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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 touchstone of Midwestern emo, the 1995 debut from Cap’n Jazz. | 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 touchstone of Midwestern emo, the 1995 debut from Cap’n Jazz. | Cap’n Jazz: Burritos, Inspiration Point, Fork Balloon Sports, Cards in the Spokes, Automatic Biographies, Kites, Kung Fu, Trophies, Banana Peels We’ve Slipped on, and Egg Shells We’ve Tippy Toed Over | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/capn-jazz-shmapn-shmazz/ | Shmap’n Shmazz | Growing up in the suburbs, you make formative bonds with people you might have almost nothing in common with. Most connections forged in high school—friendships, romances, career paths—don’t survive graduation. This includes Cap’n Jazz, a band that was created by two teenage brothers in Buffalo Grove, Illinois.
Upon the release of their debut LP, they exploded and then imploded within the span of a few months. They had no obvious chemistry, no organizing artistic principles, nothing to suggest they took more than a minute to consider anything besides the songs they were making. These songs defined the shape of punk to come by not giving it any shape at all, by going in at least three different directions at once, and living out the main psychosomatic driver of Midwestern emo: brain and heart locked in a war for every last drop of warm blood in your body. The run-on title of their one and only album begs you to experience the music the way it was made: shout first, process later.
The original version of Cap’n Jazz featured the local high school’s star running back as the drummer. He quit to focus on football and a 12-year-old Mike Kinsella learned how to play a 16-piece drum set on the fly. “I was garbage, but it was hilarious,” he once joked. His older brother by three years, Tim, was a natural leader—in a 2017 documentary, his mother remembers him as a precocious elementary schooler, retelling the Immaculate Conception in journalistic language so crisp and charismatic that his teachers imagined a future where he’d become President of the United States. Though an acclaimed and prolific author, teacher, and musician, he’s also spent the past 20 years making almost entirely unintelligible records with Joan of Arc, one of the most consistently loathed bands in indie rock.
Buffalo Grove is an overwhelmingly white Chicago suburb—which would have made Latino guitarist Victor Villarreal an outcast by default, even putting aside his predilections for metal and dropping acid. He skipped the first practice but eventually showed up playing metal legend Randy Rhoads’ “Dee” for a band who’d written a number of songs with only two chords. The definitive lineup of Cap’n Jazz was rounded out by affable bassist Sam Zurick, and guitarist Davey Von Bohlen, who later achieved great success with the Promise Ring and Maritime and now spends most of his time focusing on his Milwaukee accounting practice.
“When Cap’n Jazz was, like, happening, we didn’t ever thought of ourselves as an emo band. Maybe they all called us an emo band, we were just like weirdo punk band,” Tim protests. His story checks out: Prior to making their first full-length, Cap’n Jazz released a handful of singles on compilations with extremely ’90s Midwestern punk names like How the Midwest Was Won, It’s a Punk Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand, and A Very Punk Christmas; the Kinsellas covered “Winter Wonderland” with their mother, and it inspired Chicago’s Screeching Weasel to call them the “crudiest [sic] and most pretentious band in Chicago.” The shorthand for Cap’n Jazz’s only album—Shmap’n Shmazz—is scrawled across the original CD version released by Man With Gun, a label that put out a total of three titles and might as well have been a private press.
Even today, Shmap’n Shmazz’s take on punk rock feels rootless, so imagine how it must’ve sounded in 1995. Up until that point, “emo” was in no danger of being a New York Times crossword clue—whether it referred to the literal “emotional hardcore” of Revolution Summer in 1985 Washington, D.C. to Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary, which was released the previous year, emo aspired to a monastic degree of purity and intensity. “I said I bled in the arms of a girl I barely met,” or “My heart revealed my cause/I’m lying naked at your feet,” or “I dream to heal your wounds/But I bleed myself” are illustrative lyrics, where a wicked crush can only be consummated by supreme sacrifice to a higher power—no wonder this stuff played so well in church basements. Conversely, the first line in the opening track “Little League”—“Hey coffee eyes/You got me coughin’ up my cookie heart”—sorta expresses the same idea as Rites of Spring, Jawbreaker, and Sunny Day Real Estate but the unabashed goofy and tactile infatuation behind it was sacrilege.
Why “Little League” begins Shmap’n Shmazz by fading into a full sprint remains a mystery— maybe they thought it was one of the few cool production tricks they could afford or maybe they wanted to replicate what it must’ve felt like to anyone outside of the greater Chicagoland area in 1995: If you weren’t following them every step of the way, you’re already breathlessly trying to catch up. They did not take the baton from any identifiable predecessors and were only influenced by bands in their immediate vicinity. On “Yes, I Am Talking To You,” the line, “I’m dying to tell you I’m dying,” is attributed to Bob Nanna, Tim’s bandmate in the short-lived the Sky Corvair, who would later become the frontman of Braid.
According to Braid’s Chris Broach, he and Kinsella were in school competing for the same women while exchanging ideas that would define “Midwestern emo” in perpetuity: incomprehensible guitar interplay, bursts of surrealist and hyper-diaristic lyricism, unabashed about its girl-crazy impulses, and casting a critical eye to the heteronormativity that always crops up in any scene that values aggressive music. The most confrontational moment on Shmap’n Shmazz occurs on its most un-punk song; over fumbling flamenco picking, Tim intones “boys kissing boys,” without elaborating. “Oh Messy Life” struggles with awe and admonishment while considering the brazenness of men, whether telling of a “boldly bald” uncle who wore a hat when swimming (“I know there’s a lesson in there somewhere”), or “boys who smell like salami and boys who’ve never apologized”—if juvenile toxic masculinity had a smell, it would be salami.
Cap’n Jazz loved a great melody but they wouldn’t let that get in the way of their next batshit idea. While Villareal’s chops would fully flower in his later work, on Shmap’n Shmazz, it almost sounds like he’s bullying the Guitar World- side of himself; the classical flourishes of “Bluegrassish” are antagonistic when applied to a gainless electric guitar, while “Flashpoint: Catheter” creates a paralyzing unease with guitar strings getting tickle-tortured. Amick and Mike always come off like the guys who just wanted to be there for the party, but in the rare, brilliant moments where everyone sounds like they’re playing on the same beat—the stutter-steps of “Puddle Splashers” and “In the Clear”’s dive-bombing drop—Cap’n Jazz create a blueprint for any emo band that claimed math-rock and vice versa. And then there’s the moments where Tim realizes the smartest guy in the room is the class clown: stopping “In the Clear” midway to recite half of the alphabet. Or throwing a French horn solo into “Basil’s Kite” to bestow punk spirit on the least punk instrument.
Of course, the class clown is usually using humor to deflect something that can’t be shared without judgment. Both Tim and Villareal have said that Cap’n Jazz served as a release valve for their anxieties; the former called Cap’n Jazz “therapeutic” during a time when he was already in the grips of substance addiction. Tim has also spoken about traumatic moments in both his childhood home and church that festered unattended until he started going to therapy as an adult. The Kinsellas were raised by a doting mother and a father whose behavior wasn’t seen as alcoholic or abusive at the time, but it would take decades for his issues to be explored in non-illusory terms.
Given the way Cap’n Jazz dealt with their demons, maybe “emo” or “weirdo punk” isn’t as proper of a classification for Shmap’n Shmazz as “psychedelic rock.” Amick and Villareal were going to school on acid, and Tim supposedly wrote the album’s lyrics in one night while high on mushrooms. The music of Shmap’n Shmazz is pure release, and the experience felt more like a purge in every sense for Tim, projectiles of partially digested and transformed memories coming violently to the surface. Much of the record goes beyond the cleansing ritual of confession and catharsis, searching for something closer to transcendence.
On first exposure, Tim may as well be speaking in tongues. Sometimes it’s all too clear what he means, others, he stacks syllables for sheer sound. He sings of a “Ringwald haze,” evoking the era’s avatar for romantic aspiration, tangible but always just out of reach. But then, “We’re using judo like Bruce Lee,” which...your guess is as good as mine. But make no mistake, this is poetry, some of the most vivid and visceral to be documented anywhere in 1995, let alone shouted, spittled, and spewed on a punk rock record. (Freak-folk singer Devendra Banhart described Tim’s early work as comparable to Rimbaud or “going to the zoo on quaaludes, but all the other animals are on speed.”)
In retrospect, Tim unintentionally set the course for freaky folk artists from Jeff Mangum to Hop Along’s Frances Quinlan to Banhart himself, collapsing the time-space continuum, bundling sexual awakening and awkwardness, birth and death, intense pain and fleeting, incapacitating joy into a collage suspended in animation that one can point at and say—ah, youth.
On “Yes, I Am Talking to You,” a piggy bank serves as an indoctrination to merciless capitalism, an innocent’s first experience with money turning into a future where “hammy fat fingers pinch clammy cold coins.” But there’s also the sweetness of a butter cookie ring on the finger nibbled down to the knuckle, “peanuts and kiddie Molotov cocktails on a starved stomach on Sunday afternoons,” chasing kites, splashing puddles, and the awestruck feeling of getting out of Buffalo Grove, being engulfed by Chicago, itself dwarfed by a “Van Gogh sky.” On “Planet Shhh,” he responds to this paralyzing insignificance by throwing it back at its creator: “Hey God, I’ll pull you outta the sky and make you 14 again.”
When kids are still in the process of growing into their bodies, “a size-and-a-half ago shoe” rules the concept of time. Cap’n Jazz may have actually lasted about that long, but longevity doesn’t make for good punk rock legend. Better to be too beautiful, too doomed—suicide, drug addiction, irreconcilable “creative differences,” buckling under commercial pressure you never asked for. These are the things we use to convince us that certain forms of genius are divine, that they can be too much for a human to actually bear. From a certain angle, Cap’n Jazz fits that narrative.
As the band slept in their van after a show at Little Rock, Arkansas’ Das Yutes a Go-Go, Villareal was in the midst of an overdose, peeing all over himself. Tim woke up screaming and in a panic. They took Villareal to a nearby hospital and had a vote about whether to keep going. Like most high-school bands, the quintet gave this whole thing a shot because it seemed like fun. And like most high-school bands, Cap’n Jazz ended because the fun wasn’t enough to justify the hassle.
For all of its impact on post-hardcore, math-rock, and virtually every band that’s ever been called “Midwestern emo,” it’s fair to say that the one thing Cap’n Jazz did that went the furthest towards cementing their legacy is breaking up months after the release of Shmap’n Shmazz. Every project that has flowed from Cap’n Jazz ever since is part of a symbiotic feedback loop that amplifies the legend of Cap’n Jazz.
Tim Kinsella kept the most active, creating new permutations of the Cap’n Jazz lineup, collaborating with Angel Olsen, recored under the name Tim Kinsellas, and inspiring some of the most caustic album reviews of the early 21st-century with Joan of Arc’s astronomical pretensions. Mike never seemed to identify with punk rock to the same degree as Tim, and when he eventually went downstate to the University of Illinois, he stripped emo of its hardcore lineage and replaced it with post-rock and minimalist jazz on American Football, which eventually restoked the sibling rivalry by replacing Shmap’n Shmazz as the most influential album of the past decade’s “emo revival.” Cap’n Jazz have been called the “Emo Velvet Underground,” but that doesn’t quite work—I don’t know what became of the lucky few people who saw these guys live, but each of their members started like 50 other bands, all of whom created a new galaxy where Cap’n Jazz is the centrifugal Big Bang.
In the time since their break up in 1995, Cap’n Jazz reunited twice—the original lineup played a run of shows in 2010 and in 2017, when they were able to capitalize on their massive influence. This once seemed like an impossibility given Tim’s aversion to nostalgia and sentimentality; but according to Von Bohlen, the one thing that brought them together was the fear of losing “that emotional attachment where we feel like we could be defined for the rest of our musical lives by this one thing that happened in our teenage years.”
The truly breathtaking commitment of these shows indicated otherwise. At FYF last year, a 42-year old Tim whipped tambourines into the crowd, took his shirt off and unbuckled his belt, dove into the crowd, gave out his phone number, and let Devendra Banhart join them on stage to expand the “kitty cat” part of “Little League” for about three minutes. Compared to the hipper, more tasteful artists who would occupy that same stage for most of the weekend, it was Cap’n Jazz who seemed like the ones who tapped into an endlessly renewable spirit that exists outside themselves; you don’t have to live in your teenage emotions to get something out of them, and when one wave of fans feels like they’ve aged out, there’s another that needs more. | 2018-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Man With Gun | August 26, 2018 | 8.8 | 26315113-eb8a-40da-a829-90a34bb02458 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Has it really been fifteen months since I came across The Books? I remember clearly the first time I\n ... | Has it really been fifteen months since I came across The Books? I remember clearly the first time I\n ... | The Books: The Lemon of Pink | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/855-the-lemon-of-pink/ | The Lemon of Pink | Has it really been fifteen months since I came across The Books? I remember clearly the first time I listened to Thought for Food. I was sitting on the sidewalk in front of my local laundromat, two loads in the washers, enjoying the shade underneath the green awning that hangs over the glass façade. Tucked into my shoulder bag I had a clutch of promo CDs that I dug out of my mailbox on the way over. My usual routine is to click through a track or two of each to get a sense of which records I want to listen to completely. After breezing through and discarding several records I've now forgotten, I snapped Thought for Food into the discman and listened straight through.
It was different-- that was clear right away-- but it was an easy listen. I put down whatever I was reading, settled into my plastic patio chair, and squinted through the sunlight at the Greek restaurant across the street, concentrating on what was coming through my headphones: the familiar sound of guitar and violin cut up and mixed with vocal samples. Thought for Food was easy to love but I realized that I'd have trouble describing what made it interesting. It was too simple, too subtle; there was too much space.
Now comes The Lemon of Pink. Having listened to The Books' debut god knows how many times since last summer and thoroughly absorbed its sound, the element of surprise has gone. In fact, the first time I heard the six-minute title suite that opens this album it seemed eerily familiar. In the first minute there's a repeating two-chord piano riff sourced from scratchy vinyl, a banjo, a collage of violin fragments, and a sample of a heavily accented woman intoning the nonsense phrase that gives the record its name. But then comes a surprise: naked, unprocessed vocals by a woman named Anne Doerner, far too modern sounding to be pulled from an old record.
Indeed, the most apparent difference between The Lemon of Pink and Thought for Food is this record's greater use of original vocals. The Books obviously have a lot of old records lying around, so it makes sense to insert a bit of structure into their finely wrought collages. Some of the vocals find their way into tracks that are essentially proper songs, others are cut and pasted into glitched-up melodic configurations. Doerner's contribution to the title track is one of the best examples of the former. Her cracked, bluesy purr fits well with The Books' solid American roots core, and the melody is spare and understated, wisely remaining one of many elements rather than becoming the prime focus of the song. There's so much breathing room here, and her voice fills it perfectly.
Books co-founder Nick Zammuto sings on several of the other tracks that play with song structure. "Don't Even Sing About It" is unusually dark and downcast, almost like an old Will Oldham dirge given The Books treatment, with unpredictable vocal samples cutting through the marching guitar plucking. "Get used to hanging if you hang long enough" is the sum total of the original lyrics, but it's the sort of cryptic splinter that suits this essentially fragmented music. "The Future, Wouldn't That Be Nice?" begins in typical Books fashion, with quick surges of crowd noise, vibraphone, guitar and bits of violin, but then the voice comes in, a flat sing-speak intoning Isaac Brockisms like "the mind has a mind of its own." I'm a little iffy on these two; where Thought for Food's "All Our Base Are Belong to Them" was weird and otherworldly, these vocal tracks fit neatly into the experimental indie rock landscape. Both are solid, but somehow the presence of this voice makes The Books sound just a little less special.
Contrast these more song-oriented bits with the sampled voice (I think it's Doerner's again) run through the shredder on "There Is No There". The various instruments and samples fold in and then start to swirl into an aural kaleidoscope, and then the vocals flutter past, too quick and broken for rational comprehension but emotionally clear as glass. You don't know what they're saying, but the feeling is immediate and intense. The power of "There Is No There" makes me think that at this point The Books still work best as collage artists, assembling odds and ends into new and affecting compositions.
The Lemon of Pink makes for an interesting contrast with Thought for Food, in part because the two records have so much in common. Several of this record's tracks that closely follow the Thought for Food template are even better than their forbears, with more dynamic range and a greater sense of development. The way the sample of a flight attendant from a Japanese airline forms the centerpiece of "Tokyo" is absolutely perfect, matching the editing brilliance of Thought for Food's "Aleatoric", and "Take Time" is one of the more epic 3\xBD-minute instrumentals you'll come across, building from quiet, simple samples into a joyous cluster of words and acoustic sound. The Lemon of Pink may sound a bit like this duo's debut, but it also sounds like nobody else. The Books remain more or less a genre of one. | 2003-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Tomlab | October 8, 2003 | 8.4 | 264a248f-4c20-43c0-ab29-e53271f9c578 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Assuming his old handle for the first time in 15 years, David Bazan digs into his desert childhood to make amends with the people he hurt—especially himself. | Assuming his old handle for the first time in 15 years, David Bazan digs into his desert childhood to make amends with the people he hurt—especially himself. | Pedro the Lion: Phoenix | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pedro-the-lion-phoenix/ | Phoenix | David Bazan has a rich history of self-sabotage. As the last century slid into this one, Bazan’s recording project, Pedro the Lion, seemed of a piece with an indie rock tide drifting toward crossover success. Over songs that flirted with emo and slowcore and flitted between acoustic lamentation and electrified frustration, he asked hard questions of religion, love, industry, and economy, snarling in a burly monotone. Still, it was catchy enough to be a close cousin of several ascendant Pacific Northwestern peers, and, as George W. Bush entered the White House, Bazan’s concerns about Christianity’s place within supposedly progressive spheres were painfully relevant. Pedro the Lion felt forever on the verge of a real breakthrough.
Then, in 2005, Bazan scrapped Pedro the Lion to spend the next 14 years releasing records under his own name. Former bandmates rose to fame with the likes of Death Cab for Cutie, Fleet Foxes, and the Shins, but he pressed ahead alone, the sour traces of those early songs curdling into words that could feel like blame games. On Pedro the Lion’s presciently titled farewell, Achilles Heel, he lampooned the careerism of “bands with managers [who] are going places.” By and large, even as those solo records hinged on some of his sharpest writing, he wasn’t.
Bazan has finally taken up the Pedro the Lion handle again, drafting a new rhythm section to play parts he wrote for another rock trio record, Phoenix. The revival began when he spent the night at his grandparents’ home in Arizona during a particularly despondent stretch of solo touring along lonely desert roads. Realizing that, almost 30 years since leaving Phoenix, he still toted around unpacked baggage from that period of his childhood, he decided Pedro the Lion was the platform for addressing those hang-ups. He was right.
These 13 new songs at least scan like the old ones—a few distorted chords and some hard truths, barbed lines suspended between a baritone mumble and a broken tenor. But on Phoenix, Bazan turns the mirror on himself in ways he never has, scouring a childhood spent in the Sonoran desert for a real understanding of his deepest flaws and most fundamental beliefs.
“Quietest Friend” reflects on an important relationship he betrayed in a momentary bid for acceptance by his school’s coolest kids. He sings this very late confession through a scrim of shame, asking for an apology but understanding he may not deserve it. In perhaps the most empathetic song of his career, he at least wants to acknowledge his adolescent impulse, how it hurt someone else, and how he can get better from here. “We could write me some reminders/I’d memorize them,” he pleas in the climb to the coda. “I could put them on a record about my hometown/Sitting here with pen and paper/I’m listening now.”
From end to end, he exposes old memories to new light, turning them around and around to understand how they built or corroded his core. During “Black Canyon,” he considers a family fable about his paramedic uncle arriving at the scene of a gruesome suicide and the surreal episode that followed. In retrospect, it’s a testament to the fact that life can hurt, whether you’re trying to kill yourself by stepping into traffic or simply existing in a world that doesn’t welcome your type. You can imagine Bazan recalling the story and, decades later, swallowing his own problems, denying himself pity.
In “Circle K” and “Model Homes,” he considers the origins of a lifetime spent believing he’s never had enough, whether lamenting his parents’ haggard house or wasting his savings on the fleeting luxury of convenience-store candy. He first spots that restlessness—that sense of self-sabotage that saw him scrap a great band 15 years ago—the day he got a bike for Christmas and headed anywhere but home. Bazan even pins his perennial complications with Christianity on himself, at least in part. He allowed others to set the parameters for his ethics and enjoyment, he announces during “Powerful Taboo,” following instructions instead of his own instincts.
Bazan sings better than he ever has on Phoenix, his voice round and worn with intricacy from years of use, like a hiking stick toted in the same hand for a thousand miles. During “Tracing the Grid,” where he revisits his childhood haunts and highways, he leavens the memories with sweetness and warmth. When he recounts Sundays spent asking his parents go to the open houses of “Model Homes,” his voice cracks with the perfect echo of pubescence and curls with the desire of a hopeful plea. But, Bazan excepted, this is an entirely new version of Pedro the Lion, and the trio mostly steps on and off the accelerator of elemental indie rock, until these 44 minutes merge into an extended smear. Between Pedro the Lion albums, Bazan flirted with synths, drum machines, hypnotic drones, and acoustic drift. Rather than fold those excursions into this return, he steps back into a familiar pattern, looking over his shoulder musically just as he does lyrically.
Phoenix makes an easy mark for cynicism, supported by the idea that Bazan is either succumbing to nostalgia or cashing in as best he can as the world spins away from this brand of embittered, androgenic indie rock. But, much like Greta Gerwig’s 2017 film Lady Bird, these songs are a corrective to nostalgia, or of longing for a rose-colored history that never actually happened. In reckoning with who he was and who he has become, Bazan is squaring off with the past and asking hard questions of it and himself.
If that reads as sheer self-absorption in an era of terrifying international turmoil, fair enough. But after two decades of blaming God, capitalism, family, friends, and the hoi polloi for his vexation and bluster, Bazan now understands he must confront his own issues before he can help take on the world’s. Phoenix unfolds like an invitation for you to do the same. “Clean up, and we all might get there together,” he sings in a contagious chorus that transmutes domestic duties into a survivalist mantra for this harsh world. Sure, maybe that’s wishful thinking, but at least it’s a restart. | 2019-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | January 23, 2019 | 7.6 | 2650022c-0326-42c0-9237-959faeacd9d8 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On his third album, the former Speedy Ortiz guitarist continues to carve out space for Black perspectives in indie rock while expanding his musical range. | On his third album, the former Speedy Ortiz guitarist continues to carve out space for Black perspectives in indie rock while expanding his musical range. | Maneka: Dark Matters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maneka-dark-matters/ | Dark Matters | After parting ways with Speedy Ortiz in 2017, Brooklyn-based musician Devin McKnight adopted the moniker Maneka to experiment with genres beyond his indie-rock roots and explore spaces not overpopulated by white dudes. On Is You Is, McKnight began wrestling with his sense of identity in a scene that, even after 20 years of progress, can still feel exclusionary of BIPOC musicians. McKnight came into his own on Devin in 2019, and he cranked his energy up to 11 by blending heavy metal and noise-punk with hip hop and jazz. On Dark Matter, McKnight continues to ask what it means to be Black in the indie scene while expanding his musical range in surprising ways.
McKnight likens America’s racist history to dark matter—an invisible force that binds the country together. “America has this really dark energy. How has it been this fucked up for so long and no one’s done anything about it?” he has said. On Dark Matters, he confronts that energy directly, writing lyrics that attack racism at its roots. On “Winners Circle,” an unusual fusion of trap drums, shoegaze guitars, and a double-time hardcore outro, he plays on the theory that Beethoven might have been a person of color who lightened his skin to pass in his own scene, singing, “Don’t paint a smile in the place where that shame hid/Play that brand new shit/That No. 9 shit.” On “The Glow Up,” he grapples with generations of racism—“And how do you explain this?/The seat in the back is meant for me?/And how do you explain this?/The ones we lost hanging from the trees”—over syrupy electric bass and guitar. And on the psychedelic “Runaway,” over dueling electric and acoustic guitars, he comes brutally to the point: “Stored in the bones/Is the feeling/You don’t belong here.”
Dark Matter’s twists and turns can be unusual, even unsettling. That’s intentional. When a musician like Alex G pivots genres on his records, they can make for a fun, experimental detour on the road to melodic indie rock. But McKnight seems determined to never let you get too comfortable, and he changes the mood from track to track. The synth-laden intro to the album pulsates like the theme song to a PBS documentary from the early 1980s, then cuts immediately into the spaced-out shoegaze of “Zipline.” The first of two brief improvisational jazz tracks featuring Chicago musician Nnamdi Ogbonnaya on drums is sandwiched between the experimental trap beat of “Winner’s Circle” and the jangly bedroom pop of “The Glow Up”; the other sits between the synth-driven grunge anthem “On Her Own” and the mellow post-rock of “Maintain.” McKnight uses these deliberate genre switches to reinforce the idea that indie rock can speak to those who don’t always see themselves reflected in the bands at the forefront of the scene. But the unfortunate side effect of the constant shifts is that they occasionally prevent the album from feeling entirely cohesive.
Dark Matters rarely thrashes as hard as Maneka’s earlier work, but McKnight’s songwriting sounds more purposeful than ever. He says volumes in this cool, innovative half hour of music. In a year that has given us double albums from Big Thief and Beach House, Dark Matters’ inspiring, genre-bending songs offer a breath of fresh air: In place of sprawl, McKnight cuts to the chase by offering an unflinching look at his own truth. | 2022-03-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Skeletal Lightning | March 17, 2022 | 7.2 | 2653b4da-59bf-4eb3-9a99-77b4373f853c | Jack Probst | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jack-probst/ | |
The Chicago-based band sheds its psychedelic garage-pop for intrepid experiments in reggaeton, synth pop, and club music, an undertaking that lands with mixed success. | The Chicago-based band sheds its psychedelic garage-pop for intrepid experiments in reggaeton, synth pop, and club music, an undertaking that lands with mixed success. | Divino Niño: Last Spa on Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/divino-nino-last-spa-on-earth/ | Last Spa on Earth | Like many artists at the height of the pandemic, Divino Niño found solace in the unfamiliar. The Chicago-based quintet, who have roots across Latin America, set out on a voyage, entering a 10-day lockdown in a Wisconsin cabin with only booze and barely fleshed-out ideas for new material in tow. “It felt so apocalyptic, what we were experiencing in that cabin,” guitarist and vocalist Camilo Medina said in a recent interview. The rest of the band also had doomsday dread on the mind; the unease allowed them to embrace a flood of new influences, like a journal stacked with sometimes illegible stream-of-consciousness reflections.
The result is far from the psychedelic garage-pop of their debut album Foam. On the group’s second record, Last Spa On Earth, they harness high doses of electro-house, hyperpop, and—most importantly—experimental reggaeton. Not every Latine indie band could execute this mission effectively, but Divino Niño aren’t afraid to take risks. The record is a bold statement on artistic freedom and the complexity of cultural identity, one that displays the creative promise of emancipating yourself from imagined limits of all kinds. It’s not easy, nor is it always done cohesively, but the mere attempt makes it a worthwhile challenge.
This time around, Divino Niño record almost entirely in their native tongue, a choice that allows this offbeat union of sounds and stories to feel somewhat more consistent. On “XO,” a subtle, slow-building synth line wanes as booming dembow riddims send you directly to the dance floor. The influence of reggaeton fully takes shape on “Tu Tonto,” which borrows the punk grit of neoperreo, a woman-led subgenre piloted by rebels Tomasa del Real and Ms Nina. It’s a colorful manifestation of how synth pop and neoperreo can harmoniously coexist.
On “Miami,” the reggaeton recedes and the band leverages snappy, ’80s-inspired synth pop production over Auto-Tuned vocals, a transition that feels a little rushed. Midway through, edgy vaporwave tones cut the song like a knife, and the lyrics get lost in the shadows. The overuse of club music tempos, the kind you might hear at 3 a.m. in the streets of Bogotá, don’t necessarily match the rest of the multidimensional sounds the band collects here, and the clashing combination is tough to ignore.
Yet the passionately intimate songs make up for the sporadic use of these genres—“Ecstasy” conjures a melancholy kind of sparkle over a twinkling synth-pop production. And while not everything feels divinely connected from start to finish, there’s a sense of self-awareness here, a dedication to seek renewal in the unknown that allows Divino Niño to buck any preconceptions of cultural identity. | 2022-09-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Winspear | September 29, 2022 | 7.1 | 26561b8f-1a17-46a0-884c-1f712af0cc5a | Holly Alvarado | https://pitchfork.com/staff/holly-alvarado/ | |
Three decades into her career, Sheryl Crow is arguably a genre unto herself. Her new album sometimes makes her singular appeal feel generic. | Three decades into her career, Sheryl Crow is arguably a genre unto herself. Her new album sometimes makes her singular appeal feel generic. | Sheryl Crow: Evolution | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sheryl-crow-evolution/ | Evolution | By the time Sheryl Crow’s 1996 self-titled album went triple platinum, she was a staple of cross-country road trips and 35-minute commutes. Her career is arguably the definitive crossover success of that decade—the rare safe bet for multiple radio formats, as pop as she is rock’n’roll, arguably a genre unto herself. Still, like other artists of her generation, Crow’s influence waned as CD players started to disappear from cars. Citing the pressures of the streaming economy, along with a growing family, she claimed that 2019’s Threads, her star-studded duets album, would be her last full-length LP. Then, over the past few years, she recorded enough singles to release a whole new album—a classic songwriter’s happy accident.
If there’s a noteworthy evolution to Evolution, it’s that Crow decided to give up her role as a producer on her music. “There’s a point where you get tired of what you do, you recognize your tricks, you despair of them,” she said in a press release. She’s handed the reins off to super-producer Mike Elizondo, the guy who, depending on who you ask, elevated “In Da Club” to greatness or yanked Extraordinary Machine down from it. (He also, some 10 years ago, played bass in Crow’s band.) Here his pop sensibilities are utilitarian, pushing the songs to radio-friendly completion without getting in the way of Crow’s hallmarks; there’s still plenty of funky guitar hooks and live percussion, even if Crow’s voice is occasionally overproduced.
When you remember that most of Evolution’s songs were intended as standalone singles, they do start to resemble archetypes of the Sheryl Crow playbook. You want the churning blues-rock number fit for a Chevy Silverado ad? Check out “Do It Again.” What about the rhythmic blend of acoustic guitar, bass, and handclaps that’ll work for both a campfire singalong and a festival encore? “Love Life” is your guy. Crow is, to her credit, tongue-in-cheek about her SoCal sensibilities. On opener “Alarm Clock,” she crafts an elaborate dream sequence, poking fun at how one might imagine an average day in the life of Sheryl Crow: blowing off work, flirting with Hollywood bartenders that look “like Chalamet,” cruising down to Malibu. It’s fun and frothy and has the best lyric about a surfboard since “Drunk in Love.”
Crow’s songs have long described self-proclaimed gurus with a raised eyebrow, but three decades into her career, she seems more comfortable being the one to dish out wisdom. She does shrooms now, apparently, but the soul-searching is digestible, on the level of a microdose rather than ego death. One too many of these motivational uplifts drag Evolution into monotony—“You Can’t Change the Weather” and “Waiting in the Wings” may as well be the same song—and her attempt at broad social commentary, on “Where?”, doesn’t fare much better. And then there’s the entirely out-of-place Peter Gabriel cover “Digging in the Dirt,” surely a Threads cast-off, that inexplicably shows up on the deluxe version.
Part of Crow’s charm has always been that even her most righteous kiss-offs play a little retro, reflecting the voice of someone who learned to write songs around a cadre of boomer session players. Maybe that’s why her attempts at social media slang on “Broken Record” (“Anger sucks but at least your brand’s trending,” “Well, we were buds but now I’m unfriending”) feel so forced. Or maybe it’s because Sheryl Crow, of all people, has no reason to pay the haters any mind. Though her music has, at its darkest, explored the loneliness and violence of American life, the qualities that draw you back to Crow’s work are sun-kissed familiarity and off-the-cuff wit. At her best, she comes across as both a trusted friend and the smartest roadie at the bar—a combination that’s deceptively difficult to pull off, much as her imitators have tried.
Coincidentally, the most interesting thing Crow says on Evolution is all about her lasting impact: “Turned on the radio and there it was/A song that sounded like something I wrote,” she sings in the opening lines of the title track. “The voice and melody were hauntingly/So familiar that I thought it was a joke.” Crow uses this moment as a jumping-off point to muse about the greater meaning of the universe, but still, the thought sticks with you. It’s true that Crow is an institution, an influence that artists from Maren Morris to Haim now wear proudly. In that respect, Evolution’s fatal flaw is conflating being ubiquitous and being generic. | 2024-04-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | The Valory Music Co. | April 2, 2024 | 6 | 26598847-cf45-4128-8e4e-db02d308043e | Claire Shaffer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-shaffer/ | |
null | James Osterburg was a man you might not look at twice on the street. Iggy Pop was his animal soul, and when Iggy got loose on a stage just about anything could happen. With the Stooges he was the mesmerizing center of a maelstrom that helped to invent a whole host of rock's musical clichés, a group that spun primal fury and young adult frustration into some of the ugliest, most brutal, most alive music of its era.
There were other subversive, confrontational rock acts before the Stooges—the cover of the band's eponymous debut even subtly references the Doors' own self-titled | The Stooges: The Stooges / Fun House | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11842-the-stooges-fun-house/ | The Stooges / Fun House | James Osterburg was a man you might not look at twice on the street. Iggy Pop was his animal soul, and when Iggy got loose on a stage just about anything could happen. With the Stooges he was the mesmerizing center of a maelstrom that helped to invent a whole host of rock's musical clichés, a group that spun primal fury and young adult frustration into some of the ugliest, most brutal, most alive music of its era.
There were other subversive, confrontational rock acts before the Stooges—the cover of the band's eponymous debut even subtly references the Doors' own self-titled album—but nobody before them had the good sense to take it as far over the top as they did. Even the band's sturdiest compositions have a feeling of instability about them, like they might collapse or fly asunder at any moment, and there are moments when Iggy can't help screaming and grunting as if he's trying to challenge Ron Asheton's guitar to some nihilistic duel. In the middle of the hippie era, their grimy, depraved, and violent take on love and life had no natural place, which is perhaps why it holds up so well.
The Stooges' first two albums are a case study in a band marking its territory with a debut and then systematically destroying that territory and everything in it on their second. As rough and abrasive as The Stooges is, it sounds positively genteel next to the apocalyptic garage meltdown of Fun House. The debut was produced by the Velvet Underground's John Cale, an art-conscious violist who worked hard to get the Stooges a crisp, muscular sound that highlighted the bleakness of their vision but made them perhaps less threatening on record than they were on stage. For Fun House, the band got Don Gallucci, whose previous claim to rock trivia fame was as the guy going "duh duh duh, duh duh, duh duh duh, duh duh" on the keyboards on the Kingsmen's epochal "Louie Louie". Gallucci essentially recorded Fun House as though it were a live album, letting the band simply attack the songs in take after exhausting take, and though the recording is less than perfect from a technical standpoint, it shoves the Stooges at the peak of their powers right in your face.
Rhino's reissues do a fine job of shoving them even further, benefitting from improved mastering that highlights the gut-punch rhythm section of Dave Alexander and Scott Asheton, who never get enough credit for being the band's pounding heart and tortured soul. Alexander's bass keeps things grounded in blues and psychedelia, rumbling low and solid in the mix as Ron Asheton's lava guitar flows around it and Dave Asheton pummels out the most basic and accordingly perfect beats possible. The raging caveman groove they lay down on "1969" to open the debut is still one of the greatest undercarriages a rock song has ever had.
The first album also contains the classic "I Wanna Be Your Dog", notable almost as much for its inclusion of piano and sleigh bell in a grinding rock arrangement as it is for its then-controversial refrain. The record also has two songs notable mostly for the fact that they show the band going in a direction they never again pursued: "We Will Fall", audaciously sequenced at track three, is a droning, 10-minute dirge featuring a backing chant and Iggy's harrowing narration of a night in a lonely hotel room. The way he sings, "Then I lay right down/ On my back/ On my bed/ In my hotel" makes what looks insanely mundane on paper sound like the last existential gasps of a dying mind. Less oppressive but no more upbeat is "Ann", which is sort of the album's ballad if you wanted to stretch and call it that. Iggy wails for a lost lover and Ron Asheton reels off a sickeningly fuzzed-out guitar solo that anticipates the most unhinged moments of Fun House.
Unhinged is too weak a word for the wildest moments of Fun House, especially closer "L.A. Blues", a fiery freakout that's more heroin than LSD and makes no pretense of song structure. Saxophonist Steven Mackay adds a nasty edge to the album's second side, blazing right along with the rest of the band to create a texture that sounds exactly like the album cover—Iggy tossed in a flaming sea, possibly hell. The record's first half is somewhat tamer, with the heavy boogie of "Down on the Street" and the paranoid snarl of "T.V. Eye", where the band plays with deadly efficiency behind Iggy's demented vocal. Iggy actually captures the feel of the whole record in the opening line of "1970": "Out of my mind on a Saturday night."
The reissues each add a whole disc of rarities, though hardcore fans will already know the Fun House extras from the 1970 boxed set, which is now out of print. On Stooges, it's basically alternate mixes and extended versions, while on Fun House it's primarily outtakes, but given the volatility of the material on that album, there's quite a bit of variation from version to version. That said, none of the out-takes are particularly revelatory outside a twisted, distended, sax-soaked version of "1970", and most casual listeners will probably not spin disc two of either set more than once or twice. Fun House does include two songs that didn't make the album, but it's hard to see where either the ravaged blues of "Slide (Slidin' the Blues)" or "Lost in the Future" would have fit without destroying the record's momentum. That said, both songs offer a chance to hear more of Mackay's sax playing and give a glimpse toward what the band might have sounded like if a lineup had solidified with him in it.
It should go without saying that these are two of the most important signposts on the way to the punk explosion, and that any rock fan with a sense of history owes it to themselves to check them out if they haven't already. What's often lost as we place them in the canon, though, is the fact that both albums sound incredibly good today on their own terms, raw and immediate and dripping with an aggression that's rarely been rivaled. | 2005-08-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-08-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | August 17, 2005 | 8.9 | 265cbd08-3632-4d8e-9eee-35f10ebbb891 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The latest solo album from Vampire Weekend’s Chris Baio was inspired by Bowie, Brexit, Trump, and climate change, but his synth pop sound doesn’t match those high stakes. | The latest solo album from Vampire Weekend’s Chris Baio was inspired by Bowie, Brexit, Trump, and climate change, but his synth pop sound doesn’t match those high stakes. | Baio: Man of the World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/baio-man-of-the-world/ | Man of the World | In the little more than four years since the last Vampire Weekend album, 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City, the entire gang of bookish indie rockers haven’t struggled to keep busy. Leader Ezra Koenig hosts his own Beats 1 radio show “Time Crisis” and co-wrote with Beyoncé on Lemonade, all while spending time crafting songs for the next Vampire Weekend LP. Rostam Batmanglij released a series of well-received solo singles, eventually leaving the band to dive headfirst into his own career—first with the collaborative album with Hamilton Leithauser and next with a debut album under his own name due this fall. Even drummer Chris Tomson found time to release his own music, this year’s messy Dams of the West record Youngish American.
And then there’s Chris Baio. Like Tomson, Baio occupies the space in Vampire Weekend outside of the core songwriting pair, and his solo career has had little to do with his main source of income. Still, the long VW break has given Baio time for a pair of solo releases. Baio’s 2015 album The Names lacked consistency, touching upon techno and pop, referencing DeLillo and Dostoyevsky, singing like Bowie and Ferry. It was an album that told us a lot about what Baio liked without directly carving a niche of his own. For his second full-length, Man of the World, the scope has narrowed and focused. Baio is finally sure of his sound, and he included an artist statement with the record to put his endeavor in context.
Baio cites several specific events for Man of the World’s inspiration: the death of his favorite artist David Bowie, Brexit, the Trump presidency, and climate change. And he is fully aware of his perspective—that of a rich, white American living abroad—while delving into these topics, addressing them directly on the album’s penultimate song: “I know Iʼm deeply privileged/To be losing just my mind/Iʼm fearful for the bodies/Of the vulnerable and kind/Iʼve got shame in my name.” Still, Man of the World delivers 41 minutes of Baio wrestling with the weight of the world, all while singing in the pantomimed voice of his hero. Where the rest of us have the occasional Twitter meltdown, Baio has gone a huge step further and set his political angst to boisterous synth pop.
The contrast is often jarring. Tonal juxtapositions aren’t too unexpected when Baio’s enunciating within spitting distance of Morrissey, but with the stakes so high, there is something unsettling at play here. For example, on the album opening “Vin Mariani,” Baio follows a line like “Learning to live with a decision/When the consequence is rather grave” with a triumphant blast of trumpets and hand-clap percussion. The consequences couldn’t sound less grave. The closest Baio comes to sounding serious is on “DANGEROUE ANAMAL”—Baio’s all-caps reflection on his own hypocrisy when it comes to climate change. The song pulses and sleeks with misguided sensuality, more seductive than anything else on the album (even if the line “I still eat meat” is not a euphemism).
That’s often the trouble with Man of the World. There is rarely nuance to Baio’s lyrics, and everything is offered up with little in the way of poetry or insight. The best moments manage to forget this is a “message” album and ease the Bowie-aping into just a vaguely British baritone. The whimsical “The Key Is Under the Mat” steps confidently closer to Vampire Weekend than any of his previous solo work, while “Sensitive Guy” winks with sly humor to match its four-on-the-floor rhythm and jubilant conclusion. But when Baio asks, “Can’t you see my aim is true?” on the title track, the album argues the opposite, and it fails to capture the wariness for the world that he’s desperate to comment on. | 2017-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Glassnote | July 7, 2017 | 5.6 | 266290ec-7a1c-4513-b56e-2e79eaf5b68c | Philip Cosores | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-cosores/ | null |
I’m Up doesn’t muster up the highs of the Slime Season series—the infectiousness of “Best Friend,” the sublime structuring of “Draw Down,” or the woozy euphoria of “Raw”—but Thug manages to compile many of his best attributes into a tightly-wound 38 minutes. | I’m Up doesn’t muster up the highs of the Slime Season series—the infectiousness of “Best Friend,” the sublime structuring of “Draw Down,” or the woozy euphoria of “Raw”—but Thug manages to compile many of his best attributes into a tightly-wound 38 minutes. | Young Thug: I'm Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21579-young-thug-im-up/ | I'm Up | Young Thug's scattershot release strategy is a refreshing change of pace from the painstaking, calculated approaches of an entire generation of legacy builders and self-mythologizers, guys pining after their place on rap’s coveted (and entirely subjective) Mt. Rushmore. But it can be a nightmare for those seeking continuity from the virtuoso, both inside and outside of his camp. When he isn’t sending thinly veiled shots at Future on social media or planning to smack Plies on the radio, he’s releasing music rapidly and without regard for quality control; Slime Season and Slime Season 2, a pair of hour-plus long mixtapes, were filled with promise, but undoubtedly packed with filler.
The new nine-song mixtape I’m Up, meanwhile, was meant to be Slime Season 3 until days before its release, and was even on Spotify as SS3 for a day (Thug has since announced that a SS3 is still on the way.) These antics make Young Thug who he is, a dynamic free spirit who isn’t beholden to much outside his immediate brotherhood; as he raps on “Hercules”: “Okay first of all, I was doing this shit 'fore I was rich/ I don't care at all, I'll go do a dolphin for my clique.” He revels in the mayhem, and leaves others to pick up the pieces left in his wake. As Lyor Cohen, head of Thug’s label, 300 Entertainment, once explained while trying to rationalize the disappearance of the missing HY!£UN35 album (and the cancellation of the corresponding tour): “What makes Thug such an interesting artist is his lack of predictability and if I knew, I'd be happy to tell you.”
It’s that chaotic energy that makes Young Thug such an unmistakably bright personality fit for a camera crew, a skilled performer on par with Ric Flair: “I’m Rey Mysterio, my life on HBO,” he squeals gleefully on opener “F Cancer” (a song that, in typical Thug fashion, isn’t even remotely about cancer). But with I’m Up, he is more than a stylist treating individual songs as sonic catwalks; he strings together thoughts, ideas, and concepts in arcs over the course of the project. Amid calls for an armistice and shots at police corruption, there is a pervasive theme: nurturing support systems. There's the ode to a fallen comrade who was gunned down last year on "King TROUP" with a near-whimpering hook. Songs about a fraternal sense of loyalty are lumped together (“My Boys,” “For My People,” “Ridin”). “My Boys” is essentially a treatise on brotherhood with rapper Ralo, who admitted he once tried to shoot and kill Thug. The closer, “Family,” features Thug’s sisters, Dora and Dolly. If there's any central message, it seems to be honor those you love and those you've lost.
It all makes for a less thrilling listen, but a stronger, more complete experience. I’m Up doesn’t muster up the highs of the Slime Season series—the infectiousness of “Best Friend,” the sublime structuring of “Draw Down,” or the woozy euphoria of “Raw”— but Thug manages to compile many of his best attributes into a tightly-wound 38 minutes: his knack for zingers, his impish demeanor, and his ability to slink through productions of all shapes and sizes. The production comes courtesy of Mike Will, Metro Boomin, and Thug’s in-house producer Wheezy, among others, and it is a diverse array of sounds with nods to the dark and distant productions of Barter 6 ("Ridin" is the fraternal twin of "Never Had It") and Atlanta's minimalist wave ("Special"). There's everything from a steady 808 chug ("Bread Winners") to church organ soul ("Family"), and Thug twists and contorts to find interesting ways to fit into them. He’s engaged throughout, making the most of each opportunity. The rapper seems to be venturing toward a more sustainable mode of operation, one that won’t burn him out before his talent can receive the attention it deserves. But, really, at this point, who could guess? | 2016-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic / 300 Entertainment | February 9, 2016 | 7.6 | 2666f832-91a0-4c57-8451-652b49578697 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The debut EP from Cibo Matto veteran Miho Hatori builds on her former band’s experimental pop aesthetic while dialing down their quirky tendencies and moving into more mature subject matter. | The debut EP from Cibo Matto veteran Miho Hatori builds on her former band’s experimental pop aesthetic while dialing down their quirky tendencies and moving into more mature subject matter. | New Optimism : Amazon to LeFrak EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/new-optimism-amazon-to-lefrak-ep/ | Amazon to LeFrak EP | When Cibo Matto called it a day for the second time, in December 2017, Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda framed the decision not as a breakup, but as the duo moving into “a new phase.” In an optimistic (if mysterious) Facebook post, they assured fans, “Our band is over but we are not going away.”
That may sound like the kind of it’s-not-you-it’s-me language we’ve come to expect from bands who are sick of living with each other’s laundry, but Amazon to LeFrak, the debut EP from Hatori’s New Optimism project, gives real meaning to their words. It is both very Cibo Matto and impressively evolved, a continuation of Hatori and Honda’s eclectic pop sound that retains the band’s stylistic experimentation while dialing down their occasionally quirky tendencies.
The diverse musical elements that made Cibo Matto a cult favorite—one that appeared on cult hit “Buffy,” no less—are all here on Amazon to LeFrak. Its sounds recreate the duo’s sonic food fight of hip-hop, jazz, funk, lounge, and soul, while Hatori’s vocals retain the dazed panache that both confused and delighted in her Cibo Matto days. But the EP casts its net even wider, adding touches of dancehall and trap to create a composite sound that is detailed without ever getting bogged down. One of the most exciting things about this release is the way in which even the smallest sounds count, be it Hatori sporadically dropping an open hi-hat into “Dr.My-Ho” or Rostam Batmanglij burying tabla drums in the mix on “Howling.” Amazon to LeFrak is the kind of record you can enjoy as a whole or endlessly pick apart as you deliberate over your favorite bassline. (Mine underlines the chorus to “Dr.My-Ho.”)
At its best, the EP rivals anything in the Cibo Matto catalog for pop-art audaciousness. “Jet Setters” is a swaggering pop song that suggests early M.I.A., but with a sense of humor, while “King of Monsters” balances tribal house rhythms with Peter Hook-esque bass lines. “Dr.My-Ho” is the standout, though, its exquisite instrumental release equal to that of Cibo Matto’s near-hit “Sugar Water” and its twinkling chorus (think Air’s “J'ai Dormi Sous L’eau” on caffeinated water) as welcoming as a cool pool water on a summer’s day. Even Amazon to Le Frak’s lesser songs are compelling: The beat on “Howling” recalls the digital groan of an MP3 glitching, while “Invisible Tan” has a synth line that stretches like chewing gum on a warm handrail.
Perhaps most importantly, for listeners who sensed a lingering whiff of novelty around her former band’s best-known songs, New Optimism’s debut is more mature and considered than Hatori’s past work. Her vocals sit snugly within the mix, rather than intruding on it, while the songs deal with adult themes like globality versus globalization (on “Jet Setters”) and ill health (on “Dr.My-Ho”). And the EP gives the overall impression that time has caught up with Hatori, as an artist and as a human. Far from being a downer, however, Amazon to LeFrak is vibrant with life and emotion—making it the perfect sing-along mix for fans ready to reckon with reality. | 2018-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Phantom Limb | July 31, 2018 | 7.6 | 266739a7-6a5f-41ef-b13b-6e5546a41a9a | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
After last year's underwhelming Caracal, the Disclosure brothers' surprise-dropped EP shows that thrill isn’t quite gone, but it’s definitely not the same. | After last year's underwhelming Caracal, the Disclosure brothers' surprise-dropped EP shows that thrill isn’t quite gone, but it’s definitely not the same. | Disclosure: Moog for Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22049-moog-for-love/ | Moog for Love | Coachella can be a little bit like high school—there are the cool kids, the rich kids, the nerds, the outsiders, the stoners, the bros, all splitting off to head bang at Rancid, pinball at Jack Ü or snake dance to Christine and the Queens. But this year, Disclosure was a magnet, drawing all the cliques together into one nation under a virtual disco ball: Goodwill greased and festival irritability eased by the molly caps swallowed an hour earlier with $13 beers, the pulsating throng was united in its love for Howard and Guy Lawrence’s expert blend of sleek pop and those big, warm and happy belted house hooks of the ‘90s.
If Moog for Love, the three-song EP the brothers surprise-dropped last week, is any indication, the thrill isn’t quite gone, but it’s definitely not the same. Granted, that’s putting a lot of pressure on a project that clocks in under 16 minutes, but on the heels of the somewhat-underwhelming, Caracal, I expected Disclosure to aim a little higher than the serviceable stuff piped into the pool area on a weekday afternoon at the W in Hollywood.
Swirling together bright, blissed-out yacht-party synths and sampled, accelerated vocals from George Benson that flirt with *Motownphilly, *the tropical title track is the clear standout on Moog. Submerging the vocals midway through the track, you can almost hear waves cresting and, consequently, feel the surf foaming around your feet, so who cares if it sounds a little like Now That’s What I Call Ibiza: 2001?
“Boss” is darker, cooler and more elegant, yet there’s nothing so special about it. It certainly doesn’t compare to the sexiness of the similarly slinky “F For You.” Still, the real problem on the EP is “Feel Like I Do,” which samples Al Green’s “I’m Still in Love With You.”
Last summer in an L.A. Times profile, Guy yawned, “The same old bass lines, the same old samples. We’re a bit bored by it.” Careful throwing shade—“I’m Still in Love With You” is a beautiful song, but it’s overplayed, and way too overplayed to be sampled in such a straightforward way. Apparently, Guy just discovered the record, but the littlest bit of Googling should’ve revealed that it’s one of the most popular soul records of all time. As it stands, “Feel Like I Do” simply speeds up a snippet of Green’s vocals and shuffles along without any real purpose. What’s the point?
The same could be said for the whole EP, which simply feels uninspired. Nothing is immediate or necessary, and that’s a strange thing to say when talking about Disclosure, the guys who released Settle, one of the best dance albums of the decade. It's well-appointed, but mediocre, like the kind of person who gets invited to Puff’s white party: no longer a trendsetter, just rich. | 2016-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Island | June 23, 2016 | 6 | 266be0a8-5a8e-4668-8d10-684ca387a97e | Rebecca Haithcoat | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca- haithcoat/ | null |
On a collaboration between Austin’s More Eaze and Orange Milk co-founder Seth Graham, the music’s frequent rests and lacunae lend its jazz-tinged electroacoustic mesh a stony, severe quality. | On a collaboration between Austin’s More Eaze and Orange Milk co-founder Seth Graham, the music’s frequent rests and lacunae lend its jazz-tinged electroacoustic mesh a stony, severe quality. | ---__--___: The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/more-eaze-seth-graham-the-heart-pumps-kool-aid/ | The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid | There is a certain genre of image, popular on lonely, neurotic networks like Twitter and Reddit, called “liminal space.” These pictures show links between one hub of activity and another, places designed to dissolve from memory: an empty hotel hallway between bustling conference rooms, a clean road arcing through a blank suburb, an isolated gas station spilling fluorescent light onto midwinter snow. They are uncanny because they force you to focus on something meant to be ignorable; they sweep the edge into the center, upsetting the usual weight of things.
The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid, a new album by Seth Graham (co-founder of the experimentally minded Ohio label Orange Milk) and More Eaze (a.k.a. Mari Maurice, the Austin-based artist who’s recently collaborated with claire rousay and Dntel) working together as ---__--___, plays with a similar reframing. The music’s frequent rests and lacunae lend its jazz-tinged electroacoustic mesh a stony, severe quality. What’s not there holds impossible weight. This music is not so much about emptiness as it is about the point at which emptiness becomes substance—where, in an inverted transubstantiation, blood thins out into chemically dyed sugar water.
Voices like the ones that streak Kool-Aid tend to appear more often among busier sound environments. The hard, crystallizing Auto-Tune, the pitch-shifting, the distortion—these mutations usually spew from a pressure cooker of sensory overload made from hyper-compressed guitars, sawtooth synthesizers, breakbeats, and other chaos. It’s rarer for them to hover over environments as unpopulated as the ones dreamed here, to unfurl unhurriedly into expansive, drained space.
Severing these voices from their usual anxious churn exposes their fragility. The processing effects used here render the voice brittle and oblique; lyrics break off into largely unintelligible shards that only cohere at key moments. On “Sadness, infinite America ... shit,” More Eaze’s garbled syllables dance against bleats of saxophone and slashes of cello, instruments whose warm acoustic resonance amplifies the lostness of an Auto-Tuned voice set adrift. The arrangement also reveals the beauty in treating voices this way, how an artificial crack in a voice can trigger the same sympathetic response as a voice that cracks purely in the throat. The ear believes the feeling behind the quaver in each gesture; it might even believe the digitized break more.
At the album’s emotional crux, “In Memory of Simon Kingston,” an elegy for the 21-year-old musician who died in New York last November, three different voices glance off of each other. The track features the Ohio-based artist recovery girl as a guest vocalist, but it’s not always clear which voice belongs to which name, a confusion that deepens the album’s melancholic bewilderment. There is a high, concatenating chirp that flickers electric over the song’s largely acoustic base of piano, celesta, and violin; there are occasional bursts of enraged growls that sound like they’ve been shaved off a metal song and abandoned here; and there is More Eaze’s wistful, languid voice, the one that winds through much of the album as a whole. At a few points in the song, the voices converge as if holding each other in the emptiness, the friction between them softening. “I just wanted to be close to you,” More Eaze sings, her voice fracturing in its machinery but holding together just enough to preserve the language it carries.
A spoken-word sequence from the Ohio artist proxy.exe grounds the album in narrative near its midway point. With direct, unprocessed vocals set against washes of organ, “rock bottom ohio” offers a meditation on failure and resurgence, on splintering apart and then finding a way to love yourself enough to haul the fragments you can salvage into the days ahead. Even if those days are shrouded in absence so thick it suffocates, even if grief splits them open like a chasm, you pull the loose threads of mercy you can find from them. You gather yourself and go on.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Orange Milk | September 30, 2021 | 7.6 | 26700ef1-8a5c-4f6a-852e-65666ae48ee0 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The 88-year-old country icon has created a loving tribute to herself that spans generations, proving there's still vitality and relevance in her work. | The 88-year-old country icon has created a loving tribute to herself that spans generations, proving there's still vitality and relevance in her work. | Loretta Lynn: Still Woman Enough | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loretta-lynn-still-woman-enough/ | Still Woman Enough | Loretta Lynn is country music incarnate, and that’s not even a point worth arguing. Her 50th studio album, Still Woman Enough, marks her first new project since 2016’s Full Circle, which trafficked heavily in the traditional and takes a similar approach: part time-capsule, part declaration of her legacy, and a little bit of “I ain’t goin’ nowhere!” attitude. This time, she’s brought some younger friends along for the ride and declared this record a “celebration of women in country music.”
