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A$AP Twelvyy’s long-awaited solo debut wears its love for New York City proudly but is plagued with inconsistencies. | A$AP Twelvyy’s long-awaited solo debut wears its love for New York City proudly but is plagued with inconsistencies. | A$AP Twelvyy: 12 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adollarap-twelvyy-12/ | 12 | Jamel Phillips, better known as A$AP Twelvyy, joined up with A$AP Yams around 2006, which makes him one of the Mob’s earliest members. Yams had put out a call for young rappers willing to work with him, and Twelvyy answered, impressed by Yams’ precociously eclectic taste. A proud New Yorker and a middling rapper, Twelvyy appeared on plenty of A$AP posse tracks and various loosies for the better part of the last decade. But his debut album was nowhere in sight even before Yams’ death in 2015. The passing hit Twelvyy hard, and the LP is only now emerging in a month that will also see a new mixtape from A$AP Ferg and A$AP Mob’s new album.
That Twelvyy has eagerly mentioned these other projects in several interviews is a good indicator of his personality on the mic. On 12, a solid collection of gangster-lite rap tracks, he is never more appealing than when he’s reflecting on moments of brotherly love, or tossing off little snippets of local history. He favors sentimental, almost sappy beats that pair nicely with his fond remembrances of crew life and rarely stray from the hazy A$AP sound. There’s a minute-long skit that is dedicated entirely to a recollection of a Mob gathering in which old Ron G and Brucie B tapes were played and plenty of purple was puffed, recalled as if it were a lost paradise. The A$AP Mob has long been synonymous with Harlem swagger but it’s difficult to recall another project that wears its love for the city’s past so proudly. Twelvyy sounds most at home on tracks like “Ea$TSideGho$T” and “Sunset Park,” nostalgia-brushed pictures of New York neighborhoods where his reflexive comfort with gangster-rap tropes is burnished by the specifics of his own experience.
But inconsistency plagues the record, as Twelvyy’s character too often disappears from view. The opening lines of “Castle Hell” paint a portrait of a kid whose innocence was shattered by the violence from which his parents sought to protect him, but the song quickly turns generic, a vague tableau of guns and bloodshed in which it’s not quite clear where Jamel Phillips fits. He has no problem supplying stray details in his verses, randomly recalling various shootings on “Strapped,” or on “Diamonds,” when he remembers that, at some point, he earned the nickname Diddy. These could be points of entry, but Twelvyy declines to elaborate, turning them into non sequiturs, stories waiting to be told in full.
Much of the time, his energy outmatches his rudimental lyricism, particularly when the songs feature his A$AP Family, whose styles he frequently adopts as his own. On the bop-indebted “Hop Out,” which features Ferg, he beats the Hood Pope at his own game, his enthusiasm boosting the song up a couple of levels. “Diamonds,” with Rocky, conveys the stoned, youthful vibe of the crew’s earliest days, with Twelvyy swagger-jacking an early iteration of Flacko’s flow. On the chorus of “Periodic Table” he shouts out collectives that came before A$AP—“I was brought up by them block boys, them heat-makers and them hot boys”—and you can hear the glee in his voice.
Yams is remembered fondly throughout the record, and the lyrics of album closer “Brothers” are raw with the pain of his absence. Twelvyy’s deep affection for his visionary friend—and the environment he created—is obvious. Yams had the kind of insight and understanding to elevate an everyman rapper like Twelvyy, highlighting his particular gifts along the way. Without him, 12 feels adrift. It’s charming in its evocation of friendship, but when the rest of the group falls away, Twelvyy struggles to break out of a mold that’s already cracking from age. | 2017-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA | August 12, 2017 | 6.4 | 2492aa27-0fd3-4a26-bd03-6393fa95857c | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The UK duo’s fifth album, produced by Dave Fridmann, is as good an introduction as you’ll get to their charmingly skewed perspective on the world | The UK duo’s fifth album, produced by Dave Fridmann, is as good an introduction as you’ll get to their charmingly skewed perspective on the world | The Lovely Eggs: This Is Eggland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-lovely-eggs-this-is-eggland/ | This Is Eggland | Among the most underrated of the riot-grrrl-adjacent bands of the ’90s and early 2000s were Babes in Toyland associates Angelica, whose best tracks were marked by a distinctly wry humor. The Lancaster, England group’s post-feminist crush lament “Liberation Is Wasted on Me,” for instance, is a long, performative sigh into a rose bouquet, a sweeping gesture toward the enlightened single crowd set to the “Be My Baby” rhythm; pause, punchline. The pummeling punk arrangement that kicks in about a minute into the song certainly doesn’t hurt matters.
Angelica’s Holly Ross went on to form the Lovely Eggs with her husband David Blackwell, formerly of the psychedelic band Three Dimensional Tanx, circa 2006, and over the past decade they’ve taken that sense of humor gonzo to cult acclaim. Representative tracks from the duo’s catalog include “Have You Ever Heard a Digital Accordion,” which features no notable digital accordion content; “Fuck It,” surely the most languid song that has been or ever will be recorded by that title; and the raucous, exhaustive bestiary of owns that is “Don’t Look At Me (I Don’t Like It).” Ever thought about someone’s “sausage-roll thumb” or “washing-line smile”? You have now.
This Is Eggland, the Lovely Eggs’ fifth album, befits its name—it’s as good an introduction as you’ll get to the group and its charmingly skewed perspective on the world. Over the years, they’ve gotten steadily heavier, from their early acoustic style to the likes of 2015’s “Magic Onion,” eventually settling on a sound that evokes psychedelic-punk touchstones like the Buzzcocks and some of the hooky, madcap glee of Charly Bliss. Or, in Ross’ own words: “It kind of sounds like a chip shop on fire.” Credit, in part, a change in personnel. Where the group’s previous albums were self-produced, Eggland brings in Dave Fridmann, known for helping the Flaming Lips and Tame Impala scale up their psychedelia to arena levels.
It’s common to the point of cliché to have a big-name producer arrive midway through a band’s career, sand down all the lo-fi edges, and replace them with studio gimmickry. But Ross and Blackwell, ever self-aware, make their upgraded sound part of the joke. “I’m With You” introduces itself with Missile Command whirs, and “Return of Witchcraft” is slathered in guitar distortion. The whiplash left-right panning of “Hello I Am Your Sun”—the opening track, and the most psyched-out song here—feels like it’s jostling you, vigorously, into the right headspace.
The defining tone of that headspace turns out to be unrelenting, gleeful pop-punk, from the swaggering riff and stop-start structure of “Dickhead” to the deadpan delivery of “Let Me Observe” to the single “I Shouldn’t Have Said That,” which mixes Ross loud and up-front. “I shouldn’t have said that—it was evil of me!” she shouts through a megaphone-like effect, with about as much remorse as Eartha Kitt. “Witchcraft” begins as a cry of joy and ends as an exorcism. “Would You Fuck” teases out a dozen or so inflections from its title, a series of increasingly wacky pulled faces. “Wiggy Giggy” does for Lancaster what the Weakerthans’ “One Great City!” did for Winnipeg. On This is Eggland, the Lovely Eggs sound like they’ve ventured out to the interplanetary shitholes of outer space and decided that the one they’ve got is quite all right. | 2018-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | March 1, 2018 | 7 | 2494b0c7-8080-46c7-8f40-d771082d3763 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
The Uruguayan-American singer-songwriter's latest is a charmingly loose grab bag, dotted with field recordings and snippets of sampled conversation. | The Uruguayan-American singer-songwriter's latest is a charmingly loose grab bag, dotted with field recordings and snippets of sampled conversation. | Juan Wauters: Introducing Juan Pablo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/juan-wauters-introducing-juan-pablo/ | Introducing Juan Pablo | Introducing Juan Pablo is dotted with field recordings, snippets of real in-person or phone conversations between Juan Wauters and his family and acquaintances. It’s the first time the Uruguayan-American singer-songwriter used this technique on an album, which may come as a surprise if you’ve followed his work. Wauters’ style of songwriting already tends to feel just like those recordings: unspectacular moments captured in real time, in detail, featuring people as they are. His previous LP from earlier this year, La Onda de Juan Pablo, took that quality to a new level with songs inspired by and featuring musicians that he met while traveling across Latin America for two years—some written and recorded right there with them. Wauters’ name (Juan Pablo Wauters in full) graces the titles of both of these albums, but ultimately in more of a “the world according to…” kind of way. It’s as if the more he tries to take a self-portrait, the more those around him come into focus.
On Introducing Juan Pablo, Wauters again seeks international inspiration, but less geographically focused this time. Introducing pulls from recording sessions in Toronto, London, Paris, and Wauters’ hometowns of Queens and Montevideo, Uruguay, while alternating between English and Spanish—his standard practice before the all-Spanish La Onda. It also features covers: a brief take on “Bolero” by the early-20th-century French composer Maurice Ravel, an altered version of a standard by Uruguayan singer Jaime Roos, and a gentle spin on Queen’s “Doing Alright” on top of a stray “Bohemian Rhapsody” interpolation elsewhere. If La Onda was a single category of Wauters’ inspirations, Introducing is a grab bag, a much wider, looser look at the songwriter through the lens of what interests him.
This scattered focus ends up sacrificing some of what made La Onda such a compelling project, and the charming sloppiness occasionally bleeds too much into the writing and recording. Introducing strings together sonically sparse songs about being with and without others—and with far fewer backing musicians this time, it feels a little more “without.” “Rubia” still succeeds wonderfully on these terms, a longing love letter to someone with a memorable nose in a far-away country that Wauters drives home with one sweet, sensitively plucked acoustic melody for the outro. “Straighten Up and Lose,” an ode to risk-taking, ends the album in similar fashion with a small, high piano line made massive atop a blanket of drone. Wauters’ gift for these little musical phrases becomes the best part of Introducing. When the song “Letter” re-appears later in the album as a duet with the singer and visual artist Maxine Yolanda, whom Wauters met while traveling through Switzerland, it doesn’t feel superfluous.
At the center of Introducing is the Jaime Roos cover, “El Hombre de la Calle,” translated into English and stripped down to a rudimentary single-piano arrangement. Roos’ original is exactly the type you’d expect would strike a chord in Wauters: a folk song describing a man who’s both anonymous and everywhere, popping with details as pedestrian as “a veces compra un diario” (“sometimes he buys a newspaper”). But Wauters sings his version in first person instead of third, as if he relates to Roos’ character too much to be a neutral narrator. He swaps in several new lyrics, too, most noticeably the final words of the chorus, which he sings in a suddenly strained, almost despairing tone: “People say I’m hard to read.” He sounds like he can’t for the life of him understand why this is. It’s true, though, in part because his focus is so often pointed outward rather than inward. When he keeps his sights focused that way, figuring him out is half the fun. | 2019-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | June 5, 2019 | 6.9 | 24953836-8b84-4347-bd9e-887487a9b1d8 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
German musician Stephen Mathieu created Before Nostromo in homage to Ridley Scott's original Alien. In the album's novel concept, each of the film's characters has a dream before emerging from hypersleep, and these glimmering sound-design pieces are their representations. | German musician Stephen Mathieu created Before Nostromo in homage to Ridley Scott's original Alien. In the album's novel concept, each of the film's characters has a dream before emerging from hypersleep, and these glimmering sound-design pieces are their representations. | Stephan Mathieu: Before Nostromo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21313-before-nostromo/ | Before Nostromo | It's ironic that Alien's famous tagline—In space no one can hear you scream—emphasizes the silence of the void, because sound is woven into the film's innermost fibers. A nearly constant backdrop of rumble accompanies the Nostromo as it slips across that godforsaken quadrant of the galaxy. The steady drone whipped up by the ship's vibrations quietly erupts into all manner of rustle and whirr—the bleeping of the navigation system, the hissing of steam vents, and countless quavering whines of uncertain provenance—until the entire world of the film feels cocooned inside an omnipresent hum.
That buzzing matrix is the subject of Before Nostromo, a new album by the German musician Stephan Mathieu. Mathieu has been working the seam between ambient, musique concrète, and microsound since the late '90s, running vintage acoustic instruments and obsolete media like wax cylinders through electroacoustic processing and digital treatments. Mathieu describes Before Nostromo as an homage to Alien's sound design, and he has given the work a novel premise. Just prior to being awakened from hypersleep by the ship's computer, the film's seven characters—Ripley, Dallas, Parker, Lambert, Kane, Brett, and even Ash, the android—each have a dream. So does Jonesey the cat. Eight tracks, ranging from four minutes to nearly 20 minutes in length, represent those respective dreams. (A ninth, "Anamorphosis", rounds out the set; Mathieu suggests that it may be attributed to the Nostromo's other passenger, the alien.)
To record the music, Mathieu used two large gongs, piano, and shortwave radio, but none of those elements are obvious from the sound of the music, which changes colors as imperceptibly as late-afternoon light. "Entropic processes," like those Alvin Lucier used to create I Am Sitting in a Room, in which a spoken text gradually decays as it bounces back and forth between two reel-to-reel players, are key to the music's soft, rounded forms.
Using relatively modest means, Mathieu evokes a vast expanse. Rarely, though, do you hear a note being produced; sounds slink into being like shadows creeping across the wall, and they abscond just as imperceptibly. There's a brief tinkling, as of wind chimes, in "Stasis 7 (Ash the Android's Dream)"; in "Stasis 1 (Dallas' Dream)" there's a sourceless tapping that reappears in "Stasis 4 (Brett's Dream)", as if Harry Dean Stanton's character were down in the engine room, banging away on pipes. Otherwise, though, everything is as soft and sanded down as a coastline worn smooth by the millennia. His abstracted shapes genuinely resemble dreams, albeit the memories of one from which you've just emerged tugging at the edges of your consciousness.
Before Nostromo is best suited for deep listening. With so few obvious features to grasp on to, even after multiple plays you may not immediately be able to tell the difference between one "dream" and another. But that's hardly the point. These bottom-of-the-well fantasies are the headiest kind of echo-chamber music, fusing the unstable oscillations of Kevin Drumm's Imperial Horizon and Folke Rabe's What?! with the soft spectral explosion of Ligeti's Lux Aeterna and the melancholy decay of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops.
It's worth noting that Before Nostromo is a digital-only release—a format that Mathieu has dedicated himself to with religious zeal, for reasons both economic and audiophile. The album takes the form of a 24-bit FLAC (the download also includes a beautifully designed PDF booklet designed by his wife, Caro Mikalef) and it sounds unusually sumptuous, with a richness—dynamic, timbral, spatial—that is all too rare in digital music. Spend some time with Mathieu's gorgeous, absorbing tribute, and then return to Alien, and you may find yourself hearing the film as you never have before. | 2015-12-08T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-12-08T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | Schwebung | December 8, 2015 | 7.9 | 249c6304-ddaa-4fcf-bfe8-56d30d5fd42f | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On a short and sprightly EP, the up-and-coming Oakland rapper and producer makes strides in both fields. | On a short and sprightly EP, the up-and-coming Oakland rapper and producer makes strides in both fields. | ovrkast.: RESET! EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ovrkast-reset-ep/ | RESET! EP | Oakland rapper-producer ovrkast. thrives on elegant beats that split the difference between hazy, traditionalist boom-bap and the wavy, loop-based production that’s taken the rap underground by storm since Madlib’s Quasimoto days. After years of Bandcamp beat tapes and a production credit on Earl Sweatshirt’s Feet of Clay, his self-produced 2020 debut Try Again put a spotlight on his anxious and observational rapping. Though often delivered in monotone, his bars were vivid and nervy, tapping into a tension between perseverance and ennui that endeared him to peers (and old friends) like Mavi and Pink Siifu. When he pondered his mother’s advice and the mystery of a higher power beneath layers of keyboards and drums on “AllPraise,” his casual, free-associative style sounded pensive and expansive at once.
Kast describes RESET!, his first project in three years, as a palate cleanser, and the atmosphere is certainly livelier. Earlier beats had chunky loops that sometimes absorbed his vocals like a sneaker in mud, but RESET! is spare and sprightly, favoring propulsion over immersion. Opener “Seamless” glides in on a sour horn squawk, wind chimes, and a soft drum fill that Kast trots over gracefully. Once muted and distant on the mic, he’s now more likely to modulate his vocals, communicating the clash of introspection and catharsis in his words. The uncharacteristic bark and snappy bounce of a song like “SHUTUP!” plays well against the sarcastic melancholy at the core of “TBH!”: “I just owe all my feelings a break.”
RESET! becomes more potent when he mixes these emotions together. Kast’s writing still includes plenty of autobiographical soul-searching, but the uncertainty of past songs like “Face” and “Church” isn’t the focus anymore. He’s charting growth instead of fighting to keep his head above water, and the beats have more space to breathe too. It’s most evident on the title track: Floating over a flute loop and trilling hand drums, Kast raps quietly about nerves shredded by shootings outside his school, grateful to have picked up writing and beatmaking instead of a gun. A beat switch ushers in a chipmunk vocal loop as his voice gets louder and his bars become bolder; by the time a rickety drum break kicks in, he’s rapping like he made it to the top of a mountain.
The only problem with RESET! is that there isn’t more of it: only six songs, most under two minutes. None sound labored, and it’s nice to hear him rapping with more confidence. The mood shifts from chill to amped on a dime; the way he spits “I could use this beat in seven years and it’ll still be hot” on “Seamless” could toast an ice cube. He’s drawing from the same anxiety-busting coming-of-age experience as redveil’s learn 2 swim but on a subtler scale. RESET! isn’t a grand splash—just the sound of one of the underground’s most promising stars breaching the surface. | 2023-08-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | August 28, 2023 | 7.3 | 249d509f-16d7-4ebc-a133-9b133c0503d6 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
One of the first things a rock critic learns is not to emphasize the character on the other end of ... | One of the first things a rock critic learns is not to emphasize the character on the other end of ... | Prince: Musicology | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6479-musicology/ | Musicology | One of the first things a rock critic learns is not to emphasize the character on the other end of the speakers when reviewing records. This person, who is playing the tunes and singing the songs, isn't to be treated as a performer so much as the instigator of all the terrible/wonderful noise infesting the writer's world, and should be judged accordingly. That is, by the social rules of rock criticism, one shouldn't judge the musicians at all, merely their music-- and even then, only in terms of how it affects the writer, and in turn, how it might do the same for other listeners. The "argument" comes during the moments when you either agree or disagree with the writer's experience.
The next thing writers learn is that just thinking of one's own experience isn't enough, because there's a whole world out there giving clues to the real value of the music. If music "matters," it follows that its impact should be obvious outside the window; "relevance" is paramount at this stage of criticism, though since bitter humility is a daily part of any rock writer's life, it pays to phrase arguments stressing relevance in ways that don't obviously indicate its bias. This kind of criticism may seem harsh (and pretty unrelated to the actual musical experience), but it also shares much with traditional journalistic aims of reporting and immediate interpretation, and as such, is a method emphasized at most mainstream music pubs.
All of this brings me to Prince and his latest album, Musicology. What happens when, by the two most common forms of writing about music, a legend comes out looking like a drastic underachiever? Do I dare call him out on this, especially after seeing many educated people pledge their written testimonies to this stuff? I've lived with this record for a few weeks now, and by any normal measure, I fail to see how anyone could seriously call it a comeback, or a return to his intimidating good form. But that's presumptuous: Despite the tried-and-true edicts of rock crit, there really is no accounting for taste, nor is Prince's extended absence from the top of the pops a concrete sign that he no longer matters.
Yet, I know what I hear: an artist who is beyond condescending his interests to generate relevance. I hear someone who's honestly more concerned with the pristine state of his record collection than he is in buying all the latest hits. I hear someone who's probably worked out most of the bigger issues in life, and is satisfied to stay with a groove for its own sake, offering his take on things rather than arresting you with it. Prince has never been embarrassed of himself on record, but on Musicology, his direction only makes sense to me in the broadest sense of appreciating life and love. The revolution is over in this corner, and I'd bet it all he could care less what anyone thinks about it. Unfortunately, in this case, it translates to music that, while often pleasant, lacks the power of not only his best work, but also most of his successors' stuff. And since Prince's "successors" could be considered half of everything on the radio, it's tough for me to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The most interesting moments on Musicology come when Prince either hits on a good concept (like the rich white girl who can't dance paying out for the "funk" in "Illusion, Coma, Pimp and Circumstance") or drops the pretense of keeping the party going altogether. Today, slow jams are his forte: the infidelity warning "What Do U Want Me 2 Do?" beats Phoenix at their own game with smoother-than-smooth vocals and a breezy chorus that would seem to close the book on anyone else attempting lite-jazz pop in the future. "Call My Name" is hardly as distinct, but is a perfectly functional slab of loverman soul along the lines of Marvin Gaye. Typically, Prince saves his best moves for the chorus (he's still pop, through and through), as his layered harmonies impart the rather straightforward admission, "I know it's only been three hours, but I love it when you call my name."
Those songs seem a tier above others on Musicology partially because Prince isn't doing his one-man band thing. Despite that I've always thought it was cool to hear him make records mostly by himself, some of the songs here betray either a disinterest in fleshing out arrangements or an inability to pull them off. "A Million Days" has the structure of good Prince rock ballad, but the sound of half-finished demo. The synth that powers the opening sounds piped in from a home studio built about 20 years ago, and even then it's not loud enough. His guitar and vocals are lavishly spread all over the mix, but the drums are too soft and muddy, so ultimately his track comes out like a bad Lenny Kravitz throwaway. Elsewhere, "Life O' the Party" and the title track suggest nothing in Prince's life these days was born this century. Not only does he waste valuable time on the former making fun of Michael Jackson, but the track is mired in stale funk a notch below the Martin theme.
"Cinnamon Girl" is the best straight rock track on Musicology, not only because its production is on par with Prince's typically well-crafted hooks, but also because it manages to keep all the details in check via relatively simple performance. Prince's grasp is hardly lacking throughout, but for various reasons, his reach comes up short many times. "If Eye Was the Man in Ur Life" starts out as an incredible jam with metal guitar, a tight, slow beat (not played by Prince) and a glorious harmonized verse melody, before bogging down at the end with some kind of be-bop thing right out of a Blood, Sweat & Tears song. I'm all for experimentation, but this seems more like a bad case of mid-song boredom and a lack of anything better to do.
The worst part is that Musicology is probably the best Prince album since at least the "symbol" album from 1992, and possibly since Sign O' the Times. But that's misleading, since this album isn't close to Sign's league-- it's also depressing to think he hasn't made a great record in over 15 years. But don't take my word for it; look out the window, see if any of your friends are jamming to this. Failing that, chart your own experience in your own headphones. By either measure, despite a few good moments, I'm missing Prince now more than ever. | 2004-04-28T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2004-04-28T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Columbia / NPG | April 28, 2004 | 5.8 | 24ac845f-aacb-4e4e-99e8-0fb117ba7814 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
At 87, the legendary avant-garde composer revisits some of his most famous compositions with the air of a master craftsman looking back on his life’s work. | At 87, the legendary avant-garde composer revisits some of his most famous compositions with the air of a master craftsman looking back on his life’s work. | Philip Glass: Philip Glass Solo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/philip-glass-philip-glass-solo/ | Philip Glass Solo | In 1969, Philip Glass was performing the European premiere of a daring new piece, Two Pages, when he realized that someone from the audience had joined him at the keys and was banging away beside him, in an obvious parody of the American composer’s ultra-repetitive music. Glass, who had toughened his knuckles as a boy in Baltimore, socked the interloper in the jaw—in some accounts of the oft-told story, he kept time with the other hand—and resumed playing. It wasn’t the last time an irate audience member would try to throw a wrench in Glass’ precision-tooled musical machinery. He’s had enough eggs lobbed at him to develop opinions on which projectile is worse—raw or hard-boiled.
But what a difference half a century makes. Once an enfant terrible of contemporary music, Glass, now 87, is among the most celebrated of the avant-garde’s elder statesmen, and age has clearly put him in a reflective mood. Following a spate of 75th-birthday events in 2012, he released a titanic retrospective box set in 2016 and published a smart, revealing memoir, looking back on a most unusual life in the arts: studying with the fêted French pianist Nadia Boulanger; trekking to Tibet in search of Buddhist gurus; pouring lead with sculptor Richard Serra; driving a cab until he finally made it as a composer, age 41.
Glass’ new album Philip Glass Solo is similarly contemplative. It revisits some of his most famous works for keyboard, which he recorded at home—on the same piano on which he wrote many of the pieces—in 2021, while concerts were still on hold, as part of his daily practice. (Even Philip Glass apparently finds it hard to resist the seductive pull of the quarantine album.) Dozens, perhaps scores, of pianists and organists have tackled this repertoire in the studio; Glass himself has recorded all these pieces before. What stands out here is the clear impression of a master craftsman looking back on his life’s work.
The album begins with “Opening,” the introduction to Glass’ 1982 album Glassworks. His debut full-length for CBS attempted to reach audiences beyond the art-world demimonde that had been coming to see his ensemble perform in downtown loft spaces; there was even a specially mixed cassette edition designed to sound better on the Sony Walkman, which had been introduced just three years before. “Opening” is not nearly as reduced or piston-like as earlier works like Two Pages or Music in Twelve Parts. To contemporary ears, its wistful modulations may sound more sentimental than minimalist. Where Glass once wrote with motorik intensity, his treatment of the polyrhythms—eighth notes in the left hand, triplets in right—ebbs and flows here, moving more fluidly than on the Glassworks recording.
“Mad Rush” is structurally similar to “Opening.” A lifelong student of Tibetan Buddhism, Glass wrote the extended piece to commemorate the Dalai Lama’s 1979 visit to New York City, performing it on the organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He later recorded it for 1989’s Glass: Solo Piano, and returned to the cathedral’s organ for the soundtrack to the 2016 film The Last Dalai Lama? You wouldn’t necessarily guess the piece’s backstory from listening; both the music and the title evoke the kineticism of New York City, long one of Glass’ primary influences. But rather than urban chaos, the composition’s elegant clockworks speak to the importance of balance; perhaps that’s what Glass had in mind when writing music for His Holiness. “The principal thing that I’ve found [about studying Tibetan Buddhism] is that the training is extremely valuable and useful in living in a world of stress, full of negativity, what we would call evil,” Glass once said. “Bad things happen. When you live in a world that’s complicated, the training that comes with that tradition is very helpful.”
Comparing Philip Glass Solo to the composer’s previous treatments of the same pieces—particularly the four movements of 1988’s Metamorphosis, which first appeared on Glass: Solo Piano—a curious contradiction reveals itself. On the one hand, the new versions are imbued with a more measured, rubato sensibility—the kind of pensive air you might expect from a late-in-life recital. At the same time, there’s nothing mawkish or maudlin or even particularly nostalgic about them, despite the project’s ruminative context, or the pandemic that was raging outside. That’s even true of “Truman Sleeps,” from The Truman Show, one of the most poignant pieces in the composer’s catalog. (In what might be the apex of his pop-culture crossover, Glass performs it in a brief on-screen cameo in the film.) Where other pianists play up its melancholy, Glass here gives it a stately reading that benefits from the subtlest shifts in tempo and intensity; he also lays into the sustain pedal, suggestively muddying the waters and keeping its graceful changes from sounding too pretty.
What becomes clear is that not only are these performances less airily atmospheric than earlier versions, despite their more considered rubato; they are more determined, more confident, more knowing. Perhaps that’s natural; Glass wrote these pieces, after all, and here a life spent living with his creations makes its way to the tape. There’s a fascinating passage in Glass’ memoir where he describes the division between theory and practice that he encountered as a student at Juilliard. Budding composers were not expected to play their own pieces; indeed, no one assumed they might want to. “Making the practice of music and the writing of music separate activities was poor advice,” he writes. “Music is, above all, something we play, it’s not something that’s meant for study only. For me, performing music is an essential part of the experience of composing.” Philip Glass Solo offers a moving testament to the unity of the two sides of his practice. Treated to his thoughtful interpretations of his own work, recorded in the intimacy of his own home, you feel lucky to have the chance to sit with him. | 2024-01-31T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-31T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Orange Mountain | January 31, 2024 | 8 | 24bbac05-b545-49e9-81ae-78fd35df94b0 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The fourth album by the Los Angeles duo is more sonically adventurous and lyrically direct while still drawing on themes of looking for faith in other people and coming up short. | The fourth album by the Los Angeles duo is more sonically adventurous and lyrically direct while still drawing on themes of looking for faith in other people and coming up short. | Girlpool: Forgiveness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/girlpool-forgiveness/ | Forgiveness | Forgiveness exists at an excruciating inflection point, where salvation and torture could easily be mistaken for romance. Across 12 mercurial pop songs, bandmates Avery Tucker and Harmony Tividad write, as they always have, about the ongoing and ever-brutal process of losing innocence. This time around, Girlpool’s songs—some of the most sonically adventurous they’ve ever made—are colored by reckless partying, sketchy sex, and the depressing realization that you can be complicit in your own suffering and still not have the tools to relieve yourself of it. Brilliant and unrelentingly bleak, it’s Tucker and Tividad’s finest exploration of the pressures and politics of young adulthood—a record that uses the sound and feeling of pop music to heighten the emotions contained within.
Forgiveness runs the gamut from glacial hyperpop to horned-up industrial electronics and serene country balladry, but the duo’s new stylistic breadth isn’t the focus. From the very first lines—“Do you even want me if I even have to ask?/Break it to me gently with your fingers up my ass”—it’s clear that Tucker and Tividad have moved beyond the impressionistic, if occasionally vague, songwriting of 2019’s What Chaos Is Imaginary. If the lyrics on that album often felt like transmissions from troubling, free-associative dreams, this record is more like the cold, sterile panic of waking from a nightmare. These songs are bolder and more brutal, less interested in florid wording or oblique metaphor; they express feelings of alienation and self-loathing with discomfiting clarity.
Tividad frequently uses metaphors of death or the divine to express a feeling of chaotic, helpless infatuation. Sometimes, as on “Junkie,” where she coos like Hannah Diamond over a barely-there dembow beat, the analogy is straightforward: A lyric like “I’m a sin for the saint you made me/Let your body destroy and change me” sits clearly in a lineage of songs that use worship as a metaphor for sex. But on the country-tinged “Faultline,” things feel more complicated: “My body’s just a landscape for your sin,” she sings, only to admit, moments later, that her desires have gone unchecked, too: “I wanted everything so much it grows/Until I can’t manage this appetite.” There are no heroes or villains in these songs—just lost souls, waiting for the earth to swallow them up.
If Tividad’s songs depict sex as something dissociative and indulgent, Tucker’s depict the act as a site of embodiment and self-determination, if not always in a particularly healthy way. On “Violet,” romantic attachment is fleeting but visceral—“When you held me like a doll, that’s when I felt so fucking strong/But without lust I get lost,” he sings—while on the industrial clanker “Country Star,” a sexual fantasy about a cowboy is more about self-actualization than the sex itself. The writing has grown more distinctive and abject, but Tividad and Tucker are still writing the kinds of stories they’ve always specialized in—looking for faith in other people and coming up short.
Tividad’s writing, in particular, shines on Forgiveness. Although her lyrics have always been rich in metaphor, her approach is more exacting on this record, each new image adding depth and texture to her emotions. The casual nature of her phrasing hides just how skillful her writing has become—the way she can telegraph a world of heartbreak and power imbalance with the most subtle of gestures: “Are you the moonlight that shines onto my shelf?” she asks a controlling partner in “Butterfly Bulletholes.” Later, she distills anxiety into one crushing sentence: “I wanna know how to live without a fear of life.” Tividad’s progression as a songwriter speaks to a feeling of Forgiveness as the most meticulous Girlpool album—across the board, she and Tucker have made subtle refinements like these that make the unguarded emotions of the songs hit even harder.
The production, handled by Yves Tumor collaborator Yves Rothman, fits the dank, 5 a.m. mood of the lyrics. For the most part, these songs are glassy and jagged, built on programmed beats and fluttering synthlines. It’s nothing new to use robotic electropop to convey romantic or drug-induced malcontent. But Tucker and Tividad have become so adept in their themes of forever-adolescence that it’s hard to listen to Forgiveness and associate it with something so musically amorphous as hyperpop. Even the most dramatic electronic elements, such as the harsh noise that opens the album, don’t affect the traditional song structures and innate charm. It’s easy to imagine any of these songs in the duo’s earlier styles of punk or folk; electronic music just feels like the right mode for Tucker and Tividad’s most alienated album. | 2022-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | May 3, 2022 | 7.6 | 24c295c7-ea9d-4c3c-a869-7b70dba68dad | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The debut album from the Iranian-Swedish artist offers a fascinatingly dark take on romantic love, filled with images of violence and devastation. | The debut album from the Iranian-Swedish artist offers a fascinatingly dark take on romantic love, filled with images of violence and devastation. | Nadia Tehran: Dozakh: All Lovers Hell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nadia-tehran-dozakh-all-lovers-hell/ | Dozakh: All Lovers Hell | Dozakh: All Lovers Hell, the debut album from Iranian-Swedish artist Nadia Tehran, begins with a recording of her immigrant father, Ali Kardar, saying that he’s not afraid of death. He’s in the middle of describing a near-fatal experience during his time as a soldier in the Iran-Iraq war. “I wake up with unbelievable pain that isn’t just pain from my legs, it’s pain through my whole soul,” he recounts in Swedish. “I didn’t even realize that my leg was gone.” And with that harrowing image, Tehran sets up Dozakh, an album examining emotional purgatory and devastation in all its forms.
Dozakh means hell in Persian. But in a statement, Tehran has explained that she conceptualizes the word metaphorically, as “a place of torment one believes they are in when separated from their lover.” In accordance with this thinking, Tehran writes about romantic love as tragedy, weaving in apocalyptic images of death and violence to underscore her point. On the synth-pop song “Down,” Tehran bridges the visceral lyricism of CocoRosie with Sky Ferreira’s twisted romanticism. “I’d be the best girl that you ever had/I’d blow you when you’re sad and lick your wounds when you’ve been bad,” she sings, revealing a fascinatingly warped sense of devotion.
Dozakh is saturated with a feeling of hopelessness, but Tehran keeps things moving with deft genre-hopping. As a preteen, Tehran sang in a punk band in her small Swedish town, and she lists her YEAR0001 label mates Yung Lean and Viagra Boys as inspirations. On “Something New,” she sounds like Karen O fronting Show Me the Body, while “Jet” is a snarling takedown of immigrant stereotypes, like a more in-your-face version of M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes.” “Alcoholic Waves” is cloud rap on downers; “True romance is a drank in my cup/True romance is to light it up,” she chants in sing-song, like a depraved lullaby. No matter the style, Tehran’s music matches her nihilistic worldview.
But this universal doom and gloom is also a crutch, and Tehran’s songwriting is ultimately not sharp or precise enough to get a singular point across. There are songs about being heartbroken and disillusioned by a former partner (“High,” “Tell Nobody”), ones that have a more pointed political message (“Jet,” “Nazi Killer”), and others that simply describe haunting thoughts of death and genocide (“Come and Go”). But Tehran fails to tie these themes together, leaving it unclear how post-war trauma and romantic heartbreak are inherently connected; the only loose common thread is the pervading sense of self-destruction. Nadia Tehran’s vision of hell is terrifying. But without an incisive message, its impact dulls by the end. | 2019-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Year0001 | May 25, 2019 | 6.8 | 24c29b6b-7def-479b-87bc-5f1f9db7981a | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
For her first record in 38 years, the wonderful British folk singer Shirley Collins dazzles with a collection of macabre and mischievous songs from centuries past. | For her first record in 38 years, the wonderful British folk singer Shirley Collins dazzles with a collection of macabre and mischievous songs from centuries past. | Shirley Collins: Lodestar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22587-lodestar/ | Lodestar | Shirley Collins is so deeply woven into the folk tradition, her own life story could be the dramatic tale of a forgotten threnody. Lodestar is Collins’ first album in 38 years, her first since she regained her ability to sing. Back in the late ’70s, following her divorce with her husband Ashley Hutchings, leader of the Albion Country Band, Collins lost her voice and retired from music. The doctors diagnosed her with dysphonia, but you might put it more fancifully; heartbreak robbed of her powers, just as some capricious faerie might steal away a child.
A working-class woman from rural Sussex, Collins learned traditional English songs passed down from her grandmother and aunt and soon fell in with the early folk revival. After meeting the song collector Alan Lomax at a party, she traveled with him across America, collecting music from foundational figures such as Bessie Jones and Mississippi Fred McDowell. The journey was serialized in her book America Across The Water, and some of the recordings found their way into the Coen Brothers’ seismic O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack. Today her admirers are legion: from Will Oldham to Billy Bragg to Current 93’s David Tibet, who was instrumental to coaxing Collins back to the stage in 2014. But as the comedian Stewart Lee—another long-time fan—writes in the liner notes, Collins’ music is “egoless,” her voice a conduit for these ancient and timeless songs. Never has this been so obvious as it is on Lodestar.
At 81, Collins’ voice has grit and grain, both old and strangely ageless. There is the sense that she has stood still, and folk has revolved around her. Recorded in Collins’ front room in her cottage in Lewes in rural Sussex, Lodestar is comprised of interpretations of English, American, and Cajun songs dating from the 16th Century to the 1950s. She is surrounded by a small coterie of collaborators, chief among them musical director/producer Ian Kearey of Oysterband and Ossian Brown and Stephen Thrower, members of Cyclobe and both formerly of the English post-industrial group Coil. Speaking of Lodestar, Kearey resists easy comparison to Johnny Cash’s latter-day recordings with Rick Rubin, but there are clear parallels. Essentially the trio’s role here is to curate an atmosphere that gestures back to Collins’ storied past, while authentically capturing her in the here and now.
There are fiddles, mandolins, and picked guitars, with Brown adding a droning hurdy-gurdy here, and a church pipe organ there. On several songs, there is something Collins simply refers to as “The Instrument”—a unique hybrid of a mountain dulcimer and a five-string banjo, which she commissioned back in the ’60s and played on 1968’s The Power of the True Love Knot. An opening 11-minute piece titled “Awake Awake—The Split Ash Tree—May Carol—Southover” weaves a rich web, tying together apocalyptic balladry, wailing hurdy-gurdy, Pagan carols, and the jingling bells of a Morris dancer. As Lodestar opens up, the theme of death takes hold—although life in these songs is cheap, and people perish in matter-of-fact ways.
“Cruel Lincoln” is the tale of a mason conned by a landowner, who returns to seek revenge. In the background, you can hear the birds sing in Collins’ garden, even as the tale of butchery unfolds: “There was blood in the kitchen, there was blood in the hall/There was blood in the parlor where the lady did fall.” On “Death And The Lady,” which Collins first recorded with her sister Dolly in 1970, a wandering woman comes face to face with the Grim Reaper; but the quaver in Collins’ voice lends this version a faltering quality, only intensifying its sense of somber fatalism.
If her voice is smaller now than back in the day, Collins is still capable of surprising range. A take on the old Cajun lament “Sur Le Borde De L’eau,” popularized by the Louisiana guitarist Blind Uncle Gaspard, is truly haunting. But a spry mischief runs through the nonsense song “Old Johnny Buckle,” in which the Johnny is given medical advice to rub his wife’s injured leg with gin, but drinks it instead, and is consequently sent to hell. This seam of black humor persists into “The Rich Irish Lady,” a song about a wealthy woman who spurns a doctor’s romantic advances, then falls ill and throws herself at his mercy. Not only does the doctor deny her, he announces that he will dance on her grave, and as the track segues into a manic Kentucky fiddle piece titled “Jeff Sturgeon,” you can imagine Collins kicking up her heels in her front room, cackling her head off.
Many of the recordings Collins made in her song-collecting days were of aged singers, transmitting the tales and melodies they themselves learned in their youth. Back then, she was their custodian, but after a lifetime carrying them, she sounds at one with them; they have grown around her, and she has grown around them. That Lodestar exists at all feels like a minor miracle. That it is so exquisitely done is a small blessing on top. | 2016-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Domino | November 8, 2016 | 8 | 24c4910c-081d-43f3-868a-91899bbd8769 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
Essential for superfans, this collection of Sylvester’s earliest known recordings illuminates how he would become a disco superstar. | Essential for superfans, this collection of Sylvester’s earliest known recordings illuminates how he would become a disco superstar. | Sylvester: Private Recordings, August 1970 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sylvester-private-recordings-august-1970/ | Private Recordings, August 1970 | Before he became a queer disco icon, Sylvester had already cast himself in a movie “in which he was the fabulous star.” Between joining the Disquotays—a glamorous gang of teenage drag queens and trans women—and meeting Hi-NRG dance music producer Patrick Cowley, Sylvester found a spotlight with the San Francisco-based performance art stage troupe the Cockettes. They provided the opportunity to showcase his formative jazz, blues, and gospel influences, looking back to the 1930s and ’40s while dressing the part. In this intimate collection of his earliest known recordings, the 22-year-old Sylvester learns songs as the tape rolls, his signature falsetto sounding fully formed.
According to his biographer, sociology professor Joshua Gamson, Sylvester wasn’t a perfect fit for the LSD-laced hippies he joined in the early 1970s: “He usually stood a few feet back, among the Cockettes but never quite one of them.” While they dropped acid and painted their faces in psychedelic colors, Sylvester sipped champagne and wore pretty dresses like Josephine Baker. He met an ally in Cockettes piano player Peter Mintun, who shared Sylvester’s love of vintage fashion and popular songs from the Prohibition Era. With his pencil-thin mustache and the keys to his father’s 1936 Ford Coupe, Mintun drove Sylvester around San Francisco, snapping the time-warping photos that accompany this album.
One summer afternoon in 1970, Sylvester and Mintun sat down with a collection of sheet music, setting up a fancy microphone and a tape recorder next to an upright piano. Their recordings weren’t intended for public consumption, just used to learn songs they would perform in the Cockettes’ midnight shows. If there’s a throughline to be found in their chosen cuts, it’s the theme of love and loss as represented by changes to the environment. George and Ira Gershwin’s “A Foggy Day” turns London’s pea-soup air pollution into a metaphor for loneliness. The narrator of “Stormy Weather,” written by The Wizard of Oz composer Harold Arlen, laments the rain “since my man and I ain’t together.” Even the clear skies of “Happy Days Are Here Again” have a trace of melancholy as Syvester stretches notes out over twinkling keys. Yet in the snippets of conversation between him and Mintun, they sound like two friends at ease.
As the afternoon goes on, both the song selections and performances become more playful. On their incomplete reading of “Viper’s Drag,” a ragtime number adapted by Fats Waller from the original version by Cab Calloway, Sylvester’s wordless scats can’t keep pace with Mintun’s fingers flying across the keys. The session’s most lively song is the dance tune “Carioca” (“It’s not a foxtrot or a polka”), as the duo messes around, pausing to allow fellow Cockette John Rothermel to join on maracas. “Indian Love Call”—familiar thanks to the appearance of Slim Whitman’s yodeling rendition in Mars Attacks! and Asteroid City—becomes a full-throated duet before the singers collapse into giggles. The tape ends with a brief attempt at “When My Dreamboat Comes Home,” as Sylvester works out the melody in real time. We don’t hear the final version he and Mintun may have finished together, but it’s a happy conclusion to their lonely laments.
Like Stevie Nicks warming up with “Wild Heart” while getting her makeup done, this rehearsal tape feels like listening in on a casual hangout, free from the pressures of onstage performance. Sylvester’s Private Recordings, August 1970 is only essential for superfans, but there are gorgeous moments that illuminate how he would become a chart-topping star. His aching take on “God Bless the Child” surpasses the sadness of Billie Holiday as he salutes a young person with money who can “just worry ’bout nothin’/’Cause he’s got his own.” Sylvester dressed to the nines in gowns and furs while embodying the songs of an elegant diva because it’s the role he was born to play. | 2023-09-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dark Entries | September 1, 2023 | 7.4 | 24c76911-6527-4e7b-9ea3-8ba3ef8d798f | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
The songs on the Chicago bedroom-pop songwriter J Fernandez's Many Levels of Laughter are intricate, introspective, and self-contained. Rather than celebrating isolation, they use the languid, daydreamy haze of bedroom pop to hint at the pathos of wasted life. | The songs on the Chicago bedroom-pop songwriter J Fernandez's Many Levels of Laughter are intricate, introspective, and self-contained. Rather than celebrating isolation, they use the languid, daydreamy haze of bedroom pop to hint at the pathos of wasted life. | J Fernandez: Many Levels of Laughter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20822-many-levels-of-laughter/ | Many Levels of Laughter | Back in 2012, J Fernandez sidelined his day job as a cartographer and released a pair of indoorsy bedroom-pop nuggets packed with Adderall-infused Byrds riffs and cabin-fever ambience. Three years and about as many interviews later, the Chicago songwriter remains elusive on his debut album, and yet easier to pin musically: the songs on Many Levels of Laughter are intricate, introspective, and self-contained, while hinting at a world just beyond the scope of the music that’s too dauntingly ordinary to warrant investigating.
While Fernandez crafts a distinctive blend of dextrous, spidery guitars and quivering organ, he’s practically anonymous as a lyricist. The record opens insisting that "Communication is a waste of time" and follows the theme. "Please don’t listen to me," he implores on "Casual Encounter", as if his presence center-stage were some kind of mistake. "Read My Mind" depicts a similar glossophobia within a muted relationship, its ambiguous opening line–"No conversation, and everything is fine"–poised between pre-breakup denial and passive-aggressive petulance. Fernandez is emotionally static, his problems less exclaimed than exhaled, so it’s no surprise when, for stretches of the record, his voice disappears entirely.
Musically Many Levels of Laughter has a neat breadth: His jauntier, jazzier passages explore the bits of Tim Buckley’s Starsailor that Doldrums bypassed on Lesser Evil, while interlude "Markers" deploys curious, playful paddling sounds against an odd, melancholy jingle. His hooks have nuance and charm–you can hear the cognitive cogs whirring behind "Apophis"’s squiggling organs, the shivery up-strokes in "Between the Channels". But even at the record’s most kaleidoscopic, Fernandez sings cautiously, as if each note were subject to stringent security checks before leaving his mouth.
"Break your habits, try a different route," he croaks on closer "Melting Down", a flash of wishful thinking as eerie, lunar synths orbit an ambling krautrock beat. As if to keep him company, a gently stirring bassline kicks in, heaving itself up the fretboard. The forward momentum is welcome, albeit akin to the flicker of daylight in a dark room as an oscillator fan tickles the curtains. After 30 minutes of cosmic despondence, though, that reprieve almost feels misplaced. Rather than celebrating isolation, Fernandez' songs use the languid, daydreamy haze of bedroom pop to hint at the pathos of wasted life. | 2015-07-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-07-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | July 23, 2015 | 6.5 | 24cb3a1b-8eb5-47bf-a66f-952ecdb960a4 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
The debut from Guns N' Roses was a watershed moment in '80s rock that chronicled every vice of Los Angeles led by the lye-voiced Axl Rose and a legendary, switchblade-sharp band. | The debut from Guns N' Roses was a watershed moment in '80s rock that chronicled every vice of Los Angeles led by the lye-voiced Axl Rose and a legendary, switchblade-sharp band. | Guns N’ Roses: Appetite for Destruction | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/guns-n-roses-appetite-for-destruction/ | Appetite for Destruction | The video for “Welcome to the Jungle,” Appetite for Destruction’s mission statement, mirrors the journey that an unsuspecting listener might take during their first spin through Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 debut. A fresh-faced, 25-year-old Axl Rose, so country that he’s got a long stalk of wheat between his teeth, gets off a bus and enters a landscape that screams “bad side of town”; neon lights flash darkly, a shady guy perched on the corner approaches him, black-stockinged legs catch Axl’s eye. Cut to a similarly dank club where, with the aid of Aqua Net, Axl and the rest of Guns N’ Roses are barreling through the track, while TVs flicker into A Clockwork Orange-style fantasia about the bad news lurking all around.
The electric opening notes, played with sputtering enthusiasm by lead guitarist Slash, only hint at the terror that’s coming; Axl’s under-his-breath “Oh my god” cranks up the tension; and then, aided by Steven Adler’s lightly swinging drums and backing vocals that recall a demon choir, the full horror is exposed—a world where every vice is for sale depending on your mood for indulgence and your tolerance for sin. The chugging breakdown, which culminates in Axl’s shrieked “You know where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby! You’re gonna diiiieeeeeaagghghhhhhghghghgh,” is “Tubular Bells” through a Marshall stack, a horror movie in miniature for anyone who thought the rock’n’roll lifestyle was all fun and games.
Amid the bumper crop of records from ’80s bands who graduated from Sunset Strip clubs to MTV’s newly minted “Headbangers Ball”—the self-titled debuts from glam brats Faster Pussycat and biker-bloozers L.A. Guns—Appetite stood out for how absolutely harsh it got, its chronicles of the wild life in Los Angeles plainly stated by the lye-voiced Axl while his bandmates bobbed and thrashed. The Los Angeles portrayed on Appetite inverts the ideal of Randy Newman’s ever-lovable metropolis, turning it into a place where the then-in-vogue term “drug war” meant fighting with the spectre of heroin (aka “Mr. Brownstone”), where trickle-down economics meant buying cheap hooch on the last scraps of credit, and where paranoid fantasies were always justified. Women were beautiful and you could even put the ones with less utility in their place every so often. It was the jungle, baby, and you were gonna die.
Appetite for Destruction didn’t only stand out because of its storm of bad vibes, although that sure helped. The band’s stew of influences—caustic punk, sinewy funk, Aerosmith, the Stones—helped make it a switchblade-sharp statement of intent. “In the last year, I’ve spent over $1,300 on cassettes, everything from Slayer to Wham! to listen to production, vocals, melodies, this and that,” Axl told the UK music magazine Sounds in 1987, and while Mike Clink’s economical production doesn’t have the gloss of Wham!’s Make It Big, studying influences beyond the glammed-up bills at the Troubadour played a large part in the band’s sound.
From the their grimy photo shoots that became Metal Edge pinups to their candid discussions of how they survived before hitting it big (“Strippers were our main source of income. They’d pay for booze, sometimes you could eat...” Slash told Rolling Stone), Guns N’ Roses were often portrayed as a clouded mass of debauchery with insatiable needs to simultaneously consume and destroy. “We are just being ourselves, but at the same time, these ’bad boy’ images tend to sell,” Axl told SPIN in 1988. Slash told Melody Maker something similar that same year: “We’re not mean, we’re not nasty, we’re decent people. We’re just out for a good time, like five teenagers on the loose.”
The Parents Music Resource Center panic that took hold in the mid-’80s helped fuel GNR’s reputation as “bad boys.” The band were open about their vices on record and in interviews, but their wide-ranging appeal, despite the cluck-clucking of reactionary critics, wasn’t merely the result of them wearing their indulgences on their sleeves. They had shrewd ears and wide-ranging influences, resulting in a sound that used bouncing-ball grooves with punk’s economy that vibrated with paranoia and antipathy yet could (very occasionally) settle into romantic bliss. Bassist Duff McKagan came from the Seattle punk scene, drumming for the legendary hyper-power-poppers Fastbacks; he and drummer Steven Adler would hone their rhythm-section camaraderie by listening to Cameo and Prince LPs. Slash, the London-born son of a costumer who designed for Bowie, decided to pick up the guitar when he heard Aerosmith’s 1975 opus Rocks, telling Guitar World that the album’s “drunken, chemically induced powerhouse sound just sold me and changed me forever.” Izzy Stradlin, the band’s chief songwriter who’d escaped Indiana with Axl, had a Charlie Watts air about him, being the coolest guy in the room while he laid down riffs from which Slash’s solos could take flight.
“Welcome to the Jungle,” the album’s opener, is followed by “It’s So Easy”—one of the greatest one-two punches in rock history. A snarling chronicle of the void at the center of any Dionysian orgy, it’s powered by Adler’s butterfly-bee drumming and riffs that sound like they’ve been turned into pistons. The lessons in funk taken by Adler and McKagan make the album’s most harrowing moments roll out of the speakers all throughout—the shimmying that underlies the rancid takedown of a cleaned-up bad girl on “My Michelle,” the musical portrayal of the “West Coast struttin’” by the blotto protagonist of “Nightrain.” Axl’s scorched-earth upper register is at key times doubled not just by his bandmates, but by a low-pitched version of his own voice—detailing that adds another edge to the group’s dystopian reveries.
Even with Appetite’s thick layers of grime, its path to mainstream success was shoved along by songs that reflected a bit of Southern California sunshine. “Sweet Child O’Mine” was the album’s big hit, a mushy love song set aloft by Slash’s thick arpeggiating (which, as he told Rolling Stone, was a “goofy personal exercise” overheard by Axl, who decided to write lyrics to it ) and Axl’s doe-eyed lyrics. It’s not all light-hearted—his initially muttered, eventually yelped, “Where do we go? Where do we go now?” that peppers the bridge reveals his ever-present search for more as the song resolves in a minor key.
The album’s most triumphant moment is the Jock-Jam-in-waiting “Paradise City,” a fever-dream anthem where green grass and lovely women abound, where everyone’s so cheerful that no one will give you shit if you add a synthesizer to the mix. The main riff is one of those so-simple-it’s-criminal melodies that get arenas shaking; when it double-times at the song’s end, with Slash freaking out on a solo and Axl pleading to be taken haaaawwoooooommmmeeee, it’s an invitation to exhume the toxins of the mean streets and the meaner drugs and the even meaner people and to just thrash away their residue.
Like most CD-era albums, Appetite has its lesser tracks, but even songs that feel like filler have odd filigrees that set them apart from their peers’ padding. “Anything Goes,” in which a horned-up Axl gets ready to get freaky, opens with Slash laying down an abstract psych-jazz solo and closes with a thrashing rework of the song’s central riff; “Think About You” is a fairly boilerplate love song elevated by beaded-curtain counterpoint guitars on its winsome chorus. “You’re Crazy,” which would later get a stripped-down treatment on the band’s stopgap 1988 LP G N’ R Lies, is a ball of paranoia made even more frantic by the guitars lagging ever so slightly behind its manic pace.
But “Rocket Queen,” the album’s closer, is a brilliant study in contrasts that still unnerves. It’s a mini-epic that hinted at the more sprawling aesthetic Axl and his bandmates would adopt on 1991’s Use Your Illusion diptych. (Those records contained the ruminative “November Rain” and the crystalline “Don’t Cry,” ones that the band had been workshopping since their earliest days as Hollywood Rose, and that were deemed inappropriate for Appetite.) It’s petulant, carnal, and romantic all at once. It famously incorporates a female orgasm recorded in their studio, with the woman’s cries and shudders folding into Slash’s guitar pyrotechnics, leaping into a yelp alongside the guitar. Its first half chugs and seethes while Axl goes over his bad side in detail—he’s seen it all, dined at elaborate buffets and came away still hungry, schooled himself in the art of manipulation. He is, in short, a bad dude…until he’s redeemed by the song’s second half, all windswept balladry that allows Axl to engage in a little street-corner whoa-oh-oh-ing. “All I ever wanted…was for you to know that I care,” he croons, an exclamation point proffered by the band in unison.
It’s a surprising closing sentiment for an album so drenched in fear and loathing. But taken of a piece with the band members’ declarations that despite the hard living they were just five guys out to have a good time, it also shows how Guns N’ Roses’ early outlook was as animated not just by its members’ heady stew of influences. Perhaps all that wanton consumption could lead to a place of contentment that offered more than the comfort offered by the Midwest, more than the neon-lit debauchery of clubs’ back rooms—a wandering through the jungle that would open up into paradise. | 2017-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Geffen | July 16, 2017 | 10 | 24e61809-7442-4926-8476-6cf4eb5ee8e4 | Maura Johnston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/ | null |
The rapper’s latest album is a clear mid-career apex that shoves his always outlandish style into territories further afield than ever before. | The rapper’s latest album is a clear mid-career apex that shoves his always outlandish style into territories further afield than ever before. | billy woods: Aethiopes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/billy-woods-preservation-aethiopes/ | Aethiopes | Rapper billy woods attacked his 2012 album History Will Absolve Me from the mindset that it could be the curtain call on his career. If the project failed, the Fidel Castro-invoking title would serve as a final message to an industry that rejected him, and he’d disappear into New York’s abandoned subway tunnels, never to be heard from again. A perennial figure in the city’s alt-rap scene, woods had been defined by his association with Cannibal Ox’s Vordul Mega and as half of Super Chron Flight Brothers, alongside Privilege. But woods didn’t become an underground king as he’d hoped and seemed destined to be just another Gotham rapper who fell out of orbit.
Then with help from what was by that point an ailing rap blogosphere, History Will Absolve Me achieved cult classic status. woods seized the opportunity to forge a reputation as one of the fiercest rappers in New York, and Backwoodz Studioz, the label he founded in 2002, became a kingdom for outsiders and alternative thinkers who didn’t fit in anywhere else on the rap landscape. Earlier this month, the label released a 10-year anniversary edition of the still-chilling History Will Absolve Me, calling it the album that single-handedly kept its lights on. In its wake is Aethiopes, a clear mid-career apex that shoves woods’ always outlandish style into territories further afield than ever before.
It’s not easy to pull a maverick like woods further into the mire, certainly not after the sorcerous brilliance of last year’s Haram. Required is a collaborator draped in enchantments and silk; an eclectic crate digger who shares his phosphorescent tendencies. Fortunately, there is Preservation, a selective producer two decades deep in the game whose previous lives have seen him serve as Yasiin Bey’s tour DJ, join forces with Ka for the disorienting Days With Dr. Yen Lo, and record an album composed entirely of samples unearthed in Hong Kong. With Preservation behind the boards on every track, Aethiopes skids across eras, countries, and cultures. It begins with “Asylum” and the swirling sounds of piano keys, delicate guitars, and snaking brass riffs that appear sourced from old North East Africa or Middle Eastern music. The song follows woods as he assumes the role of a boy living under the cloud of battling parents within a gated residence, watching the unusual activities of a new neighbor with Hitchcockian obsession.
A lyricist whose hieroglyphics typically require work to crack, woods often writes from shifting perspectives, weaving in poignant imagery, strange motifs, and seemingly personal elements. On “Protoevangelium,” he gives details about a party in Chinatown spent smoking cigars and spotting Julius Erving. woods has always rapped with unbreakable forward movement—flowing in long sentences, never dwelling too long on any syllable—that lends itself well to storytelling. But these days, he finds the pocket a little better, seemingly more mindful about running over margins or bumping up against beats.
