed intriguing, even if the results usually made me feel jaded.
With Stranger—Lean’s third official album, and his best—it seems clear that the emphasis on Lean as “foreign rap interpreter” only did the 21-year old a disservice. “I don’t even know if I’m making hip-hop anymore,” he admitted in a recent interview. It’s an interesting statement in Lean’s case—if not a particularly unique one, generally—at a time when the current popular rap landscape sounds more like the Sad Boys than ever. But he’s right, in a sense: Lean’s rapping is, by a long shot, the least interesting part of his music. And the moments on Stranger where he breaks away from rap are striking glimpses of his full potential, piercing through the detachment that once obscured real emotion. In these moments, Lean’s identity shifts from something borrowed to something innate.
“Ice dropping, red bottom sky/Ice on my feet, I keep slipping,” Lean sing-songs on the chorus of “Red Bottom Sky,” his catchiest single to date. These are painterly lyrics—a bit evasive, maybe, but intense and world-building, closer in spirit to magical realism than the vacant randomness of his “iced-out Arizona Iced Tea” phase. And the way Lean sings them, especially, reminds me of Swedish indie pop of the mid-2000s like the Tough Alliance, CEO, and jj: bands whose blithe, Balearic sounds masked something unsettling beneath the surface, and who often weaved American cultural touchstones into their loose strands of thought in ways that were sometimes irritatingly twee, but sometimes transcendent. GUD’s production moves like a gentle tide, ebbing and flowing to create echoing pockets of empty space; the effect is somewhere between Boards of Canada, jj’s 2010 Kills tape, and Chief Keef.
The latter’s influence on Lean’s rapped and sung delivery here is hard to overstate (though the same could be said for 2017 rap in general), and tracks like “Drop It / Scooter” and “Push / Lost Weekend” are successful in the sense that they are capable Keef impressions. But even when Lean’s rapping falls short, Stranger’s breathtaking production from GUD, Yung Sherman, and White Armor holds the album together, albeit occasionally making me wish for instrumental versions (as with “Iceman,” a gorgeous, yearning beat that wouldn’t be at odds with elegant instrumental grime labels like Boxed or Gobstopper). Nevertheless, Lean presents well-crafted, transportive songs filled with clever, emo and pop-punk inspired bridges and outros that let the beat fade into nothingness.
But Lean saves Stranger’s most powerful, and promising, songs for the end, a one-two punch of raw emotion and no rapping whatsoever. “Agony” begins as little more than Lean accompanied by bleary piano; his plain-spoken imagery flickers with the quiet horror of gothic literature, infinitely more evocative than any of his percocet/molly/percocet cliches. “My window smiles in fright,” he sings shakily. “Isolation caved in/I adore you, sound of your skin.” And for just these last lines, he is backed by an Icelandic children’s choir in a breathtaking swell of quiet anguish. Finally, there is “Yellowman,” inspired according to Lean by the 1895 Robert W. Chambers story collection The King in Yellow—supernatural horror stories that circle around a play that causes madness in those who read it. Lean’s funereal chants drag, with resigned pathos, through Sigur Rós cinematics, sickly sirens, and fatalistic marching band snares. Lean, at some point, gets lost in the wall of sound. And still it feels like the most essential music of his career: no longer an outsider looking in, but an artist fully embodying himself. | 2017-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Year0001 | November 11, 2017 | 6.8 | 24617a23-c0fa-4d41-b14e-1d9b24a85b70 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | |
Art Brut's Top of the Pops is a 2xCD greatest hits collection featuring a disc of B-sides and demos. In the narrative the collection spins, everything that followed the London band's 2005 debut Bang Bang Rock & Roll did so with increasing shades of bitterness. | Art Brut's Top of the Pops is a 2xCD greatest hits collection featuring a disc of B-sides and demos. In the narrative the collection spins, everything that followed the London band's 2005 debut Bang Bang Rock & Roll did so with increasing shades of bitterness. | Art Brut: Top of the Pops | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17906-art-brut-top-of-the-pops/ | Top of the Pops | These days, most people only pay attention to the British Top 40 when it's been hijacked by dullards trying to prove a point-- last week it was the battlefield for a protest at the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's increasingly rose-tinted legacy. Yet it still contains a certain romantic allure among those who never stood a chance of getting in it. Art Brut's new greatest hits collection Top of the Pops (a two-disc set featuring a CD of B-sides and demos) is named after the defunct BBC TV rundown of the nation's favourite songs, an obsession of their ever-enthusiastic frontman Eddie Argos on which they never appeared. In typically shambolic fashion, they've only gone and forgotten to include their actual song "Top of the Pops", an early and live favourite that was always prefaced by a gleeful string of fibs about where the south London band were number one.
Presciently named after the French for "outsider art," Art Brut always shot just wide of the mark; had they been around 10 years earlier, they'd undoubtedly have been a fixture of the ITV network's "Chart Show Indie Chart"-- an earnest rival to "TOTP" that broadcast videos by bands like the Wedding Present (who released two singles volumes called Hit Parade) on Saturday mornings-- if not genuine Britpop bona fides. In a Pitchfork interview from 2009, Argos recalled seeing a copy of NME that asked, "Who's the new Jarvis Cocker?" "I thought, 'Fucking hell, some prick I bet.' And I opened it up and it was me. I was like, 'Oh fuck! Well, that's nice."
Just as British indie music was getting smart again after a fallow few years either side of the millennium, Art Brut's demeanor embraced indie's coziest, most cardigan-wearing past; Argos standing against all prevailing trends, trying to recreate the world of his youth. But their 2005 debut Bang Bang Rock & Roll was a near perfect, shabbily anthemic post-punk record that set out Argos' abundantly hilarious lyrical stock in trade: singing about how his relationships with music and ladies were as close as the "n" in "snog" and "song".
In among the declarations of romantic haplessness ("I've seen her naked twice!") was a rampant self-mythologizing streak so overstated it was as if Art Brut knew they could only ever fail, despite being stated with such bounding naivety and joyous conviction that they believed it would all come true. If only; Argos' benign, brilliant, Half Man Half Biscuit-indebted sense of humor evident on the Bang Bang Rock & Roll singles included here is something painfully lacking among young British indie bands today.
Art Brut were arguably obsessed with restoring a culture over individual success, which is lucky since their highest charting single went in like a bullet at number 41. Although one memorable scene in "Gilmore Girls" sees resident indie nut Lane Kim swear that "Formed a Band" should be the national anthem, Art Brut abjectly failed at bringing back the time Argos craved, or slowing the path of an increasingly compromised alternative music culture to the mainstream. But having committed themselves to failure after establishing such lofty goals in the first place, you'd think it wouldn't matter to them.
Unfortunately, at least in the narrative that Top of the Pops spins, everything that followed Bang Bang Rock & Roll did so with increasingly unbecoming shades of bitterness. They'd have been better off reissuing Bang Bang for a second time than opting to tell this glum take on events. The songs included here from 2007's EMI-released It's a Bit Complicated (where Jasper Future replaced Chris Chinchilla on guitar) wonder "what else can we do when the kids don't like it?" Argos experiments with and ultimately muddles his personal narratives, and when he wearily yells "punk rock ist nicht tot!" it sounds like the delusional cry of a man bent over punk's dying corpse; not the words of the bloke who once joyously belted, "MODERN ART! MAKES ME! WANT TO ROCK OUT!"
The malaise increases with 2009's Art Brut vs. Satan (a return to Cooking Vinyl/Downtown), produced by Frank Black, where Argos sings of his arrested development, unruly drinking problems, and shit summer jobs. He also now hates all the idiots that just can't appreciate good music: "If we can't change the world/ Let's at least get the charts right/ How can you sleep at night/ When nobody likes the music we write?/ Record-buying public, we hate them/ This is Art Brut vs. Satan," goes "Demons Out!", where the band start to sound like the tiresomely dogmatic Cribs. The Wakefield band's 2005 single "Hey Scenesters!" was a disdainful comment on the emergence of indie culture that Art Brut ran around celebrating like lunatics on "Formed a Band". Here, the distance between them shrinks depressingly.
The returns don't stop diminishing: Also produced by Frank Black, 2011's Brilliant! Tragic!'s "Axl Rose" sees Argos reduced to a cantankerous cipher: "The world is fucked, and you're an idiot/ Why don't you take a long look at my middle digit!" He makes hapless attempts at singing in a sinister whisper that suggests a stalker ogling his unwitting intented; the band are as convincingly vigorous as someone trying to pogo on a belly full of Sunday roast.
Two new numbers close CD1: "Arizona Bay" is named for a Bill Hicks album where he fantasized about L.A. falling "in the fucking ocean", thus destroying the fantasy explored in Bang Bang Rock & Roll's "Moving to L.A." Here, Argos is in the middle of an earthquake situation that reads like a less-than-subtle take on the band's dwindling career. Closer "We Make Pop Music" is the only song on Top of the Pops' main disc that hits a musically regretful note, playing out with an almost-epic middle-eight over which Argos desperately yells, "We make pop music! We make pop music!" (Though in a recent blogpost, Argos wrote, "I only like guitar music and everybody who disagrees with me is a cunt.")