For a new album, though, the material is mostly old—some dating back nearly a century. On opening number “Coal Miner’s Daughter (Recitation),” Lynn recites the lyrics to her most famous song—the one that launched her into the country music spotlight—accompanied by a few sparse banjo strings. Her memories of her own life and career loom large throughout. The overall effect is that of a beloved, banged-up scrapbook stuffed with lyrics, song fragments, and love letters. Aided by her own kin—her daughter Patsy Lynn Russell and John Carter Cash co-produced—Lynn has created a loving tribute to herself. Still Woman Enough is a pleasant, nostalgic, occasionally brilliant collection that fits neatly into the country legend’s catalog and introduces her to younger fans who love Margo Price and Kacey Musgraves but haven’t yet found their way back to Lynn and Kitty Wells.
The songs flow like smooth Tennessee whiskey, but Lynn shines brightest on the oldies. She charms on a sweet, simple rendition of the sprightly hymn-inspired classic “Keep on the Sunny Side,” a song first immortalized by the Carter Family in 1928 and then reintroduced to a more contemporary audience via the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?. “Honky Tonk Girl” sees her revisiting her very first single (then titled “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl”); in 1960, the song ushered in phase one of Lynn’s success and was a hard-earned hit. Before it took off, she and her husband had spent countless hours driving to country radio stations across the U.S. to beg them to play the record. This hopeful, madcap DIY promotion campaign has become an integral piece of Loretta Lynn lore, and the song itself holds up just fine.
It’s hard to improve on a classic, and this latest version of “Honky Tonk Girl” dials down the original’s saucy swagger for a more knowing, genial tone; it cleans up the barroom pathos in favor of a jauntier approach, and, expectedly, adds improved audio quality. That honky tonk girl has grown up and seen some things along the way. Lynn’s deep, lived-in familiarity with her old songs gives her an incredible edge and makes even her less predictable choices feel less risky. Her take on the traditional folk song “I Don’t Feel At Home Anymore” is a joy despite its downtrodden lyrics, and the gently rollicking “Old Kentucky Home” is pure ear candy; meanwhile, her cover of Hank Williams’ country gospel ode “I Saw the Light” is downright happy. She even puts a little swing on it in contrast to Williams’ piously po-faced original.
While her trademark nasal twang has mellowed out a bit over the decades, updated mainstays like this one illustrate the staying power of her once-in-several-generations voice and show what can happen when technology finally catches up to an artist’s vision. Still Woman Enough is a study in sunny, lush arrangements and positively drips with strings—cello, steel guitar, acoustic guitar, upright bass, fiddle, banjo, and mandolin, the latter of which makes a winsome appearance on the saccharine 1968 ballad “My Love.” It’s a marked contrast to 1971’s “I Wanna Be Free,” which revives the feisty spirit that’s remained a defining feature of her best work; ballads are nice, but anyone can write a love song.
Only Loretta Lynn could’ve written tunes that once felt as transgressive as “One’s On the Way,” which now deftly chronicles the drudgery and frustration of working-class motherhood (and how the women’s liberation movement left those women behind), with help from a clear-voiced Margo Price; or “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” a kicky warning to those who dare cast a wandering eye upon her husband. The latter may as well be seen as Lynn’s answer to “Jolene,” Dolly Parton’s iconic plea to a flame-haired interloper; where Parton begged for mercy, a flinty-edged Lynn happily promised to send any comers straight to fist city—and the addition of outlaw country legend Tanya Tucker on this remake only ups the stakes for those who’d dare disturb that wedded bliss. A new tune, “Still Woman Enough,” featuring Carrie Underwood and Reba McEntire, follows in those rebellious footsteps, with its unabashed nods to aging, sexuality, and hardship; one gets the impression that Lynn may be almost 90 years old, but she’d still pick a switch and hand out a whooping if need be.
It makes sense for her to release an album like this now: a partial retrospective that feels safe and familiar but adds youthful sparkle from a new generation that Lynn can comfortably say she’s inspired. There’s a clear throughline from Lynn to Tucker and McEntire, to Price and Underwood—they’re very different women from different eras, but without Lynn to blaze that trail with honesty and grit in the first place, their paths would’ve been that much thornier. And if Lynn hadn’t weathered all those slings and arrows decades before, who’s to say today’s feminist country artists would’ve found their way at all.
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. | 2021-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Legacy | March 22, 2021 | 7.5 | 267103ec-9b0a-412f-b273-c545f19cee87 | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | |
On an album blending downtempo beats and ambient textures, many of the strongest moments skew toward the Canadian producer’s softer side, with slight arrangements that meditate on a single mood. | On an album blending downtempo beats and ambient textures, many of the strongest moments skew toward the Canadian producer’s softer side, with slight arrangements that meditate on a single mood. | Khotin: Finds You Well | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/khotin-finds-you-well/ | Finds You Well | For Dylan Khotin-Foote, house music has long been a vehicle for careful studies of ambient tone and texture. On his 2014 debut album, Hello World, the Canadian producer used hardware synths and drum machines to craft muted compositions that traded the bleary-eyed psychedelia of the Orb and the KLF for a playful impressionism with little interest in historical continuity. The album became a touchstone for a generation of lo-fi house producers who slathered their recordings with reverb and tape hiss. Unlike many of his peers, Khotin mostly abandoned the kick drum, honing his focus on vivid soundscapes with albums like New Tab and Beautiful You. Finds You Well, his first album under the alias in two years, pairs his skill as an ambient musician with a newfound interest in spacious downtempo production, expanding the scope of the project without compromising what made his earlier work so special.
Like his early experiments with house music, Khotin’s use of warped and pitch-shifted breakbeats serves mostly to complement his foundation in ambient composition. Tracks like “Ivory Tower” and “Heavyball” feature breezy melodies and coarse drums loops in equal parts, building intricate collages that feel intentional in new ways. With its dial-tone arpeggios and warbling tape-deck stutter, “WEM Lagoon Jump” invites comparisons to ’90s IDM icons Boards of Canada, finding a soothing equanimity in the rolling current of its effect-ridden snares. Beyond their immediate rhythmic similarities, the two acts share an affinity for wistful samples and field recordings; “Groove 32” explores the percussive potential of short vocal clips doused in radio static, while “Outside in the Light” turns distant voicemails from family members into something warm and dreamlike.
As much as the album benefits from a renewed interest in rhythm, many of its strongest moments skew toward the softer side of the producer’s palette, with slight arrangements that meditate on a single mood. On “Lucky Egg,” a steady loop of pitched toms and synth pads blooms into a poignant snapshot of a snowy landscape, as a single crystalline keyboard floats like lens flare across its surface. The shortest track on the album, as well as one of its sparsest, it sets the tone for a stretch of delicate compositions that wring heartbreak from the upright piano. “Your Favorite Building” calls to mind the rosy miniatures of Blithe Field and Ricky Eat Acid at their most affecting; like these contemporaries, Khotin seems content to set a few well-placed elements in motion, stepping back to watch their smoldering glow from a distance instead of fidgeting with any single detail up close.
In its final moments, the album recedes even further into heartfelt solitude. With little more than a few skeletal piano chords struck at distant intervals, “Shopping List” finds a sublime beauty in the near-silent space between tones, sculpting excess reverb into a wintery jetstream that might otherwise be categorized as background noise. Less about the sound itself than the strategic use of its absence, it’s a moment that might go unnoticed on another record, but one that feels like a transformative reset in Khotin’s hands. What might sound ordinary in isolation can feel transcendent with the right frame of reference, and as Finds You Well shows, sometimes it’s the smallest details that can reshape your entire perspective. | 2020-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | September 26, 2020 | 7.2 | 2673326f-8e16-4b7a-a4a3-d430eb81d4f6 | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
Willow’s fourth solo album continues to unpack her lifelong struggles with the extremes of human emotion, using a trove of pop-rock stylings from nu-metal to pop-punk to somewhat mixed effect. | Willow’s fourth solo album continues to unpack her lifelong struggles with the extremes of human emotion, using a trove of pop-rock stylings from nu-metal to pop-punk to somewhat mixed effect. | Willow: lately I feel EVERYTHING | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/willow-lately-i-feel-everything/ | lately I feel EVERYTHING | Willow Smith wants to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study physics. She wants to learn about the “beautiful mystery” of the unseeable, she says. But all that’s apparently five years away. In the meantime, she’s written an unofficial honors thesis on a different imperceptible force: anxiety, and the sentiments that come with it. Just before the pandemic lockdown last year, she and her creative collaborator (and alleged beau) Tyler Cole rented space at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where they locked themselves in a box for 24 hours to perform the “eight stages of anxiety.” Songs from the duo’s recent album, fittingly titled The Anxiety, played on loop. This ambitious project left unanswered questions: She and Cole scribbled “Why Are We Here?” and “What Inspires You?” onto MOCA’s walls, without an apparent reply. Willow’s fourth solo album continues to unpack her lifelong struggles with the extremes of human emotion, using a trove of pop-rock stylings from nu-metal to pop-punk to express joy and fear, pride, and paranoia. Or as the record’s title puts it, lately I feel EVERYTHING.
Willow’s pivot to snot-nosed power chords and down-tuned riffs might raise eyebrows after a three-album run of smooth R&B twinged with folksy mysticism. But her fascination with the harsher sounds of rock feels like a natural progression, one that marries her family’s musical history with her self-professed love for the genre. Willow grew up watching her mother, Jada Pinkett Smith, perform as a rare nu-metal frontwoman with her band Wicked Wisdom. She easily rattles off her musical inspirations—My Chemical Romance, Paramore, Fefe Dobson—and, perhaps because of her mother’s musical past, feels comfortable with the finer points of hard rock subgenres: She covered Wicked Wisdom for the Red Table for this past Mother’s Day, but in interviews, she’s careful to distinguish that sound from the more “youthful” bent of Zumiez rock.
On lately I feel EVERYTHING, she and her co-producer Cole expand on their capabilities as rock composers and musicians. Both are passionate guitarists, something they hinted at with bluesy riffs on previous albums. But from the opening measures of “Transparent Soul,” the guitar is paramount—it’s filtered and faded on the pummeling intro of “Gaslight,” swirling and reverberated on “naïve,” slow-burning and brassy on “Come Home” and “¡BREAKOUT!” It’s also a markedly louder backdrop for her vocals—on songs like “Gaslight” and “Lipstick,” she belts with impressive control, shouting tonelessly one moment and gliding across several notes in one syllable the next. The marriage of disparate rock subgenres works because her instrumentation shares a common early 2000s perspective: the echoing guitars on “XTRA” recall the disaffected pop-rock of Pink’s Missundaztood or early Kelly Clarkson. And in a nod to the legacy of the ribald ringleaders of Warped Tour’s past, she throws in “Fuck You,” a predictably explicit 30-second interlude, as if to show that she knows evoking this particular era of rock requires a flippant sense of humor.
Where previous albums were often weighed down by Willow’s heady spiritual preoccupations and heavy-handed musical idolatry, lately I feel EVERYTHING succeeds when it examines human feelings. Willow writes skillfully about the experience of anxiety: The desire to push away loved ones on “don’t SAVE ME,” the painful self-awareness of “naïve,” and the need for connection paired with fear of codependency on “Come Home” all ring painfully true and impressively nuanced. She has a knack for knowing when her words might be stronger on someone else’s tongue, too—on “Grow,” one of several Travis Barker collaborations that feel at home on the Fueled by Ramen roster, she recruits sneer queen Avril Lavigne, her nasally alto coming in like a warm, fingerless-gloved hug from pop-punk’s past. Like many of the genre’s biggest hits, it’s so saturated with hooks that it succeeds in spite of its slightly facile writing; more importantly, at just over two minutes, it lays everything on the table and gets out before the melodies get old.
Still, there’s a hollowness at the core of her pop-punk explorations. Perhaps it’s harder to relate to her struggles with sycophants and stupendous fame on “Transparent Soul” than, say, the pains of unrequited love or the frustrations of adolescence. Her messages about the power of self-love on songs like “Gaslight” feel too enthusiastically optimistic, like a motivational speaker signed to Hopeless Records. And, as with many of the pop-punk revivalists who’ve been taken under Barker’s wing, her songs with him sound a bit prefab, as if Barker was simply flipping between presets on the Blink-182 machine. Though he likely means well, Barker’s influence on current mainstream pop-punk has overwhelmingly flattened the genre, reducing it to his undoubtedly impressive drum solos and a few shiny power chords. Willow succeeds where Barker’s other prodigies—Jxdn, Machine Gun Kelly, Yungblud—falter because she, similar to Olivia Rodrigo, uses pop-punk as a spice, rather than her album’s main ingredient.
Willow also shares her contemporaries’ lack of awareness about what’s happening elsewhere in pop-punk, claiming that she wants to bring back the sounds of her youth without acknowledging that, in plenty of local scenes, they never went away. In multiple interviews, she’s talked about the importance of being a rare Black woman in rock: “[Dobson, Pinkett Smith, and Alexis Brown of Straight Line Stitch] were the only three Black rock singers that I knew of, so really I just wanted to make this album as an ode to them,” she told SPIN. Willow’s foray into pop-punk undoubtedly raises the profile of Black female vocalists, who have been shut out of a scene with a history of racism and sexism. But her enthusiasm also neglects the work of plenty of pop-punk vocalists who are women of color, like those of Pinkshift and Meet Me @ the Altar, who’ve carved their lanes without the help of TikTok stardom or famous parents. It’s just simpler for stars like Willow, Lil Huddy, and The Kid Laroi to “revive” pop-punk if they ignore the grassroots groups who’ve kept it alive since its LiveJournal days.
And so lately I feel EVERYTHING ends up stuck between its intent and its effect. She uses the genre to work through her struggles with mental illness, but her songs still sound unwaveringly optimistic, as if she knows her every move is still under a microscope. Her ambitions are bold, but the album has a sense of polished remove that prevents it from scaling real emotional heights. Willow shines in her darker, introspective songs, when wistfulness tinges her voice and the guitars are washed in melancholy. She might not be trapped in a literal box, as she was at MOCA last year. But metaphorically it’s still there; she still seems too worried about self-presentation to excavate those anxious questions she scrawled on the museum walls.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Universal | July 21, 2021 | 6.6 | 267f50d1-ff9b-4d88-b740-a4da305f6076 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Building on the success of their early singles and EP, the UK's Bloc Party draw from the darker end of their homeland's 1980s indie pop canon to create a powerful debut LP. The silly bandname may bely their sober and resolute sound, but it's of little consequence in the shadow of this record's charismatic sophistication and outstanding songwriting that emphasizes substance-over-style, contrasting with their peers in Interpol and Franz Ferdinand. | Building on the success of their early singles and EP, the UK's Bloc Party draw from the darker end of their homeland's 1980s indie pop canon to create a powerful debut LP. The silly bandname may bely their sober and resolute sound, but it's of little consequence in the shadow of this record's charismatic sophistication and outstanding songwriting that emphasizes substance-over-style, contrasting with their peers in Interpol and Franz Ferdinand. | Bloc Party: Silent Alarm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1130-silent-alarm/ | Silent Alarm | The English live on an island, have national radio, and they had the Smiths and the Stone Roses. As a result, they're less embarrassed than Americans to dream of indie guitar bands commanding decent audiences. That's part of what Bloc Party frontman Kele Okerere seems to have in mind when he describes this album as "Technicolor." He means it has big sound, big hooks, energetic performances, ambition-- all the things that make rock bands sound skilled and confident. He means no messing around, no interludes or experiments. He means the kind of guitar record where every song wants to be as tight as the singles; the kind that wants to be worth every penny any lawn-mowing pre-teen might spend on it. Because according to him, nobody makes that kind of record anymore.
That isn't true-- and the last thing anyone wants is for U2 to try harder-- but he has a point; it's no accident that there are people who think Radiohead haven't really delivered since The Bends. Put it like that, and what Bloc Party actually sound like drops pretty low on the list of things you need to know about Silent Alarm. What perhaps matters most is that they're trying to make one of those clean, consistent, ambitious Popular Guitar Rock albums-- and depending on how much stock you put in that kind of thing, they've done a great job of it. This is a solid, intelligent album that a lot of people will love-- one that'll slot onto indie-crossover CD racks right beside the debuts from Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, and the Futureheads.
Lead single "Banquet" is wonderfully tight and energetic-- the same kind of spiffy half-dancing rock as Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" or Duran Duran's "Planet Earth". That's easy to pull off when you've got a drummer this good, and a bassist that locks in with him so neatly, whether it's for rock charge or disco hustle. That, in fact, has been Bloc Party's main selling point, apart from the whole Remarkably Competent thing: When the rhythm section stretches its limbs, they leap a good distance away from the straight-ahead eighth-note riffing of the others in this game. Filter in their timely post-punk moves, Bunnymen gestures, and pop ambitions, and you start to feel like this is what it might have been like to listen to the Police or XTC in the early 80s; the sound of a straight-up rock band just a shade more sophisticated, and a little more interested in rhythm, than most of their peers.
And of course the opener, "Like Eating Glass", is even grander and snappier than "Banquet", as if to promise from the start that these guys take your purchase seriously. The songwriting is simple in style (forward rhythm, tidy hooks, guitars) but smart in detail-- all stops and starts, bridges and breakdowns, firework flourishes and tasteful studio tweaks. Even more striking are the precision and sheer good taste of the performances: It's not so easy to show off within the confines of songs this focused, but these guys seem to manage just fine.
So you get all the usual scrubbed-up gifts: the slower song, the slower song that turns into a faster one, the one with the studio effects, the one with the handclaps. A lot of this material is surprisingly scripted, as if someone spent whole nights in the practice space trying to get a two-bar guitar transition to work Just So. Okerere has a voice that's weirdly similar to the singer from the long-forgotten Adorable, with whom Bloc Party share a hell of a lot more than an appreciation for the Bunnymen: It's a vaguely-strangled back-of-throat thing that lets him moan and shout with refreshing gusto when the band gets going. (Typically ambitious topics of moaning: other people, culture war, girls and society and stuff.) The voice weakens a bit when he needs to croon, but crooning isn't really the point here. Bloc Party can be pretty, even sappy, but they're never looking to be atmospheric; they can rock, but they're never looking to whip up dark drama. This album charges happily down the center-- it shakes its hips now and then, and it whispers here and there, but it always seems to come back to tight and bouncy.
People will love this record. And so, inevitably, the people who don't love it will start complaining. And when they complain, they'll point out that this is just a regular-old rock album, full of all the current stylish rock-album tricks. And they'll be absolutely right; at worst, Bloc Party are like one of those people who are so well-groomed that it's hard to remember exactly what they look like. But really, a complaint like that misses something: Being a good ol' unchallenging rock band is this outfit's whole point-- and their biggest strength. | 2005-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2005-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | V2 / Wichita / Vice | February 14, 2005 | 8.9 | 2686c926-a745-4e85-a5fe-625739b3eac9 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
The sixth album from Loke Rahbek’s experimental industrial project is his most cohesive to date, dissecting pop for parts and refiguring melodic elements into something truly other. | The sixth album from Loke Rahbek’s experimental industrial project is his most cohesive to date, dissecting pop for parts and refiguring melodic elements into something truly other. | Croatian Amor: Isa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/croatian-amor-isa/ | Isa | Loke Rahbek’s multitudes have long been multiplying. A decade ago, the Danish producer was singing in a black metal band called Sexdrome when he named his brutal noise label, Posh Isolation, after a 1998 lyric of the Glaswegian twee-pop band Belle and Sebastian: “Anything’s better than posh isolation.” His oeuvre has ranged from the absurdist power electronics/performance art of Damien Dubrovnik to faithful new wave in Lust for Youth. Guiding all of Rahbek’s disparate work is an inquiry into what might constitute the underground music of today. His ambient electronic project Croatian Amor is its gentlest answer.
Isa, named after the Muslim Arabic word for Jesus, is his most cohesive project to date. His self-described “bubblegum industrial” has only traces of sugar left, but he still lets in plenty of light and air. It’s an understated electronic collage that seems as spiritually akin to the gothic electronics of Arca as the terror of Throbbing Gristle, but Rahbek also seems fascinated by pop—with dissecting pop for parts and refiguring melodic elements into something truly other. In 2016, Rahbek said he had listened to Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak for the first time on a plane while the aircraft broke down and made an emergency landing. Isa sounds like that, too: pop actively deconstructing, adding a sleek AutoTune and rattle to its nonlinear shape.
The album feels more like a series of waves than a collection of songs. It crests on relative bangers such as the heart-tugging “Point Reflex Blue” and a minimal club track, “Dark Cut,” both coming into circuitous but muscular rhythms. Rahbek’s beats seem to go forward and backward at the same time, as if the air is hissing out of a balloon. Though Isa busily accrues new ideas at every turn, it is slow and palliative, and sometimes it is hard to discern whether the calm is serene or disquieting or just blank. Extremities are presented with concrete language, like a guttural scream or a robotic refrain of “all angels meet again”—invoking an afterlife and necessarily implying death.
When vocals appear—from the likes of Danish synthesis-philosopher Soho Rezanejad and HTRK’s Jonnine Standish—they are both pretty and unsettled. Typically spoken through robotic augmentation, the lyric-monologues bring an existential edge to this feather-light music, especially the alien-like voices of automation that recur. “Enhance photo to reveal a picture of Bird caught mid-flight,” one goes, “enhance again, the bird has a human face screaming.” There seem to be oblique critiques laced throughout. “Brutality makes us feel safe […] The gentle appearance makes us feel safe,” a voice slowly intones on “In Alarm Light,” a clear comment on the illusion of safety. By the final track, “In World Cell,” as the entire album seems to collapse onto itself, Isa ends with a hope that shakes you, a childlike voice proclaiming through static, “I believe that things still can be changed.”
Still, Isa is never more ominous than on its two interstitials, “Eden 1.1” and “Eden 1.2,” featuring Rahbek’s previous collaborators and vanguard noisemakers, Puce Mary and Yves Tumor. Amid slashes of industrial noise and chilling silences, the two artists take turns offering similar surreal speeches about gazing up at a black airplane, a pitch-black sky, vomit, and a bird of paradise—sinister appeals to the unknown, to the unavoidable end times. These interstitials give Isa a dimensionality that seems to break a fourth wall of the record.
As a teenager, Rahbek was a painter, but he gave it up in favor of noise music after being disillusioned by what galleries did to art. Maybe it is ironic that his poised new music evokes nothing more than the wide-open walls of a gallery space. Maybe it is proof that creativity is a circle—and that the past, when we least expect it, can emerge new, telling us about the future. | 2019-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Posh Isolation | January 31, 2019 | 7.6 | 26884987-cb9e-4f57-8d0a-191adde2df8c | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Only a band as inscrutable as Oneida would attempt a 3xCD in 2009; only a band brimming with this many ideas could pull it off. | Only a band as inscrutable as Oneida would attempt a 3xCD in 2009; only a band brimming with this many ideas could pull it off. | Oneida: Rated O | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13215-rated-o/ | Rated O | Even three decades beyond the punk era, there's still a lingering urge to scoff at the supposed bloat and indulgence of the double album. Concision is often held as a virtue for many modern indie bands, and, let's face it, there are scant few double albums in rock that really have the ideas and vision to sustain their runtime. Save for prolific geniuses like Frank Zappa or Prince, the even-rarer triple album is more common for weighty anthologies, or documenting the live shows of acts with drooling fan bases, from the Grateful Dead to Pearl Jam. Sure, the Clash brought us a rare triple triple album of original material at the peak of their critical capital, but even that was reviled in certain circles. So... why on earth would any band release a triple album now?
Maybe you've never met Oneida. When so inclined, they'll fill a whole side of vinyl with one long track, one whole CD's running time with two or three-- and if you haven't seen them on the festival circuit lately, it's because they went ahead and started their own. The reason they can do this (aside from keeping their dayjobs) is that their fans-- being open-minded enough to absorb the many permutations of repetitive, inexhaustible rhythms, and stinging vintage organ and guitar over 10 years-- eat it right up. Those fans won't be surprised by the behemoth Rated O-- some have been waiting for it ever since it was planned and then scrapped before 2006's Happy New Year.
Before putting the idea of a 3xCD set aside, Drummer Kid Millions told an interviewer the project was "the stone tablets of Onieda." Given how hard it is to nail the band down to one sound, figuring out what those tablets could be remained a mystery. The good news: Between beat-heavy studio workouts, some of their loosest instrumental jams, and their most liberal use of "O"-related puns in song titles, Oneida were considerate enough to build it all around lean, no-frills rock on par with the best of their earlier work. Rated O contains the band's wildest experiments while still covering most of their previous sonic tentpoles.
The first disc introduces the band as beat-hungry, dub-obsessed studio scientists, where at least 10 minutes go by before any sound resembling a guitar is discernible. While opener "Brownout in Lagos" is ostensibly inspired by dancehall, its rubbery and distorted beat sounds only remotely like that genre or any of Oneida's previous work. It features bona-fide toasting from Dad-Ali Ziai, but the guest is another texture in a very strange soup of radar blips, tin cans, and faraway explosions. "What's Up, Jackal?" begins with echoing drums and a hiccupping Eastern tone, before leading into muffled screaming and a dizzy studio collage that sounds like the aural equivalent of a strobe light, with that hiccup being the only constant. The first minute of 10 on "10:30 at the Oasis" has a similar fakeout before emerging into a more delirious and layered version of the sleek jams that Trans Am were later known for (which makes sense, as Trans Am's Phil Manley/Double Rainbow contributes here, alongside former Onieda axeman Papa Crazee). This first disc is new for band, fans, and unacquainted listeners alike, and there aren't a whole lot of hooks to guide anyone. As with much of Oneida's work, it starts and ends on the beat, leading listeners through percussive whirlwinds of psychedelic sound.
The middle disc is closer to the band's live sound with few overdubs, and is an exemplary document of the hell the band can raise as an honest-to-god rock outfit. "The River" starts from Oneida's familiar monotone patter before uniting on a simple but massive-sounding theme, showing more melodic certainty and fearless classic-rock worship than they have in a while. Proto-metal riffs power spacey but insistent workouts like "I Will Haunt You" and "Ghost in the Room", while more exotic rhythms push "The Life You Preferred"; these tracks sprint and shimmy and drone without ever losing momentum. As the sluggish chant of "Luxury Travel" slows to a halt, the most stretched-out part of the three-disc set begins with disc C: "O" is an anchorless sitar-laden haze until minute five, when the rhythm builds and the guitars coagulate around brief, hypnotic tones. "End of Time" is a formless, nervous drone (smoke break!) that leads into the 20-minute "Folk Wisdom". Make no mistake: The band is jamming.
But Oneida's version of jamming tends to be a more pulsing, atmospheric, moody affair than the scale-fingering aimlessness the word probably calls to mind, and the tracks on the third disc are no exception. They don't have the same layers or utilize the studio in quite the same way as last year's instrumental Preteen Weaponry did, but marathon sessions like "Folk Wisdom" maintain their anxious, yearning edge while revealing the intuition and chemistry of the band through its many subtle shifts and turns. The last section of Rated O may feel like work to some, but at this point in the record (and their careers), it also feels earned.
While it's not quite three discs of all killer and no filler-- the plodding anguish of "The Human Factor" is difficult enough the first time through-- Rated O could stand easily as three discrete records, with each of them meriting their own release. Putting them all together is what makes it a statement: In an era when easy availability of music makes attention spans dwindle, it's an audacious listen the first time around, not to mention the repeated listens that Oneida records often reward. And as music gets increasingly reduced to a "niche interest" (shudder) and focuses more on the novelty of the physical package, the triple-gatefold Rated O is undoubtedly a beautiful package.
More than anything, Rated O is part and parcel of the band's long-standing and always-increasing ambition--don't forget this massive slab is part of a triptych of albums, with the third installment yet to come. Few bands push themselves this far from their comfort zone, fewer still this late in their career-- and that slice of the pie chart gets even smaller when considering what little attention the band has received, even in indie circles, while they've continued to innovate and sweat. Maybe you've got some other Brooklyn band pegged as your creative north star-- and that's cool, this year has some contenders-- but Oneida are the only band running that I could tell a listener with a straight face, yes, it's worth three discs, and it's worth your time. | 2009-07-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-07-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar / Brah | July 16, 2009 | 8.4 | 268a5688-1f55-48e4-95f0-a4bad5f26185 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
James Murphy offers his second multi-track album as LCD Soundsystem, and it's as close to a perfect hybrid of dance and rock music's values as you're likely to ever hear. | James Murphy offers his second multi-track album as LCD Soundsystem, and it's as close to a perfect hybrid of dance and rock music's values as you're likely to ever hear. | LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10017-sound-of-silver/ | Sound of Silver | James Murphy started releasing dance music some time between "B.O.B." and "Get Ur Freak On". It was a golden age for modern pop, a period during which a lot of personal aesthetics crumbled. Indie wasn't a dirty word, but it was a meaningless one. Pop, though, wasn't just more meaningless, it was more everything. And for the first time in a long while, pop also had its evangelicals; people who could argue convincingly in its favor, and who knew how to contextualize it interestingly. That turnover period was an exciting time; the ideological tension, the feeling that something was at stake, the exuberance of redrawing your bounds. The habitual mixtape maker in your life probably remembers it well.
Despite eventually remixing Britney Spears and N.E.R.D., Murphy never had a hands-on relationship with pop. Nonetheless, his transition out of punk and into dance music ran concurrent with this modest revolution, and it's pretty much impossible to separate his epiphanies from ours. That early LCD tracks like "Losing My Edge" used to feature in playlists alongside, say, "Work It" or "...Baby One More Time" only reinforces the link. So it's fitting that the finest work of Murphy's career is an album that sits squarely at the intersection of all those careening ideologies. Sound of Silver, his second as LCD Soundsystem, is as close to a perfect hybrid of dance and rock music's values as you're likely to ever hear.
These days, there isn't as much to talk about. It feels like less is up for grabs, as if music fans are gripped by a general fatigue. I'm not sure if you rapidly skim the same articles as I do, but apparently 72% of the internet is now made up of free mp3s, while another 14% is accompanying blurbs. Sometimes, I don't know how you guys do it. We're besieged and stupefied enough by downloads and mixes and remixes and mashups and collections of songs masquerading as albums that an album that feels like an album strikes me as positively ideal right now. Thankfully, Murphy-- a self-confessed 1970s rock nerd who grew up in the heyday of art-rock and albums as Statements-- unapologetically sets out to make dance records that breathe like proper albums.
In that respect, Sound of Silver isn't far removed from LCD Soundsystem's eponymous 2005 debut, which ultimately tried to do the same thing but fell slightly short. While Sound of Silver makes no bones about Murphy's well-known appreciation of Brian Eno's pop vocal affectations ("Get Innocuous", "Sound of Silver"), the Velvet Underground ("New York I Love You"), or new-wave ("Watch the Tapes"), it never feels like a paste job, but rather just the well-considered work of someone connecting the dots between the past and the present.
There's not a single weak track here, and many more already feel classic. "Sound of Silver" is a seven-minute suite that morphs from a rumbling, ice-cold, no-wave groove into a liquefied jumble of kalimbas, pianos, and fizzy synths. "All My Friends" begins with a piano riff that sounds not unlike a speeding train (or, at least, Steve Reich's approximation of one) and rolls downhill into fireworks. And then there's the song that precedes it, and with which it combines to form the record's center. A sleek, delicate, and effortlessly melodic sliver of electro, "Someone Great" is my favorite song of the year so far, and constitutes new ground for Murphy both in terms of prettiness and poignancy. It's about loss, but the lyric remains tantalizingly ambiguous. As with most great songs, its best lines buzz around the edges of the story: "The worst is all the lovely weather/ I'm stunned it's not raining/ The coffee isn't even bitter/ Because, what's the difference."
Murphy used to court spontaneity by refusing to pre-write any of his lyrics before going into the vocal booth, claiming in interviews that they were all ad-libbed. It's a strategy he's evidently abandoned on Sound of Silver, and the record is much better for it. On "All My Friends", for instance, he tackles a favorite subject (getting older) from the wrong end of an all-nighter: "You spend the first five years trying to get with the plan/ And the next five years trying to be with your friends again." On "North American Scum", he tackles continental divide with straight deadpan: "Well I don't know, I don't know where to begin/ we are North American/ And for those of you who still think we're from England / we're like... 'No.'"
When it's all said and done, Murphy's real legacy to dance music will be his production sense. He's an analog obsessive with a general aversion to software, and Sound of Silver reflects that. Far removed from the compressed, trebly, and overmastered paradigm that's gripped electronic music in the last decade, Sound of Silver sounds deep, spacious, and full-blooded. (Like, um, an old rock record.) It's an absolute joy to listen to, for every possible reason, not the least of which is because, these days, those epiphanies feel like they're coming fewer and farther between. | 2007-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2007-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | EMI / DFA | March 20, 2007 | 9.2 | 268a88ca-ee62-4950-a6dd-b02ecd67fbbc | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
Despite guest spots from the likes of Jay-Z, André 3000, and Dr. Dre, the victory lap crowning Rick Ross' four-year rise to dominance still feels depressingly earthbound. | Despite guest spots from the likes of Jay-Z, André 3000, and Dr. Dre, the victory lap crowning Rick Ross' four-year rise to dominance still feels depressingly earthbound. | Rick Ross: God Forgives, I Don't | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16997-god-forgives-i-dont/ | God Forgives, I Don't | God Forgives, I Don't doesn't feel good enough, or big enough, to be what it is: The victory lap crowning Rick Ross' four-year rise to dominance, beginning with 2009's Deeper Than Rap. Part of what made Ross' Big Leap possible, now that it's over, was the fact that he was allowed to do it on his own bizarre terms: Deeper Than Rap's street single, "Mafia Music", swatted 50 Cent, unprovoked, at the exact moment that Ross' own reputation was most fragile. It had no chorus, just four minutes of Ross huffing about Bob Marley, Whitney Houston, and how the dope in his trunk made the car "smell like blue cheese." The album itself was overstuffed for a summer-radio takeover that Ross was in no position to reasonably expect. Teflon Don, just one year later, shortened its running time to an equally absurd 11 songs, as if Ross felt the next logical move was to remind rap fans of Illmatic. Both succeeded because they were fired by the flames of Ross' outrageous self-belief. He built a self-contained, no-reality-allowed planet, and spending time there was good for the soul.
God Forgives, I Don’t, by comparison, feels depressingly earthbound. The entire rap industry now worships Ross: At last May's Maybach Music Group conference, Lyor Cohen, Diddy, Swizz Beatz, and others showed up to shower ridiculous accolades on Ross (Diddy: "I think Rick Ross will go down in history as one of the great record men." Lyor: "Having a conversation with Ross is like having a conversation with Nas or Hova." Swizz Beatz: "Rick is also a painter, an artist; he understands Basquiat"). He is no longer the former punchline defying gravity: He is the center of gravity, and God Forgives is the first project of his to bend under the weight of rap-industry expectation.
In fact, L.A.Reid himself shows up on "Maybach Music IV", muttering about how "it takes a boss to recognize a boss." Reid's presence is unforgivable, not even by God: It's like having your party crashed by your high school principal. The moment may be more viscerally unappealing than picturing Ross taking advantage of the $24,000 toilet he brags about on "Hold Me Back". The only other guest on "Maybach Music IV", the latest installment of a series that has featured guest appearances by Jay-Z, Kanye West, T.I., and Erykah Badu, is... Ne-Yo, i.e., The Guy Who Sings On Your Def Jam Album When You No Longer Have Any Control Over Your Own Commercial Destiny. Even the beat is a tired jazz-fusion retread of "Maybach Music III".
God Forgives is an unsteady vehicle like that, the kind of misfortune-plagued summer blockbuster with visible seams: All that money invested, and they didn't fix that one shot where the spaceship looks like a sticker? How did a song called "Diced Pineapples" end up on the album still called "Diced Pineapples", and why did they let Wale kick it off telling a woman he intends to figure out how deep her birth canal is? When Ross shows up on "Hold Me Back", he is painfully, jarringly out of time with the track, panting after the beat like a winded fat uncle trying, and failing, to tag his 10-year-old nephew "it." You can almost see him bent over, his hands resting on his knees, while the downbeat speeds away from him.
The "biggest" moments, like "Maybach Music IV", are the most leaden: "3 Kings" is the big-event track, with verses from Dr. Dre and Jay-Z. All three verses can be summed up in a single line. For Dre, it is "YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO THIS BEAT THROUGH MY HEADPHONES!" For Jay, it is "Niggas couldn't walk in my daughters' socks/ Banksy, bitches, Basquiats." For Ross, it is the clanging, charmless "Come and suck a dick for a millionaire!" All three bring their C game, and the result is lethal. The beat bears the name of Jake One, a producer who usually graces his music with analog warmth, but Dre's surgical-gloves mixing vacuums out every trace of humanity. Deep into his Detox oblivion, Dre's production has come to sound the way George Lucas' Star Wars prequels look-- sterilized, molded-plastic, and soulless.
There is still some great music on God Forgives, but it is somewhat overshadowed by these higher-profile misfires. "Sixteen" brings André 3000 into Ross' orbit, and Three Stacks obliges, like he does every few years, with a casually mind-melting verse. The Cool- and Dre-produced "Ashamed" is built on a great Wilson Pickett sample; "Ashamed" is a solid example of Ross' plush luxury rap done well. "Ten Jesus Pieces", the rare "reflective Bawse" moment, finds Ross barking about pulling prayers from his "archive" (even the guy's prayers are stored somewhere expensive-sounding) over Jeffrey Osborne's lovestruck "Baby". "911" sounds like it was recorded during the same time as the far-superior material on last winter's Rich Forever, and is therefore excellent. The project is too big to completely fail, and it doesn't. But Planet Boss just became a much less fun place to visit. | 2012-07-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-07-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | July 30, 2012 | 6.8 | 268f1573-c094-4cfe-9c61-c3229167b5b4 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The Florida teenager Chester Watson is a rapper in the mold of Earl Sweatshirt or MF DOOM. His latest cassette-only release works a similar mood: It's all cracked psychedelia, off-kilter weirdness, and a dedication to a lifestyle with time built in for Saturday morning cartoons, cereal, and pontificating about the world through blunt smoke. | The Florida teenager Chester Watson is a rapper in the mold of Earl Sweatshirt or MF DOOM. His latest cassette-only release works a similar mood: It's all cracked psychedelia, off-kilter weirdness, and a dedication to a lifestyle with time built in for Saturday morning cartoons, cereal, and pontificating about the world through blunt smoke. | Chester Watson: Past Cloaks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21528-past-cloaks/ | Past Cloaks | Underground rap suffered a bad patch for awhile there in the mid-'00s. It was hard to have fun listening to music that didn’t even sound like it was remotely fun to make, and so much of it felt like attending a lecture that you immediately knew you didn’t want to be at. Besides, it’s an insular world, built on obsessive minutiae and indecipherable jokes, and is usually defined by a focus on lyrics over song structure. If you have ever cared about underground rap, you have not only thrown the word "lyricism" around with abandon, you’ve also debated what it really means for 27 years of your life, even if you are only 16. It’s a commitment so heavy that it transcends space and time.
In recent years, though, that’s changed. Thank Earl Sweatshirt. Or thank Kendrick Lamar. Or the new generation of ears trained on MF DOOM's every move. Let’s thank Madlib, too, while we’re at it. The perma-stoned Oxnard producer has been tirelessly working with obscure samples for years, pushing them away from their source material so they take on strange new lives. He’s been a guiding light for a whole new wave of rappers and producers, directly and indirectly helping them shake off the arbitrary rules of a genre that thrives on breaking them.
Enter Chester Watson, a Florida teenager who sits so comfortably and skillfully amongst his influences that he already feels like their peer. His latest release, Past Cloaks, from a new label called POW Records—a project of Pitchfork contributor Jeff Weiss—is an actual cassette, which means that the more you play it, the more it’ll degrade, before eventually breaking down entirely.
But you’ll probably stream this somewhere—I’m streaming it right now—and the beauty is that you don’t lose much of the crust and murk when you listen to it digitally. That’s largely thanks to the production: a hodgepodge of repurposed beats, some done by Watson himself, and some done by a crew of in-house producers like Psymun, Art Vandelay, DRWN, and a bunch more. They’re all working within similar parameters: cracked psychedelia, off-kilter weirdness, and a dedication to a lifestyle with time built in for Saturday morning cartoons, cereal, and pontificating about the world through blunt smoke.
Past Cloaks is, in a way, a very necessary compilation tape. True to underground rap fashion, Watson’s discography is already daunting, but by pulling together material he’s recorded over the past few years—unreleased or otherwise—he’s dialed in on the mythology that he’s been building, focusing it in an unexpectedly breezy 19-track sequence that pulls warbly samples from damaged-beyond-repair records and snatches of TV dialogue, flipping them into compositions that fit together like melted puzzle pieces.
Watson is a formidable rapper, and wastes no time making sure we know that. On opening track "Phantom," his blunted voice bounces like a half-deflated basketball over keys that sound like they’re being played through an inch of dust. He’s a stream of consciousness rapper, letting vivid moments emerge and then quickly disappear. The entire tape feels like a casual studio session, with guests occasionally flitting in and out, and Watson holding court next to a stack of paperbacks, rapping about the virtues of getting stoned and seeing the world in sepia. It’s the kind of unbridled creativity that feels somehow untampered with.
Watson’s still in the early stages of what will hopefully be a long career. Which means that sometimes, like on "Purple Leaves," he sounds so much like Earl Sweatshirt that it’s a little distracting. But he’ll continue to develop, and there’s so much promise and endlessly re-playable material here that even the overly referential stuff is a pleasure to listen to. Besides, Watson could do a lot worse than look to Earl for inspiration—especially when he casually drops lyrical gems like "sippin' syrup in my room and all my clothes are out." This is the kind of mundane-yet-telling detail that feels bound to cultivate a loyal fanbase.
Speaking of loyal fanbases: There’s another thing you can do with tapes besides listen to them degrade. You can pass them around. Pocket them. Lend them to people. Make dubs of dubs until the original takes on a near-mystical quality. Past Cloaks isn’t perfect enough to be canonized, but it’s strong enough to form a small cult around. | 2016-02-03T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-03T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | POW | February 3, 2016 | 7.2 | 2696d327-7816-493f-904a-f2c9215a904d | Sam Hockley-Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-hockley-smith/ | null |
Tranquil and reverberant, the North Carolina folk songwriter’s new album finds relief and resolution in the circadian rhythms of the natural world. | Tranquil and reverberant, the North Carolina folk songwriter’s new album finds relief and resolution in the circadian rhythms of the natural world. | H.C. McEntire: Every Acre | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hc-mcentire-every-acre/ | Every Acre | H.C. McEntire has made a career complicating the music of her youth. A child of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, McEntire began life on a family farm, her days soundtracked by the local country radio station. On Sundays, she’d attend church, the heavenward hymns lifting her out of her weekday twang. These influences have informed McEntire’s own reverent folk songs, whose gospel inflections and bucolic imagery reflect deep psychogeographic connections to the land where she grew up.
Sense of place remains the cornerstone of McEntire’s songwriting on Every Acre, an album that finds relief and resolution in the circadian rhythms of the natural world. Where 2018’s Lionheart and 2020’s Eno Axis imagined the land as a site of memory, from which McEntire tried to reconcile her queerness with her religious upbringing, Every Acre reconfigures the Southern setting as a scene of potential rejuvenation and regeneration: a place from which to begin the sluggish walk towards recovery. “It ain’t the easy kind of healing/When you’re down on your knees, clawing at the garden,” she sings in a viscid drone on “Rows of Clover.”
Slowness, and an appreciation for the long drag of time, is the album’s guiding aesthetic principle. McEntire’s world comes steadily and languidly into focus: The sound of croaking night frogs fills the hazy frame, while McEntire outlines a landscape of flowing rivers, stacked logs, ripe onions. She grounds herself in these details, attempting to lodge a restless and drifting mind into unerring, observable environmental fact. The songs’ tranquil pulse lends them a therapeutic quality that recalls the woozy and warm psychedelic tones of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon and the soniferous romance of Tammy Wynette’s We Sure Can Love Each Other.
It’s a peaceful contrast to the central preoccupation of McEntire’s lyrics, which concern self-effacement, sublimation, grief, and the singer’s ongoing struggle with depression. McEntire takes all of these subjects gently by the hand, befriending them. Her voice dances a dawdling waltz with itself: melismatic, drawling, half-drunk on sleep. Her guitar offers an even more languid counterpoint, as McEntire hammers off and on at the unhurried pace of a dipping bird. Slowness acts as a salve and a cure. Every Acre travels at the pace of healing, however long it takes a scab to suture a wound.
McEntire, a creative writing graduate, proved herself a deft and diligent lyricist on previous albums. Every Acre takes even greater advantage of the space where language fails and only music can fill the lapse. “Time ain’t always kind,” she repeats on “Turpentine,” delighting more in how the phrase sounds in song than how it reads as verse. On Every Acre, McEntire’s patient observations of the land provide her with a new footing: one full of possibility and promise. It’s in the commitment to stasis that McEntire finds the fortitude to begin anew. | 2023-01-31T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-31T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | January 31, 2023 | 7.6 | 2697348e-1bf0-47e5-aa9f-141b4b0b7555 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
On the first proper Sparks album in nearly a decade, the Mael brothers let existential anxiety into their bouncy music more overtly than usual. | On the first proper Sparks album in nearly a decade, the Mael brothers let existential anxiety into their bouncy music more overtly than usual. | Sparks: Hippopotamus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sparks-hippopotamus/ | Hippopotamus | Few bands will ever reach the half-century mark, and fewer still could manage that looking so blasé as Sparks. They watch time pass with wry distance, adopting musical fashions like visitors from a parallel dimension. The Brothers Mael got the first of their occasional hits during the 1970s glam era, but their affect owed more to vaudeville than rock theater: urbane, contrived, pushing formulas to absurd ends, with Russell an antic pile of hair and Ron a severe, unmoving mustache. (He’s said that he grew it in tribute to Charlie Chaplin.) Sparks’ breakthrough single “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us,” released in 1974, was all prancing swagger, but its lyrics mocked male posturing, a favorite Mael target: “Heartbeat, increasing heartbeat/You hear the thunder of stampeding rhinos, elephants, and tacky tigers.” One could easily miss the sheer number of words Russell piles up, or how the melody seems to dart for cover. It takes a lot of care to sound that ridiculous.
Sparks started working with Giorgio Moroder as the ’70s ended, shedding the shell of their band. No other synth-pop group had yet achieved the same balance of irony and sentiment, at least not until Pet Shop Boys came along a few years later. Their camp could give form to something inexpressible: “I never feel like garbage when I’m with you/I almost feel normal when I’m with you.” Later Sparks albums stuck with that electronic template, but the Maels have found new ways to amuse themselves. 2002’s Lil’ Beethoven used orchestral arrangements, while 2015’s FFS enlisted Franz Ferdinand as a perverse backing band. So the title track of Hippopotamus, the first Sparks qua Sparks record in nearly a decade, would naturally be a bouncy aria, one they rhyme with “anonymous,” “Hieronymus,” “abacus,” “microbus,” and “Titus Andronicus.”
More surprising is just how well Russell Mael’s voice holds up, especially given his tendency towards falsetto, stealing away phrases like an eagle with a tortoise. He’s still got the range, but age has softened his highest register—Mael floats above himself in overdubs, a sprite strumming along to mortal folly. “Edith Piaf (Said It Better Than Me)” invokes her “Je ne regrette rien” only to politely demur (“Pretty song, but not intended for me”), as the narrator describes a life untouched by danger or sin: “There were no smoky dives/Few amours, fous or not/There were no petty crimes/Foreign substances bought.” The music swells in melodramatic counterpoint. It’s impossible to tell which direction the joke is even aimed towards. I laughed.
The risk here is that listening to three or four minutes of unfunny satire feels agonizing. (Roy Scheider in All That Jazz, dying and delirious, to God: “What’s the matter, don’t you like musical comedy?”) Sparks’ wit does fail them with a couple of Hippopotamus tracks: “Giddy Giddy” repeats a thin conceit at irritating length, and “The Amazing Mr. Repeat” apparently exists to justify its vocal contortions. But Ron Mael’s arrangements can estrange the silliest premise. “When You’re a French Director” features actual French director Leos Carax cackling about auteurism, the lurching brass and accordion forever entertaining some demonic bistro. “Unaware” addresses a baby in the womb, listing off news and trivia she’ll remain happily ignorant of. The production smothers Russell’s voice with guitar feedback, as if he were seeding her subconscious.
The Sparks catalog does not lack for unpleasant characters or situations, but existential anxiety rarely comes through this overtly. “Probably Nothing” seems like a trifle at first, until you realize it’s a meta joke about memory loss and the fear of dementia. Elsewhere the duo laments how dreary it is giving half-ignored funeral speeches (“All of them prattle on/Even your widow yawns”), a task that must be coming up more and more often. “It’s a—,” Russell begins, pausing in solemn caricature, before another voice completes the thought: “—bummer.” Mael also talks about quoting Shakespeare; I thought of Yorick, and the grin Death steals from every jester. | 2017-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | BMG | September 13, 2017 | 7.1 | 26a1ec3e-1e3c-40d9-83b7-395594963f91 | Chris Randle | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-randle/ | |
Metal band blends elements of folk and goth to create a dark, haunting album that's as gorgeous as it is ugly. | Metal band blends elements of folk and goth to create a dark, haunting album that's as gorgeous as it is ugly. | Wolves in the Throne Room: Diadem of 12 Stars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9074-diadem-of-12-stars/ | Diadem of 12 Stars | As the home of labels such as Kill Rock Stars and K Records, Olympia, Washington has blessed us with a wide variety of off-kilter music. Unwound, Bikini Kill, and Microphones/Mount Eerie were birthed in the city, while Nirvana and the Melvins used it as a hub, connecting with a population of fans not available in their own smaller hometowns. Something about the bustling college town seems to breed a restlessness that can't be cured with mainstream music. In that sense, Wolves in the Throne Room fit perfectly with their geographical peers. Musically, however, the band is a wholly different monster, combining intense, desolate black metal with dark folk and goth.
Wolves claim inspiration from the "mystical witch ideology" of the Olympian forests (a Googling only revealed news stories about a woman robbing banks dressed as a witch, but I don't doubt the mythology exists), and the imagery on the disc adheres to that. The cover is a misty forest waterfall scene, and the sparse booklet shows the three flannel-and-jeans-clad band members ritualistically jamming out in the woods, complete with a naked woman and enough candles to make Smokey the Bear bristle. Oddly, the picture shows two members playing acoustic guitars while a third blows on some sort of woodwind. These instruments don't really reflect the music on Diadem of 12 Stars, but they do give a hint that there's more here than your typical muddy barrage of black metal muck.
The four songs, shrouded in a just-slightly-cleaner version of black metal's usual lo-fi production, range from 13 to 20 minutes. For many of those minutes, the band sticks to the genre's typical facets. An impenetrable wall of wailing instruments is set to a rhythm that alternates from blindingly fast to a slow crawl, and the vocals, mixed low, are desperate rasps peppered with bestial growls. But it's the inclusion of folk and goth that separates Wolves in the Throne Room from the pack, breaking up the madness with moments of poetic clarity. Opener "Queen of the Borrowed Light" is a relentless assault for the first five minutes. But seemingly out of nowhere, the distortion gives way to quiet, clean picking and atmospheric keyboards, ushering in the song's second act. "Face in the Mirror (Part 1)" introduces witch-inspired, gothic female vocals provided by Hammer of Misfortune's Jamie Myers. But after another brief acoustic folk interlude, the band erupts again into familiar territory with dizzying speed and demonic howls.
Those who aren't familiar with this style of music might find it hard to see the beauty that is here, and the songs' epic lengths certainly don't invite new listeners. Admittedly, listening to the record is daunting. The songs are complex, with layers of melodies that at times seem to be working completely against each other. Even with the breaks and quiet interludes throughout the songs, it will take multiple listens for songs to differentiate themselves (but really, that's probably not the band's intention anyway). But art doesn't have to be pleasant to be pretty, nor easy to be enjoyable, and Diadem of 12 Stars is a dark, haunting piece that's as gorgeous as it is ugly. | 2006-06-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2006-06-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal | Vendlus | June 2, 2006 | 7.7 | 26a25b6d-66b2-4235-ae95-8122b24c8df1 | Cory D. Byrom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cory-d. byrom/ | null |
In pursuit of sweaty deliverance, the acrobatic singer takes worries about police brutality, relationship woes, and embracing differences to the dance floor. | In pursuit of sweaty deliverance, the acrobatic singer takes worries about police brutality, relationship woes, and embracing differences to the dance floor. | My Brightest Diamond: A Million and One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/my-brightest-diamond-a-million-and-one/ | A Million and One | A Million and One, the fifth full-length from Shara Nova’s My Brightest Diamond, is nocturnal and optimistic, like the dark winter trek toward the lights of the dance floor. “Sometimes I will go to a club and don’t want to be distracted by everyone else’s energy,” Nova says, “but I want to dance hard, so I face the wall, playing with what shadows I can create.” Nova is directed and moody during these 10 tracks, making the sort of sulky party music that is the specialty of Troye Sivan or Robyn. They don’t want to escape their tender aches but, instead, bring their little heartbreaks along in the search for sweaty deliverance. Nova understands the value of pleasure in a painful time.
On 2014’s This Is My Hand, Nova’s pop landscape was weird and dextrous, full of swaying horns and electronics. Her opera-trained voice aces incredible whirligigs and whiplashes here, too, but there is little sense that this is a show. It’s on the ground like a fighter, her voice weaponized by jagged quavers and barbed high notes. Even within a single preposition, like “for” during opener “It’s Me on the Dance Floor,” she can flip from full-bodied boom to imposing growl. She often layers her voice with itself so that songs like “White Noise” and “Supernova” reveal their eerie underbellies over time. Her voice is intense, the kind that suggests the mouth and throat as a series of interconnected caves; you want to follow it down.
Over the past decade, Nova has collaborated with artists who share her sense of narrative drama: Laurie Anderson, Sufjan Stevens, the Decemberists, David Byrne. Her most potent songs often describe the type of loneliness that is particular to the oddball—like “Another Chance,” where lovely howls over twinkling bells and stuttering drums communicate relationship regrets. When she sings “You won’t believe what you cannot see” during “A Million Pearls,” it suggests being resigned to someone else’s inability to see her shimmer.
Even though Nova asks you to dance often—the snapping funk interlude of “It’s Me on the Dance Floor” practically commands it—she favors slightly aloof, entirely glacial dramatics. Her tone is glistening, large-scale. The songs here have the backbone of a club track, but their sparseness allows the elements to echo, for you to understand each phrase. Earl Harvin’s sensational drumming holds itself closely to Nova’s charged voice; on “Sway,” his moves sound like trailing footsteps.
A Million and One, Nova says, is indebted to Detroit, a city just east of her Ypsilanti hometown. References to Detroit are oblique, and the geography comes across as a biographical fact rather than an explicit feeling. During “You Wanna See My Teeth,” she actually heads for Florida, documenting the scene of Trayvon Martin’s murder. Somewhat uncomfortably, Nova embodies Martin by stepping into his clothes, as when she flatly sings “My hood is up” over jolting guitars. Sirens flashing in the distance are theatrical props, enhancing the showtune quality of her jarring phrases. “Hey kid, where ya going, going?” she asks with the bullish, upbeat tone of a musical. The final perspective switch—to the person who gets away with murder, who “nothing can touch”—leaves a haunting residue.
Most of the songs on A Million and One burrow between ecstasy and threat, Nova’s voice playing at the edges of those feelings. During “It’s Me on the Dance Floor,” she sings: “I been going out/I been going out on a limb.” She tells us how to read the album, that she’s going to upend even the songs that seem ready for the floor. The pursuit of pleasure can be risky, and that’s the rush. | 2018-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rhyme & Reason | December 14, 2018 | 7 | 26b2f18d-cefd-47d7-923f-d80b340485ce | Maggie Lange | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maggie-lange/ | |
A Tribe Called Quest’s sixth (and final) album was a rumor for 18 years. It’s here, and against many odds, it reinvigorates the group’s discography without resting on nostalgia. | A Tribe Called Quest’s sixth (and final) album was a rumor for 18 years. It’s here, and against many odds, it reinvigorates the group’s discography without resting on nostalgia. | A Tribe Called Quest: We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22607-we-got-it-from-here-thank-you-4-your-service/ | We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service | Since their 1990 debut, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, A Tribe Called Quest have been forward-thinking, presenting their albums as full-length meditations on sound and society. They didn’t break new ground as much as they dug deeper into the lands beneath their feet, turning stones and cultivating fertile soil, unearthing the past and tending the roots, with album-length suites centered around loose conceits—the light diary of Instinctive Travels, the aural dive into drums, bass, and downbeats of 1991’s The Low End Theory, the pan-African flight of 1993’s Midnight Marauders, the dysfunction of hip-hop’s materialism on 1996’s Beats, Rhymes and Life, and the yearning sadness of 1998’s The Love Movement. The latter strived to serve as a healing elixir and balm for what was, up until recently, the swan song for one of the greatest acts that hip-hop has ever produced.
Alluded to constantly via rumors and unfounded hopes, a forthcoming Tribe album seemed like wishful thinking for years. Despite the assurances of legendary music executives, fans could not be blamed for being cynical. The group had splintered fabulously, as documented in Michael Rapaport’s unflinching 2011 documentary Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest. Moreover, the death of member Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor earlier this year, seemed to ensure that any future efforts would be full of excavated throwaways and repurposed vocals from other projects made fresh via studio magic. Yet, We got it from Here exists, their sixth (and final) album, and it’s full of unblemished offerings that were recorded at Q-Tip’s home studio following their performance on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show one year ago. And, against many odds, it’s an album that reinvigorates the group’s enviable discography without resting on the nostalgia of past accomplishment.