Preservation’s instrumentals are minimalist, with samples not always arranged in solid, repeating loops, but instead feel like they’re floating around the room. “The Doldrums” deploys a small number of slow-moving elements—twangy fret play, bassy hammer-ons—to form a dusty beat that summons feelings of the cinematic Wild West. Similarly, the Sergio Leone-evoking “Christine” includes some before-the-bullets-fly tension, the vinyl hissing like rain as woods plays a high plains drifter in a dirty trench coat. Then there’s the doom march of “Sauvage,” featuring guest verses from Boldy James and Gabe ’Nandez. The steady beep resembles a life support machine, ramping up the sense of anxiety as woods raps about kids caught up in bad situations: a boy entering 11th grade having already beaten a case for shooting a violent uncle; parents who are forced to kick their child out of the family home before the house is shot up. “NYNEX” sets out a bleak vision for the future with flashes of harmonica that sound like music from a hobo living in dystopia.
The Backwoodz ethos has attracted a million Def Jux comparisons, which aren’t inaccurate but perhaps outdated. Whereas El Producto and his company heaved 1990s brass knuckles New York rap as subterranean as it would go, Backwoodz’ can feel totally adrift of time or linearity. It’s a crew that refuses to glance backwards—in 2022, there are no obvious analogs to Backwoodz. Still, it’s exciting to hear woods join forces with El-P and Breeze Brewin of Juggaknots, a veteran of another sadly perished independent rap institute in Fondle ‘Em, on “Heavy Water.” On this crossover episode, the trio share the mic like it’s a game of pass the parcel: El-P expresses confusion at Google Chrome, and woods calls himself the “multiverse Benzino,” a hilarious reference to one of rap’s most unpalatable villains of the 2000s.
The album’s final stretch encapsulates its elaborate brilliance. On “Remorseless,” Preservation lines up the otherworldly Moog sounds while woods delivers a broad benediction on the lessons he’s learned over the years; closer “Smith + Cross” is built around a piercing guitar sample that lends it an appropriately epic feel. You can picture woods standing at a new zenith. As it turns out, it wasn’t history that absolved him but his own grand aspirations, belatedly recognized in his own time. | 2022-04-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Backwoodz Studioz | April 11, 2022 | 8 | 24e68871-8f17-45d8-a3c1-bc79d0228be9 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Magnolia Electric Co. and Songs:Ohia singer-songwriter takes a few steps away from his recent full, collaborative sound. | Magnolia Electric Co. and Songs:Ohia singer-songwriter takes a few steps away from his recent full, collaborative sound. | Jason Molina: Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9336-let-me-go-let-me-go-let-me-go/ | Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go | Like Bill Murray, Demi Moore, and Pac-Man, Jason Molina has a thing about ghosts. In the singer-songwriter's lyric vocabulary, "ghost" ranks alongside "moon" and "blues" in the top three most-used nouns, and in 2000 he named an album recorded under his previous guise, Songs:Ohia, Ghost Tropic. But Molina's phantasm fetish goes beyond linguistics; often, when his songs, voice, and production are at their best, Molina even begins to sound like a ghost, a reasonable approximation of what folk music from beyond the grave would resemble.
Molina's recent incarnation as the frontman of the southern-fried Magnolia Electric Co. has moved him away from that obsession, as despite the frequent use of the word "ghost," spectral visitations don't usually come with slide-guitar solos. Since the retirement of the Songs:Ohia alias, Molina's records have become more and more crowded, a progression away from his sparse, vacant beginnings to a more full and collaborative sound. Let Me Go3, on the other hand, represents a visit back to those alone-in-the-studio early days, and in doing so restores the haunted to his house.
Or maybe I should say "haunted mansion." While most folk singers go automatically to a production style that screams intimate, aiming to sound like they're sitting right next to you on the couch playing their songs, Molina's solo work emphasizes space-- you might be in the same room, but he's on the other side of an empty great hall. Rather than whispering in your ear, his voice is all about projection, surrounding you on all sides with thousand-mile echo on "It's Easier Now" and "Some Things Never Try", proving again and again that meager instrumentation doesn't have to sound diminutive and cozy.
In their paradoxically rich emptiness, many of the songs on Let Me Go don't settle for simple guitar-and-singing either, with Molina adding touches of piano and wheezing pump organ to "It Costs You Nothing", and a tortoise-speed drum-machine murmur to the album's final three tracks. Meanwhile, analog hiss fills every available nook and cranny, with occasional creaks and studio clatter that will thoroughly freak out anyone who dares listen on headphones in an empty apartment. Dynamics aren't ignored either, as after eight tracks of post-storm hush Molina abruptly pulls out the electric guitar on the final song, tuned to an awful clanging tone and blurting out shockingly loud string-bending notes in between verses.
But any successful ghost knows that it's not just the medium that's important in a good haunting, it's also the message. Molina once again proves himself the master of the opening line, from the thick imagery of the very commencement of the album ("Behind these eyes/ A desert spirit/ Sea serpent heart/ Inside a sunken ship") to apocalyptic weather forecasts ("The dark outside the world/ I think it looks like rain") to eerie, desperate paranoia ("Something must've happened to both of us"). The two songs with repetitive titles (the title track and "Get Out Get Out Get Out") come off especially ghostly, the perseverance only strengthening their purpose as either urgent warnings or longings for release, which presumably are the priorities of most spectral beings.
So is Let Me Go the long-awaited return to world's end folk supremacy for Molina, a retreat from the Crazy Horse fantasy camp of Magnolia Electric Co.? Probably not, given that its release is timed almost simultaneous to another Magnolia record, and the fact that Molina continues to only rarely play shows without the protective layer of a full band. But for fans missing the pause-in-the-thunderstorm pregnant solitude of Songs:Ohia, Let Me Go will get you that fix you've been craving, a teasingly short half-hour reminder of his old persona. Impersonating the paranormal must be an exhausting task, but at least Molina is willing to give us a brief haunting for old time's sake. | 2006-08-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2006-08-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | August 25, 2006 | 7.9 | 24e92bcc-3455-453a-a9f6-355494e35a00 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
The Chilean American musician’s third album this year is a nominal successor to 2015’s ambient film score Pomegranates, but where that album sprawled, Telas is taut and exhaustively balanced. | The Chilean American musician’s third album this year is a nominal successor to 2015’s ambient film score Pomegranates, but where that album sprawled, Telas is taut and exhaustively balanced. | Nicolás Jaar: Telas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nicolas-jaar-telas/ | Telas | Nicolás Jaar’s 2020 output so far amounts to three albums which, at first glance, have little to do with one another. First, he released a new collection under the alias Against All Logic, his Beyoncé-and-Kanye-sampling dance project, which clanged into the world like a soundtrack to the last party before February turned to March. Then the pandemic shuttered clubs and Jaar unveiled Cenizas, the long-awaited successor to his most overtly personal records, 2011’s Space Is Only Noise and 2016’s Sirens. Cenizas was a surprise: When it arrived, most of us had only been in quarantine for a few weeks, but Jaar’s prescient music sounded withdrawn and cautionary, using drawn-out ambient passages to explore an expansive sense of solitude. He may be putting out albums faster than we can get haircuts, but the 30-year-old nonetheless suggests Thoreau contemplating at Walden Pond, an artist in lockdown for reasons of conviction rather than contagion.
Months have passed and while COVID-19 continues to rage in the Americas, the Chilean American producer gives us Telas, a record in which he continues to explore solitude. Telas is the nominal successor to his 2015 film score Pomegranates, made in the vein of an ambient musician. But while Pomegranates was sprawling, Telas is a taut, exhaustively balanced work, although its four long songs add up to an hour of music. In the context of Jaar’s busy year, it signifies a continued blurring of his various roles—DJ, ambient craftsman, distinctive vocalist with an electronic toolkit—and the album’s deliberate structure and ominous mood indicate that Jaar can make direct, even political statements without sung lyrics or speech samples.
The record begins with one of the blown-out horns that Jaar has been favoring recently, accompanied by percussion performed on wooden and metal instruments built by artists Anna Ippolito and Marzio Zorio. We’ve heard Jaar use custom-built devices before, on Cenizas and the latest Against All Logic record. Here, the objects—which have both a harsh metallic ping and a dull, quick decay—suggest ancient sounds, dusted and polished to seem startling and new. The rest of opener “Telahora” and its follow-up, “Telencima,” never command the listener’s entire attention, but they’re full of symmetrical passages, calls that wait minutes before they hear responses, and phrases that sound transposed from melodic to rhythmic instruments. Jaar has mastered the art of changing his stems mid-line, turning strings into bells and back again. One of Telas’ joys is the way he shifts his sonics fluidly and frequently, without the gridded template of a danceable beat.
The record’s understatement eventually builds to a striking climax near the end of the third song: a bass clarinet, treated heavily to sound like an arpeggiated synth. It’s the most forceful moment on an album that remains effortlessly elusive, as well as an anomaly that seems endless in its reference: It suggests both the build-ups essential to dance music and the prog-rock influences that slide under the surface of Jaar’s sensibility. Jaar has discussed his love for Pink Floyd in the past, and even on a record as far afield from traditional songwriting as he’s ever ventured, their presence occasionally looms.
The last track, “Telallás,” is all denouement after Jaar’s proggy woodwind playing, but it keeps us oriented by employing more repetitive musical phrases than the album’s ponderous middle section. It’s a fitting conclusion to a record by an artist who, 12 years into his career, has little to prove about his range or ability. Telas is not a culmination for Jaar, even if it brings his ambient strains closer than ever to the more crowd-pleasing facets of his work. It suggests, instead, that his various guises were always working toward a common aim—as though all he had to do was lead us to the other end of his studio and pull the tarp off something he’s been laboring over, and suddenly every piece in the room seems like an indispensable part of a whole body of work.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Other People | July 20, 2020 | 7.5 | 24eb1e85-61ba-4039-9348-2bfb605d2d35 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
The adventurous New York label that helped to define the sound of early-1980s left-field dance music celebrates its 30th with a comp. | The adventurous New York label that helped to define the sound of early-1980s left-field dance music celebrates its 30th with a comp. | Various Artists: Ze 30: Ze Records Story 1979-2009 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13361-ze-30-ze-records-story-1979-2009/ | Ze 30: Ze Records Story 1979-2009 | An almost-teacher growing up in the Bronx during the 1960s starts making disco records influenced by 30s jazz and Caribbean calypso during the mid-70s. A Harvard dropout and Village Voice theater critic is coerced by her boyfriend, heir to a British maternity-goods empire, to record some music. The suggestion is seconded by a Parisian punk-shop owner then new to New York. The song is called "Disco Clone", a brittle dance track by a hot woman about how all the hot women at the clubs look exactly the same, but that shouldn't stop boys from wanting to bed them. It's funny-- it's a disco track, but a disco track that ridicules and defiles the image of disco.
Later, the dropout's record is produced by the almost-teacher, who has taken to wearing zoot suits. She calls him an "ice-cream soda," which is supposed to be an insult. Along the way, they're joined by a saxophonist who punches his audience members in the face, and a couple of friends from suburban Detroit who record abstract funk with beat poetry over it. This all happens in the span of about four years, during which Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban of Ze Records-- and August Darnell, Cristina, James Chance and Was (Not Was)-- change the shape of music around them. Very New York.
The records released on Ze at the dawn of the 80s wouldn't have had a comfortable home elsewhere. August Darnell, the almost-teacher (he earned a Master's in English with the intention of joining the vocation, but music intervened), had some success with Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, but wanted more freedom-- freedom he got as Ze's in-house producer and with his new project, Kid Creole and the Coconuts. James Chance and the Contortions made violent, anti-musical rock that people were calling "no wave," but Ze invited him to record disco-- a chance he jumped at, presumably because it would enable him to piss off the fans he had accidentally earned trying to piss people off.
Some of the label's singles were fairly straight disco with a flair for theater-- "Deputy of Love", for example, by Darnell's friends Don Armando's Second Avenue Rhumba Band. Others, like Was (Not Was)'s "Wheel Me Out," were songs only familiar when broken into discrete parts-- a disembodied string melody, the purr of a woman's voice, hippie poetry, UFO sound effects making casual visits, Latin percussion. But together? Unpalatable to everyone-- too glamorous and dance-oriented for the punks to buy, too freakish to ever work consistently at mainstream clubs or at Puerto Rican block parties on the Lower East Side. When it came time for the label to issue a compilation in 1981, they called it Mutant Disco.
Listening to Ze 30, compiled by Ze's Michel Esteban and Strut Records' Quinton Scott, you might think that Ze was a pretty good label instead of a great one. You would be misled. It certainly isn't the fault of the misfits who recorded all this fearless, cockeyed music, but Ze 30 is a confused baby. About half the cuts are obvious and half are obscure, raising the question of just who Strut and Ze were aiming at with this thing. After several listens, my guess is two-fold: Long-time fans and first time listeners. Naturally, they hit the woods.
Complaints: I don't need to hear Alan Vega of Suicide performing rockabilly. Material and Nona Hendyx's "Bustin' Out" definitely belongs here, but the extended version is a waste of space. I'm glad for James Chance's "Roving Eye"-- "Contort Yourself" is, in the realm of 80s art-rock compilations, overrated and overexposed, which is funny considering that most people would probably find it unlistenable. Casino Music's cover of "The Beat Goes On" makes me very uncomfortable, which is more a statement of fact than a complaint. Selections for some of the label's biggest artists-- including Cristina, Was (Not Was), and Kid Creole-- feel like second choices, and while the songs are great, their inclusion feels problematic if the compilation really is being marketed as "the one Ze Records album you need to own."
But with access to a catalog as deep and frequently innovative as Ze's, "failure" is an accident of the mouth, a word with no meaning. The selections here do support Ze's reputation. They illustrate, in bullet points, not only what made the label special, but what made them influential to artists like the Chromatics, LCD Soundsystem, even M.I.A. (whose "Sunshowers" takes its name and hook from a Dr. Buzzard/August Darnell song). Lizzy Mercier Descloux's "Hard-Boiled Babe" is practically dubstep-- so unprecedented that it's hard not to wonder what they were thinking while making it. On nearly every track, rules are broken, boundaries are stretched and pushed back into other territories.
(As an aside for people who might buy this but would want to supplement it with other tracks, here are some suggestions: Was (Not Was)'s "Wheel Me Out"; Cristina's "Disco Clone"; Lizzy Mercier Descloux's "Funky Stuff" or "Lady O K'pele"; Kid Creole's "Annie, I'm Not Your Daddy"; Coati Mundi's "Me No Pop I"-- all songs I'd put on a single-disc compilation of the label, all available through Ze's own digital shop, eMusic, or iTunes.)
The current musical moment isn't a particularly great time to reissue this material. There's no particularly great time to be a brave weirdo. Or, it's always a great time. Mutant Disco, unfortunately, is out of print (though available through digital retailers). Ze 30 is a decent substitution, and is accompanied by great notes rife with first-person accounts of the label's history.
When Suicide went into the studio with the Cars' Ric Ocasek, Ze co-founder Michael Zilkha hoped they'd record something like Donna Summer's chilly, momentous "I Feel Love", a track that re-imagined what disco could do without abandoning it. The duo recorded "Dream Baby Dream", an insistent tick-tock of drum machines and glockenspiels offset by the moans of Alan Vega, who does a good impression of someone who has just taken a bad fall. A song by a band that hadn't found a venue they couldn't get kicked out of, sung by a frontman who used to take to the audience swinging a bike chain. A band that, three years earlier, had recorded a ten-minute long exercise in horrific screaming called "Frankie Teardrop". And a couple of label heads thought they could squeeze a dance hit out of them. | 2009-08-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-08-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | Strut | August 14, 2009 | 7.7 | 24efab57-6fd1-45ee-b86b-0e8afe556110 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Hey Mr Ferryman is Mark Eitzel’s heaviest album, but it’s also, in a peculiar way, his sweetest—like Phil Spector orchestrating a George Saunders story. | Hey Mr Ferryman is Mark Eitzel’s heaviest album, but it’s also, in a peculiar way, his sweetest—like Phil Spector orchestrating a George Saunders story. | Mark Eitzel: Hey Mr Ferryman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22821-hey-mr-ferryman/ | Hey Mr Ferryman | So much of Mark Eitzel’s music exists in spite of itself. Sung in a husky register between a whisper and a croon, his songs are filled with characters willing themselves to disappear, transmitting from a translucent state between existence and nothingness. At the beginning of his last album, 2012’s Don’t Be a Stranger, a woman approached Eitzel to say, “I love you, but you’re dead,” a six-word phrase that sums up the tension in Eitzel’s body of work, both in his seminal band American Music Club and throughout his fruitful solo career. His songs don’t confront mortality; they drift in and out if it like subway stops.
So when the reaper himself comes to take Eitzel away in “The Last Ten Years,” the opening number of his latest album Hey Mr Ferryman, Eitzel is not particularly bothered. As he begins his descent to the netherworld, he’s actually more concerned that they get his drink order right: “So, mister ferryman,” he sings over a smooth, lite-rock groove, “Do you party where you’re from?” While Mark Eitzel’s songs have always been stately, with his moody fingerpicking standing as one of the saddest, most immediately identifiable sounds in indie rock, they’ve never been so ornate. The eleven tracks on Hey Mr Ferryman are adorned with codas and false-endings, strings and bells, backing vocals and auxiliary percussion. If Don’t Be a Stranger, with its stark ballads and haunting production, felt like a vulnerable return-to-form, this is the moment where the stakes heighten and the urgency increases: the Skeleton Tree to Stranger’s Push the Sky Away.
All the production on Ferryman might seem over-the-top (more than one song ends with an on-the-knees-at-the-edge-of-the-stage guitar solo), if his lyrics weren’t so crushing. In a standout track called “In My Role as a Professional Singer and Ham,” Eitzel wails in the chorus, “When you look at me, I look away.” It’s a sentiment that’s often rung true for Eitzel. For all his years as a working songwriter—with even a major label deal thrown in the mix for a little bit in the ’90s—he’s never armed himself for a proper breakthrough: his work always felt too quiet, too insular, too strange. But on Ferryman, Eitzel is staring right back out at you. Notice in that line in “My Role” how he holds out the second syllable of “away” to make sure he’s got your attention (while also making the self-deprecating song title feel a little less ironic). In this context, the orchestration feels less ornamental and more like a reflection of Eitzel’s own confidence and catharsis.
As always, Eitzel populates Ferryman with a myriad of stories and characters, taking the focus off of himself and onto his word choice and the thematic links between songs. Sometimes, he takes on a literal character, like in the Joni Mitchell-style showbiz tragicomedy “Mr Humphries” or the repurposed folklore of “La Llorona.” Other times, he uses his subjects as a foil for his own fatalistic tendencies. “An Answer” is one of Eitzel’s finest love songs and one that finds him questioning his entire belief system: “You make me want to stick around and find if there’s an answer,” he sings. It’s crucial that he doesn’t say, “You make me believe that there’s an answer”—it’s still a Mark Eitzel song, after all. But the idea that someone can open him up to the possibility of permanence feels like a revelation.
That sentiment forms the underlying message of Ferryman—that optimism doesn’t necessarily mean knowing that things will be okay, but simply having a reason to wait and find out if they could be. It’s Eitzel’s heaviest album, but it’s also, in a peculiar way, his sweetest—like Phil Spector orchestrating a George Saunders story. “If that was death, it’s not so bad,” Eitzel sings in “An Angel’s Wing Brushed the Penny Slot,” from the perspective of a dead woman haunting her gambling-addict widow. Visiting him in the hotel where she died, she leaves him with a pithy message: “The El Cortez still welcomes me/Guess if you die on their floor, the drinks are all free.” After all, Eitzel implies, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel is just another way to look on the bright side. | 2017-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | January 26, 2017 | 8.1 | 24f5613f-ad30-4fb5-9a6f-1b3b86be56ac | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Neko Case’s remarkable new album, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You is an exorcism of a dark period of her life, and her most plainly autobiographical album to date. It also could be the most potent record of her career. | Neko Case’s remarkable new album, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You is an exorcism of a dark period of her life, and her most plainly autobiographical album to date. It also could be the most potent record of her career. | Neko Case: The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18451-neko-case-the-worse-things-get-the-harder-i-fight/ | The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight... | It feels quaint to think of the days when people called Neko Case a country singer; she has spent the past decade moving towards a sound that makes genre descriptions seem as confining and anachronistic as corsets. Case got her start playing drums in Vancouver punk bands. Then at some point, thankfully, someone convinced her that she could sing. Even italicized, that word feels inadequate to describe the meteorological event that takes place when Neko Case opens her mouth. Case has a moonbeam for a voice: imposing in timbre, opalescent in tone, and always surprising in its sheer force.
Case’s earliest records (the first two were billed as Neko Case & Her Boyfriends), were collections of country standards and spirited but generically twangy originals (representative title: "Honky Tonk Hiccups"). But once she broke off on her own and started writing her own material, beginning with 2002’s bleakly stirring Blacklisted, two seemingly contradictory things happened. The first is that her music became increasingly more pop-oriented, owing in part to her collaborations with Canadian rockers the Sadies and a side gig as the resident siren in one of the best power-pop bands of the last decade, the New Pornographers. The other is that her music became darkly, magnificently weird. All of Case’s subsequent solo records have a surreal, untamed quality about them, thanks to her unusual taste in protagonists (tornados, female prisoners, man-eating tigers) and the idiosyncratic grit of her songwriting voice. "If I puked up some sonnets," she sings in one of the most quotable verses of her endlessly quotable new album, "Would you call me a miracle?" It’s a fair question, coming from an uncompromising artist whose career has unfurled like a sprawling, unruly piece of free verse.
After the release of her last record, 2009’s Middle Cyclone, though, Case weathered a rough patch. She lost her grandmother (with whom she was close), and then both of her parents (with whom she was not), and as a result-- something she’s begun to talk about in interviews for this record-- sunk into a depression. "It was physically debilitating," she told The Guardian recently. "You’re just in this murk. And you’re with other humans but you lose all your human skills and it’s just like you’re in this plastic bag and you can’t quite connect with people." Case’s remarkable new album, The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You is an exorcism of this dark period of her life-- and also her most plainly autobiographical album yet. It is to Case’s discography what 2005's The Sunset Tree was to the Mountain Goats’: a seasoned songwriter known for evocative portraits of fictional characters finally turning that gimlet eye in on itself. The result is the most potent album of her career.
The Worse Things Get is made of the same metal as Middle Cyclone, but fashioned into a much sharper object. The languid, mid-tempo ballads that occasionally made Cyclone sag have been replaced by songs that are shorter, tighter, and more cutting. Not a single one overstays its welcome, from the bracing, minimal self-help credo "Afraid" to the wistful "Calling Cards", a quietly devastating tale of long-suffering long-distance longing. "We’ll all be together, even when we’re not together," Case's voice swells, finally landing on a bittersweet image that rings out long after the song fades: "I’ve got calling cards from 20 years ago."
The evolution between these two records is most striking, though, when the tempo revs up. When it first came out, the punchy lead-off single "Man" sounded like a retread of Cyclone’s caustically poppy "People Got A Lotta Nerve" ("I’m a man, man, man/ Man, man, man-eater"), but within the context of the record (or even more obviously, if you play the two back to back) the earlier song can’t hold a candle to it-- "Man" is bottled lightning. M. Ward’s buzzsaw lead guitar rages like a feral creature in a too-small cage, which, Case’s seething, unbridled vocal point out, is exactly what it feels like to be imprisoned in the impossible expectations of femininity. "I’m a man/ That's what you raised me to be," she taunts like a shit-talking prizefighter. "Fat-fingered bullies were no match for me/ I still taste them in my teeth."
Case’s songs have long played fast and loose with gender roles and often star bold women ("We’ve got a lady pilot," she announced memorably on Blacklisted, "Not afraid to die!"), but at the same time they reject simple, hollow for-my-ladies sloganeering in favor of more complicated truths. The “strong, independent woman” is a cliché that society often paints in black and white, but Case’s take on the subject is a portrait of innumerable grays. In a Neko Case song, freedom, strength and womanhood are all statements punctuated by question marks rather than exclamation points. But whenever The Worse Things Get risks getting too conceptual, a casual, mildly self-deprecating humor always brings these songs back down to earth. "I was surprised when you called me a lady," she sings on "I’m From No Where", a subdued, acoustic comedown following "Man", "'Cause I’m still not so sure that’s what I wanna be." It might sound like a grand, abstract statement, but her logic's totally reasonable: "I remember the 80s/ And I remember its puffy sleeves."
It’s an emotionally wrenching record throughout, but The Worse Things Get is at its most devastating when it takes up motherhood. Animated by rattling percussion and an arrangement that chatters like a dense forest, the opener "Wild Creatures" has an intrepid air about it ("I’m not fighting for your freedom/ I am fighting to be wild") until it ends on a minor-key revelation: "There’s no mother’s hands to quiet me." This particular absence hovers constantly in the ether of The Worse Things Get, until it finally bubbles over on the stunning a capella centerpiece "Nearly Midnight, Honolulu". It’s a bold move and perhaps the most polarizing song she’s ever released; Case usually dresses her subjects up in magical realism and poetic turns of phrase, but she’s never worn her heart on her sleeve as plainly as she does here. The song tells the story of a mother Case saw screaming at a child in an airport in Hawaii-- "Get the fuck away from me!/ Why don’t you ever shut up?"-- and as she sings them she slathers the mother’s words in reverb, the echo poignantly suggesting ripple effects they’ll have on the kid’s psyche. "Honolulu" hits like a shot to the gut. Case writes the song as an open letter to the neglected child ("Don’t you ever shut up, kid/ Please have your say") and amidst the arrangement’s negative space, her voice is a thick blanket in the shivering cold.
And that’s the most impressive thing about The Worse Things Get: though it’s a record that looks at topics like depression and parental neglect square in the teeth, its overall tone is one of resilience. The penultimate track, "Where Did I Leave That Fire" begins with a sparse, post-rock arrangement but eventually gathers into a triumphant and surprisingly comic midtempo ballad about mojo returned. But the true victory lap is "Ragtime", a rousing blast of "Crimson and Clover"-esque pop that serves up hard-won hope and plenty of mantras for carrying on. "I’ll reveal myself invincible soon," Case sings, as a parade’s worth of brass swells around her in agreement.
Somehow, The Worse Things Get is Case’s tightest record and also her strangest. With its off-kilter arrangements and eccentric turns of phrase, it’s a world unto itself. If it has any contemporaries, they’re records like Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel… or Cat Power’s Sun-- the works of artists for whom “maturity” has not meant putting out that fire that Case sings so evocatively about chasing. | 2013-09-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-09-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Anti- | September 5, 2013 | 8.2 | 250c8ffd-769a-476d-ad3e-3a3834b58cd7 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
This new LP from psych-folk guitar hero Ben Chasny is his warmest, most accessible release yet. Its supporting cast of avant-rock all-stars includes Damon & Naomi, Ryley Walker, and Circuit Des Yeux. | This new LP from psych-folk guitar hero Ben Chasny is his warmest, most accessible release yet. Its supporting cast of avant-rock all-stars includes Damon & Naomi, Ryley Walker, and Circuit Des Yeux. | Six Organs of Admittance: Burning the Threshold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22928-burning-the-threshold/ | Burning the Threshold | For nearly 20 years now, Ben Chasny has been releasing a steady stream of records as Six Organs of Admittance, playing with other bands (Comets on Fire, Rangda) and participating in countless one-off collaborations. But 2015 found the psych-folk guitar hero embarking on a different kind of touring. The two Six Organs album he issued that year—Hexadic and Hexadic II—weren’t just complementary electric/acoustic riffs on the same material. They were also veritable display models for a new, open-source model of composition that Chasny had developed, through specially notated and arranged playing cards. Explaining the concept—known as the Hexadic system—required Chasny to write an accompanying book, issue his own line of cards, draft up diagrams, and maintain an extensive section of related resources on his website. And for added clarity, he even hosted a series of lectures on the subject.
But as much as the Hexadic project seemed to announce a new phase in Chasny’s career, its sheer scope and complexity has, for now at least, had the opposite effect—that is, it’s prompted Chasny to pursue simpler pleasures in his music. With Burning the Threshold, he reverts to the acoustic idyll last heard on 2011’s Asleep on the Floodplain. However, where that melodically-focused record could drift off into oscillating 12-minute odysseys, the new album puts a premium on clarity and concision. Quite simply, this is the warmest, most welcoming, and accessible album in Six Organs’ canon—which may come as a disappointment to fans who prefer Chasny’s more extreme excursions. But for those who first encountered Chasny alongside Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom in 2004-era New Weird America magazine features, and haven’t kept up with his prolific pace, this is the perfect place to rediscover his mesmerizing musicianship and sublime songcraft.
Chasny wrote Burning the Threshold while working on a musical based on the life of Wallace Stevens, and the though the two projects aren’t directly related, the poet’s magic realist approach shaped the album’s thematic framework. Like his participatory approach to promoting Hexadic, Chasny has a way of translating weighty, obtuse ideas from science and theology into pure, easily relatable messaging. On “Things As They Are,” Chasny invokes Stevens’ necessary-angel archetype to meditate on the relationship between natural wonder and human progress. On “Adoration Song,” he becomes possibly the first indie rock artist to namedrop French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in song when he intones, “our friend Gaston says we’re made of lines,” before channeling that sentiment into a jubilant chorus. Over vigorous open-chord strums, he exhorts, “Rise up now!/So Sun softly speaks/Adoration comes from our softened beaks,” transforming the song into an oblique protest anthem at a time when the very concept of compassion feels like it’s under attack by the powers that be.
Though it ranks among Chasny’s most gentle records, Burning the Threshold nonetheless accommodates a large supporting cast of avant-rock all stars who lend these intimately scaled songs a greater dimension. The gorgeous “Under Fixed Stars” takes the hushed intro to the Rolling Stones’ “Moonlight Mile” and spins it out into a mantra, with Damon & Naomi’s hypnotic hums swaddling some of Chasny’s most tender lyrics to date (“I kept your letters inside my sleeve/Between my heart and my hand they breathe”). The instrumental “Around the Axis,” by contrast, sees Chasny squaring off against finger-picking phenom Ryley Walker in a left channel/right channel duel, their tense, tangled interplay blurring the line between harmony and discord. And in the album’s lone act of aggression, “Taken by Ascent,” Chasny busts out his electric to shred overtop a taut, Chris Corsano-powered groove, with haunting guest vocals from Haley Fohr (a.k.a. Circuit Des Yeux) intensifying the song’s ominous thrust.
But that proves to be a fleeting black-could intrusion on an album that otherwise brims with sunrise-summoning optimism, where every glistening guitar pluck seems to shake off the morning dew. Beyond the Threshold hits its rapturous peak on “St. Eustace,” which resembles a Zeppelin III folk jam given a kosmische spin courtesy of Cooper Crain’s splendorous synth drones. The song is named for the second-century Roman warrior who gave himself over to Christianity after seeing a vision of a crucifix hovering between the antlers of the deer he was hunting. Likewise, Beyond the Threshold is a means to coax ecstatic experiences from everyday occurrences—whether through communion with God or just a bottle of Jager. | 2017-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Drag City | February 28, 2017 | 8.1 | 250e45f0-fb00-4de7-9628-3a77d445551f | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
With his career in a statistical downfall, the L.A. rapper and his inferiority complex return for another round. | With his career in a statistical downfall, the L.A. rapper and his inferiority complex return for another round. | The Game: L.A.X. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12123-lax/ | L.A.X. | Reality used to be a friend of Game; these days, he's better off with its close cousin, perception. Statistically, his short but eventful career is in a freefall-- his sophomore album, Doctor's Advocate, sold several million fewer copies than its predecessor, The Document**ary, his first feature film (Waist Deep) couldn't even be enjoyed ironically, and I've never seen his Converse Hurricane shoe in stores, let alone in public. And I live in L.A. Yet, the perception is that he's riding a head of artistic steam into L.A.X. due to, as Pitchfork contributor Jayson Greene put it, shedding the impression that he's one of the least interesting rappers to ever go platinum. Where he was once reverent of anyone in hip-hop that had been in the same room as a record deal, the Game soon alienated nearly everyone responsible for The Document's success-- as far as role-playing goes, unstable psycho was infinitely more entertaining than name-dropping money pit.
The problem is, self-immolation is an artistic ideal that doesn't leave much of an exit strategy, and once the dud singles and release dates started piling up for L.A.X., Game was left to do his A.J. Soprano routine in magazines, unable to handle his daddy issues and at times threatening to kill other people or himself. The perception of Doctor's Advocate as career suicide made it a voyeuristic pleasure for the message-board rubberneckers Game actively courts. That inferiority complex and desperate need for approval keeps L.A.X. surprisingly entertaining even though there are far more weak tracks on it than good ones.
Still, it's difficult to keep seeing him as a loose cannon ("Hated on so much/ Passion of Christ need a sequel," he raps) when most of his adversaries respond to his beefs by completely ignoring him, and when nearly every viable hip-hop artist (plus Travis Barker) makes a guest spot here. Obviously, a lot of those spots are late-90s-style padding: If DMX's performance on the intro and outro are any indication, his gospel-rap ambitions should result in the comedy record of the year, and while Tha Carter III has sold 25,000 copies in the time it takes to read this paragraph, the beyond-hideous hook of "woe is Game" weepie "My Life" suggests Lil Wayne's too in hock to buy an autotuner that can work at full capacity.
Befitting someone who, to be honest, is still learning on the job, Game continues to improve although there are certain handicaps that he'll never overcome-- he compares himself to Chris Paul ("I never dribble out of bounds"), but he's more like Shaq trying to run a fastbreak. There's something almost endearing about the confidence he has in his lumbering flow (watch him try a double-time spit on "L.A.X. Files" or lope triplets on "Cali Sunshine") and limited ability to create on the fly, but really, you just brace yourself and hope no one gets seriously injured. His similes can still be painfully awkward ("flow like oregano"?), his boasts more idiot than savant ("Word to Martha Stewart/ If I can park a Buick/ I can flip a Brinks truck/ I've got the heart to do it"), and he relies on variants of "fuck" to fill up syllables to the point where charging money for a clean version is a "fuck you" in itself. At least he only threatens to break into Dr. Dre's house once.
For better or worse, his increasing confidence has allowed him to aim for concepts beyond the usual talk of how dangerous California is, trading darts with Raekwon and making a bilious rainmaker with Cool & Dre that rejiggers "She Works Hard for the Money" into Game's very own "Push It to the Limit". But then you get idea tracks like "Never Say Goodbye", which is rapped from the perspective of 2Pac, Biggie and Eazy-E right before their deaths; the "One More Chance" karaoke in the middle portion is probably the most embarrassing thing Game will ever do in his career, which is saying something. But at least that seems like a noble failure-- no matter how much better Game gets on the mic, he'll never record a decent love song or stop trying. His bullish voice, however, sounds more convincing talking about Ice Cube's Lethal Injection than anything with the faintest hint of eroticism-- not even David Tyree would vouch for "beautiful as an Eli Manning pass" as a viable pickup line.
After Ludacris effortlessly sasses up "Ya Heard" like Game never could, he laments the attention given to Kanye and Weezy before asking, "Y'all act like y'all don't hear me spit/ Like selling 7 million records ain't shit". It's an absurd boast but it's a canny move to align himself as a peer of those two as opposed to an adversary-- the hundreds of barbs Game threw at 50 Cent had a fraction of the impact Wayne and Kanye exerted by speaking the only language Curtis understands: record sales. But the Game may have at least unloosened the screws for G-Unit's epic collapse. Relatively, he's won Round 3 by making his third straight album that's better than it has any right to be-- but the fact that the Game can make perfectly uncompelling competence sound like victory is proof that he's a master thespian of hip-hop theater. Waist Deep notwithstanding. | 2008-08-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-08-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Geffen | August 22, 2008 | 6.4 | 2511ef92-93f3-4403-b890-d90c7618079d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
It would be easy to dismiss most of Blonde Redhead's output as a triumph of style over substance. Purveyors ... | It would be easy to dismiss most of Blonde Redhead's output as a triumph of style over substance. Purveyors ... | Blonde Redhead: Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/804-melody-of-certain-damaged-lemons/ | Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons | It would be easy to dismiss most of Blonde Redhead's output as a triumph of style over substance. Purveyors of all things avant-garde and chic in the NYC indie underground, the group's hipness quotient is horribly precious. Comprised of Japanese vocalist/guitarist Kazu Makino and Italian twins Amedeo (vocals/guitar) and Simone Pace (drums), Blonde Redhead's self-consciously arty clang has made me wish I was a hip "no-wave" New Yorker rather than an mere enthusiast of this band's works.
Blonde Redhead's biggest detractors focus on the group's uncanny resemblance to Sonic Youth. But while Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons won't exactly silence such suggestions, it does seem to move conscientiously away from the influences that have marred the group's previous work. The title itself makes plain Blonde Redhead's musical M.O.: they've tempered their indulgences somewhat, and begun focusing on integrating hooks and feeling into their cavalcade of ringing guitars and propulsive percussion. It doesn't quite qualify as a pop album, but it definitely serves as their warmest and most accessible record yet.
Perhaps the presence of Fugazi guitarist Guy Picciotto behind the boards has had something to do with this progression. This album is as much an advancement over Blonde Redhead's similarly Picciotto-produced 1998 LP, In an Expression of the Inexpressible, as Expression was over 1997's Fake Can Be Just as Good. Songs like "Melody of Certain Three" maintain the band's archetype while strengthening their grasp of dynamics-- Simone still pounds the drums in a murderous rage, but also leaves room here for some welcome tempo change.
More surprising is "Loved Despite of Great Faults," certainly the closest the group has come to writing a full-fledged love song. Amedeo's accented delivery of lines like, "You will move with me/ We will stay still/ And words will move around us," connect moreso than Kazu's typically orgasmic vocalizations. Kazu is thankfully more restrained here without reducing her vocal contributions, the finest of which is "This is Not." Easily one of the most puzzling tracks the group has recorded, "This is Not" brings to mind what an unlikely collaboration between Blonde Redhead and the Magnetic Fields might sound like.
While not necessarily distinguishing themselves immeasurably from setting and influence, Blonde Redhead have begun to produce music that evades such nets. The potential evidenced on Melody easily outdoes the band's previous outings and hints at a full flowering of their work in the near future. After all this time, the band are progressively figuring it out. So, rather than musing ponderously on life in the elegantly wasted East Coast Babylon, I can finally appreciate what it is Blonde Redhead are doing and expect them to continue doing better. | 2000-06-06T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2000-06-06T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Touch and Go | June 6, 2000 | 7.8 | 2512e882-6707-4800-a4e0-1163acb9eda3 | Hefner Macauley | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hefner-macauley/ | null |
Despite the ramblings of armchair philosophers and fanatical pseudo-luddites, a computer is not a cold, inherently impersonal entity. Unlike more ... | Despite the ramblings of armchair philosophers and fanatical pseudo-luddites, a computer is not a cold, inherently impersonal entity. Unlike more ... | Jim O’Rourke: I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1, 2, 3, 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6041-im-happy-and-im-singing-and-a-1-2-3-4/ | I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1, 2, 3, 4 | Despite the ramblings of armchair philosophers and fanatical pseudo-luddites, a computer is not a cold, inherently impersonal entity. Unlike more utilitarian electronic items (calculators, microwaves, etc), computers can be endowed by their owners with a sometimes startling degree of personality. Countless hours of work are often put into creating a computer that bears the characteristics of its owner, or at least the characteristics that its owner wants it to possess.
And yet, many people still seem to be reluctant to acknowledge that something warm, organic, and truly personal can emerge from the silicon belly of a Powerbook-- especially when it comes to music. Journalists have been going on for ages about some pieces of wood, molded metal, and a few electromagnets being an extension of the penis. What's so different about the concept of a laptop being an extension of the laptop? No, a computer can't be physically smacked around like a guitar or a set of drums, but its nearly limitless potential for the creation and manipulation of sound makes it a perfect medium for uniquely personal music.
I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1, 2, 3, 4 is a collection of three tracks performed by Jim O'Rourke on his laptop computer in New York, Osaka, and Tokyo. Given the nature of these performances, the record inhabits that squishy gray area somewhere between a composition and an improvisation. Since this is the first time these songs have been released, it's impossible to know how much of the album is premeditated.
The results of O'Rourke's half-improvisations are absolutely stunning. I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1, 2, 3, 4 is comprised of sounds too intricate and complex to be the product of spontaneous experimentation. But unlike many albums consisting of such sounds, this album moves at the speed of human thought, developing in a subtle, methodical, yet never cold and technical manner. Changes happen slowly enough that you can fully take in every nuance, yet nothing ever seems obvious.
"I'm Happy" opens the record with nondescript glitchy sine waves playing a sparse, quiet pattern. That pattern swells to a buzzing mass of sound so dense that it seems to comprise a single melodic entity. Gradually, O'Rourke manipulates this one central sonic pillar, adding sounds that vary slightly in melody and timbre. And somehow, he manages to keep "I'm Happy" dense enough to be completely enveloping, while still open enough to be noticeably transformed by every one of its individual voices. About halfway through the track, a series of subtle melodic changes and the addition of a humming bass drone drastically alter the character of the song, though the elements comprising remain largely unchanged.
Though "I'm Happy" fades out with a few moments of dark ambience, the following track, "And I'm Singing," showcases a more playful side of O'Rourke's laptop. Opening with the stuttered sounds of a timer and chime, "And I'm Singing" then sees him using looped keyboards and synthesized sounds to create what could best be described as a single fragment of a gorgeous melody frozen in time. Strange, ambiguous percussive sounds create a controlled cacophony, until the song metamorphoses into a minimalistic arrangement of clean and distorted synthesized blips. A single array of melodies is repeated, developing so slowly that it can barely be noticed. It then flows seamlessly into what could be the album's finest moment: a progression of odd, ambiguous sounds backed by distorted sine waves and acoustic guitar. Like its predecessor, "And I'm Singing" ends with a brief period of subdued ambience.
Whereas "I'm Happy" and " And I'm Singing" often use a flurry of individual sounds to create the illusion tranquility, "And a 1, 2, 3, 4" is much more sparse, allowing the listener to focus more closely on every sound O'Rourke uses. And the sounds themselves are utterly gorgeous-- subtly manipulated strings that quiver and pulsate in slow, sweeping gestures, constantly arranging themselves into new harmonic patterns. As more voices are added, these patterns become more complex and more regular until the end of the song, at which point O'Rourke gently deconstructs the layers of sound that have been building for over fifteen minutes with the introduction of new, thoroughly engaging sounds that function almost like a screen behind which the song can dismantle itself.
Indeed, I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1, 2, 3, 4, despite its somewhat ridiculous title and its digital origins, is a startlingly personal, affecting album, drawing as much on the fragile melodicism of folk music as the technical manipulation of minimalism. And considering the strength of the bond that can develop between a man and his machine, this record may be O'Rourke's most direct statement to date. | 2002-01-27T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2002-01-27T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental | Mego | January 27, 2002 | 9 | 25140d0c-7a92-4476-9ecc-594d0ccb72fc | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Cursive and the Good Life frontman again effectively takes his music to the edge of emotional catastrophe. | Cursive and the Good Life frontman again effectively takes his music to the edge of emotional catastrophe. | Tim Kasher: The Game of Monogamy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14685-the-game-of-monogamy/ | The Game of Monogamy | "Self-absorbed" isn't how you typically describe good art, or good people for that matter, but Tim Kasher has made a nice career for himself as an exception to that rule. Whether in the guise of Cursive's caustic, thrashing emo or the perpetually evolving Good Life's intimate confessionals, Kasher and the central figure in his songs have often seemed like the same guy: someone all too aware of his own flaws but almost entirely unsympathetic; someone condemned to doomed relationships who'd likely still be miserable without anyone else's help. As he states on The Game of Monogamy's "Strays", "writers are selfish, writers are egotists/ I'm afraid I'm as bad as it gets"-- and that's this record's love song.
After Kasher's 2003-04 career peak (Cursive's The Ugly Organ, the Good Life's Album of the Year), his musical horizons and themes broadened. And although Kasher had proven to be a master of self-immolation, when tackling Big Topics, his flame only burned lukewarm. As the title of The Game of Monogamy indicates, Kasher's back in his wheelhouse of pain, rendering married life in such suffocating and punishing terms that even the most militant Proposition-8 opponent will think, "we're fighting for this?" It's probably the most typically "Kasher" theme possible, but musically it also serves as a compendium that reconciles his two main projects. Awkward Baskin-Robbins/ sexual dissatisfaction metaphor aside, "Cold Love" is Kasher at his most power-pop, with the sarcastically neurotic "Bad, Bad Dreams" not far behind. On the other end, the delicate acoustic picking on "Strays" makes it sound like a heartbreaker, even if the wearied contentment of finding love amidst lost souls is the closest he gets to happiness. Between those two poles are the bandcamp orchestration you've come to expect from Saddle Creek-- the upbeat brass pomp of "I'm Afraid I'm Gonna Die Here" comes off as totally sarcastic considering its lyrical misery, while the strings of "There Must Be Something I've Lost" throw Kasher even deeper into despair.
Even so, as with most of Kasher's work, the main draws of Monogamy aren't really musical-- words always get prominence over melody. Simply put, if you get a spark out of idealizing your romantic failures by doing things like drunkenly Googling ex-girlfriends (as he does in great detail on "There Must Be Something I've Lost"), listening to Monogamy as a whole is like dousing yourself in gasoline. There's little poetry in Kasher's poisonous lyrics, he barely even bothers to rhyme them, and he'll ignore meter altogether if it means getting the last word in. But his directness can prove to be a bandage-ripping rush that gets the core of feelings that are repressed only to reveal themselves uglier than ever. "I am a grown man/ How did this happen? People are gonna start expecting more from me," is the first line Kasher sorta-sings and from there on out, it's something like if Arcade Fire's The Suburbs was written by Grinderman, middle-class, middle-age anxiety filtered through a prism of psychosexual panic.
As cathartic as it can be, a big reason that Kasher's never pitched a perfect game can be chalked up to how the accumulative effect of his unyielding cynicism feels like self-fulfilling prophecy: Though "No Fireworks" is the ninth song on Monogamy, by that point, it feels like the 10th song about how committing yourself to one person will inevitably result in an unsatisfying sex life. Still, if you want to take yourself to the edge of emotional catastrophe while maintaining a safe distance, Kasher's got the best shit in town: I'm always hesitant to use the term "guilty pleasure," but I'll stop short and suggest that the pleasure that Monogamy provides is at the very least unhealthy, a controlled substance that packs less buzz with each use and that Saddle Creek should at least have put a warning on saying "do not combine with alcohol or listen to while operating within heavy relationships." | 2010-09-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-09-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | September 30, 2010 | 6.6 | 25151338-a6aa-4c18-b0b4-ea29f68755b9 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
This brisk, summery, inarguably fun EP features Quavo, Travis Scott, and Jidenna gliding atop the trio’s tropical big-tent beats, which coincide with the all-too familiar riddims of Top 10 radio. | This brisk, summery, inarguably fun EP features Quavo, Travis Scott, and Jidenna gliding atop the trio’s tropical big-tent beats, which coincide with the all-too familiar riddims of Top 10 radio. | Major Lazer: Know No Better EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23379-know-no-better-ep/ | Know No Better EP | Who better to thrive in our island-obsessed pop multiverse than Diplo? A decade after he and Switch produced M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” the tropical collage favored by the duo, who officially became Major Lazer in 2009, dominates the airwaves. Acts as disparate as Daddy Yankee, Ed Sheeran, and the Chainsmokers share the Top 10, indulging in mid-tempo riddims and stadium-worthy hooks that take cues from dancehall.
Switch departed in 2011, but Major Lazer endures. Diplo and his new accomplices Walshy Fire and Jillionaire traded in any hint of countercultural signifiers for pop’s big tent and a collection of of-the-moment co-stars on its 2015 album Peace is the Mission. Know No Better, a new EP, released with little warning last week*,* mines similar territory*. *The first two tracks alone feature Quavo, Sean Paul, Travis Scott, J. Balvin and Camila Cabello—add the Major Lazer trio and that’s the kind of dizzying star-power on which *Fast and the Furious *franchises are founded.
Those initial two songs, along with a third, “Particula,” are the highlights on this brisk clubby delight of an EP, which doesn’t quite clear the 20-minute mark. Each has a standout section; on the title track, it’s Travis Scott, gleefully surfing a thumping bouncy-castle of a 4/4 beat in his opening verses. Balvin adds real feeling to the bridge of his feature “Buscando Huellas” the strongest overall song on the EP. And the Afrobeat-influenced “Particula” features the catchiest hook, thanks to the Nigerian vocalist Ice Prince and some nicely timed synths.
Mix and match those three sections and you might have a candidate for the song of the summer. But consigned to their separate slots, they serve as mere scene-setters on tracks that convey only mood and nothing more. All three songs are conceptually bankrupt, lacking even the simplest sentiments to coax listeners to return. That might help explain why the rappers here seem so adrift: Quavo, Sean Paul, and Jidenna slide by in near-anonymity, unable to hinge their verses on even the thinnest outcropping of meaning.
Still, no listener in a summery state of mind would object to the three openers, nor to “Sua Cara,” a too-short samba-influenced ballad featuring the Brazilian singer Anitta, whose thin, pretty voice may remind American listeners of the Nina Sky twins. It’s the heavier, more club-ready songs—“Jump” and the soca cut “Front of the Line” —that fall entirely flat, lacking the jots of inspiration that collaborators are able to provide elsewhere.
Diplo’s appropriator-in-chief act notwithstanding, it’s possible that the American producer simply has his hands in too many pots. In a recent interview on Beats One, he enthusiastically described the many projects he has in the works—a collaboration with Mark Ronson, another, rap-themed EP under his own name, a full Major Lazer album coming in the fall—while habitually forgetting who it was that he was actually working with. An eye for emerging talent has always served Major Lazer in good stead, but relying on features can only get an act so far, even in the most welcoming of pop environments. And as fun as it is at times, *Know No Better *doubles as a testament to the result of spreading a handful of good ideas too thin. | 2017-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Pop/R&B | Mad Decent | June 7, 2017 | 6.4 | 2516ae86-e518-4292-9871-f6ce5a2e616e | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
Without sacrificing any of the technical virtuosity, the pair of Tennesseans have made THREE* *their most personal collection to date. They turn street voyeurism and psychic panic into a triumph. | Without sacrificing any of the technical virtuosity, the pair of Tennesseans have made THREE* *their most personal collection to date. They turn street voyeurism and psychic panic into a triumph. | Starlito / Don Trip: Step Brothers THREE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23047-starlito-don-trip-step-brothers-three/ | Step Brothers THREE | About forty minutes into Step Brothers THREE, on the somber “Just Want It All,” Don Trip raps: “All I know is the truth, and I pour it all in my lines/Looking for more of my kind, Lito was all I could find.” Lito, of course, is Starlito, Trip’s collaborator of six years and one of the only working rappers who can match him bar for bar, threat for threat. Their work together over three full-length records and some stray shots is an alchemic blend of technique and confession; each has pushed the other to write the best, most incisive material of his career. Without sacrificing any of the technical virtuosity, the pair of Tennesseans has made THREE their most personal collection to date.
Lito and Trip—from Nashville and Memphis, respectively—are rapper’s rappers, but they write as if they need to get out of the booth and attend to real life as soon as possible. (Later in the same verse from “Just Want It All,” Trip laments his sister’s jealousy over the car he bought his mother, makes sure his kitchen is fully stocked with pans, then takes friends fishing to keep them out of prison.) In the middle of “The 13th Amendment Song,” Starlito even sets a hard deadline: “Ain’t it ironic that they lock us up for playing with keys?/Save your receipts, ‘cause freedom ain’t free, and lawyers ain’t cheap/And I know—I got court on the 18th.” Whatever the opposite of escapism is, that’s Step Brothers THREE.
Both rappers were run through the industry ringer earlier in their careers, but they smartly avoid casting themselves as virtuous outsiders to a vacuous mainstream. Instead, they tunnel deep into their own worlds, their own psyches (Starlito, from “What I Gotta Do”: “I ain’t watch the news since they shot at me”). Instead of turning solipsistic, you get writers who reveal themselves through their interactions with others—Trip obsessing over his kids’ seatbelts, Lito weighing the risk-reward in lying to a woman who’s already lost her trust in him.
On a purely aesthetic level, Lito and Trip are uniquely well-suited for a duo. The former’s voice is lower, gruffer, where the latter brightens songs and gives them a buoyancy that they might otherwise be missing. The writing itself is almost telepathically in sync, but the vocal approaches give the impression that the step brothers are approaching the truth from opposite sides. (They’ve leveraged this to chilling effect in the past: “Caesar and Brutus,” from Step Brothers TWO, pits Lito and Trip as blood rivals.) On the closer “Untitled No Hook,” you’re left with the distinct feeling that each rapper gets something different out of the pursuit, which in turn makes a song like “3rd 2nd Chance” all the more affecting.
And yet, while each rapper is prone to introspection, and while listening to Step Brothers THREE frequently feels voyeuristic, the album opens with an exaltation. “Yeah 5X” is full of infidelity and deposition testimony and trunks stuffed with shrink-wrapped bricks. At one point, Trip raps, “My nigga beat a murder trial, to us that’s called triumph.” That’s what this record (and really, the whole collaboration) is: a triumph. Don Trip and Starlito’s music is bursting with the sort of low-level psychic panic that’s just below the surface in nearly everybody. They navigate that—and suspicious lovers, predatory record executives, would-be assailants, and so on—and come out the other side with vivid, virtuosic rap music. What could be more triumphant? | 2017-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Empire / Grind Hard | March 29, 2017 | 7.7 | 2519b1f2-30d1-4f9c-b4d6-7c5ab4114cd9 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
The rapper-producer’s third album answers the exhaustion of contemporary life online by stripping down and buttoning up, yielding a newly disciplined take on his trademark deep house. | The rapper-producer’s third album answers the exhaustion of contemporary life online by stripping down and buttoning up, yielding a newly disciplined take on his trademark deep house. | Galcher Lustwerk: Information | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/galcher-lustwerk-information/ | Information | Galcher Lustwerk has finally come in from the cold. After six years of moving like a silhouette across club floors, the New York producer is up to something far more conspicuous. Information, his third full-length (and first for Ghostly International), dispenses with the shadow play and arrives like a no-frills dispatch from the border region of burnout and sensory glut. Now, Lustwerk passes as old guard, and he’s at ease whenever his tracks are most on edge. The 12 compositions that make up Information have evolved his sensual, liquid style into one that distills the contradictory logics of the digital age—it’s tense, airless, and paranoid without losing an inch of his comic swagger or mischievous irony, a sensibility cultivated by bone-deep cultural exhaustion.
The unconstrained lushness of Lustwerk’s past productions has undergone austerity measures: He’s gutted the interiors of his hypnotic house, leaving behind only the raw materials as Information’s sonic architecture. Crisp live drum samples replace the excessively tweaked-out kicks and crushed snares of his early repertoire. While his mixes are often pushed into the red, Lustwerk has throttled back the voltage. Each track on Information sports shellacked surface tension, glossy and high-resolution. The back-to-back sequencing of “I See a Dime” and “Another Story” quickly establishes this disciplined palette. On each track, sharpened hi-hats skip over tightened bongo patterns or clave bursts, clearing up space for new streams of information: sparse synths, moving like viscous tides strategically expanded by taut stereo delays.
Lustwerk devotees might need a moment to adjust to the unused square footage. Information, as a whole, finds definition in its heady ambiguity. The logic that guides his production works like a redacted document, the producer withholding key parcels of information (a verse, a key change, a new melody) for as long as he can get away with it. On “Been a Long Night,” a loose groove topped off with dizzy synth pads and glassy digital piano, Lustwerk holds off on introducing the song’s first verse until the three-minute mark. Once the flow cuts in—“Damn, just my type/Been a long night, yeah/It’s been a long night”—Lustwerk drops out one of the muddier synths, swapping it for a stern bassline that immediately sharpens the track’s focus.
No sound or detail on Information arrives without a censor’s level of scrutiny, or suspicion: Lustwerk as public information officer, dispensing his like an official statement. Even if it’s a bit, or the latest iteration of his persona, Lustwerk never breaks the self-serious pose. This consistency, while laudable, is double-edged: Information can be so in the cut that it leaves itself unable to make any sudden moves. It makes you miss the unpredictable zigs and zags of Lustwerk’s pre-Dark Bliss material, which was always trying to outrun our expectations.
Lustwerk is confronting them, rather. Instead of retreating into the hazy, nocturnal electronics that he perfected on 200% Galcher and Dark Bliss, or logging off entirely, he offers a bearable take on the fatigue collectively suffered by anyone plugged into modern information networks. The attrition of 24/7 connection is the theme that underpins Information. In a recent conversation with DJ Mag, Lustwerk explained his headspace: “With this album especially, that there’s this undercurrent of being really, really burnt out,” he continues. “For the past two years, I was burnt out, all of the time. I’m almost... inoperable, you know.” There’s little daylight between that feeling and how he renders it on the album. “Information overload, man/Occupation overlord, man,” Lustwerk says on “Bit,” a deconstructed funk that moves like Fresh-era Sly and the Family Stone. At each of the album’s scene changes, Lustwerk’s wordplay keeps looping and interlocking around paranoid subtexts. Lustwerk, the avatar, the man, can’t seem to shake some all-seeing eye. A virutal chase sequence runs the distance of the album from “Another Story” (“Got my shoes on my feet/Got my cash got my keys out the door on the street/People following me get the fuck off my back/Go the fuck off the map”) to album closer “Speed” (“Running out of time/What’s it gonna be/Who you wanna be/Do you got some speed/Do you got control/Do you know your role”).