With the release of Top of the Pops, Argos keeps insisting that Art Brut were a "classic rock" band all along, offering the fact that they've been on the cover of German Rolling Stone and posed naked in the NME as proof. In a sense (though not the one intended), he's right: Bang Bang Rock & Roll was an accidentally classic album that gave Art Brut an immediate legacy that they seemed to know they'd never top-- a fate that befalls classic rock bands obsessed with besting their best and blaming the rest rather than engaging with the culture around them. | 2013-04-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-04-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | The End | April 17, 2013 | 6 | 24625bec-95d3-487b-a778-5034d2112113 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Starting out as a Valentine's Day gift for Passion Pit leader Michael Angelakos' girlfriend, this set of lap-pop serenades deftly walks the line between beat-driven, Hot Chip floor geeking and twee atmospherics. | Starting out as a Valentine's Day gift for Passion Pit leader Michael Angelakos' girlfriend, this set of lap-pop serenades deftly walks the line between beat-driven, Hot Chip floor geeking and twee atmospherics. | Passion Pit: Chunk of Change EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12379-chunk-of-change-ep/ | Chunk of Change EP | It's a backstory you couldn't possibly escape: This past Valentine's Day, Michael Angelakos opted out of throwing down the coin for some chocolates, teddy bears, or a copy of Love Actually. A little on the late side, he instead recorded for his girlfriend the lion's share of the lap-pop serenade, Chunk of Change. Friends were excited by what they heard, a band was born, a record deal signed.
Defined as much by its lyrical prism and Angelakos' falsetto (more on that later) as its gooey textures, Chunk of Change walks the line between beat-driven, Hot Chip floor geeking and twee atmospherics. And while he gave his band the name of a 1980s skin flick, Angelakos' production mirrors the more cuddly bent that sparked the project: synths are Downy-soft, blankets of melodic skin that expand alongside their oversized choruses. More significantly, it suggests a certain level of un-self-conscious pop versatility. You can gyrate. You can navelgaze. You can shiver. You can cringe.
It's a sonic ethos that fits much of Angelakos' lyrical Lloyd Dobler-ing well. Opener "I've Got Your Number" is a clear standout, its synthetic handclaps and high frequency whirring offer a prime framework for introducing the dude's voice and poetry. Depending on your emotional constitution or complexion, the latter can be, understandably, something of a turn-off. As is the case with the less propulsive material here, most time is spent nose-to-nose with turns like "Have you seen me cry tears like diamonds? Down and down they fly, faster and faster," or "Whatever happens to you, whatever happens to me, I hope that I'll fall asleep knowing that you'll always be the story with no ending." But you can't fault a guy for loving someone his way. Given the notion that Angelakos initially expected just one person to really listen, the record benefits heavily from that which a lot of us look for in sound or elsewhere: emotional authenticity.
If anything, the EP's major flaw is also a gamebreaker. Angelakos' falsetto flirts dangerously with histrionics at times, the breathy swings of "Cuddle Fuddle" or forgettable disco-pop of "Better Things" are two examples of his pipes at their most distracting. He can veer way off course for sure, but when matching the movement and mood of his own textures, his exuberance can be narcotic. "Sleepyhead" is the one addition not included on the original mixtape and it hints at savvier, more muscular vibrations coming down the pipeline (a full-length is slated for early 2009). Also the EP's shortest and most infectious moment, it's a tipsy, bass-heavy Cristal bath with the likes of Mannheim Steamroller and Ginuwine. I think it's about a girl. | 2008-11-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2008-11-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Frenchkiss | November 5, 2008 | 7.9 | 246d22be-02ff-43a0-a9e9-4453beb98218 | Tyler Grisham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tyler-grisham/ | null |
Newly reissued with bonus material for its 50th anniversary, the Dead’s fourth album returned them to their folk-blues roots and transformed the trajectory of their career in the process. | Newly reissued with bonus material for its 50th anniversary, the Dead’s fourth album returned them to their folk-blues roots and transformed the trajectory of their career in the process. | Grateful Dead: Workingman’s Dead / The Angel’s Share | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grateful-dead-workingmans-dead-the-angels-share/ | Workingman’s Dead / The Angel’s Share | Freshly busted in New Orleans and teetering upon the edge of financial ruin, the Grateful Dead began 1970 in dire need of a new beginning. Remarkably for a band who had a habit of making their own bad luck, the Dead didn’t miss this opportunity. Operating with a focus they rarely possessed, the band returned to their folk-blues roots and knocked out their fourth album, Workingman’s Dead, in a matter of days, transforming the trajectory of their career in the process.
Often grouped together with its successor American Beauty—reasonably so, considering how Beauty is carved from the same rustic material and appeared just a matter of months later—Workingman’s Dead fit into the anti-psychedelia wave that swept through American rock’n’roll at the dawn of the 1970s. The zeitgeist shifted away from trippy excesses after the release of the Band’s Music From Big Pink in 1968 but the Grateful Dead found greater inspiration in the eponymous 1969 debut from Crosby, Stills & Nash, gravitating toward their harmony-laden homey folk-rock. Stephen Stills and David Crosby traveled similar circles to the Dead, eventually wandering out to Mickey Hart’s ranch in Marin County, a place that doubled as the group’s unofficial headquarters. Stills and Crosby encouraged Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Phil Lesh to sing harmonies, a skill that would come in handy when it came to recording the new batch of songs Garcia was writing with his lyricist Robert Hunter.
What came easily to CSN was work for the Dead. Garcia’s partner Mountain Girl—aka Carolyn Adams, a former Merry Prankster who wound up marrying the guitarist in 1981—laughed about the process to band biographer David Browne, claiming in his 2015 book So Many Roads: The Life And Times Of The Grateful Dead, “They were expected to sing all those parts, and it didn’t go well. It sounded like cats howling.” It’s possible to hear that howl echoing through Workingman’s Dead. The trio’s voices don’t quite mesh, sometimes hitting a dissonant chord, sometimes scrambling for the same note; their effort isn’t merely heard, it’s felt. All that fumbling winds up as an asset on Workingman’s Dead, adding a bit of messiness to the tight performances.
Much of that precision can be chalked up to how the Grateful Dead mapped out all of Workingman’s Dead prior to recording the album with their live-sound team of Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor, a pair who shared a co-production credit with the band. Nothing was left to chance. Matthews, Cantor, and Garcia drew up a provisional sequencing during these sessions, circulating this rough draft on demo cassettes among the band. Rehearsals came next, then the rapid sessions, outtakes of which can be heard on The Angel’s Share, a digital-only collection released alongside the 50th Anniversary edition of Workingman’s Dead. The chief insight provided by The Angel’s Share is how Garcia kept the Dead on track, calling for changes in tempo and directing the arrangements so neither the song nor vibe is obscured. Compared to its willfully spacy predecessor Aoxomoxoa—an album the band recorded twice, as the band exhausted the possibilities of a new 16-track tape recorder while exhausting the patience and wallet of Warner Bros—the simplicity of Workingman’s Dead is bracing, even refreshing, but it’s the earthy, weathered grooves that give the album its distinct character and power.
A crucial part of the Dead’s simplification was relying almost entirely on songs written by Garcia and Hunter in tandem. Jerry wound up singing nearly all the songs, too, sharing the lead with Weir on the bluegrass breakdown “Cumberland Blues” and turning over “Easy Wind,” a blues written by Hunter on his own, to Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the band’s husky original frontman. If it weren’t for “Easy Wind,” Pigpen wouldn’t have registered on Workingman’s Dead at all, his absence a reflection of both his increasing alcoholism (he’d die of the disease three years later) and how the songs largely traded blues and experimentation for folk and country.
Drummer Bill Kreutzmann would later claim in his memoir Deal: My Three Decades Of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs With The Grateful Dead that Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty represented their “Bakersfield era,” a nod to the country music coming out of California in the 1960s. Certainly, the band made no attempt to conceal their debt to Merle Haggard—the album’s title is a nod to Hag’s 1969 number one country single “Workin’ Man Blues”—but Bakersfield country explicitly tangled with modern concerns, addressing contemporary issues in its lyrics and embracing electrified instruments. With its pronounced twang, only “Cumberland Blues” echoed the style of Bakersfield. The rest of the album is devoted to high lonesome ballads, Sunday afternoon singalongs, and fleet fingerpicking straight out of Appalachia. Inspired equally by old folk tales and black & white movies, Hunter spun legends of mines, dire wolves, and train conductors. His lyrical obsessions may not be all that dissimilar from Robbie Robertson, who populated Band records with Confederate soldiers and farmhands, but Hunter deliberately confounded and conflated his time frame, so it was hard to tell where the old, weird America ended and the paisley underground began.