The album’s first number, “The Space Program,” is quintessential Tribe—it has that sooty bottom heavy warmness, the uncluttered arrangements and bright instrumentation, and it sounds like a piece of 2016 instead of a fragment of 1994. For the first time in their career, the entire group appears to be at their peak, exuding a well-earned effortlessness. Even if Ali Shaheed Muhammad is listed nowhere on the credits, the act’s three MC’s—the abstract Q-Tip, the ruffneck Phife, and the often M.I.A. Jarobi—are on point all the time, picking up each other's couplets and passing microphones like hot potatoes. On “The Space Program,” Jarobi rhymes “We takin’ off to Mars, got the space vessels overflowin’/What, you think they want us there? All us niggas not goin’,” before Q-Tip nimbly takes over with “Reputation ain’t glowin’, reparations ain’t flowin’/If you find yourself stuck in a creek, you better start rowin’.” The song plays with a sci-fi framing—“There ain't no space program for niggas/Yo, you stuck here, nigga”—yet it’s not about an imaginary future, but right now. “Imagine if this shit was really talkin’ about space, dude,” Q-Tip raps, unveiling the entire song as a metaphor for gentrification, perhaps even forecasting the showdown over the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. And just that quickly, you realize that Tribe—poetical, allegorical, direct, and forever pushing forward from the present—are back as if they never left.
The timeliness of this album can’t be understated, nor could it have been predicted. On “We the People…,” Q-Tip breaks out into a mini-song as hook: “All you Black folks, you must go/All you Mexicans, you must go/And all you poor folks, you must go/Muslims and gays, boy we hate your ways/So all you bad folk, you must go.” It follows in the pathways of Jamila Woods’ HEAVN and Solange Knowles’ A Seat at the Table as an album that expresses the deeply painful and deep-seated racist attitudes of current America without rancor. That the hook echoes President-elect Donald Trump’s most famous and reductionist campaign views works in ways that it would not had Hillary Clinton garnered enough electoral college votes to win the election. (For comparison, the video for Ty Dolla $ign and Future’s “Campaign,” released the day before the election, seemed to bank on a Clinton victory in its jubilation, but now feels tone deaf.) Ironically, Tribe may have also been seeing a Clinton victory; Q-Tip references a female president on “The Space Program.”
A decade and a half ago, while working on his (erroneously shelved, then belatedly released) sophomore album Kamaal the Abstract, Q-Tip was asked about grown men making hip-hop music—he had, after all, just entered his thirties and was still playing at what is largely a young person’s game. He countered that hip-hop was not solely a youth genre; that the media and commercial forces had made it so; that the top MC of the moment—Jay Z—was in his thirties; that the best art comes not from the exuberance of youth, but the mastery of form. We got it from Here proves that he was right.
Q-Tip has long been quietly regarded as one of hip-hop’s most thoughtful and inventive producers, and this album is full of accomplished flourishes. On the lascivious “Enough!!,” the vocals of Ms Jck (of undersung alt-R&B progenitors J*Davey) are treated like source material, woven into the musical bed. There are layered, echoing, melodic sonic manipulations and restrained uses of Jack White and Elton John on “Solid Wall of Sound.” On the introspective and confessional “Ego,” White (again) is used sparingly and smartly for subdued electric guitar touches. *We got it from Here *is not the music of a producer showing off, but of one knowing what to do and when to do it. There is a bevy of guests on this record, but they all serve the project like instruments that come in and out without attempting to take over with solo turns.
When “Dis Generation” uses a sample of Musical Youth’s “Pass the Dutchie,” one can see a labyrinth of in-jokes and conceptual easter eggs that extends to the rhymes: Phife prefers cabs to Uber; Jarobi is wizened, smoking on “impeccable grass” and waiting for New York to approve medical marijuana; and Busta Rhymes—who appears multiple times and sounds more at home with his Native Tongues brethren than he ever has with the extended Cash Money bling set or even on his The Abstract and the Dragon mixtape with Q-Tip—is “Bruce Lee-in’ niggas while you niggas UFC.” For his part, Q-Tip shouts out Joey Bada$$, Earl Sweatshirt, Kendrick Lamar, and J. Cole as “gatekeepers of flow/They are extensions of instinctual soul.” It’s what ATCQ has always been—self-referential without being self-serving, part of the pack but moving at their own pace, and able to lightly and relatedly convey observations that would be heavy and pedantic from just about anyone else.
It can’t be said enough how simply good this record sounds and feels. Everyone here shows themselves to be a better rapper than they have ever been before, but that still doesn’t capture the ease and exuberance of it all, how Q-Tip curls flows and words on “The Donald,” how Jarobi surprises with packed strings of rhyme at each turn, how Phife and Busta Rhymes dip effortlessly in and out of Caribbean patois and Black American slanguage. (And that’s not even taking into account Consequence’s inventive word marriages on “Mobius” and “Whateva Will Be,” Kendrick Lamar’s energetic angst on “Conrad Tokyo,” or André 3000’s and Tip’s playful tag team on “Kids…”) The music is decidedly analog, a refutation of polished sheen and maximal perfection; it’s an extension and culmination of ATCQ’s jazz-influenced low-end theory. But that doesn’t capture the bounces, grooves, sexual moans, random bleeps, stuttering drums that float throughout—like every classic Tribe album, it defies simple descriptions.
Many of the songs here hearken back to off-kilter and underexposed gems of days past (see: Tribe’s “One Two Shit” with Busta Rhymes and De La Soul’s ATCQ-featuring “Sh.Fe. MC’s” from days past for musical antecedents) without feeling like retreads, the free-wheeling whimsy and experimentation of the past having been replaced a grounded irony and proficiency. So much has stayed the same and yet so much has changed.
There’s no overriding story that easily presents itself—no vocal guide a la Midnight Marauders, no driving ethos served on platter like the Low End Theory; the title itself, which lends to an interpretation of this as a project of hubris demanding homage, is never explicitly explained. Even Phife’s death is given due reverence, but isn’t treated as a central theme. We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service is all just beats, rhymes, and life. Nothing about this feels like a legacy cash-in; it feels like a legit A Tribe Called Quest album. We should be the ones thanking them. | 2016-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Epic | November 17, 2016 | 9 | 26b3a6ff-b9bd-4d73-8d9c-110bf25e4377 | kris ex | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kris-ex/ | null |
Lust For Youth have spent the last six years refining lo-fi darkwave into club-ready synth-pop. Compassion is the end product of that evolution, a once rough stone polished into a lustrous crystal. | Lust For Youth have spent the last six years refining lo-fi darkwave into club-ready synth-pop. Compassion is the end product of that evolution, a once rough stone polished into a lustrous crystal. | Lust for Youth: Compassion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21646-compassion/ | Compassion | Go back to Hannes Norrvide’s earliest solo recordings as Lust For Youth and listen closely. Trapped underneath the droning synths, morose vocals and grainy production, you’ll find some big melodies fighting to reach the surface. Over the course of a string of full-lengths, singles and cassettes, he’s worked steadily to clean up and refine his sound. 2014’s International marked a turning point: Working now as a three-piece, the band’s vision suddenly snapped into focus, tightly-wound new wave anthems emerging from the shadows.
Compassion goes further yet, pushing Lust For Youth’s sound to its natural conclusion: glimmering, maximalist dance-pop. If these songs were photographs, they’d have the brightness cranked up all the way. The synths here are crisp, the vocals high in the mix, the production echoey but slick. Musically, they’ve stripped away the last vestiges of post-punk tension, giving these songs over fully to driving, four-on-the-floor beats. Put another way, Compassion presents a band that could easily have slotted into any lineup at the Haçienda in the late ‘80s without arousing a whiff of suspicion.
Things start off slowly with "Stardom," a new wave aubade whose synths pierce through the track like light through blinds. Norrvide’s previous claims of writing love songs always felt a bit disingenuous but there's no mistaking his straightforward couplets here (“I’m complete, I’m content/In your bed but I’m floating"). While his vocals have become far more expressive over time, there's still a pronounced austerity in his delivery--think Bernard Sumner with a head cold.
The rest of the album continues in this vein, gleefully mining the sounds of the Thatcher era: See the Smiths-esque balladry of "Display", or "Sudden Ambitions," which reads like a lost Depeche Mode B-side. “Better Looking Brother” is the album’s clear centerpiece, a seven-and-a-half-minute cut that sounds like it was ripped straight from New Order's singles catalog, chiming guitar arpeggios, dated club beat and all. It's a gorgeous song, a joyous merry-go-round that keeps spinning until just past the four-minute mark, when the track dissolves into a shuddering mass of atmospheric noise and then comes roaring back. Unfortunately, that genuinely thrilling moment is one of only few that attempt to reconcile the band's past and present.
Certainly, Lust For Youth’s rapid stylistic evolution has been impressive. Just a few years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine Norrvide’s lo-fi darkwave beating a path to something this polished. That said, the last decade has hardly wanted for this sort of '80s nostalgia, and whereas acts like Cut Copy and the Junior Boys introduced new textures to this well-worn template, too few of the songs on Compassion add up to more than the sum of their influences. What’s more, while Lust For Youth’s earlier work wasn’t nearly as refined, it had plenty of personality; many of the songs here sound not just derivative but generic. Compassion still feels like the album that Lust For Youth have been working toward this whole time—it just turns out that the journey may have been more rewarding than the destination. | 2016-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Sacred Bones | March 18, 2016 | 6.2 | 26b4c827-0cf9-4408-b44c-2caa0af439d2 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
Twenty years on from its original release, Yo La Tengo’s finest album still sparkles with wit and charm, an album so cozy you forget about its musical eclecticism. | Twenty years on from its original release, Yo La Tengo’s finest album still sparkles with wit and charm, an album so cozy you forget about its musical eclecticism. | Yo La Tengo: I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yo-la-tengo-i-can-hear-the-heart-beating-as-one/ | I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One | An easy way to break the ice when meeting a new couple is to ask them how they met. Sometimes there’s no story; more often these days, they met through an online dating website. But now and then the answer is revelatory. Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley were formally introduced on America’s Independence Day weekend. It was 1980, and the Feelies, New Jersey’s own nervy new wavers, were playing at Maxwell’s, a bar that had opened a couple of years earlier in Hoboken. The curly-haired rock critic from New York City’s northern suburbs and the art-schooled daughter of an Oscar-winning animation duo on Manhattan’s Upper West Side shared a passion for music. Within months, they were in a close relationship, and they started playing together, Ira on guitar, Georgia on drums. By 1984, they’d formed Yo La Tengo, putting out several respectable albums of Flying Nun- and Velvet Underground-minded college rock with a rotating array of bassists. But it wasn’t until they brought on a former Virginia college radio DJ named James McNew that these Hoboken-anchored Maxwell’s regulars moved from channeling their record collection to advancing on it.
The 1993 album Painful was Yo La Tengo’s first breakthrough, a whispery feedback-streak opus that stood as a worthy riposte to British shoegaze; Electr-O-Pura, two years later, sounded more spartan but boasted career-highlight songs like “Blue Line Swinger.” While those two records solidified Yo La Tengo as one of the best bands in a competitive indie rock landscape, 1997’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One was their first true masterpiece. More than a dozen years into get-in-the-van touring life, here was a band not only expanding the boundaries of American garage rock, but exploding them. But for all its stylistic eclecticism, the record also sensitively traces the outlines of intimacy, both musical and romantic, hinting at a new way to imagine a life in music, one that still resonates 20 years on.
Yo La Tengo had always had the covers repertoire of a jukebox, and here they channeled that into their own songwriting. The love-buzzed guitar swirl Painful still had its power, as evidenced by the perfect squall of a track like “Deeper Into Movies.” But their wry bossa nova on romantic duet “Center of Gravity,” the alt-country lilt on pedal-steel weeper “One PM Again,” and aching jazz-pop balladry with the Hubley-led “Shadows” were just as masterful. Steel-guitar instrumental “Green Arrow” wrought cinematic expanses out of cricket chirps and off-kilter percussion. And a band that a decade ago cut a harmonica-tinged jangler called “3 Blocks From Groove St.” happily found that rhythmic destination in the Stereolab-locked psych loops of “Moby Octopad,” which also managed to sample an obscure Burt Bacharach track.
Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield has written that Kaplan and Hubley “[do] for marriage what the Velvet Underground did for heroin,” and there’s something to the love-is-the-drug comparison. “When the smack begins to flow/I really don’t care anymore,” Lou Reed sang on the Velvets track, one where he infamously called the opiate both his life and his wife. Yo La Tengo also seek escape, talking of love as their place to hide from the outside world. “Locked in a kiss, outside eyes cease to exist,” they sing in the first words we hear on I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. The feedback-stained “Damage” could be a shuffling tone poem reminiscent of Laughing Stock-era Talk Talk, except for Kaplan’s soft speak-singing: “I used to think about you all the time/I would think about you all the time/Now it just feels weird that there you are,” he murmurs. What was once routine can be made privately uncanny through time shared together. It’s something outside eyes can’t see. They don’t even exist.
That same inscrutable intimacy is all over the album’s most groove-driven—and most seductive—track, the indie-mixtape classic “Autumn Sweater.” When Kaplan gently describes a knock at the door, and how “We could slip away/Wouldn’t that be better,” as an organ peals over hiccuping polyrhythms, he might be portraying a bashful pair going on a date. But the critic Jon Dolan, writing about I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One in 1997, heard a lover contemplating an affair, his partner’s steady beat reminding him that “it’s a waste of time.” Or it might be a drearily autobiographical tune about Kaplan and Hubley having to go to some boring function after Labor Day, and we’re all reimagining it as somehow sensual and profound. Whatever the specific reference, the song itself is quintessentially cozy, capturing the feeling where the days are growing shorter and it’s time to move inside.
The album’s title also describes a group of musicians working closely in sync. Throughout, under the Nashville tutelage of longtime producer Roger Moutenot, the band seems to have established its own innate communication. They’ve been doing it enough to make it look easy. Their cover-band roots return on “Little Honda,” which gets under the hood of the Brian Wilson original and corrodes it with chugging distortion; it wasn’t necessarily supposed to be on the album, McNew has said, but “it just sort of turned out pretty good.” And McNew, who has also long made endearingly shambling indie-pop under the goofy misnomer Dump, he had his first Yo La Tengo lead vocal on “Stockholm Syndrome,” and earns it with high and lonesome folk-skronk that’s like a missing evolutionary link between Neil Young and Whitney. The penultimate track, “We’re an American Band,” is not a cover; its six-odd minutes of whispery harmonies and smoldering shrillness offer a very different idea than Grand Funk Railroad’s of what that title phrase means. It’s a bittersweet elegy for a life on the road, of Monday matinees and playing in Southern college towns where Cracked Rear View is the pre-show house music. It’s an idea that was already turning into a throwback in its own time, as the major labels’ slash-and-burn approach to the U.S. indie underground left a denuded cultural landscape. But in the elegant sprawl of Yo La Tengo’s rendering, it all sounds like a dream nonetheless.
In the story of I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, the other key relationship, beyond Kaplan-Hubley, and beyond Kaplan-Hubley-McNew, is between the musicians and their fans. The winking title of melodious instrumental opener “Return to Hot Chicken” is an inside joke not only for the band, but also for those who follow them (“hot chicken” had been referenced in earlier song titles). Along with “Autumn Sweater,” the record’s other unassailable landmark is “Sugarcube,” a fuzzed-out singalong that’s some of the finest American noise-pop of its era. The song’s video, Yo La Tengo’s last for more than a decade, features “Mr. Show’”s David Cross and Bob Odenkirk and a pre-Jack Black school of rock. The band’s members are cast as down-to-earth underdogs who’ll bow a guitar if you ask them to but don’t really see the point of stadium-rock theatricality. If they had “cred,” it was because they were credible—because they, as fans first too, knew their own capacity to suspend disbelief about industry pomp. They knew how fragile their idealistic outlook could be, too: “I crumble like a sugarcube for you,” Kaplan insisted.
Yo La Tengo may not have bought into their own hype, but by this point in their career, it was considerable. SPIN, CMJ, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly all bestowed I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One with rave reviews. It cracked No. 5 on the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics’ poll, still the band’s highest placement, and has ranked high on 1990s best-albums lists, Pitchfork’s among them. I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One is not, in other words, an album that obviously screams out for a critical reassessment. But beyond its music, which has lost none of its luster, the album also captures a moment in time, and points to creative ideals that still matter.
Over the past 20 years, Yo La Tengo have kept releasing good-to-great albums, from their more nakedly love-themed And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out in 2000 to 2015’s Stuff Like That There, a covers-based callback to the band’s pre-Matador album Fakebook. They’ve scored films, they’ve backed Yoko Ono. They’ve even performed Grand Funk’s “We’re an American Band”—after all, Yo La Tengo were born on the Fourth of July, remember? In short, by trying just about everything but never forgetting who their fans are they’ve pursued the insular yet alluring worldview that I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One epitomized. When Yo La Tengo are cited as an influence these days, it often seems to be by bands that are directly channeling the ’90s, but their human-scale approach to being in love and being in a band while making their way through the music industry machinery. Yo La Tengo never really were about mainstream success. What they were about may be summed up in the album’s finale, yet another cover, this time of a mid-century MOR staple.
Once recorded by singer Anita Bryant (later known more for her ugly anti-gay activism), “My Little Corner of the World” now belongs to Yo La Tengo so indelibly that “Gilmore Girls,” when misguidedly denied permission to use the band’s version, closely replicated it for a song in the pilot episode (Yo La Tengo later performed on the show—McNew was a fan). In the knowingly naive mold of Moe Tucker on VU’s “After Hours,” it’s an invitation from Hubley to a lover, to a band, to a specific audience: “I always knew that I’d find someone like you,” she asserts. Their little corner of the world may have since acquired a dust bunny or two, a couple of chips in the paint. But this couple, this band, seems to understand, with Leonard Cohen, that there’s a crack in everything, because that’s where the light gets in. How some people met may be a good conversation-starter. How their hearts began to beat in time is between them. And where they want to go from there, Yo La Tengo remind us, is a back-and-forth that can fill a life. | 2017-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | October 29, 2017 | 9.7 | 26b776bb-3530-4a70-9ecc-b913eb9f6631 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
MGMT follow the surprise hit Oracular Spectacular by teaming with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom for a leftfield psych-pop LP bereft of obvious singles. | MGMT follow the surprise hit Oracular Spectacular by teaming with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom for a leftfield psych-pop LP bereft of obvious singles. | MGMT: Congratulations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14122-congratulations/ | Congratulations | If you’re coming to the second MGMT album because you loved “Time to Pretend,” “Kids,” and “Electric Feel,” there’s the door. No such moments exist on Congratulations. Hell, there aren’t even failed attempts at replicating those songs here. This time out, MGMT aren’t crafting pop; they’re Creating Art. The problem is that many of the half-million or so people who bought their debut, Oracular Spectacular, just want a couple catchy-as-fuck, ear-candy singles to blast in their cars or put on with their friends.
One possible response to Congratulations is that MGMT are having a real “time to pretend” moment—that they’re willfully being weird, and either shrinking from the challenge of repeating their crossover success or clumsily aiming to prove their underground cred. But the simplest answer seems most realistic: MGMT are being themselves. Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden wrote and released “Time to Pretend” and “Kids” way back in 2005. With a major-label contract in hand, they’ve never again written anything so radio-friendly. Instead, they penned the headier and exploratory (and weaker) parts of their debut album with help from go-to bells-and-whistles guy Dave Fridmann. This led to songs called “4th Dimensional Transition” and “Of Moons, Birds & Monsters.” Pastoral English pop, flighty mysticism, and studio-rat arrangements aren't the exception with this band, they're the rule.
Now they’ve returned with an album full of that stuff, and the result is audacious, ambitious, and a little fried. Working with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom, MGMT have crafted a grandiose but not always clear-eyed record. Instead of the commercial climbers they’re lumped alongside (the Killers, Kings of Leon, Muse), MGMT follow the lead of the Flaming Lips and Beck and prove to be kindred spirits with Of Montreal, Yeasayer, and Klaxons. They’re in love with 1970s art-rock, and they’ve immersed themselves in uncool subgenres like pop-psych and prog. And despite the lack of marquee songs, they’ve made, top to bottom, a more interesting and even better record this time out.
If their success granted them the opportunity to do whatever they wanted, MGMT took advantage of it, layering songs with a surplus of ideas when a few good ones would have done. Every track here has successful passages, but frustratingly, they too often turn out to be detours or trap doors. In general, the less cluttered and more focused their tracks are, the better they turn out. The most satisfying songs are the ballads—the title track in particular, but also “I Found a Whistle”—or the ones like “It’s Working” and “Someone’s Missing” that walk a fairly linear path. The most arduous is the 12-minute “Siberian Breaks,” which has some intriguing elements but little discernible reason to be so densely constructed.
Few bands this year will release a record under more difficult circumstances than MGMT, and following a shock commercial success with a zig when your fans want you to zag has always been dangerous. MGMT aren’t hitting the self-destruct button here, but the best-case scenario is that a cult, happy to shed the carpetbagger fans of OS, are willing to follow these guys around from idea to idea. Some may even use them as an introduction to the bands they’ve namechecked—Spacemen 3, Brian Eno, Television Personalities—and the sounds from which they’ve drawn inspiration. The more likely, short-term result is that MGMT are reined in a bit, not given so much rope to hang themselves. But that they didn’t hang themselves here, given the circumstances, suggests a certain amount of talent. Whether they write club-friendly songs like “Kids” or tracks like “Congratulations” or “Flash Delirium” or “It’s Working,” they can write songs. Hopefully, next time they won’t try to jam two dozen of them onto a nine-track album. | 2010-04-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-04-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | April 12, 2010 | 6.8 | 26ba70fb-26aa-40f4-9373-d26544d96bc9 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | |
The Danish singer-songwriter’s powerhouse voice can wring genuine catharsis out of even the gaudiest pop, but on her third album, the muted, anonymous production too often holds her back. | The Danish singer-songwriter’s powerhouse voice can wring genuine catharsis out of even the gaudiest pop, but on her third album, the muted, anonymous production too often holds her back. | MØ: Motordrome | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mo-motordrome/ | Motordrome | A motordrome is an electrifying image to attach to a pop album. Evocative of thundering sound, burnt rubber, and engines speeding by in a blur, the specialty racetrack is the guiding metaphor behind Danish synth-pop singer MØ’s third LP, which uses it as a loose stand-in for the relentless spiral of anxiety. It’s a perilous loop the singer is eager to escape; her own anxiety manifested in frequent panic attacks following a lengthy, stressful tour behind her sophomore album, 2018’s Forever Neverland. Motordrome is crafted as a way to see through those struggles, approached with a sense of restraint. She reaches for new heights, but the album’s muted, anonymous production largely pushes MØ’s performances into the background.
MØ’s best songs are fueled by her brash, raspy voice, which is capable of turning even the gaudiest pop concoction into a concentrated surge of catharsis. Motordrome instead drowns her out in bland settings, relying on forgettable, reverb-soaked guitar melodies and rolling drum beats. “Wheelspin” and “Brad Pitt” both plod along over sluggish beats and slackened synths, her usually punchy voice delivering merely a glancing blow. Even some of the more propulsive songs, like “Cool to Cry,” settle into sterile, stomping pop-rock, an unfortunate byproduct of a mix of producers (Ariel Rechtshaid, S.G. Lewis, Linus Wikland) whose styles struggle to cohere together.
Motordrome’s highlights arrive when MØ’s performance and songwriting overcome the staid backdrops. On “Live to Survive,” she assumes a staccato rhythm over uptempo, splashy synths that glitz up the struggle of learning from your mistakes. “New Moon,” meanwhile, is one of her best straightforward dance songs in years, bolstered by charging synth lines that lend heft to the song’s headstrong verses about a manipulative relationship: “I’m not that somebody you used to bully,” she vows, just before the song opens up into a dazzling chorus that proves the point.
In those instances, MØ’s music hits with emotive, compelling power. On the album’s fan-dedicated opener “Kindness,” she finds a similar sweet spot as her voice dances along with sharp string jabs and a pattering drumbeat. “Let me in, shake me out of my shell,” she trills, “I wanna feel like myself again.” In her raw, rollicking delivery, MØ does sound comfortable in her skin again, giving the lyric a genuinely openhearted turn. Motordrome occasionally passes through such exhilarating moments, but faceless production too often spins its wheels, making it seem as though MØ is still in search of a sound to match the bravado. | 2022-02-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | February 2, 2022 | 6.2 | 26bbc556-b55b-4542-b540-416082761493 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The “vaporwave opera” tag is a red herring: The electronic musician formerly known as Mirror Kisses has grown into his most fully realized vision of pop yet. | The “vaporwave opera” tag is a red herring: The electronic musician formerly known as Mirror Kisses has grown into his most fully realized vision of pop yet. | George Clanton : Slide | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/george-clanton-slide/ | Slide | George Clanton is exactly the kind of artist chillwave could have used a decade ago. The Virginia-born artist’s faded synth pop hits all the right 1980s-indebted notes, but as a singer Clanton is anything but chill. Starting under the moniker Mirror Kisses in the late 2000s and continuing on 100% Electronica, his 2015 debut under his own name, Clanton has let anxiety, joy, lust, insecurity, and a sharp sense of humor run wild through his music. While many chillwave artists struggled to bring lasting personalities to match their early internet fame, and while vaporwave champions anonymity, he couldn’t do either if he tried. Like Ariel Pink before him, Clanton throws himself into his music without any self-conscious concern for cool—and throws himself about in breathtakingly physical live shows that bring to mind a young John Maus.
Though Clanton’s pop sensibilities are undeniable, he’s proven just as adept at navigating the surreal world of vaporwave with his project ESPRIT 空想. The moniker, an outlet for his more experimental production work, has captured a woozy magic all its own. Like much early vaporwave, ESPRIT 空想 chopped up Muzak and other seemingly tasteless samples into foggy soundscapes, a sort of exotica for the digital world. That project culminated in last fall’s companion album 200% Electronica, a psychedelic treasure trove built on stretched-out samples of his own pop songs. Clanton makes an even greater leap on Slide, a self-described “vaporwave opera” and his first album under his own name in three years. By channeling his most dynamic production ideas through his best set of pop songs yet, Slide aligns all of Clanton’s strengths at once.
That expanded range is immediately apparent. Opener “Livin’ Loose” begins as pure vaporwave as a chintzy synth chime intertwines with hypnotically stretched-out sax samples, unsteadily warping in and out of tune. Clanton’s voice rises up and everything locks into place under a lively beat as the melting atmosphere solidifies into a driving dance track. These are sounds Clanton has nailed in the past in different projects, but he blends them here with an effortlessness that’s new. It’s a feeling that only grows over the album even as individual songs fire off in unique directions.
The enormous “Make It Forever” is one of Clanton’s first songs to capture the relentless energy of his live shows, where he’ll scream and thrash in front of a self-made wall of LED lights. The crashing drums and shimmering synth make for one of the biggest hooks on the album, but even that feels small next to his heart-on-sleeve shout, “When you come back again/We can convene/Make it forever.” Other songs, like “Monster” and the title track, find emotional resonance in softer moments, revealing a more vulnerable side as Clanton’s voice explores a higher register. It comes full circle beautifully on “You Lost Me There,” which offers a somber reprisal of “Forever”’s big chorus, elevating both songs in the process.
In a recent interview, Clanton describes his decision to return to his own name as a spontaneous one. He had intended 100% Electronica to be a Mirror Kisses record before he decided to drop the alias altogether. On the other hand, “Slide is the first album that I’ve written from the jump as myself,” he says, and the distinction feels crucial: Stepping out from behind the alter ego has clearly changed his music in palpable and exciting ways. Whether you’ve followed his sprawling discography over the years or are only discovering him now, Slide feels like the true introduction to George Clanton. | 2018-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 100% Electronica | September 1, 2018 | 7.3 | 26bee701-e2d4-4b92-aae3-4444d9d7348c | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
On the Manchester art-rock band's second album, the flat-out ridiculousness of their debut is replaced with a mixture of concise, moving, often funny pop singles, mid-paced laments, and roiling tirades. | On the Manchester art-rock band's second album, the flat-out ridiculousness of their debut is replaced with a mixture of concise, moving, often funny pop singles, mid-paced laments, and roiling tirades. | Everything Everything: Arc | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17540-arc/ | Arc | The first single to be released from Everything Everything's second album, Arc, kicks off with a finger-wag at the deadening effect of extreme consumerism: "Sold your liver, but you still feel in the red/ Sold my feelings now I'm hanging by a thread." The sentiment might seem a bit rich coming from a band whose debut album, Man Alive, ricocheted between advertising hoarding-style proclamations like a rubberized pinball bouncing off Flubberized bumpers: If song titles like "MY KZ, YR BF", "Qwerty Finger", and "Photoshop Handsome" weren't a strong enough allusion to brief attention spans, then the agitated, yelpy hairpin nature of the material implied that, true to their name, Everything Everything were not men of singular focus.
Probably as many people hated them for it as became slavishly, delightedly addicted. If you could look past Jonathan Higgs' extreme garrulousness, Man Alive's equally distracted and distracting exterior contained much scathing humor (and heartbreak) about the absurdity of modern media overload, and our disrespect for the planet. "Chest pumped elegantly elephantine/ southern hemisphere by Calvin Klein," Higgs sang with weary wit on "Photoshop Handsome". But laughing at society forever is a hiding to becoming a low-tier Vice stringer, and lyrically, Arc realizes that, beneath those low-fat muffins that promise to change your life for five minutes, there's hell in that hand-basket.
The album name inadvertently nods to a biblical story about salvation; there's anything but on Arc, where Higgs repeatedly envisages apocalyptic situations both as payback for human irresponsibility, and out of a surprisingly binary desire to stand at the end of time and weigh up whether we did more bad than good. The beasts that populate his Bosch-like landscape are privileged guilt, apathy, generational despair, the inability to communicate, foiled aspiration, and broken homes, though they're rendered with less crash, bang, and wallop than you might expect-- touring with Muse recently didn't make EE go full conspiratorial prog lizard king, thank god.
The flat-out ridiculousness of Man Alive's most exhilarating material is gone, and in its place a mixture of perfectly concise, moving, visceral, often funny pop singles, perhaps one too many mid-paced laments, and a couple of rounds of roiling tirades. Some welcome breathing space unites the strands; songs stick within a genre at a time, and Higgs' lyrics no longer need Infinite Jest-style footnotes to decode them. If the subject matter sounds like Thom Yorke's dinner table patter, at least it's tempered by plenty of musical larks: the percussive glottal stops and exclamations of "Cough Cough" are a funny, theatrical jibe at half-assed activism, "Armourland" is testament to anyone who's ever claimed Max Tundra's mashed vocal glitch is ripe for pop transformation, coupled with the most gorgeous, warm rush of a chorus EE have ever written: "I wanna take you home/ And find some new joy in this autopilot life." And Higgs' sense of cadence and consonance is strong as ever, backed up by the band's campy, musical theater backing vocals: "So fast, hence take an arrow from your quiver or we're/ Past tense-- what's a trilobite to anyone?" he sings on the stuttering "Kemosabe", underpinned by Jeremy Pritchard's rude funk bass.
Everything Everything's reputation for abject maximalism overlooks their unexpected ability to craft relatively tender, sad songs; the handful on Man Alive were as delicate but dark as the coiled rainbow on oil's surface. There are similarly unconventional, small-scale ballads on Arc, the best of which is "Torso of the Week", whose nervous, mournful verses about the literal and figurative grind of the treadmill eventually burst into a Roman candle of a chorus. "The House is Dust" is an atmospheric tale of divorce made ominous by Michael Spearman's cavernous drums; centerpiece "Arc" is seemingly a structural homage to OK Computer's "Fitter Happier", and the best employ of the luscious, Hans Zimmer-y strings that showboat throughout the record. But violins will play sad for any old chump, and beyond the silliness and spark present on Arc, there's a braveness more profound than sticking Beyoncé, Arvo Part, and Mr. Bungle on your influences list and calling it mammy.
It doesn't take an analyst to deduce that the former knottiness of Higgs' lyrics might have been a smokescreen for some ineffable feeling-- for all the words, he didn't often admit to much. Throughout Arc, he's repeatedly crueler to himself than any critic could have been about Man Alive, and sinks beneath the dulled specter of male depression. The juddering, Dustin Wong-like shimmer of "Choice Mountain" veils him pondering reincarnation rather than submit to hopelessness; the fraught "Feet for Hands" (which opens with the only truly unpleasant sound on the record, a misplaced mandolin intro) asks, "When you think of me, don't remember this/ Not a slow wane of a blinded man," and the sublime "Radiant" counters guitarist Alex Robertshaw's piercing, heart-pounding release with the mournful admission, "I could make a difference, but I don't."
Their general sense of drama and vulnerability couched within a pretty masculine idiom-- guitar rock, to be reductive-- brings to mind the way Queen duped a nation into pounding a masculine chest with a feminine fist. The way that Everything Everything play against the macho, aggressive posturing of contemporaries who could care less about caring should be their strongest calling card. "Don't try to hide it! ... 'Cos it'll have you in the end," Higgs sings in a strong head voice on the final song, the itchy, choral anthem, "Don't Try". He should know; Arc is a brilliant lesson in not letting your neuroses become you. | 2013-01-17T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2013-01-17T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Rock | RCA | January 17, 2013 | 7.6 | 26c0b182-3654-45e6-83fd-986971ac798f | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
New Orleans MC and self-proclaimed "best rapper alive" squares his ambition with his delivery and creates what could wind up being the year's most vital mixtape. | New Orleans MC and self-proclaimed "best rapper alive" squares his ambition with his delivery and creates what could wind up being the year's most vital mixtape. | Lil Wayne / DJ Drama: Dedication 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9148-dedication-2/ | Dedication 2 | The cover of Dedication 2 shows Lil Wayne, eyes closed, the words "Fear God" inked on his lids. Take it as a particularly gruesome example of the repentant gangster cliché, or, considering Wayne christens himself "The God" just minutes into this mixtape, a blasphemous warning. Self-deification is nothing new in hip-hop, but-- whether Rakim Allah's humble expression or Jayhova's hyperbolic swagger-- it tends to be a New York thing. So New Orleans' Lil' Wayne not only proclaiming god status but "best rapper alive"-- instead of merely "King of the South"-- is significant both for his rebuke of the prevalent trapper-before-rapper conceit of his Southern peers and his direct challenge to the NYC lyrical throne. Just a few years ago, Wayne making these claims would have been laughable, but with each significant release, he's proving himself to be the most imminent eminence post Jay-Z.
In his praise of Wayne's performance on "The Tonight Show" **earlier this year, Pitchfork's Nick Sylvester wrote, "it's one of those black-and-white-to-technicolor moments after which, if you still don't believe in Wayne, you're just lying to yourself"; Dedication 2 is the aural equivalent. More than anything Wayne's done, it's evidence of his virtuosity as a rapper and MC, showman and lyricist. Tha Carter II was one of last year's best hip-hop albums, but its clean lines hemmed Wayne. He crafted too much, measured his movements instead of letting fly, as he does here.
The track that will convert most naysayers, "Georgia Bush", borrows the instrumental from Disturbing Tha Peace's state-repping anthem; Wayne adds one word to the hook and transforms the hoedown into a stinging protest. But, never one to eschew form for function, he mocks the styles of the original song's participants, Ludacris and Field Mob. It is, at once, a vicious uppercut at the U.S. president, the media, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, racism, neglect, an embrace of his city and its populace, and a fearsome display of skill and intelligence. "So what happened to the levees/ Why wasn't they steady?/ Why wasn't they able to control this?/ I know some folk that live by the levee that keep on tellin' me they heard some explosions/ Same shit happened back with Hurricane Betsy 1965/ I ain't too young to know this/ That was President Johnson/ This is President [Georgia] Bush," Wayne raps in breathless double-time, folding history, conspiracy, anger, and confusion over each other with style and venom.
Does this one song, at the end of a mixtape, justify the sex, drugs, and violence of nearly every other? It doesn't mean to. It only makes the thoughts, emotions, and motivations behind his more objectionable lyrics more explicit and literal, but it's not as if the same conclusions cannot be drawn from his other material. Wayne is no fool; he's built a mountainous persona of myth and some truth and coerces the listener to burrow into it through the tiny holes he's left in the façade. Whether you choose to dig is up to you, but Wayne is just beginning his ascent. He is 23 years old, 11 years in, and working on a level most need more time to reach. His confidence and charisma overwhelms, and on this mixtape he's doing more than wresting beats from contemporaries-- he's invading their songs and conquering their styles and cadences. Rick Ross, Dem Franchize Boyz, Three 6 Mafia: Wayne's merciless, claiming Southern anthems for himself and spitting Northern verses over them.
For his part, DJ Drama provides another example of why he's killing the mixtape game right now. Whether he's putting Pharrell over Wu-Tang or Little Brother over Pharrell, Drama is a magician. What might look like a dullard's handful from the top 10 is actually a platform for Wayne and a notable departure from the first Dedication's East Coast larceny and Tha Carter II's ambiguous production. "Poppin' My Collar", "What You Know", "Kryptonite," "Hustlin'", and "I Think They Like Me" all get the royal treatment, and it's exhilarating to hear Wayne bring his best to these regional-gone-national hits.
Much has been made of Lil' Wayne's growth from album to mixtape to album and so forth, and Dedication 2 is no exception. He seems more ambitious, and more capable of fulfilling ambitions with every release. Wayne clearly believes he's the "best rapper alive." What remains to be seen is whether he can convince the rest of us. | 2006-06-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-06-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | null | June 22, 2006 | 8.1 | 26c126bf-d19d-413f-aeac-e1305271c65e | Peter Macia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peter-macia/ | null |
The live album from one of the UK’s largest rock bands serves as a broad, if flawed, introduction to the still-growing band, their enormous potential, and the swaggeringly neurotic frontman Matt Healy. | The live album from one of the UK’s largest rock bands serves as a broad, if flawed, introduction to the still-growing band, their enormous potential, and the swaggeringly neurotic frontman Matt Healy. | The 1975: DH00278 (Live From the O2, London, 12/16/2016) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-1975-dh00278-live-from-the-o2-london-12162016/ | DH00278 (Live From the O2, London, 12/16/2016) | If pop’s notable figures of the present time-warped themselves to, say, 1987, the UK band the 1975 would probably occupy a place similar to INXS, or Duran Duran. They craft super-catchy songs that ping-pong through pop-adjacent genres and aren’t afraid to throw in some sax skronks or vibed-out textural experiments. It’s a heady mix, and their second album, last year’s I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it, made it even more so. It front-loaded its vibed-out moments (its title track is a six-minute dreamscape, its strident bass serving as the only tether to reality) but balanced them out with exquisitely constructed pop songs that got meta-fantastic about 21st-century culture like the sumptuous “Change of Heart.” I like it when you sleep… documented a band with creative energy to spare, able to wink sardonically at selfie culture’s halls of mirrors while also being very much a part of it.
With a new album reportedly coming out sometime in 2018, the band close the book on the Sleep era with DH00278, an audio-only capture of the 1975’s December 16, 2016, show at London’s O2 Arena, one of two they played at the UK’s biggest indoor venue. (It was initially released as a concert film on Christmas 2016.) While it doesn’t entirely echo the thrill of being in the same EnormoDome as Matt Healy and his bandmates, at about two hours long and with 24 tracks, DH00278 serves as a broad, if flawed, introduction to the still-growing band and their potential. When it succeeds, it does so because of the electrified bond between the band and its audience, which gets a jolt from the casually audacious way the group brings together glam, shoegaze, synth-pop, and any other sound that might tickle its fancy—even when the 1975 fall short, their sheer nerve is worth applauding.
Live albums are now more of an oddity. Are they necessary in the age of Setlist.FM and YouTube and shortened festival sets, and don’t they mostly benefit rock acts, who seem to be out of fashion in America right now? Sure they are, if only because they provide a historical record of those bands who can keep a crowd’s attention for more than your festival-standard 45 minutes. A document of a single, two-hour show in one place, from the opening cheers through the big singles and into the long stretches of mood music—a recollection that isn’t done until the sounds of the crowd exiting as “Jungle Boogie” wafts in the background fade out—might be passé, but it does at least reveal which acts have built up stamina and magnetism.
On paper, the 1975 operate in the rock band mold—they have a guitar-vox-bass-drums core, are fronted by a larger-than-life persona in Healy, and are more than willing to super-size their sound with brass or even a choir. DH00278 shows how they’ve blown up that ideal and refashioned it for the 2010s, whether by bringing in a choir for the impish “The Sound” (sample lyric: “You’re so conceited, I said ‘I love you’/What does it matter if I lie to you?”) or hyper-charging an open-road anthem with overdriven guitars and bashed-out beats (the glorious “Milk”). It also reveals the bond the 1975 have developed with their audience, who are fervent and steadfast, tracking Healy’s cryptic social-media posts and poring over the musical and lyrical details of the band’s songs. The cheers for tracks like the hip-wriggling anti-fame broadside “Love Me” and the bad-kid-jitters anthem “Chocolate” are lusty and loud; Healy gets nearly drowned out by fans singing along multiple times. In the context of a show, ambient interludes like the swirling “Please Be Naked” is a chance for crowd and artist to bathe in feedback and glory, marveling at being in the same room together. But on DH00278, some of that electricity is lost, as the nuances offered by those tracks’ studio versions get dampened.
Not to mention those interludes are all without Healy, the swaggeringly neurotic frontman who can follow up a passionate screed against in-concert phone use (“The memory, the visceral memory of the next three and a half minutes will be better than a video on your iPhone,” he pleads before the glittery smolder “Fallingforyou”) with a request for a bit more wine, and who can passionately advocate for human rights, and who can pull off multiple welcomes to a crowd over the course of a show with brio. His charisma radiates from the speakers on a recording heard a year and change after the actual event it’s chronicling. Even if the songs weren’t as good as they are, DH00278 would still be a chance to capture the enigmatic Healy as both showmanship-minded frontman and frazzled neurotic—two sides that aren’t as different as one might think. | 2018-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Dirty Hit / Interscope | January 8, 2018 | 7.1 | 26c48449-f95e-4f41-b7d0-5b8f7a01bf76 | Maura Johnston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/ | |
The Washington, D.C.-based rapper GoldLink broke through with an upbeat fusion of house music and hip-hop on his mixtape The God Complex, snagging the attention of Rick Rubin. His debut album concerns a relationship and subsequent breakup he had when he was 16, and the details are often kept elusive. | The Washington, D.C.-based rapper GoldLink broke through with an upbeat fusion of house music and hip-hop on his mixtape The God Complex, snagging the attention of Rick Rubin. His debut album concerns a relationship and subsequent breakup he had when he was 16, and the details are often kept elusive. | GoldLink: And After That, We Didn’t Talk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21209-and-after-that-we-didnt-talk/ | And After That, We Didn’t Talk | On GoldLink's 2014 debut mixtape The God Complex, the then-20-year-old rapper nailed a difficult balance: soft sounds, hard rhymes. The music—an uptempo mixture of house music and hip-hop signifiers (GoldLink coined the term "future bounce" for it)—offset lyrics full of hypermasculine, purposefully exaggerated sexual boasts and street-savvy narratives. There was something indescribable about hearing the high-voiced rapper spit something like "Dick to the face, might choke" 0ver bubbly champagne synths, and the tape caught on, along with its signature hit "Ay Ay". The Washington, D.C. rapper toured alongside Mac Miller, as well as electronic producers like SBTRKT and Kaytranada. He even caught the attention of Def Jam founder/music visionary Rick Rubin, who has served as a mentor for his debut album, And After That, We Didn't Talk.
And After That, We Didn't Talk is not a significant sonic departure from Link's previous work, but it carries more thematic weight. The album concerns a relationship and subsequent breakup he had when he was 16, but telling a six-year-old story also leaves the door open for very selective memory. The woman in question remains nameless throughout the album, and though he freely talks about a "Que" (with whom she was cheating on Link), an "Allan" (a likely previous boyfriend), and sprinkles other biographical notes, the bigger picture of why this moment and this person matter so much to Link that he dedicated his first studio album to her is often missing.
Instead, And After That communicates GoldLink's state of mind. He is reflective on the opening track, "After You Left", hopeful on "Zipporah", with its gospel chant bridge, "Lord, Lord, I need your help, Lord." The following three songs ("Dark Skin Women", "Spectrum", and "Dance on Me") best encapsulate his hip-hop/dance hybrid sound, and find Link returning to the sexual braggadocio of The God Complex, which is often where he finds the most joy as a writer (listen to his very vivid description of cunnilingus on "Dance on Me").
Toward the album's end, Link ventures into R&B and, at times, completely abandons rapping. He sings about his obsessive love on "Palm Trees", and while it's still unclear why he's obsessed, his pained vocals make you believe. The same emotion comes through on "Polarized" when he sings, "Go down South to Atlanta with your sister and/ I'll fly you myself, if I have to." In that song, all we learn about the subject is that she's a 5'7" model, but Link is convincing enough as a communicator to make up for the lyrical gaps.
And After That, We Didn't Talk is not quite as immediately exciting as its predecessor, which was a burst of aphrodisiac energy. GoldLink feels tugged down occasionally by the story he is trying to tell. As he said in an interview with Pitchfork, "I feel like 99% of niggas lie in they raps; I don't." The literal truths, however, distract from how he expresses them. GoldLink is a total-package artist, someone who does not have to rely entirely on facts to succeed as a rapper. His music works when every element blends together, and And After That, We Didn't Talk is most interesting when he shares only the most vital details from a moment. It's then that he can wring his experiences for their emotions and convey feelings with more than just words. | 2015-12-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-12-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Soulection | December 1, 2015 | 7.3 | 26c7366d-9336-4b79-b624-fbf4a251c55e | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
On their latest LP, Ava Luna are, as always, toying with a collection of ideas that should not work together in theory. The album has a loose, playful energy, and always seems to be ready to pounce on you. | On their latest LP, Ava Luna are, as always, toying with a collection of ideas that should not work together in theory. The album has a loose, playful energy, and always seems to be ready to pounce on you. | Ava Luna: Infinite House | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20453-infinite-house/ | Infinite House | On their third full-length, the Brooklyn quintet Ava Luna is, as always, toying with a collection of ideas that should not work together in theory. There are traces of genres they’ve already spent some time exploring: British post-punk, '70s soul and funk, late '60s krautrock. The band recorded Infinite House in wildly different environments—Benton, Mississippi and Brooklyn—which serve as central and opposing life forces for the album. One minute murmuring, echoed vocals imitate spirits in a Southern forest, and the next frontman Carlos Hernandez is texting a lover and bemoaning the cost of living. It’s a scatterbrained trip, one that invites you to nestle into its grooves and get comfy before it rudely catapults you out again.
Take, for example, opener "Company". A muted bass line thumps through the first minute, joined by some leisurely strumming and a faint hi-hat. Drummer Julian Fader abruptly cues the rest of the band in for an outburst of noise and distortion as Hernandez hollers in sheer desperation, "Do you appreciate my company?" This is a group that basks in these kinds of bipolar switches, slinking away to a new mood just as they’d gotten grips on the one preceding it.
Nonsense is intrinsic to Ava Luna, and either of its two backup singers (Felicia Douglass and Becca Kauffman) is prone to breaking out into gibberish at any given moment. But they take this tendency to a new level on "Tenderize" when Kauffman breathily scats between Hernandez’s anxious yelps like a jazz club singer. Douglass’ shadowy harmonies counteracts them both, closing in the gaps at exactly the right points. When the group builds on each other this way, the result is eerily mystical. This layering works similarly on "Coat of Shellac", blending the slickness of R&B with the harshness of post-punk and unpredictability of no wave.
The album has a loose, playful energy, and always seems to be ready to pounce on you. Skittish guitar improvisations tangle with neo-soul percussion on "Steve Polyester", while Kauffman alternates between speaking and sliding into song sporadically, as if by accident. "Black Dog" starts off with Hernandez telling a seductive, drowsy tale over a few simple guitar chords, allowing for a much-needed moment of respite. Of course, that too gives way to the dissonance, accompanied by haunting, gospel choir gang vocals. He often riffs on freewheeling blues-rock in the style of Captain Beefheart, most prominently during the serrated rhythms of "Best Hexagon".
The most bizarre track—if forced to pick one—is "Victoria". Primal utterances dance circles around distorted, intergalactic synth beats. Kauffman takes a beguiling taunt ("You’re no good, baby!"), deconstructs it, then pieces it back together repeatedly. It’s a disorienting thrill that draws out the band’s innate ingenuity. There are plenty of other high points on the album—the aching chorus of "Billz" is arguably Hernandez’s most addictive yet—but listening to Ava Luna play off of each others’ quirks here is intoxicating. Minimalism has never been their strong suit, and they wrestle with controlling their lawless tendencies, yet Infinite House doesn’t compromise the group’s hyperactive curiosity. Keeping up with it requires careful attention, though unpacking it hardly feels laborious. Just don’t expect Ava Luna to do any hand-holding for you throughout the process. | 2015-04-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-04-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Western Vinyl | April 15, 2015 | 7.6 | 26cb624b-eabc-4c4e-ba78-d90a6fb8667f | Tess Duncan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tess-duncan/ | null |
Tim Hecker's new album is more focused on performance than process, as most of it was recorded with a small group of orchestral musicians affiliated with the label Bedroom Community. Rather than having the music conjure a space, the space now shapes the music, and while Hecker’s music has always been eerie, it's never been this forceful. | Tim Hecker's new album is more focused on performance than process, as most of it was recorded with a small group of orchestral musicians affiliated with the label Bedroom Community. Rather than having the music conjure a space, the space now shapes the music, and while Hecker’s music has always been eerie, it's never been this forceful. | Tim Hecker: Virgins | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18559-tim-hecker-virgins/ | Virgins | Tim Hecker’s first album under his own name was called Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again. This was 2001: Ambient and electronic music was still ruled by the penetrating austerity of labels like Mille Plateaux and Raster-Noton—labels whose artists strove to make their music sound as digital as possible. Markus Popp's Oval, which inspired a lot of supposedly funny comments about whether or not its CDs were skipping, is still probably the best example of this—and in an era where CDs are starting to go the way of the public pay phone, probably the most quaint, too.
From its title down, Haunt Me presented a model of electronic music that was spectral, imperfect, and capable of erosion. The most applicable metaphors for it weren’t technological, but natural: Parts of the album sounded like the slow tearing of paper, other parts like wind blowing across infinities of sand. Hecker didn’t just imbue his computers with “warmth”—a lazy term that has long needed to be put down—but with mortality. (Remember that that this was 2001, a year after the Y2K scare made supposedly infallible stores of digital information look vulnerable in a very human way.) At the time, Haunt Me’s most obvious companion was Fennesz’s Endless Summer, a grainy, blissful album that resembles easy-listening music coming through on the broken broadcast of a distant star.
Hecker has more or less followed course for the past 12 years, releasing high-quality albums with the low-key consistency of someone apparently unconcerned with trend. His approach to sound and texture can be traced to mid-2000s Radiohead, the ominous holding patterns of Godspeed You! Black Emperor (fellow Canadians with which Hecker has toured), William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, and basically any music that sounds like it has been abandoned by its maker to rot. His peaks are arguable: My favorites are 2006’s Harmony in Ultraviolet (his most conventionally beautiful) and 2011’s Ravedeath, 1972, which was built out of a single session of live organ, piano and guitar, recorded in an Icelandic church, and later worked over in the studio.
Virgins is the first Tim Hecker album more focused on performance than process. Most of it was recorded with a small group of orchestral musicians affiliated with Bedroom Community, the collective that also includes composers Nico Muhly, Ben Frost, Valgeir Sigurðsson and Paul Corley. (Frost helped record Ravedeath; Paul Corley engineered both Ravedeath and Virgins, and co-produced Oneohtrix Point Never’s R Plus Seven at Bedroom Community’s Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik; Oneohtrix Point Never’s Dan Lopatin collaborated with Hecker on 2011’s Instrumental Tourist: The world of forward-thinking electro-acoustic music is a small and fraternal one.)
The live-room conceit is an interesting turn for an artist who for a long time worked in a primarily digital realm: Rather than having the music conjure a space, the space now shapes the music—a return to idea of sound as something that exists in the air before on hard drives, and of albums as specific records of specific people in specific places. Even the electronics—and there are still plenty of electronics—sound like they’re refracting and ricocheting off of wood and metal, scraping a ceiling, trying to find a way out.
Hecker’s music has always been eerie, but never this forceful. Some sections of Virgins feel like soundtracks for horror-movie climaxes when the camera fixes on a sickening image and refuses to turn away, fascinated and trapped at the same time. Even the album’s quieter moments are more tense than they might’ve been on Hecker’s earlier albums—a function, maybe, of a live-room environment where every creak and whisper seems to be happening a few feet from the speakers instead of at some artificially cavernous distance.
This is music that benefits from being heard loud and/or on headphones in the same way couches are best experienced by actually sitting down in them instead of just brushing your fingers against the upholstery as you leave the room. Like a lot of Ben Frost’s albums (or something like Swans’ The Seer), Virgins feels possessed by the idea that no advancements in society or technology will ever shake our primal reactions to fear, wonder, awe and what in a more naïve era used to be called the sublime. And while it’s a fallacy to think that hyperseriousness is the only way to strike people at their core, it’s still inspiring to hear an artist—especially one who started out as mellow as Hecker—double down and make a statement so confrontational. Once haunted, now he’s the one who haunts. | 2013-10-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-10-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Kranky / Paper Bag | October 15, 2013 | 8.3 | 26daca02-adbb-44e0-bfe2-de53be49dec5 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
With dancefloors gone dark, the Northern Irish DJs tailor their second album to homebound listeners, but their indoor voices don’t command the same attention as their main-stage belters. | With dancefloors gone dark, the Northern Irish DJs tailor their second album to homebound listeners, but their indoor voices don’t command the same attention as their main-stage belters. | Bicep: Isles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bicep-isles/ | Isles | The idea of a home-listening record from Bicep feels suspiciously oxymoronic. Like Orbital and Avicii before them, the Belfast-born duo of Matt McBriar and Andy Ferguson are one of those electronic acts designed for the sweeping euphoria of big summer stages. Isles, their second album, should be blowing the cobwebs off the Southern Hemisphere’s festival circuit as you read this. Instead, the pandemic intervened, so Bicep are rolling out a domesticated version of their music, promising a “much, much harder” version of the same material to be delivered in person once it’s safe to tread the boards. No wonder Bicep sounded so miserable on comeback single “Atlas,” a song whose Ofra Haza sample and synth squiggles suggest an (inverted) cross between Richie Hawtin’s F.U.S.E. project and the Sisters of Mercy: the live shutdown has left them like heirs to a knife factory in the age of big soup.
In the best-case scenario, Bicep might have proven themselves to be house music’s own Taylor Swifts, taking their epic bluster down several notches to locate a homely charm that is equally sympathetic to their gifts. In reality, though, you’d be pressed to find significant difference between Isles and Bicep’s eponymous debut album. The new release may push the boat out a little further in search of sample sources, with Malawian polyrhythms and snatches of the Bulgarian State Radio & Television Choir connecting on “Apricots,” but the group’s bread and butter remains cavernous electronica, progressive house, and a scraping of UK garage, underpinned by a strong melodic current. This might sound like a convoluted mix, but Bicep keep their productions simple, linear, and uncluttered. They’re like the anti-100 gecs. Not all that much happens in a Bicep song, and what does is orderly and well signposted.
For many people, this is part of the duo’s charm. Bicep resonate with large audiences precisely because their music is so digestible, like the well-ordered moral structures of a blockbuster film. But this means Bicep walk a perilous line between brilliant and banal. When they get it right and the melodies connect, as on Isles’ epically wistful “X,” they are hugely enjoyable. When they don’t, as on the disappointingly vague “Cazenove,” there’s almost nothing to get your teeth into; their music drifts by in a haze of turbo-charged powder puff.
Isles is at its best when the gloom sinks in. “Atlas” has a wonderfully hangdog feel; “Apricots” is Dead Can Dance deep house; and the liturgical feel of “Lido” suggests monk-friendly German electronica act Enigma. “Saku (feat. Clara La San),” meanwhile, is almost an excellent song: Its vocal melody has a bitter sting of melancholy, like tears drying in a cold winter wind, but the production is too polite, a house-cat version of UK garage that has been neutered and declawed. There’s no rage, little passion and—rather ironically—no muscle.
“Saku”’s frustratingly not-quite-there production is emblematic of the way Isles teeters on the brink of success. There is something confoundingly almost about Bicep: they are almost a great act, almost capable of unleashing vast emotion, and almost on the verge of letting go. But the release never quite arrives. Isles has sparkling moments but it’s all a bit constrained, like a potted plant on a window sill that craves the natural wildness of a garden.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | January 22, 2021 | 6.3 | 26db12e0-eb20-42c0-8c3e-582216de9d24 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The once-mighty Pixies debase their legacy with this mercifully brief new EP. | The once-mighty Pixies debase their legacy with this mercifully brief new EP. | Pixies: EP-1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18560-pixies-ep-1/ | EP-1 | The sad spoils of a job in music criticism: I am finally given the chance to review a new release by the Pixies, and it's this. There is a bitter personal irony in the moment, a momentary affirmation of a fear that anyone chasing the culture industry contends with occasionally: I got here too late. Anything worth covering has already happened.