The burnt-out optics of Information would be fatalistic if not for Lustwerk’s ability to work in a fantasy headspace according to a warped set of coordinates. One of his boldest statements to date, “Cig Angel” isn’t cleanly located in the realm of hip-house or left-field R&B or dance music. It’s a sedated anthem few would have imagined Lustwerk producing, a love song for the pre-dawn. Nervous and quavering chords find relief in the track’s cool, restrained drums. Above the mix, Lustwerk’s oxidized voice whispers the word “angel”—a deliciously simple hook that will survive the obsolescence of electronic anthems similar to it. The fantasy of Information feels less like an attempt at creating cinematic ambience or cold, urban moods, and more like an investigation of the stretch between darkness of night and daybreak. Here, Lustwerk’s game is to see how long you can sustain something like the state the novelist William Gibson is said to have found his stories in—“Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking”—before dissolving into screens or restless slumber.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | December 3, 2019 | 7.9 | 251cda88-3c86-4aa9-a3c1-06c2466b6667 | Nathan Taylor Pemberton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-taylor pemberton/ | |
Though too scattered to stand alone, the various demos and remixes culled from Carrie & Lowell add new context and dimension to Sufjan Stevens’ masterful album. | Though too scattered to stand alone, the various demos and remixes culled from Carrie & Lowell add new context and dimension to Sufjan Stevens’ masterful album. | Sufjan Stevens: The Greatest Gift | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sufjan-stevens-the-greatest-gift/ | The Greatest Gift | Despite its austerity, Sufjan Stevens’ 2015 album Carrie & Lowell aligns more neatly with its immediate predecessors—the synth phantasmagoria of The Age of Adz and the baroque pop odyssey of Illinois—than it does with the singer’s early chamber-folk. All that he learned in crafting those two epics he applied to the hushed reassembly of his grief after his mother’s death, plus a little extra, all-purpose sorrow to boot. Carrie & Lowell sounds cavernous, covered with nooks and fissures and intimate production details—the multi-tracking of Stevens’ worn, cracking voice, the barely audible sleigh bells sparkling across “Should Have Known Better” and the title track’s windswept coda. On the album’s companion anthology The Greatest Gift, Stevens opens a window onto the process of making and living with Carrie & Lowell, from its first tentative iPhone demos to the remixes performed onstage during its accompanying tour.
Unlike 2006’s The Avalanche, where Stevens culled B-sides from the 90-minute Illinois plus a few alternate versions of “Chicago,” The Greatest Gift focuses mostly on reframing songs from Carrie & Lowell. Only four tracks here are previously unheard, and it’s easy to see why they didn’t make the album’s cut. “Wallowa Lake Monster” explores the same complicated maternal relationship that haunts Carrie & Lowell through the childlike lens of an aquatic cryptid, which would have thrown an odd third element into the album’s cosmology of stark realism and Christianity. While lovely, “The Hidden River of My Life” taps back into that interminable whimsy—“Suppose the world was not informed by real estate or power lines,” Stevens muses two minutes before declaring himself a beaver—and both “City of Roses” and “The Greatest Gift” could fit right in with Stevens’ many hours of Christmas music.
The weary, spectral iPhone demos included here also shed some light into just how an album like Carrie & Lowell is born—in multiple, slow passes, with a lot of deliberation and labor between them. “John My Beloved,” sung into an iPhone mic, features lyrics that would later be tweaked: Stevens reads John for “some kind of stone” instead of “some kind of poem,” and there’s a “ring” and a “life-giving string” that feel a bit like stock objects from the Sufjan Stevens prop closet. In embryo form, “Carrie & Lowell” lacks that memorable coda, ending abruptly after the second verse. These unvarnished sketches hint at the way the entire album may have been written: not in a single outpouring but in halting bursts stifled by each song’s emotional weight.
The highlight of the collection is easily the remixes, which tease out the compact stems of the original songs and let them flourish in open, flowing space. Helado Negro helms two remixes, of “Death With Dignity” and “All of Me Wants All of You,” and the way he unwinds previously buried vocal harmonies is enough to make you want a full-blown, album-length collaboration between the two artists. Stevens’ own remix of “Drawn to the Blood” hews close enough to the version on Carrie & Lowell Live, but with crisper vocals, while Doveman’s gentle take on the 2015 tour single “Exploding Whale” lends as much gravitas as possible to a song that contains the words “epic fail.”
Though too scattered to stand alone, The Greatest Gift adds new dimension to Carrie & Lowell. It’s easy enough to read albums, especially those as moving as Stevens’, as ironclad cultural objects, produced once and then immutable. The Greatest Gift contextualizes the work more as a living document. It exposes shadows of the album’s past and future, and for that, it’s exquisitely generous. | 2017-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Asthmatic Kitty | November 29, 2017 | 7.2 | 2520ab2a-9893-42e4-a877-3ea4c24774b2 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Savoy Motel recreate the sounds of the ’70s using the ’90s pastiche techniques of Beck, Ween and Royal Trux, compacting glam-rock, southern boogie, and Stax sax stabs into 8-bit videogame proportions. | Savoy Motel recreate the sounds of the ’70s using the ’90s pastiche techniques of Beck, Ween and Royal Trux, compacting glam-rock, southern boogie, and Stax sax stabs into 8-bit videogame proportions. | Savoy Motel: Savoy Motel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22454-savoy-motel/ | Savoy Motel | On first glance, it’s easy to peg Savoy Motel as ’70s revivalists. Their logo is rendered in Shotgun font like the title card on some Saturday morning kids’ show; the Lichtenstein-style pop-art graphic of their debut album resembles a bargain-bin K-Tel comp of disco hits. And in their videos, the Nashville quartet come off as a cross between the Partridge family and Manson family, all vintage thrift-store duds and hypnotic blank stares. But on this first full-length, Savoy Motel aren’t so much recreating a moment from 40 years ago as heralding the 20-year nostalgia cycle for 20-year nostalgia cycles. They render the sounds of the ’70s using the ’90s pastiche techniques of Beck, Ween, and Royal Trux, compacting glam-rock, southern boogie, and Stax sax stabs into 8-bit videogame proportions.
Savoy Motel is something of a hybrid Tennessee garage-rock supergroup: bassist/vocalist Jeffrey Novak and drummer Jessica McFarland played together in raucous power-pop outfit Cheap Time; guitarists Dillon Watson and Mimi Galbierz slathered the fuzz on thick in Heavy Cream. But that in-the-red ethos is barely perceptible here—the wild abandon of their previous groups has been harnessed into vacuum-sealed pawn-shop pop is capable of inciting spontaneous line-dancing. The fetching first song on their debut doubles as Savoy Motel’s mission-statement slogan. With its staccato faux-brass jabs and cheerfully chintzy psych-funk groove, “Souvenir Shop Rock” does to ’70s pop signifiers what a snowglobe does to a city skyline: it both miniaturizes and exaggerates its features, closing itself off from the real world to create its own make-believe wonderland.
But in Savoy Motel’s case, the music’s hermetic dimensions amplify the bustling activity within them: the call-and-response interplay between singer Novak’s louche delivery and Galbierz and McFarland’s stoner-soul harmonies; the squelching sci-fi synths and drum-machine tics; and the squealing leads of Watson, a disciple from the Neil Hagerty school of avant-shredding. And while they shamelessly draw from the past, they shrewdly rearrange their source elements into curious combinations: “Doctor Cook” swaps out Marc Bolan’s top hat for a Stetson; “Mindless Blues” is Can’s “Halleluwah” if Damo Suzuki got elbowed out by ESG.
However, Savoy Motel's clever record-collector references and kitschy lo-tech dressing ultimately play supporting roles to the insidious, interlocking hooks and seductive swagger of songs like “Sorry People,” “Everyone Wants to Win,” and “Hot One.” Tellingly, the one concerted effort to unravel their tightly coiled aesthetic—on the nine-minute, maggot-brained slow jam “International Language”—proves to be the album’s least compelling moment, exposing the limitations of trying to go widescreen on a Super-8 budget. But while that track indulges Savoy Motel’s latent epic ambitions, the true charm of this record lies in the way it craftily retrofits the sound of ’70s excess for our age of austerity. | 2016-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | What's Your Rupture? | October 24, 2016 | 7.4 | 2521f35b-780c-415e-917b-82cceca4a086 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Full of melodic singing and zig-zagging riffs, the new Mastodon LP reins-in the Atlanta metal band’s technical abilities without watering them down—though it smooths out some of their angular edges. | Full of melodic singing and zig-zagging riffs, the new Mastodon LP reins-in the Atlanta metal band’s technical abilities without watering them down—though it smooths out some of their angular edges. | Mastodon: Emperor of Sand | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23019-emperor-of-sand/ | Emperor of Sand | At least in certain respects, Mastodon’s Emperor of Sand might well be metal’s answer to Rush’s mainstream-conquering 1981 classic Moving Pictures. For its seventh studio outing, the Atlanta quartet reins-in its prodigious technical abilities without watering them down. As Metallica’s black album famously showed, this is no easy feat. Mastodon haven’t had an easy go of it either, but fans who thought 2014’s Once More ’Round the Sun veered uncomfortably close to radio-friendly should give Emperor of Sand a chance.
That’s not to say this new album isn’t stuffed to the gills with melodic singing—you can expect to hear a bunch of these songs on commercial radio this summer. Opener “Sultan’s Curse,” for one, is a trademark Mastodon gallop that again shows guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds doing his best impression of Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell. Second track “Show Yourself” starts out with a bouncy, almost danceable boogie-rock hook before reverting to one of Mastodon’s zig-zagging riffs. Be warned: If you see clean singing as a concession, you’re going to have issues with this album. And if you’re wary of returning Crack the Skye producer Brendan O’Brien—famous for helming ’90s blockbusters by Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots—you should know that, as usual, O’Brien smooths out some of the band’s angular edges. But unlike the last album, Emperor of Sand’s balance tips back to what Mastodon built a reputation on.
Over their first three proper full-lengths—2002’s Remission, 2004’s Leviathan, and 2006’s Blood Mountain—Mastodon flexed their chops almost like a sports team that had more to prove the more successful it got. By 2009’s Crack the Skye, a concept album that revisits Tsarist Russia via Stephen Hawking, Mastodon’s lyrics had grown as lofty as the music. At the same time, Crack the Skye contained hints that a more tempered approach was coming. The band’s three lead vocalists—Hinds, bassist Troy Sanders, and drummer Brann Dailor—began to exchange death metal howls for increasingly melodic singing. The transition to concise songs on 2011’s The Hunter might have come as a shock if you were a fan of the 13-minute rollercoaster suites that incorporated death, thrash, Southern, and traditional heavy metal. But the hooks had been lurking all along.
Nevertheless, if you’re partial to Mastodon’s longer, classical-influenced songs, you’re not going to see Emperor of Sand’s appeal—unless you zoom-out and take the album as one complete work. That’s not difficult to do now that Mastodon have finally mastered the art of writing 11 tracks that flow together as one. Like The Hunter and Once More ’Round the Sun, each of the songs on Emperor of Sand stands alone, musically speaking. But this time, the band took a page from Crack the Skye to spin an elaborate yarn about the passage of time, using sand as a metaphor for mortality but also as a window to set the story in the deserts of ancient Arabia. In true Mastodon fashion, the album’s protagonist attempts to communicate telepathically with African and Native American tribes in hopes that they’ll make it rain on his behalf.
The plot gets way, um, thicker than that, but suffice it to say the band leaves plenty of room to geek-out on the lyrics. More compellingly, Emperor of Sand marks the third Mastodon album directly inspired by a bandmember’s loss of a relative, in this case the untimely passing of guitarist Bill Kelliher’s mother. That Mastodon are capable of channeling personal tragedies into madcap sci-fi fantasy is impressive, but on Emperor of Sand they finally harness their musical ambitions as well.
Without fail, whenever a song on Emperor of Sand feels like it’s about to go overboard on the polish, the band takes it in a more jagged direction. Conversely, whenever a song runs close to rehashing Mastodon’s familiar bag of tricks, the band steps up its tastefulness and songcraft. The timing is so uncanny that you might not even notice. Meanwhile, Dailor—never a drummer you could accuse of under-playing—doesn’t so much tone down his playing so much as shift between varying degrees of busy. It makes a tremendous difference, adding dynamics to what was once an endless flurry of fills and rolls.
During the bridge section of “Clandestiny,” an ascending Tony Banks-style synthesizer line stamps Dailor’s long-professed love of Genesis’ prog opus The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway onto Emperor of Sand’s sleeve. Unlike Genesis, however, Mastodon haven’t gone past the point of no return in pursuit of accessibility. If anything, Emperor of Sand proves the opposite. Musicians often rationalize losing their edge by talking about “maturity.” Mastodon can now feel free to use the word without lying to their fanbase. | 2017-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Reprise | April 3, 2017 | 7.6 | 252f26ff-c7f4-4266-a26a-8da8a206935a | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Where Titus Andronicus once made great statements out of bloat, on their sixth album they do it with refreshing brevity. | Where Titus Andronicus once made great statements out of bloat, on their sixth album they do it with refreshing brevity. | Titus Andronicus: An Obelisk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/titus-andronicus-an-obelisk/ | An Obelisk | Patrick Stickles understands that it takes a gimmick to sell music these days, so he’s winkingly provided one. To tease their throat-grabbing new album An Obelisk, the band released a meta, 36-minute pilot for a sitcom called “STACKS” that satirizes the modern promotional cycle while simultaneously feeding it, following a barely fictionalized version of Stickles as he endures the indignities of the record industry. After the album’s first video flops, his label PR suggests manufacturing a viral dance challenge (“#TitusAndronicusChallenge or something like that?”). When he dismisses that idea, they suggest a pivot to synth pop. His day plays out in a sequence of deflating interactions that make the episode feel like a structural mirror of A Charlie Brown Christmas—both chronicle a melancholy idealist as they process the commercialization of something they cherish.
“STACKS” isn’t required viewing. The acting is stiff and the pacing is pokey, but it’s punctuated by moments of inspiration, especially a barroom cypher where Stickles throws down some surprisingly spirited raps about narrow-minded critics: “The last shit that I dropped was A Productive Cough/The media greeted it with a reductive scoff.” The relatively cold reception to 2018’s A Productive Cough can’t help but cast a shadow over An Obelisk and its gripes about the music industry (as Stickles testifies on opener “Just Like Ringing a Bell,” “They’re making a dirty fortune selling something that’s barely working, an inferior version of rock’n’roll or whatever else has touched your soul.”) But Stickles preemptively refutes any suggestion that An Obelisk’s rowdiness is a response to that record. It was always the plan to follow up that more acoustic album with a punk rock one, or so his sitcom insists in an interview with a condescending music journalist.
It’s just a happy coincidence, then, that the new record corrects much of what didn’t work about the last one. A Productive Cough felt more like a genre exercise than a passion project, and that’s true of An Obelisk, too, except this time the genre is a far better fit. Produced by Bob Mould and recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio, it’s the band’s shortest album (38 minutes) and by far their leanest (even 2012’s Local Business, which seemed streamlined at the time, was only stripped down in comparison to the Civil War epic it followed).
Where Titus Andronicus once made a statement out of bloat, here they do it with brevity. Two consecutive songs clock in at under a minute and a half, including the 68-second standout “On the Street.” With its “There’s too many police” rally cry, that song is Stickles’ most overt attempt to write an archetypal oi! anthem—and it really does sound like something anarcho-punks might have rioted to circa 1978—but the entire album is peppered with callbacks to punk’s glory years, from the “Clampdown” stop/starts of “Within the Gravitron” to the pint-raising Pogues breakdown of “Hey Ma.”
Though it isn’t as elaborately themed as Titus Andronicus’ most celebrated work, there’s an arc to An Obelisk. From an opening stretch that literally includes a song titled “(I Blame) Society,” Stickles gradually stops pointing fingers and begins interrogating himself, considering his own complicity in systems he abhors. “I say that I’m innocent but it isn’t true,” he fesses in a Johnny Rotten snarl on “Beneath the Boot.”
After exfoliating its sour facade, An Obelisk ends on a constructive note. In keeping with the record’s ’70s pub rock undertones, closer “Tumult Around the World” plays like Stickles’ own “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding,” an uplifting plea for empathy. “There’s tumult around the earth/But everywhere, there’s people dreaming and people holding on to hope,” he sings, abandoning cathartic punk sloganeering for earnestness and an implicit vow to be one of those people. His opinion of the music industry may not have improved any, but at least his view of humanity has. | 2019-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | June 22, 2019 | 7 | 2535d691-30c3-4f93-acf8-43a039e55459 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
A drummer and sound engineer with wide-ranging influences, the Franco-Ecuadorian producer constructs dancefloor rhythms that snap with feral intensity. | A drummer and sound engineer with wide-ranging influences, the Franco-Ecuadorian producer constructs dancefloor rhythms that snap with feral intensity. | Nicola Cruz: Self Oscillation EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nicola-cruz-self-oscillation-ep/ | Self Oscillation EP | For the past seven years, Nicola Cruz has been primarily known for his fusions of electronic music and Andean folk. On early releases like 2015’s Prender el Alma, the Franco-Ecuadorian musician folded indigenous instruments like quena and charango into dubby, downbeat grooves. By 2019’s Siku, he was reaching beyond the South American cordillera, combining breathy flutes with diverse Latin American and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. “Maybe it’s an anthropological thing,” he said of his magpie tendencies. Though promoters and interviewers still tend to peg him to his initial reference points, his work has continued to absorb a broader range of influences; last year’s Subtropique EP for London’s Rhythm Section International label was taut, machine-driven club music, more Panorama Bar than pan flute.
Cruz returns to the UK label with the Self Oscillation EP, his hardest-hitting and most unpredictable release yet. Eschewing the chilled-out vibes of some of his early records, all six tracks are made for dancing. Cruz trained as both a drummer and a sound engineer, and it shows—his rhythms snap with feral intensity, and his drum sounds have uncommon bite. Sharpened hi-hats pierce glowering sub-bass; syncopated grooves are pulled as taut as a nylon slackline, for maximum elasticity.
If Cruz is an anthropologist, then Self Oscillation might be a study in dance music’s tribal allegiances. Almost every track suggests a hybrid of some heretofore undocumented cultural fusion. “Cadera” opens the record with soca rhythms punctuated by gravelly acid lines; chilly dissonance leaves a whiff of freezer burn wafting over an otherwise hot-blooded groove. Slow and skulking, “Residual Heat” pairs crisp dembow rhythms with airy vocal samples and laser zaps, splicing the “deep reggaetón” of DJ Python with the bleep techno of 1990s Sheffield.
Despite their frequently referential qualities, these songs resist being pinned down. The only track that feels like a genre study is “Surface Tension,” but the style that it evokes is the West London broken beat that flourished around the turn of the millennium—itself a dynamic hybrid of techno, breakbeats, garage, and hard-nosed funk. Spinning dubbed-out metallic accents around an incredibly funky breakbeat groove, the tune’s a dead ringer for the Y2K output of labels like 2000 Black, while lush chords underline the historical links between broken beat and Detroit techno-jazz.
Cruz rarely misses an opportunity to put a provocative wrinkle into the mix. Oddly truncated vocal loops—shades of vintage Herbert—are panned so that they seem to wrap around your head, triggering strange psychoacoustic effects. The drums are layered in such a way that they sound less like a single, cohesive kit and more like many different drummers reflected in the shards of a shattered mirror; every hit feels like a fragmentary glimpse into a different room, each one with its own acoustic properties.
Like the best dance music, these tracks exude a kind of controlled audacity. The staccato breakbeat and ostinato synth of “Self Oscillation” move with a cocky strut, like dark sunglasses and a leather jacket transposed straight to MIDI; the futuristic disco of “Neo Costeño” is saucy and insouciant, tailored for high-stepping moves and light-headed twirls. The closing cut is the most audacious of all: “Pulso Invisible” begins with springy, speedy dub percussion, stray noises tumbling like flotsam in the waves. Cruz, who tends to peg his releases to one of the four elements, has called Self Oscillation a water record, and you can hear that influence in the song’s liquid flux. But halfway through, a spiraling synth arpeggio comes swimming through the mix, and suddenly the seascape turns the color of ’90s trance, as though a tributary of classic Underworld had spilled into a stream of early-’00s dubstep. The unpredictable mixture is a measure of just how inventive Cruz can be: a surfer on the tide, letting the current carry him where it may. | 2022-07-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Rhythm Section International | July 5, 2022 | 7.8 | 25371f8f-c4c1-4a5d-8aad-3a6e7ff80de2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
From the beginning, Sam Smith seemed set for stardom, and that's the main problem with his debut album In the Lonely Hour: it feels like the record company has groomed him within an inch of his life. | From the beginning, Sam Smith seemed set for stardom, and that's the main problem with his debut album In the Lonely Hour: it feels like the record company has groomed him within an inch of his life. | Sam Smith: In the Lonely Hour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19450-sam-smith-in-the-lonely-hour/ | In the Lonely Hour | From the beginning, Sam Smith seemed set for stardom: his debut came at the start of Disclosure's world domination and gave them a show-stopping performance on the lingering mega-hit "Latch". Less than a year later, he appeared on Naughty Boy's "La La La", a summer smash that went to number one in the UK and the top of the charts in the rest of Europe. By the time he released "Money on My Mind" at the beginning of 2014, it was already a done deal. The young 22-year-old, the son of a wealthy London banker who was fired for spending too much time trying to jumpstart his pop career, would be the UK's next big thing. And here we are: the week where his debut In the Lonely Hour, sees release in North America, the album is sitting at number one in the UK for the second week in a row, riding two chart-topping singles and edging the US top ten with its latest.
So why all the hubbub? If you've heard "Latch", you already know about that voice: Sam Smith possesses one hell of a set of pipes, able to go from a commanding lower register to an inhumanly high squawk in record time. (“I remember hearing ‘Latch’ and thinking, ‘No person can go through that many vocal ranges at one time without going through a computer,’ ” said one of his A&R reps in a recent feature.) That talent is central to "Money on My Mind", an itchy-feet drum'n'bass number with a chorus so high-pitched you might mistake Smith for a bird. More importantly, however, he details his signing to the record label and his apparent unwillingness to kowtow to record label demands, attempting to set himself apart as a freethinker. "I do it for the love," he insists on the chorus, and "You say, 'Could you write a song for me?'/ I say, 'I'm sorry I won't do that happily'" in the verse. But the main problem with In the Lonely Hour—and all of Smith's music up to this point—is exactly the opposite: it feels like the record company has groomed him within an inch of his life.
With undeniable pipes weighed down by generic songcraft, Smith makes me think of Duffy, a blue-eyed soul singer recruited in the wake of Amy Winehouse to capitalize on the sudden hunger for retro soul music. While Smith doesn't tap into that sound as directly, the emotional impact of the syrupy strings, by-the-book lyrics about heartbreak, and trite chord progressions is the same.
In the Lonely Hour is meant to be Smith's love letter to a man who never returned his feelings; it's an affecting idea, and Smith's inexperience—he hasn't yet been in a relationship—should provide for a fascinating level of sincerity, but too often it feels like he's being held back by an oppressive sense of musical conservatism. "Stay With Me" (currently making its way up the U.S. charts) has all the elements of a stunning ballad, a plea for a lover to stay over after a one night stand just for some human contact. Unfortunately, a hammy choir over-emotes all over his delicate late-night vulnerability, taking Smith's raw honesty and overcooking it to a grey pallor.
There are other moments of lucidity that pop up amidst the midtempo mush. The tender "Good Thing" has Smith expertly navigating tangled lyrics about obsession ("Too much of a good thing won't be good anymore/ Watch where I tread before I fall")—but then there's an inexplicable blast of cheesy Hollywood strings in lieu of a bridge. "Leave Your Lover", meanwhile, has a disarmingly direct chorus: "Leave your lover/ Leave him for me," all sung matter-of-factly in his most gorgeous falsetto. He repeats the conceit on "Like I Can", this time a mess of clichés built on a trendy acoustic guitar stomp, a sound that's more representative of the rest of the album. "Not in That Way" is a histrionic weeper with all the subtlety of a Susan Boyle song, and the type of lyrics written by high-schoolers still stuck rhyming "moon", "June", and "spoon".
Still, most of In the Lonely Hour is enjoyable just for Smith's voice alone—so unusual, unpredictable and utterly pleasing that it can be wonderful to listen to even through the most egregious of lite-FM tropes. But so much of the album remains hard to swallow otherwise, lost underneath layers of industry polish and focus-grouped lyrics. Though there's no doubt In the Lonely Hour comes from a personal place, it doesn't end up feeling like a very personal record. Except for one part: on the album's very first line, Smith quivers "When I signed my deal/ I felt pressure." Judging from how In the Lonely Hour turned out, his suspicions were for good reason. | 2014-06-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-06-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | June 19, 2014 | 5.5 | 253837a0-fcc6-4e48-bee1-0fc7f10eec50 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
Over the course of five EPs issued on five different labels-- the highlights of which are compiled here-- this Los Angeles duo's mastered a low-tech immensity that allows its songs to seem much bigger than their constituent parts. | Over the course of five EPs issued on five different labels-- the highlights of which are compiled here-- this Los Angeles duo's mastered a low-tech immensity that allows its songs to seem much bigger than their constituent parts. | No Age: Weirdo Rippers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10330-weirdo-rippers/ | Weirdo Rippers | Beginning this past March, Los Angeles duo No Age released five impeccably decorated, vinyl-only EPs on five different labels. The blitz coincided with a seemingly endless string of live shows-- the kinds you go home and tell friends about. Not a bad one-two punch. Shattering eardrums in clubs is the most natural way to spread the word about your band, and their records were a smart way to spread a wealth of material while creating colorful collector's items in the process. Weirdo Rippers, an 11-song compilation consisting of highlights from those records, stitches songs together by sound and feel, rather than presenting them chronologically. The songs flow together swimmingly, and despite track-by-track brevity (three songs are under two minutes, three are under three) the group has mastered a low-tech immensity, and the album builds into something much bigger than its constituent parts.
Guitarist Randy Randall and singing drummer Dean Spunt nabbed "No Age" from the 1987 SST compilation of the same name. The album featured Black Flag, Blind Idiot God, Henry Kaiser, Pell Mell, and others taking a stab at instrumental music-- not a bad historical, aesthetic, or West-Coast linkage. The band's coolly detached, eye-catching design schemes aren't random, either: Randall and Spunt, who were two-thirds of beloved noise-rockers Wives, are firmly entrenched in the L.A. DIY/art scene. They collaborate on visual/performance/video art and are connected to grassroots art space the Smell-- the building on the cover of Weirdo Rippers-- where you can score vegan pancakes, drink orange juice, and get a $5 haircut while watching Silver Daggers bleed the speakers. No Age played their first show there in April. (Continuing with the multi-trasking, Spunt also runs PPM! records, which has put out music by Wives, Mika Miko, KIT, Shoplifting, and John Wiese.)
A loud duo with art credibility, a massive touring schedule, and a one-man label in its ranks brings Lightning Bolt to mind; but No Age have a softer surf-psychedelic side that conjures another twosome: old Olympia favorites Kicking Giant. Or, as another Pitchfork staffer pointed out, the best K Records fuzz-rock band of all time, Lync. No Age, though, goes into an even airier, bedroom-pretty realm, with a punk rawness to their delivery. Their oft-chanted hooks (see "Boy Void" or "Every Artist Needs A Tragedy") are out-of-phase, the approach sloppy and spastic. At the same time, these songs come off soporific, restful, and totally in control. Nothing grates. It all feels soft and up-close.
"I Wanna Sleep", maybe a mellow response to Harry Pussy's "I Don't Care About Sleep Anymore", is a feedback lullaby beneath mellow, chugging guitars. A similar rhythm opens "My Life's Alright Without You", which jump-cuts suburban goth to the Dickies' nasal enunciations ("Well, I hate you/ I hate you/ My life's alright without you"), only after a shuffling loop. Every now and again the drums and vocal kick disappear, revealing that trippiness, which never quite goes away. "Everybody's Down" (full disclosure: I included it on a CD I recently curated) is the most rousing, kick-ass song I've heard in a while. Opening with brief spate of backwards distortion strands, it shifts to a speedy strum and doubled vocals shouting teen-bleak lyrics that culminate with a poppy shout of angstful communalism: "Everybody's down/ Every soul in every town/ Everybody's got me going 'oooh ahhh ooh ahh ooh ahh ooh'." A speedier shout and dust-kicking drum'n'guitar wrap it up with a clatter.
Deerhunter's Bradford Cox recently called No Age his favorite new band. Like Cox's crew, Randall and Spunt seem to be creating their own universe. In "Loosen This Job", after drum sticks tap out a code and distortion gently floods the room, Spunt asks, "Why are there so many records in my life?" Or at least it sounds like that. It's hard to tell. Whether or not that's what he says, or what he means, he's right. Despite an overload of music these days, if often feels like there are fewer essential listens. At the end of Weirdo Rippers, you're left with a rare sense of having discovered something new. Outside just their sound, No Age bring back the DIY energy of Kicking Giant and Lync and '90s zines and, importantly, a life away from computer screens. The songs have thumping heartbeats. Each and every one. All the jangling feedback loops and cymbal submersions in the world can't hide that. | 2007-06-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-06-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | FatCat | June 12, 2007 | 8 | 25393972-cf32-49d0-b240-7c43e4ec9596 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a piece of Detroit history that rippled through all of hip-hop. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a piece of Detroit history that rippled through all of hip-hop. | J Dilla: Welcome 2 Detroit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/j-dilla-welcome-2-detroit/ | Welcome 2 Detroit | The opening two notes of Welcome 2 Detroit, a dramatic double hit of modulated bass guitar and dusted organ, represent the culmination of a vast musical history. Not only was this album J Dilla’s debut as a 27-year-old solo artist, but it was also the first time that name appeared on a record cover. After nearly a decade of DIY releases, high-profile remixes, and productions credited to Jay Dee, slowly a renown bordering on reverence was built for one James DeWitt Yancey.
Though he had several creative phases yet to come, Dilla was, in many ways, operating at the very peak of his game at the turn of the millennium. His production work with A Tribe Called Quest had brought him into the neo-soul collective Soulquarians, a circle of like-minded collaborators who had just worked on a string of critically acclaimed LPs: the Roots’ Things Fall Apart, Common’s Like Water For Chocolate, and Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun. After donating his talents to artists, it was time for Dilla alone to step into the spotlight.
What Dilla ultimately delivered to the label was not even close to a beat tape, which was what he was ostensibly commissioned to create. As much a portrait of a city as a personal introduction, Welcome 2 Detroit is closer to a jazz-funk concept album like 1969’s Yusef Lateef’s Detroit than a conventional rap record, framing Jay’s own particular reinvention of hip-hop within the city’s multi-decade legacy, including live excursions into techno, electric jazz, and Afro-funk.
It was a lot to get across, especially for an artist known chiefly to those listeners who cared enough to read productions credits in the liner notes—which is why it packed so much into its very first bar. That initial double tap, followed by a more intricate resolution of the musical phrase in a bass and drum shuffle, admirably served to condense the history of Dilla, Detroit, and beyond. Like many individual notes and drum hits in Jay Dee’s extensive beat catalog, they reward obsessive, granular contemplation. The texture of the drum sample suggests a segment of funk or psych-rock committed to tape somewhere in Detroit in the early 1970s; you can practically hear the room noise at Motown’s Studio B or the equally legendary United Sound Systems.
Play those two notes again: Maybe they were lifted from some lesser-known Funkadelic spin-off, a more psychedelic side project from Motown session guitarist Dennis Coffey or his Sussex labelmate Rodriguez, or maybe even a bluesier passage from Detroit proto-punks MC5 or the Stooges. The simple loop not only echoes through all those references in the space of a single bar, it conjures the clash and swell of the larger forces—the riots, the assembly lines, the church choirs—that shaped them. It’s hard to listen to that short vamp without assuming a hurts-so-good frown.
Despite the feel of its local origins, the sample actually comes from Moğollar, a Turkish group that sounds to the Western ear something like a cross between the Moody Blues and a band of actual gypsies. Jay Dee dug deeper and ranged much further afield than any of his contemporaries—all the way to Asia Minor, in fact—to isolate a few bars of gold that could speak perfectly to the heart of the inner city experience. The connection to Detroit, however, is almost entirely sleight of hand, created by Jay’s words (“Welcome to the D, Baby! It’s all live out here”) and the context he’s placed around it. A close listen to the Moğollar original, the 1970 single “Haliç'te Gün Batışı” reveals even more sorcery at work. There are organ flourishes that disappear on Welcome 2 Detroit, evidence that Jay Dee filtered, freaked and Frankensteined bits of the source material to get the perfect fluid-sounding bed for his first 50 seconds of fame.
There are novels that could be written just about this intro, recorded, according to Dilla’s original liner notes, “the night B-4 the album turn-in date” with a handheld mic under the influence of Möet and weed. The raw, dusted production quality, for instance, foreshadows Just Blaze’s work on JAY-Z’s 2003 “Public Service Announcement,” itself the start of a whole era of East Coast rap where the grungier side of rock was reclaimed by black MCs as a signifier for the depredations of the hustler lifestyle. But it is, of course, only the intro, its main job to pave the way for what follows—another introduction. “Y’all Ain’t Ready,” though more in line with the hip-hop productions Dilla had become known for by ’01, is essentially a second course of appetizers, letting Dilla swear to the listener’s unreadiness. In fact, as ardent Dilla dissectors have recorded, the words “get ready” or similar (“Y’all ain’t ready” etc.) are repeated some 18 times between these first two tracks. But what we’re meant to get ready for, apparently, is a sensation that combines musical enjoyment with a state of extreme disorientation. Track three, “Think Twice,” is another sharp left turn, the third in under three minutes. Instead of some riotous pay-off, there’s a single lingering chord painted delicately in electric piano, which then melts into a neo-soul cover of “Think Twice” originally by trumpeter and jazz fusion guru Donald Byrd.
This unconventional sequencing is Dilla’s way of announcing Welcome 2 Detroit’s unconventional story, filled with stray dialogue, some kind of plot, and a dizzying montage of twists and turns meant to sketch the whole spiritual landscape of Detroit. The result feels like the opening chase sequence of Beverly Hills Cop, where Eddie Murphy hangs from the back of a truck of stolen cigarettes as it jackknifes its way across Detroit to the tune of the Pointer Sisters “Neutron Dance.”
All of Dilla’s abrupt jumps gradually settle into a sort of jerky rhythm all their own. What at first seems like a series of non sequiturs slowly reveal an underlying structure: Welcome 2 Detroit is actually two or three different kinds of styles woven together. One is an entirely sample-less and mostly instrumental, like “Think Twice,” the first of five such compositions on the album that re-interpret a genre through Dilla’s lens. “B.B.E. (Big Booty Express)” is also a clear tribute to Detroit techno and its foundational texts (Kraftwerk, Vangelis, the progressive italo-disco of Giorgio Moroder and Alexander Robotnick) created on Triton keyboard and the iconic Roland TR-909 drum machine. “Rico Suave Bossa Nova” and “African Rhythms” are essentially drum covers of by the Milton Banana Trio and Oneness of Juju.
Carving through the instrumentals is straight ahead rap—or at least as straight-ahead as any Dilla project ever gets—operating more like a release from his original Detroit crew Slum Village. Several cuts on Welcome 2 Detroit sound more like sequels to tracks on their breakout 1997 album Fan-Tas-Tic Vol. 1, but here, in keeping with the all-city theme of project, the SV roster is replaced by a stellar who’s-who of mostly D-based vocal talent, including Dilla himself, who also stretches out as an MC. On tracks like “The Clapper,” he comes into his own as one of the game’s greasiest MCs. This side of Dilla unexpectedly complements the sophistication and musicality of his production, as if you suddenly discovered that Four Tet and Beanie Sigel were actually the same person.
In some ways, these different modes could be evaluated and reviewed on their own, but much more important is how they speak to each other and the overall thematic statement of Dilla’s debut. Where his influences sampled bits of soul-jazz to provide melody and timbre to compositions of eight-bar breaks, Dilla more often sampled bits of, well, anything to reconfigure them into less predictable compositions that functioned more like jazz. Helming all the instruments himself except for voice, trumpet (Dwele) and trombone (credited to “Dwele’s brother”), Dilla abandons the parameters of sample-based music altogether on “Think Twice,” following Byrd’s composition through it’s three distinct melodic movements with a feel that stands up with the best of what you might find on a Maxwell or D’Angelo LP.
Occasionally, Welcome 2 Detroit is marred by a goofily sexist voicemail skit and other moments of clunkiness (“‘Cause you know it’s Frank-n-Dank/Take a sip of/Ya drank”) and even a certain repetitiveness as Dilla’s always-banging drum tracks tend to veer consistently towards the minimalist end of his palette. The zags into other territory serve to break up the metronome quality of the rap tracks, but the irrepressible melodic sense that marks much of his other hip-hop production (think Slum Village “Fall in Love” or Common’s “It’s Your World”) are nevertheless a bit siloed here.
But even the jumps between genres and the album’s slightly scattershot feel speak to his restless brilliance. It wouldn’t be a proper Dilla introduction unless he was innovating on multiple levels—melodically, rhythmically, thematically—even if these seem to pull him in multiple directions at once. If anything, the needle-skipping mood hurt only in the sense that they keep the album moving sideways, rather than building upwards; always engaging but knee-capping the emergence of a larger sweep or clear story arc.
Even when they pull against each other, these individual moments of Dilla-ness—the squelchy-low end frequencies painted with a detuned Mini Moog Voyager, the bits of soul records you know by heart transformed into odd melodic passages that float in and out of a rap boast in sublime defiance of conventional verse/chorus structure—are are so, well, dope; the touch so deft, the innovations so original, that even the skips, clunks, pauses, and unexpected turns will be pored over and replayed so obsessively they almost become a part of the listener. | 2018-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | BBE Music | October 7, 2018 | 8.5 | 253f4d9c-79dc-452c-a49a-79d6c67687a8 | Edwin “STATS” Houghton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/edwin-“stats” houghton/ | |
The experimental metal trio’s four-song, 76-minute album is the peak of their career. It’s dense and invigorating, highlighting the band’s dexterity, creativity, and clarity of purpose. | The experimental metal trio’s four-song, 76-minute album is the peak of their career. It’s dense and invigorating, highlighting the band’s dexterity, creativity, and clarity of purpose. | Sumac: The Healer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sumac-the-healer/ | The Healer | From the start, Sumac has welcomed abundance. Singer and guitarist Aaron Turner, an omnivorous multi-disciplinary artist with some 20 musical projects to his name, feeds all of his storied past into his band with drummer Nick Yacyshyn and bassist Brian Cook. When the Pacific Northwest supergroup debuted in 2015 with The Deal, their songs were already knotty hybrids of sludge, hardcore, noise, death metal, and beyond. And each subsequent record has sounded increasingly unsatisfied with keeping pure the tenets of heavy rock’s subgenres. Whether building or deconstructing, Sumac’s open-ended metal continuously seeks to incorporate more and more and more.
For all their indulgences, Sumac are veteran musicians in absolute control, whose improvisations are as exact and technically proficient as their dense, circuitous songwriting. This has never been so bluntly apparent as it is on The Healer, the trio’s fifth full-length. Sumac doubles down on everything that made them one of the most fascinating metal bands in recent memory. Grimier chords, longer and weirder freeform jams, utterly confounding rhythms, seismic heaviness, and profound humanity at its core—all sharpened for maximum effect. Their four-song, 76-minute album is a live performance tour de force unique in its dexterity, creativity, and clarity of purpose.
But if jaw-dropping musicianship is a given by this point in Sumac’s career, what makes The Healer exceptional is its command of spatial presence and emotional weight. “World of Light” begins its unhinged half hour as an eldritch ooze of drone, low-end rumble, and Turner’s primal rasp. The cracked caterwaul he releases when crying out “Shiiine!” sounds more animalistic than any guttural growl could. About 11 minutes in, the music starts climbing out of the turbulent soup with slow, deliberate steps. It can feel like some kind of cosmic rebirth or spiritual awakening. Yacyshyn and Cook’s brutal rhythm section sometimes drops out completely, leaving Turner’s guitar and Faith Coloccia’s tape noise to cut haunting shapes from the void. Diving head-first into negative space, Sumac builds tension while revealing what hides beneath each onslaught.
Often what The Healer reveals is hidden in plain sight. The three main instruments are recorded as if under a microscope, more intensely rendering the physicality of their moment-to-moment vibrations. Bass strings rattle against the fretboard like a chained animal; droning feedback crackles like woodfire; the toggle of guitar switches snap like dried leaves; cymbals burst and glimmer like fractals. The hyper-reality of these peripheral sounds brings a raw psychedelia to the music, which is a rich through line across The Healer. “Yellow Dawn,” full of warbling organ notes and low-slung tom patter, begins with the band’s most explicitly psychedelic arrangement. It carries through the merciless pummeling and origami time signatures to reemerge as an untethered guitar solo that’s as much “Dopesmoker” as it is “Black Hole Sun.” Such recognizable and warmly loved sounds round out the album’s more intricate stretches in a way that galvanizes both.
In a year that has seen Knocked Loose going viral on Spotify and Deftones rank among the most popular bands listened to during sex, Sumac has released their least crossover-friendly record yet. The Healer stands in stark contrast to dopamine-drenched metal blasts the length of TikTok videos, like a meditative yet grotesque Jodorowsky film in all of its surreal excess. Epic album closer “The Stone’s Turn” is a mystifying journey, full of starts and stops, whirlwind blast beats, diffuse psych, and electrified riffs that just fucking go. If Love in Shadow searched ever more deeply for metal’s untapped possibilities and May You Be Held confidently wrestled with its roiling unknown, then The Healer swallows its universe whole and reforms it anew. It’s an album that uses the rejection of metal’s well-trodden forms not as an endpoint but as a catalyst for bringing something else into being. | 2024-06-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | June 25, 2024 | 8.4 | 254624c9-a23b-493e-aef2-1dfc7ba4e2c8 | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
26-year-old Swedish singer and songwriter Tove Nilsson's debut album showcases her foibles and off-kilter perspective on heartbreak. She offers shape and personality to a record that might otherwise be written off as too slick or inert, or indistinguishable from a host of peers making competent, spacious, and downcast pop music. | 26-year-old Swedish singer and songwriter Tove Nilsson's debut album showcases her foibles and off-kilter perspective on heartbreak. She offers shape and personality to a record that might otherwise be written off as too slick or inert, or indistinguishable from a host of peers making competent, spacious, and downcast pop music. | Tove Lo: Queen of the Clouds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19781-to-love-queen-of-the-clouds/ | Queen of the Clouds | We’ve reached a point at which the once-hyperbolic term overnight success is literal. Catchy songs and videos find huge audiences instantly but quickly lose their adhesive; stars burn ultra-bright and ultra-fast. But we’re also in an era of quiet, slowly spreading hits—polished, anonymous-seeming pop songs that percolate and achieve ubiquity over many months. They take root on small blogs, find homes in cosmopolitan retail stores and overpriced fitness classes. They’re used in TV shows; they excite a cappella groups. Eventually, as if by some abstract force designed to counterbalance the internet’s star-making warp speed, some begin gradually inching up the pop charts. Songs now become full-on phenomena years after their initial recordings; Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Disclosure’s “Latch” bubbled up forever, it seemed.
Another artist making such an upward crawl is Tove Nilsson, a 26-year-old Swedish singer and songwriter who goes by Tove Lo. Her résumé includes writing credits for artists like Cher Lloyd and Lea Michele from “Glee”, and she’s firmly rooted in Sweden’s current network of pop characters. In high school, she played music with Caroline Hjelt of Icona Pop (for whom she’s also written songs); she’s linked with Max Martin and production duo the Struts. After listening to her music—bruised, brightly arranged pop songs that feel grand but not excessive—it should come as no surprise that she graduated from Stockholm’s Rytmus music school, the place where Robyn was trained.
Nilsson released a song called “Habits (Stay High)”, and the accompanying art showed the singer with mascara tears streaming down her face, in a photo that looked like it could have been snapped on an iPhone—about a year-and-a-half ago. It’s a big, sticky song, but not so big that it stuns your senses or numbs you into enjoyment. The single, which just recently cracked the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100, is an exclamation of lost love and self medication; it contrasts a giant hook and chorus (“I gotta stay high all the time/ To keep you off my mind”) with snappy verses filled with quietly distinct, often strange imagery: of Nilsson eating her dinner in the bathtub, getting drunken munchies, seducing dads on playgrounds.
This sort of color—which might feel whimsical, were the content not so dark—pops up frequently across Nilsson’s assured major-label debut, Queen of the Clouds. Her foibles and off-kilter perspective on heartbreak offer shape and personality to a record that might otherwise be written off as too slick or inert, or indistinguishable from a host of peers making competent, spacious, and downcast pop music. She thrives on understated contradictions and grim quirks: While her friends are dating guys who are “turning 53,” she sneers on “Like Em Young”, she says prefers younger men. She gets drunk during the day and stays that way into the night, not the other way around, she tells us on “Talking Body”, a song that turns a lustful gaze on a male partner. On that song, seemingly low stakes are given great weight, and delivered with dead seriousness: “If you love me right/ We fuck for life.” On a song called “Moments”, she resents her cushy, happy childhood, as though it’s caused her to work doubly hard in order to become an interesting artist.
“I can get a little drunk/ I get into all the ‘dont’'s,” Nilsson continues on that song, before delivering the kiss-off: “But on good days I am charming as fuck.” It’s this sort of disarming honesty, a coupling of self-doubt and boldness in well-phrased lyrics—not necessarily Nilsson’s great hooks—that stick in the brain while listening to Queen of the Clouds. In two months time, she'll join Katy Perry on an arena tour, and by then, that the majority of the audience members will most likely be quite familiar with her music—and assumedly, they'll be just as delighted to hear the odd, charismatic little asides in her songs as they will be to belt out the choruses. | 2014-09-30T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-09-30T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island / Interscope | September 30, 2014 | 7.2 | 25481a35-d43e-4c86-b922-167c149ae06e | Carrie Battan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carrie-battan/ | null |
Australian electronic outfit Cut Copy never sounded like a band that had a problem getting to the point. On Free Your Mind, though, their most overtly fun and least dynamic music restates the obvious over and over again. | Australian electronic outfit Cut Copy never sounded like a band that had a problem getting to the point. On Free Your Mind, though, their most overtly fun and least dynamic music restates the obvious over and over again. | Cut Copy: Free Your Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18689-cut-copy-free-your-mind/ | Free Your Mind | Cut Copy never sounded like a band that had a problem getting to the point. Nor did they ever sound like a band that needed a serotonin boost. Yet, even “Lights & Music”, “Need You Now”, “Hearts on Fire”, “Take Me Over” and just about any of the Australian quartet’s uniformly excellent and directly-titled singles can sound wishy-washy and kinda dark in the face of Free Your Mind, its Successories screen-saver album cover and Dan Whitford’s claim that the title refers to a freedom that’s “universally positive and timeless.” Maybe Cut Copy were hippies all along, and whether you think that’s progress or a serious regression, Free Your Mind is at least a sensible continuation of their trajectory from the cosmopolitan, club-friendly and DFA-affiliated In Ghost Colours to the breezier, more festival-ready 80s pop of Zonoscope. But there’s a difference between freeing your mind, losing your mind and just flat-out shutting it down. And you just wish Cut Copy left even something to the imagination, as their most overtly fun and least dynamic music restates the obvious over and over again throughout Free Your Mind.
Their aims are admirable here. Whitford claimed the band took their inspiration from the Summers of Love, both 1967 and 1989. Philosophically and sonically, those years are something of a package deal anyway—Stone Roses and Inspiral Carpets were essentially psychedelic pop-rock bands with beats, while Primal Scream and Happy Mondays had no qualms about straight-up pilfering the era. You can’t doubt Cut Copy’s commitment to sidling up with nu-Madchester types like Jagwar Ma and Paradise, as there’s barely any modernist touch to be found on the title track, just all of your favorite E’s and wizz signifiers, sorted out neatly: staggered house piano vamps, endlessly thumping bass drum and Whitford letting his vocals get all baggy in every sense of the word, an amalgamation of Shaun Ryder’s dysfunctional relationship with pitch, Ian Brown’s bedheaded proclamations and Bobby Gillespie’s revolutionary hokum.
In about five minutes, you hear everything new Cut Copy has to offer, though they stay true to their strange nostalgia for the future by slipping inside the proverbial acid house on “Let Me Show You Love” and all but sampling Stone Roses’ “Don’t Stop” on “Take Me Higher". There are enough highlights to still make their ecstatic live shows a must-see; “Walking in the Sky” is stately flower-child pop while “We Are Explorers” reaches the hands-in-the-air mania as effectively as their previous singles. But with its timbale breakdown, a chorus melody with sharp contours rather than flabby curves, it’s just a reminder of what you're missing out on here.
Free Your Mind has a personality, at least. It’s a concept album of sorts, taking you out of the desert (Coachella’s EDM-friendly Sahara Tent?), above the city and... something about the waves. You wouldn’t think they’d have much more to say about holistic healing and solar-religiosity after ending Zonoscope with a 15-minute song named “Sun God", and they don’t really, though it doesn’t stop them from trying—the lyrical component of Free Your Mind is straight Screamadelica magnet poetry about us getting higher/shining brighter than the sun and getting free and getting loaded. And while Whitford’s slack affectations are pitch-perfect on “Free Your Mind”, elsewhere the same effect just means he’s singing off key, capturing the tone of his influences, but lacking the necessary rock-star posturing.
If this seems like an unusual amount of focus on Cut Copy’s lyrics, it’s because the music itself seems content to keep the beat and little else. Though it’s every bit as sequentially-formatted as In Ghost Colours or Zonoscope, Free Your Mind lacks the dynamism of its predecessors, the DJ-curated ebb and flow. You can laugh at the ridiculous spoken word interludes, but they’re about the only thing that can jar you out of the mid-album lull created as Free Your Mind goes forward. With few exceptions, it’s basically a Cut Copy album that’s just deep cuts—you get the same octave-jumping funk basslines (“In Memory Capsule”), the occasional acoustic-laced pop-rock (“Dark Corners & Mountain Tops”) and slow-moving disco-pop from their past records, only with lumpier melodies and Dave Fridmann’s mixing job using reverb like packing peanuts to make Free Your Mind sound both puffy and stiff.
Cut Copy’s music has always been simple; the difficult part was trying to explain in non-illusory terms what made Bright Like Neon Love, In Ghost Colours and Zonoscope glorious and uplifting rather than silly or even flat out dumb. My take is that they had omnivorous enough taste to show they take their craft seriously, while avoiding crowd-moving mock profundity and proving they don’t take themselves all that serious. Free Your Mind manages to be Cut Copy's most homogenous and it's most "message-based" record yet, and in doing little other than turning on, tuning in and dropping out, there’s precious little separating it from the vapid electro-pop to which Cut Copy used to be an alternative. | 2013-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Modular | November 4, 2013 | 6.4 | 254925b8-33f4-4a4c-8fdd-acc23d1638fb | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Isaac Hayes' game-changing film score, which launched the soul/funk soundtrack craze in the early 70s, is given a deluxe reissue. | Isaac Hayes' game-changing film score, which launched the soul/funk soundtrack craze in the early 70s, is given a deluxe reissue. | Isaac Hayes: Shaft OST [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13629-shaft-ost-deluxe-edition/ | Shaft OST [Deluxe Edition] | It's not often that a musician gets a chance to initiate a massive shift in two different fields of entertainment at the same time. Things were different before Isaac Hayes made the leap to scoring movies: you had your Beatles vehicles and your concert documentaries, your ripped-from-the-charts soundtracks (Easy Rider) and your film scores that became pop hits (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). But there was nothing quite like the convergence of popular and cinematic music in Shaft, at least not since Duke Ellington was tapped to soundtrack Anatomy of a Murder 12 years previous. With Shaft, Hayes didn't just break through with a #1 pop album, #1 pop single, and Academy Award, he changed the musical directions of Hollywood and R&B simultaneously. Within two years, damn near everybody in soul had a soundtrack in their discography, resulting in career-defining classics (Curtis Mayfield's Super Fly) as well as creative transitional experiments (Marvin Gaye's Trouble Man). And it hit hard in the other direction, too: by 1973, Bruce Lee and James Bond alike were busting heads to Lalo Schifrin and George Martin scores that threw in the same serpentine wah-wahs and supple funk percussion that nabbed Hayes his Oscar.
And yet most people have a hard time looking past that first song. For all the "baaaad mother--/ Shut yo' mouth" rapport and whocka-chicka style that provoked a thousand deconstructions of 1970s attitude, "Theme from Shaft" was an intricate overture doubling as a character-establishing theme that made a title card all but redundant, and it proves how easy Hayes' transition from songwriter to film-score composer actually was. The liner notes to Stax's new, remastered Deluxe Edition reissue of the Shaft soundtrack make note of Hayes' previous foray into the field (the semi-obscure Norman Mailer film Maidstone) and the advisement of jazz composer Tom McIntosh to "just do your thing" instead of worrying about taking cues from the score to an epic like Doctor Zhivago. But despite his non-traditional approach-- The Isaac Hayes Movement was said to have recorded "headwise," without the use of sheet music-- Hayes reached an ideal midpoint between film scoring convention and R&B auteurism, and Shaft is full of cinematic cues and motifs that came naturally to a musician who'd already pushed the boundaries of symphonic soul two years before on Hot Buttered Soul.
The majority of Shaft is instrumental, with lots of incidental music that runs between a minute to four and change; it's best experienced in the original filmic context but still has a certain appeal on its own. Aside from being a rich vein of sample material (the agitated cricket-chirp guitars in "Walk From Regio's" and the simmering, brassy strut of "No Name Bar" being two of the richest), these tracks are also an illuminating cross-section of what Hayes and his musicians-- the Bar-Kays, the Movement, and the Memphis Strings & Horns-- were capable of. The Hammond-driven "Bumpy's Lament" is the most distinctive nod to Stax as it existed in both the mid 60s and the early 70s, combining the grittiness of gospel roots with opulent strings and flutes. "Ellie's Love Theme" and "Shaft Strikes Again" take it even further, grafting Burt Bacharach/Hal David light-pop melodies into the mix to add an undercurrent of upscale sophistication. And the nods to jazz (the Wes Montgomery-esque guitars in "Café Regio's") and blues ("Bumpy's Blues", one flying-V and raspy-smooth drawl away from being an Albert King single) were, if anything, emblematic of how versatile the Stax/Enterprise "house style" had actually become.
There are still a couple moments of Isaac Hayes as we know him in a more traditional, non-cinematic sense, even though one of them isn't just montage-ready but a sort of montage in itself. "Soulsville" is one of the quintessential 70s slice-of-life-as-protest songs, and while its travelogue-style breakdown of ghetto strife is a now-familiar theme, it's also clearly written as an entreaty for otherwise-oblivious whites to sympathize with Black America's troubles ("The chains that bind him are hard to see/ Unless you take this walk with me"), and its mournful sax might be the most iconic moment outside the title theme. Then there's Hayes as marathon runner: the simmering funk of "Do Your Thing" takes vamping to a staggering extent, starting with a slinky backbone and working its way into a manic, wailing-guitar frenzy that seems calculated to top the already-intense climax of Hayes' own "Walk on By". It's that rare 19 1/2-minute song that's so propulsive and energetic that it goes by like it's five, though the band does get so exhaustively thorough with wringing every last drop of sweat and power out of its groove that eventually one of the guitarists just starts riffing off the three-note NBC theme for no apparent reason. (Left on the CD/digital version: the sudden, hilariously meta "fuck it, we're out of time" needle-scratch ending.)
Within a couple of years of Shaft, Hayes had become so much of a soundtrack celebrity that it briefly threatened to eclipse his other work, and by 1974's Tough Guys and Truck Turner he was able to knock out an entire album's worth of soundtrack-ready funk so easily that he had more than enough time to star in the movies themselves. But while his music never really regressed-- Truck Turner, soundtrack or no, might be his best album of the 70s-- Shaft is where Hayes' meteoric popularity peaked. And for damn good reason: he created a theme song that was both ubiquitous and game-changing. But, as the liner notes reveal, it was the last thing he wrote for the score-- making it a song whose strengths were simply the culmination of an already extensive and finely-crafted soundtrack. | 2009-11-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2009-11-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Stax | November 2, 2009 | 8.5 | 2551727f-a1fc-4c47-afc2-e7d88bc75815 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Crash of Rhinos' second album, Knots, is the result of endless practice in the time since the UK band's 2011's Distal and a formidable inspirational spark. Knots is an intuitive, rigorously plotted record hinting at genre transcendence. | Crash of Rhinos' second album, Knots, is the result of endless practice in the time since the UK band's 2011's Distal and a formidable inspirational spark. Knots is an intuitive, rigorously plotted record hinting at genre transcendence. | Crash of Rhinos: Knots | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18357-crash-of-rhinos-knots/ | Knots | The title of Crash of Rhinos’ stunning second LP is taken from a list of stalemates-- “wasted nights, impasses and knots.” The Derby, UK, quintet spends the duration Knots trying to break through these deadlocks, and they start with anthemic single “Opener”. With equal parts anxious anticipation and relief, Ian Draper barks “you’re not wasting time” to his companion, embodying the stomach-in-knots feeling that pervades the record: the two are going to sleep together that night or never see each other again, but nothing’s going to be left unsaid this time. It’s a confrontational song about a confrontation and it’s almost impossible for hear it and remain a disinterested bystander. My first listen, I wanted to tear a phonebook in half. A colleague said it made her want to cry, “in a good way.” But the heart’s a muscle too, right? Make no mistake, Knots is emo as hell and a reminder that the term evolved from “emotional hardcore.” It’s an album of real stakes and bone-deep commitment, where any honest interaction, of mind, body, or soul, is preferably full-contact.
The multifaceted construction of the band allows them to express themselves as both grounded and aspiring, a combination of Dischord’s stoic post-hardcore and the literate, heart-on-sleeve and girl crazy Midwestern emo of the mid-to-late 90s. Crash of Rhinos describe themselves as “five voices, two guitars, two basses, one drum kit,” adding, “we make a racket.” The roles are fluid, as drummer Oli Craven is just as likely to be foregrounded as any of the guitarists, while the overlap of steely, resonant lead vocals and unvarnished yelling result in both strident melodies and unorthodox harmonies. That’s a lot to keep track of and on their 2011 debut Distal, Crash of Rhinos occasionally lost the handle, a promising band a bit overwhelmed by their wealth of ideas.