”Casey Jones” makes hay of this confusion, with Garcia singing, “Driving that train/High on cocaine,” with an audible grin, recognizing that while Hunter may have based his verse on an old blues song documenting a turn-of-the-century train disaster, his verse could be heard as a rallying call for the underground. “Uncle John’s Band,” the band’s first charting hit, walked a similar line, sounding like a campfire perennial while being finely attuned to the hippie hangover of the early 1970s, the period when all the dreams of love and peace started to get a tad tarnished. Appropriately, the scaled-down Workingman’s Dead can be seen as reflecting the moment when hippies retreated from the universal aspirations to personal concerns, a perfect soundtrack to hunkering down on a commune or maybe learning how to grow up while ensconced in a suburb.
The complete performance that pushes the 50th Anniversary Edition of Workingman’s Dead into Super Deluxe status captures this uneasy change, only from a different angle. Plucked from the Dead’s multi-night stint at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York in February 1971, it finds the group navigating the absence of Mickey Hart. Weir mentions the missing Hart from the stage, claiming the drummer wasn’t feeling well, which wasn’t a lie but his illness stemmed from his unease at discovering how his father Lenny fleeced the Dead for many thousands of dollars while serving as the group’s manager.
Without Hart, the group sounds lean and fleet, nearly as simple as they were in the studio for Workingman’s Dead but allowing themselves plenty of space to jam and boogie. The set features several songs that would form the backbone of American Beauty, including the Weir-led “Sugar Magnolia” and “Truckin’”, a pair of tunes essential to the mythology of the band and their popularity through the 1970s. Hearing them as part of this (very) extended coda to the original album helps hammer home how different Workingman’s Dead is from the rest of the Dead’s catalog. American Beauty is superficially similar, mining the same folk-country blend, finding space for vocalists that weren’t Garcia and sanding off the rough edges apparent throughout Workingman’s Dead. It’s a smoother listen, but like any homespun art, the imperfections are what makes Workingman’s Dead compelling. Within those ragged harmonies, hard strums, and fables, it’s possible to hear the Grateful Dead transform from psychedelic upstarts to an American institution.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | July 11, 2020 | 9.1 | 246e8595-e03a-4bf3-b469-551f2a496c19 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
No longer sounding like stripped-down Hold Steady songs, Finn's latest solo album is the accomplished work of a wise songwriter—mournful, musically layered, and full of empathy. | No longer sounding like stripped-down Hold Steady songs, Finn's latest solo album is the accomplished work of a wise songwriter—mournful, musically layered, and full of empathy. | Craig Finn: We All Want the Same Things | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23008-we-all-want-the-same-things/ | We All Want the Same Things | Craig Finn has never written a song like “God in Chicago.” Sure, the plot points should be familiar to anyone who’s followed his work since Lifter Puller or the Hold Steady. There’s kissing in the streets; there’s salvation in an unexpected place; there’s drugs; there’s a busted boombox playing Led Zeppelin III. But in “God in Chicago,” the spoken-word piano ballad centerpiece of Finn’s stunning new album, it feels heavier, like all his songs are contained in this one. Detailing a journey with a near stranger to settle the score for her dead brother, it illustrates the consequences of Finn’s reckless, dangerous characters with a newfound penchant for realism. When the central drug deal goes down, it happens swiftly and silently. “This isn’t the movies,” Finn explains—a distinction that would have been moot in earlier songs, where real life and rock’n’roll cliché blended into bar-band euphoria.
Through much of his career, Finn’s work has come with the coziness of a weekend spent returning to a college town: filled with old friends, inside jokes, and a bittersweet struggle to move forward. While the best moments of his previous two solo albums felt like little more than stripped-back versions of solid Hold Steady songs, We All Want the Same Things is more subtle and strange. Finn’s weathered voice is at its most expressive, tied to songs that take him as far from his comfort zone as he’s ever tread. It’s a remarkable record not for sounding like a return-to-form, but for feeling like entirely new territory without sacrificing its thrill or familiarity.
Finn’s writing in these songs often feels like an exercise in empathy, seeking out people who’ve never gotten the spotlight in his work. The male protagonist of “Tangletown” is a wealthy divorcee who works a boring job, goes to bed early, and surrounds himself with luxuries that poorly mask his inner turmoil. You never learn his name, but it’s almost certainly not “Charlemagne” or “Gideon”: it might be “Craig.” In “It Hits When It Hits,” Finn sounds lonely and lost atop a slow-pulsing rhythm. “I can tell that today is gonna be a celebration,” he repeats while the music drags at his words, suggesting that today will, in fact, be just the opposite. His call for hard-won joy is miles away from Hold Steady anthems where celebration felt like a divine right: “This summer, grant us all the power,” he once sang, “To drink on top of water towers.” Here, his characters have a hard time summoning the power just to make it through the day.
Finn has referred to these new songs as “co-dependency jams,” and the relationships he describes in them are complex and colorful, from the partners-in-crime of “Jester & June” to the grieving road-trippers of “God in Chicago.” When people are called by name, he simply affirms their presence in the world, his characters grateful for not being alone. “James, I’m glad that you’re here,” Finn sings through the synthy Kaputt-pop of “Birds Trapped in the Airport”; “Nathan, you’re my only friend,” he urges in “Ninety Bucks.” Of course, the sincerity of any of these statements is tenuous. In “Ninety Bucks,” Nathan responds to his friend by loaning her money, knowing she probably won’t use it for MRI-certification. All the while, a single piano note plods in the background as their monotonous dynamic starts sounding something like stability. “Sometimes I can push ahead,” Finn sings, “Some nights the wheels just spin.”
The entirety of We All Want the Same Things is steeped in a mournful haze that makes the “wild kind of sadness” Finn sings about in “Jester & June” come to life, and helps these songs transcend from short stories into action-packed anthems on par with his finest work. Bruce Springsteen, particularly his character-driven early work, has long been a reference point for Finn’s music. But here, he seems more inspired by Bruce’s darker material: the haunting fadeout of “Racing in the Street,” the layered vocals in “Stolen Car,” the muted trumpet in “Meeting Across the River” that made its star-crossed drug deal sound doomed before it even happened. In “Preludes,” Finn sings about driving through a storm, accompanied by flutes that sound like snow against windshield wipers. In “Rescue Blues,” Stuart Bogie’s horn ascends as Finn comes closer to finding a sense of resolution. “I guess we all/Get by in different ways,” he sings tenderly, more confident with each repetition. Finally, Craig Finn sounds like he’ll be all right, like he’s got somewhere to go when the party’s over. | 2017-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | March 23, 2017 | 7.8 | 2473180d-1570-4eba-a2ac-bd0654410085 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Kamasi Washington, a member of the studio band that composed To Pimp a Butterfly, has released a triple-album set that functions as an extravagant love letter to (among other things): soul jazz, John Coltrane (various periods), and 1970s fusion leaders like Miles Davis and Weather Report. It’s a large and generous canvas, with the feel of a generational intervention. | Kamasi Washington, a member of the studio band that composed To Pimp a Butterfly, has released a triple-album set that functions as an extravagant love letter to (among other things): soul jazz, John Coltrane (various periods), and 1970s fusion leaders like Miles Davis and Weather Report. It’s a large and generous canvas, with the feel of a generational intervention. | Kamasi Washington: The Epic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20557-the-epic/ | The Epic | It is probably impossible to discuss Kamasi Washington's new record—all three impressive hours of it—without copping to at least some awareness of two extra-musical truths. The first of these holds that, as a member of the studio wrecking crew that brought Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly into being, this saxophonist-composer is unusually well poised to secure the attention of listeners who have previously been uninterested in jazz. (This past spring's celebration of all-things-TPAB was sufficiently strong that Billboard even published a well-reported piece that detailed exactly how Lamar's album came to feature so many jazz figures, including Washington.)
The second truth is that jazz could use a few more people with Washington's cachet in the wider world—touring with Snoop Dogg, or putting out albums on Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder imprint. Admitting this is not tantamount to saying that jazz is in some unhealthy creative state (it isn't), but rather that the music currently faces an uphill struggle in the marketplace (as it often has).
You can see hints of these outside considerations in some of the pre-release writing around The Epic—virtually all of which cites Washington's hip-hop associations as a reason to pay attention to his big debut as a jazz bandleader. (Washington cut one prior album as part of a collective, in 2004, but this set is his real coming-out party.) One can imagine other elite contemporary jazz artists grinding teeth while checking Twitter, muttering to themselves: if anyone paid attention to me, they'd notice the post-turntablism beats in my music.