I don’t really feel that way, of course, but this quickie EP, dropped into the world two days ago, prompts bleak thoughts, at least while it’s on. It’s mercifully brief-- four songs, one, “Indie Cindy”, repeated in a “clean” version-- but considering it is the first new release bearing the Pixies name since 1991’s Trompe Le Monde, it leaves deep marks. Nothing in these four faceless, fatuous alt-rock songs distinguishes them as the music of the Pixies. Nothing, in fact, distinguishes them at all. Kim Deal is absent, having left the band, but no one else-- not Santiago or Lovering or even Frank Black-- seem to have shown up either.
From the moment Black’s bleating vocal take begins on “Andro Queen”, it’s painfully clear: There is no Pixies in this Pixies. No tension between preschool giddiness and grad-school sophistication, between finger-painting pop and Bunuel-quoting lyrics; no seesaw between playfulness and menace; no intimations of terror. There is no alien shimmer to the guitars or the vocal melodies. The cheerily plodding power chords and excruciating rhyme scheme of “Another Toe in the Ocean” recall Green Album-era Weezer, or Lit. The turgid crunch of “What Goes Boom” summons uncomfortable memories of Papa Roach covering “Gouge Away”. This music wasn’t just written or recorded without any regard to the quality of the Pixies legacy, it was done so without regard to songwriting quality at all. If one of these songs had started playing over the credits of an American Pie knockoff that never reached theaters, you would not blink.
For anyone with even a mild investment in the music the Pixies made in the 1980s-- which, considering how far their influence spread after Kurt Cobain leaked them into the world’s mainstream water supply, is a fair amount of people-- the utterly anonymous sound of EP-1 is shocking. On “Indie Cindy”, Black rants and mutters lines like “You put the cock in cocktail, man/ I put the tail in wait, watch me walk." It's terrible, but it's possibly the most memorable turn of phrase he manages. The rest streams by like multiplex air-conditioning.
It's hard not to take the EP's failure personally. If not for the once-faraway promise of the Pixies, and bands like the Pixies, I would almost certainly never have wandered down the foolish siren-song path to music-critic employment in the first place. When I saw them play after they reunited, nine years ago, I distinctly remember the thrill, shared by the other twentysomethings around me, as we all sang along to “Hey”. This moment, maybe, wasn’t supposed to be. I was cheating death, or time, and like any good monkey’s-paw cautionary tale, it would certainly backfire in some way. And so it has. Very soon, no one will remember much about this EP, or that it even exists. But it’s a minor tragedy that it was released, and it’s almost enough to make me wish the reunion and even that magical show I saw never happened. | 2013-09-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-09-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | September 6, 2013 | 1 | 26dbebed-ecdd-44b4-880c-b100286ca2d5 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
null | After parting ways with Uncle Tupelo partner Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy's first step was an unsteady one-- Wilco's *A.M.*, like a nervous houseguest fidgeting to get comfortable on the couch, never found its vibe. Farrar, on the other hand, with Son Volt, confidently assumed his position as Americana's standard bearer. Things soon changed, however, as 1996's sprawling and ambitious *Being There* saw Wilco reimagining themselves as rock'n'roll revivalists with a drunken swagger, and winning the hearts of Uncle Tupelo fans and critics the world over-- Son Volt, meanwhile, stagnated on 1997's *Straightaways*, which, while not a bad record by any | Wilco: Summerteeth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8677-summer-teeth/ | Summerteeth | After parting ways with Uncle Tupelo partner Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy's first step was an unsteady one-- Wilco's A.M., like a nervous houseguest fidgeting to get comfortable on the couch, never found its vibe. Farrar, on the other hand, with Son Volt, confidently assumed his position as Americana's standard bearer. Things soon changed, however, as 1996's sprawling and ambitious Being There saw Wilco reimagining themselves as rock'n'roll revivalists with a drunken swagger, and winning the hearts of Uncle Tupelo fans and critics the world over-- Son Volt, meanwhile, stagnated on 1997's Straightaways, which, while not a bad record by any stretch, failed to innovate quite like Wilco had. The tide had turned, and Wilco found themselves unexpectedly on top.
In 1998, Wilco teamed with British folkie Billy Bragg for Mermaid Avenue, a collection of Woody Guthrie lyrics paired with original music by the collaborating artists. Wilco lent a suitable Midwestern sensibility to the project, but with Guthrie putting the words in his mouth, Tweedy had yet to beat the biggest knock against him. By now, it was obvious that he had a knack for crafting instantly memorable melodies; the question was: what did he have to say?
Just as the Velvets' swan song, Loaded, was packed with hit songs for critics who claimed Lou Reed was incapable of writing them, so too is Summerteeth Jeff Tweedy's statement of purpose. The album, a loose song cycle considering the intermingling of perception, communication, and reality, and its affect on our relationships, witnesses the band dismissing its country-rock sound for a studio sheen that would make Brian Wilson proud. Drawing on the pop music of their late-60s and early-70s youths, the band members have crafted a collection of immediately infectious and consistently stunning melodies with complex, layered arrangements. With the band having jettisoned Max Johnston and his dobro, fiddle, and mandolin, Summerteeth's songs are driven not by rustic guitar licks, but rather by Jay Bennett's grand organ fills and ever-present harmonies, which paint the album in Technicolor.
Undermining this sticky-sweet pop party in a delicious irony, and ultimately supplying Summerteeth with its depth and success, is Tweedy's dark contemplation. The intrigue begins quickly on the album's opener, "Can't Stand It", which finds our narrator lamenting the end of a relationship over a pop-soul ditty punctuated by bells. As the source of the narrator's frustration crystallizes on his own fickle emotions, Tweedy plants the seeds of mistrust, warning of "speakers speaking in code."
As the album racks up false realizations, startling confessions, and outright lies, listeners find themselves exchanging suspicious glances with their guides. Where "Pieholden Suite" dupes a sleeping lover, the frail "We're Just Friends" finds Tweedy lying only to himself. Similarly, the singer's resolve on the jubilant would-be self-help anthem "Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway(again)" is plastered like a forced smile, and cracks like, "I'm a bomb, regardless," scar the façade. In fact, during the album's first half, only the overtly sarcastic "How to Fight Loneliness" is what it seems.
The album's confusion climaxes during its keystone, the majestic "Via Chicago", and its counterpart "ELT". On the former, a scorned lover stews, "I dreamed about killing you again last night/ And it felt alright with me." Then, a couplet of unsettling stream-of-consciousness lyrics give way to Tweedy as he tears into a disturbingly deliberate, off-key guitar riff that might very well be the musical moment of 1999. Interestingly, the celebratory "ELT" finds our sad psychopath repented and healed: "Oh, what have I been missing/ Wishing, wishing that you were dead." Taken on its merits, the song is almost unimaginatively sincere, but in context, it becomes enigmatic. As the narrator shuffles his story for our approval, which spin are we to believe? Brilliantly, the album leaves such questions unanswered.
As Tweedy removes his trickster mask for "My Darling", a spare lullaby to his young son, the mood of the album emerges, but Summerteeth's transformation is most apparent in its two recitals of "A Shot in the Arm". Amidst the incertitude of the album's twilight opening, its chorus, "Maybe all I need is a shot in the arm/ Something in my veins/ Bloodier than blood," seems a ghoulish reference to drug addiction. However, its reprise, on the heels of the Elvis Costello-by-way-of-Phil Spector romp, "Candyfloss", seems to call on an inner strength and the fortitude for self-improvement.
From its opener, in which "our prayers will never be answered again," to "In a Future Age", where Tweedy challenges us to "turn our prayers to outrageous dares," Summerteeth drags us through our interpersonal garbage, only to politely ask us to pick up after ourselves. Once drawn in by the album's addictive pop hooks, the band ensnares us with clever ironies and rich musical treatments that never let go. As the album admits its intricacies, it's clear that the band is growing exponentially. Having confidently abandoned their alt-country ghosts, Wilco has become a band from which we can expect everything and nothing at all. With Summerteeth, they've delivered on both counts, crafting an album as wonderfully ambiguous and beautifully uncertain as life itself. | 1999-02-28T01:01:40.000-05:00 | 1999-02-28T01:01:40.000-05:00 | Rock | Reprise | February 28, 1999 | 9.4 | 26dc342b-12fd-4621-9c85-1a6fa9ea8dd6 | Pitchfork | null |
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The folk singer enlists an elite, dynamic group of players for an album deconstructed from a master jam session, naturally creating his most jazz-forward release to date. | The folk singer enlists an elite, dynamic group of players for an album deconstructed from a master jam session, naturally creating his most jazz-forward release to date. | Sam Amidon: The Following Mountain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23156-the-following-mountain/ | The Following Mountain | You can rely on Sam Amidon’s albums for heavily reworked American traditionals and a bit of Irish folk, mixed with a heartfelt pop cover or two—and always that beseeching voice, with its dusky bronze hue, elongating syllables like whale song. But only the last is present on The Following Mountain, his first record of mostly original material, save for a few stray citations: the lyrics of “Blackbird,” a Kentucky fiddle tune, and some lines from a 17th-century poem. It is also, as foreshadowed by the presence of the electric jazz guitarist Bill Frisell on his last record, Amidon’s most jazz-forward release to date.
Amidon inspires deep personal identification in his fans, but his sixth album sometimes courts admiration more than cathexis, at least compared to its most crushable predecessors. He usually spins old-time music into jazzy flights and neoclassical compositions, stitching rustic motifs and lyrics into postmodern Appalachian pastiches. Here, he’s done the opposite, extracting folk songs from his own improvisations. Free-jazz finale “April” is the album’s keystone, the final twelve minutes of an epic sesh with some prodigious players along for the jam including percussionist luminary Milford Graves. The spiritual saxophonist Sam Gendel, the eclectic instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, and other younger musicians also add fine playing throughout
Amidon and producer Leo Abrahams reverse engineered songs from individual moments of the master jam, and drew out a unifying, gently driving rhythm across the album. The resultant music rolls and shimmers, with hard little fillips of guitar glinting in waves of woodwinds and violins, organs and electric basses. The bright purity of beloved songs like “Saro” are absent. Instead, imagine if Amidon’s best record, I See the Sign, had been all “Kedron” and “How Come That Blood”—all understated dynamics and trotting rhythm—and no “Johanna The Row-di” or “Pretty Fair Damsel.”
It’s not a bad look, but the record has a rocky start. “Fortune” is simply underdeveloped, a sketch. “Ghosts,” though, is a real stumbling block. Amidon drags ear-splitting squalls across his violin and howls almost tunelessly, as if the music were a thicket he’s trying to claw out of. But things quickly settle down, and familiar dreamlike pastorals reign, with an effect like looking at an Andrew Wyeth painting while—not tripping, exactly, but gently hallucinating as from sleep deprivation.
*The Following Mountain *is more a musician’s record than an art object. “Another Story Told” emphasizes, however archly, the gestures of live-in-a-room playing (“Fiddles,” announces a carefully tracked-in voice); other song titles also shout out their players (Sultan’s elegant congas propel the entrancing “Juma Mountain” and Gendel leads the mythic “Gendel in 5” with force and clarity). The cold-burning blues of “Warren,” blending an old shape-note song and a Chinese poem, matches these highlights in sultry, solemn grit.
But what to do with “April”? It’s a juicier voyage through extended techniques than “Ghosts,” but it’s also an undeniably jarring ending for a placid record, and I’m not sure one can even appreciate the end of a long improv out of context. It’s interesting that it is the master document for the other songs, but that doesn’t make listening to them side by side feel intelligible. It’s no knock on the great drummer Graves, who once gigged with Albert Ayler and Sonny Sharrock, to wonder who would ever put on a Sam Amidon record when they were in the mood for some rowdy jazz. But, a few odd decisions aside, there’s enough between the unforgiving slopes to make this essential for Amidon’s present devotees, if not the perfect mountain for prospective new ones to climb. | 2017-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | May 25, 2017 | 7 | 26e3c3e6-7894-4562-833a-d2e20fec3472 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The work of London-born, Sudanese artist Ahmed Gallab, aka Sinkane, blends styles including sub-Saharan pop, shoegaze, and afro-rock. More than ever, his new album has the feel of a democratic band. | The work of London-born, Sudanese artist Ahmed Gallab, aka Sinkane, blends styles including sub-Saharan pop, shoegaze, and afro-rock. More than ever, his new album has the feel of a democratic band. | Sinkane: Life & Livin’ It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22872-life-livin-it/ | Life & Livin’ It | If any artist deserves to swerve around a borderless Earth with a real World Passport, it’s the London-born, Sudanese artist Ahmed Gallab. Listen to his catalog under the Sinkane moniker and you’ll hear fragments of sub-Saharan pop, shoegaze, afro-rock, electronica, krautrock, and everything in between—all melded into his own funky blend. Jumping into Sinkane’s discography is like a weekend immersed in your local record store’s world music rack.
On Life & Livin’ It, Sinkane’s sound is, more than ever, that of a democratic band. Supporting its predecessor, Mean Love, Gallab and his musicians toured 166 shows in 20 countries, and this new album retains the immediacy of a live set. The highlife bluster and catchy hooks of Life & Livin’ It are sweet as taffy, like a bright sunburst of positivity that could melt ice.
With production spotless from front-to-back, no instrument trips another’s heels. The orchestration remains refreshingly breezy, from the simple-but-infectious keyboard riffs of “Favorite Song,” to the gentle sax lines on “U’Huh,” to the afrobeat bluster of members of Brooklyn band Antibalas’ rich horn sections on “Telephone.” (If anything, the mix could be a little too clean.) Gallab—eternally infused with the spirits of his Sudanese pop forefathers—shines on top of the rhythms with zero struggles. A bit of an outlier, opener “Deadweight” features the kind of digital blips that have underpinned some of Gallab’s previous work: The chipped guitar chords, twinkling keys, and rapped bongos rev up slowly, culminating with wailing guitars.
The singer’s gentle vocal tones perfectly suit the lyrics, which are sunny, upbeat, and sometimes a little goofy. There’s an endearing simplicity to “Favorite Song,” inspired by Gallab’s one-time side job as a DJ: “Won’t you play my favorite song?” he repeats over and over. Elsewhere, “U’Huh” sees Gallab asserting, “Everything is fine/We’re all gonna be alright” and “Kulu shi tamaam,” an Arabic phrase meaning “everything is great.” It’s either an admirable shot of optimism or skittish fingers-crossing given these times we find ourselves in.
On closer “The Way,” the guitars get nasty. The horns come down hard, and chants of “I know, I know, I know” summon the spirit of Bill Withers. It’s psychedelic-era Temptations cut with Blaxploitation grooves. *Life & Livin’ It *signs off with a stiff jab to the nose, hinting at what could be if Sinkane’s next journey takes them deeper into the mud. | 2017-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | City Slang | February 8, 2017 | 7.3 | 26ecbc92-1d32-4270-87da-12f486338d55 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | null |
Indie rock’s preeminent classical composer offers a selection of piano pieces from minimal, to rousing, to a heroic concerto for two pianos backed by a full orchestra. | Indie rock’s preeminent classical composer offers a selection of piano pieces from minimal, to rousing, to a heroic concerto for two pianos backed by a full orchestra. | Bryce Dessner: El Chan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bryce-dessner-el-chan/ | El Chan | Bryce Dessner’s “Concerto for Two Pianos” opens with a rolling boom of sound, rich and super-saturated. The two piano soloists, Katia and Marielle Labèque, gallop up and down the keyboard and the orchestra shudders and blurts. It is the kind of curtain-drawing moment that concertos used to be made of, and as this introduction clears out, a rising four-note piano theme emerges. It’s a simple, searching figure that could serve an Indiana Jones-style swashbuckler score as well as a chamber opera, and Dessner proves that to us by blowing the theme up and shrinking it. We hear it ripple through the woodwinds, the strings; under the hands of the Labèque sisters, it sounds like cool jazz.
Dessner, of course, is a member of the National, one of the longest-running success stories of 21st-century indie rock. Part of their durability might have something to do with just how busy its members keep between album cycles: By now, Dessner is almost as integral to the contemporary classical programming cycles of American orchestras as his band is to summer festivals. Deutsche Grammophon releases his works and every few years, he premieres a new, substantive commission. In 2018, he was named a creative partner to the San Francisco Symphony, under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen. For a contemporary composer, there are few loftier positions. It is an unusual lane for a working rock musician to occupy.
Dessner’s music feels heavily influenced by early 20th-century composers like Bartók and Debussy—composers working within the range of conventional tonality but pushing its outermost limits, composers who did then-unprecedented things with orchestral color. The opening flourish to the “Concerto For Two Pianos” nods towards Olivier Messiaen’s massive “Turangalîla-Symphonie,” which opens with a similar burst. Dessner keeps a low profile in his band, and his classical works don’t have the showy faux-intellectual edge of, say, Frank Zappa’s concert works, but he is unafraid of bombast, and seems to understand and even relish the ways that orchestras are uniquely positioned to create it.
His new concerto is filled with long, heroic piano runs set against the orchestra, the kind of writing that evokes the hoary old hero’s-journey dynamic that once defined all concertos. The piece is short and punchy, all three movements clocking in under a total of 25 minutes. At times it veers towards the empty-calories sensations of composers like Michael Daugherty, whose works fill your ears and dissipate as fast as fireworks. But it’s a meaty and sometimes haunting work, a genre exercise that fulfills its own goals, kind of like a good cop show or western.
“Haven,” a pristine little eight-minute piece for piano and guitar, is less memorable. It is so wildly and distractingly redolent of Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint” that it verges on a student exercise. If you synced up, say, the 2:12 mark of first movement of “Electric Counterpoint” with the opening of “Haven," you would have your own little Reich work. Dessner doesn’t usually go for such open mimicry. The piece is lively but has a hard time arguing for its independent existence.
The title work, “El Chan,” features a whisper of pianos that begins to sound a bit like John Adams’ “Hallelujah Junction” and then opens into a stillness closer to Erik Satie. But Dessner’s music has too much surging harmonic motion to fit neatly into the smooth churn of modern minimalism. The work is a dedication the filmmaker Alejandro Iñárritu, and there is some of his frenetic spirit in the music: “Coyote” is two minutes of leaping, pounding dissonances, a mixture of playfulness and rising panic. It makes him a refreshingly old-fashioned kind of composer. His pieces do the sorts of things that compositions students were taught to watch for: first theme, second theme, development, recapitulate.
Old-fashioned never needs to mean “sleepy,” though, and these pieces are more sedate and less distinguished than some of his others. The dulcet murmur of the concert hall seems to be overtaking him as his classical career grows in stature: I deeply missed the gnashed teeth and bad-caffeine jolt of his Kronos Quartet piece “Aheym,” or the soured-milk little dissonances of “Raphael,” which he recorded with the Copenhagen Philharmonic in 2014. As his rock-band gig got a little more predictable, his classical pieces used to be the secret places you could hear him indulge some wild-hair energy; it’s disheartening to see that spirit fade as his resume grows. | 2019-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Deutsche Grammophon | April 13, 2019 | 7 | 26ee211c-b85f-4a97-b33b-c87f51ad9f3c | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
While this seven-song EP sounds like it was birthed from the same creative wavelength as the London producer's recent LP Dedication, here the album's glum funereality gets an almost dance-friendly makeover. | While this seven-song EP sounds like it was birthed from the same creative wavelength as the London producer's recent LP Dedication, here the album's glum funereality gets an almost dance-friendly makeover. | Zomby: Nothing EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16086-nothing/ | Nothing EP | Don't let the title or post-album late-year timing fool you-- there are plenty of good things happening on Nothing. While it sounds like it was taken from the same creative burst that birthed London producer Zomby's recent LP Dedication, here that album's glum funereality gets an almost dance-friendly makeover. With its classic-sounding jungle breaks and ragga vocal samples, opener "Labyrinth" immediately recalls Zomby's vaguely conceptual throwback debut Where Were U in '92?, though drenched in noir melancholy. The breaks stutter and sputter, the perfunctory chord progression is oddly defeatist, and the characteristic airhorns are mockingly empty and peripheral: Breakbeat 'ardkore never sounded this tormented.
That's not to say Nothing isn't ever upbeat or danceable-- it's tinged with Dedication's air of quiet, nocturnal introspection but not shackled by its thematic bent or album-oriented sequencing. Thus we get seven shades of Zomby, and even if they're basically different shades of gray, it's exciting to hear him branch out. He tries something new on the unusually dissolute "Trapdoor", where grainy synths billow over scattershot percussion that has more to do with footwork than Zomby's usual hardcore continuum. "Digital Fractal" and "Equinox" take the pseudo-garage bounce of older tracks like "Tarantula" and turn it somber in two different ways: "Fractal" plays with dulcet, mournful tones and shrouds its cycling arpeggios in reverb so they sound like they're off in the distance, lost in a fog, while the shimmering "Equinox" sucks that echo chamber dry, all crisply slicing snares and tactile hand percussion. It's a brilliant realism often missing from an artist whose work is expressed through glassy, artificial textures or borrowed tropes from extinct genres.
Those extinct genres make a determined comeback on Nothing, however, and Zomby's take on them is stronger than ever. "Sens" toys gently with its breaks, carefully placing them in the white space of a melody caught between jerky and jilted, and "Ecstasy Versions" transitions from a hesitant breakbeat crawler into full-on jungle. Even here, again Zomby's morose melodicism takes center stage, a track more about its sadly cooing vocals-- a common sample source sullied and sullen-- and bleepy melody than the flashy, distracting breaks that should be the center of attention. It's like he's proving once and for all that Where Were U in '92? wasn't just a transparent exercise, blending his hardcore copycat tracks with his more personal, idiosyncratic tendencies.
The Nothing EP was originally included as an appendage to the Japanese edition of Dedication, so it seems almost certain that these were leftovers from the album. But it says a lot about the strength of these tracks-- and Zomby's preternatural propensity for prolific greatness-- that the seven odds and sods on Nothing make for such a strong whole. It's not quite the sound of Zomby having fun-- this music is still too dark for that-- but it's Zomby being his usual tangential self again, after bearing the constraints of a second cohesive album. He recently tweeted: "jungle is going to come back hard, mark my words, it might be five years from now but we will witness a new great age of jungle in England." This sounds like the excitable mouthing-off of a delusional purist, but really, with visionary artists like Zomby behind a potential new wave of the stuff, it's hard not to wonder if he could be right. | 2011-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | 4AD | November 30, 2011 | 7.5 | 26f3ff79-7131-4a45-b84f-f3677430b276 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
Latest from these Glaswegian indie-poppers blends 1950s beach music, country, and bubbly orch-pop to complement their alternately romantic and cynical lyrics. | Latest from these Glaswegian indie-poppers blends 1950s beach music, country, and bubbly orch-pop to complement their alternately romantic and cynical lyrics. | Camera Obscura: My Maudlin Career | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12942-my-maudlin-career/ | My Maudlin Career | On the title track of Camera Obscura's fourth album, My Maudlin Career, Tracyanne Campbell sings, "This maudlin career has come to an end/ I don't want to be sad again." As usual, she's being sincerely ironic. Camera Obscura fans will be pleased to know that she's still turning out maudlin torch songs with apparent ease. It is a record of the most immoderate sentiment: Thirty seconds in, on "French Navy", you've already got a dusty library, a French sailor, and the moon on the silvery lake. By the second track, "The Sweetest Thing", Campbell's ready to trade her mother for a compliment from a certain someone. She might not want to be sad again, but judging from the kind of tangled romantic assignations she confesses to here? Album number five already lurks in the inevitable fallout.
The sonic similarities and early connections between Camera Obscura and fellow Glaswegians Belle and Sebastian have already been flogged to death; what's less often mentioned is that they're also growing up parallel. Both began as lo-fi indie-pop bands with heads full of classic pop radio. Over time, both shifted their emphasis toward crafting classic-sounding songs in various Western pop idioms while retaining traces of their button-badge origins. More timid incarnations of Camera Obscura dissolved their genre exercises into a sort of equalizing cuddliness; on My Maudlin Career, the band's confidence draws them into sharper relief. You'll hear traces of 1950s beach music on "The Sweetest Thing", country on "Forest and Sands", and bubbly orch-pop all over the place. The album feels as if it could have been released any time in the last 50-odd years, but the inspired arrangements-- and, of course, Campbell's indelible voice-- make it sound fresh, too.
"Refinement" is the watchword on My Maudlin Career, and there are two particular developments of note. One is the string arrangements, which are kinda out of control. They buffet the verses relentlessly, taking over entirely whenever the jubilation reaches such a feverish pitch that words can no longer express it-- check out the deliriously up-swirling end of "Careless Love". It's as if George Gershwin stormed the studio. A weaker band might have floundered under the weight, which brings us to the second notable development: Campbell's singing retains its vulnerable-but-tough naiveté, but it sounds more assertive and agile, with increased swing and soul, than ever before. There are still melodies of heart-wrenching simplicity that stick in your head to an almost irritating degree (beware of the dangerously catchy "James"), balanced by songs with longer, more complex and limber melodic phrases. It's a singing style one wants to call "mature."
And maturity is a central concept to Camera Obscura-- Campbell's found it in her singing, but in her lyrics, the search continues. The asymmetries in her personality give her songs their distinct character. She still has that bitingly sarcastic, even cynical side, which lends a flinty edge to the sentimentality. Even in an adoring ode to a sailor boyfriend, she takes a moment to derisively mention his "dietary restrictions." And on the rollicking "Swans", you can practically hear her rolling her eyes when she sings, "So you want to be a writer? Fantastic idea!" Sarcasm seems to be a defense mechanism for Campbell, one that's necessary because of two very pronounced and conflicting personality traits. On one hand, she's a hopeless romantic. On the other, she's very cautious, and somewhat pessimistic. These contrary impulses create the tragically beautiful situations in her songs.
The fear of getting lost crops up frequently-- at least twice on this album. So does the fear of public opinion, which rears its head on "French Navy": "I'll be criticized for lending out my art/ I was criticized for letting you break my heart." Campbell is striving for equilibrium in adult relationships but keeps falling back into teenage predicaments. Her meditations on maturity, responsibility, and healthy love give the record its darker, more serious overtones. On "Away with Murder", over sullen minor-key organs, she contemplates the point where support shades into enabling: "How many times have you told me you want to die?" The question of what we owe the people we love, and what we can reasonably expect from them in return, is the backdrop for all the romance and depression. People are always showing up at Campbell's door when she doesn't want them to, or not showing up when she does. Being beholden in this way seems to frustrate and attract her in equal measure. Luckily for us, until this schism is resolved, her maudlin career should continue to play out apace. | 2009-04-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-04-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | April 21, 2009 | 8.3 | 26f5e919-c94f-4f00-b4c4-0d84991b4fec | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Dâm-Funk has always been one of the spacier of funk’s new prophets, which, considering how far-out that whole scene is, is a major accomplishment. On his new album he's leveled up on both sides of the equation–the pop stuff’s poppier, and the weird stuff’s more intriguingly weird. | Dâm-Funk has always been one of the spacier of funk’s new prophets, which, considering how far-out that whole scene is, is a major accomplishment. On his new album he's leveled up on both sides of the equation–the pop stuff’s poppier, and the weird stuff’s more intriguingly weird. | Dām Funk: Invite the Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20943-invite-the-light/ | Invite the Light | If history has taught us anything about the funk, it’s that the funk is a cyclical thing. Its powers and influence ebb and flow in waves; over the years, funk has ridden out these changes with an easygoing grace, confident in the fact that any low period will be inevitably followed by a swing back up. Right now we’re living in an especially strong time for funk–in fact, it should go down as one of the highest points in funk history. And like the other times like this in the past, we have California to thank for it.
Funk’s current comeback has been rumbling out of L.A. since the end of the last decade. There was the Brainfeeder crew breaking hip-hop’s increasingly mechanized mold in order to reconnect it with the cosmic slop that helped birth it. A generation of young rappers that grew up during the city’s gangsta-rap heyday (many of them aligned with Black Hippy and TDE) began preparing for the return of g-funk 20 years after it first developed. Somewhere off to the side, Dâm-Funk began creating massive beats whose invocations of past masters like Roger Troutman and Egyptian Lover underlined Cali’s prominent place in funk’s lineage.
Only in the past year or so has it become entirely clear that these aren’t isolated cases, but one immense upswell, as artists from across these different scenes released a string of records that reflected a new level of skill, including Flying Lotus’ You’re Dead!, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, and Thundercat’s The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam. With Invite the Light, Dâm-Funk’s joined them.
Dâm’s always been one of the spacier of funk’s new prophets, which, considering how far-out that whole scene is, is a major accomplishment. He’s always seemed uninterested in making his creative impulses fit in any kind of box, so his records tend to range from relatively straightforward, pop-compatible stuff into more abstract territory hovering in an ambiguous space between funk, electro, and experimental electronic music.
Invite the Light is proof that Dâm-Funk’s leveled up on both sides of the equation–the pop stuff’s poppier, and the weird stuff’s more intriguingly weird. On the opening track, former Ohio Player Junie Morrison delivers a staticky distress call from some dystopian time where the funk’s been extinguished and humanity suffers because of it. What follows is a megaton funk bomb that would be more than sufficient to set this alternate universe straight.
In his intro, Morrison says that he "cannot tell you the exact time, day, or year" that he’s broadcasting from, because humankind’s given up keeping track. Invite the Light’s got the same kind of temporal ambiguity running through it. Dâm-Funk has a particular soft spot for the peak of funk’s analog electronic era (bookended roughly by "More Bounce to the Ounce" and "Egypt, Egypt"), but he seems to be drawing his inspiration here from funk in its entirety.
Some of these songs are the catchiest and most direct Dâm’s ever produced, and they all go about it in distinctly different ways. "We Continue" has a Zapp-ish electro bass bump, but the synth pads, twinkling pianos, and multitracked vocals layered on top impart a breezy disco buoyancy that suggests matching satin outfits and choreographed dance moves. "Somewhere, Someday", meanwhile, has the same sparkle as the soulful midtempo bubblegum Prince makes when he’s not feeling tortured.
Even when Dâm gets further out, the album holds together. "The Hunt and Murder of Lucifer", as the title suggests, is a deeply tripped out, bloody-sounding instrumental with leads shared by a nastily buzzing bass part and an icier, pitch-bent synth that throws off all kinds of unsettling discordant frequencies when the two combine. And his Ariel Pink collaboration "Acting" is such potently blissed-out psychedelia that you’re likely to catch a contact high just listening to it.
At its best, Invite the Light manages to bring together Dâm-Funk’s wilder, more experimental side with his newly refined pop side to produce not just some of the strongest material he’s ever made, but some of the strongest material to arise out of the current funk boom. "HowUGonFu*kAroundAndChooseABusta'?" comes near the middle of the album, and it feels like the track that everything else revolves around. From different angles, it resembles Snoop when he was trying to sound like George Clinton, or Prince when he was trying to sound like a rapper, or Outkast when they were trying to sound like Prince. Taken as a whole, though, it’s unmistakably new and unique, and it'll make you thankful that we get to live in a world where funk exists. | 2015-09-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Stones Throw | September 1, 2015 | 7.6 | 26f8b95e-7d6e-4b25-a982-8e810e4500a9 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Morrissey's first album in five years is as musically rich and worldly as he gets, and it proves he can be as hilarious and multi-dimensional as ever. But it's also a deeply sour record, and this album's expressions of wide-ranging contempt are at times unbecomingly convincing. | Morrissey's first album in five years is as musically rich and worldly as he gets, and it proves he can be as hilarious and multi-dimensional as ever. But it's also a deeply sour record, and this album's expressions of wide-ranging contempt are at times unbecomingly convincing. | Morrissey: World Peace Is None of Your Business | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19603-morrissey-world-peace-is-none-of-your-business/ | World Peace Is None of Your Business | "We were paralyzed by the dumbness of the times. So we did our best to change them." That's Morrissey, on how clueless gatekeepers blocked the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" from bigger commercial success, in the new book Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s. His comments here are striking partly for how little has changed—in Morrissey's telling, everyone else was wrong: the other Smiths, who were "embarrassed" by the lyrics; producer John Porter, who downplayed them; Rough Trade head Geoff Travis, who relegated the song to a UK B-side; and the American chartkeepers and TV producers, who failed to recognize the track's genius. Morrissey's remarks also stand out, though, for their optimism. All his hope might've been gone, as he sang, but he still left a scrap for the rest of us.
Though World Peace Is None of Your Business, Morrissey's first album in five years, comes in times that are undoubtedly just as dumb in their own way, the Smiths' place within them is secure. Defunct for almost three decades, the band is a perennial subject of Coachella reunion whispers. Morrissey elicits tributes in "Parks and Recreation" dialogue and Peanuts-themed Tumblr mashups alike. The gap between albums is his longest since virtually disappearing between 1997's misunderstood Maladjusted and 2004's tommy gun-blazing You Are the Quarry, but nowadays Morrissey is rarely far from the public eye, whether publishing a sometimes-brilliant memoir, canceling tour dates (while blaming the opener), or getting into it over animal rights with Jimmy Kimmel and Los Angeles' Staples Center. Remember when he appeared to start using Twitter? Then denied using Twitter? Post-financial crisis, he's as ubiquitous as global protest movements.
Tour and Twitter drama aside, the rollout of World Peace has still managed only to raise Morrissey's profile, from the album's priceless album cover and tracklist to unconventional spoken-word videos guest-starring past musical collaborator Nancy Sinatra and fellow PETA activist Pamela Anderson. The full-length itself, though—in a characteristic Morrissey twist—is hardly welcoming to newcomers. It's musically as rich and worldly as Morrissey gets, and the 55-year-old who early last year addressed another round of health concerns by quipping that "the reports of my death have been greatly understated" proves he can be as hilarious and multi-dimensional as ever. But it's also a deeply sour record, even for Morrissey. He's always had it both ways, singing his life but with a wink that resists literal interpretations; even so, this album's expressions of wide-ranging contempt are at times unbecomingly convincing.
Ever since You Are the Quarry weathered criticism for Jerry Finn's unsubtle production, Morrissey's albums have flourished sonically, and that growth is its furthest-reaching to date on World Peace. Boz Boorer, on guitar since 1992's Your Arsenal, brings a muscular continuity and sense of comfort—but keyboard/synthesizer newcomer Gustavo Manzur and producer Joe Chiccarelli (the White Stripes, Beck) go beyond the Ennio Morricone orchestral cameo from 2006's Ringleader of the Tormentors and the unpredictable luxuriance of 2009's Years of Refusal. Recorded in France, the album makes the world its business, encompassing meditative drones along with flamenco guitars and mariachi horns. It's as meticulously detailed as it is cosmopolitan, and marks the second straight Morrissey album that rewards listening without paying attention to the lyrics.
Morrissey's golden vibrato also sounds gloriously undamaged by his recent medical woes. As ever, it's most evident in his nonverbal tics—the way he stretches out the word "ways" into umpteen syllables on "Staircase at the University", an "Ask"-jaunty number about a student whose academic imperfections lead to suicide, and how he melismatically unfurls "cries" on "The Bullfighter Dies", another cheerfully morbid song cheering the perfectly Morrissey-esque subject of the title ("because we all want the bull to survive"). "Neal Cassady Drops Dead" is as jagged and punchy as its bleakly funny, faux-Beat tirade about "babies full of rabies/ Rabies full of scabies/ Scarlett has a fever.../ The little fella has got Rubella." Morrissey still knows how to be cranky with aplomb.
Still, at times the intricate arrangements come across as a means of covering up unmemorable songwriting. The murky midtempo rock of "Istanbul", about a father who identifies the body of his dead son, and the ornately textured strummer "Mountjoy", which finds grim equality in a notorious Irish prison ("We all lose/ Rich or poor"), are evidence of how these songs often tend to drag. The worst offender is nearly eight-minute centerpiece "I'm Not a Man", which grows from ambient twinkles and show-tunes crooning to gutsy modern-rock pounding and howling as Morrissey reaches new levels of self-righteousness: "I'd never kill or eat an animal/ And I never would destroy this planet I am on." All credit to Morrissey for speaking inconvenient truths, but it doesn't take joining the Koch family to possess the ability to walk out of this lecture. Forget "man"—what about "charming"?
Along with the occasional trudging bits, Morrissey's smug preachiness is the album's other off-putting point. The title track is ingeniously catchy and deeply sardonic, but dismissing protesters from Ukraine to Bahrain as "you poor little fool" and coining the mantra that "Each time you vote/ You support the process" isn't a dose of welcome realism; it's cynical and self-absorbed (Americans in Morrissey's lifetime marched and died for voting rights). The glamorous, self-mythologizing romantic melancholy that's Morrissey's stock-in-trade, meanwhile, comes up only rarely, though you can hear its echoes in the joyously "Besame Mucho"-flipping "Kiss Me a Lot," and Morrissey's exaltation of ruffians in the vaguely sexualized violence of "Smiler With Knife". The album's most miserablist songs, to use the word long applied to Morrissey's music, nevertheless zoom out for a wider view: there's the Spanish-tinged romp "Earth Is the Loneliest Planet", where "You fail as a woman/ And you lose as a man," and the pointedly dirge-like "Kick the Bride Down the Aisle", where Morrissey's scorn for institution of matrimony leaves me longing for the Hidden Cameras' more entertaining "Ban Marriage".
On finale "Oboe Concerto", which idiosyncratically leans on Boorer's sax and clarinet, Morrissey repeats, "There's a song I can't stand/ And it's stuck in my head." Beneath electronic blips and burbles, the lurching bass line is reminiscent of the Smiths' 1987 song "Death of a Disco Dancer". There, he familiarily sings: "If you think peace is a common goal/ That goes to show how little you know," adding, "Love, peace, and harmony / Oh, very nice, very nice, very nice, very nice / But maybe in the next world." Or, as he intones now, "Round, round, rhythm of life goes round." Morrissey, a wag might say, is none of our business. | 2014-07-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-07-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol / Harvest | July 14, 2014 | 5.9 | 26faa5f4-710c-487f-85b7-3cca3d7b67d7 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The new album from the Neptunes' rock project can be backhandedly complimented as a comeback of sorts by mere virtue of not being noticeably worse than what came before it. | The new album from the Neptunes' rock project can be backhandedly complimented as a comeback of sorts by mere virtue of not being noticeably worse than what came before it. | N.E.R.D.: Seeing Sounds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11610-seeing-sounds/ | Seeing Sounds | Rockist habits die hard-- if you don't believe me, go to the nearest used CD store and spin a N.E.R.D. album. Trust me, they'll be there. While the Neptunes' space-age synths and bucket percussion spawned literally dozens of pop hits over the past decade, even as contemporaries like Timbaland and Kanye West were becoming muso darlings, these Tidewater gadflies were mostly denied any sort of serious credibility until they got critics back into their comfort zone by hitching their sound to Hulk Smash palm-mute riffs and live drums. At which point everyone went kinda overboard, as Brent DiCrescenzo put it in a review of 2004's Fly or Die, "limit[ing] their vocabulary to the Hall of Fame" while lauding some of the weakest material Pharrell Williams, Chad Hugo, and Shay ever came up with. At least In Search Of... had enough juice to be called uneven, but the musical priorities of Fly or Die were so out of whack, only the most determined contrarian could possibly still be listening to it. Needless to say, all those breathless "future of music" plaudits were probably anticipating a more profound result of N.E.R.D.'s influence in 2008 than kids in tight pants learning how to pull a fakie ollie.
So yeah, the bar's been set far lower for Seeing Sounds, which by default makes it a more satisfying experience-- it can even be backhandedly complimented as a comeback of sorts by mere virtue of not being noticeably worse than what came before it. But the continuing problem of N.E.R.D. is that it's nearly impossible to figure out how much you should invest in them, or really how much they're invested in it-- as the group's public voice, Pharrell has never shied away from claims of helming some sort of polyglot musical mastermind, and free of their commercial burdens, N.E.R.D. should ostensibly document their unfettered genius. And then they release songs that chop it up with Good Charlotte, compare female asses to spaceships, and on lead single "Everybody Nose (All the Girls Standing in the Line for the Bathroom)", P lampoons partygoing cokeheads by sounding like Baha Men after five too many rails. If you're looking to soundtrack scenes of "Real World: Hollywood" housemates dry-fucking each other at Geisha House ("jump around like you're ADHD! ADHD!" goes "Anti-Matter"), Seeing Sounds might be worthy of regular rotation, but for the rest of us, it's just another baffling, obnoxious mess of "serious fun" from a squad whose glory days are getting harder to remember.
It almost feels silly pointing out how brazenly they're wielding Occam's Razor here: Were Seeing Sounds just a collection of hooks or beats, it might not be half bad. I can't imagine too many people in Starboard P's Rolodex turning down the sass mouthed chorus of "Anti-Matter" or the gleaming harmonies of "Sooner or Later", but neither disparages the idea of actual songwriting being far down the list of what N.E.R.D. is actually good at. The former gets marooned from the rest of the song as they go into a rampage fueled by equal parts Red Bull and Roni Size, and as for the latter, it's ironic that P swipes the piano part from "Changes", since they repeat themselves so often over the span of nearly seven minutes of nebulous breakup malaise that you'll wonder if you got a faulty leak.
Like its unexpected stylistic kin My Morning Jacket's Evil Urges, Seeing Sounds finds its creators partaking in the subversively phallocentric narcissism of staring at their CD collections, confusing music listening with music understanding rather than enjoyment. At first blush, "Windows" nicely jerry-rigs an octave-toggling surf riff to some eerily Sting-ish backing vocals, but get past that surface pleasure and you're treated to Pharrell's typically priapic lyrics, rhyming the title with "she's a 10, yo," among other things (mostly "yo"). "Happy" is N.E.R.D.'s shoegaze moment (no, really), albeit with a complete misunderstanding of the production dynamics-- despite all those flanger sound effects, it's about as immersive as a thimble and could just as easily be coming out of a Sega Genesis. And then there's "Kill Joy", which along with Lil' Wayne's "Mrs. Officer", augurs a scary possibility that rappers are starting to rediscover deep cuts from Blood Sugar Sex Magik.
At the very least, some will feel better knowing that Pharrell and Chad are apparently speaking again, even if playing 52 pickup with genre is becoming the only fun of N.E.R.D. albums as opposed to considering every track a battle to see whether P first gets bored of his lyrics or his melodies; it's a tough call on "Yeah You", four minutes of quiet storm drizzle about being stalked via e-mail. But in an odd way, Seeing Sounds is a liberating listen-- clearly, N.E.R.D. are beholden to no one but themselves and a kind ear can at least enjoy the almost Zen-like nothingness of the Black Card Era: all withdrawal, no deposit. | 2008-06-13T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-06-13T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Interscope | June 13, 2008 | 4.6 | 271527bb-d224-4eee-b770-d485de2b181f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
In a grand move to restore liner notes to their informative zenith, the inky little paper accompanying Gallowsbird's Bark ... | In a grand move to restore liner notes to their informative zenith, the inky little paper accompanying Gallowsbird's Bark ... | The Fiery Furnaces: Gallowsbird's Bark | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3271-gallowsbirds-bark/ | Gallowsbird's Bark | In a grand move to restore liner notes to their informative zenith, the inky little paper accompanying Gallowsbird's Bark offers a handful of (supposedly) autobiographical clues to The Fiery Furnaces' raucous brother/sister gambol: "Matthew encouraged Eleanor to come down in the basement to make their first Fiery Furnaces music together. Maybe he should have hit and stabbed and smashed her. But he just swore." Despite some implied tongue-in-cheekiness (and the obvious fact that relentless sibling posturing is an awfully exhausted conceit right now, even if these kids really are related), it's a surprisingly apt and insightful peep into the bright blue heart of The Fiery Furnaces' blaze: violence, dark rooms, boy/girl handholding, and big selfless compromises all vie for attention on this debut, a feisty blues-rock barn-dance with enough pings and yelps to keep everyone's little hands curled tightly into fists.
The Furnaces' electric guitar, drums, sparingly applied bass, and freewheeling piano riffs recollect everything from Muddy Waters to the Rolling Stones, and Gallowsbird's Bark plays like a big, half-drunken romp through golden-era rock 'n' roll-- airy and thrilling and shifty as hell. Lyrics mostly consist of quasi-rambling witticisms that somehow come together in the delivery; Eleanor Friedberger's brash, oddly assured warble (the evenly hollered "I pierced my ears with a three-hole punch/ I ate three dozen donuts for lunch") is lovingly reminiscent of the kinds of semi-absurdist snickers that Dylan got away with in the late 60s (check the baffling-but-somehow-not credo, "The sun isn't yellow/ It's chicken," from "Tombstone Blues"). Likewise, the duo's spare, confrontational guitar riffing is grating only insofar as it jars; blues-driven, feral, and scribbling all over the page, Bark's sixteen tracks house a mess of weird, undulating musical bits that are hugely intriguing despite not always making a whole shitload of sense.
"South Is Only a Home" opens the record in a sloppy downhill tumble. It's a solid, foot-stomping burst, with honkytonk piano plonking out a declining scale and a wrestled guitar making a mess that's as thrilling as it is damaging. Both "Leaky Tunnel" and "Inca Rag/Name Game" channel Lennon/McCartney melody-gone-weird ("Inca Rag" has a piano opening that's awfully close to "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da") while "I'm Gonna Run" sees Eleanor's Jack White/Chrissie Hynde growl/coo suggestively noting, "Saw my brother coming up the hill/ I tied a beach towel around my wrist." It's all muted violence and esoteric observations skidding across wily guitar foundations, bouncy piano hits, and puttering percussion.
Despite just now cutting their proper debut, the Furnaces have already burned through a pile of drummers (Ryan Sawyer bravely grips the sticks here), and the duo's brother/sister throwdown seems volatile enough to ignite just about anything seated directly in its blazing path. They spew the best kinds of sparks, though: accessible, but skewed and peculiar enough to keep you peeking nervously over your shoulder every couple of minutes. | 2003-10-02T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2003-10-02T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | October 2, 2003 | 8.4 | 27157225-f063-42f4-8922-ce5b68e3d1b7 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
HEALTH follow their apocalyptic debut, arguably better remix album, and thrashing, industrial-disco single "Die Slow" with LP No. 2. | HEALTH follow their apocalyptic debut, arguably better remix album, and thrashing, industrial-disco single "Die Slow" with LP No. 2. | HEALTH: Get Color | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13409-get-color/ | Get Color | On their self-titled 2007 debut, L.A. Smell alumni HEALTH were a band going for broke, throwing everything-- noise, aggression, tribalist tendencies, spastic energy-- at the wall and barely waiting around long enough to watch it splatter. It was a nihilistic sound-- post-apocalyptic, even-- and even though you could hear distinct traces of noise-rock forbears Liars and Boredoms in their approach, the sheer energy of the thing seemed to suggest the potential for the band to carve out its own style. Fast-forward two years later and HEALTH's profile has risen considerably, thanks in part to the national-media focus on their DIY homebase the Smell, a solid remix album, and a coveted opening slot for Nine Inch Nails on one of that group's final tours.
All of the pieces were in place, then, for HEALTH to blow minds and unfasten jaws with the follow-up to their first release, Get Color. And when lead single "Die Slow" dropped a few months back, it seemed like they just might pull it off. The thrashing, industrial-disco track was easily the best thing the group had done to date, and it hinted that they had zeroed in on a more neatly defined aesthetic using a heavier focus on melody and song structure. So naturally the big question now is if the rest of Get Color lives up to the promise of "Die Slow". The answer is that it does... kind of.
In terms of its stylistic shift, the album is an unqualified success. Whether the result of their mixed-genre collaborations with Crystal Castles, relentless touring or plain old musical growth, HEALTH have clearly located their sound. It hinges on a more delicate balance of noise and prettiness (think the heaviest part of a My Bloody Valentine track magnified to entire-song length) and emphasizes frontman Jake Duzsik's androgynous vocals. With this revamped style, portions of Get Color reach the high bar set by "Die Slow". One such moment is "Before Tigers", with huge walls of guitar-and-drum noise that play off its whisper-to-a-roar vocals. "Nice Girls" is meaner and more asymmetrical but succeeds with similar contrast. Here, forceful tribal drumming sets off screeching instrumental caterwauls that seem at odds with, but ultimately blend into its ethereal, almost feminine coos.
HEALTH also incorporate more electronic textures this time around, and songs like "Death+" and "Eat Flesh" find the band using intricate synth patterns as jumping-off points for brutal freakouts. These tracks rely less on melody than those mentioned above, and while usually very sonically interesting, they seem to have only one purpose-- destruction. In that sense, a number like "Eat Flesh" fascinates my ears but doesn't do much for my heart. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to feel when I listen to the song, other than that maybe everything is fucked so it's best we just rage until the sun comes up. Which is a completely legitimate sentiment (and, heck, probably accurate) but I think I was able to glean that much from HEALTH's first record.
With its machine-gun drumming and end-of-days guitar shredding, Get Color's second-to-last track, "We Are Water" also seems to be racing towards some kind of total annihilation, a violent end. But the band takes a surprising detour by following that song up with the more pensive closer "In Violet", which takes a step back to survey the scorched landscape, assess the damage done, and explore the possibilities beyond the moment. It's this sort of mature downshift that seems to suggest that if HEALTH can continue to find some deeper meaning behind their very impressive musicianship, they might be onto something great. | 2009-08-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-08-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Lovepump United | August 31, 2009 | 7.4 | 27162489-c34a-4f54-9dff-6753e25a3459 | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
Since his cover of "No Diggity" and 2012's Thinking In Textures, Chet Faker has been the Australian poster boy for the nebulous intersection of R&B and soul-influenced electronic music. This is his first full-length. | Since his cover of "No Diggity" and 2012's Thinking In Textures, Chet Faker has been the Australian poster boy for the nebulous intersection of R&B and soul-influenced electronic music. This is his first full-length. | Chet Faker: Built on Glass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19224-chet-faker-built-on-glass/ | Built on Glass | Given Chet Faker's profile in his homeland over the past few years, it's easy to forget the Melbourne producer had only put out a single solo EP before Built on Glass. Since his cover of "No Diggity" and 2012's Thinking In Textures, Faker has been the Australian poster boy for the nebulous intersection of R&B and soul-influenced electronic music. Either somewhere between James Blake and Tom Krell or a leader of the ignominious "Australian sound" depending on who you ask, Faker's standard-bearing might seem a little premature. Built on Glass, as his first full-length, is therefore his case to the world.
There's some premeditation to this statement of his. Faker reportedly scrapped his album twice in pursuit of refining what Chet Faker is supposed to sound like. The result is some inconsistency as Faker tries to reconcile every avenue of his interest with his existing identity, and almost certain disappointment for anyone who expected 52 minutes of Chet as soft-spoken sex facilitator. In the confusion, though, is the chance for surprise, and Faker capitalizes with a hint of just how far his horizons can expand beyond the flaccid cracker-crooning of his previous work.
The first half of the record is where Faker satisfies his obligations. Opening with his trademark Rhodes piano and soupy vocals with "Release Your Problems", he then runs through the beat- and sample-chopping singles "Talk Is Cheap" and "Melt" and the woozy R&B of "Gold". The first indication that not everything is as it seems comes on "No Advice (Airport Version)": splitting up the two singles, it occupies half its duration with electroacoustic burbling before allowing Faker to sing a few short bars over nothing but a low, vibrating hum.
It's necessary to talk about Built on Glass in sides as it makes a point of distinguishing between them. The record pivots with the interlude "/", a gravelly Southern accent speaking through vinyl pops and cracks: "That was the other side of the record. Now relax still more and drift a little deeper as you listen." This second half is where Faker becomes more adventurous, enough to venture beyond the borders set for him by his first record. With the blueprint reaffirmed by the first side, the back load feels like he's consciously leaving behind familiar ground to investigate his other influences further. Faker plays with depth, allowing each element room to move between the back and foreground. Booming drums shatter the cavernous atmosphere of "Blush", broken shards of glass tumble over each other, and Faker's pitch-shifted vocals clash from high and low, finally uniting harmoniously in the middle.
The album's climax is in the coupling of the betrayal-house of "1998" and the rhythmic textures of "Cigarettes & Loneliness". On "1998", Faker's mumblemouth drawl works in his favor, sounding too numb in parts to even motivate his lips, but at least finding the strength to croak "We used to be friends." A chattering beat leads it into "Cigarettes & Loneliness" and Faker's voice strengthens into a Van Morrison-like lilt, dancing over syllables.
Maybe it's no coincidence that between the whirring synths and the beat, like metal wheels clanking over tracks, it sounds like the siren of a level railway crossing; the kind of place desperate folks all too often wander in their final moments. The track itself conjures a similar, overbearing futility. Again, Faker explores the space, disrupting the stability of its plucked central riff with cascading elements both percussive and melodic, sucking it all up into its weeping choruses as Faker pleads helplessly for understanding.
Faker placed a keyboard on the cover of Thinking In Textures, nodding towards his greatest tool. On Built on Glass, it's replaced by a human hand; possibly a nod towards Faker's adoption of what we still anachronistically refer to as "real instruments." While the core of Built on Glass is still drum machines and synthesizers, Faker's expansion into the organic and electroacoustic has given him a wider territory to roam. And while the introduction of those elements into his work might leave some wondering what happened to the bedroom producer who took over Australia with a dashed-off Blackstreet cover, Chet Faker's first full-length album proves that the artist is eager to explore new frontiers. | 2014-04-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-04-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Downtown / Future Classic | April 15, 2014 | 7.3 | 2719bc48-846d-4fea-a425-60f8a9a052ea | Jake Cleland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jake-cleland/ | null |
Transporting the innovations of John Cage, Christian Wolff, and other avant-garde mainstays to a more melodic neo-pop context, Dusseldorf-based pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann pulls from a variety of genres not necessarily known for their accessibility to create an endlessly listenable modern classical record. | Transporting the innovations of John Cage, Christian Wolff, and other avant-garde mainstays to a more melodic neo-pop context, Dusseldorf-based pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann pulls from a variety of genres not necessarily known for their accessibility to create an endlessly listenable modern classical record. | Hauschka: Ferndorf | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12205-ferndorf/ | Ferndorf | The previous records I've heard from Dusseldorf-based pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann, who records as Hauschka, have revolved around the titular instrument of his 2005 release The Prepared Piano. That album seemed to crystalize certain connections between the modified piano and later developments in experimental music. Bertelmann began with an approach to piano popularized by John Cage, who in the 1930s placed screws, pieces of rubber, and other objects between strings in order to turn the instrument into a kind of miniature percussion orchestra. As with avant-garde mainstays like Christian Wolff or David Tudor, Bertelmann in concert has been known to climb inside the piano itself between pieces to modify its innards, adding treatments and monkeying with the wires in search of new textures. But unlike any of these composers, he prefers melodies with a folk-like simplicity, pieces you can hum, with the comforting repetition of Glass/Reich-style minimalism serving as a rhythmic underpinning. So Bertelmann transports these innovations into a more melodic neo-pop context, while also adding some light electronic processing as a tip of the hat to the possibilities of computers. He's showed how familiar music can be transformed and made new by manipulations in the physical and virtual realms, but his music is easily enjoyed by listeners with no time for classical music.
While previous records focused on piano, Ferndorf, while keeping that instrument at its center, finds Bertelmann expanding his palette further. He's joined here by various combinations of a violin (by Sabine Baron), cello (by Insa Schirmer and Donja Djember), and trombone (by Bernhard Voelz). Sometimes the short pieces-- most are between two and five minutes-- are fleshed out the way you might expect from a small chamber ensemble, with the strings adding counterpoint or extending melodic ideas. And sometimes, like on "Barfuss Durch Gras", which incorporates about eight or nine different textures-- buzzes, trills, scrapes, and drones-- it's hard to tell who might be playing what.
While the latter is abstract enough to remind me of the electro-acoustic experimentation of Ekkehard Ehlers, Joseph Suchy, and Franz Hautzinger on their 2004 album Soundchambers, "Barfuss Durch Gras" is an anomaly; the bulk of Ferndorf reflects the vibrant, cheerful pastoralism of the record's title (it translates as "distant village," a reference to Bertelmann's childhood in rural Germany). For example, deadened bass strings form a pulse that could almost be described as "groovy" on "Rode Null", and when the strings fall in and the melody begins, it has the charming, easy swing of a Vince Guaraldi number. "Neuschnee" is more lyrical, with an underpinning of yearning, as it moves from big swells of sounds to hushed contemplation. And then the closing "Weeks of Rain", which finds Bertelmann alone at the piano, is as romantically melancholy as its title, bringing to mind a half-drunk Bill Evans in a sentimental mood playing a Chopin nocturne.