The songs on Knots unfold like brilliant football plays, utilizing synchronization, deception, quick cuts, speed and brawn, the individual players given omni-directional free reign for the larger purpose of forward momentum. “Opener” mirrors the dramatic conversation of its narrators where heavy emotions can no longer be expressed delicately and everything has to go right. All four guitars appear to strike out in different rhythms, yet churn forward by interlocking in their respective gaps and pauses. When “Opener” snaps into its pulverizing chorus, it puts the subtle restraint of Knots into sharp relief-- it’s the only time all five members appear to be acting in unison, and the force is devastating.
Knots is often every bit as hooky following “Opener”, though rarely as condensed into radio-readiness. More than half of the songs here extend past five minutes to accommodate every four-bar tangent or drum fill accenting the band’s burly barstool poetry and dashboard confessionals. I imagine Crash of Rhinos are partial to semicolons, as Knots abides by its instructions: pause. Collect yourself. Go.
The album’s bookends “Luck Has a Name” and “Speeds of Ocean Greyhounds”, are reverse images of each other, the former sprinting out and cycling through quicksilver time changes before settling into a patient build, while the latter starts out as a ballad before closing out Knots with a percussive victory lap. “Sum of All Parts” feigns itself as a mid-album, waltz-timed cool-down before a chorus of doubled vocals and guitars that lunges out of the speakers. There are two short guitar instrumentals-- acoustic fingerpicking exercise “Everything Is” and the ruminative “The Reason I Took So Long”-- and while beautiful in their own right, they’re the only points on Knots where Crash of Rhinos limit themselves to one thing.
They both prove necessary in establishing continuity throughout Knots, as Crash of Rhinos get increasingly ambitious throughout. The first half acknowledges its debt to the bands that will draw in new listeners and nostalgists-- think a softer Fugazi, a musclebound version of tourmates Braid, …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, anything J. Robbins has been involved with-- while Side B goes out into more audacious, free-form compositions. On “Mannheim”, they tease out the dissonant chords and oblong time signatures of their earlier work. “Standards & Practice” weaves two gracefully looping guitars for a melody too distinct to allow counterpoint-- instead, the band’s vocals clash in brassy, atonal harmonies like free jazz horns. You get the sense that Knots could be a standard in its current genre, but the exploratory second half suggests Crash of Rhinos are working towards transcending it.
It’s that combination of potential and realization that gives Knots a spiritual connection to its lineage in addition to a sonic one. A UK band whose influences are entirely American, you can picture Crash of Rhinos watching YouTubes of old Fugazi and Braid shows and wishing they had something similar, where the communal expression was as meaningful for the crowd as the artist. The best of this stuff felt like it was perpetually on the verge, that something was at stake, and that’s where Knots finds the energy to answer its main philosophical challenge: Is fear stronger than your desire for emotional freedom? This is played out on centerpiece “Impasses”, where guitarist Richard Birkin screams “it could’ve been a waste of your time!” before the band spasms and double clutches, working up the courage to admit “it wasn’t a waste of mine!” It’s a raw moment, expressing the kind of sentiment that leaves one vulnerable and prone to embarrassment if it’s not reciprocated. There’s an undeniable catharsis in crossing that line as well and after that point, “Impasses” can never go back to being the tense and composed post-punk it presented itself as in the beginning. Instances like these make Knots feel vital. While indie rock still primarily traffics in timid sounds and mannered emotions, Crash of Rhinos dare to care too much on Knots and their risk is our reward*.* | 2013-07-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-07-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | Big Scary Monsters / Top Shelf / To Lose La Track | July 31, 2013 | 8.1 | 2559c026-6f6c-402a-a235-4055a3257845 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Direct, smart, catchy, and extremely punk, Shopping is a band for our confusing times. It's for dancing first and foremost, with any political undertones there for the taking after you're done shaking your ass. | Direct, smart, catchy, and extremely punk, Shopping is a band for our confusing times. It's for dancing first and foremost, with any political undertones there for the taking after you're done shaking your ass. | Shopping: Why Choose | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20965-why-choose/ | Why Choose | Whenever Shopping are asked whether they’re a political band, they always default to talking about dancing. Any messages in their music are purely a matter of circumstance, they say: of being delivered by a queer woman of color, of being a London DIY band who know what productivity looks like on their own terms. It's not hard to see why they'd want to avoid the political umbrella: when a British band cops to having political motivations, their inability to overhaul the system/write "Ghost Town" Part Two is usually held up as a sign of their failure—in the U.K., at any rate. And so rather than subject themselves to that scrutiny, Shopping instead choose to shake off their oppressors, encouraging shimmying to fill the emptiness of the superficial social interactions and masquerade of commerce-as-choice that their songs quite clearly detail.
There’s no shortage of academic texts citing the radical nature of movement, but the trio’s second album, Why Choose, is blissfully direct and free of added intellectual ballast. When so much modern discourse is a teetering layer cake of opinions, it’s bliss to hear Rachel Aggs celebrate idleness in one breath—over the awkward twangs of "Time Wasted"—and then demand urgency on "Why Wait"’s anxious, accelerated disco hi-hats. As she puts it in the latter, "Why choose when I just want it both ways?/ When I could just take it all?/ I wanna do it my way."
To that end, very few of Shopping’s post-punk moves are novel, but the trio maintain an exhilarating, crafty pace, having upped the detail and twisted the structures of their songs since 2013’s Consumer Complaints. The almost uniformly plain guitar tone used throughout is a great showcase for their bright and endlessly varied post-punk tangles. Their nimble songs barely touch the ground, other than the occasional coldwave synth breeze, or seawashed motorik splash à la Electrelane, touches that make for lovely, errant starbursts in Shopping’s otherwise tightly martialed constellations.
A sense of street-smarts survival runs through Why Choose: The rattling guitar of "Wind Up" and "Knocking" is scrappy as a young bare-knuckle boxer. "Take It Outside" runs on caustic pep, mocking the language of empty threat with drummer Andrew Milk delivering weary pleas to "break it up." By contrast, the record’s sincere, personal moments don’t posture. On the brisk "I Have Decided", Agga adopts a deep, unyielding tone to declare, "You won’t change my thinking/ This means nothing to me."
Shopping are in constant conversation, literally so when Aggs and Milk act out halves of two different lovers’ quarrels on "Straight Lines", the second half of a dialogue they started on Consumer Complaints. On that record’s "For Your Money", Milk played the role of a young man hooking up with rich older guys; here he plays the moneyed party, allowing the band to turn the uncertain power dynamic of user and used inside-out again. He reels off his character’s anxieties at the arrangement, concluding: "You go home empty-handed when you go home with his type," but there's no implied judgement of the situation. Shopping’s idea of choice doesn't mean one agenda at the expense of another, but establishing a welcoming space for all comers. It works because their naturally scatty, riotous spark means they could never sound neutral. | 2015-10-07T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-07T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | FatCat | October 7, 2015 | 7.6 | 255baf53-3a80-4bf9-bc20-7a13e14b003b | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The second album from the UK pop producer is pleasant and anonymous, all good vibes and cabana jams. | The second album from the UK pop producer is pleasant and anonymous, all good vibes and cabana jams. | SG Lewis: AudioLust & HigherLove | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sg-lewis-audiolust-and-higherlove/ | AudioLust & HigherLove | Play any song from SG Lewis’s second album, AudioLust & HigherLove, and you’ll wonder where you’ve heard it before. A Target or TGI Fridays? Maybe it was a Spotify-curated playlist called “Good Vibes” or “Happy Beats.” You’ve heard that four-on-the-floor drum pattern with the shimmery synth lead at least a thousand times, even if you can’t quite pinpoint where (but probably on a decade-old Daft Punk or Disclosure song). The 28-year-old British producer and songwriter’s wholesome blend of disco and dance music feels designed to soundtrack summer parties and moments when one might unironically mutter, “My life is a movie.” Like the rest of Lewis’ catalog, AudioLust & HigherLove is well-executed and loads of fun, but the question lingers: What, if anything, is distinct about his music?
Despite operating within a familiar pastiche, Lewis is more than just a great impressionist. He has produced for Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, and Elton John, and his solo work sounds like a successor to Random Access Memories, a collage of squeaky-clean disco, house, and prog-pop that fuses live and electronic instruments. On his 2021 debut, times, he captured a glittery, strobing dancefloor ethos, rotating through a cast of glamorous hooks that hinted tonight might just be the night. It was schmaltzy and sometimes airless, but Lewis’ shrewd, pristine production compensated for the lack of conceptual ingenuity. Even so, times often sounded like the work of a producer still forming an identity, a devotee of Daft Punk and Pharrell reluctant to color too far outside the lines.
AudioLust & HigherLove is bigger, brighter, and more confident than times, its highs higher and its lows less gimmicky. The songs are glossy and anthemic, stuffed with vivid, cinematic details: side-chained vocals, live orchestral arrangements, kick drums so beefy they knock through an iPhone speaker. “Infatuation” and “Something About Your Love” highlight Lewis’ talent for crafting emotive, funk-flecked bangers; he’s a wizard at merging EDM build-ups with ’80s R&B rhythms. Both of these songs feature Lewis as lead vocalist, a welcome wrinkle for an artist who previously confessed a lack of confidence in his voice. On some songs, like “Another Life” and “Honest,” it’s obvious he’s still nurturing that confidence; his rigid, plainspoken melodies sound like placeholders for a more assured singer. But then there are the choruses on “Oh Laura” and “Missing You,” where he extends his range and lands on a pair of striking melodies, proving he’s capable of anchoring an arena-sized pop song on his own.
Lewis’ singing is one of the few novelties on AudioLust & HigherLove. The rest is all breezy grooves and cabana jams, frictionless and blemish-free. By the time “Plain Sailing” arrives more than halfway through the album, we’re already intimately familiar with the phaser-laden pre-chorus, the syrupy stacked synths, the processed vocals coated in a pleasantly dull sheen. Lewis’ writing, which evokes summer breezes and romantic flings, is as memorable as your fourth drink of the night.
Lewis describes AudioLust & HigherLove as a concept record in two acts: “AudioLust is the darker, lusty, infatuated, short-lived, and ego-driven version of love,” he explains in a press release. “The second half represents a much deeper, actualized, and fulfilled version of love.” But these themes—the lifeblood of mainstream pop music—are rendered so generically that they bear little consequence. Yes, Tove Lo revels in the “sweat drip[ping] down your naked chest” on early album cut “Call on Me,” and later, on “Vibe Like This,” Lucky Daye admits that he’s “never felt a vibe like this/Might be worth the risk.” The sentiment is nice, but the vibe is endlessly replaceable. | 2023-01-31T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-31T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | January 31, 2023 | 6 | 25651751-6716-499d-a5a0-5f35f7e9c14a | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
The UK rapper’s third album is pitched as both a pious expression of worship and an earnest message of self-affirmation—but with plenty of opportunities for flexing along the way. | The UK rapper’s third album is pitched as both a pious expression of worship and an earnest message of self-affirmation—but with plenty of opportunities for flexing along the way. | Stormzy: This Is What I Mean | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stormzy-this-is-what-i-mean/ | This Is What I Mean | It’s time to add “singer” to the centipede of slashes that defines Stormzy’s career, because singing is what the rapper/publisher/philanthropist/awkward dancer mostly does on his third album, This Is What I Mean. There are soft coos, choral harmonies, pattering Sprechgesang, and even spirited shots at some lung-busting R&B. He also raps, of course, but he’s already shown that he’s good at that—September’s “Mel Made Me Do It,” a teaser for this album, proved his talent undeniable. It’s true that he’s eked out a few strained choruses before—most notably on 2017’s choir-assisted “Blinded by Your Grace Pt. 2”—but, since then, he’s been having lessons. Now he sings with the palpable freedom of someone hitting high notes in the shower, folding into the collective roars of the soccer terraces, or, more pointedly in Stormzy’s case, tuning harmonies with fellow church worshippers. He spent much of the past 18 months catching up on COVID-cancelled tour dates, bouncing from arena to festival field. But far from reflected adulation and sweaty mosh pits, this record feels imbued with the stillness of the monthly worship meetings that he attends in South London. “I heard Sunday’s the new Saturday,” he offers, offhandedly, on the title track.
The bulk of This Is What I Mean was recorded on Osea Island, a private slab of land that sits in the Blackwater Estuary, off the coast of Essex. For just a few hours each day, a single road connects the island to the mainland before the tarmac is swallowed up by brackish waters. Stormzy needed to isolate himself—from the world, from expectations, and from his inner doubts and demons—to remind himself what freedom feels like. In a setting that was part writing camp and part religious retreat, the sprawling cast of musicians hand-picked to work on the record would wake, eat, pray, and then create. Even with this collective approach, for much of the time, Stormzy is performing for an audience of one: God. Songs like the spare “Holy Spirit,” where he offloads the burdens he wrestled on Heavy Is the Head, are prayers shared. On “Please”—which will stir tabloid headlines for its gentle show of solidarity with Meghan Markle, a fellow lightning rod for the UK’s racist press—he addresses his Creator directly over simple, undulating piano; as his voice slips away to silence, the choir swells to embrace him, like a congregation laying hands on a penitent.
Not that he doesn’t make room for a flex or two amid all the Christian humility. He shrugs off 50-grand charges for sleeping through private jet departure times and blows through luxury watch brands with an ease that would make Switzerland’s toniest dealers blush. It’s wildly entertaining. On the luxurious kick-back rap of “My Presidents Are Black,” he takes potshots at the UK government, offering Cabinet member Michael Gove “something for your nose,” and pokes once more at his old foil Wiley, demurring, “I can’t war with no broken man.” And if he’s not flexing or exploring his faith, then he’s, well, fucking. He delivers “orgasms, more than you can fathom” on “Fire + Water,” and barely winking references to what’s in his pants on “Need You” (whose awkward amapiano log drums exhibit a rare instance of trend-hopping). He has a habit of falling for the corny when he’s pining, and his singing voice is a little too thin to carry off the clichés that pepper “Firebabe” about dancing on tables and “how she lights up a room” being “something to behold.” Sometimes he overshares, but Stormzy’s appeal has long been in his candidness.
The album’s cover depicts an envelope on a doormat. It’s ambiguous enough to hold broad, loaded meanings—just as possibly a letter from an apologetic lover as a demand left at 10 Downing Street’s famous black door. Mostly, though, the album scans as Stormzy’s note to himself, whether he’s writing through paranoia and suicidal thoughts on the lilting “I Got My Smile Back” or letting deep, healing breaths coat the mic on “Please.” Most striking is the clarity of the production. This Is What I Mean is an ensemble affair, but every note, every snare clack and hi-hat, has space to luxuriate. “Ahh, this is clean, this is clean,” Stormzy marvels on the title track. It’s a long way from freestyles in the park. But more than just a feat of engineering, it’s analogous to Stormzy’s clarity of vision and mission on this record. He famously bumped his hero JAY-Z off a song in 2019, and the same considered sense of curation bleeds through at every turn.
If Stormzy’s last album, and the pressure to speak for a generation, weighed heavily, then This Is What I Mean feels lighter, freer. “The second one was stressful but it’s simple for my third/Holy Spirit guide me to the things that you prefer,” he purrs on “My Presidents Are Black,” the album’s thematic anchor. Unburdened, Stormzy is able to open his lungs, not just to scream and shout, but to breathe, and sing. The payoff for the listener is hearing an artist—set aside the slashes—at the height of his powers, both creative and otherwise, and letting his instincts lead. | 2022-12-01T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-01T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 0207 Def Jam / Interscope | December 1, 2022 | 7.7 | 256aa5fb-a174-4c87-ae87-c16da514ea83 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
Debut LP from one of techno's poster boys delivers on the promise of his singles. | Debut LP from one of techno's poster boys delivers on the promise of his singles. | Nathan Fake: Drowning in a Sea of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3360-drowning-in-a-sea-of-love/ | Drowning in a Sea of Love | It wasn't long after he released his first 12-inch on James Holden's fledgling Border Community imprint in 2003 that Norfolk's Nathan Fake was tagged progressive techno's poster boy. His age (a disarming 22), preeminent fondness for gauzy synths, and continued close affiliation with Border Community-- now sort of the Green Party of techno labels-- have reinforced that caricature, but its been his gradual shift away from the sturdy rhythms of early tracks like "Outhouse" in favor of the facemelting sounds of "Dynamo" and "The Sky Was Pink" that have cemented the image.
Drowning in a Sea of Love marks Fake's long-awaited debut LP, and sees him complete the transformation from 4/4-friendly house producer into the prog prince of nu-IDM. Where his singles once comprised long, rolling stretches of gravel road rhythms, there's barely a beat to be found here, and what few there are bump less like thunderstorms than metronomes, existing as cursory structures rather than focal points.
It's a drastic change, but it's not necessarily for the worse. Texturally, Drowning recalls both M83 and Morr Music's cutesy cadre of melody-happy synthpoppers, but where the former often feels too rich for consumption and the latter too relentlessly sweet, this strikes a perfect note somewhere in between. It's one of the lightest, easiest records I've heard in a long time, a low-calorie pleasure that makes up for what it lacks in gut-level punch by never seeming to diminish in returns.
"Superpositions", "You Are Here", and "Long Story" are all shoegazer-inspired tracks that begin as embers and finish as forest fires, and "Bawsey" is a beautiful, decaying, minor-key piece that might as well have been swiped right out of Boards Of Canada's textbook, but it's the swoonsome "Charlie's House" that stands as the album's highlight. Beginning with a crisp rhythm track and a glowing, circular arpeggio, it takes on a haunting, dusky quality about a minute in, when Fake introduces his favorite sound: the same yawning, mournful synth that made the original incarnation of "The Sky Was Pink" (which gets a workmanlike remix elsewhere on the record) such a revelation.
Holden's remix of "The Sky Was Pink" was one of my favorite techno tracks of last year, if not ever, and his shadow looms large over this record as well. I might just be projecting what I know of the back story onto the material, but despite having formally moved away from house music, it still often feels like Fake is setting the table for-- or at least overtly tempting-- the remix. Maybe that's why early reviews of this have been just as likely to lump it in with house as with IDM, because there's a certain spirit to what Fake does that can't be erased simply because the backbone has been. Regardless, he's got such a beautiful, producer-ly touch that we should be happy with whatever record he wants to make, so long as he's making them. | 2006-02-21T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2006-02-21T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Border Community | February 21, 2006 | 8.4 | 25708e75-118d-4dec-9b6d-b06f8b5d2d36 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
On their second album, the Australian quartet expands into a Colossus-sized version of itself. Everything feels bigger, heavier, and more meaningful. | On their second album, the Australian quartet expands into a Colossus-sized version of itself. Everything feels bigger, heavier, and more meaningful. | Amyl and the Sniffers: Comfort to Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amyl-and-the-sniffers-comfort-to-me/ | Comfort to Me | Like the perfect comeback belatedly snapping into the mind during a shower, Amyl and the Sniffers’ second album calls back to a former antagonizer with newfound clarity. Two years ago, while the band was touring their self-titled debut, a “gobby pre-teen” accosted singer Amy Taylor on the street in London, calling her ugly. On “Freaks to the Front,” she reclaims the term with pride: “I’m short, I’m shy, I’m fucked up, I’m bloody ugly!” she sneers, pulling a B-Rabbit out of her hat by disarming any future fuckbois before issuing a warning: “Get out my way/Don't bloody touch me!”
Comfort to Me finds the Australian quartet at its most resolute, as Taylor’s lyrics pull us into her endlessly vacillating mind, made all the more relatable for its many contradictions. She wants love but doesn’t need anything from anyone. She wants to smash capitalism but isn’t quite sure she cares enough to pull down the hammer. Sweaty and surrounded in the pit, she’s just moshing on her own.
Despite the internal duality, Amyl and the Sniffers radiate confidence, even as they’re cribbing from the annals of hardcore history. The band’s secret is in doubling down on, simply, ripping like hell. Produced by Courtney Barnett collaborator Dan Luscombe, Comfort to Me is crammed wall-to-wall with the primal currency of rock music: riffs. And while many of their well-creased notes have been in circulation for a while, they aren’t counterfeit bills. After a few years destroying stages and dives across the world, the Melbourne-based band who once mocked themselves as puerile musicians can finally shred.
Of course, with musical growth and big-time knob twiddlers—Comfort to Me was mastered by Bernie Grundman, who has also worked on blockbusters like Thriller and Aja —comes great responsibility, or at least expectations. Amyl and the Sniffers have expanded into a Colossus-sized version of themselves, magnifying and perfecting what they already did pretty well instead of caving in the foundation of their sound and starting anew. Why change when you’ve conquered the formula?
Anyone who has worn a Wipers pin will recognize a good many of these riffs, or at least detect their essences: “Laughing” reeks of the jagged staccato leads of D.C. punks the Monorchid and its sassier offspring Skull Kontrol. The band squats in X and Gun Club territory on the punk-blues breakup song “No More Tears.” Guitarist Dec Martens’ deft post-chorus line on “Security” is played by a man who I’d wager has heard Magazine’s “Shot by Both Sides.” Their music presents a canon of rock riffs like a succession of waves crashing on the same beach. Amyl and the Sniffers are, as ever, shamelessly chugging coldies by the surf.
Comfort to Me is the band’s heaviest outing yet, and never more clearly than on “Capital,” a Motörhead-influenced bounce that outlines the struggle between activism and apathy. Despite the transparency of the homage, Taylor’s idiosyncratic delivery takes the lead. As she spits tongue twisters like “slapping on the pokies and buying all the backy” at a frenetic pace, she races alongside the instrumentation, nearly outpacing it. It’s like she’s in the room, screaming in your face, determined to spill her mind out before the song has a chance to end.
Taylor has also evolved as a lyricist. No shade to early romps like “70’s Street Munchies” or “Stole My Push Bike,” but punk’s reigning snarl champion has figured out how to address weighty issues without being didactic or surrendering the snotty squeal that made those early tracks so alluring. On “Knifey,” the band slows it down and lets the barre chords ring, allowing Taylor’s heartbreaking plea to burst through. ”All I ever wanted was to walk by the park/All I ever wanted was to walk by the river, see the stars/Please! Stop fucking me up,” she begs. But she’s armed and ready: “Out comes the night, out comes my knifey/This is how I get home nicely.”
Taylor is either recalling a personal experience and the knife is her weapon of defense, or she’s channelling the ubiquitous dread all women face. In switching pronouns from “I” to “we” halfway through the track, Taylor inverts the “alone in the pit” trope from the beginning of the album; this psychic pain is near-universal. But, as ever, Taylor’s knotty internal struggle reigns: “I turn around and backtrack, because I ain’t that tough.” Comfort to Me transports us to a familiar, paradoxical world: uncertain, harsh, and magnetic.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | September 14, 2021 | 7.6 | 25729a8e-5de2-4c91-80a5-f80336e8e52f | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
Beck's 2006 album is reissued as a 2xCD package with all of its attendant videos and remixes from Ellen Allien, Villalobos, and David Sitek, among others | Beck's 2006 album is reissued as a 2xCD package with all of its attendant videos and remixes from Ellen Allien, Villalobos, and David Sitek, among others | Beck: The Information: Deluxe Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9980-the-information-deluxe-edition/ | The Information: Deluxe Edition | Whether its quickly canonized status as one of the 1990s greatest albums is deserved or not, the one thing about Odelay that seems the most innovative in retrospect is the avalanche of remixes that followed in its wake. No less than four of the album's songs-- "Devil's Haircut", "Where It's At", "The New Pollution", and "Jack-Ass"-- were released as extended CD or 12" singles and reworked extensively; "Devil's Haircut" alone has somewhere around a half-dozen variations, including Aphex Twin's hyperactive drill-n-bass machete job and a hardcore punk homage/parody titled, amusingly enough, "American Wasteland".
While there was a certain hip-hop methodology to the album's sample-heavy construction and production, it still seemed a bit weird and exciting to hear all these reinterpretations; few artists who fell under the rubric of rock (alt- or otherwise) had left their supposedly finished work so open to other artists' alterations. And with so many layers of postmodernism and context-warping already extant in the original music, each additional remix simply blurred whatever sense of meaning the songs-- opaque lyrics and all-- were supposed to have in the first place. Critics called it irony, but it felt more like reverse engineering.
Ten years later, Beck's notion of malleable pop had grown to encompass two introspective psych-folk albums in Mutations and Sea Change, a Dirty Mind-cum-Emotional Rescue disco-funk monstrosity in Midnite Vultures (which accidentally kickstarted electroclash-- "Get Real Paid" has a lot to answer for), and Guero, a disoriented attempt to try and return to a centered idea of what the Beck "sound" actually consisted of. The (wrong) answer: a collage of a collage.
By the time the mediocrity-stuffed remix album Guerolito came out in early 2006, the idea of easily reconfigurable modular music felt less intriguing than the idea of actually good music, and the summer hype push behind The Information-- make-your-own-design sticker covers, crazy low-budget streaming internet videos, a bunch of blah-de-blah about the user-created-content future of music-- felt less like the excited tinkering of a Fluxus-reared conceptual artist and more like a collar-tugging attempt to grab an audience increasingly disinterested in anything you couldn't put on an iPod. The CD came, the CD went, the press disappointedly mulled over it for a week, and then they moved on to whatever it was Danger Mouse was doing.
Thing is, The Information's a pretty decent album, and time's been fair to it: After half a year's worth of exposure, the moments that sounded like blatant sore-thumb references on first listen-- the "Chameleon"-ic fusion funk of "Cellphone's Dead", the piano in "Strange Apparition" that evokes circa-Altamont Rolling Stones, the synth-bass murmur and crystalline inflections that make "Dark Star" sound like a somnambulist take on Stevie Wonder's "Have a Talk With God"-- feel a bit more integrated into a greater sonic whole, while the album's less-immediate experimental tracks (the micro-Beck "Motorcade" and the Eno-lite "Movie Theme", in particular) have worked their way from dull, instant skip-overs into tolerable diversions. And Beck's lyrics are some of his most immediate, having developed into a coherent and unobstructed examination of modern-age anxiety without losing their beat-poet opacity. Calling it Beck's best since Odelay is sort of faint praise, but while it doesn't have the feel of a revelatory Event Record, the album does cohere into something evolutionary, using Beck's older work as a starting point instead of a salvage yard.
The irony, of course, is that Beck's attempted user-content toolkit of an album is singular enough to avoid benefiting from a bunch of extraneous, context-altering additional material-- especially in a package as unwieldy as the "Deluxe Edition" (has any other album packaging in major-label history made pulling a CD out of a paper sleeve this damn difficult?). Most of the diehard Beck fans who haven't heard the bonus tracks on the first disc probably just haven't figured out the finer points of filesharing, though his attempts at DFA-esque dance-punk ("Inside Out") and giggling, Clear Spot-style Beefheart funk (the Minutemen/Commodores/Sonic Youth/Jodeci-namedropping "This Girl That I Know") are worth hearing at least once.
Like the earlier pressings of the October release, the Deluxe Edition also has all those cheapie videos he made with producer Nigel Godrich, though if you're skeeved out by public access-quality cinematography and inane wigs you're probably better off just skipping to the noir-absurdist Michel Gondry clip for "Cellphone's Dead". And if you screwed up the sticker design on the cover of your old copy, this one comes with the full four-page set, so you can start it over and then put all the extra ones on your "Guitar Hero" guitar or something.
If there's a significant pull to buy this version of the album instead of the slightly cheaper original, it's the full disc of remixes, which are limited in the scope of their source material (three songs, six remixes) but still manage to steer clear of stylistic redundancy. Ellen Allien's propulsive minimal house transformation of "Cellphone's Dead" is the most essential track, downplaying the squelchy bassline of the original in favor of the delicate piano that underpinned it and relying on a ghostly-reverbed fragment of the chorus-- "eye of the sun"-- as the main vocal hook. David Andrew Sitek of TV on the Radio takes a similar route instrumentally on his mix of "Dark Star", scaling back everything but the rhythm and Beck's voice for the first couple minutes, then gradually letting a wave of electronics and an Ornette-style free-jazz sax solo bleed their way through.
The others are take-or-leave matters: Both attempts at re-envisioning "Nausea"-- the Bumblebeez's apathetic-sounding indie-disco slog and the Chap's amorphous orchestral electro-- feel less energetic than the original, while Ricardo Villalobos' 14-and-a-half-minute tech-house extension of "Cellphone's Dead" comes across like a pre-existing instrumental with the vocals stapled to it; here, Beck sounds like he's leaning against a wall in a state of bewilderment watching other people dance and muttering house-rap verses to himself to stave off his nerves.
So, this is a cash-in. Not like it's a bad time for it, since a relatively sparse stretch of the year like this-- Arcade Fire notwithstanding-- feels like a good occasion to revisit a moderately slept-on album that, if anything, at least transcends its gimmickry. Just be aware that once all the stickers are peeled away and the videos fall into YouTube limbo, most of the enjoyment you'll find on it is in the core of the album as it existed six months ago. It is what it is, and it doesn't need to be anything else. | 2007-03-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-03-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | March 12, 2007 | 7.4 | 257c4502-d603-49cf-bd85-ea255d0cc1b0 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Okovi showcases the searing, fully-formed music of Nika Danilova, an album of close personal experiences rendered into urgent goth-pop songs as emotional as they are necessary. | Okovi showcases the searing, fully-formed music of Nika Danilova, an album of close personal experiences rendered into urgent goth-pop songs as emotional as they are necessary. | Zola Jesus: Okovi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zola-jesus-okovi/ | Okovi | On the cover of her fifth studio album, Zola Jesus is drenched in a similar viscous substance that obscured her face on the sleeve to her 2010 Stridulum EP. Okovi, named with a word that means “shackles” in most Slavic languages, also marks a return to Sacred Bones, the Brooklyn label that nurtured the singer and producer in her early years and on which she’s released all her albums except for 2014’s Taiga, which came out on Mute. Zola Jesus, also known as Nika Roza Danilova, said three years ago that she hoped Taiga would break through to pop radio, climb the Billboard charts, and unpin Zola Jesus from her goth-pop niche. None of that happened; Zola Jesus has still only grazed the Billboard 200 by way of her feature on M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, but the abandonment of her Top 40 aspirations has yielded some of her most powerful music since that Stridulum EP and its sternum-cracking single “Night.”
Since Taiga’s release, Danilova experienced multiple brushes with death: Someone close to her was diagnosed with cancer, a close friend attempted suicide twice, and she herself felt pulled by depression’s gravity. Okovi threads these stories together in both oblique and direct retellings. Danilova yearns “to keep that knife from you” on the mournful, string-based “Witness”; on its punchier sequel “Siphon,” she insists, “We’d rather clean the blood of a living man...we’d hate to see you give into those cold dark nights inside your head.” These direct appeals to suicidal loved ones conjure an urgency that Zola Jesus’s more abstract ruminations on death tended to lack. While Taiga often sacrificed specificity in favor of power—“Dangerous Days” orbited darkness without ever clarifying its source—Okovi’s dramas are hard to miss.
Even explicitly fictional narratives like “Soak,” in which Danilova sings as a woman choosing to kill herself rather than be murdered, resonate with the album’s broader themes. Over a beat and cello combo that recalls Dido’s “Here With Me,” Danilova ventures into death in character, drowning herself in the tradition of Ophelia and Virginia Woolf. The gesture, a synecdoche for feminine madness, feels like Danilova’s attempt to externalize her longing for death, to plug it into an archetype far older than she is. As she inhabits the classical scene of a woman drowning, some of the weight of her own ideation seems to lift. Death’s a lot lighter when you’re seeing it on a stage or behind museum glass than when you’re carrying it around in your marrow.
As much as Danilova finds relief in history, it also prompts anxiety on the galloping “Veka,” whose goth, night-ready beat takes some of the air out of her unanswerable questions about legacy. “Who will you find you/When all you are is dust?/Who will find you/In centuries?” she asks, gently echoing Percy Shelley's poem “Ozymandias” and its illustration of the futility of building anything to last. Without that beat, “Veka” might have landed as a facile complaint about the uselessness of making art; as a body-moving banger, though, it prioritizes the here and now over the vague horizon of a world some centuries into the future. Who cares who digs up our bones as long as we can use them to dance while we’re alive?
The cover of Okovi differs from Stridulum’s cover in one pointed way: Rather than being slicked over, Danilova’s eyes have been cleared of the muck that otherwise covers her. She looks just slightly left of the camera, her eyes dark and calm, unbothered. Upon closer inspection, you can see she’s not actually drowning in the oil; instead, it looks like it’s been applied to a photograph of her that’s been re-photographed. There are brush strokes around her face, and the sharpness of the circles exposing her eyes makes the stuff look more like a mask she’s chosen to wear rather than something used to tar her. Maybe Zola Jesus is still carrying the same slime that’s weighed her down for years, but at least she can see clearly through it now. For all its dark signifiers, all its grapplings with death, Okovi leans towards the light. | 2017-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sacred Bones | September 6, 2017 | 8.3 | 2588de98-40ae-400e-88f4-38129a0607ca | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
On his fourth album helming the Brooklyn chamber folk ensemble, Jordan Lee brings a watchmaker’s precision to a baroque sound typically associated with billowy grandeur. | On his fourth album helming the Brooklyn chamber folk ensemble, Jordan Lee brings a watchmaker’s precision to a baroque sound typically associated with billowy grandeur. | Mutual Benefit: Growing at the Edges | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mutual-benefit-growing-at-the-edges/ | Growing at the Edges | It takes a true optimist to see the upside of a wildfire. Throughout Growing at the Edges, the bottomlessly tender fourth album from his baroque indie project Mutual Benefit, Jordan Lee conjures angry skies, scorched earth, and suffocating smoke, yet somehow the destruction only strengthens his sense of serenity and wonder. In Lee’s world, every catastrophe is an opportunity for regrowth and renewal. As he spells it out hopefully on the title track, “Peeking from a seed, where there was a wasteland, something new.”
Lee sees a kindred spirit in that charred soil, as he avails himself of new mindsets and healthier outlooks in the face of change. The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter spent five years writing these songs, but he insists it was only late in the process that he realized he was writing a love album—which is wild, given how impossible it is to listen to Growing at the Edges and miss the romance. The entire album is blanked in a lavender haze. Between Lee’s chivalrous quiver and the serenading string arrangements, every song lands like a softly blown kiss in a silent film.
The florid accompaniments of Mutual Benefit’s previous records carry over, but Growing at the Edges bears a much more pronounced imprint of jazz and classical, in no small degree due to the input of multi-instrumentalist Gabriel Birnbaum and violinist/string arranger Concetta Abbate. Lee says he took inspiration from his time listening to New York jazz radio during the pandemic, and if that makes him sound like a tourist, he demonstrates an aficionado’s appreciation of the genre’s subtleties. The record is never more serene than when he clears space to revel in the gentle explorations of Birnbaum’s saxophone.
In their brushed drums and blushing upright bass, Growing’s most serene tracks evoke the levitating rhythms of Richard Davis and Connie Kay on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. There are shades, too, of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon and Willie Nelson’s Stardust in the delicate, tuxedo-tailed twang of “Beginner’s Heart” and “Little Ways.” And in the watchmaker’s intricacy of its arrangements, there are echoes of Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimist, albeit with none of the tension or toil. Grizzly Bear’s songs always showed their work; they wanted you to hear the protractors and composition books involved in their meticulous creation. Mutual Benefit’s songs are no less exactingly composed, yet they offer the illusion they materialized from dreams.
One way to enjoy the record is to marvel at its sheer precision—how each song stands alone as its own perfectly bundled bouquet, even while their shared lyrical and musical motifs form the impression of a seamless suite. But for all its craftsmanship, this is an album that thinks with its heart. “I love how you will dance around the entire room to a song that only you hear,” Lee swoons on the waltzing “Wasteland Companions,” and in some ways the whole record feels like his attempt to honor the free spirit modeled by his partner—to turn off his overactive brain and indulge the possibility of hope, even in a world where so much can and does go wrong.
Over the last decade and a half, it’s been easy to become inured to records as gorgeous as this. As indie pop matured from the busted symphonics of Elephant 6 into the conservatory-trained chamber music of artists like Sufjan Stevens, Fleet Foxes, and San Fermin—and as the stray string accompaniments that periodically graced indie projects swelled into full ensembles—it grew harder be wowed by the grandeur and sophistication of it all. So perhaps Growing at the Edges’ greatest trick is rekindling the sense of romance and connection all that splendor can evoke. Its arrangements are lavish but never demanding, vibrant but never loud, decadent but never distracting. They do so much, yet never so much that they risk disrupting the record’s carefully understated sense of enchantment. | 2023-10-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Transgressive | October 12, 2023 | 7.9 | 2590ac69-9028-4f25-91cb-3b662b786e46 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On his latest record, Neil Michael Hagerty hedges his post-modern tics in favor of three-minute, riff-based rawk that reminds us this is the same rock zealot who convinced Pussy Galore to re-record Exile on Main St. back in the day. | On his latest record, Neil Michael Hagerty hedges his post-modern tics in favor of three-minute, riff-based rawk that reminds us this is the same rock zealot who convinced Pussy Galore to re-record Exile on Main St. back in the day. | The Howling Hex: XI | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10567-xi/ | XI | Neil Michael Hagerty's long, tortuous career has laid waste to a lot of opening paragraphs, practically lobotomizing the reviewer before he/she can begin tackling his equally brain-melting music. I would even go so far as to suspect this Renaissance dude of fattening up his résumé intentionally, as a misdirect masking his ambitious yet sloppy music. Considering his two biggest inspirational sources-- classic and noise rock-- this equivocation makes sense: On the surface, Hagerty and his most recent band Howling Hex qualify as your standard meat'n'potatoes rock outfit, yet the group takes great pains in shrouding their potentially accessible sound with disjointed songwriting, arcane lyrics, and other artistic fuckery. And oh yeah, he was in Pussy Galore, Royal Trux, and has written two books as well as an obsessive Howling Hex blog, among other pursuits.
2006's Nightclub Version of the Eternal marked an unprecedented level of button-pushing for the Hex, as a string of seven minute-plus masturbatory jams frustrated even the staunchest defenders of the band's idiosyncrasies. Thankfully, XI's slicked-back tracks sound like reparations, Hagerty hedging his postmodern tics in favor of three-minute, riff-based rawk that reminds us this is the same rock zealot who convinced Pussy Galore to re-record Exile on Main St. back in the day. Hell, at some points, you might confuse this for a Spoon record. The meaty guitar/sax/horn trifecta on straightforward, swaggering pop rockers like "Ambulance Across the Street" and "Everybody's Doing It" avoids any protracted jams, the lyrics cogent enough to generate both pathos and a storyline in the latter: "Broken heart, broken home/ Now you're lyin' there all alone,/ In an ambulance across the street."
Unfortunately, Hagerty can't go completely cold turkey from the jam band stuff. Even with shorter songs, the ideas still remain fairly loose and unfocused, not to mention the spoken word diarrhea of "Let Fridays Decide", a pretentious intermission that undermines much of the album's unexpected edibility. Considering the punch of dirtier, nastier garage rock nuggets like "Live Wire" and "Theme", I wish Hagerty sought and destroyed more Stooge-isms on this record. Still, the consistent Fogerty shuffles here make XI the most worthwhile Hex release since 2005's All-Night Fox, and a nice little twilight-of-career album-- assuming the sun will ever set on Hagerty's rampaging career. | 2007-08-29T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2007-08-29T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | August 29, 2007 | 6.4 | 2590f6bd-53b0-4034-abab-8f9af2ed0251 | Adam Moerder | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adam-moerder/ | null |
The Melbourne post-punk band makes a messy life feel easier to untangle, writing songs with an appealing simplicity, buoyancy, and emotional openness. | The Melbourne post-punk band makes a messy life feel easier to untangle, writing songs with an appealing simplicity, buoyancy, and emotional openness. | Primo!: Amici | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/primo-amici/ | Amici | Primo! creates energy out of ennui. The first track of their 23-minute debut LP, “You’ve Got a Million,” is a tiny miracle: Primo! take the small, mundane experience of being simply overworked and reminds us—with spindly guitars, calm levity, and a tilted grace—that the muchness is universal, that you might be overwhelmed but you are not alone. “You’ve got a million things to do/Racing all over town,” the women of Primo! sing with verve, earning the exclamation point. “Flights of stairs can’t slow you down!” In the face of never-ending to-do lists—of “waiting for nothing much at all”—Primo! evoke composure and personal fortitude. You can make things happen while you wait, as the song’s existence attests. Their chiming music urges you along.
With sharp lyrics and copious breathing space, Amici lands somewhere between Flying Nun-style jangle and the extreme minimalism of Young Marble Giants, all while sounding uniquely of Melbourne’s current, thoughtfully witty art-punk moment. The band—Xanthe Waite, Violetta Delconte Race, Suzanne Walker, and recently added bassist Amy Hill—have ties to Total Control, whose guitarist Al Montfort recorded and mixed Amici. The electronic flourishes that hover behind the album feel like a connective tissue to his group.
But Primo!’s approach to post-punk, comparatively, has an appealing simplicity, buoyancy, and emotional openness. Songs blossom from dreary everyday life, like flowers in concrete—words like “deadline,” “traffic,” and “plastic covering” beam with possibility, becoming almost uplifting. Primo!’s music has a tactful lightness of touch, particularly its drumming, and it all floats, even as songs are set near “a cemetery gate” or “shopping alone on a public holiday.” Everyone sings together, adding a blissful collective energy, the kind that makes a messy life feel easier to untangle.
As with many great homespun pop records, you feel as if you are listening in on the process of Amici, rather than simply listening to it. That dynamic holds thematically, too: Much of Amici sounds like a subtle negotiation between quiet, interior struggle and the potential of a dreamer saving herself. The chugging “A City Stair” feels like zipping determinedly through streets alone. On the upbeat “Future,” the band is at an office intoning that, “You’re not alone/There are thousands and thousands/Like you!” And “Bronte Blues” is an empathic antidote to the kind of “very very very small problem” that threatens to stack up and topple over when you least expect it. “Balance it out with walks by the sea/Balance it out with little luxuries,” Primo! sings, with encouraging “Try it!”s shouted in the distance. (With that excellent title, I imagine these lyrics emerging while reading Wuthering Heights near a body of water.)
Few are worthy of a comparison to the beloved San Francisco band Grass Widow, but Primo! earn one, not just for their stylistic makeup and inspired harmonies, but because of their similarly discernible internal logic. Amici is the sound of people working together to find a way forward, and the whole of the record feels like a comrade telling you to hang on. Even the title seems to acknowledge Primo!’s three-way conversation, as well as the one uncorrupted source of comfort in life: friendship.
The highlight of Amici is the buzzy ballad “Ticking Off a List.” Like “You’ve Got a Million,” it’s about the hard fact that life happens while we’re busy tending to our endless, individual tasks. “What a bird’s-eye view,” they sing, “I’m not above, but I imagine you/Trotting around/Ticking off a list of things to do.” It sounds like a poem Frank O’Hara might write after gazing at the Instagram account of a faraway friend, and even more at the song’s outset: “What do you see? There’s a fogginess to some beauty.” That is a wistful daydream of a punk lyric, and one charged with hope. Clarity is rare; the tedium of quotidian responsibility can make things cloudier still. But, of course, it’s amid the work that we often and suddenly explode the boundaries of our lives. Amici is evidence of grasping joy along the way. | 2018-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Upset the Rhythm | August 6, 2018 | 7.5 | 25960b31-4a92-4d10-b1db-d0c24d14f6d2 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Months after his country-rap video went viral, the purposefully mysterious artist releases an EP with all the personality of a wiped smartphone. | Months after his country-rap video went viral, the purposefully mysterious artist releases an EP with all the personality of a wiped smartphone. | RMR: Drug Dealing Is a Lost Art EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rmr-drug-dealing-is-a-lost-art-ep/ | Drug Dealing Is a Lost Art EP | In the months since his Rascal Flatts homage “Rascal” went viral via a cheeky video pairing sweet singing and leering guns, RMR has cultivated a hazy mythology. He grew up “between” Buckhead, Atlanta and Inglewood, Los Angeles, cities a continent apart. He’s influenced by Kanye, Keith Urban, and Gary LeVox, but he’s not a country musician or rapper; he’s a “new-age artist.” In videos and in meetings with record execs, he wears a ski mask, insisting on anonymity because he wants “people to listen with their ears, not their eyes.” On his debut EP, Drug Dealing Is a Lost Art, all this intrigue falls flat. There’s nothing fun, intriguing, or provocative about his music. Despite all his fusionist posturing, he’s got the personality of a wiped smartphone: sleek, modern, empty.
Though RMR favors pageantry on camera, on record he’s modest. As seen in the “Rascal” video, which opens with him belting out a melody, he prizes his voice. It’s a resonant, powerful instrument, and the clip hinges on its bluesy allure to sell the emo-trap shtick that follows. The EP is just as dependent on his voice, but without the video’s props, RMR is exposed. His music is weirdly both overwrought and inert. He croons with the force and intensity of a Rod Wave or 070 Shake but fails to make that strain compelling. The flexes on “Nouveau Riche” are hollow despite being delivered at full blast. “Now I got the life I wanted/Hoping I don’t fuck it up,” he sings, sans context. He could be talking about signing a record deal or replacing his PC with a Mac. There’s no way to know and little reason to care.
He often speaks of escape and arrival without elaborating or embellishing his journey. From his perfunctory mentions of poverty and struggle on “Welfare” to the motivational-speaker talk of “Rascal” (“I came up and so could you”), RMR’s tales are so generic and grayscale that Westside Gunn lands the most colorful line on the album with a lazy throwaway: “My shooter got a big beard/He from Philly.” RMR’s elusiveness is clearly supposed to cultivate some sense of mystery, but there are no breadcrumbs to follow, no puzzle pieces to assemble. He describes the world and himself so impersonally it feels like he was literally born yesterday.
He supplements his poor writing with his bland melodies, convinced that the act of singing is inherently charismatic. “Codeine got me in my feelings/ Codeine got me in my feelings,” he repeats on “Dealer,” yelping the second line. He’s attempting to evoke the mania and delirium of a bender, but the actual result is more “heard ‘Codeine Crazy’ once.” That’s his bit, essentially: I’ve heard it all. This might be compelling if there were a sense of audacity to his mash-ups, but he’s got the stage presence of a floorboard.
Compared to Rina Sawayama treating nu-metal like a sacred art, Pink Siifu channeling hardcore into black rage, or Breland hamming up “My Truck” with that delightful, over-the-top drawl, RMR has no imagination. His take on hybridity is so staid and lifeless that he can’t even sell “Fuck twelve” on “Rascal;” in his mouth it feels less like a battlecry and more like a Spencer’s Gifts executive spitballing t-shirt ideas.
It’s that abiding feeling of vacancy that makes Drug Dealing Is a Lost Art feel so thoroughly feckless and inept. On “I’m Not Over You,” a track co-produced by Timbaland and Andre Brissett, RMR revisits the country- rap template that made him viral. Given Timbaland’s role in legitimizing and innovating country rap in the form of Bubba Sparxxx, the collaboration had the potential to give depth to RMR’s professed genre agnosticism, to show there was a vision underlying all the mythmaking. Instead, we get an uninspired ballad about some brokenhearted schmuck over a flavorless mix of banjo and bass kicks. Sometimes a mask is just a blank face. | 2020-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | CMNTY CULTURE / Warner | June 15, 2020 | 3.3 | 2597a400-77fd-43e4-96e0-8ddc42efa242 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Less than five months after frontman John Dwyer told an audience at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall that they wouldn’t be seeing the band in action for a while, Thee Oh Sees have reemerged with their eighth full-length record in six years. Drop turns out to be the next logical step in the progression undertaken on 2013’s Floating Coffin and 2012’s Putrifiers II. | Less than five months after frontman John Dwyer told an audience at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall that they wouldn’t be seeing the band in action for a while, Thee Oh Sees have reemerged with their eighth full-length record in six years. Drop turns out to be the next logical step in the progression undertaken on 2013’s Floating Coffin and 2012’s Putrifiers II. | Thee Oh Sees: Drop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19277-thee-oh-sees-drop/ | Drop | Well, that didn’t take long. As it turns out, the only thing Thee Oh Sees do more expediently than release new music is hiatuses. Less than five months after frontman John Dwyer told a hometown audience at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall that they wouldn’t be seeing the band in action for a while, Thee Oh Sees have reemerged with their eighth full-length record in six years (to say nothing of a 7" and split-EP stream that that presumably puts as great a strain on America’s vinyl pressing plants as Record Store Day). And despite the significant developments in Dwyer’s life so far this year—like moving to L.A. and reuniting his early 2000s scuzz-rock combo the Coachwhips at SXSW*—Drop* turns out to be the next logical step in the progression undertaken on 2013’s Floating Coffin and 2012’s Putrifiers II, further reconciling Thee Oh Sees once-oppositional motorik-punk pummel and psychedelic-pop whimsy into a feel-good fuzz-rock groove. If Dwyer's morning-after clarification of his onstage address didn't already defuse the uncertainty surrounding the Thee Oh Sees' future, the steady-as-she-goes nature of Drop renders the hiatus announcement a total blip non-event in the band's trajectory.
If anything, the increasingly refined, texturally detailed nature of their recent recordings—not to mention a way-lighter touring itinerary than usual—suggests that Thee Oh Sees weren’t so much pondering a break-up as a Beatles-circa-’66 shake-up, easing up on the relentless road show in favour of a more considered approach in the studio. Accordingly, the songs on Drop aren’t so much tailored to the band’s notoriously blitzkrieged, crowd-swarmed concerts as the all-night after-party. That’s not to suggest it’s an especially mellow record; the noise and chaos linger, but Dwyer and co. are in less of a hurry to unleash it, preferring to patiently zone out rather than freak out.
Coming on like the come-down successors to Putrifiers II rave-up “Lupine Dominus”, the early double-shot of “Encrypted Bounce” and “Savage Victory” counts as two of the band’s most entrancing tracks to date: the former distills the serrated psychedelia of Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” and airtight groove of Can’s “Mother Sky” into Nuggets-sized dimensions, while the latter taps into the same spectral spirit as the Rolling Stones’ ace acid-rock oddity “2000 Light Years From Home”. But even though such familiar record-collector reference points abound on Drop, the mischievous melodies and funhouse-mirrored guitar contortions render the results unmistakably Oh Sees. After introducing itself with a mellontroned refrain uncannily similar to Aerosmith’s “Dream On” (not that there’s anything wrong with that), “The King’s Noise” shows Dwyer to be as in thrall to the early-’70s canon of Bowie, Bolan, and Lennon as peers like Ty Segall and The Smith Westerns—though, unlike them, he punctuates each verse line of faux-Brit diction with a destabilizing Yes-like arpeggio. And despite its titular allusion to every brostepper’s favorite sound, “Drop” actually splits the difference between the Who’s maximum R&B and the Stooges’ Raw Power. (However, the Kinksian “Camera”—with its admission that “life is a camera and I cannot get near ya”—could very well be Dwyer’s dismissive comment on selfies.)
If Drop ultimately ranks a notch below its immediate predecessors in Thee Oh Sees’ discography, it’s for a couple of tracks that stick out as frivolous filler, like the repetitious, nursery-rhymed paisley pop of “Put Some Reverb on My Brother” and the drifting, synth-washed decadanse of “Transparent World”. But as per recent Thee Oh Sees tradition, the album comes to a peaceful balladic conclusion with the unabashedly Beatlesque “The Lens”, though in this case, it feels less like a strategic antidote to the anarchy that preceded it than a natural manifestation of Drop’s stress-free spirit. And yet, just when the song introduces a baroque harpsichord flourish grafted from the mid-section of “In My Life”, it comes to a swift conclusion, as if the band were embarrassed by this uncharacteristic indulgence. It just goes to show that, even at their most relaxed and reverential, Thee Oh Sees’ feisty, impulsive essence still cuts through loud and clear. | 2014-04-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-04-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Castle Face | April 24, 2014 | 7.8 | 2598271e-91c9-4887-ab27-aa8721c6d218 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Arriving during the UK’s worst cost-of-living crisis since the 1950s, the North London rapper’s debut album is an artfully told portrait of life on the dole. | Arriving during the UK’s worst cost-of-living crisis since the 1950s, the North London rapper’s debut album is an artfully told portrait of life on the dole. | Jeshi: Universal Credit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeshi-universal-credit/ | Universal Credit | On paper, there are more exciting things than a concept album about being fucked over by a broken bureaucratic system. However, on the North London rapper Jeshi’s debut album Universal Credit (named after the UK’s welfare provision), he holds the recorder right to the receiver so you can trudge through the call centre menu options with him. The record is about being ground down and then going out. It’s a spiritual successor to Mike Skinner’s early output as The Streets that serves as a companion to slowthai’s more recent pointed truth-telling, and it contains moments where Jeshi reaches the exhilarating heights of both of these artists.
The album arrives during the UK’s worst cost-of-living crisis since the 1950s, and mere days after the Chancellor of the Exchequer became the first frontline politician to be named in the Sunday Times Rich List. The exact timing of these events may be coincidental, but they still add an extra poignancy and prescience to Jeshi’s bitter lyrics. The repeat refrain of “Generation no hope” on “Generation” comes with more bite, and the crushing frustrations of the opening skit sting that much more.
Jeshi lays out in detail what the cost of a hand-to-mouth existence is, explaining in depth what it feels like to have the government use your own poverty as a stick to beat you with. “Hit By A Train” captures the utter depressive slump that is life on the dole, and Jeshi describes a self-medication ritual full of cheap food and bad drugs. “Back here again, every weekend is the same, one loop on replay,” he spits over the bouncy kicks and sharp claps of “Sick.” He writes cyclical choruses that contain the same scenes repeating over and over again—like the daytime TV that fills his days on “National Lottery”—in a timeline that constantly collapses in on itself.
All this might be a miserable listen in lesser hands, but Jeshi captures life’s small joys as well as its multifold indignities. The stumbling pianos on “Killing Me Slowly” soundtrack a tale of getting hopelessly wasted; “Another Cigarette” successfully replicates the feeling of a drunken headspin, and the late-night antics of “3210” are soundtracked by a silky house shuffle. Still though, a dash of humor might have helped here and there.
Britain has, over the decades, taken up benefits bashing as something of a grim national sport. Welfare claimants have been paraded on TV shows like Benefits Street; so-called scroungers make an easy sneer for punch-down tabloids. Jeshi’s account, more artfully told, flips that tradition on its head. On Universal Credit, he proffers downbeat tales that invite empathy, and they deserve, more than anything, to be heard. | 2022-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Because | June 2, 2022 | 7.6 | 259bcbac-b8fb-44b9-894f-519c35201899 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
Without a major label deal or superstar allegiances, Wiz has turned himself into a hip-hop star by rapping about weed, girls, and smoking weed with girls. | Without a major label deal or superstar allegiances, Wiz has turned himself into a hip-hop star by rapping about weed, girls, and smoking weed with girls. | Wiz Khalifa: Kush and Orange Juice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14160-kush-and-orange-juice/ | Kush and Orange Juice | Kids love them some Wiz Khalifa. In a recent Washington City Paper review, the rap blogger Noz described a sold-out 9:30 Club full of late-teens/early-twenties fans, all singing along with the young Pittsburgh rapper's entire set. A little bit of YouTube research shows similar scenes-- at clubs across the country, not just the ones in the Eastern corridor. And when Kush and Orange Juice, the new Wiz mixtape, hit the internet last week, it was a #1 Twitter trending topic for most of the day. And though it's important not to put too much stock in something as ephemeral as trending topics, it at least means there are a whole lot of people talking about a rapper with no major label deal and no superstar allegiances. It's pretty impressive.
Wiz's appeal isn't too hard to figure out. Though he lost his deal with Warner Bros. a while back, you never hear any of the bitterness usually associated with big-label refugees. Instead, he talks his shit with a blasé assurance; one chorus on the mixtape goes, "We belong on the top, but we ain't trippin'/ Cuz we'll get there in a minute." For the most part, he raps about only three things: Weed, girls, and smoking weed with girls (usually your girl). His rap style is easy and conversational, a pinched murmur that never leans too hard on punchlines or narrative. He's got this donkey giggle that he lets loose often, and it might beat out Lil Wayne's guffaw as rap's most irritating laugh, no mean feat. He sounds like the kid two dorm rooms down, bragging about whatever insane party he was at last night while he munches Froot Loops out of the box and watches cartoons on the common-room TV. He's charismatic in a completely relatable way.
He's also got a great ear for beats. The tracks are airy, diffuse things, full of smooth 1980s-funk synths and drums that amble along slowly and quietly. His choices in samples suggest a lot of time watching TV while stoned: Frou Frou's Garden State end-credits song "Let Go" on "In the Cut", Disney princess Demi Lovato's Camp Rock soundtrack single "Our Time Is Here" on "We're Done". "Good Dank" is all warm, rippling psych-funk-- its guitars and organs woozy as all hell, its drums completely nonexistent. And rather than bulldozing through these beats, Wiz just dances around them, never letting his delivery settle into a consistent cadence. Often, he sings his choruses in a calm, casual quaver. Sometimes, he skips rapping altogether. On "Up", he spends four minutes just singing the praises of weed over spaced-out Rhodes plinks, ending by repeating, "Everything's better when you're high," over and over.
When a more conventional rapper like Killa Kyleon or Big K.R.I.T. shows up, the contrast speaks volumes. Those guys are both very good at what they do, but they sound almost old-fashioned in this context, nicely breaking up the half-committed shit-talk. Wiz never sounds like he has a lot at stake; he talks like life is a long, unchanging progression of joints and hotel rooms and girls, which, for him, maybe it is. Among his most characteristic lines is this: "While you at home on Twitter, trying to hack her page and shit/ We smoking and cracking jokes on how lame you is." That kind of indolent wit can lead to some truly dubious ideas, like when Wiz sang Beyoncé's "If I Were a Boy" as "If I Were a Lame" on 2009's Burn After Rolling mixtape, or when he tries his hand at reggae on "Still Blazin" here. But for the most part, Kush and Orange Juice is a surprisingly relaxed and easy listen, a great soundtrack for a barbecue or a spring-weather drive. And that's all it wants to be, so mission accomplished. | 2010-04-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-04-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | null | April 22, 2010 | 7.2 | 259d2807-37cf-4819-b9bc-57fe2529f051 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
This brief, quickly assembled EP follows in the darkly psychedelic vein of the Flaming Lips last album, 2009's Embryonic. | This brief, quickly assembled EP follows in the darkly psychedelic vein of the Flaming Lips last album, 2009's Embryonic. | The Flaming Lips / Neon Indian: The Flaming Lips With Neon Indian | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15286-the-flaming-lips-with-neon-indian/ | The Flaming Lips With Neon Indian | Outside of geographic proximity (Norman, Okla., and Denton, Texas, are only 150 miles apart), psychedelia is the only obvious link between the Flaming Lips and Alan Palomo's project Neon Indian. The Lips often veer to the darker side of psych, especially recently (see their 2009 dread-filled opus Embryonic), while Palomo deals in a day-glo take on 1980's pop. So when Wayne Coyne revealed that they were banging out a fast collaboration-- as he put it, "that shit should be ready to go pretty quickly"-- the first question that came to mind was whether the result would lean more toward sun or shadows.