Given all this, it's something of a gobsmacking paradox to discover what a hip-hop-free zone The Epic is, and how enamored of jazz's past it turns out to be. This triple-album set is an extravagant love letter to (among other things): soul jazz, John Coltrane (various periods), and 1970s fusion leaders like Miles Davis and Weather Report. The Epic's Disc 1 opener, "Change of the Guard", might as well be titled "We Love All Kinds of 'Trane". Its ringing opening piano chords sound almost entirely lifted from the playbook of McCoy Tyner, the pianist in Coltrane's so-called "Classic Quartet." (That's the group responsible for A Love Supreme.) The opening theme in the saxes is something that could only have been written after "Impressions". And the harmonious writing for Washington's string section recalls posthumous Coltrane releases like Infinity—tracks from which featured orchestral overdubs supervised by Alice Coltrane (who is, as you may have read, Flying Lotus's aunt). Toward the end of the 12-minute tune, Washington's tenor sax solo veers off into flights of screeching intensity that were the hallmark of Coltrane's later groups—specifically the ones that also included Pharoah Sanders. (Who is, by the way, still active—and still great, on the evidence of last year's record with the São Paulo Underground.)
What The Epic does come to sound like, over the course of its significant running time, is a generational intervention—an educational tool that widens the definition of styles that fall under "jazz classicism." With his writing for string sections and chorus, Washington even flirts with that most dreaded of appellations: smooth. But these specific choices also wind up paying dividends: The calmly spiritual voices and Washington's wailing playing during the back half of "Askim" feels novel.
Three hours is a lot of music, and Washington uses the space to range freely—the R&B vocals of Patrice Quinn crop up roughly once per disc, and there are long sections that feel indebted to grittier funk and soul. Washington has a healthy sense of melodrama, which is especially clear whenever the chorus swoops in with open-hearted "ooohs" and "aaahs", aiming straight for the listener's gooseflesh. Meantime, some of the longer, less ambitious instrumental tracks (like "Isabelle") play things much safer, in a kind of chill-jazz mode that features greasy-soul-organ and tasteful solos from Washington's large cast of skilled supporters (like electric bassist Thundercat and trombonist Ryan Porter). While faultlessly executed, these are the only moments across the music's three-hour sprawl that resemble padding. On the uptempo, high-energy music, like the updated Miles Davis-isms of "Re Run Home", as well the potent Disc 3 closer, "The Message", Washington and his band truly excel.
The big news is that The Epic actually makes good on its titular promise without bothering to make even a faint-hearted stab in the direction of fulfilling its pre-release hype. If you came for the hip-hop associations, and can't listen for anything else, you will surely be disappointed. But to listen like that is to cheat yourself. If you want rapping over contemporary jazz, you can find it elsewhere. If you're in the mood for acoustic adaptations of electronic-music practices, look to Vijay Iyer Trio's recent Break Stuff (specifically, the track "Hood", which is a shout-out to Detroit DJ Robert Hood). You can find more studiously contemporary R&B vocals on Robert Glasper's recent Black Radio series. Kamasi Washington's epic isn't the place for those things—though it is also a zone of surprise. Instead of a self-conscious attempt to seize someone else’s idea of the zeitgeist, it's a large and generous canvas, clearly created in the hopes of attracting new visitors to the post-Coltrane wing of the jazz museum. At this point, that project is its own form of radicalism. | 2015-05-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-05-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Brainfeeder | May 8, 2015 | 8.6 | 24758524-dfb7-47ab-967b-aaaa9713fbc9 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The emo-rap artist rebounds from a sophomore slump with an album that glows with conviction and sometimes-uncomfortable honesty. | The emo-rap artist rebounds from a sophomore slump with an album that glows with conviction and sometimes-uncomfortable honesty. | nothing,nowhere.: Trauma Factory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nothing-nowhere-trauma-factory/ | Trauma Factory | Twenty-eight-year-old Joe Mulherin has been performing as nothing,nowhere. since 2015, making emo rap as restrained and nervous as he appears to be in photos. But the raw lyricism of his debut album, Reaper, confirmed that his anxiety went deeper than just being camera-shy. His smoky production and surprising openness earned him critical acclaim in mid-2017, when Lil Peep was still alive and emo rap was flourishing. But the second nothing,nowhere. album that came out that year, ruiner, indicated an early sophomore slump, plagued by a lack of conviction. Fortunately, Mulherin’s latest album, Trauma Factory, makes that slump feel like a fluke. Aided by its dynamic pop-punk flourishes, Trauma Factory glows with earnestness and demonstrates all the good that can come from embracing pain.
The most noticeable difference between Trauma Factory and ruiner is Mulherin’s vocal performance. He has always had (and on occasion, still employs) a nasally delivery, over-enunciating with his reedy voice in a way that’s almost childish. His delivery is confident, but the brattiness of his voice is best served by the pop-punk melodies he favors when singing. And for most of Trauma Factory, that’s what he does, sometimes sounding like he’s putting his whole body into delivering each burning syllable. His strong rhythmic sensibility, essential for rap, boosts his singing, too. On the nocturnal pop-punk track “nightmare,” Mulherin hisses, “Well, I saw you with a new boy/I’m looking for something that I can destroy,” with precision, turning a rather basic concept into something venomous.
As usual on his albums, the pop-punk moments are more convincing and exciting than the straightforward rap ones. Although most of the songs are just slightly above the two-minute mark, Trauma Factory can occasionally feel bloated at 15 tracks, usually with its more trap-inspired songs. It’s strange to hear a song as restrained and plodding “exile” on the same album as something like the anthemic “fake friend,” which in comparison, sounds like it was made by a much more electric, impassioned artist.
But even when the music falters, Mulherin manages to save it with his own conviction. The production of “death” aims for something experimental, closer to Ho99o9 than emo rap, but its sputtering bass and rather unimpressive heavy guitar breakdown lands it closer to Twenty One Pilots. Mulherin’s voice, though, is ragged and panicky as he shrieks “I scare myself to death” over and over again. You forget all about the lackluster guitar and droopy bass to focus on his voice, his fear oozing like rotting fruit. The unexpected love song “crave” crackles with yearning; Mulherin sounds breathless as he notices “anticipation on your face and I wanna taste it.” Sometimes, Mulherin’s sincerity can be painful. On “real,” Mulherin sounds defeated, detailing reading album reviews in bed, becoming influenced by “a stranger’s opinion” until tension mounts and he shouts out that “You don’t know what I been dealing with/… Had a panic attack every day for a year.”
This line is almost uncomfortably truthful and specific, and it urges you to remember that you’re listening to a person. This reminder of humanity—that, just like you, Mulherin is worried, he has panic attacks, he stays in bed for too long—is essential to the music he makes. Emo, at its best, creates kinship. Mulherin allows his pain to flow through him, not trap him, and the result is liberating. He makes you feel like you can be honest, too, no matter the repercussions. You can get up the next day, give the world your full self, and embrace not knowing what happens next.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Fueled by Ramen | February 23, 2021 | 6.6 | 2476b6ab-44b5-4ef6-adc5-9bb583380917 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
The UK singer-songwriter and producer’s vision of pop is spare yet sumptuous. His new album features Panda Bear and Carly Rae Jepsen, but the real draw is the mellow, déjà vu quality of the music. | The UK singer-songwriter and producer’s vision of pop is spare yet sumptuous. His new album features Panda Bear and Carly Rae Jepsen, but the real draw is the mellow, déjà vu quality of the music. | Bullion: Affection | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bullion-affection/ | Affection | The backstory of a Bullion song is never obvious. All that’s legible are stray details—a name, a place, an age—silhouetted in the warm light of emotional afterglow. In “Hula,” my favorite song from 2020’s We Had a Good Time, he hinted at stolen moments on dancefloors in Tokyo, Mexico, and Berlin (no further context; guess you had to be there) and asked, out of nowhere, “Are people in pain where you are?” That a bittersweet synth-pop track so perfectly suited for swaying cheek to cheek coincided with the onset of the novel coronavirus made the question feel uncannily apropos.
The British singer, songwriter, and producer born Nathan Jenkins similarly blends the vague with the vivid on “Your Father,” one of the standouts on his new album, Affection. Over characteristically subtle production—a fistful of agates for a synth line; flashing shoals of guitar and sax—he sketches out the blurriest fragments of a private memory, then twists the focus ring: “Your father/Listened to/The whole of/The White Album/As he waited to collect us.” No matter how many times I rewind the line, I can’t quite make sense of it. I can see it: chaperone, tape deck on the dashboard, an hour that Dad spent killing time while the kids got up to who knows what. But the specifics are indistinct, known only to Jenkins and the “you” of the song. Bullion’s vignettes are just that: sharp in the center, darkened around the margins of the frame.
But you don’t come to Bullion’s music for the stories, really; you come for the sound, and he has never sounded more in control of his craft than on Affection. Since the late 2000s, Jenkins has been developing an idiosyncratic style that’s hard to sum up, in spite of its elegant restraint. You could call it retro-conscious electro pop with one foot in UK dance music; you could also simply call it pop, or at least the kind of pop you’d expect from someone who’s produced Carly Rae Jepsen and Nilüfer Yanya. He calls it “Pop, not slop”—also the name of a long-running playlist he maintains on Spotify.