Ferndorf as a record isn't something to get you hearing music in a new way or an open up a new world, but it does succeed very nicely for what it is. Bertelmann takes an approach to piano founded in mid-20th century avant-garde, brings along a few other instruments form the classical world, and pushes the whole in the direction of simplicity, remaining unapologetically musical and getting over on chords, melody, and a little bit of texture. How appropriate that the record comes to us from the Fat Cat label, home of Max Richter and Mice Parade. Like these artists, Bertelmann has a way of pulling aspects of several genres not necessarily known for their accessibility into an instantly likable whole. Ferndorf is the sort of record that can brighten any room. | 2008-09-18T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-09-18T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hauschka | September 18, 2008 | 7.8 | 2721d25e-4806-43ec-9f83-74a5302a5ba1 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Men's follow-up to 2011’s Leave Home and last year’s Open Your Heart is a deeper and more mature record steeped in rock signifers; it shows the difference between respecting tradition and being boring, between quieting down and going soft, between being earnest and being sappy. | The Men's follow-up to 2011’s Leave Home and last year’s Open Your Heart is a deeper and more mature record steeped in rock signifers; it shows the difference between respecting tradition and being boring, between quieting down and going soft, between being earnest and being sappy. | The Men: New Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17668-the-men-new-moon/ | New Moon | It's the first law of indie-rock: Every grungy, guitar-powered act-- from Dinosaur Jr. to Titus Andronicus-- eventually goes a little Crazy Horse, gradually easing their squalling sludgefeasts into a classic-rock comfort zone. I just didn't expect it to happen so soon for the Men. Over the course of two quick-succession albums, 2011's Leave Home and last year's Open Your Heart, the Brooklyn bruisers' primordial post-hardcore roar had exploded into a constellation of possibilities, exploring everything from krautrock to country to shoegazed psychedelia. But the Men that hit the road in early 2012 to promote Open Your Heart were already a different band than the one documented on that record. Their once-unwieldy noise was being harnessed into a more economical drive and harmonicas were being blown. A band that less than two years ago sounded like descendents of Big Black had already found their way to Big Pink.
This is the Men that greet us on New Moon-- recorded, natch, in a cabin in the Catskills. And what gracious hosts they've become, welcoming us in with the gentle, piano-tapped lullaby "Open the Door". Even when you take the band's rapid-fire maturation into account, the song still startles with its angelic harmonies, peaceful images of "trees swaying," and general air of bonhomie. But if the opener seemingly announces a break from the band's formative inspirations, New Moon as a whole reinforces their spiritual connection to them. In hindsight, 1980s indie rock wasn't so much an antidote to the preceding generation's dinosaur rock as a tough-love corrective measure to revitalize it, from the Minutmen’s CCR/BOC boosterism to Hüsker Dü's sand-blasted take on the Byrds. What the Men ultimately share with their SST forbears isn't a sound but a work ethic, with a record-release output that can barely keep pace with their artistic progression, fuelled by a blatant disregard for the punks they're bound to piss off along the way.
But as New Moon proves, there's a big difference between respecting tradition and being boring, between quieting down and going soft, between being earnest and being sappy. The album's more rustic first side may exhibit their newly professed fondness for Tom Petty, but the spirit is still a lot closer to Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers. Acoustic guitars are front and center, but they slash and scrape rather than soothe; the early double shot of "Half Angel Half Light" and "Without a Face" suggests Full Moon Fever had Jeff Lynne been ousted from the producer's chair and replaced by Spot. What initially impresses about the record is not just that the Men have reconciled their growing affinity for delicate, confessional songcraft with their usual raw frayed-nerve energy, but how easy they make it look.
That's not to say there weren’t some growing pains along the way: Shortly after the release of Open Your Heart, the band excommunicated bassist Chris Hansell, the guy responsible for the most unforgivably caustic, phlegm-splatterd songs in the repertoire. A recent Village Voice cover story claims Hansell was shown the door because he couldn’t afford to keep up with the band's growing tour commitments, however, his scuzz-punk regressions were increasingly at odds with the Men's ever-evolving aesthetic. And playing a big hand in that development was the band's go-to producer Ben Greenberg, who was not just promoted to replace Hansell, but immediately placed on equal singing and songwriting footing with founding members Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi. To say he fits right in would be an understatement; his two standout turns-- "The Brass" and the urgent "Repulsion" redux "I See No One"-- respectively push the paint-peeling power-pop of Open Your Heart further into the red and into the rough. (The band's ranks have also expanded to include new fifth member Kevin Faulker, to satisfy their surging demand for lap-steel.)
In contrast to Open Your Heart's exploratory eclecticism, New Moon unabashedly plays to the extremities of the Men's sound. But the album counts as the band's most cohesive statement yet, thanks to savvy sequencing that gradually amps up the volume and ramps up the velocity. You can even hear the precise moment the band snaps in the middle of "I Saw Her Face", when the song suddenly up-shifts from a sad-eyed, "Cortez"-killing dirge into a ferocious, full-torque rave-up, blazing the trail for the album's decidedly more raucous second act.
But where Open Your Heart's stylstic diversity sometimes felt like genre tourism for the sake of it (the country song was actually called "Country Song", after all), New Moon's sonic dichotomies are emblematic of a deeper emotional distress. No matter which of the band's three frontmen are singing them, the Men's songs are pretty simple: someone's usually missing someone who's far away, or dreaming of a better place, and there's often alcohol involved. But over the whole of New Moon, you get the sense the Men are coming to grips with the men they want to be (loving, upstanding, domesticated) and the kind of men they have to be-- i.e., the sort of hardened souls that must spend most of their year in vans and dives in order to survive. As the album flames out in the psych-punk apocalypse of "Supermoon", the moment as is as poignant as it potent: Like the retired hitman in countless gangster movies who gets pulled in for one last hit, New Moon bristles with all the internal tension of a dormant beast that, try as it may, can't ever be fully tamed. Open Your Heart was the sound of the Men issuing themselves a challenge-- "I wanna see you write a love song!" Perro exclaimed on the opening track. New Moon follows through on that promise but inevitably discovers that, when you do open your heart, blood gets spilled. | 2013-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | March 8, 2013 | 8.2 | 2722f008-bfb0-42de-8bea-b116128df002 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Overjoyed is the legendary art-punk band’s first new studio album since 2001’s Hello, and in those intervening thirteen years, the seemingly ageless duo of Jad Fair and brother David haven’t lost their knack for the fine art of the charm offensive. The album shows just how much Half Japanese, despite their reserved seat in the indie continuum, still exist in a hermetic dimension of its own. | Overjoyed is the legendary art-punk band’s first new studio album since 2001’s Hello, and in those intervening thirteen years, the seemingly ageless duo of Jad Fair and brother David haven’t lost their knack for the fine art of the charm offensive. The album shows just how much Half Japanese, despite their reserved seat in the indie continuum, still exist in a hermetic dimension of its own. | Half Japanese: Overjoyed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19653-overjoyed/ | Overjoyed | “Let’s put apples in the lemon pie!” exclaims Jad Fair on “The Time Is Now”, one of the least-hinged songs on Half Japanese’s Overjoyed. It’s the legendary art-punk band’s first new studio album since 2001’s Hello, and in those intervening 13 years, he hasn't lost his knack for the charm offensive. “The Time Is Now” wobbles and wanders like a tranquilized tiger cub, with a meandering jangle threatening to tug Jad’s string of greeting-card pleasantries alarmingly off center. “I’m so glad you’re you,” he sings through his nose, sounding more like the punk-rock Mister Rogers than Jonathan Richman ever did.
Richman is one of the few antecedents that went into Half Japanese’s protean stew of primitivist punk when the band formed in the '70s; avowedly amateurish and autodidactic, Jad and his brother David spun the blistering, shambolic rawness of their early singles into tooth-fracturing sweetness of their first masterpiece, 1980’s Half Gentlemen/Not Beasts (which featured, not so coincidentally, a Modern Lovers cover). Half Japanese is more infamous for the bands they’ve influenced, most notably Nirvana, although there’s a whole universe of lo-fi disciples tucked away in Jad’s back pocket. Overjoyed shows just how much Half Japanese, despite their reserved seat in the indie continuum, still exist in a hermetic dimension of its own. From the spiky, Voidoids-like jerkiness of “In Its Pull” to the slashing, sidelong surf riffs of “Shining Star”, the album views the rest of the musical world through a kaleidoscope and hears it through a tin can.
That said, Overjoyed isn’t anywhere near as tinny as Half Japanese is known for. Produced by Deerhoof’s John Dieterich, it’s one of the most full-blooded and competently tracked albums in the band’s catalog. Even when “Meant to Be That Way” lurches off its axis thanks to an onslaught of wiggly, reverberating overdubs, the rhythm section is rock solid; barely a trace of lo-fi glory can be heard on “Do It Nation”, the album’s most distorted and self-destructive track. “Do it, do it, do it,” Jad chants like a bratty version of Malcolm Mooney over a droning, drool-inducing monochord. With maturity comes assuredness, but there’s a lack of desperate vulnerability to Overjoyed that renders it far less fetchingly fragile than its predecessors.
There’s a scene in Jeff Feuerzeig’s 1993 documentary Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King in which the band is performing on a makeshift stage for the residents of Duplex Nursing Home in Boston (made famous by David Greenberger’s long-running zine Duplex Planet). While hatcheting their way through a version of Wilson Pickett’s “In The Midnight Hour”, one of the old men in the audience pulls a harmonica out of his shirt pocket and starts honking along, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do. Not to paint them as ancient or anything, but the brothers Fair are now closer in age to that old man than they are to the strapping young versions of themselves who forged milestones like Half Gentlemen/Not Beasts. In essence, Overjoyed is the sound of the Fairs playing along with themselves, or at least the sweet, weird boys they used to be—not always with as much spark or chaos, but mashing up the fruits just as gleefully. | 2014-09-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-09-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | September 2, 2014 | 6.8 | 2726dd5b-13ed-4712-9ef8-66daa5eb136a | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
French Montana has spent most of his career as the weakest rapper in the room. On Wave Gods, he imagines a woozier, wavier alternate world, one in which he takes center stage for the first time. | French Montana has spent most of his career as the weakest rapper in the room. On Wave Gods, he imagines a woozier, wavier alternate world, one in which he takes center stage for the first time. | French Montana: Wave Gods | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21657-wave-gods/ | Wave Gods | The first thing you need to know about French Montana is that back-to-back subsections on his otherwise disorganized Wikipedia page are "Shooting Attempts" and "Exotic Pets." At the beginning of this decade, the Bronx-bred rapper was drifting somewhere between "budding star" and "also-ran," hawking DVDs and mixtapes anchored by his more-famous friends. By the end of 2014, he was living a parallel life as Fitzgeraldian social climber stuck in a real-life safari of leopards and Kardashians. (Here's a video called "2 Chainz and French Montana Feed a $40K Giraffe.")
Last May, Chinx, a Far Rockaway native who was a close friend to and collaborator with French, was killed in a still-unsolved shooting. (The NYPD has said that they believe his murder might be tied to the 2007 killing of Stack Bundles, another collaborator.) It's in the shadow of that tragedy that French's new mixtape, Wave Gods, begins: "They threw me in the black hole, I had to climb up/ Once Chinx passed, I took some time off." On the tape's cover, French is joined by Max B, his kindred creative spirit who isn't up for parole until 2042. He's finally at the top—or at least adjacent to it—but he had to come alone.
Wave Gods hears French bring moments of tragedy and Technicolor excess to life frequently and in equal measure. "Holy Moly" is all joy ("My bitch from Cuba and my lawyer Jewish"); on the "Sanctuary" remix, he borrows the Weeknd's "Bring the drugs, baby, I'ma bring my pain." Sometimes, they're shoehorned into the same verse: on the Kanye West- and Nas-featuring "Figure It Out," French considers Chinx and Max, Eazy E, Allen Iverson, and Bill Cosby, but also slips in "Why I fucked them both when they said they're sisters?" and you can practically hear him grinning at the camera.
Until now, French had spent much of his career as the weakest, or at least most anonymous rapper in the room. Most fans push both Coke Wave installments into the Max B canon. His introduction to pop audiences came on "Stay Schemin," which was more noted for Drake's shots at Common and Vanessa Bryant. His 2013 Bad Boy/Maybach Music Group debut, Excuse My French, had more guests (Drake, Nicki, Wayne, Snoop) than tracks, suffered dismal reviews, and failed to sell 100,000 copies. Worse still, his detractors—many of whom were presumably unfamiliar with his earlier work—wrote him off as a relic from a dead era, a last gasp for old New York heads who couldn't or wouldn't get with the times.
In reality, French was never a classicist in any sense, and certainly not a '90s revivalist. His golden age was the mid- and late-2000s, when Wayne and T-Pain dominated radio, and when Max was turning Harlem into a grim, funhouse mirror version of that sound. On Wave Gods, French has improved his writing, sure, but more importantly has imagined a world where that sound became the dominant commercial mode, where the precision of trap or the maximalism of drill never took over, where we're left with something more stripped down, woozier, wavier.
And so this time, the guests bend into his orbit. Quavo's staccato triplets on "Groupie Love" are blunted by the Auto-Tune. Kodak Black is 13 years younger and from 1,200 miles south, but on "Lock Jaw" sounds like he's been locked in a give-and-go for years. On "Jackson 5," he puts an original stamp on the same sort of soul loops that have been dominating the city's mixtape circuit since the early W. Bush years. The prevailing atmosphere on Wave Gods is so strong that the one time French does yield home court, to Future on "Miley Cyrus," it's jarring, despite being an excellent song in its own right.
Wave Gods ends with two appearances from Chinx—"All Over" and yet another remix of "Off the Rip." It's a touching tribute from an artist who was eager to share the spotlight when it was a necessity, and remains so now that he can carry songs on his own. "Rip" in particular is moving in this new context, at its strange intersection of celebration and memorial. A$AP Rocky, the song's latest guest, implores the audience to "pay attention, I'm the main event." That might have been true before, but it isn't anymore. | 2016-02-25T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-25T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 25, 2016 | 7.9 | 27271e50-cd8e-4993-b4d0-432a233bc9a8 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
After three mixtapes-- highlighted by 2008's triumphant and savvy The Mixtape About Nothing-- Wale finally issues his debut LP. | After three mixtapes-- highlighted by 2008's triumphant and savvy The Mixtape About Nothing-- Wale finally issues his debut LP. | Wale: Attention Deficit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13695-attention-deficit/ | Attention Deficit | It's no secret that the Internet is hurting rappers. Hurting their record sales. Hurting their ability to control narrative. And, perhaps most crucially, hurting their ability to self-edit. Flip cam freestyles, track-a-day mixtapes, local radio interviews delivered worldwide. Reining it in has never been more difficult. To his credit, Wale has appeared to be in clear control of his output. In the space of three years he's released three proper mixtapes: 2007's giddy grab bag 100 Miles & Running, 2008's triumphant and savvy The Mixtape About Nothing, and this year's modest Back to the Feature. But even that tempered rollout may have been too much. Wale's proper solo debut, Attention Deficit, feels like a mishmash of those three tapes, flashing greatness but almost never transcending, and always sounding effortful. Has he said too much already?
Initially positioned as a refreshing rejoinder in a new generation of rappers, Wale was never fit for savior-dom. He's said the Roots' Black Thought is his favorite MC. That's about right: technically gifted, occasionally thrilling, mostly destined to be a cog in a machine. Attention Deficit seems to ignore that, especially on the front end. What's made so many rap debuts successful is a fluidity, a connectivity from moment to moment. Wale's been slapped with the dreaded "no personality" tag in recent months. The opposite is true: Wale seems to jump constantly from persona to persona.
Opener "Triumph", a terrific, Afro-beat-inspired production by TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, indicates this will be a sonic adventure. It's not particularly. "Mama Told Me" is a sort of post-Kanye reflection on how difficult it is coming up in the game, namedropping people in his life whose names you will not recognize. It's been done before and better. "Mirrors" is sonically consistent-- squealing horns and down-low bass-- but also features that tried-and-true rap trope: the Bun B feature. It's negligible. "Pretty Girls" is an ode to women via his native Washington D.C. sound, produced by longtime partner Best Kept Secret, sampling legendary Go-Go crew the Backyard Band, and featuring that group's Weensey. It's a classic hip-hop raveup, loose and fun. And then Atlanta's Gucci Mane shows up. Wasn't this supposed to be a D.C. anthem? "World Tour" is typically bland, R&B diva-led (in this case Jazmine Sullivan) nostalgia-stroking patter. "Let It Loose" is the Pharrell record. Six songs in and we're hitting all the bases, without any sense of what it means to be Wale.
The second half reveals a bit more: Wale is obsessed with women, whether recounting the story of a coke-addicted fameball on Mark Ronson's delicate "90210", or emotionally thrashing over an ex on the loping, gorgeous "Diary". He is distinctly interested in the female experience, even if the subject is launching him into paranoia by refusing to pick up the phone at 4 a.m. on a Saturday night. This is a unique gift-- I can't recall the last time an MC seemed so tapped into a woman's perspective while still feeling the chill of romantic strain. Sitek returns with the astounding "TV in the Radio", a song that both convinced me of K'Naan as a serious rapper (debatable until now) and positioned Wale properly in the mix, rapidly firing syllables like a semi-automatic. It's a bravura performance.
"Contemplate", produced by Syience, samples Rihanna's "Question Existing" and transforms it into a dark, brooding piece about the difficulties of love. That it arrives amidst Rihanna's troubling trauma-as-promotional run is sad and fitting. Alas, there won't be much to gain from "Chillin'", the much-maligned Lady Gaga collaboration and botched first single. This was the first step in Wale's multiple personality debacle and he seems to know as much-- nothing else on Attention Deficit resembles the goofy sneakers-shouting writing here. Ironically, it's the song that directly precedes "Chillin'" that feels most truthful. "Shades", featuring Chrisette Michele, is a resilient look at being a dark-skinned African-American (Wale is first generation Nigerian-American). On the song he raps, "They napped and slept on me/ Man, I hate black/ Skin tone, I wish I could take it back/ But rearrange my status, maybe if I was khaki/ Associating light-skinned with classy/ The minstrel show showed a me that was not me." Internal rhyme schemes, halting phrasing, thoughtful self-exploration; this is Wale at his best. Not as a preening star filling in the gaps for a king-making debut. A regular person, with doubts and sadness, joy and confidence. There's just not enough of it on Attention Deficit. | 2009-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Interscope / Allido | November 10, 2009 | 6.6 | 2731ffc6-59e8-49da-a320-326ed88ad5cc | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
The Canadian songwriter blends into the atmosphere of her piano and acoustic guitar, presenting her exceedingly intimate music as an inventive and subtly visceral experience. | The Canadian songwriter blends into the atmosphere of her piano and acoustic guitar, presenting her exceedingly intimate music as an inventive and subtly visceral experience. | Jennifer Castle: Monarch Season | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jennifer-castle-monarch-season/ | Monarch Season | There is nowhere to hide on Monarch Season. The latest album from Canadian songwriter Jennifer Castle is as open-ended and unfurnished as folk music can get. Each of its songs was recorded at Castle’s Ontario home, the windows open to let in sounds from Lake Erie just outside. The lyrics are bound by a focus on the moon, but you would be hard-pressed to find anything resembling a narrative in her writing. “I see the wings in everything,” Castle sings in the title track, offering a key into the imagistic worldview that spans her music.
In an interview with Kreative Kontrol, Castle described the recording process for this album, a solitary exercise featuring just a few appearances from long-time collaborator Jeff McMurrich, as being somewhat improvised. Instead of complete thoughts, she favored the feeling of uncertainty. When she takes a long pause between her words, as she does throughout the slow-motion highlight “Moonbeam or Ray,” she lets you linger in that space with her. The goal is to present her songs like fireflies in a jar: glowing, alive, and waiting to be released back into the night.
The quiet of this record is particularly effective in response to 2018’s Angels of Death, a lush full-band album that accompanied Castle’s writing on grief with the most sweeping music of her career: One of its best songs, “Rose Waterfalls,” sounded like the theme to an imaginary ’70s film about a country singer living on a commune. It was a record that framed her voice, a distinctive instrument pitched between the melodic depth of Emmylou Harris and the outsider charm of Kath Bloom, as a leading force: a vessel for storytelling, high drama, and big questions.
On Monarch Season, she subverts this authority, blending into the atmosphere of her piano and acoustic guitar. Sometimes, her voice disappears completely. Castle bookends the record with the wordless acoustic opener, “Theory Rest,” and a coda of field recordings, giving it the aura of a live set broadcast from her home (although it was completed before lockdown this year). She aids this intuitive structure by including “Veins,” a song she first recorded for her 2006 debut. Accompanying herself on acoustic guitar, she punctuates her words with a wheezy motif on harmonica that comes out slightly glitched, like the recording had been warped by the time that’s passed.
These psychedelic effects are a way for Castle to toy with the mechanics of her songwriting, to keep her music from resembling anything that feels traditional or reverent to the past. The most old-school sounding moment is “I’ll Never Walk Alone,” with melodic fingerpicking that seems transported from an old British folk song. But instead of singing along, Castle uses her warbling, hushed voice to play against its catharsis. In the lyrics, she alludes to the draining quality of performing live, trying to please an audience of more than just herself: “I birthed from the mouth of a cave/And I walked to the front of the stage,” she sings. “I labored all night for them/Labored all day.”
In these words, Castle implies a distance between the two poles of her career—the solitary spark of creation and the presentation of her completed work to the world. The thrill of Monarch Season is in how she collapses these roles, offering her music as something both thoughtful and unfinished. (The physical edition of the record comes with a songbook, allowing listeners to recreate her process and rebuild these songs from scratch.) The result is an inventive and subtly visceral record. On any given listen, we are invited to travel its distance along with her: to quiet our thoughts, take a deep breath, and linger in the strange, uneasy space between where we started and where we’re going next.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | October 27, 2020 | 7.5 | 2734a6ac-4b84-438d-af97-6dd0e8f23197 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Though there are tracks featuring Cyndi Lauper, the National, and St. Vincent, this exhaustive 112-song soundtrack is chiefly a profound testament to humanity’s endless fascination with butts. | Though there are tracks featuring Cyndi Lauper, the National, and St. Vincent, this exhaustive 112-song soundtrack is chiefly a profound testament to humanity’s endless fascination with butts. | Various Artists: The Bob’s Burgers Music Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23134-the-bobs-burgers-music-album/ | The Bob’s Burgers Music Album | Music, we are told, is important. Our cultural heritage of classic symphonies, soaring pop singles, and inscrutable jazz albums can grasp the human soul and move us to experience emotions we didn’t think were even possible. Music was born alongside the human race, it is woven into our evolution, and, we are led to understand, is one of the most crucial most widely revered art forms in the world. But if music is so great, why did it take this long for someone to make an album where Cyndi Lauper sings a song called “Taffy Butt”?
Thankfully, The Bob’s Burgers Music Album is here to save us. “Taffy Butt” is one of 112 tracks that make up the two-hour soundtrack album, collecting music from the FOX animated sitcom about the Belcher family (parents Bob and Linda; kids Tina, Gene, and Louise) and their struggling burger joint. The full extent of the Bob’s music collection is kind of a lot. It’s pitched almost entirely at “Bob’s” die-hards and listening to this album without being a fan of “Bob’s Burgers” is a fool’s errand. Even for fanatics, the two hours still feels like an ill-advised trek. Almost every song is under two minutes long, there’s lots of dialogue, and the singing is mostly endearingly awkward. Listening to The Bob’s Burgers Music Album condenses six seasons and over 100 episodes of the show into two hours—but where else are you supposed to turn if you want to hear Kevin Kline sing about wanting to fuck an elephant?
However, let's first talk about butts. Even a cursory glance at the tracklist will confirm that 10% of the songs on The Bob’s Burgers Music Album reference butts in some fashion in their titles alone. (Including lyrical content, it’s probably well over a third.) Over the span of the show, “Bob’s Burgers”’ characters have experienced every possible emotional reaction to butts, from fear (“Butts, Butts, Butts”) to a fascination with what comes out of them (“The Diarrhea Song,” “Mad Pooper,” “The Fart Song,” “BM in the PM”) to mystification at different things they could form or be formed by (“Taffy Butt,” “Butt Phone”). More than anything, The Bob’s Burgers Music Album is a profound testament to humanity’s endless fascination with its own ass.
It’s only natural the soundtrack album is focused on butts: collecting all of “Bob’s Burgers’” music only highlights how much that music is fueled by the show’s blithely positive, delightfully weird attitude toward sex. There’s a vibrator jingle (“Sneaky Pete”), the show’s so-drippy-it’s-wet ’70s porn parody (included as a 20-second song called “Sex Music”), and of course, the show’s best-known song, aspirational bestiality anthem “Electric Love.” But even ignoring Megan Mullally crooning about Thomas Edison’s “electric junk,” most of these songs are doting love letters to various styles and genres.
TV shows are produced with a tight enough turnaround that it’s hard for any series to consistently do original songs without pastiching pre-existing genres, something “Bob’s Burgers” has done with relish. The songs of fictional boy band Boyz 4 Now are note-perfect riffs on the kind of metaphors boy bands have been using for decades, with Max Greenfield playing young heartthrob Boo Boo asking girls to let him “whisper in [her] eyes.” John Roberts’ ode to grimy bathrooms “Lifting Up the Skirt of the Night” practically oozes with love for Michael McDonald. The ease with which the soundtrack switches between novelty ditties and riot grrrl homage—a genre the show is most cozy with—is part of its draw.
As the show and the album go on, the music team becomes more and more ambitious, culminating with songs like “Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl,” which simultaneously adapts and parodies Die Hard and Working Girl while also fitting them into the odd genre of musical theater. These are the “Bob’s” gems refined and extracted by the album, even without the show’s visual component. As a collection of funny, sweet homages to the music the “Bob’s Burgers” team loves, the soundtrack album is a pretty clear triumph.
The comedy of forcing lyrics about butts and farts and diarrhea into popular song formats comes all the way around at the end, where the Bob’s team stashes the “Bob’s Buskers” series. Here, professional musicians cover songs from the show, which is mostly an excuse for St. Vincent or the National to do hilariously grim covers of songs like holiday jams “Sailors in Your Mouth” and “Christmas Magic.” “Bob’s Burgers” is a successful sitcom precisely because it grounds these contrasts in a deep well of horny earnestness, which is why The Bob’s Burgers Music Album could only end with the National and Låpsley covering the show’s pooping anthem, “Bad Stuff Happens in the Bathroom.” Bad stuff only happens in the bathroom if you’ve eaten too many burgers. For the rest of us, it’s a place of musical glory. | 2017-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Sub Pop | May 16, 2017 | 6.9 | 273532fc-ac94-48b9-934f-0fe4011f85f7 | Eric Thurm | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-thurm/ | null |
When Woods released 2012’s Bend Beyond, they’d released five proper LPs in as many years, all just about equally good. The result of a relatively lengthy two-year process, their new album With Light and With Love might not be a bold reinvention, but there's an unmistakable focus and determination that can serve as a proper substitute for overt, bar-raising ambition. | When Woods released 2012’s Bend Beyond, they’d released five proper LPs in as many years, all just about equally good. The result of a relatively lengthy two-year process, their new album With Light and With Love might not be a bold reinvention, but there's an unmistakable focus and determination that can serve as a proper substitute for overt, bar-raising ambition. | Woods: With Light and With Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19205-woods-with-light-and-with-love/ | With Light and With Love | Combine their rustic, throwback image and prodigious work ethic and Woods is about as literal as the term “cottage industry” gets in indie rock*—*not only do they run a label, they also throw an annual get-together in Big Sur consisting of “two days of mellow music and celebration.” And it's possible that attending the Woodsist Festival is the only way to find people who engage in heated debate about how one would rank Woods’ discography. By 2012’s Bend Beyond, they’d released five proper LPs in as many years, all just about equally good. Their impeccable consistency can make you wonder if Woods have the impulses or incentive to truly go for it. The result of a relatively lengthy two-year process, their new album With Light and With Love might not be a bold reinvention, but there's an unmistakable focus and determination that can serve as a proper substitute for overt, bar-raising ambition.
Similar to the Men’s Tomorrow’s Hits and Future Islands’ Singles, other 2014 albums by respected "lo-fi" bands recording in a “real studio”, With Light and With Love is a reminder that while Woods' hard-touring, road-dog reputation has solidifed their fanbase, people show up in the first place because the band can write great songs. This isn’t a jamband who occasionally stumbles onto golden tunes: Jeremy Earl’s high, distinct voice is predisposed to melodies that quickly corkscrew their way into your memory*.* The differences between the classicist pop-rock of “Only the Lonely” and early Shins mostly come down to the vocal effects being used.
"Only the Lonely" is one of the many times where the relatively sparkly production of With Light and With Love shortens the distance between Woods and quasi-indie acts that fill much bigger festival bills. “Moving to the Left” isn’t their first shot at a crossover, but it's their best; they emphasize their rhythm section with caricatured, bulging bass and a snappy, near-synthetic drum track that typifies Yoshimi-era Flaming Lips. Earl sings, “It feels strange/ It feels the same”, and that’s really With Light and With Love summed up, since nothing Woods do here will alienate anyone other than the most hardcore 4-track enthusiasts. “Moving to the Left” still slowly unravels into a coda filled with wah-wah guitars, and it’s preceded by the requisite Woods woodshedder that takes up an inordinate amount of the LP’s space. The title track is over 9 minutes, yet it never feels improvisatory or exploratory or tacked on*—*the wigged-out soloing isn’t meant to show Woods’ considerable chops, only to serve the masterful return to its forceful chorus.
Still, With Light and With Lovenever makes much of a fuss about its aims. Earl’s lyrics are inquisitive in nature without giving you much to chew on, taking on the form of homilies about self-discovery and existential doubt. No matter how many times I’ve heard him sing “Are we floating by and by/ Are we moving to the left?”, the question never sounds particularly answerable, let alone urgent. And towards the back half, Woods occasionally revert to a genial folk-rock band that can anonymously blend into "indie BBQ" playlists.
But the versatility of Woods becomes more evident throughout the album, as they spread outwards rather than building upward: you get B3-infused soul (“Leaves Like Glass”), breezy psychedelia (“New Light”) and darker shades of American Beauty (“Shining”), giving jamband types, roots fans, folkies, indie kids and DIY fetishists a place to link up. “Breakthrough”, “masterpiece”, “bold leap”*—*those aren’t words that really seem applicable to With Light and With Love, or Woods for that matter, but they’re allowing themselves to be extremely likable for a larger crowd. | 2014-04-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-04-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Woodsist | April 14, 2014 | 7.9 | 2736307b-317b-495a-ba68-ca790a607142 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Structured around a grid of 121 minor chords, the English experimental musician’s 121st release injects process music with a welcome dose of beauty, chaos, and emotion. | Structured around a grid of 121 minor chords, the English experimental musician’s 121st release injects process music with a welcome dose of beauty, chaos, and emotion. | Richard Youngs: CXXI | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/richard-youngs-cxxi/ | CXXI | On the surface, CXXI seems like English experimental musician Richard Youngs’ tongue-in-cheek parody of computerized, algorithm-aided process music. The album’s stark title is simply “121” in Roman numerals, reflecting the fact that this is his 121st release, and the album is structured around a grid of exactly 121 minor chords. However, contra appearances, the music itself—consisting primarily of sine waves, tape-echoed trombone, ear-tickling field recordings and electronics, and Youngs’ plaintive voice—flows with a spontaneous, meandering logic, and Youngs’ chosen chords, far from being robotic, carry a deep melancholy reminiscent of Robert Wyatt’s most intimate work. This tension between structure and sprawl, control and feeling, drives CXXI: While his sound recalls the ramshackle experiments of computer music pioneers like David Behrman, Youngs’ unique emphasis on tonality and emotion results in simultaneously rigorous and accessible music that not only dissolves into the fabric of its immediate physical environment, like the most immersive ambient, but also distills and heightens the overwhelming beauty, chaos, and complexity of life in the way that only the most devastating pop can.
“Tokyo Photograph” lays the groundwork for the album, with Youngs’ voice and guest Sophie Cooper’s trombone tactically darting above and below a thrumming bed of randomly cycling sine-wave chords. Youngs limits himself to wordless utterances, the first line of a verse constantly interrupted: It’s as if he’s repeatedly trying to force meaning onto the music, but the music simply swallows his words whole. Cooper’s trombone steps in to finish Youngs’ sentences, while a wavering tape echo smudges her chiming, crystalline notes across time and soundstage. The decision to feature a delay effect so prominently is far from incidental: Delay is simultaneously mathematical—a certain number of repeats in a certain amount of time—and intuitive, unpredictable, prone to chaotic feedback loops that quickly spin out of the player’s control. It is the perfect embodiment of the tension between structure and sprawl that animates CXXI as a whole.
“The Unlearning” takes the formula laid down in “Tokyo Photograph” and stretches it even further, diving deeper into the fabric of chords that structures the music and eliminating the comforting, if still cryptic, human presence of Youngs and Cooper entirely. In this more abstract sound world, Youngs’ sine waves come to the foreground. The sine wave, like the tape delay that propels much of CXXI, is a perfect unity of structure and fluidity: a building block with which to build more complex sonic architectures, but also a limitless oscillation—the endless, ever-present hum of everyday life embodied in a signal. While the intense, meditative focus of “The Unlearning” highlights the unexpected emotion hidden in Youngs’ algorithmic process, it ultimately strips away too much of the human element that makes “Tokyo Photograph” so compelling—most notably the latter’s manipulated field recordings, which grant it that key, delightful sense of spontaneity.
Adam Butcher’s video for “Tokyo Photograph” explicitly links CXXI to the physical world, rapidly superimposing fragments of Youngs’ grid of chords onto images of abandoned structures made of concrete, brick, and corrugated iron—including a striking sound mirror located at Abbott’s Cliff, near Kent in the UK. Sound mirrors are able to pick up sound from great distances, and were even used as experimental defense systems against air raids before the invention of radar. In a sense, CXXI is a sound mirror in musical form: on the one hand a rigid, fixed object with clearly defined, almost hermetic rules; on the other, a mysterious, oddly beautiful monument to humanity that is inseparable from the physical world around it and the particular, peculiar social relations that both called it into being and grant it power and significance. CXXI’s 121 chords not only dissolve into Youngs’ 121 works—a kind of abstract, algorithmic autobiography—but also, as seen in Butcher’s video, into the world itself, the world outside the music. CXXI’s physical release is packaged with a “chord chart” for each piece; Youngs is inviting the listener to play along.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Black Truffle | October 7, 2021 | 7.5 | 273b07c7-0ff4-4506-b4f8-a101720bbea2 | Sunik Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sunik-kim/ | |
London-based producer the Bug knows bass, and on London Zoo, it hits at machine-gun intervals, leaving deep, tube-station echoes disintegrating in its wake. A manifestation of how London has mutated the sounds of Jamaica to its own ends, this monster dubstep/dancehall hybrid makes Burial's Untrue sound like Music for Airports. | London-based producer the Bug knows bass, and on London Zoo, it hits at machine-gun intervals, leaving deep, tube-station echoes disintegrating in its wake. A manifestation of how London has mutated the sounds of Jamaica to its own ends, this monster dubstep/dancehall hybrid makes Burial's Untrue sound like Music for Airports. | The Bug: London Zoo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12000-london-zoo/ | London Zoo | Kevin Martin, under a dozen-or-so aliases and across numerous genres, has been screwing around with deep bass for well over a decade. 1997's Tapping the Conversation-- a concept album conceived as a surrogate soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation-- was his first release as the Bug, and in retrospect, it sounds like an alternate-universe prototype of dubstep, based on instrumental hip-hop rather than UK garage rhythms. By the time he issued his 2003 follow-up Pressure, he'd already charged headlong into heavy digital ragga, building a repertoire of grimy, distorted beats that mutated dancehall into a glitchy, blown-out commotion.
Martin's latest Bug album, London Zoo, is very much in keeping with that permutation, which stands out amidst the recent wave of dubstep in a way that makes Burial's Untrue sound like Music for Airports. But it also takes the Bug's work into a somewhat cleaner, less abrasive area-- it streamlines the sound, shaves away the distortion, and draws most of its impact from the rhythms themselves. Of course, "less abrasive" doesn't necessarily mean it hit any less hard: Martin knows how and when to drop a heavy beat directly on top of you, and there's a carefully crafted tension throughout this record, no matter how sparse or dense that beat actually is.
Sparseness and density tend to work in tandem on London Zoo's strongest tracks: Bass hits at machine-gun intervals, leaving deep, tube-station echoes disintegrating in its wake and giving a number of these tracks a simultaneous sensation of freeness and claustrophobia. Reverberating, distorted voices and spare synth melodies close in on you even as they recede into the distance, and the rhythms are so pervasive and locked in that after a while you start hearing the spaces in between as much as you're hearing the beats themselves.
Martin has also enlisted an army of top-notch singers and toasters for the record, ranging from dancehall veterans like Tippa Irie to Burial and Kode9 collaborator Spaceape. However, three names in particular stand out. First, there's Roll Deep member Flowdan, whose grumbling, elastic baritone contributions to the chaingun-rhythm "Jah War" (heard on the fantastic 2006 Planet Mu comp Mary Anne Hobbs Presents the Warrior Dubz) and last year's sinster, headknock single "Skeng" show up again here. Flowdan is also at the center of the manic "Warning", which features one of the album's best hooks and a hell of a rampaging performance; there's one cool bit about halfway through where he ratchets the intensity in his voice down to a conversational rumble to match a moment in the song where the bass draws back, then resumes shouting right when it drops back in.
Singer/toaster Ricky Ranking shows up on three tracks as well, and his vocal range-- switching from sweet melodies to foreboding chants-- is impressive, even if he's best suited to the slower numbers (especially the dirgelike closer "Judgement"). And the two appearances from Warrior Queen are knockouts: "Poison Dart", originally released as a single last year, is ruffneck feminism ("Though me na sling no gun, a boy think sey me soft/ But me a real poison dart") delivered with a sharp, wailing sneer over more low end than most MCs could contend with, and "Insane", which augments a chirpier, more buoyant flow with a smoothly-sung chorus and a few out-there adlibs, including a funny little riff on Tears for Fears' "Mad World".
The only caveat concerning London Zoo is how far it might skew away from your traditional notions of dancehall-- and even then, it helps to recognize that, if anything, this record is another manifestation of how London has transformed the sounds of Jamaica to its own ends, from 2-tone to jungle to dubstep. It's a tense record, sure, but that tension is palpable in a crossover-friendly way, invoking Babylon and fire while avoiding the more problematic aspects of "slack" lyrics. It's angry and ferocious, but always triumphant: When it threatens to bust out your windows and rip holes in your speakers, it crackles with the kind of force that makes you want to punch the air as hard as your subwoofers do. | 2008-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | July 30, 2008 | 8.6 | 273b1b77-bdcc-423f-8a80-b4fb761be000 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Rhino reissues the 1979 post-punk classic, adding the Yellow EP and four previously unreleased tracks. | Rhino reissues the 1979 post-punk classic, adding the Yellow EP and four previously unreleased tracks. | Gang of Four: Entertainment! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3389-entertainment/ | Entertainment! | Gang of Four were a pop band. Their funk was no less stark or forbidding than, say, the more astringent Timbaland productions. They certainly weren't as twitchy, speedy, or noisy as James Brown at his most energized. Their great innovation-- Andy Gill's morse code guitar, as if playing a riff for more than a few bars caused him physical pain-- is post-punk's most ripped-off idea after badly played disco drums. They had attitude, energy, the big beat, skilled players funneling their virtuosity into the necessary notes, a handy way with a catch phrase, and sweaty live performances. Sounds like pop to me.
They formed in 1977 as part of a scene surrounding Leeds University's fine arts department that also included the Mekons and the Au Pairs. They were art students who named themselves after the Maoists that ran China until the leader's death in 1976. But they bonded over pub rockers Dr. Feelgood and 70s British blues band Free, exactly the sort of dinosaur hard rock post-punk was supposed to have purged in its own Cultural Revolution. The seeming contradiction, at least in terms of the Good Music Society the music press was constructing at the time, might have explained their sound, which critic Simon Reynolds described as a "checked and inhibited hard rock: cock rock [with] the cock lopped off."
Andy Gill kept his guitar chilly, without the blanket of fuzz provided by effects pedals and the agreeable tone of valve amps. Blues riffs do crop up, but it's almost as if Gill is playing against his technique, scattering them like fishes in a pond with a scrabble of notes. He rarely engages in anything like a solo, the ejaculation part of cock rock. Gill's playing approaches rock drama through dynamics. On "Return the Gift" he's a shrill S-O-S pattern underneath the weight of Dave Allen's bass on the choruses, a flinty, almost Derek Bailey-like anti-solo. On "(Love Like) Anthrax", he sounds like he's trying to split concrete with a garden spade on a congested street. The guitars on "Natural's Not In It" are actually kind of sexy, in an uncomfortable frottage sort of way.
The band says they were trying to get Allen to play a "quarter of the notes he was actually capable of playing," which must be a pretty alarming number given his busyness on tracks like "Damaged Goods". The bass is the only fluid part of Go4's sound, and even that's more croaky than bubbling. On "Ether" there's no bassline to speak of, just big bullfrog gulps as the guitar clangs, bell-like, and a sinister high-noon melodica whistles in the distance. Drummer Hugo Burnham played funk beats and disco snare crashes but with all the reverb stripped off so that they splashed like alcohol. He's the band's secret weapon, and stuff like the hard snare crack that sounds like a handclap on "Not Great Men" is often what makes a song. When they all locked in, as on "I Found That Essence Rare", the effect is like stuffing 10 pounds of funk into a five-pound bag.
Emotionally, however, Entertainment! is a brick. Like a black hole, no romanticism escapes it. Hints of black humor (especially in the artwork) creep into their aesthetic without overwhelming it. Relationships are reduced to "contract[s] in our mutual interest." Jon King often sings in the first person, implicating himself before anyone else: "I can't work/ I can't achieve"; "how can I sit and eat my tea with all that blood flowing from the television?" Out of one speaker, Gill drones the production details of the love song like a bored copywriter on "Anthrax", concluding "we just don't think what goes on between two people should be shrouded in mystery." Out of the other speaker, King moans that he "feel[s] like a beetle on its back/ And there's no way for me to get up."
Hardly head over heels, Go4 continually recast "I Want To Hold Your Hand" as a death grip dragging you under. Go4 interrogated everything, including the band itself, with the kind of rigor only middle-class white art students can afford. But then they were a very English band, very much of a moment where being politically active precluded any sort of irony. (And besides, Bush/Blair may be as scary as Reagan/Thatcher, but Bloc Party aren't scrapping with Nazis at every other show.) Not for nothing was the band that really took their sound into the mainstream the Red Hot Chili Peppers, hardly models of good Marxist propriety. Even the recent, more stylistically faithful post-punk revival bands wouldn't poo-poo a love song.
It would have been interesting to imagine Gang of Four as not just a pop band but as proper pop stars, because they would have been the driest pop stars ever. But instead, they refused to change a lyric the BBC found offensive for a planned "Top of the Pops" appearance, which effectively sunk their chart hopes. By the time they were ready to insert tongue-in-ass, no one wanted to hear their too slick take on what constituted "pop." Sometimes the people really do want it raw. Though they once might have looked askance at becoming an institution (of sorts), at least you can once again easily buy one of the great rock albums, now expanded with eight additional tracks. Anyone who says it's played out is a douchebag who deserves his Medium Medium records and willful obscurity. And that's one thing that I don't want to catch. | 2005-05-11T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2005-05-11T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | EMI | May 11, 2005 | 9.5 | 273b9b1a-976c-4e35-9cec-b647aaa4f2ad | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
On a new double album, the experimental collective continues its journey from vaporwave toward fractured, maximalist pop music. | On a new double album, the experimental collective continues its journey from vaporwave toward fractured, maximalist pop music. | death’s dynamic shroud: Darklife | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deaths-dynamic-shroud-darklife/ | Darklife | death’s dynamic shroud began with a Sega Dreamcast and a case of the flu. During Christmas 2013, James Webster attempted to persuade his friend and fellow Dayton, Ohio musician Tech Honors that the open-world game Shenmue could be experienced as “an interactive vaporwave album.” Sick at home on New Year’s Eve, he then created a woozy collection of songs called シェンムーONLINE entirely out of samples from the game. Honors responded with his own vaporwave album, and the NUWRLD mixtape series was born under the shared alias death’s dynamic shroud.wmv. Their work soon attracted the attention of Orange Milk Records co-founder Keith Rankin, also a veteran of the Dayton experimental music scene, who went on to release Honors’s 世界大戦 OLYMPICS and to collaborate with Webster on 신세기 EVANGELIS in 2014. Since then, death’s dynamic shroud has been the umbrella name under which Webster, Honors, and Rankin release music, solo or in collaboration.
While the NUWRLD mixtape series now comprises over 30 installments, the official death’s dynamic shroud albums tend to be major statements. Webster and Rankin’s 2015 release I’ll Try Living Like This upped their production value substantially by trading washed-out tape warble for CD-quality sheen, while 2017’s Heavy Black Heart was the first release to feature all three artists. Their latest LP, Darklife, a double album again featuring the complete trio, represents a concerted effort toward greater accessibility, backed by a months-long, four-single campaign from their new label 100% Electronica—a dramatic change for a band accustomed to the quick-drop approach of vaporwave. It also represents a significant artistic evolution, completing their journey away from vaporwave and toward complexly fractured, maximalist pop.
Darklife documents DDS’s humanity emerging from their once purely digital world. While it still features the internet-damaged sample manipulation that has become their trademark, it also incorporates more original production, instrumentation, and vocals than previous releases. Often this approach leads to effective juxtapositions, as in “Neon Memories,” when Honors’ vocals meld with a screaming synth until a glitch reintroduces the candy-pop chorus. Lyrically, the album also explores this transition from robotic to human. Album opener “Stay” features a computerized voice intoning, “Where consciousness makes no difference at all/The apartment and the garden/They might as well have never even happened.” In closing track “Dark Matter,” Tech Honors repeats these lyrics in a very human tenor, giving the same words a raw emotional resonance.
death’s dynamic shroud is at their best when indulging in crowd-pleasing excess. The outsized “Judgment Bolt,” with its blown-out bass, super-chopped vocals, and wall of synths, exemplifies what makes the project exciting, both live and in studio. The more subdued moments are just as compelling, like “Light Left the Garden,” a carefully composed ballad whose tentative build climaxes in the unsettlingly romantic line, “When I talked to you/If you’d asked me to/I would have killed the president.” Elsewhere, “I Just Wanted to Know Love” forgoes percussion entirely except for a brief flutter, gaining momentum from gradually layered synths and weepy samples from a soap opera. These smaller-scale tracks have the effect of zooming in from a neon cityscape to focus on the human dramas taking place at street level.
Across 15 songs totaling over an hour, death’s dynamic shroud attempt to include a full spectrum of atmospheres and styles created through the alchemy of their collaboration. Sometimes this density detracts from the cohesiveness of the album: The nightmare clatter and bang of “After Third Heaven” sits uneasily among the syrupy sweetness of its surrounding tracks, while the fourth side of the album lags with the six-minute “Rare Angel,” which feels like an obstacle to the finale. This is a problem of too many ideas competing for space—but then again, we shouldn’t expect anything else from these musicians’ hyper-frenetic, supersized world. | 2022-09-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 100% Electronica | September 22, 2022 | 7.4 | 273fe45a-7db6-41e2-815d-c1910d154ab1 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
The iconic stoner metal band’s first studio album in almost two decades is a twin ode to volume and weed. It makes everything that was originally great about Sleep even better. | The iconic stoner metal band’s first studio album in almost two decades is a twin ode to volume and weed. It makes everything that was originally great about Sleep even better. | Sleep: The Sciences | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sleep-the-sciences/ | The Sciences | When Sleep reconvened for two high-profile sets at All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2009, it looked as if they were simply rubber-stamping the Articles of Reunion. The icons of stoner metal played their great 1992 album Sleep’s Holy Mountain in full, along with a rare excerpt from the monolithic Dopesmoker, the record whose legal woes partially caused the band to splinter in 1995. Years later, the trio gave Dopesmoker the deluxe-reissue treatment, excavated archival songs that were never released, and issued a decent single through Adult Swim. All the while, Sleep nabbed pay-dirt slots on festival bills and toured big clubs, teasing the arrival of a new album—someday. Even when they posed dinner plates of weed atop mixing consoles, those promises felt like self-signing permission slips, allowing Sleep to continue making new money with old songs. That, after all, is the typical ’90s reunion ritual.
But on the Weedians’ holiest of holidays, April 20, Sleep actually released their fourth full-length, The Sciences, through Jack White’s Third Man Records. And even more unexpectedly, it’s substantive enough to warrant its extended genesis and boost Sleep’s legacy, not just reaffirm it. The essential trick of The Sciences—and the reason it feels like more than an overdue cash-in—is these 40something dudes have managed to grow up without growing old. Their minds are still focused on weed and the escape that it offers, but that’s just the gag; these riffs, rhythms, and the mantra-like singing of Al Cisneros are a drug unto themselves, evidence of a band that’s improved upon their animating idea. It is a twin ode to volume and weed that makes everything that was originally great about Sleep even better.
In their own bands, Cisneros and guitarist Matt Pike have progressed to more adult concerns. High on Fire’s Luminiferous was a political diatribe, its conspiracy theories and apocalyptic scenarios laced with twin senses of fantasy and fable. And since the start, Cisneros and his band OM have been a sort of spiritual search-craft, navigating a tangle of religious iconography and mystical koans. During the last decade, though, they have allowed themselves to slip fully back into Sleep, like old college buddies escaping to a cabin for a weekend retreat of booze, joints, and limited responsibilities. These songs are funny, loaded with the sort of pot portmanteaus (“rifftuals” goes into the lexicon immediately) and puns (as does “The CBDeacon,” their amazing nickname for Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler) you’d expect from a band that once recast weed smoke as the Star of Bethlehem. They celebrate the “indica field” and talk about space travel through the “Iommisphere.” There’s a song that turns the universe of Dune into a land of bud and bongs, another that urges melting icebergs to fight back against the cities that are killing them. (Feeling stoned yet?)
But Sleep have never played so audaciously or so well as they do here. Cisneros has always been an interesting singer, but he’s never sounded so powerful or resolved as he does on The Sciences. During “Sonic Titan,” he is practically messianic, his see-sawing monotone dispatching you to Zion; for “Marijuanaut’s Theme,” he pushes and pulls the melody horizontally and vertically, bending it in time and in harmony. He’s no longer only intoning directions toward Nazareth, he’s leading you there. Pike practically wrestles his guitar during the solo for “Antarcticans Thawed,” which slips so far out of time and tune that it feels like free jazz. Elsewhere, his riffs are lean and elegant, curved like the chrome fenders of a classic motorcycle.
And since joining the band after those initial ATP comebacks, drummer Jason Roeder has become an essential influence. He splits the difference between Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham and the jazz-rock legend Billy Cobham, a seismic shift for Sleep’s past atavism. On “Antarcticans Thawed,” he plays with a sense of narrative, steadily arcing from a restrained military march to a lumbering groove to, at the song’s peak, fills that amplify the melody itself. This subtlety is a testament to his time in Neurosis, doom’s most sophisticated and nuanced storytellers. This is a revelatory new philosophy for Sleep.
Reunions don’t often go like this. The Pixies and Pavement, the Smashing Pumpkins and Neutral Milk Hotel: At their best, those restarts allowed young fans to witness a band they assumed they’d always missed. At their worst, they turned into embarrassing reminders that our heroes can be greedy misanthropes. But Sleep’s return on The Sciences recalls the joyful revival of Dinosaur Jr., another trio who applied new skills to old attitudes on 2007’s Beyond. That record, of course, launched a stunning second phase for Dinosaur Jr., arguably better than their first. Sleep may move too slowly for that to happen, but for now, these six new rifftuals burn perfectly. | 2018-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Third Man | April 26, 2018 | 8.4 | 2742ca73-8eae-4498-986a-8053eca52519 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The second album by Sweden's Lust for Youth has the same M.O. as his debut-- Casio keyboard melodies collide, drum machines thump, Hannes Norrvide hollers into the void-- but the cleaner, warmer production makes Perfect View a lusher, prettier listen. | The second album by Sweden's Lust for Youth has the same M.O. as his debut-- Casio keyboard melodies collide, drum machines thump, Hannes Norrvide hollers into the void-- but the cleaner, warmer production makes Perfect View a lusher, prettier listen. | Lust for Youth: Perfect View | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18122-lust-for-youth-perfect-view/ | Perfect View | This is what Hannes Norrvide does as Lust for Youth: He sets up two simple melody lines on his Casio keyboard. He lets them ram ceaselessly into each other like abandoned go-karts. And then, over a muted thump of a drum machine, he hollers into the void. That's his entire M.O., and on paper it sounds about as appetizing as sucking stale air from an open freezer. But Norrvide makes surprisingly tactile, even sensual music this way, and on Perfect View, his second full length in only six months, he rides his own modestly cresting wave. He is still making the exact same sound, and it remains narrowly captivating in the exact same way.
The production on Perfect View is marginally cleaner and warmer than last fall's Growing Seeds, making it a lusher and prettier listen. But these are relative terms-- “unnerving” and “lonely” probably suit Lust for Youth better. Growing Seeds’ particular unnerving loneliness came not just from its sonic murk but from the traces of unease the murk failed to cover, and Perfect View, with its richer, mellower synths and deeper sound, brings Norrvide closer into focus. But his thick Swedish accent, muffled by reverb, still keeps us at an arms-length from his message: When he repeatedly chants the title of “I Found Love”, it sounds more like, “I’ve fallen off.”
Norrvide has insisted in interviews that his songs are about love, relationships, and morality. They probably are, but you'll find very little in this music to tell you so. What you'll hear, above all, is a firm belief in the comfort of synthesizers-- the wide, lonely bands of sound they make, the cottony feeling they leave in your mind. The song titles function like blank, terse placards-- "Another Day", "End", "Image"-- and the hum of the music acts similarly, as a mild anaesthetic, a small tonic for the times you'd rather erase your feelings for a few minutes than think about them.
Sifting through Perfect View to find highlightable moments proves surprisingly difficult: there's the nearly-funky bongo break on “Another Day”, the little bits of sampled speech that pop up on "Barcelona" and elsewhere; “Kirsten” and closer “I Found Love in a Different Place” turn the drum hits way up, and hint at what Lust for Youth might eventually sound like if Norrvide cleared his throat and demanded our undivided attention. But these details melt the minute you stop focusing on them, and I think Norrvide means them to. Listening normally, the songs blur together like fan blades, and it's hard to tell how long you've been listening to Perfect View. His is the ambient music of someone else's party, happening far away from where you are, and the distance is part of the allure. | 2013-06-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-06-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Sacred Bones | June 13, 2013 | 6.9 | 27431213-327c-4e27-9e40-1aa424db715a | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Tame Impala's second full-length, Lonerism, will once again be compared to albums from the late 1960s and early 70s. But the project is exciting because, by maximizing the use of the available technology, it taps into the progressive and experimental spirit of psychedelic rock, and not just the sound. | Tame Impala's second full-length, Lonerism, will once again be compared to albums from the late 1960s and early 70s. But the project is exciting because, by maximizing the use of the available technology, it taps into the progressive and experimental spirit of psychedelic rock, and not just the sound. | Tame Impala: Lonerism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17131-lonerism/ | Lonerism | If their debut was any indication, Tame Impala's second full-length, Lonerism, will once again be compared to albums from the late 1960s and early 70s. But if their intent was to make a record that sounds like it came from that era, they've failed and ended up with something more fascinating. Sure, there's merit to the countless groups and scenes that seek out the right tube amps and compressors and microphones in order to create flawless period pieces. They're often called "revivalists," even though the actual term is wasted on them. Are they really breathing new life into this form by keeping it cryogenically frozen in ideas nearly a half-century old? Tame Impala prove far more exciting because, by maximizing the use of the available technology, they tap into the progressive and experimental spirit of psychedelic rock, and not just the sound.
Tame Impala did something similar on 2010's Innerspeaker, and they might be open to "Same Impala"-type jokes if the expanse of psychedelic rock were something you'd be expected to move on from after one record. Lonerism does make the kind of tune-ups that typically generate a lot of second LP plaudits: It's leaner, more propulsive, more confident, and less beholden to its influences. But Lonerism's genius manifests itself in Tame Impala's ability to figure out a way to integrate the concepts of electronic music-making without resorting to ripping off the breakbeat/Beatles template of "Setting Sun".
Leader Kevin Parker doesn't sound like an electronic producer, he just thinks like one. He sees his songs as blank canvases rather than boxed-in verse/chorus structures while emphasizing fluidity, constant motion, and textural evolution. You could spend the entirety of opener "Be Above It" letting your ears luxuriate in the diversity of tactile sensations-- the subliminal whisper of the title becomes a rhythm track, a barreling drum break is severely tweaked to sound like an oncoming rush of bison, a flanged guitar wobbles like neon Jello, and Parker's laconic, slightly echoed vocals pulls the whole thing together. Lonerism could go anywhere from that point, which is confirmed by the majestic song that follows, "Endors Toi". Follow the regal path of the lead synth or tilt your ears towards the righteously loud drum rolls that sound like masterfully chopped Bonham/Moon samples. I'm reminded of Radiohead's stated goal on "Airbag", which was to recreate Endtroducing..... in real time, or what DJ Shadow himself has been trying to do ever since in terms of merging the rarest vinyl grooves with your stony older brother's record collection.