That's settled immediately by the opener on this four-track, 22-minute EP, the ominously titled "Is David Bowie Dying?" It's not completely clear what the lyrics have to do with Bowie's potential demise, but the music feels like an elegy, a kind of spaced-out funeral march. With its slow, crunchy beat, cutting sonic debris, and Coyne's weary intonations, it would fit well among Embryonic's doomy mantras. "Take your legs and run/ To the death rays of the sun," he sings with resignation, followed by a stoic chant of "goodbye, goodbye." It's pretty morose, but hypnotic and fully-realized-- impressively so considering how quickly it was made.
The rest of the record shares those dark qualities-- much of it is stark, cavernous, and full of murky low end. But the other three tracks are less polished, more loose and experimental. Which is not to suggest they're somehow unfinished. Their sounds are more suited to an amorphous form, making it tough to tell exactly what Palomo contributed. Even on "Alan's Theremin"-- an eight-minute soundscape that ranks with the weirdest stuff by either act-- there's no telling what came from that instrument (or even if he actually used one). But Palomo's anonymity reflects an internal coherence. This isn't a case of musicians who just met randomly throwing sounds at each other. As unpredictable as the music can be, very little comes off as gratuitous or out of place.
Still, if you're looking for something as song-like as "Is David Bowie Dying?", stick around for the closer. As with the first cut, its title-- "Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth Part 2"-- makes a specific reference, in this case to a Minutemen song. But again, how the music relates to that title isn't overt. The track sounds more like a krautrock jam, with a muffled bass groove that could've been ripped from a Can outtake. In keeping with the record's vibe, it blows apart near the end, with individual sounds dying off into the ether. It's a dark way to end, but it suggests open space rather than closed perfection. Turns out this collaboration is as much about implication as explication-- as much about what these artists could do as what they actually did. | 2011-04-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-04-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Electronic | Warner Bros. / Lovely Sorts of Death | April 5, 2011 | 7.4 | 259f576a-03b7-4de3-a70b-bc6dfc058f5e | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The New York agit-punks’ latest EP is another menacing, distorted call to arms. | The New York agit-punks’ latest EP is another menacing, distorted call to arms. | HARAM: وين كنيت بي ١١/٩؟? “Where Were You on 9/11?” EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-where-were-you-on-911-ep/ | وين كنيت بي ١١/٩؟? “Where Were You on 9/11?” EP | “Where were you on 9/11?” is a loaded question. For some, those moments were imbued with grief and personal horror; for others, the horrors came after the clouds of ash had settled, and a new, violent era of American political consciousness dawned. That famous, widespread sense of kindness and solidarity that was said to have briefly reigned in New York City following 9/11 did not extend to everyone; those who came of age post-9/11, in the shadow of the hawkish Patriot Act, remember something different.
Following the attack, hate crimes against Muslims, Sikhs, and people of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent rose sharply, and that toxic Islamophobia has formed the bedrock of both U.S. foreign policy and its xenophobic, right-wing political rhetoric ever since. This is the reality that spawned New York agit-punks Haram, and that they seek to confront via their short, sharp tracks of hardcore aggression and lyrics sung in Arabic. Vocalist Nader Haram, who was born in Yonkers to Lebanese parents, tackled that question head-on with their 2017 debut بس ربحت, خسرت “When You Have Won, You Have Lost” and remain vigilant on the band’s latest EP, “وين كنيت بي ١١/٩؟? “Where Were You on 9/11?” a menacing, distorted call to arms.
On the title track (for which the band provided an English translation), menacing guitars shove over for Nader’s snarling, wounded recollections—“The pilots did their flying/Where did you think I was, on 9/11?” Like so many others of his generation, he was sitting in class when his teacher broke the news. The only Muslim kid in his 5th-grade class at Catholic school, Nader was pulled out of class and questioned by the principal, an experience that left an indelible mark on his understanding of racism and surveillance (which was only compounded when he briefly became a target for the FBI). “In Jesus’ school/Came my teacher/She told me I was there,” he howls through the trauma, biting off each syllable with bared teeth.
”قنبلة بي السماء (Bomb in the Sky)” offers a sickening snapshot of life under the forever war, its rage and frantic energy packed into under two minutes of gritty punk rock’n’roll. “جهاد, جهادي (Jihad, Jihadi)” is intoxicating, its blunt lyrics—“Kill, Kill, Kill/You destroyed us with your union”—and sturdy groove two-stepping towards the revolution. On the taut, anthemic “(الحل (المقاومة The Solution (Is Resistance),” Nader turns his focus towards the future, bellowing, “When you wake me up/It’s all or nothing/Everything for the resistance!”
That resistance is intrinsic to Haram’s every note and breath as a punk band; there is nothing radical about falling in line with the status quo, and as Nader told Discipline Press back in 2017, “Any minority being threatened in a community…if you’re a true punk and someone that actually believes in it, you have to stand up and defend that shit.” In just under eight minutes, Haram do more for the cause of righteously political punk than performative pretenders have in three decades, and with “Where Were You on 9/11?” they’ve sounded the alarm for all of us to keep waking the fuck up. | 2019-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Toxic State | April 9, 2019 | 7.7 | 25a170b4-6e48-44e7-96b8-9cc7f839fdb9 | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | |
The Baltimore rapper continues to earn his “Captain Hook” nickname on an album full of Murda Beatz’s sometimes too-spare production. | The Baltimore rapper continues to earn his “Captain Hook” nickname on an album full of Murda Beatz’s sometimes too-spare production. | Shordie Shordie / Murda Beatz: Memory Lane | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shordie-shordie-murda-beatz-memory-lane/ | Memory Lane | Every city with a buzzing rap scene can relate to Baltimore: Throughout the 2010s, as the city’s rap scene caught fire, tragedy after tragedy prevented artists from taking off the same way that their punch-in, flow-obsessed neighbors in the DMV did. The 23-year-old rising star Lor Scoota died in 2016 and local phenom Young Moose became the target of a Baltimore Police Department raid that resulted in him being imprisoned for eight months.
Despite all this, Baltimore’s rap scene is thriving today. The loudest (and most nasally) voice in the city belongs to Shordie Shordie, who rose to prominence as the designated hook-man of Peso Da Mafia before leaving the group to try his hand at a solo career. Shordie’s melody-first approach to songwriting made him stand out in his former group. Reading the lyrics to his 2018 breakout single, “Bitchuary,” you’d think the song sounded closer to a questionable argument you hear through thin walls than a tense, flirty back-and-forth, but that’s Shordie’s appeal: Any vulnerability he’s willing to show is always going to be cloaked with a hook you want to sing in the shower.
Memory Lane, Shordie’s follow-up to 2020’s >Music, is set on convincing you that he and “Nice for What” producer Murda Beatz have unrivaled chemistry—and for the most part, their ideas are in lockstep. The lone-producer project is new territory for Shordie, but he seems comfortable with Murda Beatz taking control. Early standout “Same Niggas” is the bread-and-butter that makes up the bulk of his discography. The subtext of every “Fuck you” he snarls is “And it don’t have to be this way.” This is just the first of several songs he spends licking his wounds—he’s a scorned lover, and he doesn’t care who knows it. “Keep your cheating to yourself and your phone, I don’t wanna cry,” he sings a song later on “Stuck in Between.”
Shordie continues to push himself as a writer, slowly becoming worthy of the “Captain Hook” nickname he adopted while with his former group. Even so, Memory Lane is a bit of a mixed bag; for every fleshed-out story of love and loss, there’s a song that’s all hook with a blasé verse added as an afterthought, like the Frank Ocean-flipping “Moral to the Story.” Shordie makes up for that miss with “LOVE,” where his cries for “L-O-V-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E” and make-up sex are a welcome, yet unexpected callback to “Loveeeeeee Song.”
Murda’s skeletal production is effective at establishing simple feelings like sadness and lust. Superstars like Drake and Cardi B flood the space on Murda’s beats with their charisma. Shordie, on the other hand, needs beats that aid his storytelling. Too often on Memory Lane is he left to do the emotional heavy lifting with his singing. These synergistic problems are only magnified by the one rapper/one producer format; a producer with a tag as recognizable as Murda’s should be bringing Shordie closer to being a household name. Instead, Murda’s contributions feel closer to the guy who you have to force to turn in his part of a group project. The album’s closer, “Ride with Shordie,” with a beat made up of just string plucks and handclaps, whisks you away to a beachside bonfire, and leaves you wondering if there were other songs with more imaginative production culled from the final tracklist. Shordie’s no stranger to stretching his voice to add an extra layer of emotion to the track, but Murda’s beats sound like they’re waiting for a second act that never begins.
In 2019, Shordie told The Fader that it could sound like he was just doing “the easy part” with Peso Da Mafia, since he was focused on hooks. Going solo has let him flourish creatively; his hooks have only become a deadlier tool in his arsenal. At their simplest, Shordie’s love stories are lucid daydreams of what a situationship could’ve been, but when he puts it all together on Memory Lane, they’re storyboarded short films detailing the ups and downs of young love.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Warner | March 11, 2021 | 6.7 | 25a26ed1-49dd-4181-b84e-67118d3c072b | Brandon Callender | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-callender/ | |
Much like the cinematic remake, which functions as nothing but an advertisement for the entire Warner Media library, the Space Jam soundtrack is soulless and gratuitous. | Much like the cinematic remake, which functions as nothing but an advertisement for the entire Warner Media library, the Space Jam soundtrack is soulless and gratuitous. | Various Artists: Space Jam: A New Legacy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-space-jam-a-new-legacy/ | Space Jam: A New Legacy | We are in the midst of IP hell, and every day there are fewer escape routes. Anything in pop culture that has ever made a profit will inevitably be revived or reimagined or rebooted or remixed or whatever other word will convince you that the old nostalgic thing you love is now the new nostalgic thing you love. Up next is 1996’s Space Jam, originally born out of a pair of commercials starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny that were designed to sell shoes and market-test whether the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes property could be made relevant to a new generation. It was a success, so they were like, “I guess this should be a movie now.” It’s a franchise born out of real integrity, which is why it makes perfect sense to return in a 2021 landscape where the sole purpose of everything is to become a bullet point on some CEO’s letter to shareholders.
Even though Space Jam is an obvious hour-and-a-half commercial, if you’re of a certain age, like I am, the franchise reserves a warm place in your heart. I mean, c’mon, it had Michael Jordan and tons of other cool NBA players and Bugs Bunny and the whole gang. I wanted to wear their Tune Squad jerseys and to visit Moron Mountain, and the way the movie alternated between reality and the cartoon world blew my mind on endless Cartoon Network rewatches. But it was the soundtrack, too. What would it be without R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly,” Seal’s “Fly Like an Eagle,” or Quad City DJ’s “Space Jam”? So many of the memories I, and many others, have for the movie are tied to those songs.
But, please, I beg you, put down the nostalgia goggles for a second. Space Jam’s sequel, Space Jam: A New Legacy, is full-on #brandedcontent. This time, it stars LeBron James instead of Michael Jordan. And if you watch the movie trailer, you’ll notice that it doesn’t just feature Looney Tunes, but also characters from It, Mad Max, and A Clockwork Orange—you know, all the things kids love these days! It’s not an advertisement for shoes and cartoon rabbits, but the entire Warner Media library. And, of course, the soundtrack is no different.
Yes, all of your favorite brand ambassadors—oh, sorry, I mean artists—make appearances on the soundtrack. John Legend, who hasn’t turned down a sponsorship since the W. Bush era, shows up for two tracks. One is called “Crowd Go Crazy,” and it has this annoyingly bright instrumental that might remind you of the ending credits theme for a second-tier Disney Channel musical. I’m 95 percent sure if you play the track backward, it contains some sort of subliminal “Don’t cancel your HBO Max subscription” message. Legend’s other track, “See Me Fly,” captures Chance the Rapper as he shoves a bunch of half-assed basketball references into his verse. It’s unclear if he’s ever watched a game or if he prepared by repeating terms he heard in a Stephen A. Smith clip. There are some bizarre lines, too: “You better look at every shot like it’s your shot at freedom,” he raps. Thanks for the motivation, I guess, Mr. Rapper.
But it has to get better, right? Well, is your idea of better “Control the World,” where 24kGoldn miserably whimpers about heartache on the most milquetoast guitar loop? Or maybe it’s Cordae’s lyrics on “Settle the Score,” which makes Porky Pig’s rap sound like that Big L and JAY-Z radio freestyle. Or what about Big Freedia’s “Goin’ Looney”? Do you mean to tell me that “I’ma duffy-daffy duck, quack, quack if you buck” over a heartless bounce beat complete with handclaps and bed creaks doesn’t get you absolutely psyched?! The fun keeps going. Joyner Lucas, Lil Tecca, Saweetie, and more all appear to collect their checks. Normally I would say they deserve a temporary ban from Spotify’s RapCaviar playlist as retribution for putting something so terrible into the world, but being included on this soundtrack is embarrassing enough. The only people who get off unscathed are Lil Baby, Kirk Franklin, and Just Blaze, because “We Win” is so bizarre that it’s the only song on this entire album worth a shit.
I get it. You’re probably wondering what the point is of railing so hard on a soundtrack and franchise that is ostensibly made for kids. But right now, in pop culture, almost anything that is mega-popular hides behind the excuse that it is “for kids” or “just entertainment” as a way to duck criticism. If it sucks, it sucks, no matter how fun it was intended to be. But whatever, I’ll probably still pay for a ticket to see the dumb movie, and whoever owns AT&T stock will get the last laugh. My soul has already been ripped out, put through a shredder, and thrown into an incinerator. It wouldn’t be right if Space Jam: A New Legacy and its soundtrack didn’t bunny hop on the ashes.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Republic / Warner Bros. | July 15, 2021 | 2.3 | 25a46f62-837a-4133-8350-f1ee9a237f8c | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
There's an added element of showmanship to the Oxford band's third album that establishes it as a point of no return. It's easy to hear Holy Fire as a more muscular complement to Wild Beasts, though its overt commercial appeal aligns Foals with the Cure in stadium mode. | There's an added element of showmanship to the Oxford band's third album that establishes it as a point of no return. It's easy to hear Holy Fire as a more muscular complement to Wild Beasts, though its overt commercial appeal aligns Foals with the Cure in stadium mode. | Foals: Holy Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17578-holy-fire/ | Holy Fire | For nearly two minutes, "Inhaler" does not sound like the triumphant return of one of Britain's most successful modern bands. In fact, it sounds claustrophobic-- hookless, even. During what feels like the chorus, Yannis Philippakis can't quite get hold of a melody that sounds like it might never resolve. All the while, he's being cramped by increasing amounts of reverb. But then, at about the 1:45 mark, he yells, "and I can't get enough... SPACE!" and then Foals break the song wide open with a riff that's startlingly low-slung and grunge-y for technically proficient guys who otherwise proudly wield their guitars pecs-high. You can easily hear a throng of festival-goers absolutely losing its shit during this extremely self-reflexive moment, and there's more like it on Holy Fire, which is a good thing. On 2010's Total Life Forever, a band once known for spindly, inscrutable songs like "Mathletics" made a shift to expansive and emotive rock in a way that was both surprising and completely logical. With Holy Fire, there's an added element of showmanship that establishes it as a point of no return.
"Inhaler" makes even more sense in the context of Holy Fire's sequencing, as it's preceded by "Prelude" (natch), a four-minute instrumental of build-and-burst dynamics that splits the difference between the Alan Parsons Project's "Sirius" and Interpol's "Untitled" in terms of fostering arena preparedness. There are key moments when everything drops out except for Philippakis' and Jimmy Smith's pinging guitars, and you imagine the floodlights cast on the audience right before the beat drops again. It's hard to hear "Prelude" as being meant for any other purpose.
Not everything about Holy Fire is this obvious, though there is a crowd-pleasing streak where Foals embrace how they can make their most populist, personal, and direct music all at the same time. While leagues more melodic and softly produced than anything on their debut, Antidotes, Total Life Forever singles such as "Blue Blood" and "Miami" still dealt in post-punk terminology, high-fretboard riffs, fractured drumming, verses and choruses fitting at odd angles. "Everytime" and "Bad Habit" (whose verse melody is perilously close to that of TLF's "This Orient") are considerably more tapered and pop-savvy, making the hooks feel like bigger payoffs by gracefully ascending towards them. A similar refinement happens on the maddeningly catchy "My Number", which reshapes the cyclical chants of "Total Life Forever" into a song that's 85% hook; deceptively chipper funk-rock surrounding a bitter declaration of romantic independence where the latter sought eternal companionship. At least in contemporary terms, it's easy to hear them as the muscular, brooding complement to Wild Beasts' limber, libidinous take on wounded British masculinity, although their more overt commercial appeal puts them in the lineage of the Cure in stadium mode, circa Wish.
That's also cause for relief; based on the success of "Spanish Sahara", you'd be forgiven for thinking Holy Fire's title and imperious cover art indicated that they were continuing down that spacious, grandiose path while using U2 as their proverbial North Star. The weakest patches of Holy Fire come when Foals try to repeat "Spanish Sahara". Though Flood and Alan Moulder's production is worth every penny and does everything in its power to make Holy Fire spacious and sparkling, "atmospheric" Foals tends to obscure melody every bit as much as Antidotes' acrobatics. Likewise, while Philipakkis' voice is becoming more versatile and expressive, his lyrics depersonalize what appear to be very personal songs with stock metaphors: "I'm the last cowboy in this town," "Every time I see you, I wanna sail away," "It's times like these when I'm on my way out of the woods," "I know I cannot be true/ I'm an animal just like you."
Though a dead heat in terms of overall quality, and similarly prone to cooling off considerably in its second half, Holy Fire is better proportioned than the top-heavy Total Life Forever. Prior to the nearly beatless and occasionally stirring final 10 minutes, "Milk and Black Spiders" slowly builds from a bed of pinprick harmonics to a stirring chorus in Holy Fire's most effective use of the slow build, and "Providence" at the very least gives its lyrics some feral embodiment with an ear-grabbing octave-shifted riff.
Holy Fire is undoubtedly a very good, ambitious record, one that operates on an artistic economy of scale, where the lustrous production and singles like "My Number" and "Inhaler" do the heavy work of confirming Foals' headliner status. The rest has the easy task of proving the Oxford band to be more emotionally substantial and idiosyncratic than any of their mainstream peers. Like Total Life Forever, Holy Fire threatens greatness, and whatever disappointment comes from missing the mark is mitigated by its scope: A bomb needs to be operational more than it needs to be accurate. | 2013-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. / Transgressive | February 12, 2013 | 7.6 | 25a5bdb7-a732-4835-90cf-d68612379888 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The debut from the it-boy bedroom pop auteur manages to feel both excitingly personal and a bit disingenuous. | The debut from the it-boy bedroom pop auteur manages to feel both excitingly personal and a bit disingenuous. | Gus Dapperton: Where Polly People Go to Read | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gus-dapperton-where-polly-people-go-to-read/ | Where Polly People Go to Read | Gus Dapperton makes sweet and frustrated sex songs for a generation that is increasingly not having sex. And how appropriate for these songs to be written, produced, recorded, mixed, and mastered all by the same 22-year-old. The lonely have to do everything themselves.
Where Polly People Go To Read is the young autodidact’s full-length debut, released on the streaming-focused label AWAL, which was expanded last year with a $150 million investment by the publishing company Kobalt. And Gus Dapperton is a good bet, averaging over a million monthly listeners on Spotify for just two self-released EPs. Born Brendan Rice and raised in New York, his sound is a hodgepodge of gauzy pop-rock, evoking Tame Impala, Mac DeMarco, and the 1975, rendered much more bedroom-y by an omnipresent Roland TR-626 drum machine that he bought off eBay. The sense throughout is feelings through a filter, a nostalgia for someone else’s nostalgia.
The songs—not to mention Gus’ foppish stage name or his aggressively idiosyncratic fashion sense, with colorful eyeshadow and very baggy fits, even when he’s just wearing boxers—manage to feel both excitingly personal and a bit disingenuous. The confusion is greatest when he’s being opaque, like on the opening to “Eyes for Ellis”: “Finn loves Ellis/But a skin-tight hope/A thin sequella come amicable/A pinch won’t dwell about the brittle-boned.” If that’s hard to follow, at least he seems aware: “I’m a lot of words for a wannabe,” he sings on the next track. Or consider the album title, which would seem a bold, straightforward claim to polysexuality if Gus hadn’t told an interviewer, “Polly people, poly as in ‘many,’ is this term I invented.”
But you can deal in some light misdirection when you’re so magnetic. His self-directed, million-view music videos usually involve Napoleon Dynamite-like expressive dancing, except everyone is hotter. In casting extras, he often does that only-unique-faces-and-bodies thing that the 1975 did in the “TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME” video and Lil Yachty on the cover to Teenage Emotions. It’s welcoming, and that was certainly the case with the video for “My Favorite Fish,” where some dancing takes place on the roof of a moving boat. The song features an adorable couplet, “I don’t usually fall in love/I’m not used to fa-la-la-la”—the album has a few gems like that, like “I’m not your hero, but I’m here” on “Sockboy”—and it has a catchy, benign funk that wafts in as John Mayer likely wishes he sounded like now.
Much of Gus’ first two EPs had that cushioned vibe to a fault, often so relentlessly soft as to be cloying. Yet at a few key moments on Polly People, he moves beyond a caricature of a bedroom pop star to sound like a fully dimensioned artist. It happens whenever he adopts a semi-guttural, pained growl: the sound is there when he says “I feel like I’m famous” on “World Class Cinema,” or when singing about a love interest’s love interest on “Fill Me Up Anthem.” It sounds like it really hurts, the emotion even more jarring and precise when contrasted with the aimless horniness elsewhere.
Gus didn’t invent this delivery—it’s a defining move of his fellow viral Gen Z auteur Corbin, of whom Gus is a confirmed fan—but it nevertheless transforms his musical persona. In his weakest moments, he might sound like he’s grinding it out alone with this old gear because he is a safe guy and a Casio keyboard is a neutered instrument. But with just the little growl, the cuteness shows a crack, and it’s clear he’s using easy tools and the accessibility of pop to process difficult emotions. Sure, sometimes Polly People sounds like Urban Outfitters smells, but thanks to these moments of humanity, you might find yourself willing to forgive him. | 2019-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | AWAL | April 18, 2019 | 6.4 | 25a9a5c0-c5b5-477e-89dd-55ceb9938425 | Duncan Cooper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/duncan-cooper/ | |
These two albums from the 1980s, now reissued with bonus tracks, aren't anywhere near Paul McCartney's best, but both have their moments and they shed light on his long-time love of R&B. | These two albums from the 1980s, now reissued with bonus tracks, aren't anywhere near Paul McCartney's best, but both have their moments and they shed light on his long-time love of R&B. | Paul McCartney: Tug of War / Pipes of Peace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21028-tug-of-war-pipes-of-peace/ | Tug of War / Pipes of Peace | Paul McCartney's team-up with Rihanna and Kanye West on "FourFiveSeconds" earlier this year was met with surprise and bewilderment by some, but if you go back far enough you'd see it's just par for the course in the mind of Macca. Ever since the Beatles covered the Cookies back in '63, McCartney has been testifying to his love of R&B. "Smokey Robinson was like God in our eyes," he once said. There was a reason Billy Preston's Rhodes solo fit so perfectly in "Get Back", after all. Paul McCartney was an R&B lover before he was ever a Beatle.
In McCartney's solo material, however, you have to fast forward to 1982's Tug of War and 1983's Pipes of Peace to hear how that R&B influence evolved in his distinctive sound. It is within these two misunderstood albums in the Macca canon that the square root of "FourFiveSeconds" can be discovered, particularly upon the release of this latest pair of deluxe editions as part of the ongoing Paul McCartney Archive Collection series.
In one sense, Tug of War plays out like the album we might've gotten had Lennon and McCartney taken up Lorne Michaels' famous $3,000 offer to reunite on "Saturday Night" in 1976. George Martin sits at the controls on a Fab Four-related project for the first time since Wings' "Live and Let Die" (unless you count the 1978 soundtrack to the unmentionably awful "jukebox musical" Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band). The specter of Lennon's tragic death and the unresolved differences between the two lifelong friends loom large across much of this material, especially the jubilant "Ballroom Dancing", the symphonic title track and "Here Today". The latter is the album's most direct reflection on Lennon's death, and it's a song McCartney has been regularly incorporating in his concerts the last couple of tours. Whatever Paul might not have said in the press at the time of Lennon's assassination, he certainly said here.
The nucleus of Tug, however, is McCartney's yin-yang pair of collaborations with Stevie Wonder. Of course we all know "Ebony and Ivory", pure ground-zero Macca schmaltz tethered by a goofy yet endearing analogy to the synchronicity between the piano's keys. Strangely enough, the song's message has grown more urgent over the years, while the utterly Triple A orchestrations of the music itself grows as dated as that Joe Piscopo/Eddie Murphy send-up on "Saturday Night Live". The key moment comes earlier on the album with "What's That You're Doing?", a tour de force of Hotter Than July-era Wonder funk that can be seen as the ColecoVision to the PS4 of "FourFiveSeconds".
Some critics derided McCartney for aging gracelessly upon the release of the electro-tinged Pipes of Peace in '83, right as he turned 41. However, a good listen to the album today reveals some ways it was ahead of its time. With the ballad "So Bad", McCartney confirmed his aforementioned Smokey worship by paying homage to Robinson's "Quiet Storm" era, emulating the Motown great's cool falsetto to such perfection that Smokey himself had a little bit of a rough time emulating it on his own cover from The Art of McCartney. Then there is "Tug of Peace", an early, primitive version of a mash-up that brought together the title cuts of these underappreciated albums. The blend is clunky, but it foreshadows his electronic music work as the Fireman and on Liverpool Sound Collage.
Then there's "Say Say Say", written in collaboration with Michael Jackson. The song was a simpatico matching of minds, combining Paul's harmonies and Jackson's meticulous sense of rhythm. Mark "Spike" Stent's magnificent 2015 remix of "Say" on the bonus disc of the Pipes reissue stretches the groove to nearly eight minutes, buoyed by a rocksteady 4/4 handclap beat that conjures up visions of the New York City Breakers dancing in your head. On "The Man", the Macca/Jacko duo sways a little closer into Paul territory with its strummy acoustic charm and Wings-esque bombast, showing that beyond "Say Say Say" and "The Girl Is Mine", they were a potent creative team before it all imploded in a dust of Beatles royalties and Nike ad money.
The extras dug up for the Tug of War reissue (the Super Deluxe Edition of each also contain DVDs of era-appropriate ephemera) make for some interesting listening—demo versions of "Wanderlust" and "The Pound Is Sinking", and a version of "Ebony" with just McCartney on electric piano. But those pale in comparison to the veritable alternate LP included in Pipes of Peace. The previously unreleased "It's Not On" sounds like Ween, while the tremolo guitar that floats across another rare cut, "Simple As That", could be the secret template for The Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?". Elsewhere, proper album tracks like "Average Person", "Keep Under Cover" and "Sweetest Little Show" in demo form sound like they could have been leftovers from Ram. In all, this reissue series continues to shine a new light on McCartney's varied solo output, finding new stories they tell. | 2015-10-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | null | October 6, 2015 | 6.7 | 25ac2a87-e4e1-49d6-97dc-768f4c96a58c | Ron Hart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ron-hart/ | null |
The iconic UK rave duo belatedly celebrates its 30th anniversary with a mixture of new songs, re-recordings of classic tracks, and remixes from the artists they’ve inspired. | The iconic UK rave duo belatedly celebrates its 30th anniversary with a mixture of new songs, re-recordings of classic tracks, and remixes from the artists they’ve inspired. | Orbital: 30 Something | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/orbital-30-something/ | 30 Something | A 30th anniversary is special for any band that makes it that far. For an electronic act forged in the spontaneous white heat of rave, it’s close to a miracle. Yet 30 Something, which belatedly marks UK rave veterans Orbital’s three decades in the trenches, offers a comprehensive argument as to why Paul and Phil Hartnoll have endured where the likes of N-Joi and SL2 have not. With a mixture of re-recorded hits, new songs, and remixes, the collection looks back on the fraternal duo’s origins while celebrating their late-blossoming influence.
This might be the key difference between 30 Something and Orbital 20, the singles collection that marked the group’s 20th anniversary. The two new remixes on that record, from Global Communication’s Tom Middleton and fidget houser Hervé, felt tacked on, only tangentially connected to the Orbital world. Thirteen years later, the duo’s rave-influenced, genre-hopping sound has rarely sounded more relevant, having found its reflection in producers like Lone, Logic1000, Jon Hopkins, and Shanti Celeste, all of whom feature here.
30 Something’s 15 remixes include a few incandescent highlights. Hopkins’ take on “Halcyon & On” adds a cute shuffle that wraps the song’s sunrise melancholy in a warm, fluffy blanket, while John Tejada cleverly cuts up the much-loved synths of “Impact.” Beyond the warm, self-referential glow of clever curation, though, most of the remixes feel like pale imitations. Orbital’s back catalog may be inconsistent but at their best—basically the first two albums—the band walked a spellbinding line between techno’s hypnotic sprawl, rave’s discordant riffs, and ambient house’s refined melodic beauty, with a little live rock noodling for good measure. It’s a difficult path to follow, and many of the remixes end up falling flat on their two-dimensional behinds. ANNA’s beefed-up take on “Belfast” feels too functional compared to the original’s heart-string-tugging choral charm, while Joris Voorn flattens out the cinematic quirks and kinks of “The Box” to leave us with a platitudinous tech-house number.
These remixes may dominate the 24-track collection, but the group’s original work wins out in spirit. Orbital have contributed two new songs, as well as a new mix of “Where Is It Going?,” their collaboration with Stephen Hawking for the 2012 London Paralympics Opening Ceremony. Infected with the bittersweet bite of nostalgia, “Smiley” and “Where Is It Going?” feel particularly poignant, both musically and thematically. The former lays clips of ravers talking about a police raid in August 1988—including a 20-year-old Paul Hartnoll describing how he was allegedly beaten by uniformed officers—over a clattering breakbeat, serpentine synth riffs, and moody chords. And the latter song’s celebration of the Large Hadron Collider feels particularly stirring in a world where the rigors of science have taken a beating from populist politicians.
The album’s peak is a set of new mixes of six of the band’s classic songs: “Impact,” “Satan,” “Chime,” “Halcyon,” “Belfast,” and “The Box.” (Well, five and a half: “The Box” never quite did it for me.) The 30 Something reworks are based on live versions that Orbital have been road-testing since they first stumbled onto the stage, which makes them something close to the definitive takes: towering, adrenaline-fueled, ever-expanding arrangements that wring every ounce of emotion, propulsion, and excitement from the songs’ once humble hearts.
This is the Orbital that millions of festival goers have bugged out to ever since 1990, when they made their first live appearance supporting the Shamen; this is the Orbital that a vast television audience experienced when UK national broadcaster Channel 4 aired the duo’s epochal 1994 Glastonbury gig. More importantly, this is Orbital at their scorching, sweeping, and melodic best. Orbital are a band that—on “Chime,” say—can work the atonal scramble of rave and into a neo-Gothic cathedral of electronic sound, all flamboyant melodic peaks and picturesque descents; a band who—on “Halcyon” or “Belfast”—can move you to tears with an elegiac sample even as the rhythm keeps your feet pumping. Would actual live versions of these songs have been better? Perhaps. But these live-inspired versions feel more universal, celebrating Orbital’s work as whole, rather than highlighting one specific gig.
Right from the start, Orbital were different: a duo of Crass- and Butthole Surfers-sampling, Doctor Who-loving punks-turned-ravers who valued live performance over DJ sets, progression over repetition, and impact over genre. At its best, 30 Something shows why this singular spirit has helped Orbital to become a group for the ages, an electronic act with soul and craft who never forgot the heart-rending and occasionally dumb rush of rave. Orbital’s second victory lap is inconsistent, but it is undoubtedly well earned. | 2022-07-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Orbital Recordings Ltd. | July 25, 2022 | 7.2 | 25adad24-b6d5-475b-8362-1038a15815a1 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Extreme-metal titans and prolific collaborators the Body team with New York-based industrial duo Uniform on a brutally satisfying—and surprisingly melodic—joint album. | Extreme-metal titans and prolific collaborators the Body team with New York-based industrial duo Uniform on a brutally satisfying—and surprisingly melodic—joint album. | Uniform / The Body: Mental Wounds Not Healing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/uniform-the-body-mental-wounds-not-healing/ | Mental Wounds Not Healing | On Mental Wounds Not Healing, two compatible bands bring out the best in each other. The joint LP from Portland extreme-metal titans the Body and New York-based industrial duo Uniform finds both outfits pushing the most intense elements of their respective sounds into the red while scaling new melodic and compositional heights. Recorded around the same time the Body were finishing last month’s I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer, these seven songs are so brutally satisfying, they might leave some listeners wishing the collaboration were permanent—an impressive feat when you consider the strength of each act’s individual catalog.
Composed of ex-Drunkdriver vocalist Michael Berdan and guitarist/programmer Ben Greenberg, formerly of the Men, Uniform have spent the last few years cutting a serious figure in the harshest corners of Brooklyn’s music scene. In 2017, they released the excellent Wake in Fright, and two tracks from that album ended up on “Twin Peaks: the Return.” Since their 2010 breakthrough, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, the Body’s Chip King and Lee Buford have remained both consistently thrilling and impossibly prolific. They’ve also put out numerous collaborative works during that time, with acts such as New Jersey black metal fiends Krieg, Louisiana sludge merchants Thou, and the intense grindcore enthusiasts in Full of Hell.
It’s been well established that the Body play well with others, but Mental Wounds Not Healing—which takes its title from a lyric in Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train”—is nothing short of artistic kismet. Versatility has always been key to King and Buford’s approach. Aside from King’s awesome howl, the Body have never really stuck to one sound: Waters of the Earth featured deceptively angelic vocalizing from the Assembly of Light choir, and although a familiar intensity binds their subsequent albums together, they’ve also proven themselves to be anything but purists by taking cues from modern pop and deconstructing their own catalog. On Mental Wounds, the boundary between their malleable style and the signature sounds Uniform bring to the table—blasted electronic beats and Berdan’s cruel sneer—is perfectly blurred, as the two acts lean into every complementary facet of their aesthetics.
Fans of both bands might be surprised at how melodic Mental Wounds can be. “In My Skin” begins as a torrid dirge before opening up to reveal fuzzy synths and lovely strumming; King’s endless scream is the cherry on top of its sludgy sundae. Closing track “Empty Comforts” carries all the anthemic sweep of a classic cut from Nine Inch Nails (who the Body have covered), its back end charging forward with a soaring guitar line of modern-rock radio proportions. Wrapped in layers of harsh static and noise, these relatively conventional elements never sound an inch out of place.
A worthy addition to both the Body’s and Uniform’s catalogs, Mental Wounds is also a useful introduction for listeners who are new to either group. With only a few years and two full-lengths under their belt, Uniform are still a band on the rise, and this inspired joint effort will undoubtedly raise their profile in extreme-music circles. For the Body, an acclaimed duo with an imposing corpus of work, the album provides an ideal entryway into their harrowing, protean, and consistently ingenious approach to metal. Mental Wounds Not Healing is a brutal, beautiful experiment—and a seamless collaboration that sounds more like the birth of a great new band. | 2018-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Sacred Bones | June 14, 2018 | 7.8 | 25af2897-6901-459e-a645-4093fe9c7129 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
On his fourth album as King Krule, Archy Marshall reckons with love and newfound fatherhood, but he still sounds beset by existential doubt. | On his fourth album as King Krule, Archy Marshall reckons with love and newfound fatherhood, but he still sounds beset by existential doubt. | King Krule: Space Heavy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-krule-space-heavy/ | Space Heavy | A King Krule song tends to sound woozy, even slick, until you get close enough to smell the rot. Blue notes curdle in grimy pools of reverb. Hooks wilt in the muck. Then he sets loose that monstrous voice and it hulks through the swamp, holding each delicate line aloft like a swaddled newborn. It is the voice that protects the poetry, neither viable without the other. Each signals vulnerability and strength; each signals the pursuit of absolute authenticity. Since 2017’s The OOZ, Archy Marshall has cooled the fire in his lungs. But even his prettiest songs seem negotiated out of that old pact with rage.
Marshall is now 28, father to a four-year-old girl, and he wrote much of his fourth King Krule album in C major. But aside from naptime ballad “Seaforth,” Space Heavy subverts the key’s easy charms. His chords are arpeggiated as if by torture, drawn and quartered across wide, yawning bars. Any melodious pleasantries occur in spite of Marshall and Dilip Harris’ production—the clogged frequencies and sonic glop that make Krule’s dwellings so oppressively dank. The contradictory feeling of claustrophobia in vast spaces evokes the sound worlds of Arthur Russell and, lately, Mica Levi and Tirzah—expressionistically abstracted, gorgeously inhospitable. Even Space Heavy’s alt-rock songs sound twinned in spirit with Levi’s recent LPs, stirring the sonics of grime and dub into some listless form of ambient grunge.
Marshall seems pretty sad, as usual, and that seems to make him angry, as usual. But not angry like he was—perennially thwarted by the social system or romantically pummeled by whatever woman. “Flimsier” spins a gorgeous, creaking lament for a disintegrating relationship; “Hamburgerphobia” comically frames a lover’s jibes as “harsh” but “valid.” “From the Swamp,” a sunnier postcard from domesticity, describes a nagging temptation, a nostalgic throb, that he finally resists. “If it’s from the swamp,” he murmurs, flirting with the anthemic, “Then back it goes.”
As his melancholia comes up against the demands and rewards of fatherhood, Marshall experiences love in “a fugue state,” feeling himself “separate into the minutest minuscule gaps of time and space,” as he grumbles on “Hamburgerphobia.” His existential displacement manifests in a preoccupation with space: He sings of vacuums, pauses, in-betweens; empty heads, chests, and stomachs; the incomprehensible gap between one consciousness and another; the way parental love can close it.
The fixation on transitory states reflects Marshall’s long-held antipathy for rock and pop form, his shift from the primacy of hooks to vaporous transitions and antic ad-libs. On Space Heavy, his most straightforward, live-sounding production since 6 Feet Beneath the Moon yields mixed results. The barren feel suits uproarious highlight “Pink Shell,” with its James Chance-via-Big Black jitters, and Ignacio Salvadores’ sax contortions on the otherwise dreary “That Is My Life, That Is Yours.” By contrast, “If Only It Was Warmth,” a fierce plaint in live recordings, sounds pallid and defanged, though the similarly economical “Wednesday Overcast” gleams, closing the album with conspicuous neatness: “My head was empty/My life was discreet/A lot has changed/Now a lot means to me.”
What is haunting, and Krule-ian, about those lines’ delivery is their palpable anhedonia—he sounds, for all his resolute purpose, as fatalistic as ever. His supposedly fulfilled narrators are granted a fate little better than nihilism. Their burly melancholy emanates from a dysfunctional masculinity that muddles ego and love and self-loathing, that stokes paranoia and distorts beauty, but that can express vulnerability because it needs, above all, to not be fake. One interpretation of Space Heavy’s limited scope is that Marshall, knowing all this, has grown wary of masterpiece thinking and the macho ideal of tortured genius. His songs have always felt close to home, charcoal-smeared with London dusk and the nocturnal cadence of London jazz. On Space Heavy, for the first time, the great London singer-songwriter’s ambitions feel accordingly local, too. | 2023-06-09T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-09T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador / XL | June 9, 2023 | 7.5 | 25b42a8e-9bbc-47af-a3b5-bfa08a6306c7 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
With trickles of piano, synth, and viola, the Los Angeles-based collaborators shape a tranquil vision of a Nordic landscape that feels just beyond the edge of reality. | With trickles of piano, synth, and viola, the Los Angeles-based collaborators shape a tranquil vision of a Nordic landscape that feels just beyond the edge of reality. | Jeremiah Chiu / Marta Sofia Honer: Recordings From the Åland Islands | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeremiah-chiu-marta-sofia-honer-recordings-from-the-aland-islands/ | Recordings From the Åland Islands | Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer originally traveled to the Åland Islands, an archipelago in the Baltic Sea that looks like paint splatter on a map, to help two friends set up a small hotel. Once there, they were so entranced by the islands’ dreamlike atmosphere that they decided to settle in and capture their impressions. The music Chiu and Honer made on Recordings From the Åland Islands recalls Terrence Malick shots—endless golden-hour sunsets, slow-motion leaves rippling in the breeze, the whole bit. I have never been to the Åland Islands, but the place that Chiu and Honer depict on record is impossibly beautiful, the kind of fragile paradise that might be better left unspoiled by human observation.
Chiu and Honer met in the Chicago improvisational scene, and they’ve been playing together for so long that their disparate instruments—Chiu works mostly with modular synthesizers, while Honer plays viola—blur together. Honer’s long bow strokes and wide vibrato smooth her viola down to the same sleepy frequency as Chiu’s synthesizers, and field recordings (chirping birds, snatches of human voice, a few muffled clanks) add to the sense of unreality. Every sound feels either softened or melted; even the hand percussion has liquid edges.
Chiu is also a visual artist, and these pieces explore texture more than movement. Chiu thickens the mix with reverberant keys, then Honer thins it with her viola, like water drizzling onto canvas. You’re never quite sure if what you’re hearing is played “live” or manipulated, and sounds keep darting over the porous border. I can’t say for sure what is happening on “Stureby House Piano,” but whatever it is, it transforms an audibly creaking out-of-tune grand piano into a skyward flock of piano-key-colored birds.
Recordings From the Åland Islands is so tranquil and beautiful that you might easily imagine it playing in the background of a prerecorded relaxation meditation. But a surprising amount happens in these pieces, and once you pay attention, you start chasing sounds: a distant clang on “By Foot, by Sea,” like a flagpole pinging in wind; the full-body shudder of distortion that passes through “Anna’s Organ.” There is a depth of field to their work, a sense of smaller sounds scurrying beneath bigger ones, that distinguishes it from the sort of kitsch you might hear piping from the corner speaker at a high-end spa.
Their process recalls the “rainforest electro” movement in Latin America, where musicians and artists are recording and reworking the sounds of the Earth as a means of reconnecting with it. In Chiu and Honer’s music, the natural world is half human conception, half unknowable Other: Spend enough time in it, and you will sense that intelligence, fleet and mysterious, moving just beneath the surface. Something is alive in their work, and it feels like it’s always rounding the next corner, just out of your reach. | 2022-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | International Anthem | March 25, 2022 | 7.7 | 25b54f77-13c5-413b-9373-d848985279d9 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Philadelphia’s Mannequin Pussy thrash swiftly from the playful to the chaotic. Their latest LP combines punk, shoegaze, death metal, and more, with the ferocious push-pull energy of a mosh pit. | Philadelphia’s Mannequin Pussy thrash swiftly from the playful to the chaotic. Their latest LP combines punk, shoegaze, death metal, and more, with the ferocious push-pull energy of a mosh pit. | Mannequin Pussy: Romantic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22415-mannequin-pussy-romantic/ | Romantic | Brevity is among Mannequin Pussy’s strengths, but a controlled volatility is the Philadelphia quartet’s calling card. The mood of any given song can zap with a disconcerting swiftness from the playful to the chaotic. This dynamic persists on record and on stage. Opening for Colleen Green at Baltimore’s Metro Gallery last August, the band kicked up a series of shoegaze-y whorls, detonating their abrupt thrash-punk before the audience could let its guard down.
Beginning in New York City, Mannequin Pussy was formed by childhood friends Marisa Dabice and Thanasi Paul, and their early demos set an ineffable foundation: indecipherable, sub-minute hardcore bursts, propelled by Paul’s sharp drumming and Dabice’s lashed punk chords. By 2014 debut LP Gypsy Pervert, the melodies buried in the group’s sound had clawed their way to the surface. Paul swapped out his drum kit for a guitar, and the band’s lineup reshuffled, while track lengths expanded modestly. Significantly, Dabice found her footing as a singer and songwriter, as evidenced by smart standouts like “Clue Juice” and “My Baby (Axe Nice),” where second-wave American punk and 1990s cuddlecore made uneasy common cause.
For all of Pervert’s advances, it never quite gelled as an album. Romantic does. Its volcanic peaks and gauzy valleys hew to a sequential logic; neither a build nor a decline, but rather, the ferocious push-pull of a mosh pit. Dabice’s vocals have taken on a bitter insistency that suits themes best described as interpersonally political. *Romantic *also benefits from a consistent, road-tested lineup that includes bassist Colins Regisford and drummer Kaleen Reading. This tautness allows the band to double down on what it does best and roll a few dice.
All lurch and glossolalia, “Pledge” suggests a lost My Bloody Valentine single harboring the paranoid stoicism of death metal. “Meatslave One” is a 56-second lamentation of smart-phone narcissism dressed in grunge flannel. The turbulent “Emotional High” and “Kiss” treat friend-dynamics from near and distant removes, respectively, with no punches pulled. On “Beside Yourself,” the don’t-look-back anthem that closes the album, the four mass their voices in angelic chorus to leaven what is a jagged, collective scorching of earth.
A wild energy animates the 20-minute Romantic, as it spills out in every direction. This is most evident on “Ten” and “Denial,” when Dabice’s personality is especially harried and panicky, her lyrics Jenga-stacked and tripping over themselves, the songs supercharged. “Ten” rails against that kind of depression that can confine you to your bedroom, buckling so hard that the song risks shaking itself into pieces. “Denial,” a jangly, introspective self-inventory, explodes in wracked gasps. “Pick yourself up, baby, everything’s gonna be fine, but if not, so what?” she counsels, pleading. “You’ll get it right the next time/You should stop getting down on yourself, everyday.” These are words to live by. | 2016-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | November 7, 2016 | 7.6 | 25b788ca-7b9b-4154-8310-619d72905182 | Raymond Cummings | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raymond-cummings/ | null |
Today we commemorate the 20th anniversary of Christopher Wallace's death with a review of his 1997 sophomore album L**ife After Death, released 16 days after he was murdered. | Today we commemorate the 20th anniversary of Christopher Wallace's death with a review of his 1997 sophomore album L**ife After Death, released 16 days after he was murdered. | The Notorious B.I.G.: Life After Death | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22946-life-after-death/ | Life After Death | Life After Death, The Notorious B.I.G.'s second and final full-length studio album, which also serves as his first posthumous release, begins where its predecessor, 1994's Ready to Die left off: with the narrator dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The blast comes courtesy of a large-bore cartridge from a high-powered revolver, while his best friend and confidante—played by label boss and possible svengali, Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs—listens in disbelief, possibly willing him back to life, possibly imagining an alternate reality where Christopher Wallace remains alive.
Ready to Die, Biggie’s previous album, also began with heart-pulling cinematic flourishes, featuring a decade-spanning montage that played as a mini saga telling the tale of a small-time street thug who was raised in a dysfunctional home and turned into a formidably successful rapper. But where the first album started with a feeling of hope arising from the muck and mire of urban poverty, Life After Death announces itself in much starker fashion.
The proper arrival of this album comes on “Somebody's Gotta Die,” a pure revenge tale. It begins sometime within the last record’s timeline, with Big “sittin' in the crib dreamin' about Learjets and coupes, the way Salt 'shoops', and how to sell records like Snoop,” when a fellow small-time drug dealer and jailmate informs him that a mutual friend has been shot for robbing a crack dealer in a most ruthless manner (“pistol whipped his kids and taped up his wife”). Big's reaction is immediate: “Is he in critical? Retaliation for this one won't be minimal ’cause I'm a criminal; way before the rap shit, bust the gat shit—Puff won't even know what happened.” We’re settling into a bloody noir, complete with well-developed minor characters harboring demented pathos and subtle foreshadowing—all this before any hints of a radio single.
This feat of storytelling is repeated two more times on the first disc of this double album alone. On “Niggas Bleed,” Big is a bagman sent to secure a large drug transaction, but his greed has him thinking about a double-cross: “I kill them all, I'll be set for life,” he imagines. He decides to call up his friend—a flashy and hard-hearted cutthroat from the Southwest who was once featured on America's Most Wanted—to partake in a heist that involves a female Puerto Rican hotel worker who used to be drug boss, and a Jamaican with long dreadlocks and a taste for Asian women. It’s a tour de force—a time-shifting tale that devotes a whole verse to the backstory of a murderous misfit straight from an Elmore Leonard short who substitutes kerosene for gasoline because “fuck it, it's flame-able.”
But “I Got a Story to Tell,” the recount of an after-hours creep with an NBA player’s girlfriend that culminates in physical assault and robbery, may be the most absurd tale of the bunch, because it's reportedly true. “Story” highlights Biggie’s gifts as a raconteur. Inside his braggadocio, cars are colored with verve: a “cherry M3” BMW, a “marine blue 6 coupe” Mercedes, a “champagne Range” Rover. For his fictional tales, names and locales are doled out like characters in hardboiled pulp fictions: “Arizona Ron from Tuscon,” “Gloria from Astoria,” and “Darkskin Jermaine” who “nearly lost half his brain over two bricks of cocaine, getting his dick sucked by Crackhead Lorraine.” But, when it comes to the truth, he's shy on specifics. No names, no states, no boroughs, or other signifiers are mentioned. When pressed by his friends as to the identity of the cuckold, he brushes it off: “One of them 6' 5” niggas—I don't know.”
Double albums tend to be overblown, self-indulgent cash grabs, but Life After Death warranted the approach. Beginning with the 1994 Quad Studios shooting of Tupac Shakur in New York City, the Notorious B.I.G—along with Combs, Shakur, and Suge Knight—was at the center of a multifaceted rivalry. It was a struggle between N.Y.'s Bad Boy and L.A.'s Death Row records that surpassed label affiliation to become about coastal loyalty, arguments about commercialism vs. art that spread from the music industry to the public, whispers of motives and allegiances ran from the streets to the urban criminal underworld. Big easily had more than one album's worth of material to talk about.
Not only did he have more drawn on, he had more ways to talk about it than anyone else. More than anyone one else in rap ever, Big was able to break language and bend syntax to speak about things in ways that were unforeseen yet seemingly unavoidable in hindsight: “At last, a nigga rappin' 'bout blunts and broads, tits and bras, ménage à trois, sex in expensive cars, and still leave you on the pavement,” he rapped on the No. 1 radio single “Hypnotize.” He continued: “Condo paid for, no car payment. At my arraignment, note for the plaintiff, 'Your daughter's tied up in a Brooklyn basement.' Face it: not guilty—that's how I stay filthy.”
Big was a master of flow, sounding unforced and unlabored over a bevy of pristine, hi-fidelity maximalist beats that seemed to always bow to his intent. His voice was that of a gentle giant; a sumo ballerina who could deashi and pas de bourrée, henka and plie. Few terms in any tongue can capture the way Big was light on his words while heavy on thought. He made his slams look like pirouettes even over the most grating pop moves like “Mo Money Mo Problems,” which showcased Combs' predilection for turning ‘80s R&B hits into ‘90s rap tunes—a push and pull between producer and artist that remains unmatched in hip-hop to this day.
This infamous tug between Combs' pop predilections and Big’s gully tendencies is all over Life After Death: the way the sequencing goes from the Herb Alpert-sampling “Hypnotize” to DJ Premier's Screamin' Jay Hawkins chop on “Kick in the Door” to a boudoir ballad with the R. Kelly-assisted “Fuck You Tonight” to black glove tough talk with The Lox on “Last Day” to lavish ballerism on the René & Angela remake “I Love the Dough” with Jay Z. It's a wrenching of the ridiculous that Big wins at every turn by being on “that Brooklyn bullshit” on “Hypnotize”; by making “Fuck You Tonight” unprofitable without a heavily-edited radio version; by squeezing so many words and skillful mispronunciations and imagery like wearing precious stones “in beards and mustaches” into “I Love the Dough.”
Despite being 24 cuts deep, the album never wears on—the quick twists, deep moods, dark humor, and mastered artistry more than hold your attention. But, still: Like even a good movie, you're ready for it to end when it ends, and it climaxes with songs that deliver on the promise of the era of conflict (and death and rage and extremism) that surrounded Big in 1997. Due to his assassination 20 years ago on March 9th, the last three songs—“My Downfall,” “Long Kiss Goodnight,” and “You're Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)”—were never enjoyed by the public at large while Big was alive. Today, it's almost impossible to hear them as anything other than war songs for the dead and those about to die. These numbers are both a declaration of intent and pauses for remorse; clarion-song and elegy alike, heavy instrumentation for the trenches and pews, all hymnals of well-earned paranoia and odes to a dawn of violence.
And, though the ending is undoubtedly full of salvos from a reluctant warrior, there's a glimmer of hope that says that the young heart of Christopher Wallace from Bed-Stuy—not the Notorious B.I.G. from Bad Boy—was still beating beneath all that armor. On “You're Nobody,” he's mingling with “thorough bitches” who rode around in a fruit-colored two-door Acura and—in a telling, but coded move—he hearkens back to the determined aspiration of his breakthrough hit “Juicy,” rapping his perceived future into existence: “As my pilot steers my Lear,” he drops seemingly apropos of nothing but rhyme and boast. But, looking deeper, further back, past the blood on his friend's sneaker from the opener, you recall how this all began:
He was sitting in the crib, envisioning Learjets, visualizing coupes, lusting the way Salt “shooped,” and wanting to sell records like Snoop Dogg. Big may not have been around to see it, but he saw it before it happened. He created an alternate reality and lived it until his death and after. | 2017-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Bad Boy | March 9, 2017 | 9.5 | 25b8b6c5-439e-4573-a1b8-4a4694719f86 | kris ex | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kris-ex/ | null |
Recorded in 1990 at a small Santa Cruz club, this joyous live document flips the energy of 1991’s Weld on its head, swapping out incendiary arena rockers for oddball picks and warm, woolly vibes. | Recorded in 1990 at a small Santa Cruz club, this joyous live document flips the energy of 1991’s Weld on its head, swapping out incendiary arena rockers for oddball picks and warm, woolly vibes. | Neil Young / Crazy Horse: Way Down in the Rust Bucket | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-and-crazy-horse-way-down-in-the-rust-bucket/ | Way Down in the Rust Bucket | Neil Young entered the 1990s acting as if his erratic 1980s never happened. He spent the bulk of the ’80s sowing wild oats while in an unhappy union with Geffen Records. The label was so aggrieved by the mercurial singer-songwriter’s behavior that they filed suit against Young, accusing him of purposefully delivering uncommercial albums. Perhaps they had a point: Once he returned to his old home at Reprise, he started making music like he had in the old days. Buoyed by the creative and commercial rebirth of 1989’s Freedom, Young reconnected with Crazy Horse, the ambling backing band who had supported him through good times and bad since way back in 1969. Picking up a fuzzy strand left hanging from Rust Never Sleeps, the 1979 album that represented their last great triumph, Young and Crazy Horse knocked out Ragged Glory at his Broken Arrow Ranch in a few weeks. The quick sessions resulted in an album with a spontaneous feel; it was the liveliest and loudest Crazy Horse had ever sounded in the studio.
As a full-bore rock’n’roll record, Ragged Glory was an ideal album to take out on the road, which is precisely what Neil Young and Crazy Horse did, spending the first four months of 1991 roaring through North America’s arenas with supporting acts Sonic Youth and Social Distortion in tow. Young’s decision to bring a pair of prominent alternative rockers on tour underscored the wild, untamed character of his work with Crazy Horse, with its swirls of distortion and primitive thump. The ensuing live 2xLP, Weld, and feedback-laden Arc EP tapped into the arena-sized aggression that fueled the band at its peak, all the way back to 1979’s incendiary Live Rust. Way Down in the Rust Bucket, the 12th live album in Young’s ongoing (and now absurdly active) Archives series, flips that energy on its head. Here, Crazy Horse aren’t interested in assaulting their audience; instead, they’re grooving along alongside them.
Some of this change in tone is surely due to the change in venue. Way Down in the Rust Bucket captures a November 13, 1990 gig at the small Santa Cruz club the Catalyst, a hometown bar that became Young’s regular stomping ground in 1977, when he spent the summer figuring out whether his ill-fated group the Ducks had a future. The Ducks didn’t survive 1977, but Young’s connection to the Catalyst endured; it became a place for him to limber up before heading back out on the road. That’s precisely what happened in November 1990: With two months to go before a big arena tour, the time was ripe to kick off the cobwebs. Playing in their own backyard—for fans who were close enough to be friends, and friends who were more like family—shaped the concert from its setlist to its execution. Gone are expected crowd-pleasers like “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” “Powderfinger,” “Rockin’ in the Free World” and “Tonight’s the Night,” all swapped out for oddball selections designed to scratch some itch of the band: American Stars ’n Bars’ cornpone romp “Homegrown,” a revved-up reading of the Re·ac·tor deep cut “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze,” plus the inane blues stomp “T-Bone.”
As silly as it sounds, “T-Bone” provides the key to unlocking many of Way Down in the Rust Bucket’s charms. It’s not much of a song—there are no other lyrics than “Got mashed potatoes/Ain’t got no T-Bone"—yet hearing Crazy Horse lock into a primal rhythm then remain there for nearly seven minutes, as Young delivers each repetition of its lone line as if it’s a new punchline, is as invigorating as his elongated solos. There’s a direct line connecting this rave-up with “Farmer John,” a frat-rock classic from Don & Dewey by way of the Premiers that wound up as a touchstone on Ragged Glory: They’re party tunes played by a band intent on having a hell of a good time.