Whatever that term may lack in precision or pith, the playlist efficiently triangulates Jenkins’ musical coordinates. It’s full of sophistipop, electrified yacht rock, Japanese city pop, mellower strains of new wave, and, above all, the odd curveball from ’70s rockers who greeted the next decade by spending major-label money on top-of-the-line synths and drum machines. Bullion’s music is steeped in the liminal areas where genres blend promiscuously and digital reverb bleeds across acoustic guitars and gridded click tracks. If his tales feel like strangers’ snapshots found in a box at the flea market, his songs have an equally vintage tint, shot through with a déjà vu quality that makes them feel like you’ve heard them before, but can’t quite place where.
In the listener-friendly tradition of pop music, Jenkins keeps his songs around the three-minute mark, and sometimes shorter. “Cinch,” the album’s sleekest encapsulation of yearning, is a scale model of bittersweet, just two minutes of pulsing arpeggios, wordless coos, and a delicious little twist in the chord change that gets me every time. His arrangements are more pared back than ever; why use two synths when one will do? But his sounds have never been more sumptuous. The keys drip with liquid texture, glow like runway lights through a rain-spattered window; voices sail into earshot on flying carpets of reversed reverb, giving songs the feeling of moving backward and forward at once.
Jenkins delights in toying with expectations: “A City’s Never,” featuring an unusually understated Panda Bear, bookends a single verse in a chorus as spotless as an electric-vehicle showroom, then twists up the bassline in its final moments, slyly throwing a toylike wrench in the works. Other songs feel like conduits for fleeting moments of joy: You may come to “Rare” for Jepsen’s heart-warming vocal harmonies, but it’s the 18-second guitar solo near the end that keeps you hitting replay. Just once does he go a little gonzo, with the fiddle and harmonica of “World_train,” featuring Charlotte Adigéry—probably my least favorite song here, though I applaud the gung-ho spirit. And sometimes a song that seems otherwise unremarkable, like the strummy “Open Hands,” suddenly assumes a more vivid shape, as though its strings had been pulled taut.
Jenkins executive-produced Avalon Emerson’s & the Charm, in which the American DJ reinvented herself as the frontwoman of a group, and he assumes a similar role here, roping a dozen or so session players and backup vocalists into streamlined songs that spin like tightly wound clocks. You can visualize the imaginary band on stage—here’s the drummer, there’s the bassist; the keys are mapped across left-hand chords and right-hand leads. A human sense of scale abides, even on songs that are almost certainly computer-assisted studio concoctions. A surprisingly large number of guitarists are on hand, given the instrument’s unobtrusive role—but when a solo like the one Joe Newman plays in “Your Father” floats to the surface, it lights up the room. Bassist Ben Reed, who played on Frank Ocean’s Blond and Endless, deserves a nod as the album’s stealth MVP; his work can be muscular, lithe, and lighthearted, sometimes all at once. He brings livewire funk to the glistening “Affection,” dutifully powers the middle-school slow dance of “Rare,” quickens the pulse of “Your Father” like a brand new crush.
The guest singers never steal the spotlight. Panda Bear’s Noah Lennox comes closest, only because he has such a distinctive drawl, but Jenkins does something clever with the mix that leaves Lennox’s voice trailing his own, like an angled shadow. Jepsen and Adigéry also lie low, inconspicuous as friendly ghosts. Jenkins’ presence is affable, modest, and muted—almost like a backup vocalist on his own songs. He sings with his head voice, slightly nasal, but there’s no shortage of warmth or tenderness in his tone. More than anything, he knows the value of simplicity.
Take “Once, in a Borrowed Car”: There are no verses, just a chorus that’s repeated five times, with minuscule variations. “Bullet down the highway,” he sings, drawing out the first word until it feels like a speeding projectile caught in slow motion; “Body blow/The body knows/Rushing to your location/To seek affection.” In those five slim lines, we’re transported into the act of desire itself. We may not know where he’s going, or to whom, or what force caused that body blow, but it hardly matters. For three minutes and change, between the blushing close harmonies and hiccupping piano solo, that desire feels as real as the blood pumping in your veins. | 2024-05-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | May 2, 2024 | 8 | 2479065c-da96-4ae3-895a-286e8a38fbde | 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 Boz Scaggs’ 1976 hit album, a record whose ineffable tragicomedy called for its own system of measurement. | 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 Boz Scaggs’ 1976 hit album, a record whose ineffable tragicomedy called for its own system of measurement. | Boz Scaggs: Silk Degrees | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boz-scaggs-silk-degrees/ | Silk Degrees | Whoever you are, wherever you are, as you read this sentence, a used vinyl copy of Silk Degrees is sitting in the closest record store to you. It is not in great condition, and it is not expensive, and it was first owned by someone at a time when a lot of people owned vinyl records—and a lot of those people owned Silk Degrees. There are certain albums that go down so smoothly—inhaling the busy sounds of pop radio and exhaling their own cool, irresistible blend—that they seem to open a permanent slot in the greater public consciousness, sailing like a ship into a harbor in the clouds. Some albums belong to everybody.
Boz Scaggs’ seventh solo album, released just after Valentine’s Day 1976, is one such album. After it hit, the Ohio-born, Texas-bred, California-based songwriter described his ascent to stardom with the quiet contentment one finds after a long vacation, or a particularly inspiring ayahuasca trip. “It was an enormous satisfaction to have a hit record,” he would say decades later, “and I wish it at least once for every musician.” None of his albums before or after reached the same level of success, and while he’d have his share of hits (especially on 1980’s Middle Man) and artistic achievements (2001’s Dig, 2013’s Memphis), his career in the mainstream is largely defined by the meticulous, glimmering sound of these 10 songs.
If you know Silk Degrees but don’t know much about Boz Scaggs, it is at least partially by design. Before its release, he was largely a critical favorite, first for his contributions to an early, underrated iteration of the Steve Miller Band, and later for the solid if slightly anonymous albums under his own name. Within five years of the release of Silk Degrees, he would retire from the music industry—and not in the casual sense of working behind the scenes, making quieter records for smaller audiences, but in the more literal sense of retreating, spending time with his family, starting that restaurant and concert venue he’d always dreamed about.
Even as Silk Degrees slowly took over the world, casting Scaggs as one of the most successful figures in pop music in the late ’70s, he never had much interest in fame. In his early 30s when it was released, he quickly grew tired of giving interviews and presenting himself as the sleek, solitary, well-dressed icon from his album covers. “Maybe people need heroes?” he offered in 1978. “I’m tired of that.” The line of work did not come naturally: He had already quit playing guitar in the studio, turning his parts over to more qualified session musicians; he didn’t enjoy life on the road and resisted embarking on major tours. He said his dream role was to be a competent bassist, somewhere in the background. “I’m not a real ambitious person by nature,” he confessed.
All this may reek of false humility from someone who sold millions of records and contributed a hit song to a John Travolta film, but Scaggs’ lack of ego speaks to the particular triumph of Silk Degrees. As a songwriter, he operated by feeling, by tempo. Writing most productively with young keyboardist and session player David Paich, he composed the album piece-by-piece, like a DJ building a set: Let’s start with something upbeat then take it into overdrive—OK, now something slower so they can catch their breath. (Unsurprisingly, the album has, for decades, proven a fertile source for sampling.) The lyrics were written last-minute, more to sustain the mood of the music than to capture any distinct narrative. This approach is most noticeable in “Jump Street,” a rollicking outlier where a dark collage of imagery about city life culminates with him howling, “I wish I was dead.”
For Scaggs, the process involved as much listening as writing. One day, Paich was playing one of his own compositions, intended for a solo album, when Scaggs heard a progression of two chords that obsessed him for weeks. Eventually, he started imagining his own song. It became “Lowdown,” the first track on Side B. This is the song that turned Silk Degrees into a slow-burn hit, released as its second single, first gaining traction on an R&B station in Cleveland, then eventually peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard charts.
Listening to “Lowdown” today, you can imagine how Scaggs felt when he heard those chords. It builds gradually, organically, a good idea snowballing in a small room. First, there’s a disco beat, played by Jeff Porcaro, one of several musicians who turned in a career-making performance on the album. Then comes David Hungate’s suggestive ribbit of a bass line, and then those two moody chords, played by Paich on a Minimoog. Eventually there are flutes, Motown backing vocals, a spacy synth freakout, and an electric guitar solo from Louie Shelton that sounds like nobody clued him into what chords he’d be playing over. How many times have I listened to this song and I still can’t tell you the structure, or the order that any of this occurs. It’s less a pop song than a killer party, a story you piece together from blurry photos the next morning.
Such is the beautiful, foggy logic of Silk Degrees, evident in both the music and the words. Scaggs’ lyrics are often indecipherable: a soulful slur of moans and vowels with occasional context clues. “3 a.m., it’s me again,” go the opening lines, and each detail feels crucial. It’s easy to imagine these songs—so romantic, so doomed—being sung in those sleep-deprived hours when everything feels a little hazy, a little desperate. And “again”—there’s a level of intimacy and urgency. We have heard from this person before, and this will not be the last time.