Those are the first two songs on Lonerism, and it's bold to lead off with seven minutes of mostly instrumentals. Yet for all of the sonic trickery, Tame Impala are anchored by the righteous aspects of classic rock. They're throwbacks in the sense that they operate from a pre-punk perspective where each musician has the chops and confidence to be capable of soloing, and the singer and the drummer were cranked loud as hell. Yes, Parker does sound like John Lennon. Many athletes pattern their golf swings after Tiger Woods, their batting stance on Barry Bonds, or stick out their tongue while taking a jump shot like Michael Jordan. It means little if you don't have the skills to connect and perform.
More important is how Parker writes melodies that are instantly memorable, that rise and fall with beautiful simplicity and give what are fairly basic and relatable sentiments heft. Lonerism lacks a chorus that instantly pops like "Solitude Is Bliss", which is an issue only if you think the best melodies necessarily need to appear in the middle of the song. You'd be hard-pressed to find hooks as catchy as the verses during the run that spans "Music to Walk Home By" through "Elephant", and while none initially stands out as the kind of hit that might push Tame Impala to bigger festival stages, the cumulative effect means Lonerism might.
So, the above is all well and good for the people who might use Lonerism to EQ their hi-fis. Does it make you feel anything? On Innerspeaker, Parker sang, "You will never come close to how I feel," so what's the emotional component to Lonerism? Though Parker's lyrics are plainspoken and occasionally a little elusive, Tame Impala's two records are called Innerspeaker and Lonerism, some of their songs go by titles like "Solitude Is Bliss", "Why Won't They Talk to Me?", "Island Walking", and "Mind Mischief". You get the idea of where Parker's head is at, or more to the point, that Parker's head is where he's at.
That's a fairly common concern in this realm. You think about most of the technophile, prog-rock opuses of recent decades and most sound like spiritual heirs of King Crimson, Pink Floyd, or Black Sabbath; records like Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Kid A, and The Moon & Antarctica tell the listener that their state of being is forced upon them, by shadowy governments, by heartless technology, by an uncaring god. It justifies the headphones-bound quarantine. What distinguishes Tame Impala is how they are able to explore the emotional difference between being alone and being isolated. Jayson Greene described Parker's voice vividly as "like someone trapped John Lennon's vocal take from 'A Day in the Life' in a jar and taught it to sing new songs." In terms of a mentality, to me it's more along the lines of "I'm Only Sleeping", embodying and advocating a wakeful and passive state of psychedelia.
Lonerism derives much of its philosophical and musical pleasure from this interaction of micro and macro. Tame Impala stack vocal and guitar harmonies on the loveably hungover "Mind Mischief", and then Parker and co-producer Dave Fridmann take control of the mixing consoles and shake the whole thing up like a snowglobe. A similarly fun trick happens on "Apocalypse Dreams", which builds the momentum of a bouncy Northern Soul groove up to a peak before the mix abruptly cuts off and spits them back into a panoramic, HD jam.
All these rich sounds serve as an alternate take on anticipating technological encroachment, that humanity and technology aren't necessarily at war. You feel small while listening to Lonerism, but in a way that makes you appreciate how man, machine, and Mother Nature can harmonize. Lonerism is portable and joyous in an unforced way, a soundtrack for the times when you're walking downtown and look up at a collection of skyscrapers, or driving through a mountain pass on an interstate or even looking at a Ferris wheel next to an ocean thinking, "Holy shit, how did this all get here?" | 2012-10-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-10-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Modular | October 8, 2012 | 9 | 27447892-5062-4c92-a530-549c727a6bdd | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
From its opening notes, Kacey Musgraves' Pageant Material sounds like a sigh of relief. Her major-label debut, 2013's Same Trailer Different Park, positioned her as something akin to the country Kendrick Lamar, and her ascendance does feel corrective at a time when bro-country's red cup runneth over with EDM's structural dynamics, NRA talking points, and "rapping." | From its opening notes, Kacey Musgraves' Pageant Material sounds like a sigh of relief. Her major-label debut, 2013's Same Trailer Different Park, positioned her as something akin to the country Kendrick Lamar, and her ascendance does feel corrective at a time when bro-country's red cup runneth over with EDM's structural dynamics, NRA talking points, and "rapping." | Kacey Musgraves: Pageant Material | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20679-pageant-material/ | Pageant Material | From its opening notes, Kacey Musgraves' Pageant Material sounds like a sigh of relief. Musgraves' voice is largely unadorned, her sound analog and organic—she is backed by a small band, sweetened by pedal steel and the occasional string section. The songs are not overworked: the choruses do not explode, they merely unfurl. Her near-perfect major-label debut, 2013's Same Trailer Different Park, positioned her as something akin to the country Kendrick Lamar—the hyperbole was that she could save country music from itself. Musgraves stands in comically stark relief to some of her CMA-hoisting peers, and her ascendance does certainly feel corrective at a time when bro-country's red cup runneth over with EDM's structural dynamics, NRA talking points, and "rapping." She's hailed as a new model, one seemingly reverse-engineered from Nashville's Top 40: a perpetually stoned real girl, fixating on fine '70s countrypolitan flourishes and focusing on self-acceptance.
Musgraves grew up rural and working class in East Texas and firmly orients herself as someone not-that-far removed from a small town fate. Country, historically, espouses nothin'-fancy humility, but in 2015, these qualities are often illustrated by naming things—cheap beer, old trucks—that signify one's down-homeness. Mainstream country is currently a few years deep into a circa-2004 hip-hop problem, where recitation of the familiar nouns of late-stage capitalism stand as totems, or replace narrative altogether (instead of "I slang in my white tee," it's "White picket fence house on this dirt.") The exactitude of purchasing power and status is being GPS'd at all times. The lone examples of this behavior on Pageant Material are a citation of Willie Nelson (who duets on his own lovely "Are You Sure"), the invocation of a room shared with Gram Parsons' ghost on "Dime Store Cowgirl", and the title track double-entendre of "the only Crown is in my glass." When Musgraves sings "Just 'cause it don't cost a lot/ Don't mean it's cheap," on "Dime Store Cowgirl" it's as much a personal thesis about simple values as a repudiation of the economy around her.
Musgraves' "not"-ness is the pivot point of her artistic identity. Her songs exude a relaxed resonance because they have a lot less to prove. They feel personal, and you can locate Musgraves the artist in them ("And if I end up goin' down in flames/ Well, at least I know I did it my own way"). Mainstream country often poses an Us vs. Them chasm meant to alienate those who cannot identify with the lifestyle or values represented; for Musgraves, openness and acceptance are the paradigm. She rejects the mandates of Top 40, but maintains the hallmarks of country tradition, which makes liking her work easy and exacting critique tricky. A lot of country is about singing about what you aren't (or rather "ain't")—which she does often here, and most potently on the title track. One of the remarkable things about Musgraves is not how much she has deviated from country norms, but the way she expands them.
The most obvious way, and the one that press and the public have latched onto, is the feminist-at-her-liberty narratives with songs (most of which are co-written by her producers, Luke Laird and Shane McAnally, who were also behind the boards on Same Trailer). While this is worth noting and celebrating, in Musgraves' case it's overstated simplification, one that continually pits her as a straw(wo)man against the easy villainy of bro country™, instead of within a canon that spans from Kitty Wells' "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" to Loretta Lynn's "Fist City" to Miranda Lambert's "Kerosene". With Pageant Material there is less good-for-the-gander agenda than anticipated. Musgraves is confident and self-contained, but she's not measuring herself against anyone's standards but her own (the Big Machine-subtweeting "Good 'Ol Boys Club", and its chaser, "Cup of Tea"), an idea that she references on most every song on the album. But under the microscope it's more than confidence, it's more than self-help self-love maxims. It's a disregard of the system; it's shrugging off the mantle of Southern Girlhood ("I'd rather lose for what I am/ Than win for what I ain't" she sings on the title track).
And unlike many in her cohort, Musgraves doesn't hoist herself up as a bad girl. Not because she isn't one, but because in her world that dichotomy doesn't exist. Instead she spends much of the record refusing the obligation to a good reputation ("Biscuits", "Late to the Party", or boasting "I'm always higher than my hair" on "Pageant Material"). She celebrates an authentic self expression above all—Musgraves' tendentious realness is what lends the album its quiet politics.
Tussling with her persona is fun and engaging work, but it's Musgraves' songcraft that provides the whoa moments. She has the ability to shift a phrase—like "family is family" or "you can take me out of the country, but you can't take the country out of me"—out of cliche and into poignancy, or hell, even into something deep. She can pin 10 of these plainspoken lines back-to-back, without ever straining the song or its narrative or appearing to do any hard work at all. Her ability to pair song to sentiment is fairly flawless.
Pageant Material is a bit smoother than Same Trailer and musically there is less to grab on to. The album's maudlin center—the triptych of "Somebody to Love", "Miserable", and "Die Fun"—gives it some gravitas. Her voice on these world-weary bits, especially the impeccably crafted "Miserable", give the album some of the heft it could use a little more of. It's an easy listen that clocks its 14 tracks swiftly, and can feel a little lightweight on repeated listens.
The binary of "good" country vs. "bad" is one we'd be wise to retire, and is the wrong narrative to frame a songwriter of Musgraves' caliber. She remixes all that we might call corny and shopworn in other, less deft hands. She's making gold records in service to small-town DGAF burner girls who managed to half get their shit together. Which is a truly strange universe for a pop star to be working in—nestling in with the ex-Swiftie fuck-up fringe, young women imagining beyond the dead ends and expectations set before them. While much of women's work in mainstream pop is hung up on pleasure (still important!) and what disposable income nets them (ditto), Musgraves is musing in a more quotidian slog of struggle and acceptance—the work of the self. It's a strange and forgiving album, less toothsome than the ones that preceded it, but Musgraves' resistance makes this album important, even when it's imperfect. | 2015-06-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-06-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Mercury Nashville | June 24, 2015 | 8 | 274b4b49-39a5-4ec3-8e10-99a66e1dfe64 | Jessica Hopper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-hopper/ | null |
On her elegant and complex fifth album, Lana Del Rey sings exquisitely of freedom and transformation and the wreckage of being alive. It establishes her as one of America’s greatest living songwriters. | On her elegant and complex fifth album, Lana Del Rey sings exquisitely of freedom and transformation and the wreckage of being alive. It establishes her as one of America’s greatest living songwriters. | Lana Del Rey: Norman Fucking Rockwell! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lana-del-rey-norman-fucking-rockwell/ | Norman Fucking Rockwell! | In 2017, Lana Del Rey stopped performing in front of the American flag. Where the singer-songwriter born Elizabeth Grant had once stood onstage before a wavering projection of stars and stripes, charged by a brash apple-pie and blue-jeans patriotism, she now deemed the flag “inappropriate,” preferring a screen of static instead. For a woman whose songs are like miniature syllabi in American Studies—saturated in references to jazz, girl groups, heavy metal, Springsteen; Hemingway and Fitzgerald; money, power, glory; excess and loss; Whitmanian multitudes—it felt like an act of defiance.
Norman Fucking Rockwell! is Lana at her deepest, and it arrives at a time when the history of America as we know it is being rewritten. Norman Rockwell himself illustrated idyllic images of American life and its history, spending 50 years with the Americana propagandists at the weekly Saturday Evening Post. His best-known works used a wondrous narrative style to center comfort and simplicity: A pastoral idea, painted and personified, of the American Dream. Lana neatly cuts through that outmoded fantasy with an emphatic fucking hyphen mark of irreverence, or enthusiasm, or both. As Lana revives American myths, with an empty deadpan that would make Lou Reed proud, she also exposes them. Like the Beach Boys, she’s looking for America; like Elvis, she’s discomfiting; like Dylan, she’s a trickster, and we are all potentially fooled.
Lana is one of our most complicated stars, a constantly unresolvable puzzle—someone who once called her own work “more of a psychological music endeavor” than pop. But on Norman Fucking Rockwell! that ground-swelling complexity coheres to reveal an indisputable fact: She is the next best American songwriter, period. Trading much of her hardboiled trap-pop and trip-hop malaise for baroque piano ballads and dazzling folk—equal parts Brill Building precision, windswept Laurel Canyon, and 2019 parlances—Lana has begun a dynamic second act in profundity. “I really do believe that words are one of the last forms of magic,” Lana once said, and she exalts each syllable more than ever here. Where her elegant wordplay once made her the Patron Saint of Internet Feelings, she now sounds like a millennial troubadour—singing tales of beloved bartenders and broken men, of fast cars and all of the senses, of freedom and transformation and the wreckage of being alive. The stakes have never been higher.
Sometimes Jack Antonoff productions seem to fly because they have been given a trampoline or a children’s bouncing castle. But here, with delicacy and grace, he and Lana find new wings in minimalism, fresh air to breathe, a structural relief. From its cascade of opening piano notes—“God damn, man child” are felicitous first words and the national mood—Norman Fucking Rockwell! achieves levity, tension, and a disarming self-awareness. The languor of Mazzy Star and downbeat skitter of Portishead meet the easy pop-rock breeze of Carole King on 1971’s Tapestry, or the searching resilience of Joni Mitchell on 1972’s For the Roses. It feels like a wall has come down, like Norman Fucking Rockwell! is less to do with camp, and more to do with real life; less to do with scripting the incandescent character of Lana Del Rey and more to do with human complexity; less about aesthetics than being. You can hear the room everywhere, and for all the spectral harmonies and cinematic splendor, it sounds like Lana alone, embracing classic Angeleno isolation.
Lana’s pillars are intact before you even hit play: glamour, eccentricity, the absurd, wit. “Your poetry’s bad and you blame the news,” she proclaims on the title track, with a raised eyebrow, and this forthright song grows more savage from there. On a nine-and-a-half-minute lullaby called “Venice Bitch,” she sings the line “fresh out of fucks forever” like a lilting lady of the canyon—in pop tradition, Lana treats California like a conceptual promised land, and here is the smoggy sprawl, stretching into a neo-psychedelic ballad for a new age of acid festival jams. She curses like the sailors on the cover. She employs old-school lingo on the one hand (“Catch ya on the flipside”) and a narcotic slur on the other. And there is no other pop star who could palatably cover Sublime’s “Doin’ Time” and turn its mall-reggae into something so balmy and sweet.
Above all, Norman Fucking Rockwell! is the sound of a heart shattering and reforming just to shatter again—of troubled people attempting to navigate the mess of love. Her ache is from empathy: for our crumbling world, for the down and out, for lovers at war with their minds. “If he’s a serial killer/Then what’s the worst that can happen to a girl that’s already hurt?” she sings like a crime novelist on “Happiness Is a Butterfly,” which is to say it is fleeting, setting herself up for a kind of heartbreak so torturous it should be possible to have it surgically removed. Many of these exquisitely narrated songs contain reminders that the trappings of masculinity—breaches in communication, emotional stiltedness, fear of vulnerability—come from the same toxic status quo as systemic patriarchy. On the wrenching “California,” Lana processes as much: “You don’t ever have to be stronger than you really are,” confessing in a tumbling rush that “I shouldn’t have done it but I read it in your letter/You said to a friend that you wished you were doing better.” Each word is on a pedestal; the song exists to amplify them. Her faint country warble wells more with each verse, and it’s devastating.
Radiating new dimensions of sensitivity and eloquence, “Mariners Apartment Complex” is a towering peak on Norman Fuckng Rockwell!, a four-minute drama about fateful potential romantic energy. But its turbulent grandeur could speak to the whole Lana Del Rey story. “You took my sadness out of context” and “They mistook my kindness for weakness” are bold refusals to be misunderstood. Referencing Elton John with her pristine declaration “I ain’t no candle in the wind,” a phrase originally inspired by the early deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Janis Joplin, is a patent embrace of life from a woman who once wrote, “I wish I was dead.” When she sings, “I fucked up, I know that, but Jesus/Can’t a girl just do the best she can?” it could be a mic-dropping rebuttal to the ludicrous standards she faced from the start (and the overblown, Internet-engineered Lana outrage that now seems sexist and pathetic). The Hollywood author Eve Babitz once wrote, “Once it is established you are you and everyone else is merely perfect, ordinarily factory-like perfect… you can wreak all the havoc you want.” Lana’s evolution follows suit. “Mariners Apartment Complex” is the sort of ballad that makes teens want to bang on pianos and spill their souls.
Lana zooms out to find her zenith. A piano ballad to close down the bar at the end of the world, “The greatest” collapses time, as if Lana is writing the zeitgeist on a typewriter, her lines raving up with fevered reference to rock’n’roll and depression and a proverbial “Kokomo.” Turning the weight of a generation into light, her words crest like the white of a tidal wave—“L.A.’s in flames, it’s a getting hot/Kanye West is blonde and gone/‘Life On Mars’ ain’t just a song/Oh, the livestream’s almost on”—and they feel on arrival to have existed forever. As ever, Lana regards the despondency of existence as a realist, offering a funhouse reflection of the way we live.
Call her Doris Doomsday: “The culture is lit/And if this is it/I had a ball,” she resolves with ecstasy and fire, a lightning rod of humor, sadness, and perception; flip jadedness and abiding love. Fanning the flames of a culture ablaze, Lana sings each word like a prayer, finessed with conviction and smoke, chaos and control. “The greatest” is a galaxy-brain moment in the pantheon of pop, and it belongs to a generation fully aware we are at risk of being distracted into oblivion, Juuling towards early death while watching Earth burn.
But hope does not elude us yet. And Lana has an anthem for that, too. The title of Norman Fucking Rockwell!’s grand finale is itself a doomy 16-word poem called “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it.” Whatever it was that brought Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen together half a century ago, that middle ground is in the solemn mood, hollowed space, and spiritual fortitude of this haunting song. In the muted resignation of her voice you can see her “trust no one” tattoo. She rejects a world of luxury, rejects happiness and sadness both, calls herself “24/7 Sylvia Plath.” And in this slow, glowering procession, she points more directly to her own personal history than ever—“spilling my guts with the Bowery bums” as a volunteer, FaceTiming her father “from beyond the grave”—and soberly she sings: “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman with my past.” In the vacant spaces between her dark phrases is the unassailable fact that people bury their pasts in order to endure them.
Norman Fucking Rockwell! is the apotheosis of Lana Del Rey, songs of curiosity and of consequence, darkness and light, a time capsule of 2019, proof that a person cannot escape herself but she can change. Lana has said hope is dangerous because of her own experience, because in Hollywood she “knows so much.” Hope is dangerous because women are rarely taken seriously, from matters of authenticity to cases of assault. Hope is dangerous because the world fails women, and the bigotry to which American power is currently pitched ensures it. Lana calls herself “a modern-day woman with a weak constitution,” witnessing “a new revolution,” with “monsters still under my bed that I never could fight off.” What makes this final song of survival so cutting is the palpable difficulty in her delivery. When she lands on “a gatekeeper carelessly dropping the keys on my nights off,” it sounds like an oblique image of corrupted power, as upsetting as it ought to be, one to finally drain her of hope. But she still has it. In a piercing falsetto we rarely if ever hear from Lana, perhaps saved for her most pressing truth, she touches the sky: “I have it, I have it, I have it.” And when she does, you believe her.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Polydor / Interscope | September 3, 2019 | 9.4 | 274de458-9724-47f0-ada9-e3b18be9e507 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The Chicago R&B poet and singer doesn’t just write about losing or finding love: Her tender and curious new album is all about the transformative potential of the journey. | The Chicago R&B poet and singer doesn’t just write about losing or finding love: Her tender and curious new album is all about the transformative potential of the journey. | Jamila Woods: Water Made Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jamila-woods-water-made-us/ | Water Made Us | How much would you let love change you? That’s the dare that singer and songwriter Jamila Woods tosses inside the circle on her sprawling new album Water Made Us. Across 17 songs, she considers love as a cell that can mutate and multiply, and she asks us to celebrate as she revels in its changes. It’s been four years since LEGACY! LEGACY!, an impatient bullhorn lofted by an artist urgent to set right historical slights. Since then Woods has been preoccupied by an inward metamorphosis, telling Them that she sought “to represent different stages of my life or relationships as a cycle.” While her earlier work sought to be definitive, here she’s fluid, tethered only to a personal philosophy of contentment and surrender. The musical inclinations and existential inquiries are curious and voracious, yet Woods keeps them sprightly and agile.
“Bugs,” the opener, is deceptively nonchalant in its pursuit of love. “Why not have pleasure on your way to the one/Or the second one?” Woods asks. Searching for “the one” can feel futile; she makes the task appear worthy, almost noble, less about finding and more about savoring. She also advises us to chill out: “Why so much pressure?” Jasminfire’s soaring violin gives the song a nursery rhyme quality that quickly turns hymnal, while drummer Homer Steinweiss turns the latter part of the song into a jazz session, trading fours to wind down the night. “Send a Dove” is smooth and melodic, in the vein of R&B heavyweights Mtume, and samples Nikki Giovanni’s far-reaching SOUL! conversation with James Baldwin. Giovanni talked to Baldwin about love, relationships, and the responsibility to show up for each other with gentleness, even when it’s difficult or untrue in the moment. “Fake it with me,” she implored. Woods continues that potent plea, singing, “Don’t save your worst for me/I’m not your leather Everlast… Lie to me still.” In conversation with her inspirations and contemporaries, particularly Kelela on Raven, Woods asks if her paramours are strong enough to do what love requires.
Songs like “Wreckage Room,” “Thermostat,” and “I Miss All My Exes” are candid with a hint of play. Woods speaks from her soul and makes life’s virtues—trust, faith, hope, memory—seem not just aspirational but necessary. Julian Reed’s piano lends an ominous air to the naked grief of the former two songs, while siblings Ayanna and Kamaria Woods’ choral harmonies on “Wreckage Room” evoke the familiarity and comfort of those we trust to carry us at our lowest: our family. The humor emerges as Woods revisits the quirks that made every past relationship similar yet different, remembering how it felt to be cared for by exes who “cook veggie burgers with Lawry’s, lemon pepper everything,” or those “who talk to God in a different language.”
Woods holds her own. Even better, she holds the team, ceding space to duendita and her Anita Baker tone on the triumphant “Tiny Garden” and to frequent collaborator Saba’s virtuosic rapping on “Practice.” Interludes—“let the cards fall,” “out of the doldrums” and “the best thing”—play like snippets of consciousness from the children on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, now grown up and ready to balance naivete with rational thinking. Standout “Wolfsheep” is a country-inflected ballad for the coconut oil kind of woman: Black girls who hike trails with Timbs and laid edges, remembering Sonia Sanchez and humming Summer Walker.
Woods brings irreverence, flexibility, and discipline to her writing, taking her time with each phrase and word placement. As a poet she needs to be clear, even if the lessons are uncertain. The steadfast quality of her lyricism brings to mind the pen games of others who have looked love squarely in the face and admitted it changed them: Carolyn Franklin, Stevie Nicks, SZA. This lineage of songwriters shares a fascination with the immediate aftermath of love—the morning after the breakup or the seconds following the revelation of infidelity. It’s not the sweeping emotions that compel them, but the moment in between separation and starting over.
Water Made Us is dextrous and steady. It conjures a profound sweetness from ordinary musings and takes the guile out of relationships. Woods gives herself over to a state of ease that is neither well-earned nor hard-fought, simply possible. Life will do as life does; all we can do is continue on until we arrive where we need to be. This is Woods’ realization on Water Made Us, and throughout, she sounds like she’s skipping: like she’s meeting love, time and again in various formations, and each time meeting herself anew. | 2023-10-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Jagjaguwar | October 17, 2023 | 8 | 2753a803-86d8-4179-9eb5-ee01b7385f83 | Tarisai Ngangura | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tarisai-ngangura/ | |
Dub pioneer Adrian Sherwood reteams with dubstep pioneer Rob Ellis (aka Pinch) for a more refined and surprising album that falls just short of its desired concept. | Dub pioneer Adrian Sherwood reteams with dubstep pioneer Rob Ellis (aka Pinch) for a more refined and surprising album that falls just short of its desired concept. | Sherwood & Pinch: Man Vs. Sofa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22929-man-vs-sofa/ | Man Vs. Sofa | Thankfully, the past few years have brought the exhilarating and acerbic production work of Adrian Sherwood back into earshot. In the midst of early ’80s London, he helped a slew of punks—the Fall, Judy Nylon, and Maximum Joy—find their inner dub sound, and he gave rastas like Bim Sherman and Prince Far I a heavily psychedelic bass tone that made them stand apart from their dreadlocked brethren. A tireless work ethic and decades of production work make it near impossible to keep a handle on the man, but a spate of reissues in the past few years, especially Sherwood at the Controls, show just how his sound anticipated the wooly electronic experimentation that now runs through the likes of Arca, the Fade to Mind crew and dubstep itself.
So having Sherwood team with dubstep pioneer Rob Ellis, aka Pinch, was surely inspired. But too often on their 2015 debut, Late Night Endless, felt cluttered and claustrophobic. And when they did take their foot off the gas, they wound up wallowing in a downtempo rut. The tempos remain quickened on their follow-up Man Vs. Sofa, but the two let the tracks breathe a bit more and there’s a sense of refinement throughout. A jittery thump opens “Roll Call,” and while there’s all manner of machine-gun handclaps, echoing hi-hats and arroyos of bass, there’s also flecks of Blaxploitation guitar and cinematic strings. It might read like a laundry list of elements, but Pinch and Sherwood move deftly between it all.
“Itchy Face” bears quick electro bass pulses and snare rolls. So when they introduce a graceful piano line and just let it luxuriate, it's like a sonic speedball. The two are so nimble and compatible now that they easily swing into echo chambers and white noise while keeping the speed up. That piano crosses over to the dubstep/classic dub stylings of “Midnight Mindset,” though it’s not the same easy blend they displayed earlier. And the title track has piano and drums flicker in and out of darkness, but it doesn’t move so much as get swallowed up by static. And when the piano rises up again on the next track, the novelty of it in their mix wears thin.
The best surprise comes when they bring Lee “Scratch” Perry in for a guest vocal turn on “Lies.” Despite decades of dub pedigree, Sherwood and Pinch forego it to instead put a tricky 2-step under him, a welcome shift in strategy. A furious lyric adds menace to the industrial haze of “Gun Law,” showing the duo moving into noisier terrain that brings to mind Sherwood’s gnarled mid-’80s output.
Things get baffling when the duo throw in a cover of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s evocative ’80s classic, “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence.” The first time through, they pay their respects to Sakamoto’s sterling piano melody, one of the loveliest soundtrack themes of the era. But after establishing the motif, Sherwood and Pinch don’t seem to know quite where to take it. A downtempo beat gets thrown underneath it, before the two grind the track to a complete halt and instead add squalls of digital glitch and some electric guitar noodling. It then goes up into the stratosphere for a moment before they bring it back down with a needlessly busy IDM drum line. Respectable as it is for both men to avoid falling back into their bag of dub tricks, a few of Man Vs. Sofa’s attempts to expand their reach fall just a bit short. | 2017-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Tectonic / On-U Sound | March 2, 2017 | 6.7 | 27569f52-7684-4fe3-82d0-cff34b7a5324 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
This compilation is an ideal introduction to a defining voice of the ’60s: a sweeping survey of pop songs as prayers for compassion, consolation, and commitment | This compilation is an ideal introduction to a defining voice of the ’60s: a sweeping survey of pop songs as prayers for compassion, consolation, and commitment | Dionne Warwick: The Complete Scepter Singles 1962-1973 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dionne-warwick-the-complete-scepter-singles-1962-1973/ | The Complete Scepter Singles 1962-1973 | Dionne Warwick had a rocky start at Scepter Records. As a child in New Jersey, she sang with her family’s gospel band, which also included her aunt, Cissy Houston; as a teenager, she recorded back-up vocals for Brook Benton, Solomon Burke, and Ben E. King. During a session for the Drifters’ “Mexican Divorce,” she impressed the song’s co-writer Burt Bacharach enough that he hired her to sing demos to shop around to other artists. “Forget the song, get the singer,” marveled the head of Scepter, Florence Greenberg. But the newcomer had to fight to get good material, and when she heard someone on the radio singing a song that was promised to her, she exploded. She recounts the scene in her 2010 memoir, My Life, As I See It: “I reminded them of the promise they made to me. ‘We have a problem here. You want me to record with you? I am who I am. Don’t make me over, man!’ In other words, don’t lie to me or tell me one thing and do something else.”
That choice of words—don’t make me over, man!—inspired Bacharach and Hal David to pen what would become her first single, 1962’s “Don’t Make Me Over.” It’s an anthem of self-determination, with pleading lyrics from David and an arrangement from Bacharach that balances drama and sophistication. But it’s Warwick who makes the song: Just 21 at the time, she delivers a measured performance, drawing on her gospel background when she gets to the big finish: “Accept me for what I am!” A rousing introduction to an artist whose eloquent vocals would define the 1960s, the song was a hit, peaking at number 21 on the charts. But there was a problem: Her name was misspelled on the label of the 45. Ironically, the woman born Dionne Warrick was made over into Dionne Warwick.
Thus began her decade-long run on Scepter, during which she recorded mostly songs written, arranged, and produced by Bacharach and David. The Complete Scepter Singles, which gathers 74 A- and B-sides from this era, is an ideal starting point with Warwick and with ’60s pop in general. Her songwriters already had a reputation for sophisticated pop fare, and this young woman from New Jersey was, with apologies to Dusty Springfield and Elvis Costello and others, the best voice for those songs. Warwick gracefully navigates Bacharach’s tricky melodies and progressions and brings life to David’s lyrics of yearning and doubt. Her performances marry technical precision with artistic flair, always hinting at massive currents of emotion running just under the surface. While not an actor per se, she embodies a sense of character, with the understanding that the song is just one scene in a larger story: a snapshot of a moment of uncertainty or a swell of love within a larger life.
The Complete Scepter Singles plays like a guide on how to sing a song. Warwick obviously has the power to deliver the big moments, but it’s the smaller, quieter turns that stand out, when she is considering the implications of the lyrics and testing how much weight the song can bear. Listen to her wild 1965 deconstruction of “You Can Have Him,” which had already been a hit for Roy Hamilton. A small army of drummers and percussionists pound out intricately overlapped rhythms, but she measures her vocals carefully, steadying the song even as she injects a sly sarcasm to its famous kiss-off. She opens the 1966 B-side “In Between the Heartaches” in a delicate, almost brittle falsetto before shifting down to her lower register, and she tempers her phrasing to flirt with the meter and push back against the arrangement. She reveals the enormity of the emotions that wash over her while also suggesting that her heartbreak doesn’t end with the song’s final notes. Her pain comes in waves; she is always bracing herself.
Not every song on The Complete Scepter Singles is a Bacharach-David tune, but such is the nature of their collaboration—its intimacy, its longevity, its success—that every track sounds like it flows from the same wellspring. Bacharach arranges her voice like it’s another instrument in the orchestra, and David pens lyrics like prayers. That might be the unifying theme of her time at Scepter: pop songs as prayers for compassion, consolation, and commitment. There’s “Wishin’ and Hopin’” and “I Say a Little Prayer,” of course, but there’s also “What the World Needs Now” and even “Walk On By.” “In the chapel of my heart, I pray that we will not be parted,” she sings on the 1963 B-side “Please Make Him Love Me,” which isn’t among Bacharach and David’s most inspired compositions. It’s a songwriting gambit for them, a theme to be unspooled in a few verses and a bridge, but Warwick digs deeper into the idea and manages to convey the sense of being swallowed up by love and fear both.
How much of yourself should you give over when you’re in love? How much should you hold in reserve? Can you be made over and still keep some part of yourself? These are the crucial questions Warwick is posing on The Complete Scepter Singles, and each song justifies itself by offering a slightly different answer. But those were also questions facing women during that decade, when they were enjoying more freedom away from the home—in offices, in clubs, on the pop charts—and were constantly chastised for it. That dilemma makes her 1964 single “A House Is Not a Home” both an artifact of its time and a song that feels timeless. David writes some heartbreaking lyrics and Bacharach provides some grand orchestral swells, but you only sense their presence subliminally. Warwick dominates every measure, investing each plea with gravity and despair. “When I climb the stairs and turn the key,” she sings in one of those moments that forces you to stop everything else you might be doing, “Oh please be there, still in love with me.” She understands the tragedy behind these negotiations: To love and be loved is to invite uncertainty and trouble into your life, but not loving and especially not being loved is to not exist at all. | 2023-04-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Real Gone | April 11, 2023 | 8.5 | 27588d29-e050-40ee-b71c-a3add22394cb | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The more willfully ugly the music of rapper/producer Black Milk becomes, the better he gets. No Poison No Paradise, his latest, features some of the ugliest- sounding, and therefore best and most fully-realized, music of his career. | The more willfully ugly the music of rapper/producer Black Milk becomes, the better he gets. No Poison No Paradise, his latest, features some of the ugliest- sounding, and therefore best and most fully-realized, music of his career. | Black Milk: No Poison, No Paradise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18615-black-milk-no-poison-no-paradise/ | No Poison, No Paradise | Detroit producer/rapper Black Milk favors sounds that hurt just a little—drums tweaked sideways so they check you in the shoulder instead of landing straight, synth sounds with big gaps in the frequencies. He has a diehard golden-age revivalist fan base, but the farther away from Native Tongues revivalism his music travels, the more willfuly ugly it becomes, the better he gets—the waveform of his best beats would look like a grin full of broken teeth. No Poison No Paradise, his latest, features some of the ugliest- sounding, and therefore best and most fully-realized, music of his career. It's a serrated, mud-caked album, one that rattles and bangs like a box full of old machine parts.
Black Milk opens it with a quick feint, almost a joke: nine seconds of murmuring jazz organ suspiciously similar "Electric Relaxation" breeze by before a blurt of static cuts through and"Interpret Sabotage", a rusted tanker crunching its treads over Reagan-era synth equipment, rolls through. "Fell in love with a certain era of music, never thought it would've came with a curse," he raps grimly, in tight, martial 6/8, the music nipping gamely at his heels.
The album is easily Black Milk's darkest. Even 2010's Album of the Year, which wrestled with a series of devastating losses and setbacks, was light-hearted by comparison, its colorful tumble of live instruments and loops keeping a semblance of a party going. On No Poison No Paradise, despair rots all the way into the hull. The terrifically dark "Codes and Cab Fare" turns a Hammond organ and a sliding bass pitch into a sustained moan, a slow plummet in free space. "Dismal"'s woodblock knock recalls OutKast's "Elevators," but the atmosphere is minor key and uneasy, gas fumes rising off an evaporated Neptunes production. The knock on "Black Sabbath" is hard enough to send furniture tipping over, and suggests Milk could have been a meaningful contributor in the room where Yeezus was hashed out.
There are a few wistful moments on No Poison that recall Milk's spiritual father figure Dilla. He reminisces about squirming uncomfortably in church pews on "Sunday's Best", a song that fades cleverly into "Monday's Worst", both songs breezing by on late-summer-light soul loops. Dreamlike sequencing touches like this are the only obvious marks of the concept behind No Poison, which, Black Milk tells us, functions as series of dreams inside the head of a character named Sonny, Jr.
There's a reason reason this conceptual framework feels vague and mushy, and it's Black Milk's career-long elephant in the room: He's a technically strong rapper, someone who writes vividly and honestly, who continually shuffles complex rhyme patterns, who audibly pops veins with his desire to say something. But his vocal tone is grit, sawdust, completely lacking in character. He suffers from a severe case of what Andrew Noz years ago dubbed "Black Thought Syndrome," wherein a rapper with a surplus of substance suffers from a severe lack of style. For a guy with such a golden ear, you'd think he would have figured out a way to weave his vocals more musically, or more distinctively, into the richly tactile music he produces in the studio.
Nonetheless, he seethes impressively here, performing with the determination of someone who has weathered a career's worth of these sorts of dispiriting notices. A few of his lines burst through via a sheer force of iron will, like on"Black Sabbath": "You know them slums where them slugs hum past your wig." His near-military focus and conviction carries the day. And he stretches out here and there—he hasn't always been the guy you think of when you think of "baby-making music," but he sounds relaxed on the convincingly slinky and unzipped "Parallels," like someone who is not only about to have sex, but conceivably enjoy it. On "Sonny, Jr.," he brings in Robert Glasper, a vital jazz pianist and producer who has been working double-time to complicate that resume with hip-hop and R&B collaborations, for an extended workout that could itself be diced up for five or six different loops. The album is full of ear-snagging textures like this, and its most compelling moments are career highlights. | 2013-10-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-10-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Fat Beats | October 22, 2013 | 7.3 | 275abc5f-452e-4dc4-8501-657b310fe339 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Leaving behind the beats of his previous work, the Bristol producer takes up chamber instruments, choral arrangements, and digital mayhem on a dizzying album about the nature of the self. | Leaving behind the beats of his previous work, the Bristol producer takes up chamber instruments, choral arrangements, and digital mayhem on a dizzying album about the nature of the self. | Vessel: Queen of Golden Dogs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vessel-queen-of-golden-dogs/ | Queen of Golden Dogs | Vessel is not the kind of artist who progresses in straight lines. “I have to move about very quickly, or I become too familiar,” he’s said of his methods. Six years on from his debut album, Sebastian Gainsborough’s music is virtually unrecognizable from its former self. Since emerging from the aftershocks of dubstep, he’s been busily deprogramming himself from the familiar codes of club music, and on Queen of Golden Dogs, he slashes the ropes and soars into the stratosphere, pulling off an extraordinary fusion of chamber music, choral quintets, poetry, surrealism, mysticism, and, not least, rubble-making electronic epics.
After the sinister, dub-informed atmospheres of 2012’s Order of Noise, an album that aligned the Bristol producer with the low-end frequencies of his Young Echo crew, Gainsborough drew a chalk line around his own little corner of not-so-danceable sound-system music. On 2014’s Punish, Honey, he assembled his own orchestra out of shonky homemade instruments, got inspired by bawdy Middle English literature, and came up with an album of shunting, grunting tracks with titles like “Red Sex.” Four years later, he’s on a different plane entirely.
Queen of Golden Dogs, as far as I can scry, is about embracing mystery and ambivalence and junking the whole illusion of “self.” It’s about the uncomfortable realization that your mind is a cluttered cabinet of secret compartments; a contradictory mess of thoughts and feelings that cannot be squashed down into an “I” or “me.” It’s an album of lofty ideas, for sure. It also, thank god, absolutely bangs—harder than anything Gainsborough has touched before, and on a level rarely attempted, let alone reached, by the kind of artist who’s also busy with composing string quartets and adapting Portuguese poems into choral spectaculars.
This time, he’s brought in a fleet of classical instruments to tangle with his already tactile electronics. The album lurches between pensive passages of strings and harpsichords, sometimes recalling These New Puritans’ skeletal experiments on Field of Reeds, and sky-scraping walls of electronic mayhem occupying the same universe as James Holden circa The Inheritors. The juxtaposition of electronic and acoustic, postmodern and baroque, obviously brings to mind Oneohtrix Point Never; moments from “Zahir (For Eleanor)” could slot straight into Age Of.
The album opens with a flourish of strings, as if we’ve walked in on a rehearsal; the ensemble loses momentum, subsumed by a writhing mass of drums and sawn-off machine-melodies. That interrupted dynamic is a trailer for the action to come, which segues from ecclesiastical splendor on “Good Animal (For Hannah)”—with the ghostly trails of a soprano voice introducing us to Olivia Chaney, who sings on most of the remaining tracks—to the chaos and crunch of “Argo (For Maggie),” where strings swoop in like sparrowhawks with their talons outstretched, echoing Bernard Parmegiani in terrorist mode. The softness of “Zahir (For Eleanor)” gives way to the pilled-up bonanza of “Glory Glory (For Tippi),” a gurgling neo-trance wind-up that shoves Lorenzo Senni into an industrial shredder with slap bass, half a scrapyard, and what might be the delicate tap of fork against wine glass. The transitions often surprise, but there’s a cumulative logic—ideas reappear in familiar but unexpected forms, like catching sight of yourself in a mirror maze.
Almost every track on the record is dedicated to an individual; the Maggie of “Argo” is Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts. The dedication is one of several clues to the album’s themes. As Pitchfork’s Nathan Reese pointed out, The Argonauts adapts the paradox of Jason’s Argo—a ship which replaced each of its parts, yet remained the same—to explore how the same paradox can occur in human bodies. Another clue is in the album’s artwork, a painting by the mid-century surrealist Remedios Varo showing a flame-haired woman receiving a ball of wool from a shadowy figure whose chest seems to be a door into a labyrinth. Varo’s paintings are windows into other worlds; she often depicted mysterious machines and androgynous figures. Her work is also a gateway into the philosophical, political and spiritual foundations of a countercultural identity that persists to this day; her reading list included Carl Jung, the I-Ching, and Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi stories, and she was deeply invested in witchcraft. There are theories for what her paintings represent, but never answers.
That sense of uncertainty folded into recognition is made explicit in “Torno-me eles e nao eu (For Remedios),” the first half of a grand central diptych that encapsulates Queen of Golden Dogs’ genius. In multi-tracked harmony, Chaney sings Fernando Pessoa’s 1930 poem, “Não sei quantas almas tenho” (“I don’t know how many souls I have”). Pessoa, one of Portugal’s most revered 20th-century poets, wrote under dozens of aliases he called “heteronyms,” lots of them variations of the word for “anonymous” in various languages. Coincidentally or not, Pessoa is Portuguese for “person”—what a status to be born into. No wonder he always felt “estranho,” as he laments in this poem: a stranger even to himself. Pessoa’s obsession with his multiple personas apparently bordered on the pathological; he reported seeing the faces of his heteronyms in the mirror. Perhaps he suffered from dissociations that would these days be diagnosed as a disorder; perhaps, through his interest in spiritualism and the occult (Aleister Crowley was a pen pal), he had a gift for seeing beyond the visible and rational. Chaney’s laminated harmonies are similarly resistant to unification, growing purposely distorted as they gather towards a crescendo.
“Torno-me” never resolves, but instead leads us into other half of the frame: “Paplu (Love That Moves the Sun),” a nearly 10-minute, white-knuckle spectacular that’s among the greatest slabs of prog electronics made this century: polyrhythmic clutter and melismatic voices hurtling along at high speed, elements thrown out into new constellations with every twist and turn, contracting and expanding like a whole universe seen from infinity. Over and over, “Paplu” finds a foothold and climbs higher, closer to something like ecstasy, or oblivion. It’s been two months since I first heard it, and I’ve never gotten all the way through without shaking my head and laughing. It’s so alien it forces you to reach for absurd metaphors. Like the blind man and the elephant, you can’t grasp it as a whole; you just feel your way through and hope you don’t get trampled. We’re left with the gloomy echoes of “Sand Tar Man Star (For Aurellia),” an ascending lattice of crumpled metal and wordless voices. It feels like the beginning of the next story rather than the end of this one.
There’s a line from an old NME review: “It’s like opening your bedroom curtains one morning and discovering that some fucker’s built the Taj Mahal in your back garden.” Fitting, probably, that the writer chose a puffed-up mausoleum to describe Oasis’ Definitely Maybe. But it comes to me again as I listen to Queen of Golden Dogs, and instead I imagine waking up to the sparkling towers of the Emerald City, in the Land of Oz: The view is radiant, even blinding—but those are your own green-tinted glasses filling in the color. It’s self-evidently splendid, but what you make of it is up to you. | 2018-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Tri Angle | November 9, 2018 | 8 | 275f8412-7007-48c4-81ee-ab18804f5f8e | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
Garden of Delete is unlike anything that Daniel Lopatin has done, in terms of technique, mood, or scope. It is denser than his previous albums, by several orders of magnitude. It is more varied, and it is funnier—scarier, too. The album carries with it a risk of whiplash that's as potent on the 15th listen as on the first. | Garden of Delete is unlike anything that Daniel Lopatin has done, in terms of technique, mood, or scope. It is denser than his previous albums, by several orders of magnitude. It is more varied, and it is funnier—scarier, too. The album carries with it a risk of whiplash that's as potent on the 15th listen as on the first. | Oneohtrix Point Never: Garden of Delete | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21108-garden-of-delete/ | Garden of Delete | "Frameworks of taste rely on dumb and great things to exist in concert with one another," Daniel Lopatin wrote earlier this year in an essay about the easy-listening saxophonist Kenny G. Reflecting on his own work as Oneohtrix Point Never, he noted, "I tolerate dumb things sometimes in a kitschy way, but mostly in a sort of zen way, wherein stuff is suspended in a myopic ooze of raw nowness that is beautiful and gross at the same time."
Ooze seeps from every pore of his new album, Garden of Delete: It is slathered all over the video for "Sticky Drama", and it erupts from the pustules of the adolescent humanoid alien, Ezra, who is the album's hero. The project spills over the limits of the album format, too, into rivulets of related texts—an array of videos, blogs, and Twitter accounts packed with surrealist Easter eggs that enhance the experience of the music in unusual ways. Ooze is formless, yet this album is deeply invested in questions of form. What invests music with value? Who creates hierarchical systems of taste? (I don't think it's a coincidence that the album title, abbreviated, alludes to the Supreme Being.)
The way Garden of Delete makes us question the assumptions behind all of our high/low binaries is part of its brilliance. OPN's music is generally understood to exist somewhere between nostalgia and irony, its vaporwave fantasias and unlikely redemptions of '80s schlock-meisters like Chris DeBurgh suggestive of late-night trips down YouTube rabbit holes. But we're not in "Chrome Country" any more. Garden of Delete is unlike anything that Lopatin has done, in terms of technique, mood, or scope. It is denser than his previous albums, by several orders of magnitude. It is more varied, and it is funnier—scarier, too. So much beauty is crosscut with so much ugliness, and so much sincerity interwoven with so many deeply nested layers of kitsch, that the album carries with it a serious risk of whiplash, and that's as true on the 15th listen as on the first.
The album's base notes will be familiar from his previous work; they consist of cool, frictionless pads, airy choral presets, and, especially, synthesized sounds that mimic acoustic instruments and revel in their own plasticity, like the tinny player piano of "Sticky Drama", or the jazz guitar noodling of "I Bite Through It". This time out, he ventures even deeper into the uncanny valley separating "real" sounds from mimetic ones. The references pile up in enormous slag heaps, and a few in particular stand out: the growls, chugging guitars, and blast beats of death metal; the flanged riffs of nu metal; and the garish synth stabs and grotesque vocal processing of contemporary commercial electronic music. Two years ago, after a bout of touring, he told Pitchfork, "I feel like I better understand the tropes and guises of EDM now," and you can hear that familiarity at various points in Garden of Delete.
That's not to say the album is a collection of big-room bangers. But certain techniques common on the Electric Daisy circuit have wormed their way into the music: Elastic trance riffs, vertiginous glissandi that zip upward like space elevators, and, especially, the highly processed and contoured voices of which Skrillex is so fond. Nothing in G.o.D. follows the usual Pavlovian dictates of mainstream rave: There are builds and drops, but they're always deployed in ways that throw the listener off balance. Instead of EDM's predictable roller coaster, he's constructed something more like Monument Valley's non-Euclidean architecture, where 2D and 3D spaces collapse into one another, and trapdoors open at the turn of a hidden dial.
Garden of Delete is the first OPN album to come with a lyric sheet—no, really—which is nice, because the processed and distorted-to-hell "singing" on the album is mostly indecipherable. But even as a novelty, the lyrics sheet helps tease out the loose, extra-musical narrative developed across a range of apocrypha that orbit the album: a cryptic PDF of a crumpled sheet of paper in which Lopatin recounts, in the manner of a Joseph Conrad introduction, his encounter with a humanoid alien who gave him the USB containing the album's files; a Blogspot account for said alien (with posts dated as far back as 1994) stuffed with aesthetic theory, jokes, flyers for prog-rockers Rush, and musings on a style called "hypergrunge"; a website for the (invented) hypergrunge band Kaoss Edge; a host of (active) Twitter accounts for all these characters; and various mind-bending videos. (Various phone numbers referenced are, alas, red herrings; one is for Spotify's support line, another the Winthrop, Mass., police department.) This may all seem, from the outside, like so much masturbatory energy spillage, but dig deep enough, and they all become part of the larger work. When, in an interview, Ezra asks Lopatin what hypergrunge represents to him, Lopatin answers, "It's nihilist/formalist. Kaoss/Edge." You couldn't ask for a more succinct summary of his music's underlying principles.
None of this would matter if the music weren't absolutely gripping—strange, moving, hilarious, sometimes pushing the limits of good taste, but always in a way that makes you want to hear more. It is more songful than anything Lopatin has done. In "Freaky Eyes", minimalist organs give way to high-pitched voices in the style of Jack Ü; "Ezra" flits between the synth arpeggios of Rustie or Hudson Mohawke, Korn's nu-metal chug, and Japanese ambient; formally, it just kind of writhes in place, neither rising nor falling. "SDFK" interrupts graceful bells and strings with a crushing death-metal interlude that abruptly falls silent. And if Trevor Horn ever produced Slayer, it might sound something like "Sticky Drama". Your favorites will probably change over time, but the apocalyptic trance of "I Bite Through It" is a good candidate for the album's highlight, the vantage point from which all the surrounding chaos begins to make sense.
It all clicked for me one Sunday morning in the pre-dawn stillness of the city. Returning from seeing off a family member at the airport at an ungodly hour, I listened to G.o.D. on headphones for the duration of the ride back to the city center. Descending from the bus, I found myself standing in front of a Hard Rock Cafe where two enormous video screens flashed senselessly away above the sidewalk, their pixelated images moving almost in time with the album's throbbing synthesizers. As Lopatin's textures stretched and spasmed in my ears, artificial light poured out onto the empty street in ungainly bursts, like tiny droplets of the ongoing heat death of the universe. It was garish and gorgeous all at once, a vision of capitalism at its tackiest accompanied by a soundtrack at once cutting and strangely empathic, and for several minutes I just stood there, transfixed by the raw, oozing nowness of it all. | 2015-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Warp | November 9, 2015 | 8.7 | 275fe628-b59c-4b1a-a41a-7dede86bfe4e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Louisville rock band refines its major-label sound on a brief but charming new album: It hits hardest when you don’t think too much about it. | The Louisville rock band refines its major-label sound on a brief but charming new album: It hits hardest when you don’t think too much about it. | White Reaper: Asking for a Ride | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/white-reaper-asking-for-a-ride/ | Asking for a Ride | White Reaper have been one album away from their big break for a while. Since the early 2010s, they’ve paid their dues as a punk-adjacent band with indie rock credibility, a glorified Iron Maiden T-shirt that decided to try taking on the world. You could hear their love for Van Halen and Cheap Trick on their teeth-kicking debut EP and Polyvinyl LPs, as frontman Tony Esposito fine-tuned his voice to be more melodic, and the band honed their ability to incorporate riffs as a song’s central hook. Standout 2017 single “Judy French” marked the point when White Reaper started embracing larger ambitions; they now wanted to be Cheap Trick. Tours with fellow arena-via-garage rockers Weezer and Billy Idol and an Elektra deal followed.
Even with these markers of success, White Reaper are still White Reaper. Asking for a Ride is their second major label release and, like its predecessor, 2019’s slick-but-fun You Deserve Love, it’s not a clear step up or back. It’s a refinement of the Major Label White Reaper Sound, where the hooks and melodies are undeniable and now include some Kiss-sized muscle. At its best, Asking for a Ride confirms that they have evolved from writing songs daydreaming of playing stadiums to writing songs that would sound huge in one. But at 29 minutes, this is their shortest album, and for the first time, there’s some filler. The van is a lot nicer, but the destination feels unclear.
Explaining a riff is like explaining a joke, so it’s easier to take the music and lyrics of Asking for a Ride at face value. Opening tracks “Asking for a Ride” and “Bozo” sound less inspired by Iron Maiden and more like sleepy karaoke, trying to recapture some of that “Make Me Wanna Die” snottiness like a 30-year-old heading back to college for homecoming week. Album closer “Pages” includes the first prominent use of acoustic guitar in a White Reaper song, but it feels like just another box to check for a band that maybe wants to write its own “If You Want My Love.” For the first time, I can’t tell if White Reaper even likes these songs—which used to be the whole point.
There are more successful attempts at power ballads elsewhere on the record. White Reaper have never been terrific at slower tempos, yet “Heaven or Not” and its sway-inducing, Pretenders-like melodies feel like a suggestion of what a Monster Ballads-worthy White Reaper song could be. It’s a rare step forward. Otherwise, Asking for a Ride works best when they stick to the old playbook. Like “Judy French,” “Fog Machine” can out-riff (and out-finger tap!) anyone west of Turnstile, and Ryan Hater’s heroically cartoonish synth entrance into the chorus would make Wayne and Garth blush. The lyrics are appropriately nonsense (“Blowing out those candles…like a fog machine”) and I want to sing along as loud as possible while air guitaring. “We knew we loved playing it together,” Esposito said of the song. “We got it together at the last minute before we went into the studio and now it’s our favorite song to play live.” In a sense, this casual observation summarizes the charm of Asking for a Ride: At its simplest and most carefree, it’s a blast. Stop to think about it too much, and the road gets rocky. | 2023-01-27T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-27T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Elektra | January 27, 2023 | 6.5 | 2763acbe-cd15-4a05-99c6-ca8516d438e7 | Brady Gerber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-gerber/ | |
The post-modern music maker limits his contextual sampling to a single subject: himself. | The post-modern music maker limits his contextual sampling to a single subject: himself. | Matthew Herbert: One One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14111-one-one/ | One One | While Matthew Herbert's methods of recording audio samples are inspiring and outlandish, he always captures a bit of the human element. It's not just because his discography includes a noisy digestive tract turned into a euphoric house melody; there's an appreciation for randomness, mistakes, and chaos that runs through his work. On his new solo album, One One, an artist who weaves multiple meanings into his music through contextual sampling strips down to a single source: himself.
At first, it seems like a playful volley in Herbert's game of dissecting music, politics, and theory. The first of a trio of conceptual releases, including One Pig (composed strictly of sounds from one pig) and One Club (sampled crowd noise from a club), One One focuses more on instruments and is 100% Herbert, including his own intimate vocals. It's a solo record simple and straightforward, less of a concept than we're used to from someone who can turn a rhythm track into an arch-consumerist critique. What then is the difficulty, statement, or challenge when an acclaimed producer makes his own album?
As with many things Herbert, it's not that easy or simple. A quieter, stripped-down approach to his typically tight rhythms and rich tones, One One has a deceptively relaxed vibe. It may be the rural studio that it was recorded in, or it may be Herbert being more introspective (just listen to him sing about home on "Berlin"). He knows how to get the most out of his source material, and when that happens to be his own voice, he plays it cool or sticks to gentle, simple melodies. He doesn't showcase substantial range or a hidden talent, but Herbert does demonstrate a lack of artifice, self-awareness, and variety."Singapore" shines with a bright, folksy vibe and retro vocal harmonies. On the slow-burning single "Leipzig", his detached storytelling style fits the song's slinky, clubland theme.
While it's conceptually all about one man, by the end of the ten heartfelt tracks, it doesn't feel as personally revealing as it does poignant. Maybe it's because the self-contained solo project is more subtle overall, with poetic, yet still political, lyrics ("And with the rising of the seas/ Mouths will be open/ And with the drying of the fields/ Everything will be gone"). Herbert met the challenge of ditching some experimental baggage and being more straightforward; he doesn't always need an elaborate platform or sonic ruse to say something worth hearing. | 2010-04-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-04-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Accidental | April 12, 2010 | 7.6 | 2764a3b1-7200-49db-bcc4-7c4959eeaaaf | Patrick Sisson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-sisson/ | null |
Despite its newfound musical relevance, the influential duo struggles to evolve beyond its signature template of empowering pop hooks and overdriven arrangements. | Despite its newfound musical relevance, the influential duo struggles to evolve beyond its signature template of empowering pop hooks and overdriven arrangements. | Sleigh Bells: Texis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sleigh-bells-texis/ | Texis | In 2016, Demi Lovato and Sleigh Bells were opponents in a copyright infringement lawsuit, despite struggling with the same basic problem: How do you recreate the bold, bleacher-stomping jolt of the band’s 2010 debut Treats without ripping it off completely? Nowadays, that sound is virtually public domain: The term “hyperpop” once described the duo of Alexis Krauss and Derek Miller before it became a dominant genre. The charts are filled with ascendant acts blowing bubblegum melodies over razored guitars, while squabbles over cheerleading outfits, prom dresses, and pilfered pop-punk hooks span generations. As it turns out, four years of silence have accomplished what the band’s last few releases—Bitter Rivals, Jessica Rabbit, and Kid Kruschev—could not: make Sleigh Bells sound like a part of indie rock’s present. More than anything, it’s this wave of goodwill that makes Texis feel like the most legitimately inspired Sleigh Bells album in nearly a decade, despite it not being altogether different from what preceded it.