Young spent 1990 absolutely giddy with the monstrous, transportive racket he could make with Crazy Horse, but those high spirits don’t always come through on Weld. Blame some of that on the arena setting; blame some of it on timing. During those early months of 1991, Crazy Horse toured as Operation Desert Storm descended on Iraq, so Young sobered up, putting an earnest and angry version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a prominent position in the set list, then leaning into the group’s harder edges. Way Down in the Rust Bucket, recorded just months earlier, has no socio-political undertones and no angst; here, “Fuckin’ Up” doesn’t play as self-immolation, it’s merely a heavy shrug. Crazy Horse’s immense volume camouflages a sweet hippie heart, an empathy that’s apparent in both the selected songs and the warm, woolly performance. This is a joyous record, where even the melancholy epics “Like a Hurricane” and “Cortez the Killer” skirt sadness. Crazy Horse lumber toward bliss, goosed along by a leader who seems so enraptured by his own solos he doesn’t want to break the spell. Context also gives these seemingly endless workouts a different vibe. They’re surrounded by garage rockers and reconstituted anthems of the counterculture, songs designed to be played and heard in a communal setting. For a dirty, grungy rock’n’roll band, there’s no better place to hold communion than the local pub, where the separation between artist and audience can be so thin, it may as well be nonexistent. Maybe that’s why Way Down in the Rust Bucket feels transcendent: It captures the world’s greatest bar band in their spiritual home.
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. | 2021-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Reprise | March 10, 2021 | 8.1 | 25bb8a88-d593-4f39-bef7-7508e693a2b2 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Composed by Avey Tare, Geologist, and Deakin, AnCo’s second audiovisual album reckons abstractly with the environmental devastation and the potentially horrifying consequences yet to come. | Composed by Avey Tare, Geologist, and Deakin, AnCo’s second audiovisual album reckons abstractly with the environmental devastation and the potentially horrifying consequences yet to come. | Animal Collective: Tangerine Reef | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/animal-collective-tangerine-reef/ | Tangerine Reef | Avey Tare’s voice floats adrift on Animal Collective’s second audiovisual album, Tangerine Reef. Made in tandem with Coral Morphologic, the Miami-based duo who merge art and science by growing and photographing coral, the film’s soundtrack plays out like a defeated, sunken warning. Coral, like the polar bear and the oil-covered seabird, has become a symbol of human recklessness as our species stares down apocalyptic climate change. It’s not cute or warm-blooded, but it’s brilliant with fluorescent color when alive, and it bleaches, like bone, when it dies. As the sea warms, coral acts as an emotional thermometer. Unlike Animal Collective’s more pop-oriented albums, which carry within them a strong, if occasionally flippant, utopian grain, Tangerine Reef feels saddled with existential weight, preemptively mourning a future vacant of the living color Coral Morphologic capture in stunning high-definition video.
Coral Morphologic’s Colin Foord and J.D. McKay first met Animal Collective in 2010 at a screening of the band’s first audiovisual LP, the sticky phantasmagoria ODDSAC. The two groups collaborated on and off over the next eight years and made Tangerine Reef in commemoration of the third International Year of the Reef—an effort by the International Coral Reef Initiative to encourage the preservation of aquatic ecosystems. The album follows AnCo’s Meeting of the Waters EP, another soundtrack to visual documentation of environmental destruction, but it’s closer in tone to Avey Tare’s most recent solo album, 2017’s Eucalyptus. Composed by Tare, Geologist, and Deakin (no Panda Bear this time), Tangerine Reef reckons abstractly with the environmental devastation already wreaked upon the earth, and the potentially horrifying consequences yet to come.
It’s a timely release. Record wildfires are singeing California, and people are dying from heat waves around the world. Global warming should be a hot-button issue, politically, and yet it is rarely spoken of on the campaign trail. A certain fatalism seems to have set in among Americans; Tangerine Reef’s slow, sad notes reflect that ambient despair. Through a soup of effects, Tare sings like he’s watching something precious slip away from him. While his voice was clear and at the forefront of the mix on Meeting of the Waters, he sounds drowned here. And yet it’s beautiful what he’s drowned in, these strange, delicate notes that sound primordial and ancient even though they’ve probably been cranked out of something pedestrian like a guitar. Toward the end of the album’s first track and lead single, “Hair Cutter,” Tare trails off, out of lyrics but still singing, and a bouquet of alien synthesizer notes rise up around him, buoying him. That song boasts the album’s loveliest vocal melody, and its strange melancholy serves as a portal to the rest of the album’s murky psychological excavations.
Coral Morphologic’s wondrous, psychedelic video work dovetails smoothly with Animal Collective’s dazzling electronic pop, but of the two groups involved in making Tangerine Reef, it’s Animal Collective who comes off more sedate. The weight of the music lends the visuals a foreboding feel, as if to remind us of the dangers these organisms face. Without Panda Bear on board, Animal Collective lose the pop edge that has resulted in their most commercially successful music, but this isn’t a project for scoring hits. It’s a meditative, hypnotic experience, and it’s not without the sense of playfulness that has driven Animal Collective throughout their career. Hearing Tare vocalize over a bouncing bassline and offhand organ riffs on “Inspector Gadget” sparks some of the same pleasure as listening to Animal Collective’s earliest albums, back when the band members obscured not only their faces but their voices and their words. Even on vocal-heavy songs, like the lurching “Coral by Numbers,” it’s hard to make out what Tare is saying. It’s as though he’s simultaneously singing and gasping for air—light on diction, heavy on desperation. “The time is now/Now is the time,” he calls out on “Hip Sponge,” like he’s begging for action, for something to change, and nothing does.
In a 2015 Vice documentary on Coral Morphologic, Foord and McKay point out that certain species of coral seem to have adapted to humanity’s incessant pollution. They’ve found organisms thriving even in the filthiest waters off Miami, growing on artificial rock substrate amid unidentifiable sludge and discarded plastic cups. This discovery runs contrary to the common, simplified narrative of human activity wiping out all life by way of environmental disregard; it suggests that the natural systems we’re disrupting are hardier than we think. The two artists aren’t shy about suggesting that Miami may be underwater by the end of the century, but they find a certain macabre poetry in the image. They see coral climbing submerged buildings, recolonizing their space. Perhaps this is the only flavor of hope to be extracted from the persistent narrative that life on earth is doomed. Even cities are organic structures, and whatever happens next on earth may just be life playing itself out, arriving at the conclusion to a story far bigger than any individual.
Tangerine Reef, in its wide, sloping compositions and glacial, dreamy pace, hints at such a frame. Its most human element—the voice—gets decentralized, swept away, blurred over by its overall flow. The music itself is beautiful and expansive, if slow and occasionally stagnant, and the perspective it asks you to take offers relief from the anxious refrain of climate doom. There’s no real protagonist to this story, no hero’s journey, no Superman crashing through the atmosphere to save us from ourselves. There’s not even cosmic retribution in this telling: The earth’s not exacting revenge on its tormentors. We’re not so important to be the targets of revenge. We’re just animals scuttling across the planet’s surface, swept up in a geological saga we barely understand. | 2018-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | August 16, 2018 | 6.9 | 25be47fa-4d23-4b24-b09c-e18166afb8e4 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
These contemporary classical arrangements of traditional folk and Bonnie “Prince” Billy songs are lovely to listen to, but not so clear thematically. | These contemporary classical arrangements of traditional folk and Bonnie “Prince” Billy songs are lovely to listen to, but not so clear thematically. | Bonnie “Prince” Billy / Bryce Dessner / Eighth Blackbird: When We Are Inhuman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bonnie-prince-billy-bryce-dessner-when-we-are-inhuman/ | When We Are Inhuman | When We Are Inhuman is a prickly collection of traditional folk tunes interspersed with Bonnie “Prince” Billy songs, all of them arranged for the contemporary classical ensemble Eighth Blackbird. The mood is both playful and haunted: The arrangements are so spare that the instruments seem to hover a few inches off the ground, and Oldham’s voice, always a little eerie, winds through the space between them, sounding disembodied. The folk tunes were arranged by Bryce Dessner, the Oldham songs by Eighth Blackbird pianist Lisa Kaplan, and taken together, they address approximately the same things: the cruel side of devotion, the animalistic side of love, the devotional aspect of sex. Like all good folk songs, they seem to mix everything up with everything else.
Sex has always been rich soil for Oldham; in his writing, even the most graphic acts (see “So Everyone,” from the 2008 album Lie Down in the Light) sound tender. “Beast For Thee,” from his 2005 album with Matt Sweeney, is one of his most fervent (and horniest) love songs: “Astride my horny horn/You’ll be in glory born/And I’ll be a beast for thee,” he exults. Kaplan’s arrangement, centered around mallet percussion, piano, and plucked strings, is a little anodyne —it sounds like it could soundtrack a bank commercial—but it also reveals a new fragility to Oldham’s promise to be “a beast.” It sounds less ribald than humble, an act of abjection.
Oldham seems to watch the animal kingdom closely, understanding, maybe, that we’re going to share their vantage point on the earth sooner or later, so he might as well learn what he can now. “One With the Birds,” another of his most beloved songs, appears here, with an arrangement that goes the obvious route of suggesting birdsong. But it also makes great use of the piano, with a music-box verse melody so delicate it sounds dreamt and some ominous low notes that rumble out at the end, reinforcing the lurking note of death.
Snuck into the middle is “Underneath the Floorboards,” a piece that Dessner adapted from the Sufjan Stevens song “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” The thematic connection between Stevens’ song and the other material on When We Are Inhuman is unclear, but it probably has something to do, again, with the intimacy of violence: Stevens’ song is a work of empathy, impossible to listen to without feeling an uncomfortable shiver of pity for Gacy. Dessner’s arrangement is macabre, more interested in evoking the things rotting beneath the floorboards than exploring the mindstate of the man hiding them.
There’s another name included on When We Are Inhuman: Julius Eastman. Eastman was a brilliant, contentious, troubled figure in Downtown NYC history, a composer whose acidic intelligence often rattled his contemporaries. He performed and improvised; he blended the minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass with swing and jazz; he sang with Meredith Monk on Dolmen Music. When he died, he was homeless and it took eight months to publish an obituary.
To conclude When We Are Inhuman, Eighth Blackbird offers Eastman’s “Stay On It,” a 1973 piece in which a bright, leaping piano figure gets string double stops daubed over it like Bob Ross clouds. High voices sing “stay on it” in the background, a little off beat and a little off-key. It is the sound of a city block party, full of human bustle and clamor and sidelong interjections from clarinet and violin like honking cars. There’s a peculiar edge to it—something in the slightly soured edges of the harmonies suggests an underlying irony, but it never hardens into sarcasm or cruelty. All of Eastman’s work shared this gnawing, anarchic restlessness.
It is entirely unclear why Eastman’s music is sharing this particular space, or what Dessner and Eighth Blackbird wish to suggest about Oldham’s similarities to Eastman. They both have a subversive spirit, maybe? Eastman’s music has steadily accrued new champions over the past decade, and it’s gratifying to see another high-profile inclusion of one of his vital works. But in general, this confusion is endemic to the project, which is full of excellent performances of strong repertoire without a lot of obvious common ground. Eastman’s work is brilliant, fiendish, devouring—he upended conventions and expectations wherever he performed, and there’s something uneasy and odd about his bookend status here.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | 37d03d | September 12, 2019 | 7.1 | 25be4f32-81b7-42b2-8c99-1f8cbfad66f4 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
After a stressful period of reinvention, the band frolics in greener grass, following its wandering muse wherever it leads. | After a stressful period of reinvention, the band frolics in greener grass, following its wandering muse wherever it leads. | The Men: Drift | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-men-drift/ | Drift | Only two years elapsed between the Men’s 2014 album, Tomorrow’s Hits, and its follow-up, Devil Music, but it felt like 10. Up to that point, the Brooklyn band had maintained a furious rate of both output and evolution. The five-album stretch from 2010’s Immaculada to Tomorrow’s Hits is right up there with Sonic Youth’s 1980s run in terms of capturing a primordial punk band’s incremental transformation into an artful, melodically sophisticated rock juggernaut. With each new record, the Men revealed surprising new strengths—krautrock rave-ups, gut-punching power-pop, countrified balladry—that formed the foundation for the next one. But while that winning streak was certainly an exciting thing for fans to behold at the time, the relentless touring that resulted ultimately sapped the Men of their spark.
After finishing up their Tomorrow’s Hits duties, the band didn’t just hit the pause button, they did a full-on reboot. When they resurfaced with Devil Music, they had both shed a crucial member (bassist/producer Ben Greenberg) and abandoned their carefully cultivated sense of ambition. Recorded over a weekend and self-released on the band’s own label, the caustic, caterwauling Devil Music reveled in lo-fi scuzz as if the previous half decade never happened. The Men had regressed back into the band they once were, but, given all they had accomplished in the interim, that made them nearly unrecognizable.
As singer/guitarist Mark Perro would explain, Devil Music was less a calculated back-to-the-garage move than a violent reaction to the band’s creative stagnation. In a 2016 blog interview, he revealed Tomorrow’s Hits was actually already in the can as far back as 2012, but the business of keeping the show on the road prevented this once-restless band from writing new material for a good three years. “Anything I had to say on [Devil Music] was very selfish and pretty frustrated,” he said, “but it goes to show you that music is a beautiful thing, because now that I got some of those songs out, I feel much better.” And so on Drift, the Men frolic in the greener grass that lies on the other side.
While the new album marks the band’s return to the Sacred Bones roster after their DIY Devil Music release, it betrays no desire to live up to or build upon the legacy they once established on that label. (Likewise, their pared-down touring itinerary suggests a reluctance to revert to their old road-warrior ways.) Drift is the sound of a de-stressed band following its wandering muse wherever it leads, with seemingly little concern for how the end results fit together. As such, it is at once their most eclectic record and their most erratic.
Of course, the Men’s earlier albums weren’t lacking for variety, but each of them sounded like the same band trying new things, with a natural ebb and flow to their stylistic mutations. (For instance, on 2012’s Open Your Heart, the ragged country-rock of “Candy” felt like a well-earned comedown after the fuzz-blasted emotional bloodletting of “Please Don’t Go Away” and the title track.) But on Drift, the Men just sound like a bunch of different, unrelated bands. And where they’ve always thrived on the tension between their in-the-red overdrive and their rough ’n’ tumble tunefulness, on Drift, their aggressive and accessible qualities are sharply segregated.
So on the one hand, you have undercooked oddities like the goth-night stomper “Maybe I’m Crazy,” a bubbling cauldron of pulsating synths and no-wave sax squawks that seems to be building toward a violent release that never comes, or the steady motorik cruiser “Secret Light,” which sounds exactly like Damo Suzuki improvising over “L.A. Woman.” And then you have the middle-aged Meat Puppets saunter of “Rose on Top of the World” and the Harvest Moon-glowed “So High,” both gentle mid-tempo folk-rock tunes that, even in light of the Men’s previous rootsy detours, are disarmingly refined and relaxed. They’re pretty songs, but a bit too breezy to do the heavy lifting on an album where the band’s exploratory impulses take precedence over their songcraft.
In that sense, Drift feels a lot closer in spirit to Perro and bandmate Nick Chiericozzi’s Dream Police project, where they workshopped an array of ideas outside the Men’s noise/pop sweet spot (though Drift does throw the circle pit a bone with the rote punk rager “Killed Someone”). In its quieter moments, Drift reveals some uncharted territory for this band to annex: The Six Organs of Admittance-worthy interstitial “Sleep” may clock in at under three minutes, and the lyrics may only amount to repeated incantations of its title, but its mounting maelstrom of acoustic oscillations and trembling strings is transfixing. The hypnotic closing hymn “Come to Me” further reinforces the notion that this band probably has a quality neo-folk record in them.
In their initial run, the Men powered through every style in the classic-rock and punk playbooks and mastered them in five years flat. After Devil Music showed they can always go back to bruising basics when the mood strikes, Drift is the sound of them trying to figure out what to do next—and compared to the maniacal focus and intensity of previous records, the band can sound oddly rudderless here. But they can still stun you with a radical reinvention. In this case, it’s “When I Held You in My Arms,” a Wurlitzer-smoothed, dark-night-of-the-soul ballad that’d be right at home in the most sorrowful depths of Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call. The song reveals a willingness to expand not just their musical vocabulary, but their emotional one as well. This band has opened its heart in the past, but never before have the Men presented such a vivid, despairing portrait of a broken one. | 2018-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | March 5, 2018 | 6.6 | 25bf0725-bc21-42aa-ab28-4b320be272a6 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Montreal band makes a very promising start, blending prog's ambition with krautrock's precision. Besnard Lakes' Jace Lasek produces. | Montreal band makes a very promising start, blending prog's ambition with krautrock's precision. Besnard Lakes' Jace Lasek produces. | Suuns: Zeroes QC | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14770-zeroes-qc/ | Zeroes QC | Plenty of bands have ambition; Montreal's Suuns have their sights set on the brass ring. Zeroes QC, their dank, oily, frequently metamorphosing debut LP, is one of the more industrious first goes I've heard in ages-- sleek, moody space-prog, self-assured, meticulous, and foreboding. More than anything, Zeroes QC sounds like the work of a much older band, the kind who've earned a few months in the studio to tool around, rearrange their pedal boards, try out literally every idea that comes to them. That's a path that often leads to convolution and overcrowding-- ask just about any prog rocker how the 80s worked out-- but Suuns seem to have taken as much care yanking things out of the mix as they did building it up. Helped along by Besnard Lakes frontman Jace Lasek, who produces here, Zeroes QC is a sleek, spacious, confident blend of prog and krautrock.
Zeroes QC seems wholly unaware of the daytime; from the buzzy prog-step that opens the record to the forebodingly lovely ballad that closes it, it's dark stuff. Extended instrumental passages abound, but Suuns aren't big on solos, let alone stacking them three-high; despite the proggy segmentation in the music, Suuns evince an almost laser-guided focus, allowing each instrument its space, never cluttering the mix with too many sound effects. The muscular low-end, the rich but never overbearing electronic flourishes, and the occasional sonic assault shows a great deal of reserve, which Suuns yield like another instrument; one gets the sense they're capable of bigger, wilder sounds, which makes the reigned-in Zeroes QC's terse successes all that more impressive.
From the deep bass wobble in "Pie XI", the wily organ bend in "Armed for Peace", or the saxophone maelstrom that closes out "Gaze", Zeroes QC is more thrilling moment-to-moment than track-for-track. It never drags, and Suuns have a fine sense of pacing, but amidst all the shape-shifting you'll find you prefer certain forms to others pretty fast. In fact, their restlessness can be a saving grace; "Up Past the Nursery", with its clip-clop rhythm and staccato vocalizations, bears an uncanny resemblance to the first couple of albums from UK garage-weirdos Clinic. It'd be easier to overlook if the same thing didn't happen on the next track, "PVC". It's jarring; not only are these decidedly b-roll as Clinic tunes go, but up against the blithe detours that mark the rest of Zeroes, these couple of songs would feel weirdly staid even if they weren't awfully familiar.
Suuns have a friend in Lasek, who brings the improbable hugeness of his rootsier Besnard Lakes material into glitzy and chromatic territory without seeming chintzy or overwrought. He's got the detail-oriented touch of a much pricier producer, and at times, his successes juicing unlikely sounds from behind the boards seem to be Zeroes QC's great strength. His Ade Blackburn routine aside, singer Ben Shemie tends to fall into the backdrop here, his voice a tad wispy amidst the steady stomp of Suuns' formidable bottom end. Compositionally, these tunes can and do wander often. It should be a mess, but it isn't; every note lands perfectly in place, every left-turn eventually circling back around. Sure, they could use a few relatable sentiments to go with their outstretched sound, and the Clinic thing's just gotta go. But few bands this young are operating on quite this scale, and fewer still have the brass-- and the patience-- to pull off a big, glitzy, complex record like Zeroes QC. There are improvements to be made, but next time these dudes hit the studio and start digging in, they'll have really earned it. | 2010-10-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-10-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | October 20, 2010 | 7.1 | 25c58602-9284-4520-9e11-78b022d656aa | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit an infamous 2007 DJ mix that helped transform dubstep from a bubbling scene to a global phenomenon. | 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 an infamous 2007 DJ mix that helped transform dubstep from a bubbling scene to a global phenomenon. | Caspa / Rusko: FabricLive.37 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caspa-rusko-fabriclive37/ | FabricLive.37 | In 2007, Parisian nouveau disco duo Justice turned in 44 minutes of sultry synth-rock for their contribution to Fabric’s hallowed FABRICLIVE DJ mixes. The series had debuted in 2001, borrowing its name from the London venue’s Friday club nights, which skewed toward drum’n’bass, breaks, and hip-hop. The franchise alternated monthly with a house and techno twin, fabric, that reflected its Saturday night lineups. Curated and commissioned by the club’s in-house label, the two strands operated as an extension of the Farringdon haunt outside of its labyrinthine HQ: In high-street record stores, car stereos, and adolescent bedrooms, the FABRICLIVE and fabric mix CDs gradually established something like a canonical picture of contemporary UK club culture, as determined by one of the world’s most recognizable clubbing brands.
Before Justice, FABRICLIVE mixes had been delivered by everyone from James Lavelle to John Peel, J Majik, James Murphy, and a number of other blokes whose names did or didn’t begin with “J”. But the French pair’s offering hadn’t, apparently, gone down so well with the folks at Fabric. The mix was rejected. Rumors as to why abounded in the forum-sphere, commenters freely wheeling out theories, substantiated or not, from beneath a cloak of online anonymity: The mix was too short; it didn’t fit the vibe; it was shit.
But for the series’ commissioners, there was little time to kill. December loomed, and a new release was needed. Two young upstarts from the burgeoning dubstep scene—25-year-old West Londoner Gary McCann, aka Caspa, and Rusko, the Yorkshire-born Christopher Mercer, aged 22—got the call. They were familiar faces in the club and the office, having signed a publishing deal with the label earlier in the year. And they were, crucially, considered reliable.
Caspa and Rusko were given three days to deliver their mix. They played a Halloween show in Sheffield on the weekend, put together a rough tracklist on the drive back to London, and, come Monday, were recording live from dubplate and vinyl in Fabric Room 3—a cramped space on the club’s mezzanine level, with the booth shrouded in Victorian brickwork. It was, in many ways, just like any other show—except the club was empty, it was 4 p.m., and the sound engineer wanted to be out by six in time for his tea. The final recording was mastered on Tuesday morning, burned to CD on Wednesday, and promo copies were in the post by Friday.
The unusual time pressure meant the tracklist was selected from a limited pot. Not just because there wasn’t the time to agonize over peaks, troughs, transitions, and breakdowns—all that journey stuff that DJs love to mythologize—but because there was no time to arrange licensing deals either: They had to pick songs they knew they could clear. As a result, 15 of the 29 tracks were by Caspa and Rusko themselves, and 17 were lifted from Caspa’s Dub Police and Sub Soldiers labels.
The fact that FABRICLIVE.37 would be Fabric’s first purely dubstep-focused mix carried an implicit responsibility to represent the scene as a whole. No easy task: By 2007, dubstep had coalesced from its initial pairing of dark garage and jungle into a recognizable style, and it was already beginning to mutate. Sub-shoots were spreading outward—first by word-of-mouth, then online—from London, where it had originated. There was the “purple” sound in Bristol, which elevated melody, color, and sci-fi synths; in Leeds, DJs put stacked dub reggae soundsystems through their paces in rickety community centers; specialist DJs like Youngsta and Hatcha had their own orbits, with producers honing their sounds to fit each selector’s style. The DNA of jump-up drum’n’bass—already derided as “clownstep” by more seasoned ravers—could be found in dubstep’s more aggressive iteration, later slapped with its own pejorative: brostep. Factions were forming, each with their own devoted advocates and critics.
Caspa and Rusko were flying the flag for their very own variant of the sound: loud, rude, and rowdy, with a dash of dub sensibility (Rusko styled his debut EP cover on photos of Haile Selassie). Even without the time constraints, FABRICLIVE.37 was never going to be a true representation of all that was dubstep. This was a Caspa and Rusko set, a near mirror of the show they’d played in Sheffield just days before. It was also a premonition of a cultural shift that would soon prioritize attention over everything: The listening equivalent of scrolling through social media, presented with an unending, increasingly bewildering stream of content designed to not just to shock or entertain you, but to keep you rolling your thumb back for more. In Silicon Valley a year earlier, Aza Raskin had first presented the concept of “infinite scroll,” later described as a “dopamine seeking reward loop” by behavioral psychologist Susan Weinschenk—and by Raskin as one of his biggest professional regrets. Now, hits are minted on TikTok. Scenes no longer crystallize on mix CDs.
Two other things happened around this time.
On July 1st, 2007, smoking in pubs, restaurants, and nightclubs became illegal in the UK. DJs found themselves contending with a new phenomenon: the smokers’ exodus. Playing more daring tunes now carried the added risk of half the dancefloor departing for a roll-up. For dubstep in particular, a sound that in its early days attracted a distinctly red-eyed crowd, this represented an especially significant shift.
A decade after the ban came into effect, drum‘n’bass kingpin Andy C—famed for his double drops and multi-deck mixing—recalled his approach of “pulling some bangers out” to keep people engaged and away from the smoking area. Caspa and Rusko’s barraging FABRICLIVE.37 mid-section complemented the fast-evolving attention economy approach: More, bigger, louder, faster, newer. Better? The jury was in the smoking area.
At the same time, in Cambodia, there were raids and clampdowns on the production of safrole oil—a key component in the production of MDMA. The resulting shortages caused an MDMA drought that dragged out for several years and was exploited by wily entrepreneurs who met the demand for uppers with an array of substitute chemical compounds, either stuffing them into pill presses and hoping people wouldn’t notice the lack of actual MDMA in their eccies (EU seizure data in 2009 revealed that most pills being necked at the time didn’t include any MDMA at all) or marketing them as something entirely new.
The big success story of this particular wave of pleasure innovation was mephedrone, or simply “drone.” Also known by a variety of tabloid-concocted names including M-CAT, White Magic, and Meow Meow—a nod to its chemical name as opposed to the fact it smells like cat piss—the drug’s popularity exploded in the UK. By 2010, it was the fourth most popular drug among clubbers in the country. Its white-powdered appearance, extreme moreishness, and attractive price point (at a tenner a gram, it was at least four times cheaper than the going rate of what was being sold as MDMA at the time) all contributed to the boom. The fact that it was also legal and very easy to come by made it appealing to those dabbling in their first tastes of adult freedom—which, for many, included going out to clubs and listening to exuberant dance music of the kind plied by Caspa and Rusko. Dubstep, born under a cloud of weed smoke, sounded different with a sprinkle of synthetic amphetamine.
In many ways, these conditions suited Caspa and Rusko’s blunt-force, humorous, adrenalized style. Their rowdy, juvenile appeal is perhaps best encapsulated by the soccer-chant horns of Rusko’s “Cockney Thug” and its repeated, context-free interjection of Alan Ford saying the word “fuck” in the thickest of East End accents (the tune was originally just called “FAK”). This was good, dumb fun. Even if its legacy has been more dumb than fun.
The rush to assemble the mix goes some way to explaining its truncated style. Tracks slam from drop to drop, with little by way of crossover, fade, or creative combination. Throughout the 20-track middle section, songs are flung in and jerked out after just a minute or so, each making way for something that sounded similar, perhaps familiar, but also totally different. It pulls you by the ears from one minute to the next; from the rumble of Cotti & ClueKid’s “Legacy,” to Caspa’s warped, underwater horns on “Big Headed Slags,” or Rusko’s various squealing synth experiments—gesticulating at the unbolted creativity and expansiveness that made dubstep such an appealing prospect in its early days, yet landing consistently on the same note over and over again.
Caspa and Rusko’s mix featured more tracks than any other FABRICLIVE release to date. This was a point noted proudly by the pair in interviews, presumably following the logic that bigger could also mean better and, maybe, more representative. But the cramped, attention-sucking mid-section ultimately masked the more musically interesting (and enduring) moments of the mix. These are found in its bookends: The soaring sax of L-Wiz’ “Girl From Codeine City,” Caspa’s Lin Wenzheng-sampling “Cockney Violin,” or ConQuest’s dubby, seven-minute closing meditation, “Forever.”
Their appointment to record Fabric’s first dubstep mix was not without controversy—few things in dubstep ever were, such was the protective zeal that many of its fans had inherited from the sometimes dogmatic drum’n’bass and garage scenes. Loefah, a key player in south London’s DMZ crew, known for their weighty, almost spiritual take on dubstep and its soundsystem roots, claimed in 2015 that the opportunity had been turned down by various people in the scene before Caspa and Rusko were brought on board. DMZ’s resident host, Sgt Pokes, writing under the “poax” pseudonym on Dubstepforum.com, reported similarly. Martin Clark, who was blogging and producing as Blackdown (as well as writing a monthly grime and dubstep column for Pitchfork), said he’d been lobbying for a dubstep contribution to Fabric’s mix series since the early noughties to no avail.
The influential pirates at Rinse FM had launched their own mix CD series in the same year, with Skream’s expansive Rinse:02 contribution preceding FABRICLIVE.37 by a matter of days. Tempa’s Dubstep Allstars showcases had been ticking over since 2004, with N-Type’s Volume 5, also released in 2007, among the best encapsulations of the genre’s broad tent. But these were still, mostly, underground interests. It was Fabric’s above-ground entry that arguably shifted the sound from young pretender to new contender and, for better or worse, would solidify a narrower interpretation of it in the popular consciousness.
The label arranged a whole day of international press for Caspa and Rusko. By the time the pair sat down for the day’s final engagement—a late-evening chat with veteran Rinse FM DJ Darkside for his GetDarker platform—Caspa said they’d done 31 interviews. The pair were excited, they said, for people to hear what they’d produced. A week later, the 8,000 people signed up to the club’s monthly FabricFirst subscription service would be among the first to experience it. FABRICLIVE.37 accelerated a singular version of dubstep into the mainstream; it placed an authoritative, globally recognized stamp on the genre’s spectrum. What Caspa and Rusko had produced, it turned out, was a spark to EDM’s strobe-lit explosion.
Within a couple of years, dubstep was the loudest, dirtiest word in global dance music. There were lots of DJs standing on desks in front of elaborate pyrotechnics displays and thousands of neck-swinging fans. Internet Explorer had a dubstep ad. The Weetabix one was worse. Some producers made hay turning out turgid, front-loaded remixes for major labels. Others slunk back to their underground communities, bitter, embarrassed even, at how quickly and easily commercial interests had swallowed their subculture. But dubstep’s moment in the zeitgeist was a boon to many in the community, too: UK-based events like SubDub expanded into international, festival-scale showcases of soundsystem culture; originators like Mala and Kode9 forged careers and nurtured labels in their own vision; it pushed others, like Loefah, Peverelist, and Pinch to explore rewarding new musical paths. Embossed CD tins, totems of Fabric’s releases, changed hands among intrigued young music fans—fans like Sherelle Thomas, the latest contributor to the new fabric presents mix series (which replaced the concurrent FABRICLIVE and fabric offerings) who pinpointed Caspa and Rusko’s mix as a key entry point to club culture.
Since its fated release, FABRICLIVE.37 has followed an arc that’s become typical of such flashpoint moments: Something that feels incredibly exciting to many and ominous to others, ages badly very quickly, and then, on reappraisal years later, reveals its true magnetic value. And there’s the realization that these are the things the mind clings to despite the attrition of daily life, in spite of the infinite scroll. Maybe that’s what Justice’s Gaspard and Xavier had in mind as they stitched together their own version of FABRICLIVE.37—plumbing ’70s disco hits and spandex rock, searching for those moments that move you to pause, breathe, and, gently, to no one in particular, whisper “FAK.”
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2022-01-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Fabric | January 9, 2022 | 7.2 | 25cd6d11-f6af-4dea-b9b3-491971f17bd9 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
Sarah Davachi's minimalist work belongs to a tradition of deep, shimmering drone music. Play her music in a quiet room on good speakers and you can practically see the air moving around your head. | Sarah Davachi's minimalist work belongs to a tradition of deep, shimmering drone music. Play her music in a quiet room on good speakers and you can practically see the air moving around your head. | Sarah Davachi: Vergers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22533-vergers/ | Vergers | Like a lot of minimalist art, Sarah Davachi’s music appears simple on the surface. Not a lot seems to happen, at least not in terms of melody, rhythm, or any of the usual categories of Western popular music: Her music consists mainly of long held tones. The real action is not found in the notes themselves but in their microtonal variations and the wealth of overtones, harmonics, and ghostly pulses produced by the friction between them. Her work belongs to a tradition of deep, shimmering drone music that includes Eliane Radigue, Kevin Drumm, Phill Niblock, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, and Folke Rabe.
Despite its apparent restraint, Davachi’s music is also profoundly expressive. Her filters sweep back and forth in slow, deliberate, and often unpredictable movements that suggest the careful thought process that drives the hand behind them. The subtlest change can set in motion complicated chain reactions—ebbing and flowing, wheels turning within wheels. Play her music in a quiet room on good speakers and you can practically see the air moving around your head.
In part, this has to do with her tools. Davachi, who studied electronic music at Mills College, in Oakland, California, typically works with a mixture of acoustic and electronic sources, or even purely acoustic instruments. Her album All My Circles Run, from earlier this year, is a set of studies for overdubbed strings, voice, organ, and piano. On Vergers, she turns her attention to the EMS Synthi 100, an analog synthesizer from the early 1970s, and complements its unusually vibrant tone with almost imperceptible additions of voice and violin.
It is her most minimal album yet. Its three long tracks initially feel almost static; they evolve so stealthily that it's easy to find yourself adrift in the middle, wondering just how you got there. The opening “Gentle So Gentle,” nearly 22 minutes long, begins with a single octave, its tones wavering like heat mirages. A minute passes; then two. It takes a while to notice a pair of quiet background tones, glowing like street lights in fog. In time, it will come to feel like all seven notes of a minor scale are resonating in blurry unison. Timbres shift; tones fatten. For a spell, the sound resembles a piano whose sustain pedal has been held down. Then, a pair of clarinets. Fifteen minutes in, and the atmosphere turns celestial for its final passage. The piece begins on a different note than the one with which it began, and even though you probably won't notice it, that shift lends an extra element of tension. There is no resolution; it is a question with no answer, an imperative to keep moving.
Where “Gentle So Gentle” is shot through with light, “Ghosts and All” is charged with dread. Over buzzing pedal tones, thin, violin-like textures saw queasily back and forth, like a camera panning across a burned forest. It is as bleak as the grimmest doom metal. Once again, she proves herself a master manipulator of frequency, stacking up layers until even the root note is lost in the miasma, and you're left disoriented, unable to find your footing.
The third and final track, “In Staying,” uses similar strategies, but it's immediately distinguishable from its companions. (Proof that Davachi is not your average drone artist is her facility for evoking wildly different universes with such a modest set of tools.) The sound evokes church bells that have been frozen in mid-peal. New tones bleed into earshot, and the bells melt away. Now we are inside a glacier, perhaps; the time scale is unfathomably long. Inside the sound, made one with the all-encompassing hum, a million tiny vibrations collide. If timbre is one of Davachi’s primary materials, time is another—thus her all-enveloping matrix of infinite ripple—and with “In Staying,” she manages a feat that is nearly impossible in music: She makes time itself seem to stand stock still. | 2016-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Important | November 26, 2016 | 7.5 | 25d04082-cd7e-4dd3-b0cf-de4a87f2c6c3 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Twenty years ago, the German electronic musician Jan Jelinek’s tools were rustier, his loops lumpier, yet his vision for a transcendent music of digital failure was very much intact. | Twenty years ago, the German electronic musician Jan Jelinek’s tools were rustier, his loops lumpier, yet his vision for a transcendent music of digital failure was very much intact. | Gramm: Personal Rock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gramm-personal-rock/ | Personal Rock | The glitch has become so familiar that we rarely hear it for what it is: the audible trace of an error, a scab grown across a damaged set of data. Purposeful glitches proliferate in popular music, where they now constitute just one more utensil in a producer’s digital toolbox. You can hear them in Skrillex, Kanye, even Bon Iver and Low. The 17-year-old pop savant Billie Eilish, who currently has 14 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, has made her name with an ASMR-pricked sound that fizzes like seltzer, fueled by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of the crinkly sonics that, years before her birth, were the exclusive property of scowling avant-techno purists.
Back around the turn of the millennium, to craft music out of such scratchy, accidental sounds was novel. Oval’s Markus Popp is the most famous example of the phenomenon, for the way he turned the clicks and pops of skipping CDs into a meditative strain of ambient music. No less important was Jan Jelinek, who on his 2001 album Loop-finding-jazz-records utilized his sampler’s looping function to whip snippets of old jazz and soul records into crackly abstractions, chords turning cloudy over beats that bristled like porcupine quills. A new reissue of Jelinek’s Personal Rock, recorded under his Gramm alias, nudges us back two years earlier, when the German electronic musician’s tools were rustier, his loops lumpier, yet his vision for a transcendent music of digital failure—sifting through the rubble of 1s and 0s and coming up with fistfuls of opals—was very much intact.
Gramm was not Jelinek’s first project; the year before Personal Rock, he put out a pair of 12"s as Farben, an alias he continued to use sporadically until the early 2010s. Farben is German for “colors,” yet those initial records were resolutely greyscale, all shadow and pinprick. The monochrome palette persists on the Gramm album, but there’s a newfound richness to his tones; each track tends to be illuminated by a chord, or set of chords, that glows dully in the muck, deep hued against a dull backdrop, in the fashion of a Rothko painting.
Farben was grounded in the tropes and rituals of dance music: The records appeared on Klang Elektronik, a Frankfurt label known for rave-tested fare from artists like Acid Jesus, and the earliest material fleshed out its clicks and whirrs with the muscular sounds of classic drum machines. But with Personal Rock, Jelinek mostly left the nightclub behind, if not always intentionally. (“Often I’d get booked to play in clubs at peak time and it didn’t work at all,” he admitted to The Wire in 2012.) The sounds here are wispier, the beats more haphazard, the arrangements more or less indifferent to the demands of the dancing body.
Gramm is still situated within dance music’s broader traditions. Opener “Legends/Nugroove TM” references an iconic New York house label, and it’s a good bet that “St. Moritz” is a nod to Berlin’s Moritz von Oswald, of Basic Channel, Maurizio, Chain Reaction, et al.—a titan of minimal techno, without whose Spartan example Jelinek might never have carved out his own stripped-back lane. And occasionally, Gramm thumps away with abandon: “Ment,” streaked with a backwards tone that recalls the pre-Kompakt label Profan, surges ahead on a powerful, swift-moving kick drum. But the functionalism of the working DJ is clearly far from Jelinek’s mind. Personal Rock’s tempos are often slow, the percussion reduced to a sliver of light dissolving against a velvety backdrop. The central chord of “Siemens.Bioport” just hovers in space, an ill-formed blob against a beat composed of dust mites and fingernail clippings; the beat in “70gr” moves like a Roomba, bouncing from corner to corner as its intake valves choke on lint.
Perhaps most striking about Personal Rock, listening back after 20 years, is how lo-fi it sounds today. There’s a reason for that: The rudimentary gear Jelinek used didn’t allow for much in the way of fidelity. But that muddy quality is a far cry from the way this stuff was presented at the time, when glitch techno tended to be hailed as a harbinger of a brave new future. In retrospect, Jelinek’s debut album has almost as much in common with the burned-out shoegaze of a band like Flying Saucer Attack as it does the lab-coated discipline of Berlin’s Raster-Noton or the laser-like repetitions of Oval. Jelinek’s work on Personal Rock is murky, moody, and, above all, expressive in a way we don’t often expect of this era of electronic music. Where minimal techno was often noted for its rigidity, the rhythms on “Type Zwei,” the album’s standout track, recall Can’s Jaki Liebezeit in their liquid grace. Zero in on the movements of Jelinek’s shape-shifting glitches, and the drab specter of silicon falls by the wayside; instead, you might hear crickets, windshield wipers, lawn sprinklers. Like a lot of art lurking in the shadow of Y2K, glitch techno was often assumed to be cold and overly intellectualized—all head, no hips—but Personal Rock is a reminder of how soulful the era’s digital music could be. | 2019-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Faitiche | April 13, 2019 | 7.7 | 25d7fccc-c9f8-406f-a5a1-0f5547fa6e0f | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Austin band, which has cultivated an intense fan base while continuing to experiment, do so again here; this record finds band leader Britt Daniel and producer/drummer Jim Eno's tendencies toward studio-based devilry coming full-flower, each listen revealing craftsmen reveling in detail. | The Austin band, which has cultivated an intense fan base while continuing to experiment, do so again here; this record finds band leader Britt Daniel and producer/drummer Jim Eno's tendencies toward studio-based devilry coming full-flower, each listen revealing craftsmen reveling in detail. | Spoon: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10390-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga/ | Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga | Prior to the release of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, online buzz suggested Spoon's sixth record was a grower, a distinction also conferred upon the Austin band's two previous albums, each more experimental (and at times alienating) than its predecessor. That optimistic adjective-- which incorporates both the listener's failure to quickly grasp a record as well as a hope to eventually do so-- feels exceedingly appropriate for Spoon, who have cultivated an intense fan base while continuing to experiment (the frequent comparisons to Wilco are indeed apt in this case).
A large contingent of Spoon's following has come from Britt Daniel's continual knack for, as he sang on 1998's "Metal Detektor", making "the sound of getting kicked when you're down." If any song were to be the quintessential Spoon pop single, then, the radiant, Jon Brion-produced "The Underdog", a Cliff's Notes encapsulation of Spoon's earnest compassion for the fucked-over, is it. With a three-piece brass fanfare, "Underdog" is a battle cry against succumbing to mediocrity masquerading as a middle finger to the standard-bearers: The lyric "Get free from the middle man" could also read: "Get free from the middle, man." Likewise, the slinky "Don't You Evah" (a cover of an unreleased song by former tourmates the Natural History) affirms Spoon's trend toward emotional trusses for the fairer sex, recalling Gimme Fiction's "They Never Got You" and Kill the Moonlight's "Don't Let It Get You Down". A different directive occurs on opener "Don't Make Me a Target", however, which revisits the obscurantist personal politicizing that many thought marked *Fiction'*s "My Mathematical Mind". With a few well-chosen phrases-- "Here come a man from the star...Beating his drum...Nuclear dicks with their dialect drawls," both victim and perpetrator become crystal clear.
Ga Ga travels past in a flash-- at 36 minutes, it returns to the brief runtime that Fiction well surpassed-- but leaves plenty of reasons to revisit. Daniel and drummer Jim Eno's tendencies toward studio-based devilry come full-flower here, each listen revealing craftsmen reveling in detail. What in lesser hands could be extra-textual gobbledygook instead feels the product of studio freestyling, something to which the murky mixing-board wizardry of Jamaican dub is an obvious precursor. Penultimate song "Finer Feelings" is one bit of proof, its wide-open guitars-- straight from Sandinista!-- augmented with a sampled toast from (Clash collaborator) Mikey Dread's "Industrial Spy". With the addition of echoed ambiance from a Brussels fair field recording, "Feelings" acquires the aura of a surreal Kingston sound system.
Earlier, "Evah"'s introduction dips into the self-referentiality the band flirted with on Fiction, featuring a diced-up, looped Daniel asking Eno to record his studio talkback. Two songs later, all manner of discordance enters and exits the reverb-heavy mix of the appropriately titled "Eddie's Ragga", which developed from a jam session with Eddie Robert of Daniel-produced Austinites I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness. Ga Ga's most intriguing sonic creation, however, is the song which takes the dub influence in the furthest direction: "The Ghost of You Lingers". A return to Moonlight's spooky sonic variegation, "Ghost"'s pounding, echoed piano feels like a merged memory of the jabbed guitar from "Small Stakes" with "Paper Tiger"'s moody expressionism. Daniel's unmistakable voice is a distant, gothic wail here, as he mourns his missing love with characteristic jargon: "We put on a clinic/ If you were here would you calm me down or settle the score."
Daniel's gift for non-mawkish romanticism results in both Ga Ga's best moments, and three of the best songs the band has yet create. Especially on Girls Can Tell, Spoon's always flirted with straight-up blue-eyed soul, and "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb" is their full-on take-off of Elvis Costello's Motown M.O. on Get Happy! (perhaps purposefully, then, the album's bonus disc is titled Get Nice!). Backed by an irresistible Holland-Dozier-Holland gospel-pop-stomp, "Cherry Bomb" re-imagines the heart/sleeve cliché as a vivid bicep tattoo, as Daniel implores his love to three-point-turn and chill out. Ga Ga's real bang happens at its close, however, with the one-two send-off of "Feelings" and "Black Like Me". The former, which ostensibly documents a Memphis-based isolation, features a handclap-accompanied chorus as energized and unremittingly hopeful as Daniel's ever been: "Sometimes I think that I'll find a love/ One that's gonna change my heart/ I'll find it in Commercial Appeal/ And then this heartache'll get chased away."
"Black"'s melodic melancholy-- backed by a weeping piano/guitar motif that recalls Let it Bleed-- is simply gorgeous. Has Daniel ever written a lyric more crushing in its confused simplicity than "I'm in need of someone to take care of me tonight"? Rather than attempt to relate with someone who's already taken leave, he splits, and so, apparently, does his mind. During the internalized call-and-response that follows, he appeals: "All the weird kids up front/ Tell me what you know you want." Thus, at the end of his emotional rope, he crosses the fourth wall and reveals the aching coda as a mutually lived performance.
With Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon have once again found a gray area between the poles of pop accessibility and untested studio theorizing, modifying a formula that has grown to feel familiar even as it wanders, and refusing to square the circle while doing so. Through whatever process they use, the band has also managed to create yet another wonderfully singular indie rock record, unafraid of unfettered passion or self-sabotage, and which affirms a shrouded, hybrid style as unquestionably theirs. Perhaps it is fitting to refer to Ga Ga, and Spoon albums on the whole, as growers, then, but with a different definition: one that takes into account the bands continual, and continually rewarding, approach to creative maturation. | 2007-07-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-07-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | July 11, 2007 | 8.5 | 25dc1aa8-f53a-42f0-9e82-2c3c7bd4dc0a | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the alternative titans’ 1993 album, where Billy Corgan discovered the larger-than-life sound that would reshape rock for decades to come. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the alternative titans’ 1993 album, where Billy Corgan discovered the larger-than-life sound that would reshape rock for decades to come. | The Smashing Pumpkins: Siamese Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/smashing-pumpkins-siamese-dream/ | Siamese Dream | When Billy Corgan was 9 years old, he stuck his head in the speakers to get closer to the terrible, godlike sound emerging from them. The record on the turntable was Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality, but the frightening sound wasn’t coming from Ozzy Osbourne, who sounded as panicked and awestruck singing on record as young Corgan felt sitting listening. Tony Iommi’s roaring guitar sounded inhuman, like the primeval source of all childlike terror and wonder. Yet it sat obediently on its haunches behind Osbourne, whose frail voice, doubled up onto itself, seemed to restrain it. Corgan needed to feel that sound rumble inside his skull. He couldn’t get close enough.
By the time Corgan and his bandmates in the Smashing Pumpkins checked into Triclops Sound Studio to record 1993’s Siamese Dream, he’d been chasing that sound for more than a decade. Over the years, the album has come to be known largely for the tiresome and oft-repeated strife that surrounded its creation—Corgan’s emotional volatility and autocratic leadership, bassist D’arcy Wretzky and rhythm guitarist James Iha’s romantic entanglement and breakup, Jimmy Chamberlin’s struggle with addiction. But the real story of Siamese Dream is the story of a sound. Judging by its lingering resonance 30 years later, it might be the single most iconic sound produced in the alternative rock era, one where everything transmuted into an idealized version of itself. “The thing about recording is, the essentials really are basic,” Corgan told Creem in 1994. “Drums sound like drums, guitars like guitars. So they have to be embellished, and that’s what I enjoy the most, the things you can do so that a drum sounds like something more than a drum, or a guitar sounds like something more than a guitar.”
Corgan was devoted to making an album that would ring in your ears like it was the only sound that had ever been made, one that would blast into your cranium like the platonic idea of every rock record you remembered hearing in your youth. One early clue for that sound came from Kevin Shields, the leading force behind the totemic shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine, in whose guitar manipulations Corgan heard glimmers of his own dreamed music: “Just playing these big chords with 7ths and 9ths but blasting the shit out of them through Marshalls,” he said years later, the wonder still palpable in his voice. He and Iha mimicked those lush wavelike tones, but they played in the style they’d learned imitating the gods of cornfed FM radio rock—they stacked the guitars in octaves, and instead of using the whammy bar to induce vertigo, as Shields did, they relied on good old-fashioned string bends, making the guitars mewl in pain.
Another cornerstone of their sound came when Corgan and Iha heard a band called Catherine playing its guitars through Electro-Harmonix Big Muff pedals. They brought the pedals to producer Butch Vig, who scoffed, saying they were impossible to record. But Corgan was adamant, and he and Iha stacked guitar overdubs, one on top of the other, tuning them to brighter or deeper frequencies, until they spread out like an irradiated sunrise. The sound swallowed everything, including Chamberlin’s ride cymbals, and everything in the mix existed to serve it. It had a heavy, dark bottom and a bright top, with Corgan’s tiny keening wail surfing along it, like a child riding in a barrel over an ocean.
This was a sound that rewarded an obsessive mindset, and by the time the record label dispatched someone to the studio to record a quick promotional interview, the band was already thoroughly miserable. No one remembers the sessions fondly: “They were not necessarily a happy bunch of campers,” Vig told the Chicago Sun-Times. Facing the cameras, Wretzky, Chamberlin, and Iha were doleful, meek, silent. When the interviewer, sensing an opening, asked, “What keeps a band together?” they collapsed into shrill, manic laughter, the only shared moment of levity.
Leaving the band behind, Corgan gave the guy a bashful tour of all the gear he’d assembled in pursuit of the album’s sound. Gesturing half-heartedly at multiple guitars, all meant to capture different tones, he held up various pedals and described their effects (“Imagine screaming your guts out,” he said helpfully of the Mu-Tron BiPhase); he pointed to a Mellotron in the corner and unzipped a case containing a sitar, gamely attempting a hangdog, apathetic air. This was the demeanor of rock’s antiheroes of the day, like Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder—you were supposed to appear bewildered and aggrieved in the face of public attention, to mumble answers like excuses.
But you can tell from Corgan’s hunched shoulders and shy demeanor that he knew, deep in the bones of his gangly 6'3" frame, that all of this stuff amounted to a confession of sorts. The pervasive stereotype of the early-’90s rocker was that of the slacker, but slackers didn’t collect Mellotrons and sitars. Corgan was inviting the world into his childhood bedroom, and it was filled with posters of all the old, embarrassing rock bands he was meant to have left in his youth: bands like Queen, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin, yes, but also bands that didn’t even have the benefit of having Satan, drugs, or sex on their side: Rush, ELO, Boston.
To a degree that overwhelmed and defined him, Corgan craved rock-god grandeur, fame, adulation, redemptive heavy-metal thunder. Growing up in a series of broken homes around Chicago, with a drug-dealer musician father and a mentally unstable mother, Corgan was entranced by anyone willing to adopt a larger-than-life persona to escape their circumstances. He watched the scrappy tough-guy wrestler Dick the Bruiser will himself to folk-hero status on flickering televisions, and he was drawn to heavy-metal bands that made theme music for a more vivid and less disappointing world. “As long as I can remember, since I was a little kid, I wanted to be famous,” he recollected to Rolling Stone. “My myth was rock god-dom. I saw that as a means to become one who has no pain.” Any time a guitar swooped into an arrangement like a comic-book hero coming down from the mountain to save the villagers, Corgan found solace. When he was nine, he’d stuck his head into the speakers, and now he was going to curl up inside them forever.
In the first 30 seconds of Siamese Dream’s first track, “Cherub Rock,” Corgan laid all these furtive childhood dreams bare. The song proceeds with the showy deliberation of an opening argument, or a magician’s trick. After two playful introductory snare rolls from Chamberlin, the equivalent of a spotlight on a closed curtain, Corgan strums that pulsating octave riff. He’s joined first by Iha, then Wretzky, both doubling him, while Chamberlin builds steadily. Then Corgan stomps the distortion pedal, and those guitars, the summation of his dreams, blot out everything, just as they did in his childhood memory of Sabbath. This was guitar music as an obliterating wave, one that Corgan summoned as if it could wash away all his childhood scars, petty grievances, personal failures, and inescapable weaknesses.
The song’s central riff, he would later reveal, was stolen, more or less wholesale, from the Canadian prog band Rush—specifically the breakdown at 3:55 in the song “By-Tor and the Snow Dog.” Nobody in the alternative era but Corgan would have had the impulse to imitate Rush, a name other alternative rockers teased each other with—as in, “Fuck, you guys sound like Rush now,” a real note that Mudhoney’s Mark Arm sent to the members of Soundgarden after they released 1991’s Badmotorfinger. Corgan insisted that “Cherub Rock” be the album’s first single, and must have relished the irony of watching Gen-X kids moshing to a song that was influenced by the least cool of his many uncool heroes.
Guitar rock, still the law of the land on MTV and in popular culture, was in a curious place at the beginning of the new decade. The distinctions between ’90s “alternative” rock and ’70s and ’80s “dinosaur” rock were nebulous, when you got down to it: “We play loud hard-rock guitars, yes, but not those loud hard-rock guitars” is a thin line to walk, which meant the borders were ever more rigorously patrolled. The very idea that you might strike an unironic guitar-hero pose, that you could peel off a wailing solo, was so rife with sociopolitical portent that it is impossible to imagine now. Liking the band Queen, for instance—in the tortured psychic arena of the early-’90s alternative-rock explosion, liking the band Queen was an intriguing enough position for Corgan to answer several interview questions about it.
He was more than happy to oblige. From the outset, Corgan relished his role as the outsider in a community meant to welcome the self-described outcasts. He made all the wrong moves, and drew attention to their wrongness: Instead of refusing a major-label contract to record for Greg Ginn’s SST, like his colleagues in Soundgarden, Corgan signed the Smashing Pumpkins to Caroline, releasing their 1991 debut, Gish, on an “indie” label that was really a subsidiary of Richard Branson’s Virgin Records. Instead of tipping his hat to the punk bands of the previous decade, he namechecked Tom Scholz, the stonecutting studio perfectionist behind the FM rock project Boston. He understood, instinctively, that cool was not a currency that guaranteed immortality. Mere humans concerned themselves with cool, a consolation prize for their pitifully short lifespans. Did Ronnie James Dio care about cool? Did Ozzy?
And yet, to his ever-expanding chagrin, Corgan himself was not a rock god. He was a regular human, and a particularly thin-skinned one who cared deeply about what people thought of him, and told them so publicly, in mortifying detail. “You hurt me,” he pouted infamously to Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil, in Soundgarden’s 1994 SPIN profile. “You hurt me deeply in my heart.”
It didn’t take long for Corgan’s reputation as a punching bag and mouthpiece to establish itself: Like the wrestlers he grew up idolizing, he couldn’t resist a chance to grab the microphone and deliver a good heel speech. He started out by ridiculing the city that he came from—“Chicago is a dead music town,” he proclaimed to the Spiral Scratch zine in 1992. “[We’ve] got eight thousand Replacements, and two thousand Hüsker Dü’s. Nobody cares”—and soon moved on to his colleagues in the ascendant alternative boom. Whether it was Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction, Pearl Jam, or, most famously, Kurt Cobain, he barely let an interview go by without mentioning one of his bêtes noires.
Soon, he had acquired the reputation of being the pain in the ass at the office party, the “not here to make friends” reality-show contestant, and his colleagues began sniping back at him, freely. Out of all the people who skewered him in the press in the ’90s—and it became something of a sport—perhaps no one took measure of him so empathetically, or nailed him as shrewdly, as his ex-girlfriend, Courtney Love: “People that Billy’s jealous of, he’s particularly vicious about,” she told SPIN. “And those are the only people he’s jealous of, really—people that are successful, that have archetypes. He’s faceless—he doesn’t have a place. He thinks he’s going to be Roger Waters, which is probably true… He’s the only one among them who can write a catchy song… but what makes him so depressed is that he has no cultural significance.”
It was a toxic stew of all of these resentments and unprocessed childhood traumas that Corgan brought to bear on the writing of Siamese Dream. Never has an album more grandiose been inspired by such a niggling concern as what the local scenesters might think of your new music. But that anxiety drove Corgan—or so he told scores of reporters—past the point of despair, straight into suicidal ideation, and out again. “I’m like the fugitive… running from the one-armed indie-rock community,” he joked to Michael Azerrad in Rolling Stone in October 1993. “If I continued on the path I was on, which was being overly conscious and worried what the indie-rock hierarchy was going to think of our new album, we were going to fail,” Corgan told Azerrad. “I don’t have the proper indie credentials,” he fretted to The Los Angeles Times. “I didn’t play in some seminal band where five people bought the record. I wasn’t a roadie... that kind of rags-to-riches story.”
As cris de couer go, “I wasn’t a roadie” might prompt more giggles than sympathy. But his anguish was real, and as he started trying to write material for Siamese Dream, he sunk into a depression so deep he came scarily close, he later revealed, to taking his own life. One night, he decided that he was either going to go through with it or “get used to it, work, and live, and be happy.” Instead, he wrote a song about the lowest he’d ever felt, and gave it an ironic chorus. “Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known/Can’t wait for tomorrow, I might not have that long,” he sang, his voice a coo instead of a howl.
By 1993, alternative rock had already earned its reputation for excessive self-pity and pained bellowing. The “loud-quiet-loud” formula—clean tones for the verses, stomp the pedal for distortion at the chorus—was clear to even casual radio listeners. Yet “Today” felt like a celebration. When Corgan sang about bottoming out, he did so over music that sounded like a sunrise. When other grunge outfits hit the pedal, the guitars usually dragged the song into the muck, thrashing. But Corgan’s songs, from the outset, rose on glittering wings. Somehow the heavier his music grew, the lighter he got.
His lyrics, just like his interview quotes, are always about the punishing crucible of self-belief. They were a hair’s breadth from the Christian rock of the same period, even though at the time of Siamese Dream, he had renounced his Catholic childhood faith. But the lyrics were all religious catechism, barely disguised—tongues and shame, crowns of thorns, “God sleeps in bliss,” “I torch my soul to show the world I am pure deep inside my heart.” Corgan’s songs shared with Christian rock a naked yearning for transcendence that could make the sincerity-avoidant squirm: “When I came to a line that made me cringe with embarrassment, that’s the one I would use,” he said of his writing process for Siamese Dream. It worked for him.