The ballads are what helped push Silk Degrees into something approaching a standards collection: The closing “We’re All Alone” was sung by everyone from Frankie Valli and Rita Coolidge, who both had hits with it, to Michael Jackson and Scott Walker, who did not. These artists were likely drawn to the song for its bittersweet vocal melody and formally beautiful structure—those descending seventh chords that make it feel like it’s constantly changing keys. Scaggs sings it near the limits of his upper register, giving the song a strange, existential loneliness. “Harbor Lights” is just as gorgeous, although it would be even more difficult to replicate the success of Scaggs’ version—a wobbly, late-night swoon that rocks back and forth before suddenly finding its sea legs with the bossa nova coda in the last 45 seconds.
Often the backing band, who would join forces under the name Toto shortly after touring Silk Degrees, stands toe-to-toe with Scaggs, fulfilling his ambition of being just one voice in a collective sound. Some of the most memorable parts are isolated choices from the musicians and arrangers: Porcaro’s opening drum fill of “What Can I Say” introduces the record as if swinging open the door to a California beach house, greeting you a little drunkenly, swaggering, mid-conversation, cocktail in hand. And the horns in “Georgia,” punctuating a string section that hovers in mid-air, ground the song and help make it sound like the last-ditch telephone call that Scaggs describes in the lyrics.
For all of the album’s highlights—the immortal “Lido Shuffle,” a punchy cover of Allen Toussaint’s “What Do You Want the Girl to Do”—“Georgia” is its emotional peak. It’s Scaggs’ finest turn as a lyricist—the half-rhyme of “Christmas in your eyes” and “moonlight through the pines,” the ambiguity of what precisely the narrator did that landed him in jail; the juxtaposition of one of his most beautiful melodies and one of his most depraved stories. It is Silk Degrees at its most luxurious and most tragic, striking a balance that no other album of its era matched.
This juxtaposition defines the poetry of Silk Degrees, whose title itself resists interpretation. “I have this box full of bits of paper, cocktail napkin scribblings, bits of wisdom,” Scaggs explained of its inspiration. “‘Silk Degrees’ was a phrase I’d had around in that box for a long time.” He had thought about using it for one of his previous records but something told him it wasn’t right, not quite yet. It’s perfect for these songs, whose mood is so cohesive and identifiable that Scaggs introduced his own system to measure it.
There are scenes in his lyrics that fit the bill—say, making love in the woods just before getting arrested, mistaking police lights for the moon. But like the films of David Lynch or the paintings of Edward Hopper, the aesthetic of Silk Degrees transcends art and seeps into the real world. Anything can be measured in silk degrees: say, a car running out of gas on a remote highway just in time to catch the sunset, or a couple breaking up in a casino, lit by the glow of slot machines. Songs by other artists—Neil Young’s “On the Beach,” Steely Dan’s “Pearl of the Quarter”—also work in his system, as evidenced by Scaggs’ laid-back 21st century cover versions.
Of course, the title can also conjure a useful way to compare the textures of bedsheets, and the commercial appeal of this music, produced by the then-unstoppable Joe Wissert, was initially its most obvious virtue. “Does the world need another white singer/songwriter dabbling in neo-Philly sweet soul?” Vivien Goldman asked in an early review. “I listened to this album over and over and over, hoping to be able to say yes. Now the answer is a qualified yes.” I feel her pain. The job of a critic becomes somewhat difficult when approaching something as smooth and universal as Silk Degrees. And yet, as it has aged, the album feels increasingly divorced from its moment in pop culture, and its more mysterious qualities—the abstract melancholy of Scaggs’ voice, the late-night twinkle of the band—are what pull you in, making it feel like your own, no matter how many people owned the LP before you did.
If I were reviewing this album in 1976, I might feel compelled to note that a lot of the music sounded derivative. Scaggs himself has always been open about his influences, from the Los Angeles contemporaries he studied closely to old standbys like Ray Charles, Jimmy Reed, and Bobby “Blue” Bland. His interviews often proceed like condensed summaries of music history, and so do his recent albums: After a tentative comeback in the late ’80s, Scaggs built up to a quicker pace with records that have taken the shape of tributes to styles, genres, and cities. He speaks about his voice as an instrument he grew more comfortable with later in life, as he got to know himself better.
It’s a quiet legacy but a notable one. Scaggs is a singer in the traditional sense, which means he is an interpreter. It’s this quality that allowed him to make a name for himself in the hippie scene of San Francisco in the 1960s—where he wore suits and was often pegged for a narc—and record his finest album at the peak of the disco era. He has always been adaptable, always thriving when presented with a challenge. If any cynicism remains about the success of Silk Degrees—for what it’s worth, Scaggs has always expressed disdain for terms like “blue-eyed soul” and “yacht rock”—it is impossible to ignore the devotion in his performances, the way these songs dug deeper the more people they reached.
There’s an excellent bootleg of a July 1976 show at Central Park on the Silk Degrees tour, a recording that was broadcast on the radio just as the album was gaining steam. Have you ever been at a concert where the momentum courses through the audience—the band’s been at it a while; the energy is translating; every song seems to burst out, slightly faster than what feels natural? Scaggs keeps his cool but you can tell he feels it. Before he introduces “Georgia,” a low rumble echoes across the stage; he glances heavenward: “Oh, it’s gonna rain a little bit! Yeah! Let’s all get electrocuted!” The crowd laughs. It’s summer in the city and the sky’s looking stormy—that’s Silk Degrees. “I’m ready to go if you are,” he drawls into the mic. He might be tempting God or he might be cuing the band. These songs leave it up to you to fill in the blanks. The man on stage is already gone.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | November 14, 2021 | 8.8 | 24791147-f41b-4c52-93f1-5f0800c260e7 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Here We Go Magic's latest turns songwriter Luke Temple's anxiety of non-commitment into an aesthetic of sorts, with the results proving strangely medicated. | Here We Go Magic's latest turns songwriter Luke Temple's anxiety of non-commitment into an aesthetic of sorts, with the results proving strangely medicated. | Here We Go Magic: A Different Ship | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16556-here-we-go-magic-a-different-ship/ | A Different Ship | The songwriter Luke Temple's existential crisis is a familiar one: He's so thoughtful about his options that he can't commit to any of them. His last two albums with Here We Go Magic (2009's self-titled and 2010's Pigeons) sounded like the work of musicians who not only weren't sure who they wanted to be, but who could entertain the possibility of being several different things from song-to-song-- a liberal mindset maybe more admirable in a friend than an artist. It's not surprising that the best thing the band has put out yet-- a twitchy krautrock song called "Collector"-- outlined Temple's fascination with people capable of fixating on a single thing, and even then, he confessed that his fascination was "mild."
A Different Ship, the band's third album, makes a go of turning the anxiety of non-commitment into its own kind of commitment. One song is called "How Do I Know"; another is called "Make Up Your Mind". The first line Temple sings is, "It's hard sometimes to be close," and throughout, he makes an effort to keep his distance. He hums, he floats, he glides politely over the mix. The band splits its time between airy ballads and dry, hypercaffeinated stuff built from layers of interwoven guitars and synths-- music that creates a revisionist history of the 1980s where tightly-wound bands like the Feelies and Devo cohabitate with yacht rock. The title track alone may herald some kind of subterranean Sting renaissance.
It's an impeccably polished and careful record. But like a shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck, sophistication can wear a guy out. Whatever rough edges the band naturally cultivated on their first two albums have been neatly shaved off and sanded down with the help of producer Nigel Godrich, who makes everything sound vacuum-packed and expensive. Thinking about Godrich inevitably makes me think about Radiohead. The creeping irony of "Everything in Its Right Place" is that it sounded like something, somewhere, was desperately wrong. The paradox here is that the band pretends at anxiety in a way that seems perfectly comfortable. It's George Clooney playing Woody Allen.
Twice on the album, Temple admits to "believing" in things: One is "action"; the other is Mary, whom he likes in part for her "calm delivery." I get the feeling he's aware of the music's even-handed character, which is as present in its sound as in his writing. And while there are moments when it comes together beautifully, like the way the carefree coda and rippling synthesizers on "How Do I Know" defy the song's rigid rhythms, a lot of this stuff feels strangely medicated. In melancholy hours it has inspired visions of bombs with their wicks dipped in water, or car commercials where good-looking creative professionals pull absently into suburban driveways.