The duo’s trajectory to this point is a familiar one: immediately perfecting an audiovisual aesthetic, a “more of the same, but slightly less” follow-up, and a much longer and intermittently successful stretch that stopped shy of a total teardown or reinvention. Texis reaches a new stage where Sleigh Bells acknowledge what worked in the first place without admitting defeat or slumping back to their old tricks. Opener “SWEET75” promises a victory big enough to amplify any mundane achievement, and whether it’s the first new Sleigh Bells song you’ve heard since 2017 or 2010, it reaffirms their vision: riffs from an era of stuffed trousers and hockey-stick guitars, overdriven drum machines, and lyrics set within the spectrum of cheerleader to motivational speaker. It also reestablishes the relationship between Krauss and Miller that’s served the band far longer than their method of brickwalling every single element, one resembling that of an R&B powerhouse and their tinkering, savant producer.
Sleigh Bells were hardly the only band at the turn of the 2010s trying to subvert classic forms of pop with a chain of distortion pedals, but unlike their scuzzier, sloppier peers, their music always threatened the possibility of becoming the real thing. Yet no matter how much command and charisma Krauss brings to Texis, it still sounds quaint, not necessarily catchier than any number of contemporary bands who don’t face the same hang-ups from indie listeners. Sleigh Bells still know a good hook when they hear one, and when they do, they repeat it as much as possible—to the point where it sounds like ad copy. Whenever Krauss shouts “I feel like dynamite!” throughout “Locust Laced,” the music doesn’t conjure a specific feeling so much as the tone of an empowering rom-com on Netflix, trying to create a vibe where none previously existed.
Texis embodies a modern approach to music consumption by recognizing that only 20 seconds of a song really need to stick. Isolate that much time from just about anywhere on the album and there’s something invigorating going on: the horror-show keys and punchy vocal samples of “An Acre Lost,” the way “Justine Go Genesis” runs the drum-n-bass/nu-metal hybrids of Art Angels through a Big Muff, or the chorus of “I’m Not Down” beating their synthy, festival-pop successors at their own game.
Nearly all of these fleeting moments of crackling energy call for a greater, unifying purpose. And yet, it is difficult to trace any emotional throughline in the music. What motivates Sleigh Bells at this point? Even if Pom Pom Squad, Illuminati Hotties, or Turnstile could not exist without Treats, they’ve all advanced on its template by imprinting their own personality on everything they touch. While Sleigh Bells have made significant evolutions since their auspicious beginning, they haven’t been able to displace the original. The most emblematic moment of Texis happens at the end of “SWEET75.” “Aren’t you a little too old for rock and roll?,” Krauss sings, and it’s a rhetorical question: Sleigh Bells might hint at changing their own narrative but the old one still works fine.
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. | 2021-09-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mom+Pop | September 16, 2021 | 6.1 | 2768b4bf-cc48-43f5-9271-b49f7f2aad1f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
A World Lit Only by Fire is Godflesh’s first album in 13 years. As a whole, the record represents music converted into motion—kinetic and mechanical, inexorable and inhuman. Godflesh, never a forgiving band, has never sounded so relentless. | A World Lit Only by Fire is Godflesh’s first album in 13 years. As a whole, the record represents music converted into motion—kinetic and mechanical, inexorable and inhuman. Godflesh, never a forgiving band, has never sounded so relentless. | Godflesh: A World Lit Only By Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19896-godflesh-a-world-lit-only-by-fire/ | A World Lit Only By Fire | “Have you ever participated in genocide?” When I interviewed Justin Broadrick in 2007, he said he was asked that question while applying for a trip to the United States for the first time after 9/11. His anecdote was good for a sick laugh; Broadrick can be funny, despite his reputation as a poker-faced purveyor of extreme metal, shoegaze, and industrial music as a former or current member of the British groups Napalm Death, Jesu, and the resurrected Godflesh, among others. But his silly story about genocide is also indicative of the way absurdity and security can go hand in hand, especially in a world where safety is, at best, a collective hallucination. Its guarantors can’t even keep knife-wielding maniacs from sprinting into the White House, let alone regular people from being beheaded. Existence, even with all its modern safeguards, is fragile, and rarely does it feel more so than when you’re listening to Broadrick’s music.
A World Lit Only by Fire is Godflesh’s first album in 13 years. Their last, 2001’s Hymns, effectively disassembled itself in order for Broadrick to scavenge its chassis for scraps, which he then used to build Jesu. Most obviously, the final track of Hymns is titled “Jesu”— but instead of being a swansong, it was a two-part, 13-minute premonition of what was to come. Jesu went on to indulge Broadrick’s latent love of shoegaze and melody, but it retained every milligram of Godflesh’s heaviness; when Broadrick issued Godflesh’s comeback EP, Decline and Fall, earlier this year, it wasn’t so much a return to form as a transference of force. But where Decline and Fall unlocked the door, A World Lit Only by Fire knocks down the entire wall surrounding it. “New Dark Ages” is the record’s method of entry, and it’s accordingly annihilative: A spindly beat pulls back the skin to reveal sleek, minimalist musculature, and those riffs crush Broadrick’s windpipe as he gets biblical with his opening warning: “Don’t look back/ We’ll dissolve”. The resurgence of fundamentalist medievalism have been a concern of industrial music ever since SPK’s 1983 classic “Another Dark Age”— and “New Dark Ages” casts that creeping fear in a coat of millennial chrome.
Much of the album doggedly refuses to deviate from the template of “New Dark Ages”, which itself isn’t that much of a departure from what Godflesh laid down on their 1989 debut album, Streetcleaner. The roboticized crust of the Godflesh of old, though, has been trimmed to fit an even bleaker era. Instead of being discreet compositions, these songs are segments of a single continuum, amputated from each other. “Shut Me Down”,“Curse Us All”, and “Carrion” flow into each other—inasmuch as anything on such a tense, brittle album could be said to flow—with an almost martial uniformity. The distinctions are in the shades of texture and syncopation. In some places, bassist G.C. Green evokes the corroded-carburetor clang of Big Black; elsewhere, Broadrick’s righteous roar gets caught in the gears of the album’s drum-machine march, if not the hopelessness of its protests.
Broadrick first flexed his skills as a slightly more conventional singer/songwriter in Jesu, but he’d begun exploring tunefulness toward the end of Godflesh’s first run. That eerie blend of ugliness and melody doesn’t crop up often on A World Lit Only by Fire; when it does, it’s for terrific effect. “Life Giver Life Taker” and “Imperator” mix wailing echoes and spectral chants with chiseled riffs and insectoid rhythms, while “Towers of Emptiness” and “Forgive Our Fathers” trail off the same way—with Broadrick’s voice, naked and human, hovering over ghostly drones and incanting the title of the track like it’s a faded memory. “Forgive Our Fathers” is particularly gorgeous; ditching his cyborg-barbarian howl halfway through, he switches to the melancholy coo of Jesu just long enough to trap and loop the song’s lingering anguish in an apocalyptic fugue. As a whole, A World Lit Only by Fire represents music converted into motion—kinetic and mechanical, inexorable and inhuman. Godflesh, never a forgiving band, has never sounded so relentless. | 2014-10-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-10-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Avalanche | October 6, 2014 | 8 | 276c4605-f883-4576-8073-723bbea83a57 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Quelle Chris' production has always been unorthodox, but Lullabies for the Broken Brain is a step further for the rapper/producer. This isn’t your average beat tape: Lullabies is made of divergent sounds, loosely built to set a pensive vibe shaded with desperation and hopelessness. | Quelle Chris' production has always been unorthodox, but Lullabies for the Broken Brain is a step further for the rapper/producer. This isn’t your average beat tape: Lullabies is made of divergent sounds, loosely built to set a pensive vibe shaded with desperation and hopelessness. | Quelle Chris: Lullabies for the Broken Brain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21582-lullabies-for-the-broken-brain/ | Lullabies for the Broken Brain | We’ve all felt alone at some point or another. In those moments, it seems the world passes by while you sit in painful silence. It’s a common emotion, really; one you’re ashamed to admit, one that needs time to run its course. It seems rapper/producer Quelle Chris is going through something similar, if his recent work is an indicator: Last year’s Innocent Country briefly touched on his perceived personal insecurities, and his new instrumental album, Lullabies for the Broken Brain, carefully walks us through that despair using lo-fi drum breaks and spacious beat construction. Quelle’s production has always been unorthodox, yet Lullabies finds him pushing for something rooted in hip-hop, though it registers further away. This isn’t your average beat tape. Lullabies is made of divergent sounds, loosely built to set a pensive vibe shaded with desperation and hopelessness.
As the title suggests, Lullabies is overtly nocturnal, full of dark, disjointed sounds and cosmic clatter. It comes together like a Madlib instrumental project in the way certain songs aren’t fully formed, but they work well within the scope of the LP, making for a coherent suite to be played all at once. Many of these tracks don’t go much beyond a minute—except for "M-39," "Peace and Pain," "I’m the Bridge You Must Burn," and a few others, which serve as some of the best work on Quelle’s album. Compared with 2012’s Jock Sin Six Beat Tape, an edgy conceptual EP dealing with societal angst, Lullabies is a slow burn designed to soundtrack what the mind endures when loneliness sets in. The melodies are cavernous and somewhat distant, emitting a gritty resonance that affirms Quelle’s premise.
At certain points on the album, we hear positive affirmations blended into the mix—like the 1970s "Most Important Person" commercial spot—offering brief glimmers of hope amongst an otherwise bleak soundscape. Lullabies is the album you play when you’re going through serious shit. At just the right length and tempo, Quelle skillfully blends genres, showing his great range as a composer and creative visionary. He opts for jazz fusion on "Desire to Be," "Red Buttons," and "Sickum," sprinkling light keys and horns into the fray; the aforementioned "Peace and Pain" is a seething electro-rock hybrid similar to the work of OPN or Trent Reznor. This is easy listening, but it has all the psychedelic grit you’d expect from a Quelle release. He’s pushed beyond his usual arc, leading to a wonderfully ambient release that should be mentioned with the genre’s trendsetters.
Then again, this isn’t surprising if you’ve followed Quelle so far. The Detroit native has long pushed his music to weird places, crafting art that’s equally genuine and peculiar. In recent years, though, Quelle has discussed his career path with the same level of angst we’ve all expressed in our respective fields. He ponders the road ahead and choices he’s made along the way. He's wondered why he's slept on and what it'll take to move past those doldrums. Over several projects, Quelle has always been someone you can relate to, and his music comes off as such. If Innocent Country trailed off without clear resolutions, Lullabies signals Quelle’s uncertain trek to the light. Many of us have taken that journey, or will do so eventually. | 2016-03-02T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-03-02T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | March 2, 2016 | 7.4 | 276f5a60-cf1e-4985-9247-e389f476d0c2 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | 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 Elliott Smith’s self-titled solo album, a darkly beautiful record whose spare arrangements conceal worlds. | 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 Elliott Smith’s self-titled solo album, a darkly beautiful record whose spare arrangements conceal worlds. | Elliott Smith: Elliott Smith | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elliott-smith-elliott-smith/ | Elliott Smith | In a 2000 interview with Melody Maker, Elliott Smith told a story from his childhood. He is three years old—Steven Paul Smith, born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1969—and he is messing around with his mother’s television set. Immediately, he is transfixed by the power of the remote control: This button makes the sound burst from the speaker and this one silences it. This button makes the screen change, each time reopening to a new world, while this one shuts it off entirely. It’s a lot of power for a child. He is delighted by the collage of faces and voices and sound and possibility until the inevitable happens: the TV breaks.
He soon learned to seek the same thrill in music. Smith’s first love was the Beatles, a band whose career lasted less than 10 years, so their every move carried immense weight and meaning for those discovering it in retrospect. His favorite song was the multi-part “A Day in the Life,” which he might have heard like a television constantly changing channels, each one landing on the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. When he started writing his own music, he followed this blueprint, accidentally stumbling upon the avant-garde. He described his earliest compositions as more like transitions than actual songs; as he reflected to Under the Radar in one of his last interviews, he didn’t understand why every part couldn’t be the best part.
From Omaha, Smith and his mother moved to Dallas. He left as a teenager, a decision he attributed to a town full of bullies and an abusive step-father. His next stops were Portland, Oregon, where he lived with his father—a preacher turned Air Force pilot turned psychiatrist—and Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. At college, Smith studied political science and philosophy and was so affected by feminist texts that he momentarily wanted to become a fireman to offset some of the damage he did to the world simply by being a straight white man. He also met like-minded artists, including classmate Neil Gust, who helped him feel useful in a different way—trading punk 7"s and collaborating on music.
After graduation, Gust and Smith returned to Portland, where they formed the grungy alt-rock band Heatmiser. The rise of Smith’s spare, self-recorded solo material and Heatmiser’s blistering rock songs are often held in contrast. But the truth is his solo work bloomed alongside their music, which had softened and matured by 1996’s extraordinary swansong Mic City Sons. So while Smith hated straining his voice to be heard over the noise (“I’ve had enough of people yelling,” he told Rolling Stone) and the way their audience reminded him of the dudes who gave him hell back in Texas, it did bring him closer to the sound he heard in his head. Rock music was always Smith’s guiding light. When interviewers compared him to folk singers like Paul Simon or Nick Drake, you could feel his eyes roll into his head. And when it came time to flesh out his solo sets with cover songs, he turned to rock radio staples: the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Kinks.
He felt a particular kindred spirit with Big Star, the cult band whose 1972 ballad “Thirteen” would become a standard in his hands. The initial connection wasn’t because of their hard-luck story or the unspeakable loneliness of records like Third. Instead, Smith admired how Alex Chilton and the band rallied for a style of music that was unfashionable in their scene, following their intuition as opposed to trends. So just as Big Star performed their charging take on British Invasion power-pop to half-empty rooms through Memphis, Smith abandoned his Portland alt-rock band—their growing acclaim, their major label deal, their “next Nirvana” buzz—to strike out on his own.
Released while Heatmiser was still gaining momentum, his 1994 solo debut Roman Candle was less a complete statement than a collection of demos, compiled in the hopes that a label would pick the best songs for a 7" single. The following year’s Elliott Smith, then, can be seen as his first official solo album, issued on the buzzy indie label Kill Rock Stars. Like Roman Candle, it was recorded in the homes of friends—Heatmiser drummer Tony Lash and Leslie Uppinghouse, who toured with the band and mixed their live sound. Uppinghouse remembers setting Smith up in her basement, off in the corner with an eight-track Tascam tape recorder. Her dog, Anna, would sometimes press her nose against the door to listen in. Uppinghouse claims she can hear her in a few songs.
Smith described a preference for writing distractedly—at crowded bars, at home watching Xena: Warrior Princess, anywhere he could take his mind off the idea of being a serious songwriter doing serious work. But he was devoted to his process. He wrote and recorded constantly, in a stream of interconnected ideas. The 12 songs he selected for Elliott Smith reflect that spirit. Phrases and images reoccur. The theme of addiction is constant, and his euphemisms are abundant and clear: white lady, white brother, death in your arms, getting good marks. His tone is often resigned, the perspective of someone who sees what’s going on but knows better than to fight. In the bridge of “Alphabet Town,” he sings, “I know what you are/I just don’t mind.” The chorus of “Good to Go” distills it even further: “You can do it if you want to.”
Thematically, it’s the darkest album he’d complete in his lifetime, but it’s also one of his most beautiful. Think of how much happens in these songs before he even starts singing. The lonesome harmonica-accompanied intro of “Alphabet Town” sets the scene like blinds opening in a dim apartment, letting in the gray light from the street. The queasy blues riff that precedes “Clementine” is the sound of stumbling to your feet, realizing how late it is and how many drinks you’ve had. And of course there’s the opening “Needle in the Hay,” led by an ominous riff whose abrupt chord changes can induce a sense of paranoia: Smith’s meticulous, lo-fi rendering of two warring impulses. It makes sense his earliest supporters were fellow artists like Lou Barlow and Mary Lou Lord: If you listened closely, you could hear entire worlds in his arrangements.
So while Elliott Smith serves as a stark blueprint for his 1997 masterpiece Either/Or, it also creates a bridge from the heavier music he played with Heatmiser. In songs like “Christian Brothers,” his voice is tougher and lower than it would ever sound again, as he growls that “no bad dream fucker’s gonna boss me around.” When he eventually performed these songs live with a full band, his accompanists re-enacted them as pointed, vicious things; he’d raise his delivery a full octave to seethe through “Needle in the Hay.” As presented here, the music is spare but deceptively layered. Note the muted drum part in “Coming Up Roses” that seems to drag his words along with it; how the droning strings in “The White Lady Loves You More” turn it into a doomed romance; how the frenzied strumming of “Southern Belle” seems poised to attack at any moment as Smith envisions a way out of the childhood memories that still raged in his mind.
This kind of songwriting—tied with the dark path his own life would go down, through addiction and hospitalizations and suicide attempts—can lead fans to look for clues in his songs, as if he laid them out like a cry for help. But he described his music more like dreaming: less in the interpretive, Freudian sense than the mysterious way you wake up feeling fragile and uneasy and inexplicably pissed at someone you haven’t spoken to in years. And for all of the addiction talk in the lyrics, Smith explained to journalists that it simply felt like a potent metaphor, a conduit toward bigger questions: Why do we turn self-destructive? How does it affect the people who love us? Where does it lead?
This insistence on not being taken literally is why Smith dismissed the idea of being a folk singer, someone who showed up on stage with a story to tell and a moral at the end. As soon as he was given the budget, he turned his records into expensive, symphonic opuses that seemed hell-bent on erasing the image of a quiet kid in his friend’s basement with an old acoustic guitar and tape recorder. Revisiting “The Biggest Lie,” the closing track on the record and one of his most heartbreaking songs, it’s almost jarring to hear him refer to “a crushed credit card/Registered to Smith.” It’s a classic trope of folk music: turning himself into a character, one whose future seemed as hopeless as the guy we imagine to be singing it.
The following years confirmed these premonitions. For his final record, From a Basement on the Hill, Smith experimented with switching his songs from mono to stereo halfway through, which might be the logical endpoint of staying up for days smoking crack in the studio but also of wanting to find new ways to burst through the speakers and make a connection: to make every part the best part. The music industry does not take kindly to these excitable, sensitive minds. He fractured more with every step, leaving Portland to seek refuge in New York and eventually Los Angeles. Pressure built; expectations grew. Late in life, he became so frustrated with projections about his future that he carved the word “NOW” into his arm and wrote a song as he bled onto the piano.
This pain eventually consumed him. But there was always some levity. During most of his live performances—a constant stressor that he once compared to a bullfight—Smith would turn to the crowd and ask for requests: “Do you want to hear a happy song or a sad song?” In his bruised, shaky voice, it always sounded kind of like a joke. After all, the magic of the girl in Either/Or’s “Say Yes” who was still in love the morning after was that, through her eyes, Smith could pretend that any sense of joy in this world might last. He claimed to have written this song in just five minutes and I wonder if we’d have gotten to hear it if he let it sit any longer.
Instead of “Say Yes,” I’d point to this album’s “St. Ides Heaven” as his most purely optimistic moment—the one I’d come closest to calling “happy.” Granted, the guy singing it is high on speed, drunk on malt liquor, and wandering around a parking lot, resenting every person who ever tried to help him. “Everyone is a fucking pro,” he laughs, because he knows, sooner or later, they’ll end up in the same place he’s at right now. Smith seems at peace knowing this. On the front cover of Elliott Smith are two bodies free-falling from apartment windows; on the back cover, tucked in the corner like a postage stamp, is Elliott Smith with dyed-blond hair, stopping to smell a flower.
Another bright moment: hearing the harmony vocals in “St. Ides Heaven” from the Spinanes’ Rebecca Gates. It’s a subtle performance that makes me consider how accustomed I am to hearing Elliott Smith singing by himself: in tight double-tracked vocals, in uncanny ribbons of harmony, as his own ghostly choir. With Gates next to him, he sounds different, maybe lighter. She wrote a little about the sessions in the liner notes for New Moon, a posthumous collection released in 2007. She remembers feeling shy but having fun, doing a few takes then going home. She also writes about a night, some time later, wandering around Portland with Smith. At one point they’re commiserating about the music industry; she remembers him being moody, wearing a raggedy old raincoat. Then somewhere along the way, they burst into laughter. It’s the kind of vague, half-remembered scene that always comes to mind when I hear these songs. You can see the rain on the street, the moon in the sky. It’s getting dark. They have the whole night ahead of them.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Kill Rock Stars | May 24, 2020 | 9.5 | 277339b4-7ab0-49dc-aa11-3b28f111809c | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Compton rapper’s second album occasionally showcases the magic he can make, but the music is largely static, a rollercoaster operating on a straight track. | The Compton rapper’s second album occasionally showcases the magic he can make, but the music is largely static, a rollercoaster operating on a straight track. | Roddy Ricch: Live Life Fast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roddy-ricch-live-life-fast/ | Live Life Fast | Roddy Ricch’s uncanny ability to blend in with almost any style of rap is his calling card, for better or worse. Being able to get in where you fit in is great for variety. But there’s always the risk of the music becoming indistinct, another identity flashing briefly in the scramble suit before being quickly replaced. At its best, like on his chart-topping single “The Box,” his vocal range can make a song crackle with unpredictable energy. At its worst—“Faces” from his 2018 mixtape Feed Tha Streets II or “Boom Boom Room” from his 2019 debut Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial—his music is grist for the same playlist mill churning out Future and Young Thug clones. When his personality and versatility work hand-in-hand, it’s easy to see why he’s become one of the biggest rappers on the planet.
But Roddy’s second album LIVE LIFE FAST lacks the spark that once helped him block a certain pop star from a No. 1 Billboard spot. Antisocial was a chance for him to find his place within contemporary rap. LIVE feels more like an obligation, an 18-track checklist of tropes to ensure maximum streamability. The Flex Anthems (“thailand,” “hibachi”) slot comfortably next to the Introspective Ballads (“crash the party”); the Trendy Features serve the same purpose as the Glorified Celebrity Cameo. It’s all perfectly serviceable, but competency is the problem. At least when artists like Trippie Redd try and fail to diversify their sound, they take bigger and more interesting swings. LIVE LIFE FAST is static, a rollercoaster operating on a straight track.
It doesn’t help that so many of the scenarios Roddy recreates are dull retreads. Some barely evolve past basic clichés. “Gotta watch out for these snitches, gotta watch out for these bitches/Gotta whisper to you niggas ’cause all the hatin’ niggas might just hear me,” he says on “crash the party,” sounding only half-committed. The hook for “all good” is a rundown of all the positive things in his life, delivered like a hastily written grocery list. The malleability of Roddy’s voice backfires when he settles into this faceless posturing. His attempt at Brooklyn drill on “murda one” is hollow compared to guest Fivio Foreign’s effortless verse on the backend. He channels Juice WRLD’s wails on “more than a trend” and Young Thug on several songs that sound more like the Great Value brand versions of other artists’ styles.
The missteps are frustrating because a handful of moments on LIVE showcase the magic Roddy can make. The occasionally clever turn of phrase (“I got some niggas that go by Murder, why they sip red rum?” from “rollercoastin”) or catchy melody (“late at night”) work overtime to hold the record together. The voiceless drum and bass interlude that starts off “moved to miami”—produced by Lexx Deathstar and Lucas Padulo—deserved a verse to compliment it. Second track “thailand” is the closest the album comes to having a hit as undeniable as “The Box”: the bars aren’t great (“Open up her tonsils like she at the dentist”), but the melody is bouncy, the flows are erratic, and Roddy fits into the pockets of Southside’s beat like water filling an ice cube tray.
Yet the isolated moments of greatness across LIVE LIFE FAST only call attention to how flavorless the rest of the project feels. At the end of “no way,” Jamie Foxx shows up to congratulate Roddy on his success. It would be a touching move if the actor-musician didn’t follow it up by asking Roddy to slow down the tempo, quoting his own hook from Kanye West and Twista’s 2003 hit “Slow Jamz”: “I don’t think these motherfuckers know about Marvin Gaye, Luther Vandross, or a little Anita.” Roddy follows the request with a 54-second interlude called—what else—“slow it down.” Most of LIVE LIFE FAST plays out with this kind of energy: forced, obvious, its best ideas obscured in a haze of self-satisfaction.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic | January 5, 2022 | 5.7 | 2773cee6-ce7c-4114-85f1-51615e903113 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Already among the decade's most vital artists, Animal Collective cement their status with the spectacular Strawberry Jam. On its first true pop record, the band masters its distinctive experimental approach to songwriting, folding celebration, longing, doubt, loss, and acceptance into complex hooks and choruses. | Already among the decade's most vital artists, Animal Collective cement their status with the spectacular Strawberry Jam. On its first true pop record, the band masters its distinctive experimental approach to songwriting, folding celebration, longing, doubt, loss, and acceptance into complex hooks and choruses. | Animal Collective: Strawberry Jam | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10650-strawberry-jam/ | Strawberry Jam | In March, Animal Collective's Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox) had his breakout moment with the release of Person Pitch. It was his first solo album that didn't sound like what we'd previously heard from Animal Collective; sample-heavy and based on loops, the album's songwriting devices favored expansion and contraction over conventional chord changes. Person Pitch reflected Panda's interest in dance music-- even when it veered toward the angelic pop innocence forever associated with the harmony-drenched hits of the 1960s and 70s. Both the album and its transcendent centerpiece, "Bros", are deservedly being widely considered among the year's best.
On Strawberry Jam, the new album from Animal Collective, it's Avey Tare's turn. It's not that Strawberry Jam resembles a solo album, or that Avey (aka Dave Portner) seems to dominate to an unusual degree-- Panda Bear is unmistakably present too, along with sound processor Geologist (aka Brian Weitz) and guitarist Deakin (aka Josh Dibb). But the specifics of who's doing what have been shuffled, and the members' respective contributions-- including who's singing at any given moment-- aren't always easy to single out. The story of this record for me, though, is the strength of Avey Tare's voice, and how his singing anchors these songs, invigorates the band's idiosyncratic melodies, and offers a clear portal into Animal Collective's utopian dreamworld.
Avey Tare's tone has never been as aching and pure as Panda Bear's, but his is the more versatile instrument. Wild intervallic leaps-- jumping up and down full octaves, or going from a full-throated howl to a piercing shriek-- have long been his trademark, and it's something that bugs a lot of people. That makes sense: His vocal style is peculiar, and could easily strike some as affected. But the way he negotiates a song like the fourth track here, "For Reverend Green", shows just how well he can adapt his singing to fit the needs of the song.
Over a repeating guitar delay that sounds a little like the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" and an organ seemingly pulled from the midway of a county fair, Avey follows the contours of "For Revered Green"'s sing-song melody but never seems bound by it. He explodes with a scream every line or two for emphasis-- not to highlight a word, but to convey the idea of feelings spilling over the edges of the song's expansive container. It's a sound and point-of-view associated now with only one band. A backing of "whoo-oo-oo" vocals working in counterpart to the main melody only reinforce how distinctive Animal Collective's sound has become. Here, more than on any record yet, they own that sound completely.
"For Reverend Green" fades into the structurally similar but tonally different "Fireworks", arguably forming the greatest back-to-back in the Animal Collective's catalog. "Fireworks" is about the pleasure of simple things, but also about how hard they can be to appreciate: "A sacred night where we'll watch the fireworks/ The frightened babies poo/ They've got two flashing eyes and they're colored why/ They make me feel that I'm only all I see sometimes."
Animal Collective are never a band I listened to for lyrics-- on those early records, they were pretty hard to make out-- but the words in "Fireworks" match perfectly the song's complex mood: There's a romantic sense of longing, an air of celebration, but also tinges of doubt, loss, and acceptance. That it's all rendered so beautifully, with tempered banshee vocals, some spacey dub elements to kick off the middle break, and one of the band's best melodies-- and layered and varied enough to have had two or three good songs built from it-- reveals the band's mastery of complex, experimental pop songcraft.
The galloping opener "Peacebone" sets the scene; Animal Collective don't seem exactly like a rock band on Strawberry Jam. There are odd sounds of indeterminate origin, and textures vaguely associated with circus music crop up regularly. Here, the melodic buoyancy and junk-shop keyboards stomping along behind Avey Tare's voice create a ramshackle backdrop for a story of a monster in a maze, strange fossils in a natural history museum, and plenty of other stuff (when Avey gets rolling, he's pretty verbose).
The only thing expected from an Animal Collective record that's never quite delivered on Strawberry Jam is the long, dreamy, droney builder. The album's second half is slightly more abstract than the catchy pop that precedes it, but these moments are tempered, causing the record to feel more focused. "#1" opens with a repeating Terry Riley-esque pattern on what sounds like an early-70s synth, but this is a cleaner, simpler sort of experiment for Animal Collective. The lead vocal is pitched down and vaguely eerie, but Panda's bright backing vocals really carry the piece, which seems happy to drift along without going any place in particular. The track's lack of momentum differentiates it from, say, the songs on the looser second half of Feels, but it's got its own vibe and it works.
The record culminates with the thunderous "Cuckoo Cuckoo", its most explosive track, shifting between lyrical piano bits (not a lot of those on past Animal Collective records) to in-the-red surges of drums, guitar, and noisemakers. And then, after so many great Avey-fronted songs, Strawberry Jam closes with the folk-like "Derek", sung by Panda. The song begins with some lightly strummed guitar and water sounds and ends with crashing percussion and a refrain that sounds like a West African pop tune (a quality also present on the Panda-sung "Chores") merging with a Phil Spector-produced instrumental single. The sound is huge, but the song is a simple ode to being needed, about the pleasure in caring for something, whether a child or family pet ("Derek never woke up at night/ And in the morning he's ready to go/ And he never had a voice like you/ To scream when he wanted something"). In other words, it's about accepting responsibility and most of all about growing up, which is something Animal Collective seem to be doing brilliantly, with their creativity and adventurous spirit intact. | 2007-09-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-09-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | September 10, 2007 | 9.3 | 2774e559-faf9-49c1-b083-8116327114de | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The London post-punk band’s second album is bigger, louder, and more textured as frontman Charlie Steen anxiously details the strange gap between youth and adulthood. | The London post-punk band’s second album is bigger, louder, and more textured as frontman Charlie Steen anxiously details the strange gap between youth and adulthood. | Shame: Drunk Tank Pink | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shame-drunk-tank-pink/ | Drunk Tank Pink | Drunk-tank pink is the shade of pacification. Meant to neutralize hostility and placate violence, the color was originally developed for a naval correctional institute in 1979, and when studies appeared to confirm its calming effects, the bubblegum hue was splashed across prison cells, psychiatric wards, and of course, drunk tanks. South London loudmouths Shame seem immune to its powers. Their second album is named for the pigment, which frontman Charlie Steen slathered on the walls of a roomy closet at home. During a period of self-imposed hermetism inside what he christened “the Womb,” Steen sat in silence and channeled an internal noise.
While Steen sheltered in the Womb, guitarist Sean Coyle-Smith shuttered himself in his bedroom down the hall, trying to make his instrument sound like anything but a guitar. Their simultaneous isolation—which occurred before everyone in the world was forced to stay home—was a response to the partying and pandemonium of non-stop touring. The austerity has served them well. Far more complex than their 2018 debut Songs of Praise, Drunk Tank Pink is the sound of a band stretching into new shapes. They’re still young, loud, and shouty—but with the guidance of producer James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Foals), their latest work is detailed and dimensional, fueled by calculated intensity.
When Shame recorded Songs of Praise, they had barely stomped out of adolescence, and their transition into adulthood was informed by a rigorous tour schedule and rowdy gigs. Shame’s live sets are charged and rambunctious; Steen sings like he’s doing hard manual labor, jugular bulging and sweat dripping. Drunk Tank Pink maintains that energy, but textures the straightforward rock of their first album with layers of frenzied guitar work, restless percussion, and Steen’s total ferocity. Anxiety has always lived in Shame’s music, but it seems to have grown into a sizable mass. This record is the result of sitting still with that anxiety for the first time, pondering the strange gap between youth and adulthood. Drunk Tank Pink is the sound of Shame staring down that void and expelling their angst.
“Born in Luton” illustrates their newly multiplanar sound, kicking off with several splintered guitar passages that scratch against one another—a nod to Afropop’s rhythmic style, or perhaps new wave’s appropriation of it. Shame let their influences mingle here; the verses are propulsive and skittering, but the chorus stretches into a slow and heavy dirge. Steen bends accordingly, spitting clipped phrases at first, but reserving his energy to wail about the cruelty of boredom: “I’ve been kicking the curb, I’ve been chipping the stone,” he howls. “I’ve been waiting outside for all of my life.” It feels like waiting for adulthood to begin, only to learn that no such distinction exists.
“Water in the Well” is another showcase for Steen’s natural aptitude as a performer. He squeals and rasps and deadpans; his onstage vitality is palpable in the recording. Always a bit cheeky, he makes it hard to tell when he’s in character and when he’s running on conviction. When he asks, “Which way is heaven, sir? We all got lost somehow,” you wonder if he’s asking Satan himself for directions. His bouncy candor is another diversion, sharpening even the cruelest lines: “I’m not your lover, dear,” he barks on a later verse. “You’re just my special, special, special friend.”
Steen recognizes the importance of humor to Shame. “If it ever stopped being funny then the band would cease,” he told Loud and Quiet in 2018. It is hard to imagine the group functioning without an element of playfulness, but a handful of songs on Drunk Tank Pink enter more somber territory. “Human, for a Minute” reflects on how we see ourselves within the context of a relationship (“I never felt human before you arrived”), and whether we feel deserving of love. It offers no catharsis, save for Coyle-Smith’s simple, bright guitar riffs.
“Snow Day” and closer “Station Wagon” are Shame at their most audacious, and the theatrics serve them. The former fuses doomsday rock with the twitchy, swift percussion of Bowie’s “Blackstar.” The collision of punk force and jazz precision is a winning combination—one previously tested by bands like Squid and black midi. Shame are still able to make it their own, though, and there’s nothing quite as sinister as Steen glowering amid the “sting of mother nature.”
But the band reach peak drama on “Station Wagon”—an ambitious number that might have overwhelmed their tastes for unadorned punk just a few years ago. The six-and-a-half minute piece opens as a meandering Americana road poem before cracking into a major-key coda. As the instruments pile on, Steen spouts wild sermons from the pinnacle of human ego: “Won’t somebody please bring me that cloud?!” The song itself was inspired by Elton John, once known for his own delusions of grandeur, but Steen’s deranged pleadings seem revelatory, more deeply rooted than pop-star mythology. Had Shame tackled this subject three years ago, it might have amounted to a playful rock song. Instead, “Station Wagon” encapsulates the band’s development as songwriters, shouting back at the bombast of youth and the perilous chore of moving beyond it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | January 15, 2021 | 7.6 | 277ac2d2-a33a-4a4e-a91b-63e791731374 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The London rapper’s fifth album reinforces his dominance of the UK scene and marks his increasing cachet in international waters, but the decision to sing might be the wrong kind of risk-taking. | The London rapper’s fifth album reinforces his dominance of the UK scene and marks his increasing cachet in international waters, but the decision to sing might be the wrong kind of risk-taking. | Giggs: Big Bad... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/giggs-big-bad/ | Big Bad... | Without Giggs, few modern London MCs—glitzy rap prince Fredo, post-grime rockstar AJ Tracey, anyone making UK drill—would be the same today. His debut album, Walk in Da Park, unzipped the subterranean world of a young gangster planting a stylistic flag in local turf. Years later, via Landlord, he would self-identify as a managerial godfather. Giggs made it out of what he habitually calls “the jungle” to kick down the industry door. Giggs designed the blueprint for spitting slow and cruddy. Giggs built the structural foundations of UK rap.
Big Bad... builds on the idea that he’s spent his career steadily ascending London’s layer cake. A promotional trailer for the album shows a giant Giggs towering over the commercial city center: smashing buildings, grabbing helicopters, and evading tanks. Understood allegorically, the implication might be that Giggs now transcends the city that birthed him, dominating it from way up high. It’s an attractive narrative. His influence over junior MCs, reputation in North America, and collaborative omnipresence with everyone from Lily Allen to Mr Eazi to Drake are all traits that are admirably, if imperfectly, reinforced on Big Bad.... It is repeatedly entertaining and experimental, and therefore memorable.
The video for the first single, “187,” starts where the trailer finishes. Giggs leaps south of the River Thames, shrinks down to normal size outside of Peckham Library, and marks his grand return through fierce, gravelly bars. The song caps an opening trio of hard-body tracks, alongside “Great Collectives,” with Auto-Tune powerhouse GASHI, and “Set It Off.” The rest of the album ebbs and flows between this trusted breed of electronic road rap and Giggs’ continued attempts at forging a new, forward-thinking vocal palette, in partnership with countless A-list friends. Most of it pays off.
Giggs is at his best while rhyming simple, fearlessly well-timed, cryptic truisms about the rougher edges of urban life, as calibrated by his razor-sharp mind and communicated via a slang dictionary that he’s kept tight to his chest for over a decade. Big Bad... overflows with different iterations of this strength. “Show Me Respect” channels the soulful, contemplative philosophy that “The Essence” and even “Slow Songs” once did: “I just show man the life/Used to show man the death/Mad years, but there’s so many left,” he ponders existentially. More of this introspection would have been welcome. Still, the thumping soundsystem intensity of bangers “Baby” (despite a bizarre reference to Madagascar’s monkeys), “Gwop Expenses” with Wretch 32 (a Snips beat with aesthetic nods to haunting old G-Unit instrumentals) and “You Ain’t” (one of the best displays of pure, hard British rapping in a long time), are all irreplaceable ingredients.
To have attracted French Montana, Lil Yachty, Swizz Beatz, Theophilus London, and Jadakiss from across the pond to contribute verses is a triumph in itself. It’s surreal to hear Swizz shout out Peckham, and reflect upon the fact that Jada’s D-Block style of hood realism would have undoubtedly influenced Giggs’ late-noughties takeover. All of these features do their job to accompany Giggs on his demonstration of newfound versatility, laid over a massive selection of crisp, heavy, whip-ready beats. The point is that only the Landlord could bring together, under one figurative roof, such a broad church of transatlantic hitmakers, from Jahlil Beats to Da Beatfreakz.
A nagging question looms over the album, though. Should Giggs be singing? His decision to do so is likely to divide audiences. Moments like the off-tune chorus of “Spun It,” whose rap verses are amongst the fiercest of Giggs’ career—“Man ain’t the aggressor, but I’ve been aggressive” he growls—were always going to be risky inclusions. The album could have been a few songs shorter. But risk aversion was never going to be a viable attitude going into a long-awaited fifth album at Giggs’ level. He can’t really be blamed for trying something new, even if the result does present the one crease in an otherwise well-ironed British trap project.
Recently, Giggs told BBC Radio 1’s Annie Mac that he is happy because he is seeing more “yutes every day getting off the streets” through their music, like he did. Big Bad... is yet another example of his continued career elevation, signaling what is possible if you stick to your guns while caring little for what others think. Its reverberations will be felt for years to come. The bonus, of course, is that it seems realistic to imagine that somewhere out there, the next generation’s Giggs has been shown a clear path not only away from the increasingly violent London roads, but toward international stardom. | 2019-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Island / NO BS Music Limited | February 28, 2019 | 7.4 | 2780362c-dd37-499e-b84a-f79c82e7fe15 | Ciaran Thapar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ciaran-thapar/ | |
The London grime star has made the strongest record of his career, chock full of nimble, intricate raps that seamlessly integrate the nerdiest of signifiers. | The London grime star has made the strongest record of his career, chock full of nimble, intricate raps that seamlessly integrate the nerdiest of signifiers. | Jme: Grime MC | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jme-grime-mc/ | Grime MC | Jme likes to boast that he can make a beat with anything: Logic, Fruity Loops, Sony Playstation, a Nokia phone, even Mario Paint. But after a decade of grinding—selling records, T-shirts, and mobile phone service—the 34-year-old producer and MC can afford better gear. And though his fourth LP proves he’s upgraded his equipment since his school days, Grime MC stays faithful to the history of London’s grime scene.
Grime MCs might rap, but heads will be quick to tell you that grime is separate from hip-hop. The genre traces its roots to the UK garage scene, where parties are focused on the floor, not the stage. Jme has been there almost since the beginning—the first Boy Better Know mixtape dropped just a few years after Wiley’s genre-founding “Eskimo” riddim. And the sounds of Grime MC, particularly the beats Jme made himself (“96 of My Life,” “Badman Walking Through,” “Brothers & Sisters”), are in the same vein as those early tracks: Booming bass, vintage drum machines, and sinister synths. While Stormzy and Boy Better Know co-founder Skepta (who’s also Jme’s older brother) flirt with more commercial sounds that have raised the scene’s profile, Jme has remained steadfast. With rowdy beats and BPMs that hover above 140, Grime MC is made for the dancefloor and steeped in the slang and Caribbean patois that permeates London’s underground.
Yet for a classicist, Jme appears to defy stereotype. He’s an OG who roots for the kids making UK drill, a vegan teetotaling street rapper, and video game obsessive who produces beats live on Twitch. He’s internet-savvy, but if you want to hear his new record, it’s only available for purchase only on CD or vinyl—no downloads, no streaming platforms. This oppositional stance to current industry norms doesn’t reflect an unwillingness to adapt to modern technology. Rather, Jme understands the flattening effect of DSPs, where Adele lives next to Stormzy who shares playlists with Beyoncé. Grime has always been a subculture, rooted in meatspace. By forcing fans to buy the record direct or from local shops, he puts the onus on the listener to seek him out. And it seems to have worked: Grime MC debuted at No. 26 on the UK Top 40 Albums chart. Weeks after its release, it’s sold out pretty much everywhere.
Opting out of the largest and fastest-growing part of the music industry certainly limits Grime MC’s potential ceiling, which is as good an indication of Jme’s goals as anything else. Having watched fellow MCs fall victim to aspirational greed, he rejects the emptiness of excess with the understanding that you can’t take it with you. “When I pass, I’m leaving a lot/Even my own skin has to stay and rot,” he raps on “How Much.” These aren’t the words of a man upset that a lesser talent has climbed higher, but of a man who’s counted his blessings.
And why shouldn’t he? At 34, Jme has made the strongest record of his career, chock full of nimble, intricate raps that seamlessly integrate the nerdiest of signifiers. At times, Grime MC feels like a retrospective, a singular statement representative of cumulative efforts. He features some of the biggest names in grime—Skepta, Giggs, and Wiley, to name a few—but outshines them all. His clear diction makes him accessible without watering down his idiosyncrasies, flexing his nerd cred via video game-raps and Star Wars references (“Man are out here gunning for my spot but with the accuracy of a Stormtrooper”). And he’s extremely funny, whether popping off one-liners (“Can’t see me like Japanese porn”) or setting up punchlines about the penises in Michaelangelo’s artwork.
In a genre often mired in cliché and gangster tropes, Jme shines as a rapper’s rapper. He’s long experimented with different lyrical styles, but has never quite achieved the level of execution he reaches on Grime MC. He crafts compelling stories, like the no-hook diary entry “96 of My Life”; he toys with clever forms of repetition on “Iss Mad” and “Knock Your Block Off”; and on “You Know,” he fires off a jaw-dropping quatrain imagining himself as a PC’s video card. As UK drill surges in popularity, some may see grime as an old man’s game. But if Grime MC is any indication, the genre—and Jme himself—has yet to reach its creative peak. | 2019-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Boy Better Know | December 13, 2019 | 8 | 2782f996-bb2c-4033-8e1d-e67013b27dac | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
On Smith Westerns’ latest, Soft Will, the band still sounds like a bunch of cocky kids with a preternatural understanding of 1970s glam rock aesthetics and the physics of power pop songcraft. But the swagger has been tempered along with the tempos, showing off a new preference for stately balladry over snotty stompers. | On Smith Westerns’ latest, Soft Will, the band still sounds like a bunch of cocky kids with a preternatural understanding of 1970s glam rock aesthetics and the physics of power pop songcraft. But the swagger has been tempered along with the tempos, showing off a new preference for stately balladry over snotty stompers. | Smith Westerns: Soft Will | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18110-the-smith-westerns-soft-will/ | Soft Will | Like so many child stars before them, Smith Westerns seemed to be headed toward an early burnout. Brothers Cullen and Cameron Omori and their friend Max Kakacek laid down the sandpaper bubblegum of their 2009 self-titled debut when they were still in high school; by the time of 2011’s Dye it Blonde, they were gleefully glomming onto the grandiosity of their classic-rock heroes, in the musical and “extracurricular” senses. Seeing Smith Westerns on the Dye it Blonde tour was like (I imagine) witnessing Faster Pussycat on the Sunset Strip in the late 1980s-- the music was very loud, the band appeared to be a little partied out, and the vibe of youthful decadence verged on self-destructive. As good as the first two Smith Westerns albums were, I questioned whether they could forge a career-- or even make it to the next gig. They were living out their college years in a rock‘n’roll band, a more eye-opening education in some ways, though it doesn’t exactly prepare you for adulthood.
On Smith Westerns’ latest, Soft Will, the band still sounds like a bunch of cocky kids with a preternatural understanding of 1970s glam-rock aesthetics and the physics of power pop songcraft. But the swagger has been tempered along with the tempos; a preference for stately balladry over snotty stompers steers Soft Will away from Electric Warrior and into All Things Must Pass territory.
Lyrically, Soft Will is like the undergraduate version of Vampire Weekend’s recent post-doctoral dissertation on mortality, Modern Vampires of the City-- VW’s cautious “Diane Young” could be an answer record to Dye it Blonde’s celebratory “All Die Young”. Omori is just getting to the point where he can finally see outside of himself, and understand that the world is a big, scary, unknowable place that you might not have licked after all. “I thought I was a loner until I went out on my own,” he sings on Will’s beatific closing track “Varsity”, as bell-like synths echo back to one of the all-time great “you’re all alone now, bub,” classics, Naked Eyes’ “Always Something There to Remind Me”. Soft Will culminates with a graduation of sorts-- Smith Westerns have survived their adolescence as a band, learned the right lessons, and (gasp) seem to have grown up.
While the band’s outlook has matured, what hasn’t changed on Soft Will is Smith Westerns’ ability to turn out instantly likeable guitar and synth-based hooks at a prodigious rate. “3am Spiritual” opens Will with a callback to Dye it Blonde, as a simple six-string strum and lilting keyboard figure give way to a heart-tugging “Whoa! Yeah!” chorus. It’s a songwriting trick learned from poring over records that were born around the time the band members were-- Bandwagonesque and I Should Coco and (definitely) Definitely Maybe. Smith Westerns aren’t interested in changing up their formula, they’ve merely found a way to utilize it more thoughtfully.
Just as Dye it Blonde sounded like Smith Westerns with better (or any) production and more sophisticated songwriting, Soft Will elaborates on Dye it Blonde by sharpening the choruses-- the “tell me tell me tell me the answer 'cuz I’m not sure” bit from “Idol” is particularly sticky-- and refining the arrangements. On the instrumental “XXIII”, Soft Will even approaches the elegance of Air’s score for Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, evoking a similar end-of-childhood dread with its cinematic mix of doomy piano chords and spectral string swooshes. Smith Westerns have given their own coming-of-age an appropriately majestic soundtrack. (The guitar riff on "Best Friend" is like a cross between CC Deville's guitar solo from Poison’s “Something to Believe In” and Clarence Clemons’ sax solo from Springsteen’s “Jungleland”.)
In the context of Smith Westerns’ discography, Soft Will is both a fresh start and a conclusion to the first part of the band’s career. In case it needs be pointed out: Smith Westerns have already built an impressive battery of records. Few groups do wistfully melodic trad-rock any better right now. Smith Westerns haven’t only not burned out, they’re a budding institution. | 2013-06-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-06-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | June 12, 2013 | 7.9 | 2788e66a-62bd-415d-9106-62e29958568d | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
The electronic artist of many pseudonyms returns with two complimentary records twinning house and techno within new, broadly ranging, self-contained worlds. | The electronic artist of many pseudonyms returns with two complimentary records twinning house and techno within new, broadly ranging, self-contained worlds. | DJ Healer / Prime Minister of Doom: DJ Healer: Nothing 2 Loose // Prime Minister of Doom: Mudshadow Propaganda | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-healer-prime-minister-of-doom-dj-healer-nothing-2-loose-prime-minister-of-doom-mudshadow-propaganda/ | DJ Healer: Nothing 2 Loose // Prime Minister of Doom: Mudshadow Propaganda | Nothing 2 Loose and Mudshadow Propaganda represent the latest missives from an anonymous artist who has gained almost mythic status among fans of underground dance music. Previously working most frequently under the monikers Prince of Denmark (for techno-oriented works) and Traumprinz (for house-ier sounds), the artist revealed a cryptic website in early April and put up for sale the albums in question, released, respectively, under new aliases DJ Healer and Prime Minister of Doom. The titles sold out immediately, and now fetch a mint on secondary markets.
Little is known about the artist, who is male by all accounts, and possibly German, given his years-long relationship with the Weimar-based Giegling label (he’s since severed ties). He is simultaneously the type of artist who makes following underground dance music so rewarding—it’s a thrill to chase his records and follow his shifting personas—and one who intimidates potential new fans, who may find the aliases confusing and have little access to his music. Sporadic mixes and communication arrive via a Soundcloud account, including the retirement of the Prince of Denmark name, and the aforementioned website reveal. (For clarity this review will refer to the artist as Traumprinz, the artist’s longest-standing alias.)
Nothing 2 Loose, under the DJ Healer alias, is the more unique of the pair of new albums. It expands on a 2016 release as DJ Metatron that introduced vaguely spiritual overtones into the Traumprinz universe, overtones that nonetheless found their way onto plenty of dancefloors. He advances those themes through DJ Healer via extended spoken word segments and clever sampling. House music has long taken inspiration—and plenty of samples—from gospel music, whose soaring voices can help transport the communal healing of the church to the club; Nothing 2 Loose incorporates the more personal, self-help aspects of religion, foregoing bombast for moody contemplation and solemnity.
There’s no doubt the results can feel portentous at times, but there are enough moments of pattering reflection to support the spiritual overtones. Nothing 2 Loose is best in these moments, as on “Gods Creation,” where a pin-prick rhythm dances around warm pads and a spoken sample—“That’s God’s creation/It’s absolutely amazing to look at it”—the effect being something like a church-y Boards of Canada. Twelve-minute album centerpiece “We Are Going Nowhere” builds into a wavy chord progression and stuttering vocal sample, like Four Tet counting out rosary beads. Over time, Nothing 2 Loose reveals itself as a potent, immersive, and singular record (only the Roberta Flack-sampling Burial replica “2 the Dark” feels out of place), yet another expansion of Traumprinz’s breadth.
Mudshadow Propaganda, in contrast, is much more familiar experience, building as it does on the grainy, warm techno he explored previously on eight LP 8. This is sparse, minimal music full of chord stabs and rhythmic trills, and the simplest explanation for its effectiveness is that Traumprinz is simply better at molding this clay than most of his peers. It lacks the aggression and futurism that characterizes so much of the genre, sticking instead to the kind of smudged, sepia-toned palate more commonly found in underground house. The music is merely foreboding instead of dystopic, a better soundtrack for a spooky forest than a warehouse.
He’s an expert at giving you one excellent thing to focus on each track, a sort of proto-hook that keeps things interesting. “Tribal Days II” and “Tribal Days III” (there is no first variant) will make you realize just how anonymous congas usually sound. “Grand Finale” (it’s track six of ten) features a wormy, rotting lead line that threatens to fall apart before it reaches the next note. Closer “The Wai” rides trance-y chords and a vocal sample—“Show me the way”—to a surprisingly euphoric finale. Any of these tracks on a random side of a 12” might not turn heads, but collected they present a kind of inky, moldering sound that is amongst the most absorbing of album-oriented techno.
It’s tempting to speculate about the man behind all this anonymity. Traumprinz doesn’t DJ—the primary way even popular dance producers generate income—but he does have the capability to simultaneously release two records via a custom website suggests someone with plenty of resources and connections in the European underground dance community. But his shifting aliases and projects do a good job deflecting this curiosity, suggesting not some monolithic genius but rather a producer talented at producing across many styles. His records remain difficult to obtain but they’re available on YouTube (albeit as bootlegs: Nothing 2 Loose, Mudshadow Propaganda) and high-quality digital copies of his records have long found a way to file-sharing and leak sites (the copy of 8 that did so came accompanied with a digital-exclusive track, a hint that these leaks may be intentional).
By retiring (for now, at least) his lauded Prince of Denmark project, Traumprinz has allowed listeners to focus on Nothing 2 Loose and Mudshadow Propaganda as new, self-contained worlds. And while it’s the DJ Healer record that truly takes up this mandate, the Prime Minister of Doom project also feels potent in its cloistered, measly minimalism. Any artist who remains anonymous in social-media-saturated 2018 is susceptible to accusations of myth-making. You can remain anonymous on a white-label; vast multi-character epics require an author. Whoever is behind the Traumprinz projects is certainly guilty of this to some degree, but it’s refreshing to trace the whims of an artist who seems interested in many little myths instead of a single, immense one. | 2018-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | May 2, 2018 | 8.2 | 2788feed-240c-47a3-9507-897a113ea2b8 | Drew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/drew-gaerig/ | |
On a pair of new albums, the composer teases compositional ideas on upright piano and then accompanies them with lusher, more realized studio works. | On a pair of new albums, the composer teases compositional ideas on upright piano and then accompanies them with lusher, more realized studio works. | Spencer Zahn: Statues I | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spencer-zahn-statues-i-statues-ii/ | Statues I / Statues II | Spencer Zahn has freely lent his talents since relocating to New York in the mid 2000s, touring with artists like Empress Of and Kimbra and contributing to studio albums over a wide sweep of genres. As a devout student of ECM, he’s equally comfortable straddling the rigorous austerity of classical music and the liberatory ethos of spiritual jazz. On last year’s Pigments, a partnership with R&B superstar Dawn Richard, his lush arrangements set the stage for a sprawling drama with Richard as the leading lady. Now Zahn is pulling back the curtain, training the spotlight on himself as he indulges in the music that fascinates him most.
Statues is a double LP, and for each Zahn dials into a different mode. On Statues I, he’s at his most somber and sedate, playing unaccompanied at an upright piano and listening to a selection of his favorite recordings while improvising alongside them. “Lawns” gives the game away most readily; it’s a skeletal interpretation of a classic by the late free jazz legend Carla Bley, borrowing the central melody but slowing the tempo. Zahn loops the phrase like a prayer, as if trying to communicate with Bley’s very spirit. The remaining pieces are originals, but use repetition to similarly lofty effects, as on “Snow Fields”; he taps out a leisurely refrain, turning the dial down to a glacial pace and conjuring the beauty of a still winter day. Some tracks can rely too heavily on these repeated passages, like “Two Cranes” or “Never Seen,” which is rescued by an extended improvisation in the midsection.
The most fascinating parts of Statues I are the moments where Zahn’s expressiveness shines through. His play is lively on “Lullaby for My Dog” and the recording betrays his emotion. His fingers strike the keys, coming down with an audible thud. His seat creaks as he swings from side to side, inviting us to imagine the space he occupies. On the lithe “Sway,” notes hang in the air, reverberating around the room. When the tones drop out, the sounds of Zahn’s shifting frame become perceptible. He’s vulnerable and exposed.
Statues II brings him away from live performance and into the studio. Here he’s iterating on the luxurious production of Pigments, working vignettes from his Yamaha CP-70 electric keyboard into tape loops and sharing them with friends who expanded upon them and gave them to Zahn to reassemble. Opener “Changes in Three Parts,” is an immediate departure from the delicate solo piano of the previous LP, with swirls of horn and piano dancing around one another. A drum pattern creeps in near the end, but it’s not really keeping time; it’s moving with the same fluidity as Zahn’s improvisations.
Even where the composition remains sparse, the music on Statues II feels fully realized thanks to its additional texture. On “Morning,” twinkling tones ring out from Zahn’s keys as pitched percussion dances along like stones skipping across water. Tunings and tempos are carefully tweaked, transforming disparate fragments into something alive and dynamic. “High Touch” ascends to free-floating reverie with a soaring trumpet solo from Spencer Ludwig, channeling the specter of Jon Hassell. Outro “Shadow Setup” is the most varied in its intricate layering, its chorus of synth washes and horn riffs coalescing into a dramatic crescendo. Zahn’s piano remains the fundamental framework throughout, but now each piece is properly refined with structure the acoustic numbers were lacking.
Statues I may feel slight in comparison to the ornate beauty of Statues II, but it’s the rehearsal before the performance, training your ear for Zahn’s compositional ideas. Statues II builds upon that foundation, imbuing the emotional core of the music with movement and vibrancy. Zahn shows restraint, then lets loose—and it’s a joy to watch him build up to that confident climax. | 2023-12-01T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-01T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | December 1, 2023 | 7.4 | 278a0b51-a8c6-41dd-91ca-a308ffd17242 | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
Venerable art-rocker Robert Wyatt-- an almost anti-pop star in the Scott Walker mold-- releases a beautiful protest in three parts. Brian Eno, Paul Weller, and Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera all guest. | Venerable art-rocker Robert Wyatt-- an almost anti-pop star in the Scott Walker mold-- releases a beautiful protest in three parts. Brian Eno, Paul Weller, and Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera all guest. | Robert Wyatt: Comicopera | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10764-comicopera/ | Comicopera | Robert Wyatt has the saddest voice in rock, which is fitting-- he's had plenty to be sad about, beginning with the 1973 accident that left him confined to a wheelchair. But Wyatt has also long been relatively at ease with his injury, if not sanguine, and has used his perch to take account of the world around him, growing increasingly politicized as the 1970s progressed and Margaret Thatcher ascended the ranks of power in the UK. At times his politics has overshadowed his music and, in the case of "Shipbuilding", even granted him a minor hit.