This was another way in which Corgan differed from his contemporaries: He had no protecting veil of irony to hide behind. He was the kind of guy who could name a song “Hummer” and profess zero awareness of the word’s sexual connotations. On “Luna,” he sings with no trace of irony or embarrassment about singing “moon-songs to your babies.” “If you really listen to my record, you’ll know that I’m a real wimp, and a hopeless romantic,” he told SPIN. This guilelessness was his Achilles heel and his gift. He could stumble upon a lyric that would pierce like a five-year-old’s unanswerable question: “Happiness will make you wonder/Will I feel okay?"
It also allowed him to write “Disarm,” a ballad with no precedents for an “alternative” band. Even within a songwriting climate that encouraged bloodletting, only Corgan sang something as bald-faced as “Cut that little child/Inside of me and such a part of you,” a line so uncomfortably direct it led to a temporary and ill-advised ban from the BBC. It was also a daringly soft, melodramatic song, full of the kind of flowery and fluttering gestures that no one else in the small scene had even tried.
Despite a few surface provocations to heavy metal’s machismo, “alternative” was still largely masculine, defined by heavy, menacing sounds and bellowing vocals. Pearl Jam had dared to soften up on Vs. with rough acoustic strummers like “Daughter,” and Kurt Cobain threw a cello into Nirvana’s discordant sound for In Utero, but Corgan arranged “Disarm” like he was furnishing the drawing room in an 18th-century castle: a string arrangement, church bells, a tympani. The result had more in common with Kate Bush than Soundgarden, and Corgan leaned into the whine in his voice, which tended to elude easy gender coding. Whining, as Sasha Geffen noted in 2020’s Glitter Up the Dark, a survey of pop music’s history of gender transgression, is “gender neutral.”
It was this softness, underpinning all the noise, that made the Pumpkins special. “I send a heart to all my dearies/When your life is so, so dreary/Dream,” Corgan whispered on “Mayonaise,” his phrasing straight out of a Victorian children’s novel, as the guitars bloomed overhead. His voice barely cuts through, just like Ozzy on the Sabbath records, but he doesn’t sound overwhelmed by the sound; he sounds swaddled in it. “I just want to be me/And when I can, I will,” he declares, not a master of reality but a refugee from it.
The two words most often used to describe the Pumpkins were “fluid” and “powerful.” Those two adjectives found their locus in Chamberlin’s drumming, which transformed the band’s songs into rivers. His touch was light—he rarely broke a stick on tour—and his idols weren’t the usual Godzilla stompers like Bonham and Moon, but jazz and swing players like Gene Krupa, Elvin Jones, David Garibaldi. He understood that true ferocity required as much delicacy as muscle. Whenever Iha and Corgan bent a string, he’d play a fill, turning each squeal into a hairpin turn. Chamberlin crafted his drum parts along with Corgan’s rhythm guitar, which meant you could hear the song’s melody in just his isolated drum track, and which infused the songs with a swaying, gentle cadence. Corgan liked to complain about his bandmates, but in Chamberlin, Corgan found a musician at whom he could throw everything—all his imperious demands for perfection, all his wildest ideas for where his music might go—and be rewarded.
Siamese Dream was a breakout success for the Pumpkins, eventually going 4x platinum. Suddenly, Corgan was a spokesperson, no longer sniping from the sidelines but uncomfortably the equal of his peers. The band headlined Lollapalooza, which Corgan was vocal about hating. He griped about not being “the cute one,” relegated to standing in the back on the band’s magazine covers. He carped ceaselessly about Iha and Wretzky, calling his band “these people I care about very much yet they continue to keep failing me.” He professed boredom with rock’n’roll, professed misery at its trappings. The minute Corgan left the studio or the stage, his dreamland vanished, and he sounded like a man who had crawled across the desert toward a mythical fountain only to taste saltwater. Corgan grimaced, wiped his mouth, and was left unsatisfied.
He already had his eye on the next horizon: a double album. His generation’s answer to The Wall. Only he could do it, he was convinced. Surely that would slake his thirst. “Nobody’s got the balls to take the pretentious ‘how dare you?’ move,” he said. “If I’m going to do it, now’s the fucking time. I’m already starting to hear minor grumblings about mortgages and stuff. It won’t be long before I start having children. Now is the fucking moment.” Better to exist in the dreamland, where perfect sounds could be made, and manipulated. On “Cherub Rock,” he howled “Let me out” from inside that sound, but he was barely audible—already a rat in a cage. Then he closed his mouth, and the guitar solo arced up from the center of the song. It was the purest sound of yearning he’s ever captured—a single high D, streaking like a flare gun into the night.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan | 2023-09-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Virgin | September 3, 2023 | 9.1 | 25e2c8a2-c4eb-4398-94fe-00a39faa5df4 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
One of the first non-grunge bands on Sub Pop showed just how malleable underground pop could be; a quarter-century later, their debut remains a bracing, brazen showcase of rock minimalism. | One of the first non-grunge bands on Sub Pop showed just how malleable underground pop could be; a quarter-century later, their debut remains a bracing, brazen showcase of rock minimalism. | The Spinanes: Manos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-spinanes-manos/ | Manos | Barely a month before the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, every independent band in the Pacific Northwest seemed to converge on Olympia, Wash., for a six-day event dreamed up by K Records’ Calvin Johnson and former label co-owner Candice Pedersen, the International Pop Underground Convention. Johnson and Pedersen wanted to showcase and support the breadth and depth of regional talent with concerts, parties, picnics, and even a Planet of the Apes marathon. Embracing DIY culture and rejecting corporate involvement, the convocation helped crystallize the burgeoning indie ethos and gave a megaphone to riot grrrls and queercore bands alike, including Heavens to Betsy and Bikini Kill. More generally, those six days in Olympia made an implicit underground idea explicit: Anyone could make viable, exciting punk with whatever resources they had on hand, even if it was two people playing guitar and drums, like the Spinanes.
Guitarist/vocalist Rebecca Gates and drummer Scott Plouf played a short set on International Pop’s first night as part of a 15-band bill of female-fronted acts called “Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now.” They weren’t the only duo—Heavens to Betsy, with Corin Tucker and Tracy Sawyer, made their debut that night—but their performance epitomized the idea of what could be done with such limited means, a concept they would soon explore on a series of singles for IMP Records. They signed to Sub Pop, becoming one of the label’s first non-grunge acts, to issue their debut full-length, Manos, in late 1993. Manos became the first independently released album to top the college radio charts, which shows just how crucial a role the Spinanes and the scene they represented played at a pivotal point in underground music. A quarter-century later, it is back in print, providing a welcome reminder of the core principles of that moment.
Manos is musically austere to the point of seeming conservative; after 25 years, that’s perhaps what remains most exciting about it. Gates’ insistence on replicating the band’s live sound in the studio overrode the possibilities of post-production, although she and Plouf did add some judicious overdubs. Musically and conceptually, Manos sounds immediate and purposeful. This is a band paring underground rock down to its essentials and then trimming it just a little more; what they keep and what they jettison makes for a bracing, often brazen listen, even at a time when “selling out” no longer connotes the mortal sin it once did.
This spartan approach means Gates and Plouf have to do more with their respective instruments, to be more inventive and sensitive in how they play off each other. On “Noel, Jonah, and Me,” Gates’ intricate riff splits the difference between lead and rhythm guitar, while Plouf punctuates her understated vocals with nervy snare interjections. “You’re twisting to feel,” Gates sings, but she and Plouf sound like they’re untangling indie rock to speak—and feel—more directly. They elaborate on that idea throughout these dozen songs, showing all the different things they could do with this lineup: the bright classic-rock riffing of “Grand Prize,” the quiet dirge of “Shellburn,” the jittery dance punk of “I Love That Party with the Monkey Kitty.”
The Spinanes’ subsequent records were less anchored to this minimal approach, giving them more gradients of sound if not necessarily more shades of emotion. Plouf split in 1996 to become the full-time drummer in Built to Spill, and Gates retired the Spinanes name three years later, releasing sporadic solo material. For its 25th anniversary, Manos traveled from the west coast to the east, from Sub Pop to Merge. Along the way, it gained a few bonus tracks. The live versions of “Epiphany” and “Manos” are the most intriguing, as they demonstrate just how closely this debut album reflected their live sound. Recorded in 1994 at Yoyo A Go Go, an Olympia festival inspired by the International Pop Underground Convention, “Manos” is a flurry of angry guitar strums and thundering drums. Gates and Plouf sound like they’re playing at each other rather than with each other. It may make you long for more live material, but a stripped-down reissue is only appropriate for such a stripped-down record, made by two people who proved just how malleable underground pop can be. | 2018-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | December 10, 2018 | 8.5 | 25e33a28-302d-43c2-9336-eb46a2e79b54 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Mica Levi's second album proper is forged from absence, dissonance, flat surfaces, and sharp edges-- a brave and tricky step down a path that terminates somewhere more elemental and holistic than "experimental pop music." | Mica Levi's second album proper is forged from absence, dissonance, flat surfaces, and sharp edges-- a brave and tricky step down a path that terminates somewhere more elemental and holistic than "experimental pop music." | Micachu and the Shapes: Never | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16849-never/ | Never | At this point, "experimental pop music" is hardly novel. The ongoing marriage of accessible songwriting and capital-A Artistry may very well be both a cause and a symptom of that which was once called indie rock's growing popularity. On a purely aesthetic level, Micachu and the Shapes could stand among this generation's most lauded arty pop purveyors. But with this, their second album proper (following last year's one-off collaboration with the London Sinfonietta, Chopped and Screwed), the band has doubled down on something genuinely different, defiantly cold, and intentionally withholding.
These qualities were certainly present on the band's 2009 debut, Jewellery, but they were tempered by much more discernibly "pop" moments. The album was chock full of strange noises and unconventional structures, but these were masterfully interwoven with catchy melodies and conventionally exhilarating rhythms. This time around, it's all but impossible to hear the band's cacophonous sonic treatments and counterintuitive structures as things that are being done to a batch of songs-- they are the songs. One can hardly picture the three humans in the band actually playing this music, and it's hard to tell a treated guitar from a vacuum cleaner or a drum kit from some clangorous but impossible-to-visualize percussive texture.
In keeping with the album's title, Never is uncompromising and direct. While both of Micachu's albums feel like the work of impossibly cool, perpetually unimpressed British art students, this attitude is the brilliant, bloodless core of Never. The whiffs of boredom and casual disdain that passed through Jewellery no longer read as a crack at style. In some ways, it's easier to approach Never as a single piece of music than as a collection of unrelated songs. There are no clear points of entry here, nothing that stands out quite as strongly as Jewellery's "Calculator" or "Wrong". Mica Levi's melodies are minimal and straightforward, but Never finds them constantly obfuscated and/or disrupted. Would-be memorable vocal lines are mumbled, manipulated, and cut off. Entire songs seem imperceptibly to slow down or lurch forward. This is decidedly uneasy listening, in an unerringly precise and purposeful way.
None of which is to say that Never is without nuance or subtlety. The theatrical call-and-response of "Ok" may be sincerely expressing the importance of directly communicating one's emotions, or dryly, brutally lampooning it. The most conventionally pretty segment of Never is a spare, 47-second set piece with flutes and bird sounds that concludes, "I want to jump into the white sky/ But I never try." It is extremely rare to hear music that is so clever, but so thoroughly disinterested in drawing attention to its own cleverness.
In the grand tradition of art that willfully denies conventional pleasures, Never has a bit of trouble fully realizing its unconventional ones. It is nearly impossible to get anything from Never stuck in your head; the album's ideas and execution are so closely intertwined that it practically ceases to exist when you aren't actually listening to it. It is a singular object forged from absence, dissonance, flat surfaces, and sharp edges-- a brave and tricky step down a path that terminates somewhere more elemental and holistic than "experimental pop music" or "catchy experimental music." | 2012-07-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-07-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Rough Trade | July 25, 2012 | 7.3 | 25e3756b-1e1c-4b26-8189-0f5b695e580d | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
On the debut LP from his band Sumerlands, producer Arthur Rizk (Title Fight, Prurient) establishes himself as a keen student of early ’80s American metal and a songwriting behemoth in his own right. | On the debut LP from his band Sumerlands, producer Arthur Rizk (Title Fight, Prurient) establishes himself as a keen student of early ’80s American metal and a songwriting behemoth in his own right. | Sumerlands: Sumerlands | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22357-sumerlands/ | Sumerlands | What’s the common link between Title Fight, Prurient, and Power Trip? Producer Arthur Rizk, now an in-demand name for what Kurt Ballou calls achieving the maximum amount of Satan. Rizk’s status as the underground producer du jour somewhat obscures the fact that he is also a keen student of early ’80s American metal, making work comparable to his masters. In Rizk’s own band Sumerlands, the guitarist has teamed up with former Hour of 13 vocalist Phil Swanson, drummer Justin DeTore of Magic Circle, guitarist John Powers, and bassist Brad Raub (Raub also plays with Rizk in crossover group War Hungry). Sumerlands’ 2014 demo hinted at a worthy update of classic American power/speed metal; with their self-titled debut full-length, Rizk establishes himself as a metal songwriting behemoth.
Rizk’s most notable productions come from bands who understand how melody can make aggression sound fuller. This is why he’s as comfortable working with shoegaze-obsessed hardcore dudes like Title Fight as he is with Dom Fernow, a master of faltering beauty. Rizk’s ability to hone in on melodies from other bands translates to his own guitar work, drawing especially from Jake E. Lee, Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist after Randy Rhoads’ death and before Zakk Wylde’s tenure. Lee bridged the gap between Rhoads’ virtuosity and Wylde’s tougher approach, and Rizk imagines Lee unburdened by Ozzy’s need for radio play.
“Seventh Seal” opens bursting with jubilant leads, and Swanson comes out charging, grabbing Rizk’s rhythm and bending it at his will. Rizk's changes and DeTore’s stomp are relentless in their catchiness, the stuff guitar hero dreams and European metal festival chants are made of. It’s flashy and tasteful, packing enough to be memorable without going into overload. The two tracks that follow, “The Guardian” and “Timelash,” are bombastic in a different way, with Rizk giving more space to Swanson. He carries the rhythms, and by upping the theatricality just a bit, Rizk’s guitar basks and becomes sneakily majestic. Rizk’s production also serves Sumerlands well, providing a sound as punchy as his rhythms and solos. If there’s one thing no one should miss about the ’80s, it’s albums marred by thin production.
Sumerlands builds upon the pre-thrash days, when metal hadn’t absorbed hardcore into its DNA, and yet was still exiting the ’70s with lightspeed. That era has gotten some due thanks to bands like In Solitude and Christian Mistress, but Sumerlands aren’t quite as focused on the comparatively elegant NWOBHM. The album is more influenced by Manilla Road’s Midwestern Viking dreams; a vision as big as, but also contrasting, boring wheat fields. “Blind” and “Spiral Infinite” are rife with speed and aggression, but they don’t come from a punky place. It’s heartier, working-class strength meets liberating curiosity. Energy doesn’t always mean fast. This contrasts with many of DeTore’s other metal projects, which still have hints of his hardcore upbringing.
Still, this is not a slick prog-metal affair. Swanson’s voice contains confidence, with a weight that suggests he’s seen some shit. “The Guardian” and “Blind” show his natural ability to ramp himself into a hysteria, just enough so he can return from the other side in one piece. He doesn’t go for piercing highs because Rizk’s wizardry is enough of a high for him—and us.
Swanson and Rizk’s chemistry is the heart of Sumerlands’ power: it’s both reverent and ageless. Metal has a weird relationship with age: its technical and physical demands favor younger players, but it’s dominated by old dudes, and even the ones that keep with new bands hold the ’80s as the apex. Aging gracefully is nearly impossible: Metallica’s relevance, for example, has long outpaced their ability to recreate their classics live. Sumerlands isn’t a record for old fans looking to relive their youth, nor is it a placeholder for younger fans with knowledge gaps. It’s an exceptional record, and the barrier to entry isn’t age. It’s whether you can surrender yourself to Rizk’s charm as the new American Heavy Metal Master. | 2016-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | September 19, 2016 | 8 | 25e42b52-9383-4c75-b2f1-702b2ee318ca | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
The New York-based Colombian rock band updates its powerful live chops with careful studio experimentation, balancing psychedelic sounds with a sense of sociopolitical urgency. | The New York-based Colombian rock band updates its powerful live chops with careful studio experimentation, balancing psychedelic sounds with a sense of sociopolitical urgency. | Combo Chimbita: IRÉ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/combo-chimbita-ire/ | IRÉ | Combo Chimbita’s music is often called psychedelic, and for good reason. The New York-based Colombian rock quartet’s guitars are subsumed in delay, their synths sprawl, and Caroline Oliveros’ piercing vibrato is almost always cloaked in reverb. The p-word can have unflattering connotations, denoting music tailored for altered consciousness or meant to soundtrack journeys peripheral to the songs themselves. But Combo Chimbita’s performances demand your undivided attention. Their energy can be so intense that it’s nearly exhausting. They show the palpable focus of a band intent upon playing a new world into being, if only for a moment.
Combo Chimbita are a transfixing live act with dynamic players, and their third album, IRÉ, faithfully captures the band’s powerful presence—even the overwhelming intensity of Oliveros’ voice, which imbues every word with a metaphysical drama. IRÉ sounds more polished than previous releases; Oliveros’ voice is colossal, surrounded by ghostly, swirling harmonies. They have sometimes seemed hesitant to record anything in the studio that can’t be recreated on stage, but they’re gradually overcoming that hesitation. In an interview for their previous record, Ahomale, the band discussed learning to use the studio as an instrument, and you can hear that approach continue to creep into the songwriting on IRÉ, whether it’s the subtle multi-tracking of Oliveros’ voice on “Oya” or the flash of Prince of Queens’ modular synths on “La Perla.” It’s in the moments that Combo Chimbita allow themselves to experiment—when Prince of Queens’ electronically pitched-down voice thunders at the end of “Memoria,” or when Oliveros’ echoing cry is transformed into a sorrowful counterpoint in the frenetic chorus of “Mujer Jaguar”—that IRÉ feels most transportive.
Since Ahomale’s release in 2019, Combo Chimbita have been motivated by an increased sense of sociopolitical urgency. On IRÉ, the band claims inspiration from Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 along with Afro-Indigenous spirituality and storytelling, including Oliveros’ own study of bullerengue, a Colombian drumming tradition; in their music videos for the album, they have sought community with queer and trans artists of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. These gestures toward a sprawling but connected Afro-Indigenous future are evident in the music—the band folds in new influences from other Afro-diasporic sounds across IRÉ, like dub on “Indiferencia,” while “Memoria” is built around a dusty loop that sounds like an homage to New York boom-bap hip-hop.
What is often called psychedelia in Combo Chimbita’s music might more accurately be identified as a conscious and considered approach to innovation. They pull earnestly from deep wells, and the weight of representing all that energy is apparent in their swirling modulations. The future seen from the present seems like a dream. On IRÉ, Combo Chimbita don’t just herald the coming of this future; they usher it into existence, note by electrifying note.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Anti- | February 10, 2022 | 7.3 | 25f20a0b-936c-40c9-a97b-c4f40b4dcf72 | Adlan Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adlan-jackson/ | |
On his corrosive fifth album, the rapper takes aim at several targets and whiffs spectacularly. His verbose, tryhard technique is a tired formula he employs without flow, direction, or meaning. | On his corrosive fifth album, the rapper takes aim at several targets and whiffs spectacularly. His verbose, tryhard technique is a tired formula he employs without flow, direction, or meaning. | Hopsin: No Shame | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hopsin-no-shame/ | No Shame | Hopsin—the California rapper whose constricting flows and humorless turns suck all the fun out of rapping—made his reputation appealing to the angstier corners of the internet, inhabited by rap moralists and “alternative thinkers”—those who earnestly think Tech N9ne is Peak Underground Rap. His new album, No Shame, is a bitter, petulant response to recent setbacks and mistakes: the collapse of his Funk Volume label, the souring of personal and professional relationships, and losing custody of his son after pleading guilty to assault. But he refuses to back down. “I built this empire off rebellion/Niggas seem to have a problem with what I be sellin’,” he raps on “Panorama City,” a song using a “California Love” sample as a Thug Life signifier. When given the chance to explain himself, he doubles down on the worst aspects of an irritating persona.
No Shame is a misfired revenge stunt. He takes aim at several targets and whiffs spectacularly, producing the worst album of his career, filled with tryhard wordplay and defamation that verges on abuse. “This album is backlash for somebody else. This album is pretty much just karma for people who have screwed me over or done something wrong to me,” he told Tim Westwood. Those people are his former business partner, manager, and Funk Volume co-founder, Damien Ritter, and his ex-girlfriend, who Hopsin was arrested for assaulting in Australia last year. The barbs he has for Ritter are boring enough, but those reserved for his ex are particularly dark.
Hopsin leaves no room for interpretation: He uses No Shame (and the press tour promoting it) to get back at the mother of his child, to damage her any way he can: “I fuckin’ hate this bitch, her name could sit on a grave/Only reason she ain’t dead is ‘cause my kid on the way/The bitch is pregnant and she strippin’, dodgin’ minimum wage/She done kick me down, locked me up, and spit on my face,” he raps, enraged on “All Your Fault (Remix).” This is a rapper using the full weight of his musical machine to discredit a woman he pled guilty to assaulting. And even for all his attempts to disgrace and humiliate her, smearing her with slut-shaming tactics and leveraging the entire force of his fan base against her, he still comes off looking much worse.
Hopsin takes pride in his writing, making fun of “mumble rappers” and those he perceives to be lesser lyricists, but his ideas are always articulated in the most corrosive ways possible; his set-ups and images are awkward, distasteful, and off-putting. Creepiness is an important part of his aesthetic—the colored contact lenses, deranged rambler rhyme mechanics (a la Eminem), and so-sinister-they’re-campy performances are all tools he uses to paint himself as a rap iconoclast. But even he pushes the limits of likability on No Shame. Slim Shady is his patron saint, and “Rap God” is his scripture. All of his defining principles originate there, only executed without grace or guile. Even his horrible, vitriolic anti-ex tirades are cribbed right from the “Kim” playbook. Rage isn’t a substitute for artistry.
He’ll rap nonsense for the sake of the scheme (”Napalm in my dang palm/I’m a dark villain like Blade, Spawn, or Akon with a cape on”). His scenes are insipid. His phrasings are either basic and unsophisticated or simply unnatural, playing up the phonetics as a distraction. “Evil and purgin’, I am more deceiving in person/Screamin’ and cursin’, fuck the world with penis insertions/I’ma feel this way until the day I’m leavin’ this Earth, man,” he raps on “Witch Doctor.” You can almost hear him asking himself, “what rhymes with this?” making raps purposelessly denser with complete disregard for syntax.
The songs that aren’t vehicles for his hatred are pointless exercises, each an elaborate convolution. Most Hopsin verses are assembled the same way, with choppy, rapid-fire cadences of multisyllabic filler. Every diphthong and accent ricochets off the next, creating the illusion of mastery when really, it’s less complex than letting an algorithm generate raps from scratch. There’s no value in craftsmanship alone; there has to be flow, direction, and meaning. “Rap monster, Black Mamba/You can’t run from the wrath I’ve been asked to cast on ya/To all the haters who been keepin’ up with my every move/Here’s my penis to latch on/I’m the only MC in this wack genre,” he raps, following his technicality-first formula.
And if there was any doubt that he’s detrimentally a creature of habit, he’s now nine songs deep in an “Ill Mind of Hopsin” series that ran out of ideas four songs ago. Things get even more unpleasant when Hopsin takes detours. On “Happy Ending,” he raps about getting off at a massage parlor in a terrible mock accent, mimicking the masseuse for the hook: “If you no say nothing, I can give you sucky-sucky.” It would be one thing if the song was just crude or offensive or unlistenable, but it’s a trifecta.
There aren’t any moments of remorse or thoughtfulness on No Shame, but there are a few moments of reflection. “I don’t like Marcus, I don’t like Hopsin/I am ashamed of them both,” he raps on “Marcus’ Gospel” before concluding, “I made my bed, I’ma lay in it.” These bars would have you believe Hopsin has learned from his mistakes. But No Shame proves otherwise. The album rebukes any and all responsibility for his current predicament, shifting blame onto others. And in an attempt to weaponize his raps against his adversaries, he exposes his deepest flaws. His album is a reminder that shame is a productive and even necessary thing, keeping us from further making fools of ourselves. | 2017-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 300 Entertainment | December 6, 2017 | 3.5 | 25f68626-9706-4054-99de-d783d8d99c8e | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
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 Fishmans’ 1996 masterpiece, a landmark of Japanese rock that fits a lifetime of aspirations and daydreams into a single 35-minute composition. | 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 Fishmans’ 1996 masterpiece, a landmark of Japanese rock that fits a lifetime of aspirations and daydreams into a single 35-minute composition. | Fishmans: Long Season | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fishmans-long-season/ | Long Season | The prospect of making an album with only one gargantuan song was one of those tossed-off comments that seemed like a joke. But when Shinji Sato put forth the idea, he was following a trajectory that defined his life: dream big, and see it through to completion. Long Season, the 1996 magnum opus of Japanese rock band Fishmans, was a radical proposition: take an existing track—the group’s six-minute single “Season”—and turn it into a dreamlike suite that elevates their gentle psych-pop to symphonic proportions. “When we made [Something in the Air], I hated having each song separated from the next,” Sato said of their previous full-length. “Why not just make it one song?”
No longer bound by single-digit runtimes, the band crafted a record that was massive in scope but suffused with everyday warmth. A mesmerizing piano motif and rocksteady bassline set the foundation while Sato’s bright and guileless voice floats above. He sounds friendly, like an affectionate drunk filling a room with positive energy, playfully stretching syllables and delivering them with easygoing charm. When he doesn’t sing, the rest of the instrumentation gets to breathe, expand, and sometimes go haywire. Crucially, Long Season does not sound like a jam session; each passage is a self-contained world of sound that serves the drifting, daydream logic of the overall piece.
Sato, Fishmans’ vocalist, guitarist, and charismatic leader, showed signs of the sort of ambition and tenacity needed to pull off a grand-scale project like Long Season from a young age. He was already a known presence at Meiji Gakuin University’s Song Writes Club when drummer Kin-ichi Motegi attended an event for new students. Motegi was stunned: “From the moment he started singing, [Sato] had an aura on another level.” Soon, the two started jamming together, and in 1987 they started a band, joined eventually by guitarist Kensuke Ojima, keyboardist Hakase-Sun, and bassist Yuzuru Kashiwabara.
Considering the sweeping art-pop of their greatest album, Fishmans had something of an inauspicious beginning: They were a reggae band. Japanese artists had been exploring reggae for more than a decade by the early 1990s, but their vocalists had a more professional style than Sato’s scrappy and childlike delivery. Fishmans’ debut, 1991’s Chappie, Don’t Cry, flopped commercially and critically, and a follow-up single, which doubled as the theme for a short-lived television show, didn’t fare much better. One journalist accused the band of having “no reggae soul.”
Early in his career, Sato had written down his goals, many of which involved success in the music business and his social life. He wanted money, he wanted people to hear his songs, he wanted popularity with girls. After their debut LP and early singles failed to make them stars, Sato and the rest of the band began to lose their faith in the industry. Fishmans had to make a decision: Would they focus on more TV tie-ins to help with sales, or pursue artistic freedom? They agreed on the latter. Suddenly, Sato had a new direction in life. “I don’t want to make it big,” he wrote in his journal. “Media interferes with creative activities. There’s a lot we should be doing in the Japanese music scene.”
Over their next several albums, Fishmans came into their own, balancing pop appeal with daring studio experiments, and eventually arriving at the wide-ranging approach to genre—dub, psychedelia, lounge, funk, jangle—that defined the Tokyo scene now known as Shibuya-kei. As Fishmans became more musically ambitious, Sato became a more demanding leader. The band, which still wasn’t making much money, began losing members. Ojima departed after 1993’s Neo Yankees’ Holiday, and Hakase after the following year’s Orange, both feeling overwhelmed by Sato’s exacting style. Things began to turn in 1995 when they signed to Polydor, which agreed to finance a private studio for the band in exchange for three new albums in two years, a much faster pace than the band was used to. The combination of pressure and space to work was a fruitful one: The three studio albums Fishmans released on Polydor, including Long Season, were the best of their career.
“That album was a work that expressed one world with eight songs,” drummer Motegi once said of 1996’s Something in the Air, the first of Fishmans’ Polydor albums. “So we thought that we could express the world of eight songs with just one.” Sato suggested expanding upon “Season,” a 1996 single already filled with ideas: There’s a lush string arrangement from new member Honzi, record scratching, homey organ chords, and two passages where Sato coos like a baby bird. Sato had only recently gotten his driver’s license, and was taking lyrical inspiration from riding around town. He sings about traveling from one end of Tokyo to the other, feeling happy but lonely, being in a dream state but also dazed by cold medication. He paints these images in relatable terms, highlighting the richness and peculiarities of simply existing. It was the perfect song to transform into an album-length composition.
Long Season begins with what sounds like a stone plunging into water, a familiar noise that anticipates the record’s immersive atmosphere. The song’s first section is built on a slowly grooving bassline and repeating piano arpeggios, a hypnotic swell with intermittent flourishes: music box, violin, moody synthesizer. After four minutes—and the brief but thrilling fakeout of a drum fill—the backbeat and vocals finally arrive. There are melodic yelps and wails, soft moments of storytelling and inquisitive questioning. “What is that song you’re humming?” he asks in a disarming moment of genuine interest. To hear it in a song whose world so gently opens up to you feels like the precursor to a heart-to-heart.
Sato wanted to capture the “flow of time in our mind” and how, for example, we may “suddenly [remember] something from 15 years ago.” Take the unexpected introduction of harmonized vocals eight minutes in. It sounds like a children’s choir singing in the distance, and as it slowly fades away, a music box starts twinkling to transport us further into the past. The album continually evolves in this way, gliding from one scene to the next. At one point, Sato keeps singing “driving…” as Motegi plays a drum roll. It has the quietly cinematic energy of a road trip. The repetition serves both as a conduit for fond remembrance and a reminder to keep moving.
Sato wrote most of Fishmans’ songs and the rest of the band actualized his ideas. He had high standards, but didn’t want to give specific instructions for what the other members should do. This dynamic was especially significant for Long Season, which features numerous guest musicians: singers like UA and MariMari, guitarist Taiji Sato, and percussionist Asa-Chang. The latter contributes a long passage of improvised tabla played alongside other percussive noises, including Motegi’s drums; the two instruments are meant to sound like they’re fighting one another. Long Season was composed with these kinds of abstract directions; for example, Sato wrote that he wanted the song to have a “sunset scene.”
The guests who recorded their contributions didn’t quite know how their parts would fit into the larger composition, which was stitched together from four different sections. Sound engineer ZAK was especially dedicated to ensuring the final product was unimpeachable. He was the one who suggested the water sounds, which dot the album during its improvisatory percussion sequence. His presence is also there in the track’s coherency. Around 21 minutes in, the familiar strains of guitar strums provide slow preparation for the intro’s reprise. Reverse tape effects symbolize this return, and when Kashiwabara’s bassline swoops in, it sounds like we’ve snapped back to reality.
Sato wanted each live performance of Long Season to be unique. During Fishmans’ December 1996 concert at Akasaka Blitz, the band members sound like they’re trading off solos during Long Season, from guitar to drums to steelpan. The piece is more stripped-down than the studio version, and its minimalist bent allows for a deeper appreciation for each individual instrument. Two years later, Fishmans performed an affecting rendition of the track at the same venue. Two-thirds of the way in, vocalists start happily chanting “Get round in the season!” as if encouraging the audience to cherish this moment. Shortly after, everyone drops out of the song except for Sato. He strums his guitar and sings in a moment of intimacy: “The two of us driving at dusk… halfway dreaming.” When the band enters again, everything feels a little more magical.
That 1998 concert was Sato’s last. He had escalating respiratory problems, and used oxygen sprays throughout the tour. Less than three months after this show, he passed away at the age of 33. “You don’t have to make compromises in your work, but it is important to be grateful and humble,” he said in his final months. Sato never got to witness the growing popularity of his band—their songs have millions of plays on streaming services, and last year, the surviving members of Fishmans staged the Long Season 2023 tour. In the ’90s, Sato didn’t believe that people would understand his music, and knew some would be turned off by Long Season’s length. Still, he pressed forward. “I believe I’m making music that can change somebody’s life,” he once said. “I’ll keep doing my best so it reaches that someone.”
Ultimately, Sato saw himself as an ordinary person and amateur musician. “I’m not a good guitar player,” he confessed, “but Fishmans’ songs need my guitar, so I play.” His singing made that devotion even clearer. Throughout Long Season, his voice is filled with a whimsical curiosity, and a freedom to intone in whatever manner he finds appropriate. At its best, his singing sounds like the natural overflow of being swept up by the music. This intuitive quality is imperative to how, despite its demanding length, Long Season is a comforting listen—it is never too academic or outré, and its pleasures are always within reach. It mirrors the way that Sato understood life: as a dream you can create and get lost inside. | 2024-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polydor | May 12, 2024 | 9.3 | 25f7ba4f-09e2-4a38-8554-ef9b593fac65 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
New set from the Analog Africa reissue label joins the ranks of the most essential African funk compilations, partly by covering ground no one else has walked on, but mostly just for relentlessly kicking ass for over an hour. | New set from the Analog Africa reissue label joins the ranks of the most essential African funk compilations, partly by covering ground no one else has walked on, but mostly just for relentlessly kicking ass for over an hour. | Various Artists: African Scream Contest: Raw & Psychedelic Sounds From Benin & Togo 70s | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11566-african-scream-contest-raw-psychedelic-sounds-from-benin-togo-70s/ | African Scream Contest: Raw & Psychedelic Sounds From Benin & Togo 70s | If you're a fan of classic music from the African continent, you're living in rich times. Interest in the music outside of the communities it was made in is at an all-time high, and there is a new crop of intrepid reissue labels willing to put in enormous amounts of time and energy to bring this music to a whole new set of waiting ears. These are not the fly-by-night exploito outfits of old-- Popular African Music, Sound Way, Analog Africa, the newly resurrected Strut, and Graeme Counsel's recent series of African music projects on Stern's/Syllart do it the right way, tracking down the original masters when available, finding the artists, and making sure they get paid.
Analog Africa's Samy Ben Redjeb already had loads of cred for the way he handled his two previous releases, which featured Zimbabwe's Hallelujah Chicken Run Band and Green Arrows, respectively. He traveled to Zimbabwe and spent time with the creators, digging deep into their stories and emerging with great-sounding, informative compilations that thoroughly introduced the listener to both the music and the musicians. African Scream Contest moves a few thousand miles northwest to Benin and Togo, two chimney-shaped former French colonies (Togo was a German colony until WWI) squeezed between West Africa's Anglophone giants, Ghana and Nigeria.
These are small countries, usually overshadowed by their neighbors in international affairs but nonetheless culturally and musically rich, and both have experienced the numbingly common ailments of former European colonies to varying degrees. Most of Francophone Africa fell heavily under the sway of Congolese rumba in the 1960s and 70s, or developed heavily Cubanized forms of their own-- Senegal, Guinea, and Mali in particular developed their own sounds parallel to rumba. Benin and Togo were certainly not exempt from rumba's charms, but they were also caught in the highlife crossfire between Ghana and Nigeria, and the funk and soul sounds imported in massive quantities to those countries in the 60s and 70s inevitably found their way across the borders.
There's even a case to be made that Afrobeat developed just as much in Cotonou, Benin, as it did in Lagos, Nigeria. Ignace de Souza & His Melody Aces were pulling in rock elements as early as 1962, and there's plenty of funk in his work with the Black Santiagos-- if you can find a copy, Original Music's long out-of-print Ignace de Souza compilation, the Great Unknowns, Vol. 1, is wall-to-wall brilliant. Benin had an amazing surfeit of excellent bands by the early 70s, and Redjeb tracked down many members, a touch-and-go process he describes vividly in the liners, which function as both educational piece and travelogue.
The kings of the Cotonou scene were Orchestre Poly-Rythmo (there are innumerable variations on their name; the most complete is Tout Puissant Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou Dahomey). Though Redjeb makes an admirable attempt to offer as much variety as possible, Poly-Rythmo still shows up three times, once on its own and twice as a backing band. The band recorded in all kinds of styles-- check Popular African Music's Reminiscin' in Tempo disc for their highlife sound, and Sound Way's Kings of Benin Urban Groove for their funk side-- but these three all feature a particularly wicked high-speed groove that they were the first to perfect. Their "Gbeti Madjro" is stunningly funky, with a few head-spinning passages where the band strips back to just guitar, bass and drums as if to say "even at our most skeletal, we are twice as powerful as anyone else."
The quality of the recordings is excellent, and the remastering brings out the depth in each one, but the character of the sound is about as raw funk gets. Togo's Roger Damawuzan (sometimes spelled Damahouzon) has all the screaming charisma of early-70s James Brown, and his "Wait for Me" balances his gruff vocal with a cool, mellow guitar riff and burbling bass. The horns and guitar sound utterly Memphis, but the cracking drums are all West Africa. His countrymen, Napo de Mi Amor et Ses Black Devil's, turn in a burning, organ-led Afrobeat tune that recalls the style of some of their Ghanaian colleagues.
Back in Benin, Orchestre Super Jheevs des Paillotes come closest to matching Poly-Rythmo's breakneck Afrofunk groove on the amazing "Ye Nan Lon An", which swivels around an Afrobeat backbeat with a breathtaking guitar part that earns pride of place ahead of the vocals in the mix and makes that upside-down engineering decision sound completely logical. It's counterintuitive moves like this that make African funk such a constant joy to discover, and there are plenty more on this disc. But beyond that, there's just a uniqueness to these musicians' take on funk and Afrobeat that's magnetic. Dig the garage rock organ flipping out over the funk beat of El Rego et Ses Commandos' "Se Na Min". Try not to dance to Picoby Band d'Abomey's outrageously raw and rhythmic "Mi Ma Kpe Dji". If you're into funky African music you won't be able to resist them.
African Scream Contest easily joins the ranks of the most essential African funk compilations, partly by covering ground no one else has walked on, but mostly just for relentlessly kicking ass for over an hour. This is some of the best funk ever recorded anywhere, and it ranges from quick blasts of hyperspeed groove like Le Super Borgou de Parakou's "Congolaise Benin Ye" to the ruminative Fela-style Afrobeat of Vincent Ahehehinnou and Les Volcans' spicy Afro-Cuban workout. Whether you've been hunting down El Rego 45s on eBay for years or just heard and loved your first Fela reissue, this disc is emphatically for you. | 2008-06-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2008-06-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Analog Africa | June 17, 2008 | 8.9 | 26077d1a-3cd5-4752-a03b-6e634009ada3 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Emily’s D+Evolution marks a radical shift in the style of upright bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding. The Grammy Award-winning artist reemerges from a two-year hiatus with a rock/funk hybrid that brings Prince and Janelle Monae to mind. | Emily’s D+Evolution marks a radical shift in the style of upright bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding. The Grammy Award-winning artist reemerges from a two-year hiatus with a rock/funk hybrid that brings Prince and Janelle Monae to mind. | Esperanza Spalding: Emily’s D+Evolution | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21575-emilys-devolution/ | Emily’s D+Evolution | In 2011, Esperanza Spalding ruined what was expected to be a grand coronation for Justin Bieber. The teen star was supposed to waltz into the Grammys, collect his "Best New Artist" trophy and dance triumphantly into the sunset. But instead, that award went to Spalding, the affable bassist with a bright smile and big Afro. In response, her Wikipedia page was vandalized, and the Recording Academy soon changed its rules, making it tougher for indie acts like Spalding to reach Grammy-level recognition.
The irony of this little episode is that Spalding never seemed to crave mainstream validation in the first place. She has established herself as an understated force in contemporary jazz and soul, skillfully walking the line between genres—just her and a trusty upright bass—crafting art that resonates with the older guard while maintaining a youthful exuberance. She’s performed for the Obamas at the White House and, in the summer of 2011, I saw her perform at the Roots Picnic in Philadelphia, Pa. There, she put fluid spins on Michael Jackson’s "I Can’t Help It" and the Weather Report’s "Predator," playing electric bass with ?uestlove on drums. No matter where she plays, she projects the sort of self-contained ease that suggests she'd be equally content to play the local open mic. Following the release of 2012’s Radio Music Society, Spalding retreated to her native Portland, Ore., to de-stress from music industry pressures. She took two years off to reconnect with her creative voice and regain some form of sanity.
On Emily’s D+Evolution, she’s reemerged emboldened. "See this pretty girl, watch this pretty girl flow," Spalding asserts boldly at the top of "Good Lava," the first track and mission statement. Using a dissonant guitar riff, thumping drums, and lurching time signature, it almost feels like a dare to stick around. The album has the feel of a nervy gauntlet throw, seething with the sort of ferocity that only comes from time spent alone, far away from the limelight. These are exuberant, confrontational songs, amplified in the same sort of rock/funk hybrid style that brings Prince and Janelle Monae to mind. Gone is the Afro, replaced with long braids, wide-rimmed glasses, and ornate outfits.
Like other hugely popular musicians before her who felt commercial pressures beginning to stunt their growth, Spalding has found an alter ego to speak to her more extroverted, creative side. Spalding sings through a muse named Emily, her middle name, though her reasons for doing so aren’t clear-cut. As a character, Emily wants you to buck the system, to fight for peace and tranquility. She wants you to reconnect with your spiritual center, to avoid facades. Emily "is a spirit, or a being, or an aspect who I met, or became aware of," Spalding recently told NPR. "I recognize that my job … is to be her arms and ears and voice and body." As a child, Spalding was curious about acting and created scenarios using movement and dance. So "in a sense," the musician recalled, "I see it as a flashlight into the future."
The theatrical D+Evolution plays like the culmination of those childhood performances. Spalding's voice retains its warmth and nuance, but she’s thrown herself into these songs with a new gusto. Each song has its own identity, from the unbroken spoken-word flow preceding "Ebony and Ivy," the fist-pumping call-and-response of "Funk the Fear," and the opera-infused histrionics of "I Want It Now." Recorded in front of a small studio audience in Los Angeles, you can almost see Spalding act out these songs as the band—comprised of guitarist and Christian Scott collaborator Matthew Stevens, producer/drummer Karriem Riggins, and others—create thick textures that provide plenty of space for her.
People will likely call this art-rock or performance art, but D+Evolution advocates an almost indescribable ethos. There are cues from Thundercat and Flying Lotus here, as well as nods to folk-rock, funk, and prog. Listening to "Judas" or "Rest In Pleasure," you could imagine an alternate universe where the Dirty Projectors explored jazz fusion without too much effort, and the exuberant vocal whoops and dense arrangements won't faze tUnE-yArDs listeners. The harmonic language remains rooted in jazz, but like Emily herself, the music doesn’t seem to be "from" anywhere: It seems most concerned with establishing space, creating room for possibility. Even the more conventional songs like "One," "Noble Nobles" and "Unconditional Love" feel expansive and rich.
This aesthetic, which doesn’t have a zip code, dovetails with the album’s overarching theme of personal freedom. On these songs, Spalding shrugs at societal constraints, urging you to "live your life" on the chorus of "Funk the Fear" and shed preconceived notions of who we're supposed to be. On "One," she embraces emotion with brave uncertainty: "I’m not lacking in love," she sings, "not haunted by its pain … of romance, life’s given me enough, I can’t complain." The lyrics are elusive at first, darting behind fast-moving songs and delivered in impressionistic, conversational bursts that recall the delivery of Joni Mitchell. But the fearless generosity behind them communicates itself loud and clear, and it's a spirit that animates the entire album. With it, Spalding has once again redefined an already singular career, dictating a vision entirely on her own terms. | 2016-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | EMI | March 4, 2016 | 8.6 | 260bd87a-d27f-4f6e-b35c-ad545c250802 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
The 17-year-old Queens rapper went viral off a certified hit, but his debut project is repetitive and uninspired. | The 17-year-old Queens rapper went viral off a certified hit, but his debut project is repetitive and uninspired. | Lil Tecca: We Love You Tecca | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-tecca-we-love-you-tecca/ | We Love You Tecca | Lil Tecca turned 17 just days before releasing his debut project We Love You Tecca, and unlike other teen rappers who have bounded up the charts in recent years, he looks his age. He’s not 17 in Riverdale casting years. He presents as an actual high schooler, complete with braces and glasses that look straight off of a CVS rack—a pointed departure break from the outsized stylist budgets and Manic Panic color palettes of rap’s biggest, youngest stars. That’s about where the distinction from his peers ends, though. Tecca’s look may be unique, but his sound isn’t.
The Queens-born rapper rhymes in the melodic patter of New York sing-rap phenom A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, with a flow that splits the difference between Chief Keef’s gruff irritability and Gunna’s glycerin slickness. He’s got a strong voice and natural instincts, and although his flow is completely secondhand, it’s precisely pitched to the moment, especially when his songs glower their way into Juice WRLD incel-rap territory. That rapper looms especially large over We Love You Tecca. Juice WRLD’s producers Nick Mira and Taz Taylor helmed Tecca’s breakthrough hit “Ransom,” and he contributes the album’s only guest feature, on a remix of that track.
Tecca’s success story has played like a smaller scale echo of Lil Nas X’s, another internet-savvy young rapper who built a listenership online too big for major labels to ignore. After millions of streams on SoundCloud and a viral video for “Ransom” on the taste-making YouTube channel Lyrical Lemonade, Tecca inked a deal with Republic Records, making him labelmates with Drake and Ariana Grande. His rise may not have stirred an all-consuming debate about genre classifications or resuscitated Billy Ray Cyrus’s career, but it’s always impressive seeing an artist so young cut through the industry’s yellow tape so quickly. Some rappers grind their whole lives for their moment. Tecca netted his between Xbox Live sessions.
Still, he could benefit from putting a little more work in. It’s not for nothing that Tecca harps about guarding his flow on “Ransom,” because throughout We Love You Tecca he clings to it like a tennis player trying to fake his way into the pros with only one serve. That flow sounds fantastic on “Ransom,” and even better as it figure-skates through the tuneful “Shots.” But Tecca wears it into the ground over the course of the album’s repetitious 40 minutes, especially in its second half, as his tracks bleed into one endless rewrite of each other.
Tecca’s most glaring deficit, though, is how indifferent his lyrics are. His songwriting consists entirely of repeating genre tropes he’s absorbed through osmosis. “I got twin Glocks, turn you to a dancer,” he threatens on “Ransom,” but annotating on his lyrics on Genius, he concedes that’s a fabrication (”I don’t have no straps for nobody,” he writes). That’s not a problem in and of itself, but some conviction or imagination is, and Tecca doesn’t even bother to disguise how empty his recycled boasts are. In his Genius footnotes for the lyric “She know I got the Fendi, Prada when I hit Milan,” he admits he doesn’t wear designer clothes, either. “Just fitting what works together,” he comments. “I have never been to Europe or nothing.”
Even great rappers cut corners and lean on filler sometimes, and even the best ones repeat themselves. But the reward of rap music in the quantity over quality age is those little glimmers of inspiration that somehow work their way into even the most mechanical exercises: the unexpected punchlines, the uncharted trains of thought, the WTF moments, the zigs that come where there should be a zag. Those are the moments that make the redundancy worthwhile. We Love You Tecca doesn’t offer many of them. | 2019-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Galactic / Republic | September 10, 2019 | 5.6 | 260d6340-1ed5-4806-b5e4-d5fce199c02d | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
This 4xCD box set collects the four albums that Wolfgang Voigt has created under his Gas moniker-- 1996's self-titled record, 1997's Zauberberg, 1998's Königsforst, and 2000's Pop-- and collectively they represent a wondrous high point in the history of electronic music. | This 4xCD box set collects the four albums that Wolfgang Voigt has created under his Gas moniker-- 1996's self-titled record, 1997's Zauberberg, 1998's Königsforst, and 2000's Pop-- and collectively they represent a wondrous high point in the history of electronic music. | GAS: Nah Und Fern | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11582-nah-und-fern/ | Nah Und Fern | In 2000, the final album from German producer Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project, Pop, finished in the #12 position in Pitchfork's Top 20 albums of the year. Suffice to say that this website was a much smaller operation then, and there were far fewer writers; collectively, we also only had time for so much experimental electronic music. "IDM" as an idea still had plenty of currency, but many of the records falling under that banner were specialty items, something one would put on in a very specific time and place. And there were lots of them. In this landscape, when experimental electronic music was going in a hundred different directions at once-- considering only Gas' label, the Frankfurt imprint Mille Plateaux, you had the jagged sound of disrupted technology in Oval, the boldly politicized field recordings of Ultra Red, the filmic breakcore of Alec Empire, along with a smattering of post-rock and industrial-- Gas was something we could all agree on.
Wide appeal-- even amongst upstart music critics-- isn't something one would expect from this project. When working as Gas in the second half of the 1990s, Voigt's tracks usually featured an unflinching kick-drum pulsing at a mid-tempo BPM-- sometimes ping-ponging across the soundfield or encrusted with burrs of syncopation-- and they typically featured samples of stern and ominous Western classical music. The string and horn drones were sourced from vinyl and proud of it, with the corresponding pops and crackles figuring prominently in the mix. The Gas sound, so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable, seemed somewhat monochrome and tightly focused at the time. It was easy to come away with the idea that the project was an exercise in Fall-like consistency-- "Always different, always the same," as John Peel said about the latter. But it's clear now that each record was its own discrete chamber in Voigt's overall construction. The evidence is here, on this 4xCD box set, which collects the albums proper-- 1996's self-titled record, 1997's Zauberberg, 1999's Königsforst, and 2000's Pop (missing is the 1995 Modern EP as well as a couple of stray tracks)-- into a single set. These records have been out of print for years-- I saw a copy of Zauberberg going for $270 on Amazon not long ago-- but those refusing to pay outlandish prices have been handsomely rewarded. Gas in many ways sounds even more wondrous now, and certainly more wide-ranging.
The self-titled debut, originally released in 1996, is perhaps the most beautiful entry in the catalog. The rich, shimmery drones seem less earth-bound and heavy relative to what would come later; rather than evoking a dense, mossy arboreal feel-- Voigt has frequently acknowledged the sights and sounds of Germany's Black Forest as an inspiration-- Gas brings to mind images of a clear night sky, as pin-pricks of twinkling guitar samples, trails of distortion that swirl like a starry cloud dispersing into the void, and the bassy string tones all meet in a vast open space designed for contemplation. Though Gas is in some ways the most conventional of the project's records, with moments easily relatable to trends in post-acid house ambient, it also marks Voigt as a producer with a rare ear for texture.
The following year's Zauberberg was the solidification of quintessential Gas aesthetic. While overall the darkest and bleakest of these offerings, Zauberberg opens and closes with the deeply spiritual and uplifting organ drones one can imagine leaking from the cracked stained glass windows of a massive cathedral somewhere in the Bavarian Alps. Sandwiched between these drifting moments of blissful surrender are grim meditations on the physicality of tension. The bass drum throbs between the speakers, less a heartbeat than the icy, unremitting march of time, while Voigt's most dissonant string samples tug everything down into the black soil. It's a shopworn observation among Gas observers to say that the music on the individual albums closely mirrors the images record covers, but Zauberberg is as dark and menacing as the noir picture of red branches in darkness featured on its front.
Beginning precisely where Zauberberg leaves off, with rumbling strings and an unblinking kick, Königsforst eventually takes things to a far more complicated place. Where Gas had previously been defined by the sense of endlessness-- insistent repetition, lengthy tracks that could conceivably go on forever, a consistent mood-- Königsforst experiments with development, moving through timbres and emotional sensations with a definable dramatic arc. The album looks back and forward simultaneously as Voigt seems to be probing the limits of what the project could be. The same starry backward guitar bit that first appeared on the third track of the debut returns on the fourth track here, now yoked to a subtle double-time kick-drum that gives a sense of blood-rushing excitement. Then the album culminates in the 15-minute fifth track, an Escher-like climb through samples of orchestral horns that change almost imperceptibly with each passing bar, moving from a firm, almost militaristic growl to welcoming, optimistic swoon by the track's end. The beatless drone that closes is another masterpiece, one that hints at massive left-turn to come on 2000's Pop; Königsforst on its own is essentially perfect.
Pop is the best known and most admired of these discs, and it provides an obvious entry point. Which is somewhat ironic, since it's also the most divergent by a huge margin. Had it come out under another name, it would have been difficult to know that this was a Gas record at all. The first three tracks offer three subtly different views of the same sound-field, a warm, wet place populated with bubbles, fizz, and hisses, along with keyboard drones and the sort of basslines Angelo Badalamenti used in "Twin Peaks" to suggest a rural idyll whose dark secrets were yet to be revealed. Had the record continued to explore this one direction, it might have been understood as a contemporary variation on the new age meditation record, something listeners would return to in order to chill out and "center" and so on. But Voigt had something else in mind. By the fourth track he's returned the steady kick to the mix, and braided the percussion with a clanging repetitive bell that one imagines the Field's Axel Willner found inspiring. As the beats disappear for two tracks the album inflates with anxiety and dread until, with the return for the 15-minute closer, we're immersed in one of the most nervous-- bordering on malicious-- Gas tracks of all.
By this point, it seems, Voigt had said what he wanted to say with Gas and was ready to move onto something else, like helping to turn the Kompakt label he runs with Michael Mayer and Jürgen Paape into one of electronic music's premier imprints. Four Gas albums in five years turned out to be quite a lot to chew on; this phase of his career is comparable to Brian Eno's instrumental music between, say, his 1973 collaboration with Robert Fripp, No Pussyfooting, and 1978's Music for Airports. More than anyone since Eno with the exception of Aphex Twin, Wolfgang Voigt was able to reimagine how ambient music could transform space. But he did so in a grounded, accessible manner. There's something primal and intuitive about this stuff; as heady electronic music goes, it's like a loaf of hearty dark bread, an easy-to-grasp but deceptively intricate musical world with a strong sense of-- to stretch the metaphor-- nourishment. Wolfgang Voigt's musical interests have led him to create stark dancefloor minimalism, playful house, and trance-inducing dub-techno; but Gas was the name he gave to music that was foremost about immersive space. This is music you can lose yourself in; see you in four or five hours. | 2008-06-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-06-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | June 5, 2008 | 9.2 | 26120c80-df2e-47a9-bfd7-b3210d157173 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Trippie Redd’s sprawling album is designed to show his versatility, but it’s not nearly wild enough to distract from its lack of coherent ideas. | Trippie Redd’s sprawling album is designed to show his versatility, but it’s not nearly wild enough to distract from its lack of coherent ideas. | Trippie Redd: ! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trippie-redd-exclamation-point/ | ! | To illustrate his chameleonic talents, the young Ohio rapper Trippie Redd has scheduled a slate of new albums: a rock record with Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, and an as-yet-to-be-explained project that proposes to show off an “unknown” side of him. But first comes !, which he’s specifically described as “versatile music.” The plan is to prove there isn’t anything he can’t do. In his quest to be master of all, he falls woefully short.
Redd says ! is an abbreviation for “immortal” and an homage to his late frenemy XXXTentacion’s album ?. Where X aimed for lo-fi emo-rap turned pop, Trippie is wholly without a target. He shoots from the hip in all directions with several misfires. EDM-smeared pop, woozy R&B, soul-rap, and melodic trap are touched on with nothing to tie these disparate threads together. The face-tatted howler leans heavily into his menacing TR666 alter ego, flipping back and forth between his signature lovesick persona and playing the nihilistic gangster. Between these poles, songs touch on being true to oneself at all costs, but these half-baked lessons land flat since Redd himself doesn’t really have an identity, musical or otherwise.
Like many in his class of SoundCloud stars, Trippie defines himself by his melodies. He cites KISS and Nirvana as influences, and his songs are predicated on him finding a tune and then freestyling the lyrics. Most of what happens here couldn’t even realistically be considered rapping, which he might argue is further proof of his flexibility, but it diminishes the impact of his songs. His ! verses are dull and unimaginative on top of being restrictive in form. Tune in at any point and you’ll likely get a fumbled string of nonsense bars. “Tryna sink my damn thoughts with these trees/Like a bible open when I spread her legs like the seas,” he raps on a song called “Lil Wayne.” (There is no mention of the rapper and it isn’t indebted to him, stylistically or otherwise.) Redd gets out-barred by a seemingly non-committal Playboi Carti name-dropping a half-dozen brands in his baby voice. Redd wants the listener to believe him virtuosic, but he barely comes off as capable.
! was advertised to his fans as the more profound of two upcoming projects, which isn’t hard when the other one is called Mobile Suit Pussy. “I just have random spurts of wanting to record but I always want it to mean something; I always want it to be deep,” he told MIC/LINE. “I don’t want to just be doing shit blindly.” But listening to this album, you’d think the exact opposite were true. No Trippie Redd song could ever actually be described as “deep”—the most thoughtful ones are less philosophical than any one of Lil B’s Based Freestyles—but these, in particular, are jumbled and digressive and witless. He has claimed “Snake Skin” is about suicide prevention, and maybe it really is in some hyper-surreal dadaist way, but then, on the very next song, he raps, “Y’all all need to change, man y’all need some help/And if you can’t, on God, nigga kill yourself.” He is constantly contradicting himself. Nothing means anything.