I think of this old line about how staying in the middle of the road is the best way to get run over. That's not entirely true. Bon Iver and Real Estate practically live there, and they're doing fine. But it's strange to hear music so alternately mellow and obsessively ornamented. At least we can guess that Temple's worries may be winding down. | 2012-05-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-05-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | May 10, 2012 | 6.3 | 24811499-18e6-455f-972e-b68743321673 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The Montreal indie band Stars have stretched hushed electro-pop into scrambling arena rock for nearly 20 years. They sound revived and more emotionally mature on their eighth album. | The Montreal indie band Stars have stretched hushed electro-pop into scrambling arena rock for nearly 20 years. They sound revived and more emotionally mature on their eighth album. | Stars: There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stars-there-is-no-love-in-fluorescent-light/ | There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light | Reflecting on his Montreal band Stars’ eighth album, co-frontperson Torquil Campbell said, “We make the small things big and the big things a chorus.” Stars stretch hushed electro-pop into scrambling arena rock, blending the Smiths’ guitar romance with bedroom soul like the product of some Mancunian Motown. Campbell, along with Amy Millan and their four bandmates, have been fiddling with their blend of heartache and hedonism, dance beats and guitar sparks, for almost 20 years now. So it’s little surprise that Campbell knows what they’re best at, even though Stars have had a run that sometimes made us wonder. If 2012’s The North was a cautious return to form and 2014’s No One Is Lost had some fun with it, then There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light finds the band with their feet on the streets and their heads scraping the sky, just where they belong.
Indispensable to Stars’ appeal is the platonic chemistry of Campbell and Millan, two different but complementary singers (he the overstated striver, she the understated virtuoso) who were like the xx before the xx, in blazing pastels instead of chiaroscuro. The greatness of their third album, 2004’s Set Yourself on Fire, is so unimpeachable that people forget about 2003’s Heart. (The throbbing “Elevator Love Letter” is still the most perfect Stars song.) “Sometimes the TV is like a lover,” Campbell sings on that album’s title track, which, like all his best lyrics, is embarrassing because it’s true. Of course, in Stars’ music, lovers are also like TV: streamlined, composited, and dramatized with a cinematic splendor that would make Baz Luhrmann blush. There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light may be the most Starry album title possible, with its unsubtle implication that love is the only real thing in a sea of encroaching artificiality, an idea made sonic in music where the rawest sentimentality is clad in the archest theater.
Airy and danceable, There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light revives our faith in Stars. We get locket-size images of yellow taxis waiting in the night, clocks chiming in empty rooms; lots of eyes and skies, boys and cars and streets. Words like “dream” and “love” are repeated until they lose all sense, or rather, infuse everything around them. The opening track “Privilege” is slinky and inviting, as Millan does slow flips around a silvery herringbone guitar. “Fluorescent Light” comes on with the particular hushed intensity that Campbell sings with when he’s planning to tug our heartstrings, but it turns into the indie-pop equivalent of a lavish club anthem.
Though Stars have reverted to a more plainly romantic, ingenuous style, you might notice, on “Fluorescent Light” and elsewhere, a more adult cast to their dynamics of desire, with more regret and ambiguity crosshatched behind the crayon strokes. “Losing to You,” where Millan and Campbell’s vocal lines cling together like lovers walking in the dark, is clearly set in an adult relationship of considerable duration, and it intuitively captures the premonitory feeling of losing someone you can’t imagine losing, but will. “Is it strong enough a bond to carry on or is there something else that’s really true?” This is a far cry from the Stars of earlier songs like “Ageless Beauty,” when they had all the answers.
The unwavering “yes” of Stars has deepened into a “maybe,” but the music still beams with conviction. Millan’s confident vocals on “Hope Avenue” make it sound like she could be a popstar in the vein of Robyn. Campbell gets a requisite U2-style burner on “Alone,” and it’s pretty glorious. The trim, popstep-inflected productions roll on through the piano-caressed “We Called It Love,” with big haymakers from Campbell (“The Maze”) and cosseting enchantments from Millan (“California, I Love that Name”) coming all the way through the end.
It’s surely significant that, for the first time, Stars turned over some control to an outsider: producer Peter Katis, who has worked often with the National. For a band like Stars, whose lifeblood and liability has always been bombast, having someone around to arch an eyebrow at them now and then must go a long way. There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light sounds like a band who defied the notion of growing up by realizing that it did anyway, and that it’s strong enough to carry on. | 2017-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Last Gang / eOne | October 17, 2017 | 7.2 | 24847227-bf81-4534-9687-dfe3af2d1b6d | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
The similarities between the Horrors' last album and their latest are disappointing if you value how they've previously made radical transformations from album to album. Luminous is an incremental move towards the edge of the 1990s, where the band slips inside this Hacienda, coloring with sunlight and glowsticks rather than pretty in pink pastels. | The similarities between the Horrors' last album and their latest are disappointing if you value how they've previously made radical transformations from album to album. Luminous is an incremental move towards the edge of the 1990s, where the band slips inside this Hacienda, coloring with sunlight and glowsticks rather than pretty in pink pastels. | The Horrors: Luminous | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19315-the-horrors-luminous/ | Luminous | When the Horrors pick lead singles, they don’t bury the lede. Their eight-minute krautrock half-marathon “Sea Within a Sea” boasted affiliations with Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, acclaimed video director Chris Cunningham, and former the Jesus & Mary Chain bassist Douglas Hart. It left no doubt that 2009's Primary Colours intended to erase the memory of the “psychotic sounds for freaks and weirdos” that typified their shlocky shock-goth debut Strange House; two years later, “Still Life” was an obvious tell of the John Hughes-in-IMAX, cloudgazing reveries to come on Skying.
So it goes, then, with "I See You", the first glimpse of their fourth LP Luminous: you could spend all seven-and-a-half minutes of thinking of adjectives to describe this dazzling moonshot and still not come up with anything better than “luminous.” But the title of the song is even more telling, considering its likeness to Skying’s second single, “I Can See Through You”, highlighting the biggest obstacle Luminous faces; it's at turns utterly breathtaking and vaguely familiar, but in the end it just sorta sounds like Skying.
The similarities between old and new are disappointing if you value how the Horrors have made radical transformations from album to album. But in the longview, they’ve always been driven by the same instincts and ambitions: regardless of whether they were invoking the Cramps, Can, or the Cure, this is spot-the-reference record collector rock, and Luminous is the first time they haven’t completely ditched the vinyl from their last time out. It’s an incremental move towards the edge of the '90s, where the band slips inside this Hacienda, coloring with sunlight and glowsticks rather than pretty in pink pastels.
Luminous opens with about three minutes of anticipatory electronic murmuring, bongos, and birdcall before “Chasing Shadows” turns on the klieg lights and lets the beat drop for a crowd of thousands who will completely lose their shit. The gleaming acoustic guitar strums that open “First Day of Spring” could’ve been pickpocketed from Happy Mondays during their 24-hour party stupor. This is still music meant for the biggest crowd possible, only now the Horrors sound more suited for the festival grounds rather than a hockey arena.
Still, the Horrors aren’t Madchester purists like Jagwar Ma, or Cut Copy circa Free Your Mind. There’s too much composure in this hardworking, stylized music—the jeans are still black and skinny instead of baggy. It’s Screamadelica dosed on trustworthy hallucinogens, or Pills 'n' Thrills & Bellyaches if we're talking about smooth, green gelcaps rather than hairspray-tasting E tablets. Or, think of the Stone Roses, the outlier of that scene in that they always just seemed like a rock band dabbling in club sounds, utilizing extended guitar codas and the occasional mechanistic thump in the place of actual groove.
In other words, Luminous is Skying with faster tempos, which might only qualify as dance music at ca. 2000 "Britpop nights" at American bars, the setting that the Horrors truly belong in. They’re a throwback to the post-Radiohead, studio-nerd likes of Doves or Elbow, acts that attracted Yanks looking towards the UK because those bands seemed more interested in guitar pedals and electronic trickery. It’s easy enough to say Luminous sounds like a million bucks, but that’s not really a figure of speech__—__just about every moment here gives you an opportunity to itemize the recording budget, from whatever gets the bass on “Jealous Sun” to sound like a steamroller to the battery of guitar pedals that achieve the streaking comet sound of “Mine and Yours” and the quasar swirl of “Falling Star”.
And yet you wonder just how much the actual people in the Horrors have invested themselves in all of this; they come off like a band that wants to play for a stadium full of people that still don’t know the first thing about them. As with Skying, it’s a high compliment to say Luminous is a giant bowl of assorted, premium ear candy, and it’s about as nourishing, which maybe is the point. Faris Badwan’s vocals are perfectly situated within his imperious surroundings—half drama king, half complacent plutocrat—and his lyrics can read like nonsense, sounding like grand proclamations before dissipating completely the moment he moves on to the next thought. Whether it’s the hint of a bizarre love triangle on “Change Your Mind” or seemingly stern repetitions like “So now you know/ Turn away”, nothing really seems like that big of a deal. They have have mastered their sound and vision, and hopefully they can grow to recognize their heart and soul, too. | 2014-05-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-05-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | XL | May 6, 2014 | 6.7 | 2489d82a-221c-42f7-abfa-f77bf2b42de4 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Canadian singer-songwriter’s third record is a fascinating outlier in her catalog, an unsparing and expansive album written in the mountains of Quebec following traumatic experiences in her life. | The Canadian singer-songwriter’s third record is a fascinating outlier in her catalog, an unsparing and expansive album written in the mountains of Quebec following traumatic experiences in her life. | Sarah McLachlan: Fumbling Towards Ecstasy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-mclachlan-fumbling-towards-ecstasy/ | Fumbling Towards Ecstasy | Four years before she founded Lilith Fair—a traveling music festival which prioritized the work of and the collaboration between women musicians—and just before she broke into the upper regions of the American charts with “Building a Mystery,” Sarah McLachlan was alone in the Canadian woods. In order to write and record her third album, 1993’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, the Nova Scotian singer-songwriter isolated herself and her two cats in a cabin located in the mountains of southern Quebec. She felt incapable of writing anything for the first three months, faintly aware of something stirring inside her which routinely failed to assemble into words or songs. It was cold. Snow had accumulated on the windows of the cabin in thick columns, and the temperature sank into the negative 30s. Outside were mammoth rock formations and woods and ice and an empty dark that invaded them at night. She felt small and alone.
McLachlan had grown self-conscious about her previous two albums, considering them either too amateurish or rigid in their writing and production. Her debut, Touch, consisted of the first songs she’d ever written; in lieu of any personal experience, she adapted her lyrics largely from the material of her dreams. Her second album, Solace, expressed a confusion and displacement she associated very specifically with her early twenties, a “mourning of [her] lost innocence,” as she told Hot Press in 1994. So she settled herself within the vastness of the mountains of Quebec longing for a kind of self-annihilating perspective—to get close to herself by getting as far away from her life as possible.
In the year before she situated herself in the wilderness, McLachlan had found herself stalked by two of her fans. They followed her from show to show and wrote her letters that progressively warped into disturbing exposures of their inner psyches. One of them moved to Vancouver, where McLachlan lived at the time, and routinely materialized in her neighborhood. “[There were instances] like running into them a couple of blocks from my house, and saying they’d been there for a couple of days,” she told the Toronto Star in 1993. “It was pretty scary. I stopped answering my mail a long time ago. I had my best friend answering it for a while, and then she had nightmares so she’s not doing it anymore, either.” A court issued a restraining order against the fan, but McLachlan was considerably shaken by the experience. She started looking over her shoulder whenever she left her house, checking her periphery for any menacing, incoming blurs.
While writing the album, McLachlan kept a small journal. Every morning she’d fill three pages of it with free association, circular thoughts about coffee that would barely solidify in her head before disintegrating, but which, halfway through her second page, would evolve into a kind of accidental introspection. She would play Tom Waits records, and she would focus on the slow redistribution of detail on one of her favorite albums, Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden. On that record, Mark Hollis, the principal member of Talk Talk, abandoned his band’s synth-pop aesthetic and stretched his new compositions out like canvas, applying his voice to them in minimal, liquid strokes that interrupted and gave shape to the yards of silence that surrounded it.
Then spring arrived. The snow evaporated and McLachlan discovered that a river, recently thawed, flowed just behind her cabin. Small blooms unfolded on branches of the trees outside. “The whole world just blew up like I’ve never seen it before,” she said. “Everything became so amplified.” She started writing songs again, and would now routinely walk the two miles from her cabin to the studio with whatever ideas she had gathered over the course of the day. Whether it was a fully-formed song or a flicker of an idea, she and her producer, Pierre Marchand, would add musical ornaments—the scattered pulse of a drum machine, a few pale shimmers of electric guitar—until they sounded like whatever it was that Sarah McLachlan songs were beginning to sound like. The songs were located somewhere between the suggestive adult contemporary gloss of her previous albums and something as boundless and figural as Spirit of Eden, a vast stone temple in which her sourceless voice echoes and decays.
This is the image that Fumbling’s first song and lead single, “Possession,” places in my head, or rather it’s the painterly details of its sound design that submerge my head in that colossal space. “Listen as the wind blows/From across the great divide,” McLachlan sings, her voice drowsy, delayed, unraveling at the same pace as a pale ribbon of smoke, “Voices trapped in yearning/Memories trapped in time.” McLachlan wrote “Possession” about her stalker; the song actually takes place in the tortured, pressurized depths of his perspective. The lyrics reproduce the rhetorical and metaphysical somersaults that appear in devotional religious texts; the narrator of “Possession” conceives of his own desire as an empty tomb where he sits and yearns, consumed by an ancient longing.
For McLachlan, inhabiting this perspective was a way for her to convert her trauma into a kind of investigation of the often porous border between desire and obsession. (Her stalker attempted to sue her for harvesting the details of the song from the content of his letters; before the suit could ascend into any court, he killed himself.) The question that animates “Possession” is the question that animates the majority of her work since, most visible in songs like “Sweet Surrender” and “I Love You”: Why does falling in love feel like lightning forking through the body?
“Possession” begins an album significantly shadowed by sexual violence. It had begun to drone constantly in McLachlan’s life—in addition to her experience of being stalked, in the previous year she had accompanied the relief organization World Vision to Thailand and Cambodia, assisting in the filming of a documentary about poverty and child prostitution. What she saw there opened up unexpected and unfamiliar space in her. “I came away with a broader understanding of the world, of the darkness that exists out there,” is how she explained it to Maclean’s in 1994. “I’ve tried to express that as honestly as I could.” This darkness flows even into “Good Enough,” which McLachlan recently described as being about “the love and the trust and the companionship that’s shared between women”; its warm reassurances sound as if they’re responding to an abusive relationship still hovering at the song’s edges: “Don’t tell me why he’s never been good to you,” she sings. “...I’ll show you why you’re so much more than good enough.”
In several of her interviews from around the time, McLachlan describes songwriting as a form of therapy, a method of contemplating and analyzing a life experience by pulling it through yourself in reverse. ”Ice,” the most harrowing and skeletal song on the record, is where McLachlan tries to process the bottomless dark she encountered in Cambodia and Thailand. “I’ve always tried to portray a sense of hope in the songs before, but that one doesn’t really have much,” she said. The song, initially supported only by McLachlan’s vocal and guitar, is slowly circulated by saxophone phrases, which then lapse, as if responding to the song’s subject, into sustained dissonances. “The only comfort is the moving of the river,” McLachlan sings. “You enter into me, a lie upon your lips.” Her voice multiplies and wreaths the song in ghosts of itself, which make it feel more complete but no less hollowed out.
Pierre Marchand, McLachlan’s producer, was a protégé of U2 and Peter Gabriel producer Daniel Lanois; like Lanois, Marchand’s productions tend to make individual instruments sound as if they’ve been drawn through a thick bruise of pigment. Fumbling isn’t particularly swathed in reverb; there’s enormous clarity in the mix. But Marchand’s effect, via Lanois, makes each instrument appear caught in a kind of luminous aura, as if filmed by the space age lenses which gave the candlelight in the movie Barry Lyndon its plural glow. You can hear it in the guitar that McLachlan strums at the start of “Hold On”; even suspended in empty space, the chord seems to ripple and catch light like the skin of a lake.
After recording Fumbling, McLachlan toured for almost two years before she and Marchand assembled its follow-up, Surfacing, her commercial breakthrough in the U.S. It’s a simpler, more straightforward, less immersive album about love and guilt; on “Angel,” her most enduring hit from the album, she traces the slow narcotic spiral of someone’s heroin overdose with just her piano and voice. Barely a month after Surfacing came out, Lilith Fair began, which rewrote the idea of a festival as a space where women could celebrate each other, and which helped invent space on radio and on the charts for musicians like Paula Cole and Shawn Colvin. McLachlan’s music now supported structures larger than herself. Her songs became more general than liminal; they’ve rarely revisited Fumbling’s cathedral immensity, the sensation of feeling remarkably alone in a haunted space.
The title Fumbling Towards Ecstasy comes from a poem McLachlan first encountered in high school—“Dulce et Decorum Est,” written by World War I poet Wilfred Owen. The line had circulated through McLachlan’s head for years: (“Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling/Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time.”) It depicts the fluttering rhythm issued by of a group of soldiers desperately trying to secure their gas masks and helmets in a fog of poisonous gas. This is the kind of imagery McLachlan was drawn to, of tragedy and horror producing, against all odds, what felt like excerpts of grace. When she explained the title to the Calgary Herald in 1993, she said, “You can get glimpses of [ecstasy]. You can get there for a second but it’s always going to go away.” Even the most untroubled song on Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, “Ice Cream,” is suspended over a deep dread. “Your love is better than ice cream/Better than anything else that I’ve tried,” McLachlan sings against soft blushes of piano. “It’s a long way down to the place where we started from.” For McLachlan, the substance of ecstasy is its elusiveness. Its absence invents its possibility. | 2017-11-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-11-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nettwerk | November 5, 2017 | 8.2 | 2491b627-6461-4763-97cd-09aaa3b51f85 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ |
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