Not that Wyatt is anyone's idea of a traditional rock singer. Since his days drumming in Soft Machine through his work as a solo artist, he's carved out a pretty unique position for himself as an almost anti-pop star. Like latter-day Scott Walker, Wyatt's essentially created his own genre, a mish-mash of jazz, art-rock, and experimental music. It's also, as with recent Walker, equally compelling and challenging, but as much as Wyatt requires concentration, his albums are generally emotionally rewarding and only confrontational in their eerie serenity.
Despite the preternatural calm in Wyatt's amazing voice, here he seems more agitated than ever. Describing his new album Comicopera in the press notes, Wyatt reveals an almost tragic distaste for the direction western civilization has taken. Indeed, the album ends with Wyatt singing in Spanish and Italian as a declared form of protest. "It's to do with feeling completely alienated from Anglo-American culture at this point," he says. "Just sort of being silent as an English-speaking person, because of this fucking war. The last thing I sing in English is 'You've planted all your everlasting hatred in my heart.'"
Those are strong words from someone so famously gentle, and in fact Comicopera ("comic opera") proceeds along a three-act structure. It begins with "Lost In Noise", a five-song suite (mostly written with poet and partner Alfreda Benge) addressing the personal, broadens to "The Here and the Now" (resolutely political) and ends with "Away With the Fairies" (where Wyatt indulges his polyglot form of protest). Wyatt is aided throughout by such regular collaborators and co-conspirators as Brian Eno, Paul Weller, and Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera.
Delineated acts aside, the disc maintains a certain sonic consistency, carefully balancing discord with grace; the structure does pay off, however-- particularly the first two-thirds. "Lost in Noise" begins with "Stay Tuned", a mournful Anja Garbarek song, but it's the astounding duet with Monica Vasconcelos, "Just as You Are", and the spacious chamber pop of "You You" that stick out as highlights.
With "The Here and the Now", things turn rueful and cynical, if deceptively poppier. "A Beautiful Place" (an Eno co-write) and "Be Serious" are an agnostic's stab at spiritualism; "How can I express myself when there's no self to express?" is the latter's take on religion's habit of doing the thinking for its adherents. "Mob Rule", "A Beautiful War", and "Out of the Blue" comprise Wyatt's state of the world dissection. The first song addresses the build up to war, and the second the deceptively sunny disposition of a soldier after a successful military run. "Out of the Blue" then switches the perspective from the bomber to the bombed. It's this victim that seethes with "everlasting hatred."
By necessity and by design, this is also where the disc loses focus, and Wyatt begins to rely on some dissolute fragments (including one actually called "Fragment"), the poetry of Federico García Lorca, and the music of Cuban composer Carlos Puebla, whose tribute to Che Guevara, "Hasta Siempre Comandante", ends the album on a mischievously radical note.
Forget for the moment that Guevara spent far too much of his later life fighting against many of the very freedoms that Wyatt (one assumes) holds dear. The song's message is still clear enough. It's Wyatt's subversive equivalent of "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?", a venerable lefty's call for a return to lost values, a cry for revolution from someone for whom violence, let alone a raised voice, is one step beyond a last resort. It hangs there at the end of the disc like a question left unanswered. | 2007-10-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-10-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Domino | October 9, 2007 | 7.5 | 278f1939-1b5e-46f2-a88e-8ff20a53f6de | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
A set of one-take recordings from Jeff Mills’ four-piece techno-jazz-funk fusion band—and one terrific Terrence Parker remix—are a reminder of the importance of editing. | A set of one-take recordings from Jeff Mills’ four-piece techno-jazz-funk fusion band—and one terrific Terrence Parker remix—are a reminder of the importance of editing. | Spiral Deluxe: Voodoo Magic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spiral-deluxe-voodoo-magic/ | Voodoo Magic | Is there any practice likelier to strike fear into the heart of the right-thinking music fan than the jam session? True, there have been bands—Can are a notable example—that have turned their improvisational nous into wonderfully adventurous music with the benefit of strict editing. But for most musicians outside the actual jam-band scene—jazz players excepted, of course—getting together to bang out musical thoughts results in little more than the bare seeds of ideas.
Voodoo Magic, the first album from cerebral Detroit techno producer Jeff Mills’ improvisational quartet Spiral Deluxe, does not exactly disprove this theory. Most of the four original tracks here were laid down by the four-piece techno-jazz-funk fusion band in one-take recordings during a two-day session in Paris in an attempt to “capture the moment.” And frankly it shows, although probably not in the way the band intended. The album’s title track is flat-out terrible, as bass guitar and drum machine show off to each other in an antipathetic musical stew. It’s the kind of formless noodling you might just about excuse if it took place at a gig while the guitar player was re-stringing his instrument and the singer was having a strop. On record, though, it comes over as self-indulgent, amorphous nonsense that should never have left the studio. The song also illustrates one of this album’s biggest problems: a weird tonal combination of glossy, sub-“Seinfeld” bass elastics and drum-machine thump that sounds ill-fitting at best and downright curdled at worst.
Yet buried somewhere within this elaborate self-gratification is the germ of a good idea. Jeff Mills may be at his best making thunderingly precise techno that wastes not a second of its relentless energy, but he is also the rare musician who can actually play the drum machine live, accompanying everything from his own DJ sets to the Montpelier Philharmonic Orchestra on his trusted 909. Gerald Mitchell, who plays keys in the Spiral Deluxe, is also a hugely accomplished player who has worked extensively with fabled techno collective Underground Resistance. When Mitchell’s soaring piano runs and classic Detroit keyboard lines combine with Mills’ masterful drum-machine work, as in the propulsive opening five minutes of “E=MC²,” supported by Kenji “Jino” Hino’s wandering bassline and Yumiko Ohno’s Moog burbles, you can feel the spark. Here, the quartet comes close to combining jazz’s unfettered melodicism with techno’s propulsive charge. That the song then breaks down into a garden-fence chat between bass twang and polite drum-machine strokes is frustrating, but you can, at least, glimpse what the band was aiming at.
Perhaps most infuriating, though, is the fact that the solution to all this dawdling is painted in mile-high fluorescent colours on the album’s closing track, a wonderfully tight Terrence Parker mix of “Let It Go.” Parker’s remix cleverly excavates every last ounce of funk and soul from the original song, which precedes it, and pushes them into the red. Coming just too late for redemption, this life-affirming example of classic Detroit house (reminiscent of the output of Underground Resistance’s Happy Records in the 1990s) is a reminder of what the rest of the album isn’t: urgent, tight, vivacious, and damnably alive. That Parker distills the bass, so fussy and flash on the original, into one simple, repeating line that actually enhances the song is telling.
As an end to the album, Parker’s mix of “Let It Go” is both brilliant and troubling, a belated sign of what Voodoo Magic could have been if Spiral Deluxe had thought less about capturing the moment and more about smashing that moment down to its essence. Playing live is all well and good. But Parker proves that proper editing is magic. | 2018-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Axis | September 13, 2018 | 5.9 | 278fcbb2-164f-4111-a6cf-3f80caed46c7 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Incorporating South Asian instruments and singing in English and Hindi, the New York singer-songwriter crafts a concept album from the perspective of a Punjabi space princess. | Incorporating South Asian instruments and singing in English and Hindi, the New York singer-songwriter crafts a concept album from the perspective of a Punjabi space princess. | Raveena : Asha’s Awakening | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/raveena-ashas-awakening/ | Asha’s Awakening | Raveena’s music has a delightfully pacifying effect, like slipping beneath a down blanket at the end of the night. Her delicate voice is typically set to acoustic guitar melodies and spacious percussion, an established sound that the New York singer-songwriter has spent the past few years tinkering with. She suggested a shimmery new direction with last year’s one-off single “Tweety,” a blast of Y2K R&B nostalgia whose shift in vocal and production styles was welcome: The pillow-soft songs on her 2019 debut could go down easy, but they were relaxed to a fault. Raveena’s luminous sophomore album, Asha’s Awakening, is a throat-clearing moment for the singer, drawing on both Western and South Asian inspirations and collaborations for a blend of dance-friendly R&B songs and soothing ballads, each of which stands on her distinctive, quiet strength.
Asha’s Awakening is a concept album from the perspective of a Punjabi space princess. Raveena uses this otherworldly construct to ruminate on personal growth, modern culture, and relationships over butter-smooth backdrops. The standout “Rush” melds laidback guitar and radiant synths into the type of blissed-out song destined to drift over summer picnics. Raveena has always excelled in this mode, but here she takes bigger risks, especially when she ups the tempo. “Kismet,” a breezy highlight fueled by joyous handclaps and keys, sails on a lithe bassline and rhythmic verses in Hindi and English. On the flirty “Secret,” Vince Staples provides Raveena with a slick counterpoint over a low bassline and swarmandal, riffing on the Bollywood-sampling production trend of the early 2000s to playfully create something that’s entirely her own.
Asha’s Awakening breaks up the pace in its latter half, with mixed results. On the spoken-word interlude “The Internet Is Like Eating Plastic,” she wryly muses on technology’s grip on her attention, but her blunt platitudes slide into cliché. (“The internet has me stupid and smart at the same time,” while relatable, doesn’t offer much insight.) The album also ends with a 13-minute guided meditation in which Raveena encourages mindfulness over birdsong and buzzing synths. The overlong addendum feels tacked on, a bonus track to reaffirm the distilled sense of tranquility the album has already achieved.
That serene aspect is mainly borne out through the album’s lush production. Raveena made a point of incorporating Indian instruments in her arrangements, a choice that’s most potent on “Asha’s Kiss,” featuring the legendary singer Asha Puthli. The pair duet over electric sitar, chiming bells, and a gently pattering drum, and the meeting of two generations forms a lovely centerpiece. Over six minutes, the song grows light and diffuse, as though Raveena and Puthli are both basking in its hazy warmth. The mood is further sustained on “Time Flies,” where Rostam provides a languid, sublime backdrop for Raveena’s bittersweet sendoff to her twenties. “Knowing I’m growing even if I’m falling apart,” she sings in a whisper over light-handed tabla and strummed guitar; “Knowing I’m okay even if I gotta restart.” The affirmation is earnest, but it isn’t cloying; through Raveena’s tender delivery, it’s illuminating, capturing an artist whose confessional instincts find harmony with her artistic ambitions. | 2022-02-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner | February 15, 2022 | 7.5 | 279189bc-b14f-4b24-a863-8ab23d1322b5 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Global effective tax rates, security-state paranoia, post-millennial malaise, and a certain modernist furniture outlet: they all get theirs on the latest release from D.C. punks Priests. At just 17-and-a-half minutes, Bodies and Control and Money and Power has neither the time nor the patience for fucking around. | Global effective tax rates, security-state paranoia, post-millennial malaise, and a certain modernist furniture outlet: they all get theirs on the latest release from D.C. punks Priests. At just 17-and-a-half minutes, Bodies and Control and Money and Power has neither the time nor the patience for fucking around. | Priests: Bodies and Control and Money and Power | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19419-priests-bodies-and-control-and-money-and-power/ | Bodies and Control and Money and Power | All that hopey-changey stuff isn't quite working out for Katie Alice Greer. "Barack Obama killed something in me," Greer screams at the tail end of Bodies and Control and Money and Power, the latest release from D.C. rabblerousers Priests, "and I'm gonna get him for it." Global effective tax rates, security-state paranoia, post-millennial malaise, and a certain modernist furniture outlet: they all get theirs on Bodies. Every anxiety-ridden, admonishment-flinging second of Bodies finds Priests—Greer, drummer Daniele Daniele, guitarist G.L. Jaguar, and bassist Taylor Mulitz—all revved up and ready to go: for them, settling down's just as bad as giving up. As Greer insists on opener "Design Within Reach", if you're "facing fear only when you have to," well, you just made the list.
Bodies—which follows two small-batch cassettes and a 7" on the band's own Sister Polygon imprint—may be Priests' big coming-out party, but it's hardly their first time at the rally. You might know Greer from punk hero Ian Svenonius' Chain and the Gang, while Jaguar's been a staple of the DC underground since his teenage years, volunteering at storied District hotspot Fort Reno. After launching Priests in 2012, they quickly made a name for themselves on the back of their fiery live shows. Even on record, it's not hard to see the appeal; they're a restless bunch, largely unconcerned with polish, careening fitfully from one provocation to the next. Jaguar's deranged-surfer anti-riffs and Mulitz's corkscrewing basslines chase each other like junkyard dogs, never letting each other out of their sights for very long. Daniele's deeply innate drumwork is the cool-headed counterpoint to her bandmates' writhing and reeling. And Greer, well, Greer is just something else altogether; whether she's doling out castigations or on the verge of a crack-up, she's an impossibly commanding presence, splitting the difference between control and chaos.
Sure, their music—which triangulates turn-of-the-80s Los Angeles, early 90s Olympia, and NYC b-movie-obsessives the Cramps, if that band spent a little less time at the drive-in and a little more time cataloging the horrors on 6 o'clock news—isn't likely to win them many points for originality, or for that matter, subtlety. But, from the first blast of feedback to the flirtation with light treason that closes it out, Bodies doesn't let up for a second; at just 17-and-a-half minutes, it has neither the time nor the patience for fucking around.
While promising enough, Priests' pre-Bodies releases too often seemed resigned to simple sloganeering, to placing message above medium. Songs about the pernicious influence of television, product placement, and, er, Lana Del Rey hit soft targets at full force; their passion was never in doubt, but for every point they landed, two more seemed pulled from the pages of a dog-eared Punk 101 textbook. At its best, Bodies atomizes that early furor, a powerful weapon to train on a more deserving set of targets. On "Powertrip," Greer rails against the confluence of authority and condescension; on "Design Within Reach," she's reminding us how often creature comforts place a wedge between the haves from the have-nots. "Right Wing" reels off a laundry list of invasive police-state maneuvers; "Modern Love/No Weapon" lifts lines from punk progenitor Jonathan Richman and image poet Diane Wakoski as a way of outlining its "plans to disrupt."
It'd be reductive to pigeonhole Priests as merely a political act, because things are never quite that cut-and-dry. "When you are just a kid you want everything to be new," Greer recalls on "New", "but you go into an old house, and everything is so scary." You can take "New" as a charred childhood memory or a quick-take comment on our disposable culture; for Priests, the personal and the political are always within shouting distance, but Greer's more explicit commentary is often placed alongside lines that leave quite a bit more to the imagination. Politics are front-and-center on the unusually poppy "Right Wing", which kicks off with purse searches and pep rallies. Still, by the song's end, Greer's insisting "I'm not trying to be anything." Closer "And Breeding" touches on post-Y2K unease and Obama-era disenfranchisement, but its first few lines imagine an Elmer's-huffing teen scribbling something about "monkeys and robots, monkey and robots" in the folds of a math ledger.
Does Greer contradict herself? Sure, maybe, and there are times when it seems she's throwing just about everything at the wall in the hopes that some of it'll stick. But political lyrics—or any lyrics, really—need not be coherent to hit home; they've just got to be compelling. Greer occasionally treads over well-worn territory; sometimes she seems to sling her lyrical Molotovs at anything that isn't bolted down. And there are plenty of moments where Greer seems almost pressed for time; the onslaught of interviews Priests have given in the run-up to Bodies illuminate many of the EP's less readily apparent messages, but without that extratextual support, portions of Bodies remain open to interpretation, and some of its more implicit messages occasionally get a bit lost in the shuffle. "We don’t have a thesis statement for our band,” Greer told the Washington Post last month. “We’re still figuring out what we’re trying to say, so if it’s nuanced and confusing to people, that’s cool. It’s nuanced and confusing to us, too.”
Priests are still a relatively new band, with just a few releases to their name; even counting Bodies, their total recorded output clocks in just about an hour. Given their relatively slim output and their occasional difficulty honing in on their targets, it seems like they've still got a couple kinks to work out. Still, the brash, unflinching Priests just feel necessary; they're just as angry—and perplexed—about the state of things as any of their peers, but unlike those who'd rather retreat into apathy, they refuse to just lie down and take it. | 2014-06-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-06-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Don Giovanni / Sister Polygon | June 6, 2014 | 7.3 | 27921a35-a316-4c12-88b0-a6f1d2b4e83e | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Two figures of underground rap—Philly’s Sadhugold and Virginia’s Ohbliv—team up for a politically blunted, cult rap record in the making. | Two figures of underground rap—Philly’s Sadhugold and Virginia’s Ohbliv—team up for a politically blunted, cult rap record in the making. | Czardust: The Ra(w) Material | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/czardust-the-raw-material/ | The Ra(w) Material | The Ra(w) Material opens with a hazy, slightly off-kilter double-tracked voice chanting, “Caveman, caveman make me a wheel.” Undulating keys and slurry drums kick in next, sounding for a second like they’re two loops running deliberately out of sync. The vocals brag about copping fire from Prometheus and stacking cash like the alchemist St. Germain, before the track is overtaken by the manic sampled dialogue of a religious zealot—at which point the beat dissolves into a misty soul loop. It’s like some fantastically blunted cacophony whose closest antecedent is the Jungle Brothers’ Crazy Wisdom Masters, a record Warner Bros. deemed too experimental to release back in the ’90s.
It turns out, the alien rapping voice belongs to Sadhugold, a Philadelphia producer who wears a stocking mask in photos and is best known for crafting beats for the underground cognoscenti that include Mach-Hommy, Your Old Droog, and the Griselda camp. It also turns out that Sadhugold rhymes very well indeed, much in the same sort of syncopated style as Madlib’s rapping persona Quasimoto. Forming as Czardust alongside Virginia’s Ohbliv—a producer whose work is similarly revered in the same circles—the duo have elevated the usual vanity hip-hop collaboration into a maelstrom of head-spinning loop science intertwined with philosophical commentary.
The Czardust world is like a puzzle box. Focus on one of Sadhugold’s raps—which are filled with brags like, “Fuck this rap shit, my nig’, let’s wrangle these chickens/It’s time to cash in with self-help books and religion, ya dig?”—and you might find the vocals fading out mid-line to be replaced by one of many cut-and-paste-style speeches. On “Murder He Wrote,” which starts out dominated by a simmering bass line and Gothic choral refrain, a female voice asks if God will heal the Earth from disease. This prompts a frantic response from a Public Access preacher who rattles off a crazed mix of Biblical references and hip-hop patter: “I’m the Lord, motherfucker, not who you thought I was supposed to be… Like my nigga Mystikal say gon’ be that way long after they release Mandela because you nincom-fuckin’-poops don’t know Jesus.” While this unfurls, a snippet of The Notorious B.I.G.'s “Hypnotize” seeps through in the background, tempting the listener to wander into another new pocket of sound.
Backed by pained guitar and monstrous bass, “Phantom of the Options” opens as a moralistic rap that includes the question, “Who can turn a terrorist into a sob story?” As you anticipate the second verse bringing forth answers, the lyrics are totally swamped by news reportage documenting the limits and justifications for violence in the name of self-defense. “What are we supposed to do if we can't protect ourselves?” laments a scared voice as the heady track ends.
All these overlapping loops and voices could sound haphazard, but Ohbliv and Sadhugold bring things full circle towards the project’s end. On “Serpent Power,” the same verse that opened the album is layered back into the song, linking the myriad sampled speeches about Christianity, the Ku Klux Klan, and Five Percenter rhetoric to the beginnings of mankind. Then on closing cut “Whattup,” Sadhugold zones out and perfectly encapsulates the cosmic Czardust ethos: “I close my eyes and embrace the blackness of space/’Til the colors and the spirit gods is back in my face like, ‘What up?’”
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | October 15, 2019 | 7.5 | 27978fe1-a937-4a8b-b985-27cf01b78540 | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
The singer’s latest album is both overbearing and underbaked, smothering lovely vocals and intriguing ideas underneath blockbuster features and irritating interludes. | The singer’s latest album is both overbearing and underbaked, smothering lovely vocals and intriguing ideas underneath blockbuster features and irritating interludes. | Brent Faiyaz : Wasteland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brent-faiyaz-wasteland/ | Wasteland | In 2020, Brent Faiyaz ushered in his 25th birthday with “Dead Man Walking,” a single that distilled a fledgling philosophy for the next quarter of his life: “Do what you wanna, live how you wanna, spend what you wanna, be who you wanna be.” Slushy harmonies and sleek orchestral production added to the drama, but it was Faiyaz’s images that made the song stick. A window slices open, and smoke streams out of the car; diamonds “doing Toosie Slides in both ears” glimmer as he coasts down the Vegas strip. Drake, whom Faiyaz takes such pains to reference in this track and the rest of his catalog, perfected this kind of pitched-down plunge into nihilism, adrenaline as the only end game. But amid this impending sense of doom, Faiyaz charmed with an ethereal voice and compelling sense of ease.
“Dead Man Walking” went viral across TikTok, and remains one of the most graceful songs of the Maryland R&B singer’s career. The single seemed to offer a more elegant, elevated posture for the guy who branded himself a “walking erection” on “Fuck the World,” the title track of his previous project. But Wasteland, his latest full-length, shows that he’s learned the wrong lessons from his viral success. On the new album, he opts for grandeur over granularity, resulting in an expensive, ambitious collection that relies on gimmicks and conceit. Instead of trusting Faiyaz to carry his own momentum, Wasteland is both overbearing and underbaked, smothering strands of lovely vocals and wisps of ideas underneath blockbuster features and irritating interludes.
Faiyaz has said that he binge-watched Tarantino movies while making the album, and Wasteland is cinematic in the most clunkily literal sense. Three of the record’s 19 tracks are skits, and that tally doesn’t include the introduction—a swirl of menacing piano chords, crowd chatter, and fragmented intonations spoken by Faiyaz and Jorja Smith about tunneling into a high to escape and, gratingly, how Twitter has co-opted the word “toxic.” (“Shakespeare used it,” Smith chimes in, “The Taming of the Shrew.”) The two-and-half-minute-long ramble culminates in an intriguing, if not obvious question: “What purpose do your vices serve in your life?”
But Faiyaz spends the next hour dodging the answer. Instead, we get a plot. Wasteland follows Faiyaz’s character as he deflects the looming responsibilities of fatherhood, lying to the pregnant mother of his future child until she is so distraught that she threatens suicide. In a painfully drawn-out scene, “Skit: Wake Up Call,” Faiyaz crashes his car speeding to see her. Between these awkwardly scripted data-dumps, we get some gleaming songs—the catchy, Tyler, the Creator-assisted “Gravity,” the tingling percussion on “Addictions”, the hazy thrill of “Dead Man Walking”—but Faiyaz shoves the listener back into the overwrought narrative before any of the hits can metabolize.
Thankfully, the execution often surpasses the ideas—these are intricate tracks, twinkling through layers of texture. But they get clogged in swerves and side-steps. “Price of Fame” undulates through pitched-down vocals slowed to a sludge and frantic beat changes, meandering without any real center; “Ghetto Gatsby” slinks through an unnecessary Alicia Keys rap to let Faiyaz belt out in his stainless falsetto. Faiyaz is at his best when he leans into disorientation, dissecting and conveying it: “Maybe my sense of reality is turned off,” he croons on “Loose Change.” The most effective songs fade and float into vapor: “All Mine” unspools gauzy strands of harmonies, while on “Wasting Time,” Faiyaz lobs some passive-aggressive pleas —“You can have all the space/More than you need”—over a lilting Neptunes beat before Drake shows up to moan about The Queen’s Gambit and flushing condoms down the toilet.
Drake is the obvious touchpoint for all this, both blueprint and benefactor. But like the Weeknd, another clear influence, Drake grounds his aching melodrama in tangible grit, sculpting scenes out of specifics. Aside from “Dead Man Walking,” Faiyaz mainly opts for sweeping statements about how evil he is, a rigid moral clarity that sometimes comes across as laziness. He labels himself a “villain,” an “egomaniac,” a gaslighter, a nemesis who deserves his tragic end. Any concrete details he offers just further fuel the caricature. He tries to convince a possessive lover to have more threesomes; he lashes out at a woman spilling cognac on his Alexander McQueens; he leaves sex stains in the back of an Uber.
When he does briefly prod at self-examination, his revelations underwhelm: “Maybe I don’t need a hug/Maybe I’m just fucked up,” he hums on “Addictions.” On “Rolling Stone,” he wails what we’re meant to think is the thesis of the album: “I’m rich as fuck and I ain’t nothing at the same time.” It’s a vacant confession, offering only an outline of vulnerability. Sometimes, even emptiness has to be earned. | 2022-07-14T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-14T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Lost Kids | July 14, 2022 | 5.9 | 27a1ccd0-f42d-472b-9be3-3c6292f8d39e | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Written after the death of bassist Cliff Burton, Metallica’s infamously abrasive masterpiece gets its 30th-anniversary treatment at a time when its sociopolitical rumblings are painfully relevant. | Written after the death of bassist Cliff Burton, Metallica’s infamously abrasive masterpiece gets its 30th-anniversary treatment at a time when its sociopolitical rumblings are painfully relevant. | Metallica: ...And Justice for All | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/metallica-and-justice-for-all/ | ...And Justice for All | …And Justice for All is the biggest metal band’s best album. I see you, Master of Puppets people, but I’ve strapped on the blindfold of Lady Justice and let the scales tip where they may: Justice wins. The songwriting of singer James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich is their most complex and vicious, retaining the power of their early thrash while jettisoning its simplistic schoolyard chants and avoiding the less-compelling hard rock tendencies to come. Use, abuse, experience, and enough beer and Jägermeister to make Keith Moon drive a luxury car into a swimming pool had tempered Hetfield’s reedy yell into something fuller and more forceful, with none of his later cigar-chomping bluster. The lyrics are a ground-level portrait of bureaucratic order pushing down on people too powerless to fight back. And the sound is nearly industrial in its ear-killing intensity, a piece of serrated steel designed to carve you and leave its nihilism in the wounds. Oh, and maybe you’ve heard this: You can’t hear the bass.
In celebration of its 30th anniversary, Justice has been remastered and re-released in a variety of formats—from a three-disc reissue with bonus material to a six-LP, four-DVD, 11-CD monstrosity that features a hardcover book of photos and liner notes and is stuffed with enough prints, patches, and assorted swag to fill a Christmas stocking. Three decades later, Justice arguably stands as the only Metallica album that’s as beloved as it is controversial. (The rest tend to skew one way or the other.) After the death of original bassist Cliff Burton in a 1986 bus accident, the band hired Jason Newsted as his replacement. They toured with him, recorded a covers EP with him, gave him moments in the spotlight on stage, and... absolutely buried him in the mix of Justice, his first-full length with Metallica. The result is the most abrasive-sounding album to sell over eight million copies ever. It’s as if, instead of adding canned crowd noises or fake room tone, Metallica preloaded it with tinnitus.
Newsted’s absence from the final mix is easy to explain, if not excuse. Some of the factors are innocuous: The three original members and the newcomer were not yet accustomed to each other’s playing styles, which led Newsted to track his basslines mostly to Hetfield’s rhythm guitar. Hetfield himself aimed for a low, pulverizing sound, eating up much of the range Newsted’s bass might have occupied. But reading the accounts of various producers, mixers, and engineers included in this set’s extensive notes suggests a more direct, less savory explanation: The bass isn’t there because the band, namely Ulrich and Hetfield, didn’t want it there.
Was this an extension of the extensive hazing to which “Newkid” was subjected by the band for years and which contributed to his departure years later? Was it an unspoken form of denial, processing Burton’s death by erasing his replacement in the studio? Was it simply a power trip by the band’s most dominant personality, Ulrich, whose vision for the sound of his own instrument was so specific and demanding that the people who helped realize it still speak about it with horror? The answer is likely “all of the above.”
But with the exception of producer Flemming Rasmussen, whose enthusiasm for Newsted’s largely unheard work makes him one of this story’s most endearing figures, and mixer Steve Thompson, who regrets having to follow Ulrich’s orders, all involved seem at peace now with the result. Even Newsted argues that “‘how it’s supposed to be’ is how it came out and what made a mark on the world.”
To the great credit of everyone involved, this reissue is no Star Wars Special Edition-style attempt to rewrite the past. You may hear a little more snap and pop and dimensionality here and there, but this is a restoration, not a revision. Everything that’s made Justice sound assaultive and insane for the past three decades—closer to Ministry’s “Stigmata,” released around the same time, than the band’s own “Enter Sandman”—remains. (Should the itch for more bass persist, YouTube can scratch it.) It’s tough to muster much anger that the remastered version isn’t …And Justice for Jason when Jason himself feels justice has been served.
Justice begins and ends at a breakneck pace. Opener “Blackened” serves the same role as “Battery” on Master of Puppets—ahead at full speed. It’s a meditation on nuclear annihilation and global extinction that, with a few tweaks, could apply to our worsening climate crisis: “Fire is the outcome of hypocrisy… Color our world blackened,” Hetfield shouts, his clipped words another piece of the percussive array. A screed about Hetfield’s “undying spite” for the parents who coddled him in conservatism, closer “Dyer’s Eve” is as intimate as “Blackened” is apocalyptic. As a parent now myself, I hear my own worst fears about tossing my children into “this hell you always knew” echoed.
Between those points, the songs are expansive affairs, in length (nearly all of them clock in beyond six minutes) and in the techniques Hetfield, Ulrich, and guitarist Kirk Hammett use to make their sociopolitical points. The riff of “The Shortest Straw,” a song about the victims of political hysteria, speeds atop the song like it’s trying to outrun the mob. The slower, near-sludge sound of “Harvester of Sorrow” reflects its first line: “My life suffocates.” The martial hook of anti-conformist anthem “Eye of the Beholder” fades in from the distance, like an approaching armored convoy. In a rare moment of humor that comports with the band’s hard-partying profile outside the studio, “The Frayed Ends of Sanity” incorporates the “ohh-WEE-ohh, YOOO-ohh” chant from The Wizard of Oz. LL Cool J must have been taking notes.
Justice’s centerpiece is, of course, “One,” the nearly eight-minute song about a mutilated war veteran. It sparks like an extended fuse before exploding in its final minutes with a Hendrix-style “Machine Gun” simulation and a Hammett solo that sounds like a panic attack. Thanks to an almost comically uncompromising video that spliced no-nonsense, black-and-white footage of the band with harrowing scenes from an adaptation of Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun, it’s the song that broke the band to the world, receiving heavy airplay on MTV despite having nothing in common with anything else on the network. Listening again, it’s amazing how little time and familiarity have dulled its impact. All its elements—from the dour four-note hook with which it begins to that gunfire burst—work as an experiential unit. You strap in and follow where it leads, even if that’s the “life in hell” of a limbless, eyeless, earless, voiceless shell of a man.
At nearly 10 minutes long and with a dozen different time signatures, the title track employs many of the same techniques. Lyrics about the utter unfairness of the American legal system convey despair with force. “Hammer of justice crushes you,” Hetfield asserts before the chorus runs, “Nothing can save us/Justice is lost/Justice is raped/Justice is gone.” But these are not the distant, doomsaying pronunciations of some gimlet-eyed observer. Hetfield is also trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and it’s getting to him, too. The chorus and the song itself conclude, “Find it so grim, so true, so real.” Hetfield draws out the last word as if to reassure himself that he is not hallucinating these horrors, that this is really happening. These humanizing touches give the otherwise impenetrable music a necessary air of vulnerability, a quality inaudible in the machinelike mix.
In that sense, “To Live Is to Die” stands as the Rosetta Stone for Justice. A lengthy, plodding instrumental with sections where the guitars simulate melancholy strings, it’s the band’s tribute to its late bassist and an artistic outlet for their sublimated grief. Burton himself (with help from either the German writer Paul Gerhardt or John Boorman’s King Arthur movie Excalibur) provides the lyrics for the brief spoken-word passage, and they are bleaker than anything the band recorded before or since: “When a man lies, he murders some part of the world,” Hetfield murmurs as Burton’s voice from beyond. “These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives. All this I cannot bear to witness any longer. Cannot the Kingdom of Salvation take me home?” In “One,” the chorus runs, “Hold my breath as I wish for death”; here, Metallica mourn their late friend by posthumously publishing his own death wish. This isn’t The Black Album, but the spirit is as black as it gets.
Despite the demons present in Metallica’s work and the largely unspoken trauma inflicted by Burton’s death, they played on. Along with a deep dive into Hetfield’s vault of riff experiments, writing sessions, demo recordings, and B-sides that include many covers, the set features six concerts (and snippets of three more). These demonstrate Metallica’s determination to plow past their recent tragedy, a recurring theme in the liner-note interviews and a visible throughline in the book’s hundreds of playful photos from photographer Ross Halfin and others.
The recordings range from the previously released Seattle ’89 to a DVD of the bands performance at the tiny Delaware rock club The Stone Balloon. (Ulrich insisted on the gig just so he could say they’d played in every state). Though they vary in sound quality and though some include no more than a single Justice song, these sets document the group’s growing realization—audible in their blistering pace and Hetfield’s rising swagger—that they could blow any other band off the fucking stage. In his essay here, Sammy Hagar actually recounts that the pressure of having to follow Metallica on the Monsters of Rock Tour caused poor ol’ Dokken to break up.
It would cheapen the power of ...And Justice for All to say it speaks to our present moment in some uniquely prescient way. Metallica weren’t predicting the future; they were describing what they saw around them. It made them world conquerors for a reason. But if Justice sounds like Now as much as it did then, it only proves the album’s point. And by refusing to soften the blow and reshape the record’s sonic signature into something more ear-pleasing, this reissue correctly implies that the music stands the test of time as well as the words. It does justice to every nightmare note. | 2018-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Blackened | November 3, 2018 | 9.3 | 27a3dfcd-b917-4aa7-b264-42083d328c84 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | |
After a few years of non-stop activity that found them moving from clubs to a Mercury Prize win and Grammy performance, Franz Ferdinand took time off and have re-emerged with an album that, more so than stoking current commerical prospects, is an exciting look at the band's potential future. | After a few years of non-stop activity that found them moving from clubs to a Mercury Prize win and Grammy performance, Franz Ferdinand took time off and have re-emerged with an album that, more so than stoking current commerical prospects, is an exciting look at the band's potential future. | Franz Ferdinand: Tonight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12609-tonight/ | Tonight | The standard line about having your whole life to write your first album and only six months to write your second seemed especially true in the case of Franz Ferdinand. The Glaswegian band issued its sophomore effort You Could Have It So Much Better some 18 months after its 2004 self-titled debut-- a narrow window considering that first record yielded three top 10 UK singles, a Mercury Prize, and a steady touring itinerary that saw them ascend from clubs to concert halls to the Grammys. But the quick turnaround and life on the road didn't affect the quality of the material so much as the band's performance of it-- sounding brawnier and brasher than on their debut, Franz Ferdinand ripped through the album's 13 songs.
Franz Ferdinand must've therefore been happy to sit out the past three years. In the time since Franz released their last album, their American contemporaries the Killers have already gone Springsteen and then swung back to their synth-pop roots, while next-generation UK upstarts like the Arctic Monkeys have weathered their own cycle of hyperbole, hibernation, and orchestral side projects. During that time, Franz Ferdinand first seemed poised to reemerge as the biggest pop band in the UK-- having initially tapped Girls Aloud guru Brian Higgins (Xenomania) to produce their third album-- or the most commercially suicidal, eventually parting ways with Higgins and indulging in extended studio jams, electronic experiments, and deconstructed, Martin Hannett-like recording techniques (complete with tales of using human bones for percussion).
In his review of You Could Have It So Much Better, Pitchfork's Nitsuh Abebe praised Franz Ferdinand for making albums that played like compilations of discrete but equally great singles, refreshingly bereft of the conceptual heft that marked the band's indie-rock peers at the time. Here the group dial that back from the start: "Ulysses" is less immediately striking than the band's previous headlining singles, as well as more lean and mechanistic. But it ably asserts Tonight's slow-burn methodology: If that "la la la" chorus sounds unremarkable at first, by the third round, it's unstoppable.
Instead, Tonight's patient pacing supports Franz singer Alex Kapranos' claims that these tracks share a nocturnal theme, reinforced by a gradually arced dusk-to-dawn sequence, a wandering spirit, and surprises that spring out of the shadows: "Send Him Away" comes on as a cool snap-along Sly Stone strut before intensifying into an unlikely but effective Afro-psych-funk jam; "Bite Hard" is a piano ballad reborn as a thick-heeled glam-rock gallop; the slo-mo-disco group chant "What You Came For" explodes into roadhouse-metal thrashing. But seeing as many of these arrangements were extracted from improvised jams, the shifts rarely feel forced, sounding more like the inevitable climaxes to Kapranos' seedy, increasingly desperate, club-crawling narratives.
It's only on Tonight's would-be epic "Lucid Dreams" that the album's exploratory approach works against the band's pop instincts. Appearing in a considerably different, elongated eight-minute version than the one that debuted on the band's website last fall, the song is now outfitted with a re-arranged, slowed-down chorus that makes it stumble where it should soar. But if the extended fade out feels overlong and anti-climactic on its own terms, in the context of Tonight it provides an effective, slate-cleaning set-up for the album's two sweetly serene closers: space-age bachelor-pad lullaby "Dream Again" and a solo acoustic-troubador turn from Kapranos on "Katherine Kiss Me".
More so than stoking the band's current commercial prospects, Tonight is an exciting record for what it could potentially spell for Franz Ferdinand's future-- from here, you could just as easily imagine the band further exploring electro-house productions, or stripping their sound down and making a folk record, or delving into tropical laptop-tronic pop. Or, if you just want them to keep re-writing "Take Me Out", well, hey, they can do that too-- see: "No You Girls", a standard-issue but still irresistible disco-floor stomper that imagines Bowie re-recording "Oh You Pretty Things" for Scary Monsters (and which recently assumed its natural habitat in an episode of "Gossip Girl). As the band that provided the exclamation point to the post-punk revival of the early 00s, there was good reason to question Franz Ferdinand's current standing in the pop world, now that that trend is on the wane. However, as it turns out, their return is perfectly timed to remind us that, in a world where UK rock is so uninspired the Brits were forced to make superstars out of Kings of Leon, you really can have it so much better. | 2009-01-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-01-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | January 26, 2009 | 7.3 | 27a4baea-f7d6-42d7-beb0-d066e05ee839 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
With his new More Is Than Isn't, RJD2—an artist who has played with many different genres and sounds—has released an album that comes across as a successful culmination of all his previous ideas and experiments. | With his new More Is Than Isn't, RJD2—an artist who has played with many different genres and sounds—has released an album that comes across as a successful culmination of all his previous ideas and experiments. | RJD2: More Is Than Isn't | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18596-rjd2-more-is-than-isnt/ | More Is Than Isn't | A little more than a decade after Deadringer came out, there's enough music—and enough attempts at reconfiguring his style—to help you construct a picture of how all over the map RJD2's career has been. Whether it's a clear picture is another thing entirely; his shift from underground rap production next big thing to muddled indie-pop singer-songwriter to studio-bound funkateer has done a lot to confuse any set-in-stone ideas of what the RJD2 sound was or is supposed to be. His partnership with Aaron Livingston as Icebird seemed like a good first step towards a reconciliation of everything RJ had built up in his portfolio over the previous ten years or so. But it also opened the door for a big “now what?" and the hesitant anticipation of future work that could build on the idea of an all-encompassing, canonical RJD2 musical identity.
And now, for what feels like the first time in his career, RJ has released an album that comes across as a successful culmination of all his previous ideas and experiments rather than simply a new shift in style.. The title of More Is Than Isn't says as much; these are established trademarks and tics—bombastic drum breaks, sunshine-gleam brass, an armada of mothership synthesizers—that definitely sound like they came from the same hands that Deadringer, Since We Last Spoke and The Colossus did. But it's that first album's boom-bap crate-digging, its follow-up's prog-funk ambition, and his most recent album's cartoon neo-soul all streamlined into an overarching sound, with all the Pavlov triggers and odd quirks and over-the-top crests that combination implies.
With this album uniting everything that made RJ RJ over the years, it establishes a definitive place for him after all this time: that of the hip-hop-inflected neo-soul fusionist producer who is just as comfortable working in moods as genres. With his instrumentals, it's as though he's working more in potential-soundtrack mode than anything; it's easier to describe his beats nowadays for what montages or scenes they could evoke rather than where their component parts could place them demographically. You can definitely dance to a lot of it: the Isley-flecked groove of “Behold, Numbers!” extends this summer's disco-funk revivalism into early fall, “Winter Isn't Coming” goes all neon-space-pyramid with high-BPM footwork-jostling bongo breaks, and the Rick Rubin-oid, Mellotron/piano/space-laser breakdown showcase “Her Majesty's Socialist Request” has already proven through its video to be a killer b-boy/b-girl anthem.
The vocal cuts are both a bit less frequent and a fair amount stronger than in his last couple records. There are a couple strong rap tracks, with emerging Columbus art-rapper P. Blackk rolling out fluid doubletime boasts over the Southern bounce-style “Bathwater” and old Soul Position partner Blueprint harnessing some of that vintage “Final Frontier” smoothness into nimble heist-metaphor storytelling for the Meters-go-caper-flick soul twang of “It All Came to Me in a Dream”. And while RJ does lend that hesitant falsetto of his to one of the tracks—the twee, contemplative “Dirty Hands,” where he actually fits well amongst the beatless chimes and strings—he largely leaves the vocals to R&B singers who can do his heavy-breaks production justice, like Icebird collaborator Aaron Livingston (“Love and Go”) or Little Brother's Phonte Coleman (doing a more straightfaced—and affecting—version of his Percy Miracles loverman schtick on “Temperamental”). It peaks on “See You Leave,” a cut featuring Roots-affiliated rapper STS and singer/writer Khari Mateen, that's as buttery as it gets; on an album that fits right in with R&B and hip-hop's free-for-all cross-genre fusion it's good to hear that RJ can build trad-soul beats with the best of them.
Still, as easy as it is to click with these songs as dance tracks or muso-appreciation fodder (RJ can still program and orchestrate a breakdown like nobody's business), it's better still to zone out and catch their sense of mood. While the vocal tracks are well-realized, this is the first album RJ's made in a long time that actually feels like it's satisfied to say most of what it has to say in instrumental form. His style-weaving, retro-contemporary instrumentation dislodges sounds from their own times and finds new modes for them. So when he rolls out burbling synthesizers that recall the early '90s heyday of ambient techno and 70s prog and glazes them over a class-of-'88 no-bullshit boom-bap break (“A Lot of Night Ahead of You”), or constructs a noir-jazz ballad that snaps from early Tom Waits tipsiness to uptempo Mayfield-style funk (“Got There, Sugar?”), all the parts fit together to turn a pastiche into something a bit less beholden to the sum of its parts. It's less about where the pieces come from than what they're evoking. And even if it's made clear by the conceptual thread that ties the album together—a three-part suite that leads off the album, appears at the halfway mark, and concludes it with three emotively varying takes on the same melodic theme—the fact that the whole of More Is Than Isn't evokes so many different well-built moods is testament to how much he's been able to elaborate on what he's capable of. | 2013-10-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-10-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Electrical Connections | October 7, 2013 | 7.7 | 27b1a0f4-5399-4f6d-b8f6-658b60d1b5e1 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
A new reissue of the illusory soundtrack to Wim Wenders’ 1991 road film, which featured the final recordings of CAN and Talking Heads, highlights its forlorn and decadent melancholy. | A new reissue of the illusory soundtrack to Wim Wenders’ 1991 road film, which featured the final recordings of CAN and Talking Heads, highlights its forlorn and decadent melancholy. | Various Artists: Until the End of the World (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-until-the-end-of-the-world-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Until the End of the World (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Write a song that sounds like the future. This was the challenge German filmmaker Wim Wenders posed to some of his favorite acts back in 1990, when he began compiling the soundtrack for his dystopian road movie Until the End of the World. What will you be writing about in ten years? How will your music sound? Set in 1999, the film follows its characters around the globe, across different continents and through different landscapes, chasing a machine that allows you to see your dreams. Music plays a crucial part, often mingling with these dreams until they become indistinguishable—fitting for a long-gestating project inspired by Aboriginal concepts of the subconscious.
Of the 20 artists to whom Wenders posed that challenge, almost all of them complied (Ray Davies was allegedly a holdout). Each seemed to rise to the occasion in a different way. R.E.M. and U2 offered outtakes from their recent hit albums, while David Byrne reclaimed an old Naked outtake to create one of Talking Heads’ final songs. Can reunited for a single session, inviting original vocalist Malcolm Mooney to chant the percolating “Last Night’s Sleep.” Such was Wenders’ reputation after 1984’s Paris, Texas and 1987’s Wings of Desire that he could coax rarities out of the world’s biggest bands and persuade others to get back together. Despite a soundtrack with so many endorsements, the film was a flop, mainly because Wenders was forced to pare his five-hour opus down to a more marketable two-and-a-half hours. The theatrical cut was leaden and confusing.
That makes Criterion’s new release of Wenders’ director’s cut a revelation, even more startling than Run-Out Groove’s new vinyl reissue of the soundtrack. The two have always existed slightly apart from each other; many more people heard the soundtrack than bothered to see the film. Still, they both start in the same place and trace similar journeys. With its woozy horns and debauched beats, Talking Heads’ “Sax & Violins” offers a jittery vision of the future, even if the track itself was a few years old by then. There are a few detours, most notably Julee Cruise’s otherworldly cover of Elvis Presley’s “Summer Kisses Winter Tears”; if it sounds like it’s from a very different kind of movie, that might be because it was produced by David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti.
What’s most remarkable about the album, however, is its consistency despite the variety of artists and sounds. Its tone is forlorn, almost decadent in its melancholy, which manifests in a strange, uneasy shimmer that runs through so many of these songs. Lou Reed’s “What’s Good” ponders the everyday details that change when a close friend dies. On the spoken-word number “It Takes Time,” Patti Smith and husband Fred “Sonic” Smith sound like they’re circling the same dark memory, each afraid to approach it directly, as the music thrums and shivers around them. Depeche Mode trade their synths and guitars for what sounds like a Black Lodge jazz combo, and Martin Gore’s lyrics welcome death as a respite from an unruly world: “Mother, are you waiting? Father, are you pacing? I’m coming home.” It could be a cover of an Appalachian hymn from 1899.
Fitting for a film by Wenders, these are songs full of vehicles and highways, evoking the odd isolation of hours spent hurtling alone down an empty road. “Whispering, as I was driving/Quietly the car rolling like a bullet,” Neneh Cherry chants on “Move With Me (Dub),” a sleek disassembling of a track from 1992’s Homebrew. Only Nick Cave, in one of his most actorly performances, offers much in the way of a story within his song, which involves a bomb in a bread basket, an exploding hotel, a blind pencil seller and his dead dog, set to a drinking-song chorus that’s one of the soundtrack’s purest highlights.
There is a sense of finality, to these songs, as though the soundtrack is marking the end of… something. Maybe an era of alternative music. Until the End of the World includes three legendary bands that were defunct by the time it was released—Talking Heads and Can, but also Berlin-based goth-adjacent outfit Crime & the City Solution. There are several acts that were moving permanently out of the underground and into the mainstream—not just R.E.M. and Depeche Mode but k.d. lang (who duets with Jane Siberry on “Calling All Angels”). Until the End of the World was released just three months after Ten and two months after Nevermind, two albums that redefined rock music for the new decade. This soundtrack doesn’t live in that world. Like the movie, it remains unmoored from the past, gesturing towards a future that’s always enticingly out of reach. | 2019-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Warner | December 9, 2019 | 8.3 | 27b80f42-7001-4863-8073-2e5ff76cb901 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Expanding from a duo to a trio, complete with saxophone, the Manchester group embraces newfound production gloss without sacrificing its indie-pop roots. | Expanding from a duo to a trio, complete with saxophone, the Manchester group embraces newfound production gloss without sacrificing its indie-pop roots. | Virginia Wing: private LIFE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/virginia-wing-private-life/ | private LIFE | Aren’t all our lives private lives right now? Over the past year, as the shutters have come down on the outside world, many of us have lost access to those spontaneous human interactions that occur in public space; the self that we show to others is increasingly that which we select, mediated through a feed or screen. The fourth full-length from Manchester’s Virginia Wing—here expanded from a duo to the trio of Alice Merida Richards, Sam Pillay, and new recruit Christopher Duffin—never addresses lockdown specifically. Understandably; perhaps they’d rather not pin a piece of their art to this dismal era. But the album’s themes—of isolation, dealing with trauma, and keeping one’s mind on an even keel—feel very much made for these times.
Formed in 2012, Virginia Wing have evolved from a halting indie group into—well, what exactly? Today they’re signed to Fire, a storied UK independent label that dates back to the 1980s, and their music increasingly embraces production gloss and pop sensibility. Discussing inspirations for private LIFE, they mention Prince, Timbaland, and the hip-hop producer Scott Storch alongside leftfield touchstones like Kleenex and the Slits. If it’s still tempting to call them a DIY group, that’s because this music still feels like it comes from a shared and private world.
“I’m Holding Out for Something,” the album’s opening track, is the group’s poppiest song to date, and maybe their best. Powered by a boom-clap rhythm and blissful filtered synths, it’s a sideways swing at ’80s freestyle, guileless in its big melodies and grand, unchecked emotions. Richards’ exultant vocal faintly recalls Sue Tompkins of Life Without Buildings, the obscure Scottish indie-pop group whose “The Leanover” was recently rediscovered by the TikTok generation. It’s the kind of song made for throwing shapes in your front room, perhaps while singing into a hairbrush, and in the track’s video, Richards does pretty much exactly that.
Deeper in, Virginia Wing synthesize their influences in bolder, stranger ways. “St. Francis Fountain” and “Half Mourning” are pop songs by structure, but they owe much to the textures of new-age music, blooming with strings and washes of synth. The addition of Duffin to the group’s lineup, meanwhile, has had a transformative effect. A tenor saxophonist, he’s played alongside Richards and Pillay before; his group XAM Duo joined forces with Virginia Wing on 2017’s collaborative record Tomorrow’s Gift. Here, he brings some gorgeous soloing—listen to him fluttering mischievously in and out of Richards’ sober vocal on “99 North.” More broadly, though, he contributes to a mood that runs throughout private LIFE: a lush, numinous quality inherited from spiritual jazz. With its serene delivery and harp-like tones, “Soft Fruit” resembles Broadcast if they were raised on Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders rather than Silver Apples and United States of America.
A band who played a UK tour in front of a sign reading “End Rape Culture,” Virginia Wing don’t lack for a politically engaged sensibility. But like its predecessor, Ecstatic Arrow, private LIFE feels less like an album raging against injustice than one willing a better, kinder world into being. Richards’ strength as a vocalist is that she sounds powerful even when she’s laying her vulnerabilities bare. On “Return to View,” a spoken-word piece with shades of Laurie Anderson, she addresses the listener directly. “I’m conscious of taking up all of the space/With my breath,” she intones. “I’ve got issues to address/And habits to change.” Many music-makers treat songwriting as a form of therapy, but it’s nice to hear that idea communicated so tangibly here: the sound of getting better, bit by bit, every day.
The album isn’t perfect; it could use one or two more bold pop bangers, and it tails off a little toward the end. But that, too, is understandable; this is an introspective record by design. private LIFE is an album exploring the urge to hide away from the injustices of the world, tempered with the awareness that at some point, you’ve got to face up to them. Right now, in the first uncertain months of 2021, Virginia Wing’s utopian visions feel especially invaluable. This is joyful music with a spirit of self-preservation at its core.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Fire | February 12, 2021 | 7.5 | 27b9ecc9-c590-42b5-a920-52e41c05fc26 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | |
The art-hardcore band’s fifth album is a dynamic departure for the group, a long, psychedelic, concept-heavy odyssey that dips into many genres along the way. | The art-hardcore band’s fifth album is a dynamic departure for the group, a long, psychedelic, concept-heavy odyssey that dips into many genres along the way. | Fucked Up: Dose Your Dreams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fucked-up-dose-your-dreams/ | Dose Your Dreams | Damian “Pink Eyes” Abraham has made a career on a being a bit much: The Canadian punk recently produced an extreme wrestling documentary called Bloodlust and looks like he could get in the ring himself, particularly when the burly, bearded, and frequently shirtless frontman of Fucked Up smashes bottles over his head on stage. He always sings like he’s trying to exfoliate his larynx with loose pieces of his ribcage and they’re the most abrasive vocals anyone will encounter from a band putting out records on Merge. Glass Boys, from 2014, represented Abraham’s purist vision of Fucked Up, a punk rock teleology that traced DIY ethics back to the ancient Greeks and had more guitar overdubs than a Smashing Pumpkins album.
Yet, compared to the band’s double-album rock operas and wooly Zodiac EPs, Glass Boys was a model of hardcore austerity, and its mild reception felt like a referendum on guitarist Mike Haliechuk ceding his artistic control. The line on Fucked Up is that they’ve been expanding the horizons of hardcore, even though it’s a genre they’ve bore little resemblance to, starting with their 2006 debut Hidden World. At this point, it’s clear that Fucked Up are part of the indie rock orthodoxy and everything that made Fucked Up a critical sensation—the saxophones, disco beats, not-all-hardcore genre experiments, and the adventures of David Eliade—are back with a vengeance on Dose Your Dreams.
It begins by recasting the titular character from their 2011 opus, David Comes To Life. Once a budding revolutionary stuck in a lightbulb factory risking it all in the name of love, David inexplicably begins the ambitious Dose Your Dreams as a drugged-up white collar schlub who quits his job on the very first song (”None of Your Business Man”). Minutes later, he meets an elderly mystic named Joyce who guides him through a psychotropic vision quest that challenges his perceptions of reality and vaguely resembles The Matrix, I guess. The plot of Dose Your Dreams could be sussed out like a Magic Eye image if you glance at the titles for long enough (“Living in a Simulation,” “Joy Stops Time,” “How To Die Happy,” “I Don’t Wanna Live in This World”), but anyone who can retell it from memory is either in Fucked Up or read the press release.
Though a thematic sequel to David Comes To Life, Dose Your Dreams demands forgetting everything you know about Fucked Up, and that includes seeing them as a traditionally structured band. Abraham even had to clarify on Instagram that he wasn’t quitting, just trying to accept a lesser role. Sharing the mic with Abraham, guitarist Ben Cook, and drummer Jonah Falco are a litany of guests from Polaris Prize Winner Lido Pimiento to singer Mary Margaret O’Hara to J Mascis. Abraham appears on only about 2/3rds of Dose Your Dreams, which is still about an hour’s worth of a guy who dominates every track he’s on. His voice is a hammer that sees everything as a nail when Haliechuk and Falco are working with stained glass. But Abraham’s unwavering commitment to brute force just as often works to the band’s advantage here, especially since Haliechuk is prone to lyrical flourishes that would send Colin Meloy to his fainting couch (“But who is this tramp sat in front of me/She smiled and said, ‘Jilly I be!’”).
Despite Haliechuk and Falco’s bombastic concept, Dose Your Dreams functions similar to the recent hip-hop blockbusters that share its 82-minute length, best enjoyed in chunks or humming in the background between the singles. There’s plenty of the jet-roar symphonies that typified David Comes to Life, but also new looks at dream-pop, corporate cock-rock strutting, dubby disco, Supertramp, mini-marathons of krautrock, and pure ’90s alt-rock. Even if the creation of Dose Your Dreams was acknowledged by all parties as a contentious power struggle that permanently altered Fucked Up, it at least sounds like one hell of a party.
This is particularly true on the title track and “Talking Pictures,” which sounds a bit like Abraham letting loose at a Madchester rave in 1991. These songs are what likely led composer Owen Pallett to describe this album as Fucked Up’s own Screamadelica, though much of Dose Your Dreams can be enjoyed as a home version of “Beat Shazam”: based on the three-song run of “How To Die Happy,” “Two I’s Closed,” and “The One I Want Will Come For Me,” this could’ve been called Fucked Up’s Loveless, Person Pitch, or You’re Living All Over Me as well.
Even with all this dynamism and attention to detail, it feels exhausting to even consider returning to all 82 minutes of Dose Your Dreams. Fucked Up have gone all in on maximalism, but it never feels like they fully interrogated its implications—by the time the jackhammer industrial pulse of “Mechanical Bull” and “Accelerate” push the album in genuinely new directions, they bear the weight of an hour’s worth of extraneous choruses, multi-tracked guitar solos, and five-minute plot-movers. For the size of the ask, where’s the emotional buy-in? David’s storyline basically evaporates 10 minutes in, Abraham feels like a guest amid the cavalcade of other voices, and it’s less of a new path forward for Fucked Up than getting back on course as a generation’s most hardcore indie rock band. There’s a Gatsby-like void at the center of Dose Your Dreams—it’s a big party, but it’s unclear who or what exactly is being celebrated. | 2018-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Metal | Merge | October 8, 2018 | 7.3 | 27bbb0c4-64a5-4832-912a-45f8802089bf | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ |
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