If nothing else, the exclamation of the title is in line with how Trippie Redd often performs; a cry of anger or pain that feels like an interjection. At his most effective, on “Mac 10” and “Immortal,” he harnesses that power. The most enjoyable moments feel like controlled chaos. Redd’s songs used to be looser and more free-flowing. He does at least sound more composed. That’s to his credit as a person but it’s not to his advantage as an artist. | 2019-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 10K Projects / Caroline | August 13, 2019 | 5.5 | 261266db-8e11-4067-81a7-421cb388a970 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Montreal-based art-punk band Ought’s debut is an endearing and electrifying album that treats panic attacks and adrenalized ecstasy as two sides of the same pounding heart. It’s an anxious, distressed record to be sure, but it presents itself as such simply to show you how that nervous energy can be put to constructive use. | Montreal-based art-punk band Ought’s debut is an endearing and electrifying album that treats panic attacks and adrenalized ecstasy as two sides of the same pounding heart. It’s an anxious, distressed record to be sure, but it presents itself as such simply to show you how that nervous energy can be put to constructive use. | Ought: More Than Any Other Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19248-ought-more-than-any-other-day/ | More Than Any Other Day | Ought are a band from Montreal on Constellation Records, which is both the most obvious and most misleading thing you can say about them. For one, they’re not actually Montreal natives, or even Canadians—their collective passports list birthplaces as far-flung as New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, and Australia. Furthermore, their tetchy, talkative brand of art-punk makes them anomalies on a Constellation roster that, from the foundational releases of Godspeed You! Black Emperor to current franchise players like Colin Stetson, has mostly favored the abstract over the elemental. But this outsider’s vantage is precisely what makes Ought’s debut album, More Than Any Other Day, so endearing and electrifying. It’s an anxious, distressed record to be sure—brimming with feelings of disaffection and dislocation—but it presents itself as such simply to show you how that nervous energy can be put to more positive, constructive use.
As legend has it, Ought came together at McGill University in 2012 during the “Printemps Erable”—i.e., the “Maple Spring,” when a push by the Quebec government to increase tuition fees across the province by 75 per cent prompted thousands of students to walk out of the classroom and into the streets for mass protests and school boycotts that lasted into the fall. For the members of Ought, it was an especially eye-opening experience, both as an immersion into Quebec’s proud tradition of civil unrest, and the celebratory, often musical form it can assume: the most enduring image of the 2012 movement is the sight of students and supporters dancing through neighbourhoods, banging on pots and pans in percussive protest. (A snippet of such a gathering can be heard in the dying moments of “Mladic” on Godspeed’s 2012 comeback release, Allelujah! Don’t Bend, Ascend!)
Now, More Than Any Other Day contains absolutely no songs about Quebecois education policy or the rising cost of living for undergrads. However, over its eight tracks, Ought strive to recapture and inspire that same sense of anarchic abandon they witnessed on the streets on Montreal in 2012. To that end, they couldn’t have chosen a more emblematic album cover—not because, as some have pointed out, its image of hands clasped in a show of solidarity bears an uncanny resemblance to another debut album from an idealistic rock band, but because, as the liner notes reveal, that photo was found discarded atop a dumpster. Accordingly, More Than Other Day is Ought’s effort to ensure that the basic tenets of passion and commitment don’t get tossed aside amid a culture of instant gratification and distraction, and remind their hashtag activist generation of how it really feels to feel. This is a manifesto to write more manifestos.
And as singer/guitarist Tim Beeler convincingly illustrates throughout the record, the process of reconnecting with your inner iconoclast can be more potent than any drug. In the standout, Marquee Moon-lit ballad “Habit”, the addiction in question is to the act of expression itself, and the liberating/empowering sensation of getting something off your chest (even if the strung-out, string-screeched coda nods to a song about a different sort of habit). The almost-title-track “Today More Than Any Other Day” puts that transformative theory into even more explicit action: over a slowcore trickle, a dejected Beeler mutters the dispiriting line “we’re sinking deeper”—but then repeats those words over and over as the song accelerates until his ennui is reborn as exhilaration. And as the song hits its joyously frantic stride, even the prospect of going grocery shopping is elevated to a near-religious experience: “Today more than other day/ I am prepared/ To make the decision/ Between 2 per cent and whole milk,” Beeler shares, fully aware that the concept of choice in a late-capitalist economy is an inherently flawed one. But for him, even such small victories can provide one with the motivation to achieve much greater ones.
With his sardonic, conversational style and ticking-time-bomb outbursts, Beeler belongs to a lineage of brainiac-maniacs that span the likes of David Byrne and the Violent Femmes’ Gordan Gano to modern-day rant-rockers like Parquet Courts and Protomartyr. Likewise, the band’s sound encompasses myriad eras and permutations of proto- and post-punk: Velvet Underground drones (via the omnipersent hum of keyboardist Matt May), Feelies speed-jangle, daydreamy Sonic Youthian sprawl. And with the gritty grooves of “Pleasant Heart” and “Around Again”, bassist Ben Stidworthy and drummer Tim Keen display an amazingly deft, Fugazi-like facility with injecting a little funk into their punk without turning it into punk-funk.
But more so than any identifiable influence, More Than Any Other Day is ultimately defined by its unsettled, restless spirit; this is an album that treats panic attacks and adrenalized ecstasy as two sides of the same pounding heart, with its simultaneous transmissions of joy and fear, discipline and chaos, comedy and tragedy. As Beeler spells it out in the album’s thrillingly combustible closer, “Gemini”: “I retain the right to be disgusted by life/ I retain the right to be in love with everything in sight.” Though born of a highly politicized protest movement, Ought aren’t telling you what to do with your life. They just want to make sure you live it. | 2014-04-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-04-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Constellation | April 29, 2014 | 8.4 | 2614764d-b653-4385-b838-b8ab3db48162 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On her second album, Xenia Rubinos negotiates a world that has prescribed ideas about how she should be—particularly as a person of color—and incisively questions her place outside of those roles. | On her second album, Xenia Rubinos negotiates a world that has prescribed ideas about how she should be—particularly as a person of color—and incisively questions her place outside of those roles. | Xenia Rubinos: Black Terry Cat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21954-xenia-rubinos-black-terry-cat/ | Black Terry Cat | Xenia Rubinos' vivid debut album, Magic Trix, drew from noise, punk, and soul, yet it was often described as “Latin music” on account of the Brooklyn songwriter's Puerto Rican and Cuban heritage. “I think that my culture plays into that because it's part of who I am,” she's said, “but I also don't think it's the totality of my work.” But for the follow-up, her newfound appreciation of hip-hop, rediscovering Erykah Badu, and creating against a backdrop of racist police brutality prompted Rubinos to consider the parameters of her identity. “You know where to put the brown girl when she's fuckin' it up,” she chants amid the gnashing synths of “See Them.” “Where you gonna put the brown girl now she's tearin' it up?”
Black Terry Cat is all about breaking beyond limitations. From mostly keys, drums, and bass, Rubinos and her small cohort bring a funky fluidity to the bright splatters of her debut, and forge a level of inventiveness comparable to Esperanza Spalding's recent epic, Emily's D+Evolution. On a day where nothing's going right, the bass and vocals on “Lonely Lover” spiral downwards, an elegant, defeated groove into the abyss. On songs like “Laugh Clown” and “Don't Wanna Be,” Rubinos is a brooding neo-soul singer, yet “Just Like I” is an exuberant but abrasive thrash (“with the same teeth, I smile, I bite you...”) that could be by Shellac if not for her loopy vocal trill.
Rubinos' magical voice gives each of these songs their own distinctive character and magnetism. Tonally, she's a little like St. Vincent's Annie Clark, with the smoky, inviting warmth of fine red wine, and is as adept at punk confrontation as R&B run-ons. Flickers of desperation color her soulful turn on “Don't Wanna Be,” about trying to get someone to love her, while she hops between consonants on the free-associating “I Won't Say,” which stalls on the piercing tone of an ECG flatline as she recites an extract from Abbey Lincoln's 1966 essay, “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?”: “Whose hair is compulsively fried, whose skin is bleached, whose nose is ‘too big,’ whose mouth is too loud, whose butt is too broad, whose feet are too flat, whose face is too black?”
On Black Terry Cat, Rubinos poses more of her own provocative questions about how black and brown bodies are contained and valued. And none more so than on the incendiary “Mexican Chef,” a spiky skit about the discreet labor performed by the people of color that “raised America in place of its mom.” Rubinos counts the Latino employees in the back of New York's every restaurant, and the workers absolving others of undesirable jobs, assuring their comfort and assuaging their guilt. “Brown cleans your house, brown takes the trash, brown even wipes your grandaddy's ass,” she raps in a springy cadence, before delivering an even harder blow about the thanks they get for it. “Brown breaks his back, brown takes the flack, brown gets cut 'cos his papers are whack/Brown sits down, brown does frown, brown's up in a hospital gown/Brown has not, brown gets shot, brown got what he deserved 'cos he fought.” With its sharp percussion and infectious polemic, it's like M.I.A. signed to Daptone, which is to say that it's a total KO.
Whereas Magic Trix was heavy with playful imagery, Rubinos gets deep inside her psyche on Black Terry Cat, as she negotiates a world that has prescribed ideas about how she should be, and questions her place outside of it. She rejects the hand that feeds and stabs on “Just Like I,” elasticizing her frustration as she details her dutiful adherence to the system. (“Every single day, living in the places you built for me.”) “How Strange It Is” is an outsider's take on life's arbitrary dividing lines, from time to borders, its curious French cabaret dissolving into nonsense. Amid the overdriven organs of “Right?”, she shoots down someone who shows her “all the things I'll never be,” and on the plainly gorgeous “Laugh Clown,” the mellow haze evoking classic Badu, Rubinos asks, “Ain't got no money, got no job/Got no kids, no country to live in: Who am I?”
But listeners of Black Terry Cat will have no doubt: Rubinos is a unique presence, with a sharp ability to make pressing issues about identity and society into funky, exhilarating music. (The record's only real downsides are a few too many instrumental interludes.) On “See Them,” she rails, “Who are they to come tell me where I'm from and what is wrong?/We know you made up stories page by page, why you lie?” Drawing from so many musical diasporas and questioning the way that different existences intersect, Rubinos' second album is American music with a different story to tell. | 2016-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | June 8, 2016 | 8 | 2617dd3d-c500-4186-9aee-b10e960e4826 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The New York four-piece WALL evoke the tarnished, shouty clangor of Mission of Burma, Wire circa Pink Flag, Pylon, and an extremely misanthropic B-52s. The sharp lyrics often tackle the false identities necessary to survive 21st century New York. | The New York four-piece WALL evoke the tarnished, shouty clangor of Mission of Burma, Wire circa Pink Flag, Pylon, and an extremely misanthropic B-52s. The sharp lyrics often tackle the false identities necessary to survive 21st century New York. | WALL: WALL EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21388-wall-ep/ | WALL EP | So far, there's not much to know about New York four-piece WALL. Bassist Elizabeth Skadden was in Finally Punk, guitarist Vince McClelland in Keepsies. Singer/guitarist Sam York has modeled for Terry Richardson. Wharf Cat is releasing their self-titled debut EP, which was produced by Parquet Courts' Austin Brown. They have given no interviews and maintain no social media profiles—just a single monochrome homepage. Maybe they're being secretive in that faintly annoying blogs-circa-2010 fashion, but maybe it's just that they're brand new. May the period that they're not beholden to the Internet and being asked crap questions about being girls (and one boy) in a band last as long as possible.
The context for their music, however, suggests itself immediately—a tarnished, shouty clangor that recalls Mission of Burma, Wire circa Pink Flag, Pylon, and an extremely misanthropic B-52s, all anchored by Vanessa Gomez's brisk drumming. York's lyrics often tackle the false identities necessary to survive 21st century New York, and it's hard not to hear a new band making this kind of crucible-forged post-punk as its own kind of costume: Is slavish adherence to a 30-year-old template really the best way to rail against the expectations of the modern age? That aside, WALL are innovative students.
For one, they're funny: "Big black suits dressed as little white lies/ Fresh baked bread keeps the pigs well fed," York blares on "Cuban Cigars," a jab at the whelps of Wall Street. A few verses later, she abandons her severe incantations for a mocking sing-song that evokes Kathleen Hanna. Her delivery on closer "Milk," a smokier song than its brittle predecessors, echoes Kim Gordon's soft disaffection as she observes how, "The sky opened up/ Milk poured out." That is, until the kicker, where she sounds like Mark E. Smith after a few hours on Tumblr. "Two-thousand feline mistresses!/ Laying all over the cobblestone!"
The appearance of these insubordinate sunbathing animals in the lyrics fits the absurdist streak that gives the EP much of its appeal, though its most exciting moment comes as York succumbs to the city's pressures. "Fit the Part" finds her flitting between the different roles she plays throughout the course of the day, and as the pressure mounts, so does the pace; from a stiff, spidery lumber to a rushed run-on, and a flooring white-hot tirade of panic and empty self-assurances. "My blood's the same I know it is/ Just the exterior changes/ Shedding layers as I race to the next task/ Looking in the mirror to the face of a stranger/ Know the heart but not the face and I/ Gotta fit the part/ Gotta fit the part to get the part," York rattles off, as if trying to grab hold of a lightning bolt.
If where WALL are coming from is entirely apparent, where they're going isn't, thanks to these adrenaline surges and hectic rhythmic swerves. There's no color to their music, and little fluidity, yet in their intense fits and starts, they develop a compelling effect that has the magnetism of good melody, even in its near-total absence. "Last Date" is the simplest song here—another tirade of words so staccato that it's hard to discern the lyrics about being crushed by the weight of someone else. While the guitar is high and insistent, York and Skadden sing in sour, mismatched harmonies. Without really altering their resolutely monotone delivery, they seem to burrow deeper into the earth. In tricks like these, WALL wriggle out from the under the weight of history. | 2016-01-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-01-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Wharf Cat | January 13, 2016 | 6.9 | 26192503-ce04-4d37-bbff-0a8f40812819 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Originally released in 1971, this monumental work in experimental music is reissued for Record Store Day, preserving the debut of a visionary experimental singer and contemporary classical composer. | Originally released in 1971, this monumental work in experimental music is reissued for Record Store Day, preserving the debut of a visionary experimental singer and contemporary classical composer. | Meredith Monk: Key | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23186-key/ | Key | In the 1990s, when director Jean-Luc Godard started getting wilder with his sound design, he sampled excerpts of Meredith Monk’s ululating vocal performances in films like Nouvelle Vague. The vocal ensemble she has led for decades keeps drawing crowds at venues like the Brooklyn Academy of Music or Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival. In recent years, Monk’s orchestral music has been championed by the St. Louis Symphony. Monk remains a powerful figure in American art, and her twin legacies as visionary experimental singer and contemporary classical composer have long seemed secure.
Her reputation continues to grow thanks to new touring stage-shows and albums like 2016’s On Behalf of Nature (which started as a dramatic piece and was later adapted into a recording). As a veteran of New York’s famed late-’60s underground, Monk has achieved a rare distinction—her recent work tends to get more attention than the music she made in her breakthrough, bohemian decade. In a reissue-mad culture that can wilt from the task of keeping up with experimentalists, later in their careers, this is no small thing. Though it does mean that the first records are still there to be rediscovered.
In 1971, Monk released her first album, Key, on the Los Angeles-based imprint Increase Records. Before too long, the original issue went out of print. Key was subsequently reissued on LP (and then CD) by Mimi Johnson’s Lovely Music. For 2017’s Record Store Day, Tompkins Square has licensed the album from Lovely to make Key’s first new vinyl pressing in decades. Its first two tracks are still mind-blowers. The a cappella opener, “Porch,” showed how much variety Monk could wring from a single vocal hook—thanks to her many vocal production styles. In the space of a couple minutes, the singer switches from brash, nasally sounds to more vulnerable, weepy expressions.
“Understreet” follows this with a repetitive keyboard line, which blares from Monk’s electric organ. This punching figure creates steady support for an even stranger vocal part. The title of this piece makes for one of the rare, discernible words you can hear in Monk’s often-abstract vocals. At first, she stretches out enunciations of “understreet” via keening, edgy timbres: a different sort of subterranean, homesick blues. Then, without warning, Monk shows off a jarring purity, reeling off a fast series of straight-tone, staccato notes. Compared with the song’s initial approach, these pitches dance with a renewed lease on pleasure. In a few short minutes, Monk creates multiple new sound-worlds, writing distinct kinds of folk music for the different populations within them.
From the beginning, Monk conceived of her work in multimedia terms, often linking her 16mm films and live music performance in installation art settings. Her description of Key as a work of “invisible theater” is bolstered not just by the dramatic nature of her performances, but by a variety of interludes. At the end of “Understreet,” the sound of feet exiting from a stage dispels the sense that you’re listening to a traditional album. A series of abstract monologues—all with the title “Vision” (and voiced by Monk colleagues Lanny Harrison and Mark Berger)—feels like the work of some modernized Greek chorus.
Side A concludes with “Fat Stream,” an early example of what would come to be a standing feature in this artist’s catalog: the Monk lullaby. Over organ chords and a steady drone note, Monk sings some gorgeous lines full of comfort—while at other points, she bends select tones in ways that vibrate madly against the keyboard music. On Side B, Key’s final two tracks also introduce new elements. The overdubbed “Change” features a crew of “companion voices” (including Fluxus artist Dick Higgins). And “Dungeon” thrums along with a steady percussive part that results in a spooky close for the album.
The new Tompkins Square vinyl reissue preserves the sense of warmth—as well as some of the original distortion—that previous reissues have displayed. This new release also has a more sharply rendered cover, offering a view of Monk in one of her early stage getups. But if you can’t track down one of the limited RSD-vinyl editions, don’t fret: the Lovely CD continues to offer a sterling version of this same important music. When Monk recorded these pieces, she was still a few years away from the perfection of Dolmen Music, or the sumptuousness of her later opera, Atlas. But she was already a force of experimental nature. | 2017-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Tompkins Square | April 22, 2017 | 8.7 | 261a16fe-7c6e-4100-be94-1485a30ae1f0 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
A sprawling new box set full of demos and alternate takes suggests a dazzling array of paths the Chicago group might have taken on their masterpiece. | A sprawling new box set full of demos and alternate takes suggests a dazzling array of paths the Chicago group might have taken on their masterpiece. | Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Super Deluxe Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wilco-yankee-hotel-foxtrot-super-deluxe-edition/ | Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Super Deluxe Edition) | There’s an alternate universe where Wilco released their fourth album on Warner/Reprise as planned, got good reviews, landed on a few year-end lists, toured slightly bigger venues, and that’s it. They continued being a midlevel rock band rather than one of the most revered rock bands of the 21st century, which is what they did in our universe. And there’s another plane of existence where they broke up before that fourth album was even released, where both Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett became casualties of the pills they were popping in the studio. That means there’s also a world where Son Volt became the foremost chroniclers of modern American life.
In retrospect, everything about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot feels astonishingly precarious. It’s an album that inspires endless what-ifs: What if it hadn’t been very good, or what if it had been extremely good but not in a way that captured the imaginations of so many listeners? What if Jim O’Rourke had been too busy to take Tweedy’s phone call and never connected them with Glenn Kotche or mixed the final album? What if Nonesuch had passed on the record, robbing us of the satisfying narrative that Wilco made Warner pay for the album twice? What if streaming it on their website had depleted sales rather than boosted them? What if a national tragedy hadn’t immediately given the music more gravity and relevance than even Wilco could have dreamed? Every hypothetical represents a new universe, a new world of possibilities.
But we live in this world, where all those decisions and actions aligned to make Yankee Hotel Foxtrot one of the defining rock albums of the 2000s. Twenty years along, we get this curious reissue, which provides evidence that Wilco have been thinking about all those what-ifs and possible Wilcoverses, too. When they boxed up their previous two albums, the band reveled in its fraught relationship with pop music as both profession and obsession, and it presented those albums as self-contained three-act plays: writing the songs and making demos, recording and assembling the final tracklist, and finally touring the album and letting the music live on its own. The Yankee Hotel Foxtrot anniversary set, however—in particular the massive 11xLP version—rejects that dramatic structure. Instead of presenting a story of gestation, birth, and life, the band offers alternatives: the album as it might have been, the album as it almost was, the album as it exists on different planes.
On the deluxe editions, Wilco have arranged all the usual demos and outtakes and radio interviews and live performances into different albums representing different sets of possibilities and outcomes, each with its own evocative title. There’s American Aquarium, rawer and weirder yet still mired in the pop palette of Summerteeth. There’s Here Comes Everybody, darker and slightly more caustic. There’s Lonely in the Deep End, which sounds like they’ve opened the door to an overstuffed closet: a tumble and crash of ideas. These iterations aren’t merely points on a timeline leading to a familiar destination; the creative process was far too messy for such a neat trajectory. Instead, they demonstrate that nothing about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was ever settled, not even its title. Even elements of the more modest 7xLP set (which includes the American Aquarium version) and 2xLP release (which presents the familiar songs in remastered form) gesture toward the album’s mutability.
It’s a fascinating idea, especially for this album in particular, given how thoroughly and painstakingly the band pored over every song, every lyric, every note. “Kamera” sounds especially shaky, each version a completely different snapshot of the same vista. On American Aquarium it opens with a dramatic drum fanfare that plainly recalls Phil Spector, before launching into a measured gallop. It’s all build, no payoff. They deleted everything and started fresh on Here Comes Everybody, with keyboards like a barrelhouse harpsichord and a more insistent beat that taunts Tweedy. And then there’s the version on The Unified Theory of Everything that replaces it all with a fuzzed-out guitar and has Tweedy singing like he’s fronting that local band from “Heavy Metal Drummer.” What would have happened if the band had stopped with one of them instead of reinventing the song a few more times?
That precariousness once clung to the album, which is perhaps why it was greeted with such enthusiasm, and even reverence, 20 years ago. The band was splintering, with longtime drummer Ken Coomer unceremoniously dismissed and Bennett playing a bigger role. There were new faces (Kotche, O’Rourke) and new challenges, most of which had to do with drugs. On some level we must have understood that the record came unfathomably close to not existing, at least not in this form, and the music on our version of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot conveys that sense of almost wasn’t. We’re fortunate in this universe, because Wilco found a way to make their dogged explorations enhance rather than obscure the humanity in these songs. It’s a bleak album, certainly. When Tweedy sings about getting money out of an ATM to buy “Diet Coca-Cola and unlit cigarettes” (does anyone sell lit cigarettes?), the moment still sounds like a monumental sigh. When he sings about watching a heavy metal band take the stage “on the landing in the summer,” the memory still resonates with warmth and wonder. And when he sings about assassining down the avenue, it’s still just as confounding as ever. (Hearing him sing “I assassinate the avenue” on the American Aquarium version of the song doesn’t clear anything up.)
All of these different iterations of the same thing coalesce into a bold statement of uncertainty, a clear-headed portrayal of confusion, a joyful depiction of despair—all contradictions that make the music more relatable, more immersive, more malleable. This anniversary set is also a reminder that the album has become more settled over time, thanks to Sam Jones’ documentary, Greg Kot’s book, Tweedy’s book, and countless reviews, profiles, and interviews. It has become familiar, perhaps comfortingly so—a reminder of a time in America that in retrospect appears quaintly fucked up. The Sound Opinions interview, recorded just after 9/11, is not only a compelling artifact, but a demonstration of how Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was already out of the band’s control. There’s a very specific weariness in Tweedy’s voice that’ll be familiar to anyone who lived through that day, and Wilco play these songs on air like they no longer recognize the things they’ve created. This anniversary box set pushes the album back off its axis. The music wobbles again, reminding us that unease and confusion were its most relatable aspects.
If Being There understood rock to be a fool’s errand and if Summerteeth presented rock as a fool’s consolation, then our Yankee Hotel Foxtrot shows how we fools (not just Tweedy, but you and me, too) desperately want music to reflect the world back to us. Even in those magical moments when a pop song does offer us a glimpse of something larger, it’s never enough. We want it to order the world, to make everything make sense, to throw senseless tragedies into reassuring relief. Music can’t do that. The world—not just this one, but each of the infinite other what-if worlds—is too gloriously, damnably messy for one band or one album or one song to capture. The world thwarts art, yet it’s all we have so we make do. That kernel of sadness and frustration persists in every universe and in every version of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. | 2022-09-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | September 24, 2022 | 10 | 262510c8-de6b-4658-98dc-48bdea9722a1 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
A badly needed remaster of this landmark LP sounds even fresher than it did 20 years ago-- and thanks to Sony there are now loads of expensive ways to hear it. | A badly needed remaster of this landmark LP sounds even fresher than it did 20 years ago-- and thanks to Sony there are now loads of expensive ways to hear it. | The Stone Roses: The Stone Roses | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13449-the-stone-roses/ | The Stone Roses | Surly, sullen and fearsomely confident in shaggy hair and baggy jeans, frontman Ian Brown declared on the Stone Roses' eponymous album, "I am the resurrection and I am the light," connecting with a nation of acid-house damaged kids eager to believe in something. As it happens, Brown's arrogance was misplaced and the band's rock stardom a lot shorter-lived than anyone expected. The Stone Roses made a stunning debut, then bled out in a slow agony of contractual disputes, internal discord, and, eventually, public indifference (though their sophomore release and swan song, Second Coming, is nowhere near as bad as people say). More prosaic than drugs or young death, this trifecta killed a career that now essentially consists of just one great record.
But the story of The Stone Roses is really a tale of two records, divided by an ocean. As Sony (which now owns original label Silvertone) rolls out a remastered version in celebration of the album's 20th anniversary, Brits wrestle with what's become a cultural crucible. When a record's aura or associations, rather than its content, begins dominating discussions-- especially when a nation routinely votes it one of rock history's best-- clothing-deprived-emperor jive usually isn't far behind. And the fact that the former idols have had the bad grace to survive into their forties and release a string of middling yet well-promoted solo albums hasn't boosted the The Stone Roses' reputation at home.
We Americans are relatively unencumbered (though it'll be fun to see if Nevermind incites as much hair-tearing when it hits 20 in two years). The Roses, and the "Madchester" scene with which they were loosely associated, never translated to the U.S. beyond modern rock radio and late-night MTV. They also failed to hugely impact an underground hostile to anything that implied feet were made for more than propping up a body so it could sip beer and look bored. Many prominent American critics didn't champion the Roses, either. "What do [the Stone Roses] do that the Byrds or Buffalo Springfield didn't do better in 1967?" Robert Christgau wondered in The Village Voice, typifying the Boomer establishment's predictable position on a band of GenXers cheeky enough to remind them, "the past was yours, but the future's mine."
To answer Christgau's question, what the Stone Roses did better was marry smart psychedelic pop to dance grooves in an incredibly accessible and powerful way that appealed both to rock and rave fans, lovers of hooks and beats, punks and people who actually welcomed 10-minute guitar solos. If influence matters, the album influenced scores of other bands, including Spiritualized, Primal Scream (which bassist Mani joined after the Roses collapsed), the Manic Street Preachers, the Beta Band, the Libertines, and, as the Gallagher brothers have never missed an opportunity to assert, Oasis. And unlike most of the Madchester bands, the Roses weren't only about a sound, a vibe, or a scene. They owned a clutch of insanely catchy, emotionally nuanced, lyrically astute songs about love, lust, youth, and raging ambition that didn't require a historical context to understand or embrace. Exploding the false dichotomy of album band/singles band, The Stone Roses is a logical, cohesive album made up of incredible stand-alone songs.
To wit, "She Bangs the Drums", "Waterfall", "Made of Stone", "(Song for My) Sugar Spun Sister", and "Fool's Gold" (a later single that was appended to the original U.S. release and, unlike fellow longtime U.S. add-on "Elephant Stone", reappears on the reissue), would make stellar radio hits in any decade. Brown's vocals, guitarist John Squire's intricate fingerwork and mighty riffs, and rhythm section Mani and Reni's sly, lockstepping grooves, are a textbook case of the whole far exceeding its components. Even "Elizabeth, My Dear", a notorious monarchy smackdown set to "Scarborough Faire"'s half-millennium-old melody, was ballsy then and remains deliciously tart today.
But queen-bashing and other acts of symbolic resistance aside ("Bye Bye Badman" and Squire's abstract expressionist cover art reference the 1968 student protests that uprooted France's political and cultural establishments), The Stone Roses isn't a radical, or even particularly progressive, work: From its verse-chorus-verses, to its meticulous overdubs and careful sequencing, to its revival-- however cleverly repurposed-- of hoary old rock myths ("I don't have to sell my soul/ He's already in me"), the album is a slick production designed for maximum market penetration. And for something that signaled a generational handoff, it's awfully invested in the previous generation's specious valorization of The Album, not to mention the hippie values inscribed in psychedelia (on this point at least, Christgau was correct).
Nobody, therefore, need be put out by Sony's splashy remarketing campaign. The 20th anniversary edition is available in four formats, from a standard single CD or vinyl set to a $120 "collector's" box of four discs, four vinyl LPs, and such extras as signed prints of Squire's artwork, a lemon-shaped USB, wallpaper, and ringtones. I can't recommend dipping into your rent money to buy that thing, but $30 for the elegantly designed deluxe edition, which includes the remastered album, a disc of demos, a DVD with live footage and videos (most of which are lame pastiches of said live footage), and a booklet of band member reminiscences, seems fair to fans. Largely lacking the funk that snuck into the studio, the demos are still a phenomenal bunch of tunes (including some that didn't make final cut) that should finally put to rest rumors that the Roses were nobodies who came out of nowhere. The demos also officially confirm that, left to his own devices, Brown sings about as well as you do on a shit-faced midnight karaoke dare. But hey, he cleans up nicely. In fact, Brown's brooding, beautiful self-harmonies on the album may be one of producer John Leckie's finest achievements.
Leckie teamed up with Brown to remaster the LP, which, produced at the tail-end of the vinyl era, lacked some range at the low end and suffered from its tin-timbred late-80s drum sound, among other issues. Now, the infamous bassline that opens "I Wanna Be Adored" has an even more thrilling anticipatory deep-earth rumble; instead of slaps, "She Bangs the Drums"' beats pack actual punches; and the originally muddy textures of a song like "Made of Stone" are brighter and broader-spectrumed, with crisp chiming guitars and lustrous basslines. The record industry has whipped itself into a frenzy of last-ditch, cash-grabbing CD reissues lately, but the original Stone Roses actually merited a sound overhaul. And the results are brilliant, further supporting the case for classic album status-- if support's needed. | 2009-09-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-09-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sony | September 11, 2009 | 10 | 2629cc7a-f553-4a68-8ec9-d3ceae791bb3 | Amy Granzin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amy-granzin/ | null |
The long-awaited second album from the Last Shadow Puppets is a lavish California confection, with strings by Owen Pallett. Like Zayn Malik's Mind of Mine, it makes very clear that frontmen Alex Turner and Miles Kane are sexy men with sexy lives having lots of sexy sex with their sexy girlfriends. | The long-awaited second album from the Last Shadow Puppets is a lavish California confection, with strings by Owen Pallett. Like Zayn Malik's Mind of Mine, it makes very clear that frontmen Alex Turner and Miles Kane are sexy men with sexy lives having lots of sexy sex with their sexy girlfriends. | The Last Shadow Puppets: Everything You've Come to Expect | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21596-everything-youve-come-to-expect/ | Everything You've Come to Expect | After the flammable tracksuits and leering interviews, it's easy to forget that in 2008, the Last Shadow Puppets were two shaggy-haired 22-year-olds sweetly in thrall to girls and Scott Walker. The Age of the Understatement was more ambitious than anything Alex Turner and Miles Kane had attempted before, but its lavish strings and Morricone twangs shrouded earnest devotion and no shortage of anxiety over paling in comparison to the next, more consummate lothario. "Please don't tell me, you don't have to, darling/ I can sense that he painted you a gushing sunset and slayed a few panthers in your defence," Turner sang on "Separate and Ever Deadly." By the final song, "Time Has Come Again," he found himself heartbroken and weeping in the street. This bold record was a cover for a severe case of imposter syndrome, which Kane evoked in a lovely turn of phrase on "Separate...": "Can't you see I'm the ghost in the wrong coat, biting butter and crumbs?"
Eight years on, the starting blocks are very different. Arctic Monkeys are five albums in, and Alex Turner could feasibly lay claim to being one of the biggest rock stars in the world. Miles Kane could feasibly lay claim to being friends with one of the biggest rock stars in the world. Both artists now live in L.A., and their long-awaited second album, Everything You've Come to Expect, is a lavish California confection, featuring a 29-piece orchestra recorded at Hollywood's storied United Recording, and arranged by Owen Pallett. His work here puts him on a par with Jean-Claude Vannier, the man behind Gainsbourg's ...Melody Nelson: The first five songs at least are totally gorgeous, the strings glassy, the tone all understated seduction, the structures fluid and surprising. Dusty opener "Aviation" could be Calexico playing backing band to some tortured crooner; "Miracle Aligner" is a fever dream of the Replacements' "Swingin Party," while the title track turns French carousel organs into a captivating narcotic spiral. It's the perfect music for the Daniel Craig-era James Bond films: sophisticated, tortured—and with a weakness for temptation.
Like Zayn Malik's Mind of Mine, Everything You've Come to Expect makes very clear that Turner and Kane are sexy men with sexy lives having lots of sexy sex with their sexy girlfriends. The only difference between them is a seven-year age gap. Sometimes they still sound as awestruck as on their debut. On "She Does the Woods," ostensibly a song about shagging in the bushes, Turner is dazzled by the girl looming above him, behind her, "a spirograph of branches that dance on the breeze." There are numerous songs about fucking—"Just let me know when you want your socks knocking off," "Baby, we ought to fuck seven years of bad luck out the powder room mirror"—and, with grim inevitability, songs about how girls have fucked them over. "Bad Habits" truly establishes Kane as the Austin Powers to his mate's Bond, as he yelps over blood-red bolero that he "should've known, little girl, that you'd do me wrong."
By the Homme-tinged desert rider "Used to Be My Girl," misanthropy has set in. "Gimme all your love so I can fill you up with hate," they ooze. One of the inspirations for Everything You've Come to Expect was Isaac Hayes' glorious Hot Buttered Soul, but that's not the first thing that comes to mind here. There's a scene in 1967's Bedazzled where Dudley Moore, as part of his deal with the devil, wishes to become a pop star so that girls will love him. Wish granted, he immediately finds himself eclipsed by his rival, played by Peter Cook, who has formed a band called Drimble Wedge and the Vegetations. Their deathless hit track, in hock to 1960s English psychedelia, goes, "I'm fickle, I'm cold, I'm shallow/ You fill me with inertia/ Don't get excited."
For a few years now, Turner has sported a well-greased quiff and an obscure attitude ("invoice me for the microphone"). You suspect he adopted the rock star posture as a protective mechanism to deal with his massive profile, while for Kane, every middle-aged dad's favorite Paul Weller substitute, it's a retrograde aspiration. They expose the dark side of their Faustian pact for fame and fortune towards the end of the record, where inspiration dims. "Pattern" sounds like the kind of orch-pop move that was often favored by Britpoppers to show that they were real artistes with longevity beyond the movement, and has similar subject matter—though Turner, no less a gifted lyricist than ever, manages to imbue the comedown with a little poetry, admitting, "I slip and I slide like a spider on an icicle."
He's at his most lugubrious and lizardy on "The Dream Synopsis," a silky string-laden number where he reminisces about flirting with a girl who worked in a kitchen, when the most danger going was getting caught kissing by the pans. Curiously, "The Bourne Identity" comes back to imposter syndrome, in a violin-heavy hero's lament peppered with plenty of great lyrics. Turner's got a "glass-bottomed ego," he's "the sequel you wanna see but you were kinda hoping they would never make," "haunted by the sweet smell of self-esteem." It's hard to think of more perfect descriptions of feeling insufficient. But Turner and Kane are so convincingly cocksure elsewhere, it's hard to feel too sorry for them. As the Last Shadow Puppets make abundantly clear on their second album, they made their own bed. | 2016-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | April 5, 2016 | 5.6 | 262a10d1-9caa-4550-b7ec-fcd76f84592c | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Tracked at Graceland in 1976, the recordings on this double-disc compilation show that Elvis never stopped believing in the power of music, that he never stopped searching for the right song to sing. | Tracked at Graceland in 1976, the recordings on this double-disc compilation show that Elvis never stopped believing in the power of music, that he never stopped searching for the right song to sing. | Elvis Presley: Way Down in the Jungle Room | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22213-way-down-in-the-jungle-room/ | Way Down in the Jungle Room | Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977, about a month after he released Moody Blue. Like so many Elvis records before it, Moody Blue wasn’t assembled with care: it indiscriminately blended new studio sides with live tracks, some dating as far back as 1974. Early in Presley’s career, his manager Colonel Tom Parker—the huckster who took Presley under his wing in ’56—realized there wasn't much of a margin in art. He chose to industrialize the making of Elvis’ music. Parker minimized studio time but maximized releases, hustling Presley into the studio for marathon sessions where he’d record enough material for upwards of three albums.
He instituted this practice not long after Elvis left the Army in 1960 and never abandoned it. Even the landmark *From Elvis in Memphis, *the 1969 record where Elvis reconnected with his muse, skimmed the surface of the Chips Moman-produced sessions at American Sound Studio. The rest of the recordings arrived months later as Back in Memphis, the studio portion of the double-LP *From Memphis to Vegas/From Vegas to Memphis—*a title so bewildering, it seems designed to confuse audiences. That word salad signals the utter indifference the Presley camp had toward presentation: the LPs were product, pure and simple.
Parker and RCA spent so little time considering the construction of these releases; their very shoddiness suggested Elvis himself didn’t care much for making music. That isn’t true. After he reasserted control of the songs he sang in 1968—not to mention how the music sounded—Presley never quite let go of the artistic reins, even if he did make concessions to both the marketplace and Parker’s business demands.
Presley’s artistry became obscured because his adoring fans would still snatch up tickets to live performances in Vegas and pick up LPs, never caring deeply about the content within. Decades of posthumous releases haven’t necessarily been kind to Presley, either. The sheer number of compilations have supported the notion that Elvis was merely a commodity to be sold. In the past few years, RCA/Legacy reconfigured Presley’s recordings according to session order, creating compilations that highlighted these concentrated bursts of energy. Way Down in the Jungle Room—a double disc set divided into a disc of master recordings and one of working renditions—is presumably the last of these. It focuses on the music Presley made primarily in February and October of 1976 at Graceland and doled out on 1976’s From Elvis Presley Boulevard,* Memphis*,* Tennessee*, and Moody Blue. “Way Down,” a funky but forgotten rocker, was the biggest hit from these sessions, peaking at 18. “Moody Blue,” a single that turned into a perennial on oldies radio, topped out only at 31.
The Jungle Room was the name given to the den adjacent to the kitchen in Graceland, Presley’s fabled Memphis home. The space earned its name due to its tacky Zebra-striped decor, kitsch that distracted from the fact that Elvis turned this room into a home recording studio early in 1976. At that time, Presley wanted to stick around Memphis due to health issues and a creeping domesticity. But by the mid-’70s, both American Sound Studio and Stax—where Presley recorded landmark sessions in the late ’60s and early ’70s, respectively—had shuttered, so he decided to dedicate a room in his mansion to music. Home studios were an indulgence befitting a superstar, but it also was cost effective, especially for a singer whose very career hinged on a trio of guys capturing lightning in a bottle at the tail end of a session.
Nothing on *Way Down in the Jungle Room *approaches the kineticism of Elvis’ first single, 1954’s “That’s Alright Mama,” the late-night throwaway that altered the course of American culture. But that’s a high bar to clear. Rather, the looseness on Way Down in the Jungle Room reveals just how much Presley learned from Sam Phillips, a producer who prized surprise over polish. Certainly, the master takes on Way Down in the Jungle Room are plenty slick, but their essence lies in the jams heard on the second disc—a collection where Elvis cracks wise with a group of musicians who would soon become his rhythm section, the TCB Band (“Taking Care of Business”), along with invited guests. He smirks, “You guys don’t deserve me on the very first part” on “Bitter They Are, Harder They Fall;” he commands, “Bring out the booze... grandma” just before launching into “Never Again.” It’s all with the intention of pushing his band toward renditions he can hear in his head.
These aren’t necessarily inventive—there’s not much that can be done to refresh the old Irish weeper “Danny Boy”—but sometimes they are. Take “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” a Fred Rose tune popularized by Roy Acuff and Hank Williams but revived in a spare, sad version by Willie Nelson in 1975. Elvis trades melancholy for a slow-burning funk, not a million miles away from his deep soul rendition of “She Thinks I Still Care,” or how he turned Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love” into a roadhouse lament. These aren’t straight covers; these are interpretations, the work of an intuitive, intelligent singer who knows how to bend a lyric to serve his style. They’re also the gateway to the rest of Way Down in the Jungle Room, showing that even at its corniest moments—and this music is often silly and overblown because, Dean Martin fan that he was, Elvis never could resist heightened emotions—Presley understood the mechanics of a song and how to heighten a performance for maximum effect.
At times he nodded toward mainstream trends. “Way Down” soars like a jetliner; “Moody Blue” co-opts every soft, hazy sound of AM pop in the mid-’70s. But the striking thing about Way Down in the Jungle Room is how it stays true to all the music Presley claimed as his own in ’68. Rockabilly isn’t heard much here—“For the Heart” has some swing, but nothing is breathless or reckless—still, there’s a clear, clean connection to the country, soul, and pop he blended in his ’68 comeback, just after he shook off the shackles of the soundtracks Parker imposed upon him. Perhaps there’s not an expansion of the sound, but there’s unquestionably a deepening of emotion, the sense that he’s a singer settling into his own bones. This maturity, this casual authority, is commanding. His performances often transcend the material, especially when schmaltz is infused with emotion: Neil Sedaka's “Solitaire” is given an operatic arrangement where Presley treats its broad lines like revelations.
Like Frank Sinatra, Elvis threw himself into his music. Whatever he had, whether it was spruced up soul or manicured mellowness, Elvis invests himself into the song he’s singing. That passion is what distinguishes Way Down in the Jungle Room from the LPs culled from the same sessions. Here, in this double disc set, it’s apparent Elvis never stopped believing in the power and redemption of music, that he never stopped searching for the right song to sing. | 2016-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Legacy / RCA | August 11, 2016 | 7 | 262aedff-b01d-4772-b92a-8fe11e57360f | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | null |
The Santa Barbara synthpop group Gardens & Villa are stuck in an existential funk. On their new album Music for Dogs, which features guitars and piano that temporally situate the record somewhere on the cusp of the '80s, the band grapple with 21st-century woes but fail to clinch victory. | The Santa Barbara synthpop group Gardens & Villa are stuck in an existential funk. On their new album Music for Dogs, which features guitars and piano that temporally situate the record somewhere on the cusp of the '80s, the band grapple with 21st-century woes but fail to clinch victory. | Gardens & Villa: Music for Dogs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20969-music-for-dogs/ | Music for Dogs | Gardens & Villa are a synthpop band stuck in an existential funk, and we have the Internet to blame. "[We’re] feeling too connected and yet at the end of the day, disconnected from everything/everyone," frontman Chris Lynch recently told Noisey, "feeling like our modern lives are starting to resemble a sci-fi world." At this point in their career, the L.A.-via-Santa Barbara group have managed to carve out a psych-ier niche to set them aside from, say, Phantogram, but they’ve got a synthpop reputation nonetheless. The conflict between technological innovation and organic artistry is a given in modern music, but for digitally-reliant acts like Gardens & Villa, the tug-of-war presents a identity crisis. On their new album Music for Dogs, the band grapple with these 21st-century woes but fail to clinch victory.
Lynch and company have framed Music For Dogs as the playful, punkish cousin to last year’s similarly anxious Dunes, with guitars and piano that temporally situate the record somewhere on the cusp of the '80s (the lush art-pop of Brian Eno and Roxy Music are the most obvious musical touchstones). Indeed, Music for Dogs sounds more kinetic than past efforts, thanks to the group's incorporation of light-footed, plunky pianos ("Express") and ever-so-mathy bridges ("Everybody"). At the same time, there’s a lukewarm quality to the jams (which, despite three- and four-minute runtimes, sound twice as long): the guitars are thin, the drum beats flimsy, the vocals frequently obfuscated by a droning synth or a similar effect. It’s as though Ben Folds attempted to create to Eno's Here Come the Warm Jets while under the influence of sleeping pills.
Considering their previous revelations regarding the album’s reactionary origins, it should come as no surprise that Gardens & Villa get more introspective on Music for Dogs. Crushing loneliness and urban ennui loom overhead like storm clouds—a compelling thematic juxtaposition against the manic singsongs of "Jubilee" and "Everybody". Frequently, these themes manifest in the form of dark, moody new wave. "Alone in the City" contextualizes a scene of Los Angelean longing in the terms of Tears for Fears, and "Maximize Results" sounds like Boy George having a panic attack.
Midway through the album on "General Research", Lynch turns the mirror on us, lamenting the various ways in which technology has torn art (and life, for that matter), asunder… or something like that. His lines are meant to scan as introspective and metaphorical, but clunkers like "Working for the blogs/ Searching for the savior/ Music for the malls" and "Vaporizing cigarettes/ Reverential productions/ Following down the rabbit hole" transmogrify any earnestness into hilarity. Gardens & Villa’s self-conscious, spindling attempts at regression and societal contemplation are admirable and occasionally catchy, but there are so many other albums*—Reflektor, Kid A*, even the oft-maligned, ahead-of-its-time *Metal Machine Music—*that navigate the intricacies of technology and society more compellingly and less heavy-handedly that you can’t help but write it off as another brick in the firewall. | 2015-08-21T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2015-08-21T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | August 21, 2015 | 4.7 | 262caa30-e219-43ab-b363-4d9567afe9bb | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Vacation, the second in a new series of mini-albums for the Ibiza-based International Feel label, is rich with Balearic textures: marimbas, choral synth pads, creamy soprano sax, acoustic guitars run through shimmering digital reverb. It takes cues from genre staples like Penguin Café Orchestra, Wally Badarou, and Sade. | Vacation, the second in a new series of mini-albums for the Ibiza-based International Feel label, is rich with Balearic textures: marimbas, choral synth pads, creamy soprano sax, acoustic guitars run through shimmering digital reverb. It takes cues from genre staples like Penguin Café Orchestra, Wally Badarou, and Sade. | CFCF: On Vacation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21494-on-vacation/ | On Vacation | CFCF's Michael Silver knows his way around a smart chord change and has a lovely voice, but he tends to work less as a songwriter than a collector of atmospheres. These can take a variety of forms: Last year's The Colours of Life took whimsical Balearic themes—rippling marimba, ringing electric guitar, New Age keys, pitter-pat CR-78 rhythms—and stretched them into a 40-minute mood piece. Exercises paid tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto's keyboard compositions, and Music for Objects projected Philip Glass' pulse minimalism through the lens of Japanese electronic musicians like Hiroshi Yoshimura and Joe Hisaishi.
Silver often gives his recordings themes linked to three-dimensional spaces and physical objects: Exercises was meant to evoke Brutalist architecture, and Music for Objects, inspired in part by Wim Wenders' Notebook on Cities and Clothes, took the form of impressionist renderings of everyday items—a bowl, a set of keys, a turnstile. He has a knack for flipping sound and space in counterintuitive ways: In 2010, he chopped and screwed a bunch of Quiet Storm R&B into the mixtape Slow R&B for Zellers Locations Canada-Wide (the title was a reference to a once-ubiquitous Canadian chain of discount department stores). What could have been a joke turned out to be a surprisingly effective (and narcotic) defamiliarization of the budget retail experience.
On Vacation, the second in a new series of mini-albums for the Ibiza-based International Feel label, comes with no explicit concept attached, but the title does a good job of capturing the balmy moods contained within. As on The Colours of Life, it favors moderate tempos and the sorts of sounds associated with José Padilla's sunset sessions at Café del Mar in the early 1990s: marimbas, choral synth pads, creamy soprano sax, acoustic guitars run through shimmering digital reverb. It takes cues from Balearic staples like Penguin Café Orchestra, Wally Badarou, and Sade; "Chasing," a gorgeous miniature for echoing guitars and accordion, is heavily indebted to the Durutti Column, while the accordion-led "Arto" pays tribute to the Japanese composer Seigen Ono. In "Vermont," which mixes acoustic guitars, faint piano, and understated synthesizers, I hear an echo of Joan Bibiloni, a Mallorcan fusion musician recently rediscovered by Amsterdam's Music From Memory label. "Pleasure Centre," on the other hand, doesn't sound far off from the slap bass and FM synths of Eric Serra's hit-or-miss soundtrack to Luc Besson's 1985 film Subway.
The album's profile is slight, with just eight songs totaling barely half an hour's running time; one of its most affecting tracks, the fretless bass and digital synth study "In the Courtyard," is over in just two minutes. It would be easy to detect the faint whiff of irony in the record's more honeyed tropes; we've been conditioned to think of many of these signifiers as being somehow compromised, given their long association with call-center hold music and sauna scenes on late-night cable. But Silver's pastiche has clearly been made with genuine appreciation for the sound of, say, clean-toned guitar run through voluminous reverb, or chunky slap bass framed by gossamer keys. These kinds of musical touchstones can't be easy to reproduce, given that many of them were made in million-dollar studios with period gear; the fidelity of his imitations is no small accomplishment. And even more to his credit is that the music is so emotionally satisfying.
Like any record-collector endeavor, the album is partly an exercise in revisionism—an attempt to take the best bits from an underrated tradition and excise the truly corny bits. Judging from the recent revival of all manner of smooth, fusion-heavy material once dubbed musica non grata, from New Age cassettes heavy on Yamaha DX7 sparkle to Phil Collins himself, we're enjoying a moment where taste is being rethought, and On Vacation plays an invaluable part in the ongoing battle to raze rockist shibboleths. A gorgeous, unassuming little record, it is Silver's most sophisticated virtual environment yet; disappear into it for a while, and you may come back with a newfound appreciation for sounds you once thought irredeemable—yes, even slap bass. | 2016-02-15T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-15T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | International Feel | February 15, 2016 | 7.8 | 262d6de2-4309-4351-a70a-eb13809032f9 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Following their excellent, sun-kissed 2010 EP Blooming Summer, the Montreal electro pop duo of Alexander Cowan and Braids' Raphaelle Standell-Preston release a chillier full-length focused on themes of disconnect, alienation, and independence. | Following their excellent, sun-kissed 2010 EP Blooming Summer, the Montreal electro pop duo of Alexander Cowan and Braids' Raphaelle Standell-Preston release a chillier full-length focused on themes of disconnect, alienation, and independence. | Blue Hawaii: Untogether | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17549-blue-hawaii-untogether/ | Untogether | In 2010, Raphaelle Standell-Preston and Alexander Cowan spent a couple of months wandering around Central America, and when they came back they made an EP that sounded like an uncommonly lyrical "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" essay: eight songs of humid, sun-kissed, heart-on-its-cut-off-sleeve electro-pop. Of course, Blue Hawaii was not the only band on the beach in 2010, but Blooming Summer managed to sound like something unique. Standell-Preston's voice moved through these songs like a jellyfish, tumbling with such grace that its sudden sting came as a surprise. "I think about you thrusting into her," she sang on the best song "Blue Gowns", her voice full of anguished jealousy and self-reproach, "And I ask myself, how stupid can you get?" Blooming Summer captured the joys and fears of a new relationship (Standell-Preston and Cowan are a couple) with careful precision, but it also felt unassumingly excellent. Blooming Summer had a quiet release on then-very-niche label Arbutus; you can still download it on their Bandcamp for $1. Standell-Preston became better known for fronting the more guitar-driven band Braids, while Blue Hawaii seemed destined to be a side project little known to people outside the couple's friends in the Montreal DIY scene. Then, of course, that scene blew up.
Sudden, international attention is sometimes enough to make a tight-knit regional scene implode, but in the past few months a few other artists have risen to the occasion and started to fill out the spotlight that Grimes has shone on her home scene Montreal. Doldrums, the scrappy, sample-heavy project from junkyard dreamer Airick Woodhead, stepped up with Lesser Evil, a full-length debut full of soaring, dystopian party anthems, while brooding duo Majical Cloudz recently made the leap from Arbutus to indie-giant Matador on the heels of a strong, idea-packed EP. But there's a downside to this kind of opportunity; people move on. "As friends grow past the Montreal scene and leave, there's a kind of falling apart there,” Cowan said in a recent FADER interview. When you listen to Blue Hawaii's first proper full-length, Untogether, this comment feels not like a diss to anybody in particular so much as a creative statement of purpose; it contextualizes the themes of disconnect, alienation and independence that coarse through Untogether. As Standell-Preston put it, "I think [making the record] was an attempt to find the glue as everything was drifting apart."
She was actually talking about her partnership with Cowan as much as her hometown. (Well, creatively speaking, not romantically-- they're still together.) In the three years since the cohesive Blooming Summer, they’ve ventured down slightly separate paths: Standell-Preston's taken a more new-agey route (experimenting with avant-garde make-up in performance; making small-talk about chakras in interviews) while Cowan spent some time absorbing EDM culture in Europe. But, true to its title, Untogether is less interested in blending all its competing enthusiasms together and more intent on emphasizing the space that separates them-- in that way at least, it's kind of the anti-Visions. Standell-Preston's vocals are routinely snipped, chopped and pasted back together like ransom notes, while Cowan steers the tracks with underlying trancelike rhythms. Untogether sometimes feels like a reaction against Blooming Summer's easy, inviting pop pleasures-- which is not necessarily a bad thing. At its most evocative, Untogether creates the eerie feeling of being the only person in a cavernous, strobe-lit club. Take the awesome two-part highlight "In Two"-- where the atmosphere's so diffuse and desolate that even a sudden intrusion of handclaps doesn't feel like a moment of collectivity or unity. Instead, it only emphasizes the feeling of isolation: the claps sound distant, drifted in, and possibly made by ghosts.
"The other day, I had a beautiful thought," Standell-Preston sings on the closing track, "The Other Day", and then lets loose the most elegant-sounding DGAF in recent memory, "What if I didn’t care at all?" It's a freeing moment-- unclasping the pressures of the scene, the stress of communicating with another person, and all the other anxieties that have pulsed beneath the 10 songs that came before it. It's also a much-needed moment of repose. The problem with Untogether is that that Blue Hawaii occasionally get carried away with emphasizing and embracing disjointedness. Cowan's fingers are a little trigger happy, and so the subdued, gradually unfurling beauty of "The Other Day" hints at what might have happened had they given some of these songs a little more breathing room. Like the haunting single "Try To Be", "Day" feels like a moment of both restraint and unity-- Cowan's rippling arpeggios compliment (rather than interrupt) Standell-Preston's crystalline vocals. Blue Hawaii still bloom most vividly when they're working together. | 2013-03-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-03-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Arbutus | March 4, 2013 | 7.1 | 26302c4e-9dbf-47d3-b359-6355f063092c | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
null | null | The Avalanches: Since I Left You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/385-since-i-left-you/ | Since I Left You | Contrary to the beliefs of many middle-American supermarket-goers, not all samples are free. Just ask Vanilla Ice. When he "sampled" the bassline from Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure," he was faced with a multi-million dollar lawsuit, rather than a complementary napkin and toothpick. Sure, nobody bats an eye when copyright law takes some money out of the shiny, rhinestone-encrusted pockets of Rob Van Winkle or Puff Daddy, but as soon as lawsuits trip up avant-hoodlums like John Oswald of Plunderphonics fame, the concept of thievery-as-art becomes a hot topic, and the line between sampling and stealing becomes fiercely contended.
Given the fact that Since I Left You, the debut album from Aussie party animals the Avalanches, contains over 900 individual samples, it's pretty incredible that this thing got released in the first place. The fact that they sample everything from long-forgotten R&B; records to golf instructionals to Madonna's "Holiday" makes it even more impressive. But what really makes this album brilliant is not as much the volume or quality of the samples used as the way that they're employed. The Avalanches have managed to build a totally unique context for all these sounds, while still allowing each to retain its own distinct flavor. As a result, Since I Left You sounds like nothing else.
Much of the beauty of the opening title song and its accompanying track, "Stay Another Season," lies in the way that the Avalanches turn obvious sonic mismatches into something all their own. It's not too common that you'll hear a sample of a horse, a rastafarian singer, and an invitation to a Club Med disco all in the same song, but somehow it makes perfect sense under the masterful direction of the Avalanches.
Indeed, many of the most interesting moments on Since I Left You come with these mismatches. "A Different Feeling" sets horn blasts from 1974 against video game sounds from 1988-- the kind of bizarre pairing of classic soul with futuristic sounds that constitutes a substantial part of Avalanches magic. "Radio," which is slated for release as the band's next Australian single, centers around a mantra-like vocal sample, a thick disco bassline, and bits and pieces of filtered guitars and synthesizers.
Throughout Since I Left You, sampled vocals are used almost like percussion. But rather than utilizing the frenetic, intricate rhythms seen in most contemporary rap, the Avalanches repeat small vocal samples over and over again, melding them into their rump-rocking grooves. And while many of these songs rely heavily on the repetition of beats and samples, no single part of the record is allowed to stagnate. Something is always being mixed up-- a sample transposed up or down a few steps, a beat chopped up into little pieces and seamlessly restructured, an unexpected vocal sample popping up out of nowhere before being swallowed up by the massive sound the Avalanches have concocted.
Another key element of Since I Left You is the keen sense of humor the Avalanches display throughout. And "Frontier Psychiatrist," one of two singles already released from the album, is simply one of the funniest songs I've heard in ages. Relying on a heavy, Ninja Tune-style beat for backing, "Frontier Psychiatrist" busts out samples from 37 spoken word recordings, resulting in an oddball, hilarious pastiche of phrases like, "You're a nut! You're crazy in the coconut!" And some brilliant scratching on a sample of a parrot.
Though it contains many distinct songs and moods, Since I Left You is a remarkably coherent record on all fronts. Aside from the fact that the Avalanches achieve a certain uniform "sound" on this album, subtler elements come into play as well. Songs blend seamlessly into one another. Samples reappear from song to song. And the album's final cut, "Extra Kings," with its breezy flute and psychedelic swells of sound, puts a brilliant twist on the album's title track, fading out with that same chipmunky voice lamenting, "I've tried but I just can't get you/ Ever since the day I left you."
In releasing Since I Left You, the Avalanches have essentially brought hundreds of slabs of inanimate vinyl to life. Though it was no doubt meticulously constructed, this is an album brimming with spontaneity, joy, sadness, humor, reflection, and general human-ness. With its high fun factor and subtle traces of deeper emotion, Since I Left You is the perfect record for the party, and for the period of regret and recovery after the party. | 1999-12-31T01:01:40.000-05:00 | 1999-12-31T01:01:40.000-05:00 | Electronic | Sire / Modular | December 31, 1999 | 9.5 | 26309a2f-1808-472c-a4ad-ef62a7037005 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